This is an exciting career move for me in so many ways, and will push me to ramp up on my “mobile SEO” knowledge very quickly.

Of course, overseeing our own SEO program will be a small part of what I do, and I will need to quickly adapt my decade+ of search industry experience to help our customers understand why, and how, the mobile Web is so intricately tied to search and discovery.

That’s for another time.

In my new role, I fully expect to have thought-leadership pieces ready shortly that help marketers understand the ins and outs of questions such as “App vs. Mobile Web – It’s Not An Either/Or”, “The Mobile Web Is About Search & Discovery”, “Google Says It’s About Speed, Relevance, and Simplicity – Where Is Your Mobile Website?”, “What Should The Mobile Marketer Prize Most?”, and other cool mobile marketing topics.

For now, I’m still highly invested in, and honored to continue, writing my In The Trenches column here at Search Engine Land!  In keeping with providing real-time value for SEL readers, I’d like to share some of the mobile website SEO resources that I’ve found valuable in getting up to speed (hint: I’m saving you time from going to Google and simply typing “mobile SEO” – you will not get you the results you need for actually learning anything valuable, with some exceptions – what a surprise!).

The mobile SEO resources below can supplement your reading of Search Engine Land’s Mobile Mondays column (and, don’t worry – I have no intention of making my column an unofficial extension of Mobile Mondays!).

On-Point Articles

• Great overview of mobile SEO! – The New Mobile SEO: What You Need To Know, Search Engine Land, by Cindy Krum (@mobilmoxie), Apr 15, 2010
• Another great article by Cindy Krum – SEO: The Amazon Android AppStore, MobileMoxie.com, March 25, 2011
• How to create a “Mobile SEO Toolkit”, Search Engine Watch, by Gary-Adam Shannon (@gshannon), January 17, 2011
• Why Mobile Friendly Is Not Mobile SEO, Search Engine Land, by Bryson Meunier (@brysonmeunier), Mar 7, 2011
• 3 Tips for Better Mobile SEO, Mashable, by Jason Taylor (@Usablenet), June 3, 2011
• 3 Strategies for Getting Found in a Mobile World, by Michael Redbord (@redbord), Hubspot, Jun 08, 2011

Resources

• Google Webmaster Central Blog, Making Websites Mobile Friendly, February 22, 2011
• GoogleMobileAds YouTube Channel – See what statistics and insights you can glean by skimming through a number of Google’s promotional videos for mobile advertising.  There’s actually some good stuff once you get past the feeling that you are being sold to.
• About Yahoo! Mobile Web Crawler, Yahoo! Help (my question – will the Bing search partnership make this irrelevant?)
• LinkedIn Groups, Mobile Marketing & Advertising & Mobile Analytics (you may have to pick through the group discussions for SEO topics and shared articles)
• 33 Mobile SEO & Mobile Analytics Resources, Tad Chef by (@seoptimise), July 9, 2009

Tools

• If you believe that W3C code validation matters in SEO, you can use their “Mobile OK” validation tool – http://validator.w3.org/mobile/
• Developing Mobile Sites, Google Webmaster Forum

Video

• Google CEO, Eric Schmidt at Mobile World Congress, May 17, 2011
• Mobile SEO Tips For Everyone – Filmed on an iPad 2 – Whiteboard Friday, SEOmoz, by Aaron Wheeler (@aaron_wheeler), May 19th, 2011
• Matt Cutts, Does indexing a mobile website create a duplicate content issues? , Jan 14, 2011

One thing I am finding is that the mobile SEO category is still in its nascent stages, and articles and resources with true tips and tricks are hard to come by.

If you know of other, legitimate, resources that will add to the resource/learning value of this article, please make your suggestions below.  And, as always, connect with me via @akomack on Twitter!

This is a question you could ask yourself either as an in-house employee at a company, an agency taking over an account from another agency, or moving into the role from one account to another within your agency.

Truth be told, I imagine that if you are at an agency, and simply taking over an account from someone else, much of the account transition will go smoothly, so you may not need to do as complete a discovery as I am suggesting below.

Think of this checklist as a way to get up to speed as quickly as possible if your predecessor did not leave a very clear audit trail/documentation. Or, perhaps you are the first person to take on the SEO Manager role at your company?

The SEO Account Takeover Checklist

This checklist is NOT in order of priority, but is numbered for usability.

Yes, some tasks will be more time-sensitive than others, and I will attempt to make a note of these as I go along. It is worthwhile to say right here that you should immediately look at how links are being created to your site, and halt any link  building efforts that appear to be poor-quality, abusive, against search engine stated guidelines, etc.  At least for the time being, until you get a handle on the situation.

