SEO Deliverance
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How to successfully integrate & manage the SEO tasks required to deliver change at big brand websites. A presentation by Tony King (@ToastedTeacake) on behalf of Semetrical.com at BrightonSEO.
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SEO Deliverance
- 1. SEO Deliverance Brighton SEO 14th September 2012 Tony King SEO Managing Consultant Semetrical.com
- 2. What is SEO deliverance? ? 1. a formal pronouncement or expression of opinion 2. rescue from moral corruption or evil; salvation 3. another word for delivery 4. rescue from bondage or danger Source: www.thefreedictionary.com
- 3. Rescue from bondage… Rigid corporate structures SEO‟s can be seen as „Just another brick in the wall‟ Tied up in pointless meetings Position yourself as the „Guru‟ Delivery something significant A step change that gets you noticed
- 4. Theman is I Feel Like a Woman‟… No path to deliverance… The „Man, an Island… Research Phase Know your market Know your competition Know your website Development Phase There‟s no limit Know your objectives to what you Know your strategy can deliver. Know your limits Implementation Phase Know your audience Know your plan Know your sh*t
- 5. Research Phase Know your market Know your competition Know your website
- 6. Know your Imarket… a Woman‟… The „Man, Feel Like No man is an Island…
- 7. Know your Icompetition… The „Man, Feel Like No man is an Island…a Woman‟…
- 8. Know your website… Like the back of your hand Get beneath the surface Review your site analytics Initiate an SEO audit Run a comprehensive site crawl Identify optimisation opportunities Schedule regular website crawls Monitor on-going updates Capture un-planned changes Quantify SEO improvements
- 9. Inspect the un-inspected… Automation Check your robots.txt Audit your XML sitemaps Domain management: Redirection status Canonical setup Domain renewal dates URL management: Upper/lower case variations Parameter ordering Trailing slashes Site performance: Site speed 404 Error handling Site downtime alerts FREE Robotto Tool: robotto.semetrical.com
- 10. Development Phase Know your objectives Know your strategy Know your limits
- 11. Know your objectives… Automation Know your objectives… What‟s the company mission? What‟s the website goal/s? Are they being tracked correctly? What‟s the value of each goal? Have any specific objectives been set? Traffic Sales Market share Brand building Campaign support Are your objectives aligned with website goals?
- 12. Know your strategy… Project scope (Scope + Costs) – Returns = Pitch Difficulty Staff and resources Who will deliver the project? In-house or outsource (to Semetrical) What are the costs? SEO is not free Technology & tools (DeepCrawl) Define the budget Allow for seasonal trends Consider the financial calendar Projected returns Show me the money!
- 13. Know your Ilimits… a Woman‟… The „Man, Feel Like No man is an Island… Build & develop the search team Read, Debate & Innovate Identify departmental advocates Sales & Marketing PR and Editorial Editorial and Copy Writers Webmasters/Infrastructure Developers & Information Architects UX Designers Research Team Define and assign responsibilities Evaluate and feedback Nurture and support the teams
- 14. Implementation Phase Know your audience Know your plan Know your sh*t
- 15. Know your audience… Who are you pitching to? What are their objectives? Consider your delivery method Pre-empt responses CEO/CFO CTO, IT Director ROI Infrastructure Market share Site performance Developer resource/time Marketing Director Sales Director Brand building Lead generation Market share Direct marketing User engagement Competitive advantage
- 16. Know your plan… Start with a business case Let the figures speak for themselves… Revenue Cost Profit Year 1 £1,250,000 £450,000 £800,000 Year 2 £1,250,000 £250,000 £1,000,000 Year 3 £1,250,000 £250,000 £1,000,000 Year 4 £1,250,000 £250,000 £1,000,000 Year 5 £1,250,000 £250,000 £1,000,000 Total £6,250,000 £1,450,000 £4,800,000 It‟s all about the ROI… “Money talks, and bullsh*t walks” Bobbi Flekman This Is Spinal Tap http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088258/quotes
