Parallax Spotlight: SEO Manager Chris Mills

Since the launch of Parallax, we’ve been looking at how our digital agency operates day in, day out through our spotlight feature. This time the Parallax Spotlight turns to our SEO Manager Chris Mills.

Hi Chris, start us off with an introduction about yourself and what your role contains here at Parallax.

I’m 24 with a degree in Literature. If i’m not working, I’m either learning something new or trying to speed run on GTA Vice City.

Every day at Parallax is completely different. Whether I spend the day tracking rankings, traffic and conversion rates, or performing on-site optimisations everything is different. I also spend time monitoring and tracking competitors, whilst catching up on everything that’s happened in the weird and wonderful world of SEO. From theory testing to optimising, it’s all key. I get involved in link building and managing PPC and retargeting campaigns, whilst also keeping a close relationship with clients.

Tell us about some of things you’ve been working on recently.

Recent changes to HTTPS, ‘Pigeon’, and the forthcoming Penguin update have meant there’s been a lot going on and ensuring that we stay ahead of the curve has been a necessity. The ‘pigeon’ change for example was pretty spectacular for us, and I managed to work with the changes and see some excellent results.

I think what I love most about SEO is the technical aspects above anything else. I also love experimenting and finding what works and what doesn’t, whilst looking at some of the work other people have been doing with structured markup for example.

A lot of the marketing work seems to be focused around content, how does that work with SEO?

As you’ve all probably heard from anyone in this area, content is king. Long gone are the days where SEO was a shady back alley business, site owners that crammed as many keywords as they could onto a page, doorway pages and sneaky JS redirects. Google’s wonderful barn of animals will find you. Nowadays we’ve got a better user experience, people can find what they want and engaging, excellent content is what’ll bring people to your page and make Google realise you’re awesome. SEO is dead right?

Where do you see SEO trends moving in the next 12 months?

I’m going to go with three S words, in no particular order. Secure, Social and Structured Data.

With the recent changes to HTTPS as a ranking signal, introduction of technologies like SPDY, better encryption and the whole NSA, Tor and iCloud security threats, I can only see websites going one way – buying themselves an SSL cert, and implementing it correctly.

We’ll see better boosts for correctly implemented 256 bit encryption. There’ll also be some teething problems around ‘this site may harm your computer’ warnings in SERPs, and we’ll see a large amount of people getting it wrong.

Structured markup will become more prominent, not to mention further schema markup being created to handle further trends. With the whole maps and core merge, we should see further movement from Google+ towards Google Maps additionally.

What stand out tools or pieces of software would you recommend to those new to SEO and digital marketing?

Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics and a crawler of your choice. If you can master these you can do anything you want. If you can’t come to conclusions about SEO using these tools, then you’re not going to get any use out of paid applications.

Last but not least, what would you be doing if you didn’t work in digital marketing?

I’d probably be wasting my life away on Twitch.

Thanks Chris!

If you’ve got a question for Chris about digital marketing, SEO or anything else let us know in the comments section below or drop us a line on Twitter or Facebook.