Hi Will. So Distilled began as a web development agency. How did the focus shift to SEO and PPC?

We have always been very focussed on the business benefits of what we do. Back when we were building websites for small businesses, we built our USP around the commercial awareness that was sadly lacking in so many of our competitors.

That naturally led us to talk to our clients about how they could make the most out of their websites and we started offering them SEO advice and running marketing campaigns. As our confidence and skills grew, we started offering stand alone services in these areas. It was around this time that Tom, my brother, joined to head up our new search department. It grew quickly and we found ourselves growing our profile and working with larger and larger clients.

Quitting the web development business was a hard decision, it was how we got our start, after all. But from a pure business perspective, it was pretty straight forward when you looked at the numbers.

In your opinion, when is it best to use SEO over PPC and vice versa? Do you follow a basic checklist when deciding which will be more appropriate?

I don’t see them as alternatives particularly. Many businesses use both with great success, and it’s worth noting that even if you don’t do SEO, you still are likely getting organic traffic from the search engines.

The biggest times where I tend to advise avoiding a specific channel are where overnight success is important, and budget is not a problem, as only paid channels can bring you instant results. And secondly, where revenue models work on the basis of very low amounts per visitor. For example, ad-supported business models, where it is rare to find paid visitor acquisition successful.

What challenges have you faced in this business that you have learnt a valuable lesson from?

As described above, quitting the web design business was a very tough decision, as it was where we started from. We were very worried about many of the details but as soon as we actually did it, we knew it was the right answer. This was an example of a lesson we are still learning. As soon as you are 70% sure about something, you should go for it.

We know that you teamed up with SEOmoz. Can you explain what this partnership meant for Distilled?

The SEOmoz partnership has been huge for us. Here is some more information from back when we announced various parts of the evolution. The biggest and most exciting part of the whole thing is that we continue to see the future of online marketing in very much the same way as the SEOmoz crew. That makes me happy as we look to the future.

Do you have any advice for people wanting to start a digitally focused business in an industry that is always changing and evolving?

Hire the smartest people you can. Things change so fast that you need people who can keep up. I explained this to someone the other day as specialist generalists. You need people who can broadly do anything, but who focus on becoming specialist in a chosen area at a time.

Thank you for taking the time to speak with us at Heavy Chef, Will. You continue to inspire us as Distilled grows from strength to strength. Follow Will on Twitter here.

How much is it essential for businesses to understand the value of a well implemented Analytic figure in their structure? I am thinking especially of the small and medium enterprises, which usually tend to underestimate its strategic importance.

A well implemented analytics data collection mechanism is an important price of entry. Without it you are coming to play the football game naked. You look embarrassing, and you are going to lose.

My hope though is that small and medium sized businesses will come to appreciate the value that actually using the data will have on their business. In as much I’ve pushed companies, of all sizes, to adopt the Digital Marketing & Measurement Model. That provides them with a very structured five step process to follow, ask the most important questions before they touch the data.

The end result is a better understanding of why it is that you need data, and once you get it how do you focus your efforts to ensure you are answering the right questions. With that comes an appreciation of why an investment in data is critical.

What do you like of this discipline from your personal perspective? Do you agree with me saying that no SEO can call himself so if he does not own a profound knowledge of Analytics?

I love SEO. It is such a fascinating science and the rewards are awesome. The thing that appeals to me personally is that there are a, mostly, clear set of logical things we have to do in order to rank high for relevant keywords. It is fun to do those things at a system or marketing level.

It would not surprise you to learn that what is a lot of fun about SEO is the enormous amount of data available to understand your current situation, understand what it will take to get to the next step, and, my favorite, quantify the business impact of our SEO efforts. Without analytics it is impossible to even be 10% effective at doing SEO. And that is great.

Finally, what is the newest challenge of the Analytics science? Are maybe the Social metrics the new western frontier of Analytics?

Social is just one more thing to think about, I am not sure that it is a challenge all by itself. In terms of challenges I think there are a couple of very sophisticated ones.

First one is that consumer experience is evolving at such a fragmented rate that most places where we need data from are places where we don’t have, to put it crudely, our analytics tools’ analytics tags. That means that more and more of the data we need to be smart sits outside our immediate purview. Our ability to use APIs, scrapers, multiple tools is going to be super critical.

The second problem, perhaps even harder, is how to deal with this multiplicity from a data analysis perspective. Much of this data is missing primary keys, it is often incomplete, and sometimes even incorrect. And it is rich with information we can turn into actionable insight. Yet from a human capital perspective we don’t have enough people with the right skills. Time will solve both these problem. But I hope that current and future analysts and marketers appreciate this problem and start to invest the seeds of what it will take to solve them in the long term.

