A publisher’s guide to search engine optimisation (and why it really matters)
With the advent of downloadable eBooks, increased eBook piracy and worries over the continued dominance of Amazon, more and more publishers are looking to interact with readers directly via their website, whether to create communities around authors and subject areas or to sell directly to the customer. But how can publishers hope to drive readers to their sites in a world where users increasingly
discover content via search engines rather than home pages?
This paper is the first of a short series that will argue that publishers need to start thinking more carefully about search engine optimisation as a key marketing tool, both to drive sales and to head off the threat of eBook piracy.
These short white papers are not 10-point guides on how to get to the top of Google, they are instead designed to help you start thinking about search in a more strategic way, to see why it is important and to give you a good starting point for developing it within your own organisation.
Where to start
This is probably the hardest part of the process; the web is full of information and guidance regarding SEO and how to maximise your search presence. However, advice can often be conflicting and doesn’t take into account the specifics of your products, market or even your organisation. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. Your publishing company is likely to be structured very differently from another publishing company, your products and customers will differ and your access to web content and ability to implement an SEO strategy will also vary.
A good SEO strategy is not about paying out money for web-based ads, and it’s not about any of the Wild West antics of some SEO consultancies. A good SEO strategy is a mixture of business considerations and technological ones, as this paper will demonstrate.
Part 1: Ownership
How well do you rank for your own authors/book titles?
Owning your own name or your author’s name in Google doesn’t mean owning the most appropriate URL, it means making sure that yours is the website most commonly associated with these words as search terms. In other words, if I type in “Harper Collins” in Google, www.harpercollins.com comes up first in the search results. This is important, because users tend to use the first few results of any search. When using search, users do not often look below the fold and it is crucial that users don’t have to scroll to find your content as they often won’t.
(What is the fold? Basically anything that your users would have to scroll to find on their monitors, the
fold will appear at different places on different screens.)
Owning your imprint’s name is not an issue for most publishing organisations. Publishing houses usually have very distinctive names for their imprints and clear brands. Nearly all publishing companies have been online for a long time at the same domain (e.g. www.harpercollins.com) and usually at the same IP address (e.g. 80.177.207.67). This gives your site authority in Google.
It is right that you would want to have possession of your own imprint name in Google and a quick test indicates that most publishing companies are doing this very successfully. But it is becoming increasingly unlikely that your users are going to be accessing your content through a home page in a traditional sense. In many cases it may be that users don’t know that a specific book or author is published by your imprint or even associate what they are looking for with your company. Users are no longer entering sites through a gateway front page, instead every page on your site becomes a potential front page (and stresses the importance of good usability).
For example: I go to lunch with a friend and they recommend to me a book they have been reading by the author James Ellroy. Later that day I remember the conversation and Google the name of the book, keywords from the name or possibly the author name.
Before we start looking at search in more detail it is important to remember that search and search results are constantly changing. This means if you now were to enter the same search terms your results may look different although certain similarities are likely to exist. The results of the search listed within this article reflect the results for the 29th January 2010 only.
Googling “James Ellroy” brings up the following results:
As you can see here, all top search results (users generally choose the results within the top three to click through) are pointing to “unofficial” results for James Ellroy. The page from Harper Collins doesn’t appear at all here. Ellroy.com looks like it could be official because of the URL but is a fan site set up by an Ellroy enthusiast. In effect these fan sites “own” the name of James Ellroy the author as they completely dominate the search listings for his name.
Other than fan sites, the two big players here are Google books (fourth in the organic listings) and Amazon (in the paid for listings, see the column on the right hand side of the search page). Google books takes the user to a page listing a variety of books by and on James Ellroy. It also offers a variety of links to retailers’ sites with what appears to be up-to-date prices for a selection of his books.
Only retail sites appear here and again there is no presence of the publisher. Looking at where Amazon are paying for ads and where they are relying on natural search is interesting (PPC will be covered in other papers in this series).
James Ellroy is an interesting example as his work, fame and prominence dates prior to the internet. The fan sites that appear at the top of these search listings are likely to have been the first presence for James Ellroy on the internet and as a result they will have a lot of authority and “link juice” for James Ellroy terms. This may explain Amazon’s PPC strategy for these terms. In such circumstances publishers need strategies to regain the ownership of their author from fans!
I also Googled “Ellroy”. The fan sites shuffled about a bit here but the search results continue to omit any official site.
Googling “James Ellroy books” again doesn’t bring up any official listing but does give us some nice reviews for his latest title Blood’s a Rover.
