The 4 key barriers to effective SEO

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1 Is SEO just a pipedream? June

2 Why is SEO success so elusive? Be honest, how many SEO (Search Engine Optimization) agencies, consultants and assorted Gurus have walked through the halls of your company? Not just the ones that have appeared since you got there, what about your predecessors? How many did they see? This begs the question, why is SEO still not done? How come you still experience an endless waiting game for things like recommendations, changes, report and results? Why is it that SEO is never top of other people s priority list? How come you still experience an endless waiting game for things like recommendations, changes, report and results? Why is it that SEO is never top of other people s priority? The fact is, SEO is complicated and at times tedious: Working with reams of spreadsheets Assessing tons of analytical data Producing loads of reports and recommendations You are not in control of the process because: You need to get IT to implement the changes and agree to implement your recommendations and of course they ll just drop everything to work on your platform! You find yourself having to constantly compromise: Chopping your recommendations back a bit Trying to prioritise the Quick Wins Never able to move at the pace you want to as changes are debated and drip fed into the business over a month period. Suddenly SEO doesn t feel like a dynamic, constantly changing, business growth activity anymore! 2

3 SEO challenges are considerable No one doubts that visibility in search is a big opportunity. Marketing and ecommerce practitioners have been plying SEO for years, trying to make it a reliable and scalable driver of revenue to the bottom line. The trouble is SEO for retail, travel and indeed any site with 000 s of categorised products, is a huge undertaking. Without a rapid way to discern SEO needs and make it happen, SEOs and marketers will struggle to deliver demonstrable and directly attributable business benefit. The 4 main factors that delay, derail and diminish SEO return are: The scale of the job Lack of available resources and the pace of organisational change Rapidity and frequency of movement in the market (trend / stock / seasons) Difficulty of tracking and attributing Return on Investment 3

4 BARRIER 1 The Scale is in the tail Despite their ingenuity, SEOs don t scale very well. Just ask your paid search team how many keywords they target, and then ask your SEO team or agency the same question. The answer will probably vary between a factor of The reason for this is your keyword opportunity in search is buried in over a long tail of tens and even hundreds of thousands of products and thousands of categories. Consequently huge numbers of pages and keywords need to be optimized. To manage this volume effectively you need to scale your SEO with the same speed, control and power you have in paid search. Most SEOs still operate in the same way as they did in 2004 so volume of this scale poses a real problem. High Cost & Competition (000,000 s) The Long Tail of SEO 1 Word Phrases boots Normally - it s still a case of consultants reviewing sites, recommending cookie cut best practices that everyone has been doing to death for years. Seeking quick wins by keeping their efforts to the top 20, 50 or even a few hundred keywords. All to deliver small incremental changes that barely move the needle. Low Cost & Risk (0 s) Head Terms Shoulder Terms Low Probability Of Conversion 2-3 Word Phrases womens boots More Descriptive black wedge ankle boots Long Tail High Probability Of Conversion If you are lucky - you may have a few talented and hungry SEOs but their efforts are dwarfed by the scale of the job in front of them. They invariably have to fight their way through thousands of small opportunities manually, in the face of a constantly shifting site, continual technical issues, slow change processes, and a rapidly moving market. For most, SEO remains an almost endless task that even the best resourced SEO teams will struggle with for months and even years. 4

5 BARRIER 2 Limited resources means SEO is very slow burn The majority of SEO recommendations invariably require a mix of editors and developers to implement the necessary changes. Unfortunately, SEO is not their only priority. Changes are fed through and pondered by technical teams who are far removed from the marketing objective. Eventually some changes are committed to, and allowed into a roadmap already packed with competing priorities, bugs and change requests from an overloaded ecommerce team. Somewhere in the mix, SEO changes have to be prioritised, this typically sees them diluted in terms of urgency, scale and impact as they are drip fed over a course of months and even years. Some SEO changes will materialise up to 6-18 months later, only to find that things have moved on with few people even remembering why these changes were made in the first place. Meantime the next raft of changes, bugs, patches, features and technology improvements arrive, and everyone continues to fret about why they re investing money in SEO. Does this sound familiar? Clearly something needs to change if SEO is ever going to become a major contributor to the bottom line. 5

