Q&A Central Presents: A marketing Q&A with Dan Richardson

Q&A Central: Marketing Edition is a weekly newsletter. Published Wednesdays.
Micro-interviews with marketing specialists around the world.         

This week's Marketing Q&A is with Dan Richardson

Q1) Provide a short description of where you work, what you do and where you are based.

A1) I’m a freelance SEO consultant based in Liverpool, UK. I’ve been freelancing for 2.5 years now after 6 years of agency SEO and 2 years in-house.

Q2) Do you use AI? If so, what are some ways that you are using AI?

A2) Yes, I’ve been using it for:?

• Writing schema.
• Building tools to add to articles.?

I’ll often ask it "What interactive tool could be added to an article on...?" It has come up with a few good ideas, which I’ve then had it to program for me and have added to the page.

Writing out some content, for things like product descriptions or short simple articles that don’t require too much editing.

Q3) Did you use AI to answer question no2?

A3) No, haha!

Q4) In short, describe what a typical day looks like at work for you.

A4) It depends on the day, but generally I’ll spend the first part of my day responding to emails, then I’ll get a few hours of client work done.

Depending on the day, I may go to the gym during my lunch (one of the perks of freelancing), then come back to do a couple more hours of client work and spend the last hour or so working on one of my personal SEO projects.

Q5) What do you enjoy most about your work?

A5) The freedom and flexibility it gives me, I also still love that feeling when you see a site you’ve been working on start to see big growth in organic traffic...? I guess that’s why I’m still doing this stuff ten years later!

Q6) What tool(s) would you say help you the most with your job, and why do you like it?

A6) Screaming Frog - can’t beat it for getting a good look at the technical side of a site.

Ahrefs - my go to for competitor analysis and link research.

Search Console - free data, straight from Google themselves, I’ve had so many big SEO wins just from reviewing data in here and actioning it.

Q7) Are there any new emerging technologies or trends that you are excited about?

A7) It’s been a whirlwind few months with the rapid acceleration in the abilities of AI. I’m both excited and nervous about what the future holds when it comes to AI.

On the one hand, it is already helping to make so many jobs, including my own, far less monotonous, but on the other hand, in the longer term, it could impact the demand for SEO services and potentially negatively impact the entire job market and economy in general.

I’m no expert on this stuff, but I enjoy playing around with it and integrating parts of it into my workflow while waiting to see what happens.

Q8) How do you stay up to date with new changes and trends in your field? What resources do you like to refer to?

A8) I follow most of the well known SEOs on Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube. I also regularly read stuff like SERoundtable.

Q9) Any tips or advice you want to provide to people working in your field?

Q9) The one thing that taught me the most about SEO is building out my own sites. If you want to improve your SEO game, I 100% recommend that you take the time to build one out and grow it.