Category Archives: Personal

A collection of personal thoughts and stories

The Pressure’s On and the Cracks are Beginning to Show

First published September 10, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Some time ago, I wrote a column saying the fallout of the economic crisis would be a rapid evolution in marketing practices, speeding the transition from the old way of doing things to a much more dominant role for digital. In that transition, search would play a bigger role than ever. In the past few months, I’m seeing exactly that come to pass. People are serious about search, from the bottom right up to the top corner office. This isn’t playtime in the sandbox anymore; we’re suddenly moving front and center.

“I’m Ready for My Close Up, Mr. CMO”

The reason people are so interested in search is that it comes with the reputation of being highly measurable and accountable. This isn’t anything new, but lately, it’s coming with some additional baggage. Now that the C-Level is involved, performance isn’t being judged simply on a trial campaign with a limited budget. Suddenly, search is being tested to see if it’s worthy of taking a starring role in the marketing mix. And that is adding a lot of pressure to those of us toiling down here in the search trenches.

Search, by its nature, isn’t all that scalable. It comes with a built-in inventory limitation. You can only reach people who have raised their hand, indicating interest in something. Once you tap out that inventory, search loses its bright shiny luster. Search is effective because it’s a signal for consumer intent. You can’t use search to create intent where none exists.

“You Bid on What?”

Management of search isn’t very scalable, either. It’s a lot of heavy lifting and obsessing over thousands of tiny little nitty-gritty details, which, if you overlook them, can suddenly blow your ROI right out of the water. Just ask the PPC manager who forgot to set the appropriate budget cap and comes in on a Monday morning to find they’ve just spent several thousand dollars of a client’s money on a broad match for the word “lube.”

Also, the new breed of client is expecting more than just a limited tactical approach to search. Suddenly they’re using words like “integrate” and “holistic” because, well, because those are just the kind of words you use when you get to the top of the corporate food chain. You get paid the big bucks because you can toss “synergistic” around in a board meeting and actually be serious at the time.

Back to the Drawing Board

Right now, people across this great land are pulling out their white boards and sketching out the rudiments of “Marketing Plan 2.0.” They know something important has shifted in the marketing landscape; the economic belly flop has made it all too apparent that there must be a better way of doing things.  I haven’t seen any huge waves of budget pouring into search yet, but I know there’s a lot of talk out there, and much of it is about search.

Generally, I think this is great news. I’m the first to complain about the tactical bias of search marketing.  I think search has a much greater role to play — but I feel it’s only fair to warn search marketers that this isn’t going to be a painless skip down the path to a lucrative retirement. Anytime there’s a big shift, it comes with an accompanying pendulum effect. After being restrained too far on one side of equilibrium, the pendulum has to correct by swinging too far in the other direction. As budgets start to come into digital channels, including search, we’ll learn that, in many cases, it comes with a set of expectations that are seriously out of whack.

Survival of the Fittest

There are some search marketers that are ready, willing and able to take search to the next level, the one it rightly deserves. There are many others who will use impressive words in the sales pitch (words like holistic, integrated and synergistic) but fall seriously short on delivery. The path ahead is going to have a lot of casualties, both on the vendor and client side. But then, evolution has never been a particularly gentle process.

Just ask any ichthyosaurus.

The New Speed of Information

First published August 27, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

This summer, we had fires in the town I live in. From the back deck of my house, I could see the smoke and, as darkness descended, the flames that were threatening the homes in the hills above Kelowna. I had friends and co-workers that lived in the neighborhoods that were being evacuated, so I wanted to know what was happening as soon as possible.

I was sitting on the back deck, watching the progress of the fire through binoculars and monitoring Twitter on my laptop. My wife was inside the house, listening on the radio and watching on TV. Because I had an eyewitness perspective, I was able to judge the timeliness of our news channels and gained a new appreciation for the speed of social networks.

News That’s Not So New

If you had tuned in to our local TV station even hours after the fires began, you wouldn’t have known that anything out of the ordinary was happening. There was no mention of the fire for hours after it started. The TV station in Vancouver was better, with real-time coverage a few hours after the fire first started. But their “coverage” consisted of newscasters repeating the same limited information, which was at least 2 hours out of date, and playing the same 30-second video loop over and over. If you needed information, you would not have found it there.

The local news radio station fared a little better, reporting new evacuation areas as soon as they came through the official communication channels. But the real test came at about 8:45 p.m. that night. The original fire started near a sawmill on the west side of Okanagan Lake. Around the aforementioned time, I noticed a wisp of smoke far removed from the main fire. It seemed to me that a new fire had started, and this one was in the hills directly above the subdivision that my business partner lived in. Was this a new fire? Were the homes threatened? I ran in and asked my wife if she had heard anything about a second fire. Nothing was being reported on TV or radio. I checked the local news Web sites. Again, no report.

