This week Ben Wills from Ontolo has taken time out to be interviewed. Ben’s responses are honest, frank and human. For all the efforts we endeavour in branding, when you tell it the way it is, there’s no truer testament than understanding the face behind the name.

Thanks again Ben.

1. Can you describe Ontolo as if I knew nothing about it?
   Ontolo is the only link building tool on the market that allows you to fully customize your link prospecting. Instead of chasing competitor backlinks, with Ontolo you define specific topics and link types for us to research and find for you. If you want to find guest posting opportunities for an article about Italian cooking, we quickly find you exactly those opportunities.
   On top of that, we’re the only SEO tool in the industry that builds your link prospect database in a way that’s fully searchable, not only on the content of each link prospect like you can search with Google, but across over 50 other data points from SEOmoz and more. In the end, we help you to quickly discover relevant and valuable backlinks for your link building campaigns.
2. What was your inspiration for creating Ontolo?
   Honestly, the impetus was boredom. I had been in the SEO industry for about seven years and felt unchallenged. I had the fortune of working with Andy Beal and many other great marketers at an SEO company in the early 2000s that had over 1,400 clients at one time. My responsibility was to design the SEO services, their execution and direct the teams that worked with our clients.
   So, since I’ve been involved in SEO, discovering both a customizable and scalable solution had been in my mind. When I was looking for what to do next in that summer of 2008 and saw that no one had yet solved the link building problem in this way, I began working on what would become Ontolo.
3. Since the commencement of your SaaS product, what have been the highs and lows for Ontolo?
   When you’re bootstrapped, the lows come a little more easily, especially in the beginning. ;) In terms of management, working with someone who you’re paying more than twice what you are and over-drafting your bank account, but they’re still unhappy with their compensation, that can be tough. But as the owner, you deal with that yourself and move on. In terms of the product, I’m sometimes challenged by having a clear vision of how the product can produce great results for our customers, but it takes time and resources and new technology to make that vision a reality.
   On the flip side, getting to see this vision you’ve had for years turn into a reality is an incredible moment of which we’ve had many. Bringing on Andy Davidoff in 2010 has been amazing. He rewrote all of the code I’d written over the previous two years in less than a week and a half and, suddenly, this thing was real. I can’t begin to explain what a wonderful moment that was. In terms of marketing, being Rand Fishkin’s first recommendation about a year ago for SEO tools to check out was an amazing rush, both in terms of how it all happened, then the amount of visibility we got as a result of that.
4. Which top 3 features of Ontolo would you say outshine the competition?
   As I mentioned above, I’d say the two obvious features are the ability to fully-customize your
   1. link prospecting is the first.
   2. The second, I would say is the ability to search on the full text of your link prospects along with dozens of SEOmoz data points, PageRank scores, outbound link data, etc. The result is that our users are finding relevant and valuable link prospects really quickly.
   3. The third, and this is a new one for us that’s in the release of the UI/UX coming out/that came out in November 2011, is how we’ve organized our marketing tools around the marketing process. We looked around – and the previous disorganization of our own tools was the catalyst for this – and saw that no one else was organizing their tools around the process. The result is that users have this set of tools that they don’t understand how to fit into their day-to-day. We’re making that much easier for users to say “Oh, it’s time for prospecting,” and they go straight to all of the tools that do that rather than having to memorize what tool does what.
5. Do you have time to read the SEO blogs while developing Ontolo, if so, which blogs/twitter accounts do you follow?
   I almost solely use HootSuite and actually rely on my Twitter stream for news. I’ve made it a point to curate a few private lists that usually keep me really well updated. Then, I quickly check those lists via HootSuite a few times throughout the day.
6. There is a broad range of techniques within the SEO industry, how do you think Ontolo manages to facilitate this?
   I have a confession to make: I’m in love with how well Raven Tools facilitates so many online marketing process. If we could do that in our own way (we have slightly different ways we aim to provide value to our customers, both complimentary), it would be amazing.
   For now, we’ve chosen to focus on solving a small handful of specific problems. Bringing relevance/linguistics into link building (as opposed to simply quantitative measurements like PageRank, etc) like we have is a much more complicated process than it might sound like. Which leads into the next question…
7. Without giving too much away, what juicy features are on your roadmap for the next 12 months?
   We made a big bet on bringing relevance and linguistics to link building. In the beginning, the technology and technique seemed like overkill to many folks.
   In the next 12 months, we’re looking to bring even more advanced linguistics technology to the content marketing and social media marketing space. I look around and see rudimentary linguistic analysis applied here and there, especially social media marketing, and just think to myself “I *know* that can be done more effectively.”
   Relevance and value. It’s quite simple, really, and incredibly powerful. It’s the bet that Google made, it’s the bet that Facebook made, and it’s the bet that we’re making in the marketing tools space with Ontolo.
8. What third party tools do you wish you could implement but don’t currently have an API?
   Until I found out about AlchemyAPI yesterday, I’d have said an API to perform many of the functions they provide. Other than that, combined with web-scraping, I can’t think of information we would want, but don’t have access to. (Obviously, I’d love Google’s raw search and link data, but that’s just not going to happen.)
9. Who inspires you in life and how is this transposed into your work life?
   I’m sure this one has been said a million times and is completely cliché, but when Steve Jobs passed, it ended up affecting me much more than I would have imagined.
   Aside from Jobs:
   The business philosophy of Toby Hecht at the Aji Network. Some ideas in his ontological design are where I came up with the name Ontolo. I’ve also listened to his lectures across over 500 hours over the past few years. I’m not enrolled in any of his programs, but hope to when I’m ready.
   The management philosophy of Ricardo Semler at Semco. Right now, Ontolo is just two of us. I live in Boulder and Andy lives in Austin. We work when we want, from where we want (I traveled more than six months this year) and we don’t expect to change that any time soon, no matter how large we grow. 37 Signals has a similar philosophy: “work doesn’t happen at work.”
   The personal development work of Eben Pagan, both as himself and David DeAngelo. The pickup artist community, understandably, gets a bad rep. But if you’ve ever listened to any of Eben’s work with a bit of sincerity, you might have been surprised at some of the deeper conversations being had. And, as he’s transitioned completely into business and marketing programs, I’ve continued to keep up.
10. What conferences are you attending over the next 12 months?
    You know, we’ve not really been big in the conference scene as we’ve been focusing on the product and getting it to where we think it can and should be. Now that we’ve come to where we are, I expect to be at many more in 2012.

Thanks again Ben.

Ben Wills has been an SEO and link builder for over 10 years, directing the efforts of more than 1,000 clients. In 2008, he started Ontolo, a suite of web-based link building tools that helps you quickly find more relevant and valuable backlinks.

