IMV45: Organic Search

The following is a transcript for IMV45: Organic Search. The original podcast is located here.

Announcer:

Welcome to the Internet Marketing Voodoo podcast, brought to you by MindComet. And now, here’s your host, Paul Lewis.

Paul Lewis:

Welcome to Internet Marketing Voodoo. I’m your host, Paul Lewis, and today’s episode is on the evolution of search. Our guest speaker today is Gord Hotchkiss. Gord is the president and CEO of Enquiro Search Solutions. Gord has a background with over 20 years in advertising and marketing. Gord began focusing specifically on search engine visibility in 1996 and has been considered a search specialist since ’99.

He works today as president and CEO of Enquiro offering organic optimization expertise. Gord is regularly published in on and offline publications such as Marketing Monitor, SEO Today and MediaPost's Search Insider.

And Gord, I can tell you just by typing in the first five letter of your name, Google searchbar already tells me how to complete that query. So I know that you must be pretty well established. Welcome to the show.

Gord Hotchkiss:

Well, thank you.

Paul Lewis:

I think where I’d like to start today is: Search has evolved quite a bit over the last five years. Five years ago people were hanging out shingles, it was kind of the wild west of – anybody could do anything with search, “we’ll get you to the top of the search engines” – and it’s become much more of a science today.

Tell us a little bit about how search and search engine optimization as a service for marketing has changed over the last five years.

Gord Hotchkiss:

Well, I think there’s a number of parts to that answer. But I think one of the biggest things that’s happened is the adoption of organic optimization by mainstream companies.

In the old days it was a bunch of affiliate marketers and really aggressive marketers that were really controlling the organic space, and the search engines made a number of changes at the back-end to try to improve the relevance of the search results and make sure that the most worthy candidates rose to the top, and I think they were assisted in that to a large extent by – when you do a search for anything, the companies that you would expect to see ranking for that coming into the search space and taking organic optimization more seriously.

So, for instance, if you’re doing a search for a hotel in a market now – it used to be that it was the affiliate marketers that really owned that space and you had to sort through all that. Now you know that Starwood chains and Hilton chains and the various properties are realizing how important that organic space is and they’re making efforts to do the things they need to do on their site to be recognized by a search engine, to be spidered properly and to make sure that there’s at least some initial optimization on the page.

And if you’re optimizing hiton.com as opposed to cheapnewyorkhotelrooms.com you’ve got a lot of what we call organic equity in that site. There’s a lot of links coming to you, there’s a lot of interlinking. So if you do your job right you shouldn’t have a problem ranking for the terms that people would expect to find you for.

So I think the main street of the search engine now has the bigger shops setting up shop on it, and they’ve pushed some of the more questionable tenants down the street.

So I think that’s one fairly big change. The other change, of course, is with the back end of the engines themselves. They’ve become more sophisticated in their algorithms, less dependent on on the page factors as what ranks, more dependent on linking structures.

And that’s not to say that people aren’t still trying to find a way to gain the system. It’s just getting harder and the bar is being raised. If someone wants to play that game, it’s getting harder and harder, and that means that there‘s a lot of people dropping off the bottom side who just can’t play the game anymore.

Paul Lewis:

Sure. So from a brand perspective if you have an established brand what should be some of your thoughts regarding: how do they get in, how do they invest, how do they select a search consultant that can help is through this? What are the key things they should be looking for?

Gord Hotchkiss:

As far as how you get into it, let’s deal with that first. The first thing you want to do is make sure that the structure of your site allows a spider into it to get to the content you want them to get to.

So that’s the first thing. You’ve gotta open the door to the spider. So if you have dynamic URLs you’re going to have to look carefully at those to make sure they’re spiderable. You’re going to have to look at the navigation structure of your site to make sure that the links are something that a spider can crawl and get to the content. You’re going to look at how many levels deep you’re burying your content. So there’s a lot of kind of technical aspects that you have to look at to make sure that you’re doing the things you need to to give the spider access to the content you want indexed.

The second thing you have to do is: you have to think about the content on your site and make sure that that content is presented in a way that the vocabulary that’s used and the way it’s presented matches what a user would expect to find. The big thing about search in general, but particularly organic search, is you really need to step in to the mind of the person who’s going to be looking for you and understand the phrases they’re going to be using, so keyword analysis and keyword discovery is an important part of that, and understand what their intent is when they’re searching for you so that you can present the right experience and prove the right content when they’re coming to find you.

Those are the basics. There’s levels of advanced strategy to go above that. The fact is until most companies get those fundamentals right those other things are things that you can play with later but there’s still a lot of companies that aren’t doing the fundamentals right. So that’s the place to start.

As far as finding an agency to help you do that, the relationship between the agency and the advertiser themselves has changed quite a bit in the last little while.

