Still skeptical? Think about it this way – search is not a strategy. Content is a strategy that search plays a major role in.

Companies spend millions in offline advertising and then fail to bridge the gap between the demand they generate for their products through gorgeous TV and print campaigns, and the quest of their customers to find more information online after having been exposed to those campaigns.

As a Brand Manager, are you aligning search strategies with your other Marketing initiatives? Odds are, you’re already “doing search,” you just don’t know it yet, but you may not be doing it as effectively as you can. With a lot of Enterprise companies, the focus seems to be on creating Social Media content that gives the consumer an opportunity to engage. But if you’re not creating that content based on what people are already telling you they want (via search), you’re missing the point.

Search is really about making sure that all of your digital assets are created in a way where they have an opportunity to dominate the Search Results page for business critical terms – pushing your competition out of the picture. You can also provide insight that answers questions such as:

• What are people saying about our brand and our competitors?
• What specific terms and categories are my consumers interested in?
• How can I use this information to make a better web experience?

So, the next time there’s a conversation about SEO and social media content– consider these points that may help you develop your overall Digital Marketing Strategy.

Is it over-hyped? In some ways, yes.

Marketers seem to be a little paranoid that this changes everything with search. Google has stated that there have not been any changes to the algorithm. You’ll get the same results for “shoes” as you would with “sho” and selecting “shoes” as the option. It’s really more of a slick browser-type of feature that speeds things up. It doesn’t fundamentally change anything you do from an SEO standpoint. You can’t optimize for “sho” and win for “shoes”.

That said, there are some things you can begin to think about while we all wait to see what type of behaviors are going to be influenced by having access to these “instant” results. One area you may want to consider researching is – how do these instant results influence your audience’s intent? Will they change their mind on what they actually want to do based on Google’s instant suggestions? Those users who know what they want to find information for are probably less likely to be distracted. For example, if I want to go to a Chicago Bears game, and search “Chicago bears 2010 schedule”, I’m not likely to see the instant results and instead click on “Chicago marathon”.

Then there’s the flip side of the coin. What about those users and potential customers that are early on in the buy cycle? Those with low brand awareness. Will they be influenced or distracted by results for “shoes” when they just type in “sho”? I’d argue that yes, they will. This means that you can lose traffic to a competitor.

So what do you do?

A good way to approach this is to develop a matrix of audience segments. For this example, let’s use “focused users” and “early users”. For your “focused users” segment, list out all your Keywords and Preferred Landing Pages. Create a baseline ranking & traffic report and monitor if there are major fluctuations now that Google Instant. For your “early users” segment, do the same. Odds are, over the upcoming months, you may see a drop in traffic for the latter segment.

At that point, you can create an action plan. For example, let’s say you see a drop in traffic for a broad topic keyword. Since you created a baseline and can clearly show the drop, you now have a business case to take to your stakeholders to get buyoff on strengthening your content or looking at linking opportunities.

Most marketers tend to forget that it doesn’t end there. Traffic can at times be misleading. Identifying what constitutes a conversion event on your site and configuring your web analytics to measure this can provide additional insight into your overall search strategy.

Let’s say your company sells sandals. Wouldn’t you like to see what the overall percentage of search traffic that actually purchases a sandal. Wouldn’t your executives like to see that you are driving X% of purchases through your SEO efforts and how much money you are saving your company? Seems like a no-brainer right? Well it is, but it gets really complicated when you are not an e-commerce site  focused on simply driving purchases.

Let’s say your company offers financial consulting services. What constitutes an engagement or conversion event? Most often, companies like this rely on generating leads, using a “contact us” form, etc. You can be more aggressive with these type of conversion events if you have the technical infrastructure.

For example, let’s say a user comes to your site after doing a Google search on “financial consulting for SMB”. Your web analytics are configured to determine what keyword was used to get the user to that page. After 20 seconds of idle activity (user isn’t doing anything), you could launch a Live Chat application that says “we noticed you’re looking for information on financial consulting for SMB – how can we assist you today?” Food for thought.

Here’s some additional topics and questions you can ask to begin to establish a solid search conversion strategy when it comes to lead generation:

• Understand which activities on the website constitute a lead.
• Name these activities and list the pages on which these conversions occur and are tracked.
• Understand what happens offline to that lead and whether or not it is tracked.
• Is there a monetary value attached to the lead? If so, what is it?
• Outside of leads, are there other conversion actions that are valuable to the business? If so, what are they and where (which pages) are they tracked?

