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On behalf of the entire team at Search Engine Watch, we wanted to wish all of our readers a happy Thanksgiving.
In order to capture as much search share as possible in 2015, SEOs need to be creating engaging, quality content.
With its new DataArt partnership, global travel search engine Skyscanner for Business is focusing on becoming more user-friendly and more mobile-friendly.
Each day your business remains local is a day of missed opportunities. In our global economy, it’s crucial your company extends the reach of its presence across national borders.
Press releases are meant for journalists, not consumers, and therefore it's time that press release syndication be stopped entirely.
Posted by RuthBurrReedy
SEO experts spend multiple hours a week reading blogs, social media and forums to stay abreast of the latest search engine developments; we spend even more time testing and measuring tactics to figure out what works best for our sites. When you spend so much of your time thinking, talking and learning about SEO, you can get lost in the echo chamber and take your eyes off the prize of growing your clients' businesses.
It's easy to get excited about the new and shiny developments in search and to hang on Google's latest announcements, but there's no point in switching a site from HTTP to HTTPS if it doesn't even have appropriately keyword-rich title tags. There's no reason to run a button-color conversion rate optimization test on a site that's still using the manufacturer's default description on product pages. Sometimes your traffic is plummeting because you haven't checked for new 404 errors in 6 months, not because you've been hit with a penalty. Think horses, not zebras, and don't forget one important fact: Most people have no idea what we're talking about.
Running a business, especially a small business, is way more than a full-time job. Most business owners these days understand that they need to be doing something for their business online, but once they get beyond "have a website" they're not sure of the next step.
Photo via Pixabay
Moving back into agency work after several years in-house, I was surprised by just how many businesses out there have never gone beyond that first step of having a website. The nitty-gritty of building a search-friendly website and driving traffic to it still aren't that widely known, and without the time or inclination to become experts in marketing their websites, most small business owners just aren't spending that much time thinking about it.
Hanging out in the SEO echo chamber is a great way to stay on top of the latest trends in digital marketing. To win and keep our clients, however, we need to step out of that echo chamber and remember just how many website owners aren't thinking about SEO at all.
Relatively few people know or understand digital marketing, and that's the reason we all have jobs (and most of us are hiring). The strapped-for-time aspect of business ownership means that once someone decides it's time to get serious about marketing their business online, they're likely to call in an expert rather than doing it themselves.
There are some really competitive industries and markets out there, but there are also plenty of niche and local markets in which almost nobody is focusing on SEO in a serious way. Take a look at who ranks for your target keywords in your local area, using an incognito window. If the key phrase isn't appearing consistently on the search results page, chances are nobody is targeting it very strongly. Combine that with an absence of heavy-hitting big brands like Amazon or Wikipedia, and you may have a market where some basic SEO improvements can make a huge difference. This includes things like:
It may not seem like much (or seem like kind of a no-brainer), but sometimes it's all you need. Of course, once the basics are in place, the smartest move is to keep improving your site and building authority; you can't rely on your competitors not knowing their stuff forever.
Even in more competitive markets, a shocking number of larger brands are paying little to no attention to best practices in search. Many businesses get the traffic and rankings they do from the power of their brands, which comes from more traditional marketing techniques and PR. These activities result in a fair amount of traffic (not to mention links and authority) on their own, but if they're being done with no attention given to SEO, they're wasting a huge opportunity. In the coming years, look for SEO-savvy brands to start capitalizing on this opportunity, leaving their competitors to play catch-up.
From inside the echo chamber, it's easy to forget just how well the fundamentals of SEO still really work. In addition to the basic items I listed above, a website should be:
So life is good and we are smart and there's a lot to do and everything is very special. Good deal, right?
SEO being a very specialized skill set has some serious downsides. Most clients don't know much about SEO, but some SEOs don't know much about it either.
There are a ton of great resources out there to learn SEO (Moz and Distilled U come to mind). That said, the web can be a ghost town of old, outdated and inaccurate information, and it can be difficult for people who don't have much experience in search marketing to know what info to trust. An article on how to make chocolate chip muffins from 2010 is still useful now; an article on PageRank sculpting from the same time period is much less so.
Outdated techniques (especially around content creation and link building) can be really tempting for the novice digital marketer. There are a ton of "tricks" to quickly generate low-quality links and content that sound like great ideas when you're hearing them for the first time. Content spinning, directory spam, link farms – they're all still going on and there are gobs of information out there on how to do them.
So why should we more experienced SEOs, who know what we're doing and what works, care about these brand new baby n00b SEOs mowing through all this bad intel?
Photo by Petras Gagilas via Flickr
The first reason is ideological – we should care because they're doing bad marketing. It contributes to everything that's spammy and terrible about the internet. It also makes us look bad. The "SEO is not spam" battle is still being fought.
The second reason is practical. People billing themselves as SEOs without knowing enough about it is a problem because clients don't know enough about it either. It's easy for someone engaging in link farming and directory spam to compete on price with someone doing full-scale content marketing, because one is much, much more work than the other. Short-term, predictable results feel a lot more tangible than long-term strategies, which are harder to guarantee and forecast. Not to mention that "X dollars for Y links" guy isn't going to add "There is a risk that these tactics will result in a penalty, which would be difficult to recover from even if I did know how to do it, which I don't."
