Selling SEO Presentation

I recently gave a presentation to the Pittsburgh SEO Group (in partnership with the local chapter of SEMPO), at Impaqt in Pittsburgh.

You can find a PDF of the presentation here, entitled 'Best Practices for Selling SEO'. Don't forget to click on the comments button on the top left of most slides so that you can get further clarification of the point of each slide.

The presentation was fun to do and the group was a lively and diverse group of smart web professionals and entrepreneurs. The group is hosted through Meetup at http://www.meetup.com/pittsburghwebdesign/.

Thanks to my good friend John LeDonne and everyone at Impaqt for arranging and hosting. Hope you join the group and look forward to meeting you.

Why webmasters are great at SEO

Big thanks to Hubspot for posting an awesomely inappropriate article on their blog that attacks webmasters, so that I have a nice, easy blog topic to write about today. Find it here: 7 Reasons Why Marketing Can't Trust the Webmaster with SEO.

All of the webmasters I work with are very keen to have an effective and wide-reaching website. They spend hours that go long past the ones they are paid for to build a website that is attractive, functional, enjoyable, and marketable. They devote their entire working life to tinkering with the mechanics of the site so that the visitor never sees 'behind the curtain' and only sees the perfect performance that was designed for them.

Why would they not be interested in SEO? SEO is all about bringing targeted visitors to their website, turning those visitors into customers and figuring out ways to bring more of them every day. The webmaster gets to have lots of visitors to test all of the amazing functions he or she has created and, perhaps more importantly, to enjoy the experience. Web design, and web administration, is an art form - and like any artist a webmaster wants to have their work be enjoyed and appreciated by their audience.

In a great relationship the fact that the webmaster reports to IT (assuming they do - in most cases that I work in they are part of the marketing function) should be a benefit - they are the bridge between operations and marketing. A good relationship leverages all of these elements and makes the whole operation greater than the sum of it's parts.

This matches the experience that I have had with Hubspot and my clients. Hubspot seems to be a company filled with rash and aggressive young men who think they have a much better product than they do. What they have is a good start. Attacking their core customer is probably not the best way to build loyalty or get to the next level that they're looking for.

By the way, if you really like what Hubspot does, one of my webmasters has solved a lot of the issues that they have and created a custom solution that we can probably help you implement.