Hi there!
If you’ve made it to this page, you’re probably interested in getting to know me or finding out a bit more about me, right?
Depending on which side of my life you want to know more about, one social network might suit you better than another. For example, if you want to know how much I know, you’re better off visiting Linkedin or some of the posts I write on other platforms. Here are a few links where you can find me:
I have some older articles out there online, but these are the places where I’m most active right now.
A bit about my story
Everyone has their story, and I have mine. To be exact, I have lots of them, just like you probably do, and all those stories are what have led me down this path.
Hard work and effort are pretty much engraved in who I am, because from a young age I had to help my parents in the family business, as things weren’t going particularly well.
As a child I was quite sure I wanted to work with computers, but my family was quite wary of technology. Back then it was also a lot more expensive than it is now, and we couldn’t afford it anyway. My only option was to go to the internet café and download material to learn something.
As a result, I was a bit of a «know-it-all» in IT, and in the end I did a higher vocational training course after finishing upper secondary school. University didn’t appeal to me because of what several students who had tried both options told me.
After finishing the course, even though it was in programming, I ended up doing an SEO work placement.
An SEO placement as a developer?
This is where I had to start figuring things out all over again. What is SEO? What do I have to do? Where do I start?
Thousands of questions were running through my mind. I had nobody to guide me, and the internet was full of documentation, much of it quite out of date, as is often the case.
The company sold LED lighting services to large businesses. I was the only person in marketing. I don’t know how competitive the LED world was back then, but nowadays it’s saturated and a very crowded market.
I started reading and doing research, tests, experiments and so on. One blog I remember reading a lot back then was ChicaSEO, and it helped me a great deal.
The thing is, I loved it, and I was invited to join a project where I would handle the whole digital marketing strategy. It was Valencia Eventos Náuticos, a news site, although we didn’t know how to fund it.
While I was on the placement and the project was getting started, several options came my way, but I had nobody to give me real advice, and in the end I learnt the hard way, as was bound to happen.
Decisions
I wanted to go for the project, my family wanted me to go to university, and I wasn’t at all sure about it because several students had been quite critical of how unspecialised the teaching was. On top of that, the company where I did my placement wanted me to stay on as an employee, so I had a lot of options.
In the end I finished the placement and recommended a classmate to take it over (since he had to do his in September), I started university without being very convinced and ended up dropping out halfway through the year for several personal reasons (studies, project, work and family all piled up on me).
After leaving university, I kept working on the nautical news site and in a part-time job (although, to be fair, I had never stopped doing either of them), while I carried on teaching myself SEO and web analytics.
After several years on the nautical project, we couldn’t work out how to make it profitable and ended up abandoning it (although I still keep the website because it was one of my first projects).
I started out as a freelancer with a friend on another project of our own, a marketing and development agency, and I made the same mistake again, one I still hadn’t learnt from and would only realise later.
What mistake?
When you’re doing something you don’t know how to do, it’s highly advisable to have someone to guide you or show you a process for how to do things, what to charge and so on. After a year and a half, I finally realised that back then I wasn’t very good at negotiating. Over time I polished that side of myself.
Remote work
Both my business partner and I got an opportunity to work remotely for a company in Belgium through an intermediary we didn’t know very well either.
At this point I quit the part-time job I had been combining with everything else I was doing. It was a big step because it was my only source of income and my family has never exactly been well off, but I was clear that if I didn’t quit, I wasn’t going to be able to move forward, and it would only get harder and harder to get out.
After leaving the job that had paid my way for many years, I started at the other company remotely, where I had to build websites and features on a private CMS they had. I should point out that there was no documentation, and the explanation of how it worked lasted 15 minutes.
I never got paid for the 2 projects I built on their own CMS, so I simply walked away and spent a week thinking things over.
What can I do?
It was late November, early October 2014, and I spent my time thinking: what can I do? What kind of work can I look for? I remember that at the time things weren’t going very well in the Spanish job market.
In April 2014 I had bought the domain Queseo.es as a play on words on ¿Qué es SEO? (Spanish for «What is SEO?»), with the idea of having my own blog. I already had the initial design and some content, so I drew up a plan to find a job.
Job search strategy
Goal: Find a job in what I know so I could specialise further
List of things I had to do:
- Post on the blog every dayWrite about some marketing books and name the authorsWrite guides and explanations
- Post every day and interact on several social networks
- Look for job offers online onlySearch job platforms and email companies directly
That was the strategy in broad strokes. I may be leaving something out, as it was a few years ago. The idea was to show what I knew through the books I had read and the posts I had published.
Thanks to tweets and social media mentions from the authors of various books, I gained visibility among other people in the industry.
