At The Helm - Episode 1 | Amy Elmayan, Director of SEO at Paperless Post

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Introducing our newest interview series from PACIFIC! 'At The Helm' is a series of chats with business leaders in charge of performance marketing programs at all kinds of brands. We'll be discussing unique challenges they face at their role and company as well as the strategies they use to solve for them.

Episode 1 is our interview with Amy Elmayan, Director of SEO at Paperless Post! We chat about all kinds of technical SEO tasks on her roadmap, growth strategies she's employing across the site, and what she thinks is critical to focus on in 2023.

Here's the transcript:

00:00:01:00 - 00:00:08:03
Shawn
Hello again. Thank you for joining and taking time out of your day to chat with me. I always appreciate it and hopefully our internet works this time.

00:00:08:16 - 00:00:09:15
Amy
Yes.

00:00:11:18 - 00:00:18:07
Shawn
Okay. Real quick, what's your current role and where do you work? And then maybe give me a quick background on yourself in SEO and maybe in marketing in general.

00:00:19:01 - 00:00:44:10
Amy
Yeah. So currently I am director of SEO at Paperless Post. We do online cards and invitations for every possible type of event and occasion. I've been doing SEO since 2011. I got started working in link building for an agency. I did that for several years and then eventually transitioned into more of a holistic SEO role working in-house at Pearson.

00:00:45:02 - 00:00:56:02
Amy
Over the years, I've done both in-house and agency side work on a variety of companies in different niches from higher education, health care, finance and ecommerce.

00:00:57:02 - 00:01:10:14
Shawn
Okay, so first of all, the link building piece. Everyone cuts their chops on SEO are in link building in the beginning. Right. That's kind of how you start. You have to get through the fire and then eventually you get to do kind of holistic SEO. Had you started back in those early days?

00:01:11:11 - 00:01:19:12
Amy
Yeah, I think it's a pretty it was a pretty common entry pathway. It was an interesting time to start as a link builder because the penguin updated just hit and a lot of things were.

00:01:20:03 - 00:01:20:07
Shawn
Yeah.

00:01:20:14 - 00:01:27:23
Amy
Yeah. A lot of people weren't crazy about link building. So when we would do our outreach, we got hit with some very, not in-depth responses.

00:01:28:04 - 00:01:34:12
Shawn
Speaking of, I know we're jumping ahead, but helpful content update, have you seen any impact on Paperless Post or anything else you're monitoring?

00:01:35:00 - 00:01:50:13
Amy
No, I haven't seen any impact whatsoever on Paperless. I was not really expecting to see any type of negative impact. I mean, we don't really do I generated content or anything that it was supposedly targeting. So I wasn't concerned to begin with. But now I haven't seen any impact one way or another yet.

00:01:50:18 - 00:02:09:05
Shawn
Gotcha. Yeah. Well, let's get. Okay. So you mentioned higher education and then I know you were at Tupperware for a while, so you had e-commerce experience as well. So at Paperless Post you guys, would you call yourself an e-commerce site or how would you describe the site in general? Like the challenge that you face with that brand.

00:02:09:23 - 00:02:32:20
Amy
Yeah, it's interesting. So we are an e-commerce site, but we're an e-commerce site that doesn't really sell any physical products. All of our cards are digital, with the one exception being we do have Paperless Post Party Shop, which sells party decorations and supplies and those are like actual physical products. But, but our main product is all online, which is interesting because we do compete in SEO in the SERP with a lot of companies that either offer a hybrid.

00:02:32:21 - 00:02:38:13
Amy
So you can do like online or download and print. And then also just the plain brick and mortar card stores like Hallmark.

00:02:39:13 - 00:02:52:21
Shawn
Okay. So is it fair to say that you might have different competitors that also offer a majority of their services or product virtually or online only versus some that might be brick and mortar hallmark maybe, or someone else like that?

00:02:53:16 - 00:03:07:02
Amy
Yeah, absolutely. It's a combination. And depending upon the particular query, type it, you know, it tends to vary. So if someone just searches birthday cards without specifying a type, the competitor is going to be a little bit different. That if somebody searches for online birthday cards specifically.

00:03:07:17 - 00:03:11:18
Shawn
Gotcha. Okay. Is Amazon one of your competitors? Do they rank for some of these?

00:03:12:06 - 00:03:16:16
Amy
Not not currently. Maybe more like the image pack, but not really in like the blue links.

