Spotlight on Search Interview with Dan Thies of SEO Research Labs
Spotlight on Search Interview with Dan Thies of SEO Research Labs: interview with Dan Thies - AKA the keyword guy - covers "how he started out, his take on keyword research tools, common misconceptions about search engine optimization, search engines and SEO training..keyword strategy was the most important part of search engine marketing, just as targeting is really the most important factor in any kind of marketing. This seemed like an obvious point to me, but nobody was really dealing with it in any kind of disciplined way. So I started writing about it, and talking about it, and people again responded.
In fact, the response was amazing. A lot of the folks who had bought my book were asking for help with keyword research, so I took a small sampling of my customer list, and emailed 300 people with an offer to do keyword research reports for something like $129.95. Well, 120 click-throughs and about 30 orders came in the same day, and I realized that there was going to be quite a lot of demand for it, if we could do it well....I found out that the "real market" was web designers, agencies, SEM consultants, and others who wanted to outsource their keyword discovery work.
Which makes sense – most of these folks are bringing on a few clients a month, and that means they only did keyword research occasionally....
The hard part of growing this part of my business is skepticism. If we tripled the price, people would be more willing to believe that real human beings are doing the work...
With either SEO or PPC, keyword discovery is just the first step. You have to take the search terms, all the little "modifier" words that come along with them, and weave them together into a broader search profile.
For SEO, this means mapping search terms to URLs, working search terms and modifiers into the copy, and building internal links to support all that. For PPC, this means coming up with a list of search terms, matching strategies (broad/phrase/exact), and mapping these to ad creatives and landing pages...
Doing PPC gives you a huge advantage over those who don't, because you can find out which search terms work, what offers people respond to, and do so quickly. What you learn from PPC can be applied to copywriting, SEO strategy, etc
list 3 or 4 of the most common misperceptions
that people think they need to pay for links strikes me as sheer madness...For example, in a shopping site, do the product pages within a category link to and support each other? If they don't do this, you're missing a huge opportunity for SEO and conversion, but go look at any shopping site.
people just not understanding how search engines work. Not understanding what they are capable of. Not understanding the logic behind it. A lot of goofy theories arise from this.
The Search Engine Marketing Kit you've written has become an valuable resource for many search marketers. It's particularly useful for anyone that wants to start their own SEO/SEM consulting business.
Resources: Matt Cutts might post something useful, Rand Fishkin might post some interesting links, Aaron Wall might hit me with some news that I didn't have....
Search Engine Guide and SEW are the two that kind of stand out, in terms of collecting all the stuff together so you don't have to dig too much."
posted by Jen @ 7:05 AM
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