1. Pull Together Your Organic Keyword Targets. Get the list of the keywords that have been targeted for SEO.  While “rankings are dead“, and I am not a fan of “rank chasing”, bite the bullet and check the keyword rankings for your target keywords. You do need to know where you are starting.
2. Access Website Analytics. Get your hands on the data!!  This is an absolute must, and perhaps one of the first steps you should take. Examine where your traffic is coming from (all sources, not just search), which keywords are converting, review the most-visited pages, look at 18-month trends (to look for seasonality and cyclicality), and generally dig into the data.
3. Re-Do Keyword Research. Don’t blindly trust what you’ve been told are the target keywords for organic SEO! You absolutely must have a deep understanding of the keyword space that your business lives in. There is no substitute for doing your own keyword research. Period.
4. PPC Data. Get access to as much Pay Per Click (PPC) data as you can from existing advertising programs that are being run for your site. Get a feel for the keywords that are being bid on, the impressions being generated, the clicks to the site, and which keywords are converting best.
5. Webmaster Tools. Get access to, and log into your Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools accounts. Look to see if the XML sitemaps are uploaded, fresh, and not showing any page crawl errors. If you find that a Webmaster account has not already been established, get on it!
6. Check Robots.txt File. Take a look at your robots.txt file and see if any rules have been created for disallowing site crawls of specific pages and/or sections of the site.  If the robots file has specific instructions, make sure you understand why.
7. Page Indexing Inventory. Check your page indexing at Google, Bing and Yahoo! with a site: lookup (e.g. site: http://www.searchengineland.com). While you will not get the true picture of exactly how many pages are indexed by each of the engines, you can use this lookup to a) get a rough feel for how many pages have been crawled, found & indexed, and you can compare this to the knowledge you have of your own website, and b) take a quick skim through the page titles to see if any opportunities exist for bulk re-tagging/changing of titles.
8. Backlink Quality Check. Check your backlink profiles at the major engines with a link: lookup (e.g. link: http://www.searchengineland.com). Keep in mind that Google will almost never show you the full backlink picture, so you are looking for a general sense of whether or not Google feels you have link strength.  While it’s still available, use Yahoo! Site Explorer to check your backlink profile, and screen out links from your own domain, and choose the filter for links pointing to the entire site (not just to the homepage). Even better, subscribe to SEOmoz’s Open Site Explorer (formerly Linkscape) and use that tool in addition to (or instead of?) the basic link lookups in the engines. You might end up finding the SEOmoz data far more useful anyway. With checking backlinks, you are not looking for quantity as much as you are looking for quality. Look for link diversity, and hope to see that the majority of the links pointing to your site appear to have been garnered through people freely linking to your site because the content is of interest. If you find links from many irrelevant sites and/or see anchor text patterns that look too tightly-correlated, you may need to figure out how to undo some potential damage.
9. Link Building Review. Ask people at the company about any link building efforts that have been conducted, or that are being conducted. If you feel that any of the efforts are producing poor-quality, manufactured links, stop those efforts immediately to assess the program in more depth.
10. Crawl Your Site. Spider your site with a crawling simulator such as Screaming Frog, Webconfs Spider Simulator, Smart IT, or others. Take a look at what data is being returned, and how search engines may view your site.
11. Grade Your Site. While I am not a huge fan of using a “grader” to determine the SEO-readiness of your site, I do see the value in having a free tool like Hubspot’s Website Grader provide a report on key SEO health points. Don’t use the report as the “gospel” of your SEO status, but look at the individual data points/recommendations and see if anything glaring pops up. You could take one step further and pay a small fee to have someone run a “premium grader” report, and provide some brief consulting time on the phone. Jim Spencer’s Web Page Advisor is a great service, and a great value, from a trusted expert, and you will get some details that you might not find elsewhere (you can find Jim on Twitter and learn a bit more about him – he’s a friend of mine, and I trust him.  I have no financial interest in Jim’s tools, services, etc.).
12. Hunt Out Orphan Pages & Broken Links. Use a tool like Xenu’s Link Sleuth (or similar program) to do an extra check, beyond Google’s Webmaster Tools, for broken links and “orphaned pages“.
13. Social Media Discovery. Take an inventory of all the social media assets being used to promote the company/organization. If you are not the person tasked with social media, make friends with the people who are running those efforts. Find out how you can collaborate. Create a list of all of the social media accounts that have been created.
14. Make Friends. If your organization has people responsible for marketing and sales roles, and you are not that person, go and immediately make friends with the people responsible for Social Media, PR, Sales, Product Development, User Acquisition, Paid Search, Display Advertising, Website Analytics, Website Development & Design, and any other function you can think of that might touch the success of an organic SEO program. Hopefully, making friends is already part of your personal DNA, and this won’t seem like a chore. The point here, from a professional role perspective, is to make sure that each of these people know that you care about the overall mission of the company, that you play well with others, and that you want to collaborate with them. Start the creative juices flowing now, and get other people at your company excited about the power of SEO.
15. Know Your Conversion Goals. No respectable SEO professional can operate effectively without understanding what the goals of the company are. Identify what each of the specific conversion points are (e.g. sales, quote requests, white paper downloads, webinar sign ups, newsletter subscriptions, etc.). Make sure you understand what the acceptable Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) is for as many of the actions as possible.  If no one has answers, dig in and start to build your own economic model for the value of acquiring a customer. Your overall task is to see if you can put the SEO budget (including your salary) into perspective with all the other acquisition channels. Although you may find that SEO is not the “best” performing acquisition channel from a pure metrics perspective, you will at least have an idea of how your efforts fit into the marketing mix, and you can always look to prove SEO ROI in other ways.
16. Domain Inventory. Get a list of all the domains owned by the company. Get a list of the domains that are registered, and identify which ones are parked, redirected, and which ones are live and used for other marketing efforts. Get an understanding of which domains may have hosted sites in the past, but are now not being used. I can’t possibly list all of the reasons that you need to get this done, but suffice it to say that you need to understand the interrelationships between all of the domains, and you need to understand the history of any past/current websites that are/have been hosted on the domains.
17. Review PPC Landing Pages. Look at the landing pages being used for PPC. See if the landing pages are isolated from the organic structure of the site, or if they are part of the traditional site structure. If the landing pages are part of the site, then know that any changes you are looking to make to pages for SEO could affect PPC programs. Also, look to gain an understanding of what the landing pages are intended to accomplish, and see if you can either take some of the conversion success points to your organic pages, or see if you can offer any content suggestions to the PPC landing pages.
18. Learn Your CMS Capabilities. Understand what can and cannot be edited on your website through an admin interface. Find out how easy it is to edit page content, browser titles, meta description tags, image alt. tags, etc. Find out if you can have access to the CMS, and what the process is for making changes. Make sure to operate within the content change processes that already exist at the company, or see if you can get the processes modified a bit to make your job easier. Don’t break anything!
19. Review Your Agencies. If any external agencies are being used for SEO, PPC, Social Media, Content Creation, or PR, see how quickly you can get meetings with your account managers. Your goal is to understand what the current strategy is, and how you can all work together to improve the website’s ability to generate valuable traffic (via SEO and the other channels – see how you can help them too).
20. Re-Assure & Empower Your Staff. If you are coming in at a Manager level, and have staff working for you, make sure to listen to what they have to say about the strategy, successes, and weaknesses of the SEO program. Assure the staff that you are all in it together, and that you want the whole team to be successful.  Find ways to individually give each person room to be creative and entrepreneurial.

If you have other suggestions for what a new SEO manager should do at the outset to check the health of the program, please share them below!  Let me know if you’ve added a suggestion by shouting out to me on Twitter @akomack.

If you have an e-commerce site, the value is pretty obvious. And, there are multiple ways to get your product image to appear in the top results – primarily through feeds into Google Shopping or via paying for product images in Google AdWords (using ad extensions).

Non e-Commerce Images?

But what if you don’t sell a traditional product and don’t have a traditional product catalog? As in, no standard e-commerce / product offerings.

Is there business value to having one of your images front and center on Google’s main organic SERPs? Yes, of course there is.

Now, you could have endless internal debates within your company about the value of getting that image there, and you may come to the conclusion that the SEO effort needed may outweigh the potential benefit. You may further convince yourself not to try because using web analytics to actually tie the value of image referrals to sales can be difficult (even in a traditional e-commerce environment).

Lay Of The Land

Let’s say that you do see the theoretical value in having an image on the “front page” of Google.

First, you may find that searches for your best keywords do not produce any image results on Google.com. This indicates that Google has not yet seen the value in showing users images for that particular keyword query.

You could stop right there and convince yourself again that it’s not worth trying.

My advice is that it’s OK to think ahead, be a first-mover, and shake up your SEO efforts a little (they may be getting a bit stale anyway).

Case Example

For those of you who are interested, here is a nice case example. (Disclosure: I do not have a relationship with the company I am highlighting below. I’m going to guess that this article won’t be entirely pleasing to them. However, because of the nature of the case example, I am going to link to them.)

A basic search for the one word keyword – “resume”:

It could be easy to argue that people searching for the single word “resume” are not well-qualified buyers of any kind of resume service. Although, it’s worth mentioning that Google’s Keyword Tool estimates 13.6 million broad searches with the word “resume” in the phrase each month.

Even better, Google’s estimate is that 673,000 people search for the exact match version of that one word each month.

However, I might argue that in the above screenshot, the image of the resume with the yellow annotations, would attract some nice attention from searchers, and could end up being the first step in the buying process for some of those visitors. (See my previous article, Acquisition Marketers And The SEO ROI Dilemma, for why even this early stage of search can help fill the acquisition funnel.)

