Tuesday, September 30, 2014
Privacy-Savvy Search Engine DuckDuckGo Blocked in China
49% of U.K. Consumers Use Organic Search to Find Online Retailers [Study]
The Social Media Advertising Beginner’s Guide for Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn
When it comes to planning where to spend your marketing budget effectively, advertising on social media is one of the most sound investments you can make.
I often speak to marketers who are just getting started with online advertising. I often offer the same advice at the start of each call. Advertising is complex, and it is never a set it and forget it process. Advertising requires testing and checking, and it requires a touch on all forms of advertising to ...
The post The Social Media Advertising Beginner’s Guide for Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn appeared first on Social.
24-Hour Breakdown of Searches on Black Friday and Cyber Monday
How to Enforce One Category Per Post in WordPress
In our categories vs tags article, we recommend that you only select one category per post. However this can be difficult for beginners to get used to. In this article, we will show you how to enforce one category per post in WordPress. This will… Read More »
To leave a comment please visit How to Enforce One Category Per Post in WordPress on WPBeginner.
"Content Performance Marketing" – 3 Steps to Future Success
The Myth of Google's 200 Ranking Factors
Posted by gfiorelli1
The woman in the gif below just said to Captain Picard that she can show him the definitive and complete list of the 200 Google ranking factors.
Picard, who is a wise man, can do nothing but going away with a facepalm.
Who can blame Captain Picard for his reaction? We all know, in fact, that a complete and ultimate list of the 200 ranking factors does not exist.
If you agree, then why do we still see statistics like these below on Buzzsumo?
Let me offer this disclaimer before I continue:
I am not writing this post to attack people like Brian Dean, who, in August, published an update to the "complete list" that Backlinko first presented in 2013. Brian, whom I esteem, created an effective piece of link bait (as the 318 linking root domains it earned testify).
I am writing this post because those lists are, quite simply, useless and dangerous, and because I hope to help people—especially the newer generations of SEO—understand that a definitive and complete "List" of Google's ranking factors does not exist. Moreover, some of the factors that appear in those lists:
- Are myths;
- Are correlation factors and not causal factors;
- Are presented just to reach the number of 200.
The origin of the myth
I admit that I did not know how the myth of "200 Google Ranking Factors" was created, but a good SEO pal of mine, Giorgio Taverniti, revealed it to me.
The first time Google declared it was using 200 ranking factors was in its Press Day on May 10th, 2006 (you may also want to read the live blog Matt Cutts did, as it illuminates many things that happened thereafter).
Seeing that the correct phrasing was "over 200 ranking factors," we can say that "200" was an approximated number, perhaps offered to journalists in order to explain how complex Google's algorithm is. If the audience had been composed of information technologists, Alan Eustace would probably have used another wording.
Another proof of how silly it is to claim to have discovered "the 200 Google ranking factors" is that, in 2010, Matt Cutts himself declared that, yes, Google counts on over 200 rankings factors, but that each factor may have up to 50 variations:
Meaning is important
Are you sure you really know what "ranking" and "indexing" mean?
I ask you this because I know many SEOs who use both words as synonyms, when they are two completely different concepts and stages of how a search engine works.
Indexing is one of the four interconnected and interdependent phases of how a search engine works:
- Crawling
- Parsing
- Indexing
- Search
Indexing is the process of locating and mapping resources around the web that are associated with a word or phrase, and it is something the search engines do, not SEOs, even if SEOs can help their work optimizing a site.
The index, as was so effectively explained to me by Enrico Altavilla, is used to determine what resources to suggest as an answer to a query and the words/phrases composing it, not in what order to suggest them. That is the function of the ranking phase.
Ranking is the final moment of the fourth phase: Search.
Context plays a major role in the Search phase, and almost every step takes into account the user's and device's characteristics.
As we can see from the image above, the Search phase is composed of four distinct stages:
- Understanding the input given by the user with a query. Hummingbird very likely operates in this moment, because Google, in order to understand better the input, modifies or extends the query and just after moves to the second stage;
- Retrieving documents from the Index, taking into account commands like "noindex."