Turning to Twitter

So I tweeted about it. Within 15 minutes, someone replied that there did seem to be a second fire and fire crews had just gone by their house, on the way up to the location. Soon, there were more tweets with eyewitness accounts and reports of more fire crews. In 30 minutes, the Kelowna Twitter community had communicated the approximate location of the new fire, the official response, potential neighborhoods that might be evacuated and even the possible cause of the fire.

Yes, it was all unvetted and unauthorized, but it was in time to make a difference. It would take TV two more hours to report a possible new fire, and even then, they got most of the details wrong. The local radio station again beat TV to the punch, but (as I found out afterwards) only because a reporter was also monitoring Twitter.

We’ve all heard about the new power of social media, whether it be breaking the news of Michael Jackson’s death or the elections in Iran, but for me, it took an event a little closer to home to help me realize the magnitude of this communication shift. Official channels are being hopelessly outstripped by the efficiency of technology-enabled communications. Communication flows freely, unrestricted by bottlenecks. One might argue that with the freedom in restrictions, one sacrifices veracity. There is no editor to double-check facts. But in the case of the Kelowna fires of 2009, at least, official channels proved to be even more inaccurate. Not everything I read on Twitter was true, but the corrections happened much faster than they did through the supposed “authorized” channels. Twitter had broken the news of Jackson’s death while the official news sources still had him in the hospital with an undisclosed condition. When it came to timely, accurate information, social media beat the massive news machine hands down.

Do we need a two-hour jump on the news we hear? Is it really that important that we know about events as soon as they happen? When a fire is bearing down on your home and every minute gained means you might lose one less precious keepsake or treasured photo, you bet it’s important.

Summer Stories: How I’ve Spent My Summer Vacations

First published August 20, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Robin Williams’ movie “RV” may not have gathered much critical acclaim, but one scene at least hit a comedic home run with me. Williams has to get a presentation back to the home office during a camping trip with his family. After his laptop goes AWOL, he uses his BlackBerry to retype the presentation and then tries to get a signal strong enough to let him email the presentation to his boss. He scales the top of his rented motor home, holding his BlackBerry heavenward trying to get a signal. This is an episode directly out of my life. I did exactly the same thing in a state park in California one summer, trying to get some file (it might have even been a Search Insider column) to someone who was expecting it. Running a business means splitting your time between family vacation activities and keeping the bare essentials going back at the office.Have Column, Will Travel

In the five years I’ve been writing for Search Insider, I’ve usually continued to contribute throughout my vacations. This has meant filing columns from campgrounds up and down the West Coast, from Hawaiian beaches, from London hotel rooms, from a chalet in the French Alps and from a charming little hotel  in Florence, Italy. Each has presented their challenges in finding a connection but it’s always been interesting weaving my experiences into the story line.

A few years ago, we were taking the family through Europe and spending a lot of time on trains. We were on the high-speed train from Lyon to Paris and I had to get a column filed. I had just received my first mobile Internet device and thought this would be just the ticket for a little “wired” jet setting. It took me the better part of the trip to key the column in with the tiny little keyboard, but finally the column was done and ready to be filed. I hit the send button and marveled at how technology allowed me to stay connected, even on a train whizzing through the French countryside at 200 kilometers an hour. Unfortunately, no one had explained data roaming charges to me. My little flirtation with international mobile computing came with a nasty little $800 surprise when I got back to the office. The technology is amazing, but the ethics of mobile carriers are noticeably less so.

My Wife Said I Could, So There!

Every time I write something while on vacation (by the way, we call it holidays here in Canada, but you’ll notice I’m carefully keeping my column Americanized) I usually get emails or comments saying I should leave the laptop and PDA at home. My wife and I have talked about this and we agreed that the ability to stay connected not only to work but also to family is worth the odd hour or two checking emails. I am much more at ease when I can check in and make sure everything is fine back home. We have amazing support systems, supplied by both family and my co-workers, so a periodic check-in is usually relatively stress-free. Besides, the Internet is a tremendous resource for a little ad-hoc planning while on the road. Last year, when plans suddenly fell through in France for three days of our trip, I was able to book alternate plans at the last minute.

