Andy Betts

M Posted 13 years ago

t 9 min read

Share13 has hit new heights with over 500 senior level executives and practitioners offering attendees an opportunity to hear from industry thought leaders and interact with highly accomplished marketers and brands. Last week I managed to catch up, alongside my colleague Nag Patta, with Dave Lloyd from Abobe.

About Dave Lloyd

Dave Lloyd is Senior Manager of Global Search Marketing at Adobe Systems where he leads a global team delivering Organic & Site Search strategies. The team’s charter is to deliver industry best practices, drive KPI-focused goals, integrate with all marketing & web disciplines, and alpha test Adobe Marketing Cloud products. In his prior role, he oversaw Cisco’s Global SEO Strategy and previously worked at Apple, Openwave, NetSuite, Palm, & Handspring. He is Google-certified, with 12 years in Digital & Search Marketing, and a Business degree from U.C. Davis.  

You were a speaker at Share last year. What made you come back?

Everything BrightEdge does is first-class and innovative and as a result they attract smart, sophisticated, and thoughtful marketers in a casual and intimate environment. Looking at the agenda, every session has the potential for valuable takeaways for any enterprise-level search marketer. Compared with last year, the emphasis is shifting toward the future of the Digital CMO, the role of Earned Media, and the growing emphasis on Social, Content, and Technical strategies. The high caliber of the presenters will help deliver that message.  

What was your favorite experience or session at Share12?

The keynotes last year gave me a clear view of the company’s vision and where the industry is going.  Any veteran of conferences also knows that a few shared experiences and nuggets of wisdom in the hallway can be invaluable – I had numerous experiences last year like this.  My two favorite moments last year were hearing the caliber of questions & responses asked during every session and then during lunch when a half dozen of us challenged each other on the latest innovations in search and which were worth prioritizing.  

What is your advice for new attendees at Share13?

Meet people and follow up - Bring 20 business cards and make it a point to get 20 back – and then find a way to develop a connection.  This could be through a LinkedIn connection, sending valuable articles, inviting them as an outsider to a team call, or sharing valuable contacts and insights. Ask questions - Take advantage of lunch and downtime between sessions to follow up with speakers and attendees on your specific use cases. Debate issues - Few things in enterprise web marketing are clean cut and often best strategies come through thinking through all viewpoints.  You’ll find a great opportunity to engage with attendees. Take action - Keep good notes, summarize relevant points for you, and integrate into your future plans.  Knowledge is truly only power when it’s acted upon.  

What sessions are you looking forward to this year?

Our team regularly looks to the future to find ways to share the Search Marketing message better with executives so I’m very interested in the The Digital CMO Wednesday panel and Search Engine Opportunity Friday panel. Given our data-driven focus & alignment to business goals, I’m expecting the Search Forecasting and Business Impact session to be useful.  And knowing the work & sophistication of my Adobe colleagues, I’m planning to attend the Metrics & Analytics, Bringing it All Together, and Aligning Content and SEO sessions.  

You have a session on global and mobile SEO. Can you share a preview of what you will be discussing?

I’ll be sharing a strategic framework to perform better against global & mobile challenges. You can read more detail on the Strategic Innovations and SEO post of the Adobe Digital Marketing blog. 

The premise is understanding why customers are coming to your site – what unique tasks are global and mobile users trying to accomplish? Once core markets are understood, it’s critical to define your team & company’s unique value to deliver to those markets. From there, it’s about maximizing opportunities through developing resources & capabilities plus strong stakeholder engagement. Lastly, how best to maintain competitive advantage – this could be through developing distributed teams, innovation in strategy and process, expanding team capability, and create synergy through better business partnerships.  Throughout the session I will share select case studies with specific global or mobile application.  

The focus on global and mobile SEO is driven by growing personalization of search results. How should marketers deal with this challenge?

