Episode 24: Interview with Derrick Wheeler

Derrick Wheeler is Senior SEO Architect at the Central Marketing Group of Microsoft. he is responsible for developing solutions, so marketers and site managers can include SEO best practices as standards and with the best available tools to their websites. Furthermore he is a regular speaker at popular search engine markting conferenzen. With more than eleven years of experience in internet marketing, Derrick has developed a deep understanding, how to rank in search engines successfully.

Andre Alpar: Hi Derrick can you introduce yourself to us please?

Derrick Wheeler: Sure, my name’s Derrick Wheeler. I’m the, well my title is informally SEO Architect at Microsoft. Formally it’s Senior Product Intelligence Manager

Andre Alpar: OK.

Derrick Wheeler: And my role is really around ensuring that our global portfolio properties at Microsoft are optimized as much as possible for organic search.

Andre Alpar: What qualified you to get this job? What have you been doing previously just out of curiosity?

Derrick Wheeler: Sure, so the only career I’ve ever known is internet marketing and mostly SEO. Around 1997 I started doing link building campaigns for sites, and it was before it even really matter for Search. And then the company I worked for… the founder had enough foresight to see that SEO was going to be a big deal and he paid Danny Sullivan to come down and train like 6 of us. And that’s when I got started in SEO. And then that company was acquired and moved out of town then I started working remotely for another internet marketing company and then I got another job in an internet marketing company. So after a while I had around 11 years of working on SEO and link building and that kind of thing. And then I thought, well you know…

Andre Alpar: So you were on the agency side.

Derrick Wheeler: I was on the agency side for 10-11 years. And then I thought won’t it be easy to just optimize for one website. You know you don’t have to worry about all this clients and I felt like the sale people would just sell and sell… trying to live up to all the promises of getting things done on time just became really difficult. So I though, ok let’s just go to one company and do SEO, Little did I realize that Microsoft has hundreds and hundreds of individually managed web properties and all these content management systems. It really is like being an internal SEO agency even though we’re not set up that way.

Andre Alpar: So you are dealing with more websites now than when you were on the agency side of things?

Derrick Wheeler: There’s more web properties in our portfolio than there were clients that I had. It was a bad move in that regard. But it was a good move in pretty much every other way.

Andre Alpar: So just to clear up misunderstandings, you are not taking care of Bing and what search results happen in Bing but instead all the properties that Microsoft has and how they appear in all different kinds of search engines around the world.

Derrick Wheeler: All search platforms, we wanna show up anywhere someone that we think would benefit from coming to our site, we want to be where they’re searching

Andre Alpar: When you look at the Keyword portfolio you guys are looking after, kind of regularly monitoring across most of the websites, I would guess that most of them are branded search terms that you are taking care of. And it’s more like a reputation management attempt, are we really being found where people are really searching one of your products? And it’s less that you’re trying to get generic terms like “Download software”, which could be, you know… other results could be interesting there as well.

Derrick Wheeler: Yeah, and that’s one of the unique things about Microsoft is that we have such a strong brands that a lot of times our branded search phrases will have 100 times more searches than a non-brand equivalent. But what we do wanna focus on and we’ve been getting better at is focusing on non-brand, because even though the volume is less it’s very strategically valuable for us to get in front of people that may not know that we offer a particular solution. Even something that’s branded, in some cases when people are looking for specific support issues, there is other third party support sites that show up that would charge people for support that maybe we have on our site in some form…

Andre Alpar: For free

Derrick Wheeler: For free.

Andre Alpar: Is it the same also for software, like a different site would appear for software, that charges for software that you offer out for free? Does that also happen? Or is it mostly support issues? [4:18]

Derrick Wheeler: Um, I don’t…

Andre Alpar: It doesn’t happen in the download space.

Derrick Wheeler: We have the download centre and all those downloads are free. Then we have like Apps, you know Windows 8 apps and phone apps, and some of those are free and some aren’t. But it’s not really relevant in that case.

Andre Alpar: So you were discussing some very interesting things, because the properties that you manage are active in a lot of countries and a lot of languages. You were quoting some of the problems that you have, like when 2 countries share a common language like French, where you have French Canada and France and Portuguese with Brazil and Portugal. How do you deal with those things? What kind of problems actually happen and how do you try to deal with them? How successful is that? If you can share it.

