SearchFest 2015 was another resounding success thanks to all the great speakers, SEMpdx board, members and SearchFest attendees. The SEMpdx SearchFest team and Board of Director Membership Chair, Nathan Isaacs are hard at work taking lots of great video footage from the show to provide attendees and even non-attendees access to a SearchFest 2015 Video Bundle for the first time in our 9 year history of sponsoring the one day conference.

Here are 5 reasons to get the video bundle, whether or not you attended SearchFest:

1. You can’t be in four places at once! With four tracks focused on multiple disciplines of search, social, paid search and content ranging from fundamentals to expert-level you’ll want to attend more than just one track.
2. It may be the best marketing educational value around. Ranging from $49-$299 the video bundle costs less than many 2 hour workshops and it will be chock full of more than 24 hours of marketing brilliance by speakers who provide strategy for some of the world’s biggest and most successful brands.
3. Post-show video access keeps the learning going. It’s easy to go to conferences, learn, get inspired and then go back to the office and it’s business as usual. Use post-show video access to keep yourself and your team on track and make the connection between learning and execution. There’s no better way to illustrate the value of your conference experience than showing how you’re using strategies and tactics from presentations to execute in-house or with clients. Having video allows you and your team to recap learnings together.
4. Familiarize yourself with great digital marketing strategists. Whether your focus is search, social, content or analysis, SearchFest boasts the best speakers in the business that are hand-picked (we don’t accept pitches) for their excellence. It’s a great way to find the digital marketing practitioners you want to follow after the show. Rand Fishkin’s Moz blog publishes an aggregation of research and how-to guides for marketers of all levels. Rae Hoffman publishes a no-nonsense blog about technical, cutting edge search topics. Mat Siltala focuses on not just the searchability of content but the usability and design aspects of marketing assets. (You won’t be the first to note that, yes, he does look a bit like that guy on Duck Dynasty:)
5. Try something different. The video bundle gives you the opportunity to watch the video presentations of new-to-you thought leaders. Watch and judge who among this crowd will later be a keynote speaker at SearchFest or MozCon.

SearchFest 2015 session videos are now available to view online.  Purchase your SearchFest Video Bundle now.

(Note: Unfortunately the closing keynote will not be available for video purchase.)

The post 5 Reasons to Get the SearchFest Video Bundle appeared first on SEMpdx.

1) Please give us your background and tell us what you do for a living.
In my official capacity, I’m the CEO of PushFire, a digital marketing agency that provides SEO and paid advertising services to medium to fortune sized companies nationwide. I’ve been in affiliate marketing (using SEO as my primary traffic generation strategy) for about 14 years now. I always say that I entered this industry as an affiliate, and I’ll “die” in this industry as an affiliate. Affiliate marketing is a love affair I don’t think I’ll ever be able to end. However, I also love what I do with PushFire. It allows me to work with a lot of brands that have unique issues I might not otherwise get to work with on a regular basis. But, owning a slew of sites means I get to test things – sometimes with abandon. I think that has always given me a stronger skill set SEO wise.

I’m probably better known to the online marketing community as Sugarrae, which is my personal brand. I’m known for telling it like it is, even if it’s not a popular opinion to give. I’m 100% self-taught and have no formal education outside of a GED. But I’m driven, determined and a hard worker, and that’s been a rewarding combination for my career. As an affiliate, you can’t bullshit your way into “looking like” you know SEO. Either you know it or you don’t eat. I don’t spout unicorn advice that seems like it would work or treat Google advice as if it’s gospel. I’m still in the trenches – with my sites and now with client sites. The SEO side of PushFire is very boutique. I can choose who we work with, and I choose to work with companies that want to win – and that I think can be positioned to win. I love playing “the game” and I have no interest in watching my team play it by themselves while I sit on the sidelines selling merchandise.

2) What factors do you use in deciding whether to enter a niche with a new website?
There’s a lot of them. I look to make sure there are ways to make money with multiple avenues, not simply AdSense or one affiliate program. I also look to see that the niche has traffic and that its traffic is trending up (and not down). Once I know if it’s worth ranking, then I figure out what it would take to rank in the niche and research the earnings potential of the niche. Lastly, I decide whether or not I have some angle that will give me a viable (and brandable) way to compete in the niche in this day and age. You can find an entire article detailing out how to perform niche research here.

