SAAL A - 1600 - Tales of Building an International, SEO-friendly Website from Scratch. Andre Alpar,...

Performance Marketing Insights Europe: SEO-steps of an internationally loved brand

Berlin – June, 24th 2015

Agenda

2 PMI Europe - Andre Alpar / Michael Brecht - Twitter: @andrealpar / @michaelbrecht

• Intro

• Initial situation

• Measures taken

• Results

• Outro

2 AA

Michael Brecht is a serial entrepreneur with a lot of international work experience

• Sold his first business to GE Capital in 1996

• Founded his first venture backed digital company during the first internet bubble in 1998 (!)

• Board member for several web companies

• Helps with digital marketing challenges way beyond Doodle within the Tamedia group

3 PMI Europe - Andre Alpar / Michael Brecht - Twitter: @andrealpar / @michaelbrecht MB

Andre Alpar has 17 years of work experience in internet business & online marketing


• First online business in 1998 • Serial entrepreneur (casual gaming

platform, audio book publisher, ecommerce marketplace)

• More than 30 Business Angel Investments

• 3+ years leading role at Rocket Internet • OMCap (conference), OMReport

(podcast), book author, presentations, professional articles, open source software

• CMO at Noblego.de – online cigar retailer

• Working with AKM3 since 2012

AA

AKM3 employs 127 people – an international team doing content and search marketing


• Founded late 2009

• Part of Publicis since late 2014

• Native speakers of 14 languages

AA

We are not „only“ a search and content marketing agency but also a cigar retailer

• Strategic approach choosing the product to be sold

• Own financing – ROI oriented

• Two brands: Noblego and Cigarmaxx

• Complementing magazine: zigarren.org

6 PMI Europe - Andre Alpar / Michael Brecht - Twitter: @andrealpar / @michaelbrecht AA

Agenda

7 PMI Europe - Andre Alpar / Michael Brecht - Twitter: @andrealpar / @michaelbrecht 7

• Intro


• Measures taken

• Results

• Outro

AA

Doodles Timeline as a Start-Up


Founded by

two Swiss

Engineers

from ETH

Zurich Tamedia AG

takes 49%

Achieves record

profit in its

Earn-out Year

and reaches

20m users

monthly

Tamedia takes

100%, both

founders leave.

Michael Brecht

joins Doodle as

new CEO and

starts

integration and

global growth

path with core

Team.

2o‘ooo‘oodle

MB

Doodle: One of the most famous scheduling tools worldwide – most probably the market leader

PMI Europe - Andre Alpar / Michael Brecht - Twitter: @andrealpar / @michaelbrecht 9

Also great for voting and a set

of great premium features / products available

MB

Doodle users today


Productivity

tool on your

desktop and

mobile devices

24 million users

per month

globally

50% private

50% business

100% Doodle

24‘ooo‘oodle

MB

Doodle as a product was already multilingual but wanted a lot more and fast: 25 countries and 17 languages asap

PMI Europe - Andre Alpar / Michael Brecht - Twitter: @andrealpar / @michaelbrecht 11 MB

Doodle‘s success was not at all based on successful search engine marketing of any kind


How could they care so little about SEO even though it is „free traffic“ and still grow so big? Super viral product!


• Super (!) viral product • Top ~ 1300 website

worldwide • Even today

approximately 80% direct and email traffic

• Every new additional users brings many (!) extra users Let’s do some SEO!

• Data via SimilarWeb

AA

Systematic keyword research showed that neither all brand nor a lot of generic traffic is captured appropriately

Maximum brand traffic

Actual brand traffic

Possible additional brand traffic

PMI Europe - Andre Alpar / Michael Brecht - Twitter: @andrealpar / @michaelbrecht 14 AA

Agenda


• Intro


• Measures taken

• Results

• Outro

AA

The number of countries and languages targeted leads to different cases of international & multilingual SEO

16

1

≥2 “International“

≥2 “Multilingual“

1

Number of countries

Number of languages

“Regular” SEO!


Four noticeably different cases of international and multilingual SEO exist

17

1



1

US+UK

DE+AT

FR

US CH

CA

Number of countries

Number of languages

US+FR

FR+CA Two cases need to be distinguished • Each language in

only one country • At least one

language in more than one country

PMI Europe - Andre Alpar / Michael Brecht - Twitter: @andrealpar / @michaelbrecht AA

Every client is special! Every SEO situation is unique!

• In general in SaaS businesses it is not necessary to do a country oriented marketing but instead language oriented is sufficient

• For most cases Doodle wants to mostly market to specific languages

• Exceptions: very important focus markets due to strategic reasons UK + BRA


Each case of international & multilingual SEO has its own “best practice” for long-term success


1



1

FR+CA

US+FR

Number of countries

Number of languages

ccTLDs

Sub-domains

ccTLDs +Sub-

domains

ccTLDs

AA

The three options differ in their attractiveness depending of the time frame of the strategy

Effo

rt /

Inco

me

Time

ccTLDs

• doodle.de

• doodle.co.uk

• doodle.fr

• doodle.es

• de.doodle.com

• uk.doodle.com

• fr.doodle.com

• es.doodle.com

• doodle.com/de/

• doodle.com/uk/

• doodle.com/fr/

• doodle.com/es/

Subdomains Subfolder vs. vs.


