We dug in and explored the challenges of educating a large media company, dealing with multiple content management systems, syndicating content and query deserves freshness, all viewed through the eyes of ABC!

Interview Transcript

Eric Enge: Can you provide a brief outline of your responsibilities at ABC News?

John Shehata: I’m the Executive Director of Search for ABC News, and recently heading SEO for media properties like ABC Family, ABC.com, and Oscars. Everything SEO goes through our department.

Eric Enge: How many people are in the department?

John Shehata: We’re a small centralized team of 2. We also have “SEO Ambassadors,” which is a group of people that work within different groups at ABC, different shows or properties that help others with SEO as the first line of defense and make sure that SEO is top of mind. They bring us in if they have bigger questions or bigger projects for us to work on.

Eric Enge: The word “ambassador” is a lead-in to the next question. One of the issues with a larger media organization (in my experience, a traditional media organization) is there’s a constant need to educate on what role SEO can play in the growth and promotion of the business. Can you talk a little bit about some of the challenges and some of the wins, perhaps, that you have had along those lines within ABC?

John Shehata: Sure thing. I believe that 40% to 50% of our job is to educate and inform people on SEO best practices, and we actually spend a lot of time doing this. We create different presentations and tailor them to different types of audiences. Presentations to C-level are different from presentations to development or tech teams, which also differ from the editorial team.

We try to help them see why SEO is important to them, and what they will gain from doing it. We’re not telling people how to do their job, but really helping them to become more successful at what they do by applying the best practices of search engine optimization. We also stress that we really don’t optimize for search engines, but instead, we optimize for people who use search engines to find our content. Education is a big part of our job.

We educate, train, and we create best practices guides, documents, and one-sheets that go around, answer emails with information, send weekly and monthly newsletters and create wikis. If we get the question more than once, we create an FAQ. We have a lot of material out there for the different users, the different departments and the different properties.

Eric Enge: I imagine that the adoption and acceptance of what you’re trying to teach is like any other human process: some people get it faster than others, some slower. You’ll have people who aren’t officially your SEO Ambassadors that actually become like an ambassador, which must be exciting when it happens. Conversely, you’ll have others where you have to proactively keep getting back in front of them saying, “Hey. Don’t forget about this. This is how it impacts you.” Is that a fair characterization?

John Shehata: Absolutely. There are different ways of approaching this. One of the things we do is highlight the success stories. When you work on a big project with the dev or tech team or on a story with the editorial team, you highlight the results. People love to see their successes shared and to get credit for their hard work, People, in general, when they see successful projects, want to jump into the bandwagon and say great job; how can we do the same?

You will find people coming to you who in the past maybe didn’t acknowledge SEO as something important within their workflow. Seeing someone else’s success makes them want to try it out themselves. You’re not going to be in every department at every single moment, so this is a very good way of letting other people actually come to you asking for help. Highlighting the successes with different departments works very well.

Eric Enge: Do you use the same content management system for all the websites you’re involved in?

John Shehata: No. it’s a good question. When I first started with Enterprise SEO, 8-10 years ago, I thought everyone was using WordPress or MovableType, and I was surprised.

Most of enterprise level companies/sites have different CMSs within the same company and sometimes within the same site. In addition, each CMS uses a different technology; some proprietary platforms and a mix of small and enterprise technologies. You’re working, most of the time, with legacy code; sometimes languages that you never worked on before.

Many companies in the past used to create their own development languages, so you’re dealing with legacy code and legacy CMSs. You have to adapt because you can’t just go to an enterprise-level site and say, “Hey. Let’s change the CMS.” You have to adapt and find your way around it.

Eric Enge: I bet that each CMS comes with its own configuration challenges.

John Shehata: Absolutely, yes. Some CMSs don’t even allow you to change a page title or add new tags into the head section. There are a lot of challenges. The biggest challenge is to convince stakeholders and explain why they need to improve the CMS, code or even upgrade the CMS platform. Another big challenge is that many big companies customized their CMS to the point that they can’t do any upgrades because it will break all their customization.

Eric Enge: I imagine that some of these content management systems freely create duplicate content. Would that be an accurate assessment?

John Shehata: I can say that every single enterprise site I worked on in my career had major duplicate content issues. But, it is not only the CMS, there are many other practices that cause this:  inconsistent linking, sharing content on multiple sections for traffic credit, and sponsorship opportunities that require different integration and designs so you need to replicate the content in different ways to satisfy the sponsorships.

Sometimes, you also see internal tracking done incorrectly causing many duplicate content issues. People want to track what happens on the sites, so they add tracking parameters to URLs for links within the site. There are so many things that can cause duplicate content.

Eric Enge: There must be lots of situations where simply eliminating the duplicate content is not so straightforward.

John Shehata: True! Sometimes, there are strong reasons for the duplication that you can’t simply fix or change, especially the ones tied to sponsorship opportunities. So, while eliminating the duplicate is the best SEO solution, we often have to rely on alternative fixes like rel=canonical tags and XML site maps. You must work with the tech team to figure out the correct permalink URLs for each of these pages so you don’t end up duplicating URLs in your XML site maps or in the source code. This can fix a little bit of the issue.

You can also work in Google Webmaster Tools to eliminate certain parameters that create duplicate content. If you have some kind of sorting or tracking parameters, you can identify those in Google and Bring Webmaster Tools to be ignored; just be very careful so you don’t end up blocking a big chunk of the site.

Eric Enge: Are you confident, in your experience, that the rel=”canonical” really does a good job of dealing with the duplicate content? Have you seen measurable benefits from that?

John Shehata: We have seen some benefits, but it’s really a Band-Aid on the problem. In many cases, I believe the XML site map actually is a much stronger signal than the canonical tag. I think a combination, of different signals, or different places giving the same signal, will hopefully get Google to accept the page you designate as the main page.

In many instances Google continues to index and rank other pages, not the canonical ones, so the best solution is still to fix the site architecture. If this is not doable, doing rel=canonical, and XML site maps are good Band-Aids.

Eric Enge: Are you also involved in syndicating content?

John Shehata: Yes. Most of the major publishers either syndicate content on their site or syndicate their own content on other sites.

Eric Enge: What kind of challenges does that bring for you?

John Shehata: There are so many questions you need to ask before you syndicate your content. Are you syndicating content to other sites that are more authoritative, or have less authority than your site? When should you syndicate the content? Will they accept or implement certain tags on their pages to tell search engines where this original content comes from?

A couple of years ago, Google told publishers to use syndication source tags. But, most of the sites that syndicate the content on their sites don’t have the capabilities, or sometimes the resources, to add these tags dynamically, linking back to the original content.

Later, Google said to use rel=canonical tags. They told us that they would consider canonical tags to be more authoritative than the syndication source tags. So, even if the site syndicating your content has the syndication source tag, but the page has canonical tags pointing to their site, this will override the syndication source tag.

Some sites do delayed syndication, where they wait a couple of hours or more before they syndicate content to other sites, so Google can verify that this content actually belongs to their site, and it was published there first, before they see it everywhere else.

What we have seen is that even if you have all the tags pointing to your site but you syndicate to a site that has a much higher authority than yours, Google might end up actually ranking the higher-authority site.

Eric Enge: I’m no Googler, but when you syndicate content to a higher-authority site, I believe that from their point of view, the user might prefer to read it from the higher-authority site, and feel more comfortable there, than they do reading it on your site, even if you published it first. Since their goal is to maximize the satisfaction of users, while it may seem wrong to us, it might actually be the best answer to them to do that.