3) Please share some of your favorite website audience retention strategies.
To quote a friend of mine:

“If you’re not building an email list, you’re an idiot”: Derek Halpern

We work so damn hard to GET traffic from the engines. An email list is a way to keep it. I use Aweber as my mailing list service.

The other audience retention must for me? Always put your audience before your monetization. But let’s be clear here. I am in no way suggesting that you shouldn’t try to monetize your audience – and try to make a lot of money from that audience. I’m simply saying you need to put your audience first when choosing what and how you market to them. Find what your audience wants to buy (full tutorial on that here) and put it in front of them. Don’t try and convince your audience to buy whatever is hawking the highest affiliate commission. Never, ever sell out the trust of your users for an affiliate commission.

The post 2015 SEMpdx SearchFest Mini-Interview: Rae Hoffman appeared first on SEMpdx.

1) Please give us your background and tell us what you do for a living.
I started my career as a professional trademark searcher believe it or not. I actually was not crazy about that first job but when the commercial Internet came along in the mid 90s my passion started in search building crawlers indexing web content and domain name databases. In 1998 I saw Eric Brewer speak at the Infonortics conference and after that talk I knew I wanted to work for a web search engine and eventually run my own commercial web search engine. After graduate school I applied to Inktomi, Eric Brewer’s search engine which powered the portals of MSN, Yahoo, AOL and Hotbot, and was hired as a product manager. I was at Inktomi for 2 years before being hired away by a Norwegian search engine called FAST/AllTheWeb which I was General Manager of for a year before the web search division was acquired by Overture along with the AltaVista. I was at Overture for six months before being acquired again by Yahoo joining my Inktomi colleagues again from earlier in my career. Six months later we launched a new search engine at Yahoo displacing Google. During my time at Yahoo I ran search product, search business (monetization and distribution), the Yahoo.com front page news desk and editorial teams, the commerce properties (Shopping, Local, Personals, Travel, Local, Autos, Tech and Real Estate) and my final role was a cross company project to boost Yahoo’s declining market share in search. Since Yahoo I have worked for both B2B and B2C companies leading marketing and am currently at Trueffect, which is an ad server that has a very unique and patented way to target and measure display ads more effectively. I focus on content marketing at the core and then multi-channel B2B marketing around that. I am high level but still am a doer too and can often be seen in AdWords, analytics, Facebook advertising amongst other things.

2) What are first party cookies and why should we care about them?
Typically many ads have traditionally been served through what is known as third party cookies. These are tracking mechanisms that act as tracking devices and are served by third party advertising companies (such as DoubleClick) and data tracking vendors (such as Epsilon). There have been many privacy concerns over these types of third party tracking mechanisms and as a result many browsers and phones do not accept them and many security programs delete these cookies on a regular basis.

First-Party cookies, on the other hand, are served by the brand along with the brands content that a user is interacting with and must be served, written or read from that brand’s domain. These cookies are typically the ones used by products such as Gmail and Facebook to ensure that logins are persistent. Browsers and security programs allow these cookies because there is a relationship between the brand that is serving the cookies as well as the fact that it would be a he usability issue to have to log in to Facebook and Gmail every time the service is accessed. Since the First-Party cookies tend to stick around for longer they have huge advantages in recognizing users and serving targeted ads as well as providing a stable base on top of which measurement algorithms can work to provide much more accurate ad measurement. As you may have heard, the Holy Grail is to get to a user centric way to target ads rather than an entirely cookie based one.

3) What is a business losing by not venturing outside the Google ecosystem for tracking, retargeting & analytics?
Google and Facebook are creating “walled gardens” around their advertising. They are not allowing others to track and measure the ads within these walled gardens. We have seen Google recently disallowing the use of tracking pixels within Google Display Network, which is another step in not providing full visibility into the performance of a brand’s ads. Having Google serve and measure its own ads is the equivalent to a student grading his own homework assignments.

