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I often get bombarded with interview requests about a week prior to SES San Francisco, and with all the coverage I do on the show floor and sessions, it’s tough to make time.  However, this year I made an exception for a thought leader in SEO, Chris Boggs of Rosetta.  For those of you that don’t know, Chris is a veteran in the search engine marketing community, and this year was a panelist in a session entitled “Digital Asset Optimization.”  I had chance to sit down with him one-on-one after his session for a little Q&A.

Garry: Chris, thanks for sitting down with me.  I attended your session today on Digital Asset Optimization and found it interesting that not many people are thinking about optimizing all of their creative assets, whether they’re text, images, video, audio, news, etc.  Can you shed a little bit of light on why it’s important?

Chris Boggs: There is a huge opportunity for multiple content types to appear in universal results, and it’s been proven that multimedia can drive significant traffic to web pages that would not normally rank for keywords.  The way I see it, there are at least 4 opportunities to appear in universal results, maybe more, considering all the types of results included in the SERP.  Granted, not every SERP will include universal results with several different types of creative assets, but an increasing amount of them do.

Garry: With all the opportunity that’s out there, why do you think more people aren’t fully optimizing their digital assets?

Chris Boggs: I think people tend to focus on the different types of media, rather than providing one destination with ALL the types of media and providing quality user experience and context. Content is holistic, if you increase the breadth of content on pages, you’re increasing the quality of a user’s experience, and that’s the content that’s going to end up ranking in the SERPs.

Garry: What about brands who focus entirely on one media type? Example: Will it Blend focuses pretty much all of their marketing efforts on YouTube.

Chris Boggs: Well yeah, that’s viral marketing.  I think there will always be a place for viral marketing and that  it will continue to happen, especially with increased adoption of social media.  Just look at Norelco’s “Shave Everywhere” campaign that was launched years ago.  It ended up changing their outlook; they cancelled all their other marketing to focus on viral marketing completely.

Garry: You had also mentioned that you worked with pharmaceutical companies.  Do you find that there are limitations due to disclosure?

Chris Boggs: Yes, absolutely pharmaceutical companies may have to be a bit more careful, but there are also many great opportunities.  We did some work on reputation management for J&J that went up against a lot of content with negative sentiment.  And that’s where I think the opportunity exists, giving the truth about any given drug, right from the source.  Unfortunately, there is still a lot of fear about participating in social media, but again, the opportunity is there.

Garry: Pharmaceutical and consumer goods aside, what other verticals can benefit from digital asset optimization?

Chris Boggs: The travel industry is another big one, there are lots of opportunities to take advantage of DAO, because as a business traveler, and as a parent, I look to travel sites to give me as much information as possible about products and services for places I want to visit.  That means going beyond text and pictures, including social aspects such as commenting, ratings, video, user-submitted assets, etc.

Garry: That’s a great point, in an earlier session, representatives from Expedia said that they leverage their Facebook fan page for unique user-generated content that drives their content marketing strategy for product pages, plus helps their SEO game because it’s all unique and timely content.

Chris Boggs: Well yes, and I think there are several trust issues that many are facing.  Glowing reviews are highly suspect.  Consumers are looking deeper into negative reviews, and genuinely judge that feedback for themselves.  Anyone can write a positive review, and many of them are all the same.  We’re in the social media age, where negative feedback isn’t deleted, but actively managed by brands to regain a person’s trust, but also exhibit customer service leadership.  That interaction goes a long way.

Garry: Agreed, that’s exactly what I look for whenever I’m reading reviews.  Going back to universal search, with all the changes Google put in place this year that emphasize personalization, do you think the SERP can be easily tainted?

Chris Boggs: Certainly, you can easily taint your universal search results depending on your past search queries.  In addition, local results are becoming more important but less emphasized; the results are personalized for your location, but that location may not be overtly displayed on the SERP.

Garry: Interesting, so you’re saying that users are almost getting “invisible local search results” by default?

Chris Boggs: Absolutely, you don’t even have to specify the location anymore, they’ll just serve the local results right away.  I also noticed that there seems to be a severe penalty for over-optimized local pages.  A prime example of this is whenever you do a search for something like “los angeles auto insurance,” where the highest ranking pages are on small sites. It seems to be a small man’s game.  Large national sites with localized landing pages that are optimized for local seem to be getting penalized.

Garry: I can see the same happening for press releases, where it seems releases optimized by location are being preferred and served up locally.

Chris Boggs: That makes sense, websites leveraging local distribution of press releases are going to be doing better.  From Google’s perspective, that content is timely, it’s local, it’s semantic and it’s extremely relevant.  Obviously, any marketing tactic would have to go hand in hand with local buzz through Facebook, Twitter, and other social media channels to fulfill a true unified approach to public relations and online marketing.

Garry: So what you’re saying is to take a unified approach, utilize a unified content strategy, and start ranking for universal search results.  Sounds good to me!

Thanks again to Chris Boggs of Rosetta for joining me in this special one-on-one interview at SES San Francisco 2010. And a special thanks to Liva Judic for the photos!

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