Cebit Australia: In-House SEO Plus Live Clinics
Managing an In-House SEO Program, Jasmine Batra, Director, Arrow Internet Marketing
Jasmine began by elaborating on the different SEO models, namely, in-House, Consultants, Co-Source and Outsourced. Managing an in-house SEO program has the following steps:
1. Setting your campaign objectives
2. Analysing your competitive environment
3. Managing stakeholders
4. Selecting the core team
5. Mapping the key skills
6. Bridging skills gap
Typical core team comprises of: SEO strategist, technical engineers, content specialists and link building experts. The SEO process is as follows:
1. SEO audit
2. SEO plan
3. Implementation
4. Benchmarking
5. Reviewing and reporting
Tests of a good SEO audit:
• More than stating the obvious
• Includes specific examples and recommendations
• What’s broken?
• What’s working well?
• Design and structure flaws
• Keyword analysis and positioning
• Geographic targeting
• Server checks
• Pages indexed by the major S.E’s
Implementation means applying your findings from the SEO audit and proposed SEO plan to the website in question. Important aspects include the role clarity, overcoming technology barriers and managing the approval process. Benchmarking includes internal benchmarking, industry benchmarking and international benchmarking. Reviewing and reporting means you need to ascertain what you are measuring, consistently measuring the same metrics, celebrating wins and re-defining SEO goals.
Costly SEO mistakes
• Misplaced expectations
• Incongruent teams
• Self-proclaimed gurus
• Turf battles
Pillars of SEO success
• 20-80 rule – 20% implementation = 80% results
• SEO champions – people who understand and believe in the SEO cause
• Skill sets
• Milestones & KPI’s – set yourself manageable goals and celebrate them
• SEO knowledge – share knowledge within the organisation
Nice overview of steps and process’ that are needed to run a successful in-house SEO team, good pointers and high level overview of the entire project management process. Jasmine even got a few laughs which on the second day of a web conference at 3-30pm is a seriously impressive feat.
Live Clinic 101 – Analysing Your Websites, Joshua Hay, Chief Operating Officer, E-Web Marketing.
This site clinic was performed on bridgestone.com.au. Various observations that came out of the clinic:
• For “tyre” Bridgestone needs to put tyres first in the title tag
• Bridgestone has 591 pages indexed while their competitors have less
• Bridgestone has 19 links only-need to create more
• Canonicalization issues
• Good unique meta description tags
• Some code is bloated-need an external file
• Have a sitemap and robots files which is good, although the robots file should have a link to the sitemap
• Some usability issues with the dealer locator button
• Flesh out titles for pages
Wow after 2 intense days on talks and live blogging I am pretty exhausted, guess im not as young as I used to be. It has been a whirlwind ride from building brands online to the semantic web and all of it has been warmly received by the webforward audience. The Cebit exhibition itself was a great event with a huge number of exhibitors and massive numbers of delegates. Look forward to next year.