inside intralinks 0 to seo
TRANSCRIPT
Inside Intralinks:
0 to SEO
John C. Fernandez
Director, Online Marketing, Intralinks
SEPTEMBER 19, 2013
Who Am I?
John C. Fernandez
Director, Online Marketing
Intralinks (NYSE: IL)
Twitter: @JFernandez
Conductor Customer Since 2012
Eloqua Customer since 2006
SFDC Customer since 2001
Doing “this” since 1999
About Intralinks NYSE: IL
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3,500+ CLIENTS
90,000+ ORGANIZATIONS
2,700,000+ USERS GLOBALLY
988 USERS INCLUDE
OF THE FORTUNE 1000
About Intralinks NYSE: IL
55,000+ TRANSACTIONS TOTALING
$23.5T
$217M 2012 REVENUE
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Industrial
Consumer
Pharmaceutical
Energy
Legal
Financial
Transportation
Federal / State
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Our Challenge
In Online Marketing, our job
was to re-design the
website, but there was a
problem…
Company had over
$100 million in revenue
Inbound Pipeline (not even
revenue!) was very low! SEPT 19, 2013 INTRALINKS :: C3: INSIDE INTRALINKS: 0 TO SEO 7
How Low?
4,987 MQLs
Any lead passed to sales (Includes
every gated form, webform, phone call,
email)
436 OPPs Sales validated opportunities
$10.7K AVG$ Average Dollar Value of Opps
$4.68M PIPELINE Total Value of Opps
9%
=
=
=
=
2008
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REVENUE Total Value of Wins = $2.46M
The Inbound World In 2008…
DRUPAL
RIGHT
NOW
MANUAL
MANUAL
WEB-TO-LEAD
No trackability
Very manual
No consistent process
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The Inbound World In 2008…
DRUPAL
Everything goes through Eloqua!
Full trackability, e-mail notifications,
and use of contact groups for archival.
RIGHT
NOW
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Steps To Our Solution
Clean Up The Website! Used to take 3 clicks to get to a form, made it 0
Used to take 4 clicks to get to a phone number, made it 0
Un-gated all of our content (Whitepapers, Webcasts, etc.)
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Your Contact Form
Ask 3 Questions What do You really need?
What does Sales really need?
And, more importantly…
What does the User really need
to give you?
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Form Analytics
Google Analytics Funnel! Cost us about $2,500 to build and
implement – Vendor: ROI Labs
Gives us clear data on how users
proceed through the Contact Us
form, where they abandon, and
where they go to upon leaving SEPT 19, 2013 INTRALINKS :: C3: INSIDE INTRALINKS: 0 TO SEO 13
What % of sales requests
check this box on our form?
Have someone call me
immediately
46% SEPT 19, 2013 INTRALINKS :: C3: INSIDE INTRALINKS: 0 TO SEO 14
What % of non-sales request
check this box?
Have someone call me
immediately
83% SEPT 19, 2013 INTRALINKS :: C3: INSIDE INTRALINKS: 0 TO SEO 15
We were completely misrouting everything!
Have someone call me
immediately
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Steps To Our Solution
Pick Up The Phone! Check every phone number on your website, collateral, etc.
• Who picks it up during office hours? Off hours? Weekends?
• Made sure to have either:
• 24/7 Coverage, by either Inside Sales or MarketOne
• Message-taking capabilities, and reference to 24/7 number
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Steps To Our Solution
No more e-mail! Created Eloqua Forms in plain
HTML for internal Customer
Service representatives to
create leads in Salesforce that
can be tracked
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What About Sales?
No, we did not have any SLAs
with Sales…
SLAs to us are magical unicorns
which do not exist in our
universe…
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What About Sales?
But, we can try a few things:
• Decide to focus on very key to-dos
for Sales, and creating reports for
Sales Management, even if they do
not have SLAs, can bring about very
positive Sales behavior!
• Mailed directly by Salesforce to
Sales!
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The Science of Our Success 2008
4,987 MQLs 3,296
$10.7K AVG$ $10.8K
$4.68M PIPELINE $34.45M
2011
436 OPPs
8%
3,171 96%
-34%
627%
1%
636%
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$2.46M REVENUE $15.43M 527%
And now for my next trick…
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What Was Missing?
There were a lot of things I didn’t talk about! What about…
Online Advertising SEO
Marketing All I was doing was infrastructure!
PPC Search
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Let’s give an example…
A very important keyword for us is
“Virtual Data Room”
“A virtual data room is an online
repository of information that is
used for the storing and
distribution of documents.”
-Wikipedia
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“Virtual Data Room” Compared to Soda…
BRAND LEADER
Intralinks
BRAND FOLLOWER
V-Rooms
GENERIC
Virtual Data Room
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Paid Search Conversions: 1/2010 - 2/2012
In looking at paid search,
Virtual Data Room and its family
dominates all non-Intralinks brand
in keywords where a conversion
(Form Fill-Out to Sales) took
place.
Rank Keyword
#1 Intralinks
#2 Intralink
#3 Virtual Dataroom
#4 Virtual Data Room
#5 Interlinks
#6 Document Repository
#7 Data Room Services
#8 Intralinks Data Room
#9 Online Data Rooms
#10 Intra links
#11 Electronic Data Room
#12 Intralinks Com
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Organic Search Traffic: 1/2010 - 2/2012
However, in looking at Natural
Search (non-Paid), the keywords
skew very much towards our
brand, but Virtual Data Room
only ranks #88 in terms of traffic.