To start, take a look at your existing keyword landscape and identify your “Top 10″ Keywords. These are terms that you have deemed business critical to have a top ranking position for. Odds are, you will probably not have a #1 ranking for each term. In the cases where you don’t, take a look at what sites are outranking yours and determine why.

You can do this in a variety of ways. You could manually look at each site, review the content, look at links, etc., but that tends to take too much time. There’s a simple way to go about this that you can use within your existing monthly production cycle.

Install a tool like SEOQuake. Once the tool is installed and turned on (via your browser), perform a search on one of your important Keywords. For each ranking site, you will be able to see important ranking factors. For example, look at the following elements:

1. How many links are pointing to the competitor’s ranking page?
2. How many of these links are using the target keyword?
3. How many of these links are owned by the competitor’s brand (such as family domains or links from the same site)?
4. When did the page originate (you can determine this by using the WayBack Machine)?
5. How many Delicious or DIGG listings does the competitor site have?
6. Does the competitor site have a DMOZ listing?
7. OnPage Factors – does the competitor site have well optimized content (Title, URL, body content, etc.)?
8. You can then determine which of these ranking factors are giving your competition the benefit by doing a side-by-side comparison against your site. Create a Matrix and list out 4-5 competitor sites for each of your important keywords. You’d be surprised how useful this can be in determining your strategy and next steps. For example:
   • Modify your content if needed to be better optimized for the target keyword
   • Create a PR or Social Media campaign aimed at generating awareness (and thus, links) to your content using important keywords.

Doing this on a monthly basis will ensure that you (and your stakeholders) have a clear roadmap for success with those business critical keywords.

If you’re a Marketer, most of the E-mail you send out to your audience will provide the option to view the e-mail in a browser, usually identified at the top of the email with something like “If this message is not displaying properly, click here to launch your browser.” When clicked, your browser opens up the same version of the e-mail as a static HTML page. Typically this e-mail has links back to your web site for additional information or other calls to action, which can be used to pass link equity for SEO purposes.

There may be certain content or emails that you don’t want to have crawled and indexed by the engines. In this case, simply format your robot.txt file accordingly. Here’s some tips & examples on how to go about this:

• Put all of the HTML versions of the e-mail that you do want to have crawled into a directory. In this example, I’ve named the directory “Google_Email”.
• Put all of the HTML versions of the e-mail that you don’t want to have crawled (due to sensitive content) into a directory. In this example, I’ve named the directory “No_Email”.
• Update your robot.txt file to disallow the “No_Email” directory:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /No_Email

• Make sure that all of the HTML versions in the “Google_Email” directory are utilizing SEO Best Practices – Optimized Headlines, Body Copy, Links Using Keywords and pointing to your site’s targeted SEO pages.
• To further increase links and traffic to your targeted SEO pages, add a “Share” option to the e-Mail that links to your site’s targeted SEO pages, thereby creating the opportunity to increase link equity naturally.
• If you cannot add body text links in the e-mail, create a “Quick Links” area in the right panel to offer links to your site’s targeted SEO pages.
• Add these E-Mails (the actual URLs) to your XML Sitemap.
• If possible, setup your web metrics to see what impact these e-mails have on your SEO performance.

It’s that simple!

It’s hard enough to get a top ranking position. Don’t overlook SEO in these important content planning stages. I’ve received panicked phone calls from Marketing Execs that just completed a site refresh and now don’t see their site’s rank. How awkward would it be to explain that to all of your stakeholders? Here’s 3 tips to avoid this and to make sure you’re taking all of this into consideration when refreshing your site content.

Run a rank report for all URLs that will be updated

I can’t overstate how important this is. This is the foundation that will drive a lot of your content decisions. You’ll want to see where you are currently ranking for your keyword landscape and which URLs are driving search traffic. This will help you establish your top priority URLs that need to be carefully assessed with any content changes. Remember, you may have a top ranking position due to the way your content is currently structured.

Changing the content on those top priority URLs may impact your ranking position and you could see a drop in rank and, thus, traffic. Once you’ve established these top priority URLs, make sure the people in your organization can clearly understand what the current SEO equity is, which will help with the content planning and overall strategy.

For example, your marketing department may want to overhaul the home page, removing the existing content and replacing it with a video introduction by your CEO. Now, if you do it the right way, you can structure your video content in a way where it’s SEO friendly. But – why would you go this route if your home page has a top 5 ranking for 10 different keywords and is already driving a lot of traffic? A better idea would be to assess what content is helping keep those top ranking positions and leave it alone. You can always create other calls to action on the home page, such as “see our CEO introduce our new product” – which would link over to a new page.