There are many practical solutions.  Some include customer-driven Content Marketing to create relevant content, alignment with Social teams to enhance synergy and extend Authorship markup - testing & targeting on your domain to improve visitor personalization - and clearly sharing results to account for personalization.  Also important is how you continue to train people on practical tips and communicate context to key stakeholders interested in personalization.  Like with many issues in Search, it’s a question of what do you control vs. influence – and picking the right battles. In this case, though personalization is here to stay, I believe it’s best addressed long-term through identifying those levers where a search-driven solution has the most influence possible and then controlling for personalization & testing further on your corporate website.  

What has changed most since you started out as a search marketer?

I often say a great search marketer must be a strong business person first, a marketer second, and a search professional third.  This hasn’t changed and though common sense, it’s not always common practice. The biggest changes to me are: 1. The pace of change 2. The necessity of search marketers to strategically align & communicate regarding business unit and product team objectives.  Change is the only constant and as customer behavior changes, and therefore algorithms, so must the role of search marketers.   We must become more aligned with business strategies, more attuned to overall digital marketing levers, and better at reporting and storytelling in order to clearly convey our value.  Adapting to change becomes a question of leadership & business-savvy in order to partner well with key stakeholders to drive transformative SEO plans.  

In general, what is your approach to managing the dynamic nature of the search landscape?

Keep learning, stay nimble (use Agile), go first to build & influence key relationships, and practice ruthless prioritization always. Share13 is in San Francisco on August 22-23 Share13 is the industry’s premier digital marketing event focused on organic search and digital marketing. Share13 is packed with content from leading brands and hands on practitioners on what is working in their business today. Unlike many other user conferences and public tradeshows, share is exclusively for search and digital marketing practitioners at leading brands. Attendees learn best practices from leaders, share their own expertise and make connections that last a lifetime.

Information and registration: http://www.brightedge.com/share13 Follow updates on Twitter @brightedge #share13        

Nag

M Posted 13 years ago

t 9 min read

We are a few days away from Share13, the industry's premier digital marketing event focused on organic search and digital marketing. Things have been hectic at BrightEdge as we give finishing touches to but we did get a minute to catch up with Simon Heseltine, industry thought-leader and Director of Audience Development at AOL.  

Simon Heseltine is currently the Director of Audience Development for Huffington Post Media Group within AOL Inc. In this position Simon and his team are responsible for planning and implementing SEO projects and trainings for many well known sites across the HPMG / AOL brand portfolio.   Simon will be part of a panel discussion on how to make the most of the search engine opportunity in the light of the dizzying change that the industry is used to. Here is a quick transcript of our chat.  

BE: Tell us about your session at Share13.

SH:This will be my first experience of the Share conference, and so I’m looking forward to expanding my network with industry leaders I haven’t yet met, sharing ideas, and talking about topics that affect all of us.  I’ll be speaking on the topic of “The Search Engine Opportunity”, basically discussing where we can, in today’s world, still get good, quality traffic to our content.  

BE: What are your thoughts on the impact of “not provided” on search marketing?

SH: It makes search marketing much more challenging. Sure we can talk about how following best practices is the way to go, but as “not provided” continues to increase, the data becomes less and less statistically significant. Some sites now have >75% of their traffic in this hidden bucket. How do you know what’s working? You don’t. Sure, you can look at page data to see which pages are getting the traffic, but then thanks to the ios6 tracking issues there’s another chunk of data that’s missing. It’s all rather depressing, really. Or to look at it another way, it’s a challenge, a challenge that anyone in the search marketing industry now has to deal with.  

BE: How has content come to be the focus of search and digital marketing?

SH: As far as I’m concerned, content’s always been a focus. Without the content you’re not going to achieve your goals, whether it’s to get people to buy something on your site or just read your articles. Now I will say that social has changed the focus more to the content side. With search engines, if the content can’t be found, can’t be crawled, or is just poorly targeted, the chances are you’d not show up when someone searches for you. With social, that’s not the case. Someone shares your content once, and it shows up in their friend’s feeds, where they can discover and share to their heart’s content.  

BE: How do you view the rise of Earned media and the relationship between Earned and owned vs paid media?