SEOs need to educate our clients and prospects on what we do and why we do it. That means giving them enough information to be able to weed out good tactics from bad even before we make the sale. It means saying "even if you don't hire me to do this, please don't hire someone who does X, Y or Z." It means taking the time to explain why we don't guarantee first-page rankings, and the risks inherent in link spam. Most of all, it means stepping out of the echo chamber and into the client's shoes, remembering that basic tenets of digital marketing that may seem obvious to us are completely foreign to most website owners. At the very least we need to educate our clients to please, please not change the website without talking to us about it first!
Since terrible SEO gives us a bad rep (and is annoying to fix), we also need to actively educate within the SEO community. Stepping out of the echo chamber in this case means we need to spend some time talking to new SEOs at conferences, instead of just talking to each other. Point brand new SEOs to the right resources to learn what we do, so they don't ruin it for everybody – for heaven's sake, stop calling them n00bs and leaving them to learn it all from questionable sources.
As SEO content creators, we should also take time on a regular basis to either update or take down any outdated content on our own sites. This can be as simple as posting a notification that the info is outdated or as complex as creating a brand new resource on the same topic. If you're getting organic search traffic to a page with outdated information, you're passively hurting the state of SEO education. A declared stance on providing up-to-date information and continually curating your existing content to make it the highest quality? Sounds like a pretty strong brand position to me, SEO bloggers!
Some people are going to read this post and say "well, duh." If you read this post and thought it was basic (in every sense of the word), go out right now and fix some of your blog posts from 3 or 4 years ago to contain the latest info. I'll wait.
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Have you seen the font resizing buttons on some popular sites? The purpose of those buttons is to provide an easier way for visitors with low vision to adjust font size without breaking a website’s layout. Even though you can use the browser’s built in… Read More »
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You’re taking the dive into a new social network, or you’re itching to grow your existing profile. You’ve got a social media strategy in place and a plan in mind. You’re raring to go.
What would be one of the most encouraging signs when you’re first starting off? I imagine it’d be gaining followers.
So how do new social media accounts do it? How do you gain your first 1,000 followers on social media or grow an account from dozens to hundreds?
Follower ...
The post How to Get Your First 1,000 Followers on Every Major Social Network appeared first on Social.
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Posted by Bill.Sebald
I truly believe in the power of partnerships. There have been some incredible partnerships that changed the fabric of our culture. Larry Page and Sergey Brin. William Procter and James Gamble. The Olson Twins.
Good partnerships provide support, motivation, and complementary skills, often allowing you to overcome hurdles faster and create some truly marvelous things. In consulting or any agency work, the concept of "partnership" should be the backbone of your relationship. Like a puzzle piece, sometimes the fit is initially difficult to find – if available at all. The truth is, you're only secure if your clients are walking in the same direction as the flow of your service. If they're walking against the current, you have what I believe to be the most detrimental predicament a service provider can have – a rift. That's a truly offensive four-letter word.
What kind of rift are we talking about? Let's do a little calculating.
First think about what you or your agency is really good at. Think about the components you have the most success with; this may actually be different than where you're most experienced. Think about what you should be selling versus not (even if those items are currently on your menu – let's be candid here, a lot of us casually promote services we believe we should be selling even though it's not a fully baked product or core competency). Think about the amount of time you really spent challenging a given service to make sure it's truly impactful to a client versus your own bottom line.
Next, think about your past client debacles (if you haven't stopped to perform a postmortem, you should). Chances are these led to events that cost you a lot of time, pain, and possibly money. They are the memories that make you shudder. Those are the days that made you dust off your resume and think about a career change.
Finally, how many of these past clients should have never been signed in the first place? How many simply weren't a fit from the start? How many simply never had a shot at being successful with you – and vice-versa? This computation really needs serious consideration. Have you wasted everyone's time?
There can be a costly fallout. I've seen talented team members quit over clients that simply could not be managed. I've seen my colleagues go so far as to cry or start seeking therapy (in part) because of overwhelming clients who were not getting what they expected and a parent company who wasn't providing any relief. Sometimes these clients were bound to an annual contract which only made them more desperate and angry. Rifts like this can kill your business.
This should never happen.
I really like this 2011 post from A List Apart called Marry Your Clients. A few years old, but nothing has changed. However, my post is going to talk about the courting part before the honeymoon.
My post also assumes you make more money on longer consulting relationships. If you've somehow built your model through routinely hunting new business with the expectation you're going to get fired, then that's a different story. For most of us however, on-boarding a client is a lot of work, both in terms of hours (which is money) and brainpower. If you "hit it off" with your client, you begin to know their business more intimately, as well as their goals and KPIs. The strategies get easier to build; they also tend to be more successful as you become aware of what their tastes and limitations are. You find you have things in common (perhaps you both enjoy long walks to the bank). You often become true partners with your clients, who in turn promote your ideas to their bosses. These are your most profitable engagements, as well as your most rewarding. They tend to last years, sometimes following your point-of-contact to their next jobs as well.
But you don't get this way simply because both parties signed a legally-bounding document.
The truth is not all parties can work together. A lot of client/agency relationships end in divorce. Like in romance, sometimes you just aren't compatible.
After my first marriage went kaput, I'll admit I went to Match.com. For those who never tried online dating, it's really an exercise in personal marketing. You upload your most attractive pictures. You sell yourself above everyone else. You send communications back and forth to the interested parties where you work to craft the "perfect" response; as well as ask qualifying questions. I found it works pretty well – the online process saved me from potentially bad dates. Don't get me wrong, I still have some awkward online dating stories…
Photo from Chuck Woolery's Twitter profile
With consulting, if we're supposed to ultimately marry our clients, we should obviously be allowed to see if there's a love connection. We should all be our own Chuck Woolery. I tend to think this stage is crucial, but often rushed by agencies or managed by a department outside of your own.
