You have also most likely seen articles about how social media can be used to develop relationships that drive links to quality content on your site. This is all SEO goodness.

Sadly, too often social media is siloed in the enterprise. What happens is someone in the executive team recognizes that there is potential value in social media and launches a project to implement it without being properly informed about the ways that social media can impact the business.

Then, one of two things happen:

1. It becomes a checkbox. Someone was assigned to it, so now it is “handled”. Unfortunately, this is social media cast adrift. Teams of people working away without direction will almost always drift towards generating the highest possible level of activity they can with minimal effort. However, activity and business results are rarely closely connected.
2. It gets treated like broadcast media. Traditional marketing people are comfortable with broadcast media, and they understand how spend in that type of media brings returns, so they assume that social media is the same way. The result here is potentally useful for brand building, but it is not clear that the most important business goals of the company are advanced.

Let’s illustrate this with two real world situations I have seen, though I need to keep the company names anonymous.

The Checkbox

Company A is a Fortune 1000 company that knows it wants to play in social media. They are a B2B brand, and they know they want to have a social media strategy, but they don’t have the resources in-house to execute it.

The head of the PR group is tasked with taking the challenge on. She is brilliant at what she does, but her plate is way to full so she can’t spend many cycles on understanding how to set the strategy.

She hires an outside social media agency to come in and take care of the strategy. The charismatic social media executive comes in and outlines a great looking strategy. The PR director does not know the right questions to ask about how this strategy will feed the business, so the strategy is approved, and the agency goes off and does their thing.

The agency does a great job and focuses on building a large audience of friends/followers. Along the way, they recognize that content closely related to the B2B brands products is not too sexy. In order to build up the audience, the topics drift steadily into a consumer focused areas.

The audience grows nicely, and they are even able to build up a good audience. But, their customers are not in it. No influence is built with their customer base, and the social media activity that takes place is not really about topics that relate in any direct way to their products.

The Result: They got to check the checkbox, but the business was not aided by the social media efforts.

A Better Approach: Don’t focus on audience size here. Consider focusing this social media strategy on curating great content related to your market space. You don’t want to be commercial and talk a lot about your products, but you can talk about the types of problems that people face that relate to your products. Curate great content from others. Use this to build relationships with industry peers and media that covers your market. For this business, building those relationships through frequent communication with influencers can be a great extension to your PR strategy.

In addition, if you are like Company A, you may have products with long sales cycles. Constant exposure to other influencers, and active online interaction with them establishes you as a leader in the space.

Your potential customers are probably checking many places to learn about potential suppliers, so the chances they will learn about you when they are doing their research is greatly enhanced. This is great from a tradaitional marketing perspective.

From an SEO perspective, those online interactions will result in brand mentions and links from highly authoritative sites and authors. That’s as good as it gets!

Broadcast Media In A Multi-Brand Enterprise

Company B is a large enterprise with more than 10 brands with a B2C focus. The executive team has a traditional marketing background, so the social media team is put into the corporate marketing department. They put together a team which includes an outside agency and in-house resources as well.

The execution is great. The content they create is closely tied to the overall theme of the brand and large audiences are built. Their is heavy interaction, and there is a lot of value to the brand overall. The model is designed to operate like TV and print, but with the added bonus of interaction, which is truly a great thing.

The problem is that brand managers for several of the product lines want to participate. They have their own niche target audiences, each of which has their own unique needs.

However, the corporate marketing department feels like it is serving a larger goal. From time to time, they will put out updates/tweets specific to each brand, but those communications are lost on the larger stream of communications for the overall brand. No consistency is possible for each individual brand, and they can’t build their own audiences.

The Result: The needs of the larger brand were served, but not of the individual brands, who get little direct benefit.

A Better Approach: Having the corporate marketing department have a social media group is a great idea. That is not at all a problem, but, it also makes sense to let the larger brands in the company portfolio have their own social media efforts that piggyback on the coporate efforts. This may be their own Google+/Facebook/Twitter accounts. They should coordinate with the corporate social media team, and can still get leverage from them. This will allow them to build audience specific to the individual brands.

From an SEO perspective, this lets the individual brands build social media accounts focused in their specific audiences and needs. This can now drive links, mentions, shares, and tweets that focus specifically on that brand.

Measurement

Last but not least, don’t forget the role of measuring results. You can’t improve what you don’t measure. Devise strategies for measuring the results you get.

This is a complex topic all by itself, and beyond the scope of this article, but there are many different tools for measurement. For example, our agency has an account with bit.ly that provides some great data:

This data is a great way to see what content is working for you, and what is not. There are many other great tools as well. Google Analytics lists a large number of quality tools on this page. Google Analytics has also added reports that seek to capture the value of social media as well.

The key thing is to make sure that measurement is a key part of your overall strategy.

Summary

These are both scenarios where enterprise organizations silo their social media. In the checkbox scenario, little direction is given and the work focuses on activity. In the broadcast media scenario, the focus is too narrow and a lot of the potential benefit is ignored.

The most important thing you can do is to step back and get an understanding of what the potential benefits could be for your business. Then, armed with that knowledge, decide which areas you want to focus on. Only then can you decide where it should sit in the organization, who should own the process, and what the priorities are for your social media efforts.

Enterprise SEO Discussion With Warren Lee, Adobe

Warren is responsible for over ~48 million monthly visits from SEO to Adobe. Warren manages SEO for Adobe.com, Photoshop.com and the many Web properties owned by Adobe.

Prior to Adobe, Warren worked for MOVE inc., where Warren was also an in-house SEO manager responsible for keeping Realtor.com the #1 most visited website in the real estate industry as reported by comScore.

Eric Enge: How do you structure your organization for SEO success?

Warren Lee: A firm awareness of common challenges with enterprise SEO can help prevent SEO disasters before they occur and can enable your search team to create a strategy to achieve the biggest wins.

The main challenges within SEO at large organizations tend to revolve around:

1. Cross functional alignment.
2. Maintaining focus on the critical initiatives.
3. Getting buy-in and support for projects around content growth, optimization, linking, and site architecture improvements.
4. Balancing training and process improvements through involvement with the right functional areas at the right times.

1.  Cross Functional Alignment

The challenge of cross-functional alignment occurs when SEO expertise is siloed in one functional area within an organization. Marketing and IT are the two most common areas SEO teams sit in.

Given that website, technical, and product marketing decisions all influence SEO performance, teams have an inherent challenge with being strategic and cross-functional. At its core, SEO teams must always be a change agent in an organization – most stakeholders do not willingly (assuming they know how) incorporate search best practices into their daily work.

Search Marketing teams that succeed embrace this challenge by making stakeholder engagement and full SEO integration a priority across the organization. This requires that teams first understand all functional groups whose work impacts SEO in order to influence the right stakeholders at the right time.

The ultimate goal being that SEO DNA be integrated early & often into every significant digital asset at your company. Doing this requires a team with the right skillset within an organizational structure and company culture that supports their agenda.

Once that’s in place, SEO teams need to evaluate their own scope of influence across the organization and build relationships with critical partners. Critical partners in a large organization include: Paid Search, Site Search, Social Media, Digital Analysts, IT, Web Ops, Web Security, Legal, Product Management, Product Marketing, Editorial, QA, Mobile, and Remarketing & Site Testing teams.

