2014 SEO Playbook: On-Page Factors

Welcome to part 2 of my annual SEO playbook. (Click here for part 1.) I have to thank Danny Sullivan and the Search Engine Land team for giving me the perfect outline for the 2014 playbook, the Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors.

Part 2 will cover on-page factors, including content, HTML and architecture. You’ll find more than enough food for thought and some very actionable steps. This is not a step-by-step SEO guide, and it’s pretty informal. Before embarking on a search engine optimization campaign, do your research or consult with an expert.

Content: Quality

Quality was a big discussion item during 2013, especially topics like word count and deep content.

After Panda, you’d think we would be well past the age of producing short “fluff” articles. However, too many websites, especially business sites that struggle to post fresh content, continue the practice. Recently, I saw a corporate blog post listing 10 must-read books on a topic — the article consisted of 10 thumbnail images and the names of the books, linked to an online bookstore. You can’t afford to keep putting out cut-rate articles like that; in bulk, they are perfect Panda-penalty bait.

On the opposite end is deep content — pages or articles of around 1,500 words or more. Websites have seen success with this content, so it may make sense to take the time spent creating lots of short, “fluffy” posts and use it instead to produce a few longer, more meaningful articles. Whatever you do, make sure content is well written, with attention to grammar and spelling. Don’t just say something; back it up with thoughtful opinion or researched facts. Put some meat on the bones. Personally, when it comes to article content, if I cannot easily pass 450 words, I will combine it with other content or deem it not worth writing about.

As for e-commerce descriptions, I used to deem 250 words as the sweet spot. Nowadays, I am less concerned about word count and more focused on creating a great list, matching features with benefits.

Content: Keywords

Keyword research is not going anywhere and is still the foundation of all on-site SEO. The difference is, after the Hummingbird update, we are discussing the role of entities, where topics take the place of keywords in the result pages. Google has made great strides in synonym identification and concept grouping — some have even called it the death of the long-tail keyword. (But, as with all the supposed death knells in our field, this, too, is probably an exaggeration.)

My advice is to make sure each page stands on its own as a topic. Do not create multiple pages about the same exact thing in order to optimize for different keywords. Instead, stick to single, well-written, citation-worthy, topic pages and optimize them for multiple keywords. This can be another good reason to use long-form content.

Content: Engagement

Engagement is about whether visitors spend time reading your content or bounce quickly away. Once again, meaningful content is key. It’s amazing how it all comes back to quality. Are you publishing something your audience or target personas will want to read, or are you just filling holes in an editorial calendar — or perhaps publishing out of guilt because you have not published anything recently?

Engagement isn’t just limited to text content, either; Web page design is equally important. Words don’t just have to read well to be engaging — they have to look good. Readability includes everything from page layout to font selection to letter and line spacing. Additionally, pay attention to navigation and the presentation of links to other content, as these elements can have a huge impact on time, bounce rates and other visitor engagement metrics such as time on page/time on site.

Content: Ads

Another part of layout is the placement of ads. Search engines will not ding you for having advertisements. That would be hypercritical. What they will penalize is too many ads or inappropriate ad placements.

I do not foresee big changes in this area beyond the enhancement of current search engine policies. In addition to display ads, be especially wary of text link ads. Make certain they are content-appropriate or matching, and that you nofollow them. If you still use automated phrase link advertising inside your content, I strongly suggest you consider removing this. If you use interstitial or pop-up advertising, make sure it doesn’t interfere with the ability of search engines to crawl your pages.

Content: Freshness

I am a big proponent of fresh content — this includes not just posting about hot topics, but also ensuring that you are publishing new content on a regular or frequent basis. Not only is new content important to attract readership, it also improves crawl frequency and depth. Earlier, I wrote that you should not create content just to check off your editorial calendar. Not to backtrack, but if you do not have an editorial calendar in place, you probably should create one and get to work creating content.

Think of your content as a tool to generate awareness and trust. This means you must get beyond writing about just your company and its products or services. Go broader and become a resource — a real, viable, honest-to-goodness resource — for your target market and the people or companies that your target market serves.

Taking this broad approach will give you more to write about, allowing you to focus on topics of interest to your target market. This is the kind of content you can build an audience with. In my opinion, if you are not trying to build an audience at the top of the marketing funnel, you are probably doing it wrong. Obviously, there are exceptions to this; though, I think a lot more companies fail here than don’t need to worry about it.

