Dustin will be speaking about “SEM PR” at Searchfest 2009 which will be held March 10th in Portland, Oregon. Get your tickets now.
1) Please give me your background and tell us what you do for a living.
I’m a veteran in-house SEO professional with a successful track record of dominating search rankings for sites in the food, financial and publishing industries. At Wetpaint, a Seattle-startup at the forefront of social publishing, I oversee SEO & SMO for over a million user-generated websites, plus the official community sites for a number of popular television shows, sports teams, and musicians.
Your readers can catch my work on my SEO blog, twitter (@webconnoissseur), or, hopefully some day, in the theater (read about my movie on IMDB).
2) You wrote a post a while back stating that the “long tail of search” is actually almost the entire tail. How would that bit of knowledge affect SEO Strategy?
The long tail of search article sheds light on how much opportunity search offers, even for very specific, unique queries. Chris Anderson’s long-tail theory has been debated recently in the music industry, but is very much alive for search. (update – What happened to Longtail.com?)
For SEOs, this means there’s an unfathomable amount of opportunity—the trick is finding strategies that attack the tail of search because as a group, they can be more valuable than some of the most coveted terms. For example, at one company I worked for, we had the #1 and #2 position in all engines for a super high volume search query. That term only represented 1-2% of all our search visits. Expanding out to our top 500 keywords, we’re still only looking at about 20% of our search traffic. Over 80% of our traffic was very specific, multi-word queries.
3) How can one measure the ROI of social media content creation?
Measuring the ROI of social media content creation is an imperfect science because a lot of the social activity takes place outside your site, which makes tracking difficult or impossible. The investment part of the equation is easy to track, but the return is not. Sales, subscriptions and traffic are easy to measure, but things like brand recognition, opinion influence and offline referrals are not.
The greatest benefits to a social media campaign are often indirect. A successful piece might attract links, which helps a site’s search engine rankings improve, which leads to more traffic, which leads to more sales. Even a piece that doesn’t gain traction on a site like Digg or StumbleUpon might be a huge hit with your existing audience.
The trick is to stop reading about it and give it a solid try. Then measure to your heart’s content, but remember that sometimes the most valuable activities are tough to measure. Much like thanking your customers after a purchase, it might be tough to measure the impact, but you know it is the right thing to do.
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.