Episode 7: Interview with Dennis Goedegebuure

Finally a new epsiode of the english version of OMReport. Today’s interview partner is Dennis Goedegebuure.

Dennis-Goedegebuure

Dennis-Goedegebuure

The interview is also available on iTunes and on Youtube.

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Transcription is included in the post as always.

Transcription of the post:

Alpar: So today’s OMReport is with Dennis. Dennis please introduce yourself and try to explain a little bit of what you do.

Goedegebuure: So, Dennis Goedegebuure used to be the director of SEO at ebay. Now I’m Vice President of internet marketing at Geeknet responsible for traffic on the sites like SlashDot and Sourceforge and I am mainly focusing on the SEO but I’m branching out into content marketing, PR and social media, optimization, just to drive a lot of traffic.

Alpar: When you look at those buzz words, what is kind of the higher aggregation of topic? So, is it like … Would you say that PR and the SEO are part of content marketing or what would you really concern yourself or what is a part of what in your logic?

Goedegebuure: So, in my logic I am looking at drive a PR angle like a hook in a content. So the content needs to be around a certain topic. So let me give you an example: We did an info graphic and a story on a SlashDot vertical for cloud computing, and we looked at the … It’s becoming hurricane season right now. Hurricanes are becoming much more powerful because of the heating of the earth. So the clouds of the hurricane become much bigger but also our cloud environments are becoming much bigger. So what is the impact of hurricanes destroying a data center in North Carolina or Virginia for cloud computing. So that’s a nice angle with the weather.

Alpar: It’s right. It’s right. So, you catch on the hurricane season, but then again your topic is something totally different?

Goedegebuure: Yes, so, well. There was a data center from – I think it was Amazon – that went down a couple of month ago due to severe weather. So, Instagram was down Reddit was down, a couple of other big sites were down, and that was all because of the weather. So, if you see that more sites are becoming depended on larger cloud environments, larger hurricanes coming by, what’s the impact on the internet?

Alpar: It’s interesting because they moved to the cloud because they kind of want to be away from the danger of being taking down.

Goedegebuure: Yes, well obviously you have redundant server capacity in different locations. So, it’s very rare that a whole cloud or a whole site would go down, but it could happens.

Alpar: So, you moved from a transaction based business to a publishing business. Would you for you work, what is the biggest difference?

Goedegebuure: The biggest difference is that we’re just focusing on driving traffic and we monetize on a number of ways like just normal display advertising, lead generation models, marketing surfaces. So, the majority of the money that we’re making is with the site are Pageview-driven.

Alpar: But is it an impact on SEO if a transaction based business like at ebay that you did before and …?

Goedegebuure: Oh, yes. Yes. So, at ebay we were much more focused on the ROI on the traffic that we were generating and how did that compare us to the search-volume that is out in the market. So sometimes you focus on something that is really cheap but there is a lot of volume in the market and the conversion rate brings you then more revenue. At a media model you just don’t care what kind of Pageviews as long as there are Pageviews flowing. With a little nuance in the lead-gen model because you wanna have qualified leads for the companies that are buying those leads. So, that’s where … It’s a little bit similar to the transaction model.

Alpar: How about budgets? Isn’t it typical that a transaction based business is willing to invest a lot more than SEOs rather than a publishing business?

Goedegebuure: So, when I came to Geeknet the CEO of Geeknet media, which has just been sold last week, so I’m still talking about Geeknet but we’re part of Dice Holding now, the CEO also came from ebay. So, he got me over there and he knew what I could do.

Alpar: Was he working with you at ebay as well?

Goedegebuure: I wasn’t working with him directly but with his team. They built a large infrastructure project for me in the past, and he knew me and we had several meetings, and so he got like “Okay, Dennis, do SEO here” and nothing was done in SEO for Sourceforge, SlashDot, so …

Alpar: It’s amazing because they are like really, really old and strong sites.

Goedegebuure: Yes and all natural back link profiles.

Alpar: And you work in the US but you’re from the Netherlands or from Belgium?

Goedegebuure: Yes, from the Netherlands. Yes. I started in ebay Netherlands and then moved over to the US and to Downs Six.

Alpar: So, did you start in ebay Netherlands as SEO or something else?

Goedegebuure: No, no. I started in 2002 just internet marketing. So, I did affiliates, I did portals like large portal-deals, paid search and then I started doing SEO.

Alpar: How come you went for SEO instead of the other channels?

Goedegebuure: I was bored with all the negotiations. Every month you had a renegotiation with a portal, affiliates or somebody else was speaking up, so, I wanted to do something completely different. And at that point, something almost new at ebay because at ebay they didn’t do SEO for a long time. Until 2002 they started to look at it. Which was like, that’s crazy but they had so much type in traffic so like everybody was coming to ebay and then they started to see the other competitors in the search engines so …

Alpar: So you have a quite analytical technical approach. How come? What are you from the background? Are you an engineer? Or are you a marketing person?

Goedegebuure: I’m a marketing person. I studied economics with finance and marketing as specialties, but working at ebay you get used to working with large data sets and I cannot work with them myself so much. So, I always have people for it, but I get the ideas what can be done with the data for my very high theoretical level …

Alpar: And then they help you figure out how to really use the data.

Goedegebuure: Exactly. Yes.

