Jennifer Laycock will be speaking about “Social Media Strategy” at SearchFest 2010, which will take place on March 9th at the Governor Hotel in Portland, Oregon. Tickets are available now. To purchase, please click the following link.

Read Interview at Search Engine People

SearchFest 2010 Interview: Jennifer Laycock is a post from: SEMpdx

Nate Sandford will be speaking about “Landing Page Testing” at SearchFest 2010, which will take place on March 9th at the Governor Hotel in Portland, Oregon. Tickets are available now. To purchase, please click the following link.

1) Please give me your background and tell us what you do for a living.

Since 2006 Nate has been on the agency side with (www.ionicmedia.com) in Los Angeles CA. Currently he is the Director of Search Marketing, working directly on paid search campaigns for clients in health care, travel, education, B2B technology, software, ecommerce, finance, self-help, social networking, publishing, precious metals, lead generation, debt, diet, technology & hardware, local, legal industries and many more. He is a regular presenter and contributor at both the PPC Summit (www.ppcsummit.com) and the Market Motive webinars (www.marketmotive.com).

2) For a given landing page, can you offer a list of the most important elements that should be tested?

The most important elements that should be tested are the elements that are going to shorten, clarify, or simplify the conversion process.
The Form – By shortening, simplifying, and clarifying your form you can see huge improvements in conversion rates.
The Headline – By making sure your headline is clear, matches your ad messaging, and ties into your call to action, you can keep the user focused on the task at hand: converting!
The call to action & button – If you want someone to do something, you have to tell them. Having a direct, clear, and simple call to action will always beat a general, hidden, boring call to action.

3) What set of circumstances indicate that it’s safe to stop testing and put into play the results of all the work?

Every landing page test is different, but if you can say that all of the following are true then you can pretty safely roll out your A/B test results.
The ads ran in a true A/B fashion with the control getting a minimum of 15% of the traffic
There was no anomalous data (e.g., site outages, email blast, etc)
The media was the same media (e.g., PPC vs. PPC) OR it was a solid cross section of all media with each page getting relatively the same volume of visits from each channel.
You have a 95% confidence that the winning page has a higher conversion rate (mathematically calculated, not your personal confidence).

SearchFest 2010 Mini-Interview: Nate Sandford is a post from: SEMpdx

Aaron Gray will be speaking about “Web Analytics” at SearchFest 2010, which will take place on March 9th at the Governor Hotel in Portland, Oregon. Tickets are available now. To purchase, please click the following link.

1)      Please give me your background and tell us what you do for a living.

Educationally, my background is in psychology and sociology.  Almost immediately after finishing my undergrad work I was wooed (distracted?) by interactive media and the web – where I’ve been professionally ever since.  Because of my interest and background in psychology, I was immediately drawn to understanding how and why people interacted with interactive systems and web sites, and how to optimize those experiences to produce better commercial results.  For a while, I focused on usability engineering and interaction design.  As a result, I founded Tweak Interactive in 2000 to create great online customer experiences for, primarily, Northwest companies.  My interests soon turned to data, and how data about behavior online, in conjunction with knowledge of human psychology, can be used to generate analytical insights which themselves are used to drive continuous, incremental improvements to the commercial performance of websites.  Based on that interest, I left Tweak and went to work for a Portland startup called WebCriteria, which had the first commercial technology for measuring the ability of web site users to complete a defined process or journey online.  

WebCriteria was eventually acquired by Coremetrics, one of the big 3 commercial web analytics players.  I stayed with Coremetrics for a few years before moving on to another local Portland company, Webtrends.  At Webtrends, I helped formulate and built the consulting practice that designs global analytics solutions for some of the largest brands in the world.  I also had a heavy hand in the creation of the current Open Exchange partner integration framework. I was at Webtrends for nearly five years, and in that time I had many roles – always focused on building or growing new teams and operational processes.  I left last summer after it became clear I was no longer going down a path that fit me, personally or professionally.  

Since June 2009, I’ve been consulting at Greater Returns, helping companies get better value from analytics and e-commerce enabling technology investments.  Sometimes that means fixing an implementation that has fallen out of tune; sometimes that means helping to create processes for the governance of analytics solutions; sometimes it means helping companies define the right measurements for their business model; and sometimes it means helping companies select the right solutions for their needs.  No matter what I do, I’m always focused on finding ways to help my clients get better value from their analytics and e-commerce investments.   