There is always more to do in Enterprise SEO and therefore all decisions have an opportunity cost. As such, positive influence and organizational change means being savvy with guarding your time and priorities so you keep a balance between the inevitable urgent -hoc requests not crowding out critical & strategic projects.

2.  Maintaining Focus On The Critical Initiatives

The solution to finding a balanced level of service is developing a team culture where project priorities are driven by data & results and supported by effective training, processes, and communication with stakeholders.

In practice, a data-driven decision process looks at the key metrics and KPIs for any project, determines a baseline on which to judge success, and determines appropriate SEO levers to pull based on their impact on metrics, and then puts a realistic project plan in place.

We’ve implemented this process in the last year as a result of hiring a passionate and skilled search team, using our own Digital Marketing Suite, and engaging consistently with both data and stakeholders to influence change.

We also borrowed key elements of the Agile software development process including twice-weekly Scrum check-ins, a running list of possible projects (currently over 150) where we pool the collective knowledge and vote quarterly on priorities, and a bi-weekly Sprint for each major project we’re working on.

A useful method to maintain priority focus involves filtering projects based on the level of impact on the few essentials of SEO: site architecture, internal and external linking, and new or existing content.

Additional projects and criteria include process and workflow optimization, co-optimization of Paid and Organic strategies, and Social Media team engagement. I have previously written about a process for identifying your company’s critical areas of focus and evaluating if your resources are aligned to enable change.

3.  Getting Buy-In

To fulfill the vision shared above requires buy-in and support for content growth and optimization, linking, and site architecture improvements.

Recent research by Rebecca Lieb at the Altimeter Group shows that SEO is often a low priority and therefore doesn’t receive as many corporate resources as online video, social media, or mobile marketing initiatives.

Organizations that overcome this do so through sharing wins to show the value of your involvement and sharing failures or site-wide challenges that impact key metrics.

Highlighting past failures or calling out future ones (if changes aren’t implemented) can be incredibly effective at getting buy-in. In particular, showing what competitors are doing that you’re not is a great catalyst. Taking it a step further to build their practices into strategy and turning that around to teams to implement can demonstrate significant value.

These both show the cost of not being strategic about SEO within your organization. And then be sure to share wins – you can turn stakeholders into SEO ambassadors and fans of your team’s work by aligning up-front on critical KPIs and celebrate mutual success, with data whenever possible.

Never take credit for search wins alone, and be mindful to thank others for their support in the wins, and you will find that getting buy-in becomes significantly easier.

4.  Balancing Search Team Involvement

Balancing involvement across global stakeholders is a challenge for every Enterprise SEO. Three strategies can help: training, accountability charts, and consistent meetings.

Ongoing cross-functional training is critical to impart SEO knowledge & ownership deeper into your org. Without it, a little knowledge (read: ignorance) will go a long way and the implications of not integrating SEO into business processes like content creation, information architecture, or social media linking won’t be fully understood.

Concepts you might cover in training could include:

• How natural search engine traffic is critical to the success of your organization.
• Successful SEO cannot be achieved by the SEO team or marketing consultants alone, it comes from team work with everyone who influences and touches all digital assets – whether this be website content, images and videos, off-site channels like blogs, social, or YouTube.
• If anyone is making changes to the site, there should be some level of interaction with the SEO team – we say “early and often”. The SEO team can prioritize how much interaction, so it’s better to over-communicate than to under-communicate.
• Custom tailoring training for specific teams, such as Editorial, QA, Social Media Leads, or the User Experience team on which SEO best practices impact their work.

It is also important to be mindful not to train yourself completely out of communication with critical partners.

So while creating custom cross functional SEO training is valuable, it is also necessary to establish integrated processes for SEO team involvement within cross functional workflows.

Finding the right touch points within other teams processes is a great method to balance training with search team involvement and helps to ensure that you stay connected with key partners.

After providing training to appropriate groups, it is very helpful to analyze their workflow processes and determine when SEO should be involved & when they can rely on your training.

When other cross functional processes are clearly understood by the search team, the use of accountability charts, such as a DACI or RASCI, is helpful towards finalizing steps towards balanced cross-functional involvement. Integrating with other team’s workflow processes in this way will not only help ensure that you stay connected, but this combined with regular meetings also ensures that SEO is always involved when needed.

Summary

In sum, to overcome the common challenges that can crop up in large organizations, SEO should be involved early and often across well prioritized initiatives. SEO evangelism, relationship building and aligning on key metrics is really critical to creating a culture of SEO.

Eric Enge: Thanks Warren!

1. The search engines keep the details of their ranking algorithms private.
2. There is a lot of bad information and misperceptions that are presented as SEO wisdom online.
3. The algorithms search engines use are frequently changing.

As a consequence of this landscape, it takes real working experience to develop strong SEO skills – you can’t get them without it. Making changes and seeing what works and what doesn’t is simply a must. Even if your SEO team (or SEO agency) has that experience, there are a number of things that you can do to make life difficult for your SEO team.

Let me count the ways …

1.  Focusing On “SEO goals” Instead Of Business Goals

Too many enterprises get focused on goals that are artificial. For example, they focus on building 100 links per month. Seriously now. I can get you 100 links per month for $400 or less and they probably won’t do anything at all for you.

Other bad goals are specific rankings or PageRank increases. Your top level goals should nearly always be: increased relevant, non-branded search engine, traffic (NBSET), and increased conversions from NBSET. Align the SEO team goals with your company goals.

2.  Doing SEO In A Vacuum

SEO impacts a lot of different disciplines. The SEO team needs to be in close coordination with many parts of the enterprise, and those parts of the organization need to be aligned with the goals and what is required to meet them.

3.  Poor Communication With The Dev Team

One common problem is the lack of a strong communication channel, and strong trust between the dev team and the SEO team. One classic example is the 301 redirect. Most tools it seems default to 302 redirects, and the developers need to really be on board with why a 301 is preferred and understand that they need to check and verify it themselves.

4.  Poor Communication With Marketing

Love those pesky marketing folks, really, I do. But sometimes they can make decisions not realizing that what they are doing is blowing up the SEO efforts. I have seen situations where the marketing team insisted on titling pages of their site with their fancy product brand names that don’t have the slightest relationship to a phrase that users ever search on.

5.  Poor Communication With The Exec Team

This is one of the easiest way to throw a wrench in your SEO efforts. One enterprise I know decided to design their site for the C-suite. As a result, they promptly ripped most of the text off of their pages and slimmed down the site into a corporate brochure. Great way to make it very difficult for search engines to figure out what is special about your site!

6.  Poor Education At The Exec Level

It turns out that communication is not enough. The execs need to know enough about SEO to understand what they don’t know, and how and when it matters. Once they understand that, they will be far more likely to get SEO advice about the impact of a decision when they need it.

7.  No Centralized Coordination of SEO

Putting your SEO team in a position where they have to separately sell multiple groups in your organization is really going to hamper their efforts. Having good communication with marketing, development and the execs is necessary, but you also need to streamline it so it is efficient.

8.  Being Over-Focused On One Specific Goal

This happens often, and one of the most common hyper-focused goals is driving traffic on one specific keyword. This narrows your SEO efforts in a way that is too artificial.

In an environment as fluid and undefined as SEO, it is best to allow some freedom to pursue the areas that bring you the fastest/largest ROI. It is usually very difficult to discern where that will come from in advance.