John Shehata: I totally agree with you. A lot of times, SEOs think of one specific tag, or one specific tactic to optimize, and then they don’t get the results expected. Google has hundreds of different factors and signals that go into their ranking formula. Syndication/Canonical tags are one of those factors. As you mentioned, if the higher-authority site has a higher click-through rate, more clicks into the site, users spend more time into the site; then Google may consider it as a better experience for the user versus the original site.

Eric Enge: Sometimes media companies let other media companies syndicate a synopsis of the article, rather than the whole article. Is that something that you use at ABC, as well?

John Shehata: We don’t do it this way; we do full syndication. ABC News, in general, is a high-authority site, and we make sure tags are implemented correctly. Even though we don’t use it, I think it’s another good tactic. Delayed syndication, partial syndication, and having a rel=canonical link back are all good tactics.

Eric Enge: As the Head of the SEO team, you have to integrate your efforts into a larger online marketing effort. Can you talk about that, as well?

John Shehata: We believe SEO is just one of the marketing channels every site has. There is paid marketing, social media, email marketing and so on. The SEO team needs first to understand the objectives and goals of the marketing department, of the site, and of the company as a whole, and then start working with all the various channels to meet those objectives.

For example, SEOs need to know what keywords the paid marketing team is targeting, such as what are the 10 most expensive keywords. Can SEO help there and save the company money? When you make other people successful, they absolutely work better with you. For example, money we saved can go to SEO or be directed to tools or development.

Social media is another marketing channel where I believe collaboration is important as SEO and social are becoming more and more integrated. Social media is becoming, or is about to become, an important SEO signal. SEO is just a part of the bigger picture of online marketing.

Eric Enge: With a large media company, I imagine that you get a tremendous amount of attention without having to do much outreach.

John Shehata: In general, that’s true. But, it differs from one brand to the other. For example, if you have a very big e-commerce brand, you will probably need to do a lot of outreach; product reviews, trying to get links, etc. For media publishers in general, people like to share, link, discuss and engage with the kind of content we produce already. In all cases, social media is very important for all types of brands to utilize effectively.

In addition, one social platform is completely different from the next. What you communicate in Google+ may not and shouldn’t be the same for Facebook or Twitter; the frequency, the timing, and other factors also need to be taken into consideration.

Eric Enge: I would picture, even for large media companies, the speed at which you can get the word out about the news you publish would have something to do with whether you win what I’ll call the ‘query-deserved freshness battle.’ There’s still some incentive to do outreach. It’s not like you need help getting in front of people, but it’s not a bad idea to get in front of people faster.

John Shehata: Absolutely. I think speed is very important factor, especially for breaking news, especially with QDF, query-deserves freshness. Taking that into consideration we never sacrifice accuracy for speed. Social Media is great help getting the word out there faster, for sure.

I believe that search engines are absolutely looking at the social rates for new Tweets, Re-Tweets, Likes, Shares, Pluses on Google+, or for whatever platforms that are opened for them.

I believe that search engines are looking at that, and some already have it as a part of their algos. If a story gets 200 Re-Tweets in 5 minutes, versus another story that got just 10 Re-Tweets, it makes a difference. I think search engines do consider these factors. Google also has sharing buttons now in Google News, so they also consider how people Like and +1 the news on Google News, as well.

Eric Enge: Thanks for joining us today.

John Shehata: Thank you so much for having me, Eric.

Closing Notes

There are many things that make Enterprise SEO particularly challenging at this scale. Some of the biggest ones are the inherent complexity of the organization, the many different business objectives, and the number of different properties involved.

John faces all of these on a day-to-day basis. But, on the other hand, there is tremendous leverage to be gained. For example, at ABC, the massive marketing machine is a big advantage; once you get it pointed in the right direction, look out!

You can see more of John Shehata’s thinking on Enterprise SEO here. Below is an example of what you will see there:

In closing, I hope this interview has offered plenty of insights for enterprise SEOs. If you have any comments, please post below.

There are three main steps you need to take when preparing for Enterprise Keyword Discovery:

1. Incorporate the social voice of the customer into your keyword and content research. This ensures that your page content is relevant and timely for users searching for solutions.
2. Identify the specific webpages that are most relevant to those keywords.
3. Determine what landing pages are likely to have the strongest impact on visiting consumers, or are in need of content changes and/or complete overhauls.

Mining For Keywords

As every experienced SEO knows, integrating with Google’s Keyword Tool is not enough as relying on Google presents a challenge. Not only is it a limited source of data, but if everyone is using Google’s Keyword Tool, then you have limited opportunity to differentiate yourself from the competition.

You need a tool that integrates with many other “sources” as well, such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Competitive Pages, Link Hubs and your Paid Search campaigns. Integrating with other data sources, including Social, is becoming more and more important as we continue to see social signals playing a larger role in the SERPs.

Though I cannot speak to the data sources for all keyword discovery products, it appears Rio SEO integrates APIs for various social sources. It also appears their product supports categorization and filtering capabilities to help manage large numbers of keywords, which is important, as organization is critical for the enterprise keyword discovery process.

Keyword Suggestions From Social Sources

Incorporating keyword suggestions from Social sources such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube helps to ensure that the keywords you target include the same “jargon” that your target audience uses to refer to your products or non-branded terms within the industry.

Example: I’m reminded of a conversation with a large PC Manufacturer where their SEO Manager was trying to help identify the best non-branded targeted keywords for one of their PC models. High query volume keywords such as “laptop” or “desktop” were too broad and offered no differentiation from any other PC model they offered. As part of his research, the SEO manager went to the Web to see how their customers (people who had bought this particular model) were referring to this product.

Surprisingly, he saw that many had converted this PC to run and store all of their home entertainment media. This was a new application for that model and one he was not even aware of until he looked at the “voice of the customer” to understand how his target audience was referring to this product. Immediately, he took this information to help craft the product page to incorporate keywords like [PC media center], which allowed him to target a new type of searcher for that product.

Keyword Suggestions For Video

Video can boost your listings, increase engagement and improve conversion rates. Enterprise organizations can tell consumers what they want to know about their products in real time and in the most engaging, informative manner through video. Not only that, video results are effective in the SERPs because they include thumbnails that grab search real estate and attract eyeballs.

• Embed relevant product information in the video so search crawlers understand what the video is about.
• Provide the video with a descriptive title in accordance with the H1 title of that webpage.
• Add video metadata such as video length, video dimensions, video thumbnail and video transcript (text of the video).
• Add keywords to the video that correspond to the keywords of the webpage.
• Create videos on all your major products to increase the chances of being found online.
• Target long-tail keywords that generate significantly more traffic and a very targeted audience.
• Create a video sitemap describing all the videos embedded in the site to help Google discover and index each video.
• Videos embedded on the site should have SEO-friendly, clean URLs including the video format file extension relevant to the video (i.e., .FLV, .WMV and .AVI).

If your goal is to create a video on a specific subject, you need to focus on YouTube suggestions for keyword discovery rather than Google’s Keyword Tool.

Example: YouTube offers keyword suggestions in a way that’s similar to the Google AdWords Tool. Creating a page with a video on it would benefit from understanding how to optimize that page for people specifically searching for videos.

Take T-Mobile’s iPhone 5 campaign. The term [iPhone 5] on the Google Keyword Tool suggested that users search Google for information around price, speed, specs and accessories, etc. Looking at the keyword suggestion for YouTube, however, returns results around reviews, parodies and unboxings (a popular video among gadget geeks that shows the unveiling of the product from its packaging along with accessories and instructions).

When creating a video of your product, you should understand the differences between how someone searches on Google vs. how they might search differently on other mediums like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, etc.

