Alex Schultz: APIs

Challenges facing enterprise SEO marketing

Working on enterprise internet marketing (100MM’s of pages and visits) is very different from sites with 100,000s or 1,000,000s of visits are very different. I am very lucky to have had the chance to work across both of these scales with my personal sites and professional experience. This difference is becoming clearer and clearer to me and I hope to write a few posts on this over the next year or so (yes I don’t blog a lot so we’ll see what happens)

I was recently asked for my personal thoughts in a survey on the challenges facing SEO in a large internet company so I thought I’d start by sharing them:

• Understanding the addressable market & actual current marketshare
• When you address a whole market like a category of e-commerce it’s hard to figure out what  the total volume of searches truly are to get the potential addressable market. Sometimes it’s hard to even find all the keywords (esp. if you don’t own your own search)
• Even when you know what the market size is it’s hard to know what % of the potential listings you have if you are looking across a million or more keywords. What sample size should you look at to understand your total market for example?
• Duplicate content issues
• Every large company I know has or has had huge duplicate content issues either with ?ref=’s and ?src=’s etc… etc… and often for valid reasons where folks want to track things properly or change the ordering of a search result.
• Getting deep links at scale to 100MM's of pages
• Self processing huge volumes of traffic data
• Again sites like Yahoo or Craigslist or others have such traffic volumes they can’t really afford existing web tracking products and the free versions don’t scale well plus often you want custom views to understand demographic of traffic by keyword and cross multiple visits etc… this seems inevitably to lead to some kind of in house processing of huge data files.
• optimizing 100MM’s of landing pages
• calculating the value of a given potential seo change
• often it’s a trade off of resources to make SEO changes but even the best SEO experts find it hard to put a precise value on kws in the URL vs the difference between 5 and 10% kw density and so on.
• The benefit of owning a huge media vehicle is you can calculate some of this… the detriment is you don’t have full control of the resources so may not get the chance to use them without a clear value of any change
• dealing with international
• wow, content localization especially around navigational terms like “shopping” when you even want to localize the URL can be tricky

So anyway those are my thoughts on the challenges of enterprise SEO. Despite these it’s a really rewarding area to work and very possible to have success in this field.

Crowdsourcing by the Guardian

I have to say I am super impressed by the Guardian’s crowdsourced analysis of the MP expenses scandal in the UK. Awesome fast turnaround to get it up and a third of the documents human reviewed. This kind of mash up is amazing and I think puts pay to the statement that the web will destroy great investigative journalism. Instead it seems really clever use of the web will enable more impressive journalism.

Of course one of the main reasons folks think the web and blogging will destroy great investigative journalism is that it needs to be funded by good advertising revenue. My perspective is that excellent use of targeting and loyal customers will allow newspapers online to fund the journalism with advertising. One thing that stands out to me is we need better targeting… the Guardian and other newspapers clearly have precisely the audience I want to target somewhere within their 30MM monthly unique visitors but no one seem to have a product yet through which I can buy exactly who I would want unless they allow a third party ad retargeting network to be live on their site.

Found via the awesome Dan Wilson and props to Tanya a friend at the guardian from eBay.co.uk days.

Amazing Speakers I have heard recently

I wanted to share a little list of folks I have heard talk recently (online or in person) who I think are totally amazing and worth listening to:

• Christine Churchill http://www.keyrelevance.com/ on keyword research using advanced tools at SMX. Top tips:
• Use http://stats.grok.se/ I continually forget about this tool but it’s ace for really detailed keyword research
• Also a great reminder about the recency attribute value pair on Google
• Matt Cutts on the canonical link tag
• http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/canonical-link-tag/
• Rand Fishkin on just about anything but specifically page rank sculpting
• http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-says-yes-you-can-still-sculpt-pagerank-no-you-cant-do-it-with-nofollow
• Mark Mahaney http://biz.yahoo.com/a/1/137122.html on the future of the internet
• Mary Meeker on the state of the internet around the world from her numerous web 2.0 presentations
• As someone who led international paid search and affiliate co-ordination and all international internet marketing at facebook I think her analysis of which markets are the most advanced in different internet areas (esp. advertising and ecommerce) are very accurate from my experience.
• Sean Parker from the founders fund/napster/plaxo/facebook talking about viral loops
• if you ever get to listen to him on this topic it’s amazing… he has a really simple description (which I won’t spoil by sharing here) that helps you understand them extremely well.