A basic search for the two-word keyword phrase – “resume sample”:

I would argue that people searching for “resume sample” would be more qualified buyers than those searching simply for “resume”.

Probably not as strong a buying signal as “resume writing service”, but still closer than the one-word keyword.

Also, I’ll note that after I prepared this case example, I did find more suitable keywords, such as “resume writing” (but not “resume writing service”), “resume templates” and “resume samples”, that seem to be a closer buying-intent phrase, have image results, and have more search volume than “resume sample” (a key reason to do your Keyword Research Homework!).

But, this case example still illustrates the strategy and tactics perfectly.

A first look at what a click on the largest “resume sample” image produces:

On-Page SEO Elements

A view of the Web page after clicking the “X” to move from seeing the image, to getting to the page that houses the image – http://www.resume-resource.com/exleg3.html:

A key thing to notice on this page is that the image of the resume is the only one of its kind on the page. While there are other images, there is only one, large, image of a sample resume.

Another important component to the success of this page is the HTML text on the page using relevant keywords -including in the heading “Attorney Resume Sample.”

Image Property Elements

A view of the image “Properties” data for the resume sample:

Notice that the name of the image contains the keyword phrase, and that there is a full image URL, contained within the site,  that can be used to link to, such as resume sample.

Linking Elements

Despite recent embarrassing linking “scandals” with JC Penney and Overstock.com, and with the advent of Google +1 potentially changing the “SEO Game” (see this SEOmoz article for a take on the why’s and why not’s of the Google +1 SEO issue), building links has been a staple of SEO, and I would argue that the tactic will still play a significant (although altered/diminished) role in Google ranking algorithms for  the foreseeable future.

A view of what Yahoo! Site Explorer provides as a look at the backlink profile for the entire resume-resource.com website:

Using Yahoo! Site Explorer is a nice quick and dirty method for seeing the backlink profile of a website, and provides a very simple (and free) way to illustrate this case example.

Notice that when I examine what Yahoo! has to say about the links pointing to the entire website, minus any links from pages within the domain itself, that there are over 10,400 inbound links.

That’s a pretty good indication that there has been a deliberate link building effort put in here (and I’m not saying anything negative about that effort, just that my experience tells me that the company spends time working on this aspect of SEO).

A view of what Yahoo! Site Explorer says about the backlink profile for the page that houses the image (http://www.resume-resource.com/exleg3.html):

Of the 14 links pointing to the page, I found 4 links that are not from within the resume-resource.com domain. A mix of cross-links and inbound links is a good thing. The point here is that it appears that there was a deliberate effort to acquire some backlinks from external sources to the page itself. Good job.

A view of what Yahoo! Site Explorer says about the backlink profile for the image file (http://www.resume-resource.com/Examples/resume-sample-attorney-legal3.gif):

Of the 28 links shown by Yahoo! Site Explorer, 2 are from within the resume-resource.com domain, and the remaining links are all from outside sources! In the current Google link environment, this is a critical component of the success of this “image campaign.”

Elements Of A Successful SEO Image Campaign

In this article, I have only highlighted a few of the elements behind this successful “image campaign”.

As you investigate what others have done to get their images “prime real estate”, you will notice that there is not a one-size-fits-all formula. But here are the basic elements (I’m sure I’m leaving out a few, so please add what you’ve seen work):

• File Name – Use keywords in the name of the image file.
• Individual URL for the Image – Use the keyword, and have the image contained within your own domain.
• Individual URL for the Page – Don’t just leave the image hanging in the ether, put context around it. Use the keyword in the URL.
• Links to the Image – Directly link to the image’s URL (both internal/cross-links and external in-bound links).
• Links to the Page Housing the Image – Make sure to use both internal/cross-links and external in-bound links.
• HTML Text – Put thematic context on the page housing the image.  Use your keywords, but don’t over-optimize; create a theme.
• Alternative  Text Tag – Don’t forget to use your Alt. Tag properties to name the image.  Again, don’t over-optimize or stuff keywords into the tag.
• Make the image itself valuable.  Make it “linkworthy”. This is “Most Important”! Examples could include informative, annotated, humourous, controversial, artistic, etc.
• Socialize – Assuming that you’ve remembered the “Most Important!” thing above, use your social media assets to promote the image URL (or the page that houses the URL if it feels more comfortable/organic) – Facebook, Twitter, Google +1, Flickr, Stumbleupon, etc.

SEO Is Nothing Without Marketing Focus

As with any SEO campaign, pay attention to the marketing details that would make the effort shine even if SEO became a dead science (art?). In the end, the image is about your company, your brand, your image, and helping prospects navigate through the buying funnel.

But there is still a very smart group of people out there that are doubters – The Acquisition Marketers.

SEO Personality Types

Company executives and owners have varying degrees of sophistication when it comes to understanding why SEO is important, or why it should be an important part of the marketing mix. I would break down the most common personality types as follows:

• Me Too – My competitors are doing it, I will too.
• The Rank Hound – I want to be #1 for my favorite keyword because I know it’s important (without any proof to back it up).
• The Small Portfolio Ranker – I understand that there are a number of relevant keywords that appear to drive business for us, let’s attack them as a group.
• The More, The Merrier – Capturing the long-tail is an important part of driving relevant visitors to our site, and they are more likely to be buyers.
• Doing Great, Just Need A Bit More - Our SEO is performing well for us.  It would be nice to push it up a notch or two, what’s the latest and greatest?
• Been There, Done That – I’ve hired consultants before, and we just haven’t see the results we needed.

The “Been There, Done That” group is the closest to The Acquisition Marketers in terms of mindset. For the most part, these are sophisticated marketers, who use tight measurements to determine where to spend their marketing dollars.

ROI Focused Marketers Still Doubt

The surprising part for me in recent weeks is that there are many Acquisition Marketers who still doubt that investing in SEO is even worth the effort. And, they have not even given it a try.

In some sense, it’s the “paralysis by analysis” conundrum. As SEO practitioners, we have all been faced with the question of “what’s the ROI?”

In my last article, 10 Quick & Dirty SEO Success Metrics, I made the case that tracking SEO success can get messy when you look at attribution tracking, and that you may have to resort to some more basic measurements to prove success.

It is exactly this messy success tracking that makes Acquisition Marketers hesitant to invest in SEO.

The Case For SEO As An Acquisition Vehicle

So, here’s my case for why SEO is a necessary piece of Acquisition Marketing:

A well-executed SEO strategy requires crafting and generating valuable content, promoting that content, and finding ways for trusted resources to link to that content. It takes time to see organic search results.

In this process, the most likely scenario is that “The Rank Hound” will be disappointed, and the “The Small Portfolio Ranker” will begin to have doubts, but may see some positive signs.  “The More, The Merrier” will see the breadth of keyword traffic begin to expand, and will be happy to see that progress.  But, even “The More, The Merrier” will begin to question if the right tail keywords are bringing in traffic.

However, this entire SEO process is moving the acquisition dial in the right direction!

