Proving the value

If you’ve ever had to prove the value of your program, campaign, or standard your ground on a situation or issue, you’ll know this all to well. Whatever the case is, you have to do a lot of research and analysis to prove the value behind your case. Lay out the opportunity analysis, costs, issues, and risks involved in the process and provide a high-level impact analysis to back up your case.Leverage data from keyword research tools, articles, do your own research on the topic, etc.

Think through all the angles, do the research, and put together an analysis that covers all angles. For example, if you are trying to prove that a development methodology being used is wrong, you can provide an estimated loss in traffic (which could lead to estimated loss in revenue) and sites that have used this method before that ended up failing or are no where to be found in search.

Highlighting wins

Reporting on wins are going to help you push future agendas across the organization. It is important to constantly be talking about the achievements you or your team has had recently. Think through this before you start the program to make sure that you know what you are analyzing, the data that you are tracking, and what the goals are you are trying to achieve.

Once the project goes live, start making note of your goals and early achievements, and that you are tracking to your plan and goals. Once you have an ample amount of data, it’s time to start distributing that data across the organization and sending that out to the executives in your organization so they are aware of the wins.

An example of an effective way of doing this is by tracking the following:

• Number of pages indexed within the first week
• Unique visitors
• Page views
• Time spent on site
• Bounce Rate

Essentially, you want to find the key metrics that are being looked at by your organization and make sure that your program increases those metrics and helps the overall goals of the organization. You can start distributing the metrics through the following channels within the organization:

• Periodic update emails that announce wins, new programs, etc.
• Monthly updates with metrics to teams
• Weekly metrics to provide status or “SEO Health”
• Announcements at staff meetings, team meetings, and even group all-hands meetings

Make sure that people believe in what you are doing and are just as excited about it as you are. You will find this is easy to do as most organizations want to see product and marketing teams increasing traffic, so it is definitely a KPI for them as well as you. Also, the metrics can dispel the non-believers and get them on your side.

Knowing when to say when

It’s important to know when enough is enough, because after a certain period of time, you just become flat out annoying. And, I’m not going to lie, I’ve been that guy a couple times. It’s one thing to try to push your agenda, but remember that you’re not going to get everything you want. So, it’s important to know when to pick your battles and know when there is no point in fighting an uphill battle all the time. Think about your high priorities and fight those battles with the data we’ve talked about and point out what is most important. The other items that are not a high priority are just going to cause you to lose the rapport that you’ve spent all that time building up.

Other times, the decision just isn’t yours to make and you need to back down, or you’re going to be seen as a nuisance, annoying, and could even lead to a lack of respect. But, when you are put in situations where you know that you are not the key decision maker it’s important to present your case. Gather the data, do the research, etc. and present your findings to the key business owners and let them know the positive or negative impacts on rankings, traffic, revenue, and overall SEO health.

Also, if SEO is a big traffic source, remind them of that, the hit they could possibly take. Once you’ve gathered that data, present it, and let them know that you understand it’s their decision to make and that you can help provide any other insight necessary. Once you’ve done that, it’s important to step back and back away from the decision and let the business owners make that decision.

When things go wrong

Not everything goes as planned and most of the time, actually, it completely falls flat, but you need to be prepared for those situations and understand the reasons they did. It is okay to fail, as long as you learn from your mistakes and can fix them and turn them into a positive. If you know that a certain strategy that isn’t pursued or a technology is being used that is is going to negatively impact organic search traffic, be sure that you’ve forewarned the correct business owners and are ready to report on it when the day comes.

Many times, a site relaunch or change in URL structures across a site will lead to a small dip in search traffic right away that picks back up and can turn into a positive. So, while technically that is not something going wrong, when people see a dip in traffic, they can be alarmed and freak out. Trust me, I’ve seen this firsthand, it’s not pretty! Again, it’s important to forewarn people and beat it into everyone’s head that it is a possibility. Even if that does not end up being the result, it’s good to prepare people for the worst case scenario and deliver the best case scenario.

The key is preparing data, presenting that data, and your analysis of what the impact will be on the site and the site traffic. If you warned people that a feature would negatively impact the traffic, be prepared and ready to show that decline and analysis. Do not be afraid to tell the team, the stakeholders, etc. involved that you had warned them about this and be confident about it. This will earn their respect, as long as it’s done in a graceful manner and without an attitude. But, you can’t just say “I told ya so” and walk away. Once the people involved understand the situation at hand, provide a couple solutions that they can use to fix the problem, and again, back it with data.

The power is in the numbers

At the end of the day, part of your role is proving the value of SEO traffic and helping the business make better decisions with that data. It’s important to find the data, provide the research, analysis, and case studies to support your recommendations that you are making. Finally, be ready to talk about the successes and failures to give people an understanding of what works, what doesn’t, and what contributed to that outcome.