- Filtering & clustering. Once Google has understood the input and retrieved the corresponding documents from the Index, it applies filters like Panda and others spam filters, but also less considered ones as the Safe-Search filter and the often forgotten Private Search layer (personalization).
- Ranking. Google applies in this moment the X number of ranking factors, not before. And the ranking factors should be considered and counted for every kind of index Google has:
- Universal search
- Image search
- Local search
- etc.
We should not forget, then, that content and layout composing the SERPs depend a lot on things like the device used.
The Unbearable Lightness of SEOs
SEOs are talented professionals with a natural tendency to develop a manic-depressive psyche.
Ok, I have exaggerated a little bit, but—and I am an SEO, too—we live moments of pure joy when we see that our work is making the organic traffic of a site rise up and to the right, but also sudden dark periods of (unconscious?) anxiety when Google announces an update or we see a small traffic drop.
For that reason, we love ranking factor lists.
We need them not just as a potential source of information, but because they reassure us, too.
And we love them even if they are just a sequence of myths.
Let's take, for example, " Google's 200 Ranking Factors,", published by Backlinko, which I use for no other reason than it being the most recent successful list published.
I'll start with an easy one:
1 - Keyword Density [Ranking Factor 17]
My eyes bleed reading that although not as important as it once was, keyword density is still something Google uses to determine the topic of a webpage.
Keyword Density never was a Google's ranking factor. Never.
If we really want to find keyword density as factor for ranking, we must go back to the 70s and 80s and look at what Stephen E. Robertson, Karen Spärck Jones, and others described as the Okapi BM25 formula.
If keyword density ever had some relevancy as a ranking factor, it was in the Pleistocene era of search engines.
We live in 2014 and Google just had its 16th birthday.
It is still obviously important having the keyword we want to rank for in the text of a web document.
However we also know that it is also possible to make our site ranking for that keyword without having it at all in the page, if Google finds enough consistent and relevant external signals, which associate that keyword to our site.
2 - LSI [Ranking Factors 18/19]
For this example I will cite what Bill Slawski wrote in this Inbound.org thread:
Latent Semantic indexing was invented and patented in 1990, before there was a web.
It was developed to help index small (less than 10,000 documents) databases of documents that didn't change much (like the Web does).
There have been a number of companies that started selling LSI Keyword generation tools that promised that they could help identify synonyms and words with the same or similar meaning.
Where those fail is that the LSI process requires access to the database (of documents) in question to calculate which words are synonyms - and the only people with access to Google's database to do that kind of analysis (which isn't possible anyway since Google's index is much to big and changes much to frequently) is Google.
3 - YouTube [Ranking Factor 76]
There's no doubt that YouTube videos are given preferential treatment in the SERP .
How can be this a ranking factor? Eventually it is a monopolistic use Google does of its own search engine, but a ranking factor?
This is a classic example of how t hese lists tend to be everything but scientific, hence unreliable if not even dangerous.
4 - Site Uptime [Ranking Factor 69]
What Brian says is correct: if Google, despite of several attempts, see that a site returns a 500 server response, then that site will start being pushed out of the SERPs.
Correct, but in this case we are talking about an Indexing issue, not a Ranking one. As I wrote before, meaning is important.
5 - Keyword as first word in domain name [Ranking Factor 3]
The ranking factor list includes this factor because in 2011 a panel of SEOs (myself included) considered that EMDs and PMDs were clearly having an advantage in terms of rankings, and so declared it in the Moz Search Ranking Factors Survey.
In 2013 Moz published a new edition of that survey, and the opinions the same SEOs had were quite different.
The most important thing, though, is understanding that these were just opinions from SEOs; they should be considered (with all the disclaimers) possible, but based more on personal experiences.
Any opinions, although authoritative, are just opinions and not science, let alone ranking factors.
6 - Country TLD Extension [Ranking Factor 10]
It is true that cTLDs offer a stronger geo-targeting indication to Google than geo-targeted subfolders and subdomains.
However, as any international SEO can confirm, a web site with a cTLD domain termination does not necessarily rank better than a generic domain name.
