Interview with George Seybold, Seybold Scientific
Thom Stratton: What got you into search engine optimization (SEO) and web analytics?
George Seybold: I’ve been in online marketing for about 15 years. I started out at Hewlett-Packard doing support in their network print server division and started seeing how there were cost savings by applying online tools to help remote resolve technicians in that case.
So that’s what got me started back when the web—well, it wasn’t even graphical back at that point. So then there’s just a whole lot of tinkering and trying to figure things out as I went along. There is no formal education on the subject matter at that time, so through my testing and trials and fun, there was—I took the opportunity to learn search engine optimization and online marketing en masse, not just one piece.
As far as how did I develop the SEO knowledge, it was through test, trial, reading, listening to podcasts and just consuming any piece of information I could get my hands on to understand what works and what’s best. Now today it’s a lot easier because patents are easily findable through Google’s search engine. We can see, actually, when a new patent is being filed by Google or Microsoft or Yahoo, and see what they are…how they are trying to protect their technology. So that leads us to pretty good insight into what their next steps are and what they are thinking about; the categorization of content within their search engine in whole. Does that make sense?
TS: Yes. So, you hear a lot about SEO out there, and it seems like there are a lot of different approaches to the same thing. Some people seem to be trying to outguess what Google does so they can, I guess, “game” the system. Other people try to focus on just making sure that the links that Google is looking at are quality links so that it’ll rate them higher just because it’s a good site. What approach do you take?
GS: First of all, if you game the system you will fail. I go out to Google regularly and talk to these guys. We’ve consulted on projects the last four or five years together. I will tell you that there are very, very smart people at Google, and if you think you can out-game them, out-trick them…there are a very elite number of people that might be able to do that, but most can’t. And I’m not one of those people.
Google does publish within their…on their blog how webmasters need to think about search engine optimization, what are the fundamentals they need to do. There’s no guessing on this matter. It’s not some fuzzy thing. It’s just a process. And that’s the way we think about it.
There are four key things that drive position within the search engines. There’s content. Your content should be singularly focused so that the Google bot, which is just a dumb little piece of code, can understand what the page is about topically. It’s just trying to place it in the right spot.
There is website framework. Although Google, for instance, doesn’t look at META tags for ranking anymore, Yahoo and Microsoft Bing do. So you still have to have those essential framework things in place, like using heading tags. Just like Microsoft Word you use a heading 1, a heading 2, a heading 3 to set up your document construct, right, to call out titles and so forth. Well, the fact is that the document on the web works exactly the same way, and Google weights those variables to say, well, if you put it in the headline then it must be valuable for to set that top.
So you’ve got content, you’ve got website framework. The third piece of this equation is links. Having a million links will not help you if you have a million links from “bad neighborhoods”, which means spammer type sites. On servers where there are a lot of spammer sites, even if it’s a quality site that’s sitting on a server with a bunch of bad neighbors, Google will recognize that.
If they are low-quality links or irrelevant links… For instance, if you are a plumbing company and you have a mechanic company link to you. Thanks to the mechanic company it’s not going to get you any value because it’s not an endorsement. That’s a key word; an endorsement by somebody who is authority in your vertical who will drive the right type of traffic to you. There has to be some relevance there.
So if I had a link from…if I was a marine biologist and had a blog, and I had a link from UC Davis on topics saying “this is the expert” and marine biologist is the word that was linked over to my blog—that’s a lot of credibility that’s being transferred there. Again, just like your professional relationships offline, you have to look at the source that’s referring. That’s links.
Lastly, it’s traffic. If you have good content people will come to it. They will find you, whether you are in social networks, or they search it and seek out through refinement of the search—seek out your content and go there, traffic will drive up your search position.
Those four things: Traffic, links, content, and website framework.
TS: So in that regard is seems almost like a vicious circle for some people. They can’t get the traffic because they aren’t doing the other stuff right.
GS: That’s exactly right.
TS: That’s where people like you come in, for instance, with the first three.