Acquisition benefits include:

• Purchase Influencing. Quality content that is generated is positively influencing buyer behavior. Whether or not the content is found via a search engine (at the beginning), the content is still pushing website visitors closer to being buyers. By “content”, I don’t just mean written text (which is of course valuable) – great content will take many forms, including video, images, graphical depictions (including infographics), webinars, contests & promotions, local search assets (e.g. Google Places), and many other forms of great, creative, and convincing content.
• Awareness. Visits from long-tail keywords, even if not the best-converting keywords, are building brand awareness, and planting the seed that your site is there for them to come back to. You may see this traffic come back to you in future visits in your analyitcs as “Direct/Bookmark” or search queries for your brand name. But, it was the initial visit, for a very specific phrase that even gave you the opportunity for that second visit.
• Creating A Voice. In order to promote the content, you need a voice. That voice is a combination of social media engagement, PR, and traditional link building. These traffic channels, and communication processes, will be there even when Google changes the search game on us all again. People will be finding you not just via search, but through good-old-fashioned communication. But, you did the groundwork, in part, to improve SEO results.
• Competitive Keywords Will Come To You. Your quest for ranking for the best-converting, and more competitive, keywords will provide results. It will just take more time than many Acquisition Marketers are typically comfortable with. But, without making the investment in organic search, your competitors will keep taking your customers away from you.

As organic search traffic, and traffic from related sources, flows in, Acquisition Marketers can do one of the things they do best – test and optimize the user experience to capture customers and prospects, and build marketing lists to nurture with care.

Every Industry Evolves & Requires Convincing Doubters In Order To Grow

As I was drafting this article, I was bouncing ideas off of a trusted adviser, Mike Schultz, from the Rain Group. Mike’s specialty is sales training.

As I talked about my surprise at still finding so many “doubters” who have not yet invested in SEO, Mike drew an analogy to how even “mature” industries need to be re-introduced to how to sell their own services. He talked about how roughly 20 years ago, law firms began to revolutionize the way they market and sell their services (even though lawyers have been around for centuries).

It became evident, that if a competitive law firm did not engage in more aggressive marketing and demand generation, then not only were they leaving potential business on the table, the perception was that they were behind the curve.

While the SEO industry is far from mature, it is true that the speed of adoption has been at a much more rapid rate than many other marketing channels. In fact, Brian Halligan and the rest of the Hubspot team, have proven how fast a new marketing concept, such as inbound marketing, can take hold.

So, my hope is that the sophisticated, ROI-driven Acquisition Marketers will take note of the broad benefits of SEO, and invest time and money in building organic search as an acquisition channel. Even when ROI measurement is not immediately available.

In an ideal world, all digital marketing efforts are managed under one bucket, and the collective measurements highlight the success of the team, or highlight the success of the complete bundle of digital efforts. But, in the end, ROI needs to be justified in order to keep the flow of budget and resources moving to each individual marketing effort.

However, your job is SEO. You know that you are adding value. You just need to prove it.

Dealing With(out) Attribution

Perhaps you’ve had this thought before – “My content brought in the visitor, they learned, they left, and they came back again through a different channel.”

So prove it.

Over the past few years, there has been considerable discussion about, and effort to solve, the issue of  tracking sales/leads based on touch points – attribution for the conversion action. The primary stumbling block has been the ability of analytics tools to differentiate between last-click conversions vs. multi-touchpoint conversions.

As the SEO professional, your question might be “did the lead/sale really come in through PPC, or did the visitor first hear of us through SEO content, and then search for our brand name and click on the first thing they saw – our PPC ad for our brand name?”

Of course, this all goes way beyond SEO vs. PPC. It’s the entire digital marketing package. Or, as Richard Fergie at SEOptimise, highlights in The Conversion Attribution Problem, it’s about the entire Marketing mix.

From a purely digital tracking standpoint, Will Critchlow of Distilled created an excellent example of the issue of attribution tracking in an article he posted on SEOmoz:

The idea here is that you want to give attribution for conversions not only to first- and last-touches but also give so-called assists to touch-points along the way (e.g. a conversion path could look like):

long-tail keyword > head keyword > branded search > direct visit

Under this scenario, you might want to give the head and branded searches some attribution for the conversion.

Tracking Tools

Many of the higher-end analytics tools on the market have developed their own methodologies to solve the attribution question.

While Adobe’s Omniture platform comes to mind immediately, you may find this list on Mashable (although maybe a bit dated): Analytics Toolbox: 50+ More Ways to Track Website Traffic – a good resource for finding, investigating and interviewing various analytics companies about their attribution tracking methodologies and technologies.

On the other side of attribution tracking technology is the ubiquitous (and free) Google Analytics. There are a number of good articles out there about how to use custom variables in Google Analytics to track multi-touch attribution. Here are a few articles that I have found helpful in this area:

• How To Get Past Last-Touch Attribution With Google Analytics, , Will Critchlow of Distilled, on SEOmoz
• Multi-Touch Attribution with Google Analytics, Yehoshua Coren (aka Analytics Ninja)
• Capturing First-Touch Source Information with Custom Variables,  , Nick Iyengar, Webshare
• Tracking Transactions back to the Initial Referrer with Google Analytics, Jeremy Aube, ROI Revolution

Another tool, that I have not used myself, Multitouchanalytics.com, looks to be an interesting way to make Google Analytics integration easier, and provide a cleaner touchpoint dashboard.

Also, Adam Goldberg produced an excellent piece here on Search Engine Land, titled Attribution Technology: What’s Best For Your Needs?, that contains a visual aid in evaluating how you might use specific technology to measure attribution – complete with pros and cons.

10 Quick & Dirty SEO Success Metrics

Multi-touch attribution tracking isn’t for everyone. It’s a pure decision of resources (e.g. cost, programming, value of your time, etc.). It’s true that tracking organic search traffic down to determine its role in influencing conversion is the holy grail of search analytics. However, there are a series of other metrics you can use to measure SEO success.

Many of the metrics listed below have been discussed by other SEO authors (e.g. Eric Enge, Tad Chef, Barry Adams, etc.), but I’ve attempted put them all in one place, and added a few myself:

1.   Keyword Rankings

My least favorite metric, and one that can get confused easily when tools are not used (i.e. manually checking rankings). That said, knowing where your target keywords rank, in a general sense, is definitely part of the scorecard. I’d say that the use of Google Suggest adds one reason to track rankings.

I was told at one point by a Google employee that 40% of all searches are triggered by Google Suggest. And, of course, the suggestions that come up start with shorter phrases, pushing ever more searchers to take the short route first. These short phrases are invariably your starting point for targeting keywords.

2.  Basic Conversion Tracking

Make sure to identify multiple conversion types, including sales, leads, subscriptions, downloads, event sign-ups, etc.

3.  Organic Search Traffic

• Overall Organic Traffic Growth – Focus on year-over-year comparisons.
• Growth of Traffic for Targeted Keywords – This is a double check against rankings. Look at month-over-month and year-over-year growth in traffic for specific target keywords.

