Archive for the stuntdubl Category
Written on August 16, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: book, marketing, seo, stuntdubl
I started interviewing people in the search marketing industry long ago (inspired by Aaron Wall) as a way to provide access to search marketing practitioners, pundits and employees at search engines. Beginning in 2005 with this interview with Brett Tabke from WebmasterWorld & Pubcon, interviews with search marketing types have been posted here covering a variety of search marketing topics.
The search engine marketing industry changes often, so it’s pretty interesting to see some of the predictions made in some of those older interviews. Below are 10 more recent SEO interviews from client side practitioners or search engine employees that you can get a lot of value from in terms of understanding how facilitating SEO works in organizations, SEO and social media, resources, tools and specific SEO tips.
Vanessa Fox – Ex Googler, now at Nine by Blue on Marketing in the Age of Google
Matt Evans of Monster.com on Agency vs. In-House SEO
Michael Nguyen of Shopzilla & Bizrate.com on Huge Ecommerce Website SEO
Scott Skurnick of Edmunds.com on Enterprise SEO
Dan Perry, SEO Director at Turner Broadcasting on Big Brand Publisher SEO
Tim Ash of SiteTuners on Landing Page Optimization
Alex Bennert, Chief Search Strategist at The Wall Street Journal on Very Large Website & Publisher SEO
Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead at Google on Google Webmaster Central
Laura Lippay – Recently left Yahoo for Nine by Blue on SEO at a Search Engine
Todd Malicoat – Consultant and Faculty at Market Motive on the Search Marketing Industry
Other interviews worth mentioning, albeit a bit older, include: Danny Sullivan, Tim Mayer, Mike Grehan, Matt Cutts, Andy Beal, Melanie Mitchell, Adam Lasnik, Jill Whalen, Eric Ward, Heather Lloyd-Martin, Andy Atkins-Kruger, Adam Audette, Neil Patel.
Be sure to watch TopRank’s YouTube channel for video interviews with search and internet marketers that we’ll capture during the SES San Francisco conference this week.
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Tags: book ,brett-tabke ,danny-sullivan ,ecommerce ,heather-lloyd- ,interview ,marketing ,publisher ,search industry news ,search-engine ,stuntdubl
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Written on July 13, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: book, marketing, seo, stuntdubl
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Tags: analytics ,book ,ethics ,faculty ,google ,guide ,internet-marketing ,local ,malicoat ,online ,research ,search ,seo ,social ,tools
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Written on May 10, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: Advertising, Object, book, marketing, seo, stuntdubl
In much the same way that people have developed banner blindness there will be an eventual blindness toward other forms of ads.
People only need to be screwed by a gem like the following about once before they lose trust in sharing *any* personal data with anybody.
The above example is a great example of the scumbag affiliate mindset. Find whatever loopholes in the law exist, and exploit them right up until they are illegal and you risk a fine. If it is profitable enough keep running it until you get fined.
The problem with such exploitative ads is that they ruin the game for everyone. And so the best networks backed by companies who intend to be around for decades typically don’t want to run those nasty ads.
The alternative way to build yield is to be more efficient by knowing more. This is part of the reason Google and Facebook are trying so hard to collect as much information as possible AND give each other blowback for their efforts. If you know someone really well and have more data than anyone else then it can be quite hard for others to build a comparable yield. This is true for your own site, but is especially true in terms of creating a distributed ad network.
Distributed ad networks are quite powerful because over time the ad unit can change as personal preference and advertiser preferences change. And with each ad load the network is collecting more data, which can be used to make the network more efficient and price gouge advertisers.
Most online businesses do not aim to operate at the core infrastructural level though, and competition is even more fierce due to a lower barrier to entry. As information is shared publicly people try to clone it precisely (or, at a minimum, create heavily inspired renditions of it). The easier your business model is to clone the more expensive it is to share your information publicly. There are over 1 million AdSense publishers. With Google sharing data down to the page and keyword level that market will get pretty efficient pretty quick.
But techniques and business models can get worn out. Even ad clicks are heavily reliant on vertical and user type. Internet Explorer users have a much higher CTR than more sophisticated web users who are more aware of advertising.
In one market we sent out a few emails to relevant sites by hand and 2 of the 5 people bitched us out because another webmaster with a similar domain name had sent them about 100 emails in the last year, and wouldn’t stop even when asked. The technique of investing thousands of Dollars into relevant content and then mentioning it to a few relevant people was, to some degree, killed … at least in that vertical.
Wherever trust is placed abuse follows, and so we have what Brett Tabke eloquently described as Google’s LinkLess Internet:
- no one links honestly any more.
- all links are suspect.
- no one links freely any more.
- those that do link freely are considered naive.
- page rank is specifically worth money.
- links are currency
- articles that once contained great links - no longer link to story targets.
Google might care more about the damage they have done, but looking the other way has been too profitable. As Brett concluded: “Not by design, but think about this: if you click a link from Google and go to a page, and that page has no interesting off site links - then you are going to turn around and go back to Google.”
When trying to organize the web there are always going to be philosophical points of view & business goals that are reflected in the relevancy algorithms. When Google was small and nimble they rooted for the little guy, embraced the affiliates who were their earliest advertisers, and claimed to be a uniquely democratic view of the web. As Google grew they realized that they were near the yield limits of direct marketing, and so they claimed brands are how you sort out the cesspool.
If you build brand you can create new search demand, but for most publishers search is a 0 sum game. For you to win somebody else loses. You are targeting the exact same existing demand as someone else is. It is certainly true for AdSense publishers and affiliates, as well as most other online publishing business models. Even offline publishers are willing to lose money so long as they can bleed dry a strategic competitor.
How are brands responding to Google’s call to promote brands? They are exploiting the holes Google is gifting them:
More major media companies are looking for ways to find cheap content. Thomson Reuters, Cox Newspapers and Hachette Filipacchi have run articles supplied by Associated Content, one of several companies, such as Demand Media and AOL’s SEED, that mines reporting from masses of freelancers for as little as $5 a story.
…
Though Mr. Keane and his media partners declined to provide details, an executive with knowledge of these deals indicates the media partners have paid anywhere from $75 to $120 per article as well as a share of any related ad revenue.
It gets a bit tiring to say brand is the solution, but water flows downhill. And so if Google wants to promote brands, who wants to promote the business models that have been banned from AdWords? How many second and third chances might you get if Google by default already hates your business model? If you have a term paper writing service that they penalized you are likely down for the count.
As a service provider understanding Google’s business objectives helps you understand where it is easiest to build returns. If they already like something then you might only need to give it a small push to get it over the hump. If you are pushing something that Google is moving away from then you are pushing uphill the whole way.
Not every SEO client project makes money. In fact, at the start of new ongoing projects it is a near certainty that both parties start losing money. There is a different approach to each type of business, and it is far easier to be profitable promoting what Google wants to promote.
The same SEO technique is typically worth much more when applied to a strong brand than when applied to a small business. Recently there has been a bunch of GARBAGE misinformation polluting the SEO space about concepts like “the brands hiding on Google.” Why? That is where the ad budget is.
Brands can practically fall over the finish line and still win - even with an incompetent SEO practicioner doing the work, so even as Google is promoting brands, SEO firms are lining up to claim brands are not getting a fair shake.
Truth is brands have it easy, and there are tons of ways to bake SEO into other advertising + marketing efforts.
There was a recent Google update which impacted many websites. Googlebot has been going crazy, but as some sites drop others went up. It makes little difference to Google, and they probably prefer to have the results mix up (even if it sacrifices relevancy a bit) because it prevents people from becoming too comfortable.
Part of why Google wants to mix new verticals into the search game is that the more people they have competing against each other the more leverage Google has over the game:
Google says users will be able to buy digital copies of books they discover through its book-search service. It will also allow book retailers—even independent shops—to sell Google Editions on their own sites, taking the bulk of the revenue. Google is still deciding whether it will follow the model where publishers set the retail price or where Google sets retail prices.
