enewton@brightedge.com

M Posted 11 years 7 months ago

t 9 min read

If you’re a brand that deals with a multinational presence, SEO can be a big undertaking technically and logistically. In this session from BrightEdge’s Share 14 event last week, speakers from 3M, adidas, Adobe, Global Strategies and Intel shared common problems encountered within and solutions they’ve created for create a winning global search program. Dave Lloyd was up first (@davelloyd1) from of Adobe. He touched on search, content and localization at a global search scale. He says to first align to the customer journey. Look at keywords or topics that are mapped to various needs like consideration intent, learning intent or support intent.

The general content optimization plan, he says, is the following:

• Identify keywords
• Organize content
• Optimize content
• Create content
• Localize content
• Link to content
• Launch process and QA of recommendations

For regional SEO coverage, Lloyd says all countries receive:

• CMS improvements
• XML and Href alternate language sitemaps
• Technical SEO ad redirect mapping

Then there’s Tier one countries, which Lloyd says is the recipient of product support through keywords, content, linking and QA. Tier 2 to Tier 4 countries receive on-page keyword optimization based on regional priorities. Next, Lloyd talked SEO localization flow, which consists of:

• In-country keyword research
• Each keyword mapped to preferred landing page
• Content localized using keywords (content, video, images, links)
• Reviewed by global search and SEO teams
• Localized and optimized content goes live
• In-country keyword research
• Each keyword mapped to preferred landing page
• Content localized using keywords like content, video, images, links

Here’s a detailed SEO localization process that Lloyd shared with the audience:

Some takeaways on strategy, partnership and quality assurance include: Strategy

• Improve consistency of keyword optimization through local assignments by language not product
• Ideal if local vendors work on all local collateral like documents, white papers, etc.
• Always think about effort vs. impact

Partnership

• Localization team coordinates vendors, regions, reviewers, the Adobe search team and the global search team
• Invest in success through vendor and reviewer training on search and keywords in the region

Quality Assurance

• The SEO team should drive QA Titles and Meta Descriptions
• Have independent linguistic reviewers for targeted regions
• Have the regional marketing managers sign off on content

SEO is not an afterthought, so you must plan ahead, respect deadlines and share info, Lloyd says. Laura-Ann Mitchell of Intel was next. She and Mellissa Jensen from Global Strategies (the agency for Intel) had a co-presentation. Mitchell starts by saying that unless you have a big budget of $5 million for SEO, it’s hard to scale globally. You have to be creative. And, you have to create relevant content for every country. Jensen is up, and talks about the process for making it work. First, she says, take a step back, and understand how content gets created all over the world. Then, streamline the content workflow first.

Look at the step-by-step process, says Jensen. Make sure the content holds the same optimization when it gets translated into the geos, and inject local keyword research during the translation process.

Next, optimize the infrastructure:

• Publish country content on ccTLDs
• Customize the CMS
• Optimize templates
• Leverage XML Sitemaps with HREFLang tags

The three takeaways for global search for enterprise? Jensen and Mitchell say the following:

1. Optimize the infrastructure
2. Optimize the translation workflow
3. Train content managers and translators

Next up: Mattia Santin (@mattiasantin) from adidas Group [Side note: Check out Mattia’s interview for the BrightEdge blog, here]. Mattia talks about how adidas grew SEO globally. When he first joined adidas, he needed to understand the strengths of the company, and the challenges in order to build an SEO program that scales. So, he says, benchmark the SEO situation. Understand any microsites, main sites, etc. Focus on the platform – the CMS first. The following represents how adidas Group sees SEO:

To make SEO work on a global search level, says Santin, look at the:

• Organization
• Process
• Scale

Understand the global search structure, create a core team, then look at regional and local SEO teams, he says. The approach to SEO is a mix of campaign-based and evergreen strategies, says Santin. So campaigns would support brand authority, seasonal and business cases, and evergreen strategy would drive conversions, be ongoing and scale.

From the SEO efforts at adidas Group, SEO proved to be the No. 1 driver of traffic globally, and it saw a 329 percent lift in SEO sales year-over-year, Santin says.

