Failure can mean certain defeat; I’m certainly not implying there’s not an end-point in some situations. Technically, though, failure is an option, but typically not the desirable one. Hell, I made my trainer, Rusty, rename his push ups till failure workout to push ups till exhaustion, attempting to spin my internal dialogue to say that even though I could not lift my body with my triceps again, I still, always have options.

In fact, we need to completely understand the minute details of a failing system, in order to identify the alternatives and, yes, options, to resolve an issue before the point of failure occurs. Marketers have the luxury of trial and error. There may not be a lot of time to consider all options when troubleshooting a hypothesis; but at least, most of the time, we have data to help.

At Define, our team occasionally diagnoses recurring workflow and deliverables. Recently, we went at one of our favorite pastimes, keyword research.

Trying to rethink keyword research, is akin to reinventing the wheel. There are a lot of tools and different approaches to help analyze the massive amounts of data Google offers, and while we may stray to new flavors of the month, we always come back to the mothership that is the Adwords Tool.

Spoiler alert: we came to this conclusion yet again while trying to find a way to make keyword discovery and content creation workflow easier.

SEO To Editorial

“Well, everyone knows Custer died at Little Bighorn. What this book presupposes is… maybe he didn’t?”

To take a step back, we’ve seen a significant shift in the past 12-18 months with editorial teams in that we (the marketers/SEOs/drivers of traffic/audience developers/soothsayers) have actually been invited to a previously verboten party, that being the planning of the editorial calendar.

Typically, in enterprise publishing, our group sits at the end of the proverbial content creation chute waiting for the widgets to come sliding down so we can bolt on our SEO part, whether it fits or not, and send it on out into the world in hopes of attracting eyeballs and popularity. Rarely were the streams crossed where editorial teams would ask for story ideas, as it was inconceivable to believe SEOs understood what audiences wanted or needed. Enter data.

One of the many steps in any good SEO training process involves teaching editorial teams how to qualify their audience. In other words, discover the migratory patterns of a particular herd and to reach them before or as they arrive at the watering hole. This is where the obvious benefits of Google Trends and Adwords come into play.

Over my 16 years in search and marketing, I’ve given intro, advanced and ninja training on this type of keyword research; after all, SEO is quite simply identifying and targeting your audience. With each new tool that emerges, some cause us to think maybe, just maybe, there’s a better way to do this. Editorial teams are hungry for the information, they want it fast and need it to be accurate. Which brings us back to our experiment.

Is there a way to research, quantify and provide content creation ideas faster and more accurately? And if so, can that process be streamlined and taught?

We started in by learning about APIs (and by that, I mean attending the school of Richard Baxter at SEOGadget.com): what it meant to pull in, work with and manipulate the data. This was followed by dumping into Excel to make some sense of the massive compiled lists (attending the Excel School of Anne Cushing at SEERInteractive.com), culling the results, dumping back into tool number two (some paid, some free), edit some more, dump into a third tool for even more refinement.

Throughout this process, we considered many options:

• Type – was this for trending/breaking news or for a feature piece where research was necessary to determine trends and seasonality?
• Difficulty – was the project around head, body or tail phrases?
• Opportunity – is there an audience around the topic?
• Time – how long will this research take and will it scale to an enterprise environment?

(There were others, but these were the umbrella headings.)

Findings: These Effects Weren’t So Special

After working through the exercise(s), we also attempted to develop new procedures and workflow, taking scalability into consideration. Editorial teams have enough to do, and in the land of enterprise marketing and audience development, traction and favor can be lost if too many new obstructions are added to the content creation process.

The first iteration of our findings and new procedures on keyword research was a five-page document. Five – pages – long. Now, this was good stuff, mind you. Exhaustive keyword research and refinement techniques would produce a never-ending supply of calendar opportunities and style guide amendments to ride into the Golden Age of Internet Publishing!

Ultimately though, we missed the mark, as there was no way we could ask a team, on deadline, in many cases, with a CMS held together by baling wire and duct tape, to stop what they were doing and follow our extensive checklist of instructions. It was unrealistic for an enterprise environment.

The second iteration produced thousands of keyword variations, which is good, right? Lots of options and opportunity to cast a wide targeted net of potential traffic-capturing goodness and some workflow shortcuts.

However, if you’ve ever seen the look from an editor when all they want to know is should I use the phrase ‘picture’ or ‘photo’ with our galleries? And, you point to the 15,000 variations on that theme? Not a realistic option when quick, accurate answers are needed. Segmentation was necessary.

