Season 1, Episode 1 of SEO Fight Club with Ted Kubaitis.

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http://seofightclub.org/episode1

The episode begins with the hair pulling and fight starting topic of defining what SEO is and what it should fundamentally encompass. Get ready to get your SEO fight on with this first episode in a new SEO podcast series.

Podcast Transcription:

Hi and thank you for listening to SEOFightClub.org. I’m Ted Kubaitis and I have 22 years of web development and SEO experience. I have patented web technologies and started online businesses. I am both an engineer and a marketer. My goal is to help you win your SEO fights.

Maybe you are new to SEO or maybe you have been doing SEO for as long as I have. This SEO primer will reboot your effectiveness and point you in a direction for achieving positive results that continue to build on new learning. Most SEOs fail in the “O” part of SEO. The optimization part of SEO demands iterative learning based on measurements. In this and future episodes I’m going to show you how fight the good SEO fight.

This episode’s FREEBIE: http://seofightclub.org/episode1

With every episode I love to give something away of high value. This episode’s SEO freebie is my own personal excel template I use for tracking monthly SEO revenue. In this episode I will walk through why collecting this data is vital to SEO success. This free download will save you hours on setting up and archiving the data. The download also shows great examples and demonstrates why the advice in this episode is so important.

You can download the freebie at: 

<figure id="attachment_47" style="width: 600px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">SEO Freebie, season 1 episode 1, SEO Revenue Reporting Template</figcaption></figure>

What is SEO?

Stay with me here. I know you just groaned at the question but this definition is so fundamental to how each of us conducts SEO that we can’t possibly compare one approach to another without considering how our definitions differ.

My definition is radical compared to most mainstream SEOs, but I want you to really consider it from all sides especially from the viewpoint of establishing good business principles and doing “the right thing” for your business. The right thing for your business doesn’t always agree with what the right thing is for Google or what the right thing is in your own best interest. We have a word for when you can isolate those areas and talk about them openly and act on them independently. It’s called integrity and its what will make a business invest in you for the long haul through all the ups and downs.

Here is my definition of SEO: Search engine optimization is the optimization of revenue from search engine sources.

I define optimization as iterative cycles of tuning and learning from the last period’s data to influence next period’s outcomes.

I know. I really went out on a limb with that, but you will be amazed with how many career SEOs are out there that are absolutely against revenue reporting in SEO. Some of them are “so-called experts” who openly advise people not to do it.

Let me explain my position and hopefully I can convince some SEO revenue haters to see the advantages revenue attribution has.

Firstly, SEO Revenue measures the health of your crawlability, indexing, keyword choices,content tuning, backlinks, rankings, relevance, and conversions all from one very sensitive gage. No other measurement in SEO tells you so much in a single measurement. I know many SEOs will argue conversion counts are just as good. Conversions are great and they signal the same things, but with Revenue the needle moves more and the signals you are looking for will be easier to read.

Secondly, every large corporation has SEO or organic revenue as a line item on their gross sales reporting. Like it or not SEO is a marketing channel that produces measurable revenue for large businesses and smaller businesses are hoping to attain that. What is the business’s goal in optimizing that SEO? To make that revenue go up! That’s what is best for the business. For SEO to be viable in a business perspective its revenue needs to be meaningful. Otherwise, why should the business care about SEO? If it doesn’t yield a better business outcome then it would be a waste of time and money… if it doesn’t help then the time and money should be spent on some other channel like social marketing or pay per click. Spending time and money for no benefit is very bad in business.

Thirdly, every bad SEO and a lot of the good ones refuse revenue accountability. They just won’t do it. By wanting the business to achieve a good financial outcome you are demonstrating a willingness to do what is in the best interest for the business even if it comes to the detriment of your own personal best interests. That’s integrity. A great SEO always puts the needs of the business first. To be a great SEO these days it takes integrity and it takes a lot of it.

I have told small businesses before that it will cost them too much to succeed in SEO in their niche. I’ve turned down their business because the margins were too thin and there was much easier revenue to be had in Pay Per Click or other channels.

Many people believe SEO is the “easy money” or “low hanging fruit”. This is simply not true. SEO is the bright shiny apple at the very top of the tree and it takes a very special and rare talent to collect those apples. Most SEOs use tactics that amount to getting a bucket and standing under their tree waiting for the apples to fall. When you use my definitions and my methods I am not only showing you how to reach out to grab the apples, but how to do it with integrity. I want you to focus on the best interests of the company. If you do this right then even the cases where you and a company part ways it still results in the business endorsing you and praising your integrity and wanting to work with you in the future if the situation changes.

Many SEOs don’t want to report on SEO revenue because it will point out that the revenue doesn’t justify the cost of SEO. All businesses start here. You need to get used to this. This is where personal interests conflict with what is best for the business. Hiding it will only last so long. Unless you sole purpose is to collect lots of retainers you will be far better off discussing the value of direction setting so that one day your revenue can justify your cost.

Let me geek out for a moment here. SEO is a vector. That means it has both magnitude and direction. As far as tomorrow is concerned direction always matters more. A smart business understands the need to invest in the future. By tracking revenue despite your personal interests you are demonstrating integrity and implementing a process that can possibly achieve the business’s goals of growing revenue. If you don’t measure the revenue then you won’t know what is or isn’t working. You won’t know if today was any better than yesterday for the business. Get out of that situation! It will ultimately hit your where it hurts most, in your integrity. SEO has ups and downs and the downs can last months. Integrity can last a lifetime and it is your best chance to weather the downs in SEO.

Please please please make direction setting, investing in the future, accountability and integrity your hallmarks. Make them the cornerstone of everything you do.

If you are new to SEO you may be asking what are the arguments against my definition?

I have gotten countless rants on why I am wrong. I read and consider them all. So far all of them have failed to convince me and I’m going to explain why.

“SEO Set Up” versus “Actually Conducting SEO”

Most of the complaints against my definition are because my definition doesn’t include the vast amounts of work that go into setting up a website and configuring it to appear in the search results. Yes this work is critical, but I view all that work as the “SEO set up”.

You can’t actually conduct the “iterative optimization” work until that set up work has been properly done. Some SEOs are good at the set up work and others are good at the iterative optimization. The set up work tends to be a lot more technical and involved with server configuration and web development. The iterative optimization tends to be more about applying marketing and business principles, tracking progress towards goals, crafting content and executing marketing plans.

It makes total sense that the technical SEO setup people would want to define SEO a different way that highlights there talents in a way that isn’t dependent on the revenue out