00:03:17:04 - 00:03:23:21
Shawn
Okay, cool. Is there a local intent that any of the queries to like? Is anyone doing a geo modifier under any of those searches?

00:03:24:21 - 00:03:43:17
Amy
Not really. But what I have noticed is certain queries will trigger like the map pack, for example. Like I think birthday cards is one of those. If I search it, I'll get like a local Hallmark store or maybe like a target or something like that. So certain queries will trigger local intent, but for the most part, like are like our actual competitors, like the blue links, if you will.

00:03:43:17 - 00:03:45:20
Amy
There's no really localized pages that show.

00:03:46:13 - 00:03:55:08
Shawn
Gotcha. Okay. Speaking of blue links, is that kind of the the field that you're playing on or is there anything else feature search, feature wise that you kind of are targeting?

00:03:56:13 - 00:04:17:18
Amy
That's the main field that we're playing in right now, I would say. I think image the image pack is something that we want to continue to optimize for. Yeah, but mainly that I would also say something that we started playing in recently with Paperless Post Party Shop is Merchant Center for Google Shopping. And so for anyone who doesn't know, it's a little bit different in that you don't just submit an e-mail site map and show up.

00:04:17:18 - 00:04:33:03
Amy
There's this whole process. You have to kind of submit your product, feed through the merchant center and then you start displaying Google started it back in like 2020 at the start of COVID to kind of help retailers. Something I implemented wise at Tupperware and I did it again for people as opposed to.

00:04:33:21 - 00:04:47:05
Shawn
Okay, you're leading me into Segways, which are perfect. So you said you did this for Paperless Post. It's like, what is your in your role right now as director of SEO? What's under your purview? Like what are some of the strategies or like ongoing things that you or your team are working on.

00:04:48:14 - 00:05:01:22
Amy
How a lot of different things at the moment. The good news is there's a ton of cross-functional support for SEO, so we're trying to knock out a lot of things at the same time. One of the big things is a lot of technical clean up. We made a ton of progress in the short time that I've been there.

00:05:01:22 - 00:05:22:02
Amy
But one of the things with I think any e-commerce site but Paperless Post, with no exception, is, you know, when users on a category page, there's a lot of different filters, which creates a lot of different query params, which creates a lot of potential for duplicative content. So making sure that we have canonical is implemented properly, making sure that Google's only crawling the pages we want to crawl.

00:05:22:14 - 00:05:47:16
Amy
One thing I noticed day one on the job is our internal site. Search results have been spammed and so clean that up now. So if you did like a site go and search for paper as opposed to you would see links to like by ivermectin online now. So yeah first thing I did was use their removals request tool and I got all of the internal site search results out of the index because it was 99.9% spam.

00:05:48:05 - 00:05:52:12
Shawn
Yeah. So you have all this bloat to probably with your crawl budget too, I'm assuming.

00:05:53:03 - 00:06:10:06
Amy
Yeah. A little bit of both. We also had an interesting issue that I've never encountered before. We had some kind of erroneous pagination. So, for example, if you are on a category page and the physical pagination on the page went up to page 15 in the source code, Google could actually crawl up to page five. And it was really strange.

00:06:10:06 - 00:06:24:11
Amy
It was like a hidden section on the page where the pagination was not working as expected. And so we'd gotten all that cleaned up. And it's it's really helped improve your budget and ensure that Google is only crawling the pages that we want to crawl so that that's not all things that we've been working on.

00:06:24:20 - 00:06:36:23
Shawn
But real quick, because I know some people listening to this are going to nerd out with us on this. So you canonical the parameters. And then did you use a robot text file to basically block any of the params with like a wild card string or something?

00:06:37:19 - 00:07:00:05
Amy
I did because some in the can articles were implemented properly, but Google was still spinning. What I felt was too much time calling them. And so I know this is a bit I don't know, some people may disagree with this, but I still felt the need to block some of them via robots.txt. So maybe a bit controversial, but yeah, so we did we had some additional rules there about start text file and one of them actually just rolled out yesterday.

00:07:00:05 - 00:07:08:06
Amy
But yes, I have blocked some of the additional params in an effort to try to get Google to spend their time and effort crawling the pages I actually went across.

