When an in-house search engine marketer lovingly crafts a new paid search ad, spends time testing multiple ad texts, labors over search term lists to pick the perfect words, the last thing the advertiser wants is to have all that work help another site’s search engine optimization efforts. And yet, increasingly, I see AdWords ad text influencing unpaid search results for Google’s partner sites.

Here’s an example:

The Viator.com text snippet that is showing up in the natural search result description for TripAdvisor is actually an AdWords ad from Viator that is displaying on TripAdvisor, a Google search partner.

If it happens once it’s news, twice it’s a coincidence and three times, it’s a trend. I’ve seen this issue cropping up more than a few times now, and launched on an exploration of how to fix it.

Marketer and partner try to solve the problem

The site and category exclusion tool in Google AdWords only allows for excluding content network sites, not search partners. At the campaign level, it is possible to target Google search only and exclude search partners, but that change would significantly impact all search partners, not just the partner gaining search engine optimization benefits. As an advertiser, I don’t think its fair that I’d have to lose all search partners to solve the issue of my content appearing on one of them.

Even if I could exclude a partner, frankly, the targeting is not the issue; the problem is that advertisers don’t want the sites their ads are showing on to derive SEO benefits from the advertiser’s marketing work on writing a relevant, keyword rich ad, not that advertisers don’t want their ads on that partner’s site. The advertising relationship is great, advertisers just didn’t sign up for the SEO relationship. I want to keep Viator’s ad appearing on TripAdvisor, I just want it to stop showing up in the search results text for them.

Can TripAdvisor (the advertising partner) solve the problem? The travel vertical is a small world and we know TripAdvisor, so we reached out on the issue. TripAdvisor was happy to chat and pointed out that they have implemented the AdSense API according to Google’s instructions and aren’t trying to derive any additional SEO benefit out of the paid search copy. In fact, they have spend a lot of time working on optimizing their site, including writing optimized meta descriptions, which they’d much prefer to show up in the search results rather than broken snippets of AdSense text.

Both advertiser and partner agree that the paid search results should not be used in any way to determine or display natural search rankings, but it seems neither party can directly resolve the issue.

Over to you, Google

Perhaps Google should have addressed this issue from the start. Google solidly claims that paid search and unpaid search are totally separate entities and never the twain shall meet, but in this case they seem to be uneasy bedfellows. How different is a paid search advertisement from a paid link (a practice Google does not condone for SEO) on someone’s site?

If a paid link represents trying to buy your way into natural search rankings, doesn’t a paid ad from AdWords that impacts natural search results represent something similar?

In-house search engine marketers should assess if this is occurring for their AdWords ads. If so, is it impacting their paid search program performance or the performance of their company’s natural search results?

Now that I’ve noticed the trend, I see examples more and more, but I don’t think the issue is yet at a pandemic level. The bottom line is that Google should be excluding its AdSense API, or really any advertising, from natural search results.

We’ve all been there. Heck, many of us are still there right now. We come to work every day, game to do whatever it takes to “move the needle”. You know the importance of your SEO work to your company’s bottom line, so your head is constantly down to get things done.

This often means pumping out seemingly endless emails to co-workers advising on one thing or another, asking for this or that, and offering non-requested advice on projects you heard about at the water cooler. No one doubts your desire to see SEO succeed, but maybe it’s time to stick you head up and take a look around. Time to take a breath and inject some reality into your world around where you sit.  No, I don’t mean where your office is situated – I’m talking about knowing your place in the larger ecosystem of your company’s efforts.

Have you ever had a conversation that included someone suggesting you didn’t understand the larger picture or what you were asking for wasn’t going to fly in the face of other considerations? What I’m really getting at is positioning. It’s critical to know where your SEO work stands in the larger sphere of work going on at your company.

Sure, the executive might have said “SEO is important” at some point, but in reality, such sound bites are often not strong enough to hang your tin-foil hat on. Worse, such commentary usually leads to folks ratcheting up interest on the topic, only to realize there is no magic bullet, and thus losing interest faster than a failing bank.

Which all means the need to determine where your program fits in lands solidly in your lap, like a wet salmon. Full of yummy potential, if only the right ingredients are on hand and applied in the correct fashion. It’s critical you either ask for assignation or push for it yourself. Your program might bring 7X ROI figures for low investment, but the PPC program can crow about huge Click Through Rates (CTRs) and the email program can run out conversion figures that would embarrass Billy Mays (RIP). Not to mention the banner advertising folks (no, seriously, not worth mentioning)… unless they engage in anything related to branding and stock the fridge full of cold, hard cash to ensure broad reach, long run-times and fresh ads every few weeks. Then they can have an effect.

The point here isn’t to find ways to compete with the various efforts your company might have in play either. The goal should be to understand where SEO fits in. In fact, you might be better served in ramping down any Ra-Ra-Ra about SEO and quietly working to seed SEO work into other programs, feeding off them and contributing to their successes.  Use the data from the PPC campaigns to help you zone in on keywords that convert – they get cracking on optimizing content for them, too.

Watch your email campaigns and note which calls to action produce the best results, then get cracking on backing those products with optimization goodness plucked from the verbiage of your emails. Are any of the websites those banner ads appear on driving traffic? If so, start looking at demographics from those sites and start building targeted keyword lists to get optimized content targeted at.

Now, lest you’re ready to start with the hate mail because I missed social, relax. Social is probably one of the least understood, least planned and biggest missed-opportunities areas in most companies. If your company doesn’t have a dedicated plan, create one. Sure, it might be outside your normal area of operation, but if no one else there is managing it, get in front of that thing and start ensuring the outreach your company does is headed in the right direction. There is plenty of opportunity via social to build links by engaging your audience – this alone should make it worth your while.

