DIYSEO

DIYSEO: Local Tasks are New and Improved

Dan Olson — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 16:52:47 +0000

Another key piece in our most recent site release is the expansion of our Local tasks and curriculum. Many search engines have significantly increased the visibility of their local listings (an example of Google’s listing is below), and we feel our new curriculum will provide a clear path for small businesses to get to the top of these local rankings.

In addition, the Local tasks are now featured in two separate sections on our site. The first is Basic Local SEO, which was added to our SEO Grade School level. Basic Local SEO focuses on claiming your profile on the largest local search engines and directories. We strongly recommend every small business that has a local target market to claim their profiles on the major engines as soon as possible.

The second section is Advanced Local SEO which is in SEO College. This section is focused around changes you can make to your website to help your site rank for local keywords as well as some additional optimization of your local listings.

For our DIYSEO clients, let us know what you think about the above updates. For those of you that aren’t yet clients, come on board!

DIYSEO: Ongoing SEO is Born-Competitor Links Out of Beta

Dan Olson — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 16:49:08 +0000

We had a number of major features and updates in our most recent release. The first notable item is the launch of our new Ongoing SEO area. Ongoing SEO is the area of the site for the clients that completed and graduated from the various levels of SEO School (such as Kindergarten or Grade School).

SEO School helps you assemble many of the key building blocks to get a site to show up in search engines, but unfortunately the work isn’t done. Achieving and maintaining your website’s rank in search engines is an ongoing effort. Either you have competitors you need to pass up to get higher in search results, or if you already have top rankings, you need to keep working to stay ahead. Our goal is to make this ongoing optimization as easy as possible.

With this feedback we officially moved the Competitor Links out of Beta and into Ongoing SEO, which will be the first of many sections in this area.

Back in May, we rolled out the Beta version of the Competitor Links tool. It is important to remember that one of the largest factors in search engine ranking is to get a large number of quality links back to your site. The Competitor Links area analyzes our clients’ competitors to understand the backlinks that each competitor is getting. The tool then recommends backlink opportunities ranked by the links that will have the most impact on your search engine results.

Based on feedback from the Beta, we added some more information in the About and How To areas, and we created additional filters based on when a user “skips” a task. We will always present 10 link opportunities per day. Once you complete or skip those 10 tasks, DIYSEO sends a fresh group the following day.

Let us know your thoughts!

Search Marketing: Get a Click out of It

DIYSEO Team — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 19:54:36 +0000

Does your small business invest in search marketing? Today, more and more small businesses are increasing their spend in search marketing. Why? Participation in search provides great value, driving both revenue and clicks to your site. This infographic demonstrate how small businesses of all types are increasing their site traffic by using the power of search marketing.

We welcome your comments and feedback. Have a great fourth of July weekend!

DIYSEO: Great new product features

Dan Olson — Mon, 17 May 2010 16:45:51 +0000

It’s been a great 6 weeks for DIYSEO since our launch on April 6th. The response to date has been phenomenal but we’re definitely not resting on our laurels. We had a busy month from a product perspective and released two big features within the last two weeks.

The first one is our Competitor Links module which we released to BETA last week. We’re extremely excited about the impact this can have on our clients’ SEO programs. Competitor Links does an analysis of your competitors to understand the backlinks that each competitor is getting. It then recommends backlink opportunities to our clients ranked by the links that will have the most impact on their search engine results. This ranking of link opportunities by our Link Strength indicator is shown in the example below.

We recommend 10 links at a time and will replenish these 10 every day as more backlinks are discovered. As I mentioned this tool is in BETA and would love any and all feedback.

The second new feature is the ability to customize On-Site tasks to specific content management systems. For example, if you are using WordPress to make edits to your site, we now have the ability to customize the How To Complete areas of each task to specifically show how to make certain updates to your site. This is another step towards customizing the tool to each client and reducing the amount of effort for our clients to complete tasks. Stay tuned for many more developments on this front!

DIYSEO Review Round-up: Buzz on the DIYSEO.com Launch

Andy — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 19:03:23 +0000

Wow, what a great launch! We’ve had hundreds of new users sign up so far and have received a lot of great feedback. I wanted to highlight some of the coverage we’ve received so far around the Web.

DIYSEO Coverage

Our launch debuted at TechCrunch, and then we later received several other writeups. Here are some highlights:

TechCrunch: DIYSEO Raises $1 Million, Launches Simple Service To Help Small Businesses Manage SEO
VentureDeal: DIYSEO Collects $1 Million Venture Capital Financing
SEO 2.0: DIYSEO Interview with Patrick Gavin
SearchEngineWatch: DIYSEO: Good Starting Point for Small Businesses?

DIYSEO Feedback

We expected due to the nature of the product that we would get some criticism when we launched–for two reasons. Firstly, a few SEO consultants might feel threatened that we are “automating” the SEO process. Frankly, prior to our launch we underestimated how many SEO’s would feel this way. One thing we’d like to point out however is that DIYSEO is priced at a $49/month price point and is aimed at small businesses with very basic Web presences–not the usual SEO consultant’s client. We acknowledge that at a certain point–especially in competitive, non-local niches–clients may outgrow DIYSEO and want to spend more time and budget on search engine optimization. At this stage, they would probably hire an SEO or social media consultant. Meanwhile, SEO consultants can benefit from sending clients with “micro” budgets (e.g., less than $1,000 a year) to DIYSEO via our affiliate program. At the end of the day, we believe the SEO ecosystem will support all kinds of services (manual, automated) at various price levels to support different segments of the market… and DIYSEO will have a place in that market! Pat has some more thoughts on how DIYSEO and SEO consultants can mutually benefit on his personal blog.

