Get Ready to Be Inspired by Matt Antonino's Remarkable Journey!

THE SHORT ANSWER

Key takeaways

Uncover the strategies and tactics used by Matt Antonino to help over 2500 businesses succeed in the digital marketing world.

Matt Antonino is one of the young-minded old guys of digital marketing.

He started marketing his own businesses in 2003 and has been deeply involved in the SEO & marketing community ever since.

Matt worked at one of the largest SEO agencies in the world as a senior manager and helped over 2500 businesses grow and improve their marketing.

Recently, Matt opened his own agency, Stack Digital, where the focus is entirely on providing exceptional business growth results to clients using multiple marketing channels.

Trying to get a new business off the ground, Matt doesn’t sleep much these days.

How would you explain specifically what you do as an SEO?

While SEO is one of the multiple marketing channels we use, our primary SEO goal is to improve rankings and, therefore, traffic, conversions, and revenue for our clients by targeting the main keyphrases.

Improving the rankings comes down to two factors: onsite SEO, offsite promotion, and link building and earning.

After keyword research and some competitor research, onsite and technical SEO follows, focusing on the target pages that each keyword relates to.

We focus on titles, content, technical elements such as indexability, proper redirects, and checking for anything that may block the site from ranking.

During and after onsite work, we follow up with offsite work, mostly content promotion, outreach, citation and local link building, and finding relevant niche sites for the client to be listed on.

This may involve research into the specific niche or into competitors and what offsite work they may be doing.

Which new skills are most important for SEO’s to learn in the next six months?

SEOs should be focused on learning how other areas of marketing work and can integrate with SEO.

The biggest change I’ve seen in 3 years is most agencies moving from “SEO agency” to “marketing agency” as a primary focus.

Don’t get trapped as that niche person who can rank a site but doesn’t know how advertising or email marketing work at all.

Rankings are very useful, but a marketing strategy is never complete if you say, “Rank these 20 keyphrases and your life will be changed.” It doesn’t work that way.

What do you find most rewarding about SEO?

I love two things most about SEO:

1) the challenge. It’s always changing, and I love that what worked yesterday may fall completely on its face today.

We have to constantly innovate, or we’re done in this industry. It’s hard to catch up to where the bleeding edge is leading and

2) I love the wins.

When you see a client on page 1 for a massive keyphrase and it changes their business, you feel amazing. We ranked one client for a single-word keyphrase, “swimwear,” and it literally changed their business.

They exploded with traffic and have since grown dramatically. Nothing beats the feeling that you made someone’s life a lot better.

How do you stay updated with the latest SEO industry news?

I read from a selection of about 300 blogs, skimming and scanning mostly, and then reading the ones that made the cut.

I also read the front page of Inbound.org daily and participate in the community there and on Moz. That pretty much keeps me up to speed.

When I get a few minutes, I like to jump into Twitter chats, but they’re too few and far between at the moment.

As an SEO, what is your favorite SEO hack?

Ha, ok … so I’ll answer this with a real website “hack.”

This one’s tricky, so people may need to read it a couple times.

Some website builders don’t give you FTP access, a way to add Analytics or any access for Search Console claim code.

Without some sort of hack you can’t claim Search Console or setup Analytics.

So what I found was that if you use the custom meta tag sections (the boxes for title, description and keywords) what happens is the CMS basically creates the

So I found out that if you put into the keywords section this code:

“> <whole Search Console or Analytics tag> <meta name=”keywords” content=”

Then the CMS would (usually) interpret that as TWO meta keywords tags (one is blank) and your whole analytics & search console tag would be placed into the header code. BAM, hacked.

Disclaimer

Everything on this website is based on my experience and opinion from two decades in the Digital Marketing industry. I don’t officially know how Google or any other search engines work.

Everything I write here is hypothetical and based on my experience. This website does not constitute advice or services; what worked for me may or may not work for you.

As an affiliate, I may earn a commission from qualifying purchases. I get commissions for purchases made through links on this website from Amazon and other third parties.