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.

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.

Yelp linking to Yahoo!

I hope I am not slow on the uptake spotting this but are yelp and yahoo working together on local search? At the foot of the following las vegas steakhouse review (this is my favorite steakhouse in las vegas by the way): http://www.yelp.com/biz/golden-steer-las-vegas there is a link to Yahoo! local which says:

 

The link is not “no followed” and points to http://local.yahoo.com/NV/Las+Vegas/Food+Dining/Restaurants/Steak+Houses and this yahoo page is currently top ten in Google for a search for “las vegas steak houses” and is actually ahead of Yelp! I can’t see any reason Yelp! would be doing this unless it’s some kind of business relationship.

I looked into a few other verticals and the same thing is happening in Italian restaurants ( http://www.yelp.com/biz/enoteca-san-marco-las-vegas ) and so on:

Looking at the link profile for the yahoo local steakhouse page you see the following results ( https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http%3A%2F%2Flocal.yahoo.com%2FNV%2FLas%2BVegas%2FFood%2BDining%2FRestaurants%2FSteak%2BHouses&bwm=i&bwmo=d ):

All 90 back links come from Yelp. It would be great if Google is ok with this for big companies since that would totally alter my backlinking strategy but I guess that the better user experience would be for Google to contain the links to the main web location for all the las vegas restaurants that yelp or yahoo have on their search results pages (wherever their main web presence is, be that on Yelp! or a standalone website). I’m going to keep an eye on this one.

How to be an effective seo within your organization: PubCon 08 - be positive

This year was my first presentation at pubcon and I was super excited to get the opportunity to participate. The area of my presentation was to evaluate how to be an effective in house SEO and I was lucky enough to be on the panel with Aaron Shear, Tony Adam, Jessica Bowman and Scott Polk. Lou Ragg was the moderator which in Vegas was pretty cool.

The main topic of all our talks was how do you convince your company to support you in doing SEO and the talks split into two fronts… play company politics or push positive results and momentum. I was definitely in the second bucket.

I essentially had 5 points:

1. alignment
   • You must be aligned with your companies #1 goal in SEO
   • Discard everything but that target: eBay = ROI, facebook = user growth
2. measurement
   • sometimes you can get support just by measuring how much value seo is generating
   • whatever happens you are in a measurable field, you can quantify your impact and so be that guy, measure your results and hang your hat on them
3. results
   • do something simple and get a result to build credibility…
   • for example a really really small thing like swapping “<company name> | <page title>” to “<page title> | <company name>” can drive results and doing that and instantly driving the company’s #1 goal is so powerful
4. double down
   • you got a result… now get more. Keep it small, keep it coming and show that you are an expert
   • I think this momentum building is 10x more positive as an approach rather than going out and producing a powerpoint strategy deck
5. share
   • now start to share your success, start to teach people how to do it themselves. Build that powerpoint and let the senior folks know what you need to do even more.

I think this is the secret to be successful in almost any internet marketing role to get success. You can be the person who says “I am positive”,”I can do more with less than you believe” and above all let your work speak for itself and you can do no wrong.

I Got Hacked

So probably one of the worst things that has happened to me online ever happened 2 weeks ago… my site was hacked. I hadn’t upgraded the version of adlogger I was using on the site and someone inserted some malicious code which then took over my site redirecting any visitor to a pure adsense page.

Google spotted this and took the following action:

Which utterly decimated my website traffic but I wholeheartedly applaud Google for doing… 100% the right thing to do and interestingly they spotted the issue at essentially the same time as I did and removed it from the site so great job by them!

 

The one thing that does frustrate me about this is that Google funded the hacker. It’s obviously terrible I got hacked and I have revised my processes to hopefully make things  better but it’s doubly terrible that hackers are now funding themselves via Google AdSense… Given the experience I have in this marketplace through my affiliate work over the years it is also clear that people don’t do this unless they are getting away with it, so Google can’t be taking the money from them fast enough to dissuade them from doing this… that’s the only way it works. This is also not the first time I have seen Google funding this kind of abuse.

Brand Keyword Bidding

Brand keyword bidding is big business and it’s becoming bigger. For anyone in the internet marketing industry it’s crucial to watch this trend and esp the decisions Google is making around it.

 

Within the affiliate industry brand bidding initially was a quick way to make a buck. In 2003-2005 affiliate managers were often slow to realize affiliates were making money for essentially no work. Even now many affiliates use a combination of geo-targeting and day parting to work around affiliate managers and get away with brand bidding.

       

As that loop hole was closed and brands took their brand name bidding in house worldwide and affiliate networks policed out the majority of the affiliates doing brand bidding Google made two changes which made brand names far less lucrative for them in many countries (esp. the UK). Google stopped allowing multiple ads for one website to appear on the same search result (i.e. no longer 10 eBay ads to a page) and Google also allowed companies to claim their brand so that no one else could bid on it (in the UK). On April 4th Google changed this second policy and that angered a lot of brand owners in the UK who are prepared to sue others have promised not to bid on competitors brands. The most interesting article I saw about this was from Hitwise’s Robin Goad. According to Hitwise in the US (where this has always been the policy) only 84% of branded search make it to the brand owner’s website, in the UK before this change 92% did and Robin just followed up showing that the change in the UK is having the expected effect.