• Percentage Of  Overall Traffic Coming From Organic – Track the trend, but be careful of peaks and valleys based on key marketing tactics such as email marketing blasts (which will obviously lower the percentage of traffic generated by organic search for that time period).

• Progress With Specific Engines – It may be a Google-centric search world, but also track progress with Yahoo/Bing, and others that may be important to your business.

4.  Keyword Diversity

Examine how many keywords are driving driving each month, and track the trend. It’s valuable to be able to report something like “in the first few months we received traffic from about 300 keywords, and now it’s a couple thousand different keywords generating the traffic (yes, this is the long-tail).

5.  Referrals From Links & Website Properties

Link building and content generation is not just about improving keyword rankings/keyword traffic. When done well, links, and websites you develop to support that effort, will bring traffic to the site. Take credit for that traffic, and for any conversions produced through those referrals.

6.  Visitor Engagement

Warning: these metrics may not appear to be “in your favor” as you create content and increase Keyword Diversity. It’s a simple fact that your success will also bring less-relevant traffic, along with the good stuff.

• Organic Bounce Rates
• Repeat Visitors
• Pageviews Per Visit
• Time Spent On Site

7.  Inbound Link Count

You’ll probably have to report on this whether you want to or not. And, not all links pointing to your site will be due to your SEO efforts. In addition, reporting on the quantity of links can seem silly to the seasoned SEO, who understands that it’s about quality, trust, anchor text, relevancy, etc. That said, keep track of the progress in acquiring links, and consider using something like SEOmoz’s Linkscape to create a quality-links report.

8.  Increase In Branded Searches

While SEO cannot possibly take all of the credit for an increase in people searching for your company’s brand and product line brands, it is also true that some credit has to be given to SEO for people coming to the site after searching for the brand name.

Be careful here though, because it is clear that other media channels can have a much greater influence on this metric. It’s easier to attribute some of the branded searches to SEO when there is less emphasis at the company on mass media and extensive PR (e.g. companies with lower advertising/marketing budgets).

9.  Pages Indexed

As you increase the crawlability of your site, and add new content, you should see the number of pages that are indexed increase. This metric can be especially important to companies with product catalogs or large quantities of technical documentation that have previously been inaccessible to search engines.

10.  Crawl Frequency

This can be a nice way to measure the success of adding fresh content sources to your site.  Keeping search engines coming back more frequently is a key component in getting new pages indexed more quickly, and in getting additional content types, such as news and blog posts, into Google’s Caffeine-crazy algorithm.

Feel free to suggest your own key SEO metrics in the comment section below.

The Bottom Line

Proving that organic search is working for your company can be as sophisticated as multi-touch attribution, or as simple as pulling together easy-to-get data points. Of course, use the metrics to also take an honest look at what might need improvement in your overall SEO strategy, and across your entire digital marketing mix.

Let’s say that after years of working hard to build a solid reputation, one day, a result surfaces in Google for a search for “your name” and one of the top results is completely damaging to your reputation.

In my last article, Reputation Conversations Start With Search Results, I mentioned that an online reputation crisis could result for any number of reasons, including:

• Past Indiscretions
• Negative Identity Confusion
• Sensitive Material

The negative result could be anywhere -a forum post, a PDF document from a government agency, a scathing article on a popular website, etc.

What should you do to eliminate, eradicate, and completely destroy that negative search result?

There is nothing you can do to achieve the goal stated above. In the current Google era, that search result will likely live on long after you care about your online reputation. It just becomes a question of how far down you can push that negative result (or how you can address the issue in content that rises to the same level).

Some Reputation Triage Options

So, what can you do?

First, take a deep breath and remember that the end result that you want is a series of very clean, and meaningful, results to come up in Google (or any other search engine) for a search for your name (i.e. your personal brand).

Remember now that you’ve been made (painfully) aware that your online reputation can be destroyed very quickly, you need to build for the long haul. You’ll want a plan in place, and a way to get your name out there consistently in a positive manner. And eventually move into having Reputation Conversations.

The basic approaches to addressing  reputation crisis are:

1. Hire an inexpensive firm to do the job as quickly as possible, with a “packaged” service
2. Engage a higher-end consultant/firm and set the stage for the long term
3. Sign up for a reputation management and monitoring service
4. Do it yourself

Using A Packaged Reputation Management Service

There are many companies out there that offer “less expensive” reputation management services (packaged up neatly in a bundle). And, you may want to contact a number of them and ask questions about what exactly they plan to do to push your negative result down the SERPs. You can start this process by going to Google and searching for “reputation management” – look at both the free/organic results and the Sponsored Results.

Talk to a number of companies to get a feel for the differences/similarities. If you aren’t getting straight answers, go with your gut and walk away – there are plenty of similar companies out there.

While evaluating the offerings, here are some questions to ask:

1. Why Does The Negative Rank So High? Why is that negative result suddenly so high up in search results? They better give you an answer that you can feel comfortable with. You might not know anything about SEO, but an answer such as “it just happens sometimes” is obviously not enough. Ask them to give you as complete an answer as they can.
2. How Far Down The SERPs Is Enough? How far will they target pushing that result down? I’d say you want to aim for at least the first 30 results (a traditional view of 3 pages) to start with. Perhaps 100 results would be even more thorough. Or beyond. But, the harder you push to fill up the space, the higher chance that there will be a mess to clean up later (which may be OK with you if the crisis is serious enough).
3. How Will They Do It? What content and websites (types of websites) will they use to push your result out of the way? You will probably find that the primary tactics will be creating a series of social bookmarking profiles for you and creating a number of mini-blogs, or “splogs” (spam + blogs).
4. How Quickly Can They Get You Results? How long will it take? I hope that somewhere in their answer they say “no promises” or “no one can ever be sure.”

You may find a packaged service that satisfies your immediate needs.

Pros: May be the fastest way to eliminate a negative search result; cheap(er). Cons: May not produce great quality results for searchers, and may cause people to dig deeper; you may have a clutter of results to clean up later.

Find A Higher End/Boutique Consultant

Another option is to engage with a “pro”; someone who will cost more but will work with you to make sure that your reputation is handled with care, and that you are setting the stage for long-term success.

You will still want to interview the “pro”, and ask them many of the questions listed above in the section above about Packaged Services. You will probably also find that they will spend more time explaining what happened to you, how to solve the problem, and how to keep the problem from cropping up again.

You do not have to turn to a self-defined “reputation expert” to achieve superior results. It obviously helps if the consultant/firm lists Reputation Management as one of their services (it means they’ve “been there, done that”).

The skills that you need are some combination of SEO, Social Media Marketing, and traditional Public Relations.

You might not find all of those skills under one roof, but the firm you are engaging with should be able to bring all of these skills to the table while managing your project. You will probably also need to budget for some content writing (budgeting your time and/or paying a ghost writer).

You would look at this option if your personal name has significant (monetary) value to you, and you are looking for more than a quick clean-up. You can find someone to give you retained advisory services (teaching you how to fish) or retain someone for ongoing services (complete with content writing, publishing, and implementing all of the many details that will come with the job).

Pros: You now have a team working for you; the stage is being set for meaningful Reputation Conversations; there is a better chance that any future crisis will be dealt with quickly and effectively.

