Craig Campbell is a renowned SEO expert hailing from Glasgow, UK, with a remarkable 18 years of experience in SEO consulting and digital marketing. With his vast knowledge and expertise, Craig has established himself as a go-to resource in the industry.
Not only is Craig a sought-after speaker and trainer, but he also serves as a regular host for SEMrush webinars, sharing invaluable insights with eager learners. Recognizing the immense value he brings to businesses, Craig expanded his endeavors by venturing into website flipping for profit, leveraging his expertise to enhance online ventures.
In addition to his entrepreneurial pursuits, Craig also dedicates his time to training agencies, equipping them with the knowledge and tools needed to elevate their SEO game. His commitment to empowering others in the field is a testament to his passion for driving excellence and fostering growth.
What truly fuels Craig’s excitement is the realization that despite SEO being around for two decades, there are still individuals who fail to grasp its intricacies. This knowledge gap presents a lucrative opportunity for Craig to maximize his earning potential by capitalizing on the untapped market.
Craig can be reached on Twitter @craigcampbell03 or via LinkedIn.
Recent Shows with Craig Campbell
399 | Link Building Tactics and Flipping Websites with Craig CampbellInterview / podcast
For episode 399 of the award-winning EDGE of the Web podcast the special guest was Craig Campbell, an SEO consultant and trainer based in Glasgow, Scotland. Host Erin Sparks spoke with Craig about the wide array of link building tactics available to SEOs today, as well as how SEOs can get into the potentially lucrative business of flipping websites. Here’s what we learned:
00:01:57
White Hat vs Black Hat SEO
These terms are fairly self-explanatory and hearken back to the pre-Penguin and pre-Panda days when you could use a variety of spammy, manipulative tricks that were practically guaranteed ways to get a site to rank well on Google. As Craig noted, the terms are just labels that become less relevant over time as Google catches up with whatever it doesn’t like and finds ways to penalize sites that use those spammy, manipulative techniques to “trick” Google into giving a site a better ranking than it deserves.
The quality bar has been raised by Google to flush out the garbage SEO styles of work. Now, it definitely matters how you go about getting your links and how you go about creating and posting content to a site. There are still some very effective ways to cheat, and there are techniques that might fall into a gray hat area. The issue with these labels is that the ones who use the white hat SEO label tend to be self-righteous about it, as if they’re doing something better than everyone else. Craig has also seen with his own eyes SEOs who make a big deal out of saying they are white hat buying links right and left but will swear to the SEO community that buying links is the work of the devil. In other words, what people practice and what people preach can be quite different. Every SEO has a bit of gray in them, like it or not.
Stealing content is clearly unethical. Using massive page buildout tools if done well and strategically so that the final content is as natural as possible can work well and some might consider that falling in a gray area, but if used poorly will come off as spammy and manipulative. Private blog networks (PBNs) are badmouthed by many but if used well and with quality in mind can be very useful. A lot of these different tools can be white hat, gray hat, or black hat depending on how they’re deployed. A PBN can be a total garbage black hat site or it can be a site that’s trusted and authoritative with good traffic and well-deserved ranking that it can pass on and share with others. Basically, if a PBN is so good that Google can’t even tell it’s a PBN, then there’s nothing wrong with using it.
If you’re going to buy links, buy good links, quality links. If you buy links from a site that has thousands of links and is sharing those links to thousands of sites, what value is it really bringing to your individual site? Probably very little. That’s not a quality link and it’s just a waste of your money and everyone’s time.
00:11:54
Other Link Building Tactics
Google made it clear that it would de-value guest blog posts, which makes sense if the only reason it’s happening is for the link building aspect of it, but what about when it brings real value and authentic communication to a particular audience? And maybe a link comes along with it but that’s not the primary purpose.
Craig agrees that people should be able to work the PR side of SEO and be out there contributing across different communities in ways that deliver valuable content to uses, and they should be able to get some PR and SEO value out of doing that if it’s quality content. But it’s another thing for a site to buy crappy guest blog content. Again, it’s all in how any particular tool or tactic is being deployed and used. But by all means, use your knowledge and expertise in ways that delivery value and also have an SEO return for your own brand.
