White Hat Search Engine Optimization, Social Media, and PR That Helps Build Your Business

Straight Shooter SEO specializes in:
- Search Engine Optimization
- Social Media Strategy
- PR
- Data analysis for business insight

Joel Greenberg is the Straight Shooter SEO
See my linkedin profile for details.
You can find my resume here.
Joel Greenberg is an interactive marketing and PR expert with a special interest in energy and cleantech. He has over twenty two years experience in non-traditional media from simulations to games, from development to research, to marketing and social media. He is published in marketing, energy, and history.

Why SEO?

Because I got tired of the agency world where we’d build webites that only drew traffic if we had an advertising budget.

The Social Media response is “Build a website that people want to go to. Build insanely great stuff.” Yes. Sure. Absolutely.

But that’s not enough. You need to build the website so that’s easily findable. The brand experience begins at the search box. If you inadvertently do something to make yourself invisible to search engines (it happens), or, if you’re competition is optimizing and you’re not, then traffic may be passing you by no matter how great your website is.

The Path to SEO

At a certain point in my career, I decided to work for a large ad agency. I was hired to help them become digital. One of my duties was to prevent them from inadvertently doing things online that would hurt their clients.

Online media people would turn to me to evaluate any number of link building, traffic driving, or SEO offerings they were considering. At the time, online media people were not that saavy and many were excited about results touted by some “black hat” SEO vendors. Because there was so much coming through the door, I was able to see the good with the bad. There was so much bad, the good, “white hat” SEO vendors seemed overwhelmed.

A few years later, when I was working as a Sales Director at Bazaarvoice, I was selling the SEO benefits of one their offerings. I won’t go into details other than to say it hinged on increasing cross linking within a site as a means for increasing SEO. And it worked. Because it worked, it caught my attention. Remembering all the black hat SEO I had seen at the ad agency, I concentrated on learning as much as I could about white hat SEO.

Then, I struck up an online conversation with  Mike Moran as we both started thinking out loud about the benefit of Ratings and Reviews in B2B. Their effectiveness to move the needle in consumer online sales is well known, but Mike was just about the only other person talking about their effectiveness in the B2B world.

Mike wrote a book on SEO and when I met him person at a conference in Portland, I felt he was straightforward and honest, unlike many of the “black hat” SEO vendors I evaluated years earlier. A former IBM Fellow, he had an engineer’s approach to SEO. He convinced me white hat SEO was a legitimate discipline of becoming more visible in search engines.

I now see SEO as another tool in the marketing toolset. If branding is about positioning in the customer’s mind, then SEO is a natural extension of branding. It’s all about positioning when the category, if not the brand or product, is top of mind. Indeed, there’s great marketing work to be done between account planners—or connection planners–and SEOs.  Understanding what people search for and why is the key to driving traffic to a business.