Interview with Italian SEO Consultant Giuseppe Pastore

As part of our BloggersIdeas interview series, today we have Intellectual SEO Consultant Giuseppe Pastore Founder of giuseppepastore.com,  He will be sharing his thoughts on SEO Marketing, Mobile Marketing & AffiliateMarketing . He is having wide experience in SEO services & have worked with many big brands. Today on bloggersideas he will sharing his knowledge on SEO. 

So lets get started with Giuseppe.

First of all thanks a lot for accepting my interview proposal. I and my  readers are very pretty glad to have you. Please tell us about yourself and your educational background?

My pleasure to be hosted on BloggersIdeas, thanks for having invited me. I’m an Italian SEO consultant (find more at http://www.giuseppepastore.com/en/) working for either big or small companies, also in international sceneries . I arrived to SEO after a master’s degree in Electronics Engineering and having understood I was enjoying more ranking websites than projecting microcircuits.

How to do SEO for new domain. What strategies you would use for its branding?

Doing SEO on a new domain isn’t any different from working on aged one, apart the fact that you start with an unknown brand and zero links. So, given you’ve done your homework regarding onsite optimization, a big effort has to be put into building a brand (and links). A good idea in this case is investing in a linkable asset to promote (ie. a PDF guide, an infographic, a tutorial video).

You can’t outreach to blogs and websites without having something valuable to offer. Depending on the niche the “object” may differ, but the basics remain the same: give value for free to relevant sites and build relationships. Egobaiting also works well in my experience (interviews, round-ups).

What are top 5 content marketing strategies for tech bloggers, who are handling tech blogs from long time. How can they rank for high competitive keywords like Samsung S5/?

Surely not easy since for this query you’ll surely have the brand website and quite a few e-commerce sites ranking. To jump in the top ten you need a very long review and topical site trust. Regarding the content, I’d pay attention to make it a hub resource about the Samsung S5; regarding links, I think these would be the formats that would attract links the most:

• A complete video review
• An infographic about the evolution of the model along time
• A Buzzfeed style post (es. 10 celebrities taking selfies with Samsung S5)
• A controversial post (ie. Study reveals Samsung S5 is the best phone to record homemade porn)
• A giveaway 

How do you go about promoting your affiliate marketing campaigns?

When working on affiliated websites I go after low competition/middle revenue niches. Promoting affiliated websites can be hard if you’re not building a really useful resource, so in some cases I just rely on links coming from other sites of mine.

I’ve bought links as well in a few occasions. Anyway my main goal is always building an email list, first, so it’s not rare I run ads landing on a squeeze page to collect emails.

Do you mainly go for organic search traffic only or do you also run paid ads? What would you recommend to others, especially the newbies?

As I was saying, an important stream of traffic for every website should arrive from subscribers, in my opinion, and I try to push people to leave me their email with different subscription forms and landings, so along time I will not totally depend on Google for traffic.

If the topic suggests to invest in social, I also try to get fans/followers. I’ve tried Facebook ads in some occasions and they can work well.

What’s hot in the Incentive marketing world right now?

I fear this is not my field and I can’t really help on it.

What is affiliate scrubbing/shaving, and what do you think about it?

Serious problem. Affiliate scrubbing is when the Advertiser flags as invalid some regular leads and doesn’t pay the due commissions for them. Affiliate shaving, instead, is when the CPA Networks steal leads to the affiliated accounts by removing their tracking ID when sending the visitor to the Advertiser website; basically the Network keeps earnings for themselves.

Unfortunately, I’m dealing with these situation and you can’t do nothing. In my case the product is a niche one and there are no alternatives, so I can choose continue running my campaigns and earn some money or stop them and earn nothing.  If you can’t replace the product with another one, my advice is bank as much as you can but don’t invest too much in the niche. 

How do I get quality affiliates to promote my own products and services?

The things you should ask yourself are:

• Are marketing instruments I offer (banners, landings) better than my competitors’ ones?
• Is my website easy usable so that people converts smoothly?
• Are commissions I offer as good as competitors’ ones?
• Do my products have a market/research volume?

If your answers aren’t always yes, chances exist your affiliated program will fail, moreover if publishers can choose similar products to promote. I’d pay a lot of attention of the entire conversion path from banners to landing to pricing, more than to commissions. If something is easy to be sold, even with lower commissions is more appealing than other options. 

What Internet marketing sites do you read regularly?

I use to read SearchEngineLand.com but I mostly stay updated via Twitter (I just follow a few people whose shared links I’m interested in).

Have you attended any SEO conferences. Please tell us how did you interact with fellow internet marketers?

I’ve attended twice SMX Milan, and a few other Italian events. I’ve had the chance to know several people there and meet people I’ve sometimes chatted on Twitter with. In some cases I tweeted them I would have been there and would loved to say hello before or after their speech; in other ones I just presented myself: when you share an interest it’s easy to keep the conversation flowing.

What Internet marketing areas are you weak and strong in? Provide examples of both.

I’m quite T-shaped, being able to move across SEO, Content marketing, Social, Web Analytics and Conversion Rate Optimization, anyway I think I do my best at technical SEO. I usually do consulting on large sites (e-commerce, big news websites) and it’s quite frequent I can greatly grow traffic by just fixing technical issues.

I’m not good at paid as I don’t often manage paid campaigns.

What do you feel are some of the most important factors to ranking high in the organic results?

• Optimized site architecture
• Long and detailed content
• Relevant Links

But pay attention to the increasing importance of quality metrics (social shares, no bounce to SERPs, good mobile UX).

Have you ever built backlinks? If you have, what kind of strategies do you implement for backlinks? What do you think about link buying, link bait, bookmarks, social links, and other specific backlink strategies?

I’ve done almost everything. In the early years I used to use directories, guest-books, comments, forums, article marketing, bookmarking, paid links. Then I shifted to guest posting and then to egobaiting, broken link building, infographic promotion, content marketing. I’ve defined a couple of new techniques myself: dropped link building, hacked link building.

As time passes, building relevant links becomes more difficult. You can still build cheap links but they don’t pass value or can get you in troubles. If you want to get good links nowadays the best way is to push out good content (in different forms: textual, video, visual) and being good at promoting it.

Do you Pinterest for your business, what kind of pinterest tools you use?

At the moment I’ve no projects using Pinterest.

How Do You Conduct An SEO Experiment & What you do when you get your client’s project. First thing you would do is ?

I’m not sure I’ve understood the question. Anyway, when doing consulting for a new client I usually start looking at how the site shows up in Google by using advanced operators (site:, inurl:, ecc), look at Anlaytics reports and verify the site in Google webmaster tools to have more information about duplications and errors. I open the website only after having looked at SERPs and start searching for common issues (faceted navigations, paginations, cookie served content, session IDs).

What kind of SEO Tools you are using right now.  Can you tell us ?

I use Majestic SEO for link analysis, Screaming Frog for sites crawling, and a number of Chrome plugins (Scraper, Redirect Path, Web developer, SEO Quake, Check my links).

Do you use Blackhat SEO techniques  in a white hat SEO way , Like scrapebox  & Xenu’s Link Sleuth ?

I use Xenu (that’s a crawling tool) but I don’t use Scrapebox, even if I know it has a lot of interesting features to be used also in whitehat way (I’d suggest this tutorial by Chris Dyson)

What is the best & worst thing you would like to say about my bloggersideas blog. Please be open to this question ?

The best thing is there’s lot of interesting content to dig in and learn from. I haven’t found something really bad on the site: it looks clean, works well on smartphones and ads are not invasive. Good job.

If you have any questions  about this interview, please do ask in the comments below !

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