Derrick Wheeler: Yes. You know we have a lot of overlapping content that’s in language. And we don’t have our sites set up optimally for the markets. We don’t use the country level top domains, like .ca / co.uk and those… And that’s like an ongoing long term issue that I’ve yet been able to successfully move the needle on. What we have done though is we’ve moved to – at least within all the major domains and sub-domains – to the same model for international. So it’s always a top level directory. It’s always en/us, for example, it’s always lowercase. Everybody is starting to do that. And we can use the Google webmaster tools to Geo target. And anywhere else that webmaster tools allow us to do that. But there’s a certain point where I don’t necessarily have… My role does not involve getting in to the individual, like, building links from that country internally. So that would be up to the individual subsidiary international site , the folks that are doing digital marketing there to come up with, you know, how can they get more links internally from other similar country sites and create more signals to help them. We are somewhat limited on what we can do there, but we still want to track it.

Andre Alpar: Do you educate? Do they come to you and ask, like the French subsidiary asks:
Hey, what can we do? Or do you have like best practices…? Is it more like a pull or like a push?

Derrick Wheeler: We have an international Url policy. But policy adoption or alignment is enforced at the GM level. So if that particular GM doesn’t enforce the policy they don’t have to follow it. There’s no repercussions….

Andre Alpar: I was asking whether mostly people come up to you with questions, like the French subsidiary asks what link should I put and where. Or is it mostly you try to push them like hey guys, you are not ranking for this branded term that you should rank for. You could do for example X, Y, Z and they try to do it. What does it usually look like? Like a pull or a push?

Derrick Wheeler: It’s both. I will get people coming to me all the time, because we’re Microsoft, we have a global address book. I can look up anybody’s email address, I can search for people at Bing and find people at Bing and email them. So a lot of people at Microsoft that don’t do SEO, they don’t know that Bing can’t really give out specifics so everybody at Microsoft that writes to Bing to get SEO help, they send them to me

Andre Alpar: Oh

Derrick Wheeler: So it will be subsidiaries saying “Hey I’m getting all of this content for France showing up in my Canadian search engines. How do I deal with this”. And then we will find out what have they done to date and maybe give them some recommendations. And then it’s up to them to implement them.

Andre Alpar: But the problem may be that it’s 2 different subsidiaries so they would both have to implement href lang and it’s 2 different GM that have to decide on that. Is that correct ?

Derrick Wheeler: That would be more like the site manager or it may be that they don’t have another release scheduled for 3 months and they can’t get it in, or maybe there is some limitation with the content management system where they can’t add that particular code in there. There’s all kind of issues we have to go with. And then there’s the occasional… I did a search for… I think it was ‘Surface’ or ‘Tablet’ at Google US and it’s top result, but then 2 below it, is Canada. So we needed to make sure that the Surface site was Geo-targeted in Google and it wasn’t. So we did that, but at the same time I’m looking to see… you know, I look in our analytics and see how many people that are going to the Canadian market site are actually in Canada and France, and hopefully after some time maybe we’ll see that decrease a little bit.

Andre Alpar: So you monitor these kinds of things every month? Just like somebody else just monitors keyword positions, you also monitor this kind of stuff?

Derrick Wheeler: I have reports that I’ve created that I get on a regular basis, and I like to look at some of the key properties that we have, and then I also look at every Microsoft site.

Andre Alpar: Is there actually a term for it, when people from the wrong country end up on the wrong content?

Derrick Wheeler: I call it… I call it…

Andre Alpar: Because I know this phenomenon…

Derrick Wheeler: I call it low-cal accuracy.

Andre Alpar: Local accuracy?

Derrick Wheeler: Low-cal accuracy.

Andre Alpar: So it’s accurate if it’s a perfect fit and it’s a less percentage of accuracy if it’s… if it’s like a mix of countries that visit certain content?

Derrick Wheeler: There’s always gonna be some mix, you know. It’s never perfect. And then sometimes people are in Canada and wanna see the France site: they’re travelling. So there’s always gonna be a little bit… But when it’s a big mix, I think, you know… and I don’t have a KPI around this yet like, in my commitments or my goals, but we just launched a new web analytics platform at the end of the last fiscal year, and we’re still starting to get all the data and build our reports, but I do wanna have one that shows market accuracy. So it would basically have, like, for Canada 80% of the traffic that’s coming into the Canadian market site is in Canada. And their browser settings are for… whatever.

Andre Alpar: Whatever language.

Derrick Wheeler: We can see where they’re at when they do the search and come in, what market they’re coming in on, and then what their browser settings are. So we can kinda get a feel for what’s the right…

Andre Alpar: You would probably even have to look at this accuracy thing not only at country level but also languages within country level, you know, Canadians guided to the English content in Canada, or French Canadians guided to the French content within Canada.

Derrick Wheeler: Yeah and right now it would be mostly me collecting data and looking at it, because there’s not necessarily a ton I can do to fix it until we start doing things like… until we get to a point in our CMS where we can start to enable some of those different tags or change up URL structures for sites that are on an old structure where it’s en/us like way at the end. Because basically right now we’re trying to get everybody unified in templates and the components that we use, the design framework of the sites… trying to get more to a “One Microsoft” look, and then international will be a big part of that.

