Episode 8: William Sears | OMReport.com

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Transcription is included in the post as always.

Alpar: OK, so today’s omreport is with William Sears. William can you introduce yourself please and explain a little bit what you do.

Sears: Sure, my name’s William Sears. I am the senior manager of Search Marketing at Disney Interactive. I work on about eight websites, primarily in the “mom” marketplace and I manage all the SEO and the social media campaigns for those sites.

Alpar: If I understood you right in the panel you just joined, it’s mostly like a publishing business. So you basically want reach and then you monetize on the ads, it’s not a transaction based business. It’s not like a shop.

Sears: Exactly right. The portfolio of sites that I work on has one of the largest footprints into the mom market out there. So, we’re highly attractive as a place to advertise for people who want to hit the mom audience. So you get food advertisers, baby products, um…

Alpar: Cosmetics.

Sears: Ya, Target, you know. Brands that appeal to moms advertise on our site so we’re driving visits to the site and page views.

Alpar: So out of curiosity, what did you do before that?

Sears: I worked at Idea Lab. Idea Lab is an incubator in Pasadena. Bill Gross is the chairman and Idea Lab has mainly focused on internet businesses but has recently broadened their portfolio to do all kinds of businesses. I worked at a small search engine called Snap and I was product manager there and I started managing a team of people on a side project that Bill Gross had come up with that was essentially doing arbitrage using paid search. So, uh, I managed that for a while and it was spun off to form a new company called Perfect Market and I’m a share holder in that company.

Alpar: So do they do something similar to the large price comparison engines? Or do they not monetize on an e-commerce area but instead a different PPC feed or something like that?

Sears: For the stuff I worked on was all advertising funded. Ya, so the same thing, acquiring traffic and monetizing it with advertising on the page.

Alpar: OK, so what is your, kind of, everyday work-life look like? What would, what are your tasks, what do you do daily? What do you do on a weekly basis? What do you do on a monthly basis?

Sears: Sure, sure. So I am very, very data driven. I spend a lot of time combing through analytics. Um, I know a lot of SEOs say that they don’t pay attention to ranking in particular but they’re more looking at traffic but I do look at ranking. I think that’s the most tangible expression of the success of our SEO efforts. So I comb through ranking data everyday. I look at reports. I update our metrics of how we’re actually doing. And I also do forward looking projections.

I; What kind of KPI’s do you usually look at besides the number of keywords that you rank, your average rank on certain keywords, or the traffic, or the–

Sears: Our highest level KPI that we focus on all the time is year over year growth in monthly organic search visits. So I take a look at those for all of our sites. I take a look at page views. I take a look at how we are doing versus what my projections were earlier in the month. Are we speeding up? Are we slowing down? Our business is highly ___

Alpar: How often do you do the projections?

Sears: Everyday.

Alpar: You do projections for the next–?

Sears: For the calendar month. So, it’s easy to do now. It’s the 26th of the month, right, so I’m pretty sure of being correct for sure now. But, what I find historically is that I’m within 5% by seven days into the month. So, it helps us to get a feel for what traffic is going to be like. It helps us know if we’re catching the seasonal waves that we do. For example, Halloween is huge for us. We have a lot of crafts and recipes around Halloween. And we get a massive amount of traffic there so we want to see if we’re tracking the same way we did the year before. So we take a look at those. Um, we also take a look at keyword and page level metrics on a weekly basis. What’s our top ten keywords? What’s our top ten blending pages? Which ones have increased and which ones have declined. And that helps us to–I like to determine as quickly as possible if things are working or not working. Another example was when Panda first hit. Immediately you could see it in the rank checking software. Bang! Something significant has happened.

Alpar: To a legitimate publishing business like Disney, is–or I assume, all the eight websites are–how did the Panda have an effect on you?

Sears: It was very positive. I think it–

Alpar: That’s what I would’ve hoped.