While you’re doing all this poking around and soul searching, take a long hard look at how you are stack ranking the work you ask others to do. Does the return on what you are asking for really outweigh other items in the queue? By taking a seriously honest look at this question, you will begin to see that many SEO-related work items just don’t stack up to enabling a new photo gallery capable of adding 10,000 page views a week and spinning more ads – will editing those ALT tags deliver the same results?

That’s the real point here – knowing your place in the company. Each time you ask someone to complete an SEO-related work item, that’s an investment of time. For sure your goal is to run SEO and run it well, but by being aware of your impact on others and by being thoughtful around where you ask for others to invest time, you not only stand to bring in positive results, you’ll find yourself getting support from the most unlikely places and programs around your company.

I was once told, “Marketing is a support function; we lead nothing.”  Guess what? SEO is a support function, we rarely ever lead.

By bringing search marketing in-house, a company has already made the determination that their SEO efforts are better managed internally than externally. Whatever the specific thought processes behind that decision, there are many realms where in-house SEO may offer an advantage over outsourcing of those same activities. In this sense, in-house SEO may be thought of as a competitive edge. And like any competitive advantage, it should be leveraged to maximize the benefits of that advantage.

This is not to say there may not be specific advantages to engaging independent contractors or using an agency, but that by thinking through and exploiting the inherent strengths of in-house SEO, you can improve the return on your in-house investment. Put another way, what can you do – or do better – that a company relying on external SEO support cannot?

SEO as an incentive

Regardless of the setting one of the biggest challenges for SEO, and in particular organic SEO, is getting all the players on board. Most SEO initiatives require both non-SEO talent and buy-in for tactical execution. Your strategy to create search-friendly URLs may be brilliant, but is not going to amount to much unless your developers also think it is a good idea, and put it on their production schedule. What’s in it for them?

Presumably, your company will benefit from increased search traffic or they would not have invested in SEO in the first place. Success in search means better profitability for the company. So by helping you, your colleagues will also be helping themselves. Bonuses may rely on company goals that search traffic can help meet. In the case of a start-up, employees have even more of a vested interest in the success or failure of efforts that are not directly under their control.

The benefits of SEO are not going to be much of an incentive for this sort of self-interested collegiality unless you very clearly demonstrate these benefits. With each success, loop back with those who helped make that success possible and provide statistical, bottom-line metrics that quantify that success.  “Thanks for your help with this project” is nice, but not quite as effective as, “thanks for your help with this project, which resulted in increased revenues of $50,000 from search engine traffic in September.”

Just a desk away

Hopefully, even without the promise of direct financial reward, your workplace fosters a spirit of camaraderie and teamwork. Building on that collegial spirit by developing close working relationships across the company is one of the most important advantages an in-house SEO program has over externally-managed search marketing, especially if that external relationship is literal, where contractors are not physically found in the office.

Again, SEO requires collective effort, and the more in which you involve your colleagues and provide feedback to them, the more motivated and effective collaborators they will become. Furthermore, by providing ongoing information, training and advice on SEO best practices, you can help bring the excitement, promise and payoff of search marketing efforts to the entire company. All things being equal, management will probably grant you more time to spend educating your colleagues than they would to a contractor or agency; if they’re enlightened, in-house SEO education is probably one of the reasons they hired you in the first place!

Search marketing aside, an in-house search program can, in itself, help build bridges that foster greater communication and teamwork in a company. There are few activities that cross over so many departmental boundaries, and one of those very specific advantages of in-house SEO is helping to globally connect the dots within an organization. More times than I can remember, a meeting or email has ended up with me introducing Jane to John’s initiative. Your media buyer may not even know where your developers sit; your server administrator may not even know you have an affiliate marketing team. You talk to them all (or you should), and one of the most important non-search services an in-house SEO can provide is putting the right stakeholders together.

Building your team, your way

If you are fortunate enough to have an SEO team, or if by reaping the fruits of your labor, you are able to start building one with the cash-flow you have generated, giving you the ability assemble a team that precisely addresses the needs of your company’s search marketing needs. You will be able to use hiring criteria that include specialist knowledge of what your company does or sells, filling gaps in your team’s abilities, or even personality. One way or another, you do not have to rely on the talent pool of a third-party provider.

Depending on the size of your company, you also may have a talent pool right at hand. By recruiting internally, you should have a much better idea of a potential SEO’s abilities and work habits than those of an external applicant.  Whatever your organization’s view on internal career moves, it will be much, much messier for a contractor or agency to bring an insider onto a company’s outsourced SEO team.

Furthermore, you may want to bring people onto your team that are not even experienced in SEO. An agency is never going to send you someone to train on the job (and a company is even more unlikely to allow that), but that may precisely be what your team needs. An individual with the right background, skills and mindset may have the potential to be an excellent SEO with your training and guidance. Good SEO help is, as they say, hard to find, and you may have better success cultivating SEOs than trying to find them.

I built a very talented team over the course of time by using these methods. In the end, the majority of my teammates came from elsewhere in the company, and the majority of them had very little or no experience in search marketing.  Yet, in a very short period of time, they were producing stellar results, and all (as far as I can determine) have remained in search marketing.

Testing the waters

Whether or not you have a team or you are the in-house team, you probably have more latitude to conduct tests than would be granted to an external contractor. Longer-term tests, particularly important for organic search optimization – can be undertaken without the risk that you will lose or no longer be able to afford the experimenter. You may also be able to test bolder hypotheses, as there will not be the same pressure to produce conclusions that are immediately actionable and profitable. Being granted the freedom to fail is one of the greatest ways to encourage innovation, and hopefully your organization understands and embraces this concept.