Many in advertising are saying that a company’s data is its second most valuable asset after its employees. Data ownership has become very strategic and letting your proprietary customer data outside of your company’s firewall is putting that data at risk for leakage to other companies and potentially your competitors. In the worst-case scenario, your customers and prospects potentially could be the bull’s eye of your competitor’s retargeting efforts.

4) How can a business successfully isolate each paid marketing initiative for purposes of measurement?
Traditionally marketers with a grounding in search have used what is called “last-click attribution” to measure marketing success. This technique gives 100% of the credit to the last click that led to the conversion. This is a simple but accurate technique but has the drawback of limiting the volume and efficiency of your purchase funnel.

These days, users are interacting with ads and a brand across many channels (social, display, SEO, PPC, email etc.) and many devices (PC, Phone, tablet etc.) and the customer journey is a lot more complex and multi touch than it used to be. More and more marketers are moving to more sophisticated attribution models that give varying degrees of credit to all the touch points with a prospect or customer. Often times the brand introduction and the last touch or click are given the majority of the weighting/credit with touch points in between receiving minimal weighting. We must make the transition to more sophisticated attribution models so we can grow the top of the funnel to get more volume in the funnel, such as branded searches, as well as efficiency in the funnel, such as increased click through rate on organic and paid search results.

5) What’s the level of opportunity in non-Google Display and how can a business comfortably test the waters?
Display is all about finding quality inventory that attracts an audience that is relevant to your business. For search people the easiest way to test display is to start in retargeting which has very similar metrics to search such as click through as well as being lower funnel. You can target all people that have visited your web site and serve them different copy and creative based on the activity the user displayed on the site. In addition you can create audience using email addresses to target customers or prospects on the web. Google Display has a bunch of inventory but you would be missing out as stopping just there.

An advertising driver that is often underestimated is that of timeliness. Facebook and other social inventory is very valuable as users access their social network very frequently and often times right after their shopping behavior takes place.

To really take your business to the next level it is optimal to go beyond just retargeting and implement a full funnel display strategy, which will optimize display across all stages of the funnel to optimize for conversion across channels. Using your own customer data, be it your site’s behavioral data or your CRM data can improve performance to a great degree.

6) How will paid search management evolve over the next few years?
The main issues I see with paid search at this time are:
1) There are too many similar channels offering paid advertising be it AdWords, Bing, Facebook, Twitter. There has got to be an easier way to generate ads: copy and creative that all seem to require different character lengths and creative
2) Paid search is still almost entirely based on the professed intent of the user through the current query and to some extent previous queries and web pages and sites clicked on. We should be able to know whom we are serving the search ads to and alter the bid or creative.
3) The web used to be more “pull” than “push”. Search was dominant but now people are open to being pushed relevant information.

As a result I see an opportunity for paid search management to be eclipsed by larger ad management system that can implement and measure the customer journey across many channels and devices. Search can become more people based so customers, prospects and former customers can get differing ads or no ads at all.

The post 2015 SEMpdx SearchFest Keynote Interview: Tim Mayer appeared first on SEMpdx.

Please give us your background and tell us what you do for a living.

I’m a content strategist at Facebook—that means I plan, structure, and improve content experiences for people so that things make sense and are easy to use. It’s a user experience role focused on language, information architecture, and information design. Put simply, my goal is to make sure that you can achieve your goals whenever you use Facebook.

In particular, I work on interfaces that help people search on Facebook and also manage a team that works on payments, commerce, and developer products. If you’ve bought ads on Facebook, sold anything in a group, logged into an app with Facebook, or built your own app using our platform APIs, then you’ve probably seen our work—and please let me know if you have feedback!

Previously, I was the principal experience architect at REI, where I focused on search, taxonomy, and content management. Before that, I was REI’s first SEO and built their agile marketing strategy for content while trying to connect the dots between web development and user experience. A few SearchFest veterans may remember some of my previous talks at SearchFest about these efforts.

But most people don’t know that I also worked for non-profits focused on environmental conservation for nearly a decade. I served as a Peace Corps Volunteer working on rural public health development in Burkina Faso, West Africa. I also traveled throughout Australia as part of a conservation fellowship in 2008.

