Stoney deGeyter is CEO of, and leads a spectacular team of seasoned marketing experts at, Pole Position Marketing. In business since 1998, Stoney has built a successful search marketing business by fusing the brightest minds with a penchant for personal and business integrity. Stoney is the driving force behind Pole Position Marketing’s desire to make his client’s businesses more successful than his own. He strives to ensure that the Pole Position Marketing team works cohesively on each project that the end result meets and exceeds client expectations.
1) Stoney, please give us an overview of your Searchfest Presentation.
I’ll be going through the keyword selection process. Much of the keyword research information and articles out there focus on the tools and/or the stats (competition) of the keywords, but very little focuses on the actual process of how to actually pick and organize keywords effectively. My presentation focuses on the entire process and teaches the audience how to find the right terms, gather the necessary information and then to put the keywords together into groupings so that you can target more keywords per page while maintaining the ability to be effective for both search engines and site visitors (conversions.)
2) How do you respond to clients who feel that “chasing the long tail of search” might interfere with their ability to tightly message their website?
Long tail keywords are such an important part of an effective SEO strategy, just are the short-tail (core) keywords. The great thing about a balanced keyword research approach that I’ll be presenting on is it teaches people how to go after long-tail and short-tail keywords simultaneously. Long tail keywords can get ranked much quicker and start producing quality traffic and sales, but the great thing is that, when implemented properly, they also provide the foundational work that paves the way for the short-tail keywords to perform as well.
3) Please describe the role of web analytics in keyword research.
Much of keyword research is (educated) guesswork. You have to put yourself in the mind of the searcher on any particular query to determine if they really are looking for what you offer. In the research process you can really only try your best to identify the most targeted keywords. Sometimes its easy, but other times we think its easy but it’s not because there are dozens of other potential meanings (or desired outcomes) from a specific keyword search. It’s not until you start driving traffic to your site via any group of keywords that you are able to determine if they really do deliver targeted traffic that gets conversions. Analyzing your web stats can really help you focus your optimization efforts on the keywords that produce conversions rather than just raw traffic.
Todd Mintz knows PPC…knows Social Media…knows SEO…knows Blogging…knows Domaining…and knows them all real well. He runs growth marketing for )and is also a Director & Founding Member of SEMpdx: Portland, Oregon’s Search Engine Marketing Association, and he can be found here on Twitter and Facebook.