At the end of the day, who benefits from the knowledge derived from an elaborate and potentially expensive test?  When those tests are conducted in-house, your company and your company alone. For an agency, the lessons learned may be applied to aid any number of clients. I’m neither suggesting that agencies will share a client’s test results, nor use them to the present or future benefit of competitors, but simply that these are lessons learned in part on your dime.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of the potential advantages offered by an in-house SEO program, but only examples. And there may be specific benefits for in-house SEO related to the particular niche your organization occupies. However big or small your company, and whatever industry it falls under, it will possess some advantages in search over similar companies without in-house SEO support. To make the most of those advantages, ensure you identify and exploit them.

There’s no going back for me now, I’ve made the compulsory switch to the new AdWords interface. While I have my gripes, there are also some useful new features which can help in-house search engine marketers save time and streamline account management tasks. The real question is, do the improvements outweigh the loss of some of the original functionality?

Without a doubt, my favorite new feature is the ability to see Search Query Performance report data while viewing an AdGroup’s keywords in an account. If you click on the magical “See Search Terms” button on the Keywords tab of an AdGroup, the Search Query Performance report data appears, with flags on which keywords are in the AdGroup. There is also the ability select and add (en masse) good keyword matches or add matching queries as negative keywords. I like that Google is making this data more transparent and actionable, right there next to the keywords.

As a corollary, content targeted campaigns now have Placement Performance report data viewable within the AdGroup, again with the ability to (en masse) exclude sites or add them as a “managed placement”. A note on the nomenclature change for content campaigns: “placement targeting”: where an advertiser specifies certain sites to target is now named “managed placements” and content targeting where an advertiser specifies keywords that trigger site matches is now named “automatic placements.”

There’s an amazing irony in Google having initially removed the search functionality from the AdWords account with the new interface (it is back now, in a small way). Yes, it was painfully slow if you had a large account, but I always thought if Google could handle searching the whole Internet, an AdWords account, even a large one, should really be easy.

The new AdWords interface has filters. And for anyone complaining about missing the old slow search, I strongly suggest you spend some time with the filters. Filtering is way more powerful than the previous search functionality, not only can you filter for text (basically the same as searching, now just faster), but also for other parameters like status, click-through rate, conversion rate, and almost anything else Google is tracking. Filters are an enormous opportunity to quickly zero in on both high and low performing account elements.

If you are a big AdWords Editor user, some changes are less exciting as they represent a move to present more AdWords Editor functionality in the online AdWords interface. Two features that I theoretically love, but never use, are the option to edit in a spreadsheet or download, both now available by clicking on the “More Actions” button, available at most levels of the account structure. I like that the functionality is there, and I am sure some search engine marketers must find it useful, but given that I use AdWords Editor quite a bit, I tend to just use it for spreadsheet size changes and account exports.

Users of Google Analytics will appreciate the new graphing feature as the functionality is very similar to Analytics graphs, though I admit I hide them most of the time as I’d rather see the numbers. Other tools have migrated to the Opportunities tab, which also contains a new “Ideas” feature. Ideas reports on potential keywords you may want to add to your AdGroups, with the ability to directly save to the AdGroup or to a pending changes file.

The suggestions and pending changes are both downloadable for review in a spreadsheet. So far I have found the Ideas to be prolific and several are good suggestions, though definitely not all. There is the ability to mark each suggestion as a good fit or not, hopefully the tool learns over time to improve suggestions. The new Keyword Tool beta, which combines the Search-based Keyword Tool with the traditional Keyword Tool is also linked from the Opportunities tab.

I am sure initially I missed some of the old AdWords features because I was used to them, and once I adjusted to the new interface I’d see the reason in their demise. This is true of filters largely replacing search, but I can’t say the same for many features I miss. For example, there is now a limit of 100 rows per page, so only 100 AdGroups or ads or keywords are viewable on a single page. I hate having to navigate through pages and would gladly trade viewing everything for whatever possible loading speed gain was generated (currently not an option). In the same vein, I miss the one page view for an AdGroup, no longer can you view the keywords and ads all on one page.

While I am sure some search engine marketers like the ability to make inline changes, I find it annoying and would love the option to turn it off. Accidental clicks to edit versus clicks on the navigational link happen all too often for me, and I don’t find the inline editing all that more useful than the previous editing functionality. Also the buttons next to account elements to pause or enable are nice, but why is delete only available on the top menu and not as an option in the button?

My last pet peeve is the altered navigation paths. From the Ads tab of an AdGroup – if you click on the link back to the Campaign level, you are still on the Ads tab, but now ads for the entire campaign display, it actually takes multiple clicks to get back to the home screen to view all campaigns, or even all AdGroups in a campaign due to the persistent tab feature. I recognize that it could be useful to see all ads for a campaign, but the navigation to do that could be built to not interfere with basic account navigation. After looking at an ad or keywords, often I’d like to go look at something else in another campaign, and with no one click to get back to the campaign list, that takes a lot more clicks than it used to.

We’ve only just begun to delve into all the practical applications of the new AdWords interface features, for more information, short, helpful videos and a guide to the new versus old interface functions, visit Google’s new AdWords interface microsite. The site is a great resource for getting up to speed on the functionality changes and answers many questions for search engine marketers.

The most important asset for an in-house SEO is the collective talent of the people that plan, produce and maintain a company’s website. The better informed these individuals are about search engine optimization strategies and tactics, the better your chance of search engine success. Company-wide SEO education is, in fact, one of the key benefits of an in-house SEO program that you can (and should) be leveraging for competitive advantage.

