5 SEO Lessons from Mad Men

As a new series of the consistently excellent Mad Men kicks off its fourth series in the US, I thought it would be a good time to reflect on a few advertising rules from the gurus at Sterling Cooper that can equally be applied to SEO.

Rule #5: “If you don’t like what’s being said, change the conversation”

Reputation management can be a key part of an SEO’s job, especially as clients learn that Google is their new home page. So how do you deal with negative search results appearing for your brand name?

  • Change the conversation – Dell are a fantastic example of this; after the “Dell Hell” episode, Dell turned around their customer support, and with the IdeaStorm website actively showed their customers they were listening. There aren’t a lot of large companies that have the ability or will to turn that kind of thing around.

In SEO there are also a few other bits we can do to address reputation issues:

  • Change Suppress the conversation – just because an isolated voice has a grudge against your company, that doesn’t mean it’s justified. What about the hundreds of satisfied customers who’ve given you testimonials? By its nature, negative press gets more traction than positive press – a bit of link building towards positive reviews can help give your satisfied customers a voice. Of course if you don’t have any satisfied customers, that’s a different story entirely ;)
  • Change Influence the conversation – imagine you’re Microsoft and have just launched a flagship gaming console. People are searching for [xbox reviews] but the first thing Google Suggest throws up is “xbox repair” and “xbox red ring of death”. Search volumes are said to influence the suggestions box, and we know ATL advertising can have a significant effect on search volumes. For a large company like Microsoft, it’s possible a co-ordinated ATL campaign could influence searcher behaviour, if not to remove the RROD suggestion, at least push it down a bit. How about releasing a red Xbox and promoting that; phrases such as [xbox red], [xbox red 120gb], etc may start to populate the suggestions box. This example’s rather far fetched but I think it’s a valid point.

    • It's notoriously difficult to affect Google Suggest, but a creative ATL campaign may insert new suggestions

  • Change Buy the conversation – a dangerous road to go down, in that you’re rewarding your critics, but if there’s a result from a poisonous blog that just won’t budge in the SERPs, approaching them with an offer to buy the site may help remove them. Read More…

Show referring keywords from Google Base

Google’s Product search is lumped into organic referrals in Google Analytics if you don’t use tracking parameters, which can distort the level of true natural search volume you see in any web analytics package.

A typical solution shown on some websites is to add ‘utm_’ tracking variables such as http://example.com/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=products to the URL, which correctly identifies the traffic as being from Google Product search (whether it’s the actual shopping search or a Google onebox). However this solution sacrifices the referring keyword data, and just shows the site as a referring website.

The simple solution to this is to change the utm_medium parameter to ‘organic’ (and the utm_source to ‘googlebase’ or similar), which Google Analytics then treats as a normal organic search engine, and accordingly reports the referring keyword :)

Update: Tripleox correctly pointed out on twitter that you can still get keyword data with the first method by going to Traffic Sources -> google / products and use the dimensions drop-down menu to select keywords.

Rudimentary Sitemap Generator

There are tons of XML Sitemap Generators out there on the web already, so why would anyone need another one? Well, one of the points of sitemaps is to give search engines a helping hand when they’re crawling and indexing your website.

Stop to think for a second about how these sitemap generator sites actually generate your sitemap. They crawl your site, and produce a nice looking sitemap file. Okay, but how the heck are these sites going to give any extra information to major search engines like Google who have the most advanced crawlers on earth?

The answer is they’re not, which is where the Perl script below comes in. It’s an extremely basic building block which simply accepts a text list of URLs (from “urls.txt”) and throws out an XML Sitemap file containing those URLs.

So how do you get the list of URLs, and what advantage does it hold over a third party generator? You can get the URLs by using your own spider or an off-the-shelf solution like Sphider; the benefit of this is you can specify crawling rules which exclude pages which you don’t want to be indexed or that have no value for search engines.
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Simple meta data bot in Perl

I needed to grab the page titles and meta descriptions for a bunch of specific URLs recently and knocked up a quick Perl script to do the hard work for me. Just run the script below from the command line, and paste the URLs you need into a file called ‘urls.txt’ placed in the same folder:
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Google: Sesame Street more important than Berlin Wall

Judging by Google’s doodles today, Sesame Street’s 40th Anniversary is more important than the 20th Anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall – at least in the UK (Google Germany seems to have its priorities right). Hmmm.

Google UK:

google-uk

Google Germany (better logo anyway IMO):

google-de



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