Inside Expert: Alex Bennert Answers Our Subscription Publishing SEO Questions

Alex Bennert, a leading organic search expert, talks to Subscription Insider about important organic search issues and trends publishers need to be thinking about

Alex Bennert

Alex Bennert

Alex Bennert is an organic search expert. More specifically, she is the organic search expert that other experts look to for advice. Her connections with the industry, evolving search technologies and the best SEO practices run deep. She has been a featured presenter, moderator and keynote speaker at many industry conferences, including: SMX, SES, RIMC and PubCon. Her specialties are in technical SEO, site audits, redesigns, development and launching of new sites, custom training for editorial and technical and management teams of enterprise-size organizations.  Organizations from the Wall Street Journal, Amazon, Zillow, Star Tribune, Atlantic Monthly, Pew Research to Urban Spoon, MarketWatch, Barrons and SmartMoney have looked to Alex for advice and help with organic search.

We had the opportunity to discuss with Alex the important organic search issues and trends publishers need to be thinking about: Mobile, Google News, First Click Free, Social Signals , Zero-Click Search, Mobile Apps and much more!

1. Has Social Media changed search?

Bennert:  When I first started doing SEO, the only ways that someone could get to your site was by directly typing in the URL, clicking on a bookmark, or clicking on a referral link or a link in an e-mail. There were very limited avenues to get people to your site. Now, with all the social media, search is actually becoming much less of a primary driver of traffic. Google used to be desperate to get search right, but there are so many other ways now that people will come to your site that search is sort of becoming less important. I’m not sure I can really say it like that, but it’s just one out of many things that are changing.

Search is a very specific, intent-driven activity. There are two kinds of searches.  The first is brand query searches, where people are using search to simply navigate through the internet. They know where they want to go, they type the terms into Google, and they go to the space.  It’s really a kind of direct traffic, even though its search traffic. The second is when they want to know something, they’re researching a product, or they want to buy something. The point is that there’s always an intent. I think that search is kind of narrowing in terms of importance, but I don’t think they are thinking enough about how those visitors are different than the ones that come from, say, an e-mail or social media accounts.

Google essentially wants to map: “What is your question?” Say that someone wants to know about a good digital camera. The searcher doesn’t necessarily know your brand or your company. They do a search and end up at a newspaper like the Wall Street Journal, which gets a lot of traffic on news topics. The problem is that people aren’t really interested in reading that paper, per se. They just wanted to read about the topic of digital cameras. You get these people who are coming to your site, and if you give them what they need they go away. Search can be a great method of getting highly qualified visitors to your site, but it’s much harder to keep them and get them to do anything. If you satisfy their intent successfully without providing any sort of persuasion to do anything further, you get a visit, but you didn’t really get revenue, a subscription, or a purchase. 

2. Does Google Plus have a future?

Bennert:  To start, it’s interesting that Google has seemed to have finally capitulated on Google Plus. They pushed that so hard, with carrot and sticks, and it actually surprises me that they didn’t succeed, because they put a lot of effort into it. It was a big part of search, it was a part of news, and it was a part of YouTube. Seeing that sort of de-emphasized is interesting. It’s actually good from a search perspective because, working with publishers, I spent a lot of training time explaining what Google Plus is, and why they should be on it even though their audience wasn’t there, and explaining how it would sort of coincide with search. Trying to get them to start another new profile, and keep track of it, and use it when they wouldn’t normally use it was always a big challenge. I’m kind of glad that I don’t have to try to do that anymore, because it really always kind of felt like putting the round peg into a square hole. When I work with them, I try to explain SEO or teach them in a way that it becomes a part of their own workflow, as opposed to something separate that they have to do, like one extra thing that they have to do. It certainly made it simpler with Google Plus being gone.

Another interesting thing is that Google renegotiated their relationship with Twitter. I’m really interested to see how that’s going to play out, but I haven’t seen it in search too much yet. I do see it in the news a little bit, so that’s interesting, because that’s just a ton of data that Google had access to, but not anymore. What happened was, they had a deal with Twitter and they got access to the Twitter fire hose. They didn’t have to crawl. They were given everything, and then the deal fell apart, or ended, and they didn’t renew it. So the only access to Twitter they had was publicly follow-able content. Trawling is a less efficient way of Google to get information than if they were getting it from a feed.

