You would have heard of many stories with a lot of struggle. Today, I am very honored to interview one of such personalities whose story is full of struggle – Roshan Samuel Ambler.
I came in touch with this gentleman from some Facebook Group and since then this person is just a message away.
If I ever approached him with some doubt, he tries his level best to solve it. If he is not aware of the right solution, he will share the contact of the right person who can guide you.
His humility is worth appreciating and he is one of the most honest digital marketer I have ever seen.
Who is Roshan Samuel Ambler?
Roshan Samuel Ambler is a digital marketing consultant and an SEO expert with a lot of experience in this field.
He is the Founder of digital marketing agency Go Lead Digital.
Roshan started his career as a Telemarketing Executive and his journey to date illustrates the fact that if you are passionate about something and work hard, you will surely achieve it.
Without wasting anytime, let’s hear it from Roshan Samuel Ambler himself.
Expert Speaks – Interview with SEO Expert Roshan Samuel Ambler
#1. Roshan, not many know about this fact that you are a college dropout. From dropping out from college to becoming SEO King, please share your story
Hi, this is Roshan Samuel Ambler, aka SEO King, nicknamed by my clients. I’m a digital marketer by profession with over 7 years of experience and SEO being my core expertise.
Have prior 3 years of experience into sales and marketing.
I had quit my full-time job in May 2018, and currently focusing on my digital firm Go Lead Digital
And a part-time blogger at SEO INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY. I also provide strategy consultation. I was also part of the team that came up with the idea of celebrating “Digital Marketing Day” every year.
I live and breathe digital marketing.
During my studying days, I have always been an average student in the class. But during my college days in HSC (Commerce + IT), I received a scholarship from my church, and I start putting extra efforts to do justice to my learning.
I broke the curve in my exams in 11th standard. I got another scholarship for 12th standard. I won’t say what I scored, but I was projected to reach an excellent score.
I’m adamant, after dropping my 1st year in college (BMS at Chetana’s Institutes of Management & Research).
I pursued sales and marketing jobs, to support my family. I grabbed every opportunity to learn and take additional responsibilities. With the struggle of 3+ years, I finally got an opportunity to work in the field web designing. I took on the job and responsibility.
Within a year, I was heading the web development team and slowing leaning towards digital marketing through SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).
I self-learned SEO and took one independent SEO project as a challenge. I carefully created an effective SEO strategy in place, focusing on increasing targeted traffic.
And after duration of fewer than six months, I was able to 3x the amount of website traffic and 5x the amount of online leads. The same client gave us almost ten confirmed referral SEO clients.
I want to achieve this kind of results for all of our clients at my firm (Go Lead Digital) I’m a critical thinker, thinking faster is not a recipe for success, especially in business-critical situations where quality is of utmost importance.
That said, productive, logical and creative thinking is crucial to solving problems in a faster and more efficient manner. There were these two projects one was where I was executing a 360 digital marketing for an international event to generate 5000 leads, and two where we were dealing with one of the top retail e-commerce chains had to acquire the first exposure for their brand.
Both the project success gave me the nickname ‘SEO King.’
#2. What are the top 3 challenges you faced in your career? How did you overcome them?
Bas Success Chahiye, Struggle Story Kab Se Ready Hai!
If I have to jot down top 3 challenges till now, it would be:
- Initial SEO career days
- Dealing with office politics
- Initial freelancing days
Initial SEO career days:
Yes, I’m a self-skilled digital marketer, but starting a career without any course or certifications is very hard. Again, this was an opportunity provided which I took and embraced it.
I won’t suggest the same path for newbies for two reasons:
a) nowadays, every DM agency asks for a course/certificate along with your educational qualifications.
b) even with a course/certificate many newbies don’t have a proper understanding of SEO or DM, so an agency owner would likely to take the risk and hire a marketer with an offline certificate than a marketer who doesn’t have any experience to show with their self-learned knowledge about digital marketing.
The another issue is communicating and justifying our work to the superiors. This was one of the major hurdles. For tackling this I started documentation of everything, having a clear communicating between internal team, and always maintaining a official copy on emails.
Later on, I realized what I actually was doing was part of a concept known as ‘Getting Things Done’. Getting Things Done (GTD) is a personal productivity methodology that redefines how you approach your life and work.
Dealing with office politics:
When it comes to office politics you have two choices: either you can try to ignore it, or you can choose to learn how to maneuver through it. It’s not really tough to handle things. ignore it and wait for your turn, never lose your focus and your priority.