SH: As most of the sites I work with tend to be on the newsy side, we’re usually the place that people are hoping to earn links and articles from. The recent Google crackdown on advertorials is going to move people away from native advertising and towards trying to earn rather than pay for articles.  

BE:What is your approach to  publishing content and measuring performance across channels like site, social, and search?

SH: We have lots of different sites on different CMSs, but we’ve basically determined what the metrics are that matter for us, and we measure every site against those particular metrics.  We have a dashboard that provides those key metrics to stakeholders in an easy format for them to quickly determine the health of a site, and it shows the different traffic-generating mechanisms across that site.  

BE: How important is mobile search in 2013?

SH: Mobile search is continuing to grow and therefore can’t be ignored.  You need to make sure that you have your mobile strategy buttoned down and in place (although if it’s not in place by now…why not?).  Mobile device and tablet usage are both continuing to increase, so plan for it.  

About Simon Heseltine

Simon Heseltine is currently the Director of Audience Development for Huffington Post Media Group within AOL Inc. In this position, Simon and his team are responsible for planning and implementing SEO projects and trainings for many well known sites across the HPMG / AOL brand portfolio.   Simon is a frequent public speaker at conferences around the US, and the UK on all manner of topics related to online marketing, and has published articles for various online industry sites over the years.

Simon will also be teaching a Search Engine Optimization class at Georgetown University this Spring. Simon has worked in online marketing for over 6 years, with over 7-1/2 years in the local search industry (including several years as a developer), and he has experience working with SEO, Social Media, Reputation Management, and PPC. Simon has built up online marketing teams, and has been brought in by several companies, to train in-house online marketing teams in industry best practices.  

Share13 is in San Francisco on August 22-23

Share13 is the industry's premier digital marketing event focused on organic search and digital marketing. Share13 is packed with content from leading brands and hands on practitioners on what is working in their business today. Unlike many other user conferences and public tradeshows, share is exclusively for search and digital marketing practitioners at leading brands. Attendees learn best practices from leaders, share their own expertise and make connections that last a lifetime.

Information and registration: http://www.brightedge.com/share13 Follow updates on Twitter @brightedge #share13      

Andy Betts

M Posted 13 years ago

t 9 min read

Back in July 2012 BrightEdge announced that the Majestic SEO’s powerful backlink engine was integrated into the BrightEdge S3 global enterprise SEO platform, enabling clients to optimize their SEO strategies using Majestic's industry leading backlink database. BrightEdge's integration with Majestic's offerings echoes both company's long history of "White Hat" SEO services to professionals that focus on delivering high-fidelity, high-value, relevant content to consumer and B2B commercial markets through online search. This fact is mirrored in a joint ‘White Hat Backlink Best Practices’ Whitepaper that was composed in partnership with Majestic SEO and Rosetta.

The free report can be downloaded here: http://www.brightedge.com/white-hat-backlink-best-practices-majestic-rosetta  

Majestic SEO at Share13

BrightEdge are delighted to announce Majestic SEO as a sponsor and presenter at Share13. We managed to catch up with Dixon Jones, Founder of Majestic SEO and Mel Carson, US Ambassador for Majestic SEO and founder of Delightful Communications and here is what they had to say:

Dixon Jones

“Over the last year, there's been a call from Brightedge customers requesting the ability to utilize Majestic data within their platform. For that reason we have been working closely with Brightedge to enable that to happen. “ “At Share 13 we'll be able to demo Majestic live for users and we'll be working with a BrightEdge representative in the demonstration area to offer a simple on-boarding process that means users won't need to set up new account facilities or payment channels as BrightEdge will manage that directly. This will allow BrightEdge customers to drill directly into the heart of the link data – both for themselves and their competitors – right through the Majestic interface. With a new layout and UX improvements, Majestic SEO is rightly seen as the world's leading link intelligence data source.”

Mel Carson

“My role at Majestic is to represent them at US events like Share13, but also to help evangelize the platform as a big data set that transcends across SEO applications. My background at Microsoft was in social media and digital PR, and while working with Dixon Jones and the team at Majestic, I’ve been doing a lot of speaking and writing about how link data can be used for influencer discovery, blogger outreach and measuring the effectiveness of an interactive approach to PR.

