| Hinde |
I’m Hinde Lamrani, the International Search Strategist for RWS. For the past eight years, I have been helping localization clients strategize for their global online visibility. Today I’m talking to Marshall Simmonds, a leader in the search industry and the founder of Define Media Group. |
| Marshall |
Good morning. How are you? |
| Hinde |
Thanks for being with us, Marshall. Can you introduce yourself a bit more? |
| Marshall |
Sure. So, hi, everybody. Good morning. My name is Marshall Simmonds. I am the founder of Define Media Group. We’re a boutique consulting firm. We focus on audience development. We focus on technology product and, of course, search engine optimization. We’ve been doing SEO since the late nineties and our focus has always been on large enterprise level sites, typically in the publishing, big data-driven content sites and technology sites. |
| Hinde |
I’ve seen that you were overseeing all the search strategies for About.com and also now it’s like, you wouldn’t find it if you Google it right now, because they’ve rebranded to Dotdash. And you also spent some time overseeing the search strategies for the New York Times. |
| Marshall |
I did end up in search for About.com and that was a pretty interesting experience because there was almost 900 guides across about 100,000 different topics, and we were generating a lot of content. And, as you mentioned, About.com was acquired by the New York Times in 2004. I headed up search for the New York Times, for the Boston Globe and the International Herald Tribune out of Paris.
And what you quickly understand and come to realize when you’re dealing with large content sites or just a lot of people, a lot of content, a lot of people, a lot of moving parts is you can’t be the holder of all information when it comes to search engine optimization or digital marketing. And that was the lesson that I learned at About.com and the New York Times. And then when we started Define Media Group, we incubated that under the NYT and the New York Times were very generous in allowing us to work in the space and work with other publishing brands, et cetera.
And you quickly understand that if you are the gatekeeper of all information, then your process is gonna come to a screeching halt. And by that, I mean, our job is to disseminate that information as quickly as possible. Make sure that every editor, every producer, every guy in the About.com sense, every guide understands his or her responsibility as it pertains to SEO. And so if you are a technologist, if you’re a developer, a product manager, you have to understand the best practices and the fundamentals of SEO.
So I am not the gatekeeper of that information. I don’t have every answer and you don’t have to come to me anytime you need more information around the topic. So we were educators and we had to make sure that everybody understands Search Engine Optimization. |
| Hinde |
It’s really important that everyone understands their role, whether it’s small or big in, contributing to the online visibility of any online assets they’re actually touching. |
| Marshall |
Yeah. I totally agree. And so one thing that we do is lots and lots and lots of trainings. And that training can be very basic. It can be very targeted, on a specific topic. It can be very broad. It can be very advanced. And so our trainings just span a wide array of topics and ability.
We have a lot of PowerPoint decks at the end of the day. And again, the idea here and the strategy here is to get that information, disseminate it, and so you have a bunch of evangelists that can carry that information out to their teams and to their site. |
| Hinde |
On the Define Media Group website, you also described how the editorial, technical, design and marketing teams must work together. It’s all parts of this whole thing. How do you drive SEO through all these stakeholders in the org? Is it only through education or are there other aspects? |
| Marshall |
Yeah, it’s a good question. It starts in the fundamentals and, you know, all roads eventually lead through tech, lead through the development team. They’re usually our first foothold into an engagement or into any type of work that we do.
We need to make sure that the best practices and the fundamentals of the site are complete, or at least have tickets in and made so work is started to then support product and editorial. Because eventually you’re gonna be engaged with those groups, with those teams, around content production or any new initiative that’s gonna affect the site. But we have to have the underpinnings, the foundation, if you will, we have to have those secure. |
| Hinde |
So this might actually be a common sense thing to you, but not for everybody. Some organizations still segregate their departments. They have siloed productions-and budgets. |
| Marshall |
SEO spans all those different siloed departments, if you will, or those teams, because it touches everybody. We’re all looking to promote content. We’re all looking to promote some type of feature on the site or product, or service of some kind. And so SEO is this bridge between them all.
And so we have always found that one of the best ways to engage is in any engagement that we start, we begin with a pretty deep dive audit process. It’s typically technical in nature. However, there is a different facet from every different business unit within an organization. It more or less requires everybody to come into a room and start talking about what their objectives are for the site. Any new initiatives they have on their roadmap for the year. And then our job is to talk about where SEO plays a role in that. Because it’s gonna be different for everybody.
