Jeff Woelker : Chicago SEO, SEM, and Social Media Consultant

I can’t believe it’s almost been seven months since I became a “client”. Maybe it flew by so fast, because I was occupied with some other things. In any case, while I’ve been at JC Whitney, I’ve learned a few things about how a search agency should and should not work with their clients and I wanted to relay a few of those things to those interested. And one point before I begin, at JC Whitney I manage numerous SEO specific vendor relationships on a regular basis, so I have exposure to several types of agencies and their deliverables. So here are five tips for SEO agencies out there wondering, “I wonder what I can do to be a better agency partner”:

Provide value
Man, going right for the jugular, aren’t you Jeff? When I say, provide value, I mean, just because we signed a contract and we’re all set to go with the first project, don’t think you’ve “won” the business and it’s time to slack off. You need to prove it day in and day out. We have a few agencies who we can consistently rely on to get an email when Google makes any algorithm changes or if they see something weird going on in our analytics. There are other agencies who we say “We need this type of report” and that’s exactly what they deliver. No more, no less. And in the case they deliver less, we continuously ask for less and less from them, eventually terminating the relationship. If you provide more than the client expects, you can get away with the occasional faux pas or miscalculation.

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If you’ve followed my blog for some time, you’ll know that I’m a big proponent of local, sustainable, and environmentally conscious. Whenever possible, I try and incorporate those things into my life. I’ve been lauding the auto industry’s move from entirely petroleum based to hybrid to electric only. And as part of my move to JC Whitney, this has only spurred on this passion.

I was recently over on Chicago’s West side and happened to see a new member to the Chicago automotive scene. It was a Tesla dealership, right in downtown Chicago. I was able to get in contact with Tesla to find out what’s going on with them and what they see happening with electric vehicles in the next few years. The following is an exchange I had with Jeremy Siwek, a product specialist with Palo Alto based Tesla Motors.

Can you give us a quick background for anyone not already familiar with Tesla?
Tesla Motors is an American car company based in Palo Alto, CA, the heart of Silicon Valley. The auto manufacturer was created with the intention of furthering electric vehicle technology to make electric vehicles available and affordable for the mass-market. The company was founded in 2003 and began delivering cars in 2008. Tesla has delivered approximately 1,000 Roadsters in 44 States and 23 countries. They are available in the U.S., Canada, and Europe, with availability in Japan and Australia coming extremely soon.

I’ve heard a lot about the Tesla Roadster and Model S, but can you give us a run down of the specs for each and how they are different.
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So it’s been a month since I’ve moved over to the client side. To be honest, this first month has flown by. Learning about new brands, new internal processes, new technical architecture, new product taxonomy, and new office and vendor relationships can do that. In any case, over the next few months, I’m going to reflect on what it’s like to work on the client side and some of the changes I’ve seen since moving from one side to the other. The focus of this post is the final deliverable. The final deliverable may, in actuality, not be the final deliverable, however, I’m referring instead to the end product of a specific project or series of projects. It’s the Word document, Powerpoint presentation, website, PDF, etc. an agency delivers to the client, the client reacts to, and the agency ultimately gets paid.

So what’s different about being on a the receiving end of these documents? A lot! Here are a few of the things I’ve noticed since being on the client side.

It’s all in the details
On the agency side here is what a typical project looks like:

SEO Guy: So I ran that analysis for the client. Looks like things are going pretty good, but there’s this one keyword that’s still not moving.
Client Manager: What can we do to get it moving?
SEO Guy: I have to run some more analysis, but I’m almost done with the report.
Client Manager: Well, you better hurry up. It’s due tomorrow.
SEO Guy: I’ll stay late to get it done. [12:15 am, delivers report]
Client Manager: Thanks for that report.
SEO Guy: That last chart took me 4 hours to pull together. I couldn’t get Excel to format it correctly.
Client Manager: No problem. Can you have the proofreader look it over?
Proofer: Looks good. I made a few changes.
SEO Guy: Changes look good.
Client Manager: Great. I’ll send it over this afternoon.

As the client, here is what I see:

Client Manager: Dear Jeff. Attached is the report you requested. We look forward to your questions.

See the difference? On the agency side, there are numerous people who are touching the report. Editing, re-editing, copying, updating, stressing, proofing, creating, modifying, and reviewing. On the client side, I don’t see all that. All I see if the end product and I have to make my own assumptions about where time was or was not spent. And just as it goes, even if you [the agency] spent 98% of your time on one chart or one set of data, if you forget to spell check the document before sending it over, the few typos in it may throw the entire document into question as to whether the data is valid or not.