Some agencies seem to have a "no dating" policy. For some, it's not uncommon to come in to work and have an email from a higher-up with the subject, "congratulations – you're now married to a new client!" Whether it's a client development department, or an add-on from an existing client, your marketing department is suddenly forced into an arranged marriage where you can only hope to live up to their expectations.
This is a recipe for disaster. I don't like to run a business on luck and risk, so clearly this makes no sense to me.
But I've been there. I once worked for an agency that handed me a signed contract for a major underwear brand – but I didn't even know we were even speaking to them. Before I had a chance to get the details, the VP of digital marketing called me. I did my best to understand what they were promised in terms of SEO goals without admitting I really had no clue about their business. The promises were unrealistic, but being somewhat timid and naïve back in the day, I went with it. Truth is, their expectations did not fit into our model, philosophies, or workflow. Ultimately I failed to deliver to their expectations. The contract ended early and I vowed to never let that happen again. Not just for the stress and anxiety it brought upon my team and me, but for the blatant neglect to the client as well.
With this being something I never forgot, I would occasionally bring this story up with others I met at networking events or conventions. I quickly learned this is far from an isolated incident occurring only to me. This is how some agencies build their business development departments.
Once again, this should never happen.
Let's assume by now I have successfully inspired a few things:
Here are some of the things we do at Greenlane to really qualify a client. Before I continue, though, I'm proud to brag a little. With these practices in place, our close rate – that is, the companies we really want to work with – is 90% in our favor. Our retainment is also very high. Once we started being prudent with our intake, we've only lost a few companies due to funding issues or a change in their business model – not out of performance. I should also add that these tips work with all sizes of clients. While some of our 20+ clients are smaller businesses, we also have household brands and public companies, all of which could attest to going through this process with us.
Your website is your Match.com profile. Your website is your personality. If you're vague or promotional or full of hype, only to get someone on the phone to which your "car salesman" gear kicks in, I don't think you're using the website to the best of its ability. People want to use the website to learn more about you before the reach out.
Our "about us" page is our third most visited page next to the homepage and pricing (outside of the blog). You can see an example from a Hotjar heatmap:
The truth is, I'm always tweaking (and A/B testing) our message on the about us page. This page is currently part of a funnel that we careful put together. The "about us" page is a quick but powerful overview putting our team front and center and highlighting our experience (including some past clients).
I believe the website's more than a brochure. It's a communication device. Don't hide or muddle who you are. When I get a prospect email through our form, I always lead them to our "Are We The Right Fit" page. That's right – I actually ask them to consider choosing wisely. Now at first glance, this might go against a conversion funnel that heats up the prospect and only encourages momentum, but this page has really been a strong asset. It's crafted to transparently present our differentiators, values, and even our pricing. It's also crafted to discourage those who aren't a good fit. You can find this page here. Even our URL provides the "Are We The Right Fit" question.
We want prospects to make a good decision. We care so much about companies doing great that we'd rather you find someone else if our model isn't perfect. Sure, sometimes after pointing someone to that link, they never return. That's OK. Just like a dating profile, this page is designed to target a certain kind of interest. Time is a commodity in agency life – no sense in wasting it on a conversation that isn't qualified. When we do catch a prospect after reviewing the page and hear, "we went with another firm who better suits our needs," it actually doesn't feel like a loss at all.
Everyone who comes back goes into our pipeline. At this stage they all get followed up on with a phone call. If they aren't a good fit from the get go we actually try to introduce them to other SEO companies or consultants who would be a better fit for them. But 9 times out of 10, it's an amazing conversation.
There are a few things I try to tell all the prospects I ultimately speak with. One, I openly admit I'm not a salesman. I couldn't sell ice water to people in hell. But I'm good at being really candid about our strengths and experiences.
Now this one tends to surprise some, especially in the larger agency setting. We admit that we are really choosy about the clients we take on. For our model, we need clients who are flexible, fast moving, interested in brand building, and interested in long-term relationships. We want clients who think in terms of strategy and will let us work with their existing marketing team and vendors. We audit them for their understanding of SEO services and tell them how we're either alike or different.
I don't think a prospect call goes by without me saying, "while you're checking us out to see if we're a good fit, we're doing the same for you." Then, if the call goes great, I let them know we'd like a follow up call to continue (a second date if you will). This follow up call has been where the real decision gets made.
I've vetted the opportunity, now my partner – who naturally has a different way of approaching opportunities and relationships – asks a different set of questions. This adds a whole different dimension and works to catch the questions I may not have asked. We've had companies ready to sign on the first call, to which I've had to divert any signatures until the next conversation. This too may seem counter-intuitive to traditional business development, but we find it extremely valuable. It's true that we could have more clients in our current book of business, but I can proudly state that every current client is exactly who we want to be with; this is very much because of everything you've read so far.
On each call we have a list of qualifying questions that we ask. Most are "must answer" questions, while others can roll into a needs analysis questionnaire that we give to each signed client. The purpose of the needs analysis is to get more granular into business items (such as seasonal trends, industry intelligence, etc.) for the intention of developing strategies. With so much to ask, it's important to be respectful of the prospects' time. At this point they've usually already indicated they've read our website, can afford our prices, and feel like we're a good fit.