What is not so true, then, is that an .es or .it web site cannot rank well outside of Google.es or Google.it. In this post I wrote last spring on State of Digital, I presented many examples where sites with "Latin American" cTLDs were outranking .es ones in Google.es. In the comments to the posts, then, you can see that this is something common in every regional version of Google.
This "ranking factor" is a clear example of how these kind of lists may mix correct information with dangerous ignorance. (I am using "ignorance" in its real meaning as "lack of knowledge or information on a given subject," in this case international SEO, and not in its pejorative sense.)
7 - Use of Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools [Ranking Factor 78]
How can something described this way be a ranking factor?
"Some think that having these two programs installed on your site can improve your page's indexing. They may also directly influence rank by giving Google more data to work with..."
"Some think?" Who? The university student ranting in a forum? A information technologist? An insider in Mountain View? This is purely speculation.
8 - Guest Posts [Ranking Factor 91]
When we talk about how dangerous doing some kinds of guest posting can be, we are talking about web spam.
Therefore, if a link (or a series of links) from guest posts are considered as having a manipulative nature, we should talk about "Spam Filters" (3rd Stage of Search) and not actual ranking.
Again, meaning is important.
9 - Facebook Likes and Facebook Shares [Ranking Factor 157/158]
Google cannot see likes and Facebook shares. So they cannot be a ranking factor. Period.
Matt Cutts, in the same SMX panel the list cites as its source, said:
We like standards that are available on the open web. If we're not able to crawl something – like Facebook or like the time we temporarily ran into problems with Twitter – we don't want to depend on that data.
The biggest mistake here, though, is confusing causation with correlation, and the power of Social Signals is a correlation power.
As I wrote a week ago in a comment to the Marcus Tober post here on Moz, social shares are not a direct cause of good rankings, but they may help in obtaining them:
Social shares > higher visibility > creation of 2nd tier backlinks (e.g. on Topsy) and improved opportunities of earning natural backlinks from people who discovered that shared content.
10 - Employees listed in LinkedIn [Factor 171]
Here, we are at the limits of the absurd.
Backlinko defines this as a branding signal. The problem is that a branding signal is not a ranking signal.
It cites an old post—a very good one— that Rand Fishkin wrote back in 2011. Unfortunately, that post was saying something completely different. Rand exposed his (correct) hypothesis that, in the future, Google would start looking at "branding" signals in order to create named entities able to reflect the offline relevancy of an online presence.
In that post, Rand never cited the "Employees listed in LinkedIn" as a factor.
I could continue, but it is not my intention to write a full rebuttal post.
No, my intention is to make clear—especially to you, young SEOs—that nothing good can come of your taking these lists at their word.
My intention is to exhort people not to create them.
What could seem like a good link-bait idea (and the performance of Brian's post is proof that it can be) ends up being something that spreads a fallacious vision of SEO, which will reach the eyes and minds of a mainstream audience of non-SEOs: businesses' owners and marketing executives, who will see the list republished in sites like Hubspot or Entrepreneur.
Are all Google ranking factor lists bad?
No.
We can find serious studies, which aim to understand why certain sites ranks better than others. The Moz Search Ranking Factor Survey cited before, and the Searchmetrics Ranking Factors study are the most shining examples of that.
Nevertheless, there exists a huge difference between those studies and a simple infographic/post listing the supposed 200 ranking factors: they are correlation studies executed following a solid scientific method.
Be aware that they are correlation studies; hence, they are just telling us what common characteristics the sites that are ranking high in the SERPs have.
Use them as inspiration for best practices to follow if they really are applicable to your site, nothing else.
You can even try to create a ranking list without doing a correlation analysis, but that work should meet three criteria:
- It should be at least as good as the Periodic Table of SEO Success that Search Engine Land presents in its site;
- It should be based on deep knowledge of how search engines' work; and
- It should always present a disclaimer about its subjective nature.
Finally, instead of searching for lists, the best idea I can offer you is to experiment yourself. Create a site, test theories, try to break the rules for understanding how Google is possibly working.
And if you feel you cannot do that alone, then consider joining the IMEC Lab that Rand created a few months ago.
Happy testing!
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!