To recap, over the past few weeks I’ve interviewed:

• Analytics SEO (Laurence O’Toole) 
• BuzzStream (Paul May)
• Raven Tools (Jon Henshaw)

1. Can you describe SEOmoz Pro as if I knew nothing about it?
   SEOmoz Pro is an online marketing analytics app that helps you improve your website. Currently, most of our tools have an SEO focus, but we’re quickly expanding that to the greater inbound marketing needs of websites such as social. We target online marketers, but do offer agency and enterprise versions of our app. Our tools range from analyzing your website for common crawl errors and warnings that you can fix to tracking keywords to checking out the backlinks profiles for you and your competitors. We also have a big emphasis on education, and in addition to our free resources such as our blog and the Beginner’s SEO Guide, we also offer PRO members training and have a strong PRO Q&A forum where PRO members can answer each other’s questions or have staff answer them.
2. What was your inspiration for creating SEOmoz Pro?
   We started building our current PRO tools when we were an SEO agency. We used them for our own clients and organically evolved into offering these tools to others. Soon we realized that our tools were our mission and now focus on that full-time. We love helping people make their websites even better.
3. Since the commencement of your SaaS product, what have been the highs and lows for SEOmoz Pro?
   Because we are such a community-driven company, the lows are definitely the days when there’s an outage or a tool isn’t working. Our PRO members are so passionate about our tools, and we realize that so many people rely on on our tools for their reporting and work that we’re even more motivated to make sure everything’s working optimally and growing in awesomeness. In the same vein, the highs are when we have people tell us that our tools and resources are invaluable to their work. Whether they tell us how we’ve changed their entire business or just helped them with a very specific problem.
4. Which top 3 features of SEOmoz Pro would you say outshine the competition?
   Our Top 3 features are: Open Site Explorer (OSE), Web App, and MozBar.
   1. OSE is a tool used for link research and analysis. Using it, you can dig deeper and compare the quality and quantity of backlinks on your site and your competitors. OSE is a tool we built from the ground up, and we stand behind the accuracy of its data.
   2. Our Web App is really the heart and soul of SEOmoz PRO. In it, you can set up campaigns for each of your websites, track them, and get feedback on how they are performing. One of the best features inside of our Web App is the Weekly Site Audit, which informs you of crawl and errors and warnings that could be either problems on your site or causing problems with site indexing on search engines. The audit not only points out errors, but also gives suggestions on how hard or easy they are to fix, how bad the error is, and links to our educational resources to help you repair it. Another wonderful feature is our On-Page Optimization tool, which analyses your target keywords and the pages you want to rank for that keyword. It gives a grade (A-F) and informs you both what you did correctly and what needs improvement. Then On-Page Optimization tool continues to track that term and page so after you’ve made adjustments, you can see your changes making a difference.
      
   3. And last, but not least, the MozBar is a Firefox and Chrome add-on that allows you access SEO metrics as you surf the web. You can do things like comparing link metrics for Google, Bing, and Yahoo! with a SERP overlay, expose page elements including link types (follow, no-follow, internal, external) and keywords, and create custom searches by search engine, country, and region/city.
      
5. Do you have time to read the SEO blogs while working with SEOmoz, if so, which blogs/twitter accounts do you follow?
   Blogs on my reading list:
   • Blogstorm: http://www.blogstorm.co.uk/
   • Google’s Inside Search: http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/
   • Search Engine Journal: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/
   • Search Engine Land: http://searchengineland.com/
   • Distilled’s blog: http://www.distilled.net/blog/
6. There are a broad range of techniques within the SEO industry, how do you think SEOmoz Pro manages to facilitate this?
   At SEOmoz, we strive to demystify inbound online marketing. Whether you’re trying to improve keyword rankings, gather 1 million Facebook likes, or link build like a fiend, this doesn’t happen because of magic spells or deep secrets hidden on the internet. It comes from both having a great company/product and hard work. That hard work can be complex, but a lot of is implementing simple best practices and SEOmoz is here to help with analysis, education, and advice. With our PRO app and tools, we want anyone in the online marketing world to be able to use them and see clear data on their website with suggestions for improvements and go forward with making their websites more awesome.
7. Without giving too much away, what juicy features are on your roadmap for the next 12 months?
   Besides some tweaks that will make our users happy, we’re launching social tools. We’re starting with tracking your Facebook and Twitter pages and analyzing trends, mentions, and more. Currently, this is in beta, and our PRO members we brought in for their feedback have been loving it. We’re also working on making our reporting features more customizable, especially downloadable reports. And…coming this spring/early summer, we have a big announcement; but right now, our lips are sealed.
8. What third party tools do you wish you could implement but don’t currently have an API?
   We believe in building features ourself to ensure accuracy of reporting. Sure, we do pull some information from PRO member’s Google Analytics and, of course, Twitter and Facebook for those social tools. But overall, we believe that we can provide more reliability and a higher quality of data by building our tools with as few third-party APIs as possible.
9. Who inspires you in life and how is this transposed into your work life?
   Who inspires me most is the Moz community and the greater internet marketing community. The passion to build better and cooler tools comes from a curiosity to make things better or create something new. But without a vibrant and passionate community, that passion dwindles. Without our community, we wouldn’t be anything. *hearts*
10. What conferences are you attending over the next 12 months?
    We’re always on-the-go. We’ll be at SES London, San Francisco, and Chicago. We’ll also be as SMX West 2012 and Advanced here in Seattle. Additionally, we put on an annual convention MozCon in Seattle, which will be in July. Our CEO Rand Fishkin will be speaking at Future of Web Apps, SMX Advanced, Marketing Innovation Forum, O’Reilly Where Conference, and, of course, MozCon. See you on the road!

Thank you Erica. I appreciate your time in replying.

Erica is SEOmoz’s Community Attaché and spends her day fostering and building relationships with SEOmoz’s members, fans, potentials, and haters both online and offline. She has a background in e-commerce, and in her spare time, she runs GeekGirlCon, a nonprofit supporting geeky women.

My personal opinion is that if BuzzStream and Analaytics SEO joined forces, this would push the expectations further for the other SEO Software providers.

Over the coming weeks I shall be sharing interviews I’ve had with the market leaders of SEO software companies and asking them straight questions and I expect to receive great honest replies. If you haven’t been requested by me yet, please drop me an email.

Enjoy.

1. Can you describe Analytics SEO as if I knew nothing about it?
   An online software platform that helps you build a more successful website, increasing site visits and sales conversions by automatically guiding you through an automated search engine optimisation process.
   Analytics SEO is an enterprise level platform and set of SEO APIs designed to offer the most automated SEO solution we know in the marketplace. It can save an agency thousands of hours of billable time and that’s just if they only use it for reporting!
   
   As a result of the software being designed to be easy to use, it has also become a powerful training tool for clients and less experienced SEOs as it breaks the process down and explains the issues, recommendations and results along the way.
2. What was your inspiration for creating Analytics SEO?
   I used to run Thomson Directories online business and in 2002/03 we launched a very successful scalable local PPC platform which helped small businesses get into Adwords very easily.  I had always envisaged rolling out a scalable SEO platform at some point in the future but at the time no one was ready.  It was only years later, when I was running my own SEO agency that I started to think about building my own SEO software platform.
   The issue for SEO agencies, as I’m sure you know very well, is that the more successful you are, the more business you bring in, the more work you have that needs organising.  It is difficult to scale an agency without having systems and processes in place.
   I felt that we were drowning under a sea of spreadsheets; so we looked for a solution that would help us manage our 5 Stage SEO process effectively but we could not find one that met our needs.  There were plenty of SEO tools out there but none that were built with workflow in mind; we needed a process driven suite of tools and processes that could run automatically and that could improve collaboration, communication and coordination across our team and with our clients.  After an exhaustive search, we decided to build our own.
   
