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Interview Jill Whalen
Mr. Pratt Interviews Jill Whalen
I did a quick study of Jill Whalen last night in preparation for this interview and found that she is a timely guest. Jill Whalen is a self proclaimed “white hat” SEO expert. Until recently “white hats” were not getting much respect from the marketing community until Rand Fishkin (who I recently interviewed) got their attention in a Newsweek article that mentioned him. Here is my interview with Jill Whalen.
Mrs. Whalen, your name was brought up in my recent interview of Rand Fishkin who is also a self proclaimed “white hat” marketing expert. Can you describe what makes someone’s ranking techniques for their client’s websites “white hat” and what is considered “black hat” these days?
You can just call me Jill. Mrs. Whalen was my mother-in-law. :-)
Sorry, where I come from we are required to use Mr. and Mrs.
I don’t generally use the terms white hat or black hat, and therefore don’t proclaim to be one or the other. To me it’s very simple. You are either trying to deceive the search engines with your website optimization or you’re not. I call deceptive SEO — search engine spamming, and non deceptive SEO — just plain old SEO.
You are glowing with confidence Jill to the point that you might bother others in your profession. You even mention that to have success you must do things the “Highrankings way”. Is your way the only way and what do you think about those who do not do things Jill’s way?
I don’t believe I ever said that to have success you *must* do things the High Rankings® way. However, if you do things the High Rankings® way (really do it, not just think you’re doing it) then you will definitely have a successful SEO campaign.
But, I’ve always said that there are many ways to skin the SEO cat. You can use whatever methods you’re comfortable with, and still achieve the same end results. I do believe that if you find a method that you like that works for you, it’s best for you to stick with that one, and not try to mix and match as you might end up confusing yourself and your optimization campaign more than helping things.
I looked back in your history online and found that the “Highrankings way” really hasn’t changed all that much over time. Has this allowed you more success with your client sites because you do not take extreme measures to game the search engines to gain temporary positive results?
The interesting thing about the High Rankings® way is that over time, the general SEO community has pretty much adopted it as the standard for non-spam SEO, which has been extremely gratifying. Years ago when I first started talking about making your website be the best it can be for your users AND the search engines, I was often scoffed at. In fact, back in the mid-to-late 90’s, once in awhile I would visit some of the popular SEO forums of that time and I wouldn’t have the foggiest idea of what they were talking about. It always seemed like they were taking the simple and making it complicated. Sometimes I would wonder if I was somehow missing the boat…until I’d look at my client’s great rankings and get smacked back into reality. Whatever I was doing, it was obviously working. I decided to simply ignore those forums and spread the word about my methods through the email lists I belonged to at the time, and then my own newsletter (the first of which started in 2000), and later through my forums. I much prefer to make the complicated simple, instead of the other way around! It really warms my heart when I receive emails from people all over the world who tell me that they’ve been reading all sorts of articles and forums on SEO, and they were completely confused until they read my stuff. Those are the best emails I could ask for!
How have your websites weathered Google’s Jagger algorithm changes?
I didn’t notice any unusual blips in rankings, traffic or conversions. That update seemed to hit a very minor segment of sites as compared to some of Google’s previous algo changes from a year or two ago. Even in those previous updates, none of my clients suffered any major losses. The only unfortunate loss was that of my sister’s B2B site. She was out of Google for exactly 1 year with her major keyword phrase after one of the updates a couple of years ago.
The interesting thing to note about my sister’s experience, however, is that although she became a real Google-hater, she also went back to her marketing roots and put some time, effort and money into other things that she had stopped doing due to her high search engine rankings. She hired a traditional PR firm for some big bucks, and found it paid off handsomely during the time she was missing from Google. I believe she has continued on with them even once her rankings came back. It was really a good lesson in not relying on free search engine rankings for your bread and butter. I often tell this story to posters on my forum who have been hurt by one or another of the updates. They generally are too angry at Google to listen at first, but sometimes they come around.
I read on your about page the following:
“I specialize in showing you why your site is not achieving top listings in the major search engines, and then providing you with the knowledge to do something about it. I focus on helping your Web site be the best it can be for the search engines /and/ your site visitors through a complete site analysis and subsequent SEO consulting”. Are you more of a coach or consultant than someone who is going to get in there and optimize individual pages on a client’s website?
I do both. You probably read that info on my “consulting” page. I do a lot of site analysis reports and consultations, as well as some in-house consulting; however, I also do a lot of full service SEO with the help of my new company, Search Creative, LLC.
