Executing a Domain Migration: An Inside Look From OnLogic (Formerly Logic Supply)

Posted by ErikaOnLogic

In October 2019, our 16-year-old company rebranded from Logic Supply to OnLogic. The recovery from a traffic standpoint has been pretty smooth (and much faster than we expected), and our customers have embraced our new name and look. We want to share our story, the steps we took to prepare for this major change, and some things we learned along the way about what it takes to execute a successful domain transition (with minimal impact on organic results) in an effort to help those facing the same challenge.

Take a deep breath, it's going to be okay.

First, a little history and background. Logic Supply was founded in 2003 as an e-commerce website that sold components and parts for small form factor computers. Over the years, the company has built up engineering and manufacturing capabilities that today allow us to offer complete industrial and ruggedized computers and technology solutions for a wide range of industries. We've known for almost 10 years that our ambitions would someday outgrow our name, and in 2015 we settled on a new one and began laying the groundwork for the transition.

Once we'd gotten past all the research and legal efforts related to the new name itself, we began formulating the website transition plans in 2018. This kind of project requires a long list of individual and team supporters, from the Design and Communications team who helped conceptualize and choose the name OnLogic, to the IT team who would be responsible for making sure the digital transition was executed effectively.

This piece is coming from the perspective of Erika Austin, who has worked in digital marketing for Logic Supply since 2009, with special credit to Tim van der Horst in our Netherlands office who led the roll-out of the new domain and the resulting SEO recovery efforts. Tim applied structure to all the data I had gathered in my head over the past 10 years of decision-making in SEO.

Unstructured Data / Structured Data = Erika / Tim

As I take you through the process and cite our plan, including what we did and didn’t do, as well as the decisions made along the way, you can download a copy of our Go-Live Checklist for your own reference.

Phase one: scoping and planning

I had full confidence that our team could lead a successful transition. The only thing was, I had never done this before. Few have, with the exception of our new IT director who had undergone a few brand and domain migrations in her career.

I had been working on building Logic Supply's domain authority for 10 years, so the idea of moving to a new domain brought up a lot of questions. To help us along the way, I sought out an expert who could validate our work and answer questions if anything came up. While many of the recommendations online were people that had cited, or written for, authoritative sites such as Moz, I decided to ask Rand Fishkin, the SEO Rockstar himself, who he would recommend as a Jungle Guide for a project like this. He was kind enough to connect us with KickPoint.

Dana DiTomaso at KickPoint was able to quickly understand where we were in the process, and what we needed. Dana proved to be instrumental in validating our efforts along the way, but we were very encouraged by her assessment that our existing plan was thorough and covered the necessary steps. Admittedly, we would have been disappointed otherwise — it was a really detailed plan.

Tim outlined a six-phase project with specifications and definitions of our SEO strategy in a website migration document with an accompanying spreadsheet, complete with an RACI (responsible, accountable, consult, and inform) matrix and timeline. Tim’s plan was extremely clear, with positive outcome scenarios including possible growth as a result of the migration.

I will credit Tim again — my head was spinning with only the potential pitfalls (detailed below) of such a huge change. What about E-A-T? This new domain had no expertise, authority, or trust to it, and growth in traffic wasn't something I had even considered. Our IT Director agreed that she had never seen that happen in her career, so we set expectations to have about a ten percent decline over six weeks before a full recovery. I squirmed a bit, but okay.

Along with traffic loss, it was important for us to lay out all the possible risks associated with this execution.

Risks

Many of the risks we faced revolved around implementation uncertainty and resource allocation on the IT side. Of the risks that were introduced, the one that I had the most reservations about was migrating our blog to a new URL path. This was decided to be too much of a risk, and we removed it from the initial plan.

*Credit to Modestos Siotos: The Website Migration Guide: SEO Strategy, Process, & Checklist

Redirect strategy for the main brand domain

To help mitigate some of the risks, we discussed options for an overlay notifying customers of the change. But as much as we wanted to get customers excited about our new name and look, we didn’t want it to be too disruptive or be penalized for a disruptive interstitial.

The more we spoke to customers leading up to the big changeover, the more we realized that — while this was a big deal to us — it ultimately didn't impact them, as long as they could still expect the high quality products and support they'd come to know us for. We ended up implementing a persistent banner on every page of the site that pointed to a page about the brand evolution, but we didn’t choose to force users into interacting with that modal.

Phase two: pre-launch preparation

Technical SEO specification

At this point in the project, we realized we had an XML sitemap that would change, but that we wanted the old sitemaps around to help reinforce the transition in Google Search Console. We also determined that an HTML sitemap would help in laying out our structure. We were six months out from our brand transition, so any changes we wanted to make to our website had to be made ASAP.

So, we cleaned up our URL structure, removing many of the existing server redirects that weren’t being used or followed much anymore by only keeping links from our referral traffic.

We also created more logical URL paths to show relationships, for example:

/products/industrial-computers/ >> /computers/industrial/

/products/rugged-computers/ >> /computers/rugged/

And updated the redirects to point to the right end path without following redirect chains:

Technical CMS specification

When doing a migration to a new domain, the depth and complexity of the technical CMS specification really depends on if you are migrating your existing platform or switching to a new one. The CMS of choice in our case didn’t change from the previous, which made our lives a little easier. We were porting our existing website over to the new domain as-is. It would mostly come down to content at this stage in the plan.

Content updates

One of the most important things at this step was to make sure our content was displaying our new brand properly. Essentially, we planned for a “simple” find/replace:

Find: *Logic Supply*

Replace: *OnLogic*

We took inventory of every attribute and field on our website that mentions the company, and applied the change across the board: descriptions, short descriptions, meta titles, meta descriptions, manufacturer, etc.

At one point we asked ourselves, "What do we do with press releases or past content that says ‘Logic Supply’? Should that be replaced with ‘OnLogic’?” In the end, we decided to exclude certain parts of the website from the script (articles, events, news from our past), but made sure that all the links were updated. We didn’t have to bury Logic Supply as a brand name, as there would be an advantage in having references to this name during the period of transition to remind customers we’re still the same company.

During this phase, we prepared what needed to be changed in Google Ads, such as headlines, descriptions, URLs, sitelinks, and videos. We ramped up our paid search budget for both terms “Logic Supply” and “OnLogic”, and prioritized pages and keywords to elevate in Google Ads in case the domain change did have an impact on our core keyword rankings.

Priority page identification

Since the intent of our migration was to port our existing platform over to a new domain and make very few changes in the process, we didn't have to list pages we would have to prioritize over others. What we did do was think about external factors that would impact our SEO, and how to limit this impact for our biggest referral traffic sources and top ranking pages.

External Links

We compiled a spreadsheet to help us address, and ideally update, backlinks to our former domain. The categories and data sources are worth noting:

Backlinks: We downloaded all of our backlinks data compiled from SEMRush and Google Search.

Referral traffic and top organic landing pages: This list was pulled from Google Analytics to determine high-traffic, priority pages we’d need to monitor closely after the transition. It also helped to prioritize links that were actively being used.

Partners: We wrote to each of our partners and suppliers about the changes in advance, and asked them to make updates to the links on their websites by certain deadlines. I was delighted to see how quickly this was implemented — a testament to our amazing partners.

Publishers: Anywhere we had a mention in a news story or website that we thought could be updated, we reached out via email at go-live. We did decide at some point we couldn’t erase our history as www.logicsupply.com, but we could at least let those contacts know we had changed. There were a few direct placement advertisements we also had to update.

Directories: We used various internet resources, and a great deal of Googling, to identify business, product, or industry directories that pointed to our old domain and/or used our old name. I hate that directories still have a place in SEO these days, since they date back to the early ages of the internet, but we wanted to cover our bases.

Redirect specification

Redirect mapping

When you’re performing a domain migration, one of the most important things for sustaining organic traffic is to help Google — and any search engine — understand that a page has moved to a new location. One way to do this is with a permanent (301) redirect.

So began our redirect mapping. Our migration scenario was fortunate in the sense that everything remained the same as far as URL structure goes. The only thing that changed was the domain name.

