smx, smxwest14, seo

1. Long-Term SEO: How To Win For Years,
Not Days
Mark Munroe
Director SEO, Trulia
mmunroe@trulia.com
@markemunroe
blog: www.seoradar.com
3/12/2014
#smx #21a

2. Introduction
 In-house SEO perspective from sites with a large organic footprint.
My experience includes:
 Trulia.com – current
 EverydayHealth (includes EverydayHealth.com, WhatToExpect.com)
 MerchantCircle.com
 SideStep.com (now integrated into Kayak)
 My focus today:
 Enabling ‘Embedded SEO Intelligence’
 The importance of ‘baking in’ knowledge throughout the organization.
 Creating and leveraging a reputation in regards to link building.

3. What is long lasting SEO?
 For us, we are not simply talking about preserving traffic! We are
talking about sustaining growth.
 Yet all successful SEO initiatives are going to tend to level off
(outside of branded SEO).
 My challenge … our challenge … is keeping that growth going.

4. SEO success – it’s not just about me!
• I don’t want to be the mysterious SEO guru
placed on pedestal, cautiously guarding
his SEO secrets.
• I want everyone to own SEO success!
• I want everyone’s eyes guarding our SEO
jewels.
• I’d never have enough SEO resource to do
what I want.

5. Creating an SEO Machine
• My objective: embed SEO intelligence into every party of the enterprise,
every nook and cranny to create an SEO machine.

6. Teams to work closely with
SEO
BD
Content Team
Quality
Assurance
Product
Management
UX – User
experience
Marketing
Engineering
• Need to get the
team working
with me.
• Working with
each other.
• With SEO
goals in mind.

7. Over-communicate SEO at every step
 Informal, day-to-day communications
 Guides
 Formal training sessions

8. Every SEO question should be followed with an
explanation
Product Designer: ‘We are redesigning this page. Any SEO impact’
Me: ‘Well, you taken our most important keyword phrase, reduced it to
a small font and reduced the contrast to make it less visible.’
Possible answers:
A. Don’t do it!
B. Make it an h1 – we should still be OK. (this was actually the designers suggestion).
A. That keyword is important to us. For Google to think it is important, it needs to
visually appear to be the most important thing on the page. Let’s keep in mind
Google’s intent. Fooling Google may work, but likely won’t be long lasting and at
some time in the future we may get a traffic drop and never understand why.

9. Example conversation 2:
 Product Manager: ‘I fixed the canonicals on the page on
Wednesday. It’s 2 days now and yet I am still seeing the wrong
page in the index. What up?’.
 In this case I do 2 things, I explain and I demonstrate.
1. Explain that it will take Google a while to re-cache the page.
1. Demonstrate how to find the page in the SERP and how to view the
cache.

10. Link building
 Link growth is still critically important to SEO.
 As a site and a brand grows, it becomes harder to move the needle.
 When you have 50 linking domains, 20 new domains is a big deal.
 When you have 5000 linking domains, 20 new ones will have minimal
impact.
 Tremendous amount of work required to sustain impactful growth
Linking Domains
New
Existing
Linking Domains
New
Existing

11. Meeting link goals - break down the silos
PR BD Marketing ContentSEO
Outreach

12. Set Targets!
 Set aggressive links goals across
each organization
 How to you set goal for other groups?
Executive buy-in!
 Periodic reviews (twice quarterly)
 Review goals and performance
 Adjust based on what’s working,
what’s not
 Look for synergies between groups.
 When everyone is working together,
with targets in mind, the improvement
is staggering.

13. Bad News: Your SEO is a disaster waiting to
happen
Tech problems can crack you finely crafted SEO program
Some of these problems can go undetected for months or years

14. SEO Disasters – just waiting to get you!
Incident
Meta noindex
and/or nofollow
Sitewide, homepage, site sections
Broken rel
canonical
Broken syntax, target to the wrong page, bad link
Disappearing, de-
optimized tittles
Sections of the site, entire site
Broken 301s Lost the value of historical 301s
Deletion of cross-
linking units
Lose value being passed to key pages
Ajaxing search
results
Making all the content in the search result un-crawlable
Unreachable
content
Link path to content removed
Robots.txt Blocking site
Crawler overload Crawlers hit your site so heavy that they kill peformance