Google can be content running at a loss or break even in new verticals because they are buying marketshare which can be used to enhance relevancy. “We’re quite comfortable having a diverse range of physical retailers, whereas most of the other players would like to have a less competitive space, because they’d like to dominate.” - Dan Clancy. Once they have the marketshare and data, they can ramp up on pricing.
Google also unveiled a new 3 column search result layout, and has no intent of offering a broadly marketed easy way to revert back to the old version. There is a legacy URL that still works, but for how long is anyone’s guess. The new search result layout allows searchers to dive deeper into various verticals. And some have speculated that the change to the layout could cost Google some ad clicks, but if it did those losses would be temporary. Many of Google’s vertical search services have limited relevancy, and the inline integration in the regular search results was hit or miss (I once saw a Philip M. Parker auto-generated book at #2 in the organic search results for a competitive keyword). 
But when you think of the types of verticals Google is now promoting, to some degree you could almost think of them as ad channels / categories where Google is buying market data and/or taking a second bite at the apple on monetization to grow the search pie.
- Where are most videos hosted? Youtube.
- Discussions? What do most free web forums & QnA websites use to monetize their websites? AdSense.
- Books? Google Editions is launching in the next couple months.
- Updates? Google will eventually likely buy Twitter.
- Product search? Could that eventually tie into the Google affiliate network?
- Maps & Local? There is an ad for that
If Google knows you want something local or recent then those are just additional dimensions to target ads against. And if many users like vertical x after searching for something then Google can use that usage data to promote that vertical more aggressively in the regular search results. as paid content models mature, Google’s focus on verticals ensures they stay at the heart of the transaction flow, giving them the data needed to improve relevancy and recommend featured paid content.
In the broader sense of marketing, I think the idea that SEO is primarily fulfilling demand is one of the reasons many people dislike the business model. The idea of being one of many shifting choices doesn’t sound very exciting to most people, especially if they don’t know much about the relevancy algorithms:
in this post industrial information age, if you are just one more entry in an algorithmically defined index, the index algorithm makes even the most amazing employee the digital equivalent of a 1909 Ford production worker. Ford didnt care if you were the most productive in the plant. Google doesnt care if you are the most valued brand in the index. They will assign their own value to you. You are just one more entry into an equation. An equation that you dont have access to.
The bigger issues with simply filling existing demand are that you miss some organic start up opportunities because you are not growing the pie. You miss the transformational business models. You won’t create a Paypal or a Skype or a Google with an SEO oriented strategy. And even if it is successful, it can be quite bland and boring as you are not covering new ground:
The technology business is fundamentally the innovation business. Etymologically, the word technology means “a better way of doing things.” As a result, innovation is the core competency for technology companies. Technology companies are born because they create a better way of doing things. Eventually, someone else will come up with a better way. Therefore, if a technology company ceases to innovate, it will die.
These innovations are product cycles. Professional CEOs are effective at maximizing, but not finding, product cycles. Conversely, founding CEOs are excellent at finding, but not maximizing, product cycles. Our experience shows—and the data supports—that teaching a founding CEO how to maximize the product cycle is easier than teaching the professional CEO how to find the new product cycle.
The other big problem when you are just selling existing solutions into existing value systems is that it often means you promote outdated products, hyped crap, and anything that is in a bubble. And if you think otherwise, take a look at the ads on your website and see if they promote the best solutions, or the solutions which produce the highest yield.
All throughout history man has fought for and stole what is his. Some legally gained, some not. But even the legal systems are a reflection of the most profitable business models. It’s why Warren Buffet believes that derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction, except for *when he owns them* … and it is why no bankers are in jail and bonuses are at record highs when unemployment is still so high. Most the recovery was fraudulent ponzi finance and the individual has to fight for whatever scraps they get. For most people search presents the same type of opportunity as a debt-based finance system, where success seems just within reach, but is not.
I am just as guilty as anyone else on that front, but it does feel good to run at least 1 or 2 websites which aims to have meaning. I just wished they provided as much yield as the other stuff does.
As search gets smarter perhaps one day they will!
But for now search is still a zero sum game
Read the original here:
SEO is a Zero Sum Game
Tags: Advertising ,apple ,book ,digital ,explorer ,google ,innovation ,legal ,online ,post ,search ,stuntdubl ,work
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Written on April 27, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: book, marketing, seo, stuntdubl
Posted by randfish
Last November, I authored a popular post on SEOmoz detailing 15 SEO
Tags: analytics ,book ,business ,comparison ,images ,marketing ,post ,price ,research ,running ,social ,stuntdubl ,tools
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Written on April 7, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: Advertising, book, chat, marketing, seo, stuntdubl
Firstly, I think domainers are geniuses. They are the only group of people that I know that can work as little as they do, and make as much as they do. Top level domainers are the TRUE optimizers, and saw the biggest gapping hole in the economics of the web ever created, and are now driving trucks of money through it. The true pioneers and geniuses within the community have started to develop an appreciation of what it takes to create successful online properties instead of just making money from parked landing pages. Unfortunately there is still a lot of laziness and blindness to some of the myths their community has helped to perpetuate. The thoughts below are from nearly a decade purchasing ~500 domain names of which I think only 10% at best hold very strong value. The rest are stinkers that I should probably not pay the $6 a year hosting if I was more dilligent with my accounting and renewal tracking.
I have been a lurker in domain and affiliate communities for years. I think it’s time to point out some of the domainer myths as the world’s of SEO’s and domainers start to collide, and the best domainers realize they need to actually develop their properties to continue to reap the rewards of their investments. Seeing “potential” through to fruition is both rewarding and extremely challenging (for a bit of credibility at this point, I invested, helped develop, and ultimately exited from CollegeDegree.com just over 3 years ago to help fund future projects.)
A perfect storm is brewing from the climate of need from marketers needing top domains and domainers needing marketing talent. It takes a lot to build a great site - so you might as well do it on a domain that people will remember when you finally put it in front of them. Landing page revenues are decreasing, and users are a bit more saavy, so many of the smart domainers are doing their best to at least develop sites on their domains to hedge their bets on big ticket domain valuations with some base level website monetization. It will definitely only continue to be more difficult to capture the “free traffic” of organic search, only as the myth that it should have ever been “free” in the first place is finally being dispelled.
We are FINALLY seeing tools to project the value of a site’s organic search traffic (like SEMRush, SpyFu, and Aaron’s awesome competitive analysis tool) to properly quantify at least a ball park range of the value of “free organic traffic”, and make projections of bottom line revenue based on these projections accordingly. The really sharp domainers, have been reaching out to folks in the SEO community, and have been attempting to learn about development and driving more traffic. To properly understand the myths, I think we must first take a look at how I appraise potential domain names (primarily for the intention of development).
1. Search term value (cost per click)
2. Exact match search term volume
3. Overall query diversity (is there longtail from the exact match that is valuable?)
4. Brand-ability (how easy is it to remember and type in)
5. Domain top level extension (.net/.orgs are still a great deal worth 10 - 20% of .com value - everything else is 2nd tier)
6. Potential type in traffic (only for very top level keyword.coms in select verticals, and really mainly good for branding)
7. Ease of future development (How easy is it to realize the “potential” of a brandable domain creating content, software, etc?)
8. Ease of monetization (is the market liquid, or does it have a high barrier to entry?)
There’s probably some others to add, but these 8 factors pretty much sum up most of the important areas up for consideration when looking at if you can earn a return from purchasing a domain name. For a more in depth guide to website valuation as a whole, you can see my older post on the subject - How to appraise a website - Website Value 101.