00:07:08:19 - 00:07:25:17
Shawn
Yeah, we ran into that problem with a similar client and did both those steps and then we did a crawl. We found that we were still internally linking to a lot of the variance. And so then we had to kind of update internal links as well so that we're not sending Googlebot on this journey saying like, Hey, go ahead and crawl this, but we also don't want you to.

00:07:26:03 - 00:07:50:08
Amy
That's actually interesting. That's a project is still sort of underway. So on our individual category pages, if you click a category and you click a card, the cards are parameterized with a query string that includes what category it is. And the reason for that is because a card can appear in multiple categories with different text, of course, but because of the nature of like an online card, you could easily use the same design for a birthday card and a wedding card.

00:07:50:08 - 00:08:12:06
Amy
You just swap the text and it goes, right, congratulations. And so the reason why all these individual cards have query params that also powers the breadcrumbs. Right now they're dynamic based on the category. The user would have access the card from the problem. From our crawl budget standpoint as we are linking internally to all these parameterized individual card pages.

00:08:12:06 - 00:08:35:11
Amy
So I'm working with our engineering team to come up with a solution so we can still kind of preserve like the information on what category that card's a part of, how the user got there, but without utilizing query params. So it's still, it's still a work in progress. I don't think it's a huge SEO problem only because the majority of our traffic goes to our category pages rather than our individual cards.

00:08:36:07 - 00:08:49:16
Shawn
Gotcha. Okay. Yeah. Is that is that the way you want it to be structured too? Like in terms of traffic allocation, are you trying to generate more to the cards themselves or do you want to keep it at the category? Subcategory flow?

00:08:49:16 - 00:09:08:12
Amy
I wouldn't be mad if we generated more traffic to the individual cards, but I still do think that the bigger game is on the category pages. I think a lot more users are intent wise. They're going to search for wedding invitations or birthday cards, right? They don't know exactly the specific design they likely want, but they know type what category, which actually kind of leads me into another.

00:09:09:21 - 00:09:13:06
Shawn
Want to take us there. I cut you off on the list of things that are under your role.

00:09:13:07 - 00:09:40:06
Amy
Yeah. So again user searching for a particular thing I think is where the big opportunity is and something that was kind of in the works when I joined PayPal. This is they're testing out the idea of utilizing themes. So on a couple of pages of Paperless Post right now, one of them is holiday invitations and one of them is kid's birthday invitations in the side nav in addition to color shape size, there's a filter for themes.

00:09:40:06 - 00:10:02:08
Amy
And what's unique about that is when you click on a theme, it doesn't actually add like a query param. It creates a new individual URL. So if you're on kid's birthday and you click dinosaur, you get flash dinosaur added to the end of the URL. So it's a neat, unique URL that can be indexed by Google. That being said, right now there's a lot of kind of technical hiccups with the pages.

00:10:02:08 - 00:10:08:07
Amy
Sometimes the H1 isn't actually updating when you choose a theme as it should.

00:10:08:17 - 00:10:09:03
Shawn
Gotcha.

00:10:09:13 - 00:10:33:11
Amy
We're in the process of kind of cleaning up a lot of that, but it's kind of a precursor for the larger project of rolling out themes to a lot more pages, people throwing weddings, baby showers. I think themes are huge from an intense standpoint, and we have internal data that shows that for the existing themes that we do have live, when a user views a theme page, they are significantly more likely to convert and actually send a card.

00:10:33:11 - 00:10:51:01
Amy
I'd say about five times more. And I think if you think about it from a user intent standpoint, it makes a lot of sense, right? So if I'm searching for a wedding invitation, I'm still not quite sure what I want. But if I'm searching for like, you know, black and gold wedding invitation or bohemian wedding invitation, I've already planned it.

00:10:51:01 - 00:10:56:00
Amy
I know exactly what I'm looking for. And so I think there's a lot higher intent behind those types of searches.

00:10:56:18 - 00:11:16:06
Shawn
Yeah. So maybe you were going to get to this, but the customer journey and how they relate to specific categories, pages, you have and the different verticals, are you do you have something that you're working on the like or maybe you already have mapped this out to kind of figure out what content they should be seen, if it's unique to that type of a page.

00:11:16:06 - 00:11:22:04
Shawn
Or do you have like an ideal category page that you think applies to all different types of categories?