Sears: It basically eliminated a lot of competitors who had kind of spammier websites. I think it punished a lot of, basically poor publishers that had poor quality content and that helped our content to rise further so it’s actually been very beneficial. Penguin also. So we noticed it within hours. So, when the first conversation was first starting to percolate on the forums, we were already seeing it in our data.

Alpar: More traffic, more rankings.

Sears: Ya, so we immediately had a conversation across the Walt Disney company, “What are you seeing?” you know. Our network is tremendous. There’s ABC, ABC News, ESPN. So we all got on the phone and said, “Well, what are you seeing?” And people were confirming that they saw movement, you know. Some of our keywords went up, some of our keywords went down. But you could tell just by looking at the data that there’d been a seismic shift in one morning. So I look at that stuff daily.

Alpar: So is there like, really, really, really short head terms that you also go for or is more like a long-tail approach because you have so much content happening there all the time?

Sears: You know, it’s both. We do really well for words like “chicken recipes”, “first trimester”, “second trimester”, “fifteenth week of pregnancy”. So those are pretty competitive keywords and they’re keywords that I think people wouldn’t normally assume Disney has any sort of competitive advantage with. So it’s very straight up normal, SEO, very competitive like any one else at this conference is fighting for those head keywords. But we pick up a lot of tail keywords as well. All of our sites pull in, maybe a hundred thousand different keywords in a month so we bring in traffic across the board but we really track the head and the torso keywords. So, for example–

Alpar: I never heard that, the combination, like head and torso.

Sears: Like torso, like in the middle, right? So we don’t yet rank on the first page for “Halloween” but we rank for “Halloween crafts”.

Alpar: Combinations of that key word with other key words.

Sears: “Halloween crafts”, “Halloween recipes”, “Halloween costumes for kids”, “homemade Halloween costumes”. We kill it on those keywords.

Alpar: You were mentioning the recipe websites that you have and that you also added in the rich for recipes. Where do you think of that as leading because usually, historically if you look at something being added by Google, or you give them more data, then at some point they may or may not, but at least have the possibility of really easily, or conveniently–

Sears: Keeping a person on the page?

Alpar: No, not just that–yes! That! Or just, like basically putting a meta search engine. So if you say, like, one of your great, you know, short head keywords is “chicken recipes”, then google, at some point may, you know, do a much better recipe search and then people, for those generic terms, like, because they’re like, they refer to a whole list of recipes and not just one. So probably Google will take away the, the whole kind of browsing, uh, to a search that they’ll offer that’ll be more specific.

Sears: That whole concept is something that people debate a lot and talk directly to google about. Google, essentially robbing publishers of an actual visit. In the case of a recipe though, you actually need to read the whole recipe, you need to know all of the ingredients, how long it’s gonna take, and they don’t show the whole thing.

Alpar: People that come for the chicken recipes, they’ll come to a list and then jump–so they’ll take, they’re not, i think they’re not stealing the user, they’re stealing some of the page views.

Sears: Perhaps. But we still get the clicks and it’s been good. It’s been double-digit growth.

Alpar: I was just wondering. Do you think that strategically it can make sense to not do it because later on it may be a disadvantage.

Sears: If the circumstances change, we’d certainly adapt. But so far it’s been a big win for us so we’re trying to do it as much as we can. Generally speaking, I think the more you can decorate your listing int the SERP. Whether it’s a recipe snippet or an e-commerce rating, you know, stars, or a map, or author markup or anything like that, it draws the eyeball to your listing and you get more clicks.

Alpar: I really like that form, the way you said it with the decorations because it reminds me a little bit of when people, when they sell stuff on eBay they decorate their offers and you basically refer to any rich snippet elements like decorations and I thought that’s a really, really nice way to describe it. Makes it more, uh, people will understand faster what you refer to.