So I’ve been around the block a bit. Like Tolkien wrote, “Not all those who wander are lost.”

Most people see “Content” as just stories, videos, etc. You view “Content” more expansively than that. Can you please elaborate?

I see content as being not just the words, not just the font, not just the layout or design. Content’s not just the structure, the code, the metadata or even the brand.

The way I see it, content’s everything—the entire system and experience. So to build a sustainable, successful content strategy requires skills and thinking in all of those areas (and more). Focusing on marketing is great, but it’s just part of the bigger picture. You also need to focus on the experience.

Crafting good experiences requires us to understand and have empathy for our audience, their situation, their needs, and goals. The best content experiences are pitched perfectly in the sweet spot, the nexus of all those human factors. I think you’ll find that it’s hard to get the word out about brands and products that aren’t useful and usable in the first place.

So what does a content strategist at Facebook actually do? What’s a typical day like?

Ha, there’s never a typical day at Facebook! And I know a lot of people are surprised that Facebook even has a content strategy team because Facebook is all user-generated content, right?

But if you look a bit closer, you’ll start to see things that aren’t created by the people using Facebook: menus, buttons, navigation, education, announcements, hierarchy, flows of interfaces, and a lot more. It turns out that there’s quite a bit of content that isn’t created by you or your friends—and this content embedded in the UI that helps guide you and sets the tone for your overall experience with Facebook.

That’s where the content strategy team comes in. We see language as an interface, but also as infrastructure that helps connect people, design, and systems. We strive to make things easy and work to earn the trust of the people using Facebook all around the world. The content experiences we create should give people context, help them make informed decisions, and help them succeed in their goals.

To accomplish all this, we must be simple, straightforward, and human in all of our design and communications. Those are the principles of Facebook’s voice, and they guide our work every day.

You talked about “crafting good experiences”. What’s the biggest mistake organizations make when they do this?

The biggest mistake you can make isn’t bad code or a poor design or a lack of metadata or even some arcane SEO gotcha.

It’s not an issue of length, or keywords, or headlines. It’s not including too many or too few social buttons or commenting options. It’s not even a failure of empathy—although that would be a huge failure, to be sure.

It’s a failure to be useful, to provide actual value and solve problems.

You can get all the tactics right, all the tools set up and systems in order, and use lots of data alongside plenty of research. But if you don’t actually meet people’s needs and provide value, then what’s the point?

Start with empathy. Continue with utility. Improve with analysis. Optimize with love.

The post 2015 SEMpdx SearchFest Keynote Interview: Jonathon Colman appeared first on SEMpdx.

1) Please give us your background and tell us what you do for a living.
I’m the CEO of Emergent Digital. We’re a digital marketing agency for good, meaning we seek to serve clients who are in business to improve the world around us. We work for nonprofits, educational institutions and purpose-driven companies in verticals like sustainable energy and social change. My background extends to the very early days of search marketing in 1999, and more recently I’ve gained experience in the emerging digital channels like social, mobile, and content marketing. I’ve been fortunate to work in-house at companies like Yahoo and at realtor.com, and I’m fascinated by analytics and emerging media.

2) How does a poor mobile site experience impact mobile search engine rankings?
In general, poor site experience hurts search engine rankings. This has really taken hold since google released the chrome browser and could then see actual user behavior on the website. We’ve seen a surge of UX-related algorithm factors pop up over there past few years as a result. Things like site speed, time on site, return visits, all these play a role in rankings. So now that mobile plays such a big role on the web, think about it like these factors also applying to mobile. Poor mobile user experience means poor mobile search rankings, all other things being equal.

3) Are the companies that have a separate mobile website hurting themselves in search rankings?
Not necessarily. All the buzz is around responsive design these days and yes, it’s great if you can design a truly responsive site because a) you only have to maintain a single code base and b) search engines only have to crawl and index a single site. That said, there are plenty of examples out there of brands that have separate desktop and mobile sites that aren’t hurting themselves. Some sites lend themselves more naturally to responsive design than others. For example, data-rich sites like realtor.com (my previous employer) have a much harder time delivering the same dataset to users on desktop and mobile, simply because of the sheer volume of information they’re promising to deliver to the user. The bst rule of thumb here is to strive to deliver the best experience to users on all devices, and based on your own technological and resource constraints, choose the mobile web development strategy that works best for you.