I’m really trying to put the “Public” back into the acronym (too often traditional PR people concentrate on press) through smart use of social media and digital strategies that help keep a message live longer. In my session at Share13 I will be focusing on how links are about relationships and are not just between websites. I’ll show how Majestic data , in conjunction with BrightEdge, can be used to help uncover ways to differentiate your digital strategy and create opportunities that are delightful, agile and unexpected for the end user. As the digital marketing world comes full circle back to content being king, the Share13 audience learns to love links, not just for ranking purposes, but for a whole lot more.”

Mel will be speaking, and maintaining his Microsoft connection, in the Webmaster Tools and White Hat Practices session alongside Vincent Wehren, Webmaster Tools Senior PM, at Bing on Friday August 23^rd at 11.20am.

Full details and the agenda can be found here: http://www.brightedge.com/share13-agenda

About Majestic SEO

Majestic SEO surveys and maps the Internet and has created the largest commercial Link Intelligence database in the world. This Internet map is used by SEOs, New Media Specialists, Affiliate Managers and online Marketing experts for a variety of uses surrounding online prominence including Link Building, Reputation Management, Website Traffic development, Competitor analysis and News Monitoring.

As link data is also a component of search engine ranking, understanding the link profile of your own, as well as competitor websites can empower rational study of Search Engine positioning. Majestic SEO is constantly revisiting web pages and sees around a billion URLs a day. As Marketing Director at Majestic SEO, Dixon Jones key objective is to continue to promote the database both as best of breed and as the dominant provider of Link data, gradually broadening the products to reach supplemental marketing channels – both geographically and vertically.

About Mel Carson

Mel Carson is a Social Media Consultant, Digital PR & Personal Branding Strategist, Keynote Speaker and Blogger & Author. After a 7-year role as Digital Marketing Evangelist at Microsoft Advertising Mel started his own company - Delightful Communications LLC - whilst also working as the US Ambassador for Majestic SEO.

Pioneers of Digital – Mel Carson and Paul Springer

Pioneers of Digital is a book showcasing success stories from leaders in advertising, marketing, search and social media. It profiles 20 of the world’s leading digital innovators from leaders from Google, Microsoft, Ted.com, MTV, Facebook and Bing. The book reveals the inspiration behind their success.

We are hoping Mel will bring a few signed copies of the book with him to Share13! See more from Pioneers of Digital at: http://www.pioneersofdigital.com/#sthash.ZFu9J2GR.dpuf

Share13 is in San Francisco on August 22-23

Share13 is the industry’s premier digital marketing event focused on organic search and digital marketing. Share13 is packed with content from leading brands and hands on practitioners on what is working in their business today. Unlike many other user conferences and public tradeshows, share is exclusively for search and digital marketing practitioners at leading brands. Attendees learn best practices from leaders, share their own expertise and make connections that last a lifetime.

Feel free to test your knowledge with BrightEdge Digital Marketing Quiz or SEO Quiz.

Information and registration: http://www.brightedge.com/share13 Follow updates on Twitter @brightedge #share13          

Andy Betts

M Posted 13 years ago

t 9 min read

Jim Brigden from iProspect UK will be speaking at Share13 on the 'Future of Search Panel' alongside Dave Tan from Google and Eric Papczun from Perfomics US. In this post Jim shares a unique view on the the common challenges search marketers face on both sides of the Atlantic.  

Jim Brigden - iProspect - Two countries united by a common challenge  

When taking a global view of search markets, the United States and United Kingdom tend to look very similar on the outside. It is for this reason that Google often tests new initiatives first on these two markets. Despite their similarities, however, these cross-Atlantic neighbours have very clear differences that are evident once you begin to peel away the surface. Before I delve further into the more intricate details of these two markets, I must first admit that my search marketing career has predominantly been spent within the UK. However, working with a number of global brands I have observed a number of differences between the UK and US dominant search markets.   

