Daniel Coburn » Work

SEO is the Bread, SEM is the butter

Daniel — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 02:06:37 +0000

In today’s topsy turvy world we see many people trying to figure out the “magic sauce” for making a long term profitable website. I have been reading some really good article around the web about how a disproportionate amount of money is being spend on SEM (PPC and other SEM tech) compared to SEO. Some of the numbers are mind boggling to me and I’m really confused at why something that gets 75% of the clicks to generate traffic only gets 15% of the Online Budget and something the generates < 25% of the traffic gets over 80% of the budget.

Here’s a Google heatmap that shows what people are actually looking at:

Google Visual Heat Map

You will notice that a vast majority of the customers are on the left side of the screen, and the ppc ads on the right are only showing green/blue vs. red and orange.

I couple of months ago at my office I began looking at our SEO and created a presentation for my manager to describe what I thought we needed to do in order to become more solid in SEO. I was happy to hear that about two months later the same issue was being brought up from our SVP. The information from the deck was given some Bling by my manager, and presented up the chain. I’m very fortunate that not only is my manager a good guy, but he also knows SEO well, and he’s been able to champion it and answer the questions as they were fired at him. This is great because SEO is a fundamental change in how most organizations in product development operate.

While I helped turn around and develop SEO Strategy for another $1billion retailer, I believe the opportunites I’ll have here will be far greater since the potential increase from fixing the basics is in the $10′s mm. Some times a company can feel like a big ship and it takes a lot to steer the titanic out of the way of an iceberg, but fortunately there are no icebergs, only great opportunity to improve things. I’ll be posting some more about basic things we’ll be working on, and what type of results we see. Also I do believe that PPC and SEO are both required for success, but SEO can bring a lot more bang for your buck in the long term, not just the short.

Been a while… “starting all over”

Daniel — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 02:11:12 +0000

My family and I have settled in Chicago, back to where I called home when I was young. My oldest is in school and smarter than ever, my middle is at home cute and adventerous as can be, my youngest is still behind and once again left behind by the government.

I love my new job, I’m doing product management for a great company with an even greater group of people. I’m really excited to be there and they have great plans, and I’m really happy to be a part of their future growth.

I’m working on personalization/customization which currently entails relevant item selections to show customers as they shop the site. I do think people get confused between personalization and relevant items. While relevant items displays are part of personalization, personalization is a lot more than just simply showing people items other people bought.

I see a truly personal experience based on knowing the customer, and knowing them well. For example it’s my daughter’s birthday in a couple of weeks. If I could be presented on a site suggestions for her birthday when I arrive, 2 things may happen.

I say, “Holy Crap I need to get her a gift”
I shop on the site to get her a gift

Either way the site has provided me a personalize experience, and hopefully I’ll reward the site with my purchse.

Microsoft PST File repair

Daniel — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 05:49:33 +0000

So I have a bunch of old PST files that I have archived from many years back. I went to get some old email and sure enough the file was somehow corrupted. I swear that computers are like old shed doors that rust if you don’t put some oil on them every few months. So I’m pretty screwed and then I got a hold of this PST Repair program (click to download) I liked it because it had a free trial to basically tell me if I were really screwed or if it could be repaired before I bought the software. So do the download if you see this and need to repair a pst file. I had 3 I could recover and 1 that was totally hosed, but 3 outta 4 is better than 0. Hope this helps someone somewhere out there.