Consistency In Messaging

You also have the ability to focus on your company’s Twitter and Facebook feeds, which can be helpful to ensure a consistent marketing message for your company across both webpage (SEO) and social channels.

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Again, as SEO and social come together, having consistency in the content of your marketing message is crucial.

Page Mapping

A page-based SEO approach rather than a keyword-driven approach is frequently used to target the most appropriate keywords in your important pages.

The page-based approach requires analysis of all the SEO factors affecting the rank of a page for targeted keywords, and then optimizing those factors.

Focusing on page-based keyword optimization can help your most important pages be quickly and easily found. Identifying the right keywords is the first step; and then, matching those keywords to the URL of your most important pages is the next step in this process.

• You must be able to run audits of the pages on your site to help suggest which URL’s (pages) are candidates to be optimized for each newly discovered keyword.
• You also must be able to call out the need when content is light, and new content creation is necessary.

Content Inspiration

The SEO process today is still focused on keywords and pages, but also entails more, especially as we begin to focus more on Content Marketing. SEO managers should be thinking pre-production, and they need to be a part of the content creation process to inject SEO techniques into the marketing and website strategy before and during the creation of the content.

This process will help to call out new content creation ideas and identify where content gaps exist. In his recent article Co-Citation and Co-Occurrence – The Next Big Thing In SEO, Haris Bacic stated, and I concur…

“…co-occurrence does not associate two sites altogether. Instead, co-occurrence refers to the association of some particular phrases – or more specifically, important keywords – that come in close proximity to each other. This close proximity of important keywords develops an association and relation that are understandable by Google as an important search engine factor.”

Creating quality content worth mentioning on the Web — content with socially redeeming value — is an important asset moving forward.

Marketing Department Input

Allowing Paid Search marketers, social marketers, product owners, offline marketers and merchandisers to see your keyword data and provide input will strengthen your marketing message consistency and helps provide quantifiable metrics suggesting what terms or concepts should be focused on the most, given consumer/end user demand. Your most important quantifiable metric is going to be query volume, which comes from the Google Keyword Tool.

Most keyword tracking software tools offer this metric, and it acts as an indicator of content demand and needs. Software running content audit checks and scoring them to show how “relevant” that page is in terms of SEO against a targeted keyword is another valuable, quantifiable metric.

Keyword Governance

One unique challenge to Enterprise programs is the sheer volume of keywords and managing the “ownership” of these keywords. That’s where Keyword Governance comes into play. Think about a company like Intel. It could be argued that a great number of the pages on their site need to target the keyword [processor]. Pretty much all of them, right?

However, if every page targets the term, Google Yahoo! and Bing may only allow one or two pages to show up in the SERPs. That means thousands of webpages have missed their mark, never showing up for critical, non-branded terms.

Establishing a level of “keyword governance” or keyword “arbitration” is the first step. This is a process for different stakeholders in the company to determine who owns each critical term. That allows different groups to focus on other keywords to create a larger “blanket of coverage” with the total number of keywords their program actively targets.

Keyword Discovery Tools For Enterprise SEO

Due to the large number of such tools available, I apologize in advance if your tool is not included in this short list of examples. That said, it seems logical to share my knowledge about a few keyword tools, allowing you to take this research further if you like. Note: I do not receive revenue from the sale of any SEO tools mentioned in this article. Considering a few of the above key points, e.g., Keyword Mining, Page Mapping and Content Inspiration, there are several tools that come to mind; but again, this list is not exhaustive.

• Keyword Discovery offers a large database of search queries from many different search engines around the world to find what people are searching for and which search terms generate the most traffic. The tool claims to help you expand your keyword lists to identify possible search terms that may not always be obvious.
• Rio SEO offers keyword discovery automation starting with a list of keywords; the system will examine the competitive landscape, social media and traditional search data sources for voice-of-the-customer keyword discovery. The tool claims to gather the metrics to help make decisions around the highest opportunity keywords. It uses workflow to help guide a user through the discovery process and also help map company landing pages to each targeted term.
• SEMRush offers analysis of your competitor(s) keywords or target audience for use in your organic and AdWords campaigns. You can gather lists of related keywords to see the common keywords used by both your domain and your competitors’. In theory, use your collected lists of the best keywords for site optimization. SEMRush also offers an API for implementation into Adword Accelerator and your own projects and graphs. It reports by domain, URL, Keyword, Trends, Rank and allows export.
• Wordstream offers a keyword tool with suggestions and claims to provide a constantly updated database. In theory, you can discover your most profitable pockets of keyword opportunities by dropping in a list of keywords or analytics data, getting back an organized keyword structure ready for relevant PPC and SEO campaigns.

As keyword discovery is the bedrock to brand messaging in enterprise-level sites, be sure to create a keyword discovery process that facilitates the inclusion of social content and customer jargon into your website messaging, making it easier for customers to find you in the SERPs.

SEO Challenges: New Site Launch Or Major Updates

1. Too many decision makers. This is one of the more basic headaches. Product marketing, engineering, PR and the executive branch can all weigh-in in ways that can have you ripping your hair out.
2. Many development priorities. This is often the most frustrating challenge, because it is the hardest one to combat. Other priorities may well be more important in the short term than what you are pushing for. Or, worse, it just makes it harder for you to get key players to buy into your idealistic view of the best way to build the new website.
3. Ignorance of SEO. You still run into those that think that SEO is unimportant. Yes, they are still out there. I dug into this a bit in my article, Why Do Brands Overlook the SEO Opportunity for Non-Branded Keywords?
4. Misinformation About SEO. This one is worse. The exec who thinks they know something, but the information is wrong, just might drive you mad. Just last week at SMX West, I was talking to one exec that told me they had just finished updating the meta keywords on 1800 to their pages. To them, this was SEO. The lost time is certainly one bad part of this, but worse still, to this exec, the SEO for the site was done. (I took it upon myself to set them straight.)
5. Misconceptions. The belief that SEO is Hopeless.

The above misinformation deserves its own brief discussion. Many believe that Google changes the rules at its whim, and hence, no SEO effort is sustainable. They have not yet bought into the basic concept that modern SEO is not about tricking Google; it is, in fact, a form of branding activity that uses many tactics that support the overall brand in ways well beyond pure ranking in the SERPs.

There are many other types of problems, but you notice that none in my above list have anything to do with the actual execution of the new website project. Let me hit you now with the stunning conclusion: the real opportunity for you occurs long before the project planning starts.

Ideally, it starts months before. That is the timeframe in which the game will be won or lost. You want to get out in front of this before the people involved begin to generate any level of activity on the project at all. If you know that the plan is to begin working on a new site in July of 2013 (or even October of 2013), the time to begin doing your work is now.

Getting the best result depends on educating the people involved, and getting their incentives aligned properly. (You can read some thoughts on how to help with the education process in my articles: Selling the Benefits of SEO in a Large Enterprise, and Getting Top Management Buy-in for Enterprise SEO).

In addition to what you see in those two articles, below are two more ideas about speeding up the education process.

Show Them Examples Of Failure

I wrote about one example of this in my last Enterprise SEO column. If you search on the generic term [diapers], Pampers and Huggies are not part of the first 6 organic SERPs:

As you can see, Pampers and Huggies are far and away the biggest brands in this space but do not rank prominently. The same thing happens if you search on another generic term such as [aspirin]:

This happens with major brands for all kinds of generic search queries. In addition, if you dig into it hard enough, you can find interesting case studies such as this one Bryson Meunier wrote about on a Mobile SEO audit. Launching a new mobile site? You can use this article to talk the team out of using a transcoding approach.