HTML: Titles & Headers

Title tags are interesting right now. The usual rules for writing optimized title tags and headers have not changed. I do foresee search engines (Google especially) rewriting more title tags algorithmically. If you see Google rewriting your title tags, test changing your HTML to the same text Google presents in the SERPs. By test, I mean change a judicious few, then observe what happens to performance indicators. If you see improvement, a broader title tag optimization program could prove worthwhile.

Going back to entity search and optimizing for multiple keywords… when you are doing topic optimization, you must be cognizant of which keywords you use in the title and H1 tags. I wish I could give you a surefire formula, but one does not exist. As you look at synonyms, pay attention to which words or phrases received the most exact match searches and trust your intuition when it comes to popular language use.

HTML: Description

I don’t see anything changing with Meta description tag optimization. Write unique descriptions for every page. They will not change your rankings; but, well-written descriptions can increase click-through rate.

I always pay attention to length, around 150 words. In reality, the actual length depends on the combined pixel width of all characters, but from a practical standpoint just make sure your descriptions are not getting cut off when they appear in the results.

For pages that appear in site links, be sure that the portion of the description that appears beneath each link forms a coherent thought. This is a place where many enterprise sites and brands can improve.

HTML: Structured Data Markup

Each year, it seems structured data markup is always a big topic.

First is the question of whether or not you should use it for organic search engine optimization. Some long-time experts do not like structured markup or machine-readable language because they do not want to help the search engines present information in a format that does not generate visits.

For example, if you type in the name of your favorite NFL team, Google will show you information about that team, including their next scheduled game, right on the SERP. Here’s an example I fondly remember: someone once asked, if you ran a zoo website, would you want Google to show your business hours at the top of the search results, or do you want people to visit the website, where they will learn more about current exhibits and events? This is a fair question — to which I think the fair answer is, whatever will get the most bodies through the door.

Google, Bing and Yahoo are going to show the data they want and in the format they desire regardless of how you or I feel. Personally, I’d much rather be a trusted source, even if it means my website information is made available in the SERPs. For this reason, I am a huge proponent of structured data markup like schema.org and RDFa.

Other forms of structured markup, like the author and publisher tags, are not controversial and have entered the realm of best practices. Use them.

HTML: Keyword Stuffing & Hidden Elements

Negative ranking factors like keyword stuffing and hidden text are so old that many of us practitioners brush them off as search engine optimization 101. Unfortunately nothing is ever so easy.

Stuffing is definitely a factor in e-commerce shopping cart optimization. It can be tricky not to use the same word or phrase over and over again when they are used as categories or descriptions for products. Different shopping carts have different levels of control. Some are more easily optimized than others. On category pages, it may be as simple as limiting the number of products you display on each page. Without going into an entire lesson on shopping cart optimization, what I will tell you is: if you have not done a shopping cart review in the last two years, it is time. Make certain your e-commerce platform is keeping up.

It still surprises me how often I see unintentional cloaking. Usually, it’s a result of the template writer getting around a quirk of the content management system. But I have also seen static links in a template that are cloaked using display: none on some pages while they appear on others, depending on something such as the category. The bottom line is this: if it appears on the page, it should be in the HTML. If it does not appear on the page, it should not appear in the HTML.

Architecture: Crawl

Not enough search engine optimizers pay attention to crawl. I realize this is a pretty broad statement, but too many of us get so caught up in everything else that this becomes one of the first things we ignore unless there are red, flashing error messages. Obviously, you want to make sure that search engines can crawl your website and all your pages (at least the ones you want crawled). Keep in mind that if you do not want to botch the flow of PageRank through your site, use the meta noindex, follow tag to exclude pages, not robots.txt.

The other concern you should have is whether or not search engines crawl and capture updates to existing pages in a timely manner. If not, it could be an overall domain authority issue or that PageRank is not flowing deep enough in sufficient quantities.

There are tricks to resolve this, such as linking to updated pages from your homepage or a level-one page until the updated deep page gets reached. The more wholesome approach is to make sure that the content which gets updated is naturally close to content or sections of content with higher authority, or to build legitimate internal links from related content that has its own off-site PageRank.

