If you haven’t yet picked up the magazine, you can find it at Barnes and Noble or most large bookstores in the US, or you can buy it online here. It contains a lot of great material in addition to the quotes from these thought leaders. But if you’ve read the article and you want more, please enjoy these full interviews with SEO experts Eric Enge, Rand Fishkin, Vanessa Fox, Gord Hotchkiss, Cindy Krum and Danny Sullivan. It’s a shame I couldn’t fit everything in the magazine article, but at least this way their full contributions will be seen.

Eric Enge - “There is evidence out there that Google will use +1s to discover new content, but it is not clear that it will influence rankings except in an indicator of something that is hot news” – Eric Enge on the role of social media in 2013.

Rand Fishkin - “…mobile appears to be more a trend of “there’s a laptop in my pocket all the time,” rather than “I have a totally new device on which I’ll do totally new things that have never been done before.” – Rand Fishkin on mobile SEO trends.

Vanessa Fox - “SEO is not about tricks or manipulating algorithms. It’s about understanding the online landscape and evolving to meet your customers where they are” – Vanessa Fox on the credibility of SEO.

Gord Hotchkiss - “But our expectations of search are changing. We now expect search to deliver us relevant functionality by knowing who we are, where we are, what we like and what we want.” – Gord Hotchkiss on the future of search.

Cindy Krum - “The search engines will continue to make policies and technologies that minimize the overhead and attention that they need to spend on mobile search (like officially endorsing Responsive Design),” – Cindy Krum on the future of mobile SEO in 2013.

Danny Sullivan - “Tools are nice. But we’ve had tools for years to build houses, yet we don’t have completely automated house building” – Danny Sullivan on the possibility of fully automated SEO.

Bryson Meunier: A lot of .Net readers seem to believe that SEO is snake oil. What would you tell these people to convince them that SEO is a legitimate marketing strategy?

Eric Enge: The problem with SEO is there are so many people who do try to cheat the system.  They approach it like the goal is to trick the search engines into giving them traffic they don’t deserve, and their sites show little concern for serving users who arrive there.  There is another group of people who represent a problem for the reputation of SEO as well — those who simply don’t know what they are doing.

For example, I still encounter people who believe that SEO is all about metatags.  For the record, there is only one metatag that influences search ranking at all, and that is the title tag.  The meta description tag does not influence ranking, but it does influence click through rates in search because it is often used as the description for your listing in the search results.  The keywords metatag does nothing.

But, I digress! There are people out there who are high quality SEOs.  As you will see in the answer to the next few questions, they focus on the following:

a. Using tools to help publishers understand what topic areas are popular in their market space (keyword research).

b. Building a site architecture and corresponding content plan that search engines can crawl and understand.

c. Promoting that content effectively on the web in a sustainable way.

BM: .Net’s readers are largely Web professionals who may see SEO as extra work and may add it at the end of the web design process if they’ve added it at all. Why should these people take SEO more seriously (if indeed they should)?

EE: The first thing to realize is that the search engines are fundamentally software programs.  Somewhere inside the walls of various Google offices are people writing code that does the following:

a. Crawl most of the pages on the web (Google knows of about 100 trillion URLs according to Matt Cutts, Google’s head of the Webspam team)

b. Do a semantic analysis of all of the pages they crawl.

c. Build a complete map of how pages across the web link to one another.

d. Store this in a database.

e. Respond to a totally arbitrary search query from anywhere on planet Earth in about 0.4 seconds.

Layer on top of that there are hundreds of different content management systems and tens or hundreds of thousands of web development teams creating pages using completely different approaches, and now you start to have an appreciation for the task.

The point is, the challenge that Google and Bing face is enormous, and one consequence of that is they end up with lots of things they do NOT do well.  A simple example is that they don’t understand the content of an image or video that well.  They also don’t deal with Javascript very well, and even CSS is a work in progress.

Handling Javascript and CSS may seem simple in concept, after all your browser does it with no trouble at all.  Doing OCR on images and other processing of image content is also very doable in principle.  But, there is a problem of scale here.  The computational challenge for the search engines is already enormous, and this remains beyond their capability to do at acceptable levels of accuracy at this point.

 BM: If SEO is about improving the user experience and good content from a search engine’s perspective, why isn’t doing usability and content strategy enough?

EE: When SEO is done the right way, usability and content is a huge part of the plan.  This is something that the snake oil SEO people don’t worry about.  But, for long term success as a web publisher, the use must come first.  However, for success as a business, you need to do more.