The final redirect map (yes, it’s the world’s most complicated one, ever) was:

logicsupply.com/* -> onlogic.com/*

Internal link redirects

As IT had their redirection mapping server-side prepared, we needed to make sure our internal links weren’t pointing to a 301 redirect, as this would hurt our SEO. Users had to be sent straight to the correct page on the new domain.

Objective: update all links on the site’s content to point to the new domain. Below is the “find/replace” table that our IT team used to help us update all the content for the transition to onlogic.com:

We also launched an HTML sitemap as soon as possible under logicsupply.com after our URL restructure, six months prior to launch.

Contingency plan

We took 15 weeks to prepare, test, and get comfortable with the migration. Once live, there is no going back. Executing thoroughly and exactly on the plan and checking every box is the only approach. So in short: there was no contingency plan. Whatever happened, once we switched domains, that was it.

GULP.

Phase two ended when we started to move away from the specifications and into exactly what needed to happen, and when. We used our Go-Live Checklist to make sure that we had every box checked for creative needs, third party integrations, and to configure file review. Making the checklist highly detailed and accurate was the only way to make sure we succeeded.

Phase three: pre-launch testing

To kick off phase three, we had to get a baseline of where we were at. We had a few errors to correct that had been outstanding in Google Search Console, like submitting noindex links through our XML sitemap. This project also alerted us to the fact that, if everything went well, site speed would be our next project to tackle.

Content review

As content wouldn’t change except for “Logic Supply” becoming “OnLogic”, we didn’t really have to do a lot of reviewing here. We did extensively test the find/replace functionality in the go-live scripts to make sure everything looked as it was supposed to, and that the sections we chose to exclude were in fact left untouched. Updated designs were also part of this review.

Technical review

The technical review involved checking everything we had planned out in the second phase, so making sure redirects, sitemaps, links, and scripts were working and crawlable. IT implemented all server-side conditions, and set up the new domain to work internally for all testing tasks that needed to be executed. Again, the checklist was leading in this endeavor.

Redirect testing

Using ScreamingFrog, we crawled both the sitemaps as well as the staging website we had internally launched for testing purposes — hidden away from the outside world. Any redirect errors that appeared were resolved on the spot.

Site launch risk assessment

Risk assessment was a continuous activity throughout the testing. We had a go or no-go decision prior to go-live, as we couldn’t go back once we flipped the switch on the domain migration. Everything that popped up as an error or flag we swiftly assessed and decided whether to mitigate or ignore for the sake of time. Surprisingly, very few things came up, so we could quickly begin the benchmarking process.

Benchmarking

The template above was what we used to track our site speed before and after. Our benchmarks were consistent between the website before and after our staged migration using both Lighthouse and GTMetrix, meaning we were on track for our go-live date.

Phase four: go-live!

The least impactful day to make this change was over the weekend, because as a B2B company, we’ve noticed that our customers tend to be online during regular office hours.

Our team in the Netherlands, including Tim, flew in to support, and our IT and marketing teams dedicated a Saturday to the migration. It also happened to be my birthday weekend, so I was excited to be able to celebrate with my colleagues while they were in town, and in turn celebrate them for all their hard work!

So, on Saturday, October 19, 2019, around 8 a.m., IT confirmed we were good to go and the maintenance page was up. This was returning a “503 — service temporarily unavailable” server response to make sure Google wouldn’t index our site during the migration.

It was at this point in the process that our Go-Live Checklist took over. It was a lot of work up front, but all of this preparation made the final execution of the domain transition a matter of a few clicks to move and/or publish items.

Among all our other tasks, we updated our page title suffix, which was previously “Logic Supply”, to “Logic Supply is now OnLogic” (today it's “OnLogic formerly Logic Supply”). This was an indication to Google that we were the same company.

The hardest part was the waiting.

Phases five and six: post-launch and performance review

I had planned to camp out next to my computer for the next few days to watch for problems, but nothing surfaced right away. While organic traffic did take an expected dip, it wasn't nearly as dramatic or prolonged as we'd been warned it might be. We are still seeing logicsupply.com indexed months later, which is frustrating, but doesn’t seem to be affecting our traffic on the new domain.

Overall, we view our website transition as a success. Our traffic returned to where we were and we surpassed our project benchmarks for both traffic and site performance.

Following the move, we looked for follow-on opportunities to help improve our site speed, including identifying inactive or out-of-date plugins from our blog. Our blog made up at least 40 percent of our organic traffic, so this change made our site faster and helped to reach our organic growth recovery goals in less than six weeks.

We are constantly looking at and prioritizing new opportunities to improve the website experience for our customers, and make doing business with OnLogic as easy as possible. The domain change project was a huge undertaking by the entire organization, and required a great deal of planning and constant communication and collaboration to pull off. That said, the time spent up-front was paid back twice over in the time saved recovering our organic traffic, and making things seamless for our website users to ensure everyone could carry on with business-as-usual.

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Google Alerts for Link Building: A Quick and Easy Guide

Posted by David_Farkas

If you’re a link builder, you know how tough it can be to persuade other site owners to link to your site with “out-of-the-blue” pitches. This is true even if you have great content or have been building links for years.

That’s why the mantra “link building is relationship building” exists. Often, before you build a link, you have to build a relationship with the site owner first. This means anything from following them on Twitter, commenting mindfully on their posts, writing emails to them to discuss their content without pitching links, etc. It’s a productive strategy, but also a time-intensive one.

However, there’s another — relatively quick — link building strategy. 

Is your ear itching? If you’re the superstitious type, this means that someone is talking about you.

Sometimes a webmaster will publish your brand name, products, or target keywords on their site without actually linking to your site. In SEO, these are known as “fresh mention” opportunities. These are typically some of the easiest link building opportunities available, since you don’t really have to explain yourself to the site owner. Mostly, you just have to ask them to put an <a href> tag in the code.

But how do you find these fresh mentions? There are multiple methods and tools, but today I’m going to highlight the one I use most often: Google Alerts.

Google Alerts is beneficial in a myriad of ways beyond the world of link building and SEO, but there’s no doubt that it’s the best way to stay on top of your fresh mention opportunities. Allow me to explain how you can use it!

Setting up Google Alerts

First off, the obvious: you need the correct link. To start using Google Alerts, head over to Google Alerts. You can technically set up alerts without a Gmail account, but I would recommend having one. If you don’t have one, click here to find out how to set one up.

When you have an account set up and land on Google Alerts, you will see a page that looks like this:

No, there’s not much to see. Not yet anyway.

Let’s take a basic example. Say you want to create an alert for mentions of link building. Simply type the phrase into the bar at the top.

You will see something similar to the image above, even before you click on anything else. The first box asks for which email address you want to receive the alerts (I’ve erased mine for the purpose of this article, but trust me, it’s there). Below that will be examples of recent alerts for your query.

Click the “Create Alert” button, and alerts will be sent to your selected inbox going forward. However, you can customize a few settings before you do so. Click the “Show options” dropdown next to the button to see a list of settings you can adjust:

Each item is auto-filled with the default setting. You can adjust the settings so that you only get alerts from specific regions, for certain types of content, and more. In general, I have found the default settings to suffice, but there are valid reasons you might want to change them (if you’re only interested in video content, for example).

When you’re done with the settings, you can create the alert!

Google Alert tips

Quotation Marks

From that point on, assuming you stuck with the default option of once-a-day emails, you'll get an email every 24 hours that looks like this:

Notice the returns in this example include pages that talk about each individual word from your query (in this example the word “link” and the word “building”). Obviously, this isn’t helpful, and it’s a waste of time to sift through these results.

So, how can you make sure that you only get results for an exact phrase? Quotation marks!

I (intentionally) made this mistake when setting up this alert. Notice in the image from the first section that “link building” didn’t include quotation marks around it. Without them, Google Alerts will return results like the ones in the image above.

The quotation marks indicate that you’re looking for an exact match of that phrase, so when you set up an alert using them you will get something that looks like this:

Much better, right?

Note that you can combine terms with and without quotation marks in one alert. Say for example I was looking for content related to link building around images. Instead of “link building images,” a phrase not likely to occur too often, I could use:

This will return results that include both the exact phrase “link building” AND the term “images”.

