Hello, welcome back to our second interview. I'm here with Mr. Steve Kinney. Steve is CEO and founder of Search Optimizers. Thank you for joining us, Steve. All right. Thank you, Tim. Nice to have you here. What is the process you and your team go through to provide an effective search engine optimization strategy for your clients? Yes. Actually the first thing that we do is an in-depth research process. What I mean by that is you have to determine the keyword themes that you want to start with. There are oftentimes thousands, tens of thousands, potentially hundreds of thousands of phrases that people are searching on everyday that relate to your products and services. The problem though is that you have to target the themes that you're likely to get ranked high for and that are going to drive the most value if those people come to your website. Then in terms of the measurement of your activities, what metrics do you use to measure the effectiveness of your strategies for your clients? Actually it's going to start out. There's several things that we're going to measure over time. But the first thing that you want to measure are rankings. The first thing we're going do is we're going to take a baseline of what are all the things that your site is ranked for to begin with. Over time, we're going to watch those rankings increase as we start to target these themes. As the ranking start to come up, the next thing we're going to start to see is traffic. We're going to measure the quantity of traffic and we'll use Google Analytics or some other tool like that to measure the quantity. The third thing is once you have the rankings coming up, the quantity of traffic, we're going to start measuring the quality of that traffic. We're going to look at things like time on site, conversions, things like that. Once we have those three things all working, then we're going to start to measure the leads. The leads that come in sometimes are measured on the website, sometimes they're measured by the phone or whatever mechanism that people are first contacting that company, and then finally, the fifth thing that we're going to measure are the sales. The key thing is in the beginning, we're just measuring the first thing. Because you're not going to see the sales move at first, but you're going to want to see the rankings. But once we work our way up and the campaign is really working 6-9-12 months into it, you'll see all five of those working really well. When do you recommend companies implement an SEO strategy in their whole development marketing campaigns and marketing strategy? Oftentimes we'll have a company that says, ''Oh, well, we want to get the website perfect before we start this.'' That's really a mistake because you're never going to have your website perfect. Potentially hundreds or thousands of people searching every day on phrases that relate to your products and services, you will never get a chance to get back those visitors or those searchers from today. The sooner the better. Building on that, when do you expect or what do you tell your clients in terms of when should they expect to start to see some positive response to the SEO efforts once you begin the strategy? That's where I think a lot of people have gotten sold a bill of goods with SEO companies that don't really deliver. They tell them to wait and in 6-9 months the magic will happen. The problem is that they get 6-9 months and they've spent that money and there's no way to get that money back. We say that you should start to see those rankings changing within the first few weeks or first month. That might not lead to the sales that pay for the campaign, but you want to start seeing those rankings start to move. Then once those rankings start to move, it's not enough to just be ranked for those phrases. If people aren't clicking through to your website, there's no value in that. Within a week or two of starting to see the rankings go up, we should start to see the traffic and so on. The net is you should start measuring within weeks, not months or years. Along those lines, what are some of the common mistakes that your clients encounter in terms of developing and implementing an SEO strategy, either with you or hopefully before you come on site? What kind of errors are they having? What kind of mistakes are they making before they contact you? It's a really a common thing. In fact, I ask this question anytime I'm in front of an audience, if I'm speaking at a conference, in front of a class, how many people here have done an SEO campaign by raise of hands? How many people here have had a bad experience for running an SEO campaign? Oftentimes it's a good percentage of people that have at least have one or more bad experiences. I would say the most common thing is they're not doing that upfront research. You can ask a business owner, what do you think you should be ranked high for? Any business owner can tell you a six or 10 or 12 phrases that they should be ranked high for. But that doesn't tell you whether those are the right places to start. You don't have the search engine credibility to get there anytime soon, and you're going to be wasting your effort going after those themes right away. Other times those sound like good themes, but people aren't really searching on those, in which case you get ranked high, but it doesn't really drive the business. For me, I'd say the most common thing is they don't do that in-depth research, look across thousands of phrases, boil those down into key themes, then from those themes, do the competitive analysis to figure out, can you get there quickly? At first, you might start with a certain set of themes that start to bring traffic and bring visitors. That will increase your search engine credibility, then you'll be able to use that increase search engine credibility to target better themes. I'm hearing the importance of planning upfront as well as a reoccurring theme of themes actually. Yes, absolutely. It's measurement. Everything should be measured. You don't want to just at first be measuring rankings and then don't pay attention to rankings because now you're focused on traffic. You're going to want to look at every one of these measures and every little change you make, did it get better or did it get worse? Continue to learn and iteratively refine whatever you do. Great. A final question to wrap up, what suggestions would you have for companies or for your clients to vet out SEO companies like yours? It's such a common thing. When I ask that question on stage, how many people have had a bad experience? Usually I'll go around the room and ask for a couple of examples of what the bad experience was. What it comes down to is they were being sold an activity. This SEO company does this activity and that activity, and they don't ask questions around accomplishment. What I say when vetting out a company is you don't care how many times they blog post or what the activities they're doing, you want to know the accomplishments. Ask them, ''Show me reports of an example company that you're currently working with. What are the themes you're targeting? What are the phrases you're in tied for? What's the traffic? What's that Delta been over time?'' Then call that company and ask them, ''What net result will this have to your sales?'' You're going to have these companies that are only selling you a bill of goods. They won't be able to provide answers for it, and they'll stop calling you, which is exactly what you want. The companies that really can do results are more than happy to share what actually happened, and their clients are more than happy to share with you what their experience was. Outstanding. Steve, thank you very much for your time. Thank you. Steve Kinney, Search Engine Optimization, founder and CEO. Thanks very much. Thanks, Tim.
