My Moment of 2012: Becky Naylor, Marcus Tandler, Dennis Goedegebuure, Alex Moss and Julie Joyce
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My Moment of 2012: Becky Naylor, Marcus Tandler, Dennis Goedegebuure, Alex Moss and Julie Joyce

20th December 2012

The end of 2012 is approaching. Here on State of Search we try and do things differently. We like to listen to what other people think and we like to let our friends talk.

So this year we asked our friends and bloggers what their moment for 2012 was and what their wishes for 2013 are. Going up to the New Year we will tell you what the best moments of our friends were and around the New Year we will show you what they wished for. Towards the end you will hear from our bloggers.

Today it is time for the second group! Today the best moments of 2012 from five truly wonderful people: Becky Naylor, Marcus Tandler, Dennis Goedegebuure, Alex Moss and Julie Joyce. 

My-Moment-2012-Becky-Naylor

Becky Naylor – Owner & Director of Bronco

“There are two standout moments of 2012 for me, one personal and one business. I’d firstly have to mention the day back in March 2012 when Dave and I renewed our wedding vows after 14 years. Since we originally “ran away” to get married at Gretna Green in Scotland back in 1998, it was brilliant to be able to do it all again in style with our three families, mine, Dave’s and the Bronco guys. The day was filled with memories and it was very emotional especially having the kids there to share the big day with us.

 

On the business front the event of the year for Bronco was forming the strategic partnership with Andy Barr’s PR Agency 10Yetis. This has enabled us to evolve Bronco to not only offer world class Search Marketing Consultancy, but to bring with it the PR angle which has given our clients a strong competitive advantage.”

My-Moment-2012-Marcus-Tandler

Marcus Tandler, Partner at Tandler.Doerje.Partner

“My favorite moment of 2012 was the start of our SEO tool OnPage.org. We started by offering 100 early adopter accounts in an open beta, and they sold within 24 hours! Four months after the official launch we´re now at almost 500 clients, and the feedback we receive is just amazing. Coming in 2nd at SEOUnited´s german “SEO elections” for the best german SEO tool is just icing on the cake.”

My-Moment-2012-Dennis-Goedegebuure

Dennis Goedegebuure, Head of Global SEO at Airbnb

“Looking back at 2012, I realized my year has been remarkable again. A couple of highlights;
– Moved early February to a wonderful house in the Richmond district in San Francisco, after we found black mold in the basement of our house we were living in.
– There has been a lot of knowledge and cheers exchanged on the several conferences I visited and spoke at. SearchFest, SMX West & Advanced, BlueGlass LA & Tampa, Pubcon and SEOktoberfest. Wow, what a list!
– Thanks to the Panda & Penguin updates, and some smart technical SEO, the traffic through search engines for Slashdot and SourceForge, the sites I was working at, more than doubled on a year-over-year basis.
– Which resulted in a favorable position for the company when Geeknet Inc decided to put the media assets on sale, and closed the deal in late September.
– While working on the sale of the company, a start-up I spoke a little more than a year ago came back to me to recruit me. The result, I started at Airbnb late October. As head of Global SEO, I’ve the privilege to bring a great product to a very competitive market. You better watch this space…
How is that for a remarkable year!

 

But wait, everything here is nothing compared to the wonderful news my wife told me in late April. We are expecting another baby, due in February 2013! Luckily everything looks great so far, and we are expecting a healthy baby boy in early February.”

My-Moment-2012-Alex-Moss

Alex Moss, Co-Founder / Technical Director, 3 Door Digital

“2012 has been a big year for me – and definitely the busiest so far professionally. Focusing on that, this year saw the launch of the company of which I’m a co-founder, 3 Door Digital. This was formed as part of a merger between 2 existing companies (Pleer in Manchester, UK and Matan Media in Tel Aviv, Israel). Although we launched at the beginning of July, it was all the behind-the-scenes work that I would class as my “hidden moments” of 2012.

As well as the merger itself, there was a lot of work in order to merge our clients and organise that over 2 offices without affecting our other day-to-day routines. Being able to still deliver service to our clients as well as dealing with this transition amongst the 4 Directors was something that I extremely proud of.

Oh, that and better rich snippet progress :)”

 

My-Moment-2012-Julie-Joyce

Julie Joyce, Owner and Director of Operations at Link Fish Media and Str0ud

“My 2012 moment came when, for the first time, a client of mine got a Webmaster Tools Warning in July. I’d nervously watched as almost everyone I knew had a client dealing with this but when this client contacted me, I completely panicked. Then more warnings went out and more clients started frantically emailing me. It was honestly the scariest weekend of my professional life because it seemed to be shaking up the entire industry and even usually calm people were predicting the end of links. Links is what we do, and I have 25 people to keep employed, so I spent the next week reading everything I could, talking to anyone I could trust, and thinking about how I could keep my office running if the absolute worst happened, all clients got deindexed and dropped us, and we had to briefly shut down.

 

I truly thought in terms of a disaster then, and I think it woke me up to the fact that being specialists in one niche has its good points and its bad points. We’ve tried to tighten up our guidelines even further so that we’re doing the best we can for our clients, and I’ve become more interested in getting back to my roots (technical SEO) by taking on audits and consulting work and not just doing link building. It’s all made me realize that a panicked response is generally the worst one though. I think it’s made me much, much calmer. When a new update comes out and people freak out, I give it a few days before I even look at rankings, just because things usually settle down and I don’t need the stress. I’ve realized that a lot of our methods that I thought were inefficient may still be a bit more of a timesuck than I’d like, but we’re weathering all these storms amazingly well and I think it’s down to not trying to take shortcuts and do everything with scale and automation in mind. I guess overall, it’s made me more confidant in what we do.”

Stay tuned for the next ones! Find the moments of Joost de Valk, Mel Carson, Jonathan Allen and Barry Schwartz here.

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Written By
Bas van den Beld is an award winning Digital Marketing consultant, trainer and speaker. He is the founder of State of Digital and helps companies develop solid marketing strategies.
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