Bargain domains has a good handle on what is important using cpc, volume, competition, ease of monetization. Doing business development for a site that does not have existing affiliate programs is among the most difficult barriers to entry for creating a successful site in a given space, and where a lot of errors from the below myths comes into play. I think a lot of domainers are discounting a lot of their domains - with little or no clue why, other than trying to cover costs. I’ve definitely snagged my fair share of nice ones in what seems to be a pretty good buyer’s market in the right places. I’ve also got a lot of garbage from mistakes like domaining after drinking;) To make the right buys, you definitely can’t fall for the top 11 myths domainers find themselves falling victim to:
1. Myth of the Type in.
Type in traffic occurs at a very small level that is constantly diminishing. I make no argument that some percentage of people type in Cameras.com when thinking about purchasing a digital camera. However, the impact of this type of traffic, overall is quite minimal. Type in traffic comes through google, bing, yahoo, and your Internet Service Provider. If your ISP decides to serve a 404 page for the domain or country code it will render to their landing page. Richard Kershaw has more about the dangers of the type in traffic myth based on some data he dug up from Sedo, so I’ll defer to his better post to explain this one further:
“… 0.001% of domains parked with Sedo get double digit per day traffic. Or to put it another way, 99.999% of domains parked with Sedo don’t hit double digits daily.“
Even Kevin Ham’s genius .CM wildcard tld strategy isn’t really working in most places anymore. What really perpetuates this myth is repeat visitors and DIRECT NAVIGATION. Direct navigation is much different from type in traffic. Direct navigation can easily come from other media sources and many times very easily owe it’s true attribution to a specific campaign or general “brand equity” which will likely always remain a somewhat vague metric for analysis and accountability.
2. Myth of the 1 Word .com
Just because it’s generic, doesn’t mean it’s good Crap.com is still crap. Yes, you can make an argument, that it is “brandable”, but so is Suudl.com or some other random character string of constants and vowels. There’s dozens of startups in Silicon Valley trying to build an awesome product on a garbage domain. Sometimes it actually works (Yoodle to go on and be better things.) Do you know how much money it costs to BUILD a true brand that people actually recognize?
Sharp entrepreneurs like domainshane.com have some solid 4 and 5 letter domains for web 2.0 startups, but there’s a difference between selling a few domains for 3 figures, and creating a full blown startup company. I will say that I do think any 4 and 5 letter .com value will only continue to rise. There are only a limited number of these and they will often be held by large corporations. A good four letter .com is HIGHLY brandable since it takes up less space for more traditional advertising (print/ radio/ tv).
The biggest myth with EVERY entrepreneur falls victim to is that it’s easy to build a company. Murphy’s law definitely applies to you, even though you think you’re the exception. You always hear the success stories of Mint.com and the like, but you miss the other 9 startups for every 1 that actually even gets a 2nd round of funding (as well as the thousands that failed to get to that point). You also miss the decades of misery endured by the executives and founders. I can count on less than two hands the number of successful entrepreneurs I know that have maintained their integrity. Any idea how hard it is to get the first round? 3 words: Tech Bubble, Recession
Having 20 or 30 single word domains may prove to be more of a blessing than a curse to either sell or develop when you look at how much money a startup has to raise to take a company to the next level past several rounds of venture funding, or the difficulty of creating a company that will sustain through a public offering.
3. Myth of the “Category Killer”
The underestimation of what it actually takes to build a real site that delivers value to real end users, and makes real revenue will be the common thread in most of these points. It’s real easy to say that you understand how to do it, and that you can do it. Even if you did it as a consultant, doesn’t mean you can do it all yourself and successfully pull it off (believe me, I fell victim to this myth for quite some time.)
Banca.com was a steal in a recent auction, but just because you own Bank.org, doesn’t mean you can build or run one and actualize the potential of such a domain.
4. Myth of “Revshare”
This begins with the fallacy that you’ll attract good people by offering them a revenue share of the project. Unfortunately, smart people realize it’s very difficult to craft these agreements, and setting expectations on the same page is a rare commodity. As a consultant, I’ve had lots of “rev-share” offers. Normally, building a long term working relationship works in a handful of ways through smaller projects.
The person who builds the house isn’t always happy to lease the land it’s built on, even if they get to share in the profits. Normally, they’d prefer to buy some less expensive land, and maintain complete control of the project, until they can be the master developer.
There are ultimately a few questions that get asked from both sides:
Domainer:
We would like to develop a site that makes millions from my genius idea of buying high quality domains in 1994.
Consultant: Did you live in Vancouver or nearby?
D: No, but I have been to some conferences around that area.
C: Cool - the domainer community fascinates me, and I’m a lurker there. I do a bit of domaining myself for myself as well.
So tell me about your site.
D: Elaborate beautiful description of properties and potential. Insert unrealistic expectations of marketing miracles.
C: screenshare examples of success.
D: More qualification of websites awesomeness.
C: More examples of wins, and answers to questions.
D: Sounds awesome, we’ll be in touch.
C: Okay cool. Have a good one.
The conversations sometimes go a few phone calls longer. The truth is, the cost of creating an amicable agreement, or in building the trust takes so much efforts, that both sides generally fall flat. The trust needed for such an arragement is generally too big of a gap to bridge in a few phone calls. The domainer opts for the cheap work with less than impressive results, and the consultant continues to consult and develop sites. Generally the domainers learn from the conversation and realize they should continue to further their search and social media marketing understanding.
A few examples:
Example #1http://www.namecake.com/venture-partners/
Some of our names experience a large volume of natural daily traffic. Couple this with their brandability and you have a powerful combination to immediately compete in your chosen field. All that’s needed to turn these domains into successful online destinations is a strong partner with the right resources.
…our ideal partners will likely have the resources to execute an entire business plan around developing the domain property. All aspects of the business will be the responsibility of the partner. While the preferred relationship is to partner with experienced companies/individuals on these projects, an outright sale of the domain name will also be considered.
A strong project manager with years of experience will likely always buy the domain outright (or find an alternative to use).
I understand that the core competency here is acquiring top level domains, but I’m wondering how many properties they have successfully built out to claim just how “easy” it is to immediately compete and make money with a top level domain. I have certainly heard the question before myself of “If you’re so good at this, why don’t you do it for yourself?” In fact, I heard it enough times that I decided I must build my own properties to disprove the naysayers. I’m sure the guys at namecake are super smart, and have made lots of money - but it if it DID come from underestimating the workload, and doing what was easy - they were extremely lucky.
Example #2 Reinvent, Marchex, and other companies have some amazing domain names, but each individual domain nearly warrants it’s own entire dedicated team to build out properly. I’m not sure some of these domainers have the true knack for creating gameplans for actual site development and launch that actualize the “potential” the domain names hold. Even though some of their large holdings are generic domains - the value in ranking for these phrases (and the business plan and development for monetizing them) often doesn’t justify the effort unfortunately. There are a handful of winners, and a lot of losers still left in these large, diverse portfolios. Focusing on one or two big areas could really do well, but trying to split the workload between a very large and diverse portfolio is spreading the resources very thin on some of the really GOOD domains they have like carfinancing.com, creditrating.com, or cheaptravel.com. By the time they realize this, the barrier to entry to start in these areas may well be much much higher.
Example #3
http://www.bigticketdomains.com/
Treatmentcenters.com – great site (doesn’t work in ff for mac), and awesome domain with the ability to create a great geo based lead generation campaign. Focus on the one site, and sell the others if you can to fund the development.
Focus on Brideloan.com, Tradeshows.com, NewYork.net, and develop StockMarket.com and MutualFunds.com. Those 4 domains could easily be enough for a lifetime. The rest might sell to an enlightened soul in one of their respective industries for fairly reasonable prices. I don’t imagine it takes lots of homeruns, and offering GOOD reasonable financing deals is a good step towards doing biz dev with saavy individuals and agencies.
