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

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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What makes a website inherently “findable” these days? Is it information architecture, web design principles, an understanding of search engines, usable interfaces, or a combination of all of these?

It’s a combination. Findability requires a holistic perspective that balances engineering, marketing, and design. I often invite web managers to ask the following three questions. Can people find your site? Can people find their way around your site? And, can people find your content and services despite your site? Success in all three areas is important and can’t be achieved without paying attention to the ways that code, content and structure work together to influence usability and findability.

Either using the items listed above, or adding your own, what is the most important aspect to think of when designing a website to ensure it is easy to use and understand?

Empathy for the user is the key to good design. Only by understanding user behavior and psychology within a particular context of use can we create products, services, and experiences that help users achieve goals, complete tasks, and find what they need. That’s why user research methods such as design ethnography and usability testing are so important. Of course, we must also know enough about the technology to see what’s possible. Often, it’s not enough to optimize for ease and efficiency. We must also strive for desirability and aim for innovation.

Do you feel like Flash, AJAX, and other highly visual, but non-text based interfaces, are making the web more or less usable or findable?

It depends. Great teams employ visual interfaces and rich interaction to create engaging user experiences without sacrificing usability and findability. Unfortunately, most teams aren’t great and quickly get in over their heads.

Are there any companies who you think really exemplify “findability” in the way they create online or offline experiences?

Other than Google, which is too obvious to mention, there’s no single company that comes to mind. What’s exciting right now is the proliferation of ideas and inventions across platforms and media. On the iPhone, for instance, there are some great niche applications like SitOrSquat (for finding public toilets when you’ve gotta go) and Nearest Tube (for finding the London Underground when you’re aboveground). Location-based services and augmented reality are particularly intriguing at the moment.

Where do you see search engines and other meta data engines in the next five years?

A key point we make in our new book, Search Patterns (available from O’Reilly Media in January 2010), is the need to think outside the box. We must continue to make incremental improvements (e.g., better interfaces and algorithms) while simultaneously pursuing radical innovation. This requires thinking more expansively about goals and strategy. Twitter and the Wikipedia were not conceived as search solutions, but as knowledge management innovations they have both transformed the search landscape. Often, the biggest changes emerge not from the center but from outside the category entirely. We all need to work on our peripheral vision.

If there’s one thing you hope people walk away with after listening to your keynote address at SES Chicago, what do you hope it will be?

I hope folks leave with a sense of urgency and enthusiasm. My goal is to inspire people to make search better.

Disclosure: I have not been financially compensated for this post, although I have received a free press pass to cover SES Chicago.

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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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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Microsoft and Yahoo have both been doing their darnedest lately to try and take back some of the market share that Google has earned for itself these days. Although marketers are not always the ultimate decision makers when it comes to which platform to advertise against, it all goes into a decision funnel that influences clients and eventually search engine users. Let me expound.

So I have a client who is looking to start a search campaign. They are looking for a recommendation on which engine(s) to use, but don’t really have a preference. Being media agnostic, I’ll recommend the best engines for their campaign objectives. However, I won’t necessarily like it if the mix contains Yahoo or Microsoft (Bing). To me, those are added overhead, added frustration, and added management time I don’t need. If the client gives me a window of opportunity, I’m going to take the path of least resistance and here’s where Yahoo and Bing are missing out on a lot of ad dollars. In a nutshell, here are 5 reasons why marketers avoid Yahoo and Bing and flock to Google when they have the opportunity.

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[Note: You'll get a lot more out of this article if you already have experience with Radian6. If not, you'll still probably get some insights.]

If you’re a search marketer, you might be getting bored these days. It seems like it’s all social media this and Twitter that. What happened to search marketing? When did we get all dusty? We’re like the old popular kid, when a new popular kid comes to town. Well fear no more, now you too can jump into the social media maelstrom. Have you thought about using social media to do your keyword research? Here me out for a second.