Iteration number three was to reduce the process, instructions, and visuals down to one page. This proved very difficult. So much to teach and so little room to explain, even single-spaced and with font size 10 (Calibri, naturally). This satisfied the time component of the exercise, but missed many aspects of the original goal.

We worked the exercise to exhaustion, aka failure.

Even Failure Is Powerful, Powerful Data

So what now? We discovered the wheel was still round and still rolled when pushed. However, the takeaways from this experience, as unsuccessful as it was, proved to be the best parts; and, when we took inventory, there were still options and opportunities left over to consider.

1.  We know from experience we can’t put a five-page document in front of an editorial team but, learning new tools and attempting to develop new procedures, in fact, revealed some great presentation material for our education slide decks – a critical part of any engagement.

2.  We segmented the research process, as one size doesn’t fit all. Want to truly reach an editorial team? Provide them with a customized approach to find their target audience. Style guide keyword research is different from research for variations on recurring seasonal traffic, which differ from trending and breaking news.

3.  Time will always be a factor, and reducing the workflow necessary is one obstacle we haven’t quite cracked yet. That is to say, I’m exhausted, I’m on the mat, but have ideas.

While we didn’t come up with an alternative approach to keyword research and content creation workflow, we learned about many new tools — enterprise, paid and free — developed some one-sheeters to distribute at the appropriate time in a campaign, and most importantly, discovered new educational opportunities for the many workshops and trainings we perform.

Failure is an option because in our world it presents so many opportunities, one of which may be there is no better answer, but that’s still a valuable data point and one we may revisit again in the future. The bottom line is: I’m happy to find failure, even if that means we just go back to the old ways of working a problem, as long as we fail get to the point of exhaustion as quickly as possible.

Yes, brands are still a very strong signal when it comes to ranking, however, recent advancements like “authorship rank” and Search Plus Your World have hyper-focused our promotion strategies.

A presumption of entitlement drives many legacy brands to complacency. Too often, we see an organization enjoy a few years of strong search results and then relax into “we’ve got that covered” mode, allowing its focus, vital resources and attention to shift to other initiatives.

But it is essential for any in-house marketer/SEO/embedded strategist to push past the corporate ego and bureaucracy to assess and identify changing technical / editorial barriers while protecting the protocol vital to traffic success.

Who’s Watching The Watchers?

The first sign of internal SEO procedures breaking down is often a competitor doing it better, faster and using your own assets. Nothing gets your boss’ attention faster than a competitor outranking you with your own ideas or content—not necessarily via scraping or syndication, but by rewriting or covering popular stories with better optimization.

Sometimes getting beaten is a simple misstep—a missed title tag on your part—but it could also be indicative of larger problems with your content creation process, from execution of best practices to keyword research to XML sitemap inclusion.

In SEO, all roads lead back to editorial. Content producers (who already have plenty to do) find and amplify the voice of a company, guarding the brand’s editorial integrity. But the days of search engine optimization responsibilities falling to another department are long gone.

In this age, content teams are expected to fully understand their audience. In fact, audience cultivation is their obligation. This means content producers must perform regular keyword research around their topics, identifying search and seasonal trends, monitoring news and user behavior and integrating the data back into the workflow, style guides and processes.

A lot of this information is already well known. For example, ask anyone on the editorial team and I’m sure they’ll know if readers use the search phrase “picture” over “photo.” But they can do more.

That’s not to say the SEO specialists shouldn’t be involved as well. SEO advisers can still educate and guide the process. But if keyword research isn’t decentralized, a bottleneck of tremendous proportions can effectively kill this critical step in strategy.

Empowering content producers to mine data raises the internal collective understanding of the audience and how users seek out and interact with a topic. Leveraging readily-available industry data and using it to optimize digital assets is much more effective as a core responsibility than an add-on feature.

Education Is The Basis Of Economic Success

Search awareness works best when raised and maintained by an ongoing, dedicated training and educational schedule. Editorial teams gain and lose new people, design teams are typically on the edge of innovation, tech is making the site better, faster, stronger and so on. But all sectors need regular updates on the micro and macro search strategies that the enterprise seeks to employ.

As an organization, mandatory quarterly or even monthly training sessions or informal SEO meetings keep information fresh and at the forefront. These sessions provide opportunities to talk about industry changes (and there are plenty) as well as tactical responses.

This is the responsibility of the in-house SEO expert. If he or she isn’t constantly “reminding” his or her fellow colleagues why search is always important, SEO—and the poor search director as well—will be forgotten.

Monthly search ranking reports, daily and weekly emails highlighting real-time examples of what worked and what didn’t are just a few of the ways to get in front of those responsible for optimization.