5. Myth of Interlinking sites
The lesson in learned when a large group of sites is wiped off the map in terms of search traffic. This is generally the point where they search around for someone to fix the problem, and claim they did nothing wrong. At the very least - interlinking your domains is NOT doing you any favors. Start splitting them off now, and quit convincing yourself that you’re Barry Diller and you own IAC. His sites have entire enterprise level teams to “co-brand” and “cross-promote) his sites. Until your parent company is worth a billion dollars, you’re still just cross linking (with little to no benefit, and potentially a lot of detriment)
6. Myth of Parking pages (slowly dissolving value)
I bet it was awesome getting a 40% rip from the overture feed when type in traffic and search traffic was high for high value phrase .coms with little content and a phoney link profile. It’s a shame that things went down hill and everyone had to start working for a living. If it makes you feel better, SEO’s are providing an increasingly more commoditized service whose value at most levels is dimishing as well, and good folks are looking for better opportunities to monetize a skillset that is still not completely easy to build despite all the advances in search marketing training in the last three or four years.
7. Myth of Not Identifying and Underestimating Search and Social Strategy Value
Search marketing can help build direct cashflow. The tools to project the value of search marketing are still just starting to grow to a point of decent accuracy. 4 years ago before Google Analytics became great, no one had PPC data. It’s hard to understand SEO if you haven’t done PPC. Their are important economic systems in play on both that affect bottom line business. Search marketing is at the core of consumer intent.
8. Myth of Low Value Services Providing High Value
Amazingly willing to spend xxx,xxx on domains, but not more than $x,xxx per month on development. A good strategy should probably spend anywhere from 10 - 30% of the budget on the domain. Depending on the project this can seem excessive to some - but I definitely strongly agree with the high value in good domain names. The trouble is that you can only develop a few (not 100’s or 1000’s). I find that I’ve been able to develop about 10 - 12 sites per year at various qualities. That’s about one per month - with about 2-5 coming out very good at the end of a year. This is with a very strong desire to sit at the computer for 40 - 60 hrs per week consistently, and work at your maximum mental capacity.
9. Myth of Hype and Community Publicity
Woohoo! Joe the domainer launched motorcyclehelmets.com - It’s sure to be a category killer! I’m not a huge hater, but I’ve seen people fall into the same trap within the SEO and internet marketing community. Just because you’re a big deal in your little niche community does not mean you’ll make money, or that anyone else anywhere will actually care if you do. Most the successful people I know that have maintained their humanity tend to have a great deal of humility (and try to minimize the hype). The hater in me comes from my self loathe of blogging and enjoying using things like foursquare and twitter. For a circle jerk of publicity and drama in a small pondof life, there are many forums and blogs to visit, but perhaps the rise of the fall for the seo community came with Threadwatch.org (I think because it was like a giant sewing circle). It is only by spending time in such a place that you have an appreciation of just how information on the web truly travels (and just how little most things really mean).
10. Myth of second tier top level domain extensions
I bought into .info’s too. I feel your pain. I think I even have some .travel, .us, .mobi and some other second tier garbage. Firstly, they’ll never gain acceptance. Secondly, they’ll never rank for anything. Thirdly, no one will remember your extension (and they’ll type in .com), and you’ll lose most of the “type-ins” you were hoping for. Lastly, remember how much it costs to build a brand? It costs even more to get your .com AFTER the fact. The cost of GREAT .coms /.nets /.orgs on the other hand continues to see growth.
11. Myth that development is EASY
The owners of MutualFunds.com have a retail price of $5 Million listed. How much more likely are your odds for success buying Mutualfunds.net for $100k, and spending the other $4.9M on product development and marketing? For that matter, why not buy a $6 domain, and redirect it later? Even if you DO have a $10M budget, does it ever really make sense to make this type of purchase? Sure it’s an amazing domain name - no question, but your domain is only one function of your marketing budget. I am a large fan of big ticket domains, but if you are top heavy in terms of percentage of your budget being spent on your domain, and neglect your product and marketing, you will be clamoring about the “potential” until the point your domain goes up to foreclosure auction, and someone else gets it at the price it likely originally should have sold for (far less than you paid).
So why is it domainers (and most entrepreurs for that matter) underestimate the cost of development?
The number one reason this happens is because business goals aren’t developed before the project starts. One of the most exclusive problems to a business that fails online is a lack of understanding in execution the marketing and business development strategies. Underestimating the true nature of the project is a realization that nearly always occurs at the end of a failed businesses’ lifecycle.
In terms of one and two word keyword domains, domainers often forget that while there is a benefit in having an exact match keyword domain, it is still only easy to rank for that single term in the short term. Ranking for all the long tail phrases or other important phrases is an entirely different story. Even ranking for the exact match of a domain can be very difficult if the domain is in a already highly developed industry. To truly understand how difficult it is to rank for something, you must be able to do some competitive intelligence in a search result, and identify:
- how many links will you need?
- how much content will you need?
- what will it take for development of the great ideas you will use to retain users?
- will you be able to create content that will engage users, or is it highly specialized?
How many links you will need is often the critical underestimation. While you CAN go out and buy links, there is certainly a level of risk that comes along with this to your precious investment.
So what’s the moral of the story?
- Don’t believe the hype (least of all your own)
- No one will buy “potential” $1 worth of revenue is worth more than $100 in potential.
- Build a business model first
- Spend more money on engineering and strong development than hype and potential.
- Cut losses on a project that doesn’t succeed
I think this is most important. If you REALLY want to make money on the web - follow these rules. Start working in one small corner of a competitive marketplace, and prove to yourself you can make a living at it. Most of the money is made from: 1. telling people how to make money 2. telling people how to improve themselves 3. telling people how to find things 4. comparing things for people in high dollar areas. 5. lead generation in the above mentioned topics with massive scaleable solutions (generally aggregations and user generated content plays).
I understand that with writing this post, I will likely ostracize myself from a bit of the domainer community, but it is only out of watching and understanding a bit from the fringes that I understand some of the domainer “community” that I have been able to form these observations. It is with a great deal of respect that I have done so, and that I offer my constructive criticism. As mentioned above - I think most good domainers are among the smartest and luckiest folks I’ve ever heard about. I hope some day I get to catch up with some cool domainer folks and swap stories over boat drinks. If you want to train teams in the meantime - I’ll give a shameless promotion for MarketMotive - it’s a great place to train your teams on holistic goals with an understanding of business goals. If you got through this whole post, and got a little upset with some of the observations -it’s probably a great place to start, and I remind you that I criticize with the utmost respect.
More sites and references:
Domainer sites I like watching:
Original post:
Website Valuation and Domain Appraisal Myths: A Cautionary Tale for Domainers
Tags: Advertising ,chat ,computer ,economics ,general ,internet ,media ,money ,project ,random ,rewards ,seattle ,seo ,stuntdubl ,vancouver
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Written on April 4, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: book, marketing, seo, stuntdubl
If you have been in the SEO field for any serious length of time you have probably come across (and benefited from) some of Tedster’s work - either directly, or indirectly from others who have repackaged his contributions as their own. He is perhaps a bit modest, but there are few people in the industry as universally well respected as he is. I have been meaning to interview him for a while now, and he is going to be speaking at Pubcon South on April 14th in Dallas, so I figured now was as good a time as any 
How long have you been an SEO, and how did you get into the field?
I started building websites in 1995 and the word SEO hadn’t been invented. I came from a background in retail marketing, rather than technology or graphic design. So my orientation wasn’t just “have I have built a good site?”, but also “are enough people finding my site?”
The best method for bringing in traffic seemed to be the search engines, so I began discussing this kind of marketing with other people I found who had the same focus. Ah, the good old days, right? We were so basic and innocently focused, you know?
If you could list a few key documents that helped you develop your understanding of search, which would be the most important ones?
Here are a few documents that acted as major watersheds for me:
Is PageRank still crucial? Or have other things replaced it in terms of importance?
