This week, for the summer edition of our Fast Five interview series, we are pleased to welcome Jan Mikinka, Senior SEO Specialist at Bluerank, a leading marketing agency in Poland, specializing in providing major brands with innovative marketing strategies to grow their online presence.Â
During the interview, Jan shared with us his views on the future of SEO and some interesting tips on how to implement a low-hanging fruit optimization for ecommerce.
- What was your first SEO project, and how did it go?
One of my first SEO projects were the local medical centres. It was really interesting project with many optimization opportunities (synergy between on-line and off-line appearance) in a quite demanding branch (medical knowledge and restrictions).
Over the years I’ve learned a lot, in fact we still cooperate and we manage to build a really nice client-agency partnership in an atmosphere of trust.
During these years and till today the project have been constantly growing and significantly increased its volume – from the tens of thousands visits per month to over several hundred thousand, in overall sum up of 2021 the number of organic sessions exceed 1,4 mln (few years earlier it was less than 400k) what for the local webpage is a really great result.
- What are the main challenges of SEO in 2022 ?
The impact of global covid pandemic –a lot of the companies has been forced to move on-line, what caused a lot of work in the whole digital marketing industry and increased the overall competitiveness.
Increasing Google’s focus on the users’ experience (adjustments to the users’ intentions, behaviour, we can already see the first steps of this process e.g., by slowly including the Core Web Vitals statistics in the ranking factors) – the good optimization of the classic SEO elements (keywords, backlinks, content) in the near future could be not enough to rank on the top positions.
- What is your favourite SEO software ?
Of course, the foundations of each SEO activities are Google’s Search Console and Analytics, but for the deeper SEO analysis (keywords, backlinks, performance) we usually need also some external tools.
Personally, I have two tools that in my opinion could satisfy the most needs of SEO specialists and those are: Ahrefs – great tool for the most day-to-day SEO works like monitoring, additional analysis of keywords, competitors, backlinks etc. it is also the best tool to analyse the international webpages.
I remember the times when it was focusing mostly on the backlinks and really admire its growth and development to become fully universal SEO tool.
The second one is ScreamingFrog crawler thanks to which we can easily analyse the webpage level of optimization, structure, verify the implementations and a lot of more things.
- What is the most common SEO mistake you see people making?
The basic adaptation of titles, H1, meta descriptions to the appropriate keywords, which is also related to the knowledge of their own customers and how they use the search engine (intentions matter – we must be able to get into the head of our users). The other problem is accidental blocking for Googlebots or deleting part or even the whole website without proper redirects (very common during migrations).
- What is a typical low-hanging fruit optimization to make in SEO for e-commerce?
For me it’s usually the proper set up and optimization of filters and parameters within the categories. If we do that well, we can easily manage a lot of new long tail keywords and also save the precious crawl budget.
