Search Marketing

Back in January I posted a fairly extensive write-up about why Home Depot sucks at search marketing and as a follow up I figured I should point out that they know a thing or two about reputation management. Recently MSN featured an article about Home Depot shafting shoppers. There were thousands of responses to this article, the majority of them on the negative side. In order to control the damage a little, Home Depot CEO Frank Blake posted a response to all the negativity. Here are a couple excerpts from his post:

I’m Frank Blake, the new CEO for The Home Depot. I’ve read a number of the postings on the MSN message board (unfortunately, there were a lot of them), and we’ve dispatched a dedicated task force – working directly with me – that is ready and willing to address each and every issue raised on this board. Please give us the chance.

There’s no way I can express how sorry I am for all of the stories you shared. I recognize that many of you were loyal and dedicated shoppers of The Home Depot … and we let you down. That’s unacceptable. Customers are our company’s lifeblood – and the sole reason we have been able to build such a successful company is because of your support. The only way we’re going to continue to be successful is by regaining your trust and confidence … and we will do that.

I’d like to thank Scott – his column about our company was insightful and revealing. You can easily tell that it struck a nerve with me. Scott, we’ll do all in our power to again make The Home Depot the store you and your wife, Carolyn, once referred to as “our store.” I’d also like to give my thanks to the many people who posted comments on this board. We want them. We need them … to enable us to keep getting better. We’re committed to being the company that helped set the standard for customer service excellence in home improvement. Please continue to hold us accountable.

A very well done response in my book. He apologizes, addresses the concerns, lays out what they are going to do to fix them, and finally thanks the author and the responders for their feedback. He couldn’t have done a better job in my book. Way to go Home Depot! I’m off to buy some patio furniture.

So what’s the deal with CNN? I can’t figure out their intentions on this one. As Loren reported a few weeks back, Google now has snippets from RSS feeds appearing on the personalized home pages. CNN doesn’t let you see some of the snippets. I don’t know if it’s a lack of understanding on how they work, or they just want to jack up their page view numbers. When the snippets first appeared, all of the stories were displaying “Read full story for latest details” as seen below:

Now some of the stories are showing the snippets:

What’s the deal CNN? Let’s go with one or the other. Page view numbers are soon to be an obsolete thing of the past anyway so just bite the bullet and use the snippets.

I have received some positive feedback from my post on Blockbuster sucking at everything so I think I’m going to start a theme. Each week I’ll do at least one post slamming a company that should be on top of the game. Today’s example of “how your marketing executives don’t know crap” is Home Depot. **Sidebar: Home Depot didn’t make me mad like Blockbuster. Other than the fact it’s so big I get lost in it, Home Depot is a great store. They just are a little bit lost in the search arena.

Part 1: User Experience

Not to bad in this department. They have a fairly easy to use menu system. The number of categories they have is a little daunting, but they do a good job making the navigation intuitive. They have good descriptions and well written user reviews. The shopping cart and checkout process appear to be straight forward and don’t make me jump through any hoops (up to the customer information screen anyhow). The only glitch as far as this goes was the strange item recommendation they gave me. I put a DeWALT 3750 PSI Gas Pressure Washer with 13HP Honda Engine in my shopping cart. When I arrived at the cart page, there is an area that gives me more “items I might also like”. Since I’m buying a gas pressure washer I apparently might also like a Westinghouse 27 In. Widescreen LCD HDTV. Huh? Is this just a random product selection or something? Maybe they should think about building some product associations into the database. Or maybe I’m supposed to watch the TV through the living room window while I pressure wash the side of the house.

Part 2: Paid Search

We’re starting down a steep slope now. User experience was a B, paid search is a C-. I didn’t delve too deep into this area, and I’m not a contractor so I don’t know where you would normally find building supplies, but that’s the point. Your average home owner that wants to put up a fence might not be sure where to get supplies, so it’s reasonable to believe that they might go in and search for [lumber] or [fencing]. Nope, no ads and according to SpyFu they aren’t bidding on it. I know they have lumber at Home Depot, wish I could find out a little more. Okay, well I hired someone to build the fence, I’m going to lay the bricks for a patio. Where do I get the bricks? Let’s search. I type in [bricks] and I see the Home Depot ad…good deal. I click on it and where do I end up? Paving stone installation. That’s not what I was looking for people, see you later. I want to buy some bricks dammit. Just because eBay and Amazon bid on every word in the dictionary doesn’t mean it’s a good idea for everyone. If you don’t have bricks, don’t bid on it. Bid on [brick installation] and [patio installation] and those types of more targeted terms. Enough with the PPC, I gotta get to the good part.