Set up multiple alerts

If you’re using Google Alerts for link building, I recommend setting up more than one alert. Consider some of the following:

• Your brand name
• Your products or services
• Your focus keywords
• Personalities associated with your brand

If you’re concerned about all the emails flooding your inbox, adjust the settings to decrease the frequency or stagger delivery days. You can also set up a separate Gmail account that only serves to receive these emails. I personally find the former to be the better option, but I know people who do the latter.

Consider setting up alerts for your competitors as well. Doing so may give you a window into their link building and publicity strategies that you can learn from. Along with that, you might find new potential target sites that aren’t mentioning you. If they mention your competitor, it’s likely they are relevant to your niche.

Also include common misspellings of any of the list items above. While Google’s algorithm is typically smart enough to correct such misspellings in its search, a few valuable results may seep through even still.

Conclusion

Google Alerts can be helpful for other purposes other than link building. Certainly, if you’re engaged in an online reputation management campaign, they’re a necessity. Some use Alerts to track the kind of publicity their competitors are getting as well.

There are other excellent link building tools out there that can complement your “fresh mention” strategy if you are a link builder, but Google Alerts is an essential. I hope you find Google Alerts as helpful for link building as I have. If you have other tools or suggestions, please mention them in the comments below.

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Three Steps to a Better-Performing About Page

Posted by AnnSmarty

Somehow, many businesses I’ve come across online have one glaring problem in common: a very weak and unconvincing About Us page.

This doesn’t make any sense in my mind, as the About page is one of the most important brand assets, and unlike link building and social media marketing, it doesn’t require any ongoing effort or investment.

An About page is often part of a buying journey. It can drive people to your site and help convince them to deal with you. And, in these uncertain times, you can use it to help build trust in you and your business.

Creating a solid About page is a one-time task, but it will boost both brand loyalty and conversions for many months to come.

Why is your About page so important?

It is often an entry page

Whether you’re a business owner or blogger, your About page tends to rank incredibly well for brand-driven search queries (those that contain your name or your brand name). If nothing else, it shows up in your sitelinks:

Or your mini-sitelinks:

This means your customers will often enter your site through your About page. Is it making a good first impression to convince them to browse your site further (or engage)?

Let’s not forget that branded queries have high intent, because people typing your brand name in the search box already know you or have heard about your products. Failing to meet their needs equals a missed opportunity.

It is often a conversion trigger (and more)

How often have you checked a business’s About page before buying anything from them? I always do, especially if it's a new brand I haven’t heard of before.

Or maybe it’s not even about buying.

Anytime someone approaches me with a quote or an interview request, I always check their About page. I refuse to deal with bloggers who don’t take themselves seriously.

Likewise, I often look to the About page when trying to find a press contact to feature a tool in my article.

On a personal level, I always open an About page to find a brand’s social media profiles when I want to follow them.

A lack of a detailed, well-structured About page often means leaked conversions as well as missed backlinks or follows.

It is an important entity optimization asset

We don’t know exactly how Google decides whether a site can be considered a brand, but we have well-educated theories so we can help Google in making this decision. The About page is a perfect entity optimization asset.

First, what we know: An About page is mentioned in Google’s human rating guidelines as one of the ways to determine the “expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness”, or E-A-T, of any page.

Human raters don’t have a direct impact on search results, but their assessments are used to teach Google’s algorithm to better rank pages. So if the About page comes up in their guidelines, it’s likely they use it as a ranking signal.

Second, Google is using information you choose to put on your About page to put your business inside their knowledge base, so it’s important to include as much detail as you can.

With all of this in mind, how should you put together a great About page?

1. Start strong

This step is not unique to this particular page, but that doesn’t make it any less important.

Treat your About page as a business card: People should be willing to learn more as soon as they see it. Your page should be eye-catching and memorable, and grab attention at first sight without the need to scroll down.

For example, Cisco starts with a powerful picture and message:

Nextiva starts with their main tagline:

Slack tells us exactly what they are doing and sums up its most impressive stats:

Telling your brand’s story is a great way to make your About page more memorable and relatable. Terminus does a very good job at starting their page with some history about the company that leaves you wanting to know more:

And Zoom starts with a video and a list of the company’s values:

Starting your page with a quick, attention-grabbing video is probably the best idea because video has been proven to convince visitors to linger a little bit longer and start engaging with the page.

You can create a short and professional video within minutes using web-based video editors like InVideo (in fact, InVideo is probably the most affordable solution I’m aware of).

To create a video intro using InVideo:

• Pick a template
• Upload your images and videos (or use the ones inside the platform)
• Edit subtitles to tell your brand’s story
• Add music or a voiceover

It’ll take you just 30 minutes to create a captivating video to put on your landing page:

2. Link your brand to other entities

With all that Google-fueled nonsense going around about nofollowing external links, or even linking out in general, marketers and bloggers tend to forget about one important thing: A link is the only way for Google to crawl the web.

More than that, Google needs links to:

• Understand how well-cited (and hence authoritative) any page is
• Create a map of sites, entities behind them, and concepts they represent

This is where linking out to other “entities” (e.g. brands, organizations, places, etc.) is so important: it helps Google identify your place within their own knowledge base.

To give you some ideas, make sure to link to:

• Your company’s professional awards
• Your featured mentions
• Conferences you were/are speaking at

For personal blogs, feel free to include references to your education, past companies you worked for, etc.

To give you a quick example of how useful this may turn out to be, here’s my own Google Knowledge Graph:



How did I get it?

To start, “Shorty Awards” is Google’s recognized entity. When I was nominated, I linked to that announcement from my blog, so Google connected me to the entity and generated a branded Knowledge Graph.

This nomination is hardly my only — or even most notable — accomplishment, but that’s all Google needed to put me on the map.

Google may know you exist, but without making a connection to a known entity, you can’t become one yourself. So start by making those associations using your About page.

To help Google even more, use semantic analysis to create copy containing related concepts and entities:

• Register at Text Optimizer and type in your core keyword (something that describes your business model/niche in the best possible way)
• Choose Google and then “New Text”

Text Optimizer will run your query in Google, grab search snippets, and apply semantic analysis to generate the list of related concepts and entities you should try and include in your content. This will make it easier for Google to understand what your business is about and what kinds of associations it should be building:

Using some structured markup is also a good idea to help Google connect all the dots. You can point Google to your organization’s details (date it was founded, founder’s name, type of company, etc.) as well as some more details including official social media channels, awards, associated books, and more.

Here are a few useful Schema generators to create your code:

• Technicalseo.com
• Hallanalysis.com

For Wordpress users, here are a few plugins to help with Schema integration.

3. Include your CTA

Most About pages I’ve had to deal with so far have one issue in common: It’s unclear what users are supposed to do once they land there.

Given the page role in the buying journey (customers may be entering your site through it or using it as a final research touchpoint), it is very important to help them proceed down your conversion channel.

Depending on the nature of your business, include a CTA to:

• Request a personal demo
• Contact you
• Check out your catalogue
• Talk to your chatbot
• Opt-in to receive your downloadable brochure or newsletter

Apart from your CTAs, there are helpful ways to make your About page easier to navigate from. These include:

• Breadcrumb navigation
• “Skip” navigation links (which are essential for accessibility, too)

Whatever you do, start treating your About page as a commercial landing page, not just a resource for information about your business. Turn it into a conversion funnel, and this includes monitoring that funnel.

On Wordpress, you can set up each link or button on your About page as an event to track using Finteza’s plugin. This way, you’ll be able to tell which of those CTAs bring in more customers and which are leaking conversions.

Finteza allows you to keep a close eye on your conversion funnel and analyze its performance based on traffic source, user location, and more.

For example, here’s us tracking all kinds of “Free Download” buttons. It’s obvious that the home page has many more entries, but the About page seems to do a better job at getting its visitors to convert:

[I am using arrows to show “leaked” clicks. The home page us obviously losing more clicks than the “About” page]

You can absolutely use Google Analytics to analyze your conversion funnel and user journeys once they land on your About page, but it will require some setup. For help, read about Google Analytics Attribution and Google Analytics Custom Dimensions — both resources are helpful in uncovering more insights with Google Analytics, beyond what you would normally monitor.