GS: Exactly right. You have to be present… Search engines and social networks are becoming very close in the way you have to think about them. The reality is that if you are inserting yourself into conversations where your customers already are, or where people who are interested in your subject matter already are, then you will get the traffic. If you just throw it out on the web and expect people to find it you will be unsuccessful in getting your position on search engines.
TS: So, what sort of businesses need you? It seems like a lot of people have a web page just in case somebody ever cares to look. Like your doctor maybe has a web page that…would you ever need to go there, as opposed to companies that may rely more on their websites. So who is your ideal client?
GS: Well, there’s two different questions there. “Ideal client” is different than “Who needs me”. It’s really a thought process more than anything. If you look at marketing online as the acquisition of new customers you need me. If you look at your website as supporting existing customers, and they know your name, you probably don’t need me. If you are a traditional company like, say, Wal-Mart, for instance, it does not need SEO because their customers, for one, know their brand through all their marketing; see their stores everywhere. They don’t need SEO because someone will know there branding and type it right in.
If you’re entering into a new market segment, take for instance a client of ours is an Indian firm that wants to reach into the airline industry in the US. They’re not known in that space. They develop their revenue recapture; develop efficiencies and that type of thing in the airline vertical. But they’re not known at all, so they have to get found underneath terms that airlines executives would search in order to go find their type of offering. They need us in that case.
Then the “ideal client” question, I don’t know if that’s really relevant there, but that’s how… when somebody should select an SEO company is based upon that criteria.
TS: Now I noticed on your website you are Google Certified. What does that mean in this context?
GS: In SEO, nothing. “Google Certified” simply represents that we have taken the tests and passed financial qualification to be able to support companies that want to do Google Adword advertisement. That being said, there’s a lot of cross-over and thought methodology that goes on there. The relationship that we maintain with Google, which is a person to person type of relationship, allows us to talk around ideas with them. They’re very guarded when it comes to kind of a church and state relationship between natural and paid search, but things cross over sometimes.
TS: I’ve heard people say that Google will actually punish people that do try and game the system.
GS: That’s exactly right. They’ll punish you—they’ll blacklist you, and literally you have to file an appeal with them and say “please include me again”. It’s called “sandboxing”, is what that is called. There are nefarious ways to game the system that are being— Some of the older ways were to put white text on a white background. You can’t see it, but it’s visible to the search engines. Well, Google saw through that. Some of the ways now that Google is trying to reconcile against right now are hiding text behind images with a layer. That’s still visible text, it’s not white on white, but it’s hidden behind a graphic, therefore it’s…Google is trying to develop ways, and Microsoft is trying to develop ways, to help weed out those types of activities presently.
TS: Now another method I’ve heard about, and actually been involved in a little bit for some people, is using various content sites out there like EzineArticles, Squidoo, to go out and actually just publish articles that happen to link to the site that’s hoping to get the bump. How does Google look on those?
GS: That’s a valid way of getting links. Here in about a week or so Google will be launching a significant change to the way that they index websites…well, return results of the websites within their search engine. That change is weighted heavily towards your social network type of engagements, and that’s why I’m saying they’re growing together, if you will.
So, for instance, if you got Squidoo or Hub Pages and created a profile, write some articles up there…if you take a digital press release and submit it out of a PR newswire and you get picked up by forty publications across the country—whatever, the world—and they all link back to you, all those things are valuable in developing those links. And I think again, it’s the good neighborhood thing. If a…I don’t know any publications that are unethical…whatever, say an unethical publication out there picks you up and publishes you, it’s not going to be weighted as heavily as if the New York Times picks you up and links back to you. So those are quality ways of doing it. But the social networks are going to be getting a big…or people who participate in publishing to the social networks and e-zine sites are going to get a bump here shortly.
TS: I’ve noticed that in publishing some of these there is a difference between, like, EzineArticles and Squidoo, because Ezine is actually…they actually review their content before they approve, and they’re sticklers about what they will and will not allow in their articles, whereas Squidoo looked like…
GS: Free-for-all…
TS: It’s pretty much a free-for-all, so one might become more of a good neighborhood, as opposed to a bad neighborhood in the latter.
