As Done by Envision Creative, of Austin, TX
Envision Creative is a marketing agency in Austin, TX. Michelle Loughry is their Director of Marketing. This article is the result of an interview with Michelle which I conducted on January 15, 2019.
Who Is Envision Creative?
Envision Creative is a creative agency who embraces SEO, not an SEO agency per se. They started 18 years ago with branding and repositioning transformations, which is their focus still.
Recognizing that advertising has moved online, they heavily incorporate digital channels into their branding and repositioning strategies, recognizing the crucial supporting role technical SEO plays in their clients' success.
Envision Is First and Foremost a Creative Agency
This is clear in the way Michelle describes what they do and who they do it for. As an agency, they’re industry agnostic and look for clients who value collaboration and relationship.
They avoid clients who are looking for order takers to handle tasks, and not a partnership agency to work with on strategy and tactics.
In describing Envision, Michelle used adjectives like energetic, powerful, and forward moving.
They offer services in the realm of branding, website design, digital marketing, and inbound marketing.
They work as an extension of their clients and they emphasize collaboration and transparency in both directions. A high level of trust is necessary for the way they work.
For some clients, Envision becomes their marketing department. For others, they are an extension of the clients' marketing team.
They Recognize the Critically Important Role Played by Technical SEO
Within Envision, the intersection between the creative work and the technical SEO work is Michelle, their Director of Marketing. She spans both worlds and ensures the creative people understand the essential nature of technical SEO as well as the basic concepts.
How Does Envision Ensure Technical SEO Gets Done Right?
In short, with detailed communications, knowledge, processes, and tools.
Knowledge
Michelle is the primary SEO technical person within Envision, and she makes sure everyone has basic knowledge of technical SEO.
Processes
The creative team and the analytics team meets daily and talks constantly, their designers are marketing minded, and the teams conduct weekly joint meetings for everyone to get together and discuss projects and issues.
Tools
They use a similar set of tools I’ve seen elsewhere: SEMrush, Google Trends, Moz, Ahrefs, Link Assistant, Google Analytics, and Google Search Console. For project management, they use Asana. For sharing files with clients, they use Box.
Growth Driven Design
Envision practices Growth Driven Design, which is an iterative approach to marketing. Conceptually, it feels very similar to the ideas promoted in the book Running Lean, which is an iterative approach to building a product or service.
First, you state a testable hypothesis related to marketing. Then, you test it. Third, per the outcome of the test, you make an adjustment to your marketing.
You state another testable hypothesis. You test it.
This hypothesize, test, and adjust, becomes a process of continuous improvement where you constantly make small adjustments after stating assumptions and describing how those assumptions are to be tested.
Growth Driven Design REQUIRES an analytical focus.
The ability to translate a desire into something that can be tested. The ability to carry out the test. And the ability to determine whether the testing was or was not successful.
You cannot do Growth Driven Design without a strong focus on analytics.
Link Building
Because a strong link profile results in higher SEO rankings, links matter. Michelle believes link building consists of two broad activities: publishing, and promotion.
The main focus at Envision Creative for building quality links is to publish content worth linking to, and promoting that content via social media.
They treat content promotion as Campaigns and use UTM codes to track the success and failure of their various content promotion campaigns.
As content is syndicated via social media, link building happens because social media is a set of peer review platforms (or channels).
It is also important to monitor backlinks to make sure their client sites (and their own) are not being “victimized” by crappy publishers.
Technical SEO Today - A Summary
Today, technical SEO is not to be ignored but is no longer the primary focus of digital marketing. Technical SEO is the common thread through all digital marketing, but advertising and marketing basics dominate what makes this all work.
If you’re sharing ideas no one cares about, the best technical SEO won’t compensate.
SEO (which requires both some creative and technical work) can also be a great market equalizer. It gives a small company who devotes some resources to their online presence (and does it right) the ability to break through the chatter and be found.
The breakthrough happens only if they publish stuff their people find useful and interesting, and only if they do the technical SEO right so the search engines properly index the content. When content is not indexed right, search engines never show it to the desired audience.
Video Search - Looking to the Future
We then spoke about voice search and video search, which seem to be related. The day when we interact with our computers as they do on Star Trek is (probably) approaching faster than we think.
Additionally, video is an increasing amount of both Internet traffic and content consumption.
By 2021 it is estimated 80% of all Internet traffic will be video.
Those born between 1995 and 2012 are known as Generation Z, and they watch on average 68 videos a day.
But today, voice search seems immature.
How will SEO services adapt to voice search resulting in answers, not web pages to look for answers in? And how will audio streams of videos (and podcasts) be parsed by search engine robots?
Today, if you want to rank a video, you embed the YouTube link in a blog post and under the video, you place the transcript of the video. But this is a workaround.
We do this because the search engines don’t easily parse these audio streams yet. But how will video SEO change when they do?
Perhaps this is an interesting topic for a future post.
Kevin Carney is the Founder and CEO of the botique link building agency Organic Growth. He has 8 years of SEO experience and 25+ years of experience managing large technical projects.
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