Search Engines

One of the substantial differences between the US and UK search markets is the impact of the Yahoo!/Bing Search Alliance. Collectively, the Alliance makes up nearly 30% of the search engine market share in the US. In stark comparison, the two only make up roughly 10% of the share of search traffic in the UK. For the most part, Google is the only player within the UK market, with 9 out of 10 searches completed through this portal. Subsequently, media spend usually follows the percentage split of search engine market share in each country, thus creating a much more competitive landscape within the UK, where the majority and often the entire budget is dedicated to Google. The approach in the US differs slightly, with a more blended budget split in comparison. However, it is important to note that Google still reigns over both the UK and the US market, even with the US popularity of the Yahoo!/Bing Search Alliance.

Competition

Despite being a fifth of the population size of the United States, the UK has a stronger amount of competition across verticals on the search engine result pages. This means that search marketers have to be on the very top of their game to get the best paid results and organic listings to compete in the crowded market. One of the biggest reasons for the higher competition is that Google has a 90% market share in the UK.

Innovation

When it comes to new offerings in the search market space, Google will release their beta opportunities to advertisers typically first in the US, with the UK often in the second release group. These roles are reversed when new changes to the search engine results pages are rolled out by Google, with testing carried out predominantly in the UK first before being extended to the US. This is something we are seeing time and time again, and it heavily relates to the fact that the overall consumer profile is very similar in both markets.

Talent issues – you’ll need good people regardless of your location

Recruiting a skilled individual or a team to manage search is not easy, even when youth unemployment is at an all-time high. How many graduates are au fait with Adwords and Google Advertising fundamentals and are business fluent?  If the UK is representative of a number of regions around the globe, then there is a grave need for an entrepreneurial, business-friendly tech-centred approach to learning.

The UK educational establishment has a long way to go to fulfill this dream, and most graduates are woefully ill-equipped when they leave, resulting in a shortage of digital talent in the market. The well-equipped graduates that do come onto the market are often pretty savvy about their worth. They know their value and negotiate hard to get the right package for them. Is your recruitment ability and pay scale going to meet their expectations? You will be competing with an array of other businesses looking for the exact same people, so do not underestimate this question.

Poaching a team out of an agency is even more difficult than recruiting individuals. An agency has trained up and invested heavily in their employees, putting the very real opportunity for career progression in front of them. They’ll also be exposed to a variety of different clients and industries too – after all, agencies try hard to share good practice and skills, and this is valued greatly by the agency team. Moving to a single client, where collective knowledge soon becomes outdated, often holds limited appeal. Agencies are often located in metropolitan areas rather than in industrial parks near a major motorway, which further boosts their appeal.  

These youngsters (and they are invariably young compared to the author of this post) put quite a high ticket on work-life balance, often what agency life is centered around. My advice to any client is to play the long game and be aware of how much time you will have to invest in talent recruitment and management, and how hard it is to replace a skilled employee.

Getting the technology right - Agency and In-house

What technology are you going to use? It’s a given that you are going to need technology to create, optimize, and report on campaigns. And it needs to integrate with your other campaigns too, as well as some of your internal systems.. How are you going to select the right bit of kit? Which client's learning are you going to call on? Do you have a head of technology/IT that you can lean on?

My experience with Marketing and IT Directors is, unfortunately, not necessarily of a shared collective vision; it’s often more akin to a fight to the death. My hunch is that you might have the technology that is safest for your agency business, rather than what gets the best marketing results for your brands. If this is the case, the Board will be looking for someone to blame, rather than reward. Expect that someone to be you. Over the years I have seen several clients launch in-house search teams, and some have been very successful in doing so.

The best in-house teams nearly always have a consultancy agreement in place with their agency to get knowledge refresh sessions, advice on technology, or even additional hands when the head of search at a client decides they want to move on. If you are a client and do decide to bring things in house, my advice would be to do so over a period of time and to make sure that the agency knows what you are planning and why. As a client you might still benefit from the agency relationship over time if you are sensitive and do so in a long-term partnership style.