Many times prospects start with their introduction and answer some of our questions. While they speak, I intently listen and take many notes.
These are 13 questions from my list that I always make sure get answered on a call, with some rationale:
Rationale : sometimes when reviewing the website it's not immediately clear what kind of business they're in. Perhaps the site just does a bad job, or sometimes their real money making services are deeper in the site and easily missed by a fast scan. One of our clients works with the government and seems to have an obvious model, but the real profit is from a by-product, something we would have never picked up on during our initial review of the website. It's important to find out exactly what the company does. Is it interesting? Can you stay engaged? Is it a sound model that you believe in? Is it a space you have experience in?
Rationale: Many times, especially if your model is different, a prospect may have a preconceived notion of what you actually do. Let's take SEO as an example – there are several different styles of SEO services. If they had a link building company in the past, and you're a more holistic SEO consulting practice, their point of reference may only be with what they've experienced. They may even have a bad taste in their mouth from a previous engagement, which gives you a chance to air it out and see how you compare. This is also a chance to know if you're potentially playing with a penalized site.
Rationale: Do they have realistic goals, or lofty, impossible goals? Be candid – tell them if you don't think you can reach the goals on the budget they have, or if you think they should choose other goals. Don't align yourself with goals you can't hit. This is where many conversations could end.
Rationale: If you're going to do more than just pump up their rankings, you probably want to know the full story. This should provide a glimpse into other marketing the prospect is executing.
Rationale: Sometimes this is answered with the question above. If not, really dig up the differentiators. Those are typically the key items to build campaigns on. Whether they are trying to create a new market segment or have a redundant offering, this can help you set timeline and success expectations.
Rationale: This is one of my favorite questions. There are many who hire an agency and expect "yes-men." Personally I believe an agency or consultant should be partners; that is, not afraid to fight for what they know is right for the benefit of the client. You shouldn't be afraid of injury:
Rationale: Not only do you want this for competitive benchmarking, but this can often help you understand more about the prospect. Not to mention, how big a hill you might have to climb to start competing on head terms.
Rationale: An international client is going to need more work than a domestic client. A local client is going to need an expertise in local search. Knowing the scope of the company can help you align your skills with their targets.
Rationale: This is a big one. It tells you how much flexibility you will have. Wordpress? Great – you'll probably have a lot of access to files and templates. A proprietary CMS or enterprise solution? Uh-oh. That probably means tickets and project queues. Are you OK with that?
Rationale: Another important question. Who will you be working with? What skill sets? Will you be able to sit at the table with other vendors too? If you're being hired to fill in the gaps, make sure you have the skills to do so. I ask about copywriters, developers, designers, and link builders at a minimum.
Rationale: A tool like Wappalyzer can probably tell you, but sometimes bigger companies have their own custom analytics through their host. Sometimes it's bigger than Google Analytics, like Omniture. Will you be allowed to have direct access to it? You'd be surprised how often we hear no.
Rationale: It's surprising how often a prospect forgets to mention those 30+ subdomains and microsites. If the prospect envisions it as part of the deal, you should at least be aware of how far the core website extends.
Rationale: The biggest question of all. Do they even meet your fee requirements? Are you staffed and ready to take on the work? Sure, talking money can be tough, but if you post your rates firm, the prospect is generally more open to talk budget. They don't feel like a negotiation is going to happen.
While these are the core questions we use, I'm sure the list will eventually grow. I don't think you should copy our list, or the order. You should ultimately create your own. Every agency or consultant has different requirements, and interviewing your prospect is as important as allowing them to interview you. But remember, you don't have to have all the business. Just the right kind of business. You will grow organically from your positive experiences. We all hear about "those other agencies" and how they consistently fail to meet client expectations. Next to "do great work," this is one powerful way to keep off that list.
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When you’re finding amazing content to share on social media—the kind of thing that grabs attention and gets people to click, share, and comment—one of the most valuable, most original places to turn is your own blog and the content you personally create.
So the questions become: How to create amazing content, how to put together blogposts strategically and efficiently, and how to get your content out to the masses.
Writing tips are a good place to start. And to supplement the ...
The post 39 Blogging Tools to Help You Work Faster, Write Better, and Land More Readers appeared first on Social.
Managing a Multi-Author blog is no easy task. You have to make sure that the authors post on time, they have the appropriate permissions and control, and so much more. Thankfully WordPress allows us to manage a multi-author blog efficiently with the help of these amazing plugins that we will highlight in this post.
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Posted by anthonycoraggio
I'm receiving more and more questions from clients about how best to leverage paid content distribution and paid social platforms (here referred to together as 'paid promotions'). There's a lot of reason for increased interest—as content production has ramped up in digital marketing, it has become harder and harder to stand out from the crowd and reach the audience you want. Facebook shutting down companies' free lunch social distribution has only further pressed the issue—and sometimes you've simply maxed out on other paid channels!
But more than simply being an extra 'pay to play' option, paid promotion is a crucial part of any holistic digital marketing strategy. By using the range of paid online promotion and advertising tools available, we can take more comprehensive control in presenting the best user experience throughout the funnel—delivering the right content, at the right time, to the right person. There are three primary functions of paid promotions:
How and why you might use paid promotions will of course vary quite a bit, but regardless of your end goal, there are two key tasks for anyone seeking to succeed in doing so. Do these two things right, and you will have laid a solid foundation for achieving your goals.
First...
