Foundry has moved to Ballard (or is it Fre-lard?)

A picture is worth a 1000 words, so lets start off by showing our location on this cool map of Ballard.

And now for the details.  The folks of Foundry have moved about 20 blocks from the edge of Wallingford to the edge of Ballard.  We’ve got more space to work with and some room for meetings and phone calls.  We even have room for Bill’s musical instrument collection which he can tell us about later.  Most importantly we have room for our new Foundry members, Silas and Anita.  They’ve joined us in the past 7 months and are already very productive.  You can see Silas in his office in the picture at the top of the page.

We’re helping recycle the Sustainable Group’s old space, while they’ve moved on to bigger spaces in South Seattle.  With Trader Joe’s, Jack In The Box and a Goodwill nearby, we’ve got something for everyone.  And after a very long week, we’ve got internet access courtesy of Comcast.

Our current to-do list:

• Get internet access
• Fix contact information on our website
  
• Fix up our entrance to make it distinctly Foundry
• Paint our kitchen/cafeteria/conference room (yes, it’s an all-in-one thing)
• Prepare the rest of our space for future colleagues and peers to join us

And just if you don’t like to click links, here’s the address:

844 NW 49th Street
Seattle, WA 98107

Launch: Re-Introducing the Sustainable Group at www.sustainablegroup.net

We are proud to introduce the Sustainable Group’s new web site at http://www.sustainablegroup.net/.

If you could do something to help the environment without paying more for the privileged - wouldn’t you?  If so, this is the site for you.  This is the definitive source for binders, notebooks, and CD sleeves which are made of recycled materials and are fully recyclable.  Get with the program, and start sporting some truly environmentally responsible office supplies.

Foundry built a fully functional and secure e-commerce web site. The site is well poised to see an increase in organic search engine traffic from our implementation of best SEO practices and our highly valuable and actionable keyword analysis. We’ve also added some traffic generating and informative features like the customer case studies and the Greenhouse Gas Saved widget.

We didn’t do this alone though. This site represents the hard work of a great group of people who are doing everything they can to make it easier for the rest of us to act on our convictions.  We are so happy to be working with them on their new site and marketing efforts. Hats off to Design Commission for some beautiful design work, and to Turnstyle for great identity work.

I look forward to complimenting you on your spiffy brown notebooks in the near future.  Lets face it, brown is the new green.

Tools for the Modern Age: Keyword Analysis

I have some bad news for some of you.  Your ability to predict the behavior of large groups of other people is really poor.  Sorry, but it is true.  The age of the intuitive marketer has past.  You are stuck down here with the rest of us mortals who have to actually work to get a better sense of what customers want, and how they are looking for it. Back in the 1960s the Mad Men of Madison Avenue had very different requirements for marketing a brand, product, or company. Today you must leverage the abundant information found everywhere, and especially on the web.

The good news is that there are tools to help us on our way.  One of the most valuable is a comprehensive keyword analysis.  This is an exercise which looks the full spectrum of keywords which are relevant to your business and explores current query volumes, your site’s current organic rankings for those terms, as well as the competitive landscape in terms of both organic (competitive websites currently ranking for those terms, and their current page rank) and paid search (competitive websites currently buying keywords, directional CPCs, and landing page URLs). This analysis is not only driven by query relevance and volume, but by a realistic assessment of where you will be able to successfully compete for quality traffic given the current structure of your site.

Let’s face it,a reasonable person looking for a plumber in Seattle might search for, “Seattle Plumber,” “Plumber Seattle,” or a great many other things.  In reality, “Plumbing Seattle” is searched an order of magnitude more often than “Seattle Plumbers” and there a lots of variations of the same theme in between.  As you make decisions about the content of your site and your SEO strategy wouldn’t you want to know how people are actually searching, and where you can realistically compete for traffic?

So while the age of intuitive marketing may have gone the way of smoking in your office, at least we now have the ability to access data we need to be able to make informed decisions about our target keywords.

If you are making decisions without the benefit of this data, drop us a line for our expert keyword analysis.  We will be happy to help.