Tomorrow evening I’ll be speaking at the SeattleTechStartups meetup (starts at 6pm– click the link for details).

The topic will be “Bootstrap Marketing for Web Startups: SEO, SMM, and Viral Marketing“. For the uninitiated, that’s Search Engine Optimization, Social Media Marketing, and Viral Marketing.

If anyone has anything in particular they want me to chat about, feel free to drop me a note (or leave a comment here). I plan to post the PowerPoint Deck and a “Related Links and Resources” page afterwards (which I’ll make available here as well).

Hope to see you all there!

Just read a great piece on Small Business Hub about SEO entitled Stopping The Google AdWords Morphine Drip: How We Saved $183 Last Week. These guys echo a sentiment that I’ve been expressing for a long time (and just posted about a few weeks ago)… Investment in SEO is virtually ALWAYS better than investment in Adwords/PPC.

Mike’s article boils it down beautifully. The search phrase that he cares about is “Internet Marketing Software”. Buying a click for this phrase costs about 7 bucks. Having managed to SEO their way to the #6 slot on that page, they got 25 visitors in a week. So, by investing in SEO, they’ve managed to get $700 in PPC value FOR FREE. I’d also imagine that searchers have a bit more inherent trust for organic search results than ads. So, if Mike’s visitors were buyers, I imagine they’d convert a bit better than their PPC brethren.

One of the things that Mike doesn’t talk about in the article (tho we chat a bit about in the comments) is the EFFECTIVENESS of what you’re presenting in the SERP (search engine result page, for you SEO noobs at home).

This isn’t uncommon. Having read a lot of Mike’s articles, I think he’s a rare SEO guy who actually thinks about it from more traditional angles. But most SEO people are very analytical people. They are looking for systems and formulas that allow them to exploit Google better than the next guy. There are degrees of evil here (referred to as “white hat”, “gray hat”, and “black hat” tactics), but they are all variations on a theme– getting Google to perceive your importance as very high in the keyword-spaces that are important to you.

So on to the point of this post– SEOs are so damn focused on getting in front of a ton of eyeballs that they often lose sight of the next critical step– putting something in front of them that inspires action. Pretend you hired an advertising firm to promote your new soft-drink. As you tip back your scotch and soda one evening (that’s what fatcat soft-drink executives drink, right?) you see a commercial on the TV for your product. You look on, horrified, as bizarre images move across the screen. The lighting is bad, the camera work is terrible, and it’s not even clear what product the commercial is about. The next morning, you call up your agency and demand an explanation. Their response: “Yeah, we saved a TON of money on production– but the good news is that we spent the savings on more ad buys! That commercial was seen by millions more people than if we’d blown all that money making a great commercial!”.

The (somewhat meandering point) I’m trying to make here is that you have a few hundred characters to make an impression and inspire action (the click), and you aren’t going to do that by seeding your listings with a jumble of keywords.

So let’s take a look at Mike’s listing.

Not too shabby, but it certainly isn’t inspired marketing copy. A lot of product people feel feel that marketeers are manipulators and that you should just present the facts. The fact is, you can be certain your competition isn’t thinking that way. And surely you’ll agree that you can present the same facts in different ways that result in some pretty different reactions. For example (my favorite– apologies to Robert Heinlein), would you rather have a nice, juicy steak or a muscle tissue sample from a castrated bull? If you’re still not buying it, I suggest you read the studies profiled in the book Made to Stick… You’ll be floored.

The realization that your SERP presentation is so critical is unfortunate. With most user experiences, testing is easy. With SERPs, testing is damn challenging. Changing your title and meta description is easy to do… But Google doesn’t re-index your site THAT often. And a bad change can have very real consequences to your traffic (and your revenue). Testing 5 good ideas could take weeks or months. I would love to hear any ideas on how you can test in the comments.

One idea that I have is creating a faux-Google experience. Create fake Google search pages with fake results that are presented when someone clicks on the search button (with maybe a few pages of results). Then get some test subjects in your target market in and ask them to search for your term and select their vendor based off what they see. Not only would you get to see which of your SERP ideas fly well, but you could also see which of your competition performs well. It’s about as expensive as a usability test, but I think the value would exceed the cost.