Right now, all development teams are thinking about speed. Speed of the site. How does it load in mobile? Do they have video? Do they have podcasts? How are they revising content and templates so that the engines can quickly and effectively get that content into the engines, index it, and you can drive traffic. Product teams are looking for the next best thing. How do they engage your audience? How do they keep them on the site? What are they looking for? And then, of course, editorial and editorial is a constant moving target because of seasonality, because of the new cycle and because of new product launches. |
| Hinde |
Absolutely. And SEO is not only about the performance of a particular page anymore. It’s a whole picture about what you’re doing about that content piece and all the platforms you’re using for that content. It could be a video, like you mentioned, your images, your, it could be on the page itself. You know, it could be a voice app, or a mobile app. And like, just talking about this, I just realized that Google just announced yesterday that Google Search Console is now having a new feature called Associations. |
| Marshall |
Yes. |
| Hinde |
Yeah. That marketers are always looking for ways to connect data across multiple platforms. This is actually good news because with this, you can actually track all types of data from multiple platforms, like your Google Analytics, your ads, your YouTube channel. You’ll be able to analyze the data about a particular product or piece of content in a cohesive way. I think this is a good way to go. A good start in the right direction. |
| Marshall |
Yeah, I agree. Any consolidation of data into one dashboard is welcomed by me and my team and by those that we’re working with, because we want it all under one roof. And having YouTube data, I’m particularly excited about that. Not because necessarily I advocate for a YouTube channel. I’m always of the mind that you should keep all video on your site and promote it first on your endemic site first, and then push it out to a YouTube channel at a later date.
But I like having the data in one place and that’s helpful because then anything that’s in Search Console, you can pull out through the API, drop it into Data Studio and track it a bit more effectively than you can through Search Console. Search Console is a great, it’s a path and it’s a good starting point, but there’s a lot of different ways to pull that data out and having it all in one central location is a strong play. And then, of course, if you have mobile apps being able to pull that in, that’s obviously, I think it’s critical. And then I have, if anything, I don’t have to manage multiple logins and try to piece together that data. |
| Hinde |
Local search has been around for a while. And we know that with Google My Business, you can really, really improve your local visibility for small businesses. But, like, I noticed that many multinationals don’t give it the importance it should get. Even with, you know, having a global brand or having multiple offices around the globe, local search still works and these companies still need to create their Google My Business and claim their business in those locations in their maps and improve their local visibility.
Because, it is one of the major ways consumers search right now and Google is serving them their local results first. Google My Business recorded a 61% jump in consumer calls in the US during the pandemic. This is really big. And it just shows that Google My Business is one of the items to keep an eye on for SEO. |
| Marshall |
Yeah. Oh, you, absolutely. That is money well-spent. And Google My Business is, like you said, designed for smaller, smaller websites to get on the map and to drive these visits that we’re talking about. You’re right. And I forget the exact cost. I want to say it’s 200 bucks or it changes, I’m sure, and you have to call to get a price, I believe, as well, but that’s your marketing budget right there.
And that is where I would focus time and attention to make sure that that information is accurate. Because Google doesn’t necessarily understand local markets as well as they understand big brands. And so it’s a foothold into your market, so that when somebody is searching for Thai restaurants near me, that is exactly when we want that coverage and what we want that listing to appear. Whether it’s in a map format, a phone number, some type of location information that will help drive somebody to a local listing. For sure. So, yeah, I’m a big believer in that and recommend that all businesses apply. |
| Hinde |
I’ve seen in your website is audience development. What does that mean to you? |
| Marshall |
Marketing has basically now fallen under this umbrella of audience development. We’re basically saying anything that’s driving traffic.
And that can mean a lot of things, whether it’s reputation management, blogger, outreach, social, and even link development, I think. And so we want to work with the people that are heading up those processes or have those objectives or have those goals and make sure that there’s some synchronization across the network. And so that the efforts aren’t disparate, but they’re more or less combined. And they’re all moving in the same direction.
