SEO Interview With Nikola Minkov

It’s time for another SEO interview with one of our friend and long time client. Without any further introductions, here’s our interview with Nikola Minkov from Serpact.com.

1. What do you do and how you started doing SEO?

Hello! Thank you for the invitation. My name is Nikola Minkov. I am 28 years old. I was born in Sofia, but I am living in Svilengrad, Bulgaria. I am doing SEO and I am the owner of  serpact.com . I am a Google AdWords (5 Certificates), Google Analytics, Google Digital Garage, Bing, Yahoo, Inbound and DoubleClick certified consultant myself. Our company is a boutique company. We work on up to 10-15 SEO projects a year.

I started my career in a very strange way. In fact, I was a professional football player and, back in 2009, I owed an online store as a hobby. Then I hired a SEO agency to work on my website. I was very curious and tried to understand how it all works. That’s why I decided to try to do it myself but I failed, naturally. Then I stopped playing football professionally and decided to outsmart Google – this was literally a suicide because I had been banned from Google several times. I used all kinds of SEO tricks but there was no result. One day I understood that this was not the right way and decided to figure out how Google “thinks”, what it recommends etc., and I started following the rules without any “black SEO tactics”. My new approach brought excellent results. In short, I am a former professional football player and a present SEO expert. It is strange, isn’t it?

2. Share with us your biggest SEO achievement and how you did it. For what competitive keywords have you ranked high and what techniques you used?

In fact, it will be very difficult to single out just one project, because there are so many, but let’s say dryfast.net. When we started the project there was a very big problem with the usability of the website – there was a big number of low-quality links to the website (Monitor Backlinks helped me remove them), there was no high quality content, some of the keywords were classified on the second page, others – on the third or fourth page but we from Serpact knew that the website had a great potential. The niche is very hard when we are talking about San Francisco and California. To compare, I can say that one click in Google Ad Words for a keyword reaches up to 250 $ at times, so you can judge for yourself how competitive it is. At present, the customer’s website is ranked between 1st and 3rd positions for some most competitive keywords.

3. What SEO techniques you believe are working best right now?

Only allowed SEO techniques or the so-called White Hat techniques. The website’s usability, its mobile version, the type of inbound and outbound connections, the website’s content and its On-page structure are very important. But the most important factor is to know your customers very well, to know everything about their business and to motivate them to work with you, to cooperate with you, because a SEO agency, which works with a large number of customers, do not invest heart and soul into its projects. We from Serpact do this, because we like our customers and we can tell you a lot about them, we know them very well, we also know their businesses and we learn something new about them every day. This is our secret recipe!

4. What’s your favorite method to build links to your site?

(Laughing) Will Google index this interview? That was a joke, of course. As a matter of fact, except for all local websites, we use only reliable sources such as CNN and others, of course. Last year we created a number of methods for free links from popular people. In this case, the link itself is not as important as the brand, because this is turning into a new link building.

5. How do you think SEO will evolve in the coming years?

I think that the quality will be most highly appreciated and many companies will lose their positions as a result of their tendency to use spam. First comes the high quality content, next is the website’s link profile, website’s popularity and its social presence. I think a website’s popularity will be the main factor in the future, remember this…