SEO for Enterprise: Stuff You Can Do Yourself!

SEO is dead.
You have no time.
Welcome to BIG SITE SEO!
SEARCH CHURCH
November 2013

Adam Audette
@audette

SEO cannot
exist in a silo

Digital Visibility
SEO

PPC
Search
PLAs
CSEs

Tech
On-Page
Links

CSEs
PLAs
Display
Display

Social
Search

Outcome
Paid

Content
Content

Social

Community
Social Ads
Management

Website
Website
Social Ads

YOU KNOW WHAT NEEDS TO BE DONE

SEO KNOWLEDGE IS NOT
WIDESPREAD

LEADERSHIP WANT
QUICK FIXES and
SILVER BULLETS

WHAT YOU DON’T SHIP, DON’T
COUNT

TIP #1

PROJECT THE OPPORTUNITY

Share of Voice for Top Terms

0.73%
1.71%

allrecipes.com

3.17%

drinks.com
about.com

2.44%

drinkmixer.com
2.93%
2.68%

recipes.com
chow.com

Not Present for High Priority KWs
Drinks

About

Drinkmixer

Allrecipes

Recipes

Chow

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

40

Monthly Share of Search Volume for High Priority KWs
250000

200000

150000

100000

50000

0
Chow

Recipes

Allrecipes

Drinkmixer

About

Drinks

PROJECT THEKW Monthly Volume vs Earned
High Priority OPPORTUNITY

Traffic (Jul-Sep), 13,451

Monthly Volume, 358,610


Traffic

Organic
conversion
%

Leads /
sales

LOTS OF TIPS

STUFF YOU CAN DO YOURSELF

INTERNAL-ish SOURCES

Internal
 Paid search query report
 Site search data
 GWT queries

 New paid & organic report
 Bing queries

ADWORDS SEARCH QUERY

Good:
 Actual queries that triggered paid ad
 Data IS available via API


Not so good:
 Paid search ≠ organic search behavior
 Have to be running paid ads
 And there‟s this…


Not so good:
 "you‟ll only see search terms that were
used by people at least 24 hours ago
and have either received clicks in the
past 30 days or were searched for by a
significant number of people."


Not so good:
 "Any search terms that did not meet this
criteria will be summed up in the 'Other
search terms' row.”

SITE SEARCH DATA

Good:
 Hey, it‟s keyword data!

SITE SEARCH DATA

Not so good:
 Site search ≠ organic search
 Your site probably has issues

GWT DATA

Good:
 The actual queries! FTW!
 Impressions, avg. position, CTR

GWT DATA

Not so good:
 Limited to ~2,000 queries per day
 (there‟s a trick to expand this)
 Queries are bucketed

 Clicks ≤ 1 don‟t count
 Data is „sanitized‟

PAID & ORGANIC ADWORDS REPORT

Good:
 Query data!
 Impressions, avg. position, CTR
 View of paid + organic

PAID & ORGANIC ADWORDS REPORT

Not so good:
 Not in the API
 (at least not officially?)
 You‟ve gotta‟ be running paid search!

BING / YAHOO! BABY

Good:
 You‟ve got actual organic query data
 It‟s raw and unfiltered

BING / YAHOO! BABY

Not so good:
 Small segment of organic search
 ~20% of RKG‟s clients‟ traffic

HOW ‘BOUT EXTERNAL SOURCES?

External
 Competitive insight tools (SEM Rush,
Search Metrics, etc)
 SEO analytics (Brightedge, SEO Clarity,
etc)
 Panel data (comScore, Alexa,
Quantcast)

CONUNDRUM OF SCRAPED DATA

What scraped data gives you:
 Query data
 Ranking position
 Competitive insight

 Ecosystem insight

3. VERIFY MORE FOLDERS IN GWT

Why verify more folders?
 GWT limited to ~2,000 daily queries
 You don‟t control what these are

3. VERIFY MORE FOLDERS IN GWT

Verify folders and subdomains
 Requires folder structure like
/drinks/whiskey
 Gives individual account access / data

 Can be used for subdomains, too

4. ANALYZE LOG FILES

Ask IT for 4 weeks of log files

4. ANALYZE LOG FILES

Ask IT for this:
 Timestamp
 URL requested
 User agent (limit to Googlebot and
Bingbot
 Response code

Googlebot is spending most of its crawl allotment on two err
pages, which could mean these pages return the wrong
status code.

Googlebot is crawling the same page with 3 separate
URLs, which could indicate a canonicalization/duplication
problem.

These URLs with ?utm_source and ?creative_desc
parameters shouldn‟t be indexed.

SERVER LOG ANALYSIS

Look for:
 Which URLs have the most requests?
 Are there duplicate URLs?
 Any language selector issues?

 Are 404s returning the wrong status
code?
 Are parameters being indexed?

5. ADD PARAMETER HANDLING RULES

5. ADD PARAMETER HANDLING RULES

WARNING: Use Care! Be holistic
w/other tools.

TECHNICAL READING

SEO tools for duplicate content:
http://plotin.us/17ChBFp

Robots.txt best practices for SEO:
http://plotin.us/1gnC8Ae

LOG FILE TOOLS

 Adam‟s: http://www.rimmkaufman.com/blog/seodiagnostics-tool/15072008/

 Ian‟s: http://www.portent.com/blog/seo/log-files-forseo-32011.htm

 Sawmill: http://www.sawmill.net/features.html

 Splunk: http://www.splunk.com/download/

6. SETUP SEO LUNCHES

Use monthly „brown bags‟ for:
 Building bridges across departments
 Keeping other teams up to speed on
changes
 Finding out what projects are in the
pipeline

7. USE THE BATHROOM

Put up “did you know” posters:
 Did u know? SEO isn‟t about spamming
search engines!

 Did u know? When you permanently move a
page use a 301.
 Did u know? Your SEO team is in building Q
and we‟ve got beer!

USE THE BATHROOM

Put up “did you know” posters:
 Did u know? SEO isn‟t about spamming
search engines!

 Did u know? When you permanently move a
page use a 301.
 Did u know? Your SEO team is in building Q
and we‟ve got beer!

8. CREATE A RUTHLESS ROADMAP

Create a 2014 technical roadmap:
 Be ruthless: what are THE TOP 3 technical SEO
things that MUST be accomplished in 2014?
 Say why they must be accomplished (back it up with
data)
 Build a business rationale with all that time you have
don‟t have.
 Have a year end meeting and set owners and
timelines for 2014.

9. TAKE (OVER) YOUR G+

The G+ is without country:
 Does social own it? Marketing? Search?

 In G+ you have a CMS and social channel at
your fingertips
 With rel publisher and authorship this is ever
more important
 Hummingbird-ness….

10. QUORA FOR CONTENT IDEAS

Quora and social sites vet for you:
 What topics are most popular

 What types of content get shared the most
 Hat tip: Mike King @ipullrank  follow him

11. STEAL YOUR COMPETITOR’S IDEAS

BUILD A REVERSE PROXY TOOL

Why a reverse proxy tool:
 Allows you to make SEO changes w/out need
for IT or dev
 Gives you flexibility to implement metadata,
titles, and optimizations
 Provides a relief for swamped dev teams, too

Lives here

Marketing

Engineering

Spans this and
more

Merchandising

UX

Content

Marketing

Engineering

Merchandising

UX

Content

9
7

Get your CEO thinking about SEO

Thank you Philly!

Adam Audette
@audette

SEO for Enterprise: Stuff You Can Do Yourself!

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Editor's Notes