Challenges of Scale

Bill Hunt of Back Azimuth Consulting knows a lot about it. "Scale is the big point, so when we’re talking about that, take somebody like Procter and Gamble – hundreds of thousands of products around the world, so whereas one site might have four brands, two brands, one brand – it might even be a mom and pop talking about a singular product…these large companies, everything is scale – multiple brands, multiple countries, multiple pages," explains Hunt. "It could be a single company – somebody like a TripAdvisor or a Travelocity with millions of pages about a singular topic…so that’s really what we’re talking about is scale that makes the big difference."

"Scale in itself is a challenge," says Hunt. "Interestingly enough, a lot of these big programs are just really starting to get ramped up, and they’ve struggled with ‘how do we do this at scale?’ and the first is indexing. At IBM, we had fifty five million pages, so how do we even make sure we have fifty five million pages indexed? So that has a variety of challenges, and so it’s the same techniques you would use, you just have to think about holistically and scale."

"Things like metrics are a little bit different," he adds. "We often have to have a slightly different business case, because while in a smaller company, I can go to my web developer and say, ‘hey, can you fix this?’ At a big company, I might have to put in a request for an offshore person to do it or an IT request for people that are already over-challenged. So we often have to do a business requirements or business feasibility requests just to get some of the simplest things done, and that in itself is a huge challenge often."

Convincing the C-Level Execs

"I did this thing many years ago that I think a lot of people have picked up on, called a ‘missed opportunity matrix’ and you know, the bigger company, the bigger the ego," says Hunt. "So you’ll get companies that say, ‘hey, we’re a fifty billion dollar company. We should be number one in Google.’ And that’s not necessarily true. So you have to humble them and remind them how you get there, and the quickest way I’ve found to do it is to take ten words that are like the poster-children or the essence of that company…I’ll give you an example from IBM. We used ‘database software’ and IBM’s probably one of the leading companies for database software. We had no rankings. Out of hundreds of thousands of searches a month there was only about sixty visits to the website….it’s almost this ‘holy shit’ moment where it’s like, ‘That can’t be. We’re the essence of database software…"

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You can probably come up with more than ten words you should rank for, but ten is probably enough to drive home the point. 

"So even those ten words…creating that, you can see what is the opportunity, then looking at log files – what are we getting? And that’s often the key catalyst to get people fired up to want to do this," says Hunt. "Then it sort of backslides a little bit when they start to understand the complexity – that we need money to do it, that we need to change our operations in many cases to do it, and then the other side of it is paid search. They’re used to spending a lot of money on TV, but now you come in and they look at search as an easy way to do it, and they’ve never really allocated money."

Now that social media has emerged as an attractive marketing channel, it’s probably even harder to convince execs of how much money is really needed.

"Because of search, we’re often able to track it better so we can show an ROI, but that in itself runs into problems now, because you’re now showing in many cases..erroneously, we’ll over-show ROI from search and it really starts to make the other marketers cringe – that ours is so much more efficient, so it’s a nice little political game you have to play," hunt says.

Speaking the Right Language

If you want to convince someone to do something, it helps if you can put it into terms that they understand. This is true in just about every situation. 

"The language that the average SEO uses doesn’t fly at the C level, or even at a VP level," warns Hunt. "They don’t care about all the mechanics and sort of geeky stuff. They want to know, ‘look, it’s gotta be changed. What’s the business value of changing it? What’s the outcome? What’s the expense?’ So if you can add some sort of MBA speak to your standard SEO shtick, it helps a lot. You have to speak their language, and just trying to overwhelm them with your brilliance about algorithms and stuff like that doesn’t work."

"I think when you do that, you put it into proper business objectives," he adds. "’Here’s the opportunity. Here’s the yield. Here’s what it’s gonna cost me, and here’s why you should cannibalize somebody else’s budget to give it to me.’…And another one I call the kumbaya moment, when you say, ‘search fits everything.’" 

"If somebody sees a TV commercial and loves our product, maybe they don’t remember who we are, but they might go query for it," Hunt elaborates. "Do we show up? Are we in the consideration set? I think that that’s where we need to take it now. We need to start being grown up ourselves and say, ‘we can place nice with everyone.’ We used to come in and say, ‘we’re the greatest thing since sliced bread.’…when you show the business value, it tends to go a very long way."

At Pubcon in Las Vegas, Mike McDonald of WebProNews caught up with Bill Hunt, CEO of Global Strategies International, a search engine marketing consultancy firm that specializes in global enterprise companies. They talked about some things that companies can do to simplify their search engine marketing efforts when their sites are huge. Hunt spoke a little about this at the PubCon session called "Discover Techniques Used by Enterprise-Level SEOs/SEMs", but talked a little more about it with Mike.