9.  Making Decisions That Impact SEO Without Knowing It (Or Checking)

This is obviously related to the communication and education related problems. However, even if the communication channels are open, it still happens that people make decisions and don’t have the discipline to first ask if there is an SEO concern with the decision. Instill the discipline in your team to ask that key question before committing to that new “great idea” someone has.

10.  The Developer “Knows” SEO

Just like those marketing folks, I love the dev team too. But, it does happen that there are developers who say they know SEO, trust them, everything will be all right. One CTO I encountered insisted that 302 vs. 301 redirects did not matter because there was no way that the search engines would be so narrow in how they interpreted redirects.

Unless that developer has worked full time on SEO for 2 years or more (and I do mean FULL time), they don’t know SEO. They may have learned some things about it, but that is not the same thing as being an expert.

11.  Doing SEO “After The Fact” – Do It Right Or Do It Over!

The most common variation of this mistake is launching a new website or a site redesign and then bringing in the SEO team. What do you mean the CMS I picked is SEO hostile? What? The title tag for every page on the site is required to be the same? There are session IDs on the URLs? Yup, I have seen all of these mistakes and more.

12.  Not Starting SEO Soon Enough (Due To Scope Of Dev Impact)

Even after you get the idea that you must involve SEO planning up front, there is still an issue of not starting soon enough. What if the SEO input leads you to realize that you have to re-architect the site? Far easier to let development know that before they are well down the path. Consider SEO a key part of the product/site requirements definition process.

13.  Keeping Social Media & SEO Separate

Today this is in fact the norm. Yet, there is a huge amount of interaction between social and SEO. For many sites, the best link building strategy going is a combined SEO and social media strategy. Operating these two disciplines in two different silos is a great way to lose a lot of leverage.

14.  Not Coordinating Content Between Social Media, Blog, PR & On-Site

The leverage in having all these disciplines work in conjunction is enormous. However, to make it work, you need to have a consistent, reinforcing, content plan across them all.

15.  Not Leveraging Your PR Efforts

Effective PR can be an awesome tool for generating lots of links and social media activity. Developing a consciousness of this in the PR department and getting them to understand how they can drive SEO and social goodness is a huge win.

16.  Picking A CMS Without SEO Team Input

This is one specific problem that happens frequently enough that I felt I needed to post it here as a separate item. Please … don’t do it.

17.  Finalizing A Site Architecture Without SEO Team Input

This is similar to the CMS line item. There is a lot of useful input that the SEO team can have here. Don’t let the SEO input be the sole source of input to a site architecture as usability and user experience factors are a big deal here, but an awareness of keywords that matter is important to take into account too.

18.  Listening To Bad Or Outdated Advice From Others

Once someone gets to know a little SEO they may start to check out other sources of information. News shocker – but not everything you read about SEO online is accurate.

For example, the article about meta tags on About.com still indicates that keyword meta tags are used by search engines.

You can also read hundreds of articles saying that SEO is dead.

Just bear in mind that we are in the age of irresponsible journalism where far too many people grasp the power of the headline without having an understanding that influence comes with some level of responsibility.

19.  Pursuing A Short-Sighted SEO Strategy Such As Low Quality Links

One of the most frustrating things in SEO is seeing your spammy competitor outrank you while cheating at SEO. Eppie Vojt published a nice case study on SEOmoz about the tactics one spammy site used to rank for the term “car insurance”. I am sure someone at Geico was saying WTF?

Unlike the example in the SEOmoz article where the site got banned from the index, there are many examples that can be shown where these cheaters just keep on ranking. It gets frustrating, and you can get the “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” thing going on in your head. Don’t do it.

You don’t want to build your business so it is at odds with Google’s goals. No happy ending there.

20.  Thinking SEO Is More Important Than The End User

This is a way of living in Google’s cross hairs too. SEO is one marketing discipline, and there are many others. Given end users good, valuable “stuff” is one function that can’t be ignored. And Google and Bing are both hard at work on methods for determining what the best “stuff” is and favoring that in your search results.

21.  Constant Tinkering

This is a serious problem in many organizations. I have worked with people that are so wrapped up in tweaking the site over and over again, and their energy would be much better spent on the inbound components of SEO, such as link building, social media, PR, etc.

22. Not Understanding The Broader SEO Landscape

It is important to understand that the landscape is constantly shifting. We had Panda occur on February 24, 2011; Search, plus Your World launch on January 10, 2012; and on January 19th, 2012 we had the Page Layout algorithm which attacked ad heavy sites.

Even more recently, Google’s Amit Singhal was talking about semantic search saying it will impact 10% of results, and Matt Cutts was heard at SXSW saying a major update targeted at over-SEO’ed sites is coming.

Head spinning? The landscape is going to continue to shift. Make sure that you are not mired in specific details of today’s algos and the great majority of your effort goes to tactics that will stand the test of time.

23.  Obsession With SEO

This is one of the things that can lead to tinkering. SEO is important, and you need to pay attention to it. But, it is not life itself. Know what I mean?

24.  On-Page Only SEO

I have seen a lot of this. Major organizations learn that SEO matters and the first thing they do is focus on on-page SEO. Getting started is good, but on-page largely defines relevance for the search engines, and not ranking.

It is often hard for enterprises to deal with the link building side of things because of the problems in coordinating with other marketing disciplines such as PR and social media. Link building does not replace PR or social media or have to be at odds with it. Getting these things to work together brings a lot of leverage, so make sure you go past the “on-page only” stage of SEO awareness.

That’s my list for today! I am sure that there are many other aspects I have overlooked in the above. Please share your ideas/examples/frustrations in the comments below!

Jordan Koene – Head of Global Content, Ebay

Eric Enge: Can you tells us how Ebay deals with the challenges of producing content on a large scale?

Jordan Koene: The cool thing about eBay is that we have millions of pages making the management of these pages complex.

However, many of the pages on eBay are not directly controlled by the company, rather they are controlled by our community of sellers. This is often a challenge and requires education and support from eBay to our community of sellers.

One of the solutions we created are pages which aggregate our sellers items into what we call a product page, such as this one for the Nikon D90 123 MP Digital SLR Camera (Black Body Only).

If you scroll down the page a bit, you will see lots of great content such as this product description (only a portion is shown):

Or, these user reviews (only a subset are shown):

These types of pages benefit the sellers by creating a larger marketplace that can compete more effectively for keywords that can bring them potential buyers.

These product pages require accurate and unique content from various sources including manufacturers, third party sources, and eBay. eBay uses a community of writers to create descriptions and product details. Instead of using the manufacturer’s text eBay is getting unique text.

The challenge we have is building scalable content solutions for millions of these product pages, and thus often times we have blank pages without a lot of content, other than the products, such as this one for Callaway Odyssey Black Series Tour Designs 9 Putter Golf Club.

As you can see here, we do not yet have a product description or user reviews for the page:

This does not make it a bad page for a user looking for that type of club, but it does not necessarily compete well for search traffic as it would if we were able to provide more information.

We do go out and contract people to help us with the content. A big key is to show them examples of good descriptions.

We also seek to build partnerships with manufacturers to get better content, and we also look to leverage technology to aggregrate unique data on each product. We also try to detect bad pages and then we have to decide how we want to deal with them. Do we remove them from the index? Or is there a better solution? We are still working on the best solution to this problem.