I am not telling you all your content should be crawled all the time. Search engines budget crawl frequency and depth for good reasons. What I am saying is manage your website crawl budget and use it well; don’t just leave everything up to chance.

Architecture: Duplicate Content

Earlier this year, Matt Cutts stunned the search engine optimization community by telling us not to worry about duplicate content. He assured us that Google will recognize this duplicate content, combine the disbursed authority, and present one URL in the SERPs.

This is really not a big surprise, as Google has been working toward this for quite some time. Webmaster tools has had automated parameter identification and Google spokespersons have discussed duplicate content consolidation for some time.

To repeat what I have written before, Google is not the only search engine out there and reality does not always work the way Google says it does. The bottom line is: keep managing your duplicate content by preventing or eliminating as much as possible, and as for the rest, put your canonical tags in place.

Speaking of canonical tags, I know a popular hack has been to use one canonical URL, improperly, on all the pages of multipage articles. There are other canonical hacks out there, as well. I’d be wary of these. If you’re using canonical tags, machine-readable content or advanced meta-tags, you’re basically waving a big red flag telling search engines that your website is technically savvy and using search engine optimization. In other words, you’re begging for additional scrutiny.

It would not surprise me if Google becomes more fierce in penalizing websites for this type of technical misdirection. Search engines tend to use a soft touch on levying penalties algorithmically for fear they will burn innocent websites. But as we have seen with Panda and Penguin, as they become more confident, they also become more aggressive. If you are optimizing for an employer, keep it clean.

Architecture: Speed

Most websites are not going to see an SEO benefit from increasing the speed of their website. Google has always said only a small fraction of sites are affected by this part of the ranking algorithm. This view seems to be borne out by correlation studies. Honestly, the best test of speed is to take your laptop to the local café and surf around your website. If you are not waiting for pages to load up, then you are probably okay.

The exceptions (sites that should be concerned about speed) are large enterprise and e-commerce websites. If you optimize for one of these, shaving a few milliseconds from load time may lower bounce rates and increase conversions or sales.

Architecture: URLs

The current best practices for URLs should hold true throughout 2014. Simple and easily readable URLs are not just about search engine optimization. With today’s multi-tabbed browsers, people are more likely to see your URLs than they are your title tags.

I will also add that, when seen in the search engine results pages, readable URLs are more likely to get clicked on than nonsensical ones. If your content management system cannot create readable URLs based on your title tags or will not let you customize URLs, it is probably time for a CMS review. This is now a basic search engine optimization feature, so if your CMS cannot handle it, I wonder about the rest of your CMS’s SEO efficacy.

Architecture: Mobile

2013 was an interesting year for mobile SEO. Google and Bing agree that the ideal configuration is for websites to have a single set of URLs for all devices and to use responsive Web design to present them accordingly. In reality, not all content management systems can handle this, and Web designers have presented case studies of situations where the search engine standard is neither practical nor desirable.

If you can execute what Google and Bing recommend, do so. However, if you cannot or have a good reason not to, be sure to use canonical tags that point to the most complete version of each page, probably your desktop version, and employ redirects based on browser platform for screen size.

You will not risk a penalty from the search engines as long as your website treats all visitors equally and doesn’t make exceptions for search engine spiders. Basically, this is similar to automatic redirection of visitors based on their geographic location for language preference.

That about wraps it up for on-page SEO factors in 2014. Be on the lookout for Part 3 of my 2014 SEO Playbook, which will cover off-page SEO factors relating to link building, local search and social media.

8 Tips For Planning Your Small Business’ 2014 Marketing Strategy

While the holiday season is undoubtedly a busy period for small business owners, it’s important to set aside time to plan your marketing strategy for the year ahead. How will you continue to maintain and grow your business in 2014? What plans do you have to keep your business on track and stay ahead of the competition?

Issues related to marketing are top-of-mind for small business owners going into the New Year. In fact, according to Yodle‘s recently released First Annual Small Business Sentiment Survey, 42% of small business owners said they are worried about finding new customers, making it their #1 overall concern. Additionally, 33% of small business owners surveyed said that keeping their current customers is a concern (#3 overall), while 21% of owners cited their competition as something they worry about (#6 overall).