So they all have search and audience development driven goals in mind. Their focus can be scattered, so to speak, but what we do want them to understand is how do we help them synchronize that effort and make sure that they develop a fundamental understanding of SEO best practices and that whatever their activity is, it’s probably gonna have an impact on search engine visibility.
So we want everyone to go in understanding that whatever their actions are, they can have an implication, positive or otherwise, and understand that whatever their role is, how does that correspond to the public facing website? How does that correspond to the direction of their marketing efforts? Direction of the promotion? And does it affect the site? Will it slow down the site? Does it affect mobile? Should we, does our audience, does it resonate with our audience more when we Tweet out or use Facebook or use Pinterest to push a message? Those are things that we have to understand and realize that there’s a business initiative that we have to consider. |
| Hinde |
Yeah, you’re right. It’s all about the user. Search engines, especially Google, very user centric. They really work towards serving the user, making things easier for the user, relevancy for the user. Every single one of their ranking factors is just basically helping the user find the information quickly relevant, expertise, everything. |
| Marshall |
Yeah. And I like what you said before Hinde, when you said it’s about the health of the site. And that is something that I completely agree with as well. And Google is sometimes more forceful in their direction. I’m sure that you remember when the big word and the big push was around mobile friendly and the idea behind mobilegeddon. And Google saying that if your site isn’t mobile friendly by this date, then you’re going to drop out of our index. Well, that didn’t happen.
And sometimes Google is a little more forceful around moving to a secure instance of HTTPS. That one was important. And there was a good reason behind that. And now Google is talking about page speed and when page speed is gonna be introduced as part of a ranking algorithm. As far as that’s concerned in May. These are things that all are indicative of the health of the site.
But you’re right, it absolutely is like how easily is it, or how easy is it for users to utilize and to navigate and to find content on the site. But it’s also relevant for the engines. How quickly and effectively can a crawler access the homepage, section fronts, deep content, archives, dynamic content. Sometimes content that’s not even static.
And so that health and wellbeing of the site is really important. And that’s kind of, that comes back to our auditing processes that’s something that we have to understand and have a higher level of understanding around, the process of whatever job service content you’re creating. What is that process and are the tools in place to facilitate that? |
| Hinde |
You know, the latest ranking factor they’ve actually announced that actually went live on the 10th of February was the passage ranking. |
| Marshall |
Hmm, yeah. |
| Hinde |
This is really interesting, where they would index and rank a passage from your content, even if it’s deep into your page. If it’s relevant to a specific user question or query, and it’s nearly like the FAQ, you know, structure that we know that’s for SEO, it’s really great to have a good Frequently Asked Questions section, but this is something similar.
And there, they can now do it, thanks to BERT. BERT was rolled out for English first, and then a couple of months later, it was rolled out for 70 languages. Now the passage ranking went live this February for English only and I’m expecting the same thing to happen here. A couple of months later, we would hear about, you know, Google pushing it for other languages. And we would see this happening for our global content. |
| Marshall |
And the idea behind that, I think, it’s technology driven in the sense that Google used to just do something that was called partial referencing technology. They might not review, index the entire page. They might not follow every link on the site. They might just look at the anchor text, look at the link and say, “Oh, we realized that you’re pointing us to a page about weather.” So we can understand that this is about weather in Idaho, in the United States, in New York without ever indexing the page.
Now, the technology is there to grab and to analyze the context, the structure of the article , the actual links. But the article in full is now being indexed and hyper analyzed in a lot of different languages, as you mentioned. And so now they’re able to pull out and I don’t know if you’ve seen this, but they’re doing it with transcripts on video as well. They can drop you in, which is what we’ve always all wanted. You get dropped into a 30-minute video and you’re looking for one little data point or a fact, or a quote, or a comment.
And you want to see exactly that moment, hear exactly that moment, or read that quote. Now this facilitates that, and there’s nothing necessarily to do. We could talk about structured data markup and that’s important. And you mentioned the FAQ mark-up, which I think has been really interesting in COVID times and has been a really strong SEO play to consider. Frequently Asked Question format, looking at structured data markup for FAQ, and that kind of support, but giving Google the ability to find that data quickly. Yeah. That’s something that we’re very interested in this year. |
| Hinde |
Another evolution is voice. I mean, a brand now can have their own instead of having their websites, their web presence, they can have their voice presence, which is their voice app. According to Gartner, they think that brands that redesign their websites to support voice search will increase digital commerce revenue by 30%. |
| Marshall |
I think voice search is important. I think we use it a lot more than we think we do, whether it’s, you know, question and answer centric when you’re saying something like, you know, “How old is Barack Obama?” Or it’s location-based then, you know, “What are pizza restaurants, where can I get pizza near me?” and then there’s a contextual side as well when you’re asking like, “Hey, show me pictures of the band Phish or Bruce Springsteen.”