Our challenge is to improve these pages with solutions that seem obvious but the ability to do so across millions of pages is very difficult and resource intensive. One of the ways of looking at content is to determine when, and if, a page should be live on the site and how damaging it is to the sites authority when many pages are poorly crafted.

Eric Enge: Can you provide some example of problems with Sitemaps?

Jordan Koene: Sitemaps are a complex issue for eBay and handling this for various page types makes it even more challenging. One example of this revolves around prioritization and frequency for different page types. Most pages on eBay change daily with new inventory or items being listed, our challenge is finding out how to prioritize these pages and send the most relavant list to Google. We also have issues with providing pages with inventory.

Because eBay is not a seller we must create pages which are a collection of the items listed on the marketplace. This is useful for users but it is critical that these pages always have items for sale otherwise the user experience is poor and the rankings will drop.

Multiply this across millions of pages and you will soon realize that we may have submitted millions of zero inventory pages in our sitemap. This is a big problem which needs significant attention. Fortunately, this was resolved by using a inventory threshold before submitting to Google.

Eric Enge: Can you outline some of your experiences with link building flops?

Jordan Koene: For the past year, eBay has used data to tell stories and gain recognition. It is funny that the ideas you believe will be most successful almost never are. We have had countless flops with infographics, top 10 lists, featured product stories but the most successful stories are generated with an audience and connected with a author.

Some of our biggest flops was creating stories around seasonal events i.e. Valentines Day. These events are sponsored with the idea of promoting our seasonal pages. However, no audience and no pickup made it difficult to generate any links or awareness.

Markus Renstrom – Head Of SEO For Yahoo

Eric Enge: Can you explain why Yahoo uses centralized ownership and standards for SEO?

Markus Renstrom: At a company like Yahoo!, with the scale in the number of countries it operates in, and the number of products available, ownership of key SEO components, especially domains and URLs, is essential to be able to scale and create a productive SEO organization.

Each time a product makes a re-design, or launches a new feature, the SEO team needs to be involved. With the number of projects going on at the same time worldwide, covering all projects for all products is challenging.

When the SEO team is included, every project starts with a negotiation on how everything from URLs to tags will be created based on the “too many cooks” principal. This is extremely time consuming and the results end up being depending on product and country, the format will be different for the same page type.

On the other hand, with a centralized ownership of the key SEO components, we have set-up a company standard per page type that has been acknowledged by the product and engineering teams as being the company standard, and from this point forward, any property in any country can launch a feature in theory without even consulting an SEO as they simply follow the standard. This allows for scale.

As an example, let’s take the meta tags.

Before, a property, let’s take Yahoo! Movies as an example, would decide to re-design worldwide. The SEO team would get an Excel sheet of all pages that are affected, that would get sent out to all regional SEO managers to localize, and it would get sent back.

The global SEO specifications get sent off to the engineering organization and a requirement is filed that ends up in a long list of requirements and gets implemented, many times after the product launched.

Total time of implementation; 4-6 weeks.

Now, instead with the centralized approach, the CMS uses a centralized library per page type that has been localized to all languages that are currently in use at Yahoo!, pulling parts of the page to create individual meta tags.

Whenever a new page is created, it automatically pulls the meta tag from the centralized library without having an SEO manager have to specify the tag. If necessary, an editor or SEO manager can update the tag, but we can assure any page published having a default set of tags that are SEO compliant.

Total time of implementation: 5 minutes.

This is why for Yahoo!, and for any big enterprises, in my opinion SEO cannot be implemented on large scale without having the SEO team have ownership of, and being responsibile for standardizing, key SEO aspects, especially domains, URLs and meta tags.

We have moved from trying to educate all the product teams on how to create an SEO compliant page, and leaving the implementation up to the product team, to owning the standard within the CMS and implementing on a large scale.

It has allowed us to have better coverage on a big scale, have properties launch with SEO friendly domains, URLs, tags etc., and have saved us resources for the regional SEO managers to focus on editorial, daily aspects of the business.

Warren Lee – SEO Manager, Adobe

Eric Enge: Can you provide some thoughts on the benefits of creating a culture of SEO in an organization?

Warren Lee: Enterprise SEO is generally considered a marketing function; its job within any business is to generate more awareness, purchases or leads, and revenue. Natural search is critical to the growth of any organization, but what makes enterprise SEO challenging is the scope and breadth of the SEO team influence needed which must extend beyond the confines of the marketing team.

The scope of evangelizing SEO in an enterprise organization means that your influence needs to extend beyond the marketing team to touch anyone who has any role that causes change on your website.

This can be very daunting for a small SEO team in a very large or highly matrixed organization because SEO touches QA, IT/development, social media, sales, mergers and acquisitions, management, business decisions, product and marketing and content development to name just a few key touch points. Getting every one of these groups to understand the basics of SEO is important for a successful enterprise SEO program.

During the SMX West panel, I’m looking forward to discuss this challenge, and to talk about strategies that work and ones that don’t work as well. Given, there are so many touch points with different teams; the SEO team needs to practically be omnipresent in all areas of the org, so realistically the only way to have a powerhouse SEO program is to get help from others. As a result, one of the most critical SEO strategies is SEO evangelism.

I have learned that leveraging data and sharing in wins is extremely helpful. Building relationships, SEO training, and institutionalizing SEO by integrating SEO into workflows and processes so that SEO is a part of every one job description is the best solution to rise to the challenge of enterprise SEO.

As far as strategies that don’t work; I’d just offer a warning that with SEO training, while it’s a very important strategy, be careful to avoid training yourself out of communication with critical partners.

Successful SEO cannot be achieved by the direct SEO team alone; it comes from team work with everyone who influences and touches the website.

Ian McAnerin – CEO, McAnerin International Inc.

Eric Enge: How can server/hosting choices affect SEO?

Ian McAnerin: The technical aspects of a site (hosting platform, server location, CMS) can have a very significant effect on SEO. In general, search engines are very good at dealing with different websites and are platform agnostic regarding rankings, but there are a few areas where these technical components can harm SEO efforts.

In the case of a hosting platform, your rankings can be affected by misconfigured DNS settings, redirects that default to 302 rather than the preferred 301, multiple error pages (common with IIS), poor security, and uptime issues.

Server location matters if you are using a gTLD such as .com or .net. In addition to geolocation problems, fast servers in the US may seem quite slow to people in Europe and Asia. You should try to locate your servers as close to your customers as possible.

Finally, a CMS can have a huge impact on your SEO efforts. Search friendly content management systems make SEO easy and simple enough that even novices can do basic SEO with little difficulty. Alternatively, there are many CMS’s out there that make it very difficult to do SEO with, even with experts working on the site fulltime. CMS choice can make or break a large site.

Eric Enge: How to you do SEO on a large scale site without cannibalization?

Ian McAnerin: The best way is through keyword-based planning. A simple method is a website plan using a spreadsheet outlining all the major pages in your site, matched to the keywords each page focuses on. This can very quickly highlight both areas of cannibalism as well as opportunities for additional content development to take advantage of underutilized keywords.

The Goal

Understanding your real goal is a great place to start.

• How does your website help you achieve your goals?
• Direct sales?
• Leads?
• Referrals to others?
• Page views (advertising or dissemination of information)?

