At the recent Minneapolis Integrated Marketing Summit, TopRank Online Marketing CEO Lee Odden moderated an exciting panel of a diverse group of SEO professionals:
Alex Bennert – Chief Search Strategist at The Wall Street Journal
Brian Kleisner – Search Engine Marketing Manager for FindLaw
Bill Leake – CEO of Apogee Results
The focus of the panel was on search engine optimization best practices, and panelists discussed everything from leveraging web analytics for decision making to how to scale efforts and many topics in between. Following is a summary of each presenter’s top points:
Alex Bennert – Chief Search Strategist at The Wall Street Journal
Alex spoke on the important of using data to make decisions, including leveraging sources such as Google webmaster tools. The information provided in webmaster tools has grown significantly since they have implemented it.
Her favorite addition is the “breaking data” feature, which tells you all of your top keywords driving traffic to the site. You can use this to see terms that gain a high volume of impressions but a low volume of clicks. From this, you’ll know that the page can be optimized better to potentially get more clicks.
And it doesn’t even have to be on page or changing keywords. Sometimes, just testing changes in meta description can help gain additional clicks. It’s something we have control over and can see near immediate results for changes. Leverage meta descriptions for clicks, and to help promote your brand and spread key messages.
Have you given access of webmaster tools to members of your team? You should consider this so they can act on data.
Additionally, branded searches and navigational queries are extremely valuable for a brand and should not be discounted. At the WSJ, hundreds of thousands see our search result monthly from brand terms.
Alex then proceeded to speak on sitemaps. She noted, if you have a large enterprise level site with frequent information that’s added/deleted, a sitemap is vital. That’s because you don’t have to wait for search engines to re-crawl your site, you’re providing it to them in a format they’ll immediately get. At the Wall Street Journal, we organize our sitemaps into specific types of content – i.e. stock queries, articles, etc. Then we can see immediately when problems crop up.
In terms of getting “old school” reporters to create additional content, like to help them see the value of SEO by showing examples of their own content. For example, I find a headline they wrote and show them how not at all findable in search, whereas others are easily findable. By showing examples, Alex is able to be persuasive and help reporters create SEO friendly content.
Brian Kleisner – Search Engine Marketing Manager for FindLaw
Brian spoke on the balance between search, and how search interacts with usability.
“Arriving from search is to enter the unknown:”
1. The searcher’s expectation for what they think they’ll find must be met.
2. Information must be presented to enable a decision or make choices.
3. The next steps must be clear.
4. The entire experience must feel safe, secure, authentic and believable.
Usability and search both share common concerns:
Findable
Credibility
Usable/useful
Valuable/desirable
Offering choice
Addressing this, Brian went on to cite several SEO tips:
SEO Tip #1: Use a keyword oriented tagline with the “Who” and “What answered.
SEO Tip #2: Use content to answer the questions naturally making sure to include the appropriate keyword. For example:
Where is your company located?
When is the next release for “keyword”?
Why are you an expert on “keyword”?
Asking these questions helps generate fresh content, better defines anchor text, provides new ideas for navigation text link labels and increases understandability for humans, search and those using assistive technology to interact with your website.
Claim your listings on the search engines and beyond (Yelp, CitySearch, etc.)
Be consistent, use the same address and phone number across the web.
Monitor and manage you and your competitor’s reputation.
Bill Leake – CEO of Apogee Results
Bill spoke about integration opportunities between Search and other marketing tactics.
He started by speaking at a high level, and that “more arrows are generally good.” Marketing works best when it works together. As we talk about ways to improve search, remember it is just another piece of marketing.
Start by defining what you really want from your marketing efforts and create a key objective.
Bill then shared integrated tactics that will improve ROI of search.
1. Integrate paid media and “earned media” for better results.
2. Consider event and name driven paid and natural search.
Leverage a national events and names for dirt cheap search traffic.
3. House list/direct mail tie-ins: integrate online marketing with more traditional focused direct marketing (think online mail-merge).
4. Create a more integrated search – use PPC traffic with your web analytics and your lead forms for list building and enhances lead generation. Leverage services such as
DemandBase
Jigsaw
Other list building via web traffic
Most B2B terms are not looked at “for fun” they are looked at due to pain points on the part of the searcher.
5. Improve spending by using down-funnel data.
One client was spending 110K per month with well understood and optimized CPL metrics. They started doing PPC optimization using human scrubbed lead data (not web forms). Results: 43% shift in PPC spend allocation, 31% software sales uplift.
6. Choose keywords on conversion metrics, not on search/reach/volume metrics. If you have paid search data, use that to determine what the money keywords are.
When it comes to marketing in the current economy, small businesses need all the help they can get. They don’t have the ad budgets, the personnel or the time that the bigger competition has. But none of those factors really matter to search engines, and SEO is a great way to both level the playing field and steal marketshare.