Cons: High(er) price point; may not clear up the specific negative search engine result as quickly as a packaged service.

Sign Up For Reputation Management & Monitoring (Self) Service

There are a number of excellent self-service reputation management tools out there in the market. Each of them has their strengths and weaknesses. Without providing my own recommendations, and in no particular order, here are some tools out there that have some strength in the market:

• Reputation Defender
• Brand-Yourself
• Vizibility
• Naymz
• Reputation Armor

While I won’t be giving a recommendation on any of the particular services above, it is worthwhile to find a tool that will help you at least monitor your personal brand and give you real tools to manage what searchers will find when they Google your name.

A tool that has a dashboard that also gives you advice is a nice feature to have as well. The monitoring capabilities in most of these tools go beyond what you might set up for yourself in a traditional Google Alert, but you should at least have some Google Alerts set up now for your name.

Pros: Gives you a great starting point to start managing your reputation; less expensive than retaining a consultant; dashboards for monitoring your name and for providing tips on what to do next

Cons: A tool, no matter how good, can never give you as much breadth and depth as you would get with a consultant; you may miss some opportunities to build great points-of-content outside of the tool and/or your own personal blog; if you choose the “wrong”platform, or use the tool incorrectly, you may actually cause people searching for you to dig deeper because something looks odd to them in the results

Do It Yourself

There is a very long list of activities, tactics, and strategies to follow if you decide to take care of the problem yourself. If you are a consultant, or in a profession where personal relationships are at a premium, then you may want to take on at least part of this task on your own.

The most important thing you can do is to be prolific and write large quantities of good-to-great content (excellent content is essential too – but keep that stuff for your own blog or for excellent by-line opportunities in widely-read publications).

In this article I will not be able to list out the many activities that you would need to do to handle a crisis, or even how to manage your online reputation for the long haul.

Truly, the list of activities for a Do-It-Yourself Reputation Triage is long and full of choices and trade-offs to be made.

The short list includes:

• Press Releases
• Social Media Participation
• Establishing Online Profiles
• Publishing Articles
• Looking For Websites Where Your Subject Appears In Searches  – Getting In those Places & Getting Those Links

Pros: Possibly the cheapest route, although you may have to spend some money to get a few things done; gives you the most control over your message.

Cons: It’s not easy if you don’t know what you’re doing, and sometimes even the “pros” can’t get it done if the problem is big enough.

How’s that as an opening statement? It’s a great way for me to “practice what I preach”, as I write an article about online reputation management (a term I did not coin).

Online Reputation Management Is Already Thriving

Simply Google “online reputation management”, and look at how many people are advertising in the Sponsored Results. This tells you right away that there’s money to be had there.

Your searching may turn up experts who also discuss managing reputations for companies and brands. For this article, I am talking solely here about personal reputation management.

The practice of managing your personal reputation online can mean many things, depending on who you are and what your goals are. Some of the obvious reputation management “conversations” include:

• Job seekers to employers
• Consultants to prospective clients
• Entrepreneur/CEO to investors, potential partners, and the general public

Of course, there are many, many other Reputation Conversations that people have every single day.  The practice of managing your reputation online will involve a wide variety of tactics and strategies – from blogging, to using social media networks, to authoring articles, and many others.

Before A Conversation Begins, A Search Takes Place

Most Reputation Conversations start with “Googling” (but they don’t have to end there, and should not end there!). For the foreseeable future, you will be at the mercy of what Google says about you when someone is seeking to learn more about you.

Expect people who are researching you to look at at least 3 pages of 10 results each, if they are using the standard Google page layout (or, think of it as 30 individual search engine results).

The digging may go deeper depending on how much is at stake for that person in getting to know you better. For now, let’s put aside the “super searcher” who may either be very adept at conducting Web research, or may be a hired professional (or someone who already uses a service like Pipl). We’ll have to delve into the area of deep searches/super-searchers another time.

Your immediate goal is to come out “sparkling clean” in those first 30 search engine results. More is better.

The ultimate goal is to engage in the Reputation Conversation that you want to have.

What Will They Find?

Before that conversation can begin, you may be faced with some of the following results of the Google search that was just completed for your name (or, your name + appended search terms):

• Past Indiscretions
• Negative Identity Confusion
• Common Name/Cluttered Results
• Irrelevant Material
• Sensitive Material
• Nothing Special

Some of these search outcomes may put you in “Crisis Mode”, while other outcomes will make you realize that you just simply need to start doing something.

Developing A Plan For Crisis Situations

A crisis may not give you time for real planning. Or, at least you may feel that way. The truth is, if a search for your name comes out with a crisis result, then you need a plan more than ever!  Of course, a crisis does have to be dealt with fast, so there will be simultaneous Planning and Triage.

While planning, you will need to think through a number of issues, including whether or not you embrace that crisis, explain it, and turn it into a positive.

Your Reputation Management Plan will need to include answering the following questions:

• What do I want people to know about me?
• What do I want people to learn about me?
• Do I have a particular tone, voice, or opinion that I want to convey?
• How frequently do I want to publish material about myself?
• How will I engage with people online once they find me?
• How will I monitor changes in the results that people see?

Answering these questions will help you define the tactics that you will use in managing your online reputation. Once you have outlined a plan for how you ultimately want to engage in Reputation Conversations, then you can begin to consider the tactics and tools to generate positive outcomes.

Some Beginning Reputation Management Resources

This article cannot begin to list out, break down, and evaluate all of the myriad possibilities for how to manage your online reputation.

Also, I am not endorsing any of the resources that I am about to list. These are sites and services that you can explore and begin to evaluate on your own.

That said, in the spirit of this column’s place here at Search Engine Land – “In The Trenches … spotlights tips, tricks, and news about the tools search engine marketing professionals use to give them a leg up on the competition” – here are some practical suggestions for where to place your Conversation Starters (it’s a 100% certainty that I’ve left out important tactical areas and specific websites – please feel free to let me know!):

• Specific Reputation Management Tools
  • Reputation Defender
  • Brand-Yourself
  • Vizibility
  • Naymz
• Blogging
  • Your own website (host your own blog on a domain name that you register)
  • Hosted Blogs (e.g. Blogger/blogspot.com, WordPress.com, TypePad, etc.)
• Social Networks
  • The “Big Players” (e.g. LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook)
  • Social Bookmarking/Sharing Sites (Digg, Reddit, Mixx, StumbleUpon, Delicious, and every other conceivable social network out there!  There will be many reasons you’ll decide whether or not to use a particular social network).
• Profile & Contact Sites
  • Google Profile
  • Plaxo
  • Profile pages for any associations you belong to
• Article Writing
  • By-lines for mainstream publications and/or trade publications
  • Article Hubs (Here’s a nice starting resource)
• Press Releases
• Sharing Your Passions
  • Clubs, charities, associations, etc.
  • Create and share your favorite videos, pictures etc. (e.g. create channels/accounts under your real name for YouTube, Flickr, etc.)

