Interview With Keller Tiemann From Volumeseo: Discussing Various SEO Strategies

As part of our BloggersIdeas interview series, today we have Keller Tiemann a longhorn alumn living in amazing Austin TX. He spend his time on Tennis, the Internet and entrepreneurship. He founded Volume SEO a consulting company helping clients increase revenue from search traffic through custom search engine optimization strategies.Today he will be sharing his Online Marketing strategies. So boom boom start the interview !

Interview with keller from  VolumeofSEO

Please introduce yourself to our readers. Can you tell us something about your SEO journey. How and when did you enter into this?

My name is Keller Tiemann, I was born in Austin, TX and grew up about 40 miles south of Austin in a small town called Wimberley. I spent most of my childhood outdoors, away from the computer and internet, I was an avid tennis player traveling to tournaments at 11 years old.

It wasn’t until I began studying business at the University of Texas in Austin that I began to take a strong interest in onlineendeavors.My journey to SEO is actually pretty interesting. I was a business student in the McCombs School of Business, studying Accounting and minoring in MIS – with a focus on web application development. I originally had a very basic and general interest in the internet, simply trying to find ways to make money online.

I saw it as a side job or hobby, I always thought that I needed my Accounting degree to guarantee a job and steady income after college.This mindset didn’t detour me though, I was fascinated with websites and so I started my first blog 6 years ago when I was 19, in 2007.

Not long afterward I started my second website, which was a bit more than a blog. Over the next few years I built some websites for school projects as I continued to build websites for friends and family and occasionally myself to bring in some passive income. In 2010 I had a concept for an online clothing exchange where users could list their used high end fashion clothing for sale and then other users could buy them.

At this point in time I knew nothing of SEO and only used PPC to drive traffic to my website. My concept failed and the website never took off. It was a big disappointment, but I learned a lot from the experience.

It was in 2011 that I created a Flippa account and began buying websites and investing my time and skills into them to try to increase their performance and revenue. Through Flippa I branched out from traditional WordPress Blogs and began working on some different types of websites, like niche informational sites, and even an eCommerce store running on the Magento platform.

It was in 2011 when I was buying and taking over websites on Flippa that I realized how important SEO was. In particular, I was able to double adsense income on my first niche site, through improving

SEO to drive more organic search traffic. I then created almost 20 niche sites from scratch and was able to get them all to rank on page #1 of Google and bring in adsense revenue.

I was hooked on SEO, I saw it as one of the most valuable skills that I had acquired next to web design, server management, and all of the other technology related skills that I had been learning.

You see at this point I had experience with about 30 different websites and wasn’t thrilled with the results I had seen from PPC. It was clear now that organic traffic was the most effective in driving conversions and that good SEO could substantially increase organic search traffic. From here on out, SEO became my main focus, although

I still spend a lot of my time on related things like server performance and user design because these components all work together to improve the results of your website.

How do I integrate content marketing in my own company?

The first and foremost area that I utilize content marketing in is my company blog for Volume SEO. I try to create content specifically for my target audience so that I can attract more organic search traffic by business owners who may need my services.I also do interviews similar to this one on BloggersIdeas.

Interview content helps me build my brand. I recently was interviewed for an article in Technorati’s business section called Austin, Texas: SEO City Y’all. This article is a great piece of content that helps build my brand and show readers that I am an SEO authority in Austin Texas.

The article also provides a great backlink for SEO purposes to my own company website.We also have a free subscription on our website for Pro SEO Tips, where we share exclusive more advanced SEO content that is quick and easy to digest.

These Pro SEO Tips share the different SEO techniques and methods that are currently working, and exactly how one may implement them on a WordPress, Drupal, HTML5, or Magento website. On a few occasions my business partner and I have analyzed certain search markets and created content about our analysis.

We have then used that content to market to the website owners in whatever niche analyzed.We create specific content for social media as well and try to increase our activity across Facebook,Twitter, and Google+. We make a lot of connections with freelancers and other SEO companies by doing this, it is a great way to network and build your brand through content marketing.

What’s the most underutilized content distribution tool?

Creating great content is half of the battle, the second half involves distributing it so that your audience actually sees the content. Social Media is a great channel for content distribution, but it is also very cluttered with users posting all of the time. So, managing Social Media as an effective content distribution channel can often times require a tool.

Although Hootsuite is the “go to” for social media management, it still seems to be way underutilized my opinion. Social Media Networks are cluttered with “noise” and I find that many people stillaren’t utilizing Hootsuite to consistently share content at the most optimal times to track their content’s performance.

How to increase your conversation rate ?

Improve your User Design.Web Design is dynamic, last year’s cool designs are outdated. Internet users are saavy and they quickly, subconsciously, make judgment’s of your credibility within seconds of landing on your website. Improve your user design so that these judgements are positive and you should see an increase in conversions.

Here are two extremely effective ways to improve your user design and increase your conversion rate:

1. Make your design simple. Only implement design elements and CTA’s that help improve the user experience on your website. Anything extra is simply clutter and taking away from your overall message.

2. Make your website design responsive to mobile and tablet. The mobile usage statistics are extremely high these days and continuing to increase, so make sure that your website delivers a mobile optimized version for these users, so that they won’t bounce but instead convert.

What are top 10 SEO tools used by you ?

In no particular order, the tools I use most are:

1. Moz Analytics
2. SEMRush
3. Google Analytics
4. Google’s Link Disavow Tool
5. Open Site Explorer
6. Ahrefs
7. Scrapebox
8. SEO Powersuite
9. Google Keyword Planner
10. My Computer!

Simple but Effective Remarketing Tips?

• Create different audiences to remarket to so that you can adjust your bidding strategy.