My point is that they now have access to that feed again, and it’s kind of interesting because I haven’t really seen it come into play, but I strongly suspect that it will. I don’t know what that will be in terms of the effect on search. I don’t think that if you tweet and you get a bunch of retweets, that’s going to have a positive effect in search. I think it’s simply that the information is more likely to start showing up in search, but I haven’t seen that happen yet.

3. Should we abandon our Google Plus profiles?

Bennert: I wouldn’t abandon it, but I would certainly ask if your users, your readers, your market are using it?  There are a lot of very industry-specific instances of high use. For some reason, lawyers love Google Plus. If your audience is there, then you definitely want to be there.

At the very least, you want to have a profile, because what it does is it gives you another opportunity to showcase your brand.  Say somebody doesn’t search specifically for your brand name. That page that they’re seeing before they even click, it’s kind of an electronic billboard for your particular brand. I see a lot of times that people don’t take care how their own brand name or other product names shows up in a search result, because this is their opportunity. It’s like a billboard that is finely tailored to the person that needs your product or service right at that second.

You’ve got your own page rank, but then what you ideally want to see is your Facebook page rank, and then your LinkedIn profile, and your Google profile, because you can control those things. It gives you more control over messaging and the first search results that come up. The more control you have over the messaging of your company, the better. You can’t just always have it on your own site, so using the authority of Facebook and LinkedIn and Google Plus to that advantage is a smart thing to do.

4. Speaking of social media, are they one of the “signals” used to weigh a page/site?

Bennert: Bing claims to use signal from social networks to establish and determine the authority of a page.

“In addition to understanding the web anchor graph, a variety of factors are used to establish and determine the authority of a page. These include signals from social networks, cited sources, name recognition and the author’s identity.”

Bing is Microsoft’s engine, and they partner with Yahoo!, so when you look at Bing and Yahoo together it’s really the same index. They’re just getting to the point where starting to pay them attention is worth it. There aren’t a lot of differences in terms of how you optimize for Bing and optimize for Google. The only thing that I know for sure is that Bing claims that they integrate social media signals into their algorithm, not heavily, but they do make use of those signals.

Bing also has a partnership with Facebook. They’ll know how well a particular post does, and that will have a different algorithm, whereas Google did not factor any social signals in except for their own Google Plus. That was really the only difference. Everything else is the same, and again, 80% of SEO is just the structure of the site, making it accessible, making it easy for the bot to find the pages that are valuable.

As for Google, although they renewed their partnership with twitter in terms of access to the “fire hose” there are no indications that tweets, retweets, etc. are being factored into ranking. Google certainly isn’t using Facebook for signals. As for Google+, considering the recent de-emphasis by Google of that platform, it doesn’t seem likely that it will ever be a solid enough signal to be used as an effective authority factor for ranking. That said, I still see posts on Google+ showing up in Google News but only for users who have specifically enabled their news setting to see them.

5. What’s the state of mobile search?

Bennert: Mobile has now outpaced desktop for searches. It’s a completely different situation, because mobile is harder due to its small screen. Plus, you also have to think about how your customers are using mobile. My favorite example is actually AAA. A visit to its website basically reads: “Here’s the value of a membership, here is how you can sign up.” But if you go to it on mobile, what you get is a button to “Call a Driver,” because they’re assuming that you’re probably broken down on the side of the road, so their entire mobile site has a totally different perspective. I think that it’s really smart. You don’t always have to do that, but it’s really good to understand how people are using mobile on your site differently than how they’re using desktop.

6. What can you tell us about “zero-click” search?

Bennert: It’s been going on for a while. For example, if I want to know if the Red Sox game is tonight, I don’t have to go to a site. I can just ask Google and it’s going to give me what’s called a “card,” with an already pre-written answer. If I want to know the definition of something, it’ll just give me a card with the definition. There are sites out there like weather sites, open dictionary sites, or financial stock market sites that lose the opportunity to get traffic from search because Google is just giving up the answers right on the search result page. Of course there’s a whole bunch of controversy about Google essentially using other people’s data. A lot of times, when they initially started doing it, they weren’t asking. They were just using it. I remember Trip Advisor and Yelp were saying, “That’s our content! You can’t do that!”

