This website addresses SEO agencies & in-house SEO departments, exclusively
This website addresses SEO agencies & in-house SEO departments, exclusively | Recruiters: reach out on LinkedIN Freelancer collaborating with SEO agencies & in-house marketing teams
SEO UX CRO engineer
It is all about the "funnel": SEO drives traffic to your website, UX sticks visitors to your pages, and keeps them coming back. CRO converts visitors into customers.
The combination of these 3 skill sets applied by one and the same consultant maximizes efficiency and RoI in an effort to make your web presence generate steadily increasing turnover for your business.
The applied methodology no longer treats SEO, UX, and CRO as independent verticals side by side. Using a holistic approach to SEO, these 3 core disciplines are aligned and coordinated within one single process, to provide an engineered solution for the online success of your specific operation.
Business consultant
The core disciplines of SEO, UX, CRO involve the processing of data generated by online search, user behavior, and triggers for customer decision-making. This intelligence can be leveraged and applied to more than just your website presence. As your consultant, I can help you listen to what your customers are saying - and even read their mind, to anticipate evolving market demand. Evaluation of the data obtained can help your business get a head start in potential new markets, prepare early, and allocate R&D budgets in an efficient manner.
Growth need not only come from selling new products and services to your existing customer base. Multilingual application of SEO, UX, and CRO disciplines can likewise help you unlock new market regions for your existing products and services. Combining both of these approaches can truly turbocharge growth for your business, as you lead market conquest in new regions worldwide using newly conceived and designed product and service offers.
The intelligence thus obtained can translate into a powerful competitive advantage for your business, and therefore requires highest level of trust, confidentiality, and non-disclosure regimes. Data collection, and processing of information can involve on-site consulting, often embedded into processes of a broader scope within your organization. Your company will profit from an outsider's perspective, driven by a result-oriented approach.
Full stack web developer
Websites are usually built in the wrong order: clients tend to ask for the layout, the looks, the design ... and only after that is finished, the website shell thus created is populated with menu labels, text, and media content - almost as an afterthought. This approach is entirely counterproductive.
Text content must be created first, based on key messages and important information to convey to the user. Using SEO best practices already at this stage is of paramount importance. A systematic approach to content creation, based on keyword clustering and the resulting SEO entities, will then yield the optimum menu and navigation layout: this is where UX comes into play. The result in turn will dictate the design, placing maximum emphasis on "Where to click". Because placing the user in control generates the highest click-through rates, the ultimate aim of CRO. In the interest of page load speed (a crucial key performance indicator), graphics are best kept to a minimum - most visual effects in the design except the logo should be generated by CSS code, not using image files.
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In building websites from scratch, the disciplines of SEO, UX, and CRO come front and center - but their implementation by one and the same individual requires that person to have a sufficient insights into the full stack of website coding languages (HTML5, CSS3, Javascript, PHP).
The same applies when an existing website should be "fixed", or "revamped". Website revision for SEO requires optimization for search, user experience, and conversion rate. The SEO-relevant text items, e.g. title tags, meta tags, tooltip (title attributes), anchor text with link code need to be administered in many places seen not by the user, but registered by the search engine. Rather than having these items handled by a (remote?) developer team, with potentially multiple hierarchial levels along the path of communication, it is preferable, and far more efficient, to have the SEO consultant acting as the programmer in getting all those items done right, "on the fly".
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The SEO audit action plan (set of recommendations, as approved) generated from an audit for SEO, UX, and CRO can of course be implemented by your existing developer team. You may want to do this to avoid interference with existing contracts. However, in the absence of such restrictions I am able to process the entire action plan myself, by implementing all SEO, UX, CRO action items into your website's existing code. Likewise, we can simply build a whole new website which integrates only those items worth preserving from your existing site. Experience has shown that this approach may cause the existing developer team to be sent on permanent vacation, as the gatekeeper function exercised by developers often proves counterproductive to implementation of sound SEO, UX & CRO strategies.
