REINCLUSION AFTERLIFE

michael King Director of inbound marketing @ipullrank

How a champion was reborn through content strategy

@iacquire

@iacquire

http://bit.ly/reinclusion-afterlife

SHOUTOUT TO @RHEA DRYSDALE

My online reputation management coach Rhea is an awesome friend and she let

me borrow her brain and experience

when I was trying to figure out the most

effective tactics for ORM.

@iPullRank

ROUND I: THE STORY DEINDEXATION HAS NEVER BEEN SO MUCH FUN

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IN THIS CORNER:

I PITY THE FOOL THAT BUYS AND SELLS LINKS.

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IN THIS CORNER:

@iPullRank

CHALLENGE ACCEPTED I LOVE A challenge

I maybe love a challenge too much because I often put myself in

places where the challenge is insurmountable like my previous

position at Publicis Modem.

WE NEED HELP WITH A little BIT OF CLEANUP

Iacquire was among a number of companies that aggressively courted me

BUT IACQUIRE WANTED MY VISION A lot of companies wanted my “talents” but iacquire wanted my LEADERSHIP vision

@iPullRank

After interviewing at a ton of places iAcquire sounded

like it’d be the place that offered me the most latitude

to truly take an agency forward, innovate and do

great work.

This isn’t an excuse, it’s just me explaining

that I didn’t understand the magnitude of the

paid link building until I did the quantifying

outreach study which was literally days

before my official start date.

I was already scheduled to be in Australia,

Arizona, Indiana and Montreal during my

first 2 months at iAcquire so my goal was

to bring on more white hat clientele so we

could quickly transition out of paid links.

@iPullRank

Matt Cutts and Mike King = BFFS 4 EVER

On may 21st, 2012 An April fools joke came to life before our very eyes I officially started at iAcquire on April 3rd after I

returned from LinkLove London, but before I got

there Joe, Robb and I played this joke on Jay and

TR.

@iPullRank

IN Iacquire’s corner

Joe Griffin Co-founder

Jay swansson Co-founder

John-paul barnych Vice President of Revenue

Tom rusling General Manager

Cindy nieves Director of Operations

Jeffrey nappi Director of Technology

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Our OLD Process We used to use money at this

point as a motivator to get links.

Protocol was not to talk about

money unless the webmaster

asks for it.

@iPullRank

IN KANSAS

REJOICED A lot of people came out of the woodwork to dance on the grave of iAcquire including people who are to this day actively selling links themselves

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GOOGLE

The Actual Fortune Cookie Joe Griffin Got the day of the deindexation

Internally: I lost my shit I wanted to respond right away with a very transparent explanation of

what happened. In fact I wrote it 3 times. The rest of the leadership

team felt differently.

Early on, it was pretty easy to not to lose it externally because I still

had hope we would hash out a solid transparent response.

Externally: I was fairly nonchalant

@iPullRank

8 DAYS

My voice was missing from that conversation because I hated it, but as a team player I lived with it

WE CHANGED OUR BUSINESS MODEL OVERNIGHT We locked ourselves in a conference room for a few

days and voila just like that Content Marketing

became all that we did. There was no more link buying

at all.

An invite to speak at a SEMPO event was rescinded An invite to write for SearchEngineLand never

materialized

Hooray! iacquire.com

On behalf of the people on my team that work hard everyday

There’s a lot more where

this came from.

B Aren’t we supposed to stay down now?

iAcquire was never like these companies that are forever branded as a

charlatans. I personally don’t know what happened to these guys, but I

do know…

@iPullRank

WAS DEINDEXED CIRCA 2002* iCrossing went through a series of rebrandings

and ultimately has been regarded as one of the

best digital agencies by a variety publications

such as advertising age, forrester wave, omma

and ad week. There is life after deindexation.

Accolades

*According to Joe Griffin

This is when I realized reputation management is JUST not about the serp

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How we trained to get back on top

EVER

020

40

60

Discovery Call

Proposal Presentation

Demo / Presentation

Full Cancel

Closed

010000

20000

30000

Visits

It was an unfortunate byproduct of the process Many people on our outreach team were not prepared to

make the leap with us so we had to let them go.

We did keep the team member who contacted the Kansas

blogger, but ultimately the loyalty was not reciprocated.

@iPullRank

We said it was over. It was over.

we stopped building links with money

WE DEFINED OUR PRINCIPLES iAcquire had already mastered the WHAT and

the HOW, but we needed the WHY. We’d

already had CRAFT, I repurposed it and used it

to define what our brand stands for.

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C R A F T

Reativity Esponsibility Cumen Ortitude ransparency

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We took the money from link buying and invested it in hiring creatives We hired writers, graphic designers, an animator and project managers to improve

our processes through verticalization.

@iPullRank

We invested in teaching our people about content strategy We needed our people to feel confident in

servicing and selling the new approach so we had

workshops and book clubs around Content

Strategy.

WE MOVED CLIENTS FROM PAID LINKS TO CONTENT-BASED LINKS Being that iAcquire is a business we couldn’t

just pull the plug on all of our links overnight, so

we set up transition plans for all clients and

gradually replaced the Paid links with content-

based links. Naturally, there were those who

chose to cancel rather than transition.