7. How do sites get their content into the zero-click searches?

Bennert: I assume, at this point, that most of those relationships are business deals that Google has done. For example, they’re doing a deal with MLB.com and NFL.com. It’s great when they actually do a deal, because it means that it works well on both sides, but if you’re not a huge site and huge brand, you have no chance of partnering with Google on something like that. Then, a lot of sites wouldn’t want to because they’re essentially letting Google have the answer so customers won’t need to visit them. 

8. What about people who come to your site from search instead of directly?

Bennert: When people come to your site from search, you have to treat them differently, because they’re not coming to your home page first. They’re coming in through a side article, so if they want to read something about Rush Limbaugh, they read it and they get to the end. If there’s no other thing to compel them to click, they’re just going to go away. Then you’ve got things like financial stock sites, where people just want to know a particular price. Today Google will just give it to you in the form of a card, but even before cards, for example, at a financial newspaper client of mine, all of our ticker traffic was high-volume, but the average time on the page was seconds, because they just needed a simple price. 

I’d like to see people really think a little bit more about how searchers have a different intention than simply visiting your site. It’s hard, because the way that you get your direct traffic to convert is often very different from the way that you can get search traffic to convert, and it varies widely by industry.

9. What about the integration of apps into search results?

Bennert: The technology is there for search engines now to index individual app “pages.” I know that you can go to Google and the developer site, and they will tell you exactly what you have to do to get your app indexed. I don’t know about Apple yet.

One of my clients has an app where if you’re looking for something to do in their city, you can launch the app and say “I want to see a jazz band tonight.” In theory, someone’s going to Google and asking, “Who’s playing jazz for brunch on Sunday?” and it will take them to the app and to that page. That’s something that’s going to become a much bigger component of search. It’s also something I see people kind of behind on, because it does require a little bit of programming to get your app to be indexed, but I’m surprised that it hasn’t become more prevalent yet. I believe that it will. Otherwise, the apps will siphon off more searchers if they don’t integrate.

10. What are best practices and conversely, some of the most common mistakes that you’re seeing?

Bennert: This is a big one, especially for huge enterprise sites, but it’s relevant even down to the mom and pop sites. All the time, I see that SEO is basically a line item in a project plan, usually as part of marketing after the site is built. That’s the worst way to do SEO, so one of the biggest things that companies can do is to incorporate it into the development of the entire project. When you’re writing out all the product requirement descriptions and stuff, that’s a great time to do your keyword research and to figure out how people are looking for what you offer so you can make sure that you have relevant content. Then when it’s time to do the wire frame, you’ll be looking at the information architecture to see if there is robust linking and that the URLs work.

Once the site is designed, and they’ve written the code, you want to go through and to make sure that the code is clean. The developers need to know how to implement all that stuff. It’s so much easier to do it when you’re building it than it is to go back and retrofit. Next is QA, making sure that everything is working, and then you’ve got launch and monitoring, and finally, analytics. Even with analytics, the other thing I see a lot is that people don’t annotate the things that they do, whether they’ve added a new section, changed a page, added a new theme, or even held an outside event.

For example, a client of mine got a lot of traffic on the dentist that killed Cecil the Lion. They got huge traffic, but they’re not going to remember it in a year if they don’t annotate it. So many things happen throughout the year and the data becomes much less meaningful, so that’s the other big thing that I think people should pay attention to because it’s so easy. SEO needs to be baked into the entire process, as opposed to being considered just as this thing that you do to market your website. That’s my top best practice tip.

11. Do you have an example of a client that did this?

Bennert: A client of mine was a major online retailer trying to break into the daily deals industry. They hired me after the entire site was completely built, and it was just a disaster to try to go back and fix all the problems that should have been managed during the development process.

The corporate headquarters has an in-house SEO person, and he is extremely good, but the company’s satellite location I was working with had their own teams, and they just didn’t have the foresight to properly implement SEO. The first company that I ever worked with impressed the hell out of me because they hired us before they ever wrote a drop of code, which was so smart of them.  

You would think that large organizations would do that, but even the best sites, the biggest sites, and the sites with the budget don’t think to do SEO during development. If you do it during development, there’s so much less you’ll have to do down the road. From that point on, there was still monitoring, looking at the data and keywords and using it to understand other ways that your audience is looking for what you have. My point is that if you bake it in, you’re 80% there, and you really don’t have to do a whole lot of extra SEO.