Source: Yodle’s First Annual Small Business Sentiment Survey, Aug. 2013

As we can all attest, 2013 was a year in which consumers increasingly adopted new technology, search and review tools and social media channels to help drive their path to purchase. This was also a year in which a variety of new marketing tools were introduced that make it easier for small businesses to reach and convert consumers in the places where they are increasingly searching.

Yet, despite small business owners’ concerns about effectively marketing their businesses, many are not making the necessary investments to adapt to today’s fast-paced and changing environment. While the consequences of inaction may seem small now, they will only become greater in the future, threatening the stability and growth of small business owners’ operations.

As you plan for 2014, make your New Year’s resolution to review the 8 simple tips below for building a better marketing strategy for your business — one that puts your customers first and your business second-to-none.

1. Develop A Realistic Forward-Looking Marketing Budget

It’s time to put your money where your mouth is. Small business owners today cite customer attraction and retention as two of their most pressing concerns, but many set aside minimal budgets for marketing.

In fact, 1 in 4 small business owners report that they don’t spend any money on marketing, while just over half (56%) spend less than $500 a month. In other words, only about a quarter of business owners spend more than $500 per month on marketing.

Source: Yodle’s First Annual Small Business Sentiment Survey, Aug. 2013

Make this the year that you corner off a larger, more flexible budget to tackle new marketing opportunities to better adapt to today’s fast-changing marketplace. I’m not saying you should break the bank allocating funds to marketing. What I do recommend is that you make strategic investments on marketing offerings that better position your business in places where consumers are increasingly going to research products or services and make purchases.

Return-on-investment should be the key factor by which you measure your marketing efforts. However, be sure to give your business the flexibility to try out new marketing opportunities and ideas to see if they stick.

There’s no doubt in my mind that any business keeping with a status quo of limited marketing in today’s changing environment will only hurt their bottom line — and not just in the short run. Small businesses should be making smart investments so they are well-positioned to attract consumers now and in the future.

2. Build A Simple & Effective Website

The website is the central component of any business’ digital strategy; it’s how your current and potential customers can most easily find and connect with you. Given its key role, it’s astonishing that more than half of small businesses owners (52%) said their business does not have a website, according to the Yodle survey.

Make your website a priority this year. Whether you’re just building your website now or looking to improve the one you have, keep these key things in mind moving forward:

• Make Contact Information Visible & Consistent: Incorporate your business’ contact information (phone number, address, email address, etc.) throughout your site, not just in your About Us or Contact Me section. Ensure that your contact information is consistent with what you have included on online business listing websites.
• Design An Appealing, Easy-To-Use Interface: Invest in a contemporary website with a visually appealing color scheme and straightforward navigation. It will not only make your website more attractive and seamless to navigate, but will also reflect on the professionalism of your business. Be careful about using features such as Flash which may negatively impact your site’s search ranking potential and which don’t load on some smartphones.
• Use Defining & Searchable Keywords On The Front & Backend: In drafting content for your website, be sure to incorporate keywords that consumers will most likely use when searching for your products and services. Ensure that your web designer incorporates these keywords into anchor text in page URL links and adds keyword-specific titles, descriptions and tags to videos posted on your website.
• Keep Current By Regularly Updating Content: In order to stay relevant to those visiting your site (including search engine crawlers) be sure to update your website content on a consistent basis. Develop an editorial calendar to update your site in conjunction with big promotions and sales, events, and other notable activities, or when you introduce new products or services.
• Monitor Website Analytics: Pay close attention to where your website visitors are coming from, how they’re finding you, and what they’re doing while on your website, so you can consistently update and improve their experiences through tweaks to your site’s navigation and content.

3. Ensure Your Website Is Mobile-Optimized

As consumers increasingly turn to smartphones and tablets to search for local business information and to shop products and services, it’s essential that your website is properly optimized for those experiences.

A recent Google/Nielsen study found that 59% of consumers visit a business’ website when conducting a mobile search. However, the vast majority of small business owners — 9 out of 10 — said their websites aren’t optimized for mobile, according to the Yodle survey. This represents a clear gap in small business’ ability to provide on-the-go consumers with a proper website experience, thus threatening their chances for securing business from those visitors.