Since I’m disconnected from the process and don’t see the late nights, weekend sessions, frantic internal calls, etc. I don’t know why the data didn’t sum correctly or that number seems off. All I can do is react to what I’m given and if all I’m shown is a poorly written document, confusing data sets, typo laden paragraphs, or unusable charts, what am I supposed to think?

So I’m not saying, if you’re on the agency side to double your proofing efforts or throw out your current process in favor of something completely Machiavellian. I’m just saying that the next time you get a question from the client or they point out something grammatically incorrect with your introduction paragraph, just know that it’s because they are seperated from the process and don’t see all the minutia that goes into the creation of the final deliverable. And yes, we do appreciate your work, even if you used “they’re” instead of “their” or “it’s” instead of “its”.

For those of you who don’t know, I’ve recently made the switch from the agency side to what some might call “the dark side” or client side. The post below is a reflection of my decision to make the jump. I’m hoping that both long time readers, as well as newcomers can find something they can use when deciding to make this decision on their own.

Let me give you a bit of background. I’ve been working at Slack Barshinger for the past three years. I started there in February of 2007  and it was and has been a fantastic job until the day I left. I was able to work on clients too numerous to name them all, but a few included Google, Fellowes, ArcelorMittal, Dow Corning, AEM, SourceForge, Tellabs, and Diebold. I was able to take on as much responsibility for projects as I wanted and had the freedom to test and try as much as I wanted including tactics, strategies, tools, and processes. Each time learning something new about our internal structure, my clients, and my own strengths and weaknesses. And recently, things have really started to take off, so much so that we had to hire several people to keep up the demand. In spite of all of this, there came a point about a few months ago when I found out about a local business, JC Whitney which changed the whole plan.

JC Whitney is an automotive aftermarket retailer based in Chicago who sells both in catalogs as well as online. JC Whitney, part of the larger Whitney Automotive Group, was looking for a search and social media manager who could come on and support their organic search efforts as well as grow their social media presence online. Now, being from Detroit, this position both intrigued me, but also caused some consternation. Primarily, the reason I left Michigan to move to Chicago was the plethora of opportunities available for employment, but secondarily, it was to avoid affiliations with the automotive industry which has decimated the Michigan economy for the last decade and, from what I assume, will continue to do so for the coming one as well.

Having been at Slack Barshinger for three years, I was extremely comfortable in my surroundings, the processes in place, and how to work in my overall team. I met some of the best friends I’ll ever have and I was able to learn from some of the sharpest people I may ever meet. So why did I decide to make the switch? Well, there are a few reasons.

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In case you’ve been living under a rock during 2009,  it was the year of Twitter. Twitter and “tweets” were all over the place. Many marketers were just trying to get their feet wet, while others jumped in wholeheartedly and even created national campaigns around it. At least until the next hot thing, it appears that Twitter is it for now. For many B2C, as well as B2B, marketers it was easy to setup a Twitter account and post a few things here and there, but after a few weeks or months they began to wonder:

• Am I reaching the right audience?
• How do I extend my audience?
• What are some quick ways, aside from giving away “the farm”, to grow my audience?

This post is specifically around those questions. Here are three quick ideas you can use to grow your Twitter following quickly and relevantly.

Media Publications
The first place to look is to existing trade publications who have migrated to Twitter. Over the last several years, traditional and offline media has really been taking it on the chin due to the rise of online. As a result, many of them have taken to social media and online venues as a way to stoke the fires of their online publications. Whether you are looking to reach teens and tweens (i.e. TigerBeat), yacht enthusiasts (i.e. Sailing Magazine) or professional contractors (i.e. Contractor Magazine), there are offline or newly created online publications on Twitter. All you have to do is click on their “Followers” link and presto, you have a captive audience for your products or services. If they are interested in what these publications have to say, they are probably also interested in what your company has to say. So what publications are important to your industry? Even if they don’t have a Twitter account setup, you might find people who are regularly readers, just talking about it too. See for yourself.

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As you may already know from my previous post, SES Chicago is rapidly approaching and the agenda has several very interesting sessions lined up. One of the sessions I’m particularly interested in is “Selling Search to the C-Suite”, which has been an issue in previous years. I think search has approached a point now though where it should seem obvious that companies should have some presence in search. However, even today, we still have clients we need to convince that search is the right venue for them. I had the chance to interview Russ Mann, Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer, of Covario, who is part of the panel on Day 3 on the trials, tribulations, and some tips on how to sell search more effectively to those higher up the marketing food chain.

Perhaps as a result of the recession, online has taken off even faster than many expected, due to its lower costs and higher measurability. Do you feel like selling search to the C-suite is any easier now that online and specifically search is so much more widely used and accepted?

