A Day in the Life of Seattle SEOs

by Larry Sivitz

When your search-savvy editor began covering the worlds of SEO and SEM, Alta Vista, Lycos and Excite were the search engines to watch and Amazon just sold books. There was no Google Dance (the index or the party), no Google Analytics, Yahoo Tools or Omniture. No Google Maps or Places. No RSS newsfeeds to syndicate, LinkedIn or Facebook profiles to place, no geo-map coordinates to optimize, YouTube playlists to theme, or iPhone or Anrdoid Apps to promote, A “conversion event” was a meeting with a new client on remediating Black Hat tactics such as keyword stuffing, link spamming, or cloaking.

Before Seattle hosted its first Advanced Search Marketing Expo, or Portland its SEMpdx SearchFest, there were five agencies doing pure organic SEO here: SEOmoz, SearchWrite, HayMeadows, Portent and Blue Moose, Today there are dozens of search practitioners around Puget Sound bearing names like Get to the Top, Point-It!, Johnon, SEOGoddess and out-of-area frontier outposts like Razorfish and Distilled, not to mention the scores of in-house search professionals. Conrad Saam of Avvo, puts the in-house mission well. There are no SEO ‘departments’ inside of an organization. Every department must understand their role in SEO and make an integral conbtribution to effective ROI, CRO and ROAS.

So what’s a routine day like in the life of a Seattle SEO? Here’s an excerpted, cutaway view of “day-parted” status updates, blog comments, tweets and Foursquare/Gowalla checkins.

8:00 am Morning commute. Listening to “This Week in Google” podcast.

9:00 Opening email Re: Linkbuilding. You’re selling me a link network where all your links are nofollowed…? Okaaay.

10:00 Checking MyClientCenter in AdWords for recent Landing Page test results, unusual bid activity.

11:00 Setting up PPC Flowchart for new account! http://tools.ppcblog.com/flowchart/

11:30 Moderating client blog comments posted overnight. WordPress upgrading again?

12:00 Checking in for lunch with video team on converting content to video. Video now has 50X better chance of page one ranking.

12:01 I just became mayor of this Starbucks!

1:00 Creating a Keyword Calendar to identify scheduled events, seasonal events and trends.

1:30 Helping client optimize for LinkedIn/Yahoo Answers with email alerts.

2:00 Using TubeMogul.com to syndicate video to 16 sharing sites.

2:15 A good read from Avinush for data decision makers. http://bit.ly/cN0hZJ

2:30 Newbie client phone call. Suggested Google’s “Starter Guide” http://tinyurl.com/5ly48c

2:45 Signing up for SMX Advanced, June 8-9 in Seattle w/ $100 off discount code mnw@smx

3:00 Google announces plans to offer GA Opt-Out. How will this affect our KPI’s? http://bit.ly/96SlZy

3:10 OMG this page is awful – *puking*

3:20 Writing optimized press release with embedded links.

3:30 Checking new Facebook metrics in Omniture SearchCenter.

3:45 Editing Robots.txt to disallow login pages from indexing.

3:55 Wait for Google Favorite Places QR Barcode or generate our own?

4:00 Advising client that PPC broad match is useless for single terms.Two word also dangerous. Reserve broad match for 4, 5 or 6 word queries.

4:20 Telling Yellow Pages sales guy we’re not interested. Response? “So you don’t want to be found by anybody?” Ha!

4:40 Building Negative Keyword Lists (NKL) for AdWords.

4:50 Studying the Intelligence Tab in Google Analytics http://bit.ly/bSHsjd

4:55 Renewing Certified Google Professional status. Prepping for exam.

5:00 Checking SEO salaries.How much should I pay? Make? http://bit.ly/6ZGcMU

5:20 Updating new Images and video sitemaps. Alt. attributes? http://bit.ly/cd73CF
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5:30pm Off to Seattle Social Media Club panel. Watch me on U-Stream. [24x7]

Larry Sivitz is the founder and president of SearchWrite and a certified Google, Microsoft and Yahoo search marketer.

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Category: SiteCynic