   We decided to build the software around a flexible SEO process, presenting all of the data an SEO might need in one place and making it really efficient to both run detailed reports in minutes, whilst enabling businesses to scale as the platform is at its most powerful when managing many websites.
3. Since the commencement of your SaaS product, what have been the highs and lows for Analytics SEO?
   The biggest high has been seeing the team and software evolve at such a rapid pace.  It’s quite fun to compare the software today with our first version in early 2009 – I can’t believe we chose a red and black interface when we first started – what were we thinking!
   We love working with all of our customers and are very driven by their feedback and ideas.   Passing on the economies of scale caused by our strong growth over the last twelve months to our customers in the form of much lower usage based pricing has always been a highlight this year.  We had been perceived by many as premium SEO software, but with the latest changes, the software is now accessible to the masses.
   In terms of the lows….two spring to mind; The first was in Q1 2011 when we unfortunately had 12 hours of outage after the Blue Square internet facility where our hosting company (TSO) are based went down – thousands of sites were affected and although we got back up without suffering any data loss, a few lessons were learned the hard way!  I should just add, to be fair to TSO their service is excellent and I do recommend them.  The second was when we lost a superb developer when his girlfriend moved back to Lithuania!
4. Which top 3 features of Analytics SEO would you say outshine the competition?
   Drilling down to just three is a little tough ;-), but areas I believe we are industry leaders in are:
   1. Service
      We offer a SaaS based solution.  The two keywords in here are software and service.  For us, and our customers, providing great service is just as important as providing great software.  I want us to build a reputation for being friendly, trustworthy and customer focused.
      Our development and support team is almost definitely our biggest USP as a business. We have invested heavily in a 100% UK based technical team with SEOs and developers who have worked with organisations including IBM and many other major brands.
      You are able to call or email our technical team any time during office hours and get a swift response. We genuinely work closely with all of our customers and take a great deal of pride in the level of free support and training we offer.
      I would expect if you spoke to any of our customers they would tell you they love our support team.  We’ve even done on-site training for some customers and are actively seeking clients in Hawaii, Mauritius and the Seychelles!
   2. Reporting / Keyword Rankings
      We believe we offer the most comprehensive own-branded SEO reports in the industry that can be generated in minutes and exported to Excel, PowerPoint or PDF format. They can be annotated easily and our pricing should deliver an ROI for any agency even if used for reporting alone.
      
      Keyword rankings are one of the largest challenges we have operationally and we have been able to deliver a great amount of accuracy in this area. It’s data we know has been extremely problematic for some of our rivals, to the extent that some have been forced to give up trying to obtain keyword rankings. It’s been extremely hard work to get to where we are today, but we are now being rewarded for it as we are one of the only tools on the market that can generate certain insights such as highlighting universal search opportunities.
   3. Automated Technical Auditing / Crawling
      Our technical auditing is also very strong and often we get excellent feedback in this area for delivering more detail and being a more “serious” tool as a result.
      We have been able to successfully crawl up to one hundred times more pages than some of our competitors. It is another example, similar to keyword rankings, where it’s been highly challenging, but our technical team have done a stellar job and its now another major strength of our platform.
      It’s amazing to work with as an SEO, as first hand we are able to see the effects of common SEO problems. Examples include poorly formed URL structures, malformed HTML, JavaScript, redirects, large page sizes and broken links. Often practitioners will diagnose these problems well, but often without actually seeing these problems first hand from the search engines perspective.
5. Do you have time to read the SEO blogs while developing Analytics SEO, if so, which blogs/twitter accounts do you follow?
   On a serious note this is probably one of the biggest challenges! It’s really tough to get the balance right between keeping on top of industry updates and working on our own priorities internally.
   At Analytics SEO we love the UK talent (we’re slightly biased!) including (but not limited to!) Dixon Jones, Martin MacDonald, Richard Baxter, Patrick Altoft, Paddy Moogan, Kelvin Newman, Rishi Lakhani, Jane Copland, Rob Kerry and many more (sorry there are too many to mention including this blog!).
   Although SEOmoz are technically one of our competitors it’s almost impossible not to mention their blog. They do a great job of relentlessly pushing out good content….and they have a lovely friendly way about them.
   It’s also worth mentioning a lot of the very best SEO’s aren’t well known and keep their heads under the radar ;-)
6. There are a broad range of techniques within the SEO industry, how do you think Analytics SEO manages to facilitate this?
   We are process and workflow driven – and although we have our own 5 Stage SEO process (Site Audit, Competitive Position, On-site optimisation, Off-site optimisation, SEO Results) it is totally flexible and a customer can manage his SEO campaigns just the way he wants them.
   We have an ethos of being highly driven by our customers which is the way any web business should be run; I call it the “Customer Within”.  Our customers, many of whom we’re lucky enough to call friends, are very much part of the team.
   We have a steering committee of top SEOs worldwide that are working with us to develop future versions of the product.  This international perspective is fascinating.  We’re always welcome to newcomers so do drop me a line on LinkedIn if you want to join us!
7. Without giving too much away, what juicy features are on your roadmap for the next 12 months?
   The next 12 months are likely to be a roller coaster ride with major new features coming by the dozen!
   We’ve got an API already but there’s so much more we can do with it.  In fact, we’re looking for beta testers for a new service we’re launching called http://howgoodisyourseo.com if anyone is interested!
   Other big areas for us will be social media integration, maybe PPC too and overhauling our link building tools with input from some of the most talented SEO’s in the industry.
   We are also investing in creating scalable, machine learning algorithms for clustering, classification and collaborative filtering implemented on top of Apache Hadoop using the map/reduce paradigm.  Crunching all of back end data is becoming increasingly challenging, so we’ll be hiring computer scientists who understand all of this ;-)
8. What third party tools do you wish you could implement but don’t currently have an API?
   As our backgrounds are very technical we are actually pretty biased towards building our own technology and IP.
   We are proud to be powered by the Majestic SEO API, as almost definitely the best data set for links, bar Google (and they unfortunately won’t sell us any data or discuss their algorithm for that matter – we already tried that!).
   However link data is an exception to the rule, as to build a serious SEO platform you need serious link data, which is very difficult to obtain!
   If the team at Google Webmaster Tools could just improve their API then it would make thousands of SEOs lives much easier!  Rankings, CTR% by position, internal links would all be very nice please!
9. Who inspires you in life and how is this transposed into your work life?
   My wife.  She has a phenomenal capacity to get things done in good humour at any time of day or night, and has managed to superbly juggle a successful career and high pressure job with bringing up our beautiful twin girls.
10. What conferences are you attending over the next 12 months?
    We would like to attend all of them, although our schedules are also increasingly more manic! SES, SMX, SAScon, BrightonSEO, ThinkVisibility and SearchLove are all standing out though…

Thanks for your time Laurence and all the very best with Analytics SEO.

Please enjoy.