In fact, the only way I seem able to find the official Harper Collins page for James Ellroy is if I Google “James Ellroy publisher” which is a shame as the Harper Collins site offers a nice author tracker feature that I could be interested in. (As a landing page it is probably less successful but I am going to talk about landing pages and how important they are in part 2 of this series).
Search engine marketing strategies work well because they are behaviourally triggered. This means that the user is already interested and looking for content or products relating to that keyword(s). Behaviourally triggered marketing campaigns are proven to have a very strong response rate because they are delivered at the stage in the buying cycle when they are most likely to influence the customer’s behaviour. I Google James Ellroy because I am interested in purchasing one of his books. If you want me to purchase from you, a great starting point is making sure you are easy for me to find!
Now let's look at search results for the title of one of Ellroy's books.
I try searching a specific book name with the author surname “la confidential ellroy”.
Admittedly this is a competitive term because of the film attached to the book. Searching on “LA Confidential Ellroy” has still not given me an official source of information about the book, although Amazon has gone from the Pay Per Click listings in the right hand column of the page into number 3 in the main or “organic” search listings. Amazon does not need to pay for their search result here because they have a reasonable listing in the natural search results. More interesting though is the number 5 offering me free eBook downloads for LA Confidential.
Pdfgeni.com is an eBook search engine. It is still in beta version which indicates it is fairly new to the market. If the site gains authority it may achieve higher rankings in Google which potentially makes it a threat to publishers. It appears to be offering me free PDF downloads and eBooks. Users like the word“free”. I like the word free. I click through to find out more.
PDFgeni lists all the eBook content it has for LA Confidential. I choose LA confidential (5th down) as it seemed most appropriate for my search.
I am now rerouted to a Czechoslovakian site that offers me the Penguin Readers Factsheet teacher’s notes for LA Confidential. I can download this page, print it and easily share it. So finding that content took 3 clicks. Admittedly I wasn’t originally looking for the Penguin Teaching Notes for LA Confidential – but say if I was, would it be that easy?
I Google “penguin readers fact sheet la confidential” (the search results were the same for “penguin readers factsheet la confidential” and very similar to “Pearson readers fact sheet la confidential”). In fact it’s easier to get hold of the pirated version than it is to buy the official version online. Pearson comes second in the listings but for something completely unrelated and the most relevant official listing from Penguin is coming in 4th. Even then it is not directly to a page that allows me to find information about the factsheet or to purchase it. It takes me one Google search and one click to get hold of the pirated version.
So you can see that using Google search it would actually take me quite some considerable effort to get to the Harper Collins site. It would be far easier for me to either go to Amazon or a number of pirated sites. This isn’t a problem specific to Harper Collins. We could have taken examples of authors from most publishers in both the trade sector and the academic or educational sphere.
For many publishers the author of the content is a key selling point of their product. For many users it would be the start of their search to buy a particular book or product. It is important for publishers to be visible to those searching for information about or trying to purchase one of your products.
At the Publishers Association’s recent discussion on eBook strategies for 2010 (#paevents) there was a clear concern about piracy and a call for better usability as a solution to pirated content. However, it is not only the usability of your site that needs to be considered but alsohow easy it is to find legitimate content. As demonstrated above, if pirated content is much easier to access than even finding the real thing it dramatically reduces a user’s motivation to purchase.
What to do next?
It is clear that something needs to be done here. Perhaps publishers need to start optimising their sites to author names or book titles. But how can this be done?
Shift Learning are running a free SEO webinar in March to help those working in the publishing industry understand the basics of SEO better. It will last for one hour and will give a complete overview of the basics of SEO in more practical terms.
Email me (
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) to sign up or to find out more about how we can help you to develop a really effective SEO strategy.
In the meantime, here are some things to consider when trying to gain ownership of your content:
- Common names are more competitive – this means that you will have to work harder to ensure a high ranking in Google.
- Unusual names are less competitive – this means it should be easier for you to achieve a high ranking in Google and there is less excuse for not!
- How do you describe yourself online? – Think carefully about the words and phrases you use to describe an author or your products.
- How do others describe you? – Think even more carefully about the words or phrases your customers use to search for your authors or products. Focus on search phrases not single keywords. There are some good free tools out there, like Google Insights, which can give you a good idea of the terms your users are employing to search for specific content (for example, a number of searchers are misspelling James Ellroy’s name when looking for his content).
The starting point for any successful SEO strategy is to start investigating the specific phrases used to search for the content you want users to find. Good solid research around keywords and phrases are one of the most important things you can do to start gaining ownership over your authors and content.
Helene Moran
Shift Learning
18 – 20 St John Street
London
EC1M 4NX
UK
T: +44(0)207 253 8959
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