Use Your Own Analytics

Your execs might point out that you are getting lots of traffic to your site. However, traffic is not the same as organic traffic on relevant non-branded keywords. The purpose of SEO is to get you traffic on these types of keywords, anyway.

As a first step, use analytics to show them what percentage of that traffic is organic. Then you can dig into it a little further to show them the search query mix. Hopefully, it does not look like this:

If it does, you are not doing well in your SEO! Your non-branded search query volume should dwarf your branded volume. Another way to get a look at this same problem is to look at the landing page mix. It is not good news if it looks like this:

Takeaways For SEO Project Planning

The key is to realize that you need to get way out in front of this. By the time people are trying to schedule the project planning meeting, it is way too late to make major changes in the way they perceive SEO, or perceive the priority of SEO.

Changing this type of mindset is something that takes many months, and lots of data. No matter how you start the exercise, and no matter how good you are as a teacher, different people get stuck in different places, or will raise different objections.

You need time to find out what these objections are, and then you will have to find ways to address them. When you are done with the first objection, you will run into the second one, and the process will repeat itself again. In addition, you are likely to have only limited time slots in a given month.

For example, if you get to meet with the development VP next Monday, you may get 10 minutes to insert a bit of your thoughts on SEO. That may be the only time you get with her/him until next month. If you have several objections to work through, it can take many months. Plan on this and work the process long before that new website project ever hits the drawing board.

The further out in front you can get started, the better. And, be prepared to exercise lots of patience!

The founder CEO was persuaded by a very bright 26-year-old VP to rebuild the site with search engines in mind. That VP had the marketing savvy to understand the power of natural search and hired me to build an in-house SEO team.

Over the next five years, we generated enormously high recurring revenues at a fraction of the cost of paid search, fueling company growth well beyond five years and extending beyond 2013.

Their SEO investment turned out to be the single, best ROI ever recorded in company history.

Development Of The SEO Team

In the process of developing the SEO team, we grew from 2 search analysts into a dedicated department supported by dual development teams of 80 personnel including developers, copywriters, link analysts, SEO analysts, PPC analysts and social media marketing analysts under two directors: myself and a VP.

Image via Shutterstock

We coordinated with several other departments including Reporting, Analytics, Website, Rich Media, International, Mobile, Branding and a few more. Our department had the best rate-of-return and highest growth rate year-over-year for five straight years.

Image via Shutterstock

As you might imagine, we made some mistakes along with the wins. We would go after the quick-wins first, always keeping search engine compliance top of mind, e.g., white-hat vs. gray-hat.

We never produced any workmanship using black-hat techniques and always remained in compliance with Google’s consistently changing Guidelines.

SEO Enterprise Analytics Tools

One of the benefits of working with such a company and having top-down support from the CEO was our ability to test everything, including SEO enterprise analytics tools. We tested all of the enterprise SEO tools on the market, new ones, old ones… we tried them all. In fact, we helped a few vendors develop their tools by contributing our needs and data to their product development road maps.

Back in 2007, there were only two enterprise-level SEO dashboards available. One of them had been in business for a while, and the other was just getting started. By 2010, we had tested the top four and several other related toolsets because no single tool at the time had all the capabilities and functionality we needed.

Keep in mind, our taxonomy had thousands of categories and roughly a million product SKUs. Inventory would swap over 5,000+ products overnight, and the margins on products varied considerably. For instance, when you consider seasonality, holidays, etc., you can begin to understand why SEO for the term “patio furniture” might not be you best or only plan of attack.

Using Good Data To Make Decisions

The timing and the type of data required to make good SEO decisions was critical path to sustaining year-over-year growth. E-commerce competition can be fierce, and you need good data to make critical decisions in a rapidly changing environment.

To help you make the kind of decisions important for your company’s growth, listed below are what I believe to be the top 10 Must-Have Features in your Enterprise SEO program and dashboard.

My Top 10 Tool Features For Successful Enterprise SEO

1. SEO Audit Score – there is no room for beginner-level software; you need an SEO Audit score which measures the SEO health of a page AND the entire SEO program. This is critical path; you must ensure your platform and your vendor provide a legitimate and authentic SEO Audit Score.
2. International Capability – support for International search engines including non-US market leaders such as Baidu, Rambler, Yandex, AUM and Naver are critical path for a successful SEO program at an enterprise level.
3. Scalability – you must have transparency into the full SEO lifecycle such as planning, execution and tracking. This is where a lot of platforms fall short; centralized planning, execution and tracking are critical path.
4. Client Referrals – talk to several of the vendor’s clients. UI demos may in fact appear to work well; however, they can also break down quickly in real-life practice. UI and custom dashboard capabilities must have a robust configuration screen. Avoid platforms with multiple-step process for setting up a dashboard. Look for a platform dashboard which can be far easier configured with drag and drop capabilities.
5. Beyond Reporting – a reporting solution with some ability to audit pages and make recommendations is not adequate. Having several reports running ad-hoc such as page audits, rank checking, competitive comparisons and link analysis is a must. Additionally, focusing on weekly reporting will not suffice.
6. Execution of SEO – the ability to help you execute on your SEO strategy includes Mobile, Local and Social. This is probably the single, most important feature you need. You must have a platform to help you execute on the complete SEO life cycle. Mobile, Local and Social have become huge working parts of the SEO life cycle.
7. Vision and Opportunity Forecasting – be aligned with the future of the industry. Opportunity forecasting includes the feasibility of how easy or difficult will it be to actually go after your top terms. Tip: generalizing CTR % overstates opportunity, presenting a good concept, but impractical in reality.
8. Keyword Discovery with landing page mapping – looking at competitive terms without the ability to monitor and track social input or to help you map keywords to the best targeted landing page will leave you hanging dry. The result is a very manual and time-consuming process. You must have keyword discovery with landing page mapping capabilities and be able to include social influence.
9. Tracking Changes – it is extremely important to track and identify known (and unknown) page changes that were made which may negatively impact your SEO program. Tracking changes is another sweet-spot that will save you enormous amounts of time and allow you to catch things you would otherwise miss.
10. Page Level Competitive Analysis – the ability to see at the page level, a side-by-side comparison of where your competitive pages are better optimized vs. your targeted landing page for a given keyword is super important and extremely valuable.

Enterprise SEO Platforms

The 10 Must Have’s listed above are derived from my personal experience over the last five years; however, there are two reports comparing enterprise SEO platforms you might also find helpful as you compare tools and platform features, along with my recommended Top 10 Must Haves to determine the best fit for your organization.

Digital Marketing Depot offers the Market Intelligence Report: Enterprise SEO Tools 2013: A Buyer’s Guide. The report offers latest trends, opportunities and challenges in this market, identifies 13 key players in SEO software tools, and covers how recent social media and marketing trends are affecting growth in this market.

The Forrester Wave™: SEO Platforms, Q4 2012 is also an unbiased comparison of enterprise SEO platforms. Forrester’s 21-criteria evaluation of SEO platforms evaluates the four largest providers of tools for organic search auditing, ranking support, measurement, and project management: BrightEdge, Conductor, Rio SEO, and SEOmoz. This report analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of each player, and plots where they stand in relation to each other and to marketers’ needs. You can acquire a copy of the Forrester report from one of the above vendors listed in the report.

I’ll leave you with one last tip… watch out for highly aggressive sales reps;  they will immediately tip you off by slashing prices and over-compensating for their weaknesses in the quality and capabilities of their platform.

I’ve had the pleasure of working on SEO in a variety of companies both in house and, frequently, through casual advice to other companies. After eight years in the business, I’m convinced that the success of search for an in-house person hinges on their ability to work within a leader’s approach to search. This is due to the interdepartmental cooperation needed to effectively run search as well as the fluid nature of our business.

