Alberto Flores
Alberto Flores is Capitán SEO and one of the founders of Indexando Marketing.
He works side by side with Fernando Ferreiro, the other half of this international marketing company, and with the rest of the Indexando Marketing team to propose the best organic and Google Ads positioning strategies, always based on measurable and objective data.
We spoke with Alberto about the peculiarities and differences of working on SEO and SEM, the potential of link building strategies and when it is advisable -or not- to opt for the controversial Black Hat SEO.
When and why did you decided to became a SEO Captain?
All happened by chance. Back in 2008-2009 I was asked to give my opinion on how the contents of an ecommerce were planned, without knowing anything about online marketing and less about organic positioning, they gave me the opportunity to reconstruct those contents from a SEO perspective, to do so I had to read a couple of books from that time (I remember one of them was by Fernando Maciá). I got hooked, I quit what was my job at the time and decided to bet everything on setting up my own agency.
I have been part of this exciting world since them and I will never regret having left a job that I had been doing for ten years to start on my own.
In addition to mastering SEO, you are also an expert in Google Ads, what difference is there when it comes to working on paid and organic positioning?
Actually, both are paid, since a SEO gets paid for doing his or her job. That said, the main difference is the possibility of having immediate return if things are done well.
Google Ads works really well for competitive sectors or the ones that need to monetize quickly; as a complement to organic positioning or in specific campaigns throughout the year in which a product / service has more presence.
Organic positioning requires a good investment capacity and patience on the part of the client, but it is well done it is very profitable in a medium or long period of time, depending on what business model we are working on.
Also, in organic the quality of the page is a very important concept and not so much in Google Ads, I am not saying that it is not important but it is not to the same extent as in SEO. I’ve seen a lot of crappy pages selling on PPC that don’t have the possibility to go organic.
What Google Ads functionalities do you like the most?
The Google Ads system offers so many possibilities that it is difficult to highlight a specific functionality but something that I really like is the possibility of enriching the snippets it offers within the extensions part. Also the wide range of ad options: video, gmail, search, etc.
In your opinion, can we only use paid media and obtain good result?
If you have a good investment capacity, without a doubt. The promotion possibilities are quite wide, since you have search, display, remarketing and more options, the visibility is immediate and that is something that must be valued.
Of course, we must bear in mind that it is a job that needs daily adjustment. Depending on the sector it can be a work that takes many hours, for example the world of locksmiths, air conditioners, boilers, plumbing, electricity… It is very competitive and the techniques we have to use have nothing to do with the ones used in other less hostile sectors.
In short, good results come from professional work, daily dedication and experience, the broader the better.
“In short, good results come from professional work, daily dedication and experience, the broader the better.”
Do you think people really understand how paid positioning works?
The common man does not understand it and the only way you have to prove that it works is by giving it a decent return so latter it will be between fantastic and great.
Usually, when they ask you about this service, you don’t find an interlocutor who is informed. This entails spending time giving the basic explanations to finish making it clear that you have to have investment capacity.
The client’s involvement is inevitable when he/she decides to hire this service and that is when he/she begins to make an effort to understand.
Another great SEO strategy is link building, could you explain how it works?
The opperation is subject to the type of client and the objetives that you search for.
In link building it is necessary to have the skills of a bloodhound, to know how to find a juicy bone to put in your mouth. For this it is necessary to have skills when negotiating links, look for tools that help you find or generate them, investigate the competition, use footprints well (they often show good linking options)… Also have contacts that share with you their linked places and share yours, obviously.
What do we have to keep in mind to develop a good link building strategy?
Basic aspects such as looking for them in places related to your client’s business model, looking at parameters such as domain authority, trust flow, the number of domains linked to the domain where you want to obtain a link, that the anchor text have a proposed strategy, the variety of the links, since these can come from different formats, even from linked banners or sponsorships on other pages.
To start with all this, you have to start from an analysis of the links that the client already has and the ones that the client’s competition have in case you have to disallow any of the obtained ones or take advantage of those that others have and you don’t.
In short, a structure according to the needs of a link with which you suddenly find yourself to improve it.
In an online reputation strategy, can a link strategy be applied?
Yes, of course, let’s imagine that you have to scroll a result in the SERP that is the name of a person + name of his or her company and an article of an online medium that links them and speaks ill of that person comes out in the first positions.
In such a case, a post can be generated in other media in which that person + name of his or her company is talked about to position it organically and move the negative at the same time leaving links in the body of the text to generate authority in the results that are up below or generate it in other posts that have been made within that scrolling strategy in the SERP.
If, in addition, we generate traffic to the links that are left in the post and to the post itself, we will promote a better ranking that displaces the negative result or results.
What are your favorite tools and extensions?
Regarding tools, I do not want to pronounce myself, since all of us who work in this area know which are the most used. Yes, I would like to say that regarding its operation and functionalities we have to test them for ourselves, since they all have their ambassadors who are usually references in this sector but, in truth, it is nothing more than a sale, so the decision and assessment its operation cannot come from third parties.
In addition, you cannot use just one because the interesting thing is to cross data and interpret which ones give the best result for one or the other functionalities.
As for extensions, I really like seominion, tag assistant, web developer and one that is used to manage them all: one-click extension manager.
Finally, what do you think of black hat techniques?
Black hat techniques are very good depending on what actions and should be used more or less intensely depending on what objective you want to achieve and what tasks they are aimed at. If, for example, there is an interest in positioning something quickly, regardless the risk of loosing it latter, it will be donde more intensely; If you want to use it on a client’s website, it will be done in a much more subtle way and by measuring the objective to be achieved well.
I have never been against the use of black techniques whenever they are used to carry out certain actions; for me it seems wrong to use them to annoy others.