In continuation of the Hotchkiss summer tradition, this column, too, is being penned on vacation. Right now I’m in a hotel room in Florence, but this Florence is in Oregon, not Italy. A friend and I are biking down the Oregon coast (three days and 192 miles behind us, so we’re a little past half way). Our wives and children are following us with a van full of anti-chafing cream and cold beer. It’s been an amazing experience, but I swear I’m going to hunt down every jerk driving a motor home down Highway 101 who doesn’t give cyclists a little extra room when whizzing by at 70 miles per hour and teach them how to dump their holding tanks, Robin Williams-style. That was the other scene in the movie that had me rolling on the floor.

Over and out from the Oregon coast!

Summer Stories: How I Became a Researcher

First published August 13, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

About six years ago, I had one of those life-changing moments that set me on a new path. I’ve always been curious. I’ve always had questions, and up to that point in my life, I was usually able to find an answer, with enough perseverance. But in 2003, I had a question that no one seemed able to answer.  It didn’t seem to be an especially difficult question, and I knew someone had the answer. They just weren’t sharing it.

The Unanswerable Question

The question was this: what percentage of searchers click on the organic results and what percentage click on the sponsored ads? Today, that’s not even a question; it’s common knowledge for search marketers. But in 2003, that wasn’t the case. Sponsored search ads were still in their infancy (Overture had just been acquired by Yahoo, and Google’s AdWords was only a couple years old) and no one at either engine was sharing the clickthrough breakdowns between organic and paid.

I reached out to everyone I knew in the industry, but either they didn’t know, or they weren’t willing to go public with the info. My connections into Google and Yahoo were nonexistent at the time. No one, it seemed, had the answer. My curiosity was stymied. And that’s when my revelation happened. If no one had the answer, perhaps I could provide it.

At the time, research was not something Enquiro did. When we wanted to find out an answer, we combed through the forums, just like everyone else. But there seemed to be a noticeable gap in available information. There was plenty of discussion about technical SEO tactics, but no one seemed to be interested in how people actually used search engines.

To me, this was an unforgiveable oversight. If we were using search as a marketing channel, shouldn’t we have some understanding of how our prospects used search?  Off the top of my head, I jotted down a list of several questions I had about how people actually search; questions that appeared to have no readily available answers. It was at that point that I officially became a researcher.

Discovering “Why”

Our first research project proved to set the path we would go down for much of the follow-up: we just looked at how people used search to do things. Our methodology has become much tighter and we now have added eye-tracking and even neuro-scanning to our arsenal, but from the beginning, our research was more focused on “why” than “what.” The first paper was called “Inside the Mind of the Searcher” and it’s still referenced on a regular basis. Frankly, we were surprised with how quickly it was picked up in the industry. Suddenly, we became the experts on search user behavior, a crown I was uncomfortable with at the beginning. Yes, we were exploring new ground, but I always worried about how representative this was to the real world. Did people really do what we said they did, or was it just a research-created anomaly?

Defining the Golden Triangle

For us, the groundbreaking study was our first eye tracking study, done through Eyetools in San Francisco. I had read the Poynter study about how people interacted with online publications and was fascinated. “What if,” I wondered, “we did this with a search engine?” I found a similarly curious cohort in Kevin Lee from DidIt and together with Eyetools we launched the first study, which discovered the now-famous “Golden Triangle.” I remember sitting with Kevin in a speaker prep room at a show whose name escapes me, looking at the very first results of the data. The pattern jumped off the page:

“Look at that!” I said, “It’s a triangle!”

Kevin, always the search optimizer, said, “We need something catchy to call it, something that we can optimize for. The Magic Triangle?”

Because the heat map tends to indicate the most popular areas in a reddish yellow color, the answer was right in front of us. I can’t remember whether it was Kevin or I that first said it, but as soon as we said it, we knew the name would stick: “It’s a gold color… The Golden Triangle?”

Is It Real?

Even with the release of the study and the quick acceptance, I still questioned whether this represented real behavior. It was later that year when I got the confirmation I needed. I had just presented the results during a session at an industry show and was stepping down from the stage. Someone was quietly standing in the corner and came over as I started to head out of the room.

“Hi. I just wanted to let you know. I work with Yahoo on user experience and your heat map looks identical to our internal ones. I actually thought you had somehow got your hands on ours.” The validation was a few years in coming, but very welcome when it finally arrived.

Today, ironically, things have come full circle. I have talked to sales and engineering teams at all the major engines and much of the research they refer to about user behavior comes from Enquiro.

And the answer to my original question has held remarkably consistent in the past 6 years: What percentage of users click on paid ads vs. organic listings? For commercial searches, it’s about 70% organic, 30% paid. Just in case you were curious.

