Day two of SEOMoz’s Pro Training continues or as we might call it, “Why SEOMOz is so awesome!” Now I like SEOMoz and their personable approach they take. Their success in elevating the importance of SEO to corporations is not to be diminished. That said there is a fair amount of self promotion but it’s not arrogant, just a little obvious. In general today was much more organized and seemed to have more of a flow. Day 2 grade: 87, B. Overall a solid B for the two days.
Session 1: This History and Future of SEO
Sorry, didn’t take notes on the history of SEO. The Todds (Malicoat and Friesen) put on a lively and entertaining discussion about the black/gray roots of SEO.
Rand Fishkin took over to talk about the future of SEO. This was just a more interesting discussion and of course it’ll be interesting to see which of these comes to pass.
Issues Rand believes to be likely
Further segmentation of results by the engines as they attempt to deliver more results tailored to the searcher’s need.
Increased globalization of the web.
Peronalization impact is still to come. Not here yet.
Increased mobile usage but not different from current user experience.
Bing + Yahoo = 12-20% of referrals to other sites. Rand makes the point that searches within the portals leading to other areas of the portal network shouldn’t count in market share – I agree. Expect Stevie Ballmer and Carol Bartz to think differently.
Social search gets interesting. Does the content from the multitude of social and user generated content sites and conversations get slurped into major indexes?
Events believed to be unlikely by Rand:
Google’s success in content networks
Bing + Yahoo gaining more than 30% of the market for referrals to other sites.
Twitter becomes a “standard” search engine.
Facebook’s social graph having a major impact.
The semantic web anytime soon.
Events Rand thinks might happen:
WolframAlpha gets traction.
The social graph becomes part of Google’s algorithm.
Session 2: Social Media Investments that Bring Real ROI
Social media for global link equity and branding. PPC is used to test and find out what converts. Then target converters with SEO for long term ROI.
Get the social media add-on for Firefrox from 97thfloor.com. (The add-on isn’t compatible with my Firefox install of v3.5 – the most recent version of FF.)
Set up your tools before starting and get your KPI’s identified and bought off by all interested parties.
Include 30-60-90 check ups and distribute progress to all stakeholders and interested parties.
Tools to assist in gathering data and tracking success. Find your preferred mix. Easytweets, Blvdstatus, Trackur, Samepoint, Search.Twitter.com, RavenTools, Quarkbase, Whostalkin, read Marty Weintraub’s blog post about developing a reputation monitoring dashboard
7 Steps to Link Bait
1. Define the audience and with precision
2. Research the market to understand the size and make up
3. Identify a suitable hook process
4. Brainstorm titles and tactics
5. Research your topic: Digg, Twitter, Reddit, Delicious
6. Create and polish your content; it must be good
7. Find distribution and launch. Get a power user to submit to social networks to help go viral.
Link Bait Hooks: attacking, humor, contrarian, news, resource, ego, pictures. Combining hooks can have a more powerful campaign impact. Interviews are also powerful and can appeal to the ego of the interviewee. Awards and badges help and also appeal to the ego in humans.
Read Copyblogger.com to get ideas for
Develop a reputation hub to keep track and maintain your profiles.
Session 3: Researching the Search Engine’s Algorithm – Had the potential to be interesting but didn’t live up to the opportunity. The complexity of the topic was not put in non-mathematician terms.
Session 4: How to Win SEO Budget & Influence the CMO
Develop a 3 tiered approach: 1) present the opportunity in quantifiable terms, 2) establish expectations and goals, 3) reports that track appropriately.
Define and quantify the market opportunity being lost. Do this by: isolate top non-branded terms, gather volumes and ranks, use a CTR curve for each position (available searching online) and figure out a per visit value. Use graphs to visually illustrate the competitive deficiencies.
Establishing your game plan.
1. Manage expectations
2. Get buy in on recommendations
3. Establish milestones to success and key performance indicators you can use to track progress.
Know if your clients have been burned in the past by ineffective SEO’s. You’ll need to go the extra mile to regain their trust.
SEO touches all facets of marketing and technology. Build an SEO task force and agree to minimum service levels – cross functional groups must collaborate to achieve success. Develop an attribution model. SEO is early stage and conversion metrics will not be the same as PPC. For SEO reports: keep metrics/KPIs fresh in everyone’s mind, urgency about competition, make it tangible and illustrate successes.
Session 5: Not much here. Unfortunately I seem to catch Vanessa Fox on her off days. She has SEO Rock Star status in the community but I’ve been underwhelmed in both seminars I’ve seen her at: SMX Analytics Toronto and now SEOMoz Pro. She’s intelligent but some folks are better at blogging than presenting. Charisma can trump depth of knowledge in a 45 minute presentation.
Session 6: Conversion Rate Optimization
This started out a bit too much like another commercial for SEOMoz. Fortunately Ben Jesson has a lot of charisma. He’s able to tell a story and work the stage making the entire room feel involved even if 75% of his content is fawning over SEOMoz A/B test results.
1. Know what to test.
2. Understand the non-customers
- Why didn’t they convert?
Where did they decide not to convert?
How does this align (or not) with the value proposition?
Speak to the customers (in person) and get feedback.
3. Develop creative that is persuasive and addresses customer issues
4. Designing tests: O/CO method = Objection + Counter Objection
Tools to help: Kamplye, Ethnio, ClicTale, iPerceptions 4Q, Google site search, talk to your customers.
General tips to improve conversion rates
1. Landing page copy should be as long as it takes to counter objections.
2. The copy must offer value. The opening paragraph must support the headline.
3. Include a call to action.
4. Include credibility factors: testimonials, logos of clients, trust badges, etc.
5. Genuine scarcity influencers, examples: only available until March 31! While supplies last or tie into inventory system and display actual amount on hand.
Session 7: Building a Kick-Butt In-house Web Marketing Team
Avvo is an online legal community and marketing company. As such they should have a stellar in-house marketing team as a core competency. That said, not all companies are online marketing firms but use the channel as a means to grow their business and reach customers. Avvo is a bit biased in their position but justifiably so given the services they provide.
Have a good PR team. Any PR that leads to links is good. The engines don’t recognize the context of the link (yet).
The entire company should be versed in SEO. Contractual agreements with partners and vendors should include language about links and how they are to be implemented. Treat linking as a business development activity.
Assign and allocate resources according to the required return on investment.
SEO is a process not an art. Set business objectives, define key metrics, establish benchmarks, brainstorm tactics, measure results to objectives, repeat.
SEO must follow an agile development methodology (not waterfall). Be flexible, react to environmental factors, take advantage of opportunities.
You are not and will not ever be smarter than Google. Do calculate internal and external variables, test scientifically, use statistical principles.
The business community accepts Google Page Rank (PR), deal with it.
Success leads to paranoia of falling rankings and competitive pressures. That’s life at the top. SEO is ongoing and you cannot let up and expect to retain leadership.
So that sums up 2 days of pretty intensive SEO training. SEOMoz is just into the larger scale events so I’ll cut them some slack. Overall it was a great value for the price. Our clients will get immediate positive impact by the tips and tactics we’ll apply. I look forward to watching these locals make good on the global SEO scene.