Monday, September 29, 2014
Former Google Employees Launch Adult Entertainment Search Engine
Got a Boring Company Blog? Here’s How to Fix It
How to Run a Facebook Contest, Analyze Your Page, and More: 11 Ideal Facebook Tools for Marketers
We’ve posted huge, helpful lists on social media tools for small business (61!) free Twitter tools (59!), and free marketing tools (29!). Facebook is next—though the list won’t be quite as huge.
The built-in tools that Facebook offers to business pages and advertisers are robust and detailed. Hence, you’re likely to uncover a smaller stash of third-party tools than you might for a network like Twitter.
Still, there are some fabulous Facebook tools out there, and they can help push your Facebook marketing campaign forward with contests, ...
The post How to Run a Facebook Contest, Analyze Your Page, and More: 11 Ideal Facebook Tools for Marketers appeared first on Social.
Mobile Site Migration Planning: Rolling Your M-Dot Into Your .Com
How to Add Staff Member Profiles in WordPress with Staffer
We are often asked about easy ways to add staff member profiles in WordPress. Previously, we showed you how to add staff member profile pages, but it required editing templates. What if we told you that there is an easier way to manage staff member… Read More »
To leave a comment please visit How to Add Staff Member Profiles in WordPress with Staffer on WPBeginner.
Why You Shouldn't Have a Mobile Marketing Strategy
Posted by willcritchlow
Before I start, I should address the irony of writing this post on a site that isn't yet designed for mobile. I don't make those decisions, nor have the insight into the development backlog. I still think this is the community to have this discussion with, so I'll just have to put up with the irony.
This post isn't really about responsive websites, though. I wanted to address a broader question. There are a few marketing topics that seem to make it into board rooms sooner than others. Social media was one – I've heard a lot of senior people ask "what's our social strategy?" over the years and now I'm hearing "what's our mobile marketing strategy?". That's why I picked mobile as my topic for our upcoming SearchLove conference in London.
But I don't want to give another talk on responsive design, mobile user-agent server headers and googlebot mobile. Those things have their place, but they are inherently tactics. Instead, I want to ask myself the question "what does a true mobile marketing strategy look like?". Before I get to that, some background:
The changing mobile landscape
I've been closely involved in mobile since the early 2000s. Before starting Distilled, I worked for a strategy consultancy called Analysys who specialised in telecoms (and particularly in mobile). I distinctly remember every year back then being hailed as "the year of the mobile" (the earliest reference I can find online was optimistic that 2000 was going to be the year of the mobile).
It's funny because a decade ago, we were doing email on our phones (the iconic Blackberry appeared in 2003), but somehow WAP, GPRS and the Nokia 6600 all failed to achieve ubiquity.
In the end, by 2007, we'd all stopped talking about the year of the mobile, which meant that even the explosive adoption of the iPhone took a while to fully seep into marketers' collective consciousness. At the recent ThoughtWorks ParadigmShift conference, I gave a talk on the three "paradigm shifting" trends I see in marketing at the moment (the other two being what I called "your TV is just another screen" and "robots are filtering everything you see"). I showed these stats:
Mobile tactics
I'm clearly not the first or only person to have noticed this, and it's generated a huge amount of thinking about "mobile friendly" and even " mobile first" design.
Towards the end of this post, I've collected some thoughts and further reading on specific mobile tactics, but before we get into that, I wanted to dive a little deeper into the strategic layer.
You shouldn't have a mobile marketing strategy
There's something going on that I've referred to as there's no such thing as mobile. What I mean by this is that consumers are seeing less and less of a distinction between their devices.
To see this, we first have to realise that 77% of all usage of "mobile" devices is done from home or work where regular computers are available.
http://think.withgoogle.com/databoard/#lang=en-us&study=19&topic=54&dp=211
The vast majority of the attraction is not mobility, but a combination of a device that is:
- Ubiquitous (the same device everywhere)
- Personal (with your settings, a degree of privacy, etc)
- Always-on / instant-on
- Designed for rapid interactions
It's the same set of trends that is driving the "bring your own device" (BYOB) trend that IT departments are having to learn to deal with.