The biggest problem is when SEOs don’t want to put the time and effort into doing quality work. They want quick-and-dirty tactics that don’t take much effort to get the desired results, and that’s when they get on the slippery slope of doing garbage SEO work, which will eventually catch up with them because Google is getting cleverer at recognizing shoddy SEO work. Sure, it would be wonderful if you could just push a button and rank, but that’s simply not how it works. It takes real effort and hard work overtime to get results.
00:16:05
Buying and Selling (Flipping) Websites: How SEOs Make the Leap
Craig is a master at buying and selling websites, but how does an SEO make the leap into that market? For Craig, it came about because of a piece of advice a retiring acquaintance of his gave him. He told Craig that instead of applying his SEO skills to websites that made their owners lots of money but only paid him a tiny fraction of that money, he needed to apply his SEO skills in ways that would be a more direct way of making money. That’s when the light bulb went off in his head.
What Craig does is look around for sites where the owner is not good at SEO. There are many eCommerce sites that people can build up very easily with simple SEO tactics, such as an Amazon site, to generate around $1,000 month but they plateau there and then get disenchanted when they can’t seem to scale it up past that mark. But Craig can take a site like that, apply his SEO expertise, strategies, and tactics, and build it up to more like $5,000 a month. And it’s fairly common to be able to sell sites like that for up to 40 times their average monthly revenue. In other words, if he can buy a $1k/month website for $40k, scale it up to $5k/month and then sell it for 40 times that, you can see the potential here.
Of course, there’s a cost to scaling the site up as well. A real-world example for Craig was buying a site for $3k, spending $10 on content and SEO over the course of six months for a total investment of $13k, and was able to sell it for $136,000. This is really no different than flipping houses in real estate. You look around for website that’s got great potential and flip it.
Sometimes it can be as easy as taking a site off of Amazon, which only pays 3-4% commissions on eCommerce sales, and switching it to a private affiliate platform that’s willing to pay more like 10% commissions and literally overnight you’ve ratcheted up its monthly earnings and can sell the site for 40 times that new figure that was literally little more than flipping a few switches.
Some wonder why Craig works on the lower end of the spectrum but for him it’s what makes the most sense. Taking a $1k/month site and scaling it to $5k/month is very simple for him to do and still results in a substantial profit. But trying to take a $10k/month site and scaling it up substantially is a lot trickier and therefore a lot riskier. You have to figure out where the sweet spot is for you.
Part of why it’s so satisfying is that Craig gets to learn a lot about different niches, how to improve on the basics of affiliate marketing, and so on. You quickly learn what’s worth investing in and what isn’t. Why mess around with a site selling $20 products when you could work on a site selling $200 products? Why mess around with a site that’s got a strong seasonal effect when you could work on a site that makes sales all year long? Craig learned this lesson the hard way with a golf website that had great sales, but only for eight months out of the year and it was just dead for four months out of the year.
Craig has been flipping websites for five or six years and has probably flipped somewhere in the range of 70-100 sites. And the SEO work he’s doing on those sites isn’t anything fancy, it’s just doing quality work on SEO basics. Some go-to places you can go to find websites to buy include odys.cc (Craig’s premium domain affiliate and aged domain site), a private Facebook group called Flipping Websites, if you want a higher-end option where you’d be investing $40-$50k on a site you can try Empire Flippers. [...]
March 5, 2021- 397 | Leaving the Digital Agency Life with SEO Expert Craig CampbellInterview / podcast
Our special guest for episode 397 of the award-winning EDGE of the Web podcast was Craig Campbell, an SEO consultant and trainer based in Glasgow, Scotland. Host Erin Sparks spoke with Craig about leaving the digital agency life in favor of becoming an SEO consultant. Here’s what we learned:
00:03:32
Craig Campbell: His Background and Experience
Craig Campbell is a well-known SEO expert from Glasgow, UK (Scotland). He has 18 years of experience in SEO Consulting and Digital Marketing. He is also a regular SEMrush webinar host, SEO trainer, and speaker. Craig has been helping more than a hundred businesses, and he decided to start flipping websites for profit. He’s also an agency trainer who provides great information to agencies to step up their SEO. Craig’s unique path in the industry. He started out as an in-house, on-page SEO, then did three years of freelancing, then ran an agency for nine years, and now has been on his own as a consultant going on seven years.
