in-house seo strategies - using actual data to be successful pubcon las vegas 2013

@5le

In-House SEO

SEO Data is the Marketing Meth You Can Cook at Your Desk

Presented by:Eli SchwartzOnline Marketing ManagerSurveyMonkey

@5le

SEO @ SurveyMonkey

@5le

In-House SEO: How Others Think of You

@5le

In-House SEO: This Should Be You

@5le

Hook Your Co-Workers on SEO Data Meth

@5le

Advantages to Using SEO Data

• LESS dumb questions• Impossible rankings• Meta keywords• Cloaking, hidden links• You will be the only SEO

expert• Other teams might include

you in meetings at project start• Make more friends• Work becomes more fun

@5le

How to Use SEO Data Effectively

• Back up SEO requests with data from YOUR site(s)Don’t trust every blog post that you read

• Say “I don’t know” frequently • Share results of any SEO experiment with all

stakeholders• Failures reinforce SEO as a marketing effort; not

dark artMagicians never screw up

• Successes motivate people to help youThank all the individuals that worked on the project

@5le

Where to Get Data?

@5le

Case Study: What is the Impact of Social (for SurveyMonkey)

• Launched brand new pages on SurveyMonkey.comContent URL’s had never been seen before by GooglePosted to a single social network immediately after publishingResearched logs to look for same day correlation to Googlebot

crawl

• Tests:Shared on corporate Google Plus with 1,900 followersShared on personal Google Plus with 155 followersShared on corporate Facebook page with 130k fansShared on personal Facebook streamShared on corporate Twitter with 11k followersShared on multiple personal Twitter profilesTested on links with internal links and those without

@5le

Results From Social Test

• Googlebot crawled 6 seconds after the Google snippet crawler

Facebook Twitter Google+

Crawled ✖ ✖ ✔

Indexed ✖ ✖ ✔

@5le

Case Study: How Does Google Crawl a Site (and others don’t)

• Launched a new Turkish language web property• Google crawl order

1. Robots.txt2. Header links3. Footer links4. Internal links over the next 24 hours

• BingbotFirst URL crawled after almost 2 daysCrawl did not begin in earnest until 5th day

• Yahoo SlurpCrawled robots.txt after 15 minutesDid not crawl any other pages for 15 days

@5le

How Long Did Googlebot Discovery Take?

4 seconds

@5le

Case Study: Redirect ALL URL’s to SSL

• Product team made the decision to increase security for all customers (SSL)

• Required redirecting all pages to https:// from http://• Plan was to launch in 2 stages

302 redirect – for testing and easy rollback 301 redirect – after successful tests

Update canonicals and sitemaps

• What happened?On the second day after 302 redirects, Googlebot crawled only

https:// URL’sIncorrect canonicals kept the http:// URL’s in the index after the

301 redirects Corrected canonicals swapped out indexed http:// URL’s for

https:// in 48 hours

@5le

Tools for Collecting SEO Data

@5le

ScreamingFrog: Mimic How Google Crawls

@5le

Tamper for Redirect Issues

@5le

Splunk: Log Analysis

@5le

AWStats + “Extra Section”

Extra section: http://bit.ly/awstatsextra

@5le

NerdyData: Search Engine for Source Code

@5le

Market Research: Learn What Users Think

@5le

Summary

• Always be testing• Build trust in your abilities by sharing results• Crawl analysis will teach you more about

Googlebot than most SEO blogs

• Tools:Crawling: Screaming FrogRedirects: TamperLogs: Splunk, AwstatsCode research: NerdyDataMarket Research: SurveyMonkey Audience

• Link bundle here: http://bit.ly/pubcon13

@5le

Thank you!

Eli Schwartz, SurveyMonkey eli@surveymonkey.com @5le @surveymonkey