2)      How much data is necessary to make a landing page “test” statistically significant?

The real answer, paradoxically, is "as much as is needed."  In all seriousness, it depends on the product or method you’re using.  If you’re using a packaged testing solution, like Google Web Site Optimizer, Maxymizer, or Autonomy Interwoven’s Optimost, they’ll pretty much manage that for you.  If you’re doing a home-grown a/b split test (which I advocate) there are tricks for telling when you’ve got enough data.  Essentially, you set the test up so that your a and b populations only represent, say, 20% of your traffic — 10% to each.  If "a" is your "original" design, then that population will see the same site version as the other 80% of your traffic who are not part of the test (actually, you can call them the "c" group).  After launching the test, wait for key ratios, such as conversion rate, in group "a" and "c" to settle out to be the same.  When they do, your test is valid enough.  If they don’t, you’ve got something wrong in your set up, and you need to figure out what that is and fix it.

 Statisticians will scream at me for recommending this approach, but I’ve seen it work many times.  A disciplined application of continuous home-grown a/b testing will yield far better returns than undisciplined use of a commercial a/b or multivariate testing solution.  

On the other hand, Google Website Optimizer says it needs about 100 "conversions" (completions of the goal you’re optimizing for) per version to get good results.  

3)      What are the pluses and minuses of Google’s Website Optimizer for landing page testing?

Well, on the plus side it’s free.  And then there’s the fact that it’s free.  Also, it’s free.  It will let you do a/b or multivariate testing, and only requires about 1000 views of the test page per week for a valid test.  It’s pretty simple to set up. 

On the down side, it may not be robust enough for more advanced organizations.  And some organizations, especially government agencies and financial services companies are sensitive to having their data in the cloud, and even more so with Google.  But, then again, it’s free.  

SearchFest 2010 Mini-Interview: Aaron Gray is a post from: SEMpdx

Michael Cottam will be speaking about “Landing Page Testing” at SearchFest 2010, which will take place on March 9th at the Governor Hotel in Portland, Oregon. Tickets are available now. To purchase, please click the following link.

1) Please give me your background and tell us what you do for a living.

Was at STEP Technology, a leading Microsoft Solution Provider, for a number of years working on online banking, e-commerce, and real estate projects until the dot-com bust in spring 2001.  Then, started www.thebigday.com, a honeymoon registry and travel company. There I got most of my SEO/SEM experience, as the vast majority of our customers were coming to us from natural search, where we were competing with Expedia, Travelocity etc. on honeymoon travel search terms. At TheBigDay, I managed our PPC campaigns on Google, MSN, TheKnot, Yahoo/Overture etc. as well as writing our own wedding vendor self-managed ad system for www.thebigday.com.  Today, I have an SEO consulting business (www.michaelcottam.com) with a mix of large and small clients, and am a regular blogger at SEOMoz.org as well as serving as one of their Q&A team.

2) AdWords is now giving product listings more prominence.  How is that working out for advertisers?

It’s a very interesting topic, actually, with Google moving from PPC to CPA, i.e. getting paid not for traffic, but for conversions.  Certainly bound to drive more people to get involved with Google Merchant Center.  What will be really interesting is how users treat the images of the products & the psychology behind this.  Traditionally consumers have triple-thick lead blinders on when it comes to banner ads.  Will the product images attract more attention & clicks, or less?  I think it’s fascinating (baffling?) that the extensions under the product ads are still PPC though.  The news I’ve seen is saying conversion to purchase rates are better by 5-10%; however, I’d be taking this with a huge grain of salt, as I’d expect the store brand name and the type of product to have a huge effect.  Also, it’s relatively new on Google from the consumer perspective, so right now, it’s going to really get noticed….will this die back after 6 months to a year?  And what if Google intensifies the amount of image-ad placement….will that dilute the effectiveness BELOW what their traditional PPC top-3 listings deliver?

3) From the consumer perspective, it’s really bringing a lot of power, as the multiple-store results let you see both seller ratings and compare prices.