1. Can you describe BuzzStream as if I knew nothing about it?
   BuzzStream is a suite of tools designed to help marketers promote their products, services and content. We have a product designed for PR professionals and another for SEOs. The SEO product makes link building more effective by centralizing all the information about the organization’s link building activities and relationships and by automating the manual, time-sucking steps involved with prospecting, link research, outreach, engagement tracking and link monitoring.
2. What was your inspiration for creating BuzzStream?
   My co-founder, Jeremy Bencken, started a company prior to BuzzStream called ApartmentRatings.com (a successful apartment hunting site that he eventually sold to Internet Brands). Virtually all of his traffic came through organic search and he found that his biggest challenge in building up that business was link building and PR. Given how competitive his market was, they needed a high volume of quality links to make an impact on the SERPs, and to get people to link, their outreach efforts had to be highly relevant and personalized. So finding a way to scale their efforts without sacrificing the personalized, approach to outreach that was needed to get results was a huge challenge. He’d tried to make this work with spreadsheets, desktop-based link management tools and general purpose CRMs, and none of them met his needs.
   So that was the original inspiration for the idea, and from there we spent a lot of time validating the market by talking to customers. From these discussions, we came to the conclusion that this problem was actually part of a bigger trend developing in the market.
   We believed that SEOs were going to need to focus more on quality links, which required more relationship-building and personalized engagement, and PR pros and social media marketers were going to need to focus more on scale. So we saw a lot of overlap in the work required of SEOs, PR pros and social media marketers and, this was going to require tools to help coordinate and control content publicity efforts among teams.
3. Since the commencement of your SaaS product, what have been the highs and lows for BuzzStream?
   The biggest high was when we launched the company at PubCon South in 2008. We had a very positive response and it felt like we’d just nailed it. The biggest low was three months later when we came out of beta and started charging for the product. Based on the response we’d gotten, we expected a large number of early signups and it just didn’t happen. This was partly just a timing issue and partly because of things that were missing from the product, and once we got over the hump, things picked up quickly. Regardless, it was a really scary time for us. It would have been very easy to decide that it just wasn’t worth continuing at that point. I’m glad we fought through it.
   Having gone through this, what I’d say to others who are bootstrapping is that, by its nature, starting up a company is a rollercoaster ride and you have to find a way control your emotions…. things are never as good or as bad as they seem when you’re in the middle of it. The two keys for me are to focus on the trend in your metrics and focus on the product above all else (nothing moves the needle like product improvement). I don’t get swept up in the highs or lows as much anymore because I know the trendlines for our high-level metrics (signups, conversions, and churn) and our usage metrics are strong.
4. Which top 3 features of BuzzStream would you say outshine the competition?
   I think it’s hard to point to specific features as “the reason” people buy a product…what typically makes a product great for a certain type of customer is how well it fits in their workflow and how much of their process it helps automate. We provide a single system that’s specifically focused on the link building process. That focus is something our customers value.
   That said, there are a few features that customers consistently say that they get the most value out of:
   1. The Buzzmarker and “mass Buzzmarker”
      Whether you’re trying to research a single site and add it into your database, or research a large list of sites, BuzzStream’s data collection capabilities are top-notch. You can “bookmark” a single site, import a list (e.g., a competitive analysis pulled from Open Site Explorer or Majestic) and BuzzStream automatically discovers contact information, social profile information and metrics (PageRank, mozRank, unique visitors, inbound links, site age, etc.). This is a big time saver.
   2. Communication tracking
      BuzzStream captures any communications between you and your contacts without any work required on your part. BuzzStream has IMAP integration, so any emails sent to or from your contacts are automatically added to the contact record. Similarly, any tweets between you and your contacts are automatically added. You can use this for more effective outreach and targeting by filtering on things like “show me all contacts that I emailed three days ago and that haven’t responded,” or “add contacts to this campaign that I’ve reached out to in the past and that have linked to me.”
   3. Centralized database that’s easy to segment for campaigns
      When you add a website or “influencer” into BuzzStream, it’s added to both your central contact database and the specific project you’re working on. The ability to filter this master list in multiple ways gives you the ability to leverage your database to build outreach lists that are very targeted to each campaign. You can filter on tags, metrics, communication history, inclusion in past projects, whether or not they’ve linked to you in the past, etc.
5. Do you have time to read the SEO blogs while developing BuzzStream, if so, which blogs/twitter accounts do you follow?
   I follow a pretty big list of sites.  Here are some of my favorites.
   As far as the more well-known SEO bloggers, I love reading Aaron Wall’s posts.  His posts are never boring, he’s brutally honest and he’s fearless.  His recent interview of the “salty droid” and his breakdown of google’s efforts to expand their market share were as thought provoking as anything I’ve read on any topic in a very long time.
   My favorite PR bloggers –Both John Bell and Shel Holtz have many excellent thought leadership posts on their blogs.  Arik Hanson, John Cass and Heather Whaling have a number of excellent posts about blogger outreach and influencer relations on their blogs.
   There are a lot of great link building bloggers out there.  Debra Mastaler is probably my favorite…great writer, brings a unique perspective to her posts and her material is highly actionable.  Her recent post about building links in an “unsexy” industry is a good example of this.  Others that I get a lot of value from are Paddy Moogan, Eric Ward, Wil Reynolds, Gab Goldenberg, and Justin Briggs.
   As far as content marketing, Lee Odden’s posts are excellent…IMO, no one has done a better job of explaining the overlap of search, social and PR.  Arnie Kuenn’s and Ian Lurie’s posts are excellent as well.
6. There is a broad range of techniques within the SEO industry, how do you think BuzzStream manages to facilitate this?
   Because the CRM element of BuzzStream is very strong, we tend to do best with people who are focused on link building outreach. It’s very easy to keep track of who you’ve reached out to in the past, who’s linked to you, who’ve you tweeted, etc. That makes it particularly valuable to people who think of link building as “content publicity” and people who are working in a team environment.
   That said, because of BuzzStream’s focus on automation and tracking, the customer base ranges from affiliate sites that do lots of link buying to the in-house team that’s doing very high-touch link building.
7. Without giving too much away, what juicy features are on your roadmap for the next 12 months?
   We’re doing a lot to improve our prospecting capabilities, list building and outreach capabilities. On the list building side, I want people to be able to leverage their social networking activities and their past outreach activities much more effectively to get links and mentions. Right now it feels like you have people following you, tweeting you, you’re sharing their content, you’re talking to them, etc….but when it comes time to conduct outreach, you don’t have an easy way to leverage all of this to find the people who are most likely to promote your content. Given our social tracking and email tracking, we’ve laid the groundwork for exposing this functionality.
   We also intend to integrate with Google Analytics (for link tracking and reporting) and we’ll expose our API.
8. What third party tools do you wish you could implement but don’t currently have an API?
   No brainer…Google Plus. They implemented a v1 of their API, but it doesn’t give us what we need for tracking.
9. Who inspires you in life and how is this transposed into your work life?
   I don’t know if I’d say “inspired,” but there are definitely entrepreneurs that I try to learn from. A good example is Eric Reis, who has driven a lot of the thinking behind the “lean startup” movement. The idea behind it being that the goal of a startup is constant learning and rapid iteration. We have a vision of what our product should look like and where it should go, but that vision doesn’t mean much until it’s faced the realities of the market. Whenever we launch something new, we try to build a “minimum viable feature set” for it, roll it out, test usage in a big way and let that drive our plans. We don’t have to know everything, as long as we can learn faster than others.
10. What conferences are you attending over the next 12 months?
    We’re trying to figure that out right now…we’ll definitely be picking up our conference schedule this year. The ones that I know we’ll be at are PubCon South and mozCon. I’m hoping that Distilled will run LinkLove again, as we heard great things about that conference.

I appreciate you taking your time out Paul to discuss so openly BuzzStream.

Paul, BuzzStream’s co-founder, has spent the last 15 years either starting companies or working in early stage startups. He was the first employee at support.com (founded by Mark Pincus, founder of zynga) and was a key contributor to the company’s growth from a pre-product startup to a public company with annual revenues exceeding $40 million. He’s held positions in marketing, product management, business development and sales at BMC Software, Tonic (acquired by Symantec), AlterPoint (acquired by Versata), Wavebender and Pluck (acquired by Demand Media).

My first interview is with Jon Henshaw from RavenSEO. I’ve been using this software for many years. In the past I have written articles suggesting improvements that would benefit RavenSEO users, so interviewing Jon was a milestone.

Enjoy.

