read more

Before SES San Jose I interviewed Chris Winfield about the panel he was speaking on, social media, and other fun stuff. With SES Chicago just around the corner (December 8-12), I had the opportunity to interview another SES speaker, Jessica Bowman. Not only is Jessica a great colleague and friend of SEOmoz, she’s also very knowledgeable about SEO and has been a recognized name (and smile) in the industry for quite some time. She’s presenting on in-house SEO next week, so I peppered her with various questions about agencies, conferences, and, of course, her desert island essentials. Enjoy!

Jessica Bowman (pictured left) along with (l-r) Laura Lippay, Dafina Curtis, Lauren Vaccarello, Kim Krause Berg, your favorite blogger, and Danielle Winfield

1. Tell us a little about yourself: what sort of work you do, where you blog, all that good stuff.

Until this year I have always been an in-house SEO, building in-house SEO programs at Yahoo!, Enterprise Rent-A-Car and Business.com.  In mid-2008 I started SEOinhouse.com, a company dedicated to helping in-house SEOs get further faster, by not reinventing the wheel.

I help companies implement SEO quickly and smoothly, through SEO consulting for in-house SEOs and building in-house SEO programs. I find there is a right approach to in-house SEO, and there’s a long approach to in-house SEO because you are trying things out and aren’t aware of what lies on the road ahead. Eventually you’ll get to the same spot, but we can get there faster with a higher ROI and less frustration.

I blog at SEMinhouse.com.

2. How did you get involved in the SEO/SEM industry? 

Like many search marketers, I fell into it. I was working at Enterprise Rent-A-Car and my position as a project manager was dissolved. I was interviewing for other positions in the company and during my free time went around looking for work. Someone said, "We want to get into search engines, I think it’s called search engine marketing."  With that, I went away for 2 weeks and emerged with a 20 page document (my first SEO audit) that explained SEO, identified what we were doing right, what we were doing wrong and what we needed to fix.  They asked if it was enough for a full-time position — it was because it was enough work to keep us busy for 2 years.  The rest, as they say, is history.

3. What’s something you love and hate about the SEO industry?

I love that there is always something new, which means there are constantly new opportunities to explore and maximize. I hate that it takes so much time to keep up with it all!  It’s a struggle to balance the workload and find the new innovative things in the media amidst all of the SEO content being written these days.

4. Do you run into any barriers being a woman in a typically male-centric industry?

Surprisingly, no.  There are a few male-only conversations or "guys’ nights," but the ladies have the same so it all balances out. As an in-house SEO I saw no more than you see at any large corporation. When I started out in search marketing my biggest barrier was youth, rather than the fact that I was female.

5. You’re speaking at SES Chicago about "In-House: Lessons Learned & Victories Won." What sort of struggles does an in-house marketer face that’s unique or different than an agency?

Where to begin!  This is a novel unto itself.  When you’re at an agency you’re expected to provide innovative ideas and a thorough list of what needs changed. When you’re in-house you’re the one who has to create that AND figure out how to pull it off amidst the opposition, politics and higher priorities.

Some in-house SEOs are better than many of the consultants I’ve seen, yet they struggle to gain support and buy-in from people in the company. Many in-house SEOs recognize that they need to bring in a consultant to help sell ideas.  In fact, a lot of my training and speaking engagements start off with a "What do you need them to do and what is the opposition?" discussion that guides the direction of everything that follows.

6. Are there specific pros and cons to working in-house vs. at an agency level?

Most definitely there are pros and cons.  When you’re at an agency you’re expected to really think outside the box and get credit for doing it. When you’re in-house you have to reign yourself in or risk gaining the perception of always having wild ideas that can’t be implemented in your organization. 

I find working at an agency a lot less stressful because you tell the client what they need to do and they have to figure out how to pull it off. I equip clients with many ideas and recommendations for doing that, but at the end of the day there is only so much the agency can do to help make that happen, unless we’re coming in on-site and building rapport with the key players.

On the flip-side, being in-house is very rewarding because the rankings and traffic growth are the result of your hard work and people in the company see that. If you play your cards right, SEO can be an extraordinarily visible position within the company - I’ve worked on projects for and presented to the COO, in-house corporate attorneys, CIO, etc. An agency can try to get this visibility, but when you’re in-house you can definitely make it happen.

7. How do you think search will evolve in the next couple years in terms of awareness and in-house adoption by various companies?

Especially in the rough economy, I anticipate more awareness for SEO and interest in investing SEO initiatives. We’re going to see executives looking more at the analytics in the way they do for PPC and expect it for SEO. I was on the phone with a recruiter the other day who was looking for an analytics driven SEO, indicating it’s already starting.  (BTW…it’s currently still available: a Director level in-house SEO position in San Francisco. Let me know if you’re interested!)

