Martin Hayman didn’t write a single word in his book until he’d already spent years as a technician wrangling the complexities of SEO. The order of events is important; far too many marketing books are written by experts who conceptualise first and experiment later, perhaps never at all.
Not Just Another SEO Pro…
Before writing, Martin used to fight for a living (or perhaps just for sport) before turning his skills toward Jiu Jitsu. This background is far from typical for the average SEO consultant, and has earned a spot in nearly every biography of him published. It’s attention-grabbing and just unusual enough to stand out amongst the typical descriptions of backlinks and crawl budgets.
Seventeen years deep in his SEO career means that his journey began when many of the SEO best practices we’ve become familiar with either didn’t exist or are in entirely different form. Since then, search engines have rewritten their rulebooks not once, not twice, but multiple times; Martin says he adapted his approach each time instead of holding onto outdated strategies.
The Book.
The Organic Advantage is aimed at owners of ecommerce sites and their marketing teams, not a general reader. Central to the book is the ANCHOR model, an intuitive strategy which simplifies the complicated world of SEO without baffling readers with a flood of jargon that they’ll have forgotten by Tuesday. Many readers say they picked the book up with skepticism, unsure of what a single volume could teach that the free and abundant content online would not; their expectations were repeatedly exceeded with practical advice and concepts they’d encountered nowhere else.
Building Products Rather Than Writing About Them.
Martin Hayman is also the co-founder of RankCaddy, an SEO data-interpretation tool designed to provide teams with action items rather than data to be filed away. Coupled with his involvement in Wild Sprout (an ecommerce-focused SEO agency), his extensive experience as agency work permeates much of what he writes. Simple theory doesn’t hold up under the pressure of real clients; when reading anything by him, it’s obvious he’s lived that pressure.
He is still a regular at industry conferences and conducting training sessions: a visible figure in the quick-moving field of SEO.