Companies with millions of pages often leverage all the different properties of partners they have and use them to get links. One way Bill talked about doing this is getting partners to link to specific pages instead of your homepage. He gives an example of a company like IBM sponsoring events. These event pages would have IBM logos linking to IBM.com, but what IBM could do is talk to the people running the event page and ask them to link to a more topical page instead of their homepage. If it was for a supply chain management event, they could link to a supply chain management page.

Another example would be OEM partners. You can have them link to the appropriate channel of your site instead of the homepage. The more partners you have, the bigger impact this kind or reaching out will make on your search engine marketing efforts. Bill says to just go out and see who’s linking to your homepage and simply ask them to change the link. And if they’re your partner, they’re more likely to comply.

Affiliate Issues

A large company is bound to have some affiliates, and you probably don’t want to step on any toes in cases like these. Bill suggests looking at the combination of paid and organic data that’s out there and turning off paid words if they’ve got a good organic ranking. Bill says to ask yourself "Is there cannibalization?"

When working with companies that have a lot of channel partners and brands themselves you have to understand what the cost is of having that affiliate partner, he notes.

A lot of big companies (like Intel) are starting to use "co-op dollars" or subsidize their channel partners work by saying: Here’s a list of words you can use, here’s some acceptable copy and if you use those, we’ll pay "X" percentage like they do with the Intel Inside program. It subsidizes and you get almost twice the amount of budget.

"Sit down and do the math," says Bill. Does it make sense to compete or does it make sense to subsidize? Or do you not need to do anything at all? Subsidizing your partners is a big win for them and you let them do all the heavy lifting.

Organizing Big Sites for SEO

For Big sites with many pages, Mike asked Bill for some tips to keep them organized and pointed in the right direction. Bill offered the following advice.

The first thing is to take your words and tier them (such as three tiers). Bill returns to IBM as an example of having 53 million pages. You can’t do SEO on all of those outside of using templates. Tier the words…take 100 words for example, and assign them each a page and monitor how those are doing. Use the page ranking…is it meeting the criteria or is it not? Focus on making sure those primary phrases are there.

Another big issue is whether or not you are actually getting indexed. Bill says to use XML sitemaps and run your own spider to "make sure you’re not getting trapped out."

Using templates is big though. Bill says he has clients that have hundreds of thousands of pages, but they can fit neatly into five templates. "Optimize five templates, and anything that’s built in that template is search-friendly out of the box." It’s not quite perfect, he says, but it’s about 80% there, and then you can fine-tune it. I would also add that a good amount of internal linking in large sites is probably a good idea as well.

A huge site with tons of content would appear to be a gargantuan task when it comes to SEO, and without organization, it can be just that. Considering the advice Bill Hunt has offered though, it doesn’t have to be as intimidating of a process as it appears on the surface.

How has social media impacted search engine marketing?

Mike Moran: It’s interesting because all the consultants that dove into search marketing a few years ago have now made the trek into social media marketing. I think that the basic idea that you can get attention from doing things for free that resonated with search engine optimizers is the same idea that makes social media so appealing.

The same people who liked the idea of crafting a good Web page to be found by search are excited at the prospect of a blog entry that attracts subscribers. I think that the public relations skill of knowing how to tell a story is the common thread between organic search and social media. If you know the kinds of things that interest your customer, you can create those stories so that search engines find them, but your customers will pass them along as well.

I think that social media has made search marketing more interesting because it’s provided another way to get value from the good content you needed to create for search marketing anyway.

 Do you see value in SEM and social media?

MM: Nah, I think it’s all a fad. Oh wait, we wrote a book about it, so we probably think there’s something going on here. Over the last few years almost everyone has discovered the excitement of getting qualified Web traffic without having to pay for advertising (with organic search and social media), or by paying much less than with other forms of advertising (with paid search).

But the real fun begins when you combine social media with search marketing. You can use your search-savvy techniques to get attention for your social media and, in turn, your social media success can bring you links to your Web content, which helps search marketing. I would go on to describe how your now-improved search marketing might further help your social media, but I’m concerned you might get dizzy.

Bill Hunt: Mike nailed it, many are looking to it as the new "it" technique and are moving on past search.  The reality is the better you optimize your content the more it will be found in the engines and the repositories for the different media types.

If you look at the whole chain of events you can see the linkages of the two.  For example, we recently worked with a client on a press release that had wide distribution and was picked up by a number of bloggers which reviewed the product. This was followed by a TV commercial that was added to YouTube. The aggregation of all of these has a cross-link value as well as creating nearly 1,500 new doorways into the site.

What do you believe are the best social media tools for SEM?

MM: I don’t think that any tool is the best in all situations. In the new chapter of the second edition of Search Engine Marketing, Inc. that we devoted to social media, we tried to cover a wide range of tools so that you could choose the ones that work best for your business, which you’ll find out only through experimentation. Most companies can benefit from blogging and microblogging (Twitter and friends), because those tools get your expertise out there front and center.

