This post is a response to Rand’s post “The Big Picture Conversation”
Full disclosure: I just started reading Good To Great a few days ago while stuck in the Chicago airport. It immediately made me recognize some changes that need to be made. I had the thought to put these into motion (in a post) before reading Rand’s post (which I am replying to here) – but the post did seal the final deal. In it, Rand recommends doing four things:
Had the huge pleasure of giving my first official SEO presentation yesterday! Was a great honor to be asked by Distilled NYC to join them at ZocDoc headquarters.
Here’s the videos (slides below!)
Answering questions of clients & people in Q&A is often more about showing understanding first before giving a technical answer.
— Dan Shure (@dan_shure) June 20, 2012
Working so much with clients and in the Moz Q&A lately, I’d really gotten to thinking just how important this above tweet is at doing an exceptional job. Not just a good job – an exceptional one. One where you not only answer the question but leave the person feeling like you really understand their unique position, and not only that, give them an awesome experience with the Moz Q&A.
And, you know, this puts us in a little dilemma. Should I tell? Its really been fun reading gems like this;
A true poetic gem. Or this;
But… fake Cutts. We’re SEOs. We solve puzzles on the internet all day. I guess this time was coming. Hopefully we still all have some fun – but ya know a puzzle is a puzzle and I can’t help but to solve it – and then write a blog post about it!!
I assumed, from this description, I was about to find myself downloading and installing an actual browser – one especially made to browse the web like an SEO. Nope! Rather, think of Browseo more like a virtual browser. Or a “browser within a browser”. Its a web app really.
An SEO-Virtual-Browser-Within-A-Browser-Web-App. Ok, get it? I’ll show it to you!
Let’s look at the website of this coffee company… I’d recently come across this local coffee roaster, New Harvest Coffee Roasters – and I really like their stuff, so I thought we’d use their site as a trial run. (And nope this isn’t a plug for them, in fact I gave them some Twitter-love not too long ago and I don’t think they were listening. We’ll talk about that later.) Moving on…
Image source: http://karlsprague.com/?p=14
I got that term “The Wall” from Wil Reynolds (see his tweet). He said;
I often “hit the wall” & realize I can’t do it all – instead of feeling helpless I start planning & prioritizing.
We had talked about this in person as well recently; the challenges you face when trying to run a business, do your work, balance work and personal life, manage commitments and think about the future.
The concept of “The Wall” has stuck with me, largely because I know I’m at that point right now.
This is also where the newness of everything is over. I can no longer have my “first post” on the Moz blog and be the “new guy with the great first post”. This is the REAL work now. The second post is much harder. Consistency and growth are the new metrics.
In the last year for me, things have been happening fast. Just a quick recap of what led to where things are today;
[hr]
August 16th 1979
I was born
1979 – 2002
lots of stuff happened
2002-2006
Build my first websites: for my bands, and my own music projects I was involved in
2007-2010
Start making websites in my spare time for other people – teach myself HTML/CSS some PHP/SQL…. but this is when I also discover SEO – it fits my mind perfectly. art and science. analytics and intuition. calculated yet inspired. solitary yet social. and the PEOPLE are awesome!!
December 2010
Decide I’m really liking this SEO thing, getting good results for people, and purchase this domain – www.evolvingseo.com – can you believe it was available for $9.99?
May/June 2011
Spend a lot of time reflecting on my “life”, reading the 80/20 Principle multiple times, taking notes – Decide I want to do SEO full time - Built this website in a week (copywriting, everything)
June – August 2011
Start studying more and more advanced SEO concepts VERY intensely – reading every blog post – continue working on sites for my current clients. Start networking on Twitter
August 2011
Won a free pass to Affiliate Summit East where I got to meet LOTS of folks who I think can safely say at this point are not only great colleagues but also some of the best friends I’ve ever had – despite living hours away.
September 2011 – December 2011
Get my blog going more. Learn learn. Read read. Talk to people on Twitter. Go to some SEO meetups hosted by Distilled and SEMNE – get a few more clients. Get rejected from my local BNI because the “Internet Marketing” company says they “do SEO and that seat is taken”.
January 2012
Blogging starts paying off.
I wrote about some weird IMDB results
January 13th 2012
Things like this started happening… I had been following Wil Reynolds for over 12 months hoping to get his attention… and then…
Almost 100 people followed me that day.
My analytics from that month shows it well.