What follows are four extreme leadership caricatures, vis-a-vis search, and recommendations on how to most effectively work search into an organization within a specific leadership perspective regarding search leadership styles.

Hands Off Leaders

Image via Shutterstock

The hands-off leader is usually old school and has been successful either prior to the advent of the Interweb or through other online channels such as highly measureable PPC, email or display. Mr. Hands Off probably still has an AOL email address for personal use.

In these organizations, search probably doesn’t exist as a function, and if it does, it’s probably grouped under an entry level PPC or display person. The Hands Off leader has either never decided to push search as a channel or worse (and more likely), has proactively chosen to steer clear of it.

How To Manage Hands Off

This is actually a great opportunity for a search marketer – as the Hands Off leader probably has built a successful business ripe with low hanging search fruit. Your challenge, here, is to get some early easy wins and report metrics up as widely and as high as possible.

Use business metrics such as ROI, cost of sales, cost of acquisition etc., to compare search against other channels. Search will (almost) always outperform.

The biggest challenge in a Hands Off organization is the cross-departmental cooperation that must happen for most search efforts to be effective.

Conquer this by over communicating and always awarding the success of those aforementioned business metrics to other departments. It’s amazing how you can make friends by turning cost centers into profit centers.

Confidently Ignorant

Image via Shutterstock

The Confidently Ignorant leader is a garbled mess of buzzwords and directives. This leader is usually someone who has worked at, but not on an online property and wouldn’t know the difference between a canonical tag and a magic wand.

While she speaks confidently of GoogleJuice, the nuance between linkbait and spam is a mystery to Confidently Ignorant. You’ve never heard her say, “I don’t know,” but she frequently spouts off on dated information she picked up at a networking event that was trendy months or years ago. “We need more Pinterest Juice!”

Usually, nothing substantial ever really happens under Confidently Ignorant.

How To Manage Confidently Ignorant

The good news is that Confidently Ignorant knows that search is important – just not what to do about it. The primary challenge, here, is to focus on those things that do move the needle and minimize the garbage. Use Confidently Ignorant’s bluster to gather resources across departments to push through your search agenda.

Managing in this organization requires a disciplined approach to project management, i.e., identify business objectives before a project is undertaken and then regularly go back and post-mortem every project. This provides you with a structure to demonstrate (privately) that Confidently Ignorant’s  pet project that she crammed through wasn’t a great investment.

In fact, over time, these post-mortems, may serve to simultaneously educate and bore her with the technical details of search. Victory. Unlike every other situation – ascribe search success directly to Confidently Ignorant (instead of the departments who actually did the work) to garner further support for projects you want to undertake.

Aspiring Growth

Image via Shutterstock

The Aspiring Growth leader often runs a start-up, is confident that his product is desperately needed and is certain that the Interweb will deliver a flood of business; he’s just not sure how. Aspiring Growth has picked up a few things here or there, but knows what he doesn’t know. He is admittedly (and appropriately) focused on his area of expertise (usually building out a product that people don’t even know they need yet.)

Additionally, he has limited understanding of the time and competitive factors around search – i.e., it’s going to take a lot more time and resources to get traffic for “mesothelioma lawyer” than “pink fuzzy bunny slippers.” He probably thinks of search in terms of ranking reports.

How To Manage Aspiring Growth

Aspiring Growth needs a lesson in reality. I’ve found that the best way to work with Aspiring Growth leaders is to overwhelm them with education around the technical and tactical components of search, communicating this early on and often. This does two things:  1) grounds them in reality that search isn’t an immediate payoff, and 2) bores them with the details. This provides them with the confidence to let you do your job, while they return to what they do best.

Aspiring Growth is highly susceptible to unscrupulous or just really bad search and Web development agencies, and you may find yourself spending most of your effort unraveling legacy issues that were offshored.

SEO Maven

Image via shutterstock

The SEO Maven leaders are few and far between. She’s probably has a high-end technical degree and sold her first business, that she coded entirely on her own.

The SEO Maven has inculcated search best practices across the organization, does nothing at all to the site without A/B/C/D/E . . . testing, and has created some impressive in-house reporting tools that she replaced Google Analytics with because she’s paranoid about sharing site data. She could probably sell these tools to the agency world, but would never consider it as she’s too focused on using them to build her business.

How To Manage the SEO Maven

This is both a hard and easy place to be as an in-house search marketer. First, there is no way you are going to be the search subject-matter expert, so eat a humility pill every day at breakfast. However, working for the SEO Maven minimizes the political battles and interdepartmental struggles that so frequently occur otherwise when dealing with search.

In SEO Maven organizations, “what have you done for me lately” is the overriding perspective. Test, test, test. Be creative and then test again. These businesses are the ultimate training grounds for search marketers – if someone was getting out of college who wanted to get into the business, this is where I’d recommend they go (especially instead of the agency route.)

Due to the connected nature of our business, highly political corporate cultures tend to flounder in their search efforts while focused, nimble companies often succeed. While we may bemoan this reality, as search marketers, learning to function within the leadership and political structure of our organization is a necessarily skill.

Everything in the search industry is continually changing: Google is rolling out new algorithms, tools, and products; Bing is partnering with Facebook in ever more interesting ways; SEO toolsets are being forced to change their approach; and techniques used by SEOs are continually being re-visited to test their validity.

Yet, there’s a paradox that exists amidst this feverish pace of change: classic, boring, “old SEO” is still what works best.

Now, before you publicly flagellate me for sounding off with such sacrilegious puffery, please continue reading.

Signs Of Evolution

There are, no doubt, some striking developments in search. Primarily the result of Google’s relentless pursuit of innovation (in the quest to seek ever higher profits while delighting users, a balance they teeter on from time to time), the search we see today may resemble that of 2010 superficially, but it is a different animal.

Google’s shopping blend is now paid, PLAs account for nearly 30% of non-brand paid search for e-commerce sites, Panda and Penguin dwelt a one-two punch to short-term SEO and paid links, and we see glimpses of the future in authorship, Google+ and the Knowledge Graph.

The Knowledge Graph, in particular, certainly points to a future far different in how Google may score pages.

Google is increasingly seeking to understand entities and their aspects.

Ranking Entities & Their Aspects

RKG has seen the influence of Google’s a priori knowledge of people, places, and things (known as entities) on Web search results. These entities have certain aspects associated with them. These aspects can be used to inform how a SERP is built, a method of ranking beyond the classic PageRank model of webpages and links.

For example, we know that Blake Mycoskie is the founder of TOMS Shoes, has a non-profit, is married, is a Christian, etc. Influencing a search result for a Blake Mycoskie query is made much more difficult if Google understands certain realities about him, because rather than just trying to shuffle results up and down the page with link tactics, SEOs would, in fact, have to change reality to change the SERP. This has serious ramifications for online reputation management work, notably for celebrities.

Social Search

Bing continues to be the leader in integrating search and social media, pulling data from nearly every major social network in a ‘separate but integrated’ presentation. Why doesn’t Bing get more attention for this? For one thing, it’s hard to change deeply conditioned habits.

There’s another problem, too, with their strategy: no one actually knows if integrated search and social media have value. There’s a lot of interest in the theory, but the practical application of combining search and social media is still nascent. We haven’t seen if the users care. (It’s mostly us marketers who are excited.) Yes, Bing has increased marketshare, but it’s still just a few ticks over 16%.

Google takes a very different approach to search and social integration. Rather than embrace the social Web and partner with Facebook and others, Google+ represents a proprietary “social layer” that pervades Google search results and integrates with all of Google. Google+ is Google, and Google is Google+.

