Moderator: Jessica Bowman, Founder, SEOinhouse.com explains that this room is for in-house SEOs, all day.
Eileen Winslow, Sr. Director of SEO, MeziMedia is up first to talk. She worked at Shopzilla and even BruceClay in the past. She believes in having a devoted SEO team.
Top 10 Questions She Gets:
(1) How Does SEO Work? She explains how it works. Basically getting your site more and higher visibility in the search engines.
(2) What Does SEO Do? There is technical optimization to make them search engine friendly. Then content optimization, then link building and then reporting.
SEO Projects: - Tech optimization - Page Revamps - New pages - Reporting - Etc
SEO Operations: - Keyword Research - Taxonomy - SEO tags - Link Requests - Content - Community
(3) Why Should I Care? Free Traffic + Conversions = Bottomline Revenue
(4) Who is on your team? Director, manager, analysts, and assistants.
(5) Who does your team work with? (A) Product owner; content, usability, network admins, project managers, engineers (B) CEO; biz intel, sales, sem, biz dev, and PR
(6) How Do Projects get on the Site? From idea to approval, to spec, to build, to priority, to plan to demo to QA and to launch.
(7) How do projects get high priority? - Forecasting is critical - Join efforts - Piggy backing on things already being done - Trading resources - Building SE into roadmaps - Success breeds confidence - Tip: Not everything is high priority
(8) How do you target operations? - 80/20 rule - Marketing calendar - Thematic clustering - Project support - Glory keyword - Tip: You cant fix everything, especially at once
(9) How do you measure success? - SEO revenue, SEO incoming, conversion rate & RPI - When to report? weekly, monthly and quarterly also post launch and 2-8 weeks post launch.
(10) Why is traffic up or down? - Give clients an action plan on what you will do.
Brian Piepgrass, from UpTake is next up.
Start ups.... You likely have a small budget. You also likely have strong motivation, because time is of the essence. Space might be tight in your office. You also have very little process in a start up. You do get to work with your whole team.
4 Habits of Successful Start Up SEO: - Insert yourself into the important process - Build Rapport - Limited Budget - Missed this one
Suggestion 1: Get involved in the development process Suggestion 2: Take on an "official role" if you can Suggestion 3: Promote a "culture" of Traffic & SEO
Building Rapport: - Target Your Boss - Target your brand guy or traditional marketer - Target your developers
(1) Drive links every day (2) Check stats every day (3) Recognize when your in over your head and if you need, find great people
Bill Scully from Siemens is next up.
Invest in yourself: - Listen to SEO and Online Marketing Podcasts - Checkout WebmasterRadio.FM and Search iTunes - Read newsletters and blogs - Download whitepapers - Check on twitter
Analyze your web logs and reports - Key campaign traffic changes - Goal changes - Overall traffic changes - 404 errors - Optimize problem areas
Work with Teams: - Conduct weekly meetings - Conduct one and ones - Attend IT/Web Dept meetings -- Application changes -- Structure changes -- New project scopes -- Remind them of SEO
Finding the Right People is hard
Attend a WebEx - Search Marketing Expo - SES - Marketing Experiments - Schedule demos with companies
Communicate with everyone, supporting them, and make sure they feel they are getting credit. They will keep coming to you, and you can gain bigger budgets. Make them feel like they are successful.
If you can, create a quarterly newsletter to send out to the teams.
Experiment with things, try new things, try ad formats, ad networks, try SEO techniques. Go to SEO conferences at least twice per year.
Audit templates - Check nofollows - Make sure robots.txt is ok - Check 404s - Check redirects
Schedule training sessions
Update XML Sitemap - Rerun your site map software - Upload new file to site - Submit it
Closing - Plan your calendar - Invest in yourself - Communicate - Make internal customers successful - Always sell value
Laura Lippay, Director of Technical Marketing, Yahoo! Inc. is last up.
She came into Yahoo as a one person team and had to build things up.
(1) The main thing she needed to do was get buy in from the top level. (2) Then create accountability (3) Set up underlying process and train teams such as training, resources, CMS that are SE friendly and reporting. (4) Implement the work
She then lists out the teams and players...
Challenges: - Where to Start? - Lack of top level buy in - Lack of accountability and no implementation - Lack of education - Chasing your tail with search site refresh - Closed doors
And she showed us this new video, Ill embed:
Awesome!