So it, you know, it raises the question, like, what is my audience searching for? You know? And does our style guide or editorial voice of the publication or the service support a conversational tone in our articles? So, I mean, if you do, I mean, that’s a pretty big shift to adopt a detailed answer to a common question. Or do you stay specifically in your niche? And so that’s what it gets back to your point about FAQs and what readers want and need to know at multiple levels of expertise.
So we have to consider are our users beginners or advanced users when we’re defining our topic? And how do we want to answer that question? Are there very specific questions that we need to answer? And that’s fine. And that’s certainly something that the editorial team should be thinking about. Ultimately, you have to have a technical component to voice search that’s necessary for schema tagging, for that content so Google knows what to use. And that you’re trying to mark this up and that you’ve done the research and that, you know that users are, our users are searching for this, with their voice instead of with their fingers. And then you have to apply those tags for voice targeted content in the CMS. And that’s, again, all roads leading through tech, but eventually falling on editorial. |
| Hinde |
There are two types actually how a business can reach users who are more interested in searching by using their voice rather than their fingers. And the first one is what you just described about, yeah, making your content more relevant and more adapted to conversational queries, so the search engine would actually suggest the reply from your website to the user query, to the user using voice, you know.
The other way you could reach your voice searchers is by developing your own voice app, which is exactly the equivalent of a website for the web. A voice app exists only for your voice searches. And it’s created in a way that it has to have a purpose and it has to have a name and the user needs to invoke it. So, for example, if you’re a bank and you create a voice app for customer service and you need to call it something and you need to let your clients know what that something is and they need to invoke it.
When they invoke it through their Google Home or their phone or any other voice device, it switches on. And they can start asking whatever questions they want about their accounts and they will get the answer because the app is built that way for that specific client. So voice apps are really interesting now because lots of businesses would use it either for customer service is a popular one. And you could use this to give lots of information that you already have answers for to your clients, instead of them having to ring you and talk to a person.
So you can build up a database of the frequently asked questions and have that information ready for them just by making it so easy for them. You just talk to their phone or any other, you know, voice device and invoke your app and ask a question and they will get the answer. Or it could be, for example, for ordering, like Pizza Hut or Domino’s, or… Domino’s is actually our pioneers in this, where you could just talk to your Domino’s voice app and you could get an order to your door. |
| Marshall |
That freaks me out a little bit. Because you know, God forbid we talk to a human and it’s funny because when you lay it out like that, I wonder how often I have been talking to AI more than I know. Because one of the first things I do is I try to get out of that. Right. And try to get out of that cycle and hit zero or say representative quickly. Of course I give context, but that’s a really interesting point is, you know, with the advancement that you’re talking about, and I’ve never used that Domino’s app before, but I’m very intrigued by it, as much as I am scared. |
| Hinde |
Well, I think with the latest generations, we are talking here about people who use their mobiles. Like all they know is their mobiles. And you know, I think it’s gonna go that way anyways, if we think about the future, because if you’re gonna be using your phone all the time, you’re gonna be talking to your phone, you’re gonna be searching on your phone, so it’s all about like making your websites mobile friendly, having like apps in there for your e-commerce and for voice, again, it’s all to do with the type of business you have.
So, Marshall, at the moment, what are the current problems that you’re solving for your clients? |
| Marshall |
It always comes back to the fundamentals, at the end of the day. The fundamentals and making sure that, you know, the saying that we have over here in the States is the blocking and tackling and making sure that we do the foundational items well. And that is just the basics of SEO. If I’m good at anything it’s repetition and that’s due to being a parent, but also because Search Engine Optimization is very cyclical.
No matter what, you always come back to, how are you thinking about your user? The writing that you do. How do you produce that content feature, product or service? And then the basics of SEO, which is titles and meta descriptions and headlines and content and framing that content and links, images, captions. All those best practices, that hasn’t changed since I started doing this in 1997. It’s evolved somewhat, but the importance is still there.