00:11:23:03 - 00:11:41:23
Amy
Yeah, that's interesting question. Right now, like the layout of our category pages is more or less the same. No matter what category you're on, you kind of have like a hero image. They want a little bit of intro text, then you see the actual carousel of cards at the bottom. There's a photocopy block with some text and sometimes some internal linking.

00:11:43:08 - 00:12:00:18
Amy
I think as far as the user journey, though, we do analyze a lot of our we have a lot of like unique data on kind of the path our users take and what they do on their path to conversion. And something that we've noticed both from kind of internal data, from looking at competitors, from doing surveys, we're really big into customer feedback.

00:12:01:12 - 00:12:02:05
Amy
As we just launched.

00:12:02:06 - 00:12:02:13
Shawn
Last.

00:12:02:20 - 00:12:27:13
Amy
Year, we launched a new feature called Box, which is like if you think about for wedding invitations, we can kind of play in the same spaces, like in the Not or Zola in terms of making an invitation, almost like a wedding website. So you think about it when you're sending out a wedding invitation. A lot of the times people are going to know about accommodations, places to stay, travel plans so you can include all of that kind of from outside the actual invitation.

00:12:27:13 - 00:12:28:20
Amy
That's kind of a space at the bottom.

00:12:28:20 - 00:12:32:01
Shawn
Of all the attached information that goes into the event. Right.

00:12:32:01 - 00:12:53:16
Amy
Right. You know, all the attached information. So if it's a wedding, you could showcase your bridal party, you could showcase the hotel options. If it's a professional conference, you could showcase the speakers. So things like that. And we we've noticed that those things are things that users are really interested in and we're trying to figure out, like for different types of events, what types of blocks make more sense for users to see.

00:12:53:16 - 00:13:00:17
Amy
So for weddings, maybe it's accommodations, maybe for kids if something else. So we're still trying to play around with some of those features.

00:13:01:14 - 00:13:14:01
Shawn
How would you test that or how would you roll something out? Are you going to like kind of make a change and then do like a pre post to kind of see how it performs? Or do you have like a split like experience and plans or.

00:13:14:11 - 00:13:36:15
Amy
Yeah, I think we've sort of fully rolled out blocks and I think right now what we're testing is like defaulting certain blocks to on or off. So there's lots of different options you could make to whatever. But we're trying to kind of figure out which ones make sense for users to utilize. And then we can we can review data showing, you know, the usage of blocks, which ones are more commonly used for different types of events and kind of inform some decisions.

00:13:37:04 - 00:13:44:22
Amy
A recent I know a recent AB test that we rolled out actually on Native we do have an app on both iOS and Google play. Oh.

00:13:45:05 - 00:13:45:12
Shawn
Okay.

00:13:45:23 - 00:14:05:00
Amy
Yeah. We tested the idea of like eliminating almost kind of our PDP page. So like if you're on our app and you're scrolling through a category and you picked a card that you like, like on web, the user flows, you land, you see the card, and then there's a button that you would like to start actually creating and designing it.

00:14:05:09 - 00:14:18:07
Amy
And I know they recently rolled out an AP test where instead of getting to that page where you see the card, you immediately go and you click the card, you're immediately taking it into the create experience. I'm not sure the outcome of that yet, but I know it's something that we were going to test.

00:14:19:04 - 00:14:30:21
Shawn
Okay. I didn't even ask, do you guys have majority mobile or desktop traffic or like how how much is mobile and are you trying to push them into the app? Or is that kind of like a deep linking situation?

00:14:31:21 - 00:14:51:12
Amy
Yeah, good question. It's it's not as different as you may think. I do think the majority of traffic is is is mobile. But it's interesting. We find a lot of users that maybe start on mobile, go through and will actually convert like finish the send on desktop out, get them to browse on mobile, but they'll actually go and finish the send on desktop app.

00:14:51:12 - 00:15:09:10
Amy
Right now, it's not a ton of our traffic. We're trying to improve that. We don't have a ton of deep linking as it is, but that's actually another thing that I'm kind of working on right now is trying to get more users to download the app and then also just as so in general, which I honestly haven't had a ton of experience yet with in my career.

00:15:09:10 - 00:15:19:08
Amy
But it's, it's been interesting. So I've provided some recs for implementation for how we can hopefully rank better in Google Play in the Android or iOS App Store. Yeah.