What PageRank is measuring (or attempting to measure) is still very critical — both the quality and number of other web pages that link to the given page. We don’t need to worship those public PR numbers, but we definitely do need quality back-links (and quality internal linking) to rank well on competitive queries.
There appears to be something parallel to PR that is emerging from social media — some metric that uses the model of influencers or thought leaders. But even with that in the mix, ranking would still depend on links, but they would be modified a bit by “followers”, “friends”, since many social sites are cautious with do-follow links.
Lets play: I have got a penalty - SEO edition. Position 6, -30, 999, etc. Are these just bogus excuses from poor SEOs who have no job calling themselves SEOs, or are they legitimate filters & penalties?
If the page never ranked well, then yes - it could well be a bogus excuse by someone whose only claim to being an SEO is that they read an e-book and bought some rank tracking software. However, Google definitely has used very obvious numeric demotions for pages that used to rank at the top.
The original -30 penalty is an example that nailed even domain name “navigational” searches. It affected some sites that did very aggressive link and 301 redirect manipulation.
What was originally called the -950 (end of results) penalty, while never an exact number, most definitely sent some very well ranked pages down into the very deep pages. Those websites were often optimized by very solid SEO people, but then Google came along and decided that the methods were no longer OK.
In recent months, those exact number penalties seem to have slipped away, replaced something a bit more “floating” and less transparent. My guess is that a negative percentage is applied to the final run re-ranking, rather than subtracting a fixed number. Google’s patent for Phrase-based Indexing does mention both possible approaches.
But even using percentages rather than a fixed number, when a top-ranked page runs afoul of some spam prevention filter, it can still tank pretty far. We just can’t read the exact problem from the exact number of positions lost anymore.
Do you see Google as having many false positives when they whack websites?
Yes, unfortunately I do. From what I see, Google tends to build an algorithm or heuristic that gathers up all the URLs that seem to follow their “spam pattern du jour” — and then they all get whacked in one big sweep. Then the reconsideration requests and the forum or blog complaints start flying and soon Google changes some factor in that filter. Viola! Some of the dolphins get released from the tuna net.
One very public case was discussed on Google Groups, where an innocent page lost its ranking because a “too much white space” filter that misread the effect of an iframe!
Google’s John Mueller fixed the issue manually by placing a flag on that one site to trigger a human inspection if it ever got whacked in the future. I’d assume that the particular filter was tweaked soon after, although there was no official word.
How many false positives does it take to add up to “many”? I’d guess that collateral damage is a single digit percentage at most — probably well under 5% of all filtered pages, and possibly less than 1%. It still hurts in a big way when it hits YOUR meticulously clean website. And even a penalty that incorrectly nails one site out of 300 can still affect quite a lot over the entire web.
How often when rankings tank do you think it is do to an algorithmic issue versus how often it is via an editorial issue with search employees?
When there are lots of similar complaints at the same time, then it’s often a change in some algorithm factor. But if it’s just one site, and that site hasn’t done something radically new and different in recent times, then it’s more likely the ranking change came from a human editorial review.
Human editors are continually doing quality review on the high volume, big money search results. It can easily happen that something gets noticed that wasn’t seen before and that slipped through the machine part of the algorithm for a long time.
That said, it is scary how often sites DO make drastic errors and don’t realize it. You see things like:
- nofollow robots meta tags getting imported from the development server
- robots.txt and .htaccess configurations gone way wrong
- hacked servers that are hosting cloaked parasite content
Google did a big favor for honest webmasters with their “Fetch as googlebot” tool. Sometimes it’s the easiest way to catch what those hacker criminals are doing.
When does it make sense for an SEO to decide to grovel to Google for forgiveness, and when should they try to fix it themselves and wait out an algorithmic response?
If you know what you’ve been doing that tripped the penalty, fix it and submit the Reconsideration Request. If you don’t know, then work on it — and if you can’t find a danged thing wrong, try the Google Webmaster Forums first, then a Request. When income depends on it, I say “grovel”.
I don’t really consider it groveling, in fact. The Reconsideration Request is one way Google acknowledges that their ranking system can do bad things to good websites.
I’ve never seen a case where a request created a problem for the website involved. It may not do any good, but I’ve never seen it do harm. I even know of a case where the first response was essentially “your site will never rank again” — but later on, it still did. There’s always hope, unless your sites are really worthless spam.
Many SEOs theorize that sometimes Google has a bit of a 2-tier justice system where bigger sites get away with murder and smaller sites get the oppressive thumb. Do you agree with that? If no, please explain why you think it is an inaccurate view. If yes, do you see it as something Google will eventually address?
I’d say there is something like that going on — it comes mostly because Google’s primary focus is on the end user experience. Even-handed fairness to all websites is on the table, but it’s a secondary concern.
The end user often expects to see such and such an authority in the results, especially when it’s been there in the past. So Google itself looks broken to a lot of people if that site gets penalized. They are between a rock and a hard place now.
What may happen goes something like this: an A-list website gets penalized, but they can repair their spam tactics and get released from their penalty a lot faster than some less prominent website would. It does seem that some penalties get released only on a certain time frame, but you don’t see those time frames applied to an A-list.
This may even be an effect of some algorithm factor. If you watch the flow of data between the various Google IP addresses, you may see this: There are times when the domain roots from certain high value websites go missing and then come back. Several data center watchers I know feel that this is evidence for some kind of white-list.
If there is a white-list, then it requires a history of trust plus a strong business presence to get included. So it might make also sense that forgiveness can come quickly.
As a practical matter, for major sites there can easily be no one person who knows everything that is going on in all the business units who touch the website.
Someone down the org chart may hire an “SEO company” that pulls some funny business and Google may seem to turn a blind eye to it, because the site is so strong and so important to Google’s end user. They may also just ignore those spam signals rather than penalize them.
Large authority site content mills are all the rage in early 2010. Will they still be an effective business model in 2013?
It’s tough to see how this could be quickly and effectively reined in, at least not by algorithm. I assume that this kind of empty filler content is not very useful for visitors — it certainly isn’t for me. So I also assume it must be on Google’s radar.
I’d say there’s a certain parallel to the paid links war, and Google’s first skirmishes in that arena gave then a few black eyes. So I expect any address to the cheap content mills to be taken slowly, and mostly by human editorial review.
The problem here is that every provider of freelance content is NOT providing junk - though some are. As far as I know, there is no current semantic processing that can sort out the two.
Given that free forums have a fairly low barrier to entry there are perhaps false alarms every day on ringing in the next major update or some such. How do you know when change is the real deal? Do you passively track a lot of data? And what makes you so good at taking a sea of tidbits and sort of mesh them into a working theme?
I do watch a lot of data, although not nearly to the degree that I used to. Trying to reverse engineer the rankings is not as fruitful as it used to be —especially now that certain positions below the top three seem to be “audition spots” rather than actually earned rankings.
It helps to have a lot of private communications — both with other trusted SEOs and also with people who post on the forums. When I combine that kind of input with my study of the patents and other Google communications, usually patterns start to stand out.
When you say “audition spots” how does that differ from “actually earned rankings”? Should webmasters worry if their rankings bounce around a bit? How long does it typically take to stabilize? Are there any early signs of an audition going good or bad? Should webmasters try to adjust mid-stream, and if so, what precautions should they take?
At least in some verticals, Google seems to be using the bottom of page 1 to give promising pages a “trial” to see how they perform. The criteria for passing these trials or “auditions” are not very clear, but something about the page looks good to Google, and so they give it a shot.
So if a page suddenly pops to a first page ranking from somewhere deep, that’s certainly a good sign. But it doesn’t mean that the new ranking is stable. If a page has recently jumped way up, it may also go back down. I wouldn’t suggest doing anything drastic in such situations, and I wouldn’t overestimate that new ranking, either. It may only be shown to certain users and not others. As always, solid new backlinks can help - especially if they are coming from an area of the web that was previously not heard from in the backlink profile. But I wouldn’t play around with on-page or on-site factors at a time like that.