Logistical problems with execution notwithstanding, it is easy enough to delegate specific SEO-related tasks to the appropriate individuals in your organization. However, if you never get beyond the “what” of SEO to the “why” your colleagues (through no fault of their own), they will never become proactive partners in your optimization efforts. The better they understand, and can observe the benefits of their efforts, the better the chance that they will incorporate SEO considerations into their daily routines and website planning.

SEO 101: communicating the basics

SEO is all about using the <meta> keywords tag successfully, right? Augmented, of course, by some clever white-one-white footer text and a few links you’ve put in blog comments. Such misconceptions are extremely common among those previously unexposed to SEO; and you will even find a surprising number of front-line web workers that have never even heard of the acronym. Accordingly, your first educational efforts should be basic ones.

When you first take the reins of an in-house SEO program, put together a brief presentation on the fundamentals of SEO, using examples from your website and industry space. Keep it simple and non-technical, focusing chiefly on the importance of site architecture, content and links in search engine rankings. Work with management to ensure that anybody involved in the website is exposed to your talk.  If your company has an employee orientation program, make sure you have the opportunity to present to new employees.

The recipients of your wisdom may or may not retain the principles you outline in your introductory presentation, but conveying these principles is actually a secondary goal. Your primary objective at this stage is to impress upon your colleagues that SEO is a process in which they play a role. I always include a slide (even as a one-man show) entitled “meet your SEO team,” followed by a list of representative employees (or job titles), with an accompanying one-liner on how each activity impacts search marketing efforts.

Specialist SEO education

Different teams have different roles to play in your SEO efforts, and once you have given everyone in the company some baseline information, you need to follow up with information tailored to specific groups.  Again, actual seminars or training classes are an obviously efficient way of educating a number of people in the same or similar roles. The groups with whom you should engage may include, but are not limited to:

• IT. Things such as server environment, hosting and domain management all obviously impact SEO. Providing technologists with information on how the back end impacts ranking will not only avoid unpleasant errors, but get the IT team thinking of SEO-friendly solutions to development and migration tasks. Bring extra-caffeinated cola.

• Programmers and coders. Once you walk these folks through the ins and outs of canonicalization, you’ll find fewer 302s you need changed to 301s, and find fewer parameters appended to URLs – to name just two code-related issues of importance to SEO.  Bring donuts.

• Designers. Just providing the factual observation that SEO and design requirements are not mutually exclusive will get you off to a great start here. Letting your designers know how the search engines index and assign relevancy to pages will inevitably result in better designs for SEO.  Bring chocolate.

• Writers. Whether or not you walk them through twenty semantically-related ranking factors, or spend an entire hour talking about blog post titles, you’ll always benefit from broadening writers’ SEO knowledge. Training sessions aside, this is also one of the groups with whom you will also want to communicate most closely with on an ongoing basis, and even train in the use of your keyword tools. Bring bourbon.

• Marketing. More than you probably realize, your cousins in marketing are a potentially important source of backlinks. But they’ll never know the importance of relevant, direct links with helpful anchor text unless you tell them. Bring flowers.

Depending on the size of your shop, some of these roles might either be combined or further segmented, and you should adjust your strategy accordingly. In any case, your educational efforts do not end with the conclusion of your last class; equally, if not more important is sharing new knowledge on an ongoing basis with your colleagues.

In-house information sharing

As search engine features and ranking factors change continually, you must provide information on these changes to your collaborators as you encounter them. Dropping by somebody’s desk and chatting is encouraged, but there are more efficient ways of imparting lessons from the search world, particularly in larger organizations.

• Internal blog. An excellent way of sharing search marketing information is through an internal blog. It does not have the formatting limitations of email, or its shelf life. It also serves as a permanent repository for the links you are passing along, and if you have the bandwidth, you can also build out SEO reference resources like keyword lists.

• Email. While not as sexy as an internal SEO blog, email is still the most effective communication weapon in your arsenal. Even if you have a blog, you will want to broadcast the URLs of articles as you post them, as it is unlikely your whole audience will subscribe to the blog’s feed.

• Cross-departmental meetings. If your company hosts these, be there. While you may not be engaging with front-line web workers here, it is still a way of passing on knowledge to the correct teams.

Tying lessons to results

In order to truly gain allies in your search marketing efforts, it is important that you highlight positive results observed as a result of your colleagues’ work. On the one hand this is (of course) positive reinforcement, but it also helps teach them (and you) how theoretical SEO knowledge translates into real-life results.

Liberally and shamelessly employ a well-known email marketing technique in conveying results, namely the use of a “PS” in an email that contains a nugget of important information.  “PS – As a result of these improvements we’ve seen a 120% increase in search traffic to this page, and an additional $40K in revenue generated from them.”  Even the most jaded skimmer of email will take notice.

The payoff

SEO is still regarded as a mysterious and opaque practice by most people, even those in closely-related web disciplines. The better educated your coworkers, the less intimidated they will feel participating in SEO work, and, of course, the better their work will be from an SEO perspective.

While companies often outsource their SEO strategy and specialist tasks, they will rarely invest in dedicated, let along ongoing, SEO education for their employees. The training and insights you provide to you colleagues will not only result in better support for your search marketing efforts, but can give your company a competitive advantage in the search realm.

The goal here today is not to cover every single point in an internal SEO plan, but to provide you a reasonable framework to work from. Using these points and fine tuning to your unique situation, will help you create a detailed plan which will be successful.

Domain expertise

No program will function without domain expertise. There, I said it. You need the talent. You cannot trust this to outsourcing. Allowing the entire SEO program for your online business to rest in the hands of a third party is akin to hitching a ride home from the party when you don’t know who the driver is and if they are drunk or sober. Sure, there are some obvious cues you can watch for, but in the end, is this a risk you are willing to run? The stakes are a bit high for my taste.

