inside intralinks 0 to seo

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)

[email protected]

Twitter: @JFernandez

Conductor Customer Since 2012

Eloqua Customer since 2006

SFDC Customer since 2001

Doing “this” since 1999

About Intralinks NYSE: IL

SEPT 19, 2013 INTRALINKS :: C3: INSIDE INTRALINKS: 0 TO SEO 4

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


Industrial

Consumer

Pharmaceutical

Energy

Legal

Financial

Transportation

Federal / State


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


REVENUE Total Value of Wins = $2.46M

The Inbound World In 2008…

DRUPAL

RIGHT

NOW

MANUAL

E-MAIL

MANUAL

WEB-TO-LEAD

No trackability

Very manual

No consistent process


The Inbound World In 2008…

DRUPAL

Everything goes through Eloqua!

Full trackability, e-mail notifications,

and use of contact groups for archival.

RIGHT

NOW


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.)


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?


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?


immediately

83% SEPT 19, 2013 INTRALINKS :: C3: INSIDE INTRALINKS: 0 TO SEO 15

We were completely misrouting everything!


immediately



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



No more e-mail! Created Eloqua Forms in plain

HTML for internal Customer

Service representatives to

create leads in Salesforce that

can be tracked


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…


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!


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%


$2.46M REVENUE $15.43M 527%

And now for my next trick…


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


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


“Virtual Data Room” Compared to Soda…

BRAND LEADER

Intralinks

BRAND FOLLOWER

V-Rooms

GENERIC

Virtual Data Room


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


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


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?


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


Who here gets e-mails like this?


But Why Is This?

On-Site Analytics Off-Site Analytics

Banners

E-mail

Social

PPC

SEO


We have Searchlight now!


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…


How has our rank gone up?

1

3

5

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9

11

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15

Rank


Does our traffic confirm this?

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Visits


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


And now for my next trick… AGAIN!


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


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?


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!”


…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!


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


2011

436 OPPs

8%

3,171 96%

-34%

627%

1%

636%


$2.46M REVENUE $15.43M 527%

How Do You Like It Now? 2008

4,987 MQLs 3,296

$10.7K AVG$ $10.8K


2011

436 OPPs

8%

3,171 96%

-34%

627%

1%

1372%


$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!


No longer this… 2008

4,987 MQLs 3,296

$10.7K AVG$ $10.8K


2011

436 OPPs

8%

3,171 96%

-34%

627%

1%

636%


$2.46M REVENUE $15.43M 527%

But this!


No longer this…

1

3

5

7

9

11

13

15

Rank


But this!


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!


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.


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


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


Did You See The Job Qualifications?


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

[email protected]

Twitter: @JFernandez