Our computers are fighting back by becoming more like our mobile devices (instant-on, app stores, even touch screens) and our mobile devices are adding to their ubiquity advantages with features previously limited to the desktop (faster processors, larger and brighter screens, faster connections, better keyboards).
So, when you realise that all our data is in the cloud and our connection to the physical device is only sentimentality (and the cost of replacement), and you consider the range of screen resolutions that can be considered "mobile", you realise that unless you mean to target customers who are literally walking around at the time, mobile marketing isn't really a distinct thing – it's just the future of digital marketing.
Every marketing strategy should be mobile
You only have to watch a user who's never built their own website, and therefore can't empathise with the technical difficulties, try to use a website that doesn't work on their iPhone or iPad. They swear at the device. They swear at the brand. They wonder if they're doing it wrong or if their connection has dropped. They abuse the "idiots who built this website" without realising the difficulty of what they're asking for.
There's no such thing as mobile as far as the user is concerned. Which means you, as marketers, have to work exceptionally hard to play nicely with ubiquity.
Fundamentally, people use their devices for:
- communicating with other people (1-1 and 1-many)
- consuming media (text, images, video)
- searching for answers
As a marketer, you can see the opportunities to be available, be found, be recommended in any of these uses. To improve your chances, you will need to consider:
- Your platform – the CMS you use, the outputs it's capable of
- Your content – the strategy of what to create and the tactical execution
- Your audience – where are they and how can you reach them?
- Your conversion paths – what do you want people to do and what would encourage them to do that?
- Your measurement abilities – how are you going to quantify and demonstrate success, and how are you going to refine your approach in light of new data?
So, what does that sound like? It sounds a lot like the approach we take for every client who comes to us for digital marketing.
And that's what I mean when I say that every marketing strategy should be a mobile marketing strategy. Through every single step of that process, you can (and should) append "on mobile" to the question.
How might I be wrong?
What if apps beat the mobile web? That's the biggest threat to web marketers right now in my opinion. Clearly this is a threat to Google as well (how do you index the app ecosystem?). So it's interesting to look at their response because they're also embracing it. Think about:
- The pace of innovation in, for example, mobile gmail apps versus desktop gmail
- How Chrome is sneaking an operating system onto every device you own and can now run Android apps
- How much a search in Chrome looks increasingly like a search in the Google app - with features moving from the app to mobile Chrome in a similar way to the way features move from mobile to desktop
- The trend towards app constellations for most of the major mobile players – taking a slice not only from the monolithic apps, but also from the regular mobile web ("there's an app for that")
I don't think the pendulum is going to swing too far this way, however. Turns out that it's not only Google that relies on indexing the sum of published human knowledge. Can you imagine going back to a world where you can't Google for an answer? I can't.
So, I think that even in this situation, "content" remains something resembling the mobile web – as does much of ecommerce away from perhaps Amazon. The long tail of providers simply works against "an app for everything". You might have an app for your favourite store and your favourite newspaper, but you're not going to have 15 of each (in my opinion).
So where do we focus our marketing? In my opinion, we focus on search, social and content. Those are the fundamental human activities which are enhanced by ubiquitous computing devices, and they're ones we understand deeply. The future looks like brands as publisher like never before.
So, should I build an app?
I don't believe this is a marketing question. It's a product and business question. I think the answer could well be "yes" for many businesses if you have elements that can be improved by:
- Native APIs (camera, coarse or fine-grained location, etc)
- Game-engine-style graphics abilities
- Offline functionality
- Lock-in that actually benefits your users somehow
But it's not a marketing question. Aside from a small number of communication tools that can grow via viral loops (think: whatsapp), apps are not a discovery mechanism. The vast majority of app store searches are navigational (i.e. people searching for apps they've already heard of) and I don't see that changing any time soon – an app store search isn't going to replace a general web search for knowledge and so it's not going to add people into the top of your funnel.
It's also such a hugely fragmented market that – from conversations with developers who've seen their apps sitting at #1 in moderate-sized categories – I know that even success doesn't inherently drive more downloads and more success.