Sears: One of my colleagues, Jeff Preston, he’s a great SEO, is extremely strong with schema.org and all kinds of markup and so he and his team are doing a lot of markup around movies, obviously for Disney and that’s a big thing, and videos and things like that. So we really are big believer in structured data and getting that markup into our pages.

Alpar: With the movies, I think actually the problems that will come up, that they are already showing more intensively because, especially movies–Google is pushing the knowledge graph really strongly–and there I would raise the question even faster, if it does make sense or not to deliver the data in a structured way because…

Sears: Well we’re trying to surface our content and we want to be sure that we’re authoritative for the intellectual property we’ve created and then we can bring that traffic into our site. Every time we’ve done that, exposed more data through structured markup, we’ve ended up getting more traffic. Our goal is to just make sure that some sort of unofficial repository of content that is borrowing or taking our content doesn’t outrank us. So we always want to be authoritative. So this what they call the knowledge box or whatever, we search for certain things; if it’s referring to some of our intellectual property, we want to make sure it shows us and not someone else. We’d rather have people have go to our sites to learn about an amusement park attraction than to go to Wikipedia.

Alpar: So when you compare working in house versus a set up from an agency or, I’m sorry–I wanted to close the question. You’re in the publishing business and publishing differs strongly from anything transactional so I think from what I see, you know, if you think of simplified areas of activity, like: technology, content, links, then usually in the publishing business, there’s a strong focus on technology, would you agree or think that’s a wrong cons–

Sears: I think so because even a publishing business is transactional. The transactions are just page views. And so we have to do a lot of analysis and use a lot of technology and a lot of data to optimize those flows. So we want minimize bounce rate, we want to increase page views per visit. So, it’s actually, the money that we make from every page view is obviously just cents compared to if we were selling a product or what have you, so we really have to fight to get enough page views, so it’s up to any real revenue.

Alpar: So how do you learn, how do you progress?

Sears: I learn a lot from my colleagues. We are always reading, always–

Alpar: Within your team?

Sears: Within my team–

Alpar: Or other colleagues from Disney?

Sears: Within my team specifically, within our building, within Disney Interactive. Across the Walt Disney Corporation there’s a lot of great SEOs and then at events like this. You know, we get to know people like you and you get different perspectives and you’re always learning. I try to make the case within my organization that it’s more important for SEOs to go to conferences than perhaps any other type of worker because the game we play changes so radically, so constantly, that if you don’t stay integrated with the community, you really fall behind.

Alpar: It’s actually funny that the SEO title is like–if you look at transactional businesses, it’s usually like a niche channel. It delivers a lot of cheap traffic, but not a lot of traffic. So average either a lot of more traffic. But there’s like so few bloggers that you would see blogging about ad words or there’s so few conferences focusing on people doing PPC. What do you think about that?

Sears: Well a lot of conferences I’ve been to, they roll the paid in with the organic. If you go to Pubcon, there’s always people talking about paid search.

Alpar: But in relation to how much money is spent and paid, there seems to be a lot less kind of, activity in a social networks, on blogs, and on conferences. How do you explain that?

Sears: I don’t really know, I think that it’s confusing to management that they pay other than the employees, they pay very little for organic search traffic so it’s easy for them to think it’s just going to fall in their lap and be automatic. But it really is a function of applied intelligence, smart people working hard to make sure your site is well optimized. So, you know, we work hard at that and I think we have to go to conferences to know what’s going on but I think people in paid search have to do it too.

Alpar: There seems to be less interaction in all the other online marketing channels. I mean, sure there’s–

Sears: I think it’s because we’re so desperate for knowledge in organic.

Alpar: Because everybody’s fishing like in a black box?

Sears: It’s almost like witchcraft to some people you know? Or blind luck. It really isn’t but–in a presentation I have, I use an analogy of, paid search is like a motor boat. You have to buy the fuel but it can get you from point A to point B directly. Pollutes a little bit, but it gets you there. Whereas, organic search is like a sailboat, you’re having to ride the winds, and ride the currents, and you have to rely on forces outside of yourself and it takes a little bit of, you know, just pressions where you can really understand what’s happening and detect little nuances in the currents that change.