This is the year to bring your business website into the mobile era. Here’s how to get started:

• Conduct A Mobile Audit: Develop an audit of your current website to determine what types of mobile consumers are visiting your website, and what they’re generally looking for when they’re there.
• Build A Mobile-Specific Website: Taking into account the findings from your audit, create a mobile-specific website that represents a slimmed down version of your desktop website. This mobile site should showcase the key topics that mobile users are generally looking for when they visit your site, so it’s easier to find them. For example, if you run a restaurant, you may consider creating a site that highlights the menu, reservations and contact information – and removes other information available on the desktop site that is less important.
• Ensure Mobile Users Know What They Can Do On The Website: Use call-to-action messaging to make clear what consumers can accomplish via the mobile website. For example, if consumers can schedule appointments or purchase products directly from the mobile site, make that as clear as possible through bold text, buttons and other eye-catching graphics.

4. Build A Complete & Accurate Listings Presence

Whether it’s Google, Bing, Yelp, YP.com, Yellowbook.com or SuperPages.com, small businesses appear on a variety of business listing websites. Ensuring that your business’ listing is complete and accurate plays an important role in determining whether consumers reviewing your listing can move forward with contacting you and making a purchase.

It may be surprising, but a notable share of business listing information is inaccurate. In fact, a ConstantContact survey of more than 350 SMBs earlier this year found that 50% of SMBs have come across inaccurate listings for their businesses. Despite this, nearly half (49%) of those surveyed said they’ve never updated their business listings online.

Spend time in 2014 getting your business’ listings up-to-speed with correct information:

• Check Up On Your Listings: Certify that your business is listed — and accurately — with services like Localeze, Axiom, SinglePlatform, Yext and Universal Business Listing, since they are the primary listings providers for local websites and apps.
• Make Your Listings As Complete As Possible: Take a close look at your business’ listings on each of the major local websites to ensure that your information is accurate. Then build out your business listings on each of these sites with any missing information, such as your website address, social media channel addresses, business photos, menus or offerings and the like. This will ensure that your consumers viewing your listings have as much information as they need to make a decision before contacting you.

5. Successfully Manage Negative Online Reviews

Online reviews are playing an increasingly central role in driving consumers’ purchasing behavior. Similar to word-of-mouth, consumers place high trust in the accuracy of online reviews. In fact, a recent Nielsen online study of 29,000 consumers across 58 countries found that about 70% of consumers trust online reviews – making them the third-most trusted form of advertising. Another recent study from Harvard Business School showed that something as simple as a one-star improvement in a Yelp business listing can deliver a noticeable increase in a restaurant’s revenue.

With the stakes so high, it’s important for small businesses to develop procedures for locating and responding to online reviews. Small business owners should spend time mapping out or improving their response plan for online reviews – especially those that place their business in a negative light.

When developing your online review plan, consider the following:

• Attempt To Prevent Customers From Writing Negative Reviews In The First Place:You should try to stop the problem before it starts by creating an environment where your customers are kept satisfied and that issues are dealt with quickly and professionally. This means ensuring that customers can reach your business directly and that you have policies in place for dealing with common problems related to your offerings.
• Monitor Review Sites On An Ongoing Basis: Set up a regular monitoring schedule for the leading review websites, and a process for who will review and respond to negative reviews.
• Keep Positive & Respond Directly: It’s easy to get upset by a negative review, since often your business has a difference of opinion with the customer over what took place. That said, ensure that your core response messages are professional and focus on ways to remedy the problem. As a first step, always try to contact the negative reviewer directly to see if you can remedy the problem.
• Determine When To Respond Publicly: Set a policy for what red lines must be crossed in order for you to respond to a negative review publicly. Perhaps your first course of action is to ask the customer to take down their negative review. If they don’t, then perhaps the next step is to respond to the review publicly by noting exactly what your business did to address the problem. The course you take depends on the nature of the review and your business’ personality, but having set guidelines in place will help you to remain consistent.
• Encourage Happy Customers To Leave Positive Reviews: Setup a strategy for encouraging satisfied customers to post positive reviews on the sites most important to you. This can be as simple as sending the customer an email after the transaction that asks them to leave feedback on a specific review website.