Whatever you do with your site promotional activities, it is critical that you tie these all back to the goal of your site.

For example, how does a strong social media presence help your business?

For many businesses, it will not result in much in the way of direct sales (though there are some businesses where social media does a great job of doing just that!). If it does not directly drive sales, is it a branding play? Or, is it a channel to develop relationships with major influencers in your market space – where such relationships can become major drivers of high quality links to your site?

I am strong proponent of designing social media strategies to help drive a strong mix of signals to your site, including links. This can be amazingly effective, and it is something that my company has done with many enterprise class customers. I do think that the search engines are already be looking at sites to see if they are getting a reasonable mix of links and social media signals.

For example, imagine that you have a set of links to a webpage that has a value. For sake of discussion, we will call that value 100. Let’s also say that you have a set of social signals that has a value of 50. I would argue that the combination of the links and the social signals together may have an aggregate value of 200.

However, for some businesses, social media is best used for pure branding value, or even to build a community that helps drive direct sales and use. These are perfectly valid strategies as well.

While I have highlighted social media in ths discussion so far, the same process of understanding how any of your marketing strategies, whether it be PR, a blog on the site, or content syndication, needs to targeted at helping your site achieve its goals.

The Major Problems

This all sounds pretty straightforward, but getting it together is a lot harder than it sounds. What happens with many enterprises is that the people involved already have a lot of other stuff on their plates. The exec team knows that they need to do something, so they take some tactical actions to get it started. But, then they don’t get the value out of it they are looking for.

Here are three of the main reasons why:

1. Uncoordinated Strategies: The company is very progressive, so they have setup a blog, an SEO team, a solid PR organization, and a social media team. They also actively pursue content marketing as a way of exposing their message and expertise to the audiences of other influential people. The problem is that they are not all singing from the same songbook. Getting each of these marketing initiatives to promote the same types of content and messaging is something you simply must do.
2. Part-time Owners: A lot of times the people assigned have many other responsibilities. The exec assigns one of the tasks (for example the blog) to their favorite marketing manager as an additional responsibility, yet that markateing manager has tons of other things on her plate. This is not going to get great deal of attention!
3. In Different Departments: For example, social media gets placed in the PR department, the blog in another area of marketing, and the SEO team is in development. What are the chances that all of these teams are going to work in close coordination? Sadly, many time they just don’t.

Possible Solutions

I believe that one of the best solutions is to have one owner that oversees all of these initiatives – SEO, social media, the blog, and content marketing. They should also have the ability to influence what happens in PR, and/or follow-up with media people that are reached by successful PR efforts.

This person needs to have four things going for them:

1. Focused – Don’t pile this big responsibility on someone’s already overflowing plate.
2. Passionate – They need to believe in the importance of the work and be a true evangelist.
3. Supported – The exec team needs to support them and make it clear from the top that this is an important initiative.
4. Authority – They need to have the ability to make things move as needed.

A single owner is the best way to set this up. If you can’t do that for some reason, then setup a team that has the same qualities. A clear mandate, a clearly defined set of responsibilities, and one or more people that are Focused, Passionate, Supported, and with Authority to drive all four disciplines toward the same goal – yup, it really can be as good as it sounds!

Today, I want to outline some of the most interesting conclusions I have from the meetings with the adCenter team on that trip. One of the things I learned is what the adCenter team is doing to make it more attractive for enterprise scale customers to leverage adCenter to expand the PPC efforts.

Firstly, there was a clear recognition by the adCenter team regarding the challenges they face. They have a large and dominant competitor. Advertisers will start with AdWords, and then consider adding adCenter if the budget allows. However, even this is not a given.

For an enterprise advertiser that wants to increase their spend by 20%, it is far easier to simply jack up their bids in AdWords than it is to build new campaigns in adCenter. There are many reasons for this, including basic differences in account structure and capabilities.

The adCenter team is heavily focused on addressing this issue. The key elements of their efforts are:

1. Simplifying the user experiences across all touchpoints.
2. Reducing the time and effort to import an AdWords campaign into adCenter.
3. Achieving feature parity as quickly as humanly possible.

The adCenter team refers to this as improving “Return on Time Spent”. The focus of the initative is to offer a better return for those advertisers who put their incremental dollars into adCenter. It is the right focus. And adCenter has some serious benefits to offer to enterprise advertisers, let’s look at the two biggest.

1. Audience Reach Is Still Sizable

comScore data shows that Bing’s market share is approximately 30% of the search market in the US. This is approaching 50%of Google’s market share, which is sizable enough to pay attention to.

The people searching on Yahoo, MSN, in Internet Explorer, and on Bing are often a different audience that the audience on Google. comScore data shows that 57 million of the searchers on Microsoft and Yahoo don’t use Google:

2.  Higher Likelihood of Purchase

There is also data to sugggest that there is a higher propensity for Bing users to convert into sales. According to ComScore, the unique searchers on Yahoo! and Microsoft sites (including Yahoo! Search, Bing, and partners) are likely to spend 24.1% more than the average searcher, and likely to spend 5.5% more than Google searchers in the U.S.

These two benefits merit serious consideration. No doubt that the adCenter team will face ongoing challenges, but advertisers can find incremental market share and potential conversions here.

The adCenter team is also working on making adCenter experiences more intuitive for their customers; delivering better insights for campaign optimizations; and new ad formats and features that will help customers unlock additional volume.

All in all, I conducted 10 different interviews of adCenter team members, and I saw a highly engaged team focused on their goals. I think that it is likely that they will succeed in significantly improving the Return on Time Spent for enterprise advertisers.

For those who are interested in more detail, I will be publishing these interviews in the coming weeks on the Stone Temple Consulting blog.

Some of the biggest factors that mark a Made-for -SEO Site are:

1. Thin slicing on search phrases – i.e. pages on the site which are not very distinct from each other, but which were created so they could each compete for minor variations of similar search phrases. Many large sites have this problem. The question that needs to be answered for every page is why does it need to exist, given the other pages already on the site? Capturing additional search traffic is not the right answer!
2. Pages created for products not sold on the site – where the intent is to cross sell the visitors on a different product. This is again a problem that some large scale sites have.
3. Lack of any real added value content – for example a site that has no distinguishing content from its competitors. Unfortunately, many legitimate e-commerce sites that have failed to build a brand or add any unique content may fall into this category. Score a double minus for using manufacturer supplied descriptions.
4. Lack of an authoritative link profile – sites that get no recognition from authoritative sources are at best non-distinct, and could be classified as a Made-for-SEO site.
5. No brand searches – if the business has no brand searches taking place then it is questionable whether or not the world at large cares whether they exist.
6. Poor user experience – as shown by user engagement metrics that is worse than competition.
7. Over commercialized – what balance does the site have between adding value to the users and closing the sale? Note that if you are a major brand with lots of brand searches you get some leeway here. A large part of your added value is the trust people place in your brand. If not, you need to think about what your value add is, and being the site someone found in the search results is not it!
8. Affiliate only model – being an affiliate site is not a sin by itself, but if it is combined with several of the other factors above, the use of affiliate links makes it clear that there is no value add in the production of the product or service.
9. Reseller only model – this is basically the same as the affiliate only model. It is OK to be a reseller, but given that your value add is not the creation of the product or service you better excel at something else!