And that all leads into that point that you made earlier, Hinde, which was about the health of the site. We think about that in a very hyper-local way in the sense that every piece of content or product that we put out, or page that we put out, or template that we create has to have that in mind. Are we benefiting the user? Are we targeting the user correctly? Does this help with SEO? And that really does come back to the building blocks of the site and to ensure that tech is giving the tools and the function necessary for us to reach that audience. |
| Hinde |
And how do you see the future, Marshall? |
| Marshall |
I mean, it’s changing daily, right? I mean, with Search Console we’ve seen them roll out more features in the last six months than we have in the last two years. And Search Console has been very good in that respect and I like that because now they’re basically doing some loose log file analysis in the crawl stats features that they have. They just in their, under the performance section, they have Google News information.
They’re doing a better job of clearing up some of the confusion, although not all of it. Clearing up some of the confusion in Search Console around the coverage and the index. And there’s all kinds of information in there. Some of it makes a lot of sense and some of it doesn’t and they’re doing a good job there. But I think as far as like what we’re focusing on in this year, it’s this evolution of what’s happening with Google News. And Google News is opening in a way that we haven’t necessarily seen before. We all interact with it at the search engine results page under the top stories module.
And you’ll see that carousel, whether you’re in mobile or desktop. Google has said like that it’s no longer mandatory for you to be approved and accepted into Google News to get into that. So basically they’re opening up the gates, so to speak. Again, they don’t wanna be too restrictive in the audience if a qualified answer to a question or some breaking or trending news is deep within Reddit, for example. So they have to be a bit more accommodating to publishers and just to content itself.
And so we’re focusing on that. I think that’s gonna change and we’re gonna see a lot of evolution in Google news, but for the most part, this year is like any other. We have to focus on best practices. That of course is around speed mainly, but we still have to research keyword phrases our audiences using Google Trends, using Ahrefs, using SEMrush as a tool, just to make sure that the timing is right with Trends and that the audience is there with volume and that we’re picking the right terms. That we’ve done the research to determine that this is how our audience is engaging our particular topic.
So, and that evolves, right? That’s gonna change. And so we have to take the time to ensure that those keyword phrases that we’re using, that they’re chosen correctly, that we’re front-loading our efforts around SEO. And then we integrate that knowledge back into what I was saying before, the best practices of title headlines, subheads, et cetera. All part of the workflow. Those are very involved and touch a lot of different departments, teams across the site. |
| Hinde |
Thank you very much, Marshall. Is there anything else you would like to add? |
| Marshall |
Expertise. Authority matters, subject matter authority matters. How established your brand is on a particular topic, whether it’s money or lifestyle or health, and who’s writing about that? Google doesn’t let you hide behind your website anymore.
They wanna see bios. They wanna know who’s writing about a particular topic. If it’s a doctor versus your crazy uncle writing about it, Google wants to know and they want to qualify that. And so if you have expertise in a particular space, you wanna showcase that. You want to link to your bios, to the writers, to the contributors of articles or content. That helps establish authority.
Whatever means to let Google know that you are a dominant player in that particular field or that topic. I think it’s in your best interest as well. That’s something that we’re certainly looking at this year, too. That’s not new by the way; that’s been around for a while. |
| Hinde |
Absolutely. It’s been around for a while, but it was the importance of it became apparent during the pandemic. |
| Marshall |
And, you know, ultimately, SEO spans all languages. And so it’s not different in Brazil, versus, you know, China, versus the US. SEO is very fundamental. And those best practices, it’s incredibly important first off, but if you adhere to those and continue to focus on those best practices and make sure that the entire organization understands those fundamentals, that is a great first step. Because people always ask, “Well, what can I do now?” You can educate. |
| Hinde |
Absolutely, you’re right. And in addition to those technical fundamentals that actually apply to all those markets you can think of, there’s also the local insights and anything that resonates with local audiences should be taken into consideration as well from a content perspective. |
| Marshall |
Totally agree. |
| Hinde |
It’s been a great conversation with you, Marshall. Thank you very much for joining us today. |
| Marshall |
Yeah. Thank you, Hinde. |