Increasingly, because search has become more important to a lot of companies, they want to retain a fair amount of control internally. They want to be able to make sure that they’re getting full value for the resources that they’re putting towards search, so more and more we’re looking at a hybrid model where there’s internal people who are generally executing on a lot of the tactical work that needs to be done with search, but they have an agency partner that’s helping provide some strategic direction as well.

And, with that in mind, the things you should be looking for in an agency are agencies who really are trying to understand your business model, your own challenges – the people who will be helping execute on the tactics. They should be asking a lot of questions and doing a lot of listening.

The other thing I’m hearing more and more and I actually just read a column that came out today from MediaPost was transparency in an agency. More and more I think people are looking for an agency that they can have an open, honest, no holds barred conversation with to say, “Don’t tell us what you think we want to hear. Tell us what we need to know. Tell us what we need to do to do this, and please don’t approach me with this black box, we’re the wizards and we know best approach to search.”

Marketers are a lot more savvy about organic optimization than they used to be. And they understand that there is a learning curve there, but I don't think most marketers now appreciate the Black Box Voodoo approach to SEO. In most cases, it’s common sense. In most cases it’s things that just have to be done to get the fundamentals right, and it’s not a secret sauce or a privileged information thing where some SEO guru is the only person who has access to the inner workings of Google’s algorithm.

And kind of along with that, if they’re coming in with guarantees that seem too good to be true, generally they are. The fact is nobody has any control over the Google algorithm. So reputable firms that like to manage expectations and go in with a clear and open understanding of what can be achieved will generally not offer guarantees, because just the implicit nature of a guarantee seems to indicate that you control something, and, the fact is, we don’t control organic visibility.

We could do all the things, get it right, Google could make one change to the algorithm and that can change your visibility online dramatically. The analogy we always use is look at it the same way you would look at a stockbroker. Stockbrokers understand the market. They understand that if you do the basic things right, over time you should generate a positive return and do better than if you didn’t have access to the information. A good, organic optimization firm should do the same thing.

They can’t control the day-to-day fluctuations in the search engine index, but they will help guide you in best practices, do the things that they know work well as far as improving organic visibility, and the returns should be significant over time.

Paul Lewis:

And that’s a great segue into – how much time should a company give their SEO partner to begin to make improvement, and what’s a reasonable – clearly the companies that promise we’ll have you at number one listing and things like that are really just bringing you along for the ride, but what are some good timeframes where you can start seeing improvements? What kind of improvements are reasonable, and how does that vary by industry? Obviously if you’re in certain industries that are heavily competed-in that’s going to be much more difficult to make an improvement than other industries.

Gord Hotchkiss:

There’s a lot of factors that go into that. One of the biggest factors that we found is – what’s the nature of that organic equity with property you’re working with? Do you have a big site that’s being crawled often by the Google spider, and is there just some fundamental technical issues that need to be fixed in order to open up a lot of content?

And, if that’s the case, then you’re dealing with a big site that just wasn’t built to be search engine friendly, and there’s a few things you can do to dramatically increase the search engine friendliness of it, the returns can pretty quick and pretty significant. The pages index could jump dramatically within a week or two, certainly a month.

And eventually, it kind of rolls through the Google sandbox and starts to gain some stability in the listings. In the first little while we see new pages coming into the index, they get an immediate boost, then they kind of settle down a bit, then they gradually climb back up and generally hold a fairly stable position in the listings over time.

Generally that little dip and dance kind of takes two to three months to sort itself out. There’s a lot of things happening with the Google index in particular, and they don’t all happen at the same time. New content gets included at a faster rate than something like the page rank algorithm gets updated. And it’s when that page rank algorithm gets updated that things tend to stabilize out a little bit and you don’t see as much flux in the position on the page. So that’s one scenario.

If you’ve got somebody who’s just launching a new site, doesn’t have any incoming links to it, is trying to build that, is in a competitive category, we’re talking months, years, or possibly never, depending on the competition they’re up against as far as top ten visibility.

I guess the answer to the question is: it depends. It depends on the nature of the site. It depends on the nature of the competition, and it depends on the content that you have within your site and how popular that content is – what’s the query volume looking for that particular content.

Paul Lewis:

Given those dependencies, is there any sort of rule of thumb that a company should be considering when it’s looking at SEM investments versus organic SEO investments? Is there any relationship between the two or any way that as a marketing manager if I said, “Look, I’m investing half a million dollars in search this year,” how should I break that out between SEO and SEM?

Gord Hotchkiss:

Well, I guess there’s a couple of ways to look at that. The first way is where are the clicks happening? And, generally speaking, it’s generally around a 30/70 split with 70% of the clicks happening on the organic, 30% on the sponsored. That varies engine by engine, varies query by query. But overall, that’s reasonably close to how the clicks split up.

If you’re looking at it form a pure traffic potential point of view, you’ve got to pay some attention to the organic side of things, and what you really need to do is find a partner that’s going to give you an honest appraisal of what your chances are in that space.