About Jim Brigden

Jim Brigden joined iProspect as Chief Client & Commercial Officer in August 2012, following its acquisition of I Spy Marketing, where he was CEO. Previously, Jim founded the first UK specialist search agency The Search Works in 2004, growing it to a £100m turnover in just three years. Since then, he’s been director of a breadth of digital media, ecommerce and technology agencies.

Share13 is in San Francisco on August 22-23 

Share13 is the industry's premier digital marketing event focused on organic search and digital marketing. Share13 is packed with content from leading brands and hands on practitioners on what is working in their business today. Unlike many other user conferences and public tradeshows, share is exclusively for search and digital marketing practitioners at leading brands. Attendees learn best practices from leaders, share their own expertise and make connections that last a lifetime.

Follow updates on Twitter @brightedge #share13  

Andy Betts

M Posted 13 years ago

t 9 min read

As Google shifts its focus to quality and relevancy, content marketing adoption has soared. It is no coincidence that the increasing focus on content marketing closely follows the significant Google algorithmic changes aiming to give users a better search experience. The convergence of paid, owned, and earned media caused many a debate on how people pitch SEO. The rise of Earned Media is all about content and engagement driven through new technology. Lisa Williams, Director of Paid, Owned and Earned Media at Rosetta shared some insights into the relationship between these channels.

Here is what Lisa had to say:

Search isn't just about the search engines anymore. It's about the discovery process people embark upon. They do it in a lot of channels, on a lot of platforms, and on a lot of devices. I'm really inspired that search is becoming more and more connected to content and story telling.

When I began working in online marketing in 1996, the content team would create an anchor piece and then rework it for product content, email, catalog, the auction, and even print pieces. Starting with the communication first, then how that communication gets shared in multiple channels, where the target market lives, allows for a more holistic approach of being in the customer journey - in the right place at the right time. I really see a big opportunity in 2013 to build upon the integration of Paid, Owned and Earned Media. It's powerful and impactful when marketers leverage Owned and Earned Media. It helps push the big "aha" moment for clients when they realize the revenue potential of "Earning" and "Owning" market share.

When a client says "we want to rank number one for this keyword (or phrase)" and we ask "what have you done as a brand to Earn or Own that position?" it helps recalibrate their thinking about gaining market share from Earned and Owned Media. That holistic approach ensures the brand is present in the customer journey. The other "aha" moment is the recognition that Earned and Owned Media have longevity, and that you don't pay for every single click the way you do with Paid Media. That said, the Paid and Display co-exposure with Natural Search is a powerful combination. This image from Altimeter Group helps illustrate how Paid, Owned and Earned Media are integrated. This should impact not only how we execute, but how we measure.

Providing great content that is relevant, linked to, shared, and endorsed fuels a winning strategy. Great content strategists, like Joe Pulizzi of The Content Marketing Institute (CMI), understand that the value of content isn't only in measuring the performance of just a single piece of content, but includes a body of work that adds enormous value for the target customer. It is important to show customers how content generates links, engagement, endorsement and sharing, and how that, in turn, influences Natural Search and Search Discovery. That type of measurement also helps clients understand that content isn't perfectly transactional like Paid, but it does generate KPI's the CMO can comfortably share. That makes content not just a mission-critical business asset, but also a strategy against which CMO’s can measure.

About Lisa Williams

Lisa’s past experience includes 17 years as an online marketer with a focus on strategic planning and implementation of Search and Owned Media. Lisa works with Fortune 500 clients to help bridge the gap between content, search and social, as well as integrating personas with targeted search marketing outreach. Lisa is on the SEMpdx Advisory Board and President and Founder of SEMCLE. Lisa will be speaking on the Social and Search panel at Share13 alongside Todd Friesen from Salesforce and Sarah Synder from Google.

Share13 is in San Francisco on August 22-23.