February 2012
First post for the Distilled Blog went up – the mysterious search for “fave”
I wrote my first SEOmoz post - which got promoted in less than 3 hours to the main blog
First guest post on iPullRank.com goes up – Stop Ignoring Entity Search
March – April 2012
Clients start pouring in. Job offers. SESNY conference. LinkLove Boston…. more leads, more guest blogging opportunities, #seochat on May 3rd…
You haven’t seen me blogging because I’ve been SWAMPED IN WORK!!
Started my position as an SEOmoz associate
Yes folks, when it rains it pours.
[hr]
That stuff was EASY. I have yet to truly “succeed”. I’m humbled every day by the challenges I face ahead. RIGHT NOW ITS SINK OR SWIM. NOW, I’m facing real challenges. Writing blog posts and doing SEO part time for a few select clients and my own projects was EASY.
Disclaimer: especially for any clients reading this 
…I’m not talking about technical SEO skills being hard. I’m talking about getting a business up on its feet – managing workload, managing growth (heck, even trying to decide how the heck I want to grow!). SEO is the EASY part for me – that’s one reason I love and want to be doing it all of the time.
[hr]
Life’s a big school right? Constant learning. Failure is not an option.
Yep… we’ve all been there right? What am I going to start doing to get better at this?
I was just two months late sending my annual LLC payment and reports. And when I sent it… wrong report. ENTIRELY wrong. FAIL.
My wife would be the first to tell you – I HATE taxes. Accounting? Can’t stand it. Contracts, NDAs, formality… I’d prefer to stab myself in the eyes with pencils.
But in order to move forward with a business that’s going to contribute and grow, I’ve gotta pay some more attention to having the books set up.
My goals in doing SEO full time were to;
If you hang out on Twitter around 1am EST you might notice I’m there. If you hang out at 7am EST, you might notice I’m there. In fact, you might notice me online working somewhere in what seems like near-24-hour-sleepless-days.
Workload balance is a DEFINITE challenge. Do I hire help? One thing I know is: I. Will. Not. Fail.
This could be a whole story in its self (and probably will be one day). You may not know but my Dad is a successful (and a bit well known) sculptor. He made this (among many other things);
The Massachusetts Fallen Firefighters Memorial – State House – Boston, MA – Robert Shure, sculptor
Guess what? My father has had two cornea (part of the eye) transplants and was even legally blind in one eye for over a year. Persistence? Not giving up? Determination? Try pursuing a professional sculpting career while being partially blind or have your eyes hurt so bad you can barely keep them open.
The best part? My Dad doesn’t talk about it. Ever. No excuses.
This seems to happen a bit in our industry. Rand. Wil.
What’s with all this transparency stuff?
I think its inevitable. As I’m writing this, I realize… this is a letter. To all my new friends, colleagues , clients – the people that have been there for me, and I hope to be there for one day. We’re all over the country, rarely see each other in person, never have time to catch up.
This is where I’m at right now. Done.. one minute left… off to a meeting… sorry about typos.
[hr]
Album listened to on repeat while writing this post: Kanye West – Graduation
Rank checking it seems is still one of those sore spots among SEOs – where there are some tools that work great certain things but not others. I’m doing some heavy keyword research (1000′s of keywords) for an ecommerce site and need something that can process rankings quickly.
So earlier today I went on over to Google Plus, where I’ve been having more luck at getting some interaction lately, and asked for people’s recommendations on rank checkers for SEO.
WOW! The feedback was phenomenal, even some folks I look up to like Wil Reynolds and Tom Critchlow chimed in. Below is, what I think, is the ultimate list of rank checkers with some pros and cons. I’ve also include what I look for in a rank checker. And don’t worry, I give complete thanks to everyone who pointed them out to me!
This is the biggest categorical difference to me, in all rank checkers – that is, whether they allow on-demand rank checking (you can run one-off’s) or campaign based rank checkers. For on-demand ranking checking, I am using it for things like keyword research or competitive research; ie I am trying to figure out what the keywords should be. For campaign based rank checking, this is obviously to track this important KPI over time.
The ability to run hundreds if not thousand of keywords is important, especially if you’re working on larger sites. Oftentimes I’m in the middle of keyword research and would like to judge search volume against rankings and all the other metrics, so I’d like to run those hundreds of words through and get the volume back into the spreadsheet quickly.
Goes without saying! Gimme that data in a spreadsheet!
This is last because, well, if a tool is good enough and saves me time, its usually VERY much worth the cost. Cost for SEO tools usually makes up for its self quite easily – so while cost is a factor, its not a big one.
