From Childhood Curiosity to Digital Success: David Quaid’s Journey

• Fearlessness, Critical Thinking and Independence are one of the greatest assets in decision-making.
• Maintaining curiosity, Dreaming Big and Managing your Mental health are all proponents of being proactive.
• Highlights prevalence of misinformation and subjective biases in SEO.
• Understanding audience preferences and context is King in content creation.

In conversation with David Quaid, an SEO Expert

1. Tell us about your childhood and how your early experiences influenced the person you are today.

I was born in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1977. My parents had just emigrated from London. At the time, Ireland was one of the poorest countries in Western Europe and hence most Irish people immigrated. There are nearly 40 million Irish people in America today and, in comparison, only 5 million Irish people in Ireland. 

South Africa at the time was bringing in British expatriates, especially skilled people like electricians, butchers, and any kind of skills that would contribute to the massive economic growth stimulated by mining. My father had studied Computer Science in the 1960s which set me up for my career and interest in computers and essentially digital marketing. When I was in high school the internet didn’t exist. We didn’t have cell phones, but we could see the potential. I couldn’t remember telephone numbers so I couldn’t wait to have a cell phone that could remember numbers for me. As we didn’t have the internet, we used to use dial-up modems and build PBS boards where people could connect in and download content. In fact, one of my first Computer Science experiments was to set up a data board where I would record bulletin networks.

I studied at the Cape Town campus of the University of South Africa and the education I got was one of the best, and I’m really grateful. However, I dropped out. Due to my dad being in IT, I taught myself how to programme at the age of 10. Going to college seemed like a waste of time. In 1988 when my parents emigrated back to Ireland, I got my first job as a software engineer in Dell computers, and three years later, I set up my first company at 24 years old.

2. What is the best advice you’ve received?

The best advice I received from my dad in general was to never be afraid. Related to computers, however, was that “you could never break it” and if you did break it, you’d fix it. He was right, I broke lots of computers. He would bring them home from work when working as an IT manager at South African Nylon Spinners. At the time, it was the largest nylon spinning company in the southern hemisphere. It was partially owned by Anglo American.

The first laptop I got at 10 years old was an Epson hX 20 which cost as much as my parents’ first house, $ 10,000. It had 0.9 megahertz. Less than 0.1% of the speed of an iPhone today.

Breaking computers and not having access to computer games, taught me a lot. If I wanted a computer game, I had to write it myself. That was a great way to learn and it is potentially lost today. I was born before the average household had a computer. Since then computers have shifted into entertainment. While young adults have grown up with technology, I wonder if they’ve lost the understanding of how computers work.

3. Have you had any mentors that have motivated you to become the person that you are today?

I would say my former managers at Dell Computers, who taught me how to develop critical thinking skills. In today’s age, one of the greatest assets the world has is the internet; it’s a democratization of information and work. It allows people to work on a global scale as immigration gets more difficult. It creates barriers and access to information, which I think shouldn’t exist. 

Although I don’t idolize people, I have realized that people make mistakes. People usually pick someone (for instance a soccer star or cricket player) and then follow everything they do. I have always looked up to people but realize that no one has a guide to life. When you’re younger and working things out in a country where technology is common, it may seem like everyone has been given a handbook to life. It can be frustrating to know that people younger than you know things that you don’t but people actually work hard at those things and are very good at covering it up. It is really important to be able to filter advice and form your own opinion. If you’re just constantly taking cues from other people, then what are you learning?

4. What keeps you proactive and excited for the future?

I have an ongoing sense of curiosity and I take care of my mental health. Mental health management is important even if you don’t think you need to. You don’t know what is going to happen as you get older. Being able to diffuse, separate yourself from work, and make time for family and friends is helpful. 

Having dreams and dreaming big is equally assistive. It is okay not to achieve all your dreams, but it’s better than having no dream and not getting anywhere.

5. How do you bring your ideas to life?

Most visionaries don’t second guess their ideas. The most intelligent people I have met don’t necessarily equate to visionaries and strategic leaders. There are different ways of measuring intelligence; IQ is a blunt mathematical and comprehension exam which is probably not fit for this purpose anymore. Overthinkers, on the other hand, can talk themselves in and out of great ideas because they look at the roadmaps. 

When people think about big ideas they tend to gravitate towards where Apple and Microsoft are today. We ignore the fact that Apple had an incredibly tumultuous ride. When I was a teenager, Apple had to be bailed out by Microsoft. If they had not bailed them out, Microsoft was going to be broken up by antitrust. The same goes for Standard Oil and Bell Labs. 

It’s silly to say, one day I want to have a big company like Apple and start measuring yourself against a $1 trillion company. You have to realize that Apple made lots of mistakes along the way. If you have an idea, go for it and try to mitigate the risks. Stay grounded and remember the most successful people started with idea A and got to success on idea H.