I grant that Facebook’s Graph Search is very cool, but no one’s sure what it will become. Signs point to the potential for a disruptive approach to search as we know it or, at least, a useful tool if you’re looking for single women nearby who enjoy getting drunk and like men. Only kidding…

Facebook has serious data and there is immense power in Graph Search for marketers. But, the powerfully revealing queries one can perform on Graph Search help to illuminate a whole universe of unsolved problems with social search.

80% of iOS6 traffic is hidden for our SEO clients.

Mobile

Mobile is increasingly playing a big role in the future of search. In fact, global mobile traffic is nearing 15%; roughly 20% of our clients’ traffic is now mobile. With varied behaviors based on the device, smart marketers need to be thinking in ever more sophisticated ways about how to serve content on smartphones, mobile phones and tablets. And, guess what, Google just changed the game on that for paid search, while the iOS6 hidden traffic problem is still not widely known by SEOs.

The Old Stuff Works

The acceleration of mobile is actually a very good example of how so-called old SEO techniques remain especially relevant today. The complexity around handling mobile content and SEO is not trivial.

Google lists useful documentation covering three basic approaches. Technical SEO expertise is key in order to successfully understand and deploy any of these approaches. And beyond that, it takes technical SEO to understand when a Google best practice could potentially create a sub-optimal user experience for your site.

Technical SEO remains the foundation of quality, comprehensive organic work. In this era of less is more SEO, our teams consistently move the need for companies by getting their house in order: pagination, duplicate content, faceted navigation, internal linking, mobile sites and site search are a few of the major technical areas needing attention. This is important work that most every large online business can justify.

Panda’s classification of Web content has magnified the need to create compelling, engaging content that users find valuable. While the emerging field of content strategy is new and exciting, the idea of building great content is nothing new. After all, Bill Gates proclaimed that content is the key back in early 1996.

Bill Gates saw content as the key in 1996.

Social media has the potential to drastically change the game of SEO (and with it, online marketing). Social media is powerful and here to stay. However, just when it changes the game of SEO is anyone’s guess.

In fact, links remain the single most important off-page ranking factor for Google (as Matt Cutts has insinuated). SearchMetrics’ study of ranking factors placed backlinks second only to Facebook Shares. While on the surface, this seems to suggest the influence of Facebook metrics over Google’s ranking factors; deeper thinking makes it apparent that popular content — which tends to gather more links — is also correlated with high Facebook activity. SearchMetrics’ conclusions are very much in line with those of experienced SEOs: links are still gold.

It must be granted that Bing’s approach to ranking pages marks a clear distinction from Google’s, specifically in how they are actively using social signals in their algorithms. We’re encouraged by Bing and their innovation and hope it leads to increased adoption and marketshare for Bing.

Back To The Future: Panda & Penguin

Google’s Panda and Penguin updates fundamentally changed the game for SEOs. Panda handily demolished thin content and the strategy of scaling infinite thin, poor-quality pages supported by an authoritative domain. Penguin cleanly discounted many manipulative links. The irony of these two massive updates is the way in which they reinforced the “old SEO” approach so many of us never stopped believing in.

Panda made high quality content and happy users matter more for SEO. Penguin made relevant, topical and useful links matter more than anchor-text stuffed spam. Ready the flux capacitor for 2009 because that’s pretty close to where we were back then, too.

SEO At A Crossroads

There’s a paradox in our work today: what’s coming is amazing (Knowledge Graph, Graph Search), what’s here is changing more rapidly than ever (authorship and rel publisher), and what’s always worked still works.

That’s why it’s called sustainable SEO. Much of the SEO industry suffers from “shiny new object” syndrome, always curious about the Next Big Thing. I don’t blame us for it. Things change so rapidly, it’s a bit of a professional ailment. We just need to remember: the more things change the more they stay the same.

I’d love to continue the conversation at SMX West. I’m speaking on three panels: Getting Ahead with Google+, Is Link Building Still Crucial? and Pagination & Canonicalization for the Pros. Come find me and let’s discuss.

More relevant reading:

• Old SEO Tools vs. New SEO Tools, Matt McGee
• Old vs. New SEO, Shari Thurow
• Super Valuable Old Stuff, Wil Reynolds

For example, one brand we work with is only concerned about ranking for its brand names (both the company and individual products). To them, that is the sole purpose of their SEO. This is not quite as trivial as it sounds, as the company has a large scale affiliate program effort, where many of their affiliates are quite aggressive at SEO. If they do not put the effort in, they can get outranked for their product brand names.

A Practical Example

Let’s take a real world example. If I use the AdWords keyword tool, I can pull a list of the search volumes on the largest brand names in diapers:

click for larger image

As you can see, the top 2 are Pampers and Huggies. Both sport impressive search volume! This is great stuff.

Since these are the top brand names in the diaper biz, let’s take a look at how they fare in a search for their key non-branded search term, “diapers”:

The screen shot shows the top six search results, and they are nowhere to be found! In fact, Huggies.com comes in at #7, and Pampers.com does not show up until the 3rd page of results. Not a good thing! Interestingly enough, the story is reversed if you search on [diaper], where Pampers comes in at the #8 spot, and Huggies is not on the first page. Still not good.

What’s The Opportunity Cost?

One way we can estimate the opportunity cost is by looking at the Google AdWords tool phrase match search volume for the major brand terms vs. the non-brand search terms:

The phrase match volume shows us the total volume of all the search queries that include the word (or words) inside the quotes. This can give us a rough estimate of the long tail search volume associated with the word or phrase. Clearly, there is a lot more long tail volume associated with the non-branded terms than there is with the branded terms.

You could argue, and you would likely be right, that the conversion rate on the branded terms will clearly be higher, and that a significant percentage of the non-branded terms long tail volume will come from things that do not apply as directly, such as [diaper bags].

However, all of that non-branded long tail search volume represents a branding opportunity that is being missed in a big way. Note that if someone searches on your brand name, they already know it, and they already have developed a certain level of interest in that brand.

If they search on a non-brand name, chances are that they don’t have that same level of commitment. What we see in the above data is 2.5 million branding opportunities. You could also argue with me that you can get more impressions per month by other media. While that would be non-trivial, you could do that, but you would be missing the point.

Nearly 100% of the search impressions are from people who have a direct and immediate interest in diapers. Granted that some of the people who search on phrases like [Diaper cakes] may be researching cakes for a baby shower, but even some of them may buy diapers for the event. Nowhere else are you going to get anywhere near the same volume of people with such a focused interest.

In addition, there is a lot of business to be had among these keywords. This is all incremental business since the search query started with a non-branded phrase.

What Can We Learn From This?

The basic branding campaigns that major brands pursue bring huge benefits. I remember when I was first learning about marketing and branding. One of the key concepts I learned was the notion that it took 7 branding impressions to create a sale. Seems to me that there are a ton of those impressions still available in search. Right now, diapers.com is reaping far more of those benefits than the major brands.

Enterprise SEO is all about the data. More accurately, it’s all about data storage.

If you can look back over a year, pull out different metrics and see which ones correlate to success, you’re one step closer to repeating that success. If you realize at the end of the year it would’ve been realllllly nice to know page speed numbers across the whole site, well, you’re sunk.

So why are so many ‘big players’ still using Excel as their main data storage tool?

Portent’s not exactly ‘enterprise’ scale, but we store a lot of information for a lot of different clients. Sometimes, we even need to retrieve it. So here’s the solution I’ve built, in broad terms.

• It cost a total of $5,000 to set up; that includes my time
• It costs $100/month to host
• I only touch it if I need the data
• For the basic stuff, it uses Excel as the front end

If you want me to get more detailed, I can write future columns on each individual component.

