Brian Combs, Founder And VP Of Services, Apogee Search
Brian Combs, Founder and VP of Services, Apogee Search
As an online marketing expert and Internet pioneer, Brian Combs specializes in bringing measurability to marketing. Before founding Apogee Search with William Leake in 2002, Combs was director of marketing and business development for Journyx, the leading provider of web-based time- and expense-management solutions. At Journyx, he oversaw all marketing and strategic partnership activities.
Since 2004, Apogee has grown to become one of the 20 largest SEO/PPC firms in the country, with clients in the hundreds. The company has achieved top Google rankings for clients on horrendously competitive keywords with high search volumes in spaces like consumer and auto finance, home security, consumer-packaged software, online education, and insurance-type products.
Jerri: Where do you see the current state/importance of SEO?
Combs: The industry is still in the “Wild West” stage, but beginning to mature. As the ROI of SEO is difficult to track (although not impossible), many SEO firms (and individual SEOs) are able to get away with providing the appearance of value, while providing very little actual value.
SEO, of course, can be a very effective marketing technique, but like all marketing, efforts must be made to track the results so that improvements can be made.
Jerri: What can organizations do right now to improve their SEO?
Combs:
■ Install a tracking system. Find out what actually works.
■ Run a PPC campaign for 30 days to prove which keywords matter. Optimizing for keywords with no search volume will not provide any benefit.
■ Put those keywords as the FIRST thing in their title tags.
■Start link building.
Jerri: What should they be focusing on for future improvements?
Combs:
■ Better content.
■Create compelling “link bait.”
■Continue link building.
■Invest more in a keyword selection testing campaign (PPC).
■ If you’re trying to master hundreds to thousands of keywords, work with the content. management system to programmatically automate much of the content-driven SEO (e.g., dynamically populating title tags with database-provided keywords).
■ Stay on top of, and take advantage of, emerging trends in social media.
Jerri: Are there any strategies that organizations might know about but are not implementing that might help with SEO results if they did?
Combs: So many organizations believe that the content part of SEO means generating page after page of keyword-stuffed copy. People should focus on creating copy for a web site’s visitors, not the search engines. Use one’s keywords in the copy, but use them naturally.
Concentrate on regularly creating new, quality content for your web site. This will help both with SEO, and with building the traffic of your site.
Jerri: What is one facet of SEO that most small and mid-sized business don’t do well, and how can they improve that?
Combs: There are two facets:
Jerri: What changes in SEO are coming as the result of the growth of social media?
Combs: Social media provide a tremendous extension of ability to create and rapidly promote link bait, including new sources of links. These new link sources can also be great sources of native traffic and potentially cause huge changes in the way we search, and thus a potential threat to the Google hegemony.
Jerri: Are there any other coming changes that will affect SEO?
Combs:
■ Mobile and local advertising.
■ Video content.
■ Google’s never-ending thirst for new revenues, and dislike of the SEO industry (a change agent).
Jerri: Is there anything I haven’t touched on that might be important for small to mid-sized organizations to know about SEO?
Combs: Most “SEO experts” are no more SEO experts than the organization they work for. Much can be self-achieved with proper research. This industry is enough of a snake pit of vipers, that it really does pay to do a bunch of research yourself (and even potentially some of the work yoursel before you buy from a vendor. Bad SEO can really really hurt you, and cause you to lose multiple years of marketplace momentum.
Lastly, make sure you focus on the real results. Rankings alone don’t pay the bills. In most cases, neither does web traffic. Track and analyze the results of your SEO efforts, making sure that you are increasing leads and/or sales.
