My name is Eric Ferguson and I'm known by some as the SEO Dude. I started doing SEO in 2001.
I can tell you the same boring things that so many other SEO professionals can tell you: that I've gotten a formal SEO education, that I've been to major SEO conferences, that I do white hat link-building, etc.
But that doesn't prove I'm an SEO expert. That just proves I have SEO experience.
What proves that I'm an SEO expert is the performance of a company that I've owned for the last 20+ years.
I own an ecommerce car parts business that I started running in 2001. That car parts business serves as a good case study to prove the impact of my SEO expertise. I personally did all the SEO work for the company. Also, for the last several years the car parts business has not done any paid advertising, so it's easy to segregate the impact of the SEO work using Google Analytics.
This is a screenshot from the Google Analytics account for the car parts business. It breaks down the different traffic channels over a seven-year period. It shows the tremendous value we've gotten from my SEO work:
If you look at the first row, it lists Organic Search, which is people who did a Google search and landed on our site. It's not paid advertising; it's free traffic. This is what effective SEO accomplishes. It shows we've gotten more than $13 million in sales during that period, all without paying a dime for any of the traffic Google sent us.
Very few people can say they personally generated that amount of sales from their SEO effort. That's why I feel comfortable saying that I'm an SEO expert, and why getting SEO training from me might be valuable to you.
Beyond that, notice the row that says Referral. This is from people who clicked a link somewhere on the web and got to our website that way. Well guess what: tons of the links out on the internet were earned through an SEO effort (getting publicity is a key to doing effective SEO). So a good chunk of the $1.7 million of sales there was also due to SEO efforts.
I actually started doing SEO work in the early 2000s but we didn't yet have ecommerce tracking set up. So I don't have proof of how much in the way of ecommerce sales our company generated from SEO-related traffic during those earlier years (2001-2012). But the company's prime actually fell in that earlier period, so that means the $10+ million of sales I showed in the screenshots above is just a fraction of the true SEO-generated sales we earned.
And now I've got a kicker for you. I've done very little SEO work since 2013. All these sales I showed above were based on SEO work I had done between about 2001 and 2013. That means the sales that came after 2013 didn't even involve me doing any ongoing SEO effort
That's another reflection of my SEO expertise. And it shows that effective SEO can be the gift that keeps on giving.
To be clear, it took a lot of work for me to accomplish this. SEO is a long term game. Spending 12 years doing varying degrees of active SEO work took focus and dedication. But the payoff was quite rewarding.
Once the work was done, the SEO "engine" I had built was so strong that it no longer required regular attention from me. The organic traffic has been on auto pilot for years now without me doing active SEO work. And to this day organic sales are still coming in.
I started that SEO effort from ground zero back in 2001 and handled all phases of the SEO effort for the business (site architecture, content creation, publicity, etc). Generating sales of that magnitude is what makes me an SEO expert. It's also what makes me different from most SEO professionals.
A little more about me: I'm a Stanford grad and I come from a family of hard workers. I have two brothers, and all three of us earned valedictorian honors in our respective high school classes. If you get your SEO training from me, you'll be learning from a guy who has a track record of performing at an elite level.
One other thing: unlike some other SEO training companies that teach a broad array of marketing services, I only specialize in SEO. I don't do Facebook ads. I don't help with Adwords. The reason is because I'm not an expert at those. SEO is all I do here because that's what I'm an expert at!
Have any questions for me? Feel free to contact me any time.