These are just some of the factors that go into whether or not a site is a Made-for-SEO website. A more general way to think about it is how the company goes about making decisions. If the only thing considered in making business decisions regarding the site is (a) getting more traffic, or: (b)converting users into sales, then we have a problem.

Let me illustrate how this unfolds with an example of how thin slicing can be done, and what should be done instead of that.

The Basics

One of the greatest marketing inventions in the search engine era is keyword research tools. These tools can give you tremendous insight into the terms used by people when referring to products or services like yours.

When thinking about your site structure and what pages to include, a keyword tool is a great place to start. I will walk through a quick example for a fictional site selling a variety of new cars online, using the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. Here is how I configured my initial query:

Based on this query, I received the following results:

This is a great start, but I can quickly see many things I don’t want to include. There are references to used cars, remote control cars, rental cars, and other unrelated terms. So the first step is to filter that out, which leaves me with something like this:

Now we have a start at a top terms list, and we probably want our pages to cover most of these terms in one fashion or another. We also need to start thinking about our site hierarchy. To do that, we need to take our terms and break them out into categories.

Here is an initial cut at that:

The Finer Points

We have a good start with our categorization, which helps us think about our hierarchy, but before we finalize that we need to make some other decisions.

For example, at the top level do I have different pages for cars, cars for sale, new cars, buy cars, and buy cars online? In a Made-for-SEO site you might do that, but in a “Made for Users” site you would not. There is no reason for those terms to be covered on different pages.

With the feature category, you may well have different pages for many of these terms, such as: muscle cars, luxury cars, diesel cars, exotic cars, safest cars, 2011 cars, most reliable cars, awd cars, convertible cars, and 2010 cars grouped together with best cars 2010.

Each of these pages may also cover additional terms. For example, the “awd cars” page would also be targeted at “all wheel drive cars”, and your “diesel cars” page would also target “diesel fuel cars”.

Even on enterprise level sites, you want to avoid generating large quantities of pages just to pick up search traffic on micro terms. For example, you don’t want to create a page for a car brand that you don’t carry just so you can cross sell them on a different brand.

In the short term, this may generate some sales for you, but in the long term, user dissatisfaction signals will come back to haunt you. This may show in the form of people bouncing off your site and clicking on other search results, or in some other signal, but it will show. This is another clear sign of a Made-for-SEO Site.

Creating large volumes of pages is not by itself bad, as long as you have real content of unique value on each of those pages. If you are the owner of this fictitious car site, and you are not the company that manufacturers the cars you are selling, you need to think long and hard about how you add value.

Some ideas include:

1. Develop a recognized brand
2. Be the most active on social media
3. Offer the best customer service
4. Provide the most helpful content and tools
5. Create an exceptional user experience
6. Develop strong relationships with industry influencers

Summary

There are many other possibilities, but the key thing is to find ways to stand out. I will expand upon these more in the Differentiate or Die panel at SMX West at the end of February.

Sites that are built as Made-for-SEO Sites, such as the content farms I wrote about in The Rise and Fall of Content Farms (three+ weeks before Panda was released by Google!), are in trouble. Their only reason to exist is to get and commercialize SEO traffic, and they prioritize that over the user experience. Trust me when I tell you that this is not a place you want to be.

This does not mean that you can’t build a site that has SEO traffic as its primary source. SEO is not bad, and it is not dead. The important subtlety is whether or not you prioritize short term SEO over content quality and user experience. Made-for-SEO sites do. Don’t go there. The days when those types of sites work will soon be gone.

UGC is very helpful for differentiation because it can add a layer of valuable content to your site that your competitors don’t have. Of course, don’t simply slap up any old blocks of user generated content for the sake of having it. Take the time and effort to figure out what content will add value to the user experience on your site.

Adding UGC to your site should be about engagement, not about adding blocks of text. Google’s Panda update made it more obvious that user engagement is a SEO ranking factor, and I expect the influence of engagement metrics to grow. As an added bonus, you can see what language real people use to describe products like yours.

As an example of effective UGC, Amazon does a great job with the way it integrates user reviews into their site:

Leveraging Your Own Site Traffic

One of the first things you should consider is leveraging the traffic you already have on your site. This can provide a lot of valuable content very quickly. Techcrunch does this very successfully as they get lots of comments on their posts. Creating UGC in this fashion requires that you already have a substantial level of traffic.

It also requires that you have a commenting platform in place, which is something that comes for free with blogging platforms. It is also useful to have an anti-spam system installed such as Akismet (also free). However, you can also consider using a platform such as Facebook Comments, which is exactly what Techcrunch does:

Facebook Comments provides a certain amount of natural anti-spam protection as you need to be logged into your Facebook account to use it. This certainly gives users with real accounts an incentive to avoid being a spammer with their accounts. Likewise, Facebook has a strong motive to remove bad accounts as well.

As of November 2011, it became apparent that Google is indexing Facebook Comments. This is good for SEO as it means that all the great content being created on your site is now credited to your site.

Other popular platforms you can incorporate on your site include BazaarVoice and PowerReviews. These are platforms for incorporating customer reviews on your site. This is a great way to capture content, though I have not yet seen any evidence that Google is indexing this content as yet. If you know of any proof of that, please let us know in the comments.

You can also use a non-platform approach. Developing methods for gathering content from visitors to your site is not hard. For example, include a poll, as NFL.com does:

A poll is not going to give you reams of text on your page, but reams of text is not the goal here – added value is. Relevant polls do a great job at increasing user engagement with your site.

If you have brick and mortar locations, you can also leverage your foot traffic. Ask people that come into your store to fill out a short survey. This is an awesome strategy, because you can provide them with a small discount as an incentive, which may directly increase your sales, and you collect some great data that you can publish.

Design your survey to collect data that is relevant to visitors to your website. One idea is to have them write a review for your product.

Leverage Social Media

If you have built a strong following in a social media community, such as Facebook, Twitter, or Google+, you have another ready made audience to leverage.

Building these communities is pretty easy for companies with strong brands, but harder for those who are less known. I won’t cover how to build such an audience here, other than to say that building a strong social media presence can be hugely valuable.

One more quick tip: if your resources are limited focus on building one large audience on one platform instead of medium sized audiences on multiple platforms.

Once you have a good sized audience, you can try running polls here too. Kaplan University did a nice job with this poll:

A total of 109 comments is not bad, and gives them a nice set of data to make use of on the site. Another idea is to try the top 10 tips for using one of your products. This could collect some great data for you.

If you don’t have an audience yet, and you want to do something right away, consider making use of Facebook ads. Once again, polling of some sort works well here.

To make this work, here are a few keys to success:

1. Use the targeting feature to reach the right audience. You may need to play with this a bit to get this right. Remember that a pretty small percentage of the audience numbers you see when setting up your ad will respond to your ad – less than a tenth of a percent.
2. Refresh the ads, and change the positioning of the poll, regularly. When someone sees the same ads more than once their chances of responding go way down. But, if they did not respond to the first one, they might to the second.
3. Experiment with different polls over time. It may take you a while to get ones that play really well in front of the audience you target.

Creative Ways To Get Data

If you don’t have strong traffic on your site or a large social media audience, one of your options is to make use of Facebook ads, but you have other options as well.

Consider using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MT). The labor here is incredibly cheap, which may cause you to worry that the workers on MT are not the right group to provide UGC for your site.

