Using a lean approach to hack your SERPs
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How to get your SEO ideas out of the backlog and onto the site, helping to make an impact on your organic growth rates. Visit https://medium.com/@skyscanner for more growth tips and https://www.skyscanner.net/mobile.html for a working example of our product in motion.
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Using a lean approach to hack your SERPs
- 1. Sam Auchterlonie Skyscanner How to hack your SERPs using a lean approach
- 4. We are never short on ideas
- 5. But most never make it past the idea stage
- 7. Speak the language of the business
- 9. Think Lean
- 10. How can we learn more quickly what works, and discard what doesn’t?
- 11. Find the shortest path to validate ideas with experimentation
- 14. “if you are not embarrassed with v1. of your work – means you have waited too long” Eric Ries
- 16. Hack your way through
- 18. A landing page is not always the answer
- 20. Create your MVP and iterate on it. Meet your goal, then roll out!
- 21. Think lean, start small
- 24. People don’t always know how to get to the party!
- 26. Find the shortest path to validate ideas with experimentation
- 28. Doing nothing is painful, not learning can be fatal
- 30. Thank You
- 31. Learn with Skyscanner • Follow Skyscanner @SkyscannerGrwth on Twitter • Sign up for our Skyscanner Growth newsletter for learnings from our successes and failures and to hear about our latest job vacancies
Editor's Notes
- Today I will be talking to you about “how to hack your SERPs using a lean approach”, Based on my Cough**9 yr** Cough experience in working in SEO, I believe that whilst I am looking out at a VERY big room, full of people with backgrounds in SEO at all levels, content, paid search, social, from both in-house and agencies we all have a lot in common… and its these that make be believe that this approach will help you get stuff done and make impact to your SERPs. The common traits as I see them are….
- We are all very passionate about driving growth, whether that be for our sites, or those of our clients,
- We all have a vested interest in Google and wanting to grow our organic visibility,
- And to do this, I can almost guarantee than none of us are short of ideas on how to do this – every SEO I meet has a huge backlog of things they would like to do and strongly believes will make impact,
- However, for most of us these ideas hit some sort of blocker….whether it be due to getting buy in from clients, or engineering support internally And this causes a lot of frustration, which I believe being LEAN can solve, so… Here are my top tips….
- Here are my top tips….
- Know the one core metric for the company, if you can build your ideas around enhancing this number primarily you are more likely to see success in selling this into them. Understanding the companies vision and goals will also help you do this. There is no point in you speaking about enhancing organic visibility when internally the goal is enquires – you need to make sure you sell your idea on how it too impacts enquiries.
- Similarly it is likely the development team are also being swamped with requests for support, your ideas will just be added to one of possibly thousands. Showing potential impact to the companies core metric will help them to prioritise – especially if you have already proven your idea to work….
- And to be able to prove this impact you have to think lean… You also want to be thinking lean about the size of work you ask for from your developers – is every feature on your page necessary to make the impact to the core metric, or just nice to have. Lots of nice to haves and make for a lot of additional work! So what do we mean by lean… Well…it is essentially a methodology for improving cycle times and quality through the elimination of waste, or put in more simple terms…
- Understanding how we can learn more quickly what works and discard what doesn’t? Ensuring that we only focus on what makes an impact and stop working on all of the nice to have’s….
- The other core message about lean is how fast you can get to the learning. We want to be doing the very smallest amount of work to understand if something will have positive impact or not, and the best way to do this is to create your very smallest of experiments – just enough to validate if your theory is correct and to measure the impact…whether than be through metrics or user feedback.
- And the most simple model to use to do this is the “build, measure, learn approach”. Here you will be constantly going through this cycle and pivoting frequently based upon your learnings. It is possible you may need to go through the cycle 6 or 7 times to get to a final answer however the learnings you have gathered in that time are valuable as it means you wont need to experiment on that again and you will be able to justify all your decisions with metrics that are meaningful to the business.
- On the slide you can see one example of Lean in practice. Here the goal was not to make a car, but to create something that helped people get from A – B. Therefore in the top example they had the initial idea from the start that they would build a car, whilst they iterated on this it was not until the final product was realised it bring any useful feedback or add any value to the end user. Whereas in the example below, they started with the smallest and easiest method to satisfy the user needs with a skateboard. Whilst it satisfied the user needs they received feedback and developed this further until they created the car – but this time the user was happy throughout the process.
- It is however vital to remember, “If you are not embarrassed with v1. of your work, it means you have waited too long to test it and gather feedback”
- For example do you think Rand at Moz.com was happy with some of his first attempts of Whiteboard Friday….. - the P.S comment at the end stating how bad they know the quality is and the comments Rand had to feedback on showing how he had to continue to pivot his strategy until these days when I am pretty certain his volume of viewers have increased 10 or even 100 fold!