Even without the world of SEO, you are still left with the challenge of marketing your site.  You would never start a business without a marketing plan, even if you had the world’s best product.  In a world where search engines are a very large source of traffic, this means 3 things:

a. Addressing topics that users care about.

b. Helping search engines understand your site, and the topics that it addresses.

c. Making sure search engines see your site as one of the best answers for queries on those topics.

This last point involves the world of link building and social media. Think of it this way: If a search engine has 2,347 sites that it thinks are great answers to a user search query, and it has to decide on which 10 to show on the first page, which to show first, etc., how does it do that?  It uses links and social media signals as votes to indicate which of those possible sites are the best answers to the query.

Like everything else in SEO, there is a right way and a wrong way to do this type of promotion.  There are lots of bad ways to get links, such as buying them, which are violations of Google’s Webmaster guidelines.  The simplest way to think about doing it right is to only pursue links which are brand building in nature.  Put another way, would you pursue that if there were no such things as search engines?  If the answer is yes, then the chances that it has value now, and will still have value in the future, is much greater.

BM: A lot of software has been introduced in the past couple of years that seeks to automate aspects of the SEO process (e.g. Bloomreach, RIO, Conductor, SEOMoz, etc.). Will SEO itself ever be completely automated?

EE: In a word, NO! There is too much that is individualized to each site.  Some of the tools you mention focus on automating a part of the process.  Bloomreach really focuses on addressing specific types of weaknesses in an e-commerce environment.  Conductor is primarily a great reporting platform, as is Brightedge.  SEOmoz provides some great tools but does not try to automate the entire process.

The other thing to realize is that SEO is a dynamic environment.  The search engines continually offer new ways to provide them with new information such as the rel=author tag Google launched last year.

Implementing these things takes work and can offer great benefits, such as a greatly increased click through rate on your listings in the search results.  These types of changes are happening all the time!

BM: Part of this article is about emerging trends in optimization, including social SEO (i.e. social signals incorporated into web search), semantic search, mobile and local SEO, multimedia SEO, etc. What would you say are some promising trends in SEO today and why?

EE: It is a full rich plate, isn’t it?  I do think that local SEO and multimedia SEO are big, but that the events in mobile and social media are even bigger.  Having looked at the analytics for scores of sites, I can tell you that mobile devices represent anywhere between 23% and 43% of the traffic on these sites.  That is a big percentage!

Of course, the search environment is as different as the web publishing environment.  Users are going to be much more centered on clicking on the top results.  Search engines are likely to rank things quite a bit differently as well.  There is also some real evidence of that being the case.

Social media is also huge. I do think that it will not happen the way people think.  The common misperception is that Likes (or +1s) will be treated as links.  My take is that this is not really an accurate viewpoint.  There is evidence out there that Google will use +1s to discover new content, but it is not clear that it will influence rankings except in an indicator of something that is hot news.

But that said, I do think that SEOcial media will be a big deal.

Get more expert views on 2013 SEO trends >>

Read the entire six page cover story, “Get to the Top of Google,” in .Net Magazine issue 0238 to find case studies, tips, trends and more.

Bryson Meunier: A lot of .Net readers seem to believe that SEO is snake oil. What would you tell these people to convince them that SEO is a legitimate marketing strategy?

Rand Fishkin: There are a lot of good arguments against SEO being just snake oil, though I would certainly empathize with your readers that many snake oil practitioners have used and abused the acronym of SEO, and thus tainted its perception. Here are a few of my favorite “no, SEO is not snake oil” refutations:

• More than 3 billion searches take place every day on Google alone. 82% of these queries result in clicks on organic results, which cannot be influenced through paid advertising spend, but can be influenced through the practice of SEO. That’s a lot of potential traffic to call “snake oil.”
• SEO is practiced by every major media company in the developed world.
• SEO consultants and full-time, in-house SEO folks are employed by nearly every Fortune 500 company.
• Google, both through representatives and through content published on their site, endorses and encourages the practice of SEO.
• SEOmoz itself has more than 2 million monthly visits, nearly all from web marketers looking to learn more about the practice. And our software, which bills monthly, has more than 18,000 subscribers as of today. If SEO were just snake oil, I strongly suspect folks would stop paying

BM: .Net’s readers are largely Web professionals who may see SEO as extra work and may add it at the end of the web design process if they’ve added it at all. Why should these people take SEO more seriously (if indeed they should)?

RF: Just as making a building green or making a car fuel efficient is far easier in the design process, so too is making a website search-friendly prior to design & production. If you add just a small dose of SEO-accessibility oversight to the architecting process, the site stands a far better chance of ranking well and earning visits from search.