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(DRAMATIZATION)

Transition Plan

It was incredibly important that we reconnect with our client base

to encourage them to remain confident in our abilities to

transition from paid links to free content-based links.

@iPullRank

We invested in strong new talent These people have helped us transition from being a link vendor to a full SEO Agency

Tom harari

Seo manager

Brittan Bright

DIR. Of client strategy

Norris Rowley

MGR. Market Research Megan Brown

Social media Strategist

SOME THINGS DIDN’T NEED TO CHANGE We were always transparent. These are

screenshots from the client-facing reporting of

iRank that is available 24/7 on-demand.

@iPullRank

What exactly happened for us to get back in?

I met MATT CUTTS AT SMX ADVANCED AND WE GOT REINDEXED Sorry, but this is another example of Correlation !=

Causation. It didn’t make any difference, but we had a

pretty direct conversation about the iAcquire situation at

SMX Advanced in front of a bunch of people. Matt said

he felt sorry for me because he knew I had nothing to

do with it.

Matt Cutts + Mike King =

BFFS 4 EVER

WE CHANGED THROUGH AND THROUGH Initially there was a disconnect between

what was being communicated to clients

and what was being said publicly. Google

had a problem with this so we aligned

communication across the board.

@iPullRank

WE REMOVED THIS POST

Tom Rusling (with some editing help from me) wrote

a post about how the Google Webmaster Tools

messages weren’t something you needed to worry

about and it was mentioned as a specific point of

contention multiple times so we removed it.

WE WROTE THIS POST As a part of our earnest effort to show that we were committed to no longer offering paid links, joe griffin wrote a post about the second wave of the google webmaster tools unnatural link messages in support of google.

@iPullRank

WE KEPT TRYING TO OPEN THE DIALOG WITH GOOGLE THROUGHOUT THE PROCESS. We showed public commitment to change and kept

reaching out to Google in hopes that they would take

notice and ultimately on July 23rd, 2012 our pages

started to trickle back into the index.

What was the content strategy behind it all?

fixing the social contract requires a focus on the why The golden circle is what separates winning brands

from losing brands. Shoutout to @joannalord, and

Ian Lurie who talked about this yesterday.

http://bit.ly/WqnsHF

@iPullRank

Chrysler turned it around by focusing on the why During the Superbowl Chrysler launched a highly-

effective commercial with Eminem, focusing on the why

of their brand and the city of Detroit.

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http://bit.ly/RB2z8m

I PERSONIFY OUR SOCIAL CONTRACT Transparency. Innovation. Brand humanization. Brand positioning. New offering launch.

For iAcquire I am a walking reputation management

content strategy, simply because I am transparent,

innovative, authentic and I lead the expansion of our

offerings. Anything I do that is positive galvanizes

iAcquire in that direction.

@iPullRank

@iPullRank

Introducing The “road to reinclusion” content strategy I developed a content strategy called “The Road

To Reinclusion” wherein the core strategy was:

“We will offer a transparent look at our transition

to a content marketing agency that is in full

compliance with Google’s Webmaster guidelines

with a focus on regaining the trust of the

community, clients and Google.” #R2R

ROAD TO REINCLUSION PERSONAS

CLIENT CARLA MAIN FOCUS

Grouchy Googler Secondary Focus

Supporter Sam Tertiary FoCus

Hater Harry Not a FOCUS

TRANSPARENCY. Share what you are doing exhaustively, people will respect your efforts. and more far more prone to believe that you and your brand has changed.

@iPullRank

INNOVATION. We continue to invest in free marketing tools

such Broken Link Index and Authora with plans

to rebuild LinkDiagnosis from scratch.

COST: Authora / BLI- $10K

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BRAND HUMANIZATION Getting our people involved in content efforts

allows us to introduce our audience to the

people behind the brand and understand the

iAcquire culture.

COST: Canon 7D and accessories: $3000

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@iPullRank

Show off the creative talents of the team My MozCon talk wasn’t just about me showing

off my talents as an emcee, it was also about

showing off iAcquire’s Creative team. Kyle

Bastian did the kinetic typography video in a few

days and Robb Dorr designed the deck (and

this one).

Cost: 20 hours of internal

Creative

THE CRAFT AWARDS We wanted to celebrate the seo community with a content marketing awards ceremony

@iPullRank

We planned and spec’d out a CRAFT Content

Marketing Awards ceremony and party for SMX East

2012 which would have featured celebrity host, DJ and

musical act as well as the distribution of awards for the

best content developed by agencies.

@iPullRank

Knowem.com Only 67 out of 300 profiles were indexed even after using a Bulk

ping tool. None of the profiles ever ranked for [iAcquire]. Links

from these sites support iacquiretweets.com

IACQUIRETWEETS.COM We have nearly 100 people at iAcquire and

most of them use Twitter, so it was pretty easy

to make a microsite that just aggregates all the

tweets with the #IACQ hash tag.

COST: 10 hours of coding/design + $100

domain/hosting.