Creating templates and guidelines

Creating a set of guidelines for the entire site is a good tasks to take on and set in stone. Once you have a mapping of sorts for the Meta Data, URLs, etc. you have a set of guidelines that the engineering team can use going forward. And, I don’t mean that you map a title/description to every URL, but more so to create a list based on sets of variables. For example if I was creating a Title tag for every artist on MySpace, I would do the following:

Template: Music, Albums, Songs, Pictures on MySpace Music Example: Eminem Music, Albums, Songs, Pictures on MySpace Music

This would help me cover the title tag for thousands of pages across the site. Find out what is important keyword wise for other pages and “templatize” those very similarly. URL wise, it is a very similar process:

Template URL: http://www.myspace.com/artistname Example: http://www.myspace.com/eminem

Modularized site sections

Creating modules across the site that are easily edited via a CMS without having to involve Product or Engineering teams can make your life a whole lot easier. Changes can take place almost immediately and you can impact things much faster. Some examples of these types of modules are:

• Latest News
• What’s Trending? or What’s Hot?
• Top 10 All Time or Top Artists
• Featured Products
• Featured Photos
• Featured Videos

You can use modules like these to insert internal links throughout your site to important content. Especially when topics are rising in search trends, being able to pass link juice quickly from sections of your site are important to apply that link equity.

Automation tools

For those of you that manage sites with hundreds of thousands of URLs, it’s impossible to do checks on the whole site or sections of the site. To start with, you can use SEOMoz Pro Toolset to find interesting pieces of info about your site. I’ve used it to find pages that have tons of link equity (or PageRank value) to find internal linking opportunities. Also, I’ve run things like crawl tests, to ensure sections of the site are crawlable and won’t run into any crawl issues.

But, doing hand checks to see if title tags, on-page SEO elements, etc. are in tact are always a good idea as well. The Site Audit tool from BrightEdge lets you create requirements and have it crawl the site to perform an automated audit and report on it. Here is an example of what a report might look like:

Creating semantic site links

One of my favorite things to do lately is automating the Link Architecture on a site, which saves you time, rather than having to remind editors to link to celebs, artists, or to sections of the site with the right keywords. Create a tool that has a mapping of keywords to URLs and have it sniff out those keywords on the page and creates links. This will help you automatically increase the number of relevant internal links on the site and removes the “guess work” and human errors that could occur.

Why automating SEO helps with daily tasks

The main point to automating SEO tasks is not to be “black hat” or create a tool to spam results in anyway, that’s not my style. Automation should be used in a way that allows you to remove repetitive tasks from your day to day role and allow you think more strategically about things as a marketer.

I want to know about your thoughts about SEO Automation and how you’ve used it to streamline your workload, leave a comment and keep the conversation going.

What are your quick wins?

Quick wins are a great way to make progress on already existing infrastructure problems that can be solved fairly quickly with minimal development resources. An example of a quick win project could be “Fixing Title Tags for XYZ section” or “Apply canonical link tag to duplicate content.”

The purpose of a quick win is to get in the door, make some changes, and get some traction on your efforts right away. If you can improve upon indexing of content, traffic, or rankings within the first couple months, you’ll instantly garner more respect within the organization and people will start looking at your bigger projects more seriously. Not only that, but, you may even be looked at to lead company wide initiatives for traffic and user acquisition.

Align big projects in product

Now that you have a list of quick wins on the roadmap, it’s time to start thinking about the major issues, clean up projects, and/or big wins that you are going to want to tackle throughout the year. “Fix Architecture Sitewide” could be an example of something that is major. Even “URL Canonicalization and Relevancy Cleanup” would be an example of a large undertaking at some companies. Projects like this are going to be big ticket winners for you from an on-page SEO perspective, and allow you to start doing things that move the needle.

Other things to look at in big projects are the things that I call “blockers.” These are projects that need to be done in order for you to make an progress from a link building, internal linking or even Social Media perspective, which will help SEO. Essentially something that is going to block you from doing your job of moving the needle. These might be bigger projects, but should be assigned extremely high priorities.

Getting into the roadmap early

Many people make the mistake of thinking SEO is a post launch activity. What will happen is product teams will come to you as they are about to launch a new part of the site, a redesign, etc. and frantically say: “Can you give me your SEO requirements for this today!” Good luck with that, right?

Sure, you’ll frantically spend the day getting them title tag structures, url structures, some internal linking ideas, etc. But, 9 times out of 10, it’ll be moved into phase 2 because they didn’t realize how big the undertaking was, or you will miss something because it was so last minute and the impact won’t be as large as it should.

Ensure the teams that are driving the product or website changes are aware that SEO is a holistic process that requires you to understand the opportunity, market, etc. and would most likely require you to think abut things in advance. It will give you time to think of the on-page SEO and Site Architecture requirements, but also, give you time to think of how to generate links, create content to push via social media, etc. Essentially, you can deliver an SEO Go To Market Strategy that involves SEO Site Architecture, Social Media, and Link Building elements.