The interview sums up the definitive role that analytics plays in any digital marketing strategy. It also provides great insight into the future challenges SEO will face and the kind of landscape we are moving into. As the constantly evolving nature of the web continues to present challenges in this area, a solid understanding of SEO and web analytics remains crucial to successfully carrying campaigns into the future.

Read the full interview published by SEOmoz, here.

(photo courtesy of SEOmoz)

Thank you for taking the time to speak with Heavy Chef Rand. We know that you were originally studying finance and working for your mother’s company, how did you get into SEO?

We were running a web design and development business and contracted with a number of SEO firms to help bring traffic and conversions to our clients’ websites. The contractors didn’t have much success, so I undertook the practice personally, learned from reading blogs and participating in forums in the SEO world and eventually started my own blog – SEOmoz.org.

We have many Heavy Chef readers in emerging economies (including Southern Africa) where mobile internet access is sometimes more prevalent than desktop access. For a small to medium size business looking to take advantage of SEO on mobile, what would your top three tips be?

Thankfully, mobile and desktop SEO are merging into a single practice as smartphones become dominant, speeds become better and the engines do less to change the types of results shown to mobile browsers.

That said, it’s critical to have a site that can load quickly on a mobile device. Even in the best circumstances, broadband speeds are rare on mobile, so speed is essential. I’d also make sure that pages can load and render in mobile-friendly browsers. Most CMS platforms (Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, etc) have great mobile support for rendering cleanly on the small screen. Third and finally, make sure you’re targeting keywords that mobile/local users are searching for (the Google AdWords Keyword Tool can help with this). If the phrases you’re ranking for aren’t matching what’s being searched, there’s little use in optimizing.

One of our readers wrote to us recently with a question that would be well suited to you, with your extensive knowledge in the field. She is a marketing manager for a retail outlet that has recently moved more aggressively into the online market. She is in the process of procuring an outsourced SEO team. She wanted to know what key questions she should be asking, to try and spot the inauthentic people from those who are going to do the business for her?

Sadly, there’s a lot of folks claiming to be “SEOs” who are little more than spammers or scammers. This has frustrated the industry for years and given a bad name to professionals who do quality work. Luckily, sniffing out the difference isn’t hard. Here’s a few resources that should help:

Even in the emerging markets, saturation in the online space is true within most industries, and doing just the SEO basics often isn’t enough. We know link building is time consuming but it can be the vital edge. Do you have a great link building strategy that you’d like to share with our readers, that they could set about implementing before the end of the year?

I love the practice described here -http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/using-twitter-and-backlinks-to-build-links/2011/07/28/ – where you take the people already connected to you (via email lists, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc) and make them your primary link targets.

Are there any companies (not agencies) within the emerging economies that have caught your eye over the last couple of years from a web marketing perspective? A company that has made you sit up and think “I like what they are doing, more companies should be doing that.”

I love what Etsy is doing in their emerging space (they just launched a gift finder that connects to Facebook which is absolutely terrific). A Slovenian company, Zemanta, has also been impressing me of late with their partnerships and marketing.

Who are your SEO heroes, the people YOU admire and look up to?

There’s so many! Wil Reynolds of SEER Interactive, the entire crew at Distilled, Ian Lurie at Portent, Bill Slawski from SEO by the Sea, Laura Lippay from How’s Your Pony, Rhea Drysdale at Outspoken, Richard Baxter from SEOGadget and dozens and dozens of others. This field is filled with amazing people doing remarkable things.

Congratulations on your book! Are there any more in the pipeline at this point?

I’ve only written one book so far, “the Art of SEO”, but I’m planning another one next year or in 2013 so stay tuned.

Thank you for talking with us, if you ever plan of visiting South Africa, you are more than welcome to pop into our Heavy Chef events. And if you fancy talking at one, I’m sure we wouldn’t say no.

I’ve never visited South Africa! But if I do make it, I certainly appreciate the invite.

To give you an example  it is useful to track discussions and themes relating to your brand. This is valuable when it comes to identifying prospective opportunities to your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategy.

What I found practically is that certain keywords relate to each other.  Through the use of ORM software I find mentions of specific keywords relating to my brand. These keywords then again find other keywords that I might not have thought about which you can call secondary keywords.

Let me talk you through how this all happens:

Firstly you need to research keywords that are relevant to your brand. For example:

Keywords for  Barack Obama would include US President, USA, US Democrat, America, White House, US Legislation etc.

Then, when reviewing the data found you are able to pick up certain trends relating to your keyword which in this case could be the BP Oil spill. It takes some common sense to pick up the patterns with these trends. The trends can then be converted  to keywords relating to your brand.

Out of those keywords that you found, you need to decide which ones would bring you more return on investment and which are less competitive.

Once you’ve identified these keywords, the real SEO effort begins. You then go through the process of adjusting your content, optimizing and creating new pages to leverage the demand of those keywords you identified.

Why does this work?

Because you are already using the existing content out there and leveraging it further to promote your own brand. This way the foundation is already there for you to use.