For me, I usually had the opportunity to work with startups. From roles of admin, HR, software testing to sales follow up. I always had a good rapport with my colleagues and superiors but let my work speaks for itself. I jumped on any opportunities to grow, taking a leap of faith and making the jump. That’s hows I landed my job in SEO (Digital Marketing).
When I joined a 10-year old leading startup/corporate company (an internal joke here 😂), I actually learned what does workplace politics actually meant.
But I got through that bullshit, only thanks to my work buddies and good friends.
From the perspective of your direct manager and your organization, you are there to serve a specific role and fulfil specific tasks. In case you are able to do these things, then the organization is taking from you what is expected and that is sufficient.
Initial freelancing days:
In the starting days of my freelance business, I also worked a full-time job to grow my business from its profits. I took the time to understand and learn that to scale the freelancing business, you need to get full onboard and take a leap.
I was working more than 90 hours a week between both jobs, no work-life balance, and I no longer needed the financial support of the full time job. In December 2017, we launched our agency named ‘Go Lead Digital’ with my friend and business partner Sunderbharathi Reddiar.
While growing our business we had little to no financial support and a very little positive advice given to us so we’ve had to learn a lot through experience. The most important things I’ve learnt so far are use all social media channels, have an informative website, charge what you’re worth, give the service you’d expect to receive, remember you can’t please everyone, be reliable and consistent, record everything in writing, and invoice for EVERYTHING!
#3. Amazing answer Roshan. What according to you is the future of SEO?
I would say ‘Voice Search’. This was also the topic for our last year ‘Digital Marketing Day’ event.
In the 2013 sci-fi film ‘Her’ is about a lonely writer who falls in love with his virtual voice assistant that is so well-developed it gives him the illusion of a romance
While voice technology is not yet that advanced, there are a considerable number of available virtual assistants i.e Cortana, Siri, Google Now, Alexa – that can perform a variety of tasks.
These virtual assistants can answer simple questions, send a dictated e-mail, read the news, set a timer, provide directions for a destination or search for a nearby restaurant etc.
They will continue to be part of an upward moving trend, because of their utility while driving, but also because they can be incorporated into other cutting-edge technologies like smart homes
This element re-confirms the necessity of focusing on versatile conversational and user-oriented content that can be easily be understood by AI algorithms and listed in top pages
Talking to virtual assistants makes voice searches conversational, so SEO’ers and search experts should make use of this opportunity to find out more about their audience and then come up with voice search optimization strategies:
- Use structured data
- Claim your Google My Business listing
- Get mobile-friendly
- Create blog posts answering your customers’ questions
It takes hard work, but voice search optimization makes your content closer to human language
Right now is the perfect time to jump on the voice SEO and gain an edge over your competition
#4. Roshan, You are a well-known SEO Expert. What are the 3 proven success tips for SEO as per you?
Hmm, a very debatable one. For me everything matters in SEO from design, Technical aspect, Content, CRO, Link building etc.
Even though the activities are standardized and readily available on the web, you’ll need create your own approach and execute different strategies for each client.
You can’t expect to do the same things, and expect exponential growth for your clients.
There are a few success hacks and you can learn it on your way up. As long as you have a growth mindset it is not a problem.
When creating an effective SEO strategy for any business, there are a few key areas that search marketers need to focus on to drive better and faster results. Some of these crucial areas are:
1. Audit : Technical, SEO, and Competitor
2. Keyword research
3. Meta tags
4. Descriptive URLs
5. Good UI/UX
6. Structured data markup
7. Content Optimization
8. Strong CTAs (Call to Action)
Similarly, for SEO off-page, I strategize what should be suitable for a business.
As a startup or a small business, you may not have budgets for content marketing but for e-commerce, it should always be SEO + Content Marketing.
#5. You started your own digital marketing agency Go Lead Digital. Please share your experience and learnings. Many people desire to start their own agency. Your experience might help them
We are in the 3rd year of running our digital marketing agency. Each year we have tackled a new challenge and we are getting better at understanding the industry & startup life.
I personally have learned so much in these years!
Initially there would be no hands off from your creative business.
If you’re not the one doing the work, then you’re still the one looking for clients, managing existing clients, making sure there is enough work to justify keeping staff, approving work and giving feedback, and a million other things.
There are no hands off, your hands are just doing other things.
The only hands off scenario is one where you’ve built up a team that is so complete that they don’t need you to keep going.
Meaning eventually you have to hire someone to replace YOU and then you’re just the owner.
