Kate Morris from Distilled: SEO is about Building a Website with the Best Experience!

We are happy to introduce you to Kate Morris from Distilled, a creative online marketing company with offices in London, New York and Seattle.

Kate is a Search Marketing Consultant, so I asked her how she started to love SEO. She said she got into “search” by mistake, through an internship that got her into PPC advertising and that turned into learning about SEO. She fell in love with it for the same reason she loves marketing as a whole – it’s about the user and getting them the best content for their needs. The human mind amazes her and how people go about making choices on the web is even more interesting for Kate.

Kate is proud to be a part of the most forward thinking and dedicated group of people she has ever worked with. At the moment, she is a Principal Consultant and the head of consultants in the Distilled Seattle office. She is in charge of all of the planning and client happiness. Kate is currently working with one of her five clients on user testing, product launches, creative piece production, new content development, analytics reviews, and so much more.

Distilled is growing rapidly into an online first agency that hopes to disrupt any and all industries we come in contact with. One of my clients is currently trying to determine what is working best with their site and what needs to be changed, so we are using tools like UserTesting.com and Qualaroo to ask users specific questions. This was very important as they are a very niche industry, and following their competitors was just not an option. They have a major drive to be the best and make the biggest impact, so we are helping them do that

Big Data

Last year, at the Seattle Interactive conference, Kate talked about the importance of Big Data. She says the amount of information that is out in the world now is amazing, but many companies do not utilize the information available to them.

Big Data is not just for companies like Facebook and FourSquare. There are smaller clients I have now that have massive amounts of information at their disposal and just a lack of time and personnel to analyze that data. I foresee a huge increase in data analyst jobs in the near future for those people that really love trend analysis.

 The future of SEO

Kate sees the future of SEO as a more steady part of the marketing mix. She says it will be what it has always been, but more people will know about it and therefore it’ll take its rightful place as a part of the bigger marketing plan.

But likewise I don’t see a need for whole positions dedicated to SEO in every company. For those that have people dedicated to email marketing and the like will need people to focus on SEO, but I am not sure it’ll warrant a whole job in other companies.

Kate adds SEO is a subset of marketing, but is also an overflow into IT as well. She says that SEO spans the technical and the marketing parts of every company. It’s a part of the process, not a process to itself. She also confirms SEO should be something that marketers consider as well as web developers. It’s not about meta tags or keyword density, it’s about the experience from a searcher’s perspective, which is just about every consumer at this point.

SEO doesn’t work without content, crawlable content. It’s as simple as that. But beyond the simple need for content, the user needs content. Content is information, it is the information people need to be swayed into a decision. It is the information that people need to make informed decisions. It’s the information that will earn their trust and admiration, so much that they tell others in person and online.

Watch Kate via video she created for Netocratic:

She explains why creating content is a part of a smart SEO strategy, and she also gives two examples – Dove and Modcloth.

[youtube width=”600″ height=”350″]http://youtu.be/oE-LSPAjaZY[/youtube]

If you are in SEO, don’t follow only SEOs!

For Kate, Rand Fishkin and Wil Reynolds are excellent influencers to follow if you are still learning about SEO. Scott Stratten and Nathalie Nahai  are her favorite people outside of the search space.

But really, if you are in SEO, don’t follow SEOs. I get so much more from following those outside of SEO.

The closest destination to meet Kate very soon is Brno. She is a speaker at the Marketing Festival next week and her excitement about being a part of it is contagious. She said she is honored to be asked to speak there and her lecture Developing Real Business Content will surely bring enlightenment to the visitors.