Organizations frequently struggle to achieve the full benefits that search engine optimization has to offer, simply because SEO is not well-integrated into existing project teams and workflows. SEO needs to be fully integrated into an organization at the operational level. This presentation outlines a framework for the operational integration of SEO with existing business units that are stakeholders in the success of a web marketing channel.

1. 1: 15: 2012
Operational
Integration of SEO

2. What is SEO?
• Using search data to build an effective content & product strategy
• Using search engines to connect with audiences and delight them
• Using the right data to measure, adjust and improve business outcomes

3. Understanding Search Engines
• Search engines are trying to return the “best” set of
documents for a given query
• How do search engines measure “best”?
– Relevance (On-Page SEO)
• Presence of machine-readable text containing keywords
related to the user’s query
• Having that text appear in “important” places on the page
• Using complex machine learning to rate content quality
(Google’s Panda algorithm)
– Authority (Off-Page SEO)
• Evaluating the web’s link graph, social mentions and author
data as “votes” for documents

4. 3 Pillars of On-Page SEO
1. Information architecture
- Has a major impact on how link authority flows to URLs
- Technical factors influencing crawlability / findability
2. Code
- Coding decisions influence engines’ ability to “understand”
pages (AJAX, Flash, etc)
- Proper use of semantic HTML (title tags, meta descriptions)
3. Content
- Keyword targeting
- Audience journey
- Quality and uniqueness

5. SEO Deliverables - IA
1. Information architecture
- IA analysis and optimization
• Based on a crawl of the site or internal IA review
- URL structure
• Short, static, descriptive
- Canonicalization
• 301 redirect mapping
• Canonical link element
- Error handling and HTTP status codes
- Robots management
- XML sitemaps
• Content segmentation to allow iterative optimization
• Multi-lingual content

6. SEO
1. IA Deliverables - Code
2. Code
- Wireframe review
• Balance visual design, creativity and interactivity with search
engines’ technical requirements
- Define SEO requirements for each page template
• Semantic HTML for each URL
• Ensure web development patterns are rendering pages that render
machine-readable text that can be crawled and indexed by engines
• Work with developers on code-level implementation questions
- Authorship
• Incorporate authorship signals for trust, ranking and CTR
- Rich snippets
• Title or professional role, affiliation, address, etc
- Web performance

7. SEO Deliverables - Content
1.
2.
Information architectu
Code
3. Content
- Keyword targeting
• Keyword research, analysis and taxonomy
- Audience journey aligned with query intent to improve UX
• Awareness
• Consideration
• Demand generation
- Quality and uniqueness
• Content sourcing decisions (unique vs licensed, etc)
• Subjective content quality
o Google’s Panda algorithm allows a machine-learning approximation of
whether content is “low quality” or not
o Above a certain threshold, all content is demoted in rankings

8. SEO and Product Management
• Project initiation
– Audit of product-level performance on the site
• Determine where products have opportunities for improvement
– Identify and add SEO requirements for each product to the PRD
• During development
– Work with developers to address questions around SEO requirements
in the PRD
– Work with QA to create automated SEO-specific tests for launch
• Post launch and ongoing
– Use data from web & SEO analytics to track product performance
– Identify iterative optimization opportunities to improve product
performance and yield

9. SEO and UX / UI
• Project initiation
– Information architecture creation
• Conceptual organization
• Findability
– Wireframe development
• Balance visual design, creativity and interactivity with search
engines’ technical requirements
• During development
– Crawl site on staging server to uncover issues with findability
• Post launch and ongoing
– Use web and SEO analytics data to iteratively improve IA
– Use 3rd party tools to improve user experience & business outcomes

10. SEO and Developers
• Project initiation
– Ensure developers understand SEO requirements
• 90+ SEO-specific tests in gyro’s Developers’ SEO Checklist
• Project-specific requirements
• During development
– Work with developers directly to address implementation questions
• Provide code-level examples
– Perform technical audits at key development milestones
• Post launch and ongoing
– Technical crawl of the site to identify bugs
– Support developers during iterative product and site optimization

11. SEO and CRM
• Project initiation
– Identify opportunities to engage with customers
• Lead capture
• Customer feedback, contact us, etc
– Assist with business requirements for CRM integration
• Progressive data capture for different conversion events
– Align expressed user intent with value delivered
• User intent  Value proposition  Data capture
• During development
– Work with QA to create tests for data capture, routing & handling
• Post launch and ongoing
– Use data from web & SEO analytics to improve conversion rate

12. SEO & Content Creation
• Project initiation
– Content audit
• Assess performance of current content toward defined business outcomes
• Gap analysis and competitive content audits
• Keyword opportunities
• During development
– Test crawlability and rendering of content
• Ensure correct implementation of semantic HTML
• Post launch and ongoing
– Content strategy and content marketing
• Align market need with company’s core competencies
• Systematize content creation and promotion toward specific outcomes

13. SEO and Social Media
• Project initiation
– Social listening
– Competitive landscape assessment
– Content audit
• Search and social media performance indicators
– Set objectives for content marketing success
• During development
– Define your strategy
• Post launch and ongoing
– Listen
– Measure
– Create and iterate

14. THANK YOU!