Individual challenges and tasks lead to different solutions: With Doodle subfolders where chosen

ccTLDs

• Not all ccTLDs available

• High acquisition costs

• Preferred for partner (e.g. ethz.doodle.com)

• Already existing

• Easy and fast to implement

Subdomains Subfolder vs. vs.


For Doodle an unique mix of language and country targeting was chosen for the subdirectory structure

• http://Doodle.com/

• http://Doodle.com/de/

• http://Doodle.com/fr/

• http://Doodle.com/es/

• http://Doodle.com/it/

• http://Doodle.com/no/

• http://Doodle.com/nl/

• http://Doodle.com/pl/

• http://Doodle.com/pt/

• http://Doodle.com/fi/

• http://Doodle.com/ru/

• …

• http://Doodle.com/en_GB/

• http://Doodle.com/pt_BR/

Language targeting Country targeting


Then HREFLANG was integrated accordingly to make Google understand what content targets what languages / countries

• Connection at URL level (not domain level)

• Goal: Roll-out for the right user-orientated content

• “Search and replace” in the SERPs

• Important: Actually only connection of the en and en-gb-version necessary

• Also realizable with sitemap.xml


Even with a product as simple as Doodle Google Webmaster Tools reports on HREFLANG were very helpful


Then other more regular SEO tasks tackled, e.g. a lot of crawling errors from old surveys

• Creation of new 404 error sites individually for every language

• Internal links to relevant sites at 404 error sites


All old ccTLD and areas creating duplicate content were consolidated on the new structure

doodle.de

doodle.ch doodle.com/de/


Some (dupe / thin) content on Doodle needed stricter indexation management

Blogs

Articles Searches Tags Pagination Categories Archives

Blogs

Articles Searches Tags Pagination Categories Archives

Old set up:

Right set up:


Also some minor technical topics were fixed like semi useless XML-sitemap


• 120 of submitted URLs had 302-redirect

• 42 URLs had meta robots NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW

AA

Some landing pages where built to explain features and use cases and thereby target specific needs and keywords

• http://Doodle.com/fr/offres-speciales

• http://Doodle.com/es/ofertas-especiales

• …


Agenda


• Intro


• Measures taken

• Results

• Outro

AA

Hreflang is accepted fast by Google and does correctly what it should do

Hreflang integration

Old shaky rankings that

clearly show problems in the

perception from Googles

perspective are gone!


First results came fast: a lot of ranking improvements and first Top 1 positions (Some examples in German)

online voting

schedule online


These days Doodle has at least top 5 rankings for most relevant keywords in most languages (Examples from France)


Not just the rankings are better but also the appearance in the SERPs is: We’ve got site links! (DE example)

Doodle did not have site links

before for other languages besides English – and not even for branded

queries


Not „just site links“ but they also work correct and reliably in more complicated cases


Site links not just for „branded terms“ but also some first site links for „generic terms“


The number of top 10 and top 100 rankings URLs and keywords is steadily going up (Example from France)


Plateau at URLs due to limited

number of meaningful keywords

(Data via Sistrix – similar to

Searchmetrics)

AA

Visibility indices of SEO tools are confirming the trend one can see from single keywords (Example from France)


No other but only the correct

subdirectory is the one

contributing to the visibility

AA

Just with a short period of time (Nov 2014 to Jan 2015) all important markets are lifting of in traffic


Doodle DE +23% Doodle EN (INTL) +24% Doodle EN (UK) +18% Doodle FR +35 % Doodle ES +24% Doodle DA +27% Doodle CH +27% Doodle BEL +30% Doodle AUS +16% Doodle BRA +14% Doodle IT +22 %

AA

Also the dedicated landing pages addressing specific use cases are able to attract significant and growing traffic

0

200

400

600

800

1.000

1.200

1.400

1.600

1.800

KW 30 KW 31 KW 32 KW 33 KW 34 KW 35 KW 36 KW 37 KW 38 KW 39

Vis

ito

rs

Calendar weeks

Traffic of new country landing pages

Doodle DE

Doodle US

Doodle EN

Doodle FR

Doodle ES

Doodle DA

Doodle PT


Agenda


• Intro


• Measures taken

• Results

• Outro

AA

As Doodle launched their new app we are jointly starting the App Store Optimization efforts


Doodle launched the iOS Version on 15th of April:

• Used completely new UX for the App built from ground up

• In six languages (EN/DE/FR/ES/IT/PT-BR)

• International PR lead to 250+ articles

• Started marketing in various countries: fb in DE, twitter planned in ES/FR/BR

New Android version will follow in June 2015

New iPad Version in autumn

MB

Do you want more? Rate this session well and tweet about it and “We’ll be back”! ;-)

• Twitter:

• @andrealpar and @akm3_com

• @michaelbrecht and @doodletweet

• Podcast www.omreport.com

• Annual „AdWords conference“ PPC Masters in Berlin in February

• OMCap: Annual online marketing conference in Berlin in October


http://www.omreport.com/

If you speak German have a look at our new book!

• > 500 pages

• > 300 charts

• Everything you need to know for professional enterprise SEO


Thank you very much for your attention! Let‘s keep in touch!

www.akm3.de

www.akm3.com

Paul-Lincke-Ufer 39/40

10999 Berlin

Germany

[email protected]

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SAAL A - 1600 - Tales of Building an International, SEO-friendly Website from Scratch. Andre Alpar,...

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Transcript of SAAL A - 1600 - Tales of Building an International, SEO-friendly Website from Scratch. Andre Alpar,...