Multilingual tech writer
"Content is king" is one of the main punchlines heard nowadays when it comes to SEO. This refers specifically to text content, and the accompanying media. Text content is read not only by the user, but first of all by the search engine. Importantly, the search engine's algorithm has to "like" the content - otherwise the page with that content will not rank high on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page), and will consequently never be read by a human user.
Your website text therefore performs a dual purpose. The text addresses the search engine and the web user. First, the search engine must judge the content to be worthwhile to be presented to the user. Secondly, the user must feel compelled to engage with the presentation on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page). Once having clicked the search result, the user must engage with the actual text. User engagement manifests itself in the duration of initial page view (dwell time KPI), and hopefully in a click-through to another page (no bounce), as well as a repeat visit. What the user will read, i.e. the text content, is critical in addressing all of these requirements.
As such, an SEO consultant must have exceptional writing skills.
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A multilingual website is designed to conquer new markets, and address an existing customer base in the proper way. But simple website translation is not enough! For optimization of search results in a particular language, the entire process of keyword research, and subsequent content creation must be revisited step by step, separately for each language.
Apart from the language, the locale of your customer base is an important consideration. Language and locale both have a direct impact on the overall website concept and need to be implemented with great care and attention to detail.
With decades of professional experience in technical writing & translation, I can personally write online content for your website in English and German. Likewise, my experience in the industry allows me to manage the production process for other languages.
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Corporate advisory & business consulting
Business owners and upper level management are well-advised to heed words of caution when deciding on their digital strategy. The level of hype prevalent in the digital marketing industry, not only limited to SEO, is really quite over the top. Marketing budgets need to be allocated sensibly, for sustainable SEO solutions able to drive lasting results.
Good consulting should place the client's long-term best interest first, even if this means arguing against any preconceived notions or quick fixes requested by the client. Your digital strategy cannot be founded on an ever-changing landscape of new fads, and buzzwords being thrown about. Avoid chasing after reoptimization with every new search engine algorithm update. Don't build your digital marketing strategy on quicksand, listening to one seller of dreams (a.k.a. "SEO guru") after another.
These are the questions addressed by a substantive digital marketing strategy.
Important keywords: "sensible SEO", "efficient code", "social reputation". Avoid the trap of vanity SEO, and digital marketing hype. Don't let your marketing department go in circles, in the hamster wheel spun by developers gatekeeping to bill maximum hours, while they lack actual SEO expertise. Use social media wisely, and mitigate reputational exposure - while maximizing promotional benefit.
Results-driven SEO consulting will take your digital marketing strategy to a whole new level. This is accomplished by leveraging synergy effects, uncovering market intelligence, and developing bespoke resources to address problems specific to your organization.
Market research using SEO methodology
SEO research expertise can be leveraged to develop, evaluate, and project new product ideas and services, or to analyse the viability of expansion into new markets (countries/regions).
Business consulting using SEO research methods serves to answer important questions, helping clients to decide future strategies, product, and service offerings.
Building on a solid foundation of research data, future needs of a client's customer base may be conjectured, and impending changes in market demand can be anticipated - What are people googling today vs. what they googled before, and what might people be googling in the future?
Online promotion & website consulting
For your business to "go online", and "be online", distinct segments of a digital marketing strategy must be coordinated:
Domain real estate
The choice of the actual domain name is very important. Your domain name is incredibly precious. You need to guard it like your eyeball. Always aim to keep a domain name contract separate from a hosting contract. In case of a legal entity, a majority shareholder may prefer to keep the domain name registered as a private individual in order to then "lease" the domain name to the legal entity.
Server environment / hosting
This refers to where your files and data are located, how they can be accessed, and how they are deployed via the internet. This is a matter of concern if you are operating a high-traffic e-commerce site. Websites with average or negligible bandwidth usage simply require a high-quality hosting account. Website security is always a concern to be addressed.