Like any other top- and middle-of-the-funnel pages, you’re welcome to reinforce your CTA by using social proof (recent reviews, testimonials, featured case studies, etc.). Here are a few ideas for placing testimonials.

Takeaways

Creating and optimizing your About page is a fairly low-effort initiative, especially if you compare it with other marketing tasks. Yet it can bring about several positive changes, like more trust in your brand and better conversion rates.

You should treat this page as a business card: It needs to create a very good impression in an instant. Put something attention-grabbing and engaging in the above-the-fold area — for example, a quick video intro, a tagline, or a photo.

Consider using links, semantic analysis, and structured markups to help Google associate your brand with other niche entities, and put it into its knowledge base.

Add CTAs (and experiment with different kinds of CTAs) to prompt your page visitors to follow your conversion funnel. An About page is often an underestimated, yet a very important part of your customers’ buying journeys, so make sure it’s clear where you want them to proceed.

Thanks for reading, hope it was helpful, let me know your thoughts/questions in the comments. Let’s discuss!

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5 Common Objections to SEO (& How to Respond) - Best of Whiteboard Friday

Posted by KameronJenkins

With marketing budgets taking a hit under the economic strain of COVID-19, advocating for the value SEO can bring to a struggling business is a new take on an old battle. This popular Whiteboard Friday episode by Kameron Jenkins covers five common objections you'll hear to SEO and how to counter them with smart, researched, fact-based responses — an important skill to brush up on now more than ever.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hey, everybody. Welcome to this week's edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Kameron Jenkins, and today we're going to be going through five common objections to SEO and how to respond. Now I know, if you're watching this and you're an SEO, you have faced some of these very objections before and probably a lot of others.

This is not an exhaustive list. I'm sure you've faced a ton of other objections, whether you're talking to a potential client, maybe you're talking to your friend or your family member. A lot of people have misunderstandings about SEO and that causes them to object to wanting to invest in it. So I thought I'd go through some of the ones that I hear the most and how I tend to respond in those situations. Hopefully, you'll find that helpful.

1. "[Other channel] drives more traffic/conversions, so it's better."

Let's dive in. The number one objection I hear a lot of the time is this other channel, whether that be PPC, social, whatever, drives more traffic or conversions, therefore it's better than SEO. I want to respond a few different ways depending. 

Success follows investment

So the number one thing I would usually say is that don't forget that success follows investment.

So if you are investing a lot of time and money and talent into your PPC or social and you're not really doing much with organic, you're kind of just letting it go, usually that means, yeah, that other channel is going to be a lot more successful. So just keep that in mind. It's not inherently successful or not. It kind of reflects the effort you're putting into it.

Every channel serves a different purpose

Number two, I would say that every channel serves a different purpose. You're not going to expect social media to drive conversions a lot of the time, because a lot of the time social is for engagement. It's for more top of the funnel. It's for more audience development. SEO, a lot of the time that lives at your top and mid-funnel efforts. It can convert, but not always.

So just keep that in mind. Every channel serves a different purpose. 

Assists vs last click only

The last thing I would say, kind of dovetailing off of that, is that assists versus last click only I know is a debate when it comes to attribution. But just keep in mind that when SEO and organic search doesn't convert as the last click before conversion, it still usually assists in the process. So look at your assisted conversions and see how SEO is contributing.

2. "SEO is dead because the SERPs are full of ads."



The number two objection I usually hear is SEO is dead because the SERPs are full of ads. To that, I would respond with a question. 

What SERPs are you looking at? 

It really depends on what you're querying. If you're only looking at those bottom funnel, high cost per click, your money keywords, absolutely those are monetized.

Those are going to be heavily monetized, because those are at the bottom of the funnel. So if you're only ever looking at that, you might be pessimistic when it comes to your SEO. You might not be thinking that SEO has any kind of value, because organic search, those organic results are pushed down really low when you're looking at those bottom funnel terms. So I think these two pieces of research are really interesting to look at in tandem when it comes to a response to this question.

I think this was put out sometime last year by Varn Research, and it said that 60% of people, when they see ads on the search results, they don't even recognize that they're ads. That's actually probably higher now that Google changed it from green to black and it kind of blends in a little bit better with the rest of it. But then this data from Jumpshot says that only about 2% to 3% of all search clicks go to PPC.

So how can these things coexist? Well, they can coexist because the vast majority of searches don't trigger ads. A lot more searches are informational and navigational more so than commercial. 

People research before buying

So just keep in mind that people are doing a lot of research before buying.

A lot of times they're looking to learn more information. They're looking to compare. Keep in mind your buyer's entire journey, their entire funnel and focus on that. Don't just focus on the bottom of the funnel, because you will get discouraged when it comes to SEO if you're only looking there. 

Better together

Also, they're just better together. There are a lot of studies that show that PPC and SEO are more effective when they're both shown on the search results together for a single company.

I'm thinking of one by Seer, they did right now, that showed the CTR is higher for both when they're on the page together. So just keep that in mind. 

3. "Organic drives traffic, just not the right kind."

The number three objection I hear a lot is that organic drives traffic, just not the right kind of traffic. People usually mean a few different things when they say that. 

Branded vs non-branded

Number one, they could mean that organic drives traffic, but it's usually just branded traffic anyway.

It's just people who know about us already, and they're searching our business name and they're finding us. That could be true. But again, that's probably because you're not investing in SEO, not because SEO is not valuable. I would also say that a lot of times this is pretty easily debunked. A lot of times inadvertently people are ranking for non-branded terms that they didn't even know they were ranking for.

So go into Google Search Console, look at their non-branded queries and see what's driving impressions and clicks to the website. 

Assists are important too

Number two, again, just to say this one more time, assists are important too. They play a part in the eventual conversion or purchase. So even if organic drives traffic that doesn't convert as the last click before conversion, it still usually plays a role.

It can be highly qualified

Number three, it can be highly qualified. Again, this is that following the investment thing. If you are actually paying attention to your audience, you know the ways they search, how they search, what terms they search for, what's important to your brand, then you can bring in really highly qualified traffic that's more inclined to convert if you're paying attention and being strategic with your SEO.

4. "SEO takes too long"

Moving on to number four, that objection I hear is SEO takes too long. That's honestly one of the most common objections you hear about SEO. 

SEO is not a growth hack

In response to that, I would say it's not a growth hack. A lot of people who are really antsy about SEO and like "why isn't it working right now" are really looking for those instant results.

They want a tactic they can sprinkle on their website for instant whatever they want. Usually it's conversions and revenue and growth. I would say it's not a growth hack. If you're looking at it that way, it's going to disappoint you. 

Methodology + time = growth

But I will say that SEO is more methodology than tactic. It's something that should be ingrained and embedded into everything you do so that over time, when it's baked into everything you're doing, you're going to achieve sustained growth.

So that's how I respond to that one. 

5. "You can't measure the ROI."

Number five, the last one and probably one of the most frustrating, I'm sure this is not exclusive to SEO. I know social hears it a lot. You can't measure the ROI, therefore I don't want to invest in it, because I don't have proof that I'm getting a return on this investment. So people kind of tend to mean, I think, two things when they say this.

A) Predicting ROI

Number one, they really want to be able to predict ROI before they even dive in. They want assurances that if I invest in this, I'm going to get X in return, which there are a lot of, I think, problems with that inherently, but there are some ways you can get close to gauging what you're going to get for your efforts. So what I would do in this situation is use your own website's data to build yourself a click-through rate curve so that you know the click-through rate at your various rank positions.

By knowing that and combining that with the search volume of a keyword or a phrase that you want to go after, you can multiply the two and just say, "Hey, here's the expected traffic we will get if you will let me work on improving our rank position from 9 to 2 or 1" or whatever that is. So there are ways to estimate and get close.

A lot of times, when you do improve, you're focusing on improving one term, you're likely going to get a lot more traffic than what you're estimating because you tend to end up ranking for so many more longer tail keywords that bring in a lot of additional search volume. So you're probably going to even underestimate when you do this. But that's one way you can predict ROI. 

B) Measuring ROI



Number two here, measuring ROI is a lot of times what people want to be doing.