We also got a lot of feedback regarding our feature set, usability, and localization (e.g., DIYSEO.com currently isn’t geared very well to UK-local sites). The truth is, we have our work cut out for us! Our planned roadmap has hundreds (yes, hundreds) of future features, usability tweaks, localization initiatives, and CMS-level customizations planned. SEO is complex enough that if we tried to cover everything, we never would have launched. At some point we felt we need to get DIYSEO to the point where it would really help local, US-based SMB’s with their SEO, and at that point, we believed it was time to show ourselves off to the world. That said, we are 100% focused on rapidly improving all aspects of the DIYSEO platform, and our main process for allocating our development time is listening to our users! So if there’s something you’d really like to see on DIYSEO.com please drop us an e-mail or tweet, or post in the DIYSEO user forum. We’ll be listening, and we’ll be working hard at making DIYSEO better.

DIYSEO Reviews

A lot of bloggers gave DIYSEO.com a spin and posted their own review. Though, one common comment we heard a lot was “don’t take anyone else’s opinion, try it for yourself!”… so after reading these please feel free to sign up for a free seven day trial and give it a try!

DIYSEO Buzz on Twitter

Here are just a few tweets about DIYSEO we came across (there were countless more):

kd_uk:

checked out diyseo, kenshoo & marin software for getting your site discovered through SEO. Some pretty useful tools

@florist:

@541live But the nice thing about this one, it’s made simple. (re: www.diyseo.com)

@morafi:

SEO for your small business. How good is it ? RT @YounisMaqousi: DIYSEO? a cool and interesting site ==> http://tcrn.ch/a0BXeB

And my favorite tweet…

@johnandrews:

Signing up and using DIYSEO is easier than live blogging the process on my WordPress hosting. Sigh.. I need a vacation already.

You can check out more DIYSEO chatter on Twitter with this search: http://twitter.com/#search?q=diyseo

Connect with DIYSEO

This is just a friendly reminder that if you’re a DIYSEO user we’d love to “connect” with you, so if you have a moment please:

That’s it for now. Thanks to everyone for their support and stay tuned for some new feature announcements in the near future!

DIYSEO Officially Launches

Andy — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 18:09:52 +0000

We have some exciting news: DIYSEO has officially launched to the public! You can check out a preview video on our homepage, or sign up for a free seven day trial.

We still have a lot more features planned for release in the coming months, but after a strong round of beta testing, we’re proud of the current usability and effectiveness of the platform. We’ve had a huge number of signups already in the last hour and can’t wait to get everyone’s feedback on the product.

You can also check out some of our coverage from around the Web (we’ll update this list throughout the day):

TechCrunch: DIYSEO Raises $1 Million, Launches Simple Service To Help Small Businesses Manage SEO
ShoeMoney: The Night SEO’s Couldn’t Sleep [DIYSEO] and The Future Of SEO For Small Business [DIY SEO]
PatrickGavin.com: Launch of DIYSEO and why its good for SEO’s
John Andrews: DIYSEO.com – Do It Yourself SEO A liveblogged review!

Thanks to everyone on the DIYSEO team, our superb beta testers, and the SEO community for helping us get to where we are today.

Launch Update: Going live very soon!

DIYSEO Team — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 19:14:35 +0000

We’ve achieved our last major milestone before the launch of our service. The DIYSEO site has been updated to provide more information about the company and now includes a new sales video that we particularly enjoy.

Stay tuned for updates coming VERY soon!

Cheers,

The DIYSEO Team

INFOGRAPHIC: The Case of Disappearing Ink

Julie Zare — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 20:00:30 +0000

In recent history, it was an everyday occurrence for people to find local businesses in print directories. However, the large shift in how people search cannot go unnoticed. Today, more and more people are using digital tools for their primary resources, and audiences are reacting in different ways.

It is pretty obvious that digital search methods will continue to see a lift in popularity while traditional search methods will decrease. Does your business have an integrated local search strategy for hitting your target audience?

INFOGRAPHIC: Ice Cream Social

DIYSEO Team — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 22:24:36 +0000

Recently, a number of studies have been published about the trend of SMBs using social media. We thought it would be great to compile a few of these statistics, as well as feature a company that’s really impacting their business through social media.

Coolhaus, an LA-based business that sells “architecturally inspired” ice cream sandwiches, proves just how successful social media can be for your small business. A recent ClickZ article describes how this unique street vendor boosted its number of Facebook fans from 0 to more than 1,300, and it accumulated nearly 8,000 Twitter followers within a year – all this by promoting offers on Facebook and Twitter (Baskin-Robbins has 10,000 Twitter followers…. not bad!). Even better, the mobile ice cream sandwich shop also plans to expand its business to other locations.

Has your small business seen success with social media? What are some examples of social media strategies that you have tested out? We’d love to hear your stories and feedback on this infographic!

INFOGRAPHIC: Where Will Marketing Be in 3 Years?

Julie Zare — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 22:02:09 +0000

It is important for small businesses to understand the marketing channels that will bring them the most value and differentiate them from competitors. This week’s infographic shows that marketing spend is shifting from traditional to interactive advertising (ex. from newspaper to SEO) as businesses see that these new channels will be much more effective in the next three years.

Have feedback for us? We’d love to hear your thoughts!

The DIYSEO Team