The things that you know are usually more interesting than that page from your sales catalog, so that kind of content not only develops a following for your company, but also attracts more links than the average Web page does. If your people are the key to your business, such as in consulting, using Facebook, Linked In, and other social networks might be a great way to show off your people.

But you might safely ignore social networks for a product business, where trolling message boards to help unhappy customers might have the most value. In short, the best way to use social media is to make it a platform for what you know and give away your expertise on subjects your customers care about. Whether the best way to do that is with Blogger, Twitter, social networks, message boards, podcasts, or YouTube depends on you and your business.

BH: The best tool of social media is not a tool but contextual relevance of your content.  I think too many marketers get excited about ways to push their message into the market and not let the market push it.  I am seeing way too many large ad agencies showing companies how to buy ads on social media.  The other is people trying to force their way into the discussion rather than enable it.

Do you see social media as a major game changer in SEM?

MM: To me, search marketing is still working very well and doesn’t need the game to be changed. But the Internet doesn’t stand still and there are several game changers out there, including blended search and personalized search, but social media marketing is certainly one of them.

As more and more companies discover the power of search marketing, it does become more difficult to get attention for your message. By taking advantage of social media, you can get people to discover and pass along your message, which then bring links into your social media message and your Web site.

Those links are the way that search engines decide that your content is of high quality, so the more links you have from the most important sites, the higher your search ranking. The most forward-looking companies are reinforcing everything they do within their Internet tactics so that each feeds the other, and they are trying to achieve the same kind of benefits with some of their offline marketing efforts, too. Soon, the distinctions between each of these tactics will become less important and the overall effect of the holistic campaign will be what people pay attention to.

What are the most important trends you see in SEM?

MM: To me, personalization is the biggest story. The idea that each person will get his/her own set of search results is very exciting for search marketers. First off, it allows you to truly segment your customers at levels that go beyond the keyword. Second, it makes the whole idea of spamming a lot harder, because spam must cut across many demographics.

So search marketers that are truly attempting to provide the right information for each person will benefit greatly from personalized search results. But search marketers will need to adjust to the search engines having even more power, because the search engines alone will know where your site ranked for each person’s keyword.

The idea that your site ranked #1 for a keyword will disappear, to be replaced by questions only search engines can answer, such as: For what percentage of searchers did my site rank #1? What was the average rank for my site yesterday? For which demographics does my site rank the highest?

BH: I really like personalization but not as much as the global impact.  I have heard Google state publicly that as much as 70% of their search traffic is from outside the US.  I have been to a number of countries this year and the growth I am seeing in markets like Russia, Brazil and China is significant.

The majority of the top 5 countries are from Asia and while they are not necessarily jumping to buy from the US they are buying and researching locally. I have found this to be a boon for both small and large companies.

Anything else you would like to add?

MM: Yes. I’d like to request that each person reading this buy three copies of our book for themselves and their two closest friends.

BH: I totally agree with Mike

The New Face o In-House Search included Ron Belanger as the moderator and Bill Hunt from Global Strategies International, Olivier Lemaignen from Intuit, Marshall D. Simmonds from New York Times, Bill Macaitis from Fox Interactive Media and Brendan Hart from National Geographic Digital Media.

First up is Bill Hunt to talk about what perspective companies should take when considering bringing search marketing in-house.

What are the best options?

• Outsource – Give everything to the agency
• InSource – Do everything in house. Few companies are actually doing this
• Hybrid – A mix

The hard questions start with: What are the objectives? Can we meet the objectives with this new approach? What level of management support do we have? Can we measure a program to show benefit? What is our bench strength? Can the program scale? Many in-house programs fail to scale.

What is the total cost for each approach? Will the company commit and follow through?

Other questions:

- How supportive is management? Talks about a missed opportunity matrix. Very effective tool for convincing management for budget.

- Can we measure our performance? Do you have the right web analytics tools in place>?

- How scalable can we be? It makes sense to make SEO part of work flow. Figure out all the people that contribute content and train them. The economies of scale cannot be beat.

- What is our bench strength? Show that you can’t do it on your own as well as the missed opportunity. What could you do with more skills and more people.

Next up is Olivier Lemaignen from Intuit who talked about the pros and cons of taking things in-house.

1 1/2 years ago Intuit had a few internal people working on paid search. SEO was a mythical thing and they were uncertain of it’s value. In a 1 1/2 year time frame, SEO is all inhouse and PPC is in part outsourced because of their bid management expertise.

First thing is to hire a team. That means you need to get budget approval, which means executive support. The scope of the team’s responsibilities need to be defined. Skills need to be defined as well and that allows you to hire the right team. Next steps are to engage with internal clients and define the right success metrics in order to track results.

