Laura: HP.com Search program manager 

Tanya: When did HP.com first begin offering an on-site search tool?

Laura: The hp.com search program began in 1998. There were "on-site" search tools before that, but they were always "site" specific.  There wasn't any cross-site search before 1998.  The hp.com search team consisted of 2-3 engineers and a business manager.

Tanya: When did you take charge of HP.com search; was this a new role or did you take it over? 

Laura: I began working with the hp.com search program in 2003 when I managed the U.S. HP Recommends search feature.  The first major new search project I worked on was managing the implementation of HPR outside the US in Brazil.  Within a year, HPR was live in about 15 large countries around the world. 

In late 2004 and early 2005, I worked a pilot SEO project to help establish the value of a worldwide program focused on SEO.  Return on SEO investment was high and management agreed to support a new SEO program in the HPCE team. The official SEO program was launched later in 2005.

In fall 2005, I became the Hp.com on-site Search program manager and our team grew in 2006 to include 4 new engineering resources in Latin America and a business analyst in Mexico. 

Tanya:  Approximately how many searches are conducted on HP.com each month?  

Laura: We have a large Web site with content in approximately 70 countries and 34 languages.  The amount of traffic varies by country and language.  There are tens of millions of searches on hp.com around the world every month.

Tanya: What is the #1 search term on HP.com?   

Laura: The top search terms vary by current products, by month, by season, by country and by language. For example, in North America and the U.K. there are far more general searches for terms such as “printer,” “iPAQ,” and “driver.”  But on HP.com in Japan, Korea, and China people tend to search by product number such as nc6400.  As a reflection of our large product offering worldwide, a large number of searches are for product trademarks and product numbers.  

Tanya: What are some of the most unusual / funniest search terms that show up in HP search logs?   

Laura: Well, search logs tend to be pretty dry or very spicy without much in between. People get confused sometimes and search hp.com rather than Google or Yahoo for their personal interests and hobbies. In our use and learn category for consumers as holidays approach, we tend to see a sudden flurry of searches for Christmas cards, or Halloween party invitations, or schoolbook covers.
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Tanya: I knew you weren’t going to give me the spicy stuff! Ok, I’ll live. What are some of the innovations to HP.com on-site search of which you’re most proud?   

Laura: My favorite innovation is “product quick links.”  If you search by product SKU, model, or series number we return very relevant links to the product overview, related supplies, support, drivers, and manuals targeted to the specific product you are interested in. The response from customers has been great.

Tanya: That is a great feature – I use it frequently for researching my own HP products. Now on to the integration piece!  When do you and your team need to integrate with the rest of HP?  

Laura: Many hp.com projects impact HP.com search.  People tend to switch fluidly between search and navigating when they are on hp.com so most customers use search at least once during a site visit. 

For a specific example, when HP purchased Mercury.com, we had to index all the Mercury.com web pages into the HP.com search index.  In general, whenever we launch a new product or service, we have to make sure the new marketing pages are indexed as quickly as possible so customers can find the new offering.  In addition, there are also new support pages which have to be available in search at the same time.  

Tanya: You and I have similar roles in trying to influence others’ efforts to encourage them better optimize their web pages/sites for maximum visibility in search engines.  How do you approach integrating with and influencing other teams you’ve never worked with and how receptive are they to your suggestions/recommendations?

Laura: It really depends on the team. Some teams are ready to partner with hp.com search and need very little help or instruction beyond the hp.com web standards. Some teams don’t have the time or resources to focus on the elements necessary for a good search experience. These teams are the hardest to work with. I have to convince them that much of their efforts in page design, layout, messaging, and marketing will be wasted if people can’t find their site or worse yet, don’t click on their pages in search results because the titles and descriptions are poor.  It’s really about education and reminders. If you tell a team about hp.com search once, chances are they won’t change existing practices. But if you show them 5 specific examples of how they could be getting more ROI from search and how other sites are getting the traffic they want, we can usually find a way to work together.  

The biggest problems come from agencies that are optimizing for speed not for long term maintenance.  Sometimes they want to get the job done with the least amount of effort and move on, but this short term approach really backfires in any type of search.

Tanya: Touché!  Educating both the program managers and the agencies is a must in these fields.  How does SEO for external search engines affect the on-site HP.com search experience?   

Laura: They complement each other completely. Usually, what works well for external search also works for search on hp.com. Both search experiences require good title tags, description tags and good inbounds links to succeed.  However, there are some differences. On-site search allows much more weighting on the keywords meta tag than external engines tend to do.  We trust our content owners not to spam their own search engine!

Tanya: Yes, it’s too bad the keywords tag was abuses so much on the web.  It really could be useful for the engines if people were just honest and understand the tag better. 

Next question: you’re often providing valuable insight to me from HP.com on-site search.  What kind of information do you think is most important for an on-site search team to share with the SEO team to help them better their program? 

Laura: I think it is important to make sure both on-site search and SEO search teams are giving site owners tips and instructions that don’t contradict each other.  Next in importance is the need to develop web standards that work for internal and external search. Finally, I think the best information I can share with an SEO team is my knowledge of new sites on hp.com and strategic plans that will affect all forms of search.

Tanya: What kind of information is useful to garner from the SEO team for on-site search? 