If you do nothing else internally, ensure the domain expertise around SEO resides in your organization.  This will allow you to ensure all downstream items reach the correct levels to meet your own corporate goals. While you might hire an agency to do the work, and they have a contract to meet – even with specific goals – the agency’s first loyalty is to its own existence. Being profitable ensures continual existence. Thus, it’s clear their first goals will be to maximize their profits.

Lest the agency world feel like ripping off hate mail to me, calm down. This is not meant to imply that agencies don’t care about their clients. Today, I think, most established agencies do genuinely care. They simply need to keep in mind the reality that they, too, run a business. For your own plans, this means their focus is often split. An internal group’s focus in on one thing – the company’s goals above all else.

Having internal domain expertise also ensures any work suggested by an agency passes the smoke test.  Some agencies simply recycle work (or common items) between jobs. Internal expertise can keep on top of changes and trends to ensure the work suggested is realistic. And if all that aren’t reason enough to develop this expertise internally, consider that someone will at least need to manage the agency relationship, and that someone better be able to speak the language the agency uses, or your money is lost.

SEO integration plan

Consider the last time you had a truly blank slate to work from. A clearly defined plan was easy to come by back in those days, right? From theory to execution, you could map each step of the plan, integrate all facets cleanly and from there, you simply build to plan.

Now think of your daily slog. Optimization requires resources. Resources require justification. “How much is the ROI if we implement the H1 tags?” While tools exist today to help you track such minute details, it’s doubtful many actually are.

With more teams tasked with bringing optimization best practices to an already-existing product, it’s critical to have a well thought out integration plan. There will always be a level of pain, but minimizing this pain is in everyone’s best interest. If you take the time to carefully plan and explain the work items and their expected impacts, you can more easily sell the plan. Be ready to slice and dice to fit other requirements and plans, but if you show up with a plan, you’ll be taken seriously. Remember, this is an “integration” plan, not an “seo at all cost” plan. Know your place, plan the work, work the audience, drive for results.

Metrics

Speaking of results, what are you tracking today? Given the advances in our ability to deeply track pretty much anything around search optimization (or any other discipline), there is no reason at all to skip this.  Don’t be content with toeing the company line on baseline metrics, either. Sure, the company is really only concerned about conversions. Great KPI. Vital, even.

Just keep in mind that other things should matter such as time on site, pages consumed, internal path mapping, cross-overs with other disciplines (think paid search conversion data & keyword research) and so on. Internal to your own program, you should be concerned with many factors which will help you build the entire picture of the ecosystem you live in. While you may not share this data outside your own group, it’s vital to your ability to make the right decisions. Metrics matter; dig deep.

Optimization tactics

I’m not going to cover this in detail. This is the SEO 101, 201 and 301 stuff. Sure, you’ve got the plan down to cover the basic on page items, but how have you integrated social media into the equation? Do you have a defined internal link building strategy? Is your business development group on board and signing contracts that help, rather than hinder, further success around SEO? Do your content creators understand how to integrate keyword research into the content planning cycle?

If you start looking around, you’ll quickly discover there are very few areas in today’s business environment that do not influence SEO in some manner. Make a list specific to your situation and start filling in the groups with actual names. Ensure those people are in on the key conversations and that they sign off on and support your efforts within their own groups.

Editorial

Repeat this with me:  A website is not a newspaper.

How users consume online is very different compared to how they consume content in printed formats.  Too many times businesses try to adhere to outdated methods and practices when creating content. You should have editorial guidelines, don’t get me wrong. These guidelines help form the basis of many products online, thus impacting credibility. But be careful to update them and review these guidelines frequently.

You might discover new problems and issues to tackle. For example, how does the world of 140 character limits work with grammatically correct best practices?

Make sure you ask these questions and come to some level of agreement around an answer. I’m not suggesting you’ll reach a consensus here, but you’ll at least have the right folks talking about the right things. After that, well, that’s what the Executives are there for – to help settle the big questions.

CMS – Content Management System

Get this right or go home. Well, not quite. You can be successful with a less-than-optimized CMS, but having a well executed, search friendly CMS will help form the basis of your program. Having a usable system enables all kinds of upstream benefits to exist. Content creation and management becomes easier.  When needed, redirects can be easily implemented, preserving past value.

While most off-the-shelf CMS have limits, there are some good starting points to work from. Wordpress might not scale for some. Windows vs. Linux is another question. Regardless, be sure when the time comes to purchase, modify or upgrade a CMS, you have a seat at the table. Your input doesn’t need to solve every problem, but you should lend guidance around what the final product should look like. The final website, that is. By clearly defining the scenarios, you enable your CMS team to build or modify in the right direction.

Templates, rich media and more

Now we’re getting to the nuts and bolts of things. Making sure your templates are properly optimized – or individual pages if you operate at that level – is critical to checking of the SEO 101 items. Titles, descriptions, keywords, H-tags, alt-tags, content placement, navigational elements and more need to be accounted for. Create the check list with best practices and have the designers/developers confirm each item is accounted for. Then go check it yourself. This does not mean you don’t trust your teammates, but their job isn’t SEO, yours is.

When using rich media, be thoughtful. Keep it well integrated, but keep the best content out of the rich elements. Follow the usual best practices and don’t fall into the trap of trying to make things too slick. A good user experience isn’t just about movies and video. A good UI takes into consideration more than the latest whiz-bang, slick-looking interfaces. There is a place for this experience, but it’s not as a content wrapper.

Cover the other usual suspects like sitemaps and robots.txt management as well. Don’t take these for granted or it’ll bite you hard in the future.

If you create an roadmap based on these 7 items, you’ll cover most of the ground needed to build and implement a sound SEO strategy.