Of course, the herculean challenge here is that you don’t have free reign to create copy that sings. You have a tiny title, a little snippet (meta description) and no control over presentation style. And, most importantly, you have to be darn sure that the extra clickability that you create by optimizing your SERP content doesn’t cost you in the rankings game.

Human beings are pretty hardwired for instant gratification. We’d all be healthier and happier if we went to the gym regularly, ate right, brushed our teeth, went to the dentist, avoided overexposure to the sun, etc. Instead, we sit in front of the TV because it’s easy and entertaining. We eat fattening food because it tastes damn good.

To search engine marketing equivalent to sitting on your ass in front of the television with a pint of Ben & Jerry’s is PPC (pay per click) search engine marketing. Don’t get me wrong– I understand that wrangling Google Adwords can be hard work. There is a lot of skill and science there. But it isn’t necessarily the most healthy way you could work to market your company. In fact, with all of the attention and competition that you find in Adwords, it’s oftentimes a pretty lousy deal. And, for the businesses that don’t have a strong viral component, it’s a flow of visitors that will stop the instant you stop spending the ad dollars.

The smart Adwords folks will carefully craft a funnel that goes all the way to a “conversion” – whether it’s a sale, a user signup, or whatever. Say you’re selling a widget online for $50, with a 50% profit margin (walking away with a clean $25 per widget– not bad!). All you have to do is make sure you pay less that $25 per buyer and you’re making money with Adwords.

Unfortunately, here are other widget sellers out there. They might be sitting on a huge supply of widgets that they have to unload at a loss (meaning that they can bid more per click than you can). They might be backed by VCs, who are hollering at them to drive up sales (even if it’s at a loss). Maybe their profit margins are higher than yours, allowing them to comfortably bid higher. Maybe their funnel is more effective than yours. Or they might just not be bright enough to know how much profit they make on a per-widget basis (“We might lose money, but we’ll make it up on volume!”).

So what’s the best alternative to Adwords?

It’s good old fashioned organic traffic. Being “linkworthy”. Search engine optimization. Burying your customers in service to the point where they are fanatical about recommending you to their widget-buying friends. Building compelling content on your site/blog so that people will link to you (this is a subset of SEO nowadays, really).

It’s not as fun, not as easily measurable, and it’s not NEARLY as instant as pay-per-click marketing. It’s the lifestyle equivalent of eating your veggies and taking a brisk jog a couple of times a week. Sadly, most businesses don’t have the discipline to invest time and money in efforts that generate healthy organic traffic. It just doesn’t provide the short-term shot in the arm that CPC does.

Brian Halligan (of Small Business Hub) offers some pretty compelling arguments for investing in SEO:

1. If you rank high for organic results, it is (typically) long lasting. So, the time/money you spend helping yourself move up the ranks is relatively persistent while the PPC campaign is money spent over and over again.
2. Organic results are clicked on a lot more than paid results, especially for well educated crowds. I read a study that showed dramatic differences as you moved from high school eduction to associate degrees to bachelors to masters to phd’s. The more educated your prospect, the less likely they are to click on an advertisement. If you are selling to high school students, you should buy cpc ads. If you are selling to engineers or professors, you need to think more about seo because that’s where the volume is.
3. Organic clicks convert at least as well as paid clicks. Marketing Sherpa’s Search Marketing Benchmark study of 3,217 marketers showed that organic clicks converted at an average of 4.2% v. 3.6% for paid.
4. Often times searchers visit your site more than once before self-selecting into a form, whitepaper, etc. We track this data carefully at HubSpot and notice that a decent portion of the leads we get are from people who have visited the site through multiple searches over multiple months. Organic search campaigns have more latency.
5. Marketing Sherpa reports that in the b2b environment, less than one-fourth of b2b buyers to look to paid listings in their first try at accessing information.
6. Many think of Google as a search company, but I think of them as a modern media conglomerate with an ultra-efficient mechanism for selling advertisements that work particularly well in the longtail. Like other media companies, Google benefits from efficient pricing of advertising. As more and more niche companies start to advertise on Google, their prices will become more efficient and their rates will become less and less attractive relative to other media outlets.

So do yourself a favor. Head over to SEOMOZ (my personal favorite SEO resource) and spend a few hours reading their free stuff.

(and be sure to eat your veggies)

I am a big proponent of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) at Jobster… I find the elusiveness of it exciting and the economies of scale interesting.