Say I am a business owner and sell a new brand of hammer but know nothing about internet marketing. Walk us through the process one would go through to achieve success, the Highrankings way.
Well, I’m not sure that I would recommend SEO for a site that only sold a new brand of hammer. In my opinion, attempting to rank highly for a one-word keyword such as “hammer” is not really what SEO is best for. If we couldn’t discover a number of specific phrases that people might use, then I would probably not take you on as a client. I would recommend other forms of marketing and a publicity campaign for you, and perhaps a PPC campaign as well.
However, I would take you as a client if you were an online hardware store that sold more than just one type of hammer.
I find the key to everything with SEO is the keyword research. That and the ability of the search engines to crawl through your site and gather all the information that you have there. With those 2 very important pieces of the puzzle, the rest easily falls into place. So the first two things we do are extensive keyword research and then an extensive audit of the current site architecture. Once you know what people are actually searching for to find the types of products or services you offer, it’s important to make sure that your site can actually support those phrases in one way or another. In fact, most of our recommendations are based on this.
Very often we find that the keywords people think they need to show up for are not necessarily their best choices for SEO. Or perhaps they are, but they never thought about the 100+ other phrases that mean the same thing and are nowhere to be found within their site. So they spend their days and nights worrying about one or two pet phrases, and stressing out when they inevitably move down or up in the engines at any given time. What my team and I do is provide them with a strategy so that they will blanket the engines with a multitude of related phrases. This increases their search engine traffic by leaps and bounds, and in also their conversions from site visitors to site purchasers.
Through the years I’ve seen my client’s traffic and sales increase by incredible percentages, like 500% or more. (Of course, in many cases they have nowhere to go but up!)
You have been doing this stuff since 1995? Are you the official elder member of the SEO club? If not who came before you and who are some people you admire?
I don’t think we actually have any “official” elders, but I’m certainly one of them. I do remember Danny Sullivan’s first newsletter if that’s any indication! The first online community I belonged to as far as Internet marketing goes, was John Audette’s I-Sales email list. That list introduced me to others in the SEO community such as Marshall Simmonds (who later started the I-Search list) and Shari Thurow who was a frequent poster there. I’ve always thought of John Audette as a bit of a mentor to me both as an Internet marketer and as a model for moderating an email newsletter. I also very much admire Danny Sullivan and at times have been jealous of how well he sees and reports all sides of an issue. He’s much more of a journalist where I’m probably an editorialist. I’ve actually talked to Danny about this before, and he’s reminded me that we also need people with strong opinions, and that my own voice is the very thing that people like (or hate ;-) about me. As usual, he’s quite right about that. The SEM world doesn’t need another unbiased Danny Sullivan — he’s got us covered extremely well on that front.
I am very interested in those who can change diapers and maintain a successful business. My wife works and I have changed more diapers than any man I know, what is the secret of juggling work and family life?
It helps that my kids are now 18, 17 and 12. I don’t believe I had to change too many diapers while doing SEO! My oldest is currently at her first year of college, so it’s just 2 at home at the moment. But really, when it comes right down to it, I still consider myself just a “mom-at-home” rather than a big old professional business person. I still work at home in my jammies, and I am pretty much on my computer 24/7. But then so is the rest of the family. It’s kind of funny when we come home from somewhere…the moment we walk in the door; we all scatter to our respective computers.
If computers and the Internet were ubiquitous when I was younger, I don’t know how different my life would have been. The only thing I was interested in when growing up was getting married and having kids. Nothing else instilled me with any passion whatsoever. Little did I know that my passion (the Internet and SEO) was out there somewhere, it just didn’t exist yet! Which is probably a good thing because I was able to focus my energies on raising my kids…at least on my oldest two…instead of on the Internet and SEO. Luckily my youngest
is totally self-motivated and didn’t need a whole lot of raising from me!
What kind of hardware and operating system do you run?
Funny you should ask that. I’ve been using my 7 or 8 year old desktop running Win98, but I just ordered a brand new system from Dell which should be arriving tomorrow or the next day! I do have a number of laptops of various brands that all have Win XP, and if I have to do anything that is resource intensive, I just use them. Can’t wait to get the new ‘puter up and running though now that I finally took the plunge!
Got any interesting tools in your seotoobox to share?
I’m not a big fan of tools actually, other than keyword research and also Web analytics. I’ve been playing with Keyword Discovery a lot and really like it for our keyword research these days. And we also use ClickTracks for Web analytics and measuring conversions, etc.
Close you eyes and tell us this first thought that comes to your head?
How much work I need to stop procrastinating and get doing!
Thanks Jill
No problem, thank you!
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