A Day in the Life Of

…Because what blog is complete without a tedious account of the author’s daily doings and musings? What we do here at Oneupweb everyday is mysterious to the uninitiated, and we do it in a building that is a unique but harmonious mix of retro, high tech, and high functionality. And what I personally do is a unique but harmonious mix of project management (natural search engine optimization – we have a team dedicated to paid search as well) and research. I’ll spare you a detailed play-by-play, here are the highlights from yesterday:

8:00
As every Oneupwebber does, the first part of the day is usually spent reading industry news, forums, and blogs (not just the search engine marketing industry, but the industries of our clients as well) to keep on top what’s news, what’s noise, and what we can do to do our jobs better.

9:00
Routine care and maintenance of client projects, which includes checking up on position reports, traffic, and conversions numbers. Google is currently doing a backlinks and PageRank update, and all is well. A couple of clients have dropped a notch in PageRank, but positions haven’t suffered. Which makes sense – Matt Cutts of Google said that the new PageRank and backlinks “have already been incorporated into scoring a while back”, but it’s always good to keep a close eye on things.

1:00
Keyword research! Probably my favorite – and the most important – part of a natural SEO project. This is the part where we determine which words and phrases the natural optimization campaign should target to get the best ROI for the client. It’s analytical, it’s creative, it’s more than a little psychological. What’s not to love? I can’t give away the secret sauce, but we did do an interesting study back in January about search query length and its correlation with conversion rate that you can download for free.

3:30
Conference call with a client to chart out the press release strategy for the next several months. Press releases can be a great tool for search engine marketing. They can help build link popularity, and can even give your site the potential to hold multiple positions for your important terms, at least by proxy.

5:30
Back to the keyword research for the last part of the day, and then home. The commute through Leelanau County is sublime this time of year, with the trees dressed to the nines in color. Not bad for a day’s work.