Here are a few tips that small businesses can use to improve their SEO and user experience.
1. Turn everything into content
Content is still King. Search engines still love unique content, and the more useful content there is on your website, the more opportunities you give searchers to find your products and services. Rob Snell gave a fabulous presentation at PUBCON South, and one of the main takeaways was how to turn everything on an e-commerce site into content. Here are some ways to “free” extra content on your site. Here were some of his tips:
Record everything and transcribe it all into text. Interviews, conversations, product DVD’s, personal opinions, etc.
Turn support emails into FAQ pages on your site
Turn PDF’s into HTML pages (although PDF files can rank on their own)
Start generating videos of everything
2. Make it personal
Small businesses have a major advantage that most bigger businesses don’t: A personal voice. By making your voice heard, you’re showcasing your authority in your market, and adding trust. Buyers love hearing recommendations or reviews, and are more influenced to buy from those vs. product feature and benefit pages. Consumers use search engines to research products, and other than the lowest price, they’re looking for recommendations. Give them some! If you have a catalog, make a buyers guide in addition to product listings. Show you’re an expert and turn your knowledge into personalized business. Teaching is a great way to make sales.
3. Optimize for local search
Odds are that your small business can take advantage of local search. 63% of consumers use search engines to research information about local companies. Start with Thomas’ excellent guide on local SEO tips that range from claiming your profile to adding media to submitting to content aggregators.
4. Improve your site’s speed
Small business sites can be notoriously slow. Site speed is usually one of the last things that small business owners care about. But now that Google has introduced speed into the ranking algorithm, it’s time to seriously start checking out how fast your site loads. But more importantly, when you improve your site’s speed, you’re also improving your customer’s experience. Don’t make users wait to buy your products! You can use tools like Web Page Analyzerand the Firefox extension YSlow! to see what’s taking your pages so long to load. If you’re using a blog or shopping cart software, search for caching plugins for your software.
5. Refine internal linking
Internal links can add value to your site considerably, but many small businesses don’t understand that you have to develop a linking mindset in order to really capitalize on it. It takes extra time to research old post links and include them in your articles, but the benefits are great. Sites like Copyblogger do an excellent job of referencing older posts in their articles. Not only does this strategy help with SEO, it also adds to the user experience, giving them more Think long and hard about your site’s linking architecture. Is your navigation schema getting to all of your content? Aside from adding sitemaps, related products and posts keep both visitors and search engines happy. Popular posts lists are also great for making sure your best content is getting seen and linked to.
6. Create content for people
If you’re generating content specifically for search engines, you’re missing a major chunk of your market. Humans don’t like to be bamboozled, and when they come to a page on your site that was obviously made for a search engine, they’ll leave in a hurry and never come back. Plus, only humans can link to your site. If you want to get more inbound links and retain customers, you need to write for customers. The goal to higher search results is still to get more people to your site. After all, search engines can’t buy anything from you.
7. Don’t fret about getting nofollow links
It’s easy to get carried away with only trying to get incoming links without the dreaded nofollow. But really, a link is still a link. If that link can bring in a potential customer, then you want it. If you’re only looking for specific types of incoming links, than odds are you’re missing lots of the low-hanging backlink fruit and worrying about the wrong things.
Who knows how long the nofollow link will be around? If you’re smart, you worry about what’s most important: creating great content. You can’t control how Google ranks things in the future. Focus on things you can control, like creating a killer experience for your customers. In the end, if you focus on giving your customers and visitors great content, many aspects of SEO will take care of itself. Great content attracts great links, especially when you promote it and leverage social SEO channels of distribution. If it’s good for your potential customers, odds are it’s good for SEO too.
Spotlight on Search Interview with Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead at Google
Spotlight on Search is an interview series that shines a light on search marketing professionals to learn more about the nature of their work, differences in SEO amongst categories of web sites and of course, SEO tips, tactics and useful tools.
Maile Ohye has become a well known public figure from Google that works with webmasters and web marketers coordinating Google Webmaster Central outreach efforts, including the Webmaster Central Blog. She has been speaking at search conferences for several years and has done many interviews like the one at the bottom of this post with Greg Jarboe on real-time search. Her involvement with Google’s Webmaster Central has been instrumental in helping many web site owners find solutions to their Google problems.
In this interview, Maile shares her experience working with Google, Webmaster Central, offers tips on improving page speed, shares unusual SEO problems, offers her perspective on SEO and Social Media as well a hint at her upcoming keynote presentation at SES Toronto.
Please tell us about your career at Google and what’s the most exciting thing about your work?
I’ve worked at Google for over four years. One of my responsibilities is to manage the Webmaster Central Blog. I love the internet, love Search, and it’s all exciting. Monday through Friday I’m able to eat these great lunches (food is another love of mine), collaborate with the coolest people, and work toward a cause I totally believe in: a better web. In my current role, I assist webmasters to implement open standards and best practices that allow search engines to crawl/index their site. Because in the end, better sites make a better web which better facilitates users finding relevant information. Yay!
