Eric Bloomfields, Vice President Of Client Service & Technology, Send Traffic
Eric Bloomfield has been with SendTraffic for more than three years. During that time, Bloomfield has managed all the technological capabilities surrounding SendTraffic’s SEO and SEM offerings.
Send Traffic was founded in 1999. It’s an online marketing firm specializing in Search Engine Marketing and Optimization, Lead Generation, and Targeted Vertical Marketing. In addition to SEM and SEO offerings, Send Traffic also provides Paid Inclusion and Feed Management, Website Analytics, and Phone Sales Analytics.
Jerri: What do you see as the current state of SEO?
Bloomfield: It’s always changing. And it requires that you just stay on the top of your game all the time. With the ever-changing algorithms that Google and Yahoo! use, they can change it on a dime. You have to stay on top of it. We hear stories all the time about Google changing their algorithm and then companies lose 80 percent of their business. We try to stay current. You have to stay ahead of the changes and that’s accomplished through best practices.
Jerri: How valuable is vertical SEO?
Bloomfield: I think vertical search is just the way everything needs to go. One of the most effective SEO strategies that you can employ is knowing your vertical and knowing where it’s going. For example, we deal with insurance so I know everything there is to know about insurance. I research the trends and pay attention to the news. But if I knew nothing about these things, then there are SEO strategies that I would do differently. Knowing your vertical very well and knowing what works in the vertical makes it possible for you to do better with your SEO efforts.
It really all starts with the keywords and knowing what keywords work for your industry. Then try to beef up the content and make sure you’re included in the right directories in the industry. Then those keywords will pull more weight in a vertical search engine than with other general search engines. Your site is going to get weighed more heavily than if you’re in general.
within your vertical, then you’re not doing as well as you could be doing. We also stay on top of it, so we have content that’s right for that verti- cal. And we often make sure that we’re pushing the content out to them. But we need to generate it. There are other companies that have the content and just need for us to tell them what to do with it.
Jerri: How is vertical SEO or search marketing different from general SEO?
Bloomfield: I actually haven’t dealt with anything that’s not vertical SEO. Everyone has to target according to their market. Even in dealing with Yahoo! you’re targeting one of the different verti- cals within Yahoo!. If you’re targeting general SEO, you’re going to spend a lot of money and you’re not going to get much. Almost everything you do is highly targeted and vertical.
I haven’t really had a case where someone came to me and said “I need everything.” It’s really a case of “here are my targets, here’s what I need, and here’s how I’m going to get it.
Jerri: What tips would you give an organization just going into SEO?
Bloomfield: You’ve got to have control of your web site. One of the big issues is that everyone has good plans, but they don’t have the ability to carry out those plans. Determine what your approach is. Focus on what you can change and what you can’t change.
Know about what pages you’re dealing with and what you should change and what you shouldn’t. I’ll say, “Here are my pages, I’m really concerned with how the search engines see them and how customers see them.” Then I just need to have a good strategy for creating and deploying content and then stick with it. I have to have a good plan on how I can continually add these pages and keep my content fresh.
It’s so important that you have a plan in place to keep this going, because you spend all that money and if you don’t keep up with it you’ll have spent that money for nothing.
Jerri: Is there anything else about SEO that you think might be important for my readers to know?
Bloomfield: It’s tough. For an SEO it’s about staying current, because it’s such a changing field. There’s always a need to stay on top of search engine trends. It’s about staying ahead of that curve and making sure that whatever changes the search engines make, you are able to make changes very quickly, too. It’s having ability to make changes in a continuously changing environment.