Contacting companies directly by email made sense because it can often be harder for them to choose when they have to sift through 200 applications on linkedin or infojobs. Most of them agreed to let me send my CV , although the odd one sent me back to the platform.
Searching online only came from the idea that if I was a professional in the online world, I shouldn’t go begging for work door to door. To me, that would have been a contradiction.
After this whole marketing plan, in a single month I managed to land 4 interviews and was able to choose between 2 job offers. Not bad for the time.
Tourism sector
I stayed at this company for 2 years and a couple of months.
I learnt Analytics inside out, and I owe a lot to the development team (the whole development team, both ours and the one next door), because I learnt a great deal from them. If it weren’t for them, I’d probably handle working with developers quite differently.
I realised that requests are often made to developers without the proper procedures or with very little explanation. I learnt to run checks and set up the whole of Analytics (although I admit I didn’t do the installation myself, I learnt all the documentation, which I read several times).
The developers also helped me a lot with database queries. It wasn’t that I didn’t know how, the problem was that I wasn’t used to wrestling with something so big, which was hard if you didn’t work with it every day. I used the queries to cross-reference data with Analytics, although I also sent other data to the marketing department when they asked for it.
I also learnt a lot from the marketing team and the people who passed through it, about writing press releases, media contacts and outreach, content plans, on-page SEO reviews, finding and vetting media for link building, database queries, SEM (I ran the campaigns for quite a long time) and more.
I discovered the importance of keeping communication open with the whole team to get hold of really important information (some of it very relevant, even from casual chats over a beer or at lunch).
I also coordinated and supervised some of the translation team’s tasks (around 4 – 5 people), such as keyword research in several languages and the full translation of the entire platform.
I was hired for junior analytics and SEO, but at some point things got out of hand and I ended up doing a lot more.
Eventually I got an offer and…
Agenciaseo.eu
First day of interviews.
Me – I want to change jobs
My current boss – I need someone
Second day of interviews
My current boss – It’s got a bit late, fancy a Fooster? My treat
Me – Why not? By the way, what’s with that cheese?
My current boss – Oh, that’s the cheese we use to prank the new people…and you fell for it all by yourself
Me – (-.-«)
Back then it was my boss, me and a part-timer who joined at the same time. I got there through a recommendation from an old colleague at my previous company.
Shortly afterwards another colleague joined, who became my first apprentice in the SEO world, and before long the company had grown a lot. The previous team had done a good job, and my boss is good at managing clients and taught us how to do it (he also cares a lot about his employees).
I joined at a fairly critical moment and had to adapt quickly, because in 2-3 months the clients had to decide whether to renew or not, and they all renewed. It wasn’t just that the previous team had done good work. Those of us who joined adapted in record time and managed all the client strategies and follow-ups excellently, which led to good results.
The company has kept growing, and today we’re like a small family and one of the most relevant companies in Spain when it comes to SEO.
Publications and more
Alongside all this, I’ve been publishing on various websites.
I’ve tried to pick the blog back up several times, but in the end I always abandon it. Right now I’m publishing more about Ghost, a CMS I really like, which I think has a lot of potential and very little information out there.
Where I publish most actively is on the Publisuites and AgenciaSEO.eu blogs, where I create pretty good content, although I don’t get to choose the topics freely, as they usually ask me for specific ones.
I really enjoy the side of analytics that focuses on Machine Learning. I’ve dug into python several times and have even learnt something very simple. I’d love to build some software along these lines with SEO at some point and work remotely.
I’ve earned the Analytics certification 3 times and the Adwords certification, with some specialisations, 2 times.
Whenever I can, I love sneaking off to marketing events, and in my spare time I run a small SEO group in Valencia with some friends.
Making videos is still on my to-do list, explaining simple things people often ask me about because they want to set up a niche site and so on, but I can’t find time for the editing, so I’ll probably go back to the plan of doing live-style videos.
In a nutshell?
I’m pretty restless when it comes to marketing. I like spending time learning and teaching others bits and pieces related to it.
What I know best is SEO, along with Analytics and Tag Manager, because that’s my bread and butter.
To me, Data Studio, even if this sounds a bit big-headed, is just another dashboard for presenting data, like any other tool that does the same job (in other words, it’s easy). I’d like to learn to work with other, more advanced dashboards , but for now I can get by with this and Google Apps Scripts if I want to pull data from an API.
For now I’m still learning about working with data, since there are a thousand ways to do it, and I’m also doing small bits and pieces with Ghost that honestly don’t usually take me long.
PS:
I still need to update this section. You can visit my LinkedIn or search for my name on Google to stay up to date. Lately I’ve learnt a lot about automation and AI, I’m currently self-employed and I’ve given a few talks at events.