Rank Keyword
#1 Intralinks
#2 Intralinks.com
#3 www.Intralinks.com
#4 Intralink
#5 Intralinks Login
#6 Interlinks
#7 Intralinks Designer
#8 Intra links
#9 Interlinks.com
#10 ww.Intralinks.com
#11 www.Intralinks.cm
#88 Virtual Data Room
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Here’s What I Had…
Tons of B2B Websites talk like this!
• No Images.
• Tons and tons of boring text.
Where was my “Virtual Data Room”
keyword?
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And now…
For the first time, we were able to
have a page dedicated to “Virtual
Data Room.” In fact, we never had
this in our content to begin with!
Also added:
• Solution Descriptors
• Solution-Specific Images
• Solution Infographic
• Case Studies
• Contact Form
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Who here gets e-mails like this?
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But Why Is This?
On-Site Analytics Off-Site Analytics
Banners
Social
PPC
SEO
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We have Searchlight now!
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Searchlight Recommendations
Searchlight had identified many issues on the keyword
“Virtual Data Room” which we needed to address:
• The keyword not being included in ALT text
• Meta Description Too Long
• Numerous Images with missing ALT Attributes
• Multiple H1 Tags
• Etc…
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How has our rank gone up?
1
3
5
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9
11
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15
Rank
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Does our traffic confirm this?
0
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Visits
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This helps our PPC, also!
$0.00$200.00$400.00$600.00$800.00
$1,000.00$1,200.00$1,400.00$1,600.00
January
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Cost/Conversion
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And now for my next trick… AGAIN!
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Lightning Only Struck Once
I did well on one page,
and it took me 3 ½ years.
So what?
• HiPPO Problems Still Exist
• Analytics Need To Grow Up
• SEO Is Too Hard to do it Alone
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What’s a HiPPO?
HiPPO = Highest Paid Person’s Opinion
SEOs are never the highest paid person in the room…
(maybe we should be?)
Remember this e-mail?
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They keep coming!!!
Actual quotes from e-mails sent in
2013 to me from HiPPOs about SEO:
• “SEO is free”
• “Our rank isn’t good for [keyword]”
• “Why is [competitor] winning?”
• “Wikipedia can do it, and they’re
begging for money!”
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…about SEO
Educate, Educate, Educate!
You have to educate your
HiPPOs about SEO:
• Be Proactive!
• Show Success!
• Show Failure!
• … but most importantly, Show a Plan
• … and Measure Against It!
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Remember what Reagan said?
“Доверяй,
но проверяй.”
– President Ronald Reagan
Remember what Reagan said?
“Trust,
but verify.”
– Russian Proverb
Remember This Slide? 2008
4,987 MQLs 3,296
$10.7K AVG$ $10.8K
$4.68M PIPELINE $34.45M
2011
436 OPPs
8%
3,171 96%
-34%
627%
1%
636%
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$2.46M REVENUE $15.43M 527%
How Do You Like It Now? 2008
4,987 MQLs 3,296
$10.7K AVG$ $10.8K
$4.68M PIPELINE $68.90M
2011
436 OPPs
8%
3,171 96%
-34%
627%
1%
1372%
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$2.46M REVENUE $30.86M 1154%
See The Problem?
Grown-up companies need grown-up
reporting and analytics
• Excel & PowerPoint are “Black
Boxes”
• Every tool you use today has an
ability to report in a professional
manner (*cough* Searchlight)
• If it doesn’t, you shouldn’t be using it!
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No longer this… 2008
4,987 MQLs 3,296
$10.7K AVG$ $10.8K
$4.68M PIPELINE $34.45M
2011
436 OPPs
8%
3,171 96%
-34%
627%
1%
636%
SEPT 19, 2013 INTRALINKS :: C3: INSIDE INTRALINKS: 0 TO SEO 48
$2.46M REVENUE $15.43M 527%
But this!
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No longer this…
1
3
5
7
9
11
13
15
Rank
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But this!
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But SEO’s can’t do it alone. We need support from everyone.
… Why?
• Content comes from Everywhere
• SEO isn’t about traffic
• It’s about the Customer Lifecycle
• SEO impacts Revenue
• Revenue impacts Everyone
Center of Excellence? Yes, many of you are getting to that
integrated Center of Excellence
… we’re not
… yet.
• Product Marketing creates strategy and messaging
• Field Marketing creates the campaigns
• Marketing Communications creates the content - …so do Corp. Communications, Investor Relations and Legal!
• Sales uses all the content
• IT runs the technology
• C-Levels and Board see (and demand) results!
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Lessons Learned
• Search is a life-long journey. No matter where you start, you
can get forward. Even if you start from as far back as we did.
• You are the expert. Inform, lead, teach.
• … but, don’t run too far ahead, even if you can.
• Focus on communicating with everyone internal and external to
your organization. SEO impacts revenue which impacts
everybody!
• You can’t do it alone. SEO is too hard a problem for that now.
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See the head fake?
Most of this deck isn’t for you…
It’s really for me.
• This is how I can help build a business case
• For Digital… For Search… For SEO… For Searchlight
• This deck is designed to be educational
• For You, of course… but also for Me… and also for My Bosses
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So How Did I Do?
What was my main goal?
• 4 ½ years later, my goal is still
to increase revenue from
digital
• To educate and evangelize,
yes…
• … but to get resources, too!
• Finally – there is a job req out
there for search!
• SEO, PPC, Digital Advertising
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Did You See The Job Qualifications?
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I couldn’t have gotten this far without Searchlight.
… but I won’t get where I’m going without out, either.
Thank You John C. Fernandez
Director, Online Marketing
Intralinks
Twitter: @JFernandez