We’re excited to have interviewed New York SEO expert Vibhu Satpaul, from Saffron Edge Inc, for the next installment of our Featured SEO Expert Series!
Saffron Edge Inc is one of SEOblog’s Top SEO companies in New York City.
Vibhu Satpaul is the co-founder and CxO of Saffron Tech and Saffron Edge. Saffron Edge has been incorporated in New Jersey since 2017. As a brand, Saffron Edge focuses primarily on digital marketing services, with expertise ranging from SEO, paid advertisement and social media management to reputation management and D2C marketing services.
Saffron Tech, headquartered in New Delhi, India, was established back in 2008 and currently focuses on tech solutions (marketing technology or MarTech) for startups in app development and digital transformation solutions for companies. The focus area for Saffron Tech is to become the D2C technology solutions partner for leading eCommerce platforms.
What would you say is unique and/or challenging about the eCommerce SEO industry?
“One of the main challenges for the eCommerce SEO industry is that it is changing constantly and is heavily reliant on consumer trends and demands. This creates unique problems which require specialization on the part of marketers to be able to solve them creatively. It involves a bit of experimentation and innovation to achieve success.
“Digital marketing, or even SEO, today has become a potent mix of technical nuances and brand building that requires maintaining a delicate balance to be successful.
“Overdoing the technical aspects of SEO while not focusing on storytelling and brand building or vice-versa can often lead to businesses becoming stagnant and risk being left behind by the competition.
“Especially now, in this post-pandemic era, we can see a lot more retail and D2C businesses realizing the importance of going digital, and their consumer behavior patterns tend to reflect and dictate the same. So, SEO, being the basic building block of eCommerce, is absolutely essential for any brand that wants to create their own authority and brand presence online.”
How does your agency stand out in a crowded market with so many eCommerce companies out there?
“Experience and 360-degree service capabilities. We have been in the industry since 2008, nurturing and servicing clients globally with special focus in North American and European markets. We have witnessed over a decade of transformation, not only in the boom of the eCommerce industry but also in the world of Google and its algorithms. We understand the world of marketing and technology to such an extent that it gives us an upperhand to help brands dominate their online presence.
“To top it off, we have always been able to host both marketing and technology teams in-house – that gives us the edge over a lot of other agencies when it comes to devising seamless 360-degree marketing and automation campaigns at reasonable costs. We also provide timelines that make our customers rely on us as their MarTech partners rather than just another solutions provider.
“We have been graced with a **** of some excellent talent who have been able to shape a lot of businesses from their infancy to becoming some of the leading retail brands.”
Can you share a success story from an eCommerce SEO or paid campaign?
“We have a lot of success stories that anyone can check out on our website. However, let me tell you about a very recent organic food manufacturing and retail brand that was struggling with only about $81.3K/month revenue for a spend of about $54K/month over the last two years.
“We were able to turn that tide across all their key marketplaces, including Amazon and Facebook, to increase their monthly revenue from $81.6K to $154K by spending nearly the same amount as previous (if not less). This, too, in a span of just four months!
“We analyzed their channels at a detailed level and found some deep-lying issues with the website, the products and their listings, which we had to work on initially. Then, it was all about managing an optimized campaign while identifying more and more opportunities that aligned with the different customer personas which were able to tap strategically with our content marketing efforts.
“This led to 89.2 percent revenue growth in four months – and it’s just a small taste of the kind of success that we deliver to our customers here at Saffron Edge.”
What is the best advice you ever received in business?
“I think innovation and failure go hand in hand and in order to innovate solutions to solve business problems, you need to give your team some room to fail as well. A lot of organizations fear taking risks and subdue their team’s potential to try different approaches and ideas. One of the keys to success is to embrace failures and learn from them and evolve.”
What do you think is the most important quality that makes an agency truly great?
“Companies who are willing to experiment, encourage problem-solving skills and impart a culture of collective growth seem to achieve more success in the long run than others. I’d also add that it doesn’t matter if you achieve success once. What matters is if you can replicate that success time and time again – that’s what helps agencies become more scalable and efficient in terms of their growth.”
Any predictions for the future of SEO?
“Even with paid advertisements seemingly dominating search preferences, SEO is still here to stay. It’ll probably evolve into being a core integration to a lot of leading tech platforms, and you’d need experts who can read and analyze data points to create effective strategies that help the business grow organically. You’d still need brand building, authority and storytelling to differentiate your product and brand narrative and stand apart from the competition.”
What is your reaction when you hear that “SEO is dying”?
“SEO isn’t dying. It’s evolving, both in terms of usability and techniques. What’s dying are the old school tactics that Google has squashed time and again to improve their customer-centric search quality. Every year, techniques rise and fall as per the changes in Google’s algorithm. But when you look at search queries, trends, user intent and behavior, you’d be amazed to see that organic marketing practices are becoming more integral to the success of any business that wishes to dominate their search presence and establish itself as an authority. If you think about it, evolution is everywhere, some industries slower than others. There is a need for Google and people to find about them, know more about them and perhaps have a transactional intent. The way to do it for businesses is through organic growth.”
What do you think is the most important contributor to keeping clients happy?
“Transparency and shared vision of success. More often than not, clients don’t realize what the actual goals are that will move the needle for their business, and the answer doesn’t always lie in revenue (even though it’s a significant contributor). What matters the most for us is creating a collaborative vision and expectation-setting with our clients, and then breaking down that vision into measurable key performance indicators (KPIs) or goals which can be presented in quarterly and annual formats.
“This not only keeps our clients engaged but also keeps them aligned with the success and failures of the campaigns and encourages them to learn and appreciate the overall success of marketing instead of just focusing on a few areas.”
Interested in being considered as an SEOblog “Featured SEO Expert”? Reach out to our team at [email protected]! We’d **** to hear from you and give you a high-traffic platform to share your SEO agency’s story and insights.