6. Build An Engaging Social Media Presence

Consumers today spend a considerable amount of time on social media interacting not only with family and friends, but increasingly with brands as well. Businesses in a variety of categories — ranging from retailers to restaurants — are successfully building social media channels to generate loyalty and engagement with their customers and potential customers. In fact, Facebook recently announced that 24 million small businesses maintain active pages on their site.

In developing or improving your social media for 2014, take the following into account:

• Determine Which Social Media Channels Work Best For Your Business: Facebook and Twitter provide strong platforms to reach the vast majority of consumers with business updates, sales and promotions, new products and services and the like. They also offer the ability to engage in one-on-one conversations with consumers regarding questions, concerns and complaints. Specialized social media sites also provide their own benefits. Pinterest, for example, enables businesses to share visually appealing offerings like clothing, furniture, art and landscaping with a like-minded audience. And sites like YouTube enable small businesses such as a DJ to post videos of their latest parties, or a local bakery to share how they make their favorite bread. As a starting point, spend some time mapping out which channels you want to use for your business and why.
• Develop An Editorial Calendar To Remain Engaged: If you create a page for your business on a social media network, it’s imperative that you remain engaged and not let the page sit idle. Consumers today expect businesses to update their social media channels several times a week with relevant information. In order to keep a steady flow of updates, develop an editorial calendar in advance so you can map out content and coordinate your efforts. Incorporate compelling photos, videos and other visual content and provide incentives to those following your pages to stay connected.
• Respond Promptly To Consumer Questions: Consumers view your social media channels as an extension of your digital presence and expect you to respond to questions, comments and other inquiries they share there. So setting up a process for monitoring your business’ pages is key.
• Share Your Deeds!: Once your channels are established, share your information wherever you can: through posters and flyers, advertisements, your business’ website, etc. Explain to customers why it’s worth it for them to follow you.

7. Take Advantage Of Automated Scheduling & E-Commerce Tools

In 2013, we saw a lot of strong activity on the automated scheduling and e-commerce front. Yet despite the promise of these new offerings, many small businesses have remained on the sidelines. For example, only 39% of small business owners rely on automated appointment booking and scheduling technology, according to the Yodle survey.

In 2014, take the opportunity to reevaluate the benefits of these new tools:

• Popular local websites such as Yelp, along with local vertical websites such as OpenTable,Seamless and GrubHub introduced new offerings that make it easier for consumers to seamlessly purchase products or schedule appointments at businesses from wherever they are. And these offerings are expanding beyond just restaurants to also include everything from doctor appointments to home repairs services.
• Sites like Amazon, eBay and Etsy continued to improve their offerings for digital storefronts that enable consumers to easily shop and purchase from businesses via their desktop, smartphone or tablet.

While there are fees are associated with each of these e-commerce offerings, small businesses benefit from avoiding start-up and maintenance costs to build these systems on their own. The tools also increase efficiency (cutting down on labor costs) and provide great platforms for increased visibility in online search.

8. Use Results Reporting To Inform Your Strategy

The Yodle survey found that more than half (56%) of small business owners do not measure results from their marketing. This means that those small business owners have no baseline to determine how well their marketing is doing or how to set priorities for what else they can or should be doing.

Source: Yodle’s First Annual Small Business Sentiment Survey, Aug. 2013

As you head into 2014, develop a simple reporting structure — perhaps a monthly report that you dedicate yourself to doing — that will enable you to clearly see how all of your marketing activities are doing and their resulting impact on your business.

It’s my hope that once you see the benefits of your business’ marketing dollars at work, you will begin to feel differently than the majority of small business owners by being excited — and not worried — about your ability to retain and attract customers in the future.

Secrets Of Successful Enterprise SEO Part 1: Operational Planning For SEO

Believe it or not, one of the most challenging aspects of taking on the responsibility of an enterprise site is not determining what needs to be done. There is usually no dearth of opportunities to improve things and no end to the long list of tasks that need to get done — yes, even at those “hallowed” sites that you may think completely dominate SEO and can do no wrong!

Rather, the challenge is to identify, prioritize and execute on these tasks, all the while ensuring that you are prepared and able to get the internal buy-in from all the stakeholders — from the bosses to the development teams and everyone in between.