- 17. Know your Iplan…Like a Woman‟… The „Man, Feel No man is an Island… Prepare your first draft: Include a cover and contents page Date and version stamp your document Include an executive summary: A synopsis of the key points and highlights Avoid jargon Keep it short but informative Include research and data in an appendix Get two people to proof read it: Listen carefully to their feedback Redraft sections that are difficult to understand Prepare the final draft: Print and bind copies for reference and distribution Save a PDF version for digital distribution
- 18. Know your Ish*t…Like a Woman‟… The man is Ish*t… No man is anFeel Like a Woman‟… Know your anIsland… No „Man, Feel The „Man, Island… Don‟t get burnt in the Dragons Den…
- 19. Deliverance… Island…a Woman‟… The „Man, an No man is I Feel Like Secure sign-off: Preparation Planning Perfecting the pitch Change development: Coordinate the search teams Maintain training and support SEO UAT & QA Audit changes Ensure specifications are met Check for side-effects Deliver the change Release to live Celebrate with the team
- 20. Delivery is only the beginning... Now you need to… Monitor Maintain Performance
- 21. Prizes… I Feel Like a Woman‟… The „Man, Good news… You all have a chance to be a WINNER..! Semetrical are giving away a FREE DeepCrawl account to one of our Twitter followers. Simply follow @Semetrical on Twitter before the end of September 2012 and ReTweet our promotional tweet to be in with a chance of winning. See our blog for full details: blog.semetrical.com/win-deepcrawl/
- 22. Thanks… You have been watching… Tony King - @ToastedTeacake SEO Managing Consultant at Semetrical Find out more at… www.semetrical.com blog.semetrical.com www.deepcrawl.co.uk Follow us on Twitter… @semetrical
Editor's Notes
- SEO Deliverance
- So what is SEO deliverance?WhenKelvin asked me to prepare a presentation outlining how to deliver SEO change at a big brands it got me thinking about the unique position SEO’s find themselves in at large corporations. SEO Deliverance is my take on how to successfully integrate and manage the SEO tasks necessary to deliver change at big brand sites.So, a quick definition of deliverance:1. a formal pronouncement or expression of opinion – My opinion, which counts for the next 10 mins.2. rescue from moral corruption or evil; salvation – Not necessarily moral corruption, but company politics can be an impacting factor.3. another word for delivery – the objective.4. rescue from bondage or danger – Don’t get tied up.So lets kick off with No.4 - rescue from bondage or danger.
- It’s this form of bondage - rigid corporate structures where SEO’s can be seen as ‘just another brick in the wall’ and get tied up in pointlessmeetings. But is size and structure a reason for a lack of delivery?Possibly, or perhaps it’s…
- There are 9 things you need to know when trying to deliver SEO change at big brands.And they fit nicely into 3 phases.Research – market, competition, websiteDevelopment – objectives, strategy, limitsImplementation – audience, plan, shit.I call these the 2Unlimited phases because if you follow these phases and…‘Know know,know know, know know,know know, know know,know know,there's know limit…To what you can deliver.
- Know your market through keyword research.It’s an essential part of understanding your market and audience search behaviours. (CLICK) At Semetrical, we’ve developed tool called DeepSemantic, which helps us research and segment over half a million keywords. It helps us quantify the size and scope of distinct keyword sectors, against which we can compare current performance to perform gap analysis and understand the expansion opportunities.(CLICK) Assess the SERPs and the impact of universal search on the keywords you identify. This analysis can highlight additional optimisation opportunities. Here we see that the keywords in Dimension 8 serve image results 50% of the time, so there could be significant value in an image optimisation strategy.(CLICK) During our KW research, we configure and test multiple keyword dimensions to assess the true value at the long-tail. This in-turn helps us identify areas of strength, underperformance and additional opportunities for growth. Knowing the market helps quantify the opportunity.