Summer Stories: How I Almost Got Busted by the St. Louis FBI

First published August 6, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

This week, the latest in my “fireside chats” (phrase courtesy of Aaron Goldman) about past SEM memories.

In the early days of our search marketing business, our collection of SEO clients ran the gamut from slightly off-white to shades of gray approaching black. Yes, back in the day we too did some stuff that wasn’t smiled upon by the anti-spam gods of the search universe. Of course, it was (and still is) sometimes difficult to determine where the line between white and black could be found.

Desperately Seeking Sublets

One of the more interesting groups we dealt with was a network of apartment-locating services. Prior to working with them, I had no idea that apartment locating was such a hyper-competitive business, but these were voracious adopters of search at the very earliest stages of the industry. The goal was to position all 10 of their various “doorway” domains in the top 10 for the prime keywords, essentially shutting out the competition. And for some reason, Texas was the hotbed of apartment finders. In 2002, if you had searched for apartments in Dallas, Houston or Austin, you’d have seen our clients.

These independent Web-based businesses formed a national association, effectively creating their own link farm. And soon after forming the association, they decided to have a meeting. The location was set to be St. Louis because it was the geographic center of the country,  And, for the first time, my company’s co-founder, Bill Barnes, and myself were asked to fly down and make a live client presentation.

My Laser Focus

As we started to work through the logistics, we realized we had no way to show the presentation slide deck we had put together. We didn’t have a projector, and the hotel meeting room we were to meet the clients in didn’t have one either. I quickly scoured St. Louis and found an AV rental shop that could provide us with a projector for the day. I arranged to have it waiting for us at the hotel when we checked in. At the time, a projector was more than a business essential; it was a cool toy that we could use to project a movie on the hotel wall, giving Bill and I our own big screen experience the night before the meeting. But the projector also came with a laser pointer, the first time I had ever encountered one of these nifty little gadgets. For regular readers, you might remember that I’m still fascinated by them, a personality quirk that came to light at the last Search Insider Summit.

Soon, a fully grown man was running around a hotel room in St. Louis, shining the little red dot at anything he could find. Bill cowered in the corner, covering his eyes for fear of inadvertent laser surgery. Being a scientifically curious type of individual, it became vitally important to me to see just how far the range of my pointer was. I ran to the window to find some targets further afield.

Could it hit the car in the parking lot below? Yes!

Could it hit the opposite wing of the hotel, some 150 feet away? Yes!

Next door to the hotel was a large, featureless office block. I had to see if the laser’s reach extended that far. The little red dot traveled along the wall, hundreds of feet away. In fact, you could see it go right through the window, shining on the interior walls of the offices inside the building. Bill, only half jokingly, said, “For God’s sake, shut that thing off, before someone thinks you’re a sniper.” Reluctantly, I hit the off switch and settled down to watch Julia Roberts in our makeshift hotel cinema.

From the Files of the FBI

The next morning, we had a few hours to kill before the presentation was scheduled. We decided to talk a walk in the bitter St. Louis cold to check out some of the surrounding area. We started walking past the office building next door that had served as my target range the night before. There, at 2222 Market Street, St. Louis, we discovered we were next-door neighbors to the headquarters of the FBI.

To this day, I can imagine the scenario: Two FBI agents, putting in extra hours to finish paper work, heads down in the nearly empty office. Suddenly, one raises his head to grab his coffee cup and is somewhat startled to see a small red laser dot moving along the wall and slowly coming to rest on his partner’s forehead. Somewhat shakily he says, “Ed, I think we may have a situation.”

Nope, not a terrorist.  Just a search marketer.

Summer Stories: How I Met Fredrick Marckini

First published July 30, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

As I said last week, I’m in the mood for a little reminiscing, so today, I’ll be sharing the story of my first industry event and how I met iProspect’s founder, Fredrick Marckini.

Bound for Beantown

It was 2001 before I attended my first industry trade show. As you might imagine, doing SEO in a small city of 120,000 people in Western Canada, our ability to “talk shop” with anyone who had the slightest clue what we were talking about was limited. The idea of being in a room with a few hundred other SEOs was mindboggling, so we checked our corporate credit card limit (our primary source of financing) and I was soon Boston-bound for SES.

The goal for the show was to “get to know people in the industry.” I had a “hit list” of industry notables I was instructed to make contact with. I staked out hallways and skulked around the doors leading into the sessions with the intention of “bumping into” Danny Sullivan, Chris Sherman, Detlev Johnson, Marshall Simmonds, Bruce Clay and, yes, Fredrick Marckini. I swear to God, I had an actual list and would put tick marks beside names when my mission was accomplished. Each day I would phone back to the office in Kelowna to report my success rate.

