International Search Summit New York 2012 Afternoon Sessions #SMXISS
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International Search Summit New York 2012 Afternoon Sessions #SMXISS

1st October 2012

The International Search Summit Afternoon Sessions included a great Case Study from Motoko Hunt for Adobe in Asia Pacific Markets, Challenges in the Middle East with Lee Mancini from Sekari, Yandex announce new features, and Don DePalma from the Common Sense Advisory discuss tools for Globalized websites and content.

Adobe: SEO In Asia Case Study – Motoko HuntAdobe

Founder and Search Marketing strategist AJPR,  Motoko Hunt talked about SEO at Adobe:

  • Adobe is shifting from agency model to inhouse SEO.
  • Manage all brands and markets in house.
  • Now there are 8 people on global SEOteam.
  • Have 30+ domains and sub domains 150+ products and services in over 90 countries.
Here are the ways Adobe organized their SEO and brought it in house and how you can do the same:

Organizational

  • Organised Adobe Search Team
  • Adobe put Organic and Paid Search under the one team so they can exchange the data, learn from one another.
  • One benefit of bringing search functionality in house is that:
  1.  they have a better communications with stakeholders, product teams, web teams
  2. they all have their goals and targets
  3. they share it with us.  We then combine with our strategies.

Be Strategic

  •  Be customer- focused through competitive and audience analysis
  • Focus on BU priorities
  • Engage closes stakeholders in regular training.

When companies use the agency model, they audit your site and give you list of actions to do.  The SEO person then has to pass this to the content writing team, web design team and so on.   This is really creating the image that SEO is creating additional work for me.  That is why people reject or do not want to pay attention to SEO.

Integrated and Data Driven

  • Begin with the end in mind on key business metrics
  • Be involved from beginning in full project life cycle
  • Align Search best practices with All Content marketing goals

Based on this… Put SEO Early and Often

  • Provide the SEO data and recommendations throughout the product and web life cycle
  • Align the metrics and segmentation used for reports with other BU
  1. Product Development/Marketing
  2. IT/Web Strategy/ Web Design
  3. Content Writing/Localisation
  4. Reporting

Comprehensive

  •  Plan ahead to stay credible
  • Capitalize on market opportunities of global + non-brand keyword optimization
  • Make sure you share the data with the team – because you changed the website, this is what has happened.

Localization

1. In- country keyword research

2. Each keyword mapped to preferred landing page

3. Content localized using keywords (content, video, images, links)

4. Reviewed by Editorial and SEO and added to Sitemaps

5. Localized and optimized content goes live

In Adobe they are lucky, they have offices in each country they do the SEO work.

 

SEO Engagement Model

motoko-seo-engagement-model

 

Center of Excellence

  •  Uniform KPIs and Tools – what to measure and why?
  • Education – eg best practice, guidelines, training, data sharing
  • Governance – common standard, policies and methodologies, uniformed technique, approach and method
  • Mentoring and Support

Prioritize Projects Using Agile Marketing

  • Scrum Methodology
  • Prioritized team projects (200+)
  • Twice weekly “stand up” meetings

Benefits

Adapatable, Collaborative, Accountable, Organized & Measurable

 

Keywords/PLPs Sharing

  • Share all this with the marketing team, PPC team, the social media team
  • It is important to share the keywords with social team
  • Share resources, this helps with internal linking

Search and Social

  • Once a company starts sharing the keywords with the social team
  • they started to optimise the content and the conversions increased.

Tools for Each Process 

Adobe use a number of tools for each element of the SEO process.

Summary:

  • Centralize and standardize the metrics, best practices and process
  • Localize for local keyword demand, local search trend, local market goals and – local calendar
  • Back up the SEO recommendations with data
  • Communicate with local stakeholders and Bus

The Challenges of The Middle East – Lee ManciniSekari

This has been covered in a previous post on State of Search.
international-search-summit-2012-middle-east-search

Getting it Right in Russia – Preston CareyYandex

RUNET – Russian InternetPreston spoke about Yandex, the search engine that is big, growing and it is going global.Big

  • In 2012 Russia became the largest internet audience in Europe.
  • Low penetration – high upside.  Only 51% penetrated
  • Russian Ad market Is booming.  It is growing at 25% a year.  And online adspend is also growing.