1. Can you describe Raven as if I knew nothing about it?
   Raven helps you research, manage, monitor and report on your SEO, social media and paid search campaigns. It’s designed for independent professionals, search marketing agencies, in-house marketing departments and large enterprise teams. It alleviates the need for spreadsheets, keeps everyone on the same page and the reporting alone can save a company thousands of dollars a month.
2. What was your inspiration for creating Raven?
   Before Raven existed, we were an Internet marketing agency. We got tired of our team being out of sync – especially our link building team – and spending countless hours each month gathering data from different tools, and then spending hours manually creating client reports. Building upon the success of some tools we had already created (SERP Tracker and SEO Analyzer) we wanted to make one seamless platform that would bring everything together. We also wanted to take the pain out of reporting, which was a huge time suck. So Raven was born, out of a need to solve our own problems as an agency.
3. Since the commencement of your SaaS product, what have been the highs and lows for Raven?
   Any time we release a new feature, it’s a big high. We are a company full of creative people who love to innovate. Nothing brings us more joy than to see a feature come to fruition, and to then see our customers love using it. When I think of lows, I think of times when we couldn’t work on new features or make existing features better. Those times were usually due to lack of resources or technical problems. We love using the platform as much as our customers do, so we experience the same highs and lows they do. If something isn’t working correctly, nobody is happy. When everything is working perfectly, and there’s new toys…err tools….available, everyone is happy.
4. Which top 3 features of Raven would you say outshine the competition?
   
   • I believe the first thing Raven does best is our unified platform. We’ve created an environment that supports enterprise level access rights, white labelling and industry standard tools into one cohesive toolset. The tools are easy to navigate and use, and many of the tools can push data to other tools. For example, if you’re doing keyword research, you can easily add those keywords to the Keyword Manager or SERP Tracker with one click. The ability to have everything in one place is priceless for many of our customers.
   • Second, our Link Management system has set the standard in the industry for SEO and link builders. It’s fully customizable, includes powerful link prospecting tools, and keeps large link building teams in sync. It also includes the best automated link monitoring service available. The link monitor not only checks the anchor text, URLs and if a link uses nofollow, it also checks javascript links, the numbers of links on a page (and if that number changes significantly) and records a screenshot of all active links.
     We call the screenshots Link Clips, and Raven provides a high resolution version for every link that is active. It also crops the image and provides a callout for the link. It’s perfect for visualizing link records, and our customers’ clients seem to really love it.
   • The third feature that outshines the competition is our reporting system. The unified platform allows us to report on all aspects of a campaign. That includes research, link building, social media, site analytics, e-commerce and goals, email newsletters, and now AdWords campaigns. Our Report Wizard makes building reports incredibly easy. In fact, you can create a report that would typically take you hours or days in just a few minutes! The reports can also be branded with your own logo and scheduled for automated creation and delivery.
5. Do you have time to read the SEO blogs while developing Raven, if so, which blogs/twitter accounts do you follow?
   I depend a lot on industry friends, Twitter and now Google Plus to keep up with trends and news. Since I follow a lot of people on Twitter, I generally learn about things by happenstance, or if someone mentions or messages me about it. There are a few blogs and news sites that I follow via RSS. They include SEOBook, Blind Five Year Old, Distilled, BlueGlass, Search Engine Journal, Search Engine Land, State of Search, Search Engine Watch, Web Pro News and SEO by the SEA. There are many more than that (I’m sure I’m forgetting some important ones), but those are the main ones that immediately come to mind.
6. There are a broad range of techniques within the SEO industry, how do you think Raven manages to facilitate this?
   We take a generalized and agnostic approach to SEO. We’re more interested in the tools that everyone needs to manage and report their data with, and less on focusing on one specific approach versus another. That’s one of the reasons we’ve made the Link Statuses, Link Types and Website Types completely customizable. It’s not our place to force our customers to use certain terminology. Every professional does it differently, and we want to enable them to do it the way they want to do it. We also recognize that some people abhor the idea of paid links, while other make it a major part of their campaign. For that reason, we allow paid link type options to be hidden from the system. We also hide our advanced paid link settings until a paid link record has been created on the account.Our approach is not completely unbiased though. I’ve made decisions to leave out certain functionality based on what we think is relevant. For example, I’ve purposely chosen to leave out a Keyword Difficulty tool from Raven, because I believe it’s irrelevant to what SEO’s should be focusing on. You either focus on target keywords for your site or you don’t. I prefer an optimist’s approach, which is why we created the Insights section. Instead of focusing on how hard something is, focus on your opportunities. For example, focus on the keywords that have little traffic, but convert well. That’s a much better place for an SEO to start, instead of looking at how big the wall is they have to climb. You’ll never get anything done if your starting point is rooted in “how hard is this going to be?”. If you’re good at what you do, regardless of difficulty, you’ll be able to make positive gains in your campaign.
7. Without giving too much away, what juicy features are on your roadmap for the next 12 months?
   We’re weeks away from launching our new real-time social stream and social media monitor . The stream will incorporate social searches, tweets connected to your Twitter account(s), and news from your Facebook account(s). Around the same time, we’ll be launching a major upgrade to our Research Assistant. It will include much more data from MajesticSEO and the SEOmoz Link Intelligence API. That update will be amazing!We have a lot planned for 2012 and I don’t want to give away too much. There are a couple things I don’t mind mentioning. First, we’re working on a completely new and unique toolbar for Chrome. We’re taking what we learned from our Firefox toolbar and incorporating existing and yet to be released features into it. I’m very excited about that. The other thing I can tell you about is contacts. Specifically, we’re working on a better way to manage relationships for link prospecting and social media interaction. We hope to have both of these features available by the end of the year or the first quarter of 2012.
8. What third party tools do you wish you could implement but don’t currently have an API?
   Google+ is the first one that comes to mind. They just released an API, but it doesn’t allow you to post to it yet. I also wish that the Google Webmaster Tools API supported more of their features. There’s enough there to make it useful, which is why we incorporated it, but I’d love to bring in their ranking data. There are a few other third party tools I would love to implement, but for competitive purposes I’m not going to mention their names ;) What I will say is that we are in talks with several of them, and I expect to launch two of them early next year.
9. Who inspires you in life and how is this transposed into your work life?
   There’s no one person that inspires me. I’m inspired by freethinkers. I mean that both philosophically and also as it relates to innovation. It’s the people who throw the textbooks out the window and strive to find their own answers that I connect with the most. It’s how I think and work, and it’s also something I share with Scott and Patrick (the other two co-founders). For me, rules are made for people who aren’t interested in real risk, innovation and success.
10. What conferences are you attending over the next 12 months and will the envoy be giving out the famous Raven t-shirts?
    The conference that I know I’m going to for sure is PubCon in Las Vegas. We’ll be giving out a ton of t-shirts at that conference, and we’re bringing back a limited edition t-shirt that people have been begging us to make for years. You’ll have to come by our booth and pick one up for yourself to find out what it is :)

Thank you Jon for your time. I appreciate you taking your time out to divulge so many details.

Jon has been involved with website development and Internet strategy since 1995. He’s taught Internet training courses professionally and has spent a good portion of his career consulting for SMBs within the U.S.

Before becoming a Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer (CPO) at Raven Internet Marketing Tools, he was an Internet Strategist at Sitening, a performance-based Internet marketing firm in Nashville, TN.

Thanks to Alexei, Peter and Nigel for being willing to be interviewed.

Please take a couple minutes out to read their replies.

1) When did you start getting involved with Social Media, and what principles and skills helped you get to where you are now?

Social Media Experts Interviewed

Alexei Lee: My background is in the music industry, I was involved in the marketing and distribution of digital content (specifically club music) for quite a few years.  Social media became increasingly important as people turned to social networks to discover new music.