Some of the lessons learned when implementing global search and SEO, says Santin, are the following:

• Educate, evangelize and “sell” SEO internally
• Build the right organization for your needs
• Build a long-term SEO plan
• Focus on priorities, scale, test and learn

Craig Berdie (@cberdie) from 3M joined the audience next. He talked about executive buy-in for global search and SEO. He says 3M has 6,000 websites served from a single server. Some of the challenges they faced were:

• Consistencies between the countries, market variations, resources
• Fundamental architectural decisions
• Rapidly evolving product sets
• Deep content locked in PDFs

Next, he goes into the tactics:

• Establish and global, collaborative learning
• Create a wiki for knowledge capture
• Implement an enterprise SEO platform (they use BrightEdge)
• License a variety of “ad hoc” tools as needed
• For global SEO projects, train marketers and measure, measure, measure.

Take a seat at the table with technical teams, says Berdie, sit in on the meetings, understand their objectives and don’t lose out on opportunities to make SEO a consideration. A tip, he says, for buy-in is to merge analytics and Salesforce to see how many leads and sales come from organic traffic, then figure out how much each click is worth in organic. The C-Suite wants to see this type of economic value. Berdie’s takeaways include:

• Finding global talent
• Focusing on the numbers, and showing economic value
• Understanding the IT side of the equation so you can get what you need
• Focusing on the teams that are willing to change
• Identifying SEO targets and create success stories
• Understanding and use available data
• And remembering that small victories generate momentum

ssharma@brightedge.com

M Posted 11 years 7 months ago

t 9 min read

Back in April 2002, Google attempted to fool the masses with its PigeonRank technology, just in time for April Fool’s Day. Fast-forward to 2014, and an algorithm run by a Pigeon update is not so far-fetched – at least not by name. The Google Pigeon update (named so by the good folks over at Search Engine Land in absence of an official name by Google) launched in late July, affecting the local search results. In a post at SEL, they highlighted the intent of the algorithm:

Google told us that the new local search algorithm ties deeper into their web search capabilities, including the hundreds of ranking signals they use in web search along with search features such as Knowledge Graph, spelling correction, synonyms and more. In addition, Google said that this new algorithm improves their distance and location ranking parameters.

Early analysis showed local directory sites like Yelp getting a boost in the search results. And Andrew Shotland of LocalSEOGuide.com highlighted the algorithm’s new ability at SEL:

We are really interested in how this update moved Google more in the direction of hyperlocal search. Something that has been flying under the radar on this update is the neighborhood specific location settings that previously seemed to be just a test are now live everywhere as far as I can tell.

But feelings were mixed on the update. Where queries that usually displayed a 7-pack in the local results, there were none, some reports said. And Mike Blumenthal over at Blumenthals.com said the change was merely Google’s response to changing searcher behavior, but the problem was that “we don’t really have the tools to fully understand some of these changes and really measure their impacts on the local business.” In his analysis, Mike says the

Google Pigeon update is able to better understand location on mobile and desktop, and has “drawn smaller radius around the presumed location of the searcher from which to draw the local search results,” and that this is “causing the more dramatic shifts in measurable desktop results.” There’s a nice summary about what marketers are seeing to date with the new local algo here. And at BrightEdge, we’re tracking this change closely within our platform, and will keep readers updated on the findings of our research. Has your business been impacted by the Google Pigeon update in some way? Let us know in the comments below.

enewton@brightedge.com

M Posted 11 years 7 months ago

t 9 min read

Let's face it: Enterprise SEO is not getting any easier. In this session at Share 14, brands like Adobe, Experian, Marriott International and Microsoft share how they’ve built and scaled their in-house SEO when facing complex challenges.

First up is Dave Lloyd (@davelloyd1) of Adobe Systems. [Be sure to catch Dave's interview on the BrightEdge Blog, here.] He says Adobe.com is the sixth most linked-to domain in the world, with over a million pages on the main website to deal with. With that, comes a lot of responsibility, he says. SEO is the most cost-effective, revenue-driving channel, says Lloyd. To use it effectively requires leverage. Be strategic – we hear that all the time, he says, but from an SEO perspective, it means focus on competitors and what the audience really needs, and focus on business KPIs. Be integrated, and align search best practices with major content marketing goals, Lloyd says.

Next, be comprehensive. Make the job of the search engine easy. And, you don’t have to implement all the Enterprise SEO recommendations, but take steps to reduce risk. Prioritize against effort and impact. He’s going to focus the rest of the talk on one area Adobe had had particular success within: Adobe TV. The business issue: The content underperformed, despite it being unique and having a lot of non-branded terms and thousands of archived videos, plus a lot of updated content…but it just wasn’t being maximized, Lloyd says. What Adobe did was expanded the “marketable universe,” which is content linking opportunities. They also had to deal with content removal happening on Adobe.com. Lloyd also took a step back to talk about SEO practices and what they mean.