Part 3: Organic Search

Paid search was a C-, organic search is an F+…if there is such a thing. Here’s where they really blow chunks. Like the kid from the Goonies. First off, look at this URL:

http://www.homedepot.com/prel80/HDUS/EN_US/diy_main/pg_diy.jsp?CNTTYPE=PROD_META&CNTKEY=
SuperFeatures2%2fAppliances%2fPM_Appliance_Promo3&cm_sp=creative-_-homepage-_-hero-_-applian
ces_super_10percoffenergystar_01162007&BV_SessionID=@@@@0992718361.1169532890@@@@&BV_E
ngineID=ccceaddjmhilddfcgelceffdfgidgnk.0&MID=9876&pos=p01

No, I am not making that up. Hello SEO 101…welcome to the show. Do I really need to say anything else about that one? Moving on, they have enough presence of mind to cloak the product pages. I take a look at the normal code for us users and what to my wandering eyes should appear? — frameset onload=”FramesetOnLoad();” Nice, so they have enough brains to properly cloak their pages, just not enough to come up with a more friendly solution than that or to fix the URL structure.

So Home Depot probably sells a lot of home appliances. Dishwashers, refrigerators and the like. Forget about the general terms like those, they aren’t anywhere to be seen. When users start the search for a home appliance, they are going to start with a more general term. They will narrow it down later to a model. Home Depot doesn’t start in the beginning of the search cycle, leaving that completely untouched. Fine, let’s say Mr. Customer has narrowed down his choices to a “Maytag Jetclean Dishwasher”. Since they have a whole page dedicated to this product, I’m thinking at least top five is where they should be. Maytag first, then it’s a shootout between Lowes, Home Depot, Sears, and maybe a couple others. No sir, wrong again. Position 37 in Google. Yea, everyone will find that. I’ve already driven to Sears before my browser even gets to page three. Okay, let’s get a little more detailed with our search in case Joe Schmoe still hasn’t found it elsewhere. “Maytag® Jetclean® II Convertible/Portable Dishwasher” copied right off their heading. Oops, bad news again. They are finally breaking page one but way down at the bottom. Granted there are some heavy weights in front of them like NextTag and Yahoo Shopping but they still should still be above the shopping portals…I mean they are the source, not the airplane catalog.

Even though I’ve probably burned my bridge to Home Depot, it would be nice to work for such a powerful company. Just think of the trust that homedepot.com has, and the ease of getting solid authority links. It seems anyone with a basic understanding of SEO could have this domain sitting at or near the top for just about everything they sell. The question is why they are sitting around letting this fall to the wayside.

Stay tuned next week, and if anyone has any ideas on more bridges I can take out let me know.

I’ve been tasked with adding an additional member to our team so I am posting about the process. These are the questions I’ll be asking in the first interview. If you’re looking for an SEO position, these might be some questions to be familiar with before you head into it.

1) Give me a description of your general SEO experience.

2) Do you currently do SEO on your own sites and give me some examples. Do you operate any blogs? Do you currently do any freelance work and do you plan on continuing it?

3) Where do you think the SEO industry is headed?

4) What industry sites, blogs, and forums do you regularly read?

5) Have you attended any search related conferences?

6) What SEO tools do you regularly use?

7) What SEO areas are you weak and strong in, and give examples of both.

What areas do you think are currently the most important in organically ranking a site?

9) Do you have experience in copywriting and can you provide some writing samples?

10) What kind of strategies do you normally implement for backlinks? What do you think about link buying, link bait, and other specific backlink strategies?