In a large organization there is always pressure to automate certain functions. Can people spend less time on mundane tasks or remove them from human hands all together? Often, organizations take for granted that automation is always better in terms of accuracy and efficiency. There’s plenty of room for automation in search engine marketing, but don’t be tempted by bid management. For almost all organizations, good old fashioned people (armed with Excel) are still the best bid management solution.

The benefits of implementing an automated bid management solution are unlikely to be large, but the costs for bid management services are still substantial. Typical bid management solution pricing is a fixed fee and/or percent of paid search spend, which is a substantial cost for any organization that has a large enough paid search account to consider bid management services.

Will a bid management solution drive several thousand dollars of incremental performance or time savings each month? The search engine marketing manager will still need to monitor and tweak the bid management, so the human time savings is arguably small. And, if a vendor is being paid based on percent of search spend, are they really incentivized to bring overspending down? It is never comfortable when vendor and client goals are misaligned.

Efficiency vs. Quality Score

If an in-house paid search program is already in the hands of a competent search engine marketer, it is likely that optimal bids are being determined to a fairly efficient degree. The main benefit of a bid management system is in increasing the frequency of bid changes. In a fairly stable, yet competitive bidding environment, the benefits of increasing frequency are modest. What would be the incremental cost saved or revenue gained from changing a bid earlier than the in-house search marketing manager would have?

Even in a more volatile environment where there are many active bidders jockeying for position, Quality Score can be a more significant factor in determining position than bid and is (currently) something that bid management systems offer almost no help in improving. Increasing  resources to improve Quality Score is likely a far better investment than bid management.

Besides likely failing the basic cost-benefit analysis, bid management solutions are often overly simplistic for many organizations. Many bid management solutions rely on setting a cost per acquisition or transaction goal to optimize bids, but rarely does a business have a universal revenue per transaction goal. Most businesses sell a variety of products at different price points and bids should reflect the actual revenue (or margin revenue) being driven by paid search marketing. Even better would be the ability to set a goal to maximize profit, revenue (or margin revenue) minus the search engine marketing expense. Using an average CPA or other contrived metric for bid management undermines the efficiency gains bid management is supposed to provide.

Reasoning for seasonality

Additionally, bid management systems are, by nature, reactive and not proactive. Many in-house marketers work in seasonal industries, where recent past data is not always a good indicator of future performance. A florist knows that bids need to be higher in the days up to Valentine’s Day, though the last two weeks of January likely showed dismal pay-per-click campaign performance. Search engine marketers in travel and retail have well defined high seasons where proactively setting higher or lower bids can lead to incremental performance gains as the season kicks off or slows down.

Bid management systems are always behind these seasonal trends as they wait for enough data to inform the bidding decision. Sometimes a human’s industry knowledge and experience is a distinct bidding advantage. Often in these situations, manual bid adjustments are entered to override the automated bidding, which negates the time savings benefit of bid management.

The temptation for a busy in-house search engine marketer to adopt an automated bid management solution, especially under management pressure, can be great. But no in-house marketer does their company any favors by ignoring the true cost-benefit analysis of implementing a bid management solution. For most in-house search marketers, bid management technology needs to advance in sophistication before real benefits can be truly realized.

As an in-house SEO, where does the legitimate scope of your activities end, and those of somebody else begin? Are you being a useful and valid contributor, or simply poking your nose in where it doesn’t belong?  What is rightfully within your scope may surprise you.  Successful search engine marketing requires you to collaborate with individuals in diverse roles, and embracing these collaborative opportunities enables you to contribute in numerous ways to the success of your company’s web-based initiatives.

At a fundamental level, you need to engage with a wide variety of people to ensure that a website’s operations, architecture, navigation, design, content and promotion support your search marketing efforts.  At another level, those varied interactions, in conjunction with your search expertise, can help improve general website performance, sales and more. As the examples below show, search considerations can make an impact well beyond the requirements of SEO itself.

Site architecture

Search engines value well-structured websites with sensible and consistent navigation schemes. As websites, sections or individual web pages are planned, you will need to work with your information architecture and design teams to ensure what’s produced will support organic search rankings. Internal linking structure, folder and file naming conventions, and page-level architecture all impact your chances of SEO success.

These SEO requirements may, in turn, help improve the general user experience. A site with an inconsistent navigation structure will confuse a human visitor every bit as much – if not more – than it will confuse search crawlers. Just as a search engine robot will reach an indexing impasse when it  encounters an orphan page (a page without links to a parent page), a user is also more likely to leave a site when you have pulled up all the ladders. Make sure you have the opportunity to weigh in on these issues.

One perspective you will be able to bring consistently to design considerations is how a site works for lateral traffic. To a surprising degree, much site planning is predicated on top-down navigation, which assumes a user will enter a conversion pathway via the home (or another) page and obediently follow the required click-path. In search, one hopes to return the most relevant page for a query in the search engines results, increasing the chances of a click-through and preventing attrition by requiring multiple clicks. Does this page stand on its own, or does it require an upper-level page for context? Are the calls-to-action sensible if this page is accessed directly? Simply posing these questions can help improve usability.

Marketing campaigns

Even in the absence of paid search traffic, there will always be intersections between SEO and specific marketing campaigns. When a marketing campaign will be rolling out that includes television, radio or print advertising components, you need to be a part of the planning to ensure that there is a target landing page that is optimized and indexed for search terms related to that campaign’s name or primary concepts.

As with most search-related issues, early involvement in marketing campaigns is key, even at the conceptual level. If, for example, your company is promoting a contest in TV or in print, throngs of users will ignore the call-to-action URL and search for the contest by name, brand, key concepts, or a combination of the above.  A campaign concept that works well for search should be short, memorable and unique – which are obviously general attributes of successful promotions as well.