Prioritizing SEO projects

Now that you have a list of Quick Wins, Major Projects, and an understanding of the company wide product roadmap, you can start prioritizing your SEO roadmap. I’m a fan of the P1-P5 system (e.g. Priority-1 to Priority-5), P1 being the most important and P5 being the least important. Basically, take a basic project management approach to your prioritization model:

• P1: I reserve this for things that are blockers and will not allow you to move forward in other activities. P1′s are the types of things that you want to nudge your teams about weekly, and sometimes daily.
• P2: Usually high priority items that are going to be long term, but, are extremely important to the business.
• P3: Not a major priority, but something that should be addressed in the near future. This can be something tied to specific pages and/or low priority content/verticals in the company.
• P4/P5: I am flexible with both of these, but essentially, I think of these as things that aren’t going to make or break my SEO initiatives and I could live without for now. For example, I would assign fixing something like H2′s and H3′s on a page a P4 and Meta Keywords a P5. These are projects that I’ll never push, but if they go out, great!

This allows you to address SEO items in a timely manner. For things that are P1, be sure to have all your specs, documentation, guidelines, etc. lined up and ready for dev teams and QA so they can hit them and you don’t become the “blocker.” This allows you to know what battles you want to fight with the product teams. I will never escalate anything that is a P3 or lower to executives because they aren’t going to move the needle. But, I’ll escalate a P1 if it is getting no traction, in a heartbeat.

Align link building and social media to product launches

Knowing when a product is going to launch really helps your ability to plan for this. Now you can start addressing these things in advance and gives you some breathing room to work with when working with content teams and/or external contractors. Create a parallel project to the Product Development task called “XYZ Product Launch Visibility” for these tasks and start tracking efforts tied to this project.

Some of the activities tied to this can be seeking out Business Development opportunities to syndicate content and/or do guest blogging. Spend that time building out content for articles, blog posts, and/or infographics that are relevant to that product, vertical, or service. Create a Social Media Visiblity plan to supplement the overall SEO efforts.

It’s all about strategy

Being strategic about your SEO roadmap and how you align to product teams and verticals can impact your success. Tracking these projects through to completion and then doing post launch analysis on rankings, traffic, etc. gives you the ability to report these up and talk about wins. Doing so will only help you to push projects forward in the future and make more of an impact going forward.

I would love to hear your thoughts about SEO strategy and how you’ve implemented similar project management principles into in-house SEO in the comments below.

The point is, you want to leverage the most out of the buzz, the press, the publicity, etc. that you can get via a launch of a new product, vertical, or feature.

Conversion and entry points

First and foremost, you need to be sure that the places that you want to maximize your SEO efforts to matches user intent. Obviously this is the case with any SEO program and is inexcusable to not have a destination that drives user conversion, yet it happens all the time. Create a Landing Page or entry point that completely matches the users intent.

Be sure to not only think of things from a marketing perspective, but also, stay close to the product team and find out release dates and feature sets. You need to understand the product so you know the types of entry points necessary and if there are multiple products, categories, etc. that need to be made visible to search engines. Be sure that these pages go live in conjunction with the product or feature release date.

Creating relevance with a content strategy

Starting to build relevance pre-launch is a good way of getting a jump start on SEO efforts that can take months at a time to get rankings for, especially if you are dealing with heavily competitive verticals like financial products.

Put together a content strategy that leads users to the new products or features you are launching soon. If you have a blog, leverage that blog to start posting content that focuses on that feature, provides insight into the product, or is newsworthy around a vertical. All of this starts to build relevance for your domain around the launch from your product team.

Another strategy is start to build content that is tailored to mid and long tail users around the topic. For example, if you are launching a something in the sports vertical around basketball training, you could develop articles on “How To’s” and “Tutorials” for people to read. After the product goes live, you can include BABs (Big Ass Buttons) and Call to actions on the page for sign up or product offerings.

Generating buzz authority via social media

Social Media is playing a big part in SEO and how, we as online marketers, get traction on the SEO programs and campaigns that we develop. Take some time a couple months prior to launch to craft a social media marketing plan that helps your SEO efforts.

I just talked about how important it is to get content on the site pre-launch to start building relevance. Use social media sites as a tool to start building authoritative links to the relevant content. Infographics are also widely popular, so don’t be afraid to put out an extremely informative one that people will pick up and link back to you with.

Be sure to do all this pre-launch. I’ve found it very successful to do a few content pieces and infographics pre-launch to start generating buzz around a topic area before the actual product was released. Then, a recap of the product launch day to start moving readers to the new product offering. Finally, continue to push with more content around the topic post launch to continue building fresh content and buzz around your domain.

Maximizing the buzz from press and publicity

Again, traditionally press releases are very helpful with SEO from a link building and buzz generation standpoint. Yet, with that, so many startups and larger organizations underutilize the targeted links to relevant content in their press releases. It also provides journalists and writers some context when they break news around the launch and might give you an opportunity to get those links from their domains.

You can also help your link building efforts when doing journalist or blogger outreach. Create a link back plan that you can send out to strong relationships and contacts. Provide them link attribution details within your outreach program and work with your PR team to craft persuasive ways of getting them to do so.

Linking, both internally and externally

After you’ve created content, it is easy to let it linger even though it has a good amount of link equity build up you can pass through the site. Go back to that content and start insert links to the relevant sections of your site. Even better that trying to fit links in, craft content that you can literally just slap links on keywords within the post to ease the burden later on.

