SearchFest 2010 Mini-Interview: Laura Lippay

Laura Lippay will be speaking about “In-House Search Marketing” at SearchFest 2010, which will take place on March 9th at the Governor Hotel in Portland, Oregon. Tickets are available now. To purchase, please click the following link.

1) Please give me your background and tell us what you do for a living.

For anyone who hasn’t heard through Greg Boser’s SEO Vanity Contest that I was previously a Ringling Brothers performer, well then let’s just get that out of the way first.  I was not a clown or the bearded lady so please remove those images from your head immediately.  Before I got into internet marketing I was a professional in-line skater.  Not the kind that wears spandex and wiggles through big orange cones, the kind that wears Kevlar and rides a halfpipe.  I lived on a train, traveled around the country riding elephants and performing the finale act of the Ringling Brothers 1996-1998 Red Unit Tour with 12-14 other skaters, and about 300 other circus members.  That was my life before marketing.

It was after several years of broken bones and torn ligaments that I realized I should probably figure out what I really want to be when I grow up so I flipped the switch and got into the online world.  I had previously taken classes in advertising design (before I dropped out of school to skate), and post-Ringling I majored in what they called “Specialized Technology” at the time. I started off in the real world hand-coding websites and doing a lot of Flash.  I worked at a multimedia firm that we rebranded as a biotech marketing firm, and our science-minded clients always wanted data.  This is when my data obsession started.  When you’re looking at data every day you’re realizing that your Flash sites (10 years ago) aren’t getting any search engine traffic.  Hence the start of my obsession with SEO (congruent with the end of my Flash days).

I soon signed on at CNET (now part of CBS) to help them start putting together their SEO program, which is thriving today with some really great San Francisco SEOs at the wheel.  We started with tracking/reporting systems and dove right into implementation, and the engineers there were a dream to work with – a super smart bunch.

In 2006 I went to Yahoo to do the same thing, working with over a dozen of the top properties in highly competitive verticals.  I started from scratch.  We needed to work on the content management system, build out reporting, connect global constituents, train a *lot* of people and provide resources for engineers, designers, QA, biz dev, and marketers before we could even think about having SEO be a smoothly integrated part of the product lifecycle. After several years this is a running machine and some of our engineers are so well versed in SEO they could probably present at the conferences.  This would not have been possible without the freakishly awesome people who I worked closely with at Yahoo like Dave Roth, Tony Adam, Matt Hanagan, Christian Westcott, Aidan Beanland and others.  And I also have to give a lot of thanks to Marshall Simmonds, Bill Hunt and Melanie Mitchell who I’ve relentlessly badgered for tips and information along the way.  Seriously guys, thanks for dealing with my incessant questioning.  We’re still friends, right?

In 2009 I started looking at doing something similar for social media at Yahoo – laying the ground work and providing the training and resources for long term success.  We’ve moved SEO that was in my part of the company to another group and social media strategy is now my main priority. It’s ridiculously fun and reminds me of the wild west days of SEO (you thought I was going to say the circus, didn’t you) because the industry is young enough that it’s changing with every blog post and you never know what might be next.  Yahoo’s are really into it which makes it even more exciting.  Besides several social initiatives that are out there now like Yahoo Piggy Banks spouting out money-saving deals on Twitter, The GPS- and camera-enabled purple Y!Bike that we gave Yahoo friends to ride around and take pictures (and created millions of WOM impressions), Yahoo For Good’s You In? Campaign where we involved our communities in doing random acts of kindness over the holidays, and a slew of other initiatives of all shapes and sizes underway across the company, we’re also doing fun things internally like a social media book library available to Yahoos, a monthly social media newsletter, expert social media guest speakers (real ones), and holding internal “Social Socials” – Yahoo meetups around the company where we get together and share ideas over a beer.