@iPullRank

SHAKESHACKCAMERA.COM We launched a camera for the Shake Shack fast food

restaurant across the street from our office and placed

post-it art in my windows with a CTA for tweeting while you

wait in line.

4 days later Shake Shack called us and asked us to

take it down. COST: $500 + 20 hours of Creative

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What scales the best is helping people out and

delivering something of value on a regular basis

as we do with Cliff Notes Tuesday, Live Site

Audits and Lunch Break.

@iPullRank

HELPING PEOPLE IS FREE.

I was initially against doing these because it’s

obvious that they are for reputation

management, but gave in in interest of owning

everything above the fold. FYI – Double-serving

ads is against the Adwords rules.

@iPullRank

DOUBLE-SERVED PAID SEARCH ADS.

…and made sure every employee is following

the iAcquire company page .The iAcquire

LinkedIn profile consistently ranks in the top 5.

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STREAMLINED LINKEDIN JOB DESCRIPTIONS

Careerbuilder, SimplyHired, Indeed. None of

them ever ranked.

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POSTED JOBS ON HIGH DA JOB SITES

Never ranked.

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CREATED IACQUIRE PHOTO ALBUMS ON FACEBOOK

I put my MozCon and SMX Advanced Tools

decks on there. It consistently ranks in the

Top 20.

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MADE A BRANDED IACQUIRE SLIDESHARE

ROUND V: COMING ATTRACTIONS What else are we rolling out?

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BRAND REFRESH & NEW CO-BRANDED CONTENT

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Above the fold on the site you have case

studies and the sliding hero that

showcases work we’ve done for our clients

followed by our USPs (our WHY).

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THE MAIN FOCUS IS THE WORK.

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The further down the homepage

the user goes the more you get to

know the actual people that work

at iAcquire.

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MORE BRAND HUMANIZATION AS YOU GO DOWN

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Each page on the new site incorporates

some element that make it worth linking so

our site can be a shining example of what

we’d like our clients to be doing.

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EVERY PAGE IS LINK WORTHY & SHAREWORTHY

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When we re-launch I will issue a challenge

to the world to poke holes in the SEO of

iacquire.com. If you can find something we

didn’t do well we’ll give you $530.

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AIR-TIGHT SEO

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@iPullRank

SOCIAL PROOF ON ALL THE THINGS!

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These will act as our Twitter

testimonials similar to what

@mikecp talked about.

The marketing team is the smallest team at

iAcquire and while our founders don’t want to

build a community around our brand I shouldn’t

be the only one having fun with Gary &

Cogswell.

USER GENERATED COMICS

@iPullRank

Since we’ve made a substantial change from

link vendor to full-blown strategic SEO partner It

is important that we appear as though we have

changed. We’ve updated the brand style and

guidelines to reflect that.

BRANDING REFRESH

@iPullRank

ROUND VI: RESULTS Has any of it done anything yet?

@iPullRank

SENTIMENT IMPROVED. The conversation around iAcquire across the

various channels has improved by 18%. We

have effectively changed the conversation.

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SERP IMPROVED. The number of positive results in the SERP has

improved 27% (including Paid Search)

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THE CONCERNED NETIZEN UPDATED HIS POST The author of our outing post updated that post

to give attention to the explanation of our new

business model.

@iPullRank

More discovery calls, more overview presentations and less cancellations

Turns out there is life after reinclusion after all.

ROUND VII: KEY TAKEAWAYS What can you learn from our mistakes?

@iPullRank

No brand is completely immune to a meltdown. Always have a plan

for crisis content strategy ready to launch.

Check out this checklist to determine

your risk quotient

http://bit.ly/QivIGY

MONITOR YOUR REPUTATION. Use Social Mention, Amplicate, Google

Alerts, turn the SERP into an RSS

feed: http://bit.ly/TTEn3R or use our

new Reputation Tracker:

http://bit.ly/SNPvxm

@iPullRank

SIDEBAR:

Please help me show that value by

signing up for the launch of Reputation

Tracker otherwise I can’t continue to

justify the creation of free tools.

Reputation Tracker: http://bit.ly/SNPvxm

The powers that be don’t see the value in the tools I create

RESPOND PROMPTLY. Distilled and SEOmoz are great

examples of brands that respond

promptly and own the blame for

their mistakes.

@iPullRank @iPullRank

DON’T

Tie the hands of your spokesperson. Choose your spokesperson wisely and then don’t hold

them back from getting the job done.

Your reputation is yours to fix. Don’t involve other brands until you have

recovered yourself. We made this mistake with Shake Shack.

I made the mistake of getting wrapped up in the sensation of the SEO

echo chamber rather than focusing on the content that made me popular.

It is very easy for people to tell when a fix just cosmetic. Fix things from the

inside out and you are insulated from most negative responses.

MAKE NEWS WITH THE CHANGE. Very few people are going to care about the positive things you are doing. Be sure to position your positive change as newsworthy.

@iPullRank

FOLLOW THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO ORM. @MattMcGee was on to something…

@iPullRank

@iPullRank

An Actual Fortune Cookie Tom Rusling Received

wwww.iacquire.com

Thank You / Q&A Michael king Director of inbound marketing

@iPullRank mike@iacquire.com