- So, my main recommendation for you is to apply these methods to ALL your SEO activity, to turn your ideas into products and hack your way through the wall.
- Here are some examples of what I mean: You work on a travel website….and you want to inspire people to travel, to help them dream and decide they want to visit places they have never heard of before. You know people search for things like: Flights for under £100 Where to go in June Then they go onto dig a little deeper, do they want to go to these places, i.e What to do in X What to see in Where to eat How much does it cost to X Previously you would create a project that would allow you to develop all these pages, for every destination – but that’s not very lean, and we have not learnt what does or doesn’t work to get us the visibility in SERP but also meets our users needs. So what do we do….
- First pick 1 destination. Review your current pages about that destination. Do you already have somewhere that is highly relevant and has some authority on the destination/topic? If so then ask yourself, do you need a new page? Can we maximise upon our current authority and expand our coverage on keywords by only adding to the page. Sometimes adding well structure content to a page is enough to get you ranking, it may then meet your users informational need and then their future needs for undertaking a transaction without the worry of them having to leave the page/site to do so. If you think it’s a possibility (even if small) that it could work – test it. Hack the content in via your CMS it wont look pretty – but see how Google responds to it or how your users do. Remember that one core business metric – how is that impacted?
- So what happens if that doesn’t work – you pivot. You have learnt something with very little effort – and if it had worked you could easily automate and roll that out. However if it hasn’t you now must go back to the build stage. Maybe you do need a new landing page.
- Do you competitor research, find out what other companies are doing to rank for these queries and ask yourself what is the very minimum you would need to do to rank for this term based on your research. Put all the nice to haves and beautiful images to a side for now – I agree they are important but not yet. Create your MVP for the page. Then watch its performance, iterate on it if needed to, until you have found a solution that meets your business needs – you can justify every element on it, it gives you the visibility on SERP you need and then approach your developer with it. Show them your results and how you believe it will make impact to the common business goal. You will be surprised how much easier it is to get them to help you on projects if you have been able to validate and get real results.
- But in true fashion you can even start smaller than this, and still make impact on the SERP, drive users to your site and achieve your companies goal! Here are a couple of examples from my own activity, early in my lean approach days…..
- We all know that if you can enhance your listing on the SERP page, it should make your ad stand out and help improve your CTR. Therefore thinking lean we added into the main body of the text some rating information – albeit static, small and ugly (as I think you can agree), however it took us only 1 minute to implement through the CMS so no technical support was required at this stage.
- This 1 minutes work, worked for us and very quickly we saw google picking this up as star ratings and as a result improve our CTR on that listing by around 10%. We then got this implemented globally, by our engineers to be automated and way more attractive on our page within the week.
- My second example of where the lean approach helped us at Skyscanner to hack at the SERPs, came from an understanding that people just don’t know how to get to the party. And what do I mean by this… well we see a lot of people on our site searching for destinations where there is not an airport, for example Marbella, Benidorm or even Ayia Napa. We believed that if we could target people like this on the SERPs we could help drive more new users to the site. Knowing if it worked we would want to roll it out and automate it we kept it small and simple
- Knowing if it worked we would want to roll it out and automate it we kept it small and simple – but sadly we are limited to where we can add new pages via our CMS so this page didn’t have means for the user to convert or search for flights it is purely informational. Not ideal but thinking back to the goal it is to drive new users. If that works we can pivot and look how to activate those users. And here is our page – not very attractive. But it worked, not only giving us the position 1 result organically but also the snippet. We are now pivoting this and rolling it out globally along with results from our pivoted experiments around activation of the user.
- So hopefully, through these examples you can see how taking a lean approach to experimenting can help to turn your ideas into products that can make impact towards the business goal. It helps to verify your ideas quickly using as little as possible technical skills, but can give big learnings and makes life 100% times easier to sell this into your developers or clients. So to remember to hack your SERPs quickly and easily, always choose the shortest path to validate ideas through experimentation and
- Don’t forget to the on-going “build – measure – learn” process, gathering feedback as often as possible!
- And remember - doing nothing is painful for you as you will never get anything done and just hit road block after road block, its painful for your growth and that of companies but not learning or iterating from this can be fatal – putting you behind other companies and people who are competing with you for that next dream job!
- Should you want to know more about the lean approach, then I can strongly recommend these books to you. They are both mandatory reading for us at Skyscanner, as we strongly believe the impact this can have on just getting stuff done!
- Thanks!