A reputable SEO company should perform a competitive analysis and develop a strategy for you to achieve high ranking across the specific keyword terms being searched. There are a few ways you can determine whether a company is reputable or not. CEO of Urban Interact, Beverly Garvin offers 3 things you should be doing:

1. Ask for references from 3 clients who have worked with them for a year or more. This will show you whether they are good and, more importantly, experienced in what they do. Happy long term clients are a great indicator that you are working with a credible provider.

2.  SEO is a long term strategy and if you want your website to be competitive you’ll need to understand that this is an ongoing effort. A reputable SEO provider will work with you during the contract period and will consult with you being transparent in their activities, even going so far as to train you on how to help continue those efforts when the contract period expires. “If they hide behind “proprietary processes, software, blah blah blah” they are not someone you should work with” says Beverly.

3.  Understand that you get what you pay for. This doesn’t mean that if you spend more you will get better results, but keep in mind that if someone promises a deal that sounds way too cheap and the results way too good to be true – they probably are. These people are taking your for a ride. Go do a little shopping around and get a general idea of how much this should cost you. Don’t go bargain hunting! The company you decide on should include a monthly consulting session where they will meet with you to review the reports (not just an emailed report) explaining the efforts made from last month, what the results were and what they will focus on in the upcoming month.

Beverly wrote a very helpful post on how hiring an SEO company is similar to hiring a Personal Trainer which should also help you put things in perspective. Thanks Beverly for such great advice!

Walking into my first day at WWC as the new intern, I knew very little about the world of eMarketing that I was diving headlong into.  My recently acquired degree in Business Administration, from back home in the States, certainly did not cover web analytics, link building, or SEO.  Though nervous as I was, relief came quickly as I soon realized it was Ok that I was just learning.  It became clear to me that learning is a large part of what eMarketing is, and that even the most experienced veterans in the office are still learning new things on a regular basis.  World Wide Creative’s very own Heavy Chef Project is a shining example of how everyone here is constantly craving new information and developing new ideas to become better at what they do, to become the all knowing and ever trustworthy Heavy Chef.

As I was introduced to the team I started feeling at home already, the relaxed atmosphere of the office seems to make everyone enjoy their time here.  While there is certainly much work to be done and there are many deadlines to keep up with, there is still time for a friendly conversation or a quick joke, which makes the work much more enjoyable.  Mike pulled me aside and gave me a quick run through on what World Wide Creative was all about, and specifically where I would be fitting into the equation, in the area of Web Marketing.  He then put me to work right away, doing one of the less exciting, but possibly most important aspects of marketing, that being research.  As I sat down at my desk, laptop in front of me, I wasn’t really sure how the research I was doing would be of any benefit.  I was simply searching Wikipedia for content related to one of WWC’s client sites. What I soon learned however, which is contrary to what every professor said to me in university, is that Wikipedia is in fact a highly respectable site, at least as far as Google is concerned.  By searching for related content in Wikipedia I was making it possible for us to put links in Wikipedia that would go to the client’s site.  By doing so, Google will realize that the client site has a lot of relevant and important information, therefore ranking it higher on related searches. Though my research was somewhat tedious at first, it led to some important link building opportunities that will help our client’s site to rank higher on Google searches.   I had just had my very first lesson in link building and search engine optimization.

On only my second day in the office I had the privilege to go and see Mike give a lecture to graduate students at Old Mutual.  How privileged I felt to be interning with WWC after seeing how well received we were at a graduate school, even despite Mike’s long and dry lecture… just kidding, the lecture was actually very interesting and clearly benefitted not only the graduate students, but me as well.   I returned to the office that afternoon and did some more link building research for a few other clients.  I also had my first taste of web analytics while doing some keyword research for various clients.  I think the coolest thing about eMarketing is our ability to measure its success in such detail.  No other form of marketing can give you such an accurate idea of your return on investment (ROI).  By far the highlight of my first week at WWC was being on the set of the Property Ninja’s third video shooting.  Property Ninjas is a viral marketing campaign WWC is doing for a realty client, we have two ninjas running around doing crazy ninja moves and fighting throughout various properties.  It is a really great way to showpiece the properties while making it entertaining as well.  It is the kind of thing you might send to your friends to give them something to laugh about.  I think it is going to be very successful at getting the clients name out there and I invite you to check out the Property Ninjas on your own to see just how fun it has been for yourself.  Property Ninjas Link:  http://www.facebook.com/inbox/?ref=mb#/propertyninjas?ref=ts.  That is all for me this week, I’m off to the Garden Route this weekend to get a taste of South Africa outside of Cape Town.

Note: I use the the term “Google” quite freely throughout the talk, when in realty I mean “search engines”. Especially when I talk about the early days before Google even existed:-)

seo

Today, search engines work much like a phone book directory used to – just on a much larger scale. How your company’s site is found can be difficult with so many options available. To single out you company’s website from the mass of information on the web, it is vital to make use Search Engine Optimization (or SEO).