SES Here I Come!

Industry events in 2001 (the show site is still live) were not quite like industry events today. I’m not sure what the official total attendance was, but it was in the hundreds, not thousands. Everyone from the show could fit in one moderately sized meeting room for lunch, and there was still room left around the perimeter for the “trade show floor,” which consisted of six or seveb folding tables with vinyl banners hung behind.  One would think, given the relatively intimate nature of the show, meeting my “targets” wouldn’t be that difficult. However, I had two things going against me: First, I’m not the most social of animals. I’m the guy who’s awkwardly waiting just outside the “conversation cluster” at most networking events, waiting to be noticed. Small talk has never been my forte. And secondly, search isn’t the most visual of industries. I knew the names of the people I wanted to meet, but I had no idea what they looked like.

Nevertheless, with persistence and dumb luck, I worked my way down the list, having less than memorable (on their part, not mine) introductions with Danny, Chris and Detlev. But one name on the list remained unchecked. Fredrick Marckini proved to be remarkably elusive. Fredrick was one of the few stars of the industry: a regular columnist for ClickZ, author of not one but three books on search marketing and the founder of  iProspect, the most successful search agency in the industry. I sniffed the winds of the Boston Marriott Copley, determined to bag my prey before I headed back to Kelowna.

The Smell of Desperation

My opportunities were rapidly running out. But on the last day, a small glimmer of hope! I was chatting in a hallway with another attendee and he mentioned that someone from iProspect had given a fascinating presentation on keyword research in the session he was just at. With only the slightest hint of a tremor of excitement, I asked if Mr. Marckini was in attendance.

“I think so. He was standing near the back.”

I literally vanished before the guy’s eyes, rushing down the hallway to the aforementioned conference room, hoping that Marckini would still be lingering in an after-session chat. I burst into the room, but alas, it was empty. Dejected, I wandered out, deciding to make a quick pit stop at the nearest men’s room.

Note: For the squeamish, the next passage is slightly tasteless but essential to the story, so please forgive me.

Steady Now…

While standing at the urinal, I was carefully maintaining the unwritten rules of men’s room etiquette, staring intently at the featureless tile in front of me. I became aware of a presence beside me: fairly tall, dark blue suit, dark hair and glasses. I turned my neck the tiniest fraction of an inch, to allow discreet scanning with my peripheral vision. I think..yes., yes…I’m sure! According to the best description available to me, Fredrick Marckini was at the next urinal!

But what to do? You simply don’t introduce yourself at a urinal, especially when there’s still directly relevant business to be completed. Timing was essential here. We had to finish at the same time. So, by imposing a not inconsiderable degree of biophysical control, I managed to reach the sinks simultaneously with Fredrick. But still, there was awkwardness to contend with. At what point is it okay to initiate social contact? Pre-rinse, mid-rinse or post-rinse? The specter of time ticking away drove me to recklessness. With hands still wet and soapy, I threw caution to the wind. It was now or never!

“Fredrick? Nice to meet you. I’m Gord Hotchkiss from Search Engine Position [our name pre-Enquiro].”

Our hands tried to grasp in a firm, manly handshake, but the soapiness made it more of a slippery glancing blow.

“Oh. I know about Search Engine Position. You guys do great work!”

My respect for Fredrick as a charming gentleman started at that moment. Not only was he gracious to a wild-eyed and soapy stranger, he actually invited me to be his guest at an Overture dinner that night. It’s been awhile since I bumped into Fredrick at an industry event (I think SES Toronto a few years ago was the last time) but it’s still one of my favorite memories.

You’re a classy guy, Fredrick!

Summer Stories: How I Got into Search

First published July 23, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

This time of year always causes me to look backwards. My birthday is in the summer, so the increasing tally of years is hard to ignore. But it was also summer, specifically the summer of 2004, when I wrote my first Search Insider column, called “The Growing Pains of Search.” That was 213 columns and about 180,000 words ago (I’m rapidly closing in on David Berkowitz and his 224 SI columns). And, finally, it was the summer of 1999 when Enquiro (then Search Engine Position) was born, so this marks my tenth official anniversary in the biz (I’ve been playing around at organic optimization since 1996).

All this preamble brings me, finally, to my point: I really don’t want to write about Bing or Google or Yahoo today. In fact, for the next few weeks, I want to go public with a few of the stories that usually only get told at Enquiro staff parties when I’m feeling a touch nostalgic (or a touch inebriated).

This week: How Danny Sullivan first got me into search…

As I said, it was in 1996 that I first started playing around with organic optimization. As the owner of a small, fledgling ad agency, my clients (in this case, a hotel in Kelowna, BC) started to ask whether I designed Web sites.

