SearchFest 2010 Mini-Interview: Matthew Brown

Matthew Brown will be speaking about “Technical SEO” 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.

1) By day, I’m Director of Search Strategy for The New York Times Company. This means I’ve got SEO responsibilities for NYTimes.com, About.com, Boston.com, and a handful of other properties. By day AND night I’m Co-Founder of Define Search Strategies, a small consulting company that is primarily focused on the publishing world, which I founded with Marshall Simmonds (a longtime industry vet). We comprise a team of four at Define that end up very busy in trying to juggle the SEO strategies of some very large web properties.

Part of the impetus behind creating Define was to give us exposure to all kinds of websites, which I think is key to keeping your SEO knives sharp. I believe it was Todd Malicoat that said that the better SEOs have a near psychic ability to analyze a site and its backlinks to predict long term rankings potential. You acquire that ability from looking at a LOT of sites and site analytics, in all sorts of categories. If you’re an in-house SEO, you should still find ways to keep a balanced SEO diet. Maybe launch an awesome Tron fan site and see if you can knock out IMDB for any meaningful queries. That’s not my site by the way, but boy do I wish it was.

2) What are some of the important metrics that you deal with regularly that non-enterprise level folks might not know about?

In the enterprise world, you sometimes have the luxury of having an analytics team that can really drill down into some of the deeper data and make meaningful observations. Things like singling out abandonment pages that aren’t obvious, or determining that the bounce rates are very different among the site’s traffic sources. I love seeing segmented data like that, that highlight how unique traffic streams can be. That can really shake off some of your broad assumptions about the audience of your site.

One advantage that enterprise sites can have is sheer volume of data, so you can actually take stock in some of the unusual metrics. I’ll admit I’m often jealous of the flexibility of non-enterprise though, especially when I see smaller site owners really killing it. There’s fewer stakeholders on small sites to keep happy, and you can make significant changes on non-enterprise sites to capitalize on the kind of data I just mentioned. In fact, I think there’s more that enterprise SEO can learn from motivated smaller sites these days, particularly from a conversion and tracking standpoint. If I could send today’s content creators and web producers to one all-day training, it would be a landing page optimization training. Maybe something by Tim Ash or Ben Jesson.

3) How successful has the effort been to educate the content creation folks at organizations like the NY Times about SEO best practices?

Oh, it’s massively successful. We never get any sort of eye rolling, and they’re glued to the Google Adwords Keyword tool everyday! Ok, for serious, it’s a mixed bag. The content creation folks that truly want to integrate SEO into their work take the training and run with it, but there still can be a shield that exists between the business side (which includes SEO and audience development) and the writers or designers. Meanwhile, rarely a day goes by without reading a ‘Death of Newspapers’ article or a handful of grim earnings reports. These two things seem at odds with each other, don’t they?

However, there’s nothing quite like the power of a journalist who integrates SEO into their process. They’ve already got their subject nailed, and likely understand the audience. So the missing piece really is the mechanics of SEO and audience development.  This path tends to be a whole hell of a lot easier than coaxing a well-written, compelling article out of an SEO. It’ll all be moot when the entire media world takes Gawker’s lead and pays on unique visitors.