The post 2015 SEMpdx SearchFest Mini-Interview: David Roth appeared first on SEMpdx.

1) Please give us your background and tell us what you do for a living.
By day, I’m the founder and CTO of WordStream, a Boston-based search marketing software and managed PPC advertising services firm. By night, I’m leading the AdWords Quality Score Rebellion and raising a future marketing prodigy, #PPCkid.

I eat mathematical formulas for breakfast and truly enjoy the analysis of Billions in ad spend, which makes me a hit at dinner parties. Software product management and product marketing are huge areas of focus for me and I love unearthing the strange and unconventional in the world of PPC to share with other marketers. I also type like a madman and write a lot.

2) If someone were to tell you that because their AdWords Ads were so successful that they’re going to run the same ads in paid social, what would you tell them?
I’d have to tell them not to do that.

Search and social ads are completely different animals and while each has its place, they’re not interchangeable.

Social ads on Facebook, Twitter and other networks can be used for direct response, but they’re far better utilized for softer content offers, engagement and lead nurturing. You can get super granular and even remarket via social advertising now, enabling you to appeal to various audience segments about whom you actually have a great deal of demographic information.

AdWords is more like the Yellow Pages, in that people probably know what they’re looking for but aren’t sure where to find it. This is where you can see big wins using targeted offers for varying levels of commercial intent.
Take advantage of the different strengths of different PPC marketing platforms to maximize your ROI.

3) I’ve seen Facebook threads where very smart people asked “Have you actually ever bought anything from a Facebook ad?” How would you respond to that?
Did anyone ever buy anything from a newspaper ad? There was no mechanism there to click through and complete a purchase, yet we knew those ads had influenced the sale at some point in the customer’s decision making process.

People are biased and influenced by social advertising, even if they don’t realize it’s happening. Very smart marketers understand that there are different touchpoints in the sales cycle and attributing a sale to the last-click undervalues each of your other marketing efforts.

Thankfully, technology is catching up with social ads and we’re seeing things like Facebook’s partnership with retail big data powerhouses Acxiom, Epsilon and others. Gradually, we’re able to attribute more influence to the correct sources, and social ads are definitely influence brand perception, loyalty, trust and even sales.

The post 2015 SEMpdx SearchFest Mini-Interview: Larry Kim appeared first on SEMpdx.

1) Please give us your background and tell us what you do for a living.

I’ve now spent nearly equal portions of my life as a librarian, web designer and search marketer.

That’s in order, so search marketing is more-or-less what I do for a living now. “More-or-less” because, like anyone that’s been doing SEO for any length of time, my roles and responsibilities have broadened and changed over time, and now include not only search engine marketing, but aspects of analytics, social media marketing and website development. In my current position at Electronic Arts I’ve rolled these activities into the collective title of “digital presence optimization.”

2) What major Google update that hasn’t happened yet will happen in the next couple years and what will it fix?

I think the time has come for SEOs to wean themselves off their focus on the Google “update”, at least as the word has been traditionally used to mean an update to Google’s algorithm that results in changes to the ranking of web pages in the search results.

Penguins and pandas and pigeons notwithstanding, the really important changes we can now observe in search are less about updates to how resources are ranked, and more about changes to the search environment itself – that is, updates to how things appear in search. I use the word “things” deliberately because search results are no longer exclusively comprised of links to web pages. The “update”, though, is exclusively concerned with the ranking of links to web pages, which is why it’s so limiting.

In terms of those more pervasive changes I think in the next couple of years we’re going to see fewer of those web links and a lot more data in search results (or data that is a lot more prominent, which diminishes the value of those web links as marketing vectors).

In short, I think we’ll see a lot more “content” (of the good kind) being delivered directly in the search results. Insofar as this will fix” anything, it will almost certainly stem the tide of “content” (of the bad kind) that is in many ways the product of the first generation of search engines.

