Acrolinx Conference 2013 - “Using Acrolinx SEO Rules as Part of a Search-Based Content Strategy”...

Building a Search-driven Information Experience

Robert Lee

Sr. Manager

Content and Search Strategy Team

Find

Trust Share

What do you do when you’ve documented every feature and your customers still can’t find the answer?

2

How to topics

KB articles

Product PDFs

Videos

Training modules

Webinars

Podcasts

Forum posts

Marketing collateral

The Symantec Information Experience: Find. Trust. Share.

Publishing more content doesn’t always help

• 163,000 KB Articles

• 90,000 How-to articles

• 5,500 manuals

We were publishing as fast as we could and customers still couldn’t find answers!

The Symantec Information Experience: Find. Trust. Share. 3

So why doesn’t search work?

• Search engines are supposed to find the best answers

• My content has the best answers

• We must need smarter software or hardware to make the search engines work better, right?


What Content Teams want an SEO tool to do

• Automatically apply secret code to topics

• Not make them change their lovingly crafted prose

• Work for both external search (Google, Bing) and internal search engines

• Run once and make search work better for the life of the document


Need to start with a different set of questions

Wrong questions:

Why doesn’t our content show up Google?

Why doesn’t the search engine they use on our site work right?

I published 12 manuals last quarter and got 100 hits. Is that good?

More helpful questions

How do I find out the phrases that my audience is using when they search for answers?

How do I optimize my content so that search engines give me maximum relevance for target keywords – without penalizing me for being spammy?

How do I track the performance of my content?


You never needed all that content

• Frequently Asked Queries: The majority of customers face the same small set of issues.

• Promote the Short Head: By promoting content that provides answers to the most common issues, we allow more customers to self-serve.

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# Topics #

Hit

s

Long tail

Sho

rt H

ead

The top 10% topics typically get >80% of the total traffic.


How search works

Customers search for

content using their own language.

Search engines look for these

phrases in their search indices (not the actual

sites)

Search engines determine

which pages have the most relevance on the subject

Search engines provide a set of ranked results for both paid

and free search

Customers click on the results

that they believe are the best matches


The real problems that you need to solve

Determine what content your customers are searching for

Use customer language in the most strategic places – and manage that language over time

Use as many relevance factors as you can without being spammy

Ensure your content is indexed by search engines

Make your content look like the best choice in the search results

Track your results


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Determine what content your customers are searching for


How to Find out what issues/themes customers care about

• Check technical support call and chat logs

• Check the most popular community forum posts

• Ask your training department what questions are most asked in classes

• Find out which videos about your product are most popular on YouTube!

Themes and customer intent analysis


How to Find out what language customers use when describing the problem

• Look at text that customers use when posting to forums

• Check text chat support logs

• Use Google Adwords and Insights to check which search queries are the most popular

Keyword research


Using Google AdWords keyword tool


Relevant new keyword ideas:

remove

removal tool

uninstall tool download

manual uninstall

uninstall password

CleanWipe

Seed terms help you find new keywords

Try different match options to tune results

Optionally exclude specific terms Tune these settings: Locations=All, Language=English,

Devices=Desktops and laptops

https://adwords.google.com/select/keywordtoolexternal

https://adwords.google.com/select/keywordtoolexternal

Using Google Trends tool • Free keyword research tool that reveals search trends

• Go to: http://www.google.com/trends/

• Type in your search phrase and click Explore.

• Let’s you view interest over time and region– Is there seasonal demand? Who is the main audience?


http://www.google.com/trends/

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Use customer language in the most strategic places – and manage that language over time


How to optimize your topics so that they contain your target keywords in the right places

• Hire an SEO expert to tune your page

• Use Acrolinx SEO rules to automatically suggest the best places to place keywords

On-page optimization


Use a tool like Acrolinx SEO rules to manage your on-page optimizations

More efficient to have one or two SEO experts do the keyword research and have authors tune the content


Use a tool like Acrolinx SEO rules to manage your on-page optimizations - continued

• SEO rules change all the time. Using Acrolinx SEO rules means your authors don’t need to stay on top of those changes.

