We met up with Bruce Clay, founder of Bruce Clay Inc, who’s been in the digital marketing game since the 90s. We picked his brain by asking him what his biggest lesson of 2017 was, and what his top tip for 2018 is.

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Naeem: “What was your biggest lesson in digital marketing in 2017?”

Bruce: “My biggest lesson in digital marketing, whatever you’re going to be doing, is to understand that it’s changing next Monday. Every Monday this is a new industry; Google changes the algorithm (according to themselves) about 5 times a day, so you can’t get into ever having the feeling that “I have the answer”, because nobody has the answer. You’re never going to figure it out. Just understand that you have to keep going.”

Naeem: “What is your top tip in digital marketing for 2018?”

Bruce:“I believe in 2018 everybody should focus on three things – Mobile first, video second and voice search.

Now anybody with a phone is going to adapt to voice search, and if you search for your own company by voice, most of the time you’ll never find yourself, unless you’re searching by explicit name.

If you’re searching for a product, you won’t be there even if you rank well in other areas. A lot of it has to do with language, and a lot of it has to do with the interpretation of the voice to understanding what you mean. So in understanding that Google is in the business of making money; answers are still pretty important to them.

So I think that voice is going to be important.

Everybody does video. If you want to know how to do something and it’s something you can do in 5 minutes, you’ll search for a video. So make sure you have video, even for help files or descriptions. We’ve seen that conversion rates go up over 40% for videos above the fold on the sales page. So video is going to be massive.”

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Tags: digital marketing, mobile first, search, SEO, video, Voice search