They want to be able to prove that what they're doing is beneficial in terms of revenue. So one way to do this is to get the lifetime value of the customer, multiply that by the close rate so that you can have a goal value. Now if you turn on your conversions and set up your goals in Google Analytics, which you I think should be doing, this assumes that you're not an e-commerce site.

There's different tracking for that, but a similar type of methodology applies. If you apply these things, you can have a goal value. So that way, when people convert on your site, you start to rack up the actual dollar value, the estimated dollar value that whatever channel is producing. So you can go to your source/medium report and see Google organic and see how many conversions it's producing and how much value.

This same thing applies if you go to your assisted conversions report. You can see how much value is in there as well. I think that's really beneficial just to be able to show people like, "Look, it is generating revenue.My SEO that's getting you organic search traffic is generating value and real dollars and cents for you." So those are some of the most common objections that I hear.

I want to know what are some of the ones that you hear too. So pop those in the comments. Let me know the objections you hear a lot of the time and include how you're either struggling to respond or find the right response to people or something that you found works as a response. Share that with us. We'd all love to know. Let's make SEO better and something that people understand a lot better. So that's it for this week's Whiteboard Friday.

Come back again next week for another one.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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The MozCon Virtual 2020 Initial Agenda

Posted by cheryldraper

It's the question that's been on plenty of people's minds: What's up with MozCon this year?

We're happy to report that 2020's MozCon is on like Donkey Kong, and as you can tell from its brand-new name, the format this year is just a tad bit different. MozCon 2020 is now MozCon Virtual, an online conference experience delivering every ounce of digital marketing expertise you expect in-person with the safety and security of social distancing at home.

Today, we're here to tell you all about it — changes, challenges, nitty-gritty details, who's speaking and what you'll learn, and more!

Here's the skinny on MozCon Virtual

MozCon Virtual will take place from the comfort of your at-home office space across July 14 & 15, 2020. Business on top, social distancing sweatpants on the bottom — you'll be cozier than ever while learning all the latest and greatest in the world of SEO.

Twenty-two industry thought leaders will walk you through the hottest topics of 2020, covering everything from SEO automation to modern content promotion to strategies for handling keyword research in the midst of a crisis. You'll see fondly familiar faces and exciting new names to the MozCon stage, and you can rest assured that we're keeping the bar as high as it's ever been for content quality.

Additionally, we know that budgets are tight right now. We want to do our part to help by making MozCon Virtual as accessible to everyone as we can. Tickets are now priced at $129. This also includes full access to the MozCon video bundle once it's released!

Save my spot at MozCon Virtual!

Changes, challenges, & nitty-gritty details

A note about transparency and making really hard decisions

We're not going to lie — organizing this year's MozCon was a challenge. As it became more and more clear that an in-person event was neither feasible nor responsible (not to mention illegal here in Washington state!), we had a relatively short window of time to pivot from a 1,600-attendee event that we ran year after year using a concrete, smooth-as-butter process, to the virtual unknown. (Pardon the pun.)

There were many, many meetings. There was research and projections and debate, and more than one idea changed form three or four times before it took shape.

In the end, it came down to what was best for our community. MozCon has never operated from a profit standpoint — most years we aim to break even — but even with the risk and cost associated with such a monumental change to the event, we knew the show must go on. SEO doesn't just stop. And right now, it's picking up speed: People are turning to the internet to solve their problems now more than ever before, and businesses of all stripes are depending on that online visibility to sustain them through hardship. SEOs and digital marketers still need access to cutting-edge thought leadership, techniques, and strategies, and MozCon can deliver — even if it means we only get to daydream about all the high fives, fist bumps, and Roger hugs.

Not your typical marketing couchference

It was important that we find ways to maintain that special MozCon magic that makes folks excited to wake up extra early on a Monday morning, don their conference badge, and skip happily to the Washington State Convention Center for a day full of educational goodness.

We're gonna miss the snacks — that's just the truth. Doughnuts and coffee aside, we've energized our virtual conference with that snazzy MozCon spirit you look forward to every year:

• The highest caliber speakers and topics in town: Twenty-two of digital marketing's top experts will share their very best advice, strategies, tactics, and research over two jam-packed days of learning. You'll have all their decks available for download, and the new choice of attending the talks that most interest you.
• Friendly neighborhood Mozzers emceeing the event: MozCon stage superstars Cyrus Shepard and Britney Muller will keep the sparkle going between session.
• Interactive Q&A with the experts: You'll be able to participate in live Q&A sessions with speakers to answer your most burning digital marketing questions and quandaries.
• Virtual networking with Birds of a Feather breakout sessions: Birds of a Feather tables are a lunchtime hit every single year. And we've heard your feedback: networking is a huge part of the MozCon experience. That's why we're introducing Birds of a Feather virtual discussions — a special online experience where you'll be able to join expert-hosted events, connect with like-minded marketers, and forge professional relationships through the magic of the internet.
• Charitable donations: Our belief in giving back hasn't changed just because we're going online. For every ticket sold we'll be making a donation, with more details to come as we draw closer to showtime.
• Awesome partners: MozCon is fortunate to have the support of our fantastic sponsors who have stuck with us through all the changes this year. They'll be sharing their expertise in special hosted breakout groups. Curious about who our partners are? Check them out: 97th Floor, Base Search Marketing, CallRail, Crowd Content, Duda, GatherUp, and PAGES!

Two days chock full of conference goodness

We know it's tough to take a full three days away from your day job, so we're approaching MozCon Virtual with multi-track options to let attendees choose their own conference adventure — with full access to every talk via the MozCon video bundle once the conference is over.

A global experience at a more accessible price

We're streaming MozCon!

Every year we've heard our community ask: I can't make the trip. Will you be streaming MozCon? To our friends around the world, we're glad to be able to answer yes — this year, MozCon will be fully available to remote attendees. While those in particularly opposite timezones may be enjoying the show in your jammies, for the first time MozCon will serve you on your sofa. And you won't miss out on a single session — every ticket holder will have full access to the MozCon video bundle after the event, meaning you can re-watch your favorites and catch up on any you missed.

MozCon quality at a price more folks can afford: Tickets are now $129

We've lowered the price to attend this year's conference for a couple of reasons.

One, while there are still some pretty significant costs to throwing a large virtual conference, those costs don't include some of our biggest-ticket items, such as a conference space and food & beverage. Delicious treats and comfy seats are a real investment!

And two, times are really darn tough right now. We know agencies, brands, and freelancers are struggling in the midst of the economic downturn, and that it's more important than ever to hone skills and build new ones. We originally lowered ticket prices by about 40%. Then, based on community feedback and suggestions, we decided to forego the idea of shipping out swag and snacks and lowered them again — to the tune of $129.

Every MozCon ticket purchased also includes full access to the MozCon video bundle, a $349 value. Our video bundles are professionally produced and fully shareable with your team, so you can keep the learning going throughout the rest of the year and revisit the talks that mattered most.

Register for MozCon Virtual

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Initial agenda

Ready to explore what we've got planned for this year? Check out our current speakers and topics — and stay tuned for more information as the agenda evolves!

Alexis Sanders

Senior SEO Account Manager, Merkle
The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Users are at the core of everything we do in modern SEO. However, finding and understanding audiences can be daunting. Alexis will cover how to find your audience, share tools that are available for all price points, and show ways in which she’s found audience research to be useful as an SEO.

Andy Crestodina

Co-founder and CMO, Orbit Media
Thought Leadership and SEO: The 3 Key Elements and Search Ranking Strategies

Everyone wants to do it, but no one really knows what it is. So what is thought leadership? What isn’t it? And how does it affect search rankings?

This presentation is a data-rich perspective on the oh-so-popular topic of thought leadership, filled with practical takeaways for becoming an authority. And it’s all about the relationship between thought leadership and SEO. We’ll see how the research answers the questions and informs the tactics: Can brands be thought leaders? Can it be outsourced? Do you need to publish research? Or strong opinion? And how does it attract links and authority, rankings, and qualified visitors? Learn how a personal brand combines with content to drive big wins in SEO.

Britney Muller

Senior SEO Scientist, Moz
TBD

Last year, Britney wowed the crowd with a bevy of new research, data, and actionable tactics for understanding and winning featured snippets. We're still piecing together all the intricate details of this year's talk, so keep an ear to the ground as we continue to evolve our agenda!

