SEO In House

SES San Jose 2009 – Interview: Alex Bennert of The Wall Street Journal

July 14, 2009 By Manoj Jasra 1 Comment

Late last week I caught up with Alex Bennert who is an SEO Strategist at the Wall Street Journal. Alex is scheduled to speak at the upcoming Search Engine Strategies in San Jose on the topic of “How SEO Can Help Save the Publishing Industry” so I decided to get her insight on this topic. Check out conversation below:

[Manoj]: What are some of the most significant differences working as an In House SEO vs. an agency.

[Alex Bennert]: As an agency SEO you are usually managing several clients at once, each one with very different strategies, resources and goals. As an in house SEO, my energy and my skills are completely devoted to a single client. I still juggle multiple projects and work with various internal departments but ultimately there is a symbiosis between these goals.

[Manoj]: Are there unique SEO opportunities available to online publications compared to other sites?

[Alex Bennert]: A SERP today displays multiple content types such as news, video, images, stock quotes and blog posts. This opens up a lot of potential real estate on the search page because many online publishers generate all of these kinds of content. Say for a given query, you have a video, a news story and a blog post that are all relevant. You can actually rank in 3 different places on the first page of a search result. Before the advent of universal search, you had to spam to accomplish multiple placements.

[Manoj]: How important has SEO and Internet marketing become to your industry now that more people look online rather than physical newspapers.

[Alex Bennert]: I’m certain that Internet marketing has become crucial to this industry however as an SEO, I consider myself more of a technologist than a marketer. Search, at its core, is simply a conduit for people looking for specific information. My job is simply to know how search engines access data so that whenever we have information, it can surface on relevant queries. Beyond that, the feedback loop of search data provides us with a lovely little window into the heads of our audience, what they’re thinking about and what words they use to express this in a search box.

[Manoj]:I am assuming duplicate content is a major concern for your online publishers?

[Alex Bennert]: You have no idea! Duplicate content was one of the first and most challenging problems to address when I came to WSJ. It was like a Hydra…every time I cut off one head, another would grow in its place. We implemented the CLE tag immediately after Google announced it, and so far it has been a huge blessing to me in this regard. It’s still a little buggy here and there, but for the most part I’ve been able to reallocate a significant amount of my time away from dupe content issues.

[Manoj]: How do you go about creating a strong SEO culture so that writers/staff are better aware of best practices before publishing content.

[Alex Bennert]: I schedule ongoing training sessions every month so that new staff, people that missed previous sessions or people that want a refresher don’t have to wait long before another session. I have different training sessions for different groups of people…the SEO for my editors/ writers/ bloggers is different from my session for IT. I also have a session for the business team that talks about understanding SEO in the context of syndication deals or microsites as well as a (less-frequent) session for management that keeps them apprised of the big picture so that I can be sure there is always top-down buy-in for SEO.

Filed Under: international SEO, Search Engine Strategies, SEO In House, SES

A Seat at the Table for Search Marketing in Big Business

October 27, 2008 By Manoj Jasra Leave a Comment

Whether you are an in-house search marketing strategist at a large organization or you’re an agency who has a search marketing champion, there is a common barrier that you will consistently come across: Establishing priority for search marketing in conjunction with getting buy-in from required stake holders. Below I have outlined 5 ways you can push search marketing strategies along more effectively within big corporations.

Relationships: While working at businesses (>150 employees) you will find there are numerous stakeholders involved with every task. Establishing strong working relationships with team members in marketing, IT, and design is extremely beneficial in understanding the corporate structure as well as the flow for strategic processes.
Quick Wins and Tips: Once you have established some decent relationships it’s a good idea to understand each individual’s priorities/responsibilities. From there you should begin to pass along occasional quick wins and tips allowing these individuals to be more effective with their day to days tasks. This idea will really help build your trust level and make your team members looks good infront of their bosses.
Training: This is a technique I have had great success with. In order to get buy-in on the implementation of SEO and PPC strategies from my marketing team, I designed one hour SEO/PPC training sessions for groups of intimate groups of 5-7. With a better understanding in both SEO and PPC the marketing team was more open to asking for my help in future strategies. I kept the groups small to help promote questions and conversation during the training sessions.
Get Involved: If you see an opportunity to help out or add insight, take it. A suggestion for an A/B test for an email marketing campaign, a missing competitive term in a PPC campaign, an important tweak to a landing page or missing meta tags for a prominent product page – Word these hidden opportunities with benefits and you will find success.
Long Term: Don’t just stop at the basics, once you have established relationships and received some buy-in, continue to evangelize search marketing with on going strategies. Find yourself a seat at meetings related to new website designs, CMS selection, and online campaigns so that you can continue to give search marketing a voice a the table.