BM: If SEO is about improving the user experience and good content from a search engine’s perspective, why isn’t doing usability and content strategy enough?

RF: Engines aren’t human users. They can’t understand that when you say “light on energy consumption” you mean “eco-friendly,” which is what searchers might actually be typing into the query box. They can’t crawl webpages that block bots. They can’t identify which of the thousands of unique versions of a single piece of content you’ve created through unique tracking URLs should appear in search results. Providing a great user experience and great content are key foundations of good SEO, but they’re not the only pieces of the puzzle.

Just as you wouldn’t expect a legal case to win simply because it “seems logically obvious,” so too you shouldn’t expect great content to rank just because you think it’s “the best thing out there on the topic.” Both the legal system and the search engines have a lot of nuance that professionals can help optimize for.

BM: A lot of software has been introduced in the past couple of years that seeks to automate aspects of the SEO process (e.g. Bloomreach, RIO, Conductor, SEOMoz, etc.). Will SEO itself ever be completely automated?

RF: No. SEO is about making content more accessible and more likely to be shared in ways engines can perceive. But, great SEO starts with human beings who are creative, tenacious, and empathetic to the needs of searchers. No software can ever automate those processes.

BM:  Part of this article is about emerging trends in optimization, including social SEO (i.e. social signals incorporated into web search), semantic search, mobile and local SEO, multimedia SEO, etc. What would you say are some promising trends in SEO today and why?

RF: Certainly the influence of social on search is very obvious in both direct and indirect ways. We’re also seeing a huge uptick in mobile queries, though interestingly, what people search for on their mobile devices isn’t that different than what they search for on desktops and laptops — mobile appears to be more a trend of “there’s a laptop in my pocket all the time,” rather than “I have a totally new device on which I’ll do totally new things that have never been done before.”

Get more expert views on 2013 SEO trends >>

Read the entire six page cover story, “Get to the Top of Google,” in .Net Magazine issue 0238 to find case studies, tips, trends and more.

Bryson Meunier: A lot of .Net readers seem to believe that SEO is snake oil. What would you tell these people to convince them that SEO is a legitimate marketing strategy?

Vanessa Fox: Unfortunately, spam and SEO tend to get grouped together in people’s minds (and even in some practitioners’ actions, unfortunately). I completely understand why those outside of SEO might have that “snake oil” perception. However, real search engine optimization should absolutely be woven into traditional marketing and web development practices. SEO is about:

• Using search data to better understand your audience and their needs
• Ensuring that you’re solving your audiences’ problems and providing differentiated value
• Raising awareness through traditional and new media channels
• Building a web site infrastructure with the understanding that search has become an important acquisition channel, which means crawlability and indexability of content are requirements just like security and speed are.

SEO is not about tricks or manipulating algorithms. It’s about understanding the online landscape and evolving to meet your customers where they are. I devoted an entire section of my book to this topic (the beginning of chapter 6):

“The phrase search engine optimization tends to bring up bad memories of e-mails asking you to trade links and web pages with repeated words but no real information and no place to click but the ads. SEO implies optimizing a site for search engines, but understanding how search fits into your business isn’t really about that at all. It’s about operating your business effectively within the current landscape…. But the term SEO is often more associated with buy-cheat-viagra-while-you-pay-poker-online-and-file-a-mesothelioma-class-action-lawsuit.com than it is with customer engagement, usability, product strategy,  and more sales.

The term SEO doesn’t describe well the whole picture of integrating a search acquisition strategy into a more comprehensive business strategy:

• Using search data to build a comprehensive and effective product and content strategy.
• Understanding searcher behavior and building searcher personas that maximize customer satisfaction and conversion.
• Realizing the customer acquisition funnel often begins with the search box, not your web site.
• Integrating organic search with other marketing efforts.
• Ensuring the technical architecture of the site can be properly crawled and indexed by search engines so that it can be visible to searchers.”

BM: .Net’s readers are largely Web professionals who may see SEO as extra work and may add it at the end of the web design process if they’ve added it at all. Why should these people take SEO more seriously (if indeed they should)?

VF: Search is ubiquitous. We all search all the time. If the readers of .Net think about it, they likely search all of the time. Organizations are losing 1) tremendous insight into their customers and potential customers if they don’t take advantage of the free search data that’s available from the millions of searches we do each day; 2) the opportunity to reach a significantly  larger audience who through being visible in search results.

BM: If SEO is about improving the user experience and good content from a search engine’s perspective, why isn’t doing usability and content strategy enough?