Data published by NYU on Mechanical Turk Demographics shows that 70% or more of the participants are based on the US, and 35% of them have income of $60K or more (as compared to 45% of the general US population). MT also allows you to specify US only participants.

The beauty of Mechanical Turk is that you can construct some pretty complex surveys and collect a lot of useful data. Here are some of the things you can do:

1. Reviews of your product or service
2. Opinion polls
3. Collect essays on any relevant topic, and then extract great quotes or publish the entire essay
4. Competitive comparisons

There are any number of ideas you can try. Let creativity reign! The main thing that you can’t do is collect personal information. This is strictly forbidden on Mechanical Turk, and if you try to do that you will get your task pulled down quickly. Repeat offenders get their account suspended.

There are a few alternatives to MT that you can consider as well. These are:

1. Short Task – similar to Mechanical Turk
2. Microworkers – similar to Mechanical Turk
3. Put together a charity campaign for a non-profit related to your space. Pay them for each response obtained for your survey or poll received from their member base. Put the participants in a drawing to win a nice prize.

Summing It Up

As I noted at the beginning, remember that it is about engagement not globs of text on your pages. The hardest task is to come up with ideas that fit your audience on your site.

Stuck for ideas? Take some time and poll your audience for ideas, or use Facebook ads or some of my “Creative Ways to Get Data” and poll those folks for ideas.

Take your time and get the ideas right first. Once that is done, there are plenty of ways to then go collect lots of data samples and get engaging content for your site.

Today, I am going to address that topic from the perspective of its impact on SEO. What is particularly interesting about this topic is that structured markup provides publishers a way to provide the search engines information about their website(s).

One of the original ways of doing that was with metatags. Unfortunately, these were so badly abused by spammers that Google stopped using it as a ranking signal. Google finally stated this publicly in this post in 2009, which notes that “Google has ignored the keywords meta tag for years and currently we see no need to change that policy.”

Google continues to indicate that markup is not used as a ranking signal: “Google doesn’t use markup for ranking purposes at this time.” However, there are important SEO benefits to using markup, and I will explore these in today’s column.

Markup In Search Results

The first benefit is that you can impact the appearance of your search listings, creating what we call a “rich snippet.” Here is an example of rich snippets in the search results, as shown on a search for one of my favorite recipes, loc lac:

The presence of the stars in the search listing will tend to draw the human eye and increase the click-through rate for those results. These modified listings are a result of the use of markup in the source code for the webpages.

The next two screen shots will give you a view as to what the code is for the first of the two search results. The first screen shot shows a piece of the hrecipe format (which is a type of Microformat) that includes the code for specifying the breadcrumb links:

Looking farther down in the hrecipe format, we get a look at the code which shows an implementation of a review (in the hreview-aggregate tag) and also shows the cook time for the recipe:

You will see additional elements included in the markup as well. My purpose in showing you this is not to try to teach you the coding details, but to illustrate the connection between the use of publisher tagged data and an impact on the search results.

There are many more examples of rich snippets and a discussion of different types of markup here. You can see information on microdata, microformats and RDFa, as well as the types of categories supported by Google. Some of the more common types of markup are:

• People
• Products
• Events
• Businessess and Organizations
• Video

In June, Google announced support for the “rel=author”, which is another form of markup. This adds the author’s picture in the search results next to search listings for the articles they have written.

Implementing this is not simple, but you can read an excellent article on how to implement rel=author here. Here is an example of what this looks like in the search results:

It’s About Click-Through Rates

One thing I have learned (over and over again!) in my time as an Internet marketer is that a morass of boring text is … well, boring. The eye is drawn to search listings that look different.

Images, such as result from rel=author, or the asterisks in the recipes (you can also get pictures in your recipes as well) do wonders, but any level of difference that breaks up the 10 blue links will do great things for you.

As a result, your click-through rate will go up, and this will bring you more qualified visitors, and that is, after all, what SEO is all about.

In addition, if you believe (as I do) that click-through rate and search results interaction is a ranking factor (you can see what Bing’s Duane Forrester had to say about Click-Through Rates and Search Rankings here), then this starts to sound like a double win.

You get higher CTR without changing your ranking; and provided that the user does not simply bounce back to the search results and click another listing, you get higher rankings to boot.

How do I reconcile this belief with Google’s statement that they don’t use markup as a ranking factor? Actually, there is no conflict there. I believe that they use CTR as a ranking factor, not the markup itself.

Remember, Google is often quite literal in the way they express things. The influence in rankings is indirect, so their statement would still be true.

Enter Schema.org

On June 2, Bing, Google and Yahoo announced the launch of Schema.org. This is markup based on the microdata specification. Google indicates that the reason the companies chose microdata over other types of markup such as microformats and RDFa is:

Instead of having webmasters decide between competing formats, we’ve decided to focus on just one format for Schema.org. In addition, a single format will improve consistency across search engines relying on the data. There are arguments to be made for preferring any of the existing standards, but we’ve found that microdata strikes a balance between the extensibility of RDFa and the simplicity of microformats, so this is the format that we’ve gone with.

I don’t think that the search engines will end their support for the other formats any time soon, but the weight of their attention will shift to Schema.org (microdata), and as a publisher your attention should shift in that direction too. As they add support for new rich snippets, that will most certainly focus on the microdata approach since they can all count on each other to support the same format.

Summary

I am bullish on adding support for Schema.org markup in your content, particularly in those cases where it is already known to be supported. The click-through rate benefits are enough to make this effort worthwhile.

If you have content that fits a format that is not yet supported by rich snippets, you may want to wait and invest your development effort elsewhere, but I would move quickly once support is announced.

I am excited that Google, Bing and Yahoo are all involved in Schema.org. When the search engines band together to define a standard, it is a major sign that something is here to stay, and that it is important. This makes it a more interesting area for us as publishers to invest effort into.

Some Auto Insurance Examples

GEICO was the first auto insurance company to make a big splash by promoting their products with humor with its famous GEICO gecko. The campaign was extremely successful, and the message was very simple: “15 minutes can save you 15% or more on car insurance.”

This approach helped it build a major national brand. Humor was the vehicle for getting consumer attention, but the critical element was the simple and compelling value proposition for their product.

GEICO has continued to push the envelope in many ways. Its “even a caveman can do it” commercials deliver the message that even if you are stupid, you can do this. Everyone feels stupid at times, and many potential auto insurance customers are intimidated by computers and the Internet. Obviously, if a caveman can do it, so can you.

You have to love the subtleties in their series of commercials with the Pierce Brosnan look-alike. They deliver their message while creating associations with the audience’s childhood experiences. They use these associations to address the concern that people may have that the savings are not really there. Can I really save that much money with that little effort?

Did the little piggy really cry “wee wee wee” all the way home? Does Charlie Daniels play a mean fiddle? Associating the answer to these questions with the answer to whether GEICO can save you money on car insurance is brilliant.

One twist on this I like is providing an answer to a question that has never been answered before: How much wood would a woodchuck chuck, if a woodchuck could chuck wood? Now you know: They won’t stop until the farmer makes them. Here, GEICO creates a sense of satisfaction by answering this question your brain may have heard hundreds of times or more, and then you’re hit with the discount message again.