Filed Under: B2B, Search Marketing In House, SEO In House

Search Marketing Training: Tweak and Improve

April 15, 2008 By Manoj Jasra Leave a Comment

Recently I have been involved in creating a search marketing training program which some very clear objectives: help new search marketing strategists get up to speed quicker, allow them to work on billable client work sooner/more efficiently and get them prepared to participate in high-level brainstorming strategies. As much as I can teach the new strategists, I have learned it’s as important to learn from them to continually tweak and improve the program. Below I have outlined 3 steps to creating a stronger search marketing training program.

Constantly Reading, Sucks: Providing course material to your trainees is important but don’t overload them with constant reading. There will come a time where their ability to absorb content through line and lines of text will simply run out.

I suggest mixing up the textual content with audio and video, additionally I recommend you introduce scenario based training. Scenario based training is way for trainees to get their hands dirty with tasks that they will face on a day to day basis. If you’re providing training for an agency or even in-house training, create tasks that are related to current issues that the company is facing, you never know what kind of innovative ideas some fresh minds could come up with.
Create a Relationship: When you’re training someone it’s important that you create an open door policy right from the start so that your student(s) can approach you with any questions related to the training program or search marketing in general. Throughout the training program, schedule some regular time with your students to ask them how they’re doing with course material. This will keep the students stay engaged with the training program and help you design a course which is custom rather than “cookie cutter.”
Get Feedback: Your search marketing training program is not going to be perfect right off the bat and it may not be perfect for a while, but the idea is to continually tweak your program with feedback from the people who are undertaking the training. Whether it’s your clients or your co-workers, it’s important to get their comments/suggestions in-relation to the course content, their ability to understand the concepts, the level of difficulty of the material and the relevancy of the course material to real-life business situations.

Filed Under: SEM, SEM Training, SEO, SEO In House

In House SEO: Make 100k Per Year

January 10, 2008 By Manoj Jasra 1 Comment

The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO), http://www.sempo.org/, today announced top line findings from its first-ever survey of in-house SEM job salary compensation. I had a chance to chat with Duane Forrester, co-chair of SEMPO’s in house committee, about the findings from the survey, listen to the audio:

In-house search engine marketers (SEMs) are receiving healthy salaries in line with their experience levels but if you want a salary in the mid-to-high $100s to the $200K range you are usually going to have to invest five to seven years to get there – a traditional dynamic in which experience brings greater compensation.

One of the key findings is that roughly one third of in-house search engine marketers are managing monthly budgets in excess of $200,000. “We anticipated a lower ceiling of monthly spend closer to the $100,000 range so we were pleasantly surprised,” says Duane Forrester, co-chair of SEMPO’s In-House SEM Committee and Lead SEO Program Manager with Microsoft. “The $200K monthly spend is a healthy barometer of the search marketing industry and it syncs up with SEMPO’s current trend projections that SEM spending will double by 2011, to more than $18 billion.”

A cross section of global entry level, mid and upper level, in-house managers and in-house analysts completed the online survey during the fall of 2007. There were 656 completed surveys, a strong market response to this inaugural project. The survey was open to all in-house SEM professionals – working in organic or paid search. SEMPO membership was not a requirement to take the survey.

SEMPO’s largest pool of survey respondents – more than 26% – came from managers, whose compensation clustered in the $60,000 to $90,000. Despite the manager’s title, SEMPO found that almost half did not directly manage people.

Senior managers and directors comprised close to 20% of the respondents. Salary ranges for senior managers clustered in the $70,000 to $100,000 range, with more than 36% reporting an annual salary of $80,000+ to $100,000.

