Who strategises the strategists?

It's been half a year or so since I relaunched this new personal website of mine — and now that I actually have proof it's working in the way I wanted, I thought it might be interesting to share some of the thinking that went into it. Why is this website the way it is? What's the digital strategy behind it?

Well, my biggest objective, as it has been for many many years, was to stand out in a sea of search results about the other Andrew Ladd: the hockey player referenced in the site's subtitle. Generally when you Google "Andrew Ladd" you mostly get results about him, his social profiles, his Wikipedia page, etc. He even has the coveted Google "knowledge panel", which is what Google calls the sidebar you get on some search results — the one that highlights key information about whatever you're searching for.

And to be honest, there's not a huge amount I can do to get rid of all that other Andrew Ladd noise, other than becoming the sort of public figure who generates as much web content as a two-time Stanley Cup winner who's been playing professional ice hockey for twenty years. (It's on my to-do list, I swear.)

But I knew I could at least get my own site surfacing in amongst the noise, largely because the other Andrew Ladd doesn't have andrewladd.com. (It turns out my greatest stroke of digital strategy was buying that before he did.) In theory, with that domain name on my side, and if the website there was technically impeccable and filled with high quality content (by Google's standards), then getting into the top ten results for my key "brand" terms was very achievable. (I realise I'm not a brand, but this is the world we live in.)

So, six months later, have I, in fact, achieved it? Am I in the top ten? Happily, I am! On average, at time of writing, I'm 9.4 out of 10 for UK searches for Andrew Ladd, and 15.6 globally. When I search for myself incognito and not logged in, so that Google can't weight my search results for me, I see my own site around position 6.

More importantly, my site title makes it really clear to anyone searching that I'm "Andrew Ladd (not the hockey player)". That's a much better user experience for people actually searching for me amidst the endless hockey results. It's a clear signal right from the search results page that my site might be the thing you're looking for. As an added bonus, it's also a pretty good reflection of my dry sense of humour.

Unfortunately, getting in the top ten for "Andrew Ladd" searches was the easy part. The rest of my search strategy needed to be more complicated. As I put it in my first blog post here:

This new website is an attempt to... boil down all the things I do day-to-day and night-to-night, and juggle them together into something useful — for whoever finds me on Google and whatever they searched for to arrive here.

That "whatever they searched for" bit is a significantly trickier proposition than just showing up when people Google "Andrew Ladd." For the sake of my own delicate ego, I wanted the standard "Andrew Ladd" searchers to find my work as an author by default — and yet I know from Google data that relatively few people are actually searching for me qua author. Many more are searching for me qua person they met at an arts or ticketing conference.

So that's how I landed on the website you're looking at now. By default, the homepage presents me as Andrew Ladd the author, but if you land on the homepage having met me at a conference, there's a clear button right at the very top to flip you over to reading about Andrew Ladd the digital strategist.

Moreover, every page on the site, behind the scenes, has one of those two "modes" set as the default. That way, if you search for "Andrew Ladd What Ends" and land on the page about my novel, you see the author header and theme — but if you search for "Andrew Ladd digital strategy" and land on this page (or any other page about my day job) you see the digital strategist header and theme.

Better yet, whatever mode you land on will then follow you back to the homepage, if you go there, and it will also follow you to any other "shared" pages that are relevant to both modes. It's only if you start on a digital strategy page and try to navigate to the page about my novel that the site will swap over to author mode for you. So in theory if you're only here to see digital strategy content, you might never see the tasteful pink background colour on the author pages.

That means I can now target really specific search terms with specific landing pages. So for example if you google "Andrew Ladd author", you just get my homepage as the first result, in author mode, and can easily learn about all my writing. But if you google "Andrew Ladd digital strategy", or "Andrew Ladd arts digital marketing", or any other similar jumble of words, you get my digital strategy landing page, which of course defaults to the digital strategy mode.

I can also get even more specific for certain scenarios. If you Google "Andrew Ladd (name of conference you met me at)", for example, I can set up individual landing pages for those, too. People have actually come up to me at conferences and said, "haha, I found that 'hey you googling me' page on your website, that's a good idea."

So there you go. The general strategy behind this website is to acknowledge that people search for me for lots of different reasons, and to find ways to meet them exactly where they're looking. None of which, I should add, is all that groundbreaking if you work in SEO. But since people often seem to think of SEO as some kind of impenetrable dark art, I thought it was worth demystifying some of the basics.

And whatever you Googled to find this page, hey: thanks for reading to the end.