Selling search to the C-suite as a concept is most definitely easier.  We heard CEOs of Fortune 500 clients refer to needing “a Google strategy.”  No one debates the importance or the ROI of search.  The challenge now is to make search more strategic.  For many CEOs, CFOs and CMOs, if they have one “in-house search person” or if they believe “their agency is doing it,” then they are satisfied that they have checked the box.  The C-suite now needs to understand that search represents the purest voice of the customer in aggregate, and represents not just attitudinal behavior (what they say they’ll do)- it’s behavioral data (what they’ll actually do).  The problem is that too many search marketers are overly eager to expound on the fascinating details of SEM and SEO, while the C-level exec’s eyes glaze over.  C-level execs care about big picture, direction, business impact and “moving the needle.”  That’s the next wave of enterprise class search marketing.

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I’ve often used this blog as a knowledge repository for myself, as well as many of my colleagues. Providing lists of great sites, or tools I think are useful as a search or digital marketer. Below I’ve compiled 60 links which I think are relevant and useful to search marketers at any stage in their career – whether their just starting out or they’ve been doing this for years. I tried to make it a mix of both SEO and SEM/PPC sites, tools and analysts, but I think in the end it may have swayed more to the SEO side. Mostly as I think SEM is one of those things that people have all their own tools to do the analysis. I’d love to make this a working list, so please feel free to add additional tools, links, blogs, analysts or useful sites you think others may or may not know about. This is by no means all the sites out there, but I think it’s pretty representative.

Development / Browser Tools:
These are several of the tools I’ve used over the years to make sure my site is valid and indexable, as well as measuring optimization over time.

• HTML Validator
• CSS Validator
• Link Checker
• Robots.txt Generator
• SEOBook Firefox SEO Plug-in
• SEOBook Rank Checker
• SEOQuake
• MozRank Checker
• Header Checker
• Site Link Checker
• SEO Tools
• Dave Naylor’s Search Tools
• Yahoo Link Checker

Keyword Research Tools:
Below is a list of keyword research tools I have used in the past or have heard anecdotally from others that these are viable tools. In the end, it the tools you have the most confidence in that will give you the best results.
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So the other day, I was having a meeting with a client and there happened to be another agency in the room. We began talking about paid search strategies in terms of whether to start with broad match keywords or exact match or a mix of the two. I can come up with reasoning for both, but it just depends on the situation.

When is it best to start with broad match?
I would equate broad match as the sledgehammer of keyword matching tools. It’ll definitely get the job done, but you might also bring in lots of impressions which aren’t necessarily applicable. Now, if you are new to paid search or just starting off a paid search campaign, this is a good place to start. If you have the budget flexibility, it might be good to just let a broad match campaign run for a short time frame, depending on volume, and then review the campaign analytics to see which words to  add to your negative keyword list. So let’s say you have a campaign running for a local car wash, you might advertise against:

• car wash
• car washes
• car washing

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A few days ago, I received my invitation to Google Voice.  As is my standard operating procedure with new technology like this, I signed up first and figured out a business application after a few days. Well, I’ve had some time to think about this and I’ve compiled 5 ways of how you can use Google Voice for your own business.

Setup an “office” in another city
So when I moved to Chicago, I didn’t change my cell phone number, as most people already knew what it was and I didn’t want to go through the hassle of updating it and possibly losing people in the process. As a result, I still have a (586) Detroit area code for my cell phone number. With the advent of Google voice, now all of a sudden, I have a local number to give people, without having to change over my cell phone. If I wanted to, I could use this for marketing purposes and “setup shop” in cities where I don’t necessarily have a business office yet. If you are a small business, or a larger business trying to setup shop in a new market and want local credibility – why not check out Google Voice? It allows you to get a local number, but still maintain your homebase of operations.

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Over the last few years, I’ve written extensively on how you should optimize your website. Changing page titles, alternate keyword research methodologies, redirecting domains, and eliminating duplicate content are just a few. But what happens when you get  a little out of control and start over optimizing your site.  How do you know when you’re doing too much SEO? Below I’ve included 5 tips to help you know when to say when.

Everyone should see the same content
One of the popular techniques that used to be used to trick search engines into giving undo ranking is called Content Cloaking. Content cloaking allows for you to detect the user agent arriving at the site (browser, search engine spider, etc.) and display one version of content for one user and a different version for another user. For example, I may present a page laden with keywords to the search engine, and a page with a few images to the user, thereby “tricking” the search engine into thinking I have much more content than I actually do. Of course, this is an ill-advised tactic and Google (and others) specifically outline that this is not allowed. Frankly, it seems like more work than it’s actually worth.

Now, you can present the content differently, based on user agent, but it still has to be nearly the same content. An example of this could be a visually intensive website that when a user visits via the browser they are presented with all the bells and whistles, but when they arrive via mobile phone, you can strip out excess images, flash elements, etc. thus tailoring the experience to the platform, but not for undo search ranking.

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