Director level compensation tracked with experience: more than 18% of the directors taking the survey said they had from five to seven years experience. About a quarter of this group reported annual salaries between $100,000 and $120,000. With this comes greater responsibility: more than 44% said they managed monthly budgets in excess of $200,000.

Filed Under: Search Marketing In House, sempo, SEO In House

In-House SEM: Buy-In and Education

January 9, 2008 By John W Ellis Leave a Comment

As an in-house search engine marketer, I have often compared notes to my counter parts in the “out-house” world. I thoroughly enjoy the work I do, as I long as I remind myself that the grass is not always greener on the other side. In fact, the green grass is usually because of a buried septic tank.

The unknown truth about in-house search engine marketing is that a majority of your time, at least at the senior level, is spent educating and “selling” SEO.

Corporate search engine marketing can not be done by a single person. There has to be a buy-in from the company. Getting individuals on-board with SEO requires strong communication, presentation and often sales skills.

Obtaining company buy-in also requires working with different personalities. There is not a magic phase or methodology that works for everyone. Some people need statistics and numbers to prove the return on ad spend. Others just need ego stroking.

Search engine marketing is a vital part of a legitimate business. Corporate buy-in requires educating the company. This can be done through continuous presentations, conference calls, memos, white papers, or various other communication avenues.

By getting everyone on board you will find help in other departments and at the executive level. For more tips for in-house search engine marketers at JohnWEllis.com

** Find more articles from John W Ellis at http://www.johnwellis.com/

Filed Under: john ellis, SEM Careers, SEO, SEO In House

What is SEO?

September 6, 2007 By John W Ellis 1 Comment

With a lot of discussion lately if SEO is dead or not, I thought I would step back to see how others define Search Engine Optimization. Before we can tell if it’s dead, let’s see what it is. Below are definitions from several popular website.

MarketingProfs.com – The altering of a Web site, Web pages and links to Web sites and Web pages to improve visibility, rank and relevance in the organic, crawler-based listings of search engines.

WebsiteNova.com – This is the process of making a website ‘search-engine-friendly.’ Search engine optimization is primarily used to increase rankings in SERPs, and effective SEO can increase the potential of your website and bring in more traffic.

Wikipedia.com – A set of methodologies aimed at improving the visibility of a website in search engine listings.

SEOmoz.org – … the active practice of optimizing a web site by improving internal and external aspects in order to increase the traffic the site receives from search engines.

Webopedia.com – … the process of increasing the amount of visitors to a Web site by ranking high in the search results of a search engine

All of those are very good definitions from very reputable sites. I use several of them often. These definitions seem to have one thing in common: traffic. SEO brings in traffic.

That is good at a basic level. SEO is definitely not dead, it’s just elementary. Traffic is good, but quality traffic is better. SEO is needed and appreciated, but it’s important not to stop there.

As mentioned before, if you are looking for help: You need a Search Engine Marketer, not an SEO.

** Find more articles from John W Ellis at http://www.johnwellis.com/

Filed Under: john ellis, Search Marketing In House, SEO, SEO In House

Free Download: In House SEO PDF

August 29, 2007 By Manoj Jasra 1 Comment

If you’re considering bringing Search Marketing In House then I recommend downloading this In House SEO PDF. Get expert advice from established SEO professionals at: NetConcepts, ResortQuest, Time Inc., Business.com and Classmates.com. Earlier this summer I asked some of the top SEO minds the same 2 questions, it was quite a popular series so I decided to turn it into a PDF.

What is the biggest advantage for an organization to bring Search Marketing In-house?
What is the biggest challenge in accomplishing a transformation to In-house SEO?

Download Now!

The PDF also includes a bonus section: Links to 10 great In house search marketing resources. Below is a snippet from the In House SEO PDF.

“Often search engine optimization is an after-thought, if it is thought of at all. The biggest benefit for bringing search marketing in-house is that you have someone internal who can champion and represent SEO in the hallways, at meetings, and through relationship building. Also, it gives everyone in the company someone to reach out to for an immediate answer and/or involvement when the need arises.” – Jessica Bowman, Business.com.

Special thanks to: John Ellis, Jessica Bowman, Jennifer Mathews Somogyi, Aidan Beanland, Rudy DeDominicis and Chris Smith.

Filed Under: Search Marketing In House, SEO In House