GS: Right. Take for instance—here’s a little known fact—Delicious.com is a very popular social bookmarking site. There is a competitor to them, which is StumbleUpon.com. Now, StumbleUpon…I forget the percentage, but it’s greater than fifty percent of the people who actually use and post items into StumbleUpon are in the United States. In Delicions, greater than seventy percent of the people who use and post content into Delicious are in India, Pakistan, and China.
What that says that there are a lot of SEO companies over in that area that do things for bargain-basement prices. They use those tools to create links back to content for US companies. But nobody’s reading it in the US. Or fewer people are reading it in the US. So if you…Google will recognize that. Now, will they modify the way that their algorithm weights that site compared to StumbleUpon? Maybe, maybe not. But they have…they’re aware of the activities that occur and how that traffic comes in, too. If they look at the traffic and mostly coming from Pakistan, India, and China, they’re going to weight that and say this is people using the system to position their clients, because it’s English language. When you’re in China and you’re posting in the English language…there’s going to be a question mark.
TS: I guess that gets us into the next area of web analytics. What do you offer there, and how can you help customers?
GS: Because we’re Google-centrics we use Google Analytics. It’s the best free solution that’s out there in the marketplace. Microsoft is aggressively moving a package into play, and it’s quite impressive, so we’ll see how that changes the game as well. There are a number of other of types solutions…Hit Box…you know, the different products that are out there. Omniture, and so forth.
I look at clients, saying I need to get a report in front of an executive who is not a technical executive, who just needs to understand the broad numbers of things so they can make a decision on what their next move is: Do I need to invest here, do I need to…whatever. How are people finding me, so forth. And these platforms allow you to get that executive level view, and drill in to a degree if you need to.
When you get to a Hit Box type of solution you’re getting a very verbose data set and break-out there. It’s great for a webmaster, for lack of a better term, or a man of very analytical business {inaudible}. But quite honestly, if they’re spending much time on that, they’re missing the boat, because they should try spending the majority time on financial analysis, not on web analysis, unless they’re just a web business.
TS: I recently started using Google Analytics on a project that I’m working on, but I’ve been using Site Meter previously and, yeah, there’s just no comparison the type of data you get back from each.
GS: It’s night and day, isn’t it? And then to be able to use year-over-year trend analysis, seeing where my customers’ buying cycles are, see where my traffic is coming in this year from last year, where do I need to place my advertisements…all those different questions can happen with Google Analytics. With Site Meter you’re very limited…or WebStat, or…I don’t know, there are a number of different web stats programs out there.
TS: So, are there ways to construct websites that would make that information more useful than with others? Is that something your company helps with?
GS: Yes, there is. It’s a client by client thing. We always look at paths; paths through a site. What is the expected path of someone traversing through your website to reach the goal? One good thing about Google Analytics is that you have the ability to specify goals and those paths through there.
Well, if you are a business that expects someone to come to the “Contact Us” page, don’t put your 800 number on your home page. It’s going to look like a bunch of people hit your home page and bounced away and never did anything. Your phone may be ringing off the hook, but your website is certainly not paying for itself because you can’t validate that. So just little things—well, there’s a lot of things, but that’s a simple example. Get your phone number off the home page. Make it easily accessible, but get it off your home page.
TS: What types of people would you normally have in an organization like this? Are they more like programmer/developer types, or what sort of mixture do you have?
GS: At first glance my company looks like an agency. It’s almost counter to an agency, however. We have a mixture of business people…MBAs and those type of folks who are very business-centric so we can understand specific verticals and what the business challenges are driving products to market. We have analyst type people who will take and crunch data and draw conclusions from a massive amount of data, and then we’ll have developers. That type of person is a very unique thing. It’s nice that they can code and that they can build stuff, but that is rapidly becoming a commodity. The type of developers we look for are those who are very hungry to go out there and understand new technology—dig into stuff and work with an analyst hand in hand and actually be able to figure out how things are connected and why, and what’s the future state of that. How might they mature beyond where they are.