I suspect there’s a lot of money to be made in the short term by getting your product feed properly loaded ahead of your online competitors, so that certain product models that aren’t found in competitors’ feeds result in you being the only result for that product & image, sidestepping the seller ratings and comparison price screen.

If you were negotiating with a site owner for a display ad placement, what portions of a typical web page are the most desirable for getting surfers to notice your ad?

Well, typically people will tell you that you need to look at the traditional heat map and place your ads there (the tipped-over L shape), however there are two problems with this:  (1) those two areas that people’s eyes scan tend to be where the main nav and category nav reside, so that space isn’t available….and (2) if you CAN get your ad there, it’s questionable whether you’re going to get conversion as that’s where people are looking for the nav elements, not your ad.  The latter of course will depend on the kind of ad….if it looks like the rest of the nav and takes someone to the right product category on your site, you might win.  However, the best conversions I’ve seen have been off of in-text explicit recommendations, i.e. where the site is reviewing or describing the major products in a given industry and mentioning your company or site. 

But….your question was DISPLAY ad placement, so in short, I’d say get it in the middle, as left as possible, with article text wrapping around it.  The banner space at the top of the page gets universally ignored, as does box or skyscraper ads to the far right.  And we won’t even talk about below-the-fold

SearchFest 2010 Mini-Interview: Michael Cottam is a post from: SEMpdx

Joanna Lord will be speaking about “Advanced PPC” at SearchFest 2010, which will take place on March 9th at the Governor Hotel in Portland, Oregon. Tickets are available now. To purchase, please click the following link.

1)       Please give me your background and tell us what you do for a living.

I am a search engine marketer with a love for both the number and content side of things. Currently I am a paid search consultant working with small to medium business clients. I am also an entrepreneur at heart, and co-founded YourJobStop.com, a job search site that helps job candidates understand the power of social media during the job search process. My background is a medley of online marketing fun…I’ve done PPC, SEO, content creation, product management, and more. Blogging has always been a favorite piece of the puzzle for me, and you can now find me weighing in on social and search topics either on my blog or for the number one social media blog, socialmedia.biz.  

2)       What are some of the top mistakes made by businesses that self-manage their own paid search campaigns?

I think the biggest mistakes occur in the processes rather than the management when it comes to in-house PPC management. Too often the proper analytics aren’t set up, testing isn’t being utilized, and communication between the paid search team and the product or engineering team isn’t leveraged. Without taking the time to make sure everything is set up correctly, and efficiently, paid search teams waste valuable time when it comes to management. Businesses that self-manage need to take a break from pressing forward and address their internal management system—do they have the right analytics? Are they really using the platforms? Do they have a strong CMS in place? What about campaign creation…do they have automation in place? Then hit the data, are you using your testing platform to its full capability? What do you do with the data?

For me the top mistakes are rarely in the bidding and strategy but more in the processes. Small businesses can increase their ROI across the board by properly addressing the processes in place for the paid search team.

3)       Are Yahoo’s & Bing’s paid search offerings worth utilizing for companies only utilizing AdWords?

I get asked this a lot by new clients. Although the landscape is always changing on us, I think it’s beneficial for any advertiser to at least have a presence on Yahoo & Bing. There is a lot to be gained from using their paid search offerings…more than just increase in share of voice and a higher ROI. You learn other platforms, you can test different users, and you can create audience segmentations that aren’t available if you just use Google.

    With all of that said, I usually work with a client to get them set-up and streamlined on Google before we tackle any other option. You can’t deny the heavy hand Google holds in paid search, so get in there & figure it out. Once you do that, it’s definitely worth it to expand into Yahoo & Bing, as well as some of the social network paid platforms. When it comes to paid search you never know where you might find some low hanging fruit or ride the wave of the long tail. As we all know for some companies and brands just a few words performing amazingly can hit their monthly goals.

    Beyond just the fact that you need to explore different user bases the other engines allow any search marketer to use a variety of tools & applications, helping us all become more holistic marketers. For search engine marketers returning a profit should always be the primary goal but learning and expanding our skill sets should be a close second.