Defining a target audience in digital advertising or paid promotions is a more exacting exercise than usual, because we're actually operationalizing a definition that can be precisely carried out by setting controls in a PPC-like interface. Think of it like programming a computer—you need to break down your definition in extremely concrete, exclusive terms that are interpretable by the tool you're using. Don't despair though—it's not hard to do, and if you've been a good marketer and developed some proper user personas you'll be ahead of the game!
Answer these questions to set a concrete definition of the people that should be targeted with a given campaign or content release. These are typically going to be the criteria you actually enter into an interface when starting a promotions campaign on a tool like Facebook or StumbleUpon.
Demographic Information - Our ideal target for this content is...
Age - Many platforms will offer simple age based targeting, usually in the form of your typical "18-24, 25 – 36" type brackets.
Gender - Again, this is a simple demographic setting and is often available. Think about setting up separate 'A/B' versions to separately address men and women when relevant!
Education Level/Status - Is your audience in school? Have they completed a degree? Facebook and LinkedIn will let you drill in on these parameters.
Geography - Be as specific as possible. Generally, the combination of a state/province and a metro area level is as granular as geotargeting options go.
There are a few more options you can find on places like Facebook -income level, marital status, employment status, and more can be particularly useful in B2C contexts.
Many platforms will also give you an opportunity to define your target audience by interests, so think about what relevant topics or subjects the target user might be particularly interested in or looking for while online! For example, likes for travel blogs, language learning sites, famous travel writers, country specific cuisine, etc all can be used to converge on a very specific type of person.
Once your target audience has been defined and the above questions answered with the best data available, you must consider the channels or platforms that will best make use of it. There are three major factors:
I strongly recommend taking a few minutes to browse around as a user when making these decisions, in order to think less abstractly about the experience you aim to create. Choosing channels is often a case-by-case process, but for common objectives there are some simple, intuitive guidelines to keep in mind:
It can be useful to combine these guidelines to plan for more complex goals. For example, if you want to convey a sense of 'discovery' but also encourage sharing, StumbleUpon Paid Discovery could fulfill both these needs—the sponsorship is subtle, the user is in 'discovery mode', and SU has a social sharing frame right on top of the page. If that audience isn't engaged enough, you might bring traffic to a piece via Reddit and retarget for sharing on Twitter.
Planning for promotion should not be an exclusively post hoc activity—the content itself should be created with intended placement and utility in mind. Engage early in the process as goals for the content are first set, so that creative development and objectives do not ultimately conflict with the feasibility of promotions. Simply being involved in the conversation to flag potential problems is often enough!
One of the most critical parts of this framework is leveling what you want to achieve with what users will accept and value in a given medium, so I want to take a moment to reinforce the importance of this.
In answering questions of targeting and placement in a performance-driven world, it can be dangerously easy to think egocentrically, only in terms of what YOU want your customer to do in a given context—or more insidiously, what you want them to want to do. Remember that as a marketer or advertiser you are necessarily carrying tremendous baggage, both in terms of product knowledge and expectations. It's tremendously important to step back from your own (or your company's) perspective and think as a user.
What you ultimately need to reach your goals isn't necessarily what individuals using one of these channels wants when doing so, or are ready to do. Take the time to understand your audience and reach out to them in a way will resonate with the journey they are on.
What considerations do you pay special attention to when promoting content? Are there areas of the discipline you'd love to learn more about? Hit me back in the comments!
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Posted by randfish
Rand has talked many times about what he calls "serendipitous marketing," where the work we do at the top of the funnel can take winding and often unexpected paths to conversions. One of the most common questions about content marketing, public relations, and other top-of-funnel efforts is how to prove their value.
In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand offers up three ways you can attempt those measurements, along with a bit of perspective you can bring to your clients and higher-ups.
For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!
Howdy, Moz Fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to talk about the value of top of the funnel demand creation, sorts of channels and tactics, and how you can actually measure the value behind them.
I'm guilty of doing something. I'm going to own up to it. A lot of the time when I talk about these kinds of tactics, stuff that sits at the very top of the funnel that creates that demand or interest in your potential target market, I call them serendipitous and unmeasurable channels. It is true that many of them are very serendipitous, but it's not entirely true that they're completely unmeasurable. They're just very, very hard to measure, but not impossible.
So today I'm going to walk you through that, not because I actually expect you to go and try and do this with every one of those serendipitous, hard to measure channels, but because I think you need to, as a marketer, have this in your toolbox and in your knowledge kit so that when your CMO, your boss, your client, your manager, your team says, "Hey how do we know that xyz is producing returns," you can say, "Actually, we don't know that." Or, "We proved it once, and we have the data from then. We continue to believe that it will drive investment. But here's how tough it is to measure, and this is why we continue to invest in it and believe in it as a channel even though we don't have the proof."
So bear with me for a second. You've got your classic marketing funnel. Top of funnel stuff is like creating that awareness of the issue, the problem, the challenge, your industry. Your middle of the funnel is where you're showing off your solution. The bottom of the funnel is usually where you're convincing folks to convert and then trying to retain people. So this is fairly simplistic. Most marketers are familiar with it.
The stuff that fits into this creating awareness bucket, that very top of funnel demand creation stuff, those are things like: public relations, getting in news and media and press coverage; a lot of social media engagement, especially social media that is not directly tied to either supporting your product or pushing your product is in that bucket; a lot of conferences, events, trade shows, booths; certainly all those coffee and beer meetings that you might have with people in your field, people outside of your field, and people who are curious; a lot of those serendipitous meetings.