00:15:19:14 - 00:15:37:07
Shawn
Yeah. I mean, one thing you're not saying is in the role of a director of SEO, you have so many things you want to do and you only have a finite amount of resources and time to really get it done right. So you have like in your case, it sounds like you have a team that's helping you be cross-functional and actually work with other teams with their own development to get this launched.

00:15:37:18 - 00:16:02:06
Shawn
But even then, you know, like we always run into sprint issues with dev teams trying to figure out like, you know, you have to do prioritize all your different recs. So the technical SEO that you started with is a good example of like things that you think are glaring that you really need to fix. But at the same time you have all these like growth strategies of like, okay, well I also want to make net new content in this new page table, but where does that fall in the priority order, you know, and then you kind of associate lift with each of them.

00:16:02:06 - 00:16:03:22
Shawn
It's it's sometimes it's nightmare, right?

00:16:05:00 - 00:16:25:19
Amy
It's it's challenging. That was one of the big projects I did and we kind of quarterly planning. But so when I first came on board, I had to put out a plan of like, here's what I want to do, and I had to kind of try to size it not only to traffic but to dollars, because at the end of the day for business and from there, we tried to kind of put together a plan of attack of how are we going to roll things out using the ACE score, impact, confidence.

00:16:25:19 - 00:16:41:12
Amy
And and so a lot of the decisions that were made, a lot of the tech stuff were things that were lower lift for the engineering team but I thought would be right potentially higher impact that that's the dream right? Like low effort high impact. But there's only so many of those before you have to move to the higher effort items.

00:16:41:14 - 00:16:51:08
Shawn
So yeah. Yeah. Speaking of the high score methodology, I think you were the one that championed that and know we work together in the past briefly and I use that all the time. I love.

00:16:51:19 - 00:16:53:00
Amy
Get on. Yeah.

00:16:53:22 - 00:17:16:04
Shawn
Okay. So talk to me about like the different things on that list of ever evolving things you want to do. Like maybe past strategies you've done, other companies or things you haven't gotten to yet. Like what to you are like your favorite go to tactics when you're presented with the challenge of, you know, some quarterly goal or annual goal that you're trying to reach and obviously you have the things that you want to fix.

00:17:16:04 - 00:17:28:12
Shawn
Right? But what are some of those like net new or maybe like or it doesn't even have to be net new. It could be something that might be like people don't often think to check blank, you know, like what are some of those strategies that you love or you keep finding yourself coming back to?

00:17:29:21 - 00:17:47:13
Amy
Yeah, one thing that I've only been a part of once, but I think it could be a big opportunity for people I suppose would be to internationalize the site. So we did that at Tupperware. So at Tupperware we have Tupperware dot com, but we had four different record store reviews. So we had Tupperware dot com, which was the Spanish version of the US site.

00:17:47:13 - 00:18:08:13
Amy
We had Tupperware done. Yeah, which was Canada English. And then we had that Tupperware at IKEA, which was Canada French. And then you get into making sure you have like lane tags are configured properly. But we actually just got feedback from a user recently that wanted to know why they couldn't translate the site into Spanish. So I think that yeah, I think that would be probably a ton of work too.

00:18:08:13 - 00:18:26:06
Amy
To translate everything, you have to think about how many cards we have and translating all of that. I mean, no small amount of work, but I think it could be a really interesting, larger kind of opportunity, not necessarily something on this super short term, but I think from a long term perspective it could be really interesting. Yeah.

00:18:26:23 - 00:18:34:15
Shawn
It would open you up to all these other markets essentially. Right. And and even in the U.S. with Spanish, if you could offer that service or translate that.

00:18:35:04 - 00:18:56:06
Amy
Yeah, absolutely. I think it's a kind of bigger thing. I think maybe a bit more niche thing. I think that we want to try to figure out is a way to to better scale and improve internal linking like across the board. Right now we have a main navigation which has kind of served historically as the way to internally link to everything.

00:18:56:06 - 00:19:20:06
Amy
And I think in some cases our main job is maybe a bit crowded and could be to pare down a little bit to try to focus on the most important pages. But then we also have a secondary left now. So if you're on a category page, you do see internal links to other pages. One thing I did learn in the past couple of years when we work together is like the power of kind of smart, if you will, semi automated internal linking.

