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Welcome to OMReport by Andre Alpar, your interview focus
podcast on topics from online marketing to internet startups
Andre Alpar: Today's OMReport is with Matt. Matt could you
please introduce yourself.
Matt Cullen: Matt Cullen, I work at Vistaprint out of the
Boston area. I'm on their organic search team and I've
been with the company since March, and before that in-house
for a big educational travel company out of Cambridge, and
then before that I was with an agency that had a lot of
huge clients in the Fortune 500 space.
OK so you moved kind of from the agency side to the
in-house side. So what was the biggest challenge when
moving in-house? How was that different from your agency
time?
Um, now you're having to deal with, you know, the processes
of getting stuff implemented yourself. Before when you were
at the agency you gave them recommendations and then,
you know, you let them take care of it. But now in the
in-house you have to deal with, you know, creative, you
have to deal with brand, legal and then the web developers
to get things implemented.
Right, so you have to justify whether something is worth it
or more worth it or more or less important for everyone.
Exactly. And they want a dollar amount, they want to know,
is this change gonna make us this much money or how...
Things like that.
Isn't it very hard to guess for most technical SEO things.
It is. But the good thing is, you know, our country has a
history so we know if you make significant changes to a
particular page that are not search-friendly then we can
say, well...
That cost us so and so much.
Yeah I mean if you guys go through with this new design we
might not rank 3 anymore. We might be off the first page.
And we can tie a dollar amount to that.
That's kind of more like the defensive approach, right, if
they change something to a negative, but let's say you
wanna, I dunno, add something to the page that was kind of
like, you know, when is a defence situation against,
you know, something that is good already but... but I think
it's a different situation when you wanna try something new
to get to a next level and then to be able to guess that
when you don't have numbers yet...
That's true.
In those cases it's probably harder to put a dollar amount
on that.
It is, but those are the most exciting parts of being
in-house because you can, you know, create a strategy
and then you can present it to the, you know, the people
that, you know, are the ones that are making the decisions
and then you can let them know, you can educate them on all
the new algorithm changes and what we need to do going
forward. So we have to let them know that the old way is
not going to work for long. It might be working right now,
but you know in three or four months it might not be
working. So, and they understand that, I mean, that's why
they hire us, we're the experts. So, as long as we put
together, you know, a solid presentation and we can tell
them that hey, this is going to help us in the long term.
You know, we're not gonna see it right now but, you know,
the changes we make today could help us for the next two
or three years.
Right. Vistaprint is a super international company, right?
Yeah we're a...
Which countries are you serving?
I don't know the exact amount but we are all over. Yeah.
So how do you steer, I mean how do you make sure that
everybody's kind of... How do you make sure everybody does
the right thing?
Oh that's... We're very close with our EU team and our
Australian and Japan team and it's great because we're
able to educate them whereas they might be doing PPC,
social and SEO for... They're low-cal and they might not
know as much about SEO as we do cos we're specialised in
our office. So it's great for educating.
So it's like a know-how centre and then you try to spread
the know-how in subsidiaries.
Yeah. And when we do make changes we want to make them
globally. We don't just want to do one-offs and change
something on US and Canada and then have the EU sites still
on an old design, still using old tactics that don't work,
so we like to take a global approach and we're moving more
towards that every month. It's so important.
Right. So, is your experience that things can be set up...
do you... it probably would make sense to... so two
questions that I came up with... so one is... probably it
would make sense to first test one country and then,
you know, do the roll-out later cos maybe something you
figured out doesn't work as it should?
Those are tactics that, you know... I know a lot of
e-commerce companies have done stuff like that and I mean
yeah it... sometimes you do that, you take one smaller
company, you try out the tactics and whether it be PPC,
SEO, you know, you try a new design of a certain page,
a product page, checkout process and, you know, you look
at the... you do split testing, you see if the changes
worked, and if the changes worked let's send it out
globally. Let's see how it does. But that's one of the
benefits of being, you know, global. So you can afford to
do these tests without having to affect your major .com domain.
So how internationalisable are things? I mean, you know,
the characters in the different countries they differ to a
certain degree so I wonder what's your gut feeling,
you know, can every... will everything work the same in
every country? Because like, conversion optimisation... I think it strongly differs. There's countries
who are like super open to giving an email address,
others are willing to fill a whole form, others are super
defensive on that. So where do you get that variation,
because that's so hard to figure out right.
