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Welcome to OMReport by Andre Alpar, your interview-focused podcast
on topics from online marketing to internet start-ups.
>>> Andre: Adam, so great to have you. Can you please introduce yourself.
>>> Adam: It's great to be here, thank you. My name is Adam Audette and I am the Chief
Knowledge Officer at RKG. And RKG is a digital marketing company
So Chief Knowledge Officer would mean you understand
your ways even beyond SEO. Is that true or is that ---
like a cooler title Well, I 'm supposed to.
Or is that just a cooler title?
It's kind of a cooler title. I've always been a fan of the continuum data,
information, knowledge and wisdom.
And something my dad taught me, and Google sometimes talks about.
I don't think I can ever work professionally over in the wisdom part,
but I can work in the knowledge part.
You have twice the years of experience probably you can
Maybe so. Maybe I'll be the Chief Wisdom Officer.
You know, I want take data and get information out of it
and deliver knowledge strategically to our clients and to our team.
It seems to be like kind of a trademark of yours
to be like more on the technical side of SEO. I think it's the most technical presentation
I've ever seen in the States -- yours, I mean.
Cool. That's great to hear.
Is that not the case? You worked mostly in positions like that.
Yes, I am very experienced in technical SEO. And the reason is
I kind of cut my teeth in SEO in e-commerce, working with companies like Zappos
and you have to be very technical to get stuff done
and understand how like kind of move things and move the needle for those sites so,
and I am also very passionate about the technical work.
You know that said, it's just one piece and you need good content
and you need links and social and you know all
that other stuff too, but
what we've found is that the great thing about technical SEO
is that it is very reliable, you know, it may not be the most high-impact
thing but it's something very dependable and
that we can typically move the needle on sites.
It is sometimes hard to argue with technical SEOs
especially when you're coming to something that you haven't work on before,
when you are like cleaning up the mess and then they ask you,
"what's the revenue we get out of the cleaning?" That's kind of hard to state.
How do you deal with that?
It is hard especially because a lot of times with SEO
it's not a single kind of magic silver bullet, it's a bunch of stuff that adds up to perform
its lift. I like putting projections on work and
kind of justifying the work with that, but typically we'll save that for
stuff that I know is going to be an impact of 15 or 20 percent
or something like that and then look at the URLs that a SEO recommendation
or set of recommendations will impact and then try to calculate an ROI that way.
Okay. I'll jump to something that I still remember from your presentation.
You were mentioning pagination and that you really love to use the rel="next"
and rel="prev" on that and you also said,
specifically that one wouldn't need on pages. Like on the first pages clearly you put an
index and on pages 2, 3, 4 and so on.
You would not need to put a "noindex-follow" in the robots there. That, I didn't understand
actually. I would have done it differently, so I was
wondering: why?
So, when rel="prev" first came out and it was a new tool and it still is relatively
new, but when it first came out,
we said "Oh", Google explained that if you annotate with "rel-prev-next"
that Google can still fire page, say, 10, page 12, page 7 in a search result
if it's relevant for the query, and we said, "uuuh, we don't want that,
we really want page 1 to be the ranking candidate always,
forever, so we're gonna no index follow all the deeper
stuff." But what we've found in our test is
that with "rel-next-prev", that we are not seeing that deeper pages fire,
and sure they could, but we are not seeing those surface in search.
So I think they are figuring it out anyways.
They seem to be doing a really good job of figuring out that
series and kind of putting it all together into one family.
But if you put in the rel="next-prev" and you had the no index,
would you switch it back to index? Just to put it,
just to make sure that the two concepts are not interfering or something like that?
They are independent signals, so rel="canonical", rel="prev-next" and noindex
could all be used together. I...you know what I would do?
I would remove it only if the data showed that
it would be a good idea try to something new and test something.
But if it's working and "no index" is on those pages with rel="prev",
I would leave it, if it's working.
Another thing I still remember from your presentation --
you see I was I awake and listening...
Taking notes? Alright!
I don't have notes.
Mental notes?
Mental notes. Exactly. I have a lot of those. You were mentioning that at one e-commerce
shop you were using products that are not available
anymore and you would try to index them via
a separate html site-map. That's how I would interpret what I've seen
- probably I didn't get right,
it was like some dead products. And you said that didn't work out and you
said that basically you had those old products in the
index and you would just, on the products,
you would suggest what other products would be similar.
That's right.
So why did that not work out?
We thought that ...
What was the mistake on it?
