SEO: Search Experience Optimization

Notes de l'éditeur

1. Lead team: SEO, SEM, and Affiliate Doing Internet Marketing for around 6 years Started out in the Local SEO space at Dex Media... Local business listing provider. 3 Years at Bodybuilding.com Started out as an SEO Specialist and moved on from there. Get in touch with me on Twitter. User name: DerrickHicks3 NEXT SLIDE
2. What is Bodybuilding.com? NEXT SLIDE
3. Largest, most visited fitness site at more than 30 million unique visitors a month. 60%+ traffic comes from organic search Over 50% of our traffic happens on mobile devices NEXT SLIDE
4. Headquarters is based in Boise, Idaho. But, we have 5 distribution centers around the world... And growing. NEXT SLIDE
5. Our business model is completely centered on: Content, Community, & Commerce Did inbound marketing before it was the thing to do. NEXT SLIDE
6. Our content team is one of the largest teams in our company. 50+ people. 1/3 of them are on our Video Production Team. 20,000+ articles publish 4-5 new day. over 9,000 videos Produce around 800-1,000 videos a year in house! On top of that... We offer detailed, 12 week training & nutrition plans for free. NEXT SLIDE
7. Community called BodySpace Millions of members. You can track workouts and your fitness journey as well as connect with like-minded people. Oddly enough, we also have one of the largest forums in the world. Our forum was our original community. NEXT SLIDE
8. And lastly, we are an ecommerce company that sells sports nutrition supplements. We have over 10,000 skews and 120 country specific catalogs. NEXT SLIDE
9. Obvious organic search is important. That’s a given. But today, I want to talk about Search Experience Optimization and... NEXT SLIDE
10. ...how that relates to Design Considerations for Search James and I work very hard to try and DESIGN a great search experience for our customers. One of the ways we do this is by finding popular topics people search for and then working hard to understand: Who is looking up that topic and why. What is the motivation. What currently ranks on the first page. What would be the most epic format to answer the question people are looking for. When I say format, I mean in-depth articles, Video, Top 10 Lists, etc. Let me show you some examples.
11. Here is an example of a video trainer. Content team did amazing job building this. It has pages and pages of content covering: Training Nutrition Supplementation Motivation It would be impossible to make something this epic without video. NEXT SLIDE
12. Here is an example where video might actually get in the way. This article is just an epic list of High Protein Foods. Video would slow the page down and not really add that much value. Maybe we could have videos of recipes, but things like that would do much better on their own pages. NEXT SLIDE
13. Here is another example where, again, lists are the best way to answer a question. People want a fast, easy to digest recommendations for protein powder. We have a video on the page, but it’s not really what people are looking for. NEXT SLIDE
14. Last example of designing a great search experience is a quick story. We have a bunch of category pages in our store. Here is an example of one for creatine. NEXT SLIDE
15. These category pages have a bunch of content as well as a video on the page. NEXT SLIDE
16. Last year, those videos were giving us Video Rich snippets in the search results. Long story short, we looked at a ton of data and determined these video rich snippets were hurting us. We removed them and our traffic and revenue doubled for over 300 category pages. Video was not what people wanted. They just wanted to buy supplements. Hopefully these examples give you some ideas on how you need to design a great Search Experience for your customers. It really is important it is to think about the format of the content you are creating. Don’t just do video or mobile because it is growing like crazy. Do it because you know it’s what’s best for YOUR specific customers. NEXT SLIDE
17. Alright... So how do we get our content team to work with us? Well, that is actually a long story and has been a work in progress for over 2 years. I’ll save you the nity gritty details and try and sum it up for you. NEXT SLIDE
18. First off... Just like any big company, Silos happen. Content team was so busy. Things seemed to be working. Why should they listen to us? We saw huge opportunities, but struggled to get buy-in. Here was one of the main opportunities we were seeing... NEXT SLIDE
19. This slide is showing number of content assets created a year. Content asset = Greater than 2,000 organic search entries a week. We where doing pretty good, but it was sporadic. It also meant that less than 3% of the content we were producing was becoming true content assets. Statistically speaking, we were kind of just getting lucky. NEXT SLIDE
20. So I had the brilliant idea of trying to influence some of the strategy & content design of one of the largest teams in our company. This picture is seriously how I felt when we first started trying to work with our content team. They are beyond amazing... and way more fit than that guy. Despite feeling like the tiniest sumo wrestler in the world, here is how we started to influence their team. We started meeting with them once a month with the goal of helping THEM be more successful. It’s pretty much always about them, what they are interested in, and how that overlaps with the SEO team. NEXT SLIDE
21. Look at key metrics: Traffic, revenue, new visit %, bounce rate, etc NEXT SLIDE
22. Show some stand out pieces that have performed well, editors love this. NEXT SLIDE
23. Share a few specific opportunities for keywords to target. The fewer, the better. A Conductor dashboard is helpful for this. NEXT SLIDE
24. Conversation naturally happens around ideas for how we can improve our content’s performance. NEXT SLIDE
25. DPG uses Trello for work flow. We can see all upcoming articles, inject suggestions. NEXT SLIDE
26. Let’s look at our results so far NEXT SLIDE
27. Reminder: An SEO asset = an article that brings in more than 2,000 visitors a week from organic search. Large jump in the total number of SEO Assets we were creating by year... Getting “lucky” more often. NEXT SLIDE
28. We also starting getting some huge wins as well. So the quality of our SEO Assets is going up too. NEXT SLIDE
29. This is just a reminder slide on how important it is to look at things in the long term. You will see a “compound interest effect” if you focus on building long-term evergreen content that people search for all the time. NEXT SLIDE
30. Thank you! Make sure you connect with me if you have any questions. Happy to help. END