15. Training focus
Session Teams
SEO 101 All
SEO Tech QA, Engineering, Product, IT
Link building,
Promotion
PR, Content Marketing, Product, BD, Social
SEO, IA and UX UX, Product, Engineering
Content
Optimization
Content, PR, Product

16. Follow the spider
 Where is the spider spending its
time? Don’t let it go down a rat
hole! On a large site with a billion
possible pages, this can be a
concern.
 Even if a site is well indexed, key
pages may get stale in Google’s
cache because too much time is
spent on low-value pages.
 Beware of search result modifiers
containing potentially nearly infinite
combinations.
 Log analysis is key to analyze
exactly where and when the Spider
is spending it’s time.

17. Crawler capacity
 Always over engineer your crawler capacity.
 If possible, have dedicated servers for crawlers vs. users.
 If possible, have dedicated servers for Bing vs. Google.

18. Conversation #1
Below is a conversation I never want to have.
CEO Me
Did our traffic drop
because of that
change we pushed
out last week?
I don’t
know!

19. Better
CEO Me
Did our traffic
drop because of
that change we
pushed out last
week?
No. We did a
controlled test on a
statistically
significant sample
before rolling out.

20. Protect your Jewels
 Most large organic sites have a few
different templates or content type
that dominate the traffic metrics.
 These need to be protected!
 These need to be nurtured for
growth.
 The answer is testing!

21. How to test SEO changes
 Implement changes on a random set of pages.
 These changes will persist at the URL level.
 Setup sample rankings and traffic monitoring on the test vs. control.

22. What is a Reputation?
 Reputation - the beliefs or opinions that are generally
held about someone or something
 With Google/Bing, links are citations that build a
reputation. Social, at a minimum help build reputations
by generating links.
 As SEOs, we’ve scrambled for ways to build those
reputations.

23. Reputation Building Techniques
2004
• Link
Swapping
• Directories
2006
• Link buying
• Press
release
2008
• Article
directories
2010
• Infographics
• Social
• Widgets
2011
• Guest
blogging
2014
• Content
Marketing

24. Increased Skittishness with Link Building
Techniques
 Even brands have not been immune:
 Expedia (unconfirmed)
 Halifax bank (unconfirmed)
 Rap Genius
 Overstock
 J.C. Penney
 With so many things crossed off the list, what can
I do?

25. Earned Reputation vs. a ‘faux’
 An earned reputation:
 Based on realized value proposition
 Arises naturally
 Is not manipulative
 Makes the recommender look good
 A ‘faux’ reputation
 Does not deliver on the promise
 Is obviously an unnatural recommendation
 Is manipulative

26. Best Way to Get Links
 The best links are not asked for. Create a reason
to be linked to.
 Compelling content or tools
 Extreme value
 In short, the best way to get links is that a link to
your site makes the linking site a better site.

27. Echo Effect
 My favorite techniques are ones that build the brand and have a
potential echo effect.
 Content Marketing
 PR
 I want influential news outlets and industry bloggers to know who we
are. The more we market valuable content, the more they will think
of us when we are not marketing to them.

28. Should I ask for links?
 Of course!
 By creating a site, content, features that will
organically generate links, it is even easier
to get links via outreach.
 It’s fine to ask for a recommendation, as
long as the recommendation is genuine.
 Relevant sites
 Relevant pages
 Added value for the linking site.

29. What about anchor text?
 Anchor text manipulation stills work but brings the most risk. Don’t
do it.
 It is the single biggest signal to Google that your reputation is not
earned.
 For distributable digital assets, I recommend to not optimize for
money keywords and focus on brand.
 For SEO outreach initiatives, I recommend leaving the anchor text in
the hands of the linking site, let them do what makes sense. What
could be more organic than that?

30. Final Word
Whenever making a decision on an SEO strategy or
tactic, consider Google’s intent. If your strategy
matches the intent of Google algorithm, you are moving
in the right direction.

31. Thank you!
Mark Munroe
Director SEO, Trulia
mmunroe@trulia.com
@markemunroe
blog: www.seoradar.com
#smx #21a