We’re going to see more companies bring search marketing in-house, especially SEO, and particularly at big brands.  Unfortunately, many of these companies will unknowingly hire the wrong talent, because what makes a successful in-house SEO is extremely different than what makes a successful agency SEO. 

8. What search tip or tactic do you think will become obsolete in the next year or so?

I hope the paid links in a list making up a "sponsored sites" section become obsolete. We know they can create issues, but so many people don’t and get themselves into trouble.  I’m hoping these become a thing of the past quickly.  Truthfully, I think most of the SEO tactics will still be important, depending on the site.  Just when I think a tactic is becoming a thing of the past, I run into a scenario where it’s a solution that works really well and this tiny change can generate millions of dollars.

9. What do you think is the most overrated piece of SEO advice, and why?

Similar to above, just when I think a tactic may be overrated, I find a company or scenario where it makes complete sense.  I believe PageRank is overrated.  It’s important in some scenarios but people get hung up on their current PageRank, despite it being several months old - it can be insightful, but I think companies waste a lot of time and money dwelling on it. Now a replacement for that might be mozRank, which reflects more up to date data.  You guys did a great job with that tool [Linkscape]- we as an industry needed it.

10. What have been your favorite and least favorite panels you’ve spoken on, and why?

My favorite panel was at SES Chicago a few years ago, I can’t even remember what it was called, but I do remember it was about in-house SEO and building the expertise within your organization. Jeffrey Rohrs moderated and it was the first and only time I have ever seen the entire room productively involved in a single conversation - the audience contributed great ideas along with the panelists, and it wasn’t your typical Question-and-Answer.

My least favorite panels are about reputation management. For me the topic is tough because executing reputation management campaigns and digging up the material for a presentation is draining because it’s all extremely negative. Years ago I was doing reputation management in-house and remember talking to the attorney about how draining we found it. But, it’s got to be done because there are a lot of good companies in need of great advice on the topic.

11. In your opinion, what is the formula for a perfect search conference?

Plenty of opportunities to meet new people, a great place at the hotel for people to congregate (part of why SES Chicago is my favorite SES conference), parties with standing room only so you’re forced to talk to everyone you pass, sessions that start at 10 am and, most importantly, never-seen-before content.

12. What is one piece of advice you can give someone who has just started out in the SEO world?

Get facilitated SEO training, whether it be an in-house SEO training that someone creates for your company, a training class that walks you through SEO 101 in a logical fashion, or SEO certification programs such as those offered by SEMPO and Market Motive. There is so much information out there right now that it’s a challenge to get the big-picture understanding and list of action items in the same fashion as a structured training class. Once you have the basics down, you’ll get even more value out of the conference sessions and articles that look at one single aspect of search marketing from many different angles.

13. What are some of your non-SEO hobbies?

There’s life beyond SEO???   I love to travel internationally and see how people live - the culture, customs and history. I once went to rural Russia and saw life in a way that I have never imagined - the heat and hot water shut off one day each week, even in the winter - that was in 2005 and I had a couple of unexpectedly cold days. I also dig museums — French Impressionism is my favorite and the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris is on my bucket list.

14. If you were stuck on an island with one DVD, one meal, one CD, and one website, what would they be? 

What a question - almost a trick question.  For the website, my initial thought was Google, but then I couldn’t access the information on the websites.  Instead I’m thinking Google Books or Amazon, because I could access an entire library of anything I could ever need to know!

For a DVD, it would have to be a custom made DVD with as many episodes of Are You Being Served? as possible (It’s a BBC comedy from the 70’s).  One meal, wow, only one - it better be filling!  One CD - again, it would have to be a custom CD, with the best-of-the-best, including 2 of my favs: That’s Amore and Circle of Life from the Lion King - who can’t smile with these two songs?

Do you like this post? Yes No

Here at the Seach Insider Summit in Park City, UT, Richard Zwicky from Enquisite has just released some amazing data. As Jessica Bowman, Todd Friesen, John Marshall and I sat in the lunch room watching his slides, we alternately stared in shock, shook our fists in anger and raised eyebrows in disbelief. If you’ve ever felt, as an SEO, that you were undervalued and underpaid compared to your paid search compatriots, here’s the evidence to back it up.