“Of course I design Web sites…”

How hard could it be? Soon, I had FrontPage and was trying to figure out how to get a sliced image to stay together in a table. After much trial and error, I had a Web site that was good enough (by 1996 standards, which thankfully weren’t too stringent) to go live. There’s still a reasonable facsimile of the original design at archive.org (check out the funky animated gif of the rotating diamonds). Inevitably, the next question came…

“So, when does everybody start booking online?”

Ooops! I hadn’t thought about traffic. If you build it, aren’t they just supposed to come? That was when I first started thinking about search engines, which at the time were Infoseek, Yahoo, Lycos, Excite and AltaVista. How the heck do you get on those things? I submitted the site, but it seemed to have little impact. The hit counter was ticking over at a rate slightly slower than Continental drift.

At that time, I was also a regional reseller for an online yellow pages site, which was supposed to be the “next big thing.” I remember going down to a reseller meeting in Vancouver, B.C. where an outside consultant was introducing a new service we could sell: search engine positioning.

“Hmm, this sounds intriguing.”

The guy, who was counting on this new business to finance a semiretired lifestyle, passed out an information sheet explaining what he did, along with what he charged, which was several thousand dollars per site.

“How hard can this be?” I said to myself (yes, it’s a recurring theme in my life). I looked over the information sheet….

“Meta tags. I know what those are. Alt tags. Yep. I know what those are too. I wonder…. ”

I took the sheet home and decided to check out this “search engine positioning” thing. The verbiage on the sheet seemed impressive. The guy sounded like he knew what he was talking about. But the sheet was very short on detail. There must be something else out there on this search “stuff.”

After some stumbling around the Web, I happened on a site with the title “A Webmaster’s Guide to Search Engines.” And there, verbatim, was all the stuff from the sales sheet. This “consultant” had simply cut and pasted sections from it. The great part was that everything was there, all the things you needed to do to optimize your own site. The guy was charging thousands for doing the same stuff that was laid out free for anyone on the Web. I was so grateful I actually became a subscriber to that site so I could lend some support.

I immediately started optimizing the client’s site. A few weeks later, they broke the top 10. And by the end of the month, they were number one for their top key phrases. For those of you who have been around as long as I have, you may remember playing Infoseek “Leapfrog.” Because Infoseek indexed almost instantly and updated results, you could use it to test your SEO skills and see what happened, ratcheting up the rankings against your competitors. Using the Webmaster’s Guide as my base, I soon figured out the fundamentals of search positioning (as it was then commonly called).

“What the hell! This stuff actually works! Maybe there is a business idea here after all.”

It took me a few more years to actually get the guts to focus exclusively on search, but that’s how I got started. Of course, the author of the Webmaster’s Guide was Danny Sullivan, and it later became Search Engine Watch. It would be 2001 before I ever met Danny, at my first Search Engine Strategies event in Boston. I didn’t get the chance to say it then (or since), so I’ll publically say it now: Thank you, Danny, for getting me into this business. It’s been more fun than I ever imagined.

SEO Success: Sign of a Healthy Corporate Culture

First published July 9, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I’ve been working with companies on SEO for over a decade now, and there’s one thing I’ve noticed: all things being equal, healthy companies with great cultures seem to do much better in organic search results. And by organic success, I mean the good, white-hat, Matt Cutts-approved kind of success. I bet that if you found the companies that do well in organic search, you’d also find companies that Jim Collins (author of “Built to Last” and “Good to Great”) would be proud of. This correlation can’t be coincidence, so I’ve outlined some reasons why this might be so:

Flatter and more-responsive organizations. Working on SEO is like taking your Web site to the doctor: a good SEO consultant will tell you what you have to do, but the hard work is up to you. Companies that listen and respond will do better than companies that justify, finger-point and go on the defensive. Healthy companies look for ways to improve; dysfunctional companies offer reasons why improvement is impossible. Companies that refuse to do the heavy lifting required to whip their site into shape generally are equally negligent in other areas of their business.

Better communication channels. SEO is by nature a cross-functional exercise. It involves many different departments, all working together toward a common goal. This approach is well within the comfort zone of healthy organizations, but totally foreign to dysfunctional ones. An SEO initiative severely tests the communication and cooperative capabilities of an organization. It requires marketing, IT, product managers and often legal to all work together, and the faster they can do this, the more positive the results will be. SEO is not a one-shot tactic. In the most competitive categories, it’s a full-out and ongoing war. The companies that can respond and adapt quickly will win that war. The ones mired in bureaucracy and butt-covering will inevitably sink in the rankings.

