Post on 20-Aug-2015
REINCLUSION AFTERLIFE
michael King Director of inbound marketing @ipullrank
How a champion was reborn through content strategy
@iacquire
SHOUTOUT TO @RHEA DRYSDALE
My online reputation management coach Rhea is an awesome friend and she let
me borrow her brain and experience
when I was trying to figure out the most
effective tactics for ORM.
@iPullRank
CHALLENGE ACCEPTED I LOVE A challenge
I maybe love a challenge too much because I often put myself in
places where the challenge is insurmountable like my previous
position at Publicis Modem.
WE NEED HELP WITH A little BIT OF CLEANUP
Iacquire was among a number of companies that aggressively courted me
BUT IACQUIRE WANTED MY VISION A lot of companies wanted my “talents” but iacquire wanted my LEADERSHIP vision
@iPullRank
After interviewing at a ton of places iAcquire sounded
like it’d be the place that offered me the most latitude
to truly take an agency forward, innovate and do
great work.
This isn’t an excuse, it’s just me explaining
that I didn’t understand the magnitude of the
paid link building until I did the quantifying
outreach study which was literally days
before my official start date.
I was already scheduled to be in Australia,
Arizona, Indiana and Montreal during my
first 2 months at iAcquire so my goal was
to bring on more white hat clientele so we
could quickly transition out of paid links.
@iPullRank
Matt Cutts and Mike King = BFFS 4 EVER
On may 21st, 2012 An April fools joke came to life before our very eyes I officially started at iAcquire on April 3rd after I
returned from LinkLove London, but before I got
there Joe, Robb and I played this joke on Jay and
TR.
@iPullRank
IN Iacquire’s corner
Joe Griffin Co-founder
Jay swansson Co-founder
John-paul barnych Vice President of Revenue
Tom rusling General Manager
Cindy nieves Director of Operations
Jeffrey nappi Director of Technology
@iPullRank
Our OLD Process We used to use money at this
point as a motivator to get links.
Protocol was not to talk about
money unless the webmaster
asks for it.
@iPullRank
REJOICED A lot of people came out of the woodwork to dance on the grave of iAcquire including people who are to this day actively selling links themselves
@iPullRank
Internally: I lost my shit I wanted to respond right away with a very transparent explanation of
what happened. In fact I wrote it 3 times. The rest of the leadership
team felt differently.
Early on, it was pretty easy to not to lose it externally because I still
had hope we would hash out a solid transparent response.
Externally: I was fairly nonchalant
@iPullRank
8 DAYS
My voice was missing from that conversation because I hated it, but as a team player I lived with it
WE CHANGED OUR BUSINESS MODEL OVERNIGHT We locked ourselves in a conference room for a few
days and voila just like that Content Marketing
became all that we did. There was no more link buying
at all.
An invite to speak at a SEMPO event was rescinded An invite to write for SearchEngineLand never
materialized
B Aren’t we supposed to stay down now?
iAcquire was never like these companies that are forever branded as a
charlatans. I personally don’t know what happened to these guys, but I
do know…
@iPullRank
WAS DEINDEXED CIRCA 2002* iCrossing went through a series of rebrandings
and ultimately has been regarded as one of the
best digital agencies by a variety publications
such as advertising age, forrester wave, omma
and ad week. There is life after deindexation.
Accolades
*According to Joe Griffin
EVER
020
40
60
Discovery Call
Proposal Presentation
Demo / Presentation
Full Cancel
Closed
010000
20000
30000
Visits
It was an unfortunate byproduct of the process Many people on our outreach team were not prepared to
make the leap with us so we had to let them go.
We did keep the team member who contacted the Kansas
blogger, but ultimately the loyalty was not reciprocated.
WE DEFINED OUR PRINCIPLES iAcquire had already mastered the WHAT and
the HOW, but we needed the WHY. We’d
already had CRAFT, I repurposed it and used it
to define what our brand stands for.
@iPullRank
C R A F T
Reativity Esponsibility Cumen Ortitude ransparency
@iPullRank
We took the money from link buying and invested it in hiring creatives We hired writers, graphic designers, an animator and project managers to improve
our processes through verticalization.
@iPullRank
We invested in teaching our people about content strategy We needed our people to feel confident in
servicing and selling the new approach so we had
workshops and book clubs around Content
Strategy.
WE MOVED CLIENTS FROM PAID LINKS TO CONTENT-BASED LINKS Being that iAcquire is a business we couldn’t
just pull the plug on all of our links overnight, so
we set up transition plans for all clients and
gradually replaced the Paid links with content-
based links. Naturally, there were those who
chose to cancel rather than transition.
@iPullRank
(DRAMATIZATION)
Transition Plan
It was incredibly important that we reconnect with our client base
to encourage them to remain confident in our abilities to
transition from paid links to free content-based links.