Site architecture
A website can be set up as a static, hard-coded site with only a front end. This avoids any regular updates, but probably requires programmer intervention for every change. This setup is best for smaller websites requiring little or no regular additions. A static website can be very good for SEO because crawlers find links and content easily, unimpeded by widgets and constant server queries.
If you plan to update your website's content regularly, and even do this yourself, then this is best done using a CMS (Content Management System). There are many pitfalls to avoid when selecting a CMS, and when installing it. WordPress (wordpress.org) is the most prominent open source CMS. WordPress can be supremely effective for SEO, but the installation needs to be executed and managed properly. Avoid quick solutions, automatic installation scripts, and anything that obscures the tracking of changes being made to the code. Automatic updates can turn into a serious headache if not managed with proper foresight, resulting in a corrupted website display, or the dreaded "white screen of death".
Both static and CMS websites can and should be responsive, i.e. "mobile-friendly" - but not all content or functions of the desktop or laptop view are suited for meaningful mobile interaction.
User interface
This is what your website visitors see, it is the most important factor in terms of "UX" (User Experience). Traditionally, this has been called "web design". The user interface is one of the main factors that keep visitors engaged on your website. Good UI/UX places the user in control, prompting more clicks, additional page visits, or even a bookmark. User experience is a very important conversion factor, for making a sale.
One of the main factors impacting both user experience and site structure is the navigation on the website. How menus and buttons are arranged and sequenced is incredibly important for allowing users to find the information and access the content they are looking for. And this arrangement and sequence of menus and buttons should be dictated by SEO!
Content
By far the most important part of your online presence is the content, i.e. the information the user is searching for AND the infomation you want to provide to the user. These two strands of communication intent between you and the user must come together in a perfect match on your website! So you want to publish content which you know the user wants to read, in order to thereby introduce them to content you want them to read - but which they didn't even know about yet and consequently were not searching for. The deeper meaning of the phrase "being on the same page"!
Content is both text and media (images, videos). The substance of the information weighs far more heavily than the looks of your website. The most successful websites (Google, Facebook, Amazon) are good examples for this: they look boring, if not horrible. But users find what they want. So they keep visiting!
Everything on your website begins and ends with content. That is why building a website starts with content, which means starting with keywords, clustered into SEO entities. Building a website starts with SEO!
On-Page & Technical SEO
This refers to any SEO-related items on your website, on your server, within your code. You have full control over all On-Page SEO and Technical SEO items, so there is no excuse for not getting this right. All of these items should be attended to already as the website is being built, and as the content is being written and installed. It is far more economical to build your site for SEO from the start. Don't do SEO as an afterthought.
Note that a properly written website can already start to rank in the search engines using exclusively On-Page methods, without even doing any Off-Page SEO. This will require an on-going effort. Regular content updates, "keeping the site alive", is very important in this regard.
Off-Page SEO
This relates to anything about driving traffic, about sending visitors to your site. Off-Page SEO involves everything that does not happen on your own server: backlinks, social media promotion, directory listings ... the list of Off-Page disciplines (scams?) is almost endless. Off-Page activities are very much a soft science, and a playground for sellers of the dreams, touting "SEO snake oil", or "SEO hotsauce". Some of these tactics work great until the next search engine algorithm update, or until the website is hit with a manual Google penalty. Most website owners never find out, because their budget dries up beforehand. Off-Page SEO can be a questionable investment. Spending money on Off-Page without having the website itself completely polished in terms of On-Page SEO is simply foolish. If any budget constraints exist, always spend every penny on On-Page SEO before even thinking about any Off-Page measures.
In addition to generating actual visitor traffic, Off-Page SEO is focused on link-building. High-quality inbound links from other websites are important signals and ranking factors in the Google search engine. The entire Google thesis, which laid the foundation for the world's most important search engine (90+ % market share), was based on the subject of link architecture throughout the world wide web, and the significance of incoming links in judging a website's reputation. The idea was great, but every single Google search algorithm update fielded ever since has been designed to modify that concept in an attempt to counteract manipulative exploitation of website links as a ranking factor.