And all along the way I’ve been working in the background on integrating SEO and social media into multi-channel marketing at Yahoo.  For example, when marketing groups at Yahoo run TV ads or radio spots with a particular slogan we need to make sure we appear in search results for the slogan. We can also incorporate that slogan into social networks, unifying our messaging across multiple channels.

2) How can an in-house SEO best convince reluctant stakeholders in an organization to help implement SEO initiatives?

Have I mentioned I’m a data addict?  Give me some statistics and I’m pretty sure I can convince you of anything.  There are different people you have to convince, and you’ll need different tools and data to do so.

In my very first meeting at Yahoo I was asked “Why should we spend time on SEO?  We have so much traffic from these other places”. I thought to myself “Are they crazy!? Everybody wants search traffic – that’s just how things work”. But they were right.  In fact I wasn’t sure whether they could actually grow their search engine traffic to measure up to to the fire hose of traffic coming from some of the largest properties on the internet.  The only way to know is to get familiar with some numbers.

In a meeting I had once with an engineer, he said to me “My boss didn’t tell me I have to do this (SEO), and I’ve got too much to do already. Sorry”.  I couldn’t argue – he was right.  The guy barely had time to give me a meeting and he had a list of responsibilities a mile long that he was held accountable for and SEO wasn’t one of them.

Although those cases weren’t the norm, they happen.  And a very large part of my job in corporate in-house SEO is to convince people from Executives to Product Managers to Designers, Biz Dev, Marketing, PR, Editors, QA and Engineers that SEO was an important part of their daily routine.  And each one in a different manner.

There are two things I can share with you on the subject of buy-in.  One is this presentation on Getting Buy-In for SEO: How to Win Over Everybody.   The other is this SEO Performance and Compliance presentation showing examples of how we show SEO performance and get compliance through a system created to track our SEO efforts *and* the efforts (or non-efforts) of the key stakeholders responsible for implementing.  

And for those of you who are facing these reluctances from coworkers on a day to day basis, here’s a little movie I made that will hopefully lighten up your hardworking SEO life for 10 minutes, called A Day In The Life of an In House SEO.  Do these sagas sound familiar to you?

It helps that we’ve had an incredible team at Yahoo who are passionate about this industry and have successfully rubbed that off on the people around them.  And if all else fails (and even if it doesn’t), take your colleagues out for a beer.  It’s amazing how much more collaboration happens afterwards.

3) What skills would an agency SEO need to develop if they wished to successfully transition to an in-house role?

I haven’t worked inside an agency before, but from working with them as vendors and seeing some of the slight differences, I would list these things as some of the top things to look out for:

• Be prepared to take responsibility for your recommendations. You don’t get to write up a document and leave. You’ll need to follow through to make sure everything is implemented, implemented correctly, set realistic expectations, and be prepared for what may or may not happen after launch.
• Develop a system of transparency to show where the ball drops when SEO isn’t fully implemented. Execs usually know that you’re responsible for SEO, but may not know that you depend on everyone else pulling their weight to make it happen.  So when they know you’re on a project but it doesn’t get great results, you’ll need to be able to easily show where the kinks in the implementation process happened.  Even better – propose solutions for fixing those kinks next time.
• Get into the process as early as possible – ideally when a project is just a concept. This way you can set the expectations for potential SEO opportunity early, as well as determine what needs to be built into the product for search traffic results. For example, when a group is considering building out content around a particular subject, see if there is enough search volume to warrant prioritizing it for SEO and/or whether there is search traffic opportunity at all.  If so, then begin spec’ing out product features that would attract more links and search traffic before wireframes even begin.  You can also get in early by watching search trends closely to determine if there are any trends with high volume searches that your company can build content around.
• Make friends with the people who you rely on to implement.  I don’t mean send a friendly email, I mean go out and have coffee or lunch (or beer) every once in a while.  You spend your entire day here 5 days a week, you might as well spend that time with friends.  It makes your 40 hours a week a lot better and you’ll find implementation happens a lot easier that way too.