Adobe focused on the top layer, and did some very tactical Enterprise SEO. They looked at additional keywords they might want to include and found about 168 new terms, specifically chosen for that body of content. Adobe performed some very basic SEO tactics, like:

• H2, bold keyword
• Meta descriptions
• Non-brand tag clouds
• Internal linking from www.adobe.com to tv.adobe.com (suggested content)
• Migrated to new search-friendly URLs

The results? The team saw keyword rankings improve, 48 percent growth in organic visits, and a 50 percent increase in free subscribers over nine months. Up next, we have Ngia Vang (@NgiaVang) of Experian Consumer Direct. [Side note: Check out Ngia's interview for the Brightedge blog, here.] Experian’s SEO goal was to focus on revenue, and they looked to their SEO agency (Rimm-Kaufman Group) to get a list of to-dos that would move the marker. And, says Vang, they needed executive buy-in and resources. It’s not always easy to secure.

Lots of people leave companies as a result of a lack of buy-in and resources, she says. The first step to accomplishing all of this was to create awareness. The “Ice Bucket Challenge” is a great example of creating awareness. Get started by building relationships. Create and implement processes, and then dig into the human aspect of it all, says Vang. One particular challenge was Experian’s content team was working in silos, Vang says, and they had to make sure SEO belonged in the process. 

The Experian SEO team then created a report card, and they reported on how the program was performing over time. This helped the team secure additional resources as needed for the SEO projects. Enterprise SEO grows slowly, but surely, Vang says. Since ramping up SEO in-house, Experian has seen a huge boost in impressions and clicks and from a “one hit wonder” to a relevant, growing program. Parting advice? Integrate, but give people room. Drive motivation and momentum, and focus on the user.

Next is Michael Jozaitis (@mjoza) of Marriott International. A major issue with Marriott International and its SEO was that many hotels were going with different SEO agencies, says Jozaitis, so the online experience was different across the board. Now, they manage about 800 hotels in-house with a team of 30 professionals in their Marriott Digital Services business. Hotels within Marriott International are not required to join the in-house SEO program; the digital team essentially runs as a non-profit and every dollar taken in needs to be reinvested into the program. Marriott Digital Services has very specific goals with its SEO, says Jozaitis: organic visits, booking room nights, and driving revenue for hotels. The Enterprise SEO team knew that social was critical for SEO success, Jozaitis says, but how do you scale that for 800 hotels? Here’s how they tackled it.

Empower the hotel staff:

• Create a strategy/approach for all hotels, tweak as needed
• Train hotels to do the day-to-day
• Give advice on strategy
• Promote best practices
• Keep guides up-to-date, as social changes fast

Deliverables:

• Audit
• Consultation
• Optimization
• Interaction Guides
• Content Calendars

Employee-generated content:

• Wealth of local knowledge
• Bring “concierge” to social
• Inspire content

The takeaways? Jozaitis says the following:

1. Start with the goal
2. Process is your friend (if you have to push something back a month to get the process right, do it)
3. Divide and conquer (don’t think you need to do everything)
4. Always be planning

Alex Volk (@alexvolk) of Microsoft is the final presenter. When he first started at Microsoft ten years ago, SEO did not exist within the company. It was about 6.5 years ago that he and Derrick Wheeler founded the practice within the company. The challenges Microsoft faced were overlapping content, inconsistent UX, domains and subdomains, multiple product versions and internal keyword competition, says Volk. How do you get the structure you need with all these challenges? You can’t control everything, he says, so the hybrid model is to find key people within the organization to try to create a bond that fuels SEO strategy.

Here’s how the Enterprise SEO team tackled the challenge:

• Designated an SEO lead
• Defined and reported SEO targets
• Categorized list of keywords
• Prioritized technical opportunities
• Adopted social sharing
• Onboarded staff with BrightEdge’s SEO platform
• Found an agency of choice; Microsoft uses iCrossing

Tactics you can use to support Enterprise SEO strategy include storytelling:

• Fear: Think about examples of things hat have gone wrong that have caused traffic drop historically, Volk says, and take screenshots. Keep it in a booklet, and save it for the moments when someone is about to do something bad, like not having a redirect strategy.
• Opportunity: For example, look at Share of Voice in BrightEdge. Contrast branded with unbranded keyword opportunity, and see where you stand. Use imagery to bring opportunities to life, Volk says.
• Cadence: And, cadence matters, he says. If you’re trying to perform storytelling, think about how to tell your story in multiple formats like email, face-to-face and so on, and know which mix of tactics are effective at your place of business.