We look at things that are very off the radar, like TweetNot.com or…these sites are so off the radar, but they are the ones that drive the progression of how things…of how a Twitter might mature, or that type of thing. We look for people who will look and say Facebook is not being indexed by Google because of privacy concerns. But look today; if you search within Facebook for somebody you actually get a results set from Microsoft Bing below the names results. So what does that mean, is Microsoft going to be the only one who is going to be able to index Facebook? And what is the result of that indexation, and that result set. How is that going to change Google’s game? That developer is responsible for helping understand how those interconnections will happen with an analyst.
TS: Where do you see your particular industry going? What sort of things are on your horizon that you’re starting to be excited about or worried about?
GS: Never worried, always excited. Technology changes so fast you have to stay aggressive and keep after it, so that’s going to be our burden and our blessing forever, I guess. The opportunity that it creates, though, is that we will see a merge of search and social marketing. Online marketing is growing at an exponential rate as far as revenue and use and understanding. Especially inside of enterprise customers, our companies have never…they don’t understand it. They don’t get it. And so there’s huge amount of opportunity out there.
We see a significant growth in the consumer market in China and India in the next ten years, so those companies are going to begin consuming the products we produce and their contemporaries produce, whereas right now we are mostly helping those companies… My company largely helps companies in countries overseas reach American markets presently. So we will see a reversal of that in ten years where we are marketing products into those developing or developed countries. So we’re aggressively getting that foothold now to be positioned for that marketplace as it arrives.
TS: You said early on that there wasn’t a lot of training available for this particular field. Has that changed? Is there more out there formally today?
GS: Formally, no. I wouldn’t say so. I’d say there are…if a person wants to dig in and learn it go to conferences. There are a lot of smart people who go there. Look for the people who are listening more than talking. The people who are talking at these conferences, they’ll share some good knowledge. But the people who are sitting in the back of the room taking notes are the people who are preparing themselves for what’s coming. They’re the real deal.
So conferences are great. Ask peers in this community. The sharing in this community is a big deal. That’s why I’ll talk so freely and openly about how SEO works—anything in online marketing work. The reality is that it’s a lot of work to get to do this type of work. Most companies can’t stomach that effort. But ask your peers, they’ll tell you where the resources are. Google will tell you exactly to how to get into Google. Microsoft will tell you exactly how to get into Bing. They don’t want you to game their system. That wastes their cycles trying to fend off the people who are gaming their system.
TS: I’ve noticed the government is starting to become a lot more aware of social media and blogging and so forth, for good or for bad. I know the FCC has been considering making some changes or some sort of regulation on blogs and commenters, and so forth, to make sure that people are who they say they are so they don’t have people working for a company going in and making comments on Amazon.com in favor of that company. How do you feel about that? Is that going to impact you at all?
GS: It won’t because…even if it passes it can’t be enforced. I can bring up a website on an offshore server, on multiple offshore servers. The US can’t touch them. And it can bounce back and forth. It’s just like the RIAA did with the music industry trying to track peer-to-peer sharing for LiveWire, and a number of different sites—Pirate Bay is one of them, for instance. They’d say to shut down this peer-to-peer sharing site. Well, they just couldn’t get after them, because as soon as they caught—as soon as they worked with Interpol to catch one location they’d drop the servers and brought the sites up on a different box in a different country. So it’s just not enforceable. And if they did do that I think that most of web companies would move off shore and not comply with American laws. I know I would, because I believe that anonymity is one of the best things the web offers.
TS: We saw that a lot recently in Iran where the government tried to clamp down on everything, but they couldn’t quite ever get it done. For one thing, there are lots of…I don’t know if you want to call them rebels or anarchists or whatever elsewhere in the world. There are some people I know of here in America that said “hey, let’s help these guys out” and started to set up systems here to help them get around the government systems there.