We had all these expiring products that were never gonna come back,
let just keep them up and let's put a nice recommendation engine
on there to say "hey, we may not have this product but
you may be interested in these other products." Seemed like a good idea.
It really didn't work.
What about it didn't work?
It didn't drive any revenue. And either it was because...
Probably the single products weren't ranking all,
you were just mistaking your data.
Possibly. No, I think we had our data pretty dialled.
It was a case where, you know, it was just, there weren't enough
expired and gone products for that strategy to work.
I think for that strategy to work you need to do it at scale
and you need to have tens of thousands of expired,
out-of-stock items and you also need really closely related recommendations.
But in an e-commerce set-up, that would usually be like
categories or filters that would match somehow products,
you know. You could filter broader and broader,
if you don't have enough products, you make up something like that
something from the same brand...
Yeah, you could and that's where your conversion hurts
because as you start to widen that and you put more and more products on there,
you start to lose that relevance. Because they are
looking for one green widget and now you are saying,
"oh, but we also have these yellow boxes" You know what I'm saying?
You start to lose that relevance and that's where it hurts.
So do you think, the average quality perception of your website
may be becoming worse because of those dead products?
We had low conversions on those pages and they didn't drive revenue.
I still think that's a valid approach.
Do you take them out of the index?
No, they are still out there, but there are no researchers put to them.
They are dead products that are dying.
Are they then growing? Because there are more and more of them?
No. No. They are not being updated.
So you just did once like a bump and then didn't build like a continuous system?
I think, we did it for about six months and, you know, maybe over 20,000 products
were probably on there and that's about big as it got.
You mentioned you did Zappos. I remember I've seen somebody somewhere else
who also said he did Zappos for nearly ten years.
That wasn't you, though?
I was probably me. I started at Zappos in 2001.
No, he did something really really spammy. It must be something different.
There was like this product comparison thing that was like ...
Oh, the Product Showdown or Smack Down?
That's rather spammy.
It's genius. That's Aaron Shear who is my good friend
and worked with me at Zappos for a few years.
I'm sorry, I didn't say spammy.
No, it's --- you could call it aggressive. It's aggressive.
Basically what the Product Showdown was, he would take -- and this is a really interesting
idea -- he would take two products that weren't related
at all and he would surface that product,
the image and the description of it, and the user reviews there.
He put it versus this other product and then just generate those ---
It was a game you could choose one that you want to win the battle
and those links into ---
It's just like 'Hot or Not' but with products.
That's how I would describe it in a really really short way.
That's right, yeah. So a really interesting idea to leverage this
- so the idea was Amazon had done some research way back
on putting highly unlikely content together to get it to rank better
because it's stuff that Google has never seen before
in the world of the internet. But this is the kind of idea that Aaron can
bring. He's a brilliant SEO.
You were consulting him and he was consulting parallel?
Yeah, we worked together. I was the SEO manager as a consultant
so I really had an in-house role at Zappos for several years
and Aaron came in. He has great depth experience in e-commerce.
He did a lot with shopping.com back in the day
and he worked at Inktomi before that, so we brought him in as a hired gun.
Ok, I understood.
So, you were also talking about mobile SEO during your presentation.
When you look at the different opportunities, there are three different options that Google
tells us are okay. What would you say, are like
the advantages and disadvantages of the different options?
Because one that always comes to the top of my mind -
we've just move our agency website and we switched it to
responsive design because it's so 'En Vogue'. You want to do it also, because we suggest
it to clients and then I figured out, okay,
maybe it sucks for mobile because the html-file is still huge and
maybe it would be cooler to have like a really slim mobile version
and then do the alternate and canonical thing.
Yeah, really fast, yeah.
What other options ?
You know, I think the thing with responsive is that everyone's talking about it. It's
the cool thing and Google is pushing it pretty hard as "Hey!
This is our ---
--- it's the dominant solution.
--- our dominant solution. But we have these other two, you know.
You really have three valid choices. Responsive, to me, the weakness in it
is you've got one set of html. So, to your point,
you're going to have larger page-size for your mobile,
but you also have the same content. Basically, it's just going to be resorted.
And a lot of companies, take an insurance company for example,
they probably want to a different mobile experience than desktop experience because they see those
user experiences as different and user behaviour as different.
So you lose the opportunity to capture somebody on a mobile
or on a tablet device if you're using responsive in some ways.
So is there like your favourite solution of those three?
I still think honestly the m.dot-subdomain is a great way to go.
It's simple, it's well understood, it's well supported with the switch-board-tags.
And you can still get all of the advantages of
a unique experience on mobile and really fast on mobile, too.