Music companies have been trailblazers in the use of content to create conversation.  We had no choice but to experiment with new approaches to marketing and this has given me a very grounded understanding of what does and doesn’t work in social media.  There’s not really any substitute for immersing yourself and learning by doing.

Peter Kay: I have been using social media in one form or another for many years now.  I was an intensive care nurse for over ten years before going it on my own in the world of business. I love people and technology so I guess I am a social geek.

Anyway, nursing in that environment provided me with many skills that I constantly draw upon today. Reading people, reading data, managing teams
and matching it all together to achieve specific goals.

Nigel Legg: I was active on forums and bulletin boards from 2001, and have had a number of blogs over the years; I progressed from there to facebook and twitter. My professional use of social media is primarily for research purposes, based on my experience working in market research.

2) When you first started using social media, did you ever consider internet marketing would become so fundamental?

Alexei Lee: The music industry was massively affected by the emergence of digital media, so I’ve always been aware of how rapidly our world is moving online and the need to keep ahead of the curve.

In terms of social media specifically, I’m constantly in awe of its potential!

Peter Kay: For me it is only an element of a wider approach.

Anyway Marketing with social media is the by product of getting everything else right. If it is the primary focus then it generally doesn’t work.
You can argue where marketing starts and finishes until the cows come home but treating social media as an advertising tool doesn’t work. The problem is that most people in my industry don’t understand this and neither do their customers. What that means is that there is a fair bit of the blind leading the blind going on.

Nigel Legg: I believe marketing has been a fundamental part of the internet from the start, and it was only natural that the new channels of social media would be used for marketing.

3) What are your favourite projects you’ve worked on?

Alexei Lee: I think my all time favourite to date has to be working on the social media campaign for Warner Bros comedy – The Hangover (during my time at HyperlaunchDMG).  It’s always a joy when you get to work with amazing content and that film was hilarious, so we had no problem getting people talking.  I think we had about 35,000 Facebook Fans by the end of the 3 month campaign.

We also ran a competition on YouTube where people posted videos of their ‘exploits’ on a night out.  Quite a bit  of moderation was needed!

Peter Kay: My favourite to date is working with the marketing team at Bath Ales.  Although I also have a number of exciting projects in the pipeline at the moment that I can’t tell you about right now.

Nigel Legg: I’m unable to pick a particular one.  I have assisted in producing baseline data for a number of PR campaigns, and have provided training to get a number of small business up and running with social media.  I am currently interested in deeper analysis of the conversations taking place, and working on using text analysis to derive the latent concepts which occur, which can be fascinating.

4) Where do you go for inspiration?

Alexei Lee: If you mean online, then I’ve got a big list of blogs I subscribe to.   But I tend to gravitate towards Mashable and Trendhunter.  Twitter is a great way of discovering random things.

Peter Kay: I go amongst lots of people interacting to get inspiration. Places like the park with my boys, a cafe or the pub with my friends. Social media is after all just a mirror of these sorts of places online so I like to observe how it all fits together without the hardware.

Nigel Legg: I read a wide range of blogs and am active in a number of Market research related groups on LinkedIn, and on twitterchats. I use social media to gather my inspiration for my own blog and work in social media.

5) How do you believe the roles of Social Media and SEO should be defined?

Alexei Lee: There’s definately an overlap between the two.  SEO is a consideration when developing content for social media because prominence on SERPs will naturally help drive traffic to your communities.  Similarly, the ability to post content quickly and frequently on open social platforms like Twitter coupled with their high Page Rank has obvious benefits for SEO marketing.  As a bit of a social media puritan though I believe the emphasis should always be to offer people something valuable, relevant and genuine to encourage conversation that will then build awareness & SEO organically.

Peter Kay: Both drive traffic BUT so what? In business it’s the bottom line that counts not the amount of hits you get.

Social media can support the bottom line of a business on so many levels that are just not immediately apparent even to many operating in this area of business.

SEO just drives traffic ;)

Nigel Legg: SEO and social media play different roles: SEO creates fast routes and sign posts to sites, while social media is a channel of communication in which all conversations are retained; it allows for far more diversity, exchange, and qualification of information. While good SEO says “go here”, social media says “you could go here, or there, or maybe you should actually be looking for this.”

About Interviewees

Alexei Lee – React. Adapt. is a social media consultancy based in Bristol and run by Alexei Lee, a specialist with over 10 years of experience in digital content, marketing and PR.  As well as providing support for local businesses, Alexei works with agencies across the UK developing and delivering social media campaigns for the consumer and business-to-business sectors.

Peter Kay – Not From Bolton is the brainchild of Peter Kay. Peter is a leading social media consultant based in Bristol.

His  approach is somewhat different to the vast majority of involved in his new sector as he works with businesses to enable them to integrate social media into their processes. The reason he operates like this is that he understands that the real power of these applications are only fully realised when they are in the hands of the business they relate to.

Think the fishing analogy. If you give a man a fish he eats for one day, if you teach him how to fish he eats every day.

Peter works with a number of high profile companies here in the South West region and increasingly he is in demand across the whole of the UK.

Nigel Legg – Trevanian Legg Ltd provide social media research services.  Data is collected from across the web, and then analysed using sophisticated text analysis tools, to provide deep insight on either an ad hoc or tracking basis of the opinions and attitudes towards companies or brands.

1) When did you start designing, and what principles and skills helped you get to where you are now?

Southwest Web Designer Interviews

Ross Anderson: [I] started designing user interface graphics about 15 years ago primarily for industry computer control systems. As web technology became more complex and able to create a rich user environment we switched to commercial web design. Regarding principles and skills, we’ve had a fairly diverse background from heavy industry to sports advertising so pride ourselves on being able to communicate and understand what drives a clients business requirements from a web site. So along the way the company has acquired some interesting skill set’s aside from the standard html, css, php and javascript. Clearly the technical skills are important but we feel that understanding a clients requirements rate just as high if not higher than just being able to build a site.

Oliver Francis: I always had an interest in design and got an apprenticeship at a design and animation studio in 1998. I was lucky enough to have two mentors; a senior designer and an animation producer. They both taught me many design principles, mainly around keeping things simple and to trust my instincts when it came to colour and space. Other useful skills I learnt were to make sure that you help the client to establish a clear brief by asking difficult or seemingly stupid questions and to balance creativity and logic to make sure the user is engaged and knows what to do next.

Duncan McKerracher: I started when I was travelling around the globe in my previous job as an athlete. Wherever I went I took my laptop, and it was a good way to occupy my mind between training and racing. I guess I tried to convert what I’d learnt through sport into a new career. Put the hours in, try new things, know your strengths and work on your weaknesses.  Oh, and never give up when things don’t work in IE6!!

When I stared I had no experience or portfolio.  I just learnt what was needed to do any work I was lucky enough to get. Thankfully I’d done a degree in Electronic Engineering so the coding bit came pretty quick. WordPress was very useful when I began. It was in its infancy but was still a quick way to build a dynamic website.

2) When you first started designing websites, did you ever consider internet marketing would become so fundamental?

Ross Anderson: We had an idea that SEO/Marketing would be one of the key’s to a site’s success. All of the industry facets need to work together, SEO, design and development to create a site that will work well for a client. With the industry changing so fast, especially, SEO it’s key to our clients success and therefore our success that we have a quality SEO company we can rely on.

Oliver Francis: Websites were almost a novelty item when I started and Internet marketing was a phrase yet to be heard! It was however clear to me that the web was going to become an essential part of any businesses marketing activity. Just how important this would become I could not have predicted!

