In a rare and wide-ranging interview, Chuck Heath Jr., brother of Gov. Sarah Palin, speaks out against the Joe McGinniss book "The Rogue" published by Random House. Heath also talks about personal observations of the Palin family and his childhood with Sarah.
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Over the past year I've interviewed for a half dozen SEO jobs at substantial companies where they've decided to stop out-sourcing and bring the SEO position in-house. While I have not yet decided to take any of those jobs, I have noticed some things that may prove enlightening to anyone considering making the move to corporate SEO.
1) If contacted by a headhunter or recruiter attempting to "Qualify" you for the SEO position interview, be patient and realize that you'll often be explaining SEO to them as they may only have a passing understanding of SEO beyond the job description provided to them. The may have a short list of our industry buzzwords in front of them.
2) If the company interviewer or human resources director doesn't understand SEO and has that same list of SEO buzzwords in front of them - be patient as well. The reason they are hiring an SEO is because they need your expertise. Just realize it will be about personalities at that point and not about your qualifications. Discuss your SEO successes, point to client web sites and searches to show current positions for that client's keyword phrases.
3) If the company you'll be working for has a home page that is a flash movie which starts playing music immediately, includes the word "Enter" or has a 30 segment image slice, politely decline the interview. You'll never convince them that text is what gets them good search engine ranking. (Art, music, video, television or radio related sites rarely include transcripts of programs, song lyrics or text reviews and text is rare for the visual, audio and video creatives.)
4) If a "site:company.com" query returns 12 pages on the SERPS, and they all include the same lame catch-phrase without keywords, make sure your job description includes "Content Development." PS: "Content Development" better be in every SEO job description.
5) If a site:company.com query returns 120,000 pages on the SERPS, and they all include the same lame catch-phrase without keywords, make sure your job decsription includes "Keyword Research." PS: "Keyword Research." better be in every SEO job description.
6) If the job description puts the SEO position in the Marketing Department, smile and apply. Marketing is where SEO belongs. Textual content as a sales tool is welcome and extensive use of real words as content is encouraged. The position title may be something odd that fits the company org charts like, "Director of Product Mgmt, Search."
7) If the job description puts the position in the IT department, look out! They'll expect an automated and programmatic solution to SEO. Automated keyword extraction tools, which take keywords from body text and insert them into Title Tags, may be in your future. You'll inevitably spend your time debugging scripts so they don't insert stop words into those tags, rather than actually writing effective tags or training content management staff to do so.
8) If you are asked if you have experience with one particular content management platform, run - unless you are certain their CMS platform allows for manual editing of Title tags, metadata, and embedded links in body text - and that system allows for CSS attributes that can be altered to support SEO concerns. Few companies will abandon legacy CMS systems because you tell them it won't work for SEO or that it will require complex workarounds to hack the proprietary in-house CMS database.
9) If asked, "Do you have experience with SEO in the field of "_____ (fill in the blank)" turn and leave the building, because they don't understand that experience with SEO is the same in every business except for differing industry buzzwords. If, on the other hand, you have a passion for the topic of the company web site, celebrate because you are going to love your job even more.
10) If the company asks if you have experience with any one particular reporting system for web site statistics and log file analytics, answer "Yes" because they all serve the same purpose, provide the same data, and export the same Excel or CSV reports. The only difference is the login username and passwords and internal navigation.
Hundreds of substantial companies are hiring in-house SEO and PPC managers to do their search engine optimization as the position continues to prove its value to corporate search rankings. I'm continuing to interview companies until I find the right corporate SEO position for me. If you get the job and any of my observations here helped you in your SEO job interview, how about a link to my site from your corporate home page? ;-)
Mike Banks Valentine operates SEOptimism, Offering SEO training of in-house content managers http://seoptimism.com/SEO_Staff_Training.htm as well as contract SEO for advertising agencies, web development companies and marketing firms. http://seoptimism.com/Ad_Agency_SEO_Contracting.htm
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As search engine optimization (SEO) professionals, we focus on keywords, aboutness, and information scent. What keyword phrases best describe a webpage, a graphic image, and/or a video? How can we ensure that information scent gets stronger from search engine results page (SERP) to a web page on our websites?
SEO professionals utilize a variety of resources to understand the words and phrases that users/searchers type into the commercial Web search engines, as well as to understand searcher behaviors.
One of the untapped places to conduct keyword research effectively is the analytics data from your site search engine. In his book, Search Analytics for Your Site: Conversations with Your Customers (*use Discount Code “SEL” to receive 15% off the book now*), information architect Louis Rosenfeld describes how website owners can implement various metrics on their site search engine to:
Better understand searcher needsImprove your website content, site navigation, and search performanceUnderstand keyword phrases in contextGet useful qualitative and quantitative metricsLou has graciously agreed to an interview for Search Engine Land readers. For the next two columns, I wanted to sum up what came out of our phone conversations, email, and other correspondences.