Externally, leverage all of the above for link building efforts. Get some directory links, do some guest blogging, link to the content within existing guest blogging spots, etc. Find creative ways to start generating externally links to the products you are now offering.

Remember to create a strategy!

I keep saying it and I still continue to see startups and larger, more mature organizations forget to include SEO in go to market strategies for products, let alone not having one at all. Make sure that you generate all the buzz that you get when launching new features and products and turning that into SEO juice that helps you rank for highly relevant keywords.

Have your companies made these mistakes in the past? What are some things that you do to maximize a “go-to-market” strategy to help SEO?

Keep the conversation going, follow me on twitter or become a facebook fan!

Don’t get me wrong, I’m the first person you’ll see constantly asking about project statuses and bubbling it up. But in the meantime, you’ll need to find out how you can deal with those resource constraints, while still remaining productive and not failing at your job.

Internal partnerships

Internal partnerships are always a big part of SEO. It is such a holistic process that you need to get everyone on your side when you’re starting a new InHouse SEO job. Just like selling the company on why it is important, you need to sell to individual teams how they are important to the holistic process.

List out all the partners that you need to make in the organization: PR/Marketing communications and how to leverage PR, Biz Dev and how they structure partnerships, engineering and how they architect the site, and the list goes on and on. Spend the down time to build and solidify those relationships and go on coffee/lunch breaks, plan happy hours, and do other intangibles that will help win people over and get things moving in the right direction.

External partnerships & business development

Sales efforts, creating partnerships, and finding business development opportunities is so important within SEO. It’s crucial to make deals with others in areas like link building and content distribution. Take a step back and look at the opportunities out there and the companies that you can parter with. Find the in’s, ask yourself “what they are lacking?”, and find a way to make it mutually beneficial for both organizations.

Getting the connections to is a big part of it, so, find out where those people are in your industry and/or vertical. What you can offer and start making those deals? What is your key value proposition? Do you have content they don’t have?

Get external partnerships headed in the right direction during resource constraints. Obviously you need to make sure that the internal resource constraints don’t affect your deals. Do this by padding estimates for deals to keep the partnership moving forward. It is better to deliver on projects early and often than late and sparsely.

Analytics and data

Something that I like to do when there is a break in the schedule is to take time to look at your InHouse SEO reporting, so you can do a little bit of an impact analysis. It gives you the opportunity to assess where you are at in your efforts and creates opportunity to reassess your overall SEO strategy.

Take the time out to do impact analysis on rankings, traffic, and conversion. Find out what you have done that is working and what isn’t. A lot of the time, it’s impossible to figure out because you have made so many changes, but, you can often bulk things together and a conclusion could be that the holistic process was the catalyst to success. That said, it would also be a good time to look at sections where you made minor changes vs. completing entire strategies and using that as a business case to move projects forward.

Roadmaps and SEO resources

Roadmap planning and project management is a place that doesn’t always get enough attention. Admittedly, I get some engrained in the tactical details sometimes, that I forget to take a step back. But, when you do have a few moments (or sometimes weeks of lag) you can leverage your assessments and find out where you are in your strategies, projects, etc. and can adjust your roadmap accordingly. Then, feel free to circulate those changes to the right people within the company, giving them an opportunity to see what is on hold and why. Furthermore, you can take the opportunity to create processes that will help your daily life when you are in full swing and you are too busy.

Along with processes that save you time and energy, you can use this as an opportunity to create SEO resources for the organization like a Wiki and/or Intranet. Putting together SEO guidelines for engineering, content, business development, PR, etc. Other things that you can do during down time, is put together presentations on trends, competitive reports, and so forth. And finally, you can distribute these resources to the teams responsible or the whole company for that matter to increase the knowledge and awareness of SEO.

Editorial and content production

While resources are constrained on the development side, you can work on other things to get those moving. For example, if you have “Product” pages on your website and you need product summaries for that. Start getting those hammered out through internal and external resources. This was a specific situation that I ran into once while waiting for a development project to start. So rather than just sit around, I reached out and had content production increased so those would be ready and just a matter of popping in.

Also, with that, blogging is a big part of SEO; start thinking of ways that you can pick up your blogging through link bait and more evergreen content throughout the site. Spend time working on an editorial and/or content production calendar that will encompass the year. Finally, you can even spend time creating a calendar of trends/etc. that is on your roadmap for content for the year.

Bottom line, from a content production standpoint, there is always something that you can do to get things moving.

Social Media marketing

If you haven’t started doing this as an SEO, it’s pretty much your best opportunity to add Social Media to the mix. Do a little research, find Social Media monitoring tools, start listening and monitoring your brand, and find out your contents reach across the social web. Find out what relevant Social Media News sites and Social Networks are out that for your company to participate in.

From there, if you have even more time, start throwing an idea or two around, maybe put together a presentation and start talking to people in the company and get a feel for how it will go over. Then, if you find a partner or two to start moving things forward, create a little internal “Social Media Team” where you can share ideas, create some business cases and even just start getting into it and deal with getting yelled at later. (You’re an SEO, you’re always getting yelled at, why stop now?!)