Establish 301 redirects

Part of your content refresh may include removing some sections or pages that are no longer relevant. Let’s say that you no longer offer a particular product or service and those pages are planning on being removed. It’s easy to overlook this and simply remove the page and then remove the ability to navigate to that page or link to it. There’s nothing wrong with removing pages, as long as you have the proper redirect strategy in place.

Remember, even though the page may not appear in your site navigation or internal linking does not mean that the page is no longer in the Google index, nor does it mean that all of the other sites out there that were linking to that page will remove that link. Make sure that a 301 redirect is placed on these pages. You can easily customize which page you would like to redirect to, which should also be a part of your overall content strategy and can also help with Information Architecture decisions.

Use search research and data to plan new content

In a previous post, I mentioned how you can really take your keyword research to the next level by having it inform all aspects of your communication strategy. If you’re planning a content refresh, get your SEO folks involved early. You’d be surprised at how useful some of the research can be when developing a content strategy. This is especially true when your site’s content refresh includes some new pages to be created. Using Keyword Research to define the true intent of what we know people are already looking for can give you ideas about how to establish content themes for these new sections of your site.

Take advantage of this opportunity to build your new content instead of looking to go back later and rebuild it!

You: “Since we’re focused on this set of keywords for SEO, here’s where you should use these Keywords in your body text links”

Stakeholder: “Great, sounds good, SEO is really important… Wait a minute – you mean that keyword actually has to appear on the page like that? Can’t we just make some code behind the scenes instead?”

This is a common challenge that can be at times difficult to overcome and tends to be more of an issue for large enterprise sites, but fundamentally exists with all sites. Think about all of the different disciplines that provide input into a web page. Usability Experts, Information Architects, Content Writers, Brand Strategists, Subject Matter Experts, Designers, Programmers, Quality Assurance, and let’s not forget the CEO and Senior Management!

Once your site strategy is signed off on by all of these stakeholders, there’s usually very specific guidelines and rules for using body content and links on your web pages. Usability is fantastic and can be used to indicate what users’ tendencies are and what types of links people naturally would click on based on their intent. Designers and IA folks come up with strategic decisions on placement of links. The Content Writers form a strategy for how to best communicate what needs to be said and follows the appropriate Brand Guidelines.

Given all of that, as a Search Marketer, you will sometimes face an uphill battle with something that seems rather simple to change. For example, let’s say your website is about shoes. A common link name that many sites use to indicate to a user that there is more information is “Learn More”. You might have a text description that communicates to the user the features of a shoe, and include a “Learn More” link for more detailed information. All this makes perfect sense.

However, let’s say that for SEO you really wanted to rank for the keyword “high-top basketball shoe”. That “Learn More” link represents an opportunity to use the keyword instead, especially if it is used on multiple pages of your site. However, due to some of the guidelines I mentioned above, no one is agreeing with you that using the Keyword as the link name is a good idea. Sound familiar?

I’m not saying that “Learn More” is a bad link name, it certainly has its place. But, for SEO – what can you do in these situations? My advice is to work alongside all of your stakeholders to come up with some creative ways to get those SEO benefits out of the link names. I’m going to keep using the “Learn More” example because it is so common. Here’s some tips that you may find useful:

• Start off by making a business case for the use of keywords in the link names. You might start by showing that you’re only ranking in the top 5 for 40% of your targeted keywords even though you’ve followed the standard SEO best practices of using the keyword in your Title Tags, H1’s, etc. You can communicate that in order to get that number to 80%, the use of keyword-rich text links can help achieve that goal.
• Show some examples. Trust me on this one but screenshots are more useful than spreadsheets. Show what types of links you’d like to explore potentially modifying and show some examples of how this could work.
• Get creative with the link names. In the shoe example above, you could use “for more information about our high-top basketball shoes, click the link to the right.” Or, you could put the “Learn More” link in a graphic next to it. You could even use something like “high-top basketball shoes – learn more“.
• Be realistic. Odds are you’re not going to get all of the links you want changed, so see if you can come to a compromise. Let’s say that there’s 20 pages on your site that contain a link to the “High-Top Basketball Shoes” page. Perhaps everyone can agree that the SEO benefits are important to take into consideration and will agree to use the Keyword on 10 of those pages.

You’ll find that once you show the whole picture, your stakeholders and team members will do what they can to work in your recommendations so you can achieve your SEO goals.