- Take a look at the SERPs, who’s consistently competing for your target keywords in paid and organic channels (CLICK). Who performs consistently well, with lots of organic rankings above the fold, who has the most top rankings? (CLICK) Crawl these competitor sites and review their site architecture to assess how they might be achieving such organic performance. (CLICK).At Semetrical, we specialise in delivering technical SEO audits and full site redevelopment strategies for enterprise level websites. To help us deliver such large projects we’ve developed a range of tools for our auditing and research processes. DeepCrawl is our cloud based crawler which can scrape in excess of 5M URLs and capture the key SEO data points. DeepCrawl helps analyse site architecture and highlights indexation, content and validation issues so you can quickly assess your competitors website weaknesses.
- So we know the size of opportunity, we’ve benchmarked our current situation and we’ve defined the objectives.We can now define a strategy.The biggest challenge is deciding the project scope, the bigger the scope, the harder the pitch. So how big is the task? Don’t go too big, or you risk falling at the first hurdle.Consider the capacity to deliver…What staff and resources are available to support you in the delivery phase?If there are any skill gaps internally, you’ll potentially need to outsource certain services.Know your costs. Consider all the tools, technology, salaries, fees, licences, events, training etc. research the associated costs and renewal dates. Prepare your budget.Don’t just list the costs, a good budget is time sensitive.Factor in any seasonal search trends to ensure paid channels don’t exceed budgets in the first week of a seasonal high traffic month.Consider the financial year, if possible, schedule your tool renewals near the start of the financial year when budgets are generally less pressurised.Project the returns.Save the best for last - or at least, reinforce the statistical reasons for delivering the project.
- A full technical audit involves analysis of a wide range of SEO factors which are all too often neglected or taken for granted. Domain management – Big brands seem to register domains every other day, make sure they are being managed efficiently. Primary and sub-domains!Redirection statusCanonical setupMalware/phishing alertsDomain registration/renewalsURL management:Case insensitive URLsParameter orderingTrailing slashesSite performanceSite speed404 Error handlingSite downtimeFREE Robotto Tool: robotto.semetrical.comSome of your are already using our free Robotto tool, which alerts you of any changes to your robots.txt file, including header response changes. Therefore helping you identify when the site is down.This analysis should be used as a benchmark to assess the impact of delivering SEO change. Keep a record of all assessments and take the opportunity to automate monitoring and alerting mechanisms during this initial auditing phase.
- The development phase is not about coding or technical changes, it’s all about developing your strategy and a proposal that will secure sign-off for delivery.
- Get back to the grass roots, understand the company mission.What is the website goal and what constitutes a conversion?Are the goals being tracked correctly? – DeepCrawl to assess inclusion of analytics tags on every page.Have any specific objectives been set? Traffic Sales Market share Brand building Campaign supportAre your objectives even aligned with website goals?This is not always the case – Negative retargeting for market share gains.
- So we know the size of opportunity, we’ve benchmarked our current situation and we’ve defined the objectives.We can now define a strategy.The biggest challenge is deciding the project scope, the bigger the scope, the harder the pitch. So how big is the task? Don’t go too big, or you risk falling at the first hurdle.Consider the capacity to deliver…What staff and resources are available to support you in the delivery phase?If there are any skill gaps internally, you’ll potentially need to outsource certain services.Know your costs. Consider all the tools, technology, salaries, fees, licences, events, training etc. research the associated costs and renewal dates. Prepare your budget.Don’t just list the costs, a good budget is time sensitive.Factor in any seasonal search trends to ensure paid channels don’t exceed budgets in the first week of a seasonal high traffic month.Consider the financial year, if possible, schedule your tool renewals near the start of the financial year when budgets are generally less pressurised.Project the returns.Save the best for last - or at least, reinforce the statistical reasons for delivering the project.