Healthy community connections. The new era of digital communications requires companies to be engaged in an ongoing dialogue with their community of customers. Great companies do this instinctively. Bad companies put up huge corporate communication barricades, keeping the angry hordes at bay. Because much of this dialogue happens online, these dialogues tend to generate reams of content and links. Raving customers generate link love; angry customers generate link hate and reputation management problems. A company that can effectively engage in conversations with customers will find a natural lift in organic rankings is often the result.

Efficient execution habits. Companies that keep a clean house do better organically than companies that keep skeletons in the closet. Both approaches are symptomatic of the company’s overall approach to business. Highly effective companies constantly upgrade systems and infrastructure, both in their organizations and their online presence. They invest in best of breed tools and technology. And they are able to quickly prioritize and executive as the landscape shifts. Again, a clean technical online infrastructure makes SEO much, much easier.

Executives that “get it.” C-level executives who make SEO a priority realize that the marketing landscape is shifting quickly. They’ve been paying attention to customer behavioral trends and have committed to being proactive rather than reactive. This usually indicates well-placed intelligence gathering “antennae” and feedback loops. It also indicates an executive who isn’t hopelessly mired in “old-boy” thinking and outdated command and control management models.

Corporate pride. Content might not be the sole king anymore (SEO is more of an oligarchy now) but it’s still part of the ruling class. Great cultures tend to engender pride that naturally precipitates an explosion of content. People blog about where they work, people tweet and product managers enthuse verbosely about what they’re working on. All of this generates great, searchable content online.

Companies get the SEO rankings they deserve. I’m guessing that if you asked any SEO consultant in the world, they’ll tell you their favorite clients are the ones that are the easiest to work with: clients who listen, are proactive and for whom continual improvement is a religion. Based on what I’ve seen in the past decade, this attitude extends beyond the SEO team (indeed, it has to) and permeates the entire culture. There are those who game the system and gain undeserved rankings, but more and more, “organic” rankings are just that: rankings that come from the very nature of the company and how they conduct themselves in the marketplace.

The New Metrics of Fame

First published July 2, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes” — Andy Warhol, 1968
When Warhol made his oft-quoted prediction, he was referring to the ability of media to push anyone into the bright glare of the spotlight for a fleeting brush with celebrity. What he couldn’t have anticipated was the strange twist the Web would throw on this issue. The Web democratized media and accelerated Warhol’s prediction. Viral fame doesn’t depend on tightly controlled channels like newspapers and TV networks; it seeps, oozes and sometimes gushes, propelled by users. All of us, including middle-aged guys from New Jersey lip-synching to pop songs, kung-fu-fighting bears and teen-aged “Star Wars”-obsessed wannabes, can now be famous.

But it’s not just the opportunities for fame that have undergone drastic Web modification. It’s also the ways we measure fame. Humans are obsessed with status. We are mesmerized by social rankings, and thanks to the infinitely measurable nature of the Web, we have a legion of new status metrics available to see how we stack up against the world at large. And I’m just as big a sucker for this as everyone else. It’s not something I’m proud of, but I regularly check my status on various Web-based metrics. Here are a few of them.

Googling One’s Self

I think everyone’s guilty of this one at one time or another. You check to see what ranks for your name, who else of the same name shows up (my doppelganger is a photographer and musician in Scotland), and how many mentions Google finds of you out in the Web wilderness (22,900).As your digital fame grows, you broaden your search parameters. For example, do you break the top 10 for just your last name? This is admittedly dependent on how common your name is. Hotchkiss is not a household word, but I am competing with a prep school in Connecticut, a town in Colorado, a civil war cartographer, a precursor to the Jeep, the owner of the Calgary Flames and a ballroom dancing instructor. Or how about your first name? Gordon Lightfoot, a video game storeowner and a comic book about ultra bondage offer stiff competition for “Gord.”

Here’s a new variation: Search Suggestion Wheel of Fortune. With the search suggestions feature now available on all the major engines, see how many letters you have to type in for your name before you appear on the list of suggested searches. I come up in 5 letters (on Google.com — my home country is a little less kind. I need to go to 7 letters on Google.ca).

Techno-Rate-i

If you’ve joined the blogosphere, a number of destinations offer updated stats on how you stack up against the Seth Godins, Guy Kawasakis, Michael Arringtons and Arianna Huffingtons of the world. I have been tremendously delinquent here. I was once in the top 100,000 on Technorati, but have slipped back to the lowly 200,000s, due mainly to posting neglect. Still, with somewhere over 100 million blogs in existence (exact numbers seem hard to find) that still puts me in the top 0.2%, so my ego can live with that.