There’s also a situation where a page seems to have earned a lot of recent backlinks but there’s something about those links that smells a bit unnatural. In cases like that, I’ve seen the page get a page one position for just certain hours out of the day. But again, it’s the total backlink profile and its diversity that I think is in play. If you’ve done some recent “link building” but it’s all one type, or the anchor text is too obviously manipulated, then look around for some other kinds of places to attract some diversity in future backlinks.
On large & open forums lots of people tend to have vastly different experience sets, knowledge sets, and even perhaps motives. How important is your background knowledge of individuals in determining how to add their input into your working theme? Who are some of the people you trust the most in the search space?
I try never to be prejudiced by someone’s recent entry into the field. Sometimes a very new person makes a key observation, even if they can’t interpret it correctly.
There is a kind of “soft SEO” knowledge that is rampant today and it isn’t going to go away. It’s a mythology mill and it’s important not to base a business decision on SEO mythology. So, I trust hands on people more than manager types and front people for businesses. If you don’t walk the walk, then for me your talk is highly suspect.
I pay attention to how people use technical vocabulary — do they say URL when they mean domain name? Do they say tag when they mean element or attribute? Not that we don’t all use verbal shortcuts, but when a pattern of technical precision becomes clear, then I listen more closely.
I have long trusted people who do not have prominent “names” as well as some who do. But I also trust people more within their area of focus, and not necessarily when they offer opinions in some other area.
I hate to make a list, because I know someone is going to get left out accidentally. Let’s just say “the usual suspects.” But as an example, if Bruce Clay says he’s tested something and discovered “X”, you can be pretty sure that he’s not blowing sunshine.
Someone who doesn’t have huge name recognition, but who I appreciate very much is Dave Harry (thegypsy). That’s partly because he pays attention to Phrase-based Indexing and other information retrieval topics that I also watch. I used to feel like a lone explorer in those areas before I discovered Dave’s contributions.
What is the biggest thing about Google where you later found out you were a bit off, but were pretty certain you were right?
That’s easy! Using the rel=”nofollow” attribute for PR sculpting. Google made that method ineffective long before I stopped advocating it. I think I actually blushed when I read the comment from Matt Cutts that the change had been in place for over a year.
What is the biggest thing about Google where you were right on it, but people didn’t believe until months or years later?
The reality of the poorly named “minus 950″ penalty. I didn’t name it, by the way. It just sort of evolved from the greater community, even though I kept trying for “EOR” or “End Of Results.
At PubCon South I believe you are speaking on information architecture. How important is site structure to an effective SEO strategy? Do you see it gaining or losing importance going forward?
It is hugely important - both for search engines and for human visitors.
Information Architecture (IA) has also been one the least well understood areas in website development. IA actually begins BEFORE the technical site structure is set up. Once you know the marketing purpose of the site, precisely and in granular detail, then IA is next.
IA involves taking all the planned content and putting it into buckets. There are many different ways to bucket any pile of content. Some approaches are built on rather personal idiosyncrasies, and other types can be more universally approachable. Even if you are planning a very elaborate, user tagged “faceted navigation” system, you still need to decide on a default set of content buckets.
That initial bucketing process then flows into deciding the main menu structure. Nest you choose the menu labels, and this is the stage where you fix the actual menu labels and fold in keyword research. But if a site is built on inflexible keyword targets from the start, then it can often be a confusing mess for a visitor to navigate.
As traffic data grows in importance for search ranking, I do see Information Architecture finally coming into its own. However, the value for the human visitor has always clearly visible on the bottom line.
What are some of the biggest issues & errors you see people make when setting up their IA?
There are two big pitfalls I run into all the time:
- Throwing too many choices at the visitor. Macy’s doesn’t put everything they sell in their display windows, and neither should a website.
- Using the internal organization of the business as the way to organize the website. That includes merely exporting a catalog to a web interface.
How would you compare PubCon South against other conferences you have attended in the past?
PubCon South is a more intimate venue than, say Vegas. That means less distraction and more in-depth networking. Even though people do attend from all over the world, there is a strong regional attendance that also gives the conference a different flavor — one that I find a very healthy change of pace.
In addition, PubCon has introduced a new format — the Spotlight Session. One entire track is made completely of Spotlight Sessions with just one or two presenters, rather than an entire panel. These are much more interactive and allow us to really stretch out on key topics.
—
Thanks Tedster! If you want to see Tedster speak he will be at Pubcon Dallas on the 14th, and if you want to learn about working with him please check out Converseon. You can also read his latest musings on search and SEO by looking into the Google forums on WebmasterWorld. A few months back Tedster also did an interview with Stuntdubl.
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Interview of Tedster from WebmasterWorld
Tags: architecture ,dallas- ,information ,input ,marketing ,microsoft ,people ,semantic ,study ,time ,visitor ,yahoo
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Written on April 1, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: book, marketing, seo, stuntdubl
Enrollment is now open for you and your team to join our Q2 Master Certification courses in SEO, Social Media, PPC , Landing Page Conversion or Web Analytics at MarketMotive.com
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Select from individual or group courses in SEO, Social Media, PPC, Landing Page Conversion or Web Analytics that are 100% online* and include:
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Written on March 31, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: Advertising, marketing, searchengineguide, seo, stuntdubl
by Jennifer Laycock
If you’re looking to further your education in online marketing or know of a non-profit that could use an educational boost of their own, you’re going to be interested in hearing about MarketMotive’s spring scholarship contest. The team at MarketMotive is generously allowing each faculty member to award a scholarship to one of their readers.
The contest is simple…just write up a brief social media marketing plan for your favorite non-profit and you’ll have a chance to earn a free scholarship (valued at $3500) for the Master Certification class of your choice in MarketMotive’s spring quarter. You can choose to publish the proposal on your site and e-mail me the link, or you can e-mail it directly to me for review. I’ll pick my three favorites and will post them here on Search Engine Guide next week. My readers will vote on their favorite and the winner will be awarded the scholarship.
If you’re already a social media whiz, that’s fantastic…use the scholarship to sign up for one of our other courses. (Or, give it away to someone else!)
You can choose from quite a few different options:
Not familiar with MarketMotive? That’s ok…check out the program and watch a brief video explaining how it all works.
Rules: Submitting a plan means contestants agree that their plan may be be posted (with attribution) and/or sent to the charity. Plans may be edited before being posted at blog owner’s discretion. Winning plan (s)will be selected at the discretion of MarketMotive faculty chairs. All entries must be submitted before 12:01 am EST on April 4th, 2010, and the finalists will be announced the week of April 5th.
Be sure and visit our small business news site.
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Win a $3500 Online Marketing Scholarship from MarketMotive (and Help a Non-Profit to Boot)
Written on March 22, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: Advertising, book, marketing, seo, stuntdubl
It’s pretty easy - write a SEO marketing plan for a non-profit of your choice, and you could win a scholarship to learn how to become an even better, more well rounded marketer. Worst case scenario, you will have written a SEO marketing plan for a non-profit that you can share with the people who run your the non-profit for your cause of choice. Pretty cool right?
MarketMotive, is allowing each faculty member to award a scholarship for certification courses valued at $3500 for the upcoming semester which starts on April 15th. All-star faculty members teach the certification courses: Dave Szetela, Matt Bailey (Fundamentals), Jennifer Laycock (Social Media), John Marshall (Web Analytics), Avinash Kaushik (Web Analytics), Greg Jarboe/Jamie O’Donnell (Online PR and Video marketing), Bryan Eisenberg (Conversion Optimization), Michael Stebbins (Email Marketing) and nailing down PPC Advertising. The goal of the scholarship is to help deserving folks (like you!) to help us in creating something great for a non-profit marketing group. If you already work at a non-profit, feel free to pull double duty, and tell me how you would continue to improve your site, or even someone elses. If you’re already a marketing pro - you’re welcome to enter as well, and donate your prize to the person you deem most worthy. Our goal is to help some deserving folks (like you) attain master certification in their field, and provide a valuable service to non-profit marketers everywhere.