Laura: Recently, some of the best information you have shared with me is information on how you are guiding content owners to handle AJAX and Flash.  Because we don’t have much AJAX on hp.com yet, we have not had any spidering challenges from AJAX. But if more pages start using AJAX we could face an indexing challenge.   Your tips on progressive enhancement for Flash content will work both inside hp.com search and on external engines but it help us to know what to expect from content owners.

Tanya: You and I sit on different teams reporting to different managers at HP.  Added to that complexity, we’re a fairly virtual company with offices across the world so you and I are in different cities.  What do you think has been the key to the SEO Program and the On-site HP.com search program being successful in integration?   

Laura: We both put the customer first. The way we do this is by letting the data lead.  Customer search behavior is very similar on external engines compared to on-site search. When you study the data, the need to collaborate is clear. 

Rather than focusing on our differences, we have always tried to find the places where there is the most opportunity to help customers find what they are looking for from HP and promote HP products.   Plus our weekly phone calls are fun and help us stay up to date on each other’s programs.   

Tanya: I agree the weekly phone calls have been of great benefit.  Now that we’ll have Ryan from the paid side attending we’ll really see the cross-search integration take full effect. 

What, if anything (wiping out all possible constraints), could we do to improve upon that integration?  

Laura: If we had more IT resources, we could build better tools to help with optimization efforts such as automated site maps.

Tanya: I face this challenge frequently and assume you do as well but how do you balance conflicting requests from different segments or business divisions of HP?  For example, when different groups each want their specific page to show up at the top of HP search results for a particular keyword query?  

Laura: Oh yes, we certainly have internal hp.com competition.  We try to balance those needs by using multiple types of search results. For example, if you search for “notebook” on hp.com in the US, you will see Recommended Links on the left side of the page that are optimized for segment strategy, a product offering from both HHO and SMB, and finally algorithmic results on the right side of the page.  

We also offer contextual search.  Once you are on a segment site or a support site, the default search is scoped to just that area of hp.com.  We always offer the ability to switch over to countrywide search, but the radio button is preset to the local site. 

Tanya: You’ve heard me rant about people using “search” to describe only one aspect of search (e.g. paid search, organic SEO or on-site search) when they should be more specific.  I have to think on-site search is often completely excluded when people use the term “search engine marketing”.  (Even Wikipedia leaves it out of their definition of Search Engine Marketing! I might have to go update that later.)  Do you think this impacts your program’s ability to get proper face time?

Laura:  Totally agree on the tendency to describe one aspect of search as all ‘Search.”

I think it hurts my program most in the communication area.  For example, I have a hard time finding out about paid search activities and the performance of specific keywords.  But I could include those keywords in our HP Recommends project if that data was being shared with the larger search community.

Another example: People don’t think of hp.com search when they are making plans for a micro site or a search ad landing page, therefore the on-site search results can look really bad if it picks up a page with strange title text or no description tag.  

Tanya: Do you have any thoughts on how or whether standardizing some terminology in the industry might help – and maybe some examples of what each pillar should be referred to as?

Laura: I like “site search”, “on-site search”, and “hp.com search” to describe my program. I’d like to hear what other think their areas should be called.  But more importantly, why they don’t use a qualifier when talking about just one of the many search experiences.  

Tanya: I’ve been to a lot of search engine marketing conferences (including SES and SMX Advanced) and I’ve seen some tracks on integrating SEO and PPC search but I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone address integration with on-site search – in fact on-site search is rarely even mentioned at these conferences which is unfortunate. It seems too that the conferences most applicable to you as the on-site search manager (e.g. Enterprise Search Summit and  Findability Enterprise Search Summit) are not typically the same that are most relevant to me as an in-house SEO.  You and I talked briefly about suggesting this topic for these conferences and potentially speaking on the subject and about how HP integrates on-site search into the broader search realm.  What do you think the value would be to attendees if such a session were offered? 

Laura: I think it would help start a new discussion in the search world. Right now on-site search is usually seen as more of an IT problem or it is lumped together with intranet search and BI activities. Paid search and organic SEO tends to be seen from a marketing POV.  So the audiences define themselves very differently. If the discussion focused on getting the largest number of targeted visitors to key landing pages using all the search tools available efficiently, then our goals all align.  

Tanya: What is your vision for HP.com search in the future?

Laura: I’d love to start adding a chat feature to search. There are some topics that are just hard to search for because of the imprecise nature of language or the complexity of the problem.  Offering a chat option for these searches would be like having an expert guide to hp.com.

I think search will be more customized to the area of the site where the search began. We have a huge range of products and services at HP but our search experience on hp.com is very consistent.  This might change in the future. We are going to have more faceted search, more ubiquitous ecommerce search, and categorized search.

Tanya: Any other thoughts about “Search” within or external to HP on which you’d like to close?

Laura: I think we are about to see a revolution in mobile search. It will impact all the search areas. We’ve heard that mobile search is coming and mobile search is here for a long time.  But like almost a million other Americans, I just acquired a little handheld gadget that has changed how and when I access the web.   

I never searched the web with my old cell phone, but in the past week or so, I’ve used my new one from restaurants, as a passenger in a car, and from the beach!  Now when I am at Blockbuster I can quickly look up movie reviews before I check out or I can search for other films  with the same actor. 

Wow, these are great answers Laura.  Thanks so much for the interview.   

Ryan Drey, HP’s Global Paid Search Marketing Manager, will be my next victim so check back next week (or get an RSS or Atom feed) for my interview with him on integration of paid and organic search.