GS: Exactly. That is an excellent example of why you can’t control that. It’s just a…it’s just impossible at this point. I love that example.
TS: At the same time I can certainly see the point that there is a need for, I guess, if they can’t police it through government, for people to police themselves so that it doesn’t become total anarchy, that you can somewhat rely on what you’re seeing out there, and not have to sit there, “okay, is this somebody who is just trying to lie to boost their company, or what?” I don’t know how you do that other than self-policing, really.
GS: Well, you do it through the sites like the New York Times, for instance. You know when it’s posted by by someone within the New York Times, and you see the comments down below and you know those are people who are not with the New York Times. The consumer has the responsibility to parse through what is, in their estimation, what is the reliable source and what is not.
TS: Yes, in some ways it’s kind of funny, because we’ve had to deal with that for years anyway, just on TV. If someone shows us an ad we have to say, “Okay, what is their motivation here? Can we really trust what they’re telling us?” And yet suddenly they expect a commenter on Amazon.com to be 100% legit. I suppose if that really does become a problem for Amazon they might go so far as to provide some mini-analytics on their own so you can say “Who is this person?” and click on it and see, gee, oddly enough they only seem to comment on these products. That might mean something.
GS: That might mean something. And that becomes the responsibility, though, of Amazon, not the government.
TS: It always makes me a little nervous—nervous or amused, I’m not sure which, when the government tries to get involved in stuff like that, because really, all they’re ever going to hurt are the honest people anyway.
GS: It’s just like when they try to put a cost on sending email. They want to put a couple of cents on each one of those emails. Good luck with that, because I will move my email server off shore, and you’re not going to tax me. You can call it the wild, wild west where I’ll soon learn to play within the construct of what’s already there. The government just…sometimes somebody doesn’t understand that the tubes don’t get clogged by… they have to talk to people who understand the technology to be able to understand the business value of not putting in place legislation that would hamper commerce, essentially.
TS: I guess to get a little farther afield maybe, to somewhat shoot the breeze a little bit here, I’ve noticed that since I got onto Twitter that probably 50-70% of the people who come in wanting to follow me are people who want to teach me how to make money on Twitter. In your estimation, how much of that is actually legit?
GS: I would say close to zero. I’ll tell you the way you can make money off Twitter. If you’re a golf star…if you’re a second—there’s a pro series and a second tier series, but say you’re in the second tier series, and you’re trying to become pro and you’re doing all the right things. If you go into Twitter and get 30,000 followers and people actually pay attention to what you’re doing because you’re sending out good golf advice. Then you negotiation your contract when you go pro, and you say “I can bring in 30,000 people that are going to watch me play along with me”, now you’re making money off Twitter. Your audience, the value of your audience, is what the value of Twitter is. But sending tweets to spam and to market to people—that’s not the value of Twitter.
Ford, a client of ours, looks at Twitter and says if they monitor it and they see if there’s a complaint out there. If there is a complaint on Ford, they get on immediately and they’re actively monitoring and reconcile what the problem was and put a solution in place if possible. Now, is there a monetary value to that? Absolutely. There’s a lot of spammers out there who are trying to do the flash-in-the-pan stuff, so that’s why I said “close to zero.”
TS: It’s like just on the way over here I drove past someone’s cheap little sign stuck on the side of the road: “If you want to make $9,000 a month I’ll show you how.” Well, if you’re making $9000 a month on whatever plan it is, why are you even bothering to advertise for anybody else?
GS: Yes, it’s ridiculous. I mean, in your industry as a reporter or whatever you would like to call that, the fact is that the more people who are following you the more valuable your content is, because then you can get syndication. That’s how you make money off of Twitter. But you have to think of how do I operationalize my audience.
Here’s a good little thing you might not know. Facebook is valued at $6.5 billion. The 300 million people who are active on Facebook today…now that puts you roughly around—and I’m not good at math in my head—but roughly around $20-25 a head for the valuation. Yet Facebook still only made between $200 and $400 million dollars last year, but they’re valued at $6.5 billion. So you look at it, and you say, well it’s the value of their audience is what holds their valuation path, not their revenue. The only only people making money off social media are the ones who are using it to compel or drive their core business in the first place.