 

Where does this money go? (insert photo)

  •  In terms of all the different channels, paid search is growing the most, 63% a year.
  • Yandex is getting half of total online spend.
  • Google has 26% market share
  • Yandex 30% market share
  • Mail.ru and Rambler are two local providers.
  • Mail.ru mail but rambler switch search provider depending on who is paying them most money
  • Russian is the 4th largest spoken language in the world

Yandex Overview

  •  Yandex is #1 search leader – 60.5%
  • Yandex is the number 1 internet destination in Russia,  44% of Russina users’ home page
  • Leading online advertising platform
  • Largest Russian internet business (went public 2011)
  • Yandex is the largest map provider in Moscow
  • Update the maps every week due to new construction
  • Yandex’s reaches far beyond search (insert photo)
  • Yandex takes the 5th place in the world ranking of search engines
  • Yandex is also in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus
  • Turkey – first international market
  • Turkish market is the fast growing and sizeable
  • Yandex’s offers maps and map based services

This growth is because of the continuous focus on innovation.  Yandex is the Gateway to the Russian Internet.

yandexx-russian-internet

SEO for Yandex

  • Organic engine rewritten and launched as MatrixNet in November 2009
  • Most of the old advice doesn’t apply anymore
  • Machine learning based, Archetypal sites chosen as targets by Assessors
  • Makes advising on SEO v hard, Yandex don’t even know what the weights are
  •  There is no formal customer support team for SEOs
  • There is a very good webmaster tools (available in English)
  • There are also general written guidelines  to how to get included in the index

New, maps and services

  • Mobile versions on all services
  • Yandex are fully capturing the mobile audience in their Maps service
  • Yandex is focused on Maps and is on the iOS6 – new iPhone 5 or upload iOS6
  • When search in Russia, then Yandex maps on the iPhone will load
  • Yandex Market – launched the Apparel clothing and shopping.
  • They have it round music and cars as well

 

This morning, Yandex Browser was launched.  It is launched on the chromium technology. Yandex have partnership with Opera and also Kaspersky – went live today !!!

 

Want to try Yandex?

  •  Contact the international bus dev team
  • Free translation, training and initial setup
  • Local optimization and campaign feedback
  • Dedicated English speaking Account Manager in Moscow
  • Web based reporting, budgeting etc all available in English

 

SEO Tools for a Globalized Website – Don DePalmaCommon Sense Advisory

Global SEO: Who can add value?
This was a very fast paced presentation but I have written some of the most important elements from the deck.
  • We know languages – traditional translation and localization teams
  • We know marketing – Marketing, social engagement, customer care, business intelligence.
  • Localisation maturity, helping these internal groups break down the walls to other organisations.

 

What have the SEO teams been doing?

They have been:

  • Doing what you have head about all day today
  • Developing machine readable keywords and keyphrases for their domestic marketing
  • Using specialized tols

What have the translation teams been up to:

They have been:

  • Working on top level domains in the target market, sometimes with local IP addresses
  • Translating the websites that live at those addresses
  • Coordinating that translation activity with branding, marketing campaign, product literation
  • They are also helping develop the customer experience.

The important thing about this slide, not just talking about getting sometone to the site, getting them further through the customer experience level (CEL)

  • Language only for marketing and customer care.
  • To reach 80% of the world’s total online population, you need at least 12 languages.

 

Marketing and translation team sometimes have conflicting goals

Translation’s goal

  • consistency within and among various websites, owner’s manuals, and customer care to ensure findability, accuracy of results, and easy update of all related materials
  • Business requirements demand that trnalsators use the same translation memory

Marketing goal

  • Get people to the site or product
  • Stick to brand identity, marketing message, campaign etc

Assess the value of what the translation teams offer

 

Pros:

Linguistic assets

  •  language skills
  • Translation memory
  • Style guides
  • Terminology databases and glossaries
  • Transcreation awareness

Vendor management – they know who’s won

Cons:

  • Focus on just-in-case translation
  • Work on high0volume throughput
  • Emphasis on absolute quality rather than accessibility and searchability

Review the tools that translation teams

Vendor Management 

Translation memory tool

  • Translated works done before, this is source and suggested content.