Andre Alpar: OK so do I have to imagine your job as running around as this crazy preacher and teacher, like “let’s unify, it really works, it gives us these changes”, like do you usually run around with best cases to convince people? Or how do you convince people, or is it just like… I dunno, I dunno…

Derrick Wheeler: I don’t run anywhere. Basically. My wife’s a runner, I’m not. But I live in Bend, Oregon, I work from home. So everybody else is all around the world and a lot in Redmond, Washington and Seattle. And my role is really around the overarching framework and strategy and approach for SEO at Microsoft, and then a lot of the different business groups like Office and Windows and Xbox and MSN have their own small in-house SEO teams. So I work with them… So I’ll look at things and I might find something that I think is an issue that could have a big impact and I’ll reach out to someone like [Gilda Lodall?] who’s in Windows and say hey, Gilda, I think I might’ve found something that might help you in your objectives or commitments to do a better job or, you know, I noticed in your Google Webmaster tools you had a big spike in this or that, you know, 404s or something, so my job is really about evangelizing SEO at Microsoft and educating people, and we do a lot of different programs and events where we educate people and guide.

Andre Alpar: So you would bring in the different in-house SEO teams that are there for the different platforms in the different countries and try to get them all together and try to teach them and, I dunno, unify KPIs or URLs or whatever.

Derrick Wheeler: We have a summit every year. It was called the XMS SEO summit, which is SMX backwards but it also means Cross-Microsoft, and now we’ve combined it with another digital marketing conference internally at Microsoft, and we have between 300 and 500 attendees.

Andre Alpar: Who all care about SEO?

Derrick Wheeler: All care about SEO, all from Microsoft. And that’s a big event for us every year. It’s usually in the Spring, and we have 30+ speakers over 20 sessions, we have 3 tracks for 2 days, and then the first day of this last year was more of a general digital marketing day. Two years ago we had Danny Sullivan and Vanessa Fox keynote, last year we had Rand Fishkin and Brian Carter, I don’t know if you know him, he’s hilarious.

Andre Alpar: So basically you set up an SEO conference?

Derrick Wheeler: It’s like an internal PubCon, and it’s 95% speakers from Microsoft. It’s awesome, it’s a huge community building and we all get together and talk about issues. A lot of times the URL structure and things are dictated by other people that we try to influence, there’s a lot of influence. It might be a particular site that’s on a different platform and their URL structure relies on their file structure. So in order to change their URLs they have to change all their files, so those kind of things…

Andre Alpar: Not easy decisions to make.

Derrick Wheeler: Yeah. If we unify to a single CMS and we… one of the things our team does… I’m on a team called MS Com and we build out or enable solutions that we try to get other business groups to adopt.

Andre Alpar: And in order for them to buy in they have to be involved in the process of the development, I would guess?

Derrick Wheeler: Well a lot of times with CMS we have folks from different groups designing the scenarios and putting in their requirements – something big like that, we have to have a lot of people involved and the team that’s running that is fabulous because I couldn’t do that myself, I couldn’t get 20 people and take all their feedback and try to make this one thing apply to everybody, but they’re really good at that, and I think we’re gonna land it this year or next year. And that’s gonna be huge for us to have a single platform.

Andre Alpar: You mentioned you’re working from home. How do you manage that. Do you have like a separate entrance to the house where there’s only you and your computer or do you do it like in the middle of the living room? How does it work? How often does it make you travel?

Derrick Wheeler: So, I go up to the Seattle area once or twice a month. And even if I was up there, a lot of my meetings would still be on phone or link or whatever because it’s a lot of global folks. Most people are in different buildings that I work with outside my core team. My manager is in LA. So we’re used to working remote, you know, he and I… Half of my career I work remote so I’m used to it. There’s downsides… I don’t get caught up in any politics, in fact sometimes I go to campus and I’m like ‘what, who said what about who…? Like what…? I didn’t know this was going on.’ So I don’t have to deal with those kind of things, I’m pretty clear-minded, I can drive my kids to school and pick them up… I work from anywhere. I tell people that I work from home but I don’t. I work from coffee shops, I work from friends’ houses, I work from my parents’… I mean, I can work from anywhere and I’m used to it now. At first it’s kinda hard to focus, but I can work from anywhere. The only time I have problems is phone calls. I usually have to schedule my time at home with phone calls.

Andre Alpar: So it’s quiet around, you’re not distracted…

Derrick Wheeler: But I have a bonus room above the garage, you know, it’s one of the biggest rooms in the house. My wife, uh… when she wanted to buy this house she used that as a selling point for me, and now that we have kids she’s trying to take it away from me and wanting to make it into more of a family room. I’m like “No, I need this big office”.