- Know your limits.Build a core, central search team Develop the core team - Read, Debate & InnovateNo matter how good you and your search team might be, the final project delivery will be dependant on others. You will effectively need to manage 2 search teams. The central core team and an extended team made up of departmental advocates, the existing staff already working at the front-line of website change delivery. Many of these teams might not have any understanding or previous experience of SEO, but they can prove hugely influential in the road to deliverance, they’re your eyes and ears within each business function and at the end of the day they will be the ones implementing changes. Consider which teams you will need input from and who is best placed to deliver your project requirements.Outline the scope of the project and define the specific tasks required of each team, along with associated timings, invite feedback and be flexible. The extended team will already have other priorities and deadlines to work to and any additional workload, especially within an unfamiliar field could be a daunting prospect. Invite their feedback and accommodate their concerns, provide reassurance and outline the support and training options that will be available.Train the extended team:Introduce best practice guidelinesPromote knowledge sharing Host regular open invite training sessions
- The implementation phase relates to the final development and delivery of the search proposal…
- Before preparing your proposal, consider your audience. Who are you pitching to?Who has influence/final sign-off?Who will gain most from delivery of your proposed changes?Pre-emptwho might attempt to block the project.Understand and appreciate the objectives of each potential audience, what are they trying to achieve themselves and what difficulties are they facing? Can you assist with their objectives or will your proposal worsen their situation? If you have the opportunity, discuss your proposal and let them air their concerns directly, invite their feedback and input, show willingness to be flexible and reach a compromise. Different audiences need different approaches, get to know the key players and how to read between the lines.
- A project proposal is rarely processed without executive sign-off and the first thing an executive will want to review is the business case. (CLICK) Executives only ever want ‘money for nothing and chicks for free’ - your business case should provide an unbiased analysis of the projected costs and benefits returned through delivery of your project.Don’t try to blag it, be honest and let the figures do the talking. (CLICK)Your keyword research and GAP analysis will have highlighted the size of opportunity and you can then use this data to project costs and returns based on average performance metrics across channels. The business case need only focus the total view of the project delivery, although it is useful to know the specific costs and returns associated to each channel, should any questions be asked.There will undoubtedly be an inflated initial cost in year one, so outline the returns in subsequent years too maximise visibility of the efficiencies being delivered longer term.9 times out of 10, your project will be signed-off based on your business case – it’s all about the ROI.
- Your plan should clearly communicate the strategic goal of your project and whenever appropriate reference your research data to quantify the opportunity. Reinforce the returns throughout and include details on the timing and methodology for achieving the goals.
- Book a meeting with the key decision maker to run-through the plan together face to face. Deliver the plan prior to the meeting and forward an electronic copy the day before the meeting as a reminder.Be prepared…You should know the proposal and the figures inside out prior to the meeting and be prepared to answer any questions quickly and accurately to avoid getting burnt.
- If you don’t receive sign-off immediately, wait a day before following up with a request for feedback.You will more than likely be given a decision deadline, when the executives have a had a chance to review a your proposal and weigh it up against other business requests, this gives you the opportunity to prepare some supporting data in the interim. Don’t go too overboard, but strategically highlight the pitfalls of non-implementation detailing the continued decline in organic traffic and increase in PPC costs over time (if they exist).
- Once you’ve delivered the plan you need to ‘monitor to maintain the performance’ You’ll also need to quantify the improvements at the earliest opportunity.SEO is a long-term strategy and improvements can take time to bed-in and show returns.However, a great feature of our DeepCrawl tool is the ability to compare and report on change metrics.(CLICK) Here’s the dashboard view of our initial benchmark crawl of the site, but when we run a subsequent crawl (CLICK) DeepCrawl automatically starts to include comparative data.(CLICK) You can build a picture of website change and improvements made over time to assess the impact on key SEO metrics. This empowers SEO’s to analyse and quantify the positive and sometimes negative implications of any website changes – both planned and un-planned. The monitoring process can be a sizable task when working with large brands, especially when it involves a portfolio of websites. DeepCrawl helps keep an eye on any indexation and content issues automatically through the scheduled crawls you setup during the benchmarking phase. Now, we are also about to release a new tool that can help efficiently monitor large portfolios of sites automatically. Our Analytics Monitor tool is like Robotto on steroids. Simply add the domains required and the Analytics Monitor tool will alert you to any errors or issues requiring your attention. Things like changes in domain header responses, the canonical implementation, robots.txt changes and malware or phishing warnings. You can swiftly review the full portfolio’s performance metrics and trends, identify any crawl issues and associated trends, review traffic-source data and errors impacting previously performing pages.All domains are monitored and tested regularly with any changes being recorded and date-stamped for your future reference.