Brian Dean

Founder, Backlinko
How to Promote Your Content Like a Boss

Creating content is easy. But getting people to see your content? That's a different story. Brian Dean shares over a dozen practical strategies that you can use to spread the word about your latest blog post, podcast episode, or YouTube video.

Casie Gillette

Senior Director of Digital, KoMarketing
Counterintuitive Content: How New Trends Have Disrupted Years of Bad Advice

Content marketers don't have it easy. We're constantly adapting to our ever-shifting landscape and juggling an overwhelming amount of information and advice: Do we produce as much content as possible? Should we focus on quality, while still maintaining consistent schedules? And now, what about YouTube, voice search, and even TikTok?

The fact is, there's no one way to do content marketing. Casie will showcase content in an entirely new light, with ideas and tips on how you can start creating content on your own terms.

Dana DiTomaso

President and partner, Kick Point
TBD

MozCon veterans know the value and vibrancy Dana brings to the stage, and this year will be no exception. Be on the lookout for juicy details about her 2020 talk — we can't wait to share.

David Sottimano

VP, Keyphraseology
Everyday Automation for Marketers

As a general rule, we shouldn't be doing things that a computer can do better. However, a lot of automation is achieved through programming expertise — and that expertise isn't usually a marketer's forte. In this session, you'll learn how to gather data, use machine learning, and automate everyday tasks for marketers using low-code or no-code solutions.

Flavilla Fongang

Brand Strategist, 3 Colours Rule
How to Go Beyond Marketing for Clients: The Value of a Thriving Brand Ecosystem

Too many marketers serve their clients the bare minimum of what's expected from an agency. To stand out among the crowd, cultivate real loyalty, and maximize the lifetime value of your clients, you have to go beyond mere marketing — developing a thriving brand ecosystem that aligns with the brand's ultimate goals. Flavilla Fongang shares her tried-and-true framework for optimizing the customer journey, improving acquisition and retention, and going beyond what's expected to serve your clients well.

Francine Rodriguez

Manager of Customer Success, WordStream
Let It Go: How to Embrace Automation and Get Way More Done

Let the robot uprising begin! We've all heard horror stories about the dangers of automating your tasks, but now is not the time to deny yourself extra help. Robots never sleep. They don't get tired or overwhelmed by their to-do lists, and they're ready to work round-the-clock to accomplish whatever task we set before them. In this talk, you'll explore all the areas were automation is kicking butt in PPC — and how you can harness the power of robots to make more time for other efforts.

Heather Physioc

Group Connections Director, Discoverability, VMLY&R
Competitive Advantage in a Commoditized Industry

SEO isn't dead — it’s commoditized. In a world where search companies are a dime a dozen and brands tout bland "unique selling propositions" that aren't unique at all, how can you avoid drowning in the sea of sameness? What are you doing that's any different from every other SEO firm? In this talk, you'll learn how to find, activate, and articulate your competitive advantage. Learn how to identify unique strengths and innovative offerings that equate to competitive advantage through these real, working examples so you can bring them to life in search. You'll leave with actionable tips and homework to help your search business stand out — and that you can use with clients to help them find their competitive edge, too.

Izzi Smith

Technical SEO Analyst, Ryte
How to Be Ahead of the (CTR) Curve

Let’s face it: Carrying out SEO magic is all in vain when you’re forgetting about how your brand and products are being surfaced in the SERPs. By not properly analyzing or enhancing our organic CTR, we're greatly limiting our potential. Izzi will help you create the perfect SERP engagement strategy by covering practical ways to uplift your significant CTR, such as remedying your critical keyword rankings that could soon be lost, leveraging brand-empowering entity features (and assessing the risks of doing so), more intelligent testing of rich & featured snippet optimizations, and a whole lot more. CTR-you-ready?? You better be!

Joy Hawkins

Owner, Sterling Sky Inc.
Google My Business: Battling Bad Info & Safeguarding Your Search Strategy

What's the harm in a little misinformation here and there? In the realm of local SEO, Joy Hawkins is here to outline exactly that. When it comes to local search and Google My Business, it can be make or break for your campaigns. Follow real data from a recent case study that illustrates why strategic decisions should be based on accurate information — and what can happen when that info is bad, wrong, or just plain incomplete.

Mike King

Managing Director, iPullRank
TBD

Mike redefined technical SEO and its importance in our industry back in 2016. In 2018, he taught us everything we didn't know about SEO. This year, he's back to share the hottest technical tactics to uplevel your efforts, plus the case studies and data that should be guiding your decisions.

Dr. Peter J. Meyers

Marketing Scientist, Moz
Moving Targets: Keywords in Crisis

Too often, we take a once-and-done approach to keyword research, but Google changes at the pace of information, and that pace speeds up even more during a crisis. How do we do keyword research in fast-paced industries and during world-changing moments? Dr. Pete provides concrete tactics for adaptive keyword research and spotting trends as they happen.

Phil Nottingham

Brand and Video Marketing Strategist, Phil Nottingham Ltd.
How to Build a Global Brand Without a Global Budget

As funnel-based marketing becomes less effective and harder to measure, "building a brand" is frequently touted as the panacea for all marketer's woes. But it's unclear how this can be achieved scalably and with a limited budget. Large enterprises resort to huge creative advertising campaigns that get their names out there by force of spend alone — but this isn't realistic for the smaller companies and the number of impressions is not the number of people impressed. In this session, Phil explains how modern brands are built through advocacy more than awareness alone, offering a deliverable method of brand marketing to radically shake up your content strategy.

Rob Ousbey

VP Product, Moz
TBD

Rob is no stranger to the MozCon stage — he's graced it in the past as emcee, and in 2019 he covered the intimidating topic of running your own SEO tests (and how to do it right.) While we're still nailing down the details of his 2020 talk, we're confident that this year's topic will be every bit as impressively daunting.

Robin Lord

Consultant, Distilled
Whatever You Do, Put Billboards in Seattle – Getting Brand Awareness Data from Google

How can you harness the vast power of Google data to gain special insight into city- and product-level brand awareness? Robin will lead us on a journey through his Google Trends methodology to use Adwords search volume data for better brand intelligence.

Ross Simmonds

CEO, Foundation
Designing a Content Engine: Going from Ideation to Creation to Distribution

What does it take to develop a content engine that drives results? In this presentation, Ross will share data around the power of having a content engine, tools & strategies for content ideation, tools and tactics for content creation, and frameworks that brands can use to ensure that their content is distributed effectively after hitting publish. This presentation will help you not only uncover content-market fit, but also capitalize on it.

Russ Jones

Principal Search Scientist, Moz
I Wanna Be Rich: Making Your Consultancy Profitable

How will your company weather the next update? How will you avoid layoffs and salary cuts? Being a master of SEO doesn't guarantee that your consultancy will succeed. After a decade and a half of experience, Russ Jones will outline the techniques that will keep your clients happy and your bottom line healthy.

Sarah Bird

CEO, Moz
Welcome to MozCon Virtual + the State of the Industry

Sarah has a storied history of kicking MozCon off with a bright, sparkly bang. The fearless leader of Moz will be welcoming each and every one of us to this year's virtual event, laying out all the pertinent details of the conference, and setting the tone for two jam-packed days of learning with a look at the State of the Industry.

Shannon McGuirk

Head of PR & Content, Aira
Great Expectations: The Truth About Digital PR Campaigns

In her talk, Shannon will challenge the desire for virality over consistency when it comes to digital PR and link building campaigns, while exploring the impact on the industry, team morale, and client expectations. By honestly sharing her own shortcomings, she'll push you to learn from your own campaign failures using tried and tested frameworks that’ll mean you can face any creative campaign or outreach struggle head-on.

Wil Reynolds

Founder & Vice President of Innovation, Seer InteractiveThe CMO Role Has Been Disrupted – Are You Ready for Your New Boss?

CMOs have the shortest tenure in the c-suite, and the CMO role has been eliminated at some of the largest brands. CEOs are now asking tougher and tougher questions about the value of marketing — and oftentimes marketers are not prepared.

