Pete Meyers will be speaking on the “Harder-Core SEO” panel at SearchFest 2014 which will take place on February 28th, 2014 in Portland, Oregon. For more information and to purchase tickets, please click here.
1) Please give us your background and tell us what you do for a living.
By training, I’m a cognitive/experimental psychologist (PhD from University of Iowa) and double-majored in psychology and computer science as an undergrad. I started coding when I was about nine, and that’s shaped a lot of my career as well. Long story short, the internet really took off about the time I finished grad school (1997), so I decided to work at a start-up as the first employee. I spent 8 years there building a business and, to my surprise, becoming an entrepreneur. I’ve worn many hats, and late in 2012 joined the Moz team full-time.
My title reads “Marketing Scientist” which is really just a way to say that I split my time between the Marketing and Data Science teams. I’m an avid content creator (blog regularly and have created pieces like the Google Algo History), but also do background research on Google that helps contribute to both content and product development. I have my hands in a lot of problems, which is generally how I like it.
2) Most of your blog posts “analyze” what Google is doing. How does your background in psychology play into your quantitative and qualitative analysis?
A solid chunk of my training is really just in the core of being an experimental scientist, and that means learning how to structure questions and find the data to answer those questions. My interest in Google was pragmatic at first, like many SEOs, but I eventually got obsessed with a few questions. For example, if Google was updating 500+ times per year, why could we only detect and name a handful of those updates? That led to the MozCast project, which has spun off into three very different research projects. I got into research psychology because I had big questions, and big questions still shape a lot of my work.
3) Most of the time I see user personas, they strike me as shallow and simplistic. How would someone of your background construct them?
I think it really depends on the problem you’re trying to solve. In many cases, personas are meant to be simplistic – they’re archetypes for understanding bigger problems. At Moz, we’re actively working on a few core user personas. They’re based on a lot of data and discussion, but the final versions will be fairly simple. What we ultimately want is a way to understand the basic segments of our customer base and use those to assess product changes and new ideas.
I look at it this way – a persona may seem simplistic, but compare it to a mission statement or a one-sentence description of your entire customer base. That’s often what many companies have, even in 2014. So, personas are frequently a step in the right direction.
Of course, if you’re trying to answer a very specific question, a persona may need to be more complex. In many cases, though, I think that starts to get into usability studies and broader experimentation. There are plenty of times when a persona is just the wrong tool for the job.
Todd Mintz knows PPC…knows Social Media…knows SEO…knows Blogging…knows Domaining…and knows them all real well. He runs growth marketing for )and is also a Director & Founding Member of SEMpdx: Portland, Oregon’s Search Engine Marketing Association, and he can be found here on Twitter and Facebook.