Anyhoo, I’ve always tried to “own” the search phrase “Tony Wright” in search engines. I have a big leg up (owning the tonywright.com domain), but I have some stiff competition. My arch-nemisis is a UK politician who shares my name. He’s written about and linked to (by name) several times a week, so I don’t have much hope of being the number one result.

Recently, much to my horror, a new Tony Wright has flashed onto the scene… And this guy is (get this) trying for the world record of sleep deprivation (11 days, if you’re curious).

Ten years ago a very small set of public figures had to care about their “public persona”.

Increasingly, everyone (or at least everyone with professional aspirations in the white-collar world) needs to start paying attention to the “face” they are presenting online.

Over the last year there have been plenty of articles about people who have botched their online persona. It doesn’t take many photos of your weekend exploits to turn off a potential employer, investor, or partner.

Doubtless these articles have prompted many people to take a slash-and-burn approach to their online persona. Making their MySpace pages private, disassociating themselves from online galleries, shutting down personal domains– I’m sure there are plenty of tactics to trim your presence.

But it looks like you can venture too far in the direction of online anonymity (tip o’ the hat to the great article over at Web Worker Daily). Some highlights of the article include:

• It turns out that a staggering 77% of recruiters do online searches on candidates.
• 25% hiring managers do online searches on candidates.
• 1 in 10 hiring managers so social networking searches on candidates

It looks like hiring managers lag a bit behind recruiters in terms of net-savvy, but this number isn’t going anywhere but up.

The article offers some good advice on how to control your online brand, mostly centered around scrutinizing and pruning the data about yourself that you make available. The article doesn’t give a ton of detail on how to actually CONTROL what pages return for your name in Google.

Here are a few tips for people who have–or are willing to have– a personal website (I’ll add some tips for people who DON’T want to get into such web geekery next!):

• Get a domain name. FirstnameLastname.com is ideal, but if you can’t get that, make damn sure that your first name and last name are somewhere in the domain name.
• Make sure your first name and last name are in the title tag of your home page. If your name is common, you might ponder adding your city, job title, or key skill(s) to the title tag. A search for John Smith might return a useless amount of data for a searcher to sift through, so they might pivot for a search like “John Smith Seattle” or “John Smith programmer”.
• Header tags. Your first name and last name should be in an h1 tag on your home page. The same advice about other search phrases applies.
• Links links links. This is the most important aspect of controlling search results… It isn’t easy and there is no shortcut. It’s more a lifestyle than a task. You need to have links to your web site and the link text needs to be EXACTLY your name. So, if I were linking to my own site, a link that says “Check out this guy” would be bad. A like that says “Tony Wright” would be good. The best example of the power of links is the phenomonon of “Google Bombing“. Google has altered their search algorithms to sidestep abuse like this, but links (and link text) is still hugely important.

  How could I possible get people to add the text “Tony Wright” to their web pages and link them to my site? It’s actually pretty easy. You most certainly have friends who have some web presence. All they need to do is find some corner of their web site to add it to. Do you participate in any web communities? Forums? Do you comment on blogs? Ever post on Google Groups? All of these places have ways where you can link back to your site (note: blogs are becoming less of an option here due to the nofollow attribute).

So what about the (vast majority of) people who really don’t want to own or maintain a web page? It’s real easy to forget that most people don’t enjoy writing/blogging, don’t have web geek skills, or don’t have time to invest in such activities. That’s fine– you can still control your results.

There are hundreds of sites out there that allow you to create online profiles. Many of them are decidedly unprofessional (MySpace, etc), but many of them cater to professionals. It doesn’t really matter which one you choose, though you should aim for the mainstream where you can and pay attention to how the site’s profiles adhere to the SEO rules discussed above. For name SEO, Jobster reigns supreme out of the box.

So here are your SEO steps for people who want to control their brand by creating a profile.

• Select a place to build a profile. Jobster and LinkedIn are your two best bets. I have a personal bias for Jobster (it’s where I work!). Whatever your opinion, Jobster has a leg up on the SEO front, which will make step #3 possible.
• Build out a kickass profile. Be honest but craft your message carefully.
• Links links links. Just like #3 in the previous list, find ways to link the your name to your profile. This is certainly the hardest step, but it’s the most important.