[hr]
On-Demand vs Campaign: On demand, although I believe you can set up scheduled reports
Volume: 100 at a time
Export: Yes
Price: Free
Website: tools.seobook.com/firefox/rank-checker/
Via: Dan Shure
On-Demand vs Campaign: Campaign
Volume: 300, 1000 or 5000
Export: Yes
Price: $99, $199 or $499 /month (but you also get their entire suite of software, training videos etc)
Website: www.seomoz.org/features
Via: Dan Shure
On-Demand vs Campaign: Campaign
Volume: 1000 or 2500 (.06 cents extra per word)
Export: Yes
Price: $99, $249 / month
Website: raventools.com/internet-marketing-tools/serp-tracker/
Via: Dan Shure
NOTE: Raven’s rank tracker is powered by Authority Labs.
On-Demand vs Campaign: Campaign
Volume: 10-5,000
Export: All paid versions
Price: Free-$299 / month
Website: www.micrositemasters.com
Via: Melissa Rubin
On-Demand vs Campaign: Campaign
Volume: Not sure
Export: Yes
Price: By Request (free trial available)
Website: www.sistrix.com/toolbox/
Via: Alessio Madeyski
On-Demand vs Campaign: Campaign
Volume: 100-500+
Export: Yes, with credits
Price: $398-$1,325+ / month
Website: www.searchmetrics.com/en/seo-software/
Via: Alessio Madeyski
On-Demand vs Campaign: On Demand
Volume: 1 (but multiple sites for each keyword)
Export: Yes
Price: Free
Website: Chrome Extension Store Page
Via: Alessio Madeyski
On-Demand vs Campaign: Campaign
Volume: 100-unlimited
Export: Lots you can do with the API
Price: $24 – $450 / month
Website: authoritylabs.com/tour/
Via: Dustin Thompson / Wil Reynolds
On-Demand vs Campaign: Campaign?
Volume: Not sure
Export: Not sure
Price: Not sure
Website: www.brightedge.com/seo-management
Via: Anthony D. Nelson
On-Demand vs Campaign: On Demand
Volume: 50 (limit to importxml commands in one G-Doc)
Export: Yes, already in spreadsheet
Price: Free
Website: This post by Tom should get you started.
Via: Dan Shure / Tom Critchlow
On-Demand vs Campaign: Campaign
Volume: 50 – 1500
Export: Yes
Price: $19 – $249 / month
Website: www.rankranger.com/?p=features
Via: Marc Levy
On-Demand vs Campaign: Campaign
Volume: Not sure, anyone?
Export: Yes
Price: $99 – $599 / month
Website: www.advancedwebranking.com/features.html
Via: Marc Levy via this article on rank checkers
On-Demand vs Campaign: Campaign
Volume: Unlimited
Export: Not sure
Price: Free
Website: www.traffictravis.com
Via: Tim Capper
On-Demand vs Campaign:
Volume: 50 – 10,000,000
Export: Yes
Price: $29 – $69 + extra for usage (premium) / month
Website: www.webposition.com
Via: Benjamin Beck
On-Demand vs Campaign: Both
Volume: Unlimited (I think)
Export: Yes
Price: $149 (no monthly cost)
Website: www.marketsamurai.com
Via: Dan Bochichio
On-Demand vs Campaign: Campaign
Volume: Unlimited
Export: Yes
Price: By Request (free demo)
Website: www.conductor.com
Via: JenMarie Robustelli
On-Demand vs Campaign: Campaign (although it says ‘real time’)
Volume: Unlimited
Export: Yes
Price: By Request
Website: getstat.com/wp/features/
Via: Mike King
On-Demand vs Campaign: Campaign
Volume: 50 keywords each domain / 3 domains (.05 cents extra word)
Export: Yes
Price: $99 – $129 / month
Website: www.seodiver.com/keyword-monitor
Via: Seodiver! (Thanks!)
On-Demand vs Campaign: Campaign
Volume: Unlimited
Export: Yes (email delivery too)
Price: $7 – $25 / month
Website: www.zoomrank.com
Via: Corey Eulas
On-Demand vs Campaign: Both it Seems
Volume: I think unlimited
Export: Premium Only
Price: Free – $249.75 (one time cost)
Website: www.link-assistant.com/rank-tracker/features.html
Via: Logan Thompson
On-Demand vs Campaign: Campaign
Volume: 20-500
Export: All levels
Price: $9-133/month
Website: http://ranktrackr.com/
Via: Alaj at RankTrackr
Please drop a recommendation in the comments! I hope to add to this list, not only more software choices but some other key factors. Also, you may notice some info is missing, or I wasn’t sure, please feel free to fill me in and I’ll update it!