Alpar: You don’t, you can’t necessarily get directly from A to B but instead you sometimes–

Sears: Ya, a good example of that is like, you get a link from page A to page B and then a link from page B to page C but page C is your money page. You know? So it’s indirect. And I think that we really rely in SEO upon inferring the tiniest nuances from—Mac, cuts less, tweet, or, you know, the last post on Google’s webmaster help forums or what we hear from our colleagues. You know because we all see different things. We’re all looking at different sets of data and it is a black box and so we have to triangulate based upon what we hear from our peers. It’s not as straight forward as other marketing channels.

Alpar: How do you see the differences between the U.S. and other markets in SEO terms or have you been active only in the U.S.?

Sears: Ya, I’ve mainly been active in the U.S., I don’t really know too much about the other markets. I know that um, for us, our advertisers want American eyeballs so we actually limit our marketing efforts expressly to get American and sometimes Canadian audience but Disney is such a brand of universal appeal, we get traffic from all over. Whether we want it or not. I mean we always want the guests but our focus is on American audience. Now that’s me, there’s other people–

Alpar: Does it have an, does that have an implication on your, like, on your work? So is there something you would do different if visitors from, I don’t know like, some third world countries, that probably surf the Disney websites–

Sears: Well you know, I have colleagues that would be better able to answer that question for you. Like we have teams that do Europe, Middle East, and Asia. And they have a lot of localization challenges, you know. When a new movie comes out and it’s called, you know the movie Brave, or do you know it as Merida?

Alpar: I know it as Merida.

Sears: Ya, it’s called Brave in the United States. So, see that’s just an example. A whole movie title is different in a different market place. So that’s a big challenge for that team but they do it well, but it’s absolutely not an area of expertise for me.

Alpar: OK, OK. So, you mentioned before that your team consists of two guys doing SEO and two guys doing social?

Sears: I have two people doing SEO that are full time employees and I have a third person that helps out, that’s a temporary worker, and then I have three people that work on my social team.

Alpar: So what are the differences between what you do and the other two and a half people that work in SEO?

Sears: I spend a lot of my time on strategy. And evangelism, in making sure the whole organization is coordinated. They spend a lot of their time very tactically. Talking to editors and producers about specific pieces of content, working with the engineering team, to make sure that whatever–we work on a scrum basis so every couple weeks there’s a new push of uh, a version of the website so we always have some “asks” every time. So they spend a lot of time trying to get those things accomplished.

Alpar: I mean if your tech is already educated enough to ask you, that’s already a great win.

Sears: Ya, ya. And they spend a lot of time in the CMS, actually making changes. Whereas I focus more of time strategically. And then the social team, it’s so time consuming, they have so much to post, they have to curate the content, find the pictures, write the copy, take the copy and share it with the production and editorial teams to make sure they’re happy with it.

Alpar: So the posting in the social networks, is separated from the editors?

Sears: Right, but they’re working closely with the editors. So it takes them a period of time to get the subject matter expertise to really be strong posters and good copywriters in that space but it comes to them.

Alpar: How come that, the social is kind of sorted to search? Or would that be, would it make more sense to have that closer to the editors, or editorial staff?

Sears: Well, our whole SEO team is pretty well embedded with the editorial team, so we’re very close to them anyway. So the lines are a little bit fuzzy of you know, where SEO ends and where editorial picks up. Same with social. I think the social leadership came to me mainly just because I knew about it and I had passion there and so they put me in charge of that and I’m also using the same sort of analytics platforms that I use for search and making it very quantitive and measuring the results that we do. So I think that it was a natural fit. Also, I think SEO and social help each other out all the time.

Alpar: Alright, thanks so much for the interview.

Sears: You’re welcome, pleasure’s mine.