Your traditional keyword research model probably looks something like this:

1. Keyword – the keyword being researched
2. Demand – number of searches per month at a given search engine (e.g. Google)
3. Brand or Non-Brand – whether the keyword utilizes a brand name or phrase

It’s fairly straightforward to create a spreadsheet with these columns that will drive a discussion about which words to focus on. However, applying a more strategic level of thought to this will help a lot of companies get out of the weeds and begin looking at how this data can map to their business priorities and objectives. For example, there are several other data points you should be looking at (provided that you have access to this information):

1. Internal Searches – provides insight into how consumers are looking for products or services once they have engaged with the website
2. Organic Search Engine Referrals – number of visits per month to the website from a given search engine (e.g. Google)
3. Paid Search Engine Referrals – number of visits per month to the website from a given search engine advertising campaign (e.g. Google AdWords)

Once you have this data, you can take it to the next level by categorizing and grouping the terms that are similar. This will help you identify themes or topic areas, which, as I mentioned above, will help you define what the searcher’s intent is. What exactly do they want to do? By expanding the topical areas, the researcher is able to assess searcher interest from an industry perspective rather than a single company or product perspective. Further, by applying semantic topics and subtopics to each keyword, the industry data as a whole can be analyzed by specific areas of interest.

Let’s say you are the owner of an athletic club. You know that people are always looking for ways to lose weight. Instead of having a list of keywords and making a web page dedicated to each keyword, look to define these different topics and themes.

You might find that there were 22 keywords that could be categorized under the topic “increase endurance”.  Another 14 keywords could be listed under the “core workouts” theme. Yet another set of words could be categorized under “burn fat” topic. You can then apply this to your site architecture planning. Create a resource center on your site for the main topics, optimize that landing page for the general themes, and then provide articles and other content that is for the more specific long-tail keywords.

That’s not all your keyword research can do for you. If you think about it, the results of traditional and basic keyword research can be applied to a myriad of marketing efforts, whether traditional or online. Further, the results can serve to drive new campaigns, or to complement existing campaigns.

Some examples:

• Topical demand data validates customer interest in products/services
• Topical demand data serves to allocate marketing budgets to areas of peak customer interest
• Brand term demand data validates whether recent product launches and or active campaigns are creating a “buzz”.
• Keywords can help influence the names of products or even the theme of your next advertising strategy

So – take your keyword research to the next level. Don’t look at it as strictly an “SEO thing”. This data is valuable information not only for your search efforts, but it can help inform just about everything going on in your marketing mix!

Developing an SEO site acquisition strategy would ensure that their audience can continue to access the information they have come to expect, and that those web pages that drive a lot of traffic, purchases, or other metrics, are transitioned in a way where the metrics are not affected; or, in some cases, can even be improved upon.

Your Site Acquisition Strategy should include these steps:

1. Develop a keyword strategy (if it doesn’t already exist) to identify and prioritize the keywords that best match the acquired site’s content.
2. Perform a current state analysis to understand the acquired site’s current performance in the search engines (ranking, traffic, etc.)
3. A content mapping strategy to identify content overlap and content deficiencies within the acquired site and the site for which integration is planned.
4. A redirect strategy to complete the short-term integration while maintaining page authority and to maximize performance.

With the content mapping, there are a number of scenarios you will want to explore, including:

• A keyword that ranks well (top 5) for both the acquired site and the main site
• A keyword that ranks well (top 5) for the acquired site but has little or no supporting content on the main site
• A keyword that ranks well (top 5) for the main site but has little or no supporting content on the acquired site
• A keyword that does not rank well for either site

Scenario 1: Your keyword ranks well for both sites

This is your low-hanging fruit, in that you’ll want to map this keyword to a URL on the main site. Take the opportunity to analyze each page to determine if there are content gaps that can be addressed to bolster the performance of the page either in rankings or in its ability to convert.

Scenario 2: Your keyword ranks well for the acquired site

In this case, you’ll want to integrate content from the acquired site into the main site to ensure that the needs of the searcher are met. Care should be taken to understand the internal link structure or thematic hub that this page is part of and to address that during content integration into the main site.

Scenario 3: If your keyword ranks well on main site

This scenario does not necessarily need to be addressed. Take the opportunity to analyze each page to determine if there are content gaps that can be addressed to bolster the performance of the page either in rankings or in conversion.

Scenario 4: If your keyword does not rank well on either site

This scenario should be flagged and addressed by ongoing search optimization efforts with short-term coverage via paid search.

Deploying a redirect strategy

Finally, you’ll want to deploy a sound redirect strategy to ensure you are getting the most out of the acquisition. Improper configuration can result in lost traction in the search engines and unethical implementation can result in getting banned altogether.

