Matthew Chalk, SEO Director at D3 Digital a media agency based in Auckland, New Zealand, joins us to share some of his SEO knowledge in another installment of our 3-Question SEO Series. You can be contacted through Linkedin here.

What is the most valuable SEO tool or technique you’d advise all website owners to adopt in 2023?

Internal link structure. I see many large brands in New Zealand neglecting the idea of creating an internal links strategy. Internal links help not only the end user of your website, but they provide Google with a hierarchy of your content and what you’d like it to rank for.

At D3 Digital deal with some large clients that have 5000+ pages on their sites, so getting the right ratios of natural vs target vs generic anchor text is crucial to the success of their campaigns. Internal links are literally free! Whilst it’s time-consuming to analyze every internal link to each of your key landing pages, it’s worth its weight in Gold once the results start to show.

Tools like LinkWhipser on both Shopify and WordPress can be a huge help in finding potential internal links to your key landing pages.

In your experience, what is a digital marketing or SEO basic that website owners tend to neglect time and time again?

Heading tag structures. On practically all of the sites that we at D3 Digital audit I notice messy headings without a clear SEO structure. I always tell my clients the same analogy when they ask why headings are important: If the Herald had two huge headlines on the first page of their newspaper, their readers wouldn’t know which one to focus on! Google is EXACTLY the same.

Having a clear focused H1 that focuses on your target keywords, along with a clear H2 that has an LSI of your target keyword is one of the easiest/quickest ways to improve the rankings of your key landing pages.

If you could travel back in time to 2005 and give yourself one piece of SEO advice, what would it be?

Well, I would have been 8 years old in 2005 and probably assumed “SEO” would be some kind of chocolate bar so I’ll answer the question more generally than literally…

Do s**t. It’s easy to fall into the trap of watching other people be supposedly successful with their ranking screenshots and traffic numbers (Linkedin can be horrible for this), but actually doing s**t and seeing those green arrows in Semrush is one of the greatest feelings in the world. Get off your ass and actually start trying to rank stuff. The quicker you make mistakes the quicker you will learn from them.

As always, we want to thank our interviewee for taking the time to give us their expert advice. Thank you Matthew! We’re sure our paths will cross again soon.