Anything that it fits into what we call top of funnel, which I actually like the shortened acronym there TOFU, TOFU content marketing. Much of the content that content marketers invested in and create is designed to be kind of above the funnel, before people are actually interested in your product or solution. Actually, this includes a lot of things that are brand advertising focused, that are just creating awareness of who you are as a company and that you exist, without specifically talking about the problem folks are facing or your solution to that problem.
So proving the value of this stuff is insanely hard. Let's use public relations as an example. The classic yard stick that PR professionals have traditionally reported on are number of stories and the quality of those stories and pieces, and where they've been published. That's a lot like in the SEO world reporting rankings and traffic. They're very high level metrics. They're sort of interesting to know. But then you have to have the belief that they connect up, that the rankings and the traffic are going to connect up to conversions, or that getting all those print pieces on the web, getting those links, or whatever is going to convert.
This is tough. The way to prove the value of this is you basically have these three options. You can segment, meaning that you segment by something like an industry vertical, by the demographics of your target, pr by geography. I'll give you an example of this.
So Moz might say, "Hey, we really think that among urban professionals in the technical marketing fields, that is who we're going to bias all of our public relations efforts to over the next year." So we're going to tell our PR firm, our in-house PR person, "Hey, that's what we want you to focus on. Get us the publications that are relevant to those folks, that are read by them on and off the Web. That's where we want to be."
This is interesting, because it means that we can then in the future actually go and measure like, "Well yeah, we had this kind of a result with that particular group that we targeted with PR." We had this much lower result with this other group that we didn't target with PR, that we could the next quarter or the next year. This is one way of doing it.
Geography actually is the most common way that I see a lot of startups and technology companies doing this. They basically focus all their efforts around a particular city or a particular state or region, sometimes even a country, and they'll do this.
At one point, I actually did run a split test using Sweden and Norway, which were places where I visited several people from Moz over the course of a couple years, spoke at some conferences and events, and then we looked at our traffic from those countries, our coverage in those countries, our links from those countries, and eventually our conversions from those countries. We did see a lift, kind of suggesting to us that maybe there was some value in those conferences.
Number two, the second way to do this is you can invest in a channel or tactic for only one of your product lines. If we're at Moz, we're going to say, "Hey, you know what? We're going to do a lot of public relations for Followerwonk specifically, but we are not going to do it for our SEO products. We're not going to do it for Moz Local. But let's see how that goes." This is another sort of segmentation tactic and can be effective. If you see that it works very well for one particular product, you might try repeating it for others.
Then the third one is that you can invest for a limited period of time. Now what's sad is this one is kind of the most common, but also the worst by far. The reason it's the worst by far, at least usually, is because most of the work that goes into any of these types of channels, think about it, press and PR, or a coffee and a beer meeting, or going to conferences and events, oftentimes takes a long time to show its value. It builds upon itself. So if I'm doing lots of in-person meetings, some of those will filter back and build on themselves. If you hear about Moz from one or two people in Seattle, well, okay, that's one signal. If you hear about it from 10, that's another thing. That might have a different kind of impact on how our brand gets out there.
So this time period stuff I really don't recommend and usually don't like. There are cases where it can be okay.
In all three of these, though, what makes it so incredibly challenging is that we have to be able to observe a number of metrics and then try and take the segments that we're supposed to be looking at, whether that's time or a product or a vertical or geography, and we want to observe metrics like traffic. We might try to look at mentions, especially for PR and branding focused stuff. We might look at links. We might look at conversion rate and total conversions. Then we have to try and control for every other thing that we're doing in our marketing that might or might not have affected those metrics as they apply to these channels.
This is why honestly that control bit is so hard. Who's to say whether public relations are really because we did a big PR effort and we talked to a lot of folks? Or is it because our products got a lot better, customers started buzzing about us, and the industry was turning our way anyway? We would have gotten 50% of those mentions even if we hadn't invested in PR. I don't know.
This is why a lot of the time with these forms of marketing, my bias is to say, "You know what? You need to use your educated opinion, and you need to believe in and invest in the quantity of serendipity that you believe you can afford or that you can't afford not to do, rather than trying to perfectly measure the value that you're getting out of these."
It's possible, but it is tremendously challenging. These are some ways that you can try it if you'd like to. I'd love to hear from all of you in the comments, especially if you've invested in this type of stuff in the past or if you have other ways of valuing, of figuring out, and of convincing your managers, your clients, your bosses, your teams to go put some dollars and energy behind these.
All right everyone, we'll see you next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
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Do you want to add multiple authors to your blog? WordPress comes with a built-in user management system that allows you to add users with different roles and capabilities allowing you to add new users without worrying about the safety of your site. In this… Read More »
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Posted by EllieWilkinson
Welcome to the second edition of Next Level! In the first Next Level blog post, the Success Team and Help Team here at Moz created 10 video walkthroughs to help you "power up" your knowledge of the Moz tools. We're continuing the educational series with a new video and a workflow showing you how to take on your competitors using Moz. Read on and level up!
For SEOs, the battle to rank highest in the search results often comes down to survival of the fittest. But if you know how to size up your competition, you can gain the upper hand and become king of the jungle! Come on a SERP-fari in this Next Level video and try these three ways to use the Moz tools to out-hunt all the other lions.
To review, here's an outline of the three steps to scoping out the competition!
