Phase 1 of Our Relaunch SEO Tools is Complete!

As you may know, new stuff always seems to be going on in the SEO world. So how do we keep up? Besides just being SEO nerds, over at e-Storm our SEO Services team go through a quarterly service review: looking for better processes to new vendors, new tactical SEO service an understanding new technology challenges (think Silverlight, Flex etc).

Last quarterly review focus is on revamping our SEO tools. And since last month weeks ago, we’ve been testing Phase 1 of our SEO Tools.

We’ve had many SEO-related tools over the years at e-Storm: internal tools, special partner tools to publicly available tools. But, now we’re heading a new consolidation effort with a tool that will incorporate how we do SEO. Our big focus was to really simplify how we do competitive SEO analysis. The tool will pull data about our clients’ competitors quicker, so we can focus more on doing analysis rather than data gathering.

Phase 1 launch is pretty simple. We’ve revamped the UI extensively to be all nice and pretty with rounded corners (that makes us web 2.0, right?).

Here’s a sneak peak (yes, we had to blur out some areas, sorry):

Screenshot of our SEO Automated Reporting

What to look forward to for Phase 2:

• More In-depth tools for competitive analysis
• Integrating data for everything from Compete.com to Google Webmaster to analytics tools
• Limited public release of the tools

If you have wishlist when it comes to SEO tools or always wish your search marketing tool couldn’t be better, shoot me a line and let me know. I’ll see if I can include you as one of our private beta testers.

Microsoft Adcenter has just released a beta version of a new plug in for excel 2007 to help you research new keywords in your ever expanding PPC and search marketing campaigns. Attendees of the webinar today got a taste of what this application is capable of.

MSN add-in offers some features that are just too valuable and way granular to pass up and I’m personally excited to make the switch over to Excel 2007 as soon as possible as MSN is still working on transposing the plug in across all excel product lifelines–which in my hyper-consumerist mindset can feel like eons.

Some of the bells and whistles for this plug in include:

-Confidence ranking - gives percentage of relevance between suggested keyword vs. website/relevant keywords

-Customized pivot tables for easy data sort of suggested keywords and confidence scores

-Automatically crawls website for all possible keywords

-Generate top keywords by verticals

- Demographic data delineated by months

- Historical data pulled from Adcenter, live search, MSN Passport users and 3rd party partnerships (all data is anonymous).

-Geo-targeting data from top states, countries and cities

In regards to first impressions this looks like a big step towards filling a void in what has been the bane of existence for all search marketers–obtaining accurate forecasting data to make appropriate keyword strategy decisions. Used in conjunction with other keyword tools you’ll just be a terror on the search marketing front.

In the past and recently, we have had clients and prospects say, why would I pay your agency these professional fees when I can hire people to come work for us and I can have them do so much more……Hmmm, here are many reasons why “hiring-in” is not the same:

- Do you really want to build an SEO (replace SEO with any of the following: paid search, word of mouth or analytics) practice internally? From our experience, having a strong team means, having the staff, sending them to conferences, having them interact with other professionals in the field, training them, sending them to speaking engagements (so they learn from others), etc.

- Hiring is not easy: finding the right person with the industry background, hands on experience is not easy

- One person can’t do it all: hiring someone internally to manage say paid search, search engine optimization or other marketing functions requires more than one person, it usually requires 1 account person (the equivalent of the internal marketing manager/director), 1 SEO strategist, 1 SEO technical person, 1 SEO content person, 1 Analytics/Reporting person

- Specialist compensation: to get the above mentioned folks, you need to invest quite a bit, you will need to hire professionals at between $60K (for an entry level person) to $125-175K for a strategist – so if you make the calculation from above. To perform SEO, you would need to hire 5 people costing you about $480K to $600K

- Why are there plumbers, contractors, freelancers and agencies: because they can do something your new hiree could do too– BUT a lot more efficiently, with a faster time to market, and yes, a lot cheaper.

Is “hiring-in” something you as a marketing director, vice-president, CMO, COO or CEO really want to do?