Marketing & Data for New Businesses, Pt. 2: SEO

I'm going to start with the rub.

As I have mentioned before, the death of traditional search has been widely heralded, and patently disproved. It is a trendy thing to write about, but has little place in today's business world, because it's a prediction that has created many fools. If you were a weather forecaster, and just showed up each day and said "It's going to rain today," you would eventually be correct, but couldn't brag too much if those showers followed three weeks of sunshine. One day, traditional search will indeed see a serious decline in relevance, but that day is not yet come.

As such, small/new businesses have to continue to care about search, and SEO in particular. Why in particular? Primarily because it is "free," but also because it can scale better than any other channel, as organic search almost automatically encompasses your entire target audience.

A search for "Elizabeth Warren" probably wanted a result about this one

So where's the rub? SEO, boon and lifeblood that it is, can be extremely difficult for new companies. In large part, this is because the number one concern of the search engines* (here I will cease deliberately referring to them collectively, and start just using "Google" or "the engines" interchangeably, because, let's face it, Google still calls all of the shots in most countries) is authority. Authority is a somewhat (deliberately) vague term that describes the likelihood that a particular result is the most common intended target of a query.

Example: If someone searches for "Elizabeth Warren," Google is going to assume that they are looking for the official website of the politician (or recent news results, or her Wikipedia page), and not a PDF of the marriage announcement of a woman with the same name from a 1978 edition of the Albuquerque Journal.

Ultimately, authority (and SEO) is about probability. The more specific the query, the easier it is for the search engine, but most users start with something fairly broad, hoping that the engine will guess their intent, and show them a set of results that contains the desired website. The problem is that for a new business, unless you are filling a niche that no one else has ever tried to fill, it's very unlikely that you will have a great deal of authority for any search other than your brand name.

It takes time to build authority, which looks at historical data, including the clicks of users following a particular query (which is one of the few times that a confirmation bias is actually an appropriate thing). However, this isn't to say that a new business should not care about SEO, just that it is a more difficult path early on.

So what can you do?  Here are a few recommendations:

• Authority is based on a lot of legacy clout. Macy's has been Macy's forever. So try to compete most strenuously in areas that are newer, for example:
• social signals are only gaining relevance in SEO, so make sure that your brand is extremely active on all of the social platforms, especially Google+
• also, make sure that for each platform, you create the right type of account, that best represents your business
• secure your site - Google has recently said that they will give slight preference to sites that are operating on HTTPS instead of HTTP; this is a pain to overhaul for sprawling legacy sites, but should be easy if you are new 

• Get it right from the start. Many companies have websites for years before they start worrying about SEO. Don't wait until you are big enough to pay a consultant to follow best practices:
• audit your pages up front - proper metadata and linking from day one
• make sure that you have enough content (500-1000+ words) on your important pages, even if some text is hidden to the viewer (but not to crawlers)
• authorize yourself as the owner of your site on Google and Bing webmaster tools, because they will be the respective canaries in your coal mine

• Publish or perish
•  Content and SEO will only be more inextricably linked, so get writing! Provide value and you will get traffic, which will in turn get you authority
• if you are going to blog or produce other types of content, keep it on your primary domain; Wordpress may be easier, but you are just dividing your 'authority points'
• if your content/blog does live offsite, make sure to cross-link it to the most relevant page on your main site, with appropriate anchor text

• Measure what you can
• On a basic level, use Analytics (or whatever you have) to keep an eye on the number of visits, and new visits (to separate people who just don't use bookmarks or type in the nav bar), from organic search
• the move to a 'not provided' world from a keyword standpoint in Google Analytics hurt, but you can see what searched terms brought organic traffic to your site in webmaster tools, so identify those queries that should be central to your business and pull that data monthly to identify trends
• Webmaster tools will also provide you with information about your rankings for various keywords, which is important in tandem with your volume of traffic from each term; use a combination to identify shifts in search behavior and effectiveness of on-page SEO

That should be enough to keep any new SEO busy for a while! It looks daunting, but the key is to just try and do the right things, generally. The engines ultimately want what is best for the consumer, and will reward sites that provide real value in an authentic manner. Keep SEO in mind with everything that you do, even if it is never the top priority, and you won't have to go back and clean it all up after the fact.

For more tips for small/new businesses, check out part one of the series.  Feel free to post questions in the comments.

Google is Shaking Things Up (Again)

What's missing in this picture? (Hint: paid ads on the right side)

The big news for advertisers to come from Google lately (and yes, I am ignoring the organic algorithm change for right now) is that they are changing where paid ads are going to appear on the search results page.  For all of the claims that Google is a power-hungry, money grubbing monster, I have to say that as an advertiser, I don’t generally see that being the case.  In fact, I am normally frustrated by things they do in order to improve the user experience because they run contrary to what I would like as a marketer.  This latest decision, to move paid ads from the right-hand rail to the bottom of the page is no different.

The first issue that we have to consider is user behavior.  Thanks to eye-mapping technology (they plop users down in a chair, tell them to navigate the search page, and have a camera mounted on top of the monitor to track their eye movement as they look around the page; not clear if they hold the lids open Clockwork Orange-style), studies have been done telling us how people actually view the SERP (search engine results page).  Combined with click data on the various links, we have a pretty good idea of how users see and interact with the search engine results, and as Google has changed the layout and result types that show up, user behavior has changed as well:

SEOmoz studied the effect of Local & Expanded Sitelinks

Basically, what we have seen in the past is that most people tend to view the page top-to-bottom, and only occasionally do their eyes wander over to the margin, unless it is a relevant part of the answer to their query (like a map or a video).  Thus, Google feels that putting those paid ads that don’t make it into the prime top-of-page slots will actually be better served at the end of the organic results, due to the natural progression of users through the listings.

I know that for organic results there is some basis for this, as listings in positions 9-10 often actually have a better click through rate than those in positions 7-8.  The idea is that we tend to gloss over the middle results, paying the most attention at the beginning, and then at the end when we are forced to decide to either click on something on the first page, or make the (increasingly rare) decision to see if page 2 of the results will have something more to our liking.

Google thinks that CTR will increase at the bottom of the page compared to the right rail, but we will see.

The other issue is a purely mathematical one for advertisers.  Where you once had 6-8 paid search results on a page, it will not be uncommon to only have 4 results, which is what I tend to see now when I get these search result layouts.  Two on top, two on bottom.  Now, if there are fewer first-page ads available, then simple supply & demand tells us that competition, and thus cost per click, is going to go up. 

Google is not saying that 2^nd page ads are going to see improved performance, so this is strictly a cut in inventory.  Everyone wants to be on the first page, so get ready to see your CPCs go up (and presumably CPA as well, all other things being equal). 

Now, I have already heard the argument that this is Google’s way to make more money from ad revenue.  Higher CPC = more fees for Google, right?  Probably not.  Think about it how much CPCs would have to increase in order for them to make up for the revenue lost by having their total first page ad inventory drop by as much as 50%.  If anything, Google is most likely costing themselves money, because people who find that their bids have moved their ads to the second page are just as likely to pause the keywords as they are to increase the amount they will pay for them.

I don’t love this change as an advertiser, but it is once again going to be hard to argue that it isn’t better for the user.