(You’ll need a Moz Pro subscription to use Keyword Difficulty and Fresh Web Explorer. If you aren't yet a Moz Pro subscriber, you can always try out the tools with a 30-day free trial.)
Looking for other resources to help you plan your attack? Here are some that might help. Go get 'em, tiger! (But watch out for zebras…)
If you have other ways of using the Moz tools to rule the jungle, we'd love to hear them! Sound off in the comments below.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
Posted by Cyrus-Shepard
Topic n. A subject or theme of a webpage, section, or site.
Several SEOs have recently written about topic modeling and advanced on-page optimization. A few of note:
The concepts themselves are dizzying: LDA, co-occurrence, and entity salience, to name only a few. The question is "How can I easily incorporate these techniques into my content for higher rankings?"
In fact, you can create optimized pages without understanding complex algorithms. Sites like Wikipedia, IMDB, and Amazon create highly optimized, topic-focused pages almost by default. Utilizing these best practices works exactly the same when you're creating your own content.
The purpose of this post is to provide a simple framework for on-page topic targeting in a way that makes optimizing easy and scalable while producing richer content for your audience.
No matter what topic modeling technique you choose, all rely on discovering relationships between words and phrases. As content creators, how we organize words on a page greatly influences how search engines determine the on-page topics.
When we use keywords phrases, search engines hunt for other phrases and concepts that relate to one another. So our first job is to expand our keywords research to incorporate these related phrases and concepts. Contextually rich content includes:
A good keyword phrase or entity is one that predicts the presence of other phrases and entities on the page. For example, a page about "The White House" predicts other phrases like "president," "Washington," and "Secret Service." Incorporating these related phrases may help strengthen the topicality of "White House."
How a page is organized can greatly influence how concepts relate to each other.
Once search engines find your keywords on a page, they need to determine which ones are most important, and which ones actually have the strongest relationships to one another.
Three primary techniques for communicating this include:
A great way to organize your on-page content is to employ your primary and secondary related keywords in support of your focus keyword. Each primary related phrase becomes its own subsection, with the secondary related phrases supporting the primary, as illustrated here.
As an example, the primary keyword phrase of this page is 'On-page Topic Targeting'. Supporting topics include: keywords and relationships, on-page optimization, links, entities, and keyword tools. Each related phrase supports the primary topic, and each becomes its own subsection.
Many webmasters overlook the importance of linking as a topic signal.
Several well-known Google search patents and early research papers describe analyzing a page's links as a way to determine topic relevancy. These include both internal links to your own pages and external links to other sites, often with relevant anchor text.
Google's own Quality Rater Guidelines cites the value external references to other sites. It also describes a page's supplemental content, which can includes internal links to other sections of your site, as a valuable resource.
If you need an example of how relevant linking can help your SEO, The New York Times famously saw success, and an increase in traffic, when it started linking out to other sites from its topic pages.
Google extracts entities from your webpage automatically, without any effort on your part. These are people, places and things that have distinct properties and relationships with each other.
• Christopher Nolan (entity, person) stands 5'4" (property, height) and directed Interstellar (entity, movie)
Even though entity extraction happens automatically, it's often essential to mark up your content with Schema for specific supported entities such as business information, reviews, and products. While the ranking benefit of adding Schema isn't 100% clear, structured data has the advantage of enhanced search results.
For a solid guide in implementing schema.org markup, see Builtvisible's excellent guide to rich snippets.
You don't need to be a search genius or spend hours on complex research to produce high quality, topic optimized content. The beauty of this framework is that it can be used by anyone, from librarians to hobby bloggers to small business owners; even when they aren't search engine experts.
A good webpage has much in common with a high quality university paper. This includes:
Your webpage doesn't need to be academic, stuffy, or boring. Some of the most interesting pages on the Internet employ these same techniques while remaining dynamic and entertaining.
Keep in mind that 'best practices' don’t apply to every situation, and as Rand Fishkin says "There's no such thing as 'perfectly optimized' or 'perfect on-page SEO.'" Pulling everything together looks something like this:
This graphic is highly inspired by Rand Fishkin's great Visual Guide to Keyword Targeting and On-Page SEO. This guide doesn't replace that canonical resource. Instead, it should be considered a supplement to it.
For the search professional, there are dozens of tools available for thematic keyword and entity research. This list is not exhaustive by any means, but contains many useful favorites.
One of the few tools on the market that delivers entity extraction, concept targeting and linked data analysis. This is a great platform for understanding how a modern search engine views your webpage.
The SEO Keyword Suggestion Tools was actually designed to return both primary and secondary related keywords, as well as options for synonyms and country targeting.
The LSIKeyword tool performs Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) on the top pages returned by Google for any given keyword phrase. The tool can go down from time to time, but it's a great one to bookmark.
Quick and easy, enter any keyword phrase and then check "Top Keywords" to see what words appear most with your primary phrase across the of the platforms that Social Mention monitors.
Google trends is a powerful related research tool, if you know how to use it. The secret is downloading your results to a CSV (under settings) to get a list up to 50 related keywords per search term.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
Nearly two months ago WordPress 4.0 was released. It came with tons of new improvements like an enhanced post editor, improved internationalization support, embed previews, etc. WordPress 4.1 is expected to be released in the second week of December, 2014. It is coming with lots… Read More »
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How do your interactions differ between the online world and the offline?
Away from the computer, we may have a better feeling on how to interact with one another and build relationships. Online? It’s a bit of a different world.
