SearchFest 2010 Mini-Interview: Mike Roberts

Mike Roberts will be speaking about “Competitive Intelligence” at SearchFest 2010, which will take place on March 9th at the Governor Hotel in Portland, Oregon. Tickets are available now. To purchase, please click the following link.

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

I am the President and Founder of SpyFu.com.  Prior to launching SpyFu, I founded another software company called Velocityscape.  I learned PPC and SEO in struggle to promote my own product.  When you have a grand total of $3000 in the bank, and you are risking some of that on Adwords, everything has a real visceral feel to it, you know what I mean?  Anyway, it was through that struggle, particularly “trying to figure out which keywords my more established competitors were buying” that I had the idea for SpyFu – which I originally prototyped as GoogSpy.com.

If you are interested in knowing more about my past, there’s a more complete bio here: https://www.spyfu.com/PressRoom/PresidentsPage.aspx

2) Your company offers a pretty overwhelming amount of information…how can a new subscriber work best with the service to pull out actionable items that will help their business?

One of our biggest challenges at SpyFu is information overload.  When you type in a domain, we’re going to show you every keyword that domain buys, ranks on organically, every ad they’ve ever run, and how their search marketing strategy has evolved over time.  That’s a huge amount of information, often millions of keywords.

So, over the last couple years, we’ve focused most of our development on putting the best, most actionable information front and center.  So, no more nasty bloated spreadsheet – I mean, you can still get them if you want, but now when you go look at a SpyFu domain and look at Ad History, we show you what we think are their most profitable keywords right away.  And, by the way, we are amazingly accurate.

Here’s a few places to start on SpyFu:

• Starting a Brand New Campaign – Type your three biggest competitors (or domains that you admire) into SpyFu Kombat.  www.spyfu.com/kombat Click on the area where all three domains overlap.  The resulting list of keywords are not just they keywords that all the domains buy, but it is ordered by what we think are the most profitable ones.
• Writing Ad Variations – Search for one of the keywords you’re writing ads for in Ad History https://www.spyfu.com/AdTermHistory.aspx First, look to see that the keyword isn’t one of the 5 types of losing keywords I talk about in 3rd video on that page.  The domains on this page are sorted in order of most successful to least successful.  A fast way to build some ad variations is to take the title from one domain, line one from another domain, and line 2 from another domain.  You could also choose two of each and plug them into a taguchi generator like https://www.adcomparator.com/
• Looking for Negative Match Keywords – Go back to SpyFu Kombat.  Type in your domain, and two of your competitors.  Click on the area where neither of your competitors are buying, and you are.  Often times, these keywords are the sort of left over residue of broad match keywords – Studio Max (shoes) matches to Autocad 3D Studio Max (software).  This is a great place to look every month for opportunities to make your existing campaign more efficient.
• Which Articles to Write for Content Marketing – Look at your own domain on SpyFu.  Click on the Organic Keywords’ View More button.  This is the list of all the keywords that you show up in the top 50 organic results on Google.  The list is automatically sorted with the keywords with the most opportunity for you on the top.  Let me clarify that last statement.  The keywords on top are the keywords that you already rank on organically, but if were to move up the ranks, you’d get more traffic worth lots of money.  So, the keywords at the top of this list are great candidates to write articles about.

3) How do you view Yahoo / Bing as alternatives to AdWords for advertisers (using all your metrical insights at your disposal)?

I do follow pretty much everything related to Yahoo and Bing, but I don’t have many uniquely powerful insights.  Here’s what I know from my experience.  As an entrepreneur promoting my own products, I’ve had no luck with Yahoo or Bing.  Actually, for that matter, I used to buy ads on Google’s search partner network.  In fact, I hate to admit it, but I’ve wasted at least $10k over the last year on that search partner network (aol, etc.)  My understanding of the phenomenon that Google seems to convert better than other search engines is that other search engines don’t work as well as for B2B stuff as they do for B2C stuff.  There’s a lot of demographic studies that make those things make a lot of sense.  I would expect that trend to continue, or even become more exaggerated with the sole exception of Bing.  Bing, in my opinion will improve its conversion rate on B2B products as time progresses.

The only other insight that I have about YahBing is that more of our customers ask us for insights on Google.com.au or Google.ca than ask for Yahoo or Bing.    I am consistently surprised by that.