VF: I believe that SEO in general doesn’t need to be a separate activity from usability and content strategy. I think that both disciplines should incorporate best practices from search rather than thinking of it as something tacked on later. Particularly, the data available from search is extremely valuable. Also, understanding that many visitors begin with a major search engine and that any page of the site can therefore become the home page of the site can shift how we look at both page design and content. I’ve done several webinars on this topic, such as http://oreillynet.com/pub/e/2179.

SEO includes another critical component, which is that the site architecture has to be built to be crawlable and indexable. Again,  I don’t think this should be something tacked on separately, but SEO technical best practices should instead be built into web development processes.

BM: A lot of software has been introduced in the past couple of years that seeks to automate aspects of the SEO process (e.g. Bloomreach, RIO, Conductor, SEOMoz, etc.). Will SEO itself ever be completely automated?

VF: SEO can never be completely automated because at the core, it’s still about understanding and engaging with audiences and providing them with unique value. However, in the past, we have had great ways of measuring progress and ROI and lots of data is available to do that.

With Blueprint, the search analytics software my company is building, our goal is to gather that data and provide hard metrics and ROI and market opportunity analysis. In addition, a great deal of diagnostics around technical issues can be automated. Our software, and some of the products you mention, provide diagnostic reports on what technical issues can be fixed for greater crawlability and indexability. Our software, for instance, analyzes server logs to see exactly how search engines are crawling the site and what problems they’re encountering.

BM: Part of this article is about emerging trends in optimization, including social SEO (i.e. social signals incorporated into web search), semantic search, mobile and local SEO, multimedia SEO, etc. What would you say are some promising trends in SEO today and why?

VF: In the near term, search is still primarily text input (whether through a keyword or voice) with a textual display. Within that framework, the search engines are evolving as the web evolves (incorporating additional signals, such as those from social, taking advantage of new technologies such as structured data and HTML5 and so on) so it’s important to also evolve. Think about how your audiences may be accessing the web (it might be from a tablet or smartphone rather than a computer) and what technologies are available to enhance that interaction (structured markup of authorship, for instance).

In the longer term, we need to to think in an even more flexible way about how our audiences may be accessing our information. It may not be through a device at all and it may not be through explicit search. Technologies like Google Glass and Google Now, for instance, are current examples. In the past, I might head to my bus stop and do a search on my phone to see if my bus is on time. But if I have an Android phone, Google Now will notify me with that information automatically based on past behaviors and current location. Responsive design will not only become more important but will take on new meaning as we perhaps have new ways to access content that doesn’t involve looking at a screen.

Get more expert views on 2013 SEO trends >>

Read the entire six page cover story, “Get to the Top of Google,” in .Net Magazine issue 0238 to find case studies, tips, trends and more.

Bryson Meunier: A lot of .Net readers seem to believe that SEO is snake oil. What would you tell these people to convince them that SEO is a legitimate marketing strategy?

Gord Hotchkiss: SEO has unfortunately got a bad rap, and it’s due mainly to questionable SEO practitioners who perpetuate the “snake oil” stereotype by making customers believe there’s some magic “black box” that “tricks” the search engines. I’ve been fighting this perception for almost 2 decades now.

SEO, when done reputably, is simply the optimization of your website. And I wouldn’t even call it optimization exclusively for search engines. We take a much more holistic approach. Our past research has shown that over half of all your website visitors will enter via a search engine. When something is responsible for this much of your traffic, you better start thinking about how to optimize for it.

Optimization can cover a lot of bases, but at its essence, it’s making sure that the intent of the searcher and the content of your site are aligned. It’s using language that’s relevant to the user. It’s making sure that content is accessible to the search engine, so it can determine what your site is about. It’s making sure the user experience on the landing page is optimized so that users can find what they’re looking for. We spend very little time worrying about algorithms, and a lot of time worrying about users. And, in that light, SEO is a very legitimate marketing strategy.

BM: .Net’s readers are largely Web professionals who may see SEO as extra work and may add it at the end of the web design process if they’ve added it at all. Why should these people take SEO more seriously (if indeed they should)?

GH: It’s much easier to build SEO best practices into the beginning of the web design process rather than trying to retrofit for search engines at the end. But here’s another excellent reason to include SEO disciplines early — it forces you to create a better website!

Good SEO optimization should be baked into your information architecture. It will force you to think about common content themes. It requires you to consider how all digital assets (such as videos and user generated content) will be integrated into the overall user experience. It helps eliminate user experience dead ends like gratuitous Flash interfaces and, my personal pet peeve, content locked in PDFs. It extends your perception of your online footprint beyond the bounds of your website, including things like social media. It will also instill a healthy rigor when it comes to thinking about how your site links together. Good SEO practices means a better user experience.