The second generation of search engines that we’re seeing emerging now will continue to evolve in response to a multi-device universe and a much more seamless universe. While mobile has been prominent in that evolution to this point, I think we’ll see the “Internet to things” play a bigger role in search moving forward.

3) How good is Google at determining content quality from an algorithmic perspective?

Certainly better than it was, but that probably isn’t saying much because it was hoodwinked so often and so broadly in the past.

That’s in regard to the quality of content, though; I think it’s made greater strides in determining the usefulness of content.

Put another way I think the search engines (although not necessarily SEOs) have learned that chasing “quality” is a fool’s errand, since it’s both a relative and subjective measure of something’s value. You’ll have a lot more success, as Google has, determining the usefulness of something because usefulness can be based on quantifiable metrics. What number of query refinements were observed before the user either seemed satisfied with a result or abandoned the query altogether? What resources returned in a result resulted in the fewest number of chained visits for a mobile user with an informational query? And so on.

Improvements in cognitive computing and entity extraction have also allowed Google to do something of an end run around low-quality content. “Content” for search marketers is still largely shorthand for “some stuff residing at a URL to which people will hopefully be directed from the search results.” “Content” for Google is now “stuff I return to users in response to a query”, and that “stuff” isn’t restricted to links to web pages. Some of that stuff may be, in fact, data that was in one upon a time only accessible via a website visit. The end run comes not only from extracting and surfacing that data, which is in itself only a sort of equivalency, but in interlinking it with other data, making it much more useful than that same data embedded in a web document.

The post SEMpdx SearchFest 2015 Mini-Interview: Aaron Bradley appeared first on SEMpdx.

1) Please give us your background and tell us what you do for a living.
I got started making a living from the Web back in 1996 as a webmaster/designer for the SMB market. By 1998 I realized my design skills were not nearly as good as my emerging SEO skills, so I moved exclusively to the marketing side of things and I’ve been there ever since.

My current gig is President and Co-founder of Foundation Digital, which is a consultancy that specializes in developing data-driven earned and owned media strategies for enterprise-level clients.

2) Panda and Penguin have certainly gotten all the PR…but are there other types of penalties out there (besides deindexing) and how might one tell if they’ve been penalized outside of Penguin/Panda?
Yes, there are many flavors of penalties that produce similar results as Panda/Penguin that appear to be automated. The one we see the most has to do with over optimized anchor text. It tends to show up when a site that has an overall solid and trustworthy profile gets a little carless/aggressive with links to a handful of pages. When that happens, it’s not uncommon for the site to take a hit only for the specific phrases contained in the anchor text.

As far as determining if you’ve been hit by something automated that isn’t directly tied to Panda/Penguin, the first step is to determine whether or not what you see internally is in fact only happening to you. That’s where services like SearchMetrics become very helpful. They give you the ability to see how volatile your entire space has been, and that can help you figure out if you if what you are seeing is really a penalty or if you have simply been caught up in some sporadic algo tweaking that doesn’t make to any official algorithm release list like https://moz.com/google-algorithm-change

If everything in your space is stable, and you are sure you don’t have any manual notifications, then the next step is really figuring out where specifically the traffic loss is coming from. If you have basic rank tracking in place (which you should) for your most obvious phrases, it’s pretty easy to spot whether or not you took a hit on a handful of specific phrases, or there was an overall demotion of all ranking content.

If you don’t have keyword tracking in place you will need to spend time looking at organic landing page reports in your analytics.

Once you’ve gone through that process, where to look further usually becomes pretty clear.

3) When I Google “Buy Viagra”, I can still seem some sites that have seem to have broken the rules to get onto page 1. Do you thinking “cheating” can always be a viable strategy or is the ability to trick Google about to vanish?
Well, if you listen to Google, the days of aggressive SEO are extremely numbered. But I’ve been listening to them say that for over 15 years, and yet, we’re still talking about it, so I’m not convinced.