Andy Betts

M Posted 13 years ago

t 9 min read

SEO is no longer purely a technical issue. There is a very significant marketing aspect to SEO. SEO is becoming more content centric. Brands that learn how to evolve their approach to SEO and content put themselves in a winning position. SEO is about technology and human behavior. Content marketing and content management systems play a large part in this relationship.  

Last week BrightEdge had the opportunity to catch up with Robin Francis, Senior Manager of Search at Autodesk. Robin is a panelist on the “Aligning Content and SEO” session and is going to talk about how web content strategy is critical in order to scale SEO. Below are some extracts and comments from our interview with Robin:

BrightEdge: Welcome to Share13 Robin. This is your 2^nd year at the event and we would love to know more about your thoughts on Share12 and how you are looking forward to Share13. It is great to be part of such an awesome event once more! Search performs best in the gray areas of digital marketing. The nice thing about Share 12 was that those areas could be hashed out on subject matter from experts - at scale. I’m really looking forward to Share13 to focus on the future and how we can take advantage of content and social opportunity today and, most importantly, how to tie our hard work to ROI and revenue.

Q: What are your thoughts on the impact of not provided on search marketing?

Not provided was scary at first - even though it was less than 5% of results. Now that is has ballooned to at least 40% of keyword data, I’m not sure that it has ruined my life like I thought it would. I treat the data as directional and make informed decisions based on my other invaluable tools, the most important being the actual SERP itself. You can learn a lot from what Google is and isn’t telling you. But hey, that’s how we all got our start isn’t it? Watching search engines from a million miles away and trying to reverse engineer their signals is fun.

Q: How has content evolved to be the focus of search and digital marketing?

Content has always been the focus of search and digital marketing. We care about the entire user experience from when they land on the page including the words and messages delivered to them and the links that take them elsewhere. That has not changed on the ground. However, companies themselves are now starting to realize that their search marketers aren’t just working to appease the search engines. There are actual people behind those searches and ‘every move they make’ is being evaluated, by search engines, in order to make their product better. Some countries won’t even entertain your product unless you “speak their language” in your content. Without great content you can’t get to personalization, effective responsive design, and many other cool tactics. All search engines have done is reinforce this behavior through the forcing function of Panda, Penguin, and so on.

Q: What is your approach to publishing content and measuring performance across channels like site, social, search?

There are three things you must take a good hard look at to succeed across channels.

1. On-page SEO factors. If you focus on the basics, it’s scalable and has far reaching benefits. However, you can’t do it alone. You must understand business and visitor needs and work together with your peers to deliver great content that meets both. Keep collaborating to get these factors prioritized until it’s second nature. Show them lots of data on how it is working FOR THEM and you will win hearts and minds to get more work done.

2. Focus on the words. Are you delivering on the user intent first, marketing descriptions second? If not, then you’ve got a problem. Run A/B, usability, or even SEM or creative social tests. This will show folks quickly if the words are resonating or just plain confusing. Then you can make the case to give users what they want in the copy. This is added data to show your peers in the previous step on how it is working FOR THEM.

3. Help me help you. PR, social media and other parts of the business that has great content but no marketing love, or groups or initiatives with aggressive goals are great places to build alliances.

Call them up. Find out what they need and show them how content and/or search can help specifically. No one cares about the best practices. They care about making their goals. Run a pilot and dig up the data on how it is performing across channels FOR THEM. This will help pave the way to bigger and better content programs that move the needle.

Q: How important is mobile search in 2013?

It is very important. Google has said, in no uncertain terms, that sites delivering a poor mobile experience will be dealt with. Even if your mobile traffic is low you have to ask if that is because the experience is currently not good enough. You’ve got a bit of time to clean it up, but not a lot!. The last thing you want is to explain how the “Cheetah” update whittled your mobile traffic down to nothing because you thought you had more time.

About Robin Francis    

Robin Francis currently works as the Senior Manager of Search & Web Content at Autodesk. Francis specializes in search strategy, search analytics, SEO copywriting, SEO for content, technical SEO, linking, training, site audits, at-scale SEO tool creation, and managing teams, vendors and freelancers.