Every top-notch enterprise SEO I know has developed ways to deal with exactly this. They have built systems, processes and techniques that provide them a framework for picking apart a large and challenging issue and helping to solve it in a manageable way.

In the world of management, this process is called “operational planning.” It’s a valuable process framework to get familiar with and has almost universal application to any project you work with.

Operational Planning For SEO

Here is quick definition from Wikipedia on what Operational Planning is:

Operational planning is the process of linking strategic goals and objectives to tactical goals and objectives. It describes milestones, conditions for success and explains how, or what portion of, a strategic plan will be put into operation during a given operational period… An operational plan is the basis for, and justification of an annual operating budget request.

Over the years, I’ve found an approach to operational planning that’s incredibly simple to implement and incredibly powerful in the results it generates. It relies on answering 3 simple questions:

• Where are we now?
• Where do we want to be?
• How do we get there?

Let’s jump in and look at how this would apply to your SEO planning needs.

Where Are We Now?

The first step in undertaking any SEO project (or any project at all, for that matter) is to identify exactly what your current status is. Think of this as your personal State of the Union — your state of current affairs. It covers every aspect of how you are doing in each of the areas of your SEO from how it compares to the past to how it has grown or declined.

For example, below are the areas I take into consideration, along with a sampling of what I would look at in each area. Of course, there are many more things to look at in each — but you get the idea.

You can either start from the inside out (starting with foundations) or outside in (starting with results). Your choice.

Note:

1. A common mistake is to start with Visibility as a measure of the current state of affairs. As mentioned in my previous article, your goal is not the highest possible rankings — your goal is the highest possible traffic (and results)!
2. Another common mistake to avoid is approaching your entire site as if it was selling the same product. Unless you are part of a very small minority of companies, you probably have a multitude of products, services and offerings.

Segmentation is a powerful tool that helps you drill down and view your performance at a more granular level to identify differences in performance. Imagine the President of the United States announcing economic growth of 2%. While that is great, as you peel back the layers, you may find that Industrial output grew 4%, but consumer spending declined by ½ a percent. This insight tells you what area to focus your effort on.

The same is true for understanding where you are now. Do the work needed to segment your performance reporting by different business lines or units to understand how each one is doing.

Where Do We Want To Be?

Every marketer has the goal of more traffic and more conversions (or at least, should!). While you can identify where you need to be in many different ways, I prefer looking at the competitive landscape to help motivate me about where I should be. No matter what industry you are in, there is always a segment or two of your business where someone is doing better than you.

Competitive intelligence is an extremely powerful tool to help understand where you stand in the search landscape.

It’s important, though, to identify who your true competitors are — not just those you think are your competitors, but those that are truly beating you in organic search. In its very simplest form, you can get a better understanding of your own top competitors by aggregating the top sites for each of your tracked keywords and building a visualization that shows what each domain’s share of the SERPs is.

For example, at an enterprise such as Sears, the executives may believe that their competitors are Target and Wal-Mart. But in reality, from a search perspective, they will have hundreds of competitors based on each product line they sell.

Here is what a true competitor report looks like for Sears overall (based on a biased sampling of keywords where Sears actually does well):

Click to enlarge

Here is the same report segmented for appliances:

Click to enlarge

Notice the difference in the competitive set? Also, do you see any of the competitors considered the “standard” competitors?

Of course, you can get more sophisticated by weighting each ranking or applying a qualitative measure on top of it, but that is a topic for another day.

In order to define where you want to be, aggregate, analyze and segment your competitors’ information against your own to identify gaps in each of your SEO efforts (foundation, assets and visibility). This should result in identification of new opportunities in each of those areas.

You can identify obvious gaps by examining where your competitors are optimizing for keywords you are not optimizing; whether they have content you don’t have; or even if they have relationships you don’t have. You can also delve into what your competitors are doing on-site with semantic markup, internal links and more. Collecting this data can take time if you’re planning to do it manually, but it’s well worth it!

How Do We Get There?

The almost-final step in the process is identifying how to bridge the gap between where you are and where you want to be — your SEO roadmap. This involves:

• Building a list of prioritized, high-level projects
• Translating the projects into smaller sub-tasks
• Assigning a priority and impact to each task
• Forecasting the impact

Forecasting can be a tough challenge when you are operating an enterprise site with hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of keywords and content pieces.