UPDATE: I also came across this discussion in the Moz Q&A about rank checking software – valuable read as well!
Thanks to EVERYONE who chimed in earlier on Google Plus!!
UPDATE – January 12, 2012 – 6:00am
I’ve sent a tweet over to Duane Forrester at Bing to see if I can get some answers, I’ll keep you posted!
I am also now seeing different results in Bing than just a few days ago (thanks to Bill Slawski for pointing this out)…
[hr]
Hey All!
So this post is pretty image heavy, thus I’ve decided to post them all in a slidedeck for easier viewing. You’ll definitely want to view full screen for a few of the slide… Enjoy!
Check out my dive into a case study on how Bing and Google are indexing and returning movie results, specifically for the IMDB. There’s some very interesting stuff, like Bing’s ignoring of the canonical tag and 302 redirect, with a few simple takeaways at the end…
I would LOVE to hear YOUR thoughts about what’s in the images below!!
[hr]
[hr]
Most of my comments are right in the slideshow, but I’d just like to add a few resources to augment my images here:
Hello!!
I’m here today to give Nashoba Valley Winery some invaluable tips on improving their online presence and capturing tons of hidden value out there on the net.
Nashoba Valley Winery is a fruit winery, restaurant and they host wine tastings, weddings, apple picking, fall events in a beautiful New England setting. On the top 5 favorite restaurants for my wife and I (doesn’t hurt its 20 minutes from home either).
I just want to point out a few long term investments and short term easy actions they could do to get more value from their presence online.
The key here, is that this is already an awesome business, their customers love them, the food and wine and experience as already top notch – they just need a little push in the right direction for online stuff. But there is huge potential for them to maximize!
First, here’s the site:
It looks like they’re on some sort of pre-1998 template setup for a platform. Some kind of ASP site. They would spend a little up front to switch to WordPress, but I can’t imagine what they’re on now being anything but a headache. Some of the several benefits to WordPress:
For example, the following screenshot shows that when people search for their wine tasting information, you just get the homepage and site-links:
Or look at this example:
So what should they do? They should use Google suggest data to see what people commonly search for, and be sure they are providing that information on their site:
I know I use Ubersuggest a lot in examples, but you can see why. This is INVALUABLE information for a business to have!!
So Nashoba Valley: create those pages and resources to help your customers find what they need more easily. Your website is like the 24/7 answering service, ready to answer people’s questions – you should anticipate them as best a possible and provide answers, so your website can work for you, round the clock.
Check out what I found here. This is a Google Blog search… look how many results there are!
Let’s dive deeper and look at a few of these posts and who wrote them… example #1
Wow! This active food blogger, wrote about Nashoba (a good review) and didn’t leave a link!! Not only that, Nashoba (it doesn’t seem) has not contacted this blogger, thanked them, re-shared the article. They have a good engaged Twitter following! Not only should they reach out with a “thank-you” – here is all your shareworthy social media content here!!! You don’t NEED to create content to tweet about all the time, just share what people have written about you!!
Here’s ANOTHER:
This blogger says “its one of my favorite places to visit each fall”. NO comment or thank-you from Nashoba. Do something with this!!!! She’s also got a great twitter following!
Nashoba Valley Winery should create a Google Alert for a blog search of their name to begin monitoring for new blog articles. And then take action!! Suggested actions are:
This is similar to above, but check this out:
Someone here was looking for Cranberry Wine in the greater Boston area. Someone even responded on behalf of Nashoba, but how killer would that be for Nashoba to respond directly?
If you want to get advanced, you could use the new tool I talked about in my last post, and hook up some killer ways to stay on top of the discussion online.
Do it Nashoba!
Alright… there’s a bit of a housekeeping issue with Facebook. You may or may not be aware, but it could be a real pain point for folks online. Have a look at what see you when typing “Nashoba Valley”…
nothing… (actually I see something at the very bottom, but STILL…)
What if we include the word “winery”? Its the full business name now, right?
Just a lonely abandoned Business Page. Ok let’s try “see more results…” (Yes, I ‘liked’ SEER interactive on Facebook…)
YIKES!!!
EIGHT OPTIONS of Facebook pages!!!! And what the heck is that listing towards the bottom????!
Unfortunately many people still try to visit your abandoned business page:
Your actual “active” Facebook page is a personal page account. I’m sure you know this and its perhaps a long term issue that’s been nagging, but it would be ideal to set a plan to migrate over to a business page and clean up those extra listings.