00:19:20:13 - 00:19:46:12
Amy
Because I know in the past when I've tried to roll out internal linking, it's either been incredibly manual to the point where like I'm manually inserting links within the body of content which is super unsustainable. I've also tested out like various WordPress plug ins that are supposed to automate internal linking. They were all terrible. So I think the idea of creating some sort of like custom logic to implement smart related links of scale is huge.

00:19:46:12 - 00:19:59:23
Amy
And I've already kind of brought this up to our engineering team. I've gotten support on it. I think it'll probably take us a little while to kind of work out the details, but I've kind of learned firsthand the importance of like a smart, strategic, internal linking.

00:20:00:16 - 00:20:21:19
Shawn
Yeah. So in the smart linking for you, is it a goal to maybe distribute equity to other pages that you're trying to bring up or you know, sometimes like the other angle is discoverability. Like you just want more pages indexed or found, but they're not. They're awful. Or maybe they're too far from the home free. Is it both?

00:20:21:19 - 00:20:24:20
Shawn
Or do you have a use case specifically for paperless posts that you would like to do?

00:20:25:12 - 00:20:47:01
Amy
I think it's both. I think one particular use case is our blog, our blog, the internal linking. I think it's not I think the logic is sort of it just links to like the most recent three publish post within a category. So only linking to the most three published post. There's a lot of blogs that don't get a lot of link juice, if you will.

00:20:47:03 - 00:21:05:20
Amy
Yeah, well, I think with the blog we could stand to benefit quite a bit. I think also our category pages too, we do have a left nav. It's with some links. It's not quite as customizable as I would like, but I think it's about I hate the term link sculpting, but I think like being strategic.

00:21:05:20 - 00:21:08:09
Shawn
About I didn't say it myself, but I was going to say I hate.

00:21:08:09 - 00:21:12:05
Amy
Like I hate that term because I don't know, I just it sounds so manipulative and I.

00:21:12:18 - 00:21:13:02
Shawn
Does.

00:21:13:10 - 00:21:29:06
Amy
I don't think that's really like the intent of what it should be. But I think links to like guide the user on an ideal path, not to overwhelm them with too many links that you kind of get into. Like what we've called internally at people's posts is like a paradox of choice, right? It's like too many choices. You don't know where the heck you go.

00:21:29:06 - 00:21:40:10
Amy
And trying to balance that with like, you know, I don't know, trying to balance out having orphan pages. I don't want to overly rely on the HTML sitemap or the XML sitemap or anything like that.

00:21:40:10 - 00:21:57:20
Shawn
So totally. Yeah, totally agree with you. The paradox of choice thing that I ever tell you that real quick. Trader Joe's anecdote about paradox of choice. Now I'm going to sound like an old guy now telling stories. But so Trader Joe's, one of the reasons people love it but they don't know they love it is because they give you limited options.

00:21:57:20 - 00:22:14:18
Shawn
So there's only like maybe two or three versions of a specific source or of certain mac and cheese in the freezer section you go versus the grocery store. It has like, you know, 18 choices for tomato sauce. And it's the paradox of choice, right? So if I had to choose this one between the other two, I know which one I'm leaning towards and I'll just choose it.

00:22:14:18 - 00:22:36:21
Shawn
And I'm a more I'm more often to buy than I am if I'm overwhelmed with choices. And I thought, that's such a little clever thing to take into a website, you know, like you're on a category page, for example, or something like that, and you have like maybe you still need to show all the different options, right? But at the top you have a kind of a prescribed or like a featured section that's got like the most popular, right?

00:22:36:21 - 00:22:46:20
Shawn
And from there user can just choose, Oh, I really like this one. And these other two aren't speaking to me versus like, here's 104 options that you have and then you have to go off of that through.

00:22:47:18 - 00:22:49:09
Amy
Yes, exactly. Yeah.

00:22:50:03 - 00:22:58:14
Shawn
Yeah. I wanted to know to well, first of all, I cut you off. Was there anything else that strategy wise that you like that you've been wanting to do?

00:22:59:11 - 00:23:23:22
Amy
Oh, gosh, I think those are two good ones. Another one is just trying to figure out how to expand. I think the amount of blog content and also like the kind of category supporting footer content that we we pretty as I just try to figure out how to how to scale that in a sustainable way. So just trying to figure out how to get additional copywriting support, that's something that we are working on and also some duplicate content issues.