It goes so far beyond just submitting text and copy for
translation because people search differently in every
country. You know, we need to... We can't just dump things
into Google translate. People... There'll be completely
different words for the same products in other countries
and, you know, we're set to make sure we have the best
translation teams there and they have to let us know,
you know, their keyword research, because that's why we
have SEOs in these other countries because we can't be
responsible. We know what works in the US but that doesn't
mean they're gonna work over there. I mean I worked on
Huggies many years ago, and over in the UK they
call them... what do they call them... they don't call them
diapers, they call them... nappies! They call them nappies.
That's cute.
You know so... you can't just go into the UK with your USA
approach because there, you know, nappies has a higher
search volume than some of these more standard terms that
the US customers are searching for.
Is there other things that you remember from your time
working for that or other clients that differ from the UK
and the US? Like, besides just the pure keywords when it
comes to, I don't know... are there things that...
Well, brands altogether. Like Arial I think was some sort
of dishwashing, some sort of cleaning product and,
you know, Arial did not even exist in the USA so we had
to have unique campaigns for Arial altogether whereas
certain things like Tide and other major brands, you know,
they cross over into all the countries. But certain
countries have specific brands, you know, with
Proctor and Gamble or Kimberley Clark... And if those
brands have been around for so long that they can't drop
it and tie it into the USA equivalent it's just not gonna
work cos they have such a footprint in the supermarkets.
Right. Would content marketing or like content creation or
off-page optimisation... would that differ in the different
countries or is that... are those approaches internationalisable from your point of view?
>From what I've seen is, you know, different countries are
more accepting of, you know, link outreach and, you know,
guest blogging which people are getting away from now, but
yeah I've seen that over the years that it's very different
when you're trying to acquire and market to other
countries. That's why you need team on location. You can't
do everything out of the USA office.
Right. Is there probably something that always pops up on
your mind when you... that was kind of a unique thing for
you that came up in one country that you thought, wow
that's different? That you could probably share?
I'm trying to think of some of the ones that... I mean
I know the differences with, you know, diapers and Arial,
those really stick out. I can't really think of anything
other than those, or stuff that I can speak of at
Vistaprint right now but... yeah, there's just... there are
constant challenges and what's great is having the teams in
local locale so we're videoconferencing with them
constantly and we're sharing our tactics and figuring out
ways that they can implement it on their end.
How are your experiences with href lang in general?
Um well...
Have you been able to experiment with that already?
Oh yeah definitely. Several country codes, we have so many
different countries that we serve, so we just need to...
Also several countries that share the same language, right?
Yes. Yes. It's like, you know, Canada, there's UK, so yeah
I mean we just try to do the best practices that Google wants.
Right. Do you see them like really taking effect? Because
my observations so far are that sometimes it seems like a
rather weak signal and it's not as strong as one would hope
it is.
Yeah it is.
So I hope they're gonna tighten up that a few notches up.
The thing is that Google's getting so much smarter when it
comes to that, that even if you don't have the href lang
tag, they're on top of it. You know, they're... Whereas
before if you didn't have those tags and you had different
countries with similar content that were in the same
language you can get dinged for that but now they realise,
you know, your co.uk and your .com might have the same
content, you might not have a href lang tag in there but
they understand that that's the best customer experience.
And that's what it comes down to, it's the customer
experience. As long as you're not trying to deceive and
you're not trying to be evil then, you know, usually
they'll give you the benefit of the doubt. Especially I
think it helps with bigger corporations too, you know,
if you...
Because they are a huge brand themselves already.
Yeah I mean, you already have a footprint in a certain
country and if you have a footprint in another country
then, you know, they'll understand that content's gonna be
similar but you know, they're serving a different audience
so...
So you mentioned you've been working in the education space
before, right. Did I get that?
The educational space?
Yeah.
I mean I've done some educational seminars at...
No, no, I like... What was the job you did before?
Oh, oh! I worked at Educational Travel. For EF Educational.
OK they do those kind of like language travel things.
Yeah they specialise in sending you know, high school
groups, you know, a teacher will get her class of
20 people to go...
That's also quite an international company I know like,
it is in Germany too.
Oh yeah. I think EF has over 30,000 employees worldwide.
Wow. So...
They have language schools, they have the travel programmes
and then they have the tour directors and 24 hour support
in each place that we travel, and I think... I mean, I'm
just throwing this number out there, I think we have
over... 'we'... they have over 350 tours. So that means
they have a presence all over the country. All over the
world.
That was also quite an international setup. Did you steer
like just the US or the whole international team? What was
your role in it?
My role... I was responsible for multiple websites because
we have EF college study tours, we had EF tours which was
the high school, we have one for Girl Scouts and then also
we had a Canada site.
So like different brands in the US.