If all the On-Page SEO is done right, it may very well be that the Off-Page happens by itself, not requiring any investment: people who love your website will share it on social media, and will link to interesting pages!
SEM & PPC
An alternative to Off-Page SEO is "SEM" (Search Engine Marketing), or so-called "paid search". This entails placing advertisements on Google search engine results pages (SERP's), which actually look quite similar to an organic index entry displayed there. Frequently, one will find both: an ad placed just above the organic search result. This makes Google a lot of money, but it also shows that SEM is frequently unnecessary. You can get to page 1 without spending money for ads. Just spend money to do good SEO, to obtain an organic ranking on the SERP.
Ads can also be placed on other publishers' web pages (Adwords / "Google ads"). This is known as "PPC" (Pay Per Click) advertising. You can set your advertising budget and clearly define the target keywords. Running a PPC ad campaign properly takes quite a bit of research. PPC ads can deliver spikes in visitor traffic, which will come at a hefty premium.
PPC ads make sense mostly for purposes of advertising a new product, an event, or seasonal offerings. Money should only be spent on PPC ad campaigns after all the stops have been pulled out in terms of On-Page SEO. Combine PPC with a dedicated long-term SEO campaign! Sending paid visitor traffic via PPC ads to a half-baked website with lousy On-Page SEO is basically like burning money. The generated traffic will not be leveraged for the required SEO KPIs such as page dwell time and repeat visits. Consider that paid traffic can never fix a high bounce rate!
SMM
As social media is gaining in importance in people's daily lives, it can become a source of regular, high-volume traffic to your website. Effectiveness of "SMM" (Social Media Marketing") is heavily dependent on the type of industry you operate in, and what you are selling. Facebook and Instagram are mainstays of B2C, while B2B is better off utilizing YouTube, Twitter (X), and LinkedIN. While you can place ads on all social media platforms, promotion is now frequently done using influencers: recognized personalities promoting your products and services online "from friend to friend" (followed to follower).
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When you set up your internet presence, look at things through the eyes of the user. What do they want to know? And how can they find it? Building a good website means satisfying search intent.
A good website build starts and ends with SEO. Likewise, SEO is the most important long-term success factor among all options available for online promotion. By comparison, it is also the most economical.
Conquering new markets using International / Multilingual SEO
The first step in a customer journey nowadays usually starts online. A user engages in online search through a search engine (e.g. Google Search, Bing, Yandex, Baidu), or on social media (e.g. YouTube Search, Facebook Search). This holds for B2C as much as for B2B, in any industry. You want to talk to your prospect in their own language, and in a culturally appropriate manner! Simple translation of your website content will not suffice: the search terms used are unique in each language - they will generally not be translations of your most successful keywords in your current home market.
In addition to language, locale must be considered. This is where regionally focused SEO comes into play. In the software industry, adaptation of content for a specific locale has been called "localization" for quite some time now. Complementing linguistic optimization, considerations of the cultural appropriateness of your message play an important role.
This means SEO, keyword research, and content creation needs to be done separately, from the ground up, for each separate language/locale. Simple translation of your website will never do.
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International / Multilingual SEO consulting can be specifically useful in the following scenarios:
My consulting activities in International / Multilingual SEO are backed up by decades of experience in the translation industry, access to linguistic resources worldwide, and established processes for efficient project management.
C-Suite consulting & problem-solving for decision-makers
Business owners and managers frequently encounter situations that require unique problem-solving skills deployed by a third party able to dedicate 100% effort to resolving exactly one issue, or answering one set of questions. Frequently, decision-makers are overwhelmed by multiple on-going processes. Unable to prioritize on medium to long-term research required in guiding the business forward, they find themselves buried in the everyday commitments of running the company. Important decisions are neglected, postponed, overlooked, or a decision is made post haste on the basis of shaky evidence, and hap hazard research. This can lead to a loss of market share, or even more catastrophic consequences.