That said, I will say that they have made significant strides in reducing the shelf-life of most forms of webspam. And that in turn has created some real separation when it comes to the profiles of spammers vs. non-spammers. In the not so distant past, it wasn’t uncommon to find fairly prominent brands engaging in tactics that Google frowned upon. But now that they tend to find and ding aggressive tactics quicker, it doesn’t make a lot of sense for a company who wants to build a strong brand that ultimately develops a large and loyal audience to go down that path.

For those types of companies, organic search is often the foundation that everything is built upon. And constantly getting smacked and having to start over just doesn’t get them where they want to go.

On the other hand, in highly profitable affiliate driven spaces like Viagra sales, there is zero need for long-term brand development simply because those who are looking to buy Viagra online don’t care. They do a search, click on the ranking site, and then click the buy button. And not once in that process do they ever think about not going through with the purchase because the domain name isn’t amazon.com.

In that kind of environment, continuing to invest in the exploitation of algorithmic holes makes perfect sense. And as long as the profit margins cover the costs involved with the process of constantly building and launching new short-term sites powered by “cheating” it will continue to exist because Google is much better at catching cheaters than they are at fixing how they cheat.

The post SEMpdx SearchFest 2015 Mini-Interview: Greg Boser appeared first on SEMpdx.

1) Please give us your background and tell us what you do for a living.
I’m the Founder of Define Media Group, specializing in enterprise search marketing and strategic audience
development. I’ve been involved in search since 1997, was the Chief Search Strategist for About.com from 1999-2011 of which the last five were spent quarterbacking all search strategy initiatives for the New York Times Company portfolio. Define Media Group started in 2005 and officially spun off from the NYTCo in January of 2011.

Define manages key components of audience development initiatives for the most influential brands and publishing networks in the world.

2) How can in-house SEO’s and SEO consultants best work together in harmony?
We work with established in-house SEOs and Audience Development teams quite often. One way we contribute at a high level is through validation of the team’s strategic (and tactical) recommendations. In many instances we find, for whatever reason, SEO is marginalized. Our job then, as consultants, is to learn, refine where necessary, and help carry the message throughout an organization. Outside consultants have the added benefit of a bigger megaphone and used properly can be huge agent for change – even when it’s simply reiterating the exact same agenda the in-house SEO team has been pushing all along.

On a more day-to-day level we provide additional support on tactical tasks. This involves auditing, setting strategy, training, reporting, and basically collaborating on, and serving as, overflow assistance.

3) When competing for Big Brand Business, how does a small niche company like yours distinguish themselves from your much larger competition?
“Size matters not” and it comes down to hustle and experience. Small companies have a distinct advantage in that the services provided for an organization are more hands-on and direct. We find that most of our clients prefer working with our team of veterans everyday instead of being passed off to junior personnel after the deal has been closed.

The post SEMpdx SearchFest 2015 Mini-Interview: Marshall Simmonds appeared first on SEMpdx.

1) Please give us your background and tell us what you do for a living.
I’m a Partner at Kick Point, a digital marketing agency based in Edmonton, Alberta. I got into SEO in 2003, when I was primarily doing web development and then slowly ended up doing more and more marketing until I stopped doing websites in 2010 and focused on digital marketing. Before that, I worked in software and I have a degree in Geography and Ecosystem Restoration.

2) If a business asks you for a good strategy for increasing online reviews, what would you tell them?
If they’re trying to get good reviews because they have lots of bad reviews, start by making sure that your house is clean. Are there bad reviews for a reason? Can you fix that reason? What can you do to fix the problems you’ve had in the past, even if the reviews are months old, and can you commit to permanently making these changes? Then, when you’re ready to start drawing in some positive reviews, set up a review page on your site or hand out postcards with information on how to leave a review. Focus on the review sites that need the most help first and then expanding from there. Asking for a review is the easy part – making sure you have a product or service that’ll result in a positive review 100% of the time is the hard part.

3) What are some best practices for building out your Google Business Listing?
Approach it as if you’re a complete outsider and have never been to your business. Do you look trustworthy? Do you need more photos, videos or posts? What else can you do to gain trust for your business on this page? Also check your page on mobile and from Maps – you never know what surprises you might find.

The post 2015 SEMpdx SearchFest Mini-Interview: Dana DiTomaso appeared first on SEMpdx.