All of these touch points should ultimately serve the purpose of pointing searchers to where you want to have your conversation. But, in order to avoid any Crisis, Identity Confusion, or Privacy Delving, it might be in your best interest to attempt to dominate at least the first 30 spots in Google with material that paints a positive picture.

In fact, don’t stop at 30 – keep publishing!

Covering The PPC Basics

We’d done all of the basic blocking and tackling:

• Focusing on phrases that had a higher probability of buying intent (somewhere in between Broad Match and “the tail”)
  • It’s worth noting that over the years, Google has gone from encouraging advertisers to pursue long-tail keywords in favor of encouraging advertisers to focus on broader terms
• Adding negative keywords
• Writing ads to attract buyers-not-browsers
• Testing ad variations
• Creating landing pages based on best practices (and ones that have worked very effectively for companies with similar profiles)
• Testing landing pages

Targeting Quality Over Quantity

One area we had not touched was the actual Offer.  Our initial goal was to get the “hard” conversion (a sales lead) as opposed to the “soft” conversion (a download, sign-up, etc.).

This seemed to be a reasonable strategy for this particular company, because we were prepared to pay a much higher Cost Per Conversion for the “right” kind of lead, rather than put larger volumes of softer leads into the marketing pipeline.

This strategy is always debatable, and worth a conversation.

Results

At the end of roughly 60 days of this activity, our lead generation efforts were decidedly a “failure.”  Not enough leads, at an unacceptable Cost Per Conversion.

The Average Cost Per Click was at such a high level that it appeared that we were suffering a penalty vs. what Google’s Keyword Tool and Traffic Estimation Tool implied. The tools provided by Google seemed to suggest that we should be paying less for each click than were actually were paying.

An inquiry to Google’s AdWords staff indicated that we were not suffering a Quality Score penalty because of any of our tactics or overall account history. Instead, we were told that the keywords we were bidding on appear to have the same overall poor Quality Scores across the AdWords marketplace (an assertion I find hard to believe).

The Inevitable Question

That’s when the question from the client arose of, “our competitors are advertising consistently for the same keywords, why is it working for them?”

The AdWords Market Place Is Not Rational

Although we had done our early competitive analysis, and taken some strategic and tactical cues from what we saw, the answer is, and may always be – Google AdWords does NOT provide a rational marketplace. The Google AdWords marketplace is not even an efficient marketplace.

In order to satisfy the Economics purists here, I am not looking at anything beyond the basic premise of the intersection between  the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH), Rational Expectations, and  basic Supply and Demand theory – perfect information, or near-perfect information, leads to rational economic decisions.

There is nothing rational or efficient about advertising via Google AdWords!

Here are just a few reasons:

• Google obscures the bidding mechanisms behind AdWords, and claims them as proprietary technology (you’re running blind at the very start)
• You will never know exactly what your competitors are paying for each click
• The marketplace is still too new to possibly have settled into a reasonable economic rhythm – new entrants, with varying levels of direct marketing experience, are constantly entering your keyword space
• Companies have varying levels of skill and sophistication when it comes to converting website visitors

Your Economic Model Is What Counts

Most importantly, companies have varying economic models – high-volume/low margin, high-margin/lower volume, single revenue streams vs. multiple revenue streams, etc.

In other words, you cannot take cues from other advertisers about whether or not you should be bidding at certain levels for keywords, or even participating in PPC advertising at all.

The best that you can do, other than use best PPC practices, is measure your own economic results and make decisions based on your own information. And, you must go beyond basic Cost Per Conversion analysis/metrics.

In an e-commerce environment, you have to not only evaluate if you are getting a financial return on the immediate transaction, you also have to evaluate the lifetime value of a customer acquired through PPC. You may be able to “get away with” using a basic rule of thumb culled from your e-commerce history.

For example, on average, a customer who purchases a product on your site will become a repeat customer X amount of the time and average $XX in sales. It’s better if you can partition off your PPC efforts into its own lifetime value analysis.

In a lead generation environment, you have to follow your leads, down to the keyword level, throughout the sales cycle. In order to add an even more accurate measurement, you need to have an understanding of how many other touch points a prospect will encounter in your overall marketing efforts, and develop a model for how effectively you convert leads once they enter your marketing system.

Key Takeaway

Without this information, you will always be faced with the question of why so many advertisers are bidding on your keywords in AdWords, and why they seem to spend so much money on that effort. You have to get to a level of comfort about your own financial return on investment, and use that as the basis of making a decision about whether or not to continue operating a Google AdWords advertising effort.

The practice is not without controversy. In an article titled, Dear Google… Stop Making Me Look Like a Fool!, Jill Whalen, of High Rankings, expressed her distaste of the practice of article marketing simply for the sake of building links. I couldn’t agree with her more!

Spamming the Web with “spun” articles, across a wide network of article directories, adds no value to the user experience when they are searching for good content about a topic.

Unfortunately, in the current search engine environment, this practice does indeed work for building links to a website, and increasing keyword rankings. While this statement may also be food for debate, it has been my personal experience that this works. Yes, I’ve actually engaged in this practice! Never, ever for a client. But, I have experimented with the tactic for websites that I personally own.

Why would I ever do this? I am firmly in the “white hat” camp when it comes to SEO. I believe that building a great user experience on your website, creating truly valuable content, and making people aware of that content (through social media and more-traditional PR outreach) is the best way to engage in an SEO campaign.  By “making people aware of that content”, I practice appropriate etiquette, and do not blindly broadcast a message that shouts “please link to me!” But, over the years (much like Jill), I have continuously bumped into competitors of my clients that engage in spammy link-building techniques, including publishing inferior content across article directories.

Because I have been frustrated with seeing my clients’ competitors win in the quest for keyword rankings using these tactics, I did what any good SEO practitioner would do – I experimented. It took me roughly 9 years in the SEO trenches to finally succumb to trying article marketing solely for the sake of link building.

I still find the practice distasteful. But it’s worked for me.

The practice is still something I would be highly reluctant to recommend to a client. Especially to a company that carefully manages its brand. Pushing out low-value content across the Web will eventually come back to haunt you – either through risking damaging your brand, or by eventually getting “caught” by Google and other engines, and risking losing keyword positions, or having your site devalued on a broader scale in the search engines’ indices.

That all said, I do think there is a place for B2B companies to engage intelligently in article marketing. A good link to your site will always be valuable. Maybe not from a keyword ranking standpoint, but at least from the standpoint of bringing qualified visitors to your website.

The key is to produce valuable content. Produce content that will position you, your company, or its staff as subject matter experts.

By publishing articles in relevant article websites, and in article sites that have real traffic and value (here’s a good reference point for finding these directories), your articles will often be found in SERPs by users. If the content is good, it will serve you well in establishing you as an authority in that particular subject.The reader may find the content of enough value to either click through a link you provide (in the body of an article, or in your author profile), or go back to a search engine and re-query your name, or your company’s name.

In the current search engine environment, those links often help boost your website’s authority in search engines, and can directly help boost a target keyword’s ranking.

For a B2B company, or for any company, that combination of brand building, direct traffic generation, and link presence, is a win-win-win situation.