First, a bit about Enquisite’s data. Enquisite is a web analytics company that focuses on search. They track search traffic to more than 5,000 sites, including SEOmoz (the rest of their client database is private), and record millions of search engine click referrals every day. From this information, they can see some amazing statistics, including:

• For every 1 click on a paid search result, the organic results generate 8.5 clicks (this is on a keyword parity basis, not counting those search results that have no paid ads)
• Based on action/conversion tracking, paid search clicks convert, on average, at 1.5X the rate of organic clicks (no surprise, since that ad text and landing page is custom optimized by the advertiser)
• From the numbers above, we can see that the opportunity from organic search is 5.66X that of paid search
• Across the board ad spending (via SEMPO):
  • 2004 was 85% PPC vs. 12% Organic
  • 2005 was 87% PPC vs. 11% Organic
  • 2006 was 87% PPC vs. 12% Organic
  • 2007 was 88% PPC vs. 10% Organic
• Spend on SEO is 1/8th of PPC
• Paid Search Agencies earn, on average 10% of their clients’ PPC spend (this number may actually be low)
• By this logic, SEO Agencies earn 1/45th (1 / 5.66 x as much as paid search agencies (from a direct keyword-to-conversion path perspective)

Richard has even more interesting and in-depth data than what’s above, but the direction is crystal clear. Because PPC is easier for advertisers and agencies to value, agencies and businesses are spending many multiples of dollars to get that traffic. Is SEO a good investment? Considering the data above, it’s exceptionally hard to argue otherwise.

So what’s Enquisite up to? Solving this problem with an automated, software solution, of course. Given the screenshots and private demos Richard’s been showing off, I’d highly recommend installing Enquisite’s analytics. It’s free for the first 30 days, SEOmoz PRO members get an additional discount (use this URL) and the data that’s gathered now can be used for additional insight when their final product launches (~Q2 2009 with a beta as early as January).

Thanks much to Richard Zwicky, who’s sitting next to me at the bar helping author and fact check this post

Do you like this post? Yes No

Web Analytics and SEO

read more

Is Ranking Dead?

read more

Recently I was working with a client and I decided to do a little experiment, because sometimes I have nothing better to do.  I wanted to know whether changing the crawl rate in Google’s Webmaster Tools really made a difference.  Part of me felt Google just put it there to make people feel that Google will come to their site more often, but part of me wanted to trust Google.

I quickly wrote a script that would stored all the user agent info, page visited, and date visited in a database.  I let it run for 200 days, 90 of which were set on the “Faster” crawl speed (the rest were on “Normal”).  I also tracked the time from which a new blog was posted and when Google first visited that post.  I tracked the site for 55 days on “Normal,” 90 days on “Faster,” and then the last 55 on “Normal” again.

Here is some background information before we get into the data I collected.  The website had 45 pages cached in Google and was over a year old when I began this experiment.  New blog posts were added between 2 and 3 times a week, adding fresh new content to the site.  The site ranks well for its brand and a few other keywords related to its field.  

During the course of the experiment over 80 new blog posts were added to the site.  While the crawl rate was set at “Normal” it took Google an average of 3.4 days to first visit the page.  When the crawl rate was set at “Faster” it took Google an average of 2.9 days to first visit the page.  That was not much of an improvement in my book, but interesting nevertheless.  Note: This is not the time when the page first appeared cached in the index, but when the bot first visited the page itself.

While the crawl rate was set to “Normal,” Google visited the site an average of 6 times a day and favored visiting the site on Tuesdays, Fridays, and Sundays.  When the crawl rate was set to “Faster,” Google visited the site an average of 7.5 times a day and favored visiting the site on Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays.  Over 90 days it visited 135 pages more than if I would have left it set to “Normal.”

If you look at the graph above you will see there is slight improvement while the crawl rate is set to “Faster,” but only for a portion of the 90 days.  After seeing the results I have come to the conclusion that changing the crawl rate in Google’s Webmaster Tools makes no substantial difference to this site.

Do you like this post? Yes No

We have been doing some research into how to rank in Google mobile web search. Google is the dominant player in mobile search in the US (source: Nielsen Mobile) - our test site hasn’t yet been indexed in the other search engines so I’ll have to report back later on how it does there:

Many of you will be familiar with the ranking factors report that SEOmoz put together last year. I found it very useful to see others’ views even though I contributed to it. I am looking forward to the update (perhaps next year?) when I expect we will see more people expressing views on usage data being incorporated into the algorithm along with the impact of reviews on local search etc.

I have been interested in mobile search for a long time. Before starting Distilled, I worked in management consultancy for Internet and mobile companies and the mobile stuff has stuck with me as a continuing interest. I now personally carry out an average of a few mobile searches a day and I know that the total search volume has been exploding. Driven by the iPhone and similar devices finally finding critical mass with normal users, we are finally seeing a true channel emerging for many businesses where there used to be only marketing hype. I’m not declaring 2008 or 2009 the ‘year of the mobile web’ and nor am I going to get into a discussion here about mobile web vs. mobile interpretations of the main web, because I think there is more value to be had in thinking about the value of the channel.