Duncan McKerracher: I started in 2006 so internet marketing was a fairly big subject and I was well aware of it.  It wasn’t until I actually sat down with clients who were spending their hard earned cash with me that I saw how fundamental it was. I was spending more time talking about all things SEO than I was coming up with visuals.

It was apparent from the off that the world of internet marking was a big one and that I would need to know how to code a site that would technically fulfill clients needs on top of looking nice.

3) What are your favourite projects you’ve worked on?

Ross Anderson: Our favourite projects tend to be ones that give us freedom to work with a client not for a client. With designing a site, being partially a creative process, it’s important that the client understands the site is not for them but for their users. It’s also great when the client really gets involved with the design and is able to add constructive ideas to the overall process, it enhances the end users view of the site by imparting a company personality through it.

Oliver Francis: We worked on a very interesting campaign for the Environment Agency, which was based around reducing fly tipping in the South West. It involved awarding winning photography and a variety of mediums including billboards, bus backs, video, and merchandising.

More recently we did a website for Bristol Community Housing Foundation that was great to work on. It needed to help the foundations tenants get more support and provide a platform for communication. It integrated features like a report a repair tool, community calendars and an intuitive content management system. The site has had a big impact on the community it serves which is the kind of thing that drives Deckchair forward.

Duncan McKerracher: Working at Kerve I’ve been pretty lucky to be part of some big projects for Jack Daniel’s, Southern Comfort, and Disney. Throughout the year we build all sorts from websites, Facebook apps, to games and API mash-ups. It’s pretty satisfying seeing a plan come together on that kind of scale.

I also work on a bunch of sites for great clients who really see the value of keeping up to date with cool new stuff on the web. Johnny Grey (luxury kitchen designer) is a good example as he’s always full of creative ideas. He’s really into his social media, challenging us to come up with all sorts of concepts.

4) Where do you go for design inspiration?

Ross Anderson: Depends what the design brief entails! Quite often we will check through site showcases or go to sites that are a clients competitor. Clients will often already have visited a number of sites and decided how the look and feel of the site should be. We sometimes get the client to create a mood board or will go through existing marketing material to try and maintain the brand of the company on the site. It really depends on the client. Often if a client is looking for something completely different inspiration can come from anywhere, walking the kids to school, visiting the cinema or having a glass of red wine with friends!

Oliver Francis: Inspiration can come from anywhere, but I do think the best inspiration comes from conversations. Being open about the problems you are trying to solve means that ideas and opinions can come from anyone you speak too. Getting an objective point-of-view can create brilliant ideas.

Duncan McKerracher: I get inspiration from all sorts of media and disciplines, not just looking at other websites. The big brands are always great places to start. I’m a big Nike fan and their most recent microsite is just awesome. It looks great and uses a pretty neat HTML5 jquery combo to do the animations.

For actual web design there are loads of design galleries and blogs.  The FWA is amazing but its pretty Flash heavy. As an HTML geek at heart I’d say bestwebgallery is a good place to go as is generally a bit more selective about what it shows. Smashingmag is always good for everything web design and often does design showcases. Through its network you can also access a bunch of other informative blogs.

5) How do you believe the roles of web designer and SEO should be defined?

Ross Anderson: WOW! That’s difficult. Firstly it’s almost a symbiotic relationship. They both need each other, for a landing page to work it needs good design and clever SEO. Interestingly both also need to have cross over in skills, [the] SEO needs to understand html and [the] design[er] needs to understand SEO, bits of anyway. In terms of a definition, web designer builds a site to look good, function well, navigate easily, provide content that engages the user and encourages them to explore the rest of the site or make contact with the site owner. SEO improves a ranking according to a set of keywords, market the site using social media, drive users to specific client goals (signing up to a newsletter, buying a product or simply picking up the telephone) and monitoring the change in traffic to site whilst doing all of the above!

Oliver Francis: Without a marketing strategy very few people are going to see a website. Likewise if someone finds a site but has no idea what to do next there’s a big problem. It’s really important that SEO and design are balanced, so close collaboration between the designer and search engine optimiser is essential.

Duncan McKerracher: That’s a tough question as SEO is an integral part of what we do. We have to advise and then build a solid platform for the client’s SEO plans to take shape. Whether it’s a small static site or a fully blown dynamic site with a bespoke CMS, all the SEO basics need be integrated into the templates. Having a great CMS that allows clients control of meta data, page titles, copy, link titles etc… is ideal, but not always manageable. It’s also our job to inform clients there’s more to SEO than just having a website that’s build properly.

Getting the website out there and creating quality backlinks is a big deal for any company, as are carefully planned adwords campaigns.

About the companies represented above:

Ross Anderson, Mediatube: Mediatube are a small web design company, based in Bristol with a big heart and even bigger ideas. They’re passionate about all aspects of top-quality web design. Which is just as well, because since they started in 2003, they have yet to come across a project that doesn’t pose a unique set of requirements.
So depending on the scope of the clients site, they draw on their independent specialists to work as a dedicated team on their project, led by Carolyn Anderson.
Their core team includes web designers, coders and web developers, including Ross Anderson and Chris Hawes; but they regularly work with partners who specialise in search marketing, SEO, branding and web copywriting. As part of their free consultation, they can identify what web services a client needs and how they can help.

Oliver Francis, Deckchair: Deckchair is a web design and development company based in Bristol. Deckchair’s two directors Ollie Francis and Rebecca Taylor like to make the complex simple.
Their strategic and consultative approach breaks down the barriers between the client and their customers, making communication easier and creating engagement.

Businesses and organisations are complex entities that need to articulate what they do to the world. By understanding what makes a business tick and how it functions, Deckchair gives their clients a solution that meets the requirement, presents the right message and is cohesive with their existing processes.

Deckchair have worked extensively in the public and private sector including software companies, colleges and not-for-profits.

Duncan McKerracher, Kerve: Kerve Creative have been delivering successful digital solutions for well over a decade, working alongside brands such as Jack Daniel’s, Disney, and Southern Comfort.
Kerve Creative prides itself on producing formidable web design, seamless graphic design and branding, and award winning art direction.  From interactive apps for Facebook, to large e-commerce sites, to beautiful print collateral Kerve Creative has the expertise and hard won experience to create engaging and considered solutions to their client’s requirements.

Dashboard Statistics, Huge Screen Real Estate Exposure, Reviews, Locality, Mobile Search, Increased Local Search uptake are just some of the reasons why your business should be interested.

Dashboard Statistics

Accountability is essential in any business and it is useful to review the statistical actionable data contained in a Google Places Dashboard every 30 days focusing on:

• Number of Impressions your company was displayed within the search results
• Number of Actions based on queried keywords
• Number of Clicks for more info on Maps
• Number of Clicks to your website

Is this something you would like to see each month? Below is a Dashboard from a friend’s website that is not being SEO’d by Phil Yarrow Consulting.

Google Places Dashboard - Aspire Photography Swindon

Huge Screen Real Estate Exposure

Google has been expanding the screen real estate for Google Places for years. The most recent rendition announced on the Google Webmaster Central Blog covers the large amount of space Google is providing to companies who have signed up for Google Places. Instead of the small one line results displaying just the company name, much much more is now being displayed.

• Company Name
• Company Description
• Website Address
• Google Places Page
• Address
• Telephone Number
• Reviews
• Map that moves when user scrolls downward

Surely this is something all business owners desire to see on the front page of Google for their business type?