Twitterholics

The newest addiction for those seeking digital attention is Twitter. Now that the celebrities have glommed onto tweeting (come on, Kutcher, DeGeneres and Spears, can’t you share a little love?), it’s not as easy to gain top tweet status, but Twitterholics can get their fix of ranking reporting at Twitterholic. I do better here than on Technorati, once again breaking top 100,000 status. 1,649, 378 more followers and I beat Oprah (@outofmygord if you care).

Fame is Fleeting

In the new wired world, we are constantly reminded of our own notoriety, or lack of same, compared to everyone else in the world. In the pre-Web world, not only were we not famous, we were also blissfully ignorant of the fact. Today, it seems that everyone should strive to have some small sliver of fame. Keeping up with the neighbors isn’t about what’s parked in your driveway, it’s how many hits your blog gets. Social status is now measured in backlinks, hits and followers. My brother-in-law dealt my ego a devastating blow when he gave me a T-shirt that said “More people have read this T-shirt than my blog.” But I’ll get even. He won’t be getting any link love in this column.

Conversations from Northwest Flight 033

First published May 28, 2009 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

“So, what is it you do?”

Oh, no! It was the question I dread. I froze.

The question was posed by a very nice woman in her mid-50s who was returning to Bellingham, Wash. from a one-month trip to Europe. She was my seatmate on yesterday’s flight back from Amsterdam.

Since I got into search, I’ve hated that question, mainly because I don’t know how to answer it. I’ve tried several times, and it’s never been a terribly satisfying experience.

There was my mom, who was trying to understand what her eldest child did. I believe really, truly, she asked with the best intentions.  But this was before she had a computer and Google was just one of those words you hear that has no frame of reference, like antebellum, Shevardnadze or Hezbollah. You know the word is important to someone, just not you. 30 seconds into my answer, I knew it was hopeless. “I work with computers, Mom, on the Internet.”

“Oh, my friend was talking about that. She’s having problems with her computer. Could you fix it?”

“Sure, Mom.”

Then there was the U.S. customs agent in Sumas, Wash., who asked me the question while I was trying to gain entry into the country to go talk at a Google sales conference.

“So, you work with Google?

“Kind of. I’m not an employee of Google, but our clients use them.”

“To search?”

“No, to advertise.”

“Advertise? Where?”

“On the results page.”

“There are no ads on Google.”

“Well, actually there are.”

The conversation could have gone two ways here. I could have explained the entire monetization of search, or I could have looked for the nearest available exit from the conversation. I opted for the latter. I gained entry into the U.S., but never did convince the agent that Google sold ads.

Just to be clear: I hate the question, not the answer. Search has been extraordinarily generous to me. It’s not a job. It’s not even a chance at a multi-million-dollar buy-out. It’s the passion. It’s a chance to wake up every morning and discover something nobody knew before. It’s knowing that your opinion counts just as much as anyone’s, because we’re all figuring it out and none of us, not even all those Ph.D.s at Google, are experts yet. It’s getting the chance to explore the potential with some of the most exciting companies in the world, around the globe. And it’s the absolute blessing to be able to spend your time doing that and make enough money to provide your family with a good lifestyle. I’m not rich, but I am very happy.

Search allowed me to exceed my dreams. I started off wanting to be Darren Stevens, the ad exec working for the big agency. Sometime in my mid-20s, twenties, I decided I was less of a Darren Stevens and more of a Michael Steadman. If that name’s not familiar, Michael Steadman was Ken Olin’s character on “thirtysomething.” I wanted to be co-owner of the Michael and Elliot Company, a small but dynamic ad agency with a handful of talented and dedicated employees, cranking out great creative for regional advertisers.

Today, my company has over 30 employees and a brand new sales office in San Jose, Calif., and we work with major accounts globally. My opinion is respected in an industry I love. I travel and speak all over the world.  In fact, a research contract with Europe’s biggest telecom and a speaking gig with Google’s U.K. team were what led me to my plane ride back from Amsterdam yesterday. Based on what my life goals were, search allowed me to whiz by them some time ago and there’s still no end in sight.

But still, there was that damned question: “So, what is it you do?” 

Oh, what the hell…

“I’m a search marketer.”

“Mmm. That must be interesting.”

Wow! She got it. She knew what I was talking about. It was just as if I said I was an accountant or a lawyer.

“Yes. It is. Very interesting.”

She went back to her book. Perhaps it was on the Hezbollah, or a biography of Shevardnadze.