Whatever you believe about mobile web, it appears to be here to stay and is growing quickly - Nielsen recently released data on growth of the UK mobile internet market (source: Nielsen mobile) - the y-axis is "unique audience in millions:

Note that if you look at the number of mobile devices in the world and the number of searches performed per user who is using the mobile web, as more mobile users turn to the mobile web, we will eventually see mobile searches outstrip PC-based searches…

If you have carried out mobile searches (using, for example, Google’s mobile site - if you use a PC to search there, you’ll also need to click ‘mobile’ in the search results) you will know that the results often look nothing like the main search results. This is for the two good reasons that:

• When you are mobile you are looking for a different kind of resource
• Many mobile devices cannot cope with the same breadth of content as desktops and laptops

It really struck home when, pre-iPhone, I searched for [train times] from my old Nokia (using the trusty Opera mobile browser). With my clumsy query I was hoping to find a mobile-friendly version of either the TFL or National Rail sites (neither gets a link because they are the most annoying sites in the world - if you live in London / the UK you will have experienced them). Instead, I found train-times.mobi which isn’t actually a real site - it is basically just a holding page (it’s worth noting that the mobile [train times] SERPS appear a bit cleaner when I look again now).

This got me thinking - I thought that ‘train times’ would be one of the more competitive searches from a mobile and so how was this site ranking? I dug in a little more and it wasn’t propped up with a bunch of exact anchor-text links or anything else like that. I was actually quite surprised it had got itself indexed. So I started to wonder what factors were influencing the mobile search rankings.

There are two main reasons that led me to hypothesise that pagerank might not be a particularly powerful factor in the mobile ranking factors (I later found a similar post from Patrick at blogstorm - and I’ve added his reason as a third):

1. People browsing on their mobile are less likely to follow links around the web (they browse less in general) and hence the link graph is less effective as a model for searcher behaviour
2. Mobile users don’t link to mobile content so the link graph isn’t created by people in the same context as the people browsing the link graph (exacerbating the issue with the regular web of the linkerati being only a subset of users - but in the mobile case, people who can link are those at their PCs and therefore an entirely distinct group from browsers - and when they are at their PCs, why would they link to mobile-specific sites?)
3. Patrick’s reason: Time and location are so much more important for mobile searches and links tell you nothing about relevance relative to either of these factors

At the moment, the mobile web is relatively young and there is not a huge amount of competition compared with the regular web so it seems plausible that you could rank for even reasonably competitive phrases without many links if other factors are relatively more powerful.

We started out by researching the sites ranking for a range of competitive mobile keyphrases (including maps, take away, taxi, train times, restaurant, poker) and formed some ideas on how we should build our test site. Following this, we built a small mobile site in a competitive niche following best development practices but without building links to it. It has two or three nofollow links which resulted in it being indexed in Google mobile search but which shouldn’t be passing any ranking benefit. Once indexed, it quickly ranked for our target phrases and has gradually improved to the extent that we are thinking about building it out further (hence why I’m not disclosing it here yet).

Based on the success of this, we have put together our current recipe for mobile rankings (I have no doubt that the algorithms will get more sophisticated as the mobile web matures). We haven’t done extensive testing to determine which of these factors is the most important, but this methodology works and all the steps are useful for mobile users, so it seems reasonable to include them all

How to build a site that does well in mobile search

• Small, lightweight and fast-loading site (< 20kb / page)
• XHTML Mobile 1.0 Doctype
• UTF-8 character encoding
• JPEG / GIF images
• Content including "mobile"
• On-site keyphrase optimisation as usual (with a focus on short titles, and small amounts of body copy)
• Regular technical SEO principles

It is worth comparing this list with Google’s mobile website advice. Note, however, that keyphrases in the domain name are not required (which I thought could be the sole reason for the ‘train times’ example above) - we got a site ranking for competitive London-oriented phrases with a domain that included no London-based keywords. We also haven’t yet added a mobile sitemap.

Seriously? What about links?

You will also have noticed something missing from that list: links. I can’t say that there is no link-based element of mobile ranking at the moment (and certainly can’t say that there isn’t going to be an increased element of it in the future). But right now, partly because of the relative lack of competition and partly because as I explained above, the link graph makes less sense for mobile sites and users, links are not needed for (at least some) mobile rankings.