For anyone reading this, thinking about starting their own business:
– make sure you stand out from the crowd,
– know your competitors,
– always try to improve yourself,
– give it all you’ve got and you won’t regret it. (And learning to function on very little sleep will also be very handy).
Here are a few insights:
1. As a rule of thumb, most short terms projects are not worth the effort and are not profitable. Aim for a retainer of 6 months minimum spends to be successful.
2. Take risks. Decide which new initiatives you are going to try each quarter or every six months.
An excellent example for us was adding App Development/Marketing & Amazon SEO to our services list. It was a substantial investment for us in terms of time and resources, but we have not looked back.
3. Trust your professionalism. Whether you believe that the client is always right or not is beside the point. We are hired to do a job that our customers don’t know how to do or don’t have the capacity to do.
This means that we lead and recommend ways to our clients how they should be reaching their goals. That is what they are paying us for, and it’s on us to prove we are right.
4. Not every customer is right for your agency. The sooner you can identify that, the better. Parting ways from a client early on is much better than after you have already disappointed each other.
The anxious client or the non-believer is the classic example; they call you several times a day and question your every move. You spend more time explaining what you intend to do and why than doing.
5. Discounts do not lead to more deals or happier clients. They can lead to fee bargaining from that point and onto eternity.
6. Not every agency employee can be customer-facing. Some will be excellent at the back office but fall apart in front of a client. Don’t try to change them, nurture them.
#6. On a lighter note, what does SEO King Roshan Samuel Ambler does in his free time?
There’s no free time for me.
I’m either working or reading about new things in digital. But I do love listening to music while I work.
#7. You are very famous on Facebook too. You manage several Facebook Groups. How does Facebook Groups help in digital marketing?
I don’t know about being famous, but yeah I try my best to be active and give back to the community.
I’m the community manager for below listed Facebook groups:
1) Digital Questions and Answers by Sorav Jain
2) Digital Marketing Group by Laptop Lifestylers and Answers by Rajat Ghai
3) Indian Digital Club by Snehal Chandak
Beneficial, yes it definitely has its perks. Again, it depends on how to look at it. For me it helps in 2 ways, helping fellow marketers and also having a collaboration opportunity with them.
For others, it might be also related to sales promotion, and personal branding.
#8. What is your message to people who aspire to make career in digital marketing?
If I could give one advice to anyone whether they’re an entrepreneur or a marketer, is to have a positive mindset.
Whether there’s a good or bad situation, life goes on. Trust yourself, take risks, be focused on what you want to achieve and plan accordingly.
Don’t forget to take consideration of your current situation family, work, finance, etc. which I feel most people fail to analyze before starting anything.
#9. What are your future plans?
We’re all set to launch a DIY SEO online kit that allows business owners and marketers ways to implement all the SEO tasks by themselves from basic to advance; anywhere else to increase their rankings in search engine listings.
We recently had our agency scale up and expanded our core team; we are also working on various automated tools that help to get simplified reports along with a detailed dashboard for DM clients with every detail about their website in a single page.
#10. As you know about this Expert Speaks initiative, would you like to nominate any other expert from digital marketing world for this interview? Also, how was your interview experience?
Thanks again Jainish for such opportunity. It was a pleasure to be finally be a part of such awesome series. Wish you more success for your blog and career.
I would suggest below names for the next round of interviews:
- Sunderbharathi Reddiar – Even though he is my friend and business partner, his journey and view of the industry are totally different. This is what helps us differentiate from other DM agencies in the industry.
- Rohan Chaubey
- Arbab Usmani
- Pranav Jha
- Mahesh Gaur from Humans of Digital Marketing
- Ivan Bayross
- Rajat Ghai
- Piyush Kukreja
- Jitendra Vaswani
- Ankit Singla
- Iftekhar Ahmed of iftiSEO
- Devvrat Singh
Conclusion
Thank you so much Roshan for being so generous. The interview was amazing. I asked you to nominate 3 experts and you have listed 12 wonderful experts. That makes you different from others.
You like to give back to community and you excel in it.
Thank you again!
So, that was the wonderful SEO Expert Roshan Samuel Ambler. If you enjoyed this Expert Speaks interview, please do share it.
I hope you learned a lot from the story of Roshan Samuel Ambler and I promise you that I will keep conducting such Expert Interviews.
Thank you for being an awesome reader!
You can connect with Roshan Samuel Ambler on LinkedIn – linkedin.com/in/roshansamuelamblerrsa/
If you are not yet connected with me on LinkedIn, then feel free to connect with me too –
linkedin.com/in/jainishshahdigital/
Happy Learning!