6. What do you look forward to the most in the future of the digital industry?

A greater empowerment of entrepreneurs. Instead of seeing capital siloed in massive organizations, I’d love to see a breakdown of these super corporations with 50,000 employees. Why do we have to invest in the next $1 trillion idea? I would love to see more people focused on solving problems and using technology. Many technological answers to world problems exist but how do we finance them? How do we maintain them? How do we deploy them? 

I would love to see a focus shift from materialization and instead see people travel more, find real-world problems, and solve them. That’s what gives me hope.

7. What do you consider to be your biggest achievement to date?

Falling in love with someone who is also in love with me. That has been my greatest gift and achievement. The greatest way to experience the world is to do it with someone who supports you and that you support back. 

Additionally, I’m more interested in leaving the world a better place than being a superstar CEO. If you read between the lines, successful people say that problems don’t go away because you’re financially successful. Success just brings other problems and doesn’t necessarily solve all problems. If you’re concerned about how the world works and how it exists; despite having many billionaires, we haven’t yet resolved many problems. 

Something I admire from the younger generation is challenging the status quo. While I love the free market, I’m not a big fan of open capitalism. I think it’s good that people question our leaders in business and politics. They ask what we are doing and how that is impacting people.

8. What do you consider the most challenging aspect of your career, having been in the industry for more than 20 years?

Misinformation is a huge challenge in SEO. People push subjective biases more than actual objective truths. If you look at management styles, for example, people tend to have Success bias/confirmation bias. Let’s say I’m a manager and I have had a very successful career with my management style. We can agree that it may not necessarily be because of that. That type of reward attitude behavior system also rewards bad behaviors like bullying. Bullying can destroy a person’s career. You could be focused and want to make changes/results, but one person high up in the chain can destroy that. It is important to be aware of these biases. Just because something is successful, doesn’t mean it is the only way to do it. Usually, management gurus and coaches tend to advise on “methods that are unquestionable and always work”. You should absolutely be questioning things if they don’t work for you.

9. Please share tips that you have found effective in keeping up with constant changes to trends.

My North Star is ‘context is king.’ For example, I don’t like golf, I think it is a boring sport and there is no content on golf that I will ever find interesting unless someone’s tearing up a golf course to build a nature reserve. Understanding what the user wants is important. 

When I was growing up there was a huge emphasis on grammar, comprehension, and writing styles. This was because comprehension skills are an important way of understanding and communicating in the world. When you look at advertising today, especially in the US market where English has deviated so much from the rest of the world’s English, you can see that the play on words has come to the forefront because it creates that instant connection. Having hard, fast rules is important in things like law, accountancy, and/or medicine. You don’t want misunderstandings in a lab report. However, in written communications, I believe that to simply say that content is good because it’s well written is subjective. Understanding your audience and their preference is far more important than trying to force your preferences on the audience.

10. What are strategies and routines that help you get things done?

I have ADHD and I am aware that it is becoming a common diagnosis. I call it a skill because it gives me enormous interest in things at the cost of a lack of interest in other things. For example, I have very little interest in sports, full stop. But I have a hyper-focus on digital marketing. 

When I wake up the first thing I like to do is check all of my projects and see where they are at and then start looking for wins. For instance, we’ve just come through the holiday period and a lot of b2b web traffic goes down whereas a lot of b2c traffic goes up. So it can be demoralizing if you’re looking at dashboards that are pointing down. It’s important to analyze data. Yes, your traffic might be down but you might have gained some search positions. 

Google rolled out several massive updates which had been grouped as HCU or helpful content. Whereas it actually has very little to do with content. And again, Google pushing a preference for content over technicalities about how it works, unfortunately, shapes how people respond to it. A lot of people are now starting to worry about their content vs worrying about technical things that are undermining their websites. 

That comes back to understanding misinformation and using critical thinking. Working out that we’ve lost traffic but here is what the data is saying. We’ve managed to gain positions in Google, we know that from gaining positions our traffic will come back when people return to that search. That’s a critical way of starting my day. Looking for the things that I need to worry about versus things that are out of my control like a search trend. That sets me up to look for things that will reinforce the win. 

Additionally, recognizing who you are. I often had multiple tabs opened when I was an employee. A lot of my managers and executive team would have their own structure of working which involved minimal distractions. That doesn’t work for me. Eventually, I realized trying to fit someone else’s mold is more work. So I keep two browsers open, one for the tasks I could share with my team and another with 100 tabs where I have news, statistics, Twitter, and all my distractions open. That suits me; I like to hop around as that is how I work.

11. How do you think SEO will change the way we see results on the web five years from now?

I once answered a question on Quora; “What will kill Google?”

There were 3,000 search engines in the 1990s that we had to build our own tools to track. There weren’t any web-based applications like SEMRUSH so we had to build our own Dell server farm in our offices to track those positions across all the search engines. 