A good SEO will decentralize the process and yet must still be retained at a level above or in-line with tech or marketing, to spearhead projects, stay abreast of changes and aid the teams engaging in massive keyword research projects. SEO directors should be invited to key stakeholder meetings, and be on design and tech’s launch cycle email lists.

While I’m a strong advocate of institutionalizing SEO—educating and holding *everyone* accountable for SEO as it pertains to his/her role and responsibility in the organization—this shouldn’t come at the cost of bureaucratization of the SEO process.

Search engine optimization isn’t an option; it’s a mandate. Those companies that understand this tenant and bake it into their DNA are the very companies your boss emails you about when she’s trolling around on her iPad on Sunday morning.

As organizations grow, attention to procedure and discipline become even more important so that critical steps aren’t overlooked. It’s OK to move content as long as it’s done correctly. Using 301 or rel=canonical seems easy to many of us and yet, too often, entire sections are reduced to vapor due to a missed step.

Being involved and advising on quality assurance methodology, via checklists and education, is the best insurance policy against future mistakes.

SEO vs. Everyone Else

There are instances when decisions are made against best practices and may take precedence over SEO.  This is natural and not necessarily a bad thing. However these decisions must be made fully understanding the consequences.

A designer chooses Flash over HTML for better UX on the new photo gallery? Tech wants AJAX over HTML 5? So be it, as long as everyone involved is aware that it comes at the cost of search ranking.

An editor wants a clever headline that’s eye catching for homepage visitors but doesn’t contain targeted keyword phrases? Fair enough, as long as the choice is made understanding it is no longer a true search opportunity. To be clear, SEO should not come at the cost of editorial integrity. Content first, SEO second. 

This is where the institutionalization of SEO is critical from top to bottom.

Under a strong SEO culture, the first question out of upper management’s or a project manager’s mouth after hearing an initial pitch is “sounds good, but what effect will that have on ranking?”

It is better to build search protocol at all levels rather than retrofitting a project in later stages when resources are fully allocated and attention to SEO is a burden.

The Battle For Budget & Resources

Business cycles naturally draw attention away from SEO.  Social activities, for example, have siphoned resources, budgets and attention away from SEO, much to the dismay of search professionals and the demise of traffic. Make no mistake: search is still the most valuable traffic you can earn.

As my colleague Brian Provost pointed out in his Ultimate Guide to Enterprise SEO, this is about real money. SEO cannot happen in a financial vacuum. Sure it can be bootstrapped, but the process requires a dedicated and permanent budget.

With a modest investment comes better analysis, which gives way to a clearer understanding of customer wants/needs and behavior. Data is gold, but if you’re not measuring it, it doesn’t exist.

It’s The Little Things: Execution = SEO Win

Keeping up with best practices—the seemingly never-ending quest of the SEO cat and mouse game — takes the lion’s share of effort and attention, but must be done strategically. If SEOs took every Google press release to tech and editorial teams, we’d soon be ignored and could even suffer a backlash.

Still, it’s those hungry sites that use the little things — every release, new angles and tech options — as an opportunity for improvement, not a burden, that see the most return on investment.

Ultimately, it’s our job to weigh the level of importance of new discoveries, the timing and how to present new strategies to the enterprise. I’ve found that quick and easy wins with early adopters that we can execute and measure against are the way to win hearts and minds. Creativity is a must.

Last Spring, Powermapper reported changes to page title length. Counts now top out around 70 characters. Normally this may not seem newsworthy, but 5 extra characters can be the difference between branding appearing in a SERP or getting ellipse’d… definitely worth the effort.

Another example: rel=author is an absolute a pain to implement and certainly doesn’t scale (Really?! I have to walk 30+ editors through creating their Google+ profiles?) But it’s worth it.

Reports are starting to come in showing solid increases in CTRs.

Google’s frequent moving of the goal posts is a good thing.

Most of the time it’s productive – improves the search product, new opportunities to leverage assets, levels the playing field and definitely keeps our world interesting – (not to mention it gives us all job security). Then there are the more complex issues such as attempting to figure out how to optimize in a Search Plus Your World, world. Again though, interesting times.

Ultimately the rules are the same for all sites, no matter the URL or brand. In the last few years, I’ve witnessed many scrappy sites that adapt and adopt much faster and keep dedicated resources on standby to take advantage of every new opportunity. All too often it’s the bigger, slower organizations that are losing pace, lulled into complacency based on past performance.

Maintaining SEO efforts through buy-in and advocacy from upper management and tech resources for quick implementation and frequent updates and training put even the biggest companies in a position to maintain ranking and traffic.

The enterprise organization that can execute quickly across the entire network gives its content the best possible chance for placement and ongoing success.