 

How translation memory works

  •  TM uses a one to one pairing of source and target
  • If there are multiple matches, a translator or algorithm must select the best match

 

Why translation memory fails for keyword matches

One to one correspondences don’t work for SEO because:

  • the source (original) Language may contain a dozen relevant keywords and phrases
  • Benefit – TM is  starting point for identifying cross

 

How terminology databases work

  • Terminologist populate and mange term bases
  • Their job is to identify, categorize, manage and propagate the consistent use of terms
  • Most terminology software allows for one to many relationships (v important feature)
  • Terms can be annotated and special cases like SEO can be described in detail (eg hreflang)

There are pros and cons of terminology management

How machine translation works – or doesn’t

–       Rules based (morphological and lexical) or statistical

–       Options:

  • Raw multi tenant MT a la Google and Bing Translator
  • Trained layered tenant MY a la Bing with APO
  • Commercial solutions both in the cloud and on premises, trained to company lexicon, style guide and other assets.

Caveats:

  • Many translation professionals still look askance at MT
  • If its not trained, those professionals will be proved right
  • But ….. MT may be better than no translation

How to address these two camps

1) Develop a creative brief

  • Its function – help SEO sepcialists and tranlsaition teams understand and reflect campaign goals in their work
  • Involve the locales (language and country)

2) Develop a style guide for every locale

  •  Address SEO in a chapter or dedicated subsection

3) Research and build up SEO linguistic assets

Document the keywords in the creative briefs, style guides and terminology system

4) Work closely with the translation department

5) Tweak translaton memory and term bases

 

Translation teams bring a lot of locale expertise to the table to SEO but it must be managed correctly by the in house marketing team.

Search in Asia: Tips for Success  – Michael BonflisWebcertain US

Baidu is an organization that does things unethical sometimes but ethical in their country.  A lot of people are scared of Baidu, but if you have a good partner then do not worry.Search Marketing in China:

  • 538 million Chinese (35% growth since last year)
  • 2% in Urban East Coastal Areas
  • 800 million mobile users
  • Baidu has 78.5% market share.

 

Preparation: Translating your site into Chinese

  •  Mandarin  – China and Taiwan
  • Cantonese – Macao and HK and Guangdon/Canton provinces

HK and Taiwan use Yahoo

Written Chinese

  • Simplified chinese came out 50 years ago
  • Before it was very complicated to write Chinese
  • PinYin (taking from characters to western)
  • Use numbers to avoid confusion  – 4399.com
  • Chinese sites have lots of links, cause cant type things, do not know what looking for

Domains in China

  • PinYin URLs preferred
  • Brand.cn
  • Chinese character Limit URL (20 characters)
  • Registering Domains – hard to register this on your own
  • Hosting domains in China, big deal.  China has a big firewall, stops data getting out.  Also connectivity as a whole.  Access is difficult
  • Getting hosting in China, v hard. – need 3 primary certificates for domains, hosting and online advertising and China.

Tips on Baidu’s paid search

  •  KW research available through Phoenix Nest account
  • There is a KW research tool that Baidu provides. Best thing to do is hire expert in that market.
  • Ad title – character limits
  • Ad copy limits
  • Baidu also has site links
  • Match keywords and ads to landing pages – keep relevance
  • Website and lading pages should be tested

Organic Search

  • Title tag is most important
  • Meta description has algorithmic value
  • No non relevant keywords allowed
  • Use lots of links on home page
  • Content rich – 700 words +
  • No duplicate content (use robot text)
  • No flash/java script
  • Backlinks: quantity and quality
  • Baidu has its own webmaster tools, it is all in Chinese
  • Sitemap submission tool
  • Crawl pressure test
  • Robot tools
  • Dead link report
  • Page optimization analyser

Social media signals are also a big deal. Weibo is Chinese version of Twitter and is being incorporated in search results.

 

Ecommerce in China: Toaboa

  • Owned by Alibaba More c2c focuses
  • Like eBay – more stores than auctioneers
  • 400million plus registered users

Alipay and Union pay for payment systems in China

Naver – Organic search marketing 

  • Planning for NAver
  • Naver Agency relationship
  • Domain names and hosting
  • Paid search marketing
  • Korean and English only language
  • 3 types ad
  • Naver only has keyword groups, no campaigns, keyword type only broad type

Naver

Key to Naver is mastering content

  • Naver café/ naver blogs
  • User generated topics and blogs
  • Naver IN (knowledge Q&A)

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Written By
Jo Juliana Turnbull is the organiser of Search London and the founder of SEO Jo Blogs, which provides practical advice and tips for those in SEO.
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