There was another publication founded by a former boss of mine to cover business news, but from a completely different perspective. He hired me and just said: “Tell us what you need to do.” It’s been two years now, and every six months he’ll ask me if I want to come in and do an audit. I tell him it’s not necessary because the site’s traffic is growing, because they did everything right.  Every once in a while I’ll suggest something like, “Schema tags are new: you might want to add this.” You can focus just on all of the analytics and the analysis when done right, and you don’t have to worry about all of the other technical things.

12. Any other best practices people should know?

Bennert: Understanding the packaging of content based on what they have behind and in front of the pay wall. There’s really not a limit to how many pages one company can get indexed in Google. In fact, I see a lot is enterprise-level sites allowing too many other pages to get indexed. Again, my client had tons of pages that were indexed that had absolutely no value, like patented results. You don’t want to search and come in on page 27 of the results, so you need to control what gets indexed.

Every page that gets indexed and searched should be a page that’s a viable entry point for your target market from a search query. If it’s not, then it shouldn’t be indexed, because there’s a crawl allocation. When the bot comes to crawl your site, there’s only a certain amount of pages it’s going to crawl, depending on a bunch of different factors. Let’s say it’s a thousand. If you’ve got a bunch of pages that are low-value, you’re wasting your crawl allocation. The answer is, there’s no limit to how many pages that you can get indexed, but you should never allow a page to get indexed that doesn’t have a purpose in search. You should be able to look at a page and go, “This page is to attract people that are looking for this keyword.”

In theory, you could have as many pages as possible. In reality, the amount of pages they get indexed is based on the page rank, or the authority, of the site. The more authority a site has, the more pages will get crawled and indexed. It’s also how the link equity is spread around, so for a lot of pages, for a lot of sites, it’s really hard to get deep-linked. Most people, when they’re linking, they’ll link to a homepage, or something like that, so a site that has a wide distribution of deep links is also more likely to get far more pages indexed.

Again, crawling is very inefficient. If you do a site map feed, you’re much more likely to get every page that’s in your feed indexed. The feed should only contain URLs that are high-value search pages. The biggest thing I see is people just put every single URL on their site in there, and that’s not smart. You’re really controlling the index, knowing which ones should get in and which one’s should not get in. Very few people really focus on that, but implementing aggressive, internal cross-linking site map feeds are your best way of getting a high volume of pages indexed.

13. Site maps: What tools should we use?   

Bennert: I know creating a site map is a very easy thing to do. You could simply make a text list of all your links, put it up there and tell Google where it’s at.

Just to reiterate, if you had 50 million pages, you’re probably not going to get 50 million indexes simply by crawl. If you put that into a site feed, your chances of getting all those 50 million indexes goes up substantially, because Google doesn’t have to find them. You’re basically just handing it to them.

14. What about getting indexed and ranked in Google News?    

Bennert: If you’re going into Google News and you’re a brand-new publisher, it takes about a year because what the algorithm wants to do is learn that you are a trustworthy publication, and it wants to see that people are choosing you out of a cluster.

You’ve got a cluster of articles and watch-it journals, CNN, and then you’ve got something smaller that’s new, when people click on the smaller one, you’re going to start to get the authority that you need to get more visibility in News, but it’s really hard being small and starting out in Google News.

A client of mine had an interesting approach where they went for rank based on social media and not search. Sometimes they would ask: “How come we’re not ranking for…?” My answer to them was, “You’ve got a really witty, funny, social kind of headline that doesn’t actually have a name in it. You’re not going to rank for the name.”        It’s worked in their favor, because the amount of this linking that they get from the social stuff they do has made their site authoritative. They were the fastest I’ve ever see any publication get into Google news and start ranking consistently.

15. Could you explain “First Click Free?”

Bennert: If you are writing content that’s behind a paywall with information that people are searching for, you have a method of customer acquisition that you’re blocking if you don’t do First Click Free. In this case, the only way that you can get anything indexed is to display the first couple of paragraphs, and then describe the rest. Google would index the first couple of paragraphs, but typically that’s not enough information to rank. Google News will also label you “Subscription only”, which people will click on less frequently.

If you have “First Click Free,” where visitors can see one article for free before hitting your paywall, you don’t need to have the subscription label, even if you are a subscription site. The question then becomes, “Why are we letting some people in for free and others not?” Another reason to do first click free, like with social, is you could get more visibility if people are able to pass around your article, link to it, and use it on Facebook. If you’re completely behind a subscription wall, that really limits you.