Alpar: That’s quite amazing because I think – you know – there is in many SEOs in everyday’s lifes. They don’t have so much data so they don’t need such sophisticated and data driven approaches.

Goedegebuure: Yes, exactly.

Alpar: It’s pretty amazing. I think the problems and also the opportunities are pretty unique at what you’ve done at ebay and also SlashDot. I would guess that the big updates that happen every now and then over at Google, they shouldn’t have a really positive effect on a publishing website. Is that correct or am I guessing wrong?

Goedegebuure: This is basically our publishing website, because we don’t have a low quality content problem or a low quality back link profiles. So, I was so happy with all the updates because I can see my traffic growing and growing.

Alpar: So, on each update of Penguin and Panda you open up champagne bottles?

Goedegebuure: I wish! I wish it was like SEO Oktoberfest there. No, not that bigger updates.

Alpar: So, what other changes do you see in the SEO during the last year or so? Do you see anything that is noteworthy?

Goedegebuure: Yes, what I see – very strong and we talked about it on here already – where the Google Plus network had been used as an identity layer and has been called out already a couple of times. So, it’s nothing that I come up with. I just see it being published by Google or set in a panel and then you pick up something and then you see it coming up “authoring” or “the value equals author” and you see sites go up in rankings where they have more authoritative authors. So, I see SEO going somewhere where, not only brand is more important but, for especially publishers, make your editors from the center of the editorial pieces so that they can have their own following and their authority, and then you will get a lot of the SEO from it.

Alpar: Okay. So, here’s a scenario. Let’s say there’s a great writer, and he also has some kind of – let’s say – social followers, and he becomes an editor at one of your websites – let’s say – for example SlashDot. And then he gains a lot of popularity and basically you helped build that authors – let’s say – personal brand. And then he goes. What happens?

Goedegebuure: That’s part of the business risk that you have in every business.

Alpar: So, it seems that the editor …

Goedegebuure: I left ebay.

Alpar: Yes, exactly. That’s correct. That’s correct. Sure. But then again it seems that it’s kind of a mutual win-win-situation, because you gain more, the articles of that author, within SlashDot, may rank better, because of his authority and you pay into his authority.

Goedegebuure: And here’s a little trick that you can do. Use the Google app engine and switch on the Google Plus profiles for Google app engine because that is on your domain then. So, they cannot take those circles with them.

Alpar: Oh, that I didn’t know. That’s quite a nice thing. Pretty nice, pretty nice. So, what does your everyday life look like? What do you do? Do you analyze a lot? Do you communicate with management or talk to techies to so to implement your stuff? What is the share of activities in your life?

Goedegebuure: So, I made some pretty drastic changes just recently. I wrote a blog post because I was finding out that I wasn’t getting all the things done that I wanted just because I spend too much time on social media. So right now …

Alpar: You, yourself, spend too much time on social media?

Goedegebuure: Yes.

Alpar: Reading or writing?

Goedegebuure: Interacting with the people in my network.

Alpar: Okay.

Goedegebuure: So, a lot of the info twitter that goes around, lot of things under the table that have been talked about. And it’s great, but if you spend too much time and not focusing on what you need to get done, then you have a problem. So, I identified that and now, what I do is, I have a very strict protocol. Every evening I set up five things that I need to get done. I do those first before I open up e-mail, before I open up twitter …

Alpar: On the next day?

Goedegebuure: On the next day. Okay. So you have the five things already done, so you don’t have to think about anymore in the morning what you need to get done.

Alpar: Okay.

Goedegebuure: Then, after I did the five things, you’re actually done with your work, before lunch and then you can do creative thinking and interacting. And because I’m on the west coast of the US, Europe is still awake and they’re in the evening on the couch, so they respond. The east coast is at work, but they’re already further along in the day and west coast, your still out there. So, you can respond on something that has happened and you can interact with people and you still get everything done.

Alpar: So, to which conference do you go to in the US? Which are the ones you could recommend?

Goedegebuure: Blue Glass. I’ve been to all of them except for the first one.

Alpar: As a speaker?

Goedegebuure: Yes

Alpar: Okay.

Goedegebuure: So, they just sold out their tempa in December, BlueGlassX . Very high quality speakers, very intimate sessions.

Alpar: How many people come?

Goedegebuure: It’s, I think 150, speakers included. But it’s the way a conference is like. You have only one track, everybody sees the same presentations. And that’s why you interact a lot with each other during the lunches and dinners. I go to a lot of the SMX conferences as well. So it’s SMX West I was speaking, SMX Advanced I was. In Seattle.

Alpar: What do you do at the conference? Do you usually listen to the other speakers panels or are you mostly like chatting in the rows right in front of …?

Goedegebuure: Both. During the … I always make a priority to meet new people.

Alpar: So, how do you do that on a conference? Do you just start chatting to them? Or do they come to you because you are a speaker anyway?

Goedegebuure: Well, sometimes I’m just sitting… going to sit at a table with people that I don’t know yet.

Alpar: That’s a good habit I think.

Goedegebuure: Yes, because otherwise you are going in your own circle all of the time, which is great because you’re friends and you see each other you learn from each other but you still need to get to know new people. It’s basically people that are not a speaker that makes conference more enjoyable for everybody and you might know the next big brains in SEO.

Alpar: Okay. That’s nice. Thanks a lot for the interview Dennis.

Goedegebuure: Okay.

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