00:23:23:22 - 00:23:47:09
Amy
There are some legacy duplicative category pages that have been really, really interesting. So we had a different wedding and we still do, but we're in the process of cleaning us up. So there's actually two different pages right now for wedding invitations. There's a group level page and a category level page. And what was interesting is it looks like someone before me realized it was an issue and kind of tried to resolve it by putting a canonical from one year to the other.

00:23:47:19 - 00:24:08:13
Amy
But Google wasn't respecting that canonical, so I kind of had to try to figure out why is that? Why is Google not respecting it? And the pages had the exact same H1, the same title tag had the same basically the same cards. The only difference I could find was that footer copy block at the bottom of the page, the one that had the more substantial copy was going better than the other.

00:24:08:13 - 00:24:32:11
Amy
And so something we've been testing out, we've been rolling it out kind of slowly to measure impact, to make sure we don't have any negative impact not only on traffic but also conversions is instead of the canonical, let's through one redirect one to the other, let's truly consolidate them and a permanent. Yeah. And on the few pages where we have rolled it out so far, the impact has either been nothing or positive depending upon which page I'm analyzing.

00:24:32:11 - 00:24:34:14
Amy
So it's something we're continuing to work through.

00:24:35:15 - 00:24:54:00
Shawn
Yeah. That's, that's an ever evolving problem. Right. Sometimes you can take care of them all. But then I don't know if this is the case with you guys, but we've been part of sites and I know you have to wear like some new pages, get creative, don't even know about it. Right. And then all of a sudden you're doing some looking GSC or crawl and you're like, Wait, hold on, what are all these net new ones?

00:24:54:00 - 00:25:00:07
Shawn
I've already redirected some of these other ones, so you have to kind of catch them as they go. But I don't know if you have that problem or not.

00:25:01:04 - 00:25:01:16
Amy
Yeah, I think.

00:25:01:16 - 00:25:02:07
Shawn
It's lovely though.

00:25:02:13 - 00:25:13:04
Amy
I know it's more just like legacy stuff I talked to. We have like a full time director of merchandizing and I've asked her like why are these two different pages exist? And she is just yeah, not sure. So yeah.

00:25:14:01 - 00:25:34:15
Shawn
That makes sense. I wanted to ask you, so we've been talking about your favorite strategies now and as we're winding down, I kind of always like to ask like what you see forward looking. So like it doesn't have to be 2023 mean, you know, in Q4 for example. But like what are some of the things that you think are going to start becoming a bigger deal for you guys to focus on?

00:25:34:15 - 00:25:52:06
Shawn
Like sometimes this helpful content update I've heard from people talk about like authorship is going to be a big thing in not having these unbiased articles or things out there. Is anything coming to mind for you or maybe in Paperless Post Space does anything specifically becoming a thing? You'll have to start thinking about?

00:25:52:06 - 00:26:15:08
Amy
That's interesting. I don't think like authorship is this big of a thing because we're not we're not it your money, your life. Like I have worked for y well sites before and I yeah it's kind of more important there. I don't know. I, I don't there's one thing specific to Paperless Post, I think just continuing to write good quality content that is relevant to users.

00:26:15:08 - 00:26:40:07
Amy
And I mean, that's, that's always going to be the case for us. Know, I think one thing that we're still kind of work in progress is transitioning a lot of our like messaging blog content content all over the place from being COVID specific to where, you know, talking to, oh yeah, we have a blog post about like how to throw a virtual or like a drive by baby shower and so like trying to like re adopt and kind of rewrite a bunch of stuff to target more in real life events to kind of meet users where they're at.

00:26:40:07 - 00:26:53:09
Amy
And so I know I've heard a lot in my few months that at paper about kind of how COVID impacted them and their business. And so just trying to make sure that we shift all of our all of our messaging accordingly, I think is really important.

00:26:54:07 - 00:27:03:11
Shawn
Oh, yeah. Messaging wise to make sure it resonates. But also search trends change like I'm sure search volumes going way down for all of those different virtual drive by type event.

00:27:03:20 - 00:27:21:03
Amy
Yeah, it's it's really interesting. So what I have to analyze our blog traffic on like a year over year basis. It looks like it's way down. But if you exclude the COVID specific blogs, that's actually up. So it's just kind of thinking about reporting it. Like I have to kind of keep that in mind when framing it to leadership.

00:27:21:11 - 00:27:28:00
Amy
It's down. That's because, you know, not as many people are reading this COVID blogs anymore, which is okay. Right.