@iPullRank
We invested in strong new talent These people have helped us transition from being a link vendor to a full SEO Agency
Tom harari
Seo manager
Brittan Bright
DIR. Of client strategy
Norris Rowley
MGR. Market Research Megan Brown
Social media Strategist
SOME THINGS DIDN’T NEED TO CHANGE We were always transparent. These are
screenshots from the client-facing reporting of
iRank that is available 24/7 on-demand.
@iPullRank
I met MATT CUTTS AT SMX ADVANCED AND WE GOT REINDEXED Sorry, but this is another example of Correlation !=
Causation. It didn’t make any difference, but we had a
pretty direct conversation about the iAcquire situation at
SMX Advanced in front of a bunch of people. Matt said
he felt sorry for me because he knew I had nothing to
do with it.
Matt Cutts + Mike King =
BFFS 4 EVER
WE CHANGED THROUGH AND THROUGH Initially there was a disconnect between
what was being communicated to clients
and what was being said publicly. Google
had a problem with this so we aligned
communication across the board.
@iPullRank
WE REMOVED THIS POST
Tom Rusling (with some editing help from me) wrote
a post about how the Google Webmaster Tools
messages weren’t something you needed to worry
about and it was mentioned as a specific point of
contention multiple times so we removed it.
WE WROTE THIS POST As a part of our earnest effort to show that we were committed to no longer offering paid links, joe griffin wrote a post about the second wave of the google webmaster tools unnatural link messages in support of google.
@iPullRank
WE KEPT TRYING TO OPEN THE DIALOG WITH GOOGLE THROUGHOUT THE PROCESS. We showed public commitment to change and kept
reaching out to Google in hopes that they would take
notice and ultimately on July 23rd, 2012 our pages
started to trickle back into the index.
fixing the social contract requires a focus on the why The golden circle is what separates winning brands
from losing brands. Shoutout to @joannalord, and
Ian Lurie who talked about this yesterday.
http://bit.ly/WqnsHF
@iPullRank
Chrysler turned it around by focusing on the why During the Superbowl Chrysler launched a highly-
effective commercial with Eminem, focusing on the why
of their brand and the city of Detroit.
@iPullRank
http://bit.ly/RB2z8m
I PERSONIFY OUR SOCIAL CONTRACT Transparency. Innovation. Brand humanization. Brand positioning. New offering launch.
For iAcquire I am a walking reputation management
content strategy, simply because I am transparent,
innovative, authentic and I lead the expansion of our
offerings. Anything I do that is positive galvanizes
iAcquire in that direction.
@iPullRank
@iPullRank
Introducing The “road to reinclusion” content strategy I developed a content strategy called “The Road
To Reinclusion” wherein the core strategy was:
“We will offer a transparent look at our transition
to a content marketing agency that is in full
compliance with Google’s Webmaster guidelines
with a focus on regaining the trust of the
community, clients and Google.” #R2R
ROAD TO REINCLUSION PERSONAS
CLIENT CARLA MAIN FOCUS
Grouchy Googler Secondary Focus
Supporter Sam Tertiary FoCus
Hater Harry Not a FOCUS
TRANSPARENCY. Share what you are doing exhaustively, people will respect your efforts. and more far more prone to believe that you and your brand has changed.
@iPullRank
INNOVATION. We continue to invest in free marketing tools
such Broken Link Index and Authora with plans
to rebuild LinkDiagnosis from scratch.
COST: Authora / BLI- $10K
@iPullRank
BRAND HUMANIZATION Getting our people involved in content efforts
allows us to introduce our audience to the
people behind the brand and understand the
iAcquire culture.
COST: Canon 7D and accessories: $3000
@iPullRank
@iPullRank
Show off the creative talents of the team My MozCon talk wasn’t just about me showing
off my talents as an emcee, it was also about
showing off iAcquire’s Creative team. Kyle
Bastian did the kinetic typography video in a few
days and Robb Dorr designed the deck (and
this one).
Cost: 20 hours of internal
Creative
THE CRAFT AWARDS We wanted to celebrate the seo community with a content marketing awards ceremony
@iPullRank
We planned and spec’d out a CRAFT Content
Marketing Awards ceremony and party for SMX East
2012 which would have featured celebrity host, DJ and
musical act as well as the distribution of awards for the
best content developed by agencies.
@iPullRank
Knowem.com Only 67 out of 300 profiles were indexed even after using a Bulk
ping tool. None of the profiles ever ranked for [iAcquire]. Links
from these sites support iacquiretweets.com
IACQUIRETWEETS.COM We have nearly 100 people at iAcquire and
most of them use Twitter, so it was pretty easy
to make a microsite that just aggregates all the
tweets with the #IACQ hash tag.