Yeah different brands.
So what was special to work with that kind of topic?
Because it's something where I would think it's really easy
to get links, you just go to all the schools...
It's not that easy.
And they'll be happy to link and then you give them,
I dunno...
The thing is that the majority of their business was
high school, and the high schools aren't gonna have
the .ed links as much as the colleges are.
Right! But the high schools are still a little bit with
website and there's a lot of them, there's just like huge
potential to tap into.
There are. There is. And, you know, the thing is that a
teacher might have a trip that they run every year but the
school doesn't want links back to EF because there are
other companies that do it and there could be other
teachers in that school that are travelling with other
companies so, you know, it's kind of a push and pull.
So if they were doing it they would probably link all
of the vendors.
Yeah they could do that. Yeah. But... one of the issues at
EF was cannibalisation because they have...
The different brands that target different keywords.
Yeah exactly, we had EF college study tours, which was
more educational-focused, but then we also had EF college
break which was more 'Let's just go on a fun trip'.
That's kind of hard to distinguish. The names are so close,
so similar.
I know!
And I understand from a marketing perspective you could say
'OK I'm gonna have this main brand and these sub-brands',
but then again when you go for search terms, how do they
differ? They probably overlap like 90%.
Yeah it was easy in print, I mean you're sending books out
to schools and you can clearly see one's just for fun and
one's educational experience, you know, possible credits or
whatever... But the problem is...
How do you translate that to SEO?
That was the biggest push and pull, because each one wanted
to be first for college travel, for you know, college
educational travel, university...
It might be the smartest thing to have like one main brand
that you work with and then once people land then you show
them like in print 'OK what are you exactly looking for'
and then distribute from there?
Yeah I mean they did that with PPC. It's much easier that
way because they click on an add and it's like 'oh OK,
which one are you looking for?' And then you go there.
So it's similar to SEO when it comes to... Just the
keyword strategy...
Yeah, yeah...
Or is it like the landing pages? But on the other hand,
I mean, on the one hand is, you know, you have some pages
that distribute, on the other hand you could say 'wow you
have 5 domains so you can take, you know, more of the
equity of the 10 organic results that are there. So how
did it work out? How do you make it a happy end?
Well I haven't been there for, you know, over a... about a
year now, but with Hummingbird coming out, maybe that will
help them out, you know, when people are actually using
conversational search terms I think that could help lead
them into the right direction, you know, if it's gonna be
educational travel or if it's gonna be, you know, college
break travel, you know, those college terms, if they ask
two or three questions in a row to Google maybe they're
going to end up at the one that we want them to end up at,
what EF wants them to end up at.
But you couldn't convince... So what...
It was hard.
Were you pushing for like a strategy where you go with all
domains for the keywords and then just see which ends up
first? Or were you pushing for a strategy where you have
like, let's say, accumulating landing page that then
distributes among the different brands? What was your kind
of favourite? Whatever the company did... I guess one can
look up what the company did because you just...
Yeah you can see, I mean you can go to search for EF Tours
or just EF.com and you can see the different properties.
Yeah but the thing is they've had these properties for so
long and, you know, I haven't been there, so maybe they are
in a process of consolidating into one strong domain just
on EF and then having...
Sub-folder.
That was one of the things that I thought would be cool.
You know, you have EF.com slash college travel or college
study or, you know, whatever it is, Girl Scouts...
And then when the keywords are slightly indifferent you
could distribute from there like you would have in a...
Yeah. It would be much easier if they were all in the same
domain. Yeah I mean these changes would take so long to
implement, you know, based on the CMS that they have and
everyone that needs to approve it, but I think in the long
term that could be a big win. You'd see a dip at the
beginning because people might have a hard time
following it...
Or a huge kick.
Yeah, um, possibly.
You could argue both. Because if you bring the link equity
of all of them together in one domain probably you'd see a
huge lift.
Yeah I mean, sometimes it takes a long time for the 301s to
kick over, but I think in the long term that could work out
for them.
Probably it was not so easy to resemble on the website the
organisational structure that a company might have so,
you know, it's easier to steer on different domains that...
there's different responsibilities, in that case
probably... like probably, yeah. It makes it less
attractive for the organisation even though from an SEO
perspective it would be better.
Yeah, it's a very competitive space so you don't wanna
shoot yourself in the foot by making a knee-jerk reaction
and, you know, either emulating a competitor or starting
something totally new, especially during peak seasons,
so it's all about timing.
Right. Thanks so much for the interview.
Hey! Thanks for having me. It was fun!
Thanks.
You can get more episodes on www.omreport.com