At the end of the day, most companies have adopted Social Media as a full on Marketing strategy, but, that doesn’t mean they are all doing it right. If you haven’t fully participated as an SEO, you better start now, so leverage free time for those activities. I don’t just mean setup a twitter account and Facebook fan page with an RSS feed. I mean get active, engaged, and start putting together actual ways the company can achieve success from an impact and reach standpoint.

Think Outside of the Box:

Get outside of your little SEO box and learn something different!

Isn’t that how we all ended up doing SEO anyway? I can’t think of a single person that I know that woke up and said, “I want to be an SEO.”

Start experimenting with something else that you might find fun and exciting. Try doing things like I mentioned above and learn a new skill set that will not only benefit your company, but will ultimately benefit you in the long run.

But, that said, Social Media is not the “end-all be-all” of new marketing tactics. There are way more things like viral marketing, buzz marketing, etc. that will get you thinking outside the box. The truth is, there is way more to viral and buzz marketing than getting a story hot on Digg and a trending topic on Twitter. Don’t get me wrong, it is a great thing to have, and I strive for achieving that every single day, but, what you want is something that will get people talking about your Brand or Product not just online, but offline as well.

Try a few things out, learn about what others are doing, start thinking outside the box and start doing something that you never thought you would be, you never know, maybe that is your next calling, just like SEO was!

Keep Moving Forward:

At the end of the day, you need to keep moving forward. These are all little things that I’ve picked up and learned how to do while I’m waiting for engineering resources to free up so I can get my strategies moving up and to the right. Trust me, I get it, the lack of resources to get projects done are painful. I’ve had to deal with MANY resource constraints, each and every time, I used it as an opportunity to better the organization and it helped increase my knowledge, skill sets, and visibility within the organization.

What are some of the things that you do when you have a pause in your strategy because of resource constraints? I’d love to hear what other InHouse SEOs do when this comes up!

Research is key

This is true for every form of marketing activity. When you are engaging in Internet marketing, you have to do the research about the industry, the audience, and so forth. More specifically, when it comes to social media, it is researching topics, keywords, conversations, etc. Finding out where people are having conversations about your vertical and your brand will help you in planning out your strategy/campaign. Your vertical might have conversations happening the most somewhere on Twitter, or on a [vertical specific] forum.

Some tools which could help you do this are Radian 6, Biz360, and Trackur, to name a few. You could also just search for some communities (go figure, right?). For example, I searched for the best niche social media sites and look at that, our good friends over at 10e20 showed up as the top result for the query: “best niche social media sites”.

Get a feel for the community

So, you’ve done the research, you would think that traditionally, the next thing you would want to do is start tracking goals and ROI. Wrong! That would be a huge mistake, because, you still have no idea of the potential within the community. You have questions to answer still – how active is the community? How much traffic do they get? Who goes there? You might have some data, but you need to physically interact with the community at this point.

Now, don’t start to go crazy and jump in head first; instead, start voting in Social News sites, start interacting on blogs and forums. Figure out who the users are, find out if they are completely transparent in what they do.

After you’ve done this, make sure that you have participated and researched enough to set forth some goals going forward. By now, I have voted on many articles, commented on lots more, and even submitted a few. Yet, I still have a lot to learn, but, it gave me enough of an understanding to assign some goals.

Setting some goals and ROI

It’s time to take your feet out of the water and get them closer to the fire. Now you need to track what you are doing and get a real understanding for what your goals are and what your organization is going to use to measure the effectiveness of a strategy or campaign, here are a couple of mine:

• Engagement - Increase the overall amount of engagement via our content on our website and/or across the Social Web. Basically, increasing things like Twitter mentions, interactions on Facebook, comments across the Social Web, and amount of votes in Social Media.
• Overall Online Visibility - This is more of a qualitative number, but, making sure that content is seen by bloggers and journalists in given verticals.
• Increased Fans, Traffic, and Links - All valuable and quantitative metrics that you can track. Number of fans/followers across the Social Web, the amount of traffic via all social media channels and/or broken out by channel, and finally, the number of relevant links that the content brought to help SEO.

Create a strategy

There are three main things that are necessary in the strategy: the research on communities, the goals and roi you expect to achieve, and finally, the game plan for how you plan to achieve those goals. Think of it as a “Social Media Playbook” that is ever evolving and changing based on the daily tactical work.

Mix it up: Don’t worry about being perfect up front with the strategy you develop. But do make sure you get something down that you can reference when necessary and build out through the motions.

Unleashing your tactical game plan

Your game plan isn’t just going to be submitting a bunch of content to social news sites and being an attention whore on Twitter. The game plan should consist of a few key elements that will help you gain visibility. The 3 key elements to start with: making friends within the communities and letting them know you are there, voting on content, and engaging in the community (comments, tweets, wall posts, etc.).

Mix it up: Now, if you are sitting there complaining about how much time this may take, this might not be for you, but even so, think through this – how many times do you find yourself idle in meetings or throughout the day that you could actually be participating and active in communities. I’ve been in many meetings where I could pay attention while also voting on stories and adding new friends.