• Acrolinx SEO Rules can help prevent your authors from over-optimizing, which can result in search engines penalizing you


• Publish optimized content the first time. Publishing and fixing, can set you back months in building relevance.

Acrolinx SEO rules pilot at Symantec

• Ran Sept 2012-January 2013

• Use browser-based tool

• Tested on 6 documents

• Keyword research was done by two SEO experts


Acrolinx SEO rules pilot at Symantec

• Recommendations from SEO rules were consistent with those of our experts

• Authors were comfortable adding optimization tasks to their authoring process because they were already Acrolinx users.

• We can get more pages optimized because SEOs don’t need to fix every page

• Running next pilot with XMetaL plug-in soon

Results


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Ensure your content is indexed by search engines


Make sure your content is getting indexed

Common reasons why content doesn’t get crawled:

• Robots.txt file is telling search engines not to

• Content hidden in graphics or code

• Crawlers can’t get to all of your site


How to determine if your content is being crawled

Use Google “cache:“ operator to see if a given page is found in the search cache.


How to determine if your content is being crawled

Use a search engine emulator and view the results


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Use as many relevance factors as you can without being spammy


Use relevance factors to help your content rank higher Links


On-site content External links for promotion On-site content

BAD EXAMPLE • No external links

• All topics link to each other

• All topics contain same set of keywords

• All topics competing with each other

GOOD EXAMPLE • One-way links from external sites pass “juice” to a

single target topic • Internal links also pass “juice” to a single target • Result: search engines know that one topic is more

important

Use relevance factors to help your content rank higher

• Including video and rich media improves your search relevance.

• Google and Bing search results highlight pages that have content with video and rich media so users are more likely to click on them.

Videos



• Use target keyword phrases in your URL and filenames.

Search engine friendly URLs


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Use keywords in site navigation UI like breadcrumb trails


2



Use keywords in H1 and H2 headings


3



Use keywords in first 100 words on the page – don’t stack ‘em


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Make your content looks like the best choice in the search results


Make your content look like the best choice in the search results

• Top places in paid and unpaid search

• Text has call to action

This text is set with the <meta name="description" content=” tag

Use text that tells customers your content is the right choice


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Track your results


Tracking progress

Conversion tracking: a call to action for each media type:

– Download a white paper

– Play a video to 80%

– Respond to feedback form

How to determine if you’re succeeding


Tracking progress

Other success criteria

• SERP placement

• Backlinks

Also track

• Keyword trends

• Hits and click-through

How to determine if you’re succeeding


Suggested tools


Task Tool URL

Keyword Research • Google Adwords Keyword Tool

• Google Insights for Search

http://www.adwords.google.com http://www.google.com/trends/

On-page optimization • Acrolinx SEO Rules http://www.acrolinx.com/seo.html

Search Engine Result Page rank

• BrightEdge www.brightedge.com

Backlinks • Moz (formerly SEOmoz) www.moz.com

Spider Emulation • SEO Tools: Search Engine Spider Simulator

http://www.webconfs.com/search-engine-spider-simulator.php

Site metrics and surveys

• Adobe Marketing Cloud http://www.adobe.com/solutions/digital-marketing.html






http://www.acrolinx.com/seo.html

http://www.acrolinx.com/seo.html

http://www.brightedge.com

http://www.moz.com









http://www.adobe.com/solutions/digital-marketing.html




Summary

Focus on finding out what content customers really want, not documenting every feature.

Use customer terminology in your text – and use a tool to manage it!

Make sure you site can be crawled by search engines.

Use as many relevance factors as you can, such as linking strategies.

Track your content performance over time.


About Robert Lee

Robert Lee has managed Content Strategy and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) projects for over five years at Symantec. A former InfoDev manager at Symantec, Bob also managed documentation projects at Microsoft and Intel. @imyeruncle


Acrolinx Conference 2013 - “Using Acrolinx SEO Rules as Part of a Search-Based Content Strategy”...

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