SearchFest 2010 Mini-Interview: Joanna Lord is a post from: SEMpdx

Richard Zwicky will be speaking about “SEO Tools” at SearchFest 2010, which will take place on March 9th at the Governor Hotel in Portland, Oregon. Tickets are available now. To purchase, please click the following link.

1)      Please give me your background and tell us what you do for a living.

I’m the Founder and President of Enquisite. What do I actually do for a living?  Well, I’ve kind of resigned myself to the fact that "I do stuff" and what that is changes constantly based on organizational needs.  Generally, I love it!  

Prior to creating Enquisite, I built a search marketing firm – Metamend, and prior to that a traditional bricks and mortar operation in the luggage and leathergoods (fashion) industry.  Fortunately, I’ve been successful each time.  For that I’m grateful to (almost ) everyone who’s participated in each of these ventures, helped me grow, and taught me a lot about business and myself along the way.

For quite a few years I made a living as a full-time SEO entrepreneur.  That ended in 2006 when Enquisite really started taking off.  I was fortunate enough to work on search campaigns across a plethora of sites, geographies and industries.  Working on a large variety of sites which ranged from  500 search referrals a day to ones with well over 1 Million search referrals per day really exposed me to a large range of the challenges that search marketers face, and I’ve used that experience, and the experiences others have taught me to guide Enquisite’s development path.       

2)      When does a business “graduate” from Google Analytics and need to consider a premium analytics solution?

I’m not sure you graduate from Google Analytics, as opposed to need to expand beyond it!  GA offers value to a lot of people, but there’s also a tremendous amount of things it just doesn’t, or outright, can’t do.  As you become more seasoned, or the sites you are dealing with become more complex, you need to add deeper, more powerful applications like CoreMetrics, Omniture, or Portland’s own WebTrends.  Of course, it you want to get serious about customer acquisition opportunities and analysis, then you need specialized applications, like our own Enquisite!  

Specialized applications are really necessary for great search marketers.  Sure, anyone can go to Google, compile a list of valuable potential links and score them, but a great search marketer uses an application like SEOmoz’s Linkscape.  You can do negative keyword research by hand, or you can use Epiar’s keyword tools.  You can do bid management via Google’s Adwords interfaces, or like the experts, you can use specialty products like Marin, Acquisio, or ClickEquations.  The same holds true for analytics.  A professional worth their salt should be using leading edge applications, like Enquisite! Then of course, you get specialized in-depth search marketing analytics, plus predictive analysis and reporting you can’t get elsewhere.  No need to drop GA, but why handicap yourself?

3)      Please give me some important analytical metrics that are too often ignored by search marketers.

I’m still shocked at how many search marketers refer to ranking reports as a meaningful metric.  How about Quality of Traffic from search, social, links, etc?  How many people engage in link building campaigns, and then monitor the rankings instead of counting the visitors?  How about putting a dollar figure to the value of a referral across all channels?  These are all meaningful metrics that people ignore, or fail to report to their clients.  Unfortunately, many of these clients don’t know to ask for this information. 

I often hear people ask about how long a tracking JavaScript takes to load, but no one ever asks how often it doesn’t load.  There’s more than one application I’ve tested that misses significant numbers of page loads, and then just samples data to fill the gaps.  Far too many people are assuming their data is good, and don’t realize how poor the data collection systems they depend on really are.  Your work is likely being undervalued because the value you’re delivering is under-reported.  

Ever watch the status bar at the bottom of your browser to see what code hangs? Now that page load times are important to your site’s score in Google, can you afford to use data collection systems which don’t load hyper fast? (this is why we use Akamai to deliver our JS).  

People always talk about quality of data, and they are right to do so.  But are you sure you are getting all the data, all the time?

SearchFest 2010 Mini-Interview: Richard Zwicky is a post from: SEMpdx

Rand Fishkin will be speaking about “SEO Tools” at SearchFest 2010, which will take place on March 9th at the Governor Hotel in Portland, Oregon. Tickets are available now. To purchase, please click the following link.

1)      Please give me your background and tell us what you do for a living.