As this column came around, I was having difficulty coming up with a compelling topic. Not only have I written about a wide range of B2B topics, the Web is also flooded with B2B marketing content (just try searching Twitter for “#B2B“!). Because I monitor social communities, feeds, and Google for fresh B2B stories and articles, I see many of the same topics written about over and over.

Put succinctly – “hasn’t it all been said before? What the heck should I write about?!?”

It occurred me that if someone was out there looking for good B2B marketing content to read, that person would likely be one of four audiences: 1) a consultant in the B2B space seeking stories to share socially and looking to make connections; 2) an in-house marketer at a B2B company looking for case studies, research, new tactics, etc.; 3) a journalist/researcher looking for stats or a story; or 4) possibly a job-seeker looking to keep current on topics related to business-to-business Internet marketing.

Something tells me that a potential hiring manager would not be one of those looking for “B2B” content.

The consultant and the in-house marketer both know what it takes to be successful as someone responsible for generating relevant website traffic and Web buzz. The journalist/researcher hopefully would find this article interesting!

The job-seeker and the hiring manager should both seek to understand what it takes to put someone in charge of a B2B Internet Marketing program.

I’ll put the skill requirements into two distinct buckets – 1) Foundational Skills, and 2) Tactical Skills.

Foundational skills are the building blocks of a successful career, and allow a person to move from one job/company/venture to another and remain successful. Tactical skills relate to very specific tools and techniques that work today. Tactical skills will constantly need to be refreshed and evolve.

Foundational skills

• Editing. It’s unlikely that the person in charge of a company’s B2B Internet marketing will also be a subject-matter authority about the company’s products and services. It is more likely that this manager will be working with subject matter experts within the company (product managers, developers, engineers, executives, etc,), and possibly outsourced resources as well (research, white papers, etc.). The search manager will help set the direction for the content that is needed, and will need to be able to proof the work, add keyword elements, and often extend the thought process through examples and data points.

• Writing. The search manager will not be the primary generator of high-value content, but she/he will be called on to write pieces of content that fit into what is already being produced. In addition, the manager will need to be able to communicate very effectively with co-workers, executives, partners, and vendors in order to move the pace along and receive critical cooperation on a continuous basis.

• Data Analysis. Understanding where Web site traffic is coming from, where it should come from, and how patterns are evolving, and can be exploited, is a key strength of a B2B Search Marketing Manager. Someone who indicates that this is not their strong area may not be a fit for leading the charge. On the other hand, this skill should not dominate their interests, and hiring someone that spends too much time playing with pretty charts and tables will not get things done.

• Project Management. A search manager will need to juggle many moving parts in order to be successful – Web developers & designers, link builders, content writers, social media participants, PR people, and any outsourced areas of specialty such as PPC management, e-mail marketing, etc.

• Vendor Management. It is my general feeling that you would be hard-pressed to find a single individual who can handle all of the things a Search Marketing Manager needs to have done. Not just in terms of time-in-the-day/week, but also finding someone with all of the requisite foundational and tactical skills is a pretty tall order. Something will have to be outsourced. The most likely candidates are link building, content generation, and PPC management. An excellent Manager will know how to write RFPs, evaluate vendors, and manage vendors with realistic expectations (push them hard, but don’t be unreasonable).

• ROI Analysis. Putting together intelligent ROI models and tracking down the necessary data are critical skills for this position! In the end, Search Marketing has to be about driving profitable business. There will always be ambiguities, such as the overall brand effect of a well-orchestrated search program, but because search is inherently so measurable, a Manager needs to be able to prove it.

• Demonstrated Ability To Learn & Apply. The online marketing space moves too rapidly to expect any potential hire to know it all. Make sure that the potential manager has demonstrated an ability to pick up new skills and technologies quickly.

• The Art of “Please” & “Thank You”. A Search Marketing Manager is never a “one person show”. She/he will always be reliant on some critical piece handled by someone else in order to be successful. Picture your fondest memories of hounding a Web developer for a website change, or of trying to get blog posts written consistently!

Tactical skills

This list will change so quickly that it will be obsolete before we know it. That said, here are some critical tactical skills that a B2B Search Marketing Manager must understand today:

• Web Analytics Technology. Google Analytics, plus at least one other Web analytics package.

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Factors. Make sure that the understanding is current, and not based on things that were read months ago and/or from performing a role that did not require setting strategic direction, and attention was not paid to building a comprehensive understanding.

• Keyword Research. Have a methodology for uncovering high-value keywords, and making decisions based on potential business outcomes (not simply on traffic volumes). Understand how to work real search query behavior into company branding and “marketing speak”.

• Link Building. Understand what it takes to acquire high-quality links. Have a comfort level with multiple tactics. Ability to articulate the trade-offs between volume of links, relevance, trust, link acquisition velocity, future potential, variety of sources, and that links will not always be the dominant factor.

• Google AdWords. Have experience running at least a limited campaign. Even if the Manager will not be managing day-to-day, she/he has to understand the variables that go into Quality Scores and how to manage high-ROI campaigns. Other PPC engines may be relevant, but AdWords experience is the bare-minimum requirement.

• Customer Relationship Management Technology. Here is one of the skills that is so clearly unique to B2B. A B2B Search Marketing Manager has to understand how leads and customers are tracked throughout the Sales Cycle. The Manager has to know how the sales force handles leads within the CRM system (e.g. Salesforce.com), and how data is held in the database. An excellent Search Manager will know how to help the Web development/IT team integrate online contact forms, website referral data, and CRM data fields into one process that will allow for tracking of leads and sales down to the individual keyword level.

• Social Networking. Have a general understanding of what it takes to build a valuable social network; both at the company-profile level and for personal profiles. Understand concepts such as authenticity, consistency, engagement, and quality interactions. At the moment, any Search Manager should at least be able to utilize Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook for B2B purposes.

• eMail Marketing. While not part of the Search function, e-mail marketing does have to coordinate with overall online messaging, content, and conversion practices. A Search Manager will understand how the moving parts of e-mail can affect an organic search program, as well as PPC programs.

• Landing Page Testing. Understand how to conduct multi-variate testing (and not just A/B testing). Have a feel for key elements of a page that stimulate conversion. Understand how to engage the entire Marketing & PR function at the company to create compelling offers and landing experiences.

• Blogging.Understand the “why’s” and “how’s” of corporate blogging. Explain what the benefits of corporate blogging are, above and beyond critical SEO benefits. Know when to consider off-site blogs vs. integrated blog content. Be able to evaluate technology decisions regarding homegrown blog platforms vs. third-party platforms such as WordPress, Drupal, and others.

How About Industry Experience?

Does a B2B Search Marketing Manager need to have vertical industry experience to be successful at a company? I answered this question sometime ago, here on Search Engine Land, when it came to hiring a search marketing agency. My argument was that an agency does not need to have prior experience in an industry to be successful. The same may be true for an in-house Search Manager, at the outset.

However, one large advantage an in-house manager has over an agency (although they don’t have to be mutually exclusive) is that the in-house Manager has the tie, focus, and resources to become an industry expert (or close to it) and be that much more effective in driving the search strategy of a company.