If you would like to win a scholarship to earn certification in any of the offered topics, pick one non-profit web site of your choice and submit a short SEO marketing plan that you think would help improve the campaign results for your chosen charity. You can choose to publish it on your website and let me know about it, or email to me (todd at this site name.com).
At the end, each winner gets a complimentary $3,500 course to earn certification. If you are already an expert in SEO, you can donate the course to whoever you feel is most qualified. In addition, each faculty member will link to the plans submitted by other finalists and winners – the sum of which will form a wealth of of information for nonprofit marketers.
Rules: Submitting a plan means contestants agree that their plan may be be posted (with attribution) and/or sent to the charity. Plans may be edited before being posted at blog owner’s discretion. Winning plan (s)will be selected at the discretion of MarketMotive faculty chairs.
More here:
Write a Non-Profit SEO Marketing Plan & Earn a Scholarship for MarketMotive SEO Master Certification
Written on February 16, 2010 by admin
Filed Under: Advertising, book, marketing, seo, stuntdubl
One of the great things about SEO is that it allows you to see many lenses on business that you can’t normally see with most other professions (outside of perhaps something in high finance or management consulting anyhow). One day you are building a bootstrapped business from scratch wondering when it will make its first Dollar, and the next day your on the phone with McKinsey consultants or an executive from a fortune 500 company talking strategy.
Zeta Interactive’s Hugo Guzman is one of the the folks in the SEO industry who has a broad experience set which perhaps eclipses my own, as he has done virtually everything. And so I recently interviewed him…
You run some of your own sites, have done some private SEO consulting, I believe you may have done some in house SEO for a while, and are now deep into the bowels of the SEO agency world. What are the best and worst parts of each role?
Great question! Here’s my take based on personal experience in each role.
Running your own site(s)
Best Thing: That feeling of unbridled entrepreneurism. I’ve always felt that website building is sort of like the new real estate development, only anybody can do it and it costs less than $100 to get started (if you know what you’re doing). The other great thing about running your own site(s) is the ability to cut out on time wasting and bureaucracy. There’s no need for filling out corporate approval paperwork or sitting through useless meetings or conference calls, so you can focus in on building content, building links, building databases, and building relationships.
Worst Thing: The cold hard reality of monetization. There used to be a day when paid links could easily bankroll early development until you got other revenue streams to a point of sustainability, but that well has dried up to a certain extent. Affiliate revenue and Adsense are both viable but take time to develop, especially if SEO is the main source of traffic, so like you, I believe that the best option is to cut out the middle man and develop a product/service of your own that fills a specific niche need at a fair price. I think that the emergence of FourSquare and Twitter localization suggests a strong opportunity for hyper-niche, location-based website development. You don’t have to be the best in the world at a specific thing in order to be successful. Just be the best in your locale or region.
SEO consulting
Best Thing: Being able to do SEO “The Right Way” (or at least “your own way”). It feels good to execute an SEO program that way you see fit, especially when it works! It makes for a very rewarding experience. It’s fun to build out the list of deliverables, the timeline for implementation, and the success metrics and KPIs that will be the foundation of your client programs.
Worst Thing: Dealing with the sales grind, chasing after clients that don’t pay on time (or at all) not getting the hourly bill rate you know you deserve, etc…basically all the business stuff that has little or nothing to do with pure SEO. Unfortunately, many of the SEOs that go this route get caught up in the grind by failing or refusing to fire bad clients, so that they can focus on building revenue by offering more granular or expanded services for their good clients.
In-house SEO
Best Thing: Being embedded in so many different aspects of a business and learning about marketing and biz dev elements outside the pure SEO realm. I spent several years working with CBS Interactive and I learned a ton about so many things and worked with some really intelligent people.
For example, I learned how C-level executives frame marketing channels like SEO. The main success metric that I was measured on was percentage of overall referring traffic (well under 10% when I first started). Even though I was able to exponentially grow natural search referrals, especially for key niches like fantasy football and March Madness – both of which are huge moneymakers for CBS – the cumulative effect on overall traffic was minimal (never reached 20%). The reason was simple; CBS owns their major television network as well as a myriad of local television affiliates, radio stations, billboards, email addresses, etc, which literally drove millions and millions of unique referrals.
This introduction to mass media metrics helped me gain perspective on the role SEO plays within the larger scheme of things (brand building and management, push/interruption marketing, email marketing, etc). And it was this perspective that would help me connect with marketing executives when I made the move to agency SEO, because I finally understood that while SEO is arguably the most cost-effective marketing channel, it was only one piece of a much larger puzzle.
Worst Thing: It’s hard to move up the corporate ladder and earn big dollars. Because SEO is typically straddled between marketing and IT, it’s tough to move up into upper-management positions. Some companies (like the Tribune Company) are starting to wake up, but for the most part, it’s still tough to move on up.
SEO Agency
Best Thing: It’s sort of like the Peace Corps in that it’s the hardest job you’ll ever love. Granted, you’re not really helping the world be a better place (just helping companies become more profitable) but getting to work with so many different verticals, marketing philosophies, business executives, and web environments is incredibly rewarding. Agency SEO (if you work at a good agency) will undoubtedly make you a better SEO, and a better business person in general.
Interestingly enough, it’s the seemingly unconquerable workload that proves to be the catalyst for professional growth. Dealing with multiple clients, each of which has impossible deadlines and unrealistic ROI expectations, forces you to prioritize your efforts and focus on the strategies and tactics that will deliver the most bang for their marketing buck. SEO’s that fail to grasp this are quickly burned out and leave the agency life (and usually return after a year or two after realizing that they can’t make much money in-house). SEO’s that “get it” quickly make an impact for clients – and the agency’s bottom line – catapulting them into management and executive roles.
Worst Thing: It’s sort of like the Post Office. The work just keeps coming and coming. It’s extremely stressful, demanding, and demoralizing at times. But hey, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger right?
From which of the 4 roles do you see the greatest profit potential?
That’s a tough one. In-house probably has the least profit potential, followed by agency work. Although it’s worth pointing out that some of the better agencies out there take extraordinary steps to keep talented individuals happy and give them a true stake in the company’s success. My agency definitely falls in that category.
Consulting has very solid profit potential but building your own site(s) is definitely king in my book because if you pick the right niche and truly devote yourself on all levels the potential is limitless.
You (Aaron Wall) write about this topic quite a bit, but it’s important to re-emphasize. If an enterprising SEO is looking to start their own site(s) the first thing to take into consideration is the level of passion they have for the topic/theme that the site(s) will encompass, because if the passion isn’t there, it’s unlikely that said SEO will have the motivation to work through the inevitable plateaus that await his/her new business. Also, as most of us know, building the right kind of content is what often leads to the inbound links that will serve as the foundation of a solid search presence, and that’s much easier to do when you truly love the topic/theme you’re dealing with.
When you guys take on new clients are you knee deep in the SEO projects? Or do you focus more on training your team?
Truthfully, I’m no longer involved in day-to-day management of SEO projects. I do touch almost every single account, but usually it’s as an advisor to the SEO specialist that’s assigned to the account or because the client needs to tap into my historical knowledge of the account (I’ve been working with some of our clients for several years now and know more about their history than some of their employees). Basically, I keep tabs on each account and come in to deal with really tough and/or complex scenarios that junior team members have never encountered. That said, I do spend a considerable amount of time testing specific hypotheses, either on client sites or on test sites that are owned and managed by my agency.