As a very regular speaker at SEO conferences all over the world, Craig is sorely missing being able to travel. And while many of those conferences went virtual, it’s just not the same as the in-person events.
00:07:50
Breaking Away from Agency-Based SEO Work
What prompted Craig to strike out on his own as a consultancy was the grind, the slog of running an agency for nine years. He’s the first to admit he didn’t do it the right way. He was too involved in the actual work, which meant he was working in the business instead of working on the business, which tends to keep you unsustainably busy and prevents you from properly managing your staff.
Craig sees this pattern happen to a lot of agency owners because they just start out flying by the seat of their pants and before they know it they’ve hired other people and suddenly they’re running a business without really having a clue about how to run a business! It’s a scary place to be due to all the responsibilities around the mechanics and knowledge required to properly oversee a business. And no one who finds themselves in this predicament likes to admit they’re doing it all wrong and have no clue how to do it right.
Learning all those lessons the hard way, however, really paved the way for Craig to become a great consultant and agency trainer. He’s also noticed that a lot of SEOs get hired into an agency and what they end up doing is sucking up all the knowledge they can and then quit and start their own agency, which is why there are always so many new agencies popping up all the time. A lot of agency owners see employees quit, start their own agency, and then become a direct competitor, which can be very frustrating. And so often the staff you have to hire simply aren’t as motivated to succeed as you are and the stress and frustration continue to grow over time.
00:14:38
The Writing on the Wall: Knowing When Enough is Enough
Eventually, Craig simply had to say enough is enough and shut the agency down. What were the signs that finally indicated to him it was time to throw in the proverbial towel? Craig noted the following three major indicators he experienced:
Inappropriate Interactions with Clients: When you’re running an agency, there are always those clients who are especially difficult to work with, but if you find yourself responding to them in ways that match their rudeness and you don’t care how rude you yourself are being, that can be a strong sign you’ve reached a breaking point.
Debilitating Levels of Stress: Running an agency is inherently stressful, but when the stress and anxiety get to the point that you need to see a doctor about and get medications to help with it, that’s another strong sign. Not feeling like you can ever switch off, not being able to sleep because you keep thinking of all the things you didn’t get to, always chasing the money, and so on. When the stress becomes personally unsustainable and starts negatively impacting your health, it’s time to rethink what you’re doing.
Losing the Love of SEO: If running the agency and dealing with clients begins to make you lose your original love of SEO, that’s another sign it may be time to give up your agency or find a radically different (better) way to run it. If you can no longer do the parts of the work you’re actually passionate about, what are you even doing?
It’s important for agency owners to have these conversations not just to commiserate, but to learn from each other how to do it better or to recognize when it’s time to forge a different path in the industry. One thing that won’t go away is the constant “wild west” feeling of the industry because of how rapidly everything changes on a continual basis. It’s a constant churn on top of which you have to layer in staff turnover and the management aspects of trying to make a business run as smoothly as possible. It’s a lot!
00:21:04
What it Takes to Walk Away from Agency Life
What should the agency owner who wants to break away from agency life do to prepare themselves for that break and what comes next?
Craig noted that at least in his experience, it’s not an instant pivot. You can’t just shut down an agency overnight, and it takes time to build your own personal brand as a consultant. Doing that means taking on a ton of speaking gigs (whether conferences or podcasts and so on), most of which are unpaid, in order to put yourself out there and show what you bring to the table. Then you have to get into deep networking to start gaining clients.
It’s all about establishing trust and authority for your personal brand. You have to be able to clearly articulate and show how you’re different from the thousands of other SEO consultants out there all vying for a limited number of clients. And when you’re doing all those free speaking gigs, you have to convey real knowledge with real value and not just talk a lot of SEO garbage the way so many do. The only way you can get sustainable bookings as a consultant is by showing how you consistently deliver actionable insights and advice that gets results.
Craig especially wants people to understand that walking away from crappy agency work and becoming a successful consultant is not easy. It’s very hard. The kind of brand building you have to do to make a go of it takes a massive investment of time, effort, and money. But if you’re good at SEO (and can keep up with constant changes in the industry) and make the investment, it can be totally worth it. [...]
February 26, 2021