Note the huge amount of screen real estate below (seven companies are being listed taking up a much larger space then previously) that is now being taken by the Google Places search result for “Bristol Toy Shops”, a very topical search query during a the last business quarter.

Google Places - Bristol Toy Shops

Reviews

Imagine if the quality of your customer reviews had a bearing on your search result ranking. Well now they do. Google Places ranks specific competing companies on one page. These companies would likely receive a similar amount of reviews as their competitors. That is, of course, if your competitor is also requesting its clients to leave reviews. Notice the reviews left for Toys R Us in Bristol adding up to a 4 out of 5 star rating.

Google Places - Reviews

“We’d never be able to request our clients to leave reviews for us” you may argue. This may have been the case if you had asked your clients ten years ago. However, they are more tech savvy now than you may give them them credit for. One excellent way to entice clients to leave reviews is through incentives.

• “Please leave a review on this Review Website and we’ll add you to our monthly £50 raffle”
• “Leave a review on this Review Website and we’ll send you a £10 gift voucher”

These and many other ideas work wonders in encouraging your clients to leave feedback. Google Places takes feedback not just from Google Place reviews, but also a whole host of websites that your clients may have already left feedback with. Some of these are:

• www.qype.co.uk
• www.yelp.co.uk
• www.localsearchdata.com
• www.welovelocal.com
• www.thomsonlocal.com
• www.freeindex.com
• www.upmystreet.com
• www.bview.co.uk

Locality

Local business searching is centred on distance. Therefore displaying the result within a map if less clandestine, less of a treasure hunt style mentality and much more customer oriented. Again, this can only be of benefit to you as a business owner.

Google Places - Map

If the searcher desires more information, he or she can easily click on the red alphabetised pin which will take them to Google Maps giving a topical search result within a map.

Increased Local Search Uptake

Reports forecasting an increase in traffic globally for Local Search show year-on-year growth patterns. Reports from SEMPO, Optimise My Website, Econsultancy and eMarketer all state encouraging figures for all businesses with local intent and show that usage of Local and Mobile Search is expanding exponentially.

On using Mobile Search for Local Search within the Google networks, earlier in the year Eric Schmidt trumpeted the synergy between these two powerful mediums. He stated that there positive growth was forecast that belied any pessimistic voices for Local Search not having the legs. Now with real time search and precise geographic capturing, providing your customers with pinpoint data is now even easier. The attention Google is placing on Local Search by recently purchasing Groupon, moving Marissa Mayer from Google into Geo and Local Services, creating a mobile operating system and manufacturing their own mobile phones gives you plenty of reasons to take Local Search seriously.

If your business needs clarity on this, we can assist you with your Local SEO Strategy.

EDIT: This post was originally posted on www.philyarrow.co.uk

Raven SEO Tools WishList

After my previous post about the near impeccable SEO tool, Raven Tools, I believe it’s only beneficial to give constructive criticism to improve a tool with a strong foundation. Proving how good Raven are, Jon Henshaw took time out of his day to reply to each 10 points. If you we’re paying for a quality service, how much more would you feel continuing to recommend them?

I spend a significantly large amount of my time using Raven, however I’m not ignorant of other superb tools out there. With Analytics SEO, Blue Glass, Influence Finders Beta and a couple of other tools around, there is strong competition from trusted brands.

What additional tools do you require to stick with Raven?

1. Tasks.

   Assign tasks to multiple users. Currently only Tasks can be sent to one individual.

2. Improved tagging feature

   …within Adwords Research, SEMRush, Wordtracker, Keyword Analyzer. These keyword tools could increase their power if Tagging using previous tags and new tags was added.

3. Dashboard > Keyword Manager

   display increase/decrease in links accumulated like the SERP Tracker

4. Google Alerts integration.

   Granted there is no Google Alerts API, however creating workflows outside the Basecamp integration options many options. Giving the option to create a task after an article launch would be beneficial. E.g. “You have created a link with an article, would you like to create a task involving a Google Alert?”

5. Links Manager > Add Link

   After a link is created, giving the option to recheck the link within x hours or days.

6. Links Manager

   Offering the method of importing links from Open Site Explorer and Majestic SEO downloads by choosing from a drop down list the format of the CSV.

7. Ranking > Search Engines

   Adding Blekko, DuckDuckGo and other SE’s would be very useful from a research angle.

8. Ranking > SERP Tracker

   Importing of daily search results from external sources such as Advanced Web Ranking XML or CSV files would make granular reporting beneficial.

9. Ranking > Competitors

   Viewing overall visibility for all competitors for the selected keywords over a given time.

10. Links Manager > Add Link

    Collating on-the-fly information about the website in question would be extremely useful. WHOIS, Archive.org, Twitter Accounts and other contact information available on the Add Link page would assist greatly.

11. Links Manager > Communication Trail

    Whenever any communication is created via email, twitter or other online media, a communication trail is created therefore giving team members or managers to monitor activity. Using a unique email address to BCC within the emails may be the solution here.

SEO Reports are fun!

Raven Tools is a superb tool. Period. However I have a nagging wish list/bug list that gets bigger by the week.

Over the past year I have sent Raven Support countless emails and always had prompt replies from Alison, Scott, Jon and Taylor telling me it’s either WIP, Keep Dreaming Phil or We Never Thought of That bucket.

There are other great tools out there, other than Raven, however this suits the desired requirements of my company and agencies I work with. If Raven can continue to update the software each Friday especially with frequently asked services, then the value continues to increase.

Enough ramble, this is my Raven wishlist. I would be interested in your wishlist.

1. Reports: Multiple Brand Profile Templates

   Currently you can assign a Brand Template to

   • Website – www.domain.com
   • Profile Template
   • Account Template.

   What if, however you wish to have a Brand Template shared over 2 or 3 Profiles?

2. Reports: Non Default Profile exports PDF branded with Raven logo

   This is pretty important to change, espically if you wish to export just one SERP report to a client using the Agency/Web Design branding?

3. Content Manager: SEO Assets

   Could videos, images and any other assets be linked to a Cloud account?

4. Content Manager: Blog Manager

   When an article is published on clients blog, could this not be detailed as Linked. The client would also be interested to know where articles have been published, whether that be off or onsite.

5. Ranking: Local

   I do appreciate this isn’t an easy one, however Raven likes a challenge. If Raven could provide ranking data for Local Search, along with the amount of reviews for each listing.

6. Ranking: Universal Results

   Many of my clients are ranking for videos and images. This isn’t being displayed within the SERPs I send my clients. This would be a massive benefit. IF a screenshot of that SERP could also be generated, that would assist hugely.

7. GWT Import Data

   Importing Google Webmaster Tools data regarding Sitemap errors, crawl errors and the like would be very useful.

8. Dashboard: Website Settings

   After changing the Language to English, Country to United Kingdom and Currency to GBP I would expect the Default Time to change to Europe (GMT +0:00 London) and the SEMRush Default to change to United Kingdom. This is such a tiny change, however it’s the small things that can slow you down.

9. Dashboard: KPI

   Having a KPI dashboard would be extremely beneficial. The software presumes rankings are the basis of good results, however many SEO companies work on Sales increase, Traffic Increase and other criteria. Could this be added?

10. Central Dashboard

    A central dashboard would assist greatly. Viewing 150+ websites all at once showing an increase/decrease of traffic, increase/decrease of sales, increase/decrease of rankings would be superb. Making this a holistic PDF report would help improve communication and continue to increase morale.

I have plenty more ideas, however these are just a tiny handful I have email Raven support about over the past 12 months.

I’d be interested in your suggestions.