Tactical recommendations for mobile
Apart from repeating the advice to think about how your site appears on mobile, I wanted to end with some positive recommendations – i.e. what should you do tactically?
- Pay attention to "dark referral sources" that obscure the incredible mobile drivers of growth for networks like Facebook and, if your audience is active on Facebook, realise that Facebook marketing increasingly is mobile marketing
- The same is actually true of email – 66% of emails are now opened on mobile devices
- Consider all those native APIs and the apps that make the best use of them – 10% of all photos mankind has taken were taken in the last 12 months
- While most mobile sessions are not happening out and about (77% happen at home or at work), all true mobile sessions of course do happen on mobile devices so it's worth thinking about hyper-locality (iBeacons)
- Of course, it's not enough to drive just engagement, you need to drive revenue, so it's well past the time that most people should be thinking about mobile CRO (video here if you have a DistilledU account)
- Make the most of second-screen mobile use (see slide 38 onwards) if you are spending money on offline or branding plays
- Watch for emerging networks – there are a variety of factors that power a high degree of volatility in mobile social (see slides 53-54 onwards)
The key lesson here? We need to stop focussing on mobile as a device we use when 'on the go'. Mobile is no longer a distinct thing but, rather, simply the future of digital marketing. It must inform every strategy we devise as marketers, and at every step of the way.
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!
Friday, September 26, 2014
Google AdWords Offers Ad Creative at Scale for PPC
Improved Targeting Available for Bing
25 Examples of WordPress Being Used as a CMS
One of the most common misconceptions about WordPress is that it is just a blogging software. People often ask us for examples of WordPress being used as a CMS and not just as a blog platform. There are thousands of websites around the world using… Read More »
To leave a comment please visit 25 Examples of WordPress Being Used as a CMS on WPBeginner.
4 Tools and Tips That Will Help You Be a More Analytical Marketer
How Some Companies Succeed at Converting Visitors yet Fail to Earn Great Customers - Whiteboard Friday
Posted by randfish
It's easy to think that conversion is the end goal for most marketing teams, but any business that relies on customer loyalty needs to take a it a step farther. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains a few of the reasons that people we thought were new customers often decide to leave.
For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!
Video transcription
Howdy Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I'm talking about some conversion rate optimization mistakes that we've made. They're pernicious and challenging to understand, because we've succeeded in one big important aspect of CRO, which is converting visitors into customers. That might sound like a great thing, but in fact sometimes being great at that can be a terrible thing. I'll talk about exactly why and how.
I've seen this at Moz. We've had a little bit of a problem with it. I've seen this at many, many other companies. I want to try and use Moz as an empathetic example to everyone out there of how these problems happen.
Succeeding at converting visitors into customers is not the end goal for the vast, vast majority of companies, unless you have a product that you know you're only ever going to sell once, and that will be the only brand interaction that you hope to have with that human being ever or that organization ever in your lives. Well, usually that's not the case.
Usually, most companies have a relationship that they want to have with their customers. They're trying to earn that customer's brand loyalty, and they're trying to earn future sales from that person. That means building a longer term relationship, which is how CRO can occasionally go very, very wrong.
I've got the three primary examples. These are the three types of things that I've seen happen in company after company. It's not just true in software, but software makes a particularly good example of it because we have a retention type model. It's not just about converting someone, but it's also about keeping them part of your service and making your product consistently useful to them, etc.
Here's our friendly Joe Searcher. Joe goes ahead and searches for SEO tools. Then, Joe gets to the free trial of Moz Pro, which you could conceivably get to if you search in Google for that. We often have AdWords ads running for things like that and maybe we rank too.
Then, Joe goes, "All right. Yeah, maybe I'll give this a spin. It's a 30 day free trial." He sees all the stuff in there. He's like, "All right. There's the Moz Bar. Maybe I'll try that, and I'll set up my Moz Analytics campaign. I see I'm getting some crawl errors and keyword scores."
Then, Joe is like, "Man, I don't know. I don't really feel totally invested in this tool. I'm not sure why I should trust the results. Maybe I don't know quite enough about SEO to validate this. Or I know enough about SEO to know that there are some little things here and there that are wrong. Maybe they told me to do some keyword stuff that I don't feel totally comfortable with. I don't trust these guys. I'm out of here. I'm going to quit."