BM: If SEO is about improving the user experience and good content from a search engine’s perspective, why isn’t doing usability and content strategy enough?

GH: Usability and content strategy is the foundation, but there does have to be a technical component as well. If you’ve got a great IA and strong content, you’re 80% of the way there. But you need to think about things like linking structures, site URLs, server side issues and metadata. These are the technical housekeeping issues that may be overlooked if you stop at usability best practices and content strategies. It all has to work hand-in-hand. The good news is, if SEO is considered from the beginning, we’re not talking about a ton of extra work.

BM: A lot of software has been introduced in the past couple of years that seeks to automate aspects of the SEO process (e.g. Bloomreach, RIO, Conductor, SEOMoz, etc.). Will SEO itself ever be completely automated?

GH: Our experience with some of these tools is that they’re great for pinpointing potential issues, but at some point, someone has to take the outputs and incorporate them into both site design and ongoing maintenance. There are certainly aspects of SEO that could be automated, but because good SEO has to go hand-in-hand with a good user experience, I personally feel more comfortable if there’s a human somewhere who’s guiding the process.

BM: Part of this article is about emerging trends in optimization, including social SEO (i.e. social signals incorporated into web search), semantic search, mobile and local SEO, multimedia SEO, etc. What would you say are some promising trends in SEO today and why?

GH: For me, the promising trends in SEO have to align with where search itself is going. Search used to be all about semantic relevance — basically a word matching exercise on steroids. We used search to find relevant information. But our expectations of search are changing. We now expect search to deliver us relevant functionality by knowing who we are, where we are, what we like and what we want. That’s a quantum leap forward from Search 1.0. Local, social, semantic and multimedia search all just fit into this all-encompassing arc — we want search that helps us do stuff. So SEO will have to keep pace with that.

Today, good SEO is about making sure that when a prospect uses a word (or words) to search for something, you match that as best as possible. But in the future, SEO will be about ensuring that when your prospect wants something, you deliver it. It may not be content. It may be a movie ticket, a hotel booking, a restaurant reservation or a downloaded TV show.

Get more expert views on 2013 SEO trends >>

Read the entire six page cover story, “Get to the Top of Google,” in .Net Magazine issue 0238 to find case studies, tips, trends and more.

Bryson Meunier: How does mobile SEO differ, if at all, from traditional or desktop SEO?

Cindy Krum: When I do a mobile SEO audit, I focus much more on usability than I would on a desktop SEO audit. There are a lot of different ways that mobilization platforms and well-meaning developers can hinder the usability of a mobile search listing or a mobile page itself. Mobile search is very action and conversion oriented, so it is not enough to rank. You have to attract the click and trigger the conversion — frequently in rapid succession — so the analysis and recommendations are a bit more nuanced, and also more focused on inspiring confidence in the mobile transaction.

With mobile SEO, it is more than just the usability of the page, but also the “usability” or utility of the search result itself. There are a lot of different types of pre-formatted mobile search results that can be displayed, so we need to make sure that the result is immediately useful for the searcher. If they are searching for a location, an interactive map should be returned, [if searching for] a product, then the appropriate products and reviews should be returned and so on. If the anticipated result is just a traditional blue link, then I want to make sure that the title tag and description tag are meaningful enough to get the click.

The terms you optimize a page for often have to be more mobile. Mobile searchers think more before they click on a result — they are in a rush, and page loads may be slow, so they are more likely to look through the top ranking results before clicking than a desktop searcher would be.

BM: Responsive design and adaptive content have really come into their own in 2012. Are these things compatible with mobile SEO? Are there any drawbacks to making a responsive site or divorcing content from the device used for presentation?

CK: In many ways, Responsive Design is great for SEO because it allows you to leverage the SEO value that you have already developed on your desktop pages to improve mobile rankings as well. The problem is that some search behavior is decidedly different when it comes from a mobile device instead of a computer. This situation is not accounted for in a purely Responsive mobile solution, so in some cases, special mobile landing pages are also needed. I have been recommending a mixed solution for most of my clients – leveraging Responsive Design when it makes sense, and special mobile-only landing pages when keywords or use-cases cannot be appropriately addressed with a Responsive Design approach.

BM: What’s important for mobile SEO in 2013?

CK: In 2012, there was a significant increase in the amount of press and attention that has been paid to mobile SEO by the search engines and the community as a whole. There is no doubt that mobile SEO is a rapidly growing discipline, and these changes and announcements will continue to increase in 2013.