For SEO, 301 redirects are the only acceptable way to redirect URLs. In the case of moved pages, search engines will index only the new URL and will transfer link authority from the old URL to the new one so that search engine rankings are not affected. The same behavior occurs when additional domains are set to point to the main domain through a 301 redirect.

During site integration, a 301 redirect should be used to map each page on the acquired site to the  corresponding page on the main site. This can be a monumental task depending on the size and complexity of integration, but it is the only way to ensure that the main site gets lasting link authority and traffic from the acquired site. You do not want to simply apply a blanket redirect that brings searchers from any page on the acquired site to the home page of the main site. This will serve only to frustrate searchers in that they now have to begin their search anew on your site.

Additionally, during integration, you will want to deploy a custom 404 (file not found) to cover any potential gaps. Get as close to searcher intent with this as possible, which means building your 404 files along product or service lines so if someone searches for a specific product page that is no longer there, you can serve a 404 file that displays that general content.

Summary

Ensuring that you make the most of your acquisitions is no small task and requires a fair amount of planning. In short, you want to:

1. Develop a set of keywords to best match the intersection of the acquired site’s content and your business goals and objectives.

2. Determine what keywords and pages are currently performing well in the search engines.

3. Map keywords to content across both sites.

4. Identify and fill any gaps in content.

5. Deploy page-to-page 301 redirects.

Enterprise SEO has the same problem. There are many complexities of building and maintaining a world class SEO program, especially within a large organization. In order to be successful with SEO, it must be “baked” into the organization.

Many companies struggle with this concept because they are under the impression that SEO is a set of deliverables that can just be purchased with more and more budget. Building a good Enterprise SEO program can literally take years before it truly becomes successful and begins to yield a good ROI story.

It is actually very similar to instituting a new Content Management System (CMS) at a large company. A CMS can be purchased, but in order to customize it to meet the needs of a large organization, it takes time.

This is why it’s important to set proper expectations – that an enterprise CMS can realistically take 1-2 years before it gets implemented correctly, and only then will you start to see any real progress and success.

Think about the specific “plumbing” that needs to happen with a CMS. There are the technical requirements, design guidelines, template requirements, content definitions, error traps, localization, just to name a few. Then there is the organizational workflow. Who has access to the content? Who needs to be trained? What approval is required? How does it fit within production cycles? Who owns Quality Assurance and Testing? What is automated vs. what should be reviewed?

These issues may not be a big deal if you’re dealing with 20 employees. But when you have over 200 employees and many different departments and layers of management, it’s important to work through all of these issues to successfully use the CMS to define and publish web content.

The same “plumbing” needs to happen with Enterprise SEO. Similar to a CMS, the success of a good SEO program is also dependent on the company’s infrastructure and technical requirements, design guidelines, content development, localization – not to mention all of the specifics with the search engines themselves.

The organizational workflow also plays a pivotal role with SEO. Usually it begins with identifying who the important stakeholders will be – Multiple Business Units, Public Relations, Editors, Web Development/IT, Designers, Information Architects, Marcoms, Social Media, Producers, Marketing Directors and Executives, just to name a few.

All of these stakeholders will most likely need training and education on SEO as well as the ability to monitor progress provide input where necessary.

Then there is the process of getting SEO fully integrated into the production cycle, where it is considered a top priority and not an afterthought. Keyword research, content strategy, audits, and other SEO recommendations must be engrained into the overall production cycle, which require both resources and additional time to allow these recommendations to be implemented.Without the actual implementation, SEO is pointless.

Let’s not forget about the ability to track SEO and provide accurate metrics. This is usually one of the biggest challenges within enterprise organizations and it is rarely done successfully. Meeting with IT staff, purchasing analytics software, gathering requirements and making recommendations are just some of the things that must be done in order to establish accurate SEO metrics that will eventually lead to the ability to look at results, make modifications and enhancements, and tell an accurate ROI story.

Finally, there’s the fact that the search industry is so innovative and is constantly changing. Keeping up with the latest trends is yet another aspect of it all. As you can see, this “plumbing” is the work that sets the foundation for SEO success, but is rarely recognized as a “success metric” because there is not a number or a ranking position you can tie to it. It is important to communicate the importance of the plumbing, otherwise the building falls apart.

Keep this in mind the next time you are faced with a question like “where are we with SEO?”, or “are we ranking #1 yet?”. Being able to effectively communicate this will help you establish proper expectations on progress, and, ultimately, SEO success.