The Requirements

I built this tool myself. I know, I’m a CEO; I’m not supposed to do this kind of thing. But I’m also a geek, and this was a hell of a lot of fun. Here were the requirements I wrote down when I started:

• Can store and retrieve hundreds of millions of records, without causing server meltdowns
• Allows easy Excel import
• Built on technology I already know: Python, LINUX, MySQL and/or MongoDB
• Keep different clients’ data separate
• But allow global analysis across all clients, if desired
• Never make me cry

Thus armed, I got to work.

The Servers

If you care about this kind of stuff: I’m running this system on two Ubuntu LINUX servers. One server runs the Python code and MySQL database (which is quite small, see the next section). The other runs MongoDB. If we ever hit the point where we need more oomph, we’ll spread MongoDB across multiple servers. It’s good at that.

The Database(s)

I ended up using a hybrid: MySQL stores the usual client stuff, like account names, site addresses and such. This kind of dataset won’t grow too large, and one client will only have so many websites, and it benefits from using MySQL’s relational structure.

MongoDB stores things like daily/hourly Facebook data, Google Analytics exports and the kind of stuff that just keeps growing. Why? Because MongoDB is a ‘NoSQL’ database. It stores everything in a flattened list-type format. That makes it a bit speedier for straight-up requests like “Show me all of the visitors, by day, for www.mysite.com, since 2011.”

Here’s a really basic look at the structure:

That’s not a database layout. It just shows how the two databases ‘talk’ to each other: MySQL stores the information used to access and retrieve data. MongoDB actually stores the data itself. MongoDB actually has about 30 different collections (in NoSQL, they call ‘tables’ collections, instead, just to be different) at the moment.

The beauty of the NoSQL system is that we can add fields and collections as needed, without screwing up the previous data. I won’t even try to explain why – I’m too much of a noob. Just keep in mind that NoSQL = lots of flexibility. Which can be a good or bad thing.

The Code

Then came the hard part: I had to actually get the data from each source and into my database.

Working with some APIs is a cinch. For example, pulling in data from Twitter was relatively easy. Here’s a quick example in Python. It grabs my account information from Twitter and prints it:

import twitter import time wait_period = 3600

screen_name = ‘portentint’ # that’s me

# you’ll need to get these by creating a Twitter API account

CONSUMER_KEY = ” CONSUMER_SECRET = ” ACCESS_TOKEN = ” ACCESS_SECRET = ”

t = twitter.Api(consumer_key = CONSUMER_KEY, consumer_secret = CONSUMER_SECRET, access_token_key = ACCESS_TOKEN, access_token_secret = ACCESS_SECRET)

response = t.GetUser(screen_name) try: print response # response is in JSON. Since I’m using MongoDB, I can just dump it into the database

except twitter.TwitterError, e:

error = str(e)

if error == ‘Rate limit exceeded. Clients may not make more than 350 requests per hour.’:

print “Rate limit exceeded. Waiting for the next hour.”

time.sleep(wait_period) else: print str(e)

Code like this powers the entire tool. The Facebook code is more complicated. The Google Analytics code is more complicated still. But other tools, like SEMRush, were far easier. And, once they’re built, you set ’em to run and let them do their jobs.

The key is to build the data collection tools you can now, and start collecting that data now. Don’t wait until you have ‘every metric’ collected and stored, because there’s always a new metric, or a new API. You’ll never launch. Only used storage is useful.

Making It All Work

I thought about building a big, fancy-schmancy reporting tool, but realized I’ve already got one: Excel.

Microsoft Excel has a cool but almost undocumented tool called Web Query. With it, you can directly import a comma- or tab-delimited file into your spreadsheet.

1. Create a script that generates and prints a comma- or tab-delimited file with the data you want. Test it! Make sure it’s generating the output you need.
2. Create a text file. Use the template below as your guide.
3. In Excel, click Data > Get External Data > Run Saved Query.
4. Choose the file you created.

The template: WEB 1 [web address of script that generates your delimited file ]

Formatting=none PreFormattedTextToColumns=True ConsecutiveDelimitersAsOne=True SingleBlockTextImport=False DisableDateRecognition=False DisableRedirections=False

After a minute or two, your data will appear in the spreadsheet. You can format it, generate graphs, etc., as needed. The best part is, you only have to do it once.

To update your data, you can open the Excel sheet and click Data > Refresh. It’ll update your sheet, and add any new rows.

Here’s a very simple dashboard I use for Portent:

Security

If you’re in an organization where security matters a lot, you don’t want to be shooting delimited files around the Web willy-nilly. Someone in IT will definitely come knocking.

At Portent, we generate random keys that have to be included in the Web query template. The server checks for the result and makes sure it matches our key generator. If it doesn’t, you can’t grab any data.

That’s pretty basic — you can get fancier. But, it prevents any accidental data dumps.

Other Stuff To Think About

Other things we’ve tested with this kind of quick-and-dirty data warehouse include:

• Grabbing catalog sales data for cross-channel analysis
• Scaling to a lot more records (billions) – it gets ugly
• Grabbing seemingly random data, like weather, to check for sales drivers
• Importing SalesForce leads information

The possibilities are endless. The point is to start now.

What You Don’t See Can Make You Awesome

The dashboard is pretty. But, the real power in this approach is that we have a lot of data at our fingertips for comparison. With a few custom queries, we can compare things like:

• Sentiment and use of images in Facebook posts
• Organic visits and Twitter followers
• Instances of duplicate content and organic visits
• Instances of duplicate content and site performance
• Adwords quality score and bid cost

…

You get the idea.

Yes, noodling around with things like Python and LINUX can be a bit spooky. Do it anyway.

A few days’ of effort gives us access to piles of great data, for years. While the dashboard is cool, the ability to research and measure across lots of different channels is better. And, never having to tell your boss, “We weren’t recording that data,” is priceless.

Although the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has been talking about new gTLDs for years, it’s clear that there are a number of Internet-savvy professionals that still have questions about what they are, and how they will affect them. With the potential to change search and marketing as we know it, understanding new gTLDs will be vital in 2013 and beyond.

What Are New gTLDs?

The new gTLDs, or generic top-level domains, are “dot-anything” domain extensions that go beyond .com, .net, .org and the other domain endings that we’re used to.

ICANN accepted applications in the first half of 2012 from large organizations wanting to run new domain extensions, which includes companies such as IBM, Google, Amazon, Audi and YouTube.

In all, 1,930 applications for new domain extensions have been filed for various types of extensions, ranging from the truly generic (.love, .shop, .app), to the brand-specific (.goog, .bmw, .aol) and the geo-specific (.nyc, .boston, .paris).

Many of the companies that have applied to run the new domain extensions are in “string contentions”. This means that there are multiple applicants for the specific new gTLD they have applied for (e.g. .app, which has 13 applicants).

These companies are working frantically to try and resolve the contentions and find a single applicant who will run the new gTLD, but if they cannot work out these issues on their own, they may need to go to an ICANN auction, something most applicants do not want to do.

The organization is also deciding how to begin releasing names to the market. It is expected, however, that the new extensions will begin appearing online in the second half of 2013, and over 1,000 new domain extensions will likely be added to the Internet by 2014.

Why Should I Care As A Brand?

Under the current system where .com is king, brand marketers and SEO professionals know the value of a good domain name.

Whether it is the business’ main site, a targeted microsite, or a “category killer” premium domain name, pithy, descriptive names have the power to make a company stand out in searches, boost its position in organic search results, and establish a reputation as a reliable source of information and a leader in a certain category.