A common mistake is to simply take all the keywords you know about and, based on a CTR curve, estimate what the traffic would be if you could get them all into position #1 (or into the top three positions). This is probably the worst way to create a forecast because it ignores seasonality, the individual rank positions of your target keywords, and the different levels of competitiveness.

Take the time to collect the search volume trends and plot out the ranking improvements from your starting point to 12 months out. Then build UP a forecast based on the roll-up of the keyword data. This can provide a solid base to extrapolate from for the rest of your site and, when you share it internally, garner much more confidence than a wild estimate.

In Conclusion

While the above operational planning framework looks at the core elements of building a roadmap, there is an important aspect not to forget — tracking, monitoring and being able to report back on the actual impact of the operational plan.

As we look forward to the start of a new year, this technique should be helpful to provide a different perspective on how you manage your SEO.

Before you ask for a budget or ask for support on an initiative, having an operational plan will ensure that you win that support as you had the details planned and thought through.

Staying Competitive In PPC: Learning From Black Friday’s Most Popular Offers

The five-day Black Friday weekend from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday provided an insightful glimpse into how retailers are running their PPC strategies for the holidays. Particularly interesting are the variety of offer types run by retailers, ranging from the expected free shipping to 2-in-1 offers which include two offers in the same ad.

Since shoppers were expecting to see a retailer’s best deals during that weekend, we wanted to see just how far retailers were willing to go to get the sale.

Using search engine results data gathered by Lighthouse (a partnership between The Search Monitor and comScore) between November 28 and December 2, 2013, on paid ads, we identified the five most common offers as follows:

1. Free Shipping. The offer of Free Shipping, with no minimum spend requirement mentioned, was the most popular offer run by retailers, showing up in 38% of all ads. Shoppers have come to expect free shipping during the holidays, so it was no surprised that this offer would be in the Top 5. It’s important to note that these ads could have brought users to a website that required a minimum spend to receive the free shipping offer, but the ads did not include this language.

2. Sale or Deal. The next most popular offer used by retailers was to include the word “sale.” This appeared in 34% of all PPC ads during Black Friday weekend.  With the Sale offer coming in behind Free Shipping, it was clear that retailers still believe that free shipping provides more perceived value than discounting the price of an item.

3. Free Shipping with Minimum Purchase. After offering a sale, the next most common offer was “Free Shipping” where the retailer included a minimum purchase amount in the ad copy. This more specific, more “forthcoming” version of the Free Shipping offer mentioned above appeared in just 12% of ads. It is obvious that more retailers prefer to omit the requirements of an offer in their ad copy than to display them.

We dug a bit deeper into this offer type to see how the minimum purchase amount differed across retail verticals. The Books, Wholesale, Beauty and Baby verticals averaged the lowest minimum spend requirements, typically between $25 and $50. The Household and Apparel verticals saw the most fluctuation, ranging anywhere from $20 to $125. The other verticals analyzed — Entertainment, Automotive, Party Supplies, Gifts and Floral, Sports and Fitness, Office Supplies, Pharmacy and Hobbies — generally asked for minimum purchases between $49 and $99. Having information like this is essential to ensure that retailers’ ads remain competitive.

4. Free Gift.  Would you click on an ad that promised you a free gift with purchase? A very small handful of retailers (7%, to be exact) employed this offer strategy during the Black Friday weekend. One could argue that the relatively low usage of this offer type represents an opportunity to stand out from other retailers. The real proof, however, will be in the clicks and cost data associated with this approach.

5. 2 Offers in 1 Ad. Rounding out the top five PPC offers run during Black Friday weekend was the offer of both free shipping and a stated dollar discount on the order. Retailers only used this very generous “2-in-1″ offer in just 6% of all weekend ads. Another interesting study could look at which retailers employ this tactic and what click-through rates they receive.

The competitive search marketing data above illustrates the importance of keeping a close eye on both your industry and specific competitors. Only when you know where you stand can you identify how to remain competitive and steal share from another retailer.

How did your PPC offers compare to these findings and how did they perform? Now that you know the most common offers used, how do you plan to change your strategy for the rest of the season?

Leave a comment below with your thoughts on the Black Friday offers and keep an eye out for an update of this chart in January 2014 from The Search Monitor.