I anticipate that Google and other providers will work much harder to improve reporting and attribution in mobile analytics. The search engines will continue to make policies and technologies that minimize the overhead and attention that they need to spend on mobile search (like officially endorsing Responsive Design); While these efforts are good for their own bottom line, my guess is that their decisions will also continue to complicate the job of mobile SEO and mobile development, at least in the near term.

Get more expert views on 2013 SEO trends >>

Read the entire six page cover story, “Get to the Top of Google,” in .Net Magazine issue 0238 to find case studies, tips, trends and more.

Bryson Meunier: A lot of .Net readers seem to believe that SEO is snake oil. What would you tell these people to convince them that SEO is a legitimate marketing strategy?

Danny Sullivan: SEO has been around for nearly two decades now, is a practice recommended by Google, which even provides its own guide for it. The world’s largest search engine isn’t going to be pushing snake oil. In fact, it has every reason not to push it. The fact that it does is probably the best reason beyond all the many out there about why SEO is important. Ignore it, and you’re ignoring what the actual search engines you want to be listed in are telling you to do to improve your chances.

BM: .Net’s readers are largely Web professionals who may see SEO as extra work and may add it at the end of the web design process if they’ve added it at all. Why should these people take SEO more seriously (if indeed they should)?

DS: If you build it, they don’t necessarily come. Creating a shiny, wonderful new web site doesn’t matter if you’ve built it in a way to make it invisible to search engines. Designers often test to ensure their sites work well in different browsers like IE, Firefox and Chrome. Well, I’ve long written about search engines as being the most important browser of all, because everyone uses them to find sites. But if you’ve not designed your site for the unique things the search engine browser wants, people won’t locate them.

BM: If SEO is about improving the user experience and good content from a search engine’s perspective, why isn’t doing usability and content strategy enough?

DS: Doing usability and content strategy can be a huge part of SEO. But usability isn’t going to hook your authorship up to Google+, or ensure you’re providing an XML sitemap via your verified Google Webmaster Tools account.

BM: A lot of software has been introduced in the past couple of years that seeks to automate aspects of the SEO process (e.g. Bloomreach, RIO, Conductor, SEOMoz, etc.). Will SEO itself ever be completely automated?

DS: Software can’t automatically tell the type of content your readers are interested in, the type of words they’ll use to seek that content, create the quality content itself to serve them — and that’s just the foundational part of SEO. Tools are nice. But we’ve had tools for years to build houses, yet we don’t have completely automated house building. Never say never, but I think humans will long be involved in SEO.

BM: Part of this article is about emerging trends in optimization, including social SEO (i.e. social signals incorporated into web search), semantic search, mobile and local SEO, multimedia SEO, etc. What would you say are some promising trends in SEO today and why?

DS: The use of more social data as a potential additional signal beyond looking at links to identify quality content is the most promising to me. The greater use of structured data is also encouraging, as are the new possibilities opened up as people search on mobile devices and with mobile apps.

Get more expert views on 2013 SEO trends >>

Read the entire six page cover story, “Get to the Top of Google,” in .Net Magazine issue 0238 to find case studies, tips, trends and more.

The Fallacy of “High Numbers = Stronger Engagement”

The data that Time on Site and Pages per Visit provides isn’t necessarily inaccurate — it just isn’t telling you what you think it is. The common belief is if people spend more time on a site or read more pages, then engagement is higher. But this isn’t always the case, nor is lower necessarily better.  This is especially true when looking at a site-wide average.

This is because different types of content on your site have different engagement profiles. For example, would you expect a person to spend more than 30 seconds on a page that contains a 30 second video? Each of the following content types has a very different engagement profile:

• A three page article
• A two page article
• A page with a handful of bullet points or quotes
• A photo slideshow

Let’s focus in on Time on Site. While a high Time on Site metric could mean the content is engaging, it could also mean the content isn’t clear or maybe they just can’t figure out how to navigate to where they want.

Additionally, a low Time on Site metric could also reflect positive engagement — for example, a person who gets to a page, finds what they are looking for and moves on is a clear cut example of a successful user experience.

So What Should You Track?

Create opportunities to track hard conversions. A hard conversion is defined as a situation where a given action results in the firing of a conversion tracking pixel. Using hard conversions to track engagement is difficult, but not impossible. It just requires a little creative thinking. For written content, including multi-page articles, you can track clicks when someone goes to view the next page of an article.  If your content is on a single page and you don’t want to break it up across multiple pages, consider adding an accordion expansion or a link requesting some action at the end of the article that you can track.