Social news sites

Take a minute and make sure that your content is ready: do you have internal links to help your SEO strategy? Did you put in a call to action at the end of the article? After that, to start getting content submitted, you are going to need to do it yourself, so create a “submission plan” of sorts leveraging the research you did above to find out where it would do well:

Social networks

Engage and interact with your fans, friends, and followers. Provide them content that is relevant to your industry, your business, etc. Think through some search terms that would make sense to track on Twitter? What are some questions that you can ask your fans to gain insight and/or increase engagement? Example from our recent conversations on Twitter:

Mix it up: Create questions in advance that you can post throughout the week or schedule using tools like Easytweets. Use tools like Seesmic Desktop you can create a search column to track keywords on the fly.

Measure, adjust, rinse, repeat

Did you achieve your goals? Was it mixed into your day and/or strategy effectively? Where could you have improved the effectiveness of the overall campaign? What were your metrics overall? And, did you hit your targets? Find areas that you can help yourself within the mix and start making changes to those and fixing that where possible.

Keep the conversation going, follow me on twitter: @tonyadam

If you’ve read my post about SEO and Social Media Success Metrics, you’ll know I take my data very seriously. Selling yourself and marketing your story of accomplishments is a big part of the role. In order to do that, you have to make sure that you have the right systems in place and the ability to present that data to executives.

Analytics and reporting

First things first, make sure that you have a reporting and/or analytics solution in place! Most companies have this, but sometimes its a good idea to ensure that you have all the data that you need at your fingertips. Some companies will have that and more, such as analysts at your disposal to run reports against and/or build out reporting for what you need measured – that is a goldmine if you are so lucky, but most in-house SEO’s are typically going to have to do this on their own.

I’ve been at companies that literally only had Page Views, Unique Users, Time Spent. Keep in mind, it was a Fortune 500 company that didn’t even have the data necessary for me to prove the value of certain aspects of my role. This isn’t just limited to my experience; I’ve talked to multiple people in the industry where reporting and analytics were just not sufficient for them to report data on their function in a timely matter. Thus, part of your role may very well entail putting on your “Product Management” hat and working with analytics teams to get the data that you need in your daily. weekly and monthly reporting.

If you are working with a company that is all about content for example, bounce rate is going to be highly important in what you do. If you are working with e-commerce and sites that require some sort of registration, you are definitely going to need to setup goals, tracking on buttons, and so forth. It is going to vary by the type of site, but make sure that the appropriate metrics are getting tracked and that you are able to automate that process to an extent.

Setting a baseline

Before you start creating reports, doing a bunch of data modeling, etc., start by create a baseline for your analysis and reporting. As I mentioned in my last post, in my new role, this is the first time I’ve actually had to do this, and, as I am doing it, I am finding it extremely valuable.

Your baseline, is going to vary based on the type of organization that you work for. But, an example of something that would be removed from a baseline report is branded search queries, as, that should be assumed to be “direct” traffic. Online publishers and news outlets might not have much more than that to remove from reporting, but, other organizations may have to get more granular in their efforts.

If your organization has a very conversion focused business that deals with e-commerce, user registration, or another funnel driven goal, you are probably going to want to remove any traffic that isn’t tightly related. An example of this is a corporate blog or a blog that you use just to jack up external numbers for overall traffic, but, only do this if the traffic truly isn’t relevant and has no value to it.

An example of an advanced segment in Google Analytics:

Baseline Traffic example from Google Analytics, as you can see, is going to be pretty steady, but over time, should trend up and to the right. Notice the advanced segment in the top left is the same one that was created in the image above:

You now have a baseline created for the search traffic that is relevant to your business and more importantly, your business goals. It is highly important to have this, as it helps you understand what your core search traffic is, where it is coming from, and how they are engaging with your site.

Setting goals

At this point, you should have an analytics platform and a baseline that gives you insight into the current state of your search traffic. Now, it’s time to start mapping out goals. There are two things that you are going to want to do. First, find out what existing goals there are at the organization and whether they have goals setup in the analytics platform around user, registration, and e-commerce funnels. Secondly, you need to set the goals that you want to achieve around overall search traffic, baseline traffic, the funnels and conversions, etc.

At times, this can be a bit daunting and even scary to some, and trust me, a lot of the time I am scared to say things like: “we will increase search traffic by 50% over the next 3 months and increase conversions by 10%.” Let’s face it, none of us want to get yelled at for not meeting expectations, let alone, maybe even getting fired. That said, if you’re confident in your abilities, just go for it, 9 times out of 10, you’ll knock it out of the park.

Take a little time and think through things that are valid goals for your role:

• Increased Traffic
• Increased Pages per Visit
• Increased Time Spent on Site
• Decreased Bounce Rate
• Increased Registrations
• Increased Conversion
• Increased Purchases

What are the goals that are relevant to your organization and business? What goals are actually accomplishable? Once you figure it out and you have put the numbers together, ask yourself: “Is this going to be an easily doable goal or is this a stretch goal?” Now, I know this sounds a bit lame to do, but, just like the old saying goes…under-promise and over-deliver.