Moreover, decision makers may find themselves unable or unwilling to task their own salaried professionals with pressing issues, or with the gathering of facts needed as a basis for decision-making. This may be for a variety of reasons. Associates might likewise be overwhelmed with day-to-day operations, or "office politics". An independent consultant engaged on a case-by-case basis can increase the number of options available to management in these scenarios. Serving as the "fall guy", an independent consultant can make things happen quickly, sidelining any concerns otherwise arising from social dynamics within the company.
Don't let your operation suffer the consequences of neglect in foresight and strategic decision-making. Make those decisions based on solid research, and a clearly defined set of options. Consider hiring an extra brain, someone to sink their teeth into pressing problems which the company's future may depend on. Apart from hourly billing, a contract involving a percentage-based success fee is one remuneration option in such scenarios. Work can be done on your premises as needed.
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The working life of a freelance translator:
Translation done properly means rewriting in another language. A good technical translator must be a gifted writer, able to explain complex technical concepts in simple words, using consistent terminology and agreed standard phrases.
Translation jobs are allocated on short notice, to tight deadlines, sometimes by several clients at once. Turning down a translation order is really not advisable - all the work done in winning that particular client might be placed in jeopardy. The replacement translator would likely continue to get that line of jobs in the future. Competition among translators is fierce, and translation agencies are not known to refer a good translator (their own production capacity) to their competitors.
A successful translator must be a self-starter, experienced in time management, and able to handle peak volumes without advance warning. The translator alone is responsible for evaluating the actual workload of a given job. Time requirements must be assessed very quickly and accurately, and the resulting self-defined work schedule must be self-monitored, and adhered to. Missing a deadline is the cardinal sin in the translation industry.
Long periods of low work volume may be interrupted by intense workload, 10-16 hour days, sometimes 10 or more days in one run without pause. While some weekdays might be void of challenges, there is rarely a completely free weekend, and work tends to accumulate around holidays and office worker vacation periods. Like any business, it is kind of like war, with long lulls in the "fighting", interrupted by clients' "surprise attacks", often at the most ungodly hour.
The fast-paced nature of the translation business rarely leaves time for studying documents before starting the actual translation process. Source text meanings must be deciphered "on the fly" with context and terminology research done sentence by sentence, as work progresses towards the deadline looming like the sword of Damocles. Mysteries are cleared up, working paragraph by paragraph, and chapter by chapter through the text: unknown terms are first translated using plausible placeholders. As work progresses, and proper terminology is decided upon, placeholders make way for the correct, grammatically harmonized translation within the entire document (search and replace).
The translatable original (the source text) is frequently authored by external contractors who remain forever out of reach for questioning. Deadline constraints, compounded by multi-layered corporate structures between the translator and actual author complicate any inquiries. Requests for information as to the meaning of source text is rarely ever clarified before the deadline - if at all. The translator is on her/his own, and needs to rely on efficient and targeted research methods to quickly determine actual source text meaning. Because highly technical terminology and engineering jargon is rarely found in any dictionary, the challenge is on the lone translator to comprehend the substance of the source text. Building on this, the translator must then select a proper and unambiguous translation understandable to the target text readership, i.e. adapted to the "register".
As a result, success in the translation industry requires rapid, thorough processing of highly technical information, frequently with limited or no context. This must be done using a methodical investigative approach to validate concepts, while conducting astute terminology research. New translation jobs frequently center around new concepts, ideas, products, and features never before seen. A good translator must have a sound knowledge base, but that alone is not sufficient. Meanings must be identified by a process of elimination, investigating details, uncovering ambiguities, all the while deadline pressure is the normal routine.