As the domain system expands to include descriptive domain extensions, there are a number of reasons for companies to consider investing in the new Internet landscape:

• Excellent Location – If the new gTLDs are adopted, used and accepted among businesses and consumers, they’ll open up new premium names at targeted domain extensions, creating an opportunity for businesses to get in on names they may have had to pay six- or seven-figure sums for as a .com. Sex.com, for example, reached a record-breaking price of $13M when its sale was brokered by Sedo in 2010. Under the new domain system, businesses could now acquire other premium names (Sex.xxx, for instance) at more manageable prices.
• Community Building – Location-based extensions such as .nyc, .boston, .tokyo and others have the potential to act as location tags, helping map websites to their target areas in the physical world and build a community online, or be utilized in mobile search.
• Innovation – There are sure to be many innovative ideas that come out of this new domain space as it evolves, with big brands such as BMW or Nike who will have their own unlimited number of domains. Imagine each BMW sold coming with its own domain and website, providing the new car owner and the manufacturer a unique platform in which to interact and further promote the brand in ways no one has ever imagined.

How Will Search Engines Adapt As A Result Of The New gTLDs?

Truthfully, there is not likely to be a very visible change in how search engines rank results in the beginning. As they have done in the past, search engines will continue to reward high-quality content.

What many people may not know is that Google already allows users to conduct searches by domain extension in its advanced search feature. In other words, users are able to see only .gov results or .org results if they so choose.

Advanced search – narrow down by TLD type

This capability doesn’t make much sense under the current system of non-descriptive TLDs such as .net, but once new gTLDs kick in it will be a useful tool for conducting a search within descriptive extensions like .boston or .cars to return highly-targeted content to a highly-qualified audience.

What Could New gTLDs Mean For Search As A Whole?

Aside from the possible rise of the “search by extension” feature on search engines, as consumers begin to understand the new, highly targeted, quality locations offered by the new gTLDs, search could experience a very dramatic overhaul in the form of a rise in niche search engines.

One place we’re already seeing previews of the potential change is with the new .xxx registry, which launched “Search.xxx.” Just as Google or Bing search the Web at large, Search.xxx is a niche search engine that only queries .xxx domains.

The particularly interesting aspect is that all .xxx websites must follow certain rules and maintain quality standards in order to own a .xxx domain – all sites have a certification and are scanned for malware or other harmful content.

In other words, only safe, high-quality and highly-qualified results are presented to the end user. As a result, the .xxx registry has seen a staggering volume of search traffic already, and is well on its way to establishing a community for xxx content online.

Search.xxx may not be for everyone, but what about Search.shoes? Search.cars? Search.app? The new gTLDs have the potential to change search as we know it, and if done right, could make quality content be easier to find.

How Do I Get Access To New Domains When They Launch?

If purchasing a domain name with a new gTLD extension makes sense for you or your clients, getting into the game early will be important in order to secure premium names at the best possible price.

Many of the new gTLDs that are approved as public registries will have a landrush phase where companies can apply to get names before general availability. While the timeline is a moving target, interested parties can sign up with to get alerts and information about gTLDs they’re interested in from many reputable premium domain marketplaces.

At the end of the day, the new gTLDs pose a rare opportunity for marketers, SEO professionals, large enterprises and established brands. Much like the early days of the domain name system in the 1990s, the new gTLDs will open doors to descriptive, premium names that have never before been registered.

Understanding the new gTLDs and keeping an eye on their progress can be a great chance to get a foot in the door right at the beginning of something big, and to buy some really valuable virtual real estate.

Algorithm Update Regularity Increasing

I have been known to say that 2011 and 2012 marked a major transition in Google’s spam fighting capabilities and mindset. Panda, Penguin, EMD, DMCA/Pirate, & Page Layout / Top Heavy Ads all had one thing in common: Google used offline analysis to identify potential ranking adjustments and then fed these results into the main algorithm. This is why those updates happen periodically, causing Danny Sullivan to tell us that The Google Dance is Back.

In my view, these few algorithms represent the tip of the iceberg. By my count, there were 9 such algorithm updates in 2011, and 21 in 2012 — more than double the 2011 total. It is more than reasonable to expect that we will see much more in 2013.

While I went public with a stance against link buying in 2008 (I actually bought my last link in 2004), this notion is much more commonly accepted today than it was then. But, we need to think more deeply than that today. Google will continue to improve its capabilities in fighting bad link building practices.

To illustrate, let’s look at the number of Panda releases over time vs. the number of Penguin releases:

As you can see, the pace of Panda releases had accelerated over time, and we can expect the same thing to happen with Penguin. This means more and more updates targeted at punishing or devaluing poor link building practices.

Google is using its expanded spam fighting capabilities to push consistently toward one goal for its organic results: include in the SERPs the webpages most likely to make the user happy with the search results.

Search engines need to evaluate two types of metrics to make these decisions: the relevance of a page to the query, and of all the pages relevant to the query, which ones are the most important/valuable to the users conducting the queries? This type of analysis is performed on a query-by-query basis.

If the search engines evaluate on a query-by-query basis, it stands to reason that they evaluate the authority of a website in response to a query in a manner that is specific to that topic area. In other words, high level website authority is not sufficient to cause a site to rank for each product area that they cover.

Enterprise Branding & Link Building

A lot of major brands cover many types of different products. Proctor & Gamble lists 47 different brands on the All Brands page on its website. Even Ford Motor Company lists five major categories of product lines on its home page. Digging in a bit further, they list six major lines of cars, ranging from the inexpensive Fiesta, to the sporty Mustang, to the pricier Taurus.

(Did you notice how those two companies each got a “free link” from me just because they are major brands?) However, let’s look at these links, and the pages they point to. Would a user, or a search engine, use those links to decide that Ford is the best company to buy a sports car from, or that P&G makes the best laundry detergent?

Of course not.

We can learn from the example of the offline advertising world. Does P&G run ads to promote that they are a large consumer goods company? Again, not really. What do their brands do instead?

1. Old Spice runs ads to tell you that they are the best deodorant.
2. Tide runs ads to tell you that they are the best detergent.
3. Ivory runs ads to tell you that they are the best soap,
4. … and so forth …

Ford does the same thing with its line of products. They have one set of ads for trucks, a different set for SUVs, and another for economy cars. These ad campaigns communicate to consumers both the relevance and importance of a product line. This type of campaigning is the logical equivalent of deep link building. You establish relevance and importance on a product line by product line basis.

For fun, I decided to see how many ads were posted on YouTube for each of their car product lines. You can see it here:

My technique of using these search queries is admittedly crude, but the point is that they run ads for each of their product lines. Your online strategy needs to reflect this, too. Search engines try to look at signals the same way that users do.

One set of such signals is the links that your product category pages get. This goes back to the traditional model of links being seen as academic-type citations for your content.

So when you look at one of your product lines, some questions you can ask yourself are:

1. Is my product covered in reviews of similar products in major magazines?
2. Do major websites covering similar products write about your product at other times (not just reviews)?
3. Do lots of bloggers who fit your target demographic write about you?
4. Is there any evidence online that your company is an expert in your product’s topic area?

There are plenty of these basic types of questions. Let me enhance them one step further. Do the places that write about you online include links to the relevant pages on your site? Note that someone writing about you without a link could represent some level of endorsement, but implementing a link, which offers the user the opportunity to leave the site publishing a link is, by definition, a stronger endorsement.

The need for deep link building, or product line by product line promotion, is not going away. For enterprise sites, this will require a similar commitment to online promotion on an item-by-item basis that mirrors what they do (or have done in the past) in promotion offline.