A client of mine once said, “We’re letting these people in and they’re not really converting very well.” Next to direct search, it was their highest traffic driver, but the lowest in terms of page views. It’s not always like that, but it usually is for publishers, so the end question was, “Are we making money off this?” They were a hybrid model: they had a subscription, but they also had ad revenue, and as it turned out more than made up for whatever they felt like they lost in subscriptions. We did very well at converting searches into subscribers. Again, it’s about knowing how to persuade different visitors in different ways. You have to treat them differently in order to get that second click, or to get that subscription.

Even with the ad revenue, it was worth it, especially if you’re newer it’s great exposure. This is because they don’t really know about you, and when they see you in search there’s sort of this automatic assumption of authority when people see something in a search engine. You really have to know for sure, you have to be able to track it and know that it’s working for you, know that it’s either growing your visitor count, or ad revenue, or that it’s growing your subscriptions. That’s why you would use First Click Free.

16. If you are a small publisher, does it make sense to use First Click Free?

Bennert: I would think it would make more sense. If you’re a small publisher, search is going to be one of your best methods of acquisition, and I would say that it’s really the only way. If you’re a small publisher for a very niche market, like high-level financial news that people can’t get anywhere else, and you know that they’ll subscribe to it, then it’s fine to not do first click free. Otherwise, you need eyeballs. You need people to know about you, you need them to read you. You need them to share it and talk about it, because that’s sort of the currency of the web.

Publishers track how many people use First Click Free to bypass the pay wall. They track the subscriptions that came from organic search, and they track the revenue that came from organic search, and so for them it was very easy to discern that it was a highly effective program.

One of the things about First Click Free is that Google only wants news articles. If you have a lot of other types of content, like columnists, or a topics page, Google doesn’t want that in the news. Only feeding them the stuff they want can be tricky depending on how your site is set up. That can be a reason to not do it, because in one particular directory or section you have stuff that is both free and not free, you will have a really hard time getting First Click Free to work effectively for you. If you’re a site and you have a lot of different types of things, but you also have news, then what you want to do is put your news stuff physically under one sub-directory or a sub domain, so that it’s isolated from other, non-news stuff. That’s the best way to do it.

17. Does anybody do First Click Free for non-news content?

Bennert: Not that I know of.

18. Are there any vendors that are helpful to implement first-click free if somebody doesn’t have an in-house SEO person?

Bennert: It’s not complicated to implement if you don’t have that one issue where you have the mixing of news and non-news. It’s really just a server setting that ensures every time you get a request from a Google property, it will bypass the wall, and you just have to set the meter to indexing five things, and Google has very specific documentation on it. If you have a website, you have to have some kind of tech support. I don’t think it’s complicated that someone would not be able to figure out how to do it. It’s not hard.

You have a lot of publications now that are doing metering. The New York Times grants access to ten articles for free each month, but with First Click Free, they still have to let me see and bypass the meter if I come from a search after those ten articles, and that’s very frustrating to some publishers. You’ve got a metering system, but this forces you to essentially have to abandon it. The other conversation that I heard a lot when the New York Times did this is that you’re making readers who aren’t tech savvy pay for it, but readers who are smart enough to just know to search the headline they are getting for free. You’re not rewarding your real customers, your best customers.

With a hard pay wall, every day you have to let people bypass it five times. The meter really doesn’t matter. Even if someone has reached their meter limit, you still have to do first click free.

19. Any fun or unusual factoid or challenging situation you can share?

Bennert: Working with any really large company is always a challenge, just because nothing happens quickly. You always have people at the top who say, “We want to see results, organic results…” Even if you implement everything immediately, organic still takes a while to work. From an SEO perspective, when you’re working with either a more agile company or a smaller company or a company that has dedicated resources, it’s much easier. You would be shocked at how many times I have been hired for an SEO project, and most of what I’ve given them was never implemented.

What happens is at some point someone’s like, “We’re going to do SEO,” but by the time they hire someone the audit takes a really long time, especially with a large site, and by then people have moved on to other priorities. It can be very frustrating when you’re at a very large company that has a lot of competing demands on IT. I like working for small companies with very big budgets. Those are my favorites.

20. Where do you see search going next year and beyond?

Bennert: The only thing that I know I can say for sure is that it’s going to become a more narrowly-focused acquisition. 

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