At the very earliest stage in campaign planning, keyword research can help provide ideas about words that might resonate with your target audience for a particular promotion. Whether from existing search traffic to your website or from keyword research related to your company’s field, search provides a unfiltered window on how users perceive your brand and the commercial space it occupies. Do not hesitate to share these insights to improve more “traditional” marketing activities.

Landing pages

Landing pages are usually tied to marketing campaigns and, like the campaigns they are associated with, you need to be aware of their existence and their performance, even if they were not designed with pay-per-click (PPC) advertising in mind. Indeed, one of the first questions to ask is if any given landing page could serve as a search advertising target, even if that was not its intended purpose.

For exclusive web-based campaigns – say a promotion limited to visits from a partner site – you need to control the how target pages are indexed or excluded from indexing. It will be a little less exclusive of a campaign if the target landing page begins appearing in the organic search results for relevant keywords.

For campaigns that include indexed pages, what is its lifespan? When will the promotion expire? When it does, what will be done with those landing pages? In another example of top-down navigation bias, it is remarkable how many people believe that removing a link to a page ends its existence:  a defunct landing page should be redirected in order to preserve the value of links to that page. If you are unaware of its existence, or blindly rely on others to handle a promotion life cycle correctly, the page could simply end up deleted, and your link equity will evaporate.

Stay on top of landing page performance too, even in the absence of a paid search component. Knowing what works and what doesn’t for landing pages will be invaluable in designing your own (just as banner campaign metrics may aid in paid keyword selection). You may even discover (and this happens more frequently than it should) that those running these campaigns may not be collecting the proper metrics, are not availing themselves of opportunities for testing, or have overlooked some other critical aspect of campaign delivery or measurement. On these occasions you can help improve the general effectiveness of marketing efforts in your organization by weighing in with your experience and expertise.

Merchandising

What can search marketing contribute to merchandising? Isn’t it the job of a search marketer to ensure that users can find your company’s goods and services once they’ve already been selected and put in a (virtual) store window? This last example might seem well beyond the realm of SEO, but again the usefulness of keyword research can extend past pure search-related activities.

Keyword research can provide valuable information on trends relevant to your company. What sort of product-related queries are on the rise? What sort of searches are you seeing fall off, even though your rankings for those queries remains high? Keyword data can help merchandisers get a jump on emerging consumer interests, as well as signaling where interest is faltering. Something as simple as Google Insights for Search and your own search logs can help augment financial metrics and market research for those making merchandising decisions.

Are you even calling your products the right thing? Of course you will have a much easier time optimizing pages for keywords that actually appear there, but at a broader level – you’ll also have better sales success if your products are semantically framed in a way that users understand and expect. A potential customer might hit the back button when confronted with a tub of crushed groundnut, but actually pull out the credit card for a jar of peanut butter.

Merchandising, along with the other areas discussed above, are just examples of the type of web activities in which an in-house SEO should get involved. However regimented or compartmentalized a company’s structure, your SEO efforts will bear the most fruit if you take an expansive view of where you should get involved. And more often than not your involvement will reap benefits that extend past the limited goals of search engine optimization.

It’s no secret that SEO is but one tactic which can be used to drive traffic to your site.  Anyone who has managed SEO and paid search campaigns can easily point out the advantages of both.  The trick, in larger companies, is to ensure they exist side by side.  Too many times these core traffic driving programs are split up and managed by different groups.  Because SEO tends to have a technical flavor, and PPC tends to deal in larger volumes of dollars, more often than not SEO resides in the engineering or operations side of the house, while paid search sits firmly in marketing.

Short of going to war with management and getting this changed, how can you create synergies between the groups?  How do you use the information one search marketing team gathers to help the other?

Paid helping organic

Paid search lives in a world of intense tracking.  Not a single cent is spent without knowing the exact ROI brought back by that penny.  Should a campaign slip below a desired limit, it is swiftly sent to the gallows.  This intense trackability can provide direct benefits in the world of organic search. 

Because paid search lives in a world where each transaction is monitored, landing pages (and more importantly, the language and messaging on the pages) is constantly refined; the organic side can quickly learn what type of content converts.  The conversion can vary, but if you have a paid campaign driving traffic to dedicated, refined landing pages, and that traffic is converting, start capturing this data.  It tracks back to keywords.  Use these keywords to cross reference with your organic lists to see if you are missing areas for exposure.  In many cases there will be overlap, the differences in conversion typically being due to where in the “conversion funnel” a user is at the time they search & find you.  Regardless, this data holds clues to what some of those users are taking action on.  By targeting them in your SEO efforts, alongside your paid campaigns, you effectively increase your exposure footprint.

Organic helping paid

Paid search has evolved to such a level where dedicated landing pages for individual ads are pretty much the defacto state of the union.  These pages are highly refined to be laser-focused, using very specific calls to action to elicit the desired purchase or transaction.  Too many times companies set aside millions for monthly PPC ad spend, only to be left penniless when it comes time to designing dedicated landing pages.  There is a hard cost in terms of time to develop and tweak these pages.  In larger companies, the resources to manage these page-level changes don’t often reside in the group spending the money and managing the campaigns, so they need to collaborate cross-group.

In the world of organic search, we live and breathe topical relevance.  There’s an opportunity here to blend your organic page content with a dedicated call to action.  By integrating the messaging, a single page can do double duty for both organic rankings, and as a landing page.