If you think you could increase traffic by 25% MoM (Month over Month), but it might be a stretch to get there, set it as an internal or personal goal that you are shooting for. Your goal to the external audience (executives and management) could then be a more easily achievable goal, such as “Increase Search Traffic by 15%.”

Sometimes you’ll find management will even ask you to do this and I’ve personally had management ask this of me in the past. Create goals that are achievable, goals to present to executives/board members, and stretch goals that are like personal or team accomplishments. What this does in effect: it gives you the ability to over-deliver, but, it makes you strive to really knock it out of the park and hit your personal goals that no one would expect. (Check your ego though, sometimes, your head can grow a bit much.)

As mentioned before, it’s extremely important to have these goals setup in your analytics platform. So, whether it is leveraging existing goals and applying funnels or segments to them, or creating all new goals, you should have something that is easily accessed. For example, here is some examples within Google Analytics of Goals and Custom Funnels:

You’re all done with goals now; it’s time to get them automated so you can spend little to no time pulling reports.

Automation and reporting

Creating reports on a daily, weekly and/or monthly basis can be a pretty time consuming process and a waste of resources, especially your own. I’m all about automating processes and this is one of those things that you can do. You’ve already done part of this by creating advanced segments, custom funnels, and goals. But, you can take this one step further make your life a lot easier.

Rather than going in and generating and exporting that report so you can use the data, have it emailed to you based on your needs. This will not only save you time, but if you are like me, once that report shows up in your Inbox, it is like a reminder to get the traffic reported up to executives.

Every analytics package has some sort of “email reporting” function, so take advantage of it. Create reports or leverage existing reports that need to be pulled manually and setup up scheduled reports that are emailed based on your needs. I like to receive weekly traffic reports that give me insight into traffic spikes, trends, and how we are doing weekly. On the first of the month, I like receiving a group of reports for monthly traffic and conversion.

An example of this is using Google Analytics Scheduled Email feature:

Presenting data and reports

For the bulk of my career, I’ve been at smaller companies and/or on the tactical side, just getting stuff done. Having been at Yahoo! and even more so in my current role, I have found how important it is to actually report data and analytics to management and executives. It is a big part of the job and just like I said above, selling yourself and selling what you have done internally is a big part of actually proving your success within an organization. Even if you have a team that lives and breathes numbers and analytics, putting together your reports that show progress and track goals is crucial.

Just like everything else, I take a step back at first and rather than shoving a bunch of information down peoples throats, I look for common themes, corporate templates, and how executives like to see information emailed or presented. Look at how others doing well in the organization and mimic it to an extent, while throwing on your own little added flare.

The most important thing though is understand the medium that executives prefer and showcasing your achievements, strategy, and/or goals in a timely fashion.

Summary

If I had to sum up this entire post, the bottom line is: make sure that you have an analytics/reporting solution in place that allows you to set baselines and goals you can automate and leverage to present data, achievements, and goals. At the end of the day, you need to prove your value, and with all of the above, you should have the tools necessary to do just that.

Questions for discussion:

• Will this help you going forward with your In-House SEO reporting?
• What situations have you run into in the past with In-House data and analytics?

Understanding the organization

From its structure, to the people and process, it is extremely important to understand the organization that you are working for. This is always my first step, and I liken it to a General in a war or an athlete playing sports. You need to observe, understand and adjust to your opponents actions and reactions. You’re going to need to adjust your game based on the situation at hand.

Now, you might not want to consider your new workplace to be a war zone (although, trust me, there are situations where I had thought I was in a war) you still need to understand the organization and how things work on a day to day, week to week, and month to month basis.

Some organizations, like a startup, are extremely fast moving and you are going to be getting stuff done weekly. On the other hand, if you are at organizations that are large/enterprise level, there are going to be times where things are going to take, weeks, if not months.

Also, you are going to find there are times where everything is just rolling and things are great; but, at other times, you might lose resources, a developer might quit, etcetera. So you’ll need to understand how the company is structured, where resources go when times are tough, and have a contingency plan for when things aren’t going exactly as planned.

Personality types & influencers

Dealing with different personality types can make or break how things get done within an organization. You don’t want to run around telling people what to do, why they are idiots or what they should be doing differently until you actually figure out the delivery, because that can make all the difference.

To figure out personality types, start asking yourself questions about how they work and interact. Are they Social? Anti-Social? Enjoy lunches? Need a little influence? Need to be told? Think through these questions and start answering them as you interact with people. You’ll start to see that not only have you learned how people work, but on top of that, you’ll notice people starting to warm up to you more and people actually doing what you need without much work.

Remember, it’s not just the people, it’s the structure of the organization that you are in that is also extremely important. Who reports to who? Are you in marketing? Product? Engineering? Who do you report to? While this may seem unimportant, it is extremely crucial, because this allows you to find out who the influencers are in the organization. Once you’ve figure that out, you’ll know who to go to when you really need to push something through.

