We’re pleased to announce an Enterprise-level In-house SEO Exchange in Atlanta on February 12, 2013.
The ½ Day In-house SEO Exchange will be an afternoon of facilitated discussions on the most pressing topics facing enterprise-level SEOs today – it’s better than training. You will get the chance to ask your peers what they are doing in an open-the-kimono environment.
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Date: February 12, 2012 Time: 1-5, Happy hour following (first drink on us!)
Venue: 5 Seasons Brewing Company @ Prado (event room downstairs)
Address: 5600 Roswell Road, Sandy Springs, GA
Requirement to Attend
You must be an in-house SEO facing enterprise-level challenges AND be willing to share some secrets in this tight-knit environment.
Everyone loves statistics. They are insightful, thought provoking and great additions to any presentation. For that reason, we summarized the best stats tweeted at SMX Social in December 2012 for your browsing pleasure:
Stop
wondering how other marketers succeed where you struggle, and get answers at
the 2-day Enterprise-level In-house SEO Exchange - an
intimate, discreet, facilitated conversation on the challenges of 2013
enterprise-level in-house SEOs.
We
only select the crème-de-la-crème of SEO to speak because of the value they
give and their willingness to share openly. Now, it's your chance for a one-on-one
Q&A with the industry's best in-house SEOs:
Microsoft - Alex
Volk, Director of Search Marketing Microsoft – Derrick Wheeler, Senior SEO Architect A billion dollar company, hundreds of websites, and a team not big enough
to handle all the work – Alex and Derrick can talk to any organization
about how to manage, execute and scale
enterprise-level SEO. They
love the SEOinhouse.com Exchange so much, they jumped at the chance to
speak and attend.
IBM - Lee
More, Search Marketing Manager Lee “gets” executives and can help you
get support from product owners, managers and similar roles. I
was so impressed by a video that Lee and I did together, I asked him to
speak.
The Home Depot - Scott
Nickels, SEO Manager Scott knows e-commerce inside and out, and has much experience in local
search and scale. Scott came as an attendee and has since become a
frequent speaker. You'll want to ask
Scott your technical questions - he’ll have all the answers.
Logitech - Jeremiah
Andrich, Senior Manager of Online Acquisition Jeremiah used to work at Bing - can you
imagine what he knows?! Not only that, he's a marketing
genius and excels at getting stuff done in a large, complex organization.
The value he brings to the table exceeds beyond search into mobile,
SEO, and even Google TV.
SEOmoz - Ruth Burr,
SEO Manager SEOmoz stopped offering consulting, but they hired an in-house SEO, and we
get to reap the wealth of knowledge that comes from being a full-time SEO
at the Moz Plex. If you want in-depth SEO insights on tools, she's
your gal (especially on SEOmoz tools).
Paychex - Coy Gupta,
Director of Search Coy makes *bleep* happen. I met Coy when he started at Paychex, and he
gives a whirlwind update every time we connect. He’ll be talking about
how he gets stuff done when you have red
tape and politics that get in the way.
Trend Micro - Noah Gamer,
Sr. SEO Manager Noah will talk about the impact of
HTML 5 on their redesign, lessons learned, and what to know
about HTML 5 and SEO. He's also doingtesting
with co-citations. I’m “chomping at the bit” to hear what he
has to say!
DocStoc - Jason
Nazaar, Co-founder and CEO An executive who knows how to scale SEO and can give you insight on what
executives need to help to prioritize and champion SEO. Ask Jason about your challenges with management.
Adobe - Warren
Lee, SEO Manager Wow, Adobe has grown their team exponentially in just a few years! Warren
has amazing insight into how to integrate SEO into development, how
to build the team and mitigate the growing pains of an SEO team larger
than one. If you’re using
CQ5/Day CMS, they can answer your EVERY question.
Shopzilla/Bizrate – Michael
Nguyen, SEO Strategist Michael is a wealth of enterprise-level SEO knowledge. Scaling SEO and metrics is what he
is all about. Michael speaks at many of our events and blows away all
attendees and myself. He’s known to talk very candidly and openly. He loves
the event so much that he said, “The In-House Exchange needs to be a
2-day event! You can do it at the Shopzilla office!” Michael is the
reason for this event.
