Enterprise SEO success case studies. How to be a successful SEO in a large company. Includes case studies and key takeaways anyone can use. Tools explained: SearchMetrics, ScreamingFrog, Splunk. This was presented at SMX West 2014

1. Follow @5le
SEO Success Case Studies
SMX West 2014
Presented by: Eli Schwartz
Online Marketing Manager, SurveyMonkey

2. Eli Schwartz SEO @ SurveyMonkey

3. Small Company

4. Enterprise

5. Learn Other Disciplines
Other resources
• Google Analytics  Avinash Kaushik
• SEO  Moz, SearchEngineLand
• PPC  PPC Hero Blog
• Landing page optimization  Tim Ash
• Social  Read Twitter
• Email Blogs from: MailChimp, ConstantContact
• Display Yahoo
• Web development  CodeAcademy, community college
TAKE ADVANTAGE

6. Developers/Engineers/Coders
• Understand the
technical
difficulty of a
project
• Getting a project
scheduled is
always a win!
• Obtain buy-in by
sharing the
ownership with
a tech
stakeholder

7. Negotiate

8. Communicate International Considerations
Bureaucracy
Add world holidays
to a shared
calendar
Include delays in
your timeline

9. Own (or Understand) Global Translations

10. Evangelize Your Job Function
• Lunch and Learn
• Daily standups
• Team presentations
• Monthly updates
• Emails about interesting events
• Conversion/Revenue
• Traffic
• Engagement
• Email open rates
• Use data as win/win
• Share successes
• Always thank all of those that assist
you

11. Case Studies

12. Which Social Networks Matter?

13. Google Plus Crawl Test
• New content URL never before seen by Google
• Shared via Google Plus
• Googlebot arrived in just 6 seconds
• Proof that Google Plus has non-social benefits

14. Google Plus Update Feb 2014
• Same test as previous September
• Shared via Google Plus
• Googlebot arrived in 12 hours
• Proof that Google Plus has non social benefits, but Google….?

15. Testing 404 Pages
• SurveyMonkey blog is a subfolder
• Inserted links into 404 page to test:
• Nofollows, anchor text, 404 page crawlability and crawl frequency
• Developed data that influenced product, engineering, and content projects

16. Meta Descriptions = Adwords Ad Copy
• Used
Adwords to
test CTR on
meta
description
snippets
• Allowed
Google to
optimize test
ad copy vs
control to
develop
optimum
organic
snippets

17. PPC/SEO Research to Name Products
• Library of survey
template
questions called
“QuestionBank”
currently has no
search volume
• Used SEO/PPC
data to come up
with search
volumes on
related queries
to develop new
naming
possibilities

18. Email/CRM Data
VS
• Promoted the use of YouTube vs Vimeo in engagement emails to overcome the
“chicken and egg” problem on YouTube
• Win for Social & CRM
• Quickly able to measure impact on landing pages by sending CRM traffic

19. SurveyMonkey Mobile App
Mobile App launched in
Feb 2014
• Keyword research
• Blog posts
• PR
• Paid marketing
• SEO

20. Tools (Daily Favorites)

21. Splunk

22. Log File Analysis with Splunk
• Discover Google crawl activity
• Browser errors
• Redirects
• IP addresses of traffic
• Anything you can see in Google Analytics
Alternatives:
• Fluentd
• Excel
• Text files

23. Searchmetrics

24. Competitive Research
Alternatives:
SEMrush

25. Screaming Frog
http://bit.ly/scfrog
Optimum
settings

26. Site Crawling with ScreamingFrog
• Discover orphaned pages
• Find multiple redirects
• Compare canonicals
• Look for broken links
• Check index status of specific pages
• Build sitemaps
• Pre-test landing page URL’s for redirects
Alternatives
• Xenu link sleuth
• Moz
• Build you own

27. Google Suggest via UberSuggest

28. Research Benefits from UberSuggest
• Discover words people are actually typing
• Keyword stem ideas
• Quickly build lists
Alternatives
• Brainstorm
• Manual Google research
• Various keyword tools + Excel

29. Facebook Interest Relationships

30. Understand How Google Views Keywords
Word has never
been used; yet, still
ranks

31. …And How Google Categorizes Keywords
Design
Recipe
Book
Brand

32. 3 Things You Need to Know
1.Forget about short term and
negotiate your way to long term
wins
2.Learn what you can about
marketing disciplines you do not
know
3.Test and explore everything

33. Thank you!
Eli Schwartz, SurveyMonkey
elis@surveymonkey.com