For example, let’s say that you need to ensure that all content on the page is visible to bots, you’re going to want to make sure that whoever influences decisions on an engineering basis can build “Progressive Enhancement” into their processes for development. Buddying up to a VP or Director (depending on your “title”) can also help you. It’s all about the relationships that you make with these influencers in an organization that can create “mini SEO Evangelists” dispersed throughout the company.

Now, this is an important step – it is also extremely important to not get into “analysis paralysis” mode with this step. It’s crucial to figure this out right away, get a move on building the relationships and start making a difference and showing results with in your SEO efforts. So, go get ‘em! Start setting up coffee dates, do drive by’s at peoples desks, and so forth. But, get this done ASAP so you can start working on what you need to get done.

Start making friends

It is pretty natural for me to try to be friendly, sincere, get along and even help everyone where I can. That’s my personality, it’s pretty much built into my DNA. It is one of the most important traits of being an In House SEO, because, you’re going to have to make friends with everyone.

SEO is such a holistic process that making friends in all areas of expertise within an organization can really help you get things done. Think about it. Think of all the different teams you are going to interact with while you are at the company. There is technology, content/editorial, business development, product development, marketing communications, product marketing, PR, ad sales (believe it or not)…and the list goes on and on. Each and every one of these individuals will be crucial to you in one way, shape or form while you are attempting to develop, implement and deliver on SEO strategies.

Make friends by being social, take people out to lunch, go to coffee for a meeting instead of a conference room, and the most important, take people out for drinks. I’ve never met an engineering team that I’ve worked with that turned down an invite to free drinks or happy hour. A little tip that I always give people is to keep a couple teams fridges stocked with beer. Yes, I’m encouraging drinking at the workplace (no, I am not encouraging it during business hours…) But, I can’t tell you how many times I get teams to agree to working on projects after I’ve cracked a beer or two open with them at the office.

Another way to “make friends” is to make people look good and feed their ego. Let’s face it, people have egos and people want to move up in their roles at big companies. Even if you work with people in a limited capacity, remember to include them and thank them when reporting the status of the program, or, when you are presenting the strategy or update to executives. Make sure you point out and thank the people that you worked with!

If your organization has large organizational meetings or weekly team meetings, make sure to talk up and thank the people that are getting stuff done for you, it will make them look good (which they want) and others will want to step up so they can get some recognition. Once you get someone some credit for something they worked on and they get some positive feedback because of it, they are going to come back to you looking for more. You’ve just become their SEO Pusherman.

Now, you’ve made some friends, you’re getting people on your side, start putting them to work!

Quick wins right off the bat

Getting a quick win under your belt will earn you some credibility in an organization. It gives you an opportunity to have a story to talk about right away. And, it gives you the ability to prove that what you are doing is important.

Once you’ve done that, people will start to listen to you more. At a big company, it is fairly simple sometimes, because there are typically a lot of issues that need to be worked out. So fix a title tag or two, find out if a part of a site is being blocked from robots, maybe somebody forgot to remove some “noindex” tags from a page, or find a trend that will likely drive a ton of traffic and get that to editorial ASAP. Either way, get one of those under your belt, so you can take that up stream and show people that you are valuable and important.

Another reason I really like quick wins is if you show some results, show that it will make a splash, or an impact of some sort, will get peoples attention. Guess what that means? Those people that you are taking effort to become friends with, will start buddying up to you, because they will want in on that attention and love from management or executives.

Build and develop a strategy

Now, although you want to get some quick wins under your belt, you need to simultaneously start thinking about how you’re going to approach things more holistically and methodically. The worst thing that you can do is start throwing SEO changes at the walls and hoping they stick. It’s not going to work for a larger organization.

What you want to do is take some time understanding the verticals, audience and target market. Do your basic keyword research, competitive intelligence and look for areas of opportunity that you can build strategies out of. Start putting this together into a report, presentation or whatever form your organization usually responds the best to. I’ve found that putting something together that is similar to Product Requirements put together by the Product Management groups will be the most effective for providing the details necessary that a Product Manager needs to float it up the ranks.

At Yahoo!, we had an SRD, SEO Research (or Requirements) Document, that details out keyword research, competitive data, development requirements and/or templates, link development and/or viral marketing strategies.

This document should holistically detail out your entire SEO Analysis for a given Market, Event, Vertical, etc. If you are/were an SEO consultant at some point, think of it as an SEO Audit that you would deliver to a client. Make sure that whoever you hand the document off to can understand the requirements and turn it around fairly quickly. At the very least, they should be able to take parts of the document and fill it into their overall Product or Marketing Strategy.

Create baselines & goals

I have to admit, I’m the type of person that likes to get in, kick ass, and take names. I’m all about being effective, and getting the quick wins in place while building out an overall strategy. That said, one of the biggest things that I’ve learned in my new role is how to effectively create a baseline for search traffic and setup goals around the original baseline set. Now, I’ll be talking about this more in my next post, so I won’t go into much detail here.

Essentially, you are going to want to create a “baseline” of your search traffic and give yourself an opportunity to show how effective and/or ineffective certain strategies are. I think this is more important in helping you determine what is working, what isn’t, and highlighting your effectiveness. At the end of the day, you need something to measure your performance against, for better or worse.