Looking at the GEICO home page, however, the follow-through on this is a little weak. I think they would be better served by redelivering the “15 minutes can save you 15% or more” message prominently on the home page, and also showing both the gecko and the caveman to fully reinforce their TV messaging.

Their TV campaigns are so ubiquitous that they may not have felt the need to do so, but personally, I like to stack the deck as much as possible.

Progressive was later to the mass TV advertising campaign game, so its task was inherently more complex. A campaign based on humor and saving money was going to have to be different to work.

To their credit, they recognized this. Even though they were going after the exact same message of saving money on car insurance, they chose to offer a higher level of proof. They published their rates and those of their competitors for each market. This new level of transparency was novel, and they took it further by publishing competitive rates, even in those markets where their pricing was not the lowest.

As they grew, they started to introduce a dry humor, with the quirky Flo, but continued to offer clear examples of differentiation in their messages. Here are some examples of things that they promote:

1. Safe driver discounts
2. Boat insurance
3. #1 in motorcycle insurance

Note that Progressive does a great job or reminding us that they are associated with Flo, and that you can save a lot of money with just a little time. The messaging is tied together really nicely here.

Even well-established brands such as Allstate have focused on clear differentiating messages. These include:

1. Going back to basics with a company that has stood by you through depressions and 12 recessions.
2. Comprehensive coverage (as emphasized by their mayhem commercials).

Allstate also does a nice job of tying their home page messaging to their TV commercials:

Studying other industries can be a great source of ideas of ways to differentiate. The key lesson is how quickly and simply the message gets delivered.

Don’t rely on your brand to make the sale for you on your website. Make sure that you deliver your value proposition message as clearly, simply and quickly as the auto insurance industry does with its TV commercials.

How Differentiation Impacts SEO

Figuring out how to differentiate your brand and your website is the single most important thing you can do from an SEO perspective. The auto industry insurance example above shows that just being a large brand is not enough.

You need to offer a unique value proposition that is obvious and apparent to casual visitors to your website. If a first-time visitor can’t tell why you are different in the first three seconds on your site, then you are not different.

And, if you aren’t different, your SEO will fail for many reasons, including:

• Potential linkers won’t link to you
• Social media influencers won’t +1/Like/Share your content
• User engagement metrics on the site will stink compared to competition

The same underlying psychological reasons that drive major brands to differentiate their message in TV advertising need to drive you to differentiate your message on your website. Linkers, influencers and search engine users are people.

Creating A Differentiation Strategy For Your Website

1. Brainstorm a list of value propositions.

Get your key staff into a room and lock the door. Give them whatever they need to stimulate their creativity, and brainstorm various ways to position your products/services on the web.

Spend a long time on this. Make sure you do this before you survey users or study in detail what the competition is doing. Do allow people to look at other industries, such as the auto insurance industry, for ideas.

I urge you to do this before studying the competition (any more than you already have) because the human brain is often more creative when it has less information. Many of you are going to want to skip this step (because we are all impatient), but don’t bias this part of the process with facts and data.

If you have already done the competitive or surveyed customers, make sure you don’t allow that information into the room during the brainstorming.

2. Survey prospective customers.

Put together a survey to get an idea from potential customers (some survey creation tips here). Instead of focusing on your value proposition, focus instead on their needs. Do they need to save money? Best service? Most features? Some particular features? Fastest results?

Include an open-ended question or two to solicit their ideas. For example, ask them what they are looking for in the product/service that they don’t think anyone in the market offers today.

If you are offering mass-market products you are in luck, because you can probably use a very simple mechanism such as Mechanical Turk to run your survey and get lots of data fairly cheaply. Or, if you already have decent traffic on your website, you can survey the people there. But if your brand is already known for something, this could bias the survey because your existing value proposition may already be in the visitor’s mind.

I prefer to use an impartial source. If neither of these work, then reach out to places where your prospective customers cluster. For example, industry associations, trade shows or other industry events, social media communities, or similar places.

3. Research your competitors.

Now that you have allowed your creativity free reign, go get some facts. Take the top three to five competitors you have and study their value propositions. Develop a detailed list of what you see on their site. Then, go do some more surveys, one competitor at a time, but focus these surveys on asking prospective customers what they believe the competitor offers. This will allow you to see how their message is bring received by the potential customer.

Make sure to get the people surveyed to indicate how strongly they believe in the message from the competitor. They may say that the competitor is promoting high quality, but does the customer believe it?

4. Look for the openings. 

Get all your people in a room for the next brainstorming session, and dig in to analyze what you have found. Where are the opportunities? Is the competition weak in one or more areas? Are they making claims that they can’t substantiate but you can?

This discussion can often have a bit of a party atmosphere to it, and you should foster that. Have fun with this! You can mock your competitors and come up with outrageous ideas. At the end of it all, make sure you break this down into a few key ideas you are going to pursue.

A big focus at this point is the messaging of the idea. It’s great if you can come up with a benefit that everyone wants, but if it someone has to read two paragraphs of text to understand what it is, it won’t work. One sentence maximum, and ideally a sentence fragment.

5. Test out your ideas.

Now go back to your prospective customers, however you reached them last time, and test out the ideas. Try a new survey and see which ideas resonate.

An important subtlety here is the context. Offering a 15% discount on auto insurance in 15 minutes or less at this point is not novel. So the customer may pay for that, but there are going to pay GEICO for it, not you.

So make sure your survey positions these potential value propositions against existing competition. Are these benefits you don’t see others offering in the market? Are they powerful enough to cause the customer to buy your stuff instead of existing products?

6. Implement it on your site and test it again. 

Once you have a value proposition that you can measure, it is time to figure out how to implement that on your site. As noted above, you have just a few seconds at most to help people get what it is they can get from you. On the site, the messaging can be quite subtle. Read Scott Brinker’s recent article on seductive landing pages for some ideas on messaging.

Seducing is not the only method. Humor works too, as exemplified by the GEICO and Progressive auto industry insurance commercial examples I used above. Another technique is establishing yourself as the most trusted, similar to the Allstate approach.

Whatever underlying tactic you use, make sure that the key benefit the customer is going to receive leaps from the page at them. Try some different versions of the implementation and go out and test how people respond to it.

Pay particularly close attention to how fast they get the value prop. On the Web, a lack of speed kills.

Summary

This all seems suspiciously like traditional marketing, doesn’t it? This is the way that things are headed.

What is different online than the TV environment is that the consumer has a lot more ways to make choices, and advertising is less about “interruption” and more about “informed choice.” TV ads interrupt your activity of choice. Searchers and people on social media sites are in control of the timing, and they are making informed choices.

But they are still people, and they respond to benefits. You need to offer them a benefit that is, or that you can help make, their biggest concern.

Use the power of the Web to help you refine your message. The constant surveys in my process follow the old-fashioned philosophy of “test, test, and then test again.” Collecting the data is relatively cheap. Rolling out a boring and undifferentiated strategy is not.

It will cost you in the traditional marketing sense, but it will also kill your SEO efforts.

It will send signals to potential linkers and social media influencers that there is nothing to see here, and nothing worth sharing. Visitors to your site will vote with their clicks and mouse movements. “Same old stuff I saw somewhere else. Nothing special here, so time to go.”

Meanwhile, the search engines see it all. They are looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

What is resonating with all the audiences that should be interested in your site? They will measure, measure and measure to find which sites linkers, influencers and customers will respond to the most, and so should you.