In the past, many search marketers have relied on Google’s Keyword suggestion tool, Keyword Discovery, Keyword Spy, Google Trends and Suggest, Omniture, and other keyword suggestion tools to come up with their search term lists. So those tools are pretty well tested and I have a feeling that many search agencies are starting to get a little bored. Well, what if we took the power of social media and constantly updating conversations and applied that to our search keywords. Here are some ideas:

Media Placement Keyword Terms
So for instance, you use a tool such as Google Blog Search, BlogCatalog, or Radian6 to monitor keywords such as “ice cream parlor” or “strawberry ice cream” and you find out that many of the conversations happening online are at sites like “Joe’s Ice Cream Blog”. Well, you can figure out how people are reaching that site using Compete.com data or just guessing (”joe’s ice cream blog”, “joe’s ice cream”,  “joe’s blog about ice cream”, etc.) and target keywords related to that, essentially snatching up users before they even reach Joe’s Ice Cream Blog.

Conversation Clouds and Related Terms
One of the cool features of Radian6 is that they provide a conversation or tag cloud associated with the keyword terms you are researching.Try putting in non-branded keywords and see how people are talking about those topics online. For example, we’ll use “strawberry ice cream” again. If people are talking about chocolate ice cream or Edy’s everytime “strawberry ice cream” is mentioned, maybe you should consider going after those terms as well. The conversation cloud will also clue you into frequency of those terms as well based on the size and color.

Influencer Link Building
Any good search program has some sort of link optimization or link building component to it and unless you have proprietary tools in house, identifying the right places to obtain links from can be difficult. Why not use Radian6’s influencer widget to determine who is the most influential in these spaces? By using traffic levels and “on topic posts” you can determine how relevant their site and content is, at least for the last 30 days. And as we’ve seen, Google loves blogs these days.

So do you use Radian6 at your agency currently? Do you also have a search marketing department? Maybe you should have a little pow wow and see if you can use social media as part of your search marketing mix.

Recently, I’ve been asked to help out a few friends do some PR on the side. Just some basic stuff, but it amazes me how much PR professionals could benefit from just a little search marketing training. Hence, I’ve put together 5 things every PR professional should know in order to better serve their clients, as well as get them a little more search savvy.

1. Use “quotes” or exact phrasing in your queries
   Now this one is pretty basic and I think most PR professionals already know this one.  If you’re trying to find where your press release was quoted, listed, or mentioned, you need to use quotes around your phrase. So if your press release is “Tommy won the big race at Sunday’s fair”, then you would use that phrase exactly, as I’ve shown here.
2. Use the “link:” syntax in your queries.
   Now most search engines support this syntax, however, I’ve found Yahoo to always have the best results for this. The “link:” syntax tells you what sites are linking to your press release. I think this syntax is actually more important than the one above, as it will show you all sites that are linking to your press release, regardless of whether they quote your press release, reuse part of the content, or just put in a random link. In any case, it shows you which sites have “staying power” and which ones are just fly-by-night press release zombies who simply regurgitate whatever the PR wires give them. You can learn more about the “link:” and see an example here.

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No matter how often you talk with a client or how in the loop your agency is, there will always be things that slip through the cracks in terms of information coming from the client. Whether it’s “Oh, I forgot to tell you. Joe’s been transferred to Omaha” or “Man, you guys should have talked with us last week. We had a bunch of fires to put out.” Each one of these is a lost opportunity to assist the client and improve your existing relationship, but it’s also lost revenue for your agency. Well, there are many ways to stay more in the loop as a result of information constantly being posted online, specifically your clients.

The following are three ideas of how you can stay more in the loop, better service your clients, and improve your bottom line at the same time.

Job alerts
You’re probably thinking, what am I going to learn from job alerts from my client? Well, the first thing you’ll learn is whether they are going to be a client much longer or not. As marketing is often the first place cuts are made, when your client stops hiring, it often means their bottom line is flattening or starting to decline and hence your relationship may come into jeopardy. Second, it will clue you into things that are going on within the organization that you are often not privileged to as a third party. Are they hiring in sales or marketing? Product development or HR? Are there trends or is this an ongoing thing? For example, if you are constantly seeing the same position come up within the marketing department, does it mean the department is growing or do they just have a lot of turnover? Do you need to make other inroads and obtain other client champions in case your client contact is transferred, laid off, fired, etc.?

Ok, you get the point, so how do you do this now? Well, the first place I would start is:

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So I recently had some difficulty describing two types of paid search techniques. The first was in regards to a set of keyword terms which include a geographic location such as “Chicago dentist” or “New York plumber”. The second set of keywords I was trying to describe was a paid search campaign which used generic keywords “plumber” or “dentist”, but only showed those ads within a specific geographic area, such as Chicago or New York. Well, after some discussion with our head of media, he let me on two terms to describe both.

Geo-targeted: Which I was able to describe prior to this discussion. This is my latter example where a user enters a generic term and you show only the paid advertising for the geographic region they live in. For example, I’m searching in Chicago and I search for “pizza” or “dentist” and the mere fact that I reside within the targeted geographic area means the ad will display for me.

Geo-modified: Which I understood the technique, but just didn’t have the vocabulary to describe. This is the former technique whereby a user is explicit and says “Chicago dentist” or “New York plumber” and it doesn’t matter whether I am in Chicago or Denver. If I search for “Chicago dentist”, the geo-modified keyword phrase will cause that ad to be displayed.

And in case you missed it, Google decided to liven up the whole mix over the last few days by releasing geo-targeted results for natural search queries. So when a user queries things like “pizza” or “dentist”, Google returns the natural results, but also includes “relevant” local results. This is still to be determined as to how accurate these results are, but at least it’s a start. I’ve included a screen shot of what this looks like below:

I’m kind of against this technique as it trains users away from using longer queries to get more detailed information. I understand the logic that many of the queries they are using are localized queries: pizza, dry cleaning, chinese food, etc. however, I’m not 100% sure users will understand that when they need local information, they can just type in a one or two word query with no modifier. I think this might confuse Google’s experience a bit for any cases where Google either provides too much or too little information. If a user enters “Chinese restaurants“, they receive information about those restaurants, along with localized listings. If they use the phrase “traditional Chinese restaurants“, they do not receive any local listings. I know I’m giving Google a hard time about semantics and they will get better over time, but it’s the behavior they are reinforcing that I have an issue with. It should be “local modifier + term” yields local results – every time. If no local modifer is specified, it should yield non-local results – every time. By creating this muddy situation, they are diluting from the user experience, ever so slightly.

Any other cool targeting terms of features I should know about? Let me know if the comments.

Photo courtesy of timsnell.

So a while back I did a little experiment to see if I could rank #1 for a keyword phrase in one day. By creating a site that morning, doing a bit of SEO and link building throughout the day and by the end of the day have a ranking site in Google. And not just ranking, but ranking well. I had seen it done previously by others, but hadn’t done it myself. And with Google’s index updating more rapidly over the last year, I knew that it was feasible to have a site go from nothing to ranking in a matter of hours or days.

Now typically, we tell our clients that it will take some time to see results and depending on the competitive set and the keywords they want to rank “well” for, it can be anywhere from two weeks to two months to two years, in extreme cases. In this case, I decided to throw caution to the wind and just see what I could do.

So one morning I read a story which threw out a bunch of buzzwords like microblogging, crowdsourcing, web 2.0, etc. and I said, this is getting out of hand. So I did a quick URL search to see what domains were available, purchased one I liked, set up a hosting plan, and posted some files I threw together quickly. All within the span of a few hours.
That’s step 1.

Step 2 is that I set up Google analytics and Google webmaster tools to ensure that Google would both crawl the site that day, as well as give me statistics on what traffic I could generate over the course of that day.

Step 3 is that I blogged about it via my own blog, posted it on Twitter where it was RT’ed a few times, and posted it to Sphinn, Digg, Del.icio.us and a few other social bookmarking sites. And by the end of the day, VOILA! You can see the results below.

So if you are in crisis mode or you really drop the ball on some marketing effort, there is still some hope that you can make up for it by creating, optimizing, and launching a site all in one day*.

*DISCLAIMER – subject to competitive set, age of your website, amount of traffic on your website, your websites authority in your space, content to support your optimization, your knowledge of HTML, CSS, etc. etc. etc. Do not try this at home – results will vary