Tracking video engagement is a solved issue. Many video player solutions like Brightcove and YouTube make it very easy to trigger events when a specific percentage of the video is played or a certain amount of time has elapsed (for example, a caption that pops up at a specific point in the video).  Determine how much of your video someone needs to watch before they would have received your message, and then have your video player trigger a conversion at that point.

Ask them. A simple survey that pops up when someone leaves your site or a certain page/section can tell you quite a bit about how successful you were in engaging them.  Not everyone will answer it, but it is certainly less arbitrary than judging based on how much time they spent on a page.

At the end of the day, there are some situations where engagement measurement is inherently fuzzy.  Not everything is as simple as tracking a conversion on a download link or a sale.  But with a little out-of-the-box thinking, you can gain a much clearer picture of site engagement. However it all starts by asking yourself what your current conversion metrics are really telling you.  Play devil’s advocate with yourself and try to come up with scenarios that prove your KPIs wrong to truly determine the accuracy of the numbers you’re looking at. Now look for a better approach.

Heather Molina from Resolution Media shared some valuable content strategy tips for brands during a recent interview with us. Heather is heading up Resolution’s Content Marketing and Digital Newsroom practice. Resolution will be using the Skyword for Agencies release of the Skyword Platform to recruit writers and create, optimize, and measure content for its clients. Here’s a quick glimpse into her insights.

Heather, as both of our organizations have seen, more and more brands are becoming publishers of content. What’s driving this trend, and what do brands need in place to do this successfully?

This reflects how things have shifted in the search space in the past 24 months. Client-side digital marketing managers are catching on to what we at Resolution saw coming down the path years ago: It’s not just about having a keyword strategy. There needs to be an overall engagement strategy, specifically one that uses behavioral data to provide insights and guide the content strategy. Relevant and fresh data count toward overall digital success. And that’s why you see big brands putting massive efforts in this area. They know that it can impact everything they are doing digitally.

One of the challenges that many brands have is maintaining the quality of the content as they scale production. How can brands ensure the level of quality needed to engage effectively with their audiences?

It is important to make sure any content that brands create meets the following criteria: be relevant, be timely, and be optimized. Once you have these basic criteria, the rest comes down to how efficient the process is. A well-defined process for building the strategy, executing against it, measuring it, and feeding it back into an ongoing strategy makes all the difference in the world.

How do you determine the right publishing frequency for a client’s program?

We determine publishing frequency by looking at the following:

Interest: It starts by assessing the opportunity. What are consumers interested in? What does our behavioral data tell us? Are there gaps anywhere between the themes the brand is covering off on now and what interests consumers?

Targeted Keywords & Themes: What are the keywords and themes that need to be addressed? Are there a great number? Or just a few? If there are a wide variety of topics, can brands build content around these topics as a relevant “news source”? This will require frequent publishing. But if there are only a few keyword themes to go after, less frequency will be needed.

Resolution Media is well known for its work in behavioral marketing, particularly with its ClearTarget™ solution, which helps your clients define their digital audiences. Can you address the synergy between what you’ll be doing in content marketing and your work in creating and targeting buyer personas?

ClearTarget™ goes beyond buyer personas. ClearTarget™ leverages various first-party and third-party data to determine ideal target audiences rooted in keyword-based behavior. ClearTarget™ not only helps brands find and engage with the right audience but is also a platform for digital strategy and planning. We don’t believe in driving just to a sale or other conversion point. We believe in helping a brand become an authority in key areas along a consumer’s digital journey.

We believe that brands need to understand the best way to target the right digital audience at the right intersection point. The foundation of everything that we do starts with ClearTarget™. Resolution has a history of architecting successful strategies with ClearTarget™, where we analyze this data and develop the best path. Content marketing is a natural evolution along this digital journey.

Last, how should companies be measuring their content marketing performance? What analytics should they use to do this well?

Measurement factors for content marketing can encompass a number of things. The most critical thing for a brand to have in place before unleashing the beast that is content marketing is a strong sense of its priorities. Agency partners should guide brands toward those metrics that will be useful in gauging success.

Measurement factors include any of the following:

• SERP (search engine results page) positioning
• Video views
• Tweets/retweets
• Comments
• Inbound links
• Unique visits
• Sales
• Leads generated

We recommend looking at a few metrics. For example, we have a client who wants to use content marketing as a way to extend their brand voice. Their end goal is to have searchable content and global scalability. We recommended a program that allows them to quickly produce content that combines their brand voice and relevant keyword phrases. The measurement metrics for this included the following:

• SERP positioning: Are these pages ranking in the search engines for a targeted keyword?
• Unique visits as a result of the content produced
• Socialization (tweets/retweets/shares)
• Inbound links to the content page

Thanks to Heather for her content marketing insights. Feel free to share your content strategy tips below.