 

Two things make this policy change an excellent way for Google to make money:

 

   
1. Branded search made up 76% of searches in the UK in 2007 according to some studies. Simply look at the famous lycos 50 to back this up or numerous studies showing either eBay or Facebook is the most searched for term online.
   
2. Having only one person bidding on their own brand can result in their bid being as low as $0.01 (esp. because their CTR is usually very high) just adding another person into the auction can push that up tremendously giving a huge boost in Google revenue from companies who can’t afford to not buy their keyword.

 

I can’t really decide what to think about the way Google is acting here. Would it be fair for companies who sell NorthFace clothing not to be able to bid on the word NorthFace? On the other hand is it fair that Google essentially extorts brands to spend in some cases $100k’s a week to simply ensure that someone who was looking for them comes to their site? There’s a tonne more depth to this, for example no one is appearing on a search for Facebook, presumably because that is purely navigational and no one clicks on a non Facebook paid link whereas NorthFace has 10 pages of ads. Google’s decision seems to say you need to sink or swim on your marketing ability and brand strength. Make your brand strong enough that people simply don’t think about clicking onto another site.

 

This little post is just a thought starter BUT as an internet marketer it is crucial you have to have a branded search strategy covering both SEO and SEM. Google won’t let you get away without it.

A little bit of an update on the Stumble Testing

Using Stumbleupon buttons on my paper airplanes site was an interesting idea that I tried a few weeks back. It seems to be working pretty well. Below you see the graph of traffic I am getting from Stumble over time from the last big stumble spike (following which I added the stumble button).

For November (i.e. not including the spike in october) Stumbleupon now makes up 10% of my site growth and approx. 1% of all site traffic. I have a fair few ideas for how to boost this source of traffic even more and am really keen to give it a go soon!!!

Stumbleupon Traffic Source

As many people have noticed stumbleupon has become a pretty good source of organic traffic. For me stumbleupon is 10-20% of the growth of my paper airplanes site at the moment and I know I am by no means the most popular paper airplanes site on stumbleupon right now (btw that wireframe rocks... a future project for me too I think).

I may not be the top paper airplanes site in stumbleupon and it certainly isn't my biggest source of traffic but it is now a significant enough contributor with lots of potential that I want to spend some time on it. The main issue as many people have seen is that traffic from stumbleupon is very bumpy indeed:

What is interesting though is though each bump is adding up to hundreds of visitors (sometimes near 1000) they are interspersed with long periods of zero (or v. low) traffic. The last spike you can see was followed by some level of sustained traffic, not huge but a significant part of my daily unique visitor growth. The main reason for this growth seems to have been adding a stumbleupon button to every page of my site.

I guess I will see how this sustains but for now things are looking pretty good for a new sustained source of traffic to paperairplanes.co.uk. Why don't you give it a go too?

Google Analytics Regular Expressions

I was using Google analytics regular expressions on Saturday to try and understand how my cocktail making relationship engine had worked out. As I was using the regular expressions I noticed that there were very few resources to help you get them right for Google Analytics so in case you are interested here are my tips.

First the regular expression variables supported by google analytics:

.  match any single character

*  match zero or more of the previous items

+  match one or more of the previous items

?  match zero or one of the previous items

()  remember contents of parenthesis as item

[]  match one item in this list

-  create a range in a list

|  or  ^ match to the beginning of the field

$ match to the end of the field

\  escape any of the above

Some real examples:

If you are looking for the page index2.php then your regular expression should be "index2\.php" you want to escape the "." with the / since that will make the regular expression run faster as Google will now only look for the "." character and not "any character" which is the special meaning of ".".

I have a regular expression "displaycocktail.php" within all my cocktail recipe pages. For the test group I was passing ?test=test on the end of that URL to google analytics and for the control group ?test=control. A couple of examples of urls showing up would be:

http://www.cocktailmaking.co.uk/displaycocktail.php/241-Slippery-Nipple?test=test

http://www.cocktailmaking.co.uk/displaycocktail.php/241-Slippery-Nipple?test=control

http://www.cocktailmaking.co.uk/displaycocktail.php/435-Blue-Lagoon?test=test

http://www.cocktailmaking.co.uk/displaycocktail.php/435-Blue-Lagoon?test=control

If I wanted to see just the control group I would use the reg exp "displaycocktail\.php/.*test=control" where the ".*" means match any number of characters at this point in the regexp.

Hopefully this (esp. the working examples) are useful for you to get started.

Cocktail Recommendation: Part 4 - the results

Wow did it work or what! The cocktail recommendation engine I produced earlier this year has been a fabulous success. I set up an AB test of the cocktail recommendation by randomly assigning my visitors to either see the cocktail recommendation engine or not and the main target was to reduce the bounce rates of visitors to my cocktail recipe pages (both buckets contain c. 1million page views).

The above graph shows you the overall impact of the test across all my cocktails with 100days of data. This impact is diluted because of the volume of cocktails for which I don't have enough data to produce cocktail recommendations so below is a list broken out by cocktail id (I have removed the names since work people see this blog and some are naughty). The cocktails in the list below are essentially the cocktails found as the first 10 here (you are warned... that page contains rude words) under the tab "Graph of cocktail recipes in order".

On average for the top 10 cocktails the recommendation engine reduced the bounce rate by 16% with some cases (esp. slippery nipple) having an impact as high as a 31% reduction in bounce rate for the page.