Connecting your data and building your data flywheel is one way to support the swift answers CEOs expect from their CMOs. We need to get stronger at bridging our day-to-day work to the value it drives. And more than ever, “brand lift” isn’t enough to satisfy CEOs.

This presentation will start at the top. How businesses are run, how CEOs talk, and how we as search marketers can use the data we have access to everyday in new ways to answer the questions of the c-suite and raise our visibility and value in organizations.

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We hope to see your smiling faces online in July!

Thanks to each and every one of you for your patience as we hammered out the details of this year's conference, for the questions you've asked and the honest feedback you've given us. We're super excited to try out something new this year! Join us this July for our first MozCon Virtual and let's explore the future of digital marketing together:

Yes, I'm going to MozCon!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

Interdisciplinarity: How to Integrate Organic Search, Paid Search, and Content Teams

Posted by HeatherPhysioc

As an industry, we talk a good game about collaboration, but the truth is it’s not really happening the way we tell our clients and bosses it happens. We stroll into new business pitches and make big claims about how “integrated” we are. We preach that our recommendations are better because we have a more “holistic” offering. But whether it’s across agencies working on the same client, different teams working within the same agency, or different teams in-house on the client side, collaboration is much harder to achieve in reality than we make it look on the outside.

More often than not, experts get sucked into their respective silos, buried by the day-to-day task lists of their jobs, focusing on their own areas of expertise. Agencies write SEO scopes and PPC scopes separately, often without accounting for content resource needs to make the channels successful. Teams bring recommendations forward to their bosses that don’t have buy-in from their peers. We don’t bring each other in, but we complain about not being brought in.

Learnings from multiple mergers

My company has gone through many mergers and acquisitions over the years, and just in the last three, we’ve merged with three other agencies in our network. We doubled in size and tripled our global footprint overnight. With those mergers came tons of complementary skill sets and client lists we could do great work for.

Through the mergers, we had a unique opportunity presented to us to solve persistent collaboration and content problems by bringing the organic search, paid search, and performance content teams together under one unified group. Now our “Discoverability” group is nearly 35 people in four offices across North America.

With all this change and merging of teams, we had some hard choices to make and hard work to do to make this integration of different capabilities and cultures successful.

Introducing interdisciplinarity

I want to introduce you to the concept of interdisciplinarity.

It’s an academic term describing when two or more areas of expertise join forces to solve new kinds of problems together. It’s when they combine and bust traditional silos to solve shared challenges, benefiting from integrating and updating their individual approaches into a new, holistic approach. Interdisciplinarity helps with the negative effects of siloing and over-specialization.

In the rapidly evolving and increasingly commoditized field of search, we need to be talking about this.

Interdisciplinarity is common in well-known technical and scientific fields like neuroscience, biochemistry, and cybernetics. There is new ground to be forged in our industry.

There is a key difference between complementarity and interdisciplinarity. Just about anyone can go online and learn SEO or PPC. Plenty of companies do “complementary” search work — sitting next to one another and at least not harming each other’s work.

But few do truly interdisciplinary work — offering new, evolved capabilities in search. In the next five years, interdisciplinarity will be the difference between search teams with a competitive edge, and search teams that stagnate.

True interdisciplinarity is when the sum of the whole is greater than its parts. It’s the Gestalt benefit of bringing distinct specialties together to create a completely custom solution for a problem. People with relevant expertise bring unique knowledge and experiences for a more cohesive, end-to-end offering that is bespoke for each need. But the work is repeatable and refinable as similar problems arise.

This concept has been a driving force guiding our way through merging teams to create something new. And now we consult with clients in complex organizations to help them achieve interdisciplinarity, too. This is more than enhancing our implementation of tactical SEO and PPC. This is about helping companies evolve how they think about and deliver on the promise of search.

Why bother with integration?

As a search professional, you have probably been perfectly smart and successful independently, so why go to the trouble of moving away from separate swim lanes to one cohesive, unified practice? And equally important, how?

Increase advocacy

The majority of our growth typically comes from better serving and expanding existing relationships, not winning big chunks of new business. You go from a select few team members on different teams advocating for their own work, to a combined force of all the team members advocating for all of each other’s work.

Cross-sell and up-sell more

An integrated search team finds it easier to cross-sell and up-sell when clients get stuck on related services. Merging our teams helps us shift budget seamlessly between practices based on demand, pilot other services to our clients, and show our chops and prove outcomes we can earn. We can also talk to our clients about capturing every opportunity possible on whole search engine results pages, instead of thinking of SERPs in chunks.

Increased speed and scale

Having an integrated team with areas of overlap allows leaders to better distribute labor across the team. For example, our performance content team now writes SEO metas and PPC ad copy. Our paid and organic search teams are conducting keyword research and competitive analysis together, reducing duplication of effort. We’re dividing and conquering to cover more research ground more quickly, share learnings from our own areas of expertise, delivering a stronger product, and speeding it up by weeks.

Create a culture of knowledge-sharing

Data-sharing becomes second-nature to an integrated search and content team. It helps you to find opportunities you wouldn’t have spotted before. A deeper and wider pool of knowledge builds a deeper and smarter search talent bench. This creates a culture of crowd-sourcing and sharing where no one feels the pressure to know everything. We solve digital marketing problems faster by pooling our knowledge.

Reduce cannibalism and competition

When individual teams have individual objectives, it runs the risk of being “every team for themselves.” But ultimately, everyone in the company or at the agency is held to a set of central, core objectives. A unified team can help search and content practitioners stop worrying about whose budgets and whose targets, and instead focus on what’s best for the business. It allows you to steer resources to where the greatest impact will be felt. It doesn’t matter so much which channels deliver — as long as we deliver.

Increase trust in recommendations

Recommendations have more weight and credibility together when they’re vetted from multiple experts. Experts should talk about joint opportunities, discuss how channels perform together and separately, and balance paid and organic recommendations. A more thoughtful, utilitarian approach is more easily defensible to a client. Demonstrating more bang for their marketing bucks makes it easier for them to say yes and invest.

Identify new capabilities

When you integrate different specialties, you are likely to develop new capabilities at the intersections between those practices. This enables you to build and launch new, unified services that increase the value we can add for clients. In our case, this led to an end-to-end digital shelf optimization offering and enhanced landing page development.

Create competitive advantage

True interdisciplinarity is difficult to accomplish, so it’s hard for competitors to replicate. Competitive advantage happens when you put in the legwork that competitors can’t, don’t, or won’t. Mastering integrated services can give you unique points of distinction that competitors don’t have, and you become increasingly indispensable to your clients and your company.

Risks and roadblocks to integration

There will be no shortage of risks, roadblocks, and obstacles to integrating teams. Following are some of the growing pains you can anticipate as a driver of change.

Moving from theory to reality

We deceive ourselves into thinking we collaborate well for so long that it’s easy to become complacent and fail to see how things could be better. We have to make the case for the benefits of working together to our colleagues and counterparts. As a group, we have to agree on the importance of collaborating on projects and proving joint outcomes with meaningful case studies. It’s a massive cultural shift to change from individual athletes on three different teams to a single, all-star, world champion team. It doesn’t happen overnight.

Risk of becoming less agile

Counterintuitively, the larger the team, the harder it is to collaborate. This is especially true when the team does several different things. Integration runs the risk of making your group too big to move quickly. It’s easy to fall into the trap of trying to force adoption of one team or the other’s way of doing things, or to collaborate constantly on everything. But we quickly learned that design-by-committee doesn’t work and we can’t force it. Group identity doesn’t negate the need for autonomy. In fact, interdisciplinary teams fail without being able to maintain their identity and autonomy, and being empowered to make decisions that are right for their team and clients. Now we keep the connective tissue that bonds us as a group, but allow for “slicing and dicing” into smaller teams to serve any need and combat the problem of getting too big to stay nimble.

Negotiating roles and defending turf

When integrating teams, conflicts are inevitable, whether it’s perceived competition for diminishing budgets, or vying for the final say on a course of action. With teams of very smart people in different areas there is bound to be some negotiating of roles, maybe even turf-defending. But through integration, we’re all sharing the same turf. It takes extra effort to give the benefit of the doubt, assume good intent, and get on the same page. It’s an exercise in humility to give everyone’s expertise equal weight, and actively seek perspective instead of it being an accidental afterthought. You have to create a culture where everyone wins when one of us wins.