I started working on the web in 1997 while in college and transitioned to SEO in 2002 as our webdev clients started needing those services. In 2004 I founded SEOmoz.org as a hobby blog, which then turned into a consulting business. In 2007, we launched a self-service SaaS product called "PRO membership" that has fueled the company’s growth ever since. Today, I’m the CEO of a profitable, venture-backed startup with 20 employees and a large International audience. My job is to inspire SEOmoz’s culture, drive strategy, evangelize our products and build the executive team.
 
2)      Do you think Venture Capitalists care about the search marketing efforts of a company they would consider funding? (…taking the typical VC scenario, not yours…)

Many do, some don’t. For example, Benchmark Capital in Silicon Valley looks very closely at the SEO ability of their portfolio companies, and even invests to help train up the marketing staff of those firms. Union Square Ventures in New York has a full-time SEO employed to help analyze potential opportunities and assist existing investments. Ignition Partners (who invested in SEOmoz), has their EIR, Vanessa Fox, assist companies with SEO issues. Another local VC in Seattle, Madrona, makes similar efforts.
 
It’s probably not yet typical, but I think it’s an emerging trend for VCs to provide this type of service to their investments and, thus, to analyze SEO in investments they consider. The issue of whether many/most have the experience and knowledge to do this effectively is another matter.

3)      Has Twitter muted many of the conversations that use to take place elsewhere (e.g. blog comments, Sphinn)?

In my opinion, yes. I wrote about it here, but to put it succinctly, much of the sharing activity that once happened in blogs, forums, personal sites and resources pages has now shifted to Twitter and Facebook. These create unique link graphs separate from the one the search engines are accustomed to crawling, processing and using. Either the engines need to find a way to use this information, or a way to operate effectively without it (I’m leaning towards the former over the latter).

SearchFest 2010 Mini-Interview: Rand Fishkin is a post from: SEMpdx

Todd Nemet will be speaking about “Technical SEO” at SearchFest 2010, which will take place on March 9th at the Governor Hotel in Portland, Oregon. Tickets are available now. To purchase, please click the following link.

1) Please give me your background and tell us what you do for a living.

I have been working with Vanessa Fox at Nine By Blue since November of last year. I’m helping her assess company’s search acquisition strategies from a technical point of view and doing other odd jobs — basically whatever needs to be done since we are a start up.

Before that I was at Google for six years. I worked on an AdWords sales engineering team that helped Google’s largest advertisers understand Google’s technology, including AdWords API, Analytics, and Webmaster Tools. I started Google in their enterprise business, running the beta program and managing support for the Google Search Appliance, which gave me a good grounding in Google’s search technology.

I’ve been working with search engines in one form or another since I started at Verity (now Autonomy) in 1994. I’m familiar with enterprise search, site search, and web search. During the dot com years I worked at Inktomi, working with proxy caches and helping to build out a lot of the early content distribution networks.

Nine By Blue: http://www.ninebyblue.com/

2) What questions should a business ask to make sure a prospective CMS is SEO friendly?

The most important thing is to make sure it is configurable with rich APIs and an active developer community. Things change so frequently on the Internet (especially with search engines) that even if you could find a CMS that is ideal out of the box, it won’t be so ideal after a year or so. When Google supports microformats appropriate to your business, you want to be able to add that. When Google changes over to their new News Sitemaps format, you want to be able to support that too. Who knows what other changes will be necessary to remain competitive in the future?

The downside of this flexibility, of course, is that it gives you enough rope to hang yourself through misconfigurations. Also a large developer community can result in a bunch of "SEO" plug-ins that may not be useful for your particular situation. But this is a much better problem to have than not being able to keep up.

3) Please give me some important technical website issues that SEO’s should focus on but frequently overlook.

Crawler efficiency: A lot of time websites appear to be doing fine in search but as I dig into them I realize that the search engines are crawling three or four times more URLs than necessary. Fixing this will result in increased freshness or better coverage or both. Fortunately, there are many techniques available to increase crawler efficiency like redirects, canonical tags, Google Webmaster Tools parameter handling configuration, moving information in URL parameters to cookies, judicious use of the robots.txt file, etc.