Intuit In-House SEM Team Structure

Working with internal clients means setting up different service levels.

Keys to Success:

• Budget autonomy. If you don’t you won’t be able to execute all the initiatives that you need.
• Executive support.
• Team structure and coverage. Having the right team organized the right way according to business unit needs is critical.
• Tolls and metrics – Branding, traffic, leads and revenue

Combine deep company and business unit expertise with deep SEO expertise.

SEO specializations: linking, new technology, tracking/reporting, searcher experience

PPC specializations: keyword development, ad copy testing, landing page testing, agency management (at least in the case of Intuit)

Holistic thinking is key. Consideration of other company marketing.

Building the in-house team starts with foundational capabilities, business unit knowledge, thought leadership. Identify a matrix of new hires with SEO expertise to mesh with long term employees that have deep company and business unit knowledge.

Scope of the in house team. Six objectives:

• Developing consistent and repeatable processes
• Scalable tools and reporting
• Ensuring coverage for the right businesses
• Coordinating with agencies, web engineering, teams, analytics, copywriters
• Best practices and standards
• Evangelizing and educating SEM across business units, web teams and geographies

BETTER
Budget autonomy, Exec support, Team structure coverage, Tools and metrics, Evangelization/education, Results

Three things the in-house team needs to be known for:

• Thought leadership
• Excellence
• Business leadership

Next up is Marshall Simmonds, Chief Search Strategist from the New York Times. Also his own agency called Define.

Organization and structure are important as well as where issues happen during the development cycle.

What can big brands do today?
Organize – Identify a point person, on site SEO manager. Strong communitator and well-schooled SEO.
Engaged team of marketing, etch, research, editorial and even sales.

Analyze – broke down prioritization buckets. Where is the low hanging fruit? Where can small changes have maximum results?

Educate – Ensure the front lines producers and editors plus back end people are all on the same page when it comes to SEO. It’s not one size fits all. It’s different for each department.

Execute strategy and measure results on an ongoing basis – Metrics saves jobs! Need to tallying up the wins and losses each month. Established baselines so that executives and Wall Street would understand them.

Give feedback to the people doing the actual work as well as feedback to the executives sponsoring the SEM program.

What not to do:

• No login. Don’t wall off content.
• Not communicating both suesses and areas of opportunity
• Not checking in with IT. They WILL screw something up, be sure to provide oversight. Must speak to ad sales so they understand the effect of what they’re selling on site SEO
• Just take the meta keywords tag out of the CMS
• Must communicate, educate the people actually performing the work. Each department gets a different checklist. It’s even built into the content management system.
• It’s important to manage expectations properly. What timeframs and growth rates actually are. With SEO, results won’t start for several months.
• A lack of editorial oversight can cause issues. You can automate things like meta description, but title tag should not be automated.

Next up is Bill Macaitis, SVP Online Marketing for FOx Interactive Media. myspace, fox.com, gamespy, etc.

Audience poll: Who wants a bigger staff? Everyone
What % of company site traffic is search? About 30%.

Centralized department and provides search marketing to all FIM sites. They use some 3rd party technology – web analytics. All manpower is in-house and they are ROI driven. Bill emphasizes that internal SEM teams must be revenue generating focused in their communications. Show upper management that when SEM asks for budget, it’s an investment with a return, not just a cost.

Internal SEM team structure for Fox Interactive

Budget is 10-15% of compensation for ongoing training. Budget covers conferences, certifications, travel, subscriptions and research. The average conference/certification cost is $1600. 3-4 events per year.

New hires spend 3-4 weeks with a dedicated mentor. 1-2 hours a day for ongoing education. Make sure you let them know what they’re accountable for and give them the tools they need to be successful. Leads to results and loyalty.

Training and Learning Mediums: Shows a huge list of blogs, sites, conferences, certification courses, associations, magazines, 3rd party research.

Last up is Brendan Hart VP Marketing Business Intelligence for National Geographic Digital Media.

The changing media landscape – for national geographic.

Goals:

Add content with consumer demand and follow search engine best practices. Optimize strategy based on industry trends. Include a search marketing component to all content. Engage SEO consultants to review work flow and best practices analysis. On site optimization plus directory/link building and some PPC.

Finding your inner search voice.

A matrix of discussion to decision for refining goals and tactics. Evaluate situation, define goals, assess current tactics. Then refine tactics, build the team and get an outside point of view.

Building a Winning Team. Core actions:

- Designate a search evangelist. Get consensus from all levels of the organization. Build consensus amongst those responsible for implementation and building cross-functional support. Execute ongoing training. Build a search program and defining accountability and goals, a search team and define practices for success.

[Many of the audience members indicated running multiple content management systems.]

Bring in an Expert Point of View. Periodically review the search program.

Benchmark and analysis are the first steps to optimization. Operationalizing search allows everyone to contribute.

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