I expect a new spate of mobile sites now. Knock yourselves out

Mobile tools

In the course of this research and some other work we have been doing, it has become abundantly clear that there is a lack of tools to help mobile marketers at the moment. There are some useful tools for the technical side of things - we find the .mobi emulator useful for testing etc. - but the marketing side of things is very under-serviced.

One area that I am particularly surprised not to have seen yet is keyword research. Traditional keyword research tools don’t shed much light on how people carry out mobile searches. There are a variety of factors that lead people to search differently when mobile, including (but probably not limited to):

• A need for different kinds of products / services when mobile
• A corresponding lack of some tasks being carried out when mobile (ever bought groceries on your phone? Know anyone who has?)
• Constraints of the device - leading, I would imagine to shorter searches, more mis-spellings etc. even when searching for the same thing
• Different refinement / re-searching behaviour resulting from time constraints and device constraints
• Desire for results local to current location
• Plausible effects in either direction on branded search - on one hand, people don’t have access to all their bookmarks, might not want to type .co.uk etc. - but on the other hand, performing a search requires two page loads to get to the end location and that can be slow on some devices

For all these reasons, and also to satisfy my general marketing curiosity, I would like better information on mobile searching habits. I think it is pretty strange that you can buy mobile search ads, but currently have no data on volumes ahead of time. When you think about finding out how people search, you realise that there are two kinds of people who have this data:

1. the search engines
2. ISPs

Now, the search engines haven’t always been particularly keen to release keyword data. AOL recently released data on the top 5 mobile searches which is quite sweet, but not particularly helpful. Mobile search is still in its infancy - and I suspect that the data is sparse for the smaller search engines and they might be a little embarrassed to release their data (do Microsoft and Yahoo! admit that "google" is still their most popular search term these days?). I have spoken to representatives at all the major engines and none of them have any roadmap that they would tell me about for releasing proper keyword data.

In the world of the regular internet, there are so many ISPs that sampling is needed, and the data is often poor (or needing a lot of correction / effort to make it usable). In the mobile world there are far fewer ISPs - in the UK, for example, if you had access to O2’s data (segmented by iPhone / non-iPhone) you would have over 20% of the market. Any of the mobile operators could do a decent job of extrapolating their data to the marketplace. Of course there is the additional benefit that they could gather segmented data across search engines and they have huge amounts of demographic data to go alongside the keywords.

So, if anyone from a mobile operator is reading, let me know who I need to bug to put together a co-branded tool that uses your data and our knowledge / skills!

We’re also finding that regular analytics data doesn’t cut it - many mobile devices don’t execute javascript. Although you can fall back on log file data, there are reasons we all love the ease of use of Google Analytics etc. If anyone has a good solution to this problem, let me know! Also - if anyone from the Google Webmaster Central team happens to be listening, we are seeing data for search impressions, but no search traffic (which we know isn’t true from our log data).

Behaviour away from search

This morning I went to a presentation by Ciaran Norris about social media marketing (given to an interesting audience of people who mainly hadn’t seen will it blend) where he reminded me about the great social media planning tool from Forrester that they call Groundswell. As he showed off the data, I was thinking (probably because I was writing this post in his presentation, sorry Ciaran) that it would be great if you could segment according to mobile use as well as geographic area - i.e. 18-24 year old females in the UK on their mobile - how does that change the proportion who are "joiners" vs. "Creators" vs. "Critics" for example.

Further reading and a funny data point

Brand Republic have a story about Yahoo! striking a deal with Virgin Mobile (I’m tempted to go all el reg on that and put exclamation marks all over the place) which claims that this gives Yahoo! an 80% market share in UK mobile search:

The deal takes Yahoo!’s market share of the UK mobile search audience to 80% and follows similar deals with Orange, O2, 3 and T-Mobile.

To which I say, in the UK vernacular, bollocks. It appears to be an extrapolation from the fact that they have "deals" with 4 of the 5 UK mobile operators (= 80% - see what they did there?). This is despite the fact that I have an iPhone with O2 and the default search when I got it was Google (great "deal" there Yahoo!). I don’t have accurate UK mobile search market share data - has anyone else seen any? - but I’d put money on Yahoo! not having an 80% market share.

If you liked my thoughts on mobile search, you can read more of my mobile musings on the Distilled blog:

• The differences between mobile and cell terminology between the UK and US influence how we think about the mobile web
• How to choose a URL for your mobile website
• Why Google could be the next Google

And a bonus link to great websites for tiny browsers.

Technorati Tags

mobile, seo

Do you like this post? Yes No

Is Ranking Dead?

read more

Is Ranking Dead?

read more

read more