And that’s where we’re concerned. For example, I popped onto Twitter at 7:30 a few months back, and I had a little search set up for “search engine optimization”, of course. I saw that this lady typed in there, “Hey I got the website done, now we need somebody for search engine optimization.” Well, there’s a green light for me. I’m going to go get it. Well, as it turns out, this lady works for British Petroleum in Kirkuk, Iraq, and they had just finished a website for how they’re delivering oil out of Iraq in a green way, and they wanted to be able to search engine optimize that. But that’s a rare thing. Most people aren’t going to go out there and say “Well, I need a new car. Wish I had a new car dealer.” That’s not the right methods.
TS: It is interesting, because Twitter does seem to represent a giant, conglomerate brain you can tap into and see what people are thinking at any given time, but sometimes just trying to sort it and get something meaningful out of it can be the trick. But yes, it is becoming rapidly—you can get everything from people who are specifically using it for very detailed business purposes to people who are saying “Well, gee, I wish I had…” and throwing it out there.
GS: It’s called Crowd-sourcing, so you can source that crowd and get some good information out of it. There’s a guy who just wrote a book…I forget the name of it. He’s out of Toronto, I believe it is. It’s “The World According to Twitter.” And he asked questions every night. For a year he did this, and he’d get a bunch of responses. One of them was “What does the acronym TSA stand for?” And he got all kinds of funny answers, you know, back from people just being clever: “Tub-Stacking Association”. But he takes all this content and collects it, and writes it and publishes it into a book. Is he making money off Twitter? Absolutely. Is he crowd-sourcing? Absolutely. Enjoying the, you know…figuring out how to look at the angles to turn it into something that works for you.
TS: Yes, that’s the trick.
GS: Yes, that is the trick. And different demographics. I guess that’s another thing to touch on there, too. Twitter is very different from Facebook in the type of people that are on.
TS: Is there anything you would like me to know, that you think that people in general might need to know about you, or in general?
GS: You know, just in general I guess, is just that when it comes search engine or online marketing—especially search engines—there’s so much slight-of-hand out there in the marketplace. There are website developers that say “Yes, we do search engine optimization”. Maybe they put in the framework for search engine optimization, but they don’t do all the other stuff. So really ask the questions. Don’t just trust—don’t trust me. I mean you can trust me, but don’t just trust me, go to people—professional companies that do SEO and ask them how they think about it, and then go to your local web guy that you want to hire, that you want to develop a relationship with, and ask them how they think about it and how they do it.
And then check them, because I see… You know, when we came into this market, and we came out just doing SEO in this marketplace. Boy, every web company that you could see within a hundred miles all of a sudden started selling SEO, too. There’s no way they have competency to do it and the resources and staff to do it. So just check, don’t just assume because they say they can do something that they do. And they can ask me to verify. I do that all that all the time. I have clients—a certain interior design company called me up the day before yesterday and said, “Hey George, they said they did SEO. We’re not seeing ourselves pushed up in the search engines at all. Can you see that they did?” It was so blatantly apparent that they didn’t even do anything in the website framework for SEO. There’s no links, and yada yada yada. So they paid $1200 for SEO and they got zero out of it.
TS: In your opinion, then, what should people be looking for?
GS: I think that it’s a…there’s a lot of technical things to look for. Look for your links, for your position—those types of things in the search engines. But the main thing is to look for… We’ve put a little bit weight in the Better Business Bureau, for instance. We’re an A+ accredited company. We were a member of the Chamber of Commerce. You know that we don’t work out of our garage. We are a true, real company, and so when you’re buying something from someone think about their presentation and understand who they are in the business community, and ask yourself if these are people that I can trust. Don’t just take their word for it that they’re people you can trust. I think that’s the biggest point of failure. And not all web guys work in their garage.