The other thing with it - one of the attendees in our session actually
asked this question is Google says that are some,
at least some of their ranking factors in mobile
are going to be mobile specific. So if you're doing responsive and you have
the same html as desktop, are you losing opportunity to rank for "mobile
specific", you know, stuff?
All I can say is that with Google pushing responsive
as hard as they are, they must have that figured it out in some
way.
How are your experiences with rel="canonical" ?
No, sorry, with "hreflang", using it?
Do you have robust experience with that? Does it have problems?
Does it interfere with any of the other concepts in your experience?
It doesn't interfere -It's very complicated.
When it first came out, we started doing testing with it right away,
and this was before they supported putting it in XML.
And it was a nightmare! You had to put all these hreflang-tags on
all of your pages. As far as international, it works very well
to set up the signals and kind of give that local
signal to Google. You can use it along with GWT Region Targeting,
and a good subdomain-strategy or TLD-strategy,
whatever you're doing. It's nice to have another tool.
It's not a cure all for international and there's still a lot of stuff that happens.
There are still like technical hiccups, some of them related to ''hreflang'' and wrong
implementation, so a lot of times we will see it implemented
but it won't line up correctly.
So what do you think? Let's say if I have a US-website
and then I want to have a UK-subsidiary and I set up duplicate content over there,
implement the ''hreflang'' correctly and then my UK website
will be ranking for the people searching from the UK
because it does a search in their place. So instead of the .com, probably the co.uk,
or the corresponding subdomain will be ranking. The subdomain
sorry, the new the local top-level-domain
it will be generating user signals as like click through rate,
bounce rate and so on and so on. Do you think those will be attributed
to the dot-com or to the uk-domain?
I think part of what ''hreflang'' is supposed to do is
- sort of like rel=''prev-next'' - is consolidate those signals.
So that the -- you know, in your example -- the co.uk is
inheriting some sort of ranking signal and somewhere,
maybe it's being shared across all of them. But it's a signal that is associated with
that specific region and,
you know, this is one of the subtleties of this
and part of why I like rel=''prev-next'' and ''hreflang'' is that they are both html5 annotations.
Google is like --- To me, this signifies where they are going,
you know, and that there are going to be a lot more
of these tools in our future, so. I think -- I would speculate, it's just a
speculation -- there's some sort of ''link equity anchor
texts''. You said interesting stuff about kind of user
data, impressions, CTR, bounce and all that stuff --
that's probably associated in some way with ''hreflang'' when you use
that.
What do you think --- What is the most typical mistake you stumble over
when you first come to a client? Are there the typical three things that you
know, I bet that they haven't got that?
You know, yeah, on the technical side, typically faceted navigation. Pagination is still a
problem. Sites aren't doing enough to be faster,
so we see a lot of opportunities to speed up their sites.
There is latency that shouldn't be there. And then on the content side,
we still see a lot of this is especially true in retail,
but using merchandising copy and not writing unique copy on product pages,
having category pages that really have no copy at all.
Their site search tends to be really bloated and there's not a...
So it is also in the index?
Exactly.
It's been indexed?
That's correct. And that's something that we often see.
And companies won't necessarily have a strategy around their site search because they think
about it internally. They don't think about the way it's getting
crawled and indexed and the problems it's causing
there.
I am wondering because of the types of problems that you deal with.
Are you mostly working for publishing companies or are you working for businesses that are
transactional, as well as publishers?
So at RKG, we have clients across every category but e-commerce is
by far in a way our specialty. So we have, the most of our clients
are in e-com.
Is it just because of you guys
are really good at that or because that fits perfectly to do SEO and that's it?
It's because... So RKG acquired my company,
AudetteMedia a couple of years ago, and AudetteMedia was known for e-commerce
SEO, based largely on my experience with Zappos
and building kind of that there. And then RKG was really focused
on direct marketing with a retail and it just happened to be that way.
What we found is - What's interesting is that
in the e-commerce space, they tend to be the most sophisticated
companies, and so these are the people that are
It's very competitive and there's a lot of money at stake,
obviously, and so there's a lot of innovation,
and there is a lot of focus on SEO as a strategy.
And now we're trying to go to travel and finance and other areas and apply those
learnings, because in some ways travel, for instance,
lags a bit behind in terms of how quickly they are adopting
a lot of the cutting edge SEO. So it's interesting, but yes,
mostly we're known for SEO, because we are hardcore direct marketers.
Nice. Thanks a lot for the interview.
Thank you. It was a pleasure.