I don’t know what will happen in the next five years as things are changing quickly. That seems prophetic but Google has done a fantastic job at being content agnostic. That might fly in the face of perceived public opinion but so much that seems like objective truth is really subjective. For example, whether we have a religious view or not is a subjective bias on both sides. Google supports tons of content that doesn’t agree with itself. If you start thinking that Google can somehow play a role in deciding objectivity versus subjectivity then you don’t understand the meaning of the words and you also don’t understand people.

There’s a video on TikTok that explains this well, it featured Neil deGrasse Tyson. When he answers questions he gives you the framework for thinking about the answer rather than the answer. He is interested in helping people use their own critical thinking. He made a profound statement, which is, “Google is a confirmation bias engine.” If we want to prove that South Africa is the best cricket team we can go to Google and find articles that confirm that bias. What ranks in Google comes down to people’s preferences in reading their content. 

What is additionally important to understand is that marketing is fractional. If you look at the number of people that convert, whether it’s somebody subscribing to your blog, buying something on your website, or becoming a lead, it is 1% of 1%. Your click-through rate in organic traffic might be 5% of people who searched, and if you look at how many keywords you ranked it could be 1%. We’re dealing with fractional stuff. There’s so much content and so many unique customer journeys and customer paths that we don’t see, and the metrics we use are geared towards telling us we’re doing a better job than we actually are. 

Google works the same way as TikTok. It surfaces content and shows it to users. It tests the popularity and viability of content using humans. Now we’re seeing the impact of AI. The first tools that are coming to the forefront of digital marketing are content writing tools. I believe this has been a big mistake as that content is lowest common denominator content. It predicts the next likelihood of words based on a prompt. That content is not additive, it is not new as it doesn’t speak from experience, and neither does it showcase thinking. 

If you ask it for anything that you don’t understand it sounds very sophisticated. If you don’t know what life is like in Antarctica and you ask an AI tool, it will pull different blogs, and be helpful. However, it will show you the most common scenario which will save you from reading 10 blog posts but will also automatically leave out any outliers. It will leave out anyone who had a different experience from the norm. That’s why you see an unhyped phase happening in AI. 

Bing hasn’t increased its market share as a result of AI. It, in fact, lost market share while making a $20 billion investment for it. On the other hand, Google makes $280 billion from ad sales. Most people who click on ads actually never see the organic result. So I think that search will continue to be a dumb tool. AI has a limited role, and I’m probably biased as I work in technology, AI, cybersecurity, networking, and cloud due to my background as a software engineer. I can’t see people that are evaluating massive data sheets going to an AI tool to get a dumbed-down lowest common denominator response when they are responsible for the cybersecurity of their company. If you look at the cybersecurity laws coming out, the CFOs handling public data are now facing sentences that include jail time. Is that something I want to take a risk on an LLM? Absolutely not.

However, if I am going to visit Kolkata, perhaps I would start with an AI generative response. Even then, that will tell me what other tourists did and I’d rather speak to somebody who lives there that can take me around and show me the best places to eat as that isn’t done by summarization.

In five years, the dumb Google will still be there. If I need to know the boiling point of water, it will be there and I don’t need an AI for that. I think just because we can doesn’t mean that we will and that’s probably for the best.

12. How do you approach introducing new strategies without compromising the stability of existing projects?

One of the interesting splits in marketing is that websites used to be owned by IT departments. A lot of the budgets and tools come from the IT or Finance department. The entire web design industry has convinced itself that it has moved from subjectivity to objectivity. 

I know this because I’m color blind like one in seven men. This is the greatest gift in digital marketing as I have a narrow span of colors that I can see. As a result, color is not important to me. I’m not saying design is not important, but there is no one great design. 

I built my first commercial website in 1995, and I got R200 for it. Which was the equivalent of working as a bartender for a week back then. Today, that amount can only buy a can of Coke in Manhattan. If you look at websites they almost all have Products, Services, About, and Contact Us pages. There have been no massive leaps in innovation. Yet companies spend massive amounts on design; they worry about it and think it needs to look good. Whereas design is as subjective as art appreciation. You can certainly tell a good piece of art from a bad one. But unless you know what you’re looking for, i.e. things like percentage conversion rate, you should agree rather than pretend a better design will guarantee results because it won’t. 

Most of the time, the reason I upgrade websites I’m working on is because it is outdated. And that is only because you’ve been looking at it for two years. New users coming to it do not know how old it is. Trying to think of the corollary is a good way of working out whether to change something or not. I look at it from a numbers point of view and change it keeping in mind the things that will make sure we don’t lose traffic.

David Quaid has a passion for technology and provides a rich and nuanced reflection on a life shaped by curiosity and resilience. He values meaningful relationships and societal contributions. He reflects on success and the importance of leaving a positive impact on the world. His insights into the digital industry highlight a balanced perspective on technology’s potential and its limitations. The emphasis on understanding user needs, maintaining mental health, and the value of curiosity provides a holistic view of what it takes to stay proactive and innovative.