So dorky, I know. Can’t help it. I really dig this stuff.
Google Webmaster Central has been a great resource for many webmasters. What tips can you share with web site owners to make the most out of Google Webmaster Tools?
Awww, Webmaster Central a “great resource” for many webmasters? That’s wonderful to hear. As for tips, I’d say verify ownership of your site in Webmaster Tools, sign up for email forwarding in Webmaster Tools’ Message Center, and then check out all the specific data for your site: our Top Search Queries feature was just revamped. Crawl Errors is cool for making sure your site is accessed as you’d expect (many people find unknown 404s, or realize they have server downtime because of noticing the “Unreachable” errors), HTML Suggestions shows you the URLs with duplicate titles or meta descriptions. I think once you start poking around in Webmaster Tools you’ll learn more and more. It’s addictive.
How does one become a Bionic Poster?
Lee, Bionic Posters aren’t born, they’re made. They’re the most active, helpful, accurate, friendly webmasters in the discussion forum. Many of them were bionic posters before we ever had recognition for bionic posters — they just went about their day helping others in the webmaster community. It was an honor for me to meet Richard Hearne and dine with webado while I was on holiday in Montreal. They’ve both individually written thousands (thousands!) of posts to help webmasters.
The disclosure about page speed being a ranking factor will certainly have an impact on user experience. What’s the impact for Google?
Speed is now a factor in rankings because we’re trying to best serve users, and studies show that users are happier with faster sites and less satisfied with slow sites. More satisfied users are shown to spend more time on the internet. More time on the internet means more time spent learning new things, becoming a better informed citizen, surfing the web and, of course, checking out your website. Speed can be a win for all parties involved.
Please share a few tips and/or tools for improving page load speed:
In your work with Google Webmaster Central, what are some of the most common mis-conceptions about SEO? Common problems? Really unique or unusual problems?
A more complex problem we’ve discussed recently is what to do with a page that has its (boilerplate) template translated into different language, causing different URLs, but where the actual (non-template) content remains the same. In other words, only the navigation can switch languages, the content itself is unchanged. This configuration is common in user-generated sites. For example, a discussion forum may have it’s template available in 20 languages, however the individual user posts are written in any language and are not translated.
Because the actual/main content is the same, rel=”canonical” makes theoretical sense. So should the webmaster use rel=”canonical” from the different languages to one preferred version? Let’s say the webmaster uses rel=”canonical” on her entire site. She points the French/Spanish/German versions to her canonical English-template version. Now, however, French-speaking users only see the English-template version in search results. Is this a desirable user search experience?
It’s a tough call. At this point, we can’t give a best practice recommendation across the board. It’s a decision left to the individual webmaster as they know their audience best.
If a web site owner was deciding how much effort to focus on standard SEO (keywords in content & links, crawling, external link acquisition) compared to social media (creating profiles, growing a network, sharing content) what tips would you give to help them decide where to spend their time? How do you see SEO and social media working together?
I think having a solid site: great content, good experience for users (intuitive navigation, responsive), descriptive page titles, standardized URL structure, etc., is of primary importance. A strong site is the foundation where you’ll likely make your online conversions. Once this foundation is established, the social media approach helps drive traffic, builds excitement (and inbound links), that you’ll be able to capitalize on with your solid site.
Congratulations on the keynote presentation at SES Toronto. What will you be speaking about?
Thanks! I’m super excited. I expect to talk about Search, Real Time Search, Webmaster Tools, cool new projects on the web. And hopefully I’ll hear feedback/concerns from the web community in Toronto, too.
Thanks so much for the interview, Lee. Hope to talk again soon.
Update: I’ve added a recent video interview with Maile from Search Engine Strategies in New York. As noted in the interview above, she will be presenting a keynote presentation at the upcoming SES Toronto, so be sure to get more information on that event and get signed up.
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When it comes to marketing in the current economy, small businesses need all the help they can get. They don’t have the ad budgets, the personnel or the time that the bigger competition has. But none of those factors really matter to search engines, and SEO is a great way to both level the playing field and steal marketshare.
Maile Ohye has become a well known public figure from Google that works with webmasters and web marketers coordinating Google Webmaster Central outreach efforts, including the Webmaster Central Blog. She has been speaking at search conferences for several years and has done many interviews like the one at the bottom of this post with Greg Jarboe on real-time search. Her involvement with Google’s Webmaster Central has been instrumental in helping many web site owners find solutions to their Google problems.
They’re the most active, helpful, accurate, friendly webmasters in the discussion forum. Many of them were bionic posters before we ever had recognition for bionic posters — they just went about their day helping others in the webmaster community. It was an honor for me to meet 