• Define your audiences by your post categories on your blog.

• Consider your membership duration, the time you are willing to remarket to your previousvisitors. Perhaps 30-60 days is a good starting point, then you can adjust as needed.

• Bid more aggressively on your audiences who show greater intent.

• Follow Neil Patel and read what he has to say about remarketing… he is damn good at it.

What kind of link building tactics you avoid ?

Most paid links should be avoided, especially if you are just getting started, it is hard to determine which paid links are acceptable and will provide SEO benefit.

Avoid using tools like SENuke to build large quantities of links. Google is looking more at relevancy and quality, not so much quantity, and often times these massive link farms are identifiable by Google and will land your website in the penalty box.

I would focus on engaging with other websites in your niche through blog commenting, and offering guest posts for these other sites. The trick with guest posting is not to look at it as an opportunity for a link but instead an opportunity to provide a great piece of content for someone else’s audience. If

the content is relevant to their audience and truly answers a query that they may have, then you have created a great guest post for SEO purposes, and any links in your post will be trusted by Google and provide great SEO benefit.

What kind of social media management tools you are using ?

Hootsuite is our primary choice for social media management. We are playing around withBuzzBundle, which was created by the guys who make SEO Powersuite, but we don’t have much to report on BuzzBundle yet.

Are you using affiliate marketing tools, can you name some ?

Affiliate marketing? This is pretty broad, I guess you could call ScrapeBox an affiliate marketing tool,and yes we use it for very specific limited purposes. It helps us find related websites to reach out to for guest posting and also to engage with and comment on blogs.

How Google’s ‘not provided’ keyword data has hindered the ability to know what consumers are looking for online ?

Why did you have to go here? Now I am in a bad mood just thinking about this! J Prior to keyword data not being provided by Google, we could see exactly what the organic search traffic to our websites was searching for in the engines. Now, we have to come up with creative reporting methods within Google Analytics to try to gain a more broad understanding of the types of search terms that are driving our traffic.

This has hindered our ability to know what users are searching for in two ways.

1. First of all it has taken up more of our time. We expend more resources on custom reporting and analyzing in order to gain valuable insights that used to appear freely in Google Analytics reports.

2. Second of all, we do not reach the same level of keyword detail through our custom methods.

We are able to paint a picture, but it can still be a bit grainy at times, as we just don’t haveaccess to the same level of keyword data.

Why Content Marketing is playing keen role in SEO 2014.

Content is King, this is true. If you want your website to rank, then you need to be creating relevant keyword targeted content that your audience is searching for. This is perhaps the one SEO technique that anyone could implement to achieve organic search rankings and increase targeted traffic to their website.

Google has evolved to a point where spam link building will not work for SEO. Although in years past one could create a very thin website, without much content, and then achieve great search engine rankings from building spammy links, in 2014 this is not the case.

Instead, Google is better analyzing content and its relevancy in order to determine what should rank for various keyword searches. So,content marketing should be your primary objective in an SEO campaign. All of the technical SEO stuff should follow your content marketing plan.

How to increase conversation rate through landing pages. ?

This goes back to the question I answered above about increasing conversion rate through improved user design.

I don’t think that I would say much different here, in fact I may say that user design is even more important on a specific landing page for a product or service.

So, one tip to increase conversions for a landing page would be to simplify the page design to exclude unnecessary links and elements, so as not to distract your audience from your content and call to actions.

Do color combination affects conversion rate ? Does it increase sales ?

Based on the research of others, the answer is yes. Color combinations do impact conversion rates and thus could potentially increase sales.

This all goes back to user design and increasing conversion rates, like I have mentioned in two of my previous answers. It is so important to analyze and understand internet users in general, and your specific audience, to make decisions like colors when it comes to web design.Of course your brand colors will impact your decisions too, but perhaps you would consider changing your company colors up a bit if it meant increasing sales, eh?

What kind of Content marketing tools you have worked upon ?

Although I have yet to develop any content marketing tools one day I would love the opportunity to create, or to help create, a valuable tool. I have the right set of skills and experience to work with developers to create a tool, but I honestly haven’t spent the time to consider a need for a tool and to come up with an idea to meet that need through a tool.

If I do find myself working on a new content marketing tool in my career, I will be sure to reach out and let you know!

I hope you enjoy this mind blowing interview session with Keller , he had given his best.

If you have any questions or doubts please do ask in the comments below !

Dont forget to share this awesome interview in social media. I will be pleased if you share this now !!! Cheers!!! Join BloggersIdeas on FacebookGoogle+ & Twitter .

 

Jitendra Vaswani
This author is verified on BloggersIdeas.com

Jitendra Vaswani is a Digital Marketing Practitioner and renowned international keynote speaker who has embraced the digital nomad lifestyle as he travels around the world. He founded two successful websites, BloggersIdeas.com & Digital Marketing Agency DigiExe of which his success stories have expanded to authoring "Inside A Hustler's Brain : In Pursuit of Financial Freedom” (20,000 copies sold worldwide) and contributing to “International Best Selling Author of Growth Hacking Book 2". Jitendra designed workshops for over 10000+ professionals in Digital marketing across continents; with intentions ultimately anchored towards creating an impactable difference by helping people build their dream business online. Jitendra Vaswani is a high-powered investor with an impressive portfolio that includes Imagestation. To learn more about his investments, Find him on Linkedin, Twitter, & Facebook.

Affiliate disclosure: In full transparency – some of the links on our website are affiliate links, if you use them to make a purchase we will earn a commission at no additional cost for you (none whatsoever!).

Comments (2)

  1. This really a motivation for all bloggers (whether its a kid or older bloggers)..Really fabulous interview article..

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