SEMpdx Searchfest 08 Mini-Interview: Colleen Wright (Response Interactive)

Colleen will give the SEM Crash Course at Searchfest which will take place on March 10th, 2008 at the Portland Zoo. Purchase your Searchfest 08 tickets now.

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

I am a Pacific Northwest native. I was born in a back alley of the rough streets of Vancouver Washington . (Not really but I’ve always wanted to say that, It makes me sound tough and mysterious) I really was born in Vancouver , but in the hospital like 99% of the rest of the population. I live in the Bull Mountain area of Tigard and teach Search Engine Marketing classes in Beaverton . I am a Master Recycler and do what I can to spread the word regarding a sustainable lifestyle and I love gardening. (It’s hard to be tough and mysterious when you are a gardener and a Master Recycler…Oh Well, my cover’s blown…I’m not really tough and mysterious!)

Back to my less than tough and mysterious background; I am an interactive marketing professional with a career spanning over 15 years. A graduate of Portland State University in Portland, Oregon with a 3.47 GPA, with two Business Administration degrees in marketing and advertising management.

Prior to starting my own business, I worked as a marketer in a variety of industries from banking and finance to seminar marketing, sports marketing (this could be considered tough and mysterious-maybe?), high tech, non-profit and horticulture. I designed my first website in 1997 for a clipart product series I project managed and developed while working at a software company that specialized in Nursery Software. The clip art series named GardenArtz Gardening Clipart continues to be a bestseller in American Nurseryman Catalog.

My biggest design project was as the marketing manager for the Oregon Society of CPA’s (ORCPA). With Saturno Design in Portland , Oregon selected as the website developer, I managed the redesign of the Oregon Society of CPAs website which included a variety of interactive features such as a custom shopping cart, online member directory and an articles library. This redesign increased web traffic exponentially. In my career, I have designed numerous sites ranging in size and complexity.

More recently, I was Marketing Director for a boutique commercial real estate company where I managed the website www.pacificsecuritycapital.com. With guidance from Top Rank Online Marketing in Minneapolis , Minnesota , PSC ‘s search engine rankings were consistently high for very competitive keywords. This is when I really started ramping up my skills in SEO. I left PSC in December 2006 to start my own company Response Interactive LLC.

To solidify my SEO/SEM knowledge I received training in Search Engine Marketing from the Search Engine Academy run by John Alexander and Robin Nobles. Because I am so tough and mysterious, they asked me to become an associate of the Search Engine Academy . Well no, not really…it was because we all felt that we worked well together so I became an associate of Search Engine Academy . I hold the same workshops that Robin and John teach back east and in Canada here locally at the Kingstad Center in Beaverton . These workshops are taught in Oregon under the name Search Engine Academy of Oregon.

I am also on the Education Committee at the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO), a member of SEMpdx and the Online Marketing Director for Portland Female Executives (PDXfX). I attend local and national professional development events such as SMX Advanced and PubCon to maintain my top skills in SEO and SEM ; not to mention the private events held by John Alexander and Robin Nobles for Search Engine Academy associates.

About Response Interactive LLC

Response Interactive LLC is an interactive marketing agency that offers search engine optimized web site design, search engine marketing services both PPC and SEO, online display ad design, development and strategy, email marketing, SEO training and consulting services for small to medium size businesses. For more information, please visit www.responseim.com.

There. That’s not so tough and mysterious, pretty straightforward I think! 😉

2) Why should somebody learn SEM in a classroom setting?

A classroom setting may not be best for everybody, I don’t know, but what I do know is that when I learn in a classroom setting where I am working on stuff that is important to me, I retain what I have been taught way better than following an online tutorial that is teaching me skills on a demo website that means nothing to me.

The Search Engine Academy of Oregon allows students to work hands-on with the tools that will turn them in to successful Search Engine Marketers. We have an arrangement with the folks at Wordtracker that allows students of my classes to have access to the full version or Wordtracker during their training so that they can research keywords that are meaningful to them.

I have students download a copy of the trial version Ranking Manager Pro and let them research how they are doing for keyword phrases that are relevant to them. I walk them through the set up process and show them the reports that are important for making real life decisions regarding their website(s).

In addition, there are many brainstorming sessions that the students absolutely love because they are helping each other with my guidance improve on the websites that they came to learn how to better market.

Does that mean you have to have a website to come to this class? Nope. I have had students come who have recently lost their marketing position in one company come to class to beef up their SEO/SEM skills because they know this is the wave of the future. They didn’t have a website that they were working on, but they loved the class because they felt like they could ask any questions and loved hearing about my real life experiences working with clients.

All you need is a laptop computer and a love of learning to come to my classes and sometimes you don’t even need the laptop…I have one spare that I allow students to borrow on a first come first serve basis.

3) What personal / professional backgrounds best lend themselves to learning succeeding in SEM?

I think you need to have a love for selling things. The best SEO/SEM professionals out their know that the whole purpose of optimizing a website is not just to see who can get the most traffic, but to actually get visitors, once at the website to take action – be it downloading a white paper, purchasing an item, getting directions to a housing development whatever it is that you want that visitor to do, the success is getting them to perform that action.

I think you also need to have a balance between the creative and the analytic sides of your brain. You should be able to tweak a program creatively and be able to analyze the results of the changes you make to continually improve upon your successes. SEO/SEM is a process. You must be willing to analyze your programs and then make changes creatively to achieve continued higher levels of success. That, in my opinion, is the fun part and it’s not so tough or mysterious (like me) if you learn how to do it the right way!