Merging processes creates complexity in the short-term

Merging processes that worked reasonably well before is a common challenge. Each team had its own comfortable way of doing things, so they might be resistant and slow to change. You may encounter conflicting expertise and opinions. It’s important to understand each team’s processes thoroughly before ripping them apart and sewing them back together — take the time to learn why things are the way they are.

Change fatigue

A constant barrage of non-stop change makes it hard for evolution to stick. It’s too much for people to absorb and adopt. It causes them to burn out and lose interest because it feels like there’s no light at the end of the tunnel. Companies that have a culture of ongoing testing, learning and optimization and where change is always expected for growth tend to fare well in the face of change, but everyone has their limits.

12 tips for integration success

Now that you are going into the process of integrating other teams informed on the risks and rewards, here are tactical tips to get it right.

1. Announce change quickly

Search team leaders should move quickly to announce the change and inform their teams. Make it clear what you’re doing and why, make the case for the benefits, and be honest about the challenges to get buy-in. Get the teams involved in the mission as soon as possible. Set the expectation that we sink or swim together. The most successful people in the face of change are those who don’t waste time obstructing the inevitable, but instead roll up their sleeves and look for ways to help.

2. Introduce and immerse immediately

Once announced, quickly take action to bring the teams together and activate. Get search and content practitioners in the room face-to-face as early and often as possible, and start a dialogue about a common mission and vision. Work together to brainstorm ideas on how to move forward. Our integration sessions included introductions and ice-breakers, overarching sessions about the department and teams, capability and case study sharing, and team-building exercises. Once you have established the new team or process, reintroduce the team to the organization to put faces with names, and educate others on what the new group is capable of and responsible for.

Get a sample agenda for an integration workshop here.

3. Implement change jointly and steadily

Announce and immerse quickly, but slow down to speed up when beginning to implement the changes. Don’t try to boil the ocean — focus on one-percent changes, one change at a time at natural points of intersection. Give ownership of different initiatives to people from each side to make sure you’re considering all the angles, which helps with buy-in across the group. Charge everyone with making it successful.

Also, try to make early changes iteratively and at natural points of friction at first, so change actually feels like a relief. For example, every SEO can relate to being left out of the content process, where keyword research is an afterthought (if it happens at all). One simple change is adding keywords and questions to a new content brief prior to creating content. This will make both writers’ and SEOs’ jobs easier. As a bonus, small wins can build momentum and endurance for more change.

4. No process is precious

Process is supposed to be a flexible framework, not a rigid set of rules that stifles innovation. Commit to establishing clear processes that incorporate key search and content stakeholders, and bring those voices to the table to collaborate in creating and refining workflows. Create a living wiki to document recurring processes, which reinforces the message of steady evolution. Update and reorganize them regularly — everyone on the team should have access and trust to refine them. Finally, check in periodically on what isn’t working and discard what doesn’t serve you.

5. Cross-train to build advocacy

Conduct cross-trainings both in immersion and continuously over time. The intent is not to be able to do each other’s jobs, but rather to be able to speak about them, advocate for them and cross-sell them. We’ve done workshops, hands-on training, and even short-term job swaps like having SEOs write e-commerce product detail pages. It creates empathy and builds trust, and makes it easier to advocate for each other’s work. It helps create mental checks, too, for search experts to ask, “Am I including the right people?” or content writers to ask, “Can someone else add value here?” Make it a habit for your group by course-correcting people when they forget, and validating and rewarding when they get it right.

6. Productize service offerings

As your search and content (or other integrated) team develops all-new joint services and processes, appoint small, cross-team committees to productize those offerings. They should clearly articulate the service, define the value, identify inputs and outputs, and ballpark costs and timing. These should be simple packages that can be “pulled off the shelf” when a relevant opportunity arises. For our team, these included things like search-driven content insights to support big burst campaigns, an end-to-end e-commerce discoverability process, and a meticulous approach to website rebuilds and redesigns.

7. Recommend and report together

Integrated search and content teams should be recommending and reporting together. It sounds obvious, but it’s rarely done well. Too often, experts regurgitate data in a silo and then smash some slideware together. Instead, compile and discuss your data together to identify the story the information tells, and how clients and marketers can make decisions across channels to best optimize. Search and content practitioners should be working together to roadmap and prioritize where to focus for the biggest opportunities, rather than one channel dictating to the other or operating on independent tracks.

8. Monthly account strategy sessions

It’s easy to retire to our individual corners and get stuck in the status quo, where search and content teams don’t talk to each other. These account strategy sessions are bigger than a task list — they are a time to collaborate, share what’s happening, and talk about the future. Discuss how the brand is performing in each channel, problems the search and content experts are solving, opportunities we see, big risks or threats, and potential joint efforts, tests, or case studies. This simple meet-up model can benefit any group you’re trying to collaborate with. Establish recurring round tables between search and other departments or global regions.

Get a sample account strategy discussion guide here.

9. Build a networked team

As your teams grow in size, geography, and complexity, a “networked team” model might make sense. A networked team has central sources of truth and process (we document ours on Confluence in living wikis), but the operations and execution are decentralized. In this model you have common standards and best practices that all practitioners can draw from, but a networked team can shapeshift and adjust to deliver the work however necessary. It’s a balance of centralized control and local team empowerment.

10. Create a culture of feedback

When merging search and content teams, coaching and direct, immediate feedback greatly speeds integration. Make transparency and accountability a part of your group’s culture. This means providing feedback to each other and feedback to you. It means peer reviewing each other’s search and content work. It means scrutinizing your shared processes and ways of working. It makes the discoverability work stronger and reduces the margin for error. Creating a culture of feedback depersonalizes the feedback and makes it about the quality of the work.

11. Market collaborative successes

Marketing success can be a major driver of integration across discoverability teams. You should always look for wins (or warnings) to create case studies that demonstrate how your team is most effective together. Find meaningful wins that cross teams, and make sure your team, clients, bosses, and colleagues hear these stories. It increases buy-in, understanding, and engagement with your newly integrated group.

12. Stay close to collaborate

Who you “sit with” matters — even in a world where a majority of us are now working from home. Connect your search and content experts as much as possible. Make it easy to strike up a conversation about things they’re working on, and turn around their chairs (or turn on their video chat) and ask questions of each other. While rearranging the floorplan at the office isn’t in the cards for everyone, or if people in different cities or companies are collaborating, look for every possible opportunity for human connection. That means video chat, traveling for in-person meetings, desk drive-bys, spending part of your day parked with colleagues in their part of the office, real-time instant messaging, or phone calls. Do whatever it takes to be present and engaged with people in other disciplines as much as possible.

Integration is the future of search and content

To quote my colleague, Britt Hankins, “As individual teams, we’re experts. As an integrated practice, we’re a powerhouse.”

Creating whole, end-to-end services that have greater impact together than separately makes us more indispensable to clients who can’t imagine going back to the disjointed world of silos. Combining and evolving our search and content capabilities into one discoverability group helps us stand out from the competition.

The cultural shift can be huge, but worth it. It’s an iterative process with plenty of growing pains along the way. Even if it doesn’t make sense to reorganize or merge teams, it does make sense to break down barriers between other disciplines. These steps can help integrate search with any other department. It could be as simple as creating a competency circle around a certain type of work or client that transcends your org chart.

As time goes on, new things are created, the group and its processes mature, and the lines between them start to blur. When your new culture is established, hire and promote for the traits to sustain it, like communication, collaboration, accountability, transparency, and empathy.

There will always be bumps along the way as you integrate search with other practices like content, technology, analytics, or user experience. It can be frustrating and time-consuming up front. People won’t always agree and conflicts will happen.

But as a leader of discoverability in your organization, you can create a culture of openness, vulnerability, and feedback. You can create the expectation of iteration, evolution, and change. You can push through obstacles together and forge something entirely new.

Remember that competitive advantage comes from doing the work your competitors can’t, don’t, or won’t. Because if it were easy, everyone would do it.

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