Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on Seattle 2.0, and imported to GeekWire as part of our acquisition of Seattle 2.0 and its archival content. For more background, see this post.

By Jennifer Cabala

Vanessa FoxVanessa Fox is known as one of the country’s foremost experts in customer acquisition from organicsearch. She created Google’sWebmaster Central, which provides both tools and community to helpwebsite owners improve their sites to gain more customers from searchand was instrumental in the sitemaps.org alliance of Google,Yahoo!, and Microsoft Live Search.   She runs her own company Nine By Blue and she just released a book, Marketingin the Age of Google
Since search is such an important part of online business we asked Vanessa to speak at Deploy2010, a conference for technologists designed to empower you with thetechnology know-how to make your startup a success.
 
She will be speaking specifically about search for startups. But before then we asked her a few questions about Google, SEO and what startups should be doing now.
 
Why did you pick your career as a technologist?

 It came accidentally, actually. My degree is in English and I loved writing so much that it never crossed my mind to spend much time with non-literary pursuits. But once I got involved with technology, it really appealed to my interest in learning how things work, building things, fitting puzzle pieces together… I actually was a technical writer early in my career and then moved into user experience, and it was very helpful to be able to understand both users and developers when building products.

Tell me a little about Google’s Webmaster Central.  Why was it an important product for you?

Webmaster Central was a significant shift in the relationship between search engines and content owners. Before Webmaster Central, how search engines crawled, indexed, and ranked web sites was almost entirely a black box. When I was working on the XML Sitemaps protocol and started talking to internal search engineers as well as to site owners, I realized that both sides could benefit from a lot more communication. But we had to figure out something scalable for the entire web. I think the combination of educational content, discussion forum, and site-specific diagnostics and statistics really worked well for that. And now site owners have access to information that they couldn’t have gotten any other way — such as when Google had trouble crawling pages of a site. These issues can dramatically impact how well a site does in search, but there was just no way of knowing about them before Webmaster Central.

I feel like we really were able to build something valuable for both site owners and Google and the team is continuing to launch awesome stuff.
 

What do you believe it takes to get a successful product to market?

Lots of collaboration. Most of the time, no one person is completely right and knows everything about the audience, market, technological issues, etc. This also means, of course, that you need a strong leader to take all of those perspectives and drive an actionable strategy.

Why did you decide to become an entrepreneur?

Even when I’ve worked in large organizations, I’ve always been a bit of an entrepreneur — I would see something that needed to be done, and just do it. Webmaster Central started that way — just as an idea that I started working on. And that tendency is how I ended up where I am now. I didn’t think to myself, oh I want to be an entrepreneur and run my own company. I thought, there’s this great need for foundational, actionable information around how to operate a business within our current online, searching culture. And Google can only go so far in providing that. I want to provide that next layer to help evolve the way we approach marketing and product development.

 

You just published a book “Marketing in the Age of Google” — why should startups care about search engine marketing/optimization?

 Everyone searches these days. When I speak at events, I often ask how many people have done a search that week. And everyone laughs at such a crazy question. But how many of those same people have built a comprehensive search acquisition strategy for their companies?

 

When should startups start thinking about SEO?

Startups should start thinking about SEO right at the beginning, not because they need to start implementing tactics immediately, but because search data is so valuable for understanding potential audiences and what product you should build. I talk a lot in the book about how search data can be useful for market research, understanding customers, and prioritizing features.

What is the biggest myth about SEO for startups?

Unfortunately, a lot of misconceptions exist about SEO. I think the biggest myth people have is that SEO is all about tactics that are tied to search engine algorithms to increase rankings. I get asked a lot of questions like, how many times should I repeat a word on my page, how many outgoing links should a page have? Forget all of that stuff. SEO isn’t about ranking. It’s about connecting with the right customers who will convert. 


Are there some common mistakes startup companies make regarding SEO and what are the fixes?

I think the most common mistake is not starting with a search strategy. What is your business goal? It’s not to get a lot of traffic. It’s to get qualified visitors who will do something specific. Focus on that and then from there, determine what that audience is really looking for. How can you provide that for them? And what will then motivate that audience to convert?

 

Do you see some startups that are doing a great job and why?

Definitely there are a lot of startups doing a great job. Startups can often have the advantage of being nimble and quickly reacting to what the data is telling them. The key is knowing what data is useful and actionable.

 
What’s next?
 
I’m really excited about the integration of searcher behavior andsearch data into a better way of marketing. We can even better buildproducts that people really want — which is what we all are striving todo anyway. 
 

Marketing in the Age of Google Seattle 2.0 is excited to give away a copy of Vanessa’s new book, “Marketing in the Age of Google” to two lucky winners.  We will randomly draw the names of two people who register to attend Deploy today We will announce the winners here tomorrow!

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