As a distributed team at Buffer—meaning we all work from wherever we’re happiest—our interactions together and our relationships with one another take place online. The same goes for many of the connections we make on social media.
So it seems worthwhile to have a ...
The post The Science of Building a Strong, Lasting Community on Social Media appeared first on Social.
Posted by Cyrus-Shepard
Topic n. A subject or theme of a webpage, section, or site.
Several SEOs have recently written about topic modeling and advanced on-page optimization. A few of note:
The concepts themselves are dizzying: LDA, co-occurrence, and entity salience, to name only a few. The question is "How can I easily incorporate these techniques into my content for higher rankings?"
In fact, you can create optimized pages without understanding complex algorithms. Sites like Wikipedia, IMDB, and Amazon create highly optimized, topic-focused pages almost by default. Utilizing these best practices works exactly the same when you're creating your own content.
The purpose of this post is to provide a simple framework for on-page topic targeting in a way that makes optimizing easy and scalable while producing richer content for your audience.
No matter what topic modeling technique you choose, all rely on discovering relationships between words and phrases. As content creators, how we organize words on a page greatly influences how search engines determine the on-page topics.
When we use keywords phrases, search engines hunt for other phrases and concepts that relate to one another. So our first job is to expand our keywords research to incorporate these related phrases and concepts. Contextually rich content includes:
A good keyword phrase or entity is one that predicts the presence of other phrases and entities on the page. For example, a page about "The White House" predicts other phrases like "president," "Washington," and "Secret Service." Incorporating these related phrases may help strengthen the topicality of "White House."
How a page is organized can greatly influence how concepts relate to each other.
Once search engines find your keywords on a page, they need to determine which ones are most important, and which ones actually have the strongest relationships to one another.
Three primary techniques for communicating this include:
A great way to organize your on-page content is to employ your primary and secondary related keywords in support of your focus keyword. Each primary related phrase becomes its own subsection, with the secondary related phrases supporting the primary, as illustrated here.
As an example, the primary keyword phrase of this page is 'On-page Topic Targeting'. Supporting topics include: keywords and relationships, on-page optimization, links, entities, and keyword tools. Each related phrase supports the primary topic, and each becomes its own subsection.
Many webmasters overlook the importance of linking as a topic signal.
Several well-known Google search patents and early research papers describe analyzing a page's links as a way to determine topic relevancy. These include both internal links to your own pages and external links to other sites, often with relevant anchor text.
Google's own Quality Rater Guidelines cites the value external references to other sites. It also describes a page's supplemental content, which can includes internal links to other sections of your site, as a valuable resource.
If you need an example of how relevant linking can help your SEO, The New York Times famously saw success, and an increase in traffic, when it started linking out to other sites from its topic pages.
Google extracts entities from your webpage automatically, without any effort on your part. These are people, places and things that have distinct properties and relationships with each other.
• Christopher Nolan (entity, person) stands 5'4" (property, height) and directed Interstellar (entity, movie)
Even though entity extraction happens automatically, it's often essential to mark up your content with Schema for specific supported entities such as business information, reviews, and products. While the ranking benefit of adding Schema isn't 100% clear, structured data has the advantage of enhanced search results.
For a solid guide in implementing schema.org markup, see Builtvisible's excellent guide to rich snippets.
You don't need to be a search genius or spend hours on complex research to produce high quality, topic optimized content. The beauty of this framework is that it can be used by anyone, from librarians to hobby bloggers to small business owners; even when they aren't search engine experts.
A good webpage has much in common with a high quality university paper. This includes:
Your webpage doesn't need to be academic, stuffy, or boring. Some of the most interesting pages on the Internet employ these same techniques while remaining dynamic and entertaining.
Keep in mind that 'best practices' don’t apply to every situation, and as Rand Fishkin says "There's no such thing as 'perfectly optimized' or 'perfect on-page SEO.'" Pulling everything together looks something like this:
This graphic is highly inspired by Rand Fishkin's great Visual Guide to Keyword Targeting and On-Page SEO. This guide doesn't replace that canonical resource. Instead, it should be considered a supplement to it.
For the search professional, there are dozens of tools available for thematic keyword and entity research. This list is not exhaustive by any means, but contains many useful favorites.
One of the few tools on the market that delivers entity extraction, concept targeting and linked data analysis. This is a great platform for understanding how a modern search engine views your webpage.
The SEO Keyword Suggestion Tools was actually designed to return both primary and secondary related keywords, as well as options for synonyms and country targeting.
The LSIKeyword tool performs Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) on the top pages returned by Google for any given keyword phrase. The tool can go down from time to time, but it's a great one to bookmark.
Quick and easy, enter any keyword phrase and then check "Top Keywords" to see what words appear most with your primary phrase across the of the platforms that Social Mention monitors.
Google trends is a powerful related research tool, if you know how to use it. The secret is downloading your results to a CSV (under settings) to get a list up to 50 related keywords per search term.
What are your best tips for creating semantically rich, topic focused content? Let us know in the comments below.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
To make Twitter really work for you as a marketer, you first need to build your reach, there’s no way around it. It doesn’t matter how great your content is, if there’s no one there to read or retweet, it won’t get the traction it deserves.
So how do you build reach and increase engagement?
Let’s start with the basics. Most social media experts will say that the core to Twitter greatness is:
Providing real value and engaging with others
Acting the way you would act in ...
The post Get More Followers And Increase Engagement With These 7 Counterintuitive Twitter Tips appeared first on Social.