Page speed: I am convinced that this will become a more important factor for search engine coverage as time goes on. Speed of the landing page is already being used by AdWords, so it’s not unreasonable to assume that it will be used for natural search soon. But even if it’s not, there are second order effects to having a slow site that will affect how search engines treat a site, such as crawler efficiency and users bouncing back to the SERPs. Fortunately, most sites I work with can greatly improve page speed with just a few tweaks like adding cache control headers, returning 304s appropriately, and enabling compression for all file types (not just text/html).

SearchFest 2010 Mini-Interview: Todd Nemet is a post from: SEMpdx

Heather Lloyd-Martin will be speaking about “SEO Content” at SearchFest 2010, which will take place on March 9th at the Governor Hotel in Portland, Oregon. Tickets are available now. To purchase, please click the following link.

1)      Please give me your background and tell us what you do for a living.

I own SuccessWorks Search Marketing, a content marketing agency specializing in SEO copywriting services and training. When I first started working as an online writer, I freelanced for a number of publications (including Entrepreneur Magazine) and wrote Web copy for clients. I had worked in print marketing before – so online Web copy was a natural next step. Then, in 1998, my writing focus changed. Back then, companies were just starting to understand the importance of "optimized" Web sites and putting keywords into copy.  I had just enough geeky knowledge under my belt to see you *could* dovetail the needs of the search engines with the needs of the readers – and create persuasive, engaging and prime-positioned Web copy.

I went to my first Search Engine Strategies when there were something like four other female speakers and sessions were held in one big room with a bunch of round tables (it was in Dallas…so that must have been 2000). My, how things have changed!

Today, I split my time between writing for clients (I think it’s important to stay in the writing game – otherwise, it’s easy to get rusty,) speaking at conferences, and training in-house and freelance writers. I just launched my new SEO Copywriting Certificate program so SEO practitioners, marketing professionals, agency folks, small business owners and copywriters can learn the art and the science. So many people think that SEO copywriting is all about "where should I stick my keyphrases" – and it’s not. Not by a long shot. It’s discovering how to create a customer persona, understanding keyphrase strategy, learning how to pen persuasive prose that converts and figuring out how it all fits into the big marketing picture. It’s actually pretty fun.

2)      What role do web analytics play in SEO Copywriting?

A huge, huge (and shall I say – huge) role. It’s sad when content marketers are told, "You don’t need to see the analytics – just write the page." When in fact, analytics help writers write even better. Here’s why:

Once a writer creates and uploads a page, the only way she knows it "works" is when (1) conversions rise and (2) rankings rise. Now really, this information is pretty darn good. But it’s general. And there is so much more to learn through analytics, such as:

1. Are people clicking on your links in that third paragraph…or is they something you can delete?
2. Can you make your copy convert even better through A/B testing?
3. Is there a page that just isn’t working?
4. What keyphrases are people using to find certain pages – and are some keyphrases better for conversion than others?
5. Are your Tweets driving traffic? Or are they just fun to write?

Some companies have a policy of not sharing this data with their content marketing specialists – and I’ve never understood that. The best writers are closet geeks. They love data. They happily roll around in information overload, picking and choosing the data they need. It’s true that not all SEO copywriters understand analytics. But the ones who *do* understand analytics – and use analytics to help drive a content marketing strategy – are worth their weight in gold! 

3)      Is it easier to “SEO Copywrite” effectively from scratch or to rewrite someone else’s non-compliant prose?

Good question – and it totally depends.

For instance, I’ve seen many, many sales pages that weren’t written with benefit statements or a customer persona in mind. It’s more of a general page filled with features – and features don’t sell. In a case like this, I always recommend a rewrite. That’s because the issue goes beyond "search engine optimization stuff" and falls into "How can we make this page perform at a higher level?" After a rewrite, I’ve seen  conversion rates go through the roof – plus, with the new SEO focus, the pages tend to position much better than before. So it’s a win-win for the client.

Then again, there are some sales pages, articles and blog posts that are excellent..but not keyphrase focused. In that situation I may recommend keyphrase editing (which is what’s commonly known as "optimizing" the page.) There are ways to seamlessly include the keyphrases so they "fit" within the copy and don’t make it sound keyphrase-stuffed.  Plus, you want to match the newly-optimized copy with a killer, clickable Title – which helps with search positions, as well as conversions off the search engine results page. Keyphrase editing can be a great way for clients to leverage the "low hanging fruit" of their content marketing campaigns and transform their good copy into great, keyphrase-rich copy.