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Understanding MT (Machine Translation) as a prerequisite to understanding AI (Artificial Intelligence)
None of these challenges in translation can be fully mastered using "Artifical Intelligence" (AI), or "Machine Translation" (MT). Nowadays, much of the workload in the translation industry actually involves "fixing" the mess the computer created, so to speak. "MT" can only work, however imperfectly, if fed by a huge volume of quality human-translated data. This data has been aggregated in Translation Memories (TM) over the past 3 decades, generated through the use of CAT-Tools (Computer Aided Translation). Without these high volumes of human translations available to build and feed the database, "MT", and now "AI" could not exist. The "AI" is only as good as the database. A superb AI algorithm drawing from a meager database will not yield even satisfactory results. The best example for this is "Google Translate", which started to improve only after a button for human editing/correction of results was added several years ago ("Rate this translation" + "Suggest an edit"). The Google MT we use today is only good because of millions of human edits to the Google Translation database.
Keyword research is one of the most important disciplines in SEO. Understanding AI, by knowing its sister technology MT, and how these are driven by data - namely, human-translated sentences/text-strings - provides powerful insights for keyword research. This is the backbone of all On-Page SEO activities, laying the foundation for SEO entity definition, driven by keyword clustering. This is just one reason why a background in the translation industry provides a solid foundation for SEO success. These insights also sharpen the eye so as to have more realistic expectations on the potential and pitfalls of using AI for SEO.
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Translators must, first and foremost, be good writers
Translation work involves rendering a text in the target language in such a way as if it had been originally written in that target language - not the source language (i.e. not the language of the original text). The target text reader must not notice a "too literal" translation, arrived at by mere sequencing of words and phrases.
In pursuit of such aims, a good translator will consider how wordings are understood by the target audience. It is important to convey meaning by matching the same tone, as appropriate in the specific in context. The register, i.e. wordings specific to the target audience (e.g. colloquial vs. formal) is an important consideration in the choice of words.
Translators lacking resourcefulness and skill in these disciplines, which must anyway be mastered by every good writer, would not last 25 years in the translation industry.
Building on my career as a professional translator, my writing skills in several languages (English & German) in combination with my SEO expertise allow me to create great content for your website.
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The service offers presented on this portfolio website are only available to "agency clients".
This portfolio website is not intended for "end clients", or the general public.
Hence the domain name, ending in ".agency", meant to imply - perhaps somewhat counterinituitively - "SEO consulting for SEO agencies only".
All services and offers advertised on this portfolio website are subject to the:
Your navigation on this website constitutes your acceptance of the full terms of this "Framework Agreement on SEO Consulting for Agencies & in-House Departments" in its most current form, upon assignment of any SEO consulting tasks.
AGENCY CLIENT CATALOGUE OF SEO SERVICES
All prices quoted "NET", without VAT.
Note that clients based outside the EU are anyway never charged VAT, given that SEO consulting is not an "electronically supplied service".
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Key terms for agency clients to consider:
When collaborating with an agency I shall not be involved with end client acquisition, project management, or customer service.
The reduced hourly rate must be justified by a high volume of work, expectation of repeat business, and long-term collaboration.
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"Agency clients" are select SEO agencies, enterprise in-house marketing departments, or other established businesses which meet certain criteria to qualify as an "agency client" (in contrast to a so-called "end client").
"Agency clients" are able to offer a sustained flow of orders/work volume (e.g. long-term SEO campaigns, work assigned over many months/years).
"Agency clients" outsource SEO contract work on a regular basis and in substantial volume, and as such qualify for reduced hourly rates.
An established business seeking to fill an employee-type SEO position, but opting to use the services of a freelancer instead, may likewise qualify for "agency rates".
For a business to qualify as an "agency client", such business must be incorporated (my invoice to be issued to a legal entity), and must have a dedicated SEO team consisting of multiple employees (not contractors). A qualifying "agency client" must have a separate, dedicated accounting department. Freelancers posing as SEO agencies do not qualify.
So-called "startups" likewise do not qualify as "agency clients", and can therefore not benefit from reduced hourly rates. "Startups" are not established businesses (~90% startup failure rate). By their very nature, startups cannot promise, let alone guarantee, a sustained volume of repeat orders/work assignments.