11) What are your thoughts on the direction of Web 2.0 technologies with regards to SEO?

12) Are you familiar with any blackhat SEO techniques, search arbitrage, and affiliate marketing?

13) Are you familiar with enterprise web analytics and what packages are your familiar with?

14) Are you familiar with A/B testing and multivariate testing?

15) Do you have experience in email marketing, banner advertising, other types of media buys and other forms of online advertising?

16) Are you experienced in managing PPC campaigns? To what extent and on what platforms?

17) Do you have experience in bid management tools, API tools, and click fraud issues?

18) Do you have experience in extensive competitive analysis and what techniques do you use?

19) What technologies are you familiar with? (We primarily use HTML, CSS, ASP, .net, PHP, SQL, and JavaScript)

20) Why are you moving from your current position and/or leaving any current projects?

21) Do you know who Matt Cutts is?

42) What is the Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything?

Thanks to Rand at SEOmoz.org for this post on SEO hiring. It helped quite a bit in assembling this list. Any additional questions anyone can think of?

*** UPDATE ***

I got several excellent questions from a couple forum postings. These get into the more complicated end of SEO.

22) What is page segmentation? (ever heard of VIPS?)

23) What’s the difference bewtween PageRank and ToolBar PageRank?

24) What is Latent Semantic Analysis (LSI - Indexing)?

25) What is Phrase Based Indexing and Retrieval and what roles does it play?

26) In Google Lore - what are ‘Hilltop’ Florida’ and ‘Big Daddy’?

*** UPDATE ***

For in-depth answers to some of these questions, visit SEO Interview Questions Part II.

We all know to take everything read in forums with a grain of salt, and the majority of the time outrageous statements are debunked by more expert members. However, being an active participant of several “high quality” forums, there seems to be a lot of misinformation floating around, even among those who appear to be experienced marketers. Here are a few from just today, so lets take a look.

* The text content ratio is the percentage of the page which is actual content, as opposed to the portion which is HTML tags, scripts, etc… …search engines use this ratio to determine the relevancy of your page and the higher this value, the greater your chances of ranking higher.

Please go and find something better to do with your time. This may have had some significance long ago in a galaxy far, far away, but not since the dark ages. Basically you should take out all your style info and just use as much text as possible. In fact, just go and copy the Mortgage Encyclopedia and rank #1 for mortgages! Sweet, I’m quitting my job to go live on a sandy beach.

* yahoo prefers a KW density of 8 % but the synonyms are counted as the same keyword.

Google prefers 2 % KW density and synonyms are counted as different KWs.

Keyword density again. Sure. Seriously how did that person even come up with those numbers, much less how he could possibly argue that point.

* Sitewide external links will give your site a penalty. Put the links in the content area instead.

* Sitewide links to your own sites or any other sites are discounted to 1 link of value.

* Yeah,it’s not good to have outgoing links in one page, you can add the “nofollow” attribute to the links if you are afraid of the pr leak.

* Hi, on my site I am going to be having a few links to other sites and I’ve read that’s bad for PR.

Here we go with PR leakage as it relates to outbound links. Of course….don’t link to anywhere, we wouldn’t want to give away our precious PR. Then we have the “don’t use sitewide links” group…. Sitewide links sometimes make sense people, it doesn’t hurt anything (unless of course it’s to a bunch of bad neighborhood junk).

Moving on to the completely ignorant argument that a nofollow tag can help you keep your PR. I’m not sure how some of these things start circulating, but nofollow is to combat comment spam, not anything related to the mythical PR leakage. How well do you think a site with absolutely no outbound links is going to do? You can keep all your PR and rule the world. With the exception of something.com ranking for [something], I think you’ll find yourself sitting in a deep sandy box.

And what the hell does “discounted to 1 link of value” mean? One outbound link negates one inbound link? I don’t even want to speculate on that one.

* the title is very important, i would recommend having it on a white background

Say what? Google ranks pages with a white background and black text higher? Sweet, more money for my beach living.

So in conclusion, the secret to defeating Google is to have a white background, as much black text as possible, only paragraph tags, and no outbound links. Anyone want to join me for a Pina Colada?