And if there is untapped potential, it’s absolutely a place that anyone should be investing some time and some budgets to get that optimization done.

Paul Lewis:

If they get through that first hurdle and get the stakeholders bought in, how much of it is typically allocated to the redevelopment or the redesign of the site to optimize it for SEO, and then how much is an ongoing basis to keep the site current with changes in the algorithm as well as having new content in certain areas? What’s the best way to engage a partner? Is it a one-time affair, or is it an ongoing relationship?

Gord Hotchkiss:

We’ve seen both, and both can work equally well depending on the nature. So, let me give you one example. So if you were doing a site redesign and the site is a reasonably static site – you maybe redo your design every year to keep it fresh – but once the sites designed there’s not a lot of changes to the site. You may add new products, new categories once in a while.

That’s probably sufficient for a one-time engagement where you engage with an SEO expert at the beginning of your redesign process, and really the rule of thumb here is the earlier you engage with them the better. If they can be involved at the wire frame stage, that’s great, as you’re starting to set up the taxonomy of your site and how that site’s going to lay out. Then best practices can be built in from the ground up, and that’s generally the ideal scenario.

But let’s say that you’re an online publisher and you’re really trying to tap into the long tail of search, and you want every new article that’s posted to your site to have the potential to draw traffic in. Then you’re probably looking at more of an ongoing relationship with an SEO vendor, and maybe that SEO vendor is only providing ongoing training, or an ongoing service in optimizing media releases, or new stories going on the site.

So it really depends on how dynamic the nature of your site is and what the needs are. There’s always emerging things like the use of local right now, which is an emerging trend that I see people need to really look at. And in that case, as local becomes more important, you may want to engage with an SEO expert to help provide some best practices in that area.

But I think overall, the whole SEO space, and SEM as well, is kind of going through a transition from the early days, where it was pretty much all outsourced and done at arm’s length, to being a much more cooperative approach. And I think there’s the old saying that you can buy a man a fish or give the man a fish and he’ll eat for a day, but you can teach him how to fish and he’ll feed himself for the rest of is life.

I think that’s where SEO is right now. If we as agencies can help our clients learn to institute best practices in their day-to-day working – in their day-to-day production of content – I think that’s a preferable way to go.

Paul Lewis:

Yeah. Absolutely. I think it’s definitely a partnership relationship with the client and explaining the fundamentals and how they can be more effective.

Gord Hotchkiss:

Yeah. And transparency as well. Getting away from this whole black box approach to SEO and saying, “You know what? It’s not a black box. In a lot of cases it’s common sense.”

One of the really nice win-wins out of this that we’ve found is generally the stuff you do right for SEO is the things that you should be doing right for your human visitors as well. It’s amazing how many usability best practices and SEO best practices are completely aligned.

Paul Lewis:

Absolutely. Well, Gord, I appreciate all of your insights. I did want to get to the next section of the show which is Truth or Marketing.

Gord Hotchkiss:

Okay.

Paul Lewis:

So these are predictions for 2008. You just tell me if you believe it’s going to come true or if it’s just marketing. The first one is the hairstyle the mullet makes a comeback. Truth or marketing?

Gord Hotchkiss:

I’m afraid that could be true. I’m seeing evidence of that, and it’s scaring the hell out of me.

Paul Lewis:

Next one. Microsoft buys Yahoo!.

Gord Hotchkiss:

That’s marketing.

Paul Lewis:

Marketing.

Gord Hotchkiss:

It doesn’t make any sense.

Paul Lewis:

Last one. Gas in the US hits over $4.00 a gallon?

Gord Hotchkiss:

That’s true.

Paul Lewis:

Yeah.

Gord Hotchkiss:

And I think it’s directly tied to the mullet thing.

Paul Lewis:

There’s a strange correlation there, but no factor from Microsoft and gas hitting $4.00 a gallon you’re sure?

Gord Hotchkiss:

Well, you know, Microsoft is probably playing around with trying to figure out how to break in to the petro chemical market ‘cause they’re just not doing well in search. So it may be Steve Ballmer’s next big thing.

Paul Lewis:

Next big thing. (Laughter)

Gord Hotchkiss:

And he may grow a mullet to do it, so it all kind of comes together.

Paul Lewis:

Steve with a mullet would be a picture, and I can see MS Exxon now, so –

Gord Hotchkiss:

Yeah.

Paul Lewis:

Anyway, Gord, I really appreciate you contributing on the show. Again, of you would like to know more information about Gord or his company that specializes in search engine solutions, you can go to enquiro.com, which is spelled E N Q U I R O dot com, or you can check out his blog at outofmygord.com. Again, Gord, thanks for being on the show.

Gord Hotchkiss:

No problem. Thank you.

Announcer:

For more information on this week’s topic, visit internetmarketingvoodoo.com. This podcast has been brought to you by MindComet, the Relationship Agency.

[End of Audio]

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