Q. What are site search analytics (SSA)?
Rosenfeld: Your users are telling you what they want from your site—in their own words—when they use your site’s search engine. Are you giving them what they want?SSA is simply a set of tools and methods to help you harvest users’ queries, test and measure how well they’re performing, and actually see how well you’re serving users. That’s it in a nutshell.
Q. That is what your search analytics book is all about. How are web searchers different from site searchers? How are they similar?
Rosenfeld: Searchers often have a better idea what we want from a specific site than they do from the Web in general. So, as you’d expect, site search queries tend to be narrower and more relevant to the site itself.For example, if you’re examining the University of Michigan’s SSA data, you won’t see nearly as many name queries (e.g., “UM,” “univ michigan”) as you will with Web search keywords. Instead, you’ll see queries that are unique to you (e.g., “football tix,” “get my transcript”).
Interestingly, knowing these more specific queries might help you invest in search engine advertising more wisely—you may be able to avoid broad, expensive keywords (e.g., “University of Michigan”) and instead bid on less expensive, more precise ones (e.g., “Michigan football tickets”) that may still be under your competitors’ radars.
Q. What types of patterns do you look at when you review site search analytics?
Rosenfeld: It really depends, as there are so many ways to categorize queries; here are just a few: Audience type: who seems to be doing the searching?Topic: what are the queries about? Products versus tutorials versus forums versus something else?Content type: what kind of content do they seem to want to retrieve?Tone: technical jargon versus marketing jargon versus plain language terminologySeasonality: does the nature of users’ information needs change over time?Because different people see different patterns, it’s ideal to have many people do the analysis—at least enough to start seeing if consistent patterns emerge. You might even have the individuals on your team do a card sorting exercise with a set of your site’s queries and then compare results.
The good news is that even if one or two people look for patterns in your site’s query data—for an hour or two every quarter—you will learn something useful. I guarantee it.
Q. I truly understand that. On a number of our client sites, we discovered that users/searchers keep going to the same blog articles over and over again via site querying. From that data, we were able to pinpoint keyword phrases that never occurred to us, even with all of the Web-based keyword research tools available to us. On that note, what is a search exit? How can website owners utilize search exit data to provide a better searcher experience?
Rosenfeld: I like Google Analytics’ definition just fine: “The percentage of searches that resulted in an immediate exit from your site.” The percentage of search exits per query is a common failure metric, along with measuring queries that retrieve zero results (which I happen to like even more).It’s useful to flag and study queries with high search exit rates—in fact, it’s one of those things to do on a regular basis. Look for patterns—are there types of queries (e.g., product names) that have surprisingly high search exit rates? Better take a deeper look at how product name queries are performing and why they’re failing. That’s where qualitative research—specifically user studies involving task analysis—work really well hand-in-hand with exploring your analytics data.
Site search analytics for "zero site search results" can reveal keyword opportunities for website owners.
Q. What do search queries (keyword queries) that get zero results typically mean? Why is that a problem for website owners?
Rosenfeld: Zero search result queries are generally due to one of two varieties of failure: You don’t have the content. This should lead to a follow-up question: why don’t you? Your customers are searching your extreme mountain biking products site for an insurance policy that’ll cover them if they fracture their skulls on the way down Pike’s Peak. Maybe there’s a business opportunity here that you’re missing by not offering such a policy?You have the content, but users can’t find it. Your content may not be written in plain language. Or your content authors don’t or won’t follow guidelines for titling and tagging their documents. Forget the constant cajoling: now you can reverse engineer the process and show content owners what happens when they don’t follow those guidelines.
Q. I have often stated that “How + Why = ROI” which means that website owners should understand how people search (which we can get from interpreting log file data), and why people search.
Rosenfeld: Absolutely. But keep in mind that SSA, like other types of analytics, can’t tell you how or why; it can only tell you what. Site search analytics data gives us a fantastic perspective on what happens when users search our sites. But it’s just one tool in the user researcher’s toolkit.
Stay tuned for Part 2 of Lou’s interview, where we will go into more depth about search sessions, precision scores, relevancy scores, how to use site search analytics to improve navigation, and some insightful tests you can use on your own site.
*Editors Note: We would like to thank Rosenfeld Media for the 15% discount for our readers. Neither Search Engine Land nor Shari Thurow has any financial interest in sales of the book, although Ms. Thurow has endorsed the book as a top read for SEOs.
Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.
Related Topics: Just Behave
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