Either way, SEO copywriting (or SEO content marketing) revolves around two skills: Creating fantastic, customer-centered writing (whether the writing is a blog post, article, press release, sales Web page, etc.), and developing a tight-and-wired per-page keyphrase strategy. You can’t have one without the other. 

SearchFest 2010 Mini-Interview: Heather Lloyd-Martin is a post from: SEMpdx

Laura Lippay will be speaking about “In-House Search Marketing” at SearchFest 2010, which will take place on March 9th at the Governor Hotel in Portland, Oregon. Tickets are available now. To purchase, please click the following link.

1) Please give me your background and tell us what you do for a living.

For anyone who hasn’t heard through Greg Boser’s SEO Vanity Contest that I was previously a Ringling Brothers performer, well then let’s just get that out of the way first.  I was not a clown or the bearded lady so please remove those images from your head immediately.  Before I got into internet marketing I was a professional in-line skater.  Not the kind that wears spandex and wiggles through big orange cones, the kind that wears Kevlar and rides a halfpipe.  I lived on a train, traveled around the country riding elephants and performing the finale act of the Ringling Brothers 1996-1998 Red Unit Tour with 12-14 other skaters, and about 300 other circus members.  That was my life before marketing.

It was after several years of broken bones and torn ligaments that I realized I should probably figure out what I really want to be when I grow up so I flipped the switch and got into the online world.  I had previously taken classes in advertising design (before I dropped out of school to skate), and post-Ringling I majored in what they called “Specialized Technology” at the time. I started off in the real world hand-coding websites and doing a lot of Flash.  I worked at a multimedia firm that we rebranded as a biotech marketing firm, and our science-minded clients always wanted data.  This is when my data obsession started.  When you’re looking at data every day you’re realizing that your Flash sites (10 years ago) aren’t getting any search engine traffic.  Hence the start of my obsession with SEO (congruent with the end of my Flash days).

I soon signed on at CNET (now part of CBS) to help them start putting together their SEO program, which is thriving today with some really great San Francisco SEOs at the wheel.  We started with tracking/reporting systems and dove right into implementation, and the engineers there were a dream to work with – a super smart bunch.

In 2006 I went to Yahoo to do the same thing, working with over a dozen of the top properties in highly competitive verticals.  I started from scratch.  We needed to work on the content management system, build out reporting, connect global constituents, train a *lot* of people and provide resources for engineers, designers, QA, biz dev, and marketers before we could even think about having SEO be a smoothly integrated part of the product lifecycle. After several years this is a running machine and some of our engineers are so well versed in SEO they could probably present at the conferences.  This would not have been possible without the freakishly awesome people who I worked closely with at Yahoo like Dave Roth, Tony Adam, Matt Hanagan, Christian Westcott, Aidan Beanland and others.  And I also have to give a lot of thanks to Marshall Simmonds, Bill Hunt and Melanie Mitchell who I’ve relentlessly badgered for tips and information along the way.  Seriously guys, thanks for dealing with my incessant questioning.  We’re still friends, right?

In 2009 I started looking at doing something similar for social media at Yahoo – laying the ground work and providing the training and resources for long term success.  We’ve moved SEO that was in my part of the company to another group and social media strategy is now my main priority. It’s ridiculously fun and reminds me of the wild west days of SEO (you thought I was going to say the circus, didn’t you) because the industry is young enough that it’s changing with every blog post and you never know what might be next.  Yahoo’s are really into it which makes it even more exciting.  Besides several social initiatives that are out there now like Yahoo Piggy Banks spouting out money-saving deals on Twitter, The GPS- and camera-enabled purple Y!Bike that we gave Yahoo friends to ride around and take pictures (and created millions of WOM impressions), Yahoo For Good’s You In? Campaign where we involved our communities in doing random acts of kindness over the holidays, and a slew of other initiatives of all shapes and sizes underway across the company, we’re also doing fun things internally like a social media book library available to Yahoos, a monthly social media newsletter, expert social media guest speakers (real ones), and holding internal “Social Socials” – Yahoo meetups around the company where we get together and share ideas over a beer.