Andre Alpar: Probably just one more thought. Did you already have some opportunities to play around with href lang and how did it play out for you? Or are you not there yet?

Derrick Wheeler: I’m not there. Individual sites like Windows is there. I’m not. I haven’t really…

Andre Alpar: Is it playing out for them?

Derrick Wheeler: I don’t… I haven’t talked to her about that. You know, the problem is I feel like I should know the answer to everything, and there’s simple things that after 6 years you’d think I’d know the answer to.

Andre Alpar: No, no I was just curious.

Derrick Wheeler: No, no, no I’m not… It’s not… Yes we do, we have had great success.

Andre Alpar: Wow amazing!

Derrick Wheeler: And that’s something I should focus on. You know, there’s two of us on the team and when Darwin (his name’s Darwin Wheeler, it’s just kind of a funny coincidence, we have very similar names) he’s taking over a lot of the global stuff, the international… So I would think… He’s just awesome! He has 11 years’ experience at ATT Wireless and he’s a very seasoned SEO and he’s just really good at understanding the bio-cycle…

Andre Alpar: Is seasoned a new experienced? It’s just seasoned… Sorry, I was…

Derrick Wheeler: Oh…

Andre Alpar: Because I’m not a native it sounded to me as if it’s not…

Derrick Wheeler: He’s very experienced. And he’s seasoned like he’s a nice seasoned steak [makes a gesture with his hand] ready to… [mimes eating a steak] Um… But what’s great is he also has global experience. So, when we have to break out our work, I try to give him the things that were the most difficult and challenging, so I could just relax, go to the beach, you know… And international was one that he’s better on, you know…

Andre Alpar: So international would mean you know to break his head how to rank in Yandex and Baidu. Is that kind of a problem?

Derrick Wheeler: Yeah we don’t kinda get that specific, we do have points of views on those kind of things that we publish and that people can read but we don’t necessarily get that specific. Most of the time what we recommend are best practices, things that apply to any property…

Andre Alpar: It would actually make sense for every website to look at your suggestions because they’re so general… so they’re not even Microsoft-specific.

Derrick Wheeler: Yeah most of them aren’t. Unless it’s platform-specific.

Andre Alpar: All right, so for certain CMS that are often used within Microsoft.

Derrick Wheeler: I’m sorry?

Andre Alpar: For certain Content Management Systems that are often used within Microsoft specific?

Derrick Wheeler: Yeah, yeah there’s some that are off the shelf. I don’t even know what those are, but there’s a lot of internal ones. One’s called Bedrock, one’s called MSCom CMS, which is one we’re building, one’s called CSP, we’ve got SharePoint sites.

Andre Alpar: OK so if you say: “It’s a SharePoint site, you know, try to do this, this and that?”

Derrick Wheeler: Yeah, we know some of the issues that they had, and actually we had input on the last version of SharePoint to help them get rid of some of the issues where it… It always forced you to have this directory called ‘Pages’ and that was always a capital P, you know…

Andre Alpar: For whatever reason.

Derrick Wheeler: Yeah so… to be able to get rid of those things… That’s the great thing about Microsoft is not only can we help to optimize websites, but we can help incorporate SEO into the products that we’re building, you know, which is great.

Andre Alpar: So is there exchange between you and the Bing team? I mean not in terms of, you know: “Rank me better for this keyword!”, but how would you interpret a website that does this, this and that. Is there an exchange like that going on or… That seems to make sense if you’re influencing the products that make websites and you’re influencing the websites and probably it would also make sense to, you know, have a conversation with the search engine that’s kind of there too.

Derrick Wheeler: Yeah so we’ve got Dwayne Forrester who works… he was in SEO in North America for MSN. And then we’ve got Vincent Waren who runs the webmaster tools, and he is one of the best SEOs I’ve ever met. He did SEO for Office and then I think he went to Windows for a bit. So, both of those guys are both SEOs, so they know… most of what they know and they can help us with best practice stuff, you know… if someone goes to Bing and says ‘I need to rank for this keyword’ Bing will say ‘well, you need to do these basic things’ that they would tell anybody they need to do, and then they would send them to me, and then I would deal with it. Now, we do use the Bing API for site search. A lot of our properties use… some use FAS but a lot of them use the Bing API, so if there are instances where they’re missing a huge part of our site we have them look into it, and they might say ‘well you’re blocking it and your robots.txt file and then we know to open it up, but when it comes to like… what little detail-y things do we need to get like a page 1 ranking… I don’t even know what that is. I mean, it’s probably links. You know, the same as Google. You know, authority. You have to be an authority on a topic to rank.

Andre Alpar: Thanks so much for your time for the interview.

Derrick Wheeler: My pleasure.