Both sides of the search equation require pages that are highly relevant and focused on targeted keywords. You can take advantage of this requirement to guide your content development.  In other words, you can create economies of scale by developing content that satisfies the needs of both your organic and paid search campaigns. And in this economy, that’s a message that resonates at the C-level.  While this focus may not be possible for everyone, nor applicable in every instance, many companies find that it works well.  By combining stats and looking through the data from both sides of the coin, you’ll uncover nuggets of value.  As with everything search, test, refine, test, refine.  By taking a holistic approach that combines your paid and organic search development, you’ll uncover the phrases unique to your site, product or service that resonate not only with those searching for information, but for those seeking to make a transaction happen.  Regardless of where a user is in their “conversion funnel,” you’ll have, and be showing, what they want.

If you do have a split search marketing program, this might be the first step in making the case that development efforts should be combined.  With today’s budgets shrinking, resources being harder to come by and a general feeling of needing more from less, looking for ways to streamline costs and find efficiencies is what makes heroes.

I recently encountered this tweet from Aidan Beanland, a Regional SEO Manager at Yahoo!:

When the SEO manager is the last to know about a new site section that’s already live –> big fat FAIL.

This is, unfortunately, such a common occurrence for SEO managers that it should have a name:  the Big Surprise (conveniently abbreviated as “BS”).  The new site section nobody thought to tell you about.  URLs nobody thought to redirect when file naming conventions were changed.  The “top secret” regional domain that materialized out of nowhere, providing Google with a neat duplicate of your site.

While it is unlikely that you will never encounter a Big Surprise when surfing your site, there are a number of steps you can take to reduce such incidents from occurring.  And when you are blindsided by a significant change to a website that undermines your SEO efforts, your response can both help avoid repeat performances and win allies for your cause.

BS risk reduction

The first step in avoiding unpleasant SEO surprises is early engagement with key stakeholders in your organization.  This engagement needs to be highly structured for, until you provide specifics, decision makers are unlikely to know which of their activities impact SEO and which do not.  Especially as in-house SEO efforts are getting underway, your colleagues are unlikely to know much about how SEO works, and part of your job is to instruct them.

So when you first approach managers, team leads or other decision-makers in each area that affects SEO, let them know exactly what issues they need to consult you about.  Keep this list succinct, especially to begin with:  it is better to have someone fully aware of five things critical for SEO than twenty-five things they will never remember.

The list of SEO-related issues you raise with each person will vary by department or area of responsibility; tailor your alert list accordingly, as per the examples below.

IT and server management:

• Changes to existing URLs, including removal or addition of parameters
• Any change in the domain environment, including domain acquisitions

Information architecture, usability and design:

• Changes to global navigation or bread crumbs
• Changes to display technology (e.g., modifications that employ Flash, Ajax or JavaScript)
• Addition, deletion or redirection of pages

Marketing and merchandising:

• Marketing or social media efforts that result in new spiderable content (especially when these are created on other networks that may not be on your radar)
• Changes to affiliate program tracking or content delivery
• Substantive changes to product lines being offered on an e-commerce site

Both for future reference and to drive the point home, follow up your meet-and-greet with a friendly but focused email, with bullet points just like the ones above.  This also gives you the opportunity to copy others in the same group (the more eyes that are open on your behalf, the merrier).  Rinse and repeat when new people – particularly managers and directors – join the company.

Corporate secrecy and the BS it can cause

I once approached a huddle composed of the Art Director and a bunch of designers.  “Nothing for you to see here, Bradley, this has no relation to SEO!”  Suitably chastened, I walked away.  Sure enough, a few days later came the Big Surprise:  an April Fools’ micro-site backing an outrageous “rumor” intended to go viral and cause a surge in traffic.  Yep, a big heap of inbound links – no relation to SEO, of course.

In the course of your discussions, let senior strategists know that your discretion can be assured.  You understand that, for a variety of reasons, foreknowledge of certain web-related initiatives needs to be restricted to key stakeholders – and that you are one of them.

Responding to the BS: one (but only one) free pass

It is Tuesday morning when, deep in the throes of keyword analysis, you receive a company-wide email from the CEO congratulating everyone on the new blog that has just been launched.  The one you have never seen before.  The Big Surprise.

Obviously, the first steps you need to take are remedial:  doing what you can to repair any damage that has occurred, or quickly capitalizing on any SEO benefits from a potentially lost opportunity.  Once any fires have been extinguished, turn your efforts towards preventing a repeat performance.

Do not panic, and do not let your ire get the best of you.  Keep in mind that the Big Surprise is almost never malevolent, and respond accordingly.  Unless your organization is populated by psychopaths intent on undermining your optimization efforts, any damage they have done to SEO is born of ignorance, not intent.

Put together a reasoned response, and amass any analytics data that demonstrates the impact of the Big Surprise on the company’s performance in search and, if at all possible, on the bottom line.  When you debrief those responsible on the consequences of their actions, keep the focus on lessons learned from the incident.  Provide one or more updates with more metrics.  By making your point civilly and backing it up with relevant numbers, your underlying message will not require spelling out:  don’t let it happen again.

If it does happen again, and you’ve taken both the proactive and reactive steps I’ve outlined, then you can reasonably expect to hold those responsible accountable.  Demanding that accountability is important, unless you want to see your SEO continually derailed by carelessness.  Typically, SEO efforts must be given visibility by its practitioners.  If an e-commerce website goes down for a day heads roll; if a site loses 1,000 inbound links because of URL rewrites, it may only illicit a shrug without a demonstration of why those lost links matter.

The good news: the BS diminishes over time

By continually educating key people in your organization about SEO, and by responding appropriately to SEO mishaps, you should see fewer and fewer Big Surprises in your future.  In the best of all possible worlds, you’ll be included in strategic decision-making processes, further diminishing the chance of tactical mistakes being made.  There will always be SEO-related issues on a website that have been overlooked, but they need not be a “big, fat FAIL.”