Good SEO training can move mountains. Great SEO training can put you in the "Honeymoon Phase" of the In-house SEO Life Cycle (in a nutshell, this means it’s when everyone is drooling over SEO and you can accomplish things you would not ordinarily achieve).
Jessica Bowman caught up with Markus Renstrom, Head of SEO at Yahoo, to talk about his thoughts on training, what
they do at Yahoo, and to glean more of his juicy tidbits for the in-house SEO
community. Take it away Markus:
Taking Markus’ comments to the next level:
Get
really smart at training, is Makus’ advice. Tailor the material based on what
your audience does. Make it crystal
clear (so that even your granny can understand) exactly what they need to do
when they go back to their desk. Don’t
forget to follow-up. Too often trainings are conducted, new tasks/processes are
assigned, but accountabilities, check-ins, and adjustments are not made. The
end result is nothing happens.
Get
really great at executing SEO training is SEOinhouse.com’s advice. This is
crucial, but not everyone has the “aptitude” to execute great training. Few
subject matter experts are good at communicating their technical expertise in a
way that others can understand and get excited about. You need to have passion about SEO, and the
ability to drop the jargon and talk about SEO in everyday language so that
someone who knows nothing about SEO can grasp the concepts AND how they act on
them in their everyday activities.
Create
the process and supporting materials first. Then, create a standard and
implement it by training the company on the new standard. This is great in theory, but too often it
fails during execution because the materials are poorly thought through,
overwhelming and not understandable by non-SEOs. Ideally people/SEO teams with the “aptitude”
for creating brilliant resources would create resources for other departments. If
you do not have this skill, outsource it. When SEO generates millions in revenue a year,
this is money well spent.
Implementing enterprise-level SEO standards is no easy feat. It sounds simple enough, but there are a lot of stakeholders, a lot of people who own areas that heavily influence SEO, whose best practices may not be in line with SEO best practices.
Jessica caught up with Markus Renstrom, Head of SEO at Yahoo, to talk about how to bring new ideas in this 6 minute video. Without further ado, meet Markus:
Taking Markus’ comments to the next level:
1) Implementation is always a hard thing to do successfully. Prepare yourself and management for the road that lies ahead. The number of stakeholders, number of people and departments involved, corporate politics, and openness to change will determine your level of challenge.
2) It’s easy to do trainings, but you need to make sure people practice what they learn in training. Too often companies hold SEO trainings, but neglect to assign accountabilities and hold people responsible for executing what they learned. The result is a training that was interesting, but never executed properly. (Part of this is often the result of poor training in the first place – more on this in a future post.)
3) In an enterprise-level organization, take control and own the SEO process to create a standard within the company, and let others do the executing. This allows the SEO team to spend more time on execution and less time on negotiating SEO tactics and prioritization with other teams. In essence, make SEO part of the guidelines for how you make a great product.
4) Take ownership of SEO. Push SEO and make noise in the company to help them realize what they are missing. Standardize everything onto the same platform to allow SEO to run smoothly across all divisions. Our founder, Jessica Bowman says, “a good in-house SEO can, unfortunately, get a reputation of sticking their nose in everyone’s business.” This is because most activities executed by other departments can help or hurt SEO, they just do not realize it.
5) Work with all the teams to make sure what you want to do will actually work. If you start as a team with input from the beginning it will help avoid issues arising later and get people on board and changes implemented much quicker. Too often we see SEOs pull together magnificent plans, and present them for the first time in front of EVERYONE. This isn’t how it should work. Instead, pre-sell everyone before the meeting, make adjustments along the way and when you walk into the meeting with everyone, everyone will have already bought into your ideas.
6) SEO is a discussion process, not a dictatorship. You need to work and talk with everyone about the process and create a standard. Make it a group activity, but avoid analysis paralysis. If you don’t have time, then bring in a third party to help drive this to the finish line for you.