6 BARRIER 3 SEO s a moving target Change is continuous in business - there are shifting sales priorities, product demands that change with the seasons and new trends that continually emerge, peak and then dissipate. Somewhere in all that hubbub, your limited SEO efforts will need continual re-focusing to ensure they are driving the most financial return for effort expended. For example, optimizing your website for jackets, jumpers, the must-have seasons toys or skiing holidays, will be a sure fire winner in October. As May emerges, demand shifts, customers are shopping for swimwear and summer dresses, Turkey is now the trending destination of choice, and there s a brand-new style of shorts that every customer is searching for. Toys meanwhile are at a static low point. Against this background it s clear SEO priorities need to be re-evaluated to ensure the site ranks across the areas where demand and sales are growing and emerging, not declining and plateauing. Meantime it s been 6 months and you still haven t got the last round of SEO recommendations implemented. Which takes us right back to problems 1 and 2, the sheer scale of the job and the lack of available resources. 6 6

7 BARRIER 4 SEO is often difficult to track and even harder to show demonstrable business impact Falling outside the tracking methods of conventional media, SEO contribution has to be extracted from analytics before it can be inserted into line by ROI reports line-by-line.. This disjointed analytics approach means SEO is often not tracked as clearly as other media contributions. This makes it difficult for marketers to see, justify and manage their investments in SEO to grow sales as they would with conventional media. Overcome these problems and you multiply your SEO revenue because SEO impact becomes much easier to see and manage. You could be entirely forgiven for wondering whether the juice is really worth the squeeze. To be honest if you knew how painful and fruitless SEO was going to be beforehand, you probably would have saved the 000s you d spent on your SEO agency and spent it on some exciting new technology instead. 7 7

8 The good news is, there is another way If you could raise the rankings for every possible category, facet, sub facet and product oriented keyword, the collective impact on visibility to the searching audience would be substantial, scaling growth in revenue right across the entire range and scope of the business. This could be tweaked and refined further to ensure that items that are in greatest demand, most likely to increase conversion rates and deliver the most revenue when they convert, are always prioritised. And as the markets, seasons and customer trends shift, these items are re-prioritised. This turns SEO from a channel that merely delivers traffic into a channel that is proactive and opportunistic in growing incremental revenue. OneHydra is a cloud-based Ecommerce platform that grows online revenue by aligning your website to match the products that customers are searching for. Enterprise-class automation technology analyses the language customers are using to search for products in search engines and adapts your site to deliver highly relevant content to them helping you find new customers, while delivering them a better, more relevant experience. While the focus of OneHydra is SEO, our solution adapts the overall website structure, merchandising and content, to the specific needs of each customer. The result is a 15%-25% lift in natural, non-brand search traffic, improved conversion rates and increased revenue growth, from practically the moment it s implemented. OneHydra integrates directly into your ecommerce and analytics platforms to continuously deliver and implement site-wide improvements, while providing you with complete control over your pages and keywords. 8

9 The SEO of choice for leading internet retailers Debenhams, Dixons, River Island and Superdry already trust OneHydra to drive more qualified traffic, conversions and revenue. NOW IS THE TIME TO ACT At last you can genuinely harness the full power of SEO and reap the commensurate financial rewards. Alternatively you could go back to shouting at your agency, and paying them thousands of pounds to focus on link building for a few head end keywords, and continue with the struggle to justify your expenditure each month. If you would like to explore further your ability to grow your natural search visitor volumes through automating your SEO strategies to drive real accountable and measurable SEO, please do get in touch. For more information Visit: info@onehydra.com Call: +(44) OneHydra, The Varnish Works, 3 Bravingtons Walk, Kings Cross, London, N1 9AJ 9