Heather Molina, Managing Director of Content Marketing at Resolution Media, is a search engine marketing professional with 9+ years experience in search engine optimization (SEO), social media optimization (SMO), and paid search (PPC).

In 2010, Google launched Places, a product that featured information about local businesses in Google Maps and Google Search. Data from Places was submitted by businesses and additional content was pulled from popular review websites, such as: Yelp, TripAdvisor, Zagat.

On May 30, 2012, Google integrated Places with Google+, ending the Google Places product and creating Google+ Local.

How it Works:

Google+ Local results appear in the new Local tab on Google, within Google search results and in Google Maps. Integration is also planned within mobile applications.

Star reviews have been replaced with Aggregate Scoring (0-30) and Individual scoring (0-3) that’s powered by Zagat Surveys. Google bought Zagat in September 2011 with the intention of making their reviews the “cornerstone of [their] local offering”.

There are currently two different types of Google+ Local pages: 1) Integrated Places pages and 2) Upgraded Google+ Local pages. A select number of businesses have been able to upgrade to Google+ Local pages. The additional features available through the upgraded Google+ Local pages include: followers, offers and hangouts. Google hasn’t specified a date when all pages will be upgraded, but they are currently beginning to honor manual upgrade requests. Business owners should continue to update their information through Google Places for Business.

Figure 1 Google+ Local page that has been transferred from Google Places, but is not upgraded

Figure 2 Upgraded Google+ Local page includes additional features such as posts, videos, followers, hangouts and more

Resolution POV:

Key benefits:

1) Opportunity to Increase Engagement

• Brands that are good at connecting with customers online can extend their expertise and grow engagement with Google+ Local, utilizing hangouts and followers to provide relevant content to their consumers.

2) Higher Visibility for Local Search

• Even though Google Places pages were important to brands and user experience, the pages were not indexed by Google and had no SEO implications. Now, Google+ Local pages will be indexed by Google and could bring higher visibility to businesses that optimize for local search.

Points of Consideration:

1) Additional Time Needed to Manage Both Google+ Local and Google Business

• It’s unclear at this point how large businesses with a large local and national presence will manage their Google+ Local page and their Google+ business page. Google is giving business owners the option to upgrade Google+ Local pages, so it would theoretically be possible to have hangouts and followers for hundreds of local stores and a brand page allowing Google+ users to get national messages.

We recommend brands assess their available resources and determine whether or not upgrading makes sense for their business. For local businesses with one location and one Google+ brand page; however, it is worth upgrading the Google+ Local page.

2) Less Visibility On Google If You’re Only On Yelp & Facebook

• There are many companies who will be hurt by Google’s integration of Places into Google+. Since reviewers will need to have a Google+ page to review local businesses, and Google+ will be highly visible in Google search for local queries, Facebook potentially stands to lose mindshare in social networking. This could also be seen as detrimental to Yelp, whose local listings will now be even less visible in Google search. Integration of Google+ with local information is also possibly harmful to Apple, who just replaced Google Maps with Apple Maps on iOS6. If reviewers prefer the enhanced Google+ Local experience for local interaction they won’t have as much of a reason to use Apple Maps, which is integrated with Yelp.

Recommendations for Marketers

1) Optimize Google+ Local pages for search

• Because Google+ Local pages are findable in search results, they represent another asset that can be optimized for your brand, or for your target keywords. Local keyword research (including regional variants) and link building at the local level can help elevate your visibility in search.

2) Integrate Search and Social Resources for Local Visibility

• If your brand has separate teams working on Google+ and organic search, Google+ Local pages represent a clear opportunity to collaborate for the greater good. Apart from initial optimization of Google+ pages, monitoring reviews/comments and responding appropriately in Google+ can bring greater visibility to the brand’s local listings than SEO or social optimization could alone.

Summary

Business owners can’t afford to ignore Google+ anymore. With Google+ integrated into the listing(s) that represent your business on Google, businesses need to develop a strategy and plan to upgrade to Google+ Local pages. While the addition of Google+ Local could provide more initial work upfront, the new product provides marketers with more social interaction (followers, videos, posts, hangouts) with their consumers on a local level. As a result, marketers could see an increase in brand loyalty and offline purchases.