One of the most memorable tests we performed was for a major insurance and financial services brand (one of the biggest in the world) that was having a ton of trouble getting their agent profile pages indexed (they had thousands of them). They were convinced that simply adding these pages to their XML sitemap would do the trick, despite the fact that Google explicitly states that submitting an XML sitemap does not replace override their normal indexing and ranking methodology. In order to convince them to take an alternate route (focusing on internal linkage that helped eliminate orphaned agent pages) we simply tested their hypothesis by taking a baseline measurement on the number of indexed agent pages, then adding all of the agent pages to their XML sitemap en masse and then measuring the impact on indexing for those pages (the impact was nil). We then convinced them to implement our recommendations and subsequently measured their impact on indexing of agent pages (over 80% of those pages were subsequently indexed). The result? An interesting conclusion that helps guide our recommendations for other clients as well as an incredibly happy Insurance brand that has now been with us for going on three years!
As for the rest of my time, it is spent training our team of specialists (and the sales folks and the account management folks) supporting sales across the US, leading sales efforts in the Southeastern United States, and working with our product development team to build tools that help facilitate SEO. Oh and I try to help promote the agency when I find some spare time ; )
It wasn’t always like that by the way. I started my agency life as a specialist and have gradually moved up the ladder.
Many of the bigger agency-styled companies sell watered down services of limited value. For example keyword ranking / websourced / marketsmart interactive went from the largest SEO company to closed almost overnight. How do you scale SEO within an agency while preventing the watering down effect that is common at most?
This is an extremely tough problem to overcome, but one of the things that we’ve focused on is product development that helps automate certain facets of the SEO process, so that our specialists can spend their time being truly strategic.
For example, back in 2008, I figured out that our specialists (including myself) were spending an inordinate amount of time formatting and filling out the Excel templates that are used to deliver page-level code recommendations to clients (more or less a staple of agency life). This included copying and pasting the existing code side-by-side with our recommended code, so that the client’s IT/dev folks could use it as a point of reference when implementing. This was essentially data entry work that was extremely tedious and took up a tremendous amount of time.
Working with our tremendous product development and digital services team based in Hyderabad, India, we were able to develop a web application that automatically scraped the designated code for a particular client web page and populated in the correct fields within our Excel template. Now, all our specialists have to do is fill in the recommendations in the appropriate fields, cutting delivery time in half. It’s tremendous productivity booster and also a tremendous morale booster for our specialists.
If you’re on the client side and are interviewing perspective SEO providers, make sure that they have some sort of technology platform in place that will help automate or at least facilitate some of the non-strategic facets. Otherwise, you’re going to spend a ton of money on what essentially amounts to data entry.
From a consumer perspective, a lot of the agencies are long on sales but short on results. What are some of the key signals consumers should pick up on when determining if an agency is the real deal or one that is selling watered down water?
That’s easy.
Ask them if they can help with direct implementation via CMS and/or hard coding. Ask them to go into excruciating detail in terms of how they handle link building (most agencies claim they do link-building, but it usually just boils down to directory submissions and paid links). Ask them to explain how content influences link-building and social media efforts. Ask them to go into excruciating detail in terms of how social media and SEO dovetail. Ask them to go into excruciating detail in terms of how they leverage analytics as it pertains to SEO. Ask them if they’re accustomed to working with senior (even C-level) executives to facilitate approval and implementation of recommendations.
If they’re worth their weight, they’ll jump at the chance to give deep answers to each and every one of these questions.
As an ad agency you guys are also involved in other marketing elements from companies. Does search ever become a key consideration when it comes to product naming, product positioning, and other advertising formats? If yes, could you share some examples?
My agency was arguably the first to truly embrace the cross-channel interactive agency model, so we definitely work with clients across a variety of marketing channels, and as a matter of fact, we offer a variety of services beyond search (we just made the Forrester Wave for email service providers).
I can’t get into specific clients and URLs due to confidentiality agreements, but I would say that well over 50% of the clients we work with take search into consideration when naming products, positioning products, and even picking vanity domains. I would say that about 25% of our clients make search their top priority when considering these types of things. Those are our favorites, because they really “get it” and work SEO into everything they do.
One example that I can give you (without revealing specific client names) is the purchasing of vanity domains to drive SEO for specific product/service offerings. I’ve seen companies drop anywhere from a few thousand to hundreds of thousands in order to secure domains that have large, authoritative link profiles and already rank for high volume keywords. In fact, I recently did some consulting on behalf of one of the largest VC firms in the world, helping one of their clients (we’ll call them “Company A”) essentially put a price tag on a the value of a domain that was owned by a smaller firm that “Company A” was looking to acquire. I actually think that this type of work could become a nice hyper niche for me in the future (until Google and others finally accomplish their goal of eliminating domains from the search equation…but that’s a story for another day).
What strategies do you use to help clients provide adequate resources for a large or complex SEO assignment when the results might take many months to materialize?
We’ve gone as far as to help clients screen potential hires or contractors in order to help them staff up for large initiatives. In addition, we’ve embedded our employees at a client’s office for large stretches of time in what you could call a “dedicated resource” type of arrangement. Lastly, we’ve helped coordinate cross-division committees and/or multi-agency collaboration in order to help get large initiatives off the ground.
Basically, I’ve always preached to the team that they have to do anything and everything to make things happen. Often times, it’s this extra effort that ends up become the primary measure of success in the client’s eyes, especially if there are some solid metrics to go along with it.
What success metrics are used along the way to help clients appreciate the returns on the SEO efforts?
I find that year-over-year trending is extremely valuable because it takes seasonality into account, and we’ll deliver that type of trending both at the aggregate level and focused on specific “big money” keywords. Incidentally, our agency doesn’t shy away from extremely competitive keywords. We go after everything that fits the client’s vertical but just make sure to set expectations early on. Clients deserve to rank for the biggest money terms, but they also need to understand that in certain cases it could take years to achieve above-the-fold placement.
Also, I believe that it’s critical to drill down and measure non-branded keywords as opposed to just looking at raw aggregate referral data, especially when you’re working with big brands that drive mammoth amounts of brand queries. If you don’t strip out the branded search referrals, then you’re not really measuring SEO (99% of the time, branded keywords have and always will rank No. 1 so the traffic they drive are a function of brand awareness, not search engine optimization).
Google is known for letting bigger brands get away with being a bit spammy. Do you ever suggest to clients that they have the opportunity to push the window?
The short answer is “Yes”.
We conform to “White Hat” SEO (whatever that means) but we also believe that it’s our job to educate clients on techniques that may or may be deemed as “spammy” by search engines like Google. They deserve to understand the entire SEO landscape, not just the vision created by Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
Also, for clients that are already relatively SEO savvy and were already dabbling in techniques deemed unsavory by Google, we will gladly provide a third-party opinion and consulting on those activities. We believe that they deserve that level of service for the premium they’re paying.
Within a company internal politics often end up kicking SEO into the back seat. When doing agency work, who are the key individuals from within the companies you service that you consider it a must to loop in on the project?
Start with the CEO (seriously). And by the way, this also applies to social media initiatives.
The goal is to find a way to move the needle for a client, even if we are faced with a tough situation in terms of marketing approval, legal approval, or IT implementation (this is more or less par for the course in verticals like Pharma and Financial Services). If we can move that needle, then we’ll immediately push to get in front of upper-level executives, so that we can help them understand what we’re trying to accomplish in the long term (and that we won’t accomplish it at the expense of their brand affinity or legal standing).
If you’re not getting face time with a senior director, VP, or C-level executive, then you’re probably not doing a very good job.
Hugo Guzman is the Vice President of SEO & Social Media at Zeta Interactive. He can be reached via email at hguzman@zetainteractive.com or via Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/hugoguzman.
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Comparing SEO Business Models
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