From an Army of 1 toTrue Organic Agility

Jonathon ColmanIn-House SEO for REI

Twitter @jcolman

PLAY THE LONG GAME

BUILD A FOUNDATION

Be generous, cultivate relationships

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• Be pro-active in meeting teams and external partners

• Get a sense of their goals and “pain-points”

• What are they trying to achieve? What impediments stand in their way?

• Do lots of favors without expecting quick returns

Know your numbers

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• Become familiar with baselines, forecasting, and performance for programs beyond your own

• Use your data to tell the story of how – at some level – everyone supports SEO

• Quantify this and start gaining acceptance for targets, goals, and annual reviews

Find (or make) your champions

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• Find your A-Team players at the grassroots level and enable them with tools, tips, and reporting

• Find your peers in management and build alliances by making them look good via your program’s traffic

• Persuade leaders with high-ROI growth projections

TRUST DRIVES SUCCESS

BUILD ACCOUNTABILITY

Make it measurable

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• Be a business case Jedi – measure out incremental gains for each effort

• Show your partners how they’re growing the business without increasing advertising budget

• Think “Big Tent” about organic search to get more allies: IA, UX, Ops, Performance, etc.

Break down the silos

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• Create shared goals between teams to encourage partnership, efficiency, and accountability

• Begin focusing on cross-team test efforts rather than waiting for perfect solutions

• Reward intrapreneurship, incentivize learning from failures

Focus on quick wins and have fun

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• “Shrink the change” by going after small, simple projects first

• As confidence grows and results add up, challenge teams with new tests, larger chunks

• Don’t strive to be perfect – just be good enough

• Err on the side of generosity, stay focused on the long view

PLANNING < DOING

BUILD AGILITY

“Assemble” cross-functional teams

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• Build teams around customer experiences, include UX designers, IAs, front/back-end devs, and SEO

• Teams are self-managed, commit to highest priority work items at regular intervals, hold themselves accountable

• Your new job? Removing all impediments.

Maximize actual work, not “work”

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• Only three meetings are allowed: planning, the daily stand-up, and retrospective

• Team co-located together with an emphasis on face-to-face interactions

• Progress measured in experiences launched

• SEO consults, does analysis/reporting, creates work items for backlog

Maintain a bias toward action

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• Team members’ progress is not stopped for politics, turf wars, disagreements, pet projects, special events, or other impediments

• Team does not produce extensive documentation or other peripheral artifacts

• Always be shipping.

“Don’t hate, iterate!”

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• Each sprint’s goal is not perfection, but instead to deliver iterative value to customers

• Get something wrong? Get negative customer feedback? Iterate.

• Large or complex projects may last several sprints; projects like site performance are always in play as new features are added to the site

ACHIEVE ASPIRATIONAL GOALS

BUILD SUCCESS

Organic productivity increase

45Peak number of organic search

technical infrastructure iterations shipped via Agile in a single year.

Page load time improvement

-1.5 sNumber of seconds per page load that

we saved our customers in 2011 through iterative Agile performance

optimizations.

Aggregate web performance boost

22Total number of years that we saved

our customers in 2011.

Duplicate content reduction

-98 %Overall decrease in duplicate content

due to Agile iterations on rel=canonical and rel=prev/next pagination <link>s

Organic share of total traffic

+10 %Organic search traffic grew its share of all incoming traffic by this amount due to Agile optimizations even as budgets

increased for other programs.

Non-brand organic traffic growth

+50 %Growth rate in non-branded organic traffic once Agile project work was

shipped to REI.com and iterated upon.

Aggregate organic traffic growth

+96 %Overall growth rate of organic search

traffic during the two-year switch from waterfall development to Agile.

LEARN MORE

BUILD KNOWLEDGE

Get started with Agile Marketing

• Principles behind the Agile Manifesto

• Agile Marketing For Conversion Optimization

• Sex and the Agile Marketer

• Agile Marketing

• Marketing Experts on Agile Marketing

• Agile Marketing, the New Black

• What the F**k is Agile Marketing?

• Agile for Marketing

• Rise of the Marketing Technologist

Source: artwallpapers.biz/vintage/Keep-Calm-and-Carry-On-Wallpaper/imagepages/image1.htm

Source: artwallpapers.biz/vintage/Keep-Calm-and-Carry-On-Wallpaper/imagepages/image1.htm

Source: flickr.com/photos/blackbeltjones/3365682994/

Many thanks!

Jonathon ColmanIn-House SEO for REIHome: about.me/jcolman

Twitter: @jcolman

E-mail: jcolman@rei.com