00:27:28:06 - 00:27:52:17
Shawn
Yeah, that was one of my last question for you was reporting do you have like a you know, we've built out of studio reports in the past. We've done PowerPoints and million of them and things like that. But do you have specific KPIs or things that you like to focus on in your CEO reporting that maybe speaks to the strategy in the work that you're doing, but also to the sea level, people that need to interpret these numbers and reports to make investment decisions.

00:27:52:17 - 00:27:55:22
Shawn
Is there like kind of your favorite way of showing the report for what you do?

00:27:56:21 - 00:28:16:12
Amy
Yeah, as it was, it's it's still data studio. And I think anything with a visual is always helpful. Sometimes I still like to talk a little too techie, and sometimes when I just talk and it's not supported by visual, people start getting lost. And so I think visuals are always helpful. I'd say as far as like KPIs right now, I like to focus a lot on non branded traffic.

00:28:16:12 - 00:28:39:21
Amy
One thing that's really, really tricky though about search console and has been something I've had to educate quite a bit on is when you feel like, so if I have a filter and I say branded search is query contains paper lists and non-branded as query does not contain paper list right. What gets confusing is if you add up query contains paperless and query does not contain paperless theoretically should equal total.

00:28:40:04 - 00:28:40:17
Shawn
Doesn't match.

00:28:41:06 - 00:29:07:07
Amy
Like it never does. And so yeah, I think so. Just kind of framing it that way, knowing that data is highly sampled and aggregated and completely imperfect. But still, I think relatively wise, if we increased by 50% non-branded traffic and as long as we keep our filters consistent, it's still meaningful. So I'd say that's something, something that we are working on getting better at is I want to start speaking more to like things like conversion rate and revenue.

00:29:07:14 - 00:29:32:00
Amy
There's been a long work in progress though to kind of get our data to a point where we can correspond and landing pages to revenue. Google Analytics is not our source of truth, but it never has been. We have an internal looker set up and it's got all kinds of data, but reporting at a channel level is not something that we started looking seriously in until recently.

00:29:32:09 - 00:29:47:00
Amy
And so I'm super excited now that the data is kind of almost finalized and a point where we can use it. Because then what I want to start focusing on more is not only pages that drive traffic, but pages that drive revenue, because at the end of the day, that's, that's what's most important.

00:29:47:21 - 00:29:58:23
Shawn
Yeah. In connecting the dots from looker to with your non brand traffic reports and everything else that you're doing is like the Holy Grail, right? But if you do that, that's the easiest way to prove return on investment.

00:29:59:09 - 00:30:17:21
Amy
Yeah. It's so tricky, though, right? Because we're never going to get query level data into Looker. And I can never say with 100% right. You can never say with 100% certainty that it was a a branded or a non branded search. And like for some sites, it's more cut and dry, right. When I when I worked at Tupperware, the home page only ranked for Tupperware like it only ranked for non branded terms.

00:30:17:21 - 00:30:32:13
Amy
It was a lot more black and white, whereas paperless it's about 5050, right? We have good brand awareness. Lots of people are searching for Paperless Post, but the home page also ranks number one for online invitations. And so it's a lot more money than like somebody may think.

00:30:33:06 - 00:30:35:19
Shawn
Yeah, that's a solid ranking, by the way. Nice flex.

00:30:36:11 - 00:30:45:20
Amy
Yeah, I can't take credit for that. That was in place before I got here. But hopefully we're going to move up more in this non branded terms over the next few months.

00:30:46:03 - 00:30:54:10
Shawn
Oh yeah, yeah. You're just adding on top. Look cool. I've really enjoyed this conversation. Is there any other wisdom or anything else you want to impart before we before we go?

00:30:55:07 - 00:30:56:20
Amy
I think that's it. Thank you. This is like.

00:30:57:18 - 00:31:06:21
Shawn
Yeah, there's a lot of fun. Hopefully we can do another one sent. Yeah. Thank you again for your time today. And I know that we went for 30 minutes on this one, but I thought this is really helpful. So hopefully the listeners to.

00:31:07:11 - 00:31:08:14
Amy
Awesome. Thank you.

00:31:08:22 - 00:31:10:07
Shawn
All right. Thank you, Amy. Have a good day.

00:31:10:20 - 00:31:11:03
Amy
Okay.

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