And all along the way I’ve been working in the background on integrating SEO and social media into multi-channel marketing at Yahoo.  For example, when marketing groups at Yahoo run TV ads or radio spots with a particular slogan we need to make sure we appear in search results for the slogan. We can also incorporate that slogan into social networks, unifying our messaging across multiple channels.

2) How can an in-house SEO best convince reluctant stakeholders in an organization to help implement SEO initiatives?

Have I mentioned I’m a data addict?  Give me some statistics and I’m pretty sure I can convince you of anything.  There are different people you have to convince, and you’ll need different tools and data to do so.

In my very first meeting at Yahoo I was asked “Why should we spend time on SEO?  We have so much traffic from these other places”. I thought to myself “Are they crazy!? Everybody wants search traffic – that’s just how things work”. But they were right.  In fact I wasn’t sure whether they could actually grow their search engine traffic to measure up to to the fire hose of traffic coming from some of the largest properties on the internet.  The only way to know is to get familiar with some numbers.

In a meeting I had once with an engineer, he said to me “My boss didn’t tell me I have to do this (SEO), and I’ve got too much to do already. Sorry”.  I couldn’t argue – he was right.  The guy barely had time to give me a meeting and he had a list of responsibilities a mile long that he was held accountable for and SEO wasn’t one of them.

Although those cases weren’t the norm, they happen.  And a very large part of my job in corporate in-house SEO is to convince people from Executives to Product Managers to Designers, Biz Dev, Marketing, PR, Editors, QA and Engineers that SEO was an important part of their daily routine.  And each one in a different manner.

There are two things I can share with you on the subject of buy-in.  One is this presentation on Getting Buy-In for SEO: How to Win Over Everybody.   The other is this SEO Performance and Compliance presentation showing examples of how we show SEO performance and get compliance through a system created to track our SEO efforts *and* the efforts (or non-efforts) of the key stakeholders responsible for implementing.  

And for those of you who are facing these reluctances from coworkers on a day to day basis, here’s a little movie I made that will hopefully lighten up your hardworking SEO life for 10 minutes, called A Day In The Life of an In House SEO.  Do these sagas sound familiar to you?

It helps that we’ve had an incredible team at Yahoo who are passionate about this industry and have successfully rubbed that off on the people around them.  And if all else fails (and even if it doesn’t), take your colleagues out for a beer.  It’s amazing how much more collaboration happens afterwards.

3) What skills would an agency SEO need to develop if they wished to successfully transition to an in-house role?

I haven’t worked inside an agency before, but from working with them as vendors and seeing some of the slight differences, I would list these things as some of the top things to look out for:

• Be prepared to take responsibility for your recommendations. You don’t get to write up a document and leave. You’ll need to follow through to make sure everything is implemented, implemented correctly, set realistic expectations, and be prepared for what may or may not happen after launch.
• Develop a system of transparency to show where the ball drops when SEO isn’t fully implemented. Execs usually know that you’re responsible for SEO, but may not know that you depend on everyone else pulling their weight to make it happen.  So when they know you’re on a project but it doesn’t get great results, you’ll need to be able to easily show where the kinks in the implementation process happened.  Even better – propose solutions for fixing those kinks next time.
• Get into the process as early as possible – ideally when a project is just a concept. This way you can set the expectations for potential SEO opportunity early, as well as determine what needs to be built into the product for search traffic results. For example, when a group is considering building out content around a particular subject, see if there is enough search volume to warrant prioritizing it for SEO and/or whether there is search traffic opportunity at all.  If so, then begin spec’ing out product features that would attract more links and search traffic before wireframes even begin.  You can also get in early by watching search trends closely to determine if there are any trends with high volume searches that your company can build content around.
• Make friends with the people who you rely on to implement.  I don’t mean send a friendly email, I mean go out and have coffee or lunch (or beer) every once in a while.  You spend your entire day here 5 days a week, you might as well spend that time with friends.  It makes your 40 hours a week a lot better and you’ll find implementation happens a lot easier that way too.

SearchFest 2010 Mini-Interview: Laura Lippay is a post from: SEMpdx