Well, that kind of sucked, right? Joe had a bad experience with Moz. He probably won't come back. He probably won't recommend us to his friends.
Unfortunately, we also provided a customer with access to our stuff, ran a credit card, and accumulated some charges and some expenses in his first month of use, and lost him as a customer. So it's a lose-lose. We were successful at converting, but it ended up being bad for both Joe and for Moz.
The problem is really here. Something fascinating that you may not know about Moz is that, on average, before someone takes a free trial of our software, they visit our website eight times before they take a free trial. Many, many visits are often correlated with high purchase prices.
But for a free trial, there are actually a lot of software companies who convert right on the first or the second visit. I think that might be a mistake. What we've observed in our data and one of the reasons that we've biased not to do this, to try and actually avoid converting someone on the first or second visit, is because Moz customers that convert on the first, or second, or third visit to our website tend to leave early and often. They tend to be not longstanding, loyal customers who have low churn rates and those kinds of things. They tend to have a very high churn and low retention.
Those who visit Moz ten times or more before converting turn out to be much more loyal. In fact, it keeps going. If they visit 14 times or more or 20 times or more, that loyalty keeps increasing. It's very fascinating and strongly suggests that before you convert someone you actually want to have a brand relationship.
Joe needs to know that Moz is going to be helpful, that he can trust it, that he's got the education and the knowledge and the information, and he's interacted with community, and he's consumed content. He's been like, "Okay, I get what's going on. When I see that F Keyword Score, I know that like, oh, right, there's some stemming here. It might not be catching all the interpretations of this keyword that I've got in there. So I give Moz a little leeway in there because this other stuff works well for me, as opposed to quitting at the first sign of trouble."
This happens in so, so many companies. If you're not careful about it, it can happen to you too.
Another good example here is, let's say, Mary. Mary is a heavy Twitter user. She has great social following and wants to do some analysis of her Twitter account, some competitive Twitter accounts. So she finds Followerwonk, which is great. It's a wonderful tool for this.
She says, "Okay, I want to get access to some of the advanced reports. I need to become a Moz Pro member to do that. What does Moz have to do with Followerwonk? Okay, I get it. Moz owns Followerwonk, so I'm getting to the free trial page for Moz Pro. Weirdly, this trial page doesn't even talk about Followerwonk in here. There's one mention in the Research Tools section. That's kind of confusing. Then, I'm going to get into the product. Now you're trying to have me set up a Moz Analytics account. I don't even own and control a website or do SEO. I'm trying to use Followerwonk. Why am I paying $99 a month if my free trial extends? Why would I do that to get all this other stuff if I just want Wonk? That doesn't make any sense, so I'm out of here. I'm going to quit."
Essentially, we created a path where Mary can't get what she actually wants and where she's forced to use things that she might not necessarily want. Maybe she doesn't want them at all. Maybe she has no idea what they do. Maybe she has no time to investigate whether they're helpful to her or not.
We're essentially devaluing our own work and products by bundling them all together and forcing Mary, who just wants Followerwonk, to have to get a Moz subscription. That kind of sucks too.
By the way, we validated this with data. On average, visitors who come through Followerwonk and sign up for a free trial perform terribly. They have very, very low stickiness until and unless they actually make it back to the Followerwonk tool immediately and start using that and use that exclusively. If they get wrapped up inside the Pro subscription and all the other tools, Open Site Explorer, Moz Analytics and Moz Bar, Keyword Difficulty, and Fresh Web Explorer, blah, they're overwhelmed. They're out of here. They didn't get what they want.
The other thing that really sucks is we've seen a bunch of research. There's been psychological research done that basically suggests that when you do this, when you bundle a whole bunch of things together, they are inherently cheapened and believe the value to be less, and they feel themselves cheated. If you buy all of this stuff and you only wanted Followerwonk, you feel like well, Followerwonk must only be worth like $20 a month.
That's not actually the case. Inside the business we can see, oh, there are all these different cost structures associated with different products, and some people who are heavy users of this and not heavy users