Scott Krager / SERPs.com is sponsoring SearchFest 2013 which will be taking place on February 22, 2013 at the Governor Hotel in Portland, Oregon. For more information or to purchase tickets, please click the following link.
1) Please give us your background and let us know what you do for a living.
I’m the founder of SERPs.com, a SEO software company here in Portland, OR. We build better tools for SEOs to understand what is going on with their websites. Before that I was running my own sites full time, since about 2007. I still have a few sites of my own but my full time focus is now on building the best SEO software possible.
2) What’s your take on the whole “SEO Tools Rankings Report” controversy?
Mostly ‘Meh’. SEOs are constantly dealing with change, this is just another one of those times where you have to adapt to a change in the market. You have to choose which data sources you want to work with and then get back to work.
3) Wouldn’t an SEO better justify their successful efforts by talking about bottom line metrics like leads / sales to clients, as opposed to talking about rankings?
Of course, but it’s not always about what you think is the best metric, it’s about what you can communicate the clearest to a client. And rankings are a very easy to understand metric.
Any data point by itself is mostly worthless. Even leads/sales, whatever. If you just report to a client, “we had 30 leads from organic traffic last week!” but you fail to tell them that the week previous you had 1100 leads…you’re not using the data correctly.
The value of data is in comparisons and combining different metrics to generate insights. Insights are valuable, data by itself is not.
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.