People have made a shift towards using the Internet to help them in their daily activities. Search engine optimization helps you to get higher rankings in search engines and so, guide more traffic towards your website. In short it can be said that search engine optimization’s goal is to make a website appear on the first pages, if not the very first page of a search done through the search engine.

The Internet Digest provides us with 3 fundamental stages of optimizing your website. The first stage is to choose the right keywords. The right keywords are those that “clearly describe the purpose and content of your site, and allow your site to show up as close to the first results page as possible”. Secondly, you need to optimize your pages for your selected keywords. On all the pages of your website you need to position your keywords in strategic locations. The last stage is to make sure that you get linked from the best directories and from lots of quality sites with a related topic.

It seems that the last stage really is the most important. For Mike Perk, Co-founder of the energetic web marketing company World Wide Creative, the most important thing is relevant links pointing back to your site. Mike explains linking in Google terms: “Google is looking for the centre of authority on a particular topic or search term. It does this by looking at where all the links point to and seeing who has the most relevant to that topic/search term. That’s the one that goes to the top.” So from my understanding, linking is basically a case of the site with the most links that refer back to them will have the highest ranking.

Gabriel Weinberg runs a search engine called Duck Duck Go. For Gabriel, it is important to have attractive URL’s and page titles but the thing that matters most is external link texts. “Google often repeats that they use more than 200 ranking factors. In my experience, external link texts matter way more than anything else. That is, the actual words in the links back to your sites and pages.”

But now, SEO might already be expanding to other fields and evolving. According to Mike “what has become extremely interesting in the last year and something that will continue to grow, is the type of content Google is indexing and rating highly. Video, images, mapping, etc are finding their way to the top of the search a lot more easily than new text content.” We should pay close attention to this expansion into multimedia fields. It could mean more ways to SEO than simply text-based content and URL’s.

There are specific elements within the professions of Search Engine Optimisation and Personal Branding that have always left me feeling a little uncomfortable.

There’s something not quite right about the unnatural manipulation of content to persuade Search Engines.

There’s also something unsettling watching someone undergo ‘image modification’ to ensure that they stand out from a crowd – kind of like talking to someone whilst they’re looking over your shoulder at their reflection in the window.

To clarify: I think search engine-friendly content and personal branding are important, but, since their rise to buzz status, both segments have seemed a little murky around the edges. Recently, I’ve watched an innocent business owner being told to make lists of key words so that they can be slammed into every paragraph of her blog (resulting in a 3 month case of writer’s block). I’ve watched a marketing person being advised to blog about something she didn’t enjoy, didn’t know a lot about, and wasn’t really suited to her style of writing (nope, that didn’t work either).

Both online content and personal branding needs to be authentic, otherwise it’s not sustainable.

• Your content needs to be focused on reinforcing your brand message. Figure out what your message is,  drive it home with passion and authority, and optimise the content afterwards. This doesn’t even require a professional SEO person, and, besides, SEO as a profession might even be redundant soon.
• Your image needs to reinforce what you’re good at, and what you enjoy. You can’t splat something onto your character like play-dough. People won’t care about your personal brand unless it delivers real value. And, please, if you create a personal blog, then do it because you want to do it, not because you think you should do it. Spare us yet another mindless heap of drivel pleading for relevancy.

That’s my opinion. But then again, I’m just the Hawaiian shirt wearing, beer loving, online brand-building guy.

Before we begin let’s keep in mind that the main point of keyword research is to uncover the keywords that will drive relevant traffic to your website. According to the experts, a longer search phrase is typically associated with better targeting and increased consumer desire. Some experts say shorter keyword searchers are shoppers and longer keyword searchers are buyers. With this, effective keywords are typically 2-3 work phrases.

Comb through each page of your website and your competitors websites

Look for keyword phrases within the titles, headings, links, and copy content. You can do this manually or with the help of Google.  With the Google AdWords Keyword Tool you can type in the URL (yours or your competitors) and Google will spider the website or page and return a keyword list based on what they think a page is about. Considering Google is the top search engine it’s important to find out which keywords they identify on your website and your competitors website.

Brainstorm

Who will visit your site? What are they looking for? What questions will they have? Brainstorm from the user’s point of view. Record all of the phrases that come to mind.

Dig into Google Analytics

With Google Analytics you can produce a list of all of the keywords used to find your site via Google. From this list you can pull out relevant keywords and add them to your running list of keyword research.

Voila you are on your way to a successful SEO campaign. In the next post I will discuss keyword analysis. Keyword analysis is the most important step in keyword research. Ultimately, the keywords you choose will power not only your SEO campaign, but also link building campaigns, blog entries and more. So choosing effective keywords is key!