Also, I’m not sure when I started talking about Nashoba in the second person, maybe just when I get excited…
Showing people that you’re out there online and listening can have a phenominal impact. Take a look at this example of a not so great review:
Just firing off a bunch of quick things here…. so its great you are taking advantage of video and YouTube. I see some improvements you could make that would take this from good to GRREEEATT!
Lastly, one little website tip…. you’ve apparently got TONS of really nice wards in your name… they are listed on your site here like this:
<back to third person/>I do realize Nashoba Valley is doing some great things as a business. I know this first hand, I’m a happy returning customer! And I know its hard to keep up with everything online especially when trying to running a business all at the same time. Yet with some automation tricks, prioritization and a little re-direction they could really maximize large untapped potential. These ideas may be “SEO centered” but they’re really about PEOPLE. Its about connecting with people online, saying thanks, giving back, showing they care and are listening. I’m not saying Nashoba Winery doesn’t care, these things will just give the right perception – that they DO care, and people will see that online and turn into more happy customers.
If you’re even in the Massachusetts Area, I really do recommend checking out Nashoba Valley Winery…
Well…. OK! I’ll take a stab at it. This is literally my 60 minute assessment of Ifttt. I know I could go into more detail, and ideas will likely develop as I begin using it, but hey, I just set up an account last night
Let’s go!
Ifttt is like “lift” with no L. Ifttt allows you to combine a variety of tools together into “actions”. An action is a “trigger” plus an “event”. For example, when I post a new photo to flickr, tweet about it. Or when I receive an email from my mom, post it to FaceBook. This page I’m sure explains it better than I just did and this page list “recipes”: public actions that users have posted for anyone to use. I just have one thing to say about this: REALLY FREAKIN COOL!
This is a neat public action (“Recipe”)… it sends you an email if its going to rain the next day.
This is some more detail on how this particular recipe is set up.
This new platform has such potential to get huge, not only for an idividual looking for a productivity boost, but as Rand inscinuates, for potential inbound marketing capabilities. I’m going to share a few quick things about their potential and three different general ways Ifttt can be used. As you’ll see in my ideas below, Ifttt is only limited by your creativity. You’re combining two tools together, but if you can think abstractly 1 + 1 isn’t always 2. Especially because of the automation aspects.
Being an SEO, my first thought it to look at the search volume numbers for a start-up. Great way to gauge potential interest and momentum. Check it out:
Google Insights shows the beginning of a trend upward in the last month. I believe this is because they recently went from private beta to just beta. Not only that though, they’re showing some good brand search volume:
Not a huge search volume in the US but global is starting to look healthy. Interesting to me as well, that global search volume is much larger, and on the insights chart above there’s been a huge Interest in China.
There are three basic ways I can suggest using Ifttt.
I think this was the obvious intended use, to help automate certain tasks. A few examples from Ifttt are:
I like this one, and I’m sure Rand will too. I’d always wondered if I could be notified when someone is “online” on Twitter. Perhaps you’re waiting to share a new piece of content with them, or have a question and you want to ask when they are likely to notice. Maybe there’s something that can do this in TweetDeck or Hootsuite, but I haven’t looked into.
Check ‘er out.
Here, I have told Ifttt to text message me whenever Rand tweets. That way I can hop on Twitter and bother him. And the result?
Tweet from @randfish sent to my phone as a text message.
I’m sure I’ve barely scratched the surface here, but I’m anxious to put this to the test with some real world examples. I think it has enormous potential for automatic content creation/curation and well as communicating with customers or potential customers.
You saw the search numbers and you’ve seen the potential of what Ifttt can do! Check out this:
So head over to Ubersuggest and grab some more Ifttt content ideas:
If there were more time in the day, I could go on forever. But I had a few last ideas for using Ifttt:
1. Content Curation / Crowdsourcing – you could take all tweets with a certain hashtag or facebook updates and collect them automatically somewhere for a bigger piece of content. Either your own tweets or those of customers etc.
2. Get this into excel / G Docs?? – The last thought I had was, I wonder if there’s a way or will be a way to get some of the data coming from actions into excel. That would be some massively useful info that have, for lots of reasons.
Alright… times out… that’s my 60 minutes first look into Ifttt… hope you liked it!
I'm Dan (Google Plus Profile). I've been helping businesses improve their websites since 2007. Improving your bottom line is my number one goal. My obsessive nature and love for SEO as a true craft doesn't hurt either. 