COST: 10 hours of coding/design + $100
domain/hosting.
@iPullRank
SHAKESHACKCAMERA.COM We launched a camera for the Shake Shack fast food
restaurant across the street from our office and placed
post-it art in my windows with a CTA for tweeting while you
wait in line.
4 days later Shake Shack called us and asked us to
take it down. COST: $500 + 20 hours of Creative
@iPullRank
What scales the best is helping people out and
delivering something of value on a regular basis
as we do with Cliff Notes Tuesday, Live Site
Audits and Lunch Break.
@iPullRank
HELPING PEOPLE IS FREE.
I was initially against doing these because it’s
obvious that they are for reputation
management, but gave in in interest of owning
everything above the fold. FYI – Double-serving
ads is against the Adwords rules.
@iPullRank
DOUBLE-SERVED PAID SEARCH ADS.
…and made sure every employee is following
the iAcquire company page .The iAcquire
LinkedIn profile consistently ranks in the top 5.
@iPullRank
STREAMLINED LINKEDIN JOB DESCRIPTIONS
Careerbuilder, SimplyHired, Indeed. None of
them ever ranked.
@iPullRank
POSTED JOBS ON HIGH DA JOB SITES
I put my MozCon and SMX Advanced Tools
decks on there. It consistently ranks in the
Top 20.
@iPullRank
MADE A BRANDED IACQUIRE SLIDESHARE
Above the fold on the site you have case
studies and the sliding hero that
showcases work we’ve done for our clients
followed by our USPs (our WHY).
@iPullRank
THE MAIN FOCUS IS THE WORK.
@iPullRank
The further down the homepage
the user goes the more you get to
know the actual people that work
at iAcquire.
@iPullRank
MORE BRAND HUMANIZATION AS YOU GO DOWN
@iPullRank
Each page on the new site incorporates
some element that make it worth linking so
our site can be a shining example of what
we’d like our clients to be doing.
@iPullRank
EVERY PAGE IS LINK WORTHY & SHAREWORTHY
@iPullRank
When we re-launch I will issue a challenge
to the world to poke holes in the SEO of
iacquire.com. If you can find something we
didn’t do well we’ll give you $530.
@iPullRank
AIR-TIGHT SEO
@iPullRank
@iPullRank
SOCIAL PROOF ON ALL THE THINGS!
@iPullRank
These will act as our Twitter
testimonials similar to what
@mikecp talked about.
The marketing team is the smallest team at
iAcquire and while our founders don’t want to
build a community around our brand I shouldn’t
be the only one having fun with Gary &
Cogswell.
USER GENERATED COMICS
@iPullRank
Since we’ve made a substantial change from
link vendor to full-blown strategic SEO partner It
is important that we appear as though we have
changed. We’ve updated the brand style and
guidelines to reflect that.
BRANDING REFRESH
@iPullRank
SENTIMENT IMPROVED. The conversation around iAcquire across the
various channels has improved by 18%. We
have effectively changed the conversation.
@iPullRank
SERP IMPROVED. The number of positive results in the SERP has
improved 27% (including Paid Search)
@iPullRank
THE CONCERNED NETIZEN UPDATED HIS POST The author of our outing post updated that post
to give attention to the explanation of our new
business model.
@iPullRank
More discovery calls, more overview presentations and less cancellations
Turns out there is life after reinclusion after all.
No brand is completely immune to a meltdown. Always have a plan
for crisis content strategy ready to launch.
MONITOR YOUR REPUTATION. Use Social Mention, Amplicate, Google
Alerts, turn the SERP into an RSS
feed: http://bit.ly/TTEn3R or use our
new Reputation Tracker:
http://bit.ly/SNPvxm
@iPullRank
SIDEBAR:
Please help me show that value by
signing up for the launch of Reputation
Tracker otherwise I can’t continue to
justify the creation of free tools.
Reputation Tracker: http://bit.ly/SNPvxm
The powers that be don’t see the value in the tools I create
RESPOND PROMPTLY. Distilled and SEOmoz are great
examples of brands that respond
promptly and own the blame for
their mistakes.
@iPullRank @iPullRank
DON’T
Tie the hands of your spokesperson. Choose your spokesperson wisely and then don’t hold
them back from getting the job done.
Your reputation is yours to fix. Don’t involve other brands until you have
recovered yourself. We made this mistake with Shake Shack.
I made the mistake of getting wrapped up in the sensation of the SEO
echo chamber rather than focusing on the content that made me popular.
It is very easy for people to tell when a fix just cosmetic. Fix things from the
inside out and you are insulated from most negative responses.
MAKE NEWS WITH THE CHANGE. Very few people are going to care about the positive things you are doing. Be sure to position your positive change as newsworthy.
@iPullRank