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Welcome to OMReport by Andre Alpar your interview focus podcast on topics from
online marketing to internet startups
>> ANDRE: Hi Derreck can you introduce to us please ?
>> DERRECK: I'm Derreck Wheeler. I'm the, well my title is Informing
Seo architect in Microsoft. Formerly is Senior Product Intelligence Manager
Ok
And my role is really around ensuring the global portfolio properties at
Microsoft are optimized as much as possible for organic search.
What qualified you to get this job ? What have you been doing previously just out
of curiosity ?
Sure, so the only career I've ever known is the internet marketing and
mostly Seo. Around 1997 I started doing link building
campaigns for sites, and was before it really matter for Search.
And then the company I worked for had enough foresee
to see Seo was going to be a big deal and he paid Danny Sullivan
to come down and train like 6 of us.
That's how I started in Seo. When that company was adquired and
moved out of town then I started working remotely for another
internet marketing company and then I got another job in an
internet marketing company. So after a while I had around 11 years of
working on Seo and Linkbuilding and that kind of things.
And then I thought, well you know...
So you where on the agency side.
I was on the agency side for 10-11 years. And they I thought
it would been easy to just optimize for one website.
You know you don't have to worry about all this clients and I felt
that the sale people will sell and sell. And then trying to live up to the promise
of getting things done on time just become really difficult.
So I though, ok let's just go to one company and do Seo,
later I realized that Microsoft has hundreds of individually managed
web properties and all this content management systems it really is
like being an internal Seo Agency even if we are not setup that way.
So you are dealing with more websites right now than when you where
on the agency side ?
There is more web properties in our portfolio than clients I had.
It was a bad move in that regard. But it was a good move in pretty
much every other way.
So just to clear up misunderstandings, you are not taking care of Bing
and what search results happen in Bing but all the properties that
Microsoft has and how they appear in all different search engines around
the world.
Also platforms, we wanna show up anywhere to someone that will benefit
for coming to our site, we want to be where they are searching
When you look at the Keyword portfolio you guys are looking after,
kind of regularly monitoring across most of the websites, I would
guess that most of them are branded terms that you are taking care of.
And it's more like a reputations management attempt, are we really
being found where people are searching one of your products?
And it's less to get generic terms like "Download software", which could be,
other results can be interesting there as well.
That's one of the unique things of Microsoft. We 've such a strong brands
that a lot of times our branded search phrases will have 100 times
more searches than a non-brand equivalent. But what we do is getting focus
at non-brand, because even thought the volume is less is very strategically
valuable for us to get in front of people that may not now we are for a
particular solution. Even when something is branded, in some cases when
the people is looking for support issues, there is other third party
support sites that show up and charge people for support that maybe we have
on our side
For free
For free.
So is the same case for software like, there are sites that appear for
software, that charges for software that you give out for free.
Does that also happen ? Or is it mostly support issues ?
No.
It doesn't happen in the download space.
We have the downloads and all those downloads are free. Then we have
like Apps, you know Windows 8 apps and phone apps, and some of those are
free and some arent. But it's not really relevant in that case.
So you where discussing some very interesting things, because the properties
that you manage are active in a lot of countries and a lot of languages.
Recalling some of the problems that you have, when 2 countries share a
common language like French, where you have French Canada
[coughs] and Portuguese with Brazil and Portugal.
How do you deal with those things? What kind of problems do actually happen and
how do you deal with them? How succesful is that ? If you can share it.
Yes. You know we had a lot of overlapping content in language.
And we don't have our sites set up optimally for the markets.
We don't use the country level top domains. (ca / co.uk and such)
And that is kind of a long term issue that I've yet been able to
successfully move on. We have done those, we 've moved major, in 7 domains
to the same model for international. So it's always a top level directory.
It's always in/us, for example, it's always lowercase.
Everybody is starting to do that. And everybody is starting to use the
google webmaster tools to Geo target. And anywhere else there are many
webmaster tools that allow us to do that. But my role does not involve getting in to
the individual building links from that country internally. So that would
be up to the individual subdiary international site , the folks that are doing
digital marketing there will come up with how can they get more links internally
from other country sites. Including more signals to help them. We are
somewhat limited on what we can do there, but we still want to track it.
Do you educate ? Do they come to you and ask, like the French subsidiary asks:
Hey, what can we do ? Is more like a pull or a push ?
We have an international Url policy. But policy adoption or alignment is
enforced at the GM level. So if that particualar GM does not enforce the
policy they don't have to follow it. There is no repercusions.
Ah
I was asking wether mostly people come up to you with questions.
What lang should I put and where. Or is it mostly you pushing like
Hey guys, you are not ranking for this branded term that you should rank for.
You could do X, Y, Z and they try to do it. How does it usually look like ?
Like a pull or a push.
It's both. I will get people coming to me all the time, because we are
Microsoft we have a global address book. I can look up anybody's email address,
I can find people at Bing and email them. So a lot of people at Microsoft,
they don't do SEO, they don't know that Bing can really give out like specifics
So everybody at Microsoft that writes to Bing to get SEO help, they send it to me
Oh
So it will be subsidiaries saying "Hey I'm getting all of this content from France
showing up in my Canadian search engine. How do I deal with this"
And then we will find out what have they done and give them some reccommendations.
And then it's up to them to implement them.
But the problem might be that is 2 different subsidiaries where both have to
implement href lang and it's 2 different GM that have to decide on that.
Is that correct ?
That will be more like the same manager or maybe that they don't have another
release scheduled for 3 months and they can't get it in, or maybe they
is some limitation with the content management system where they can't add that
particular code in there. There is all kind of issues we have to deal
with. And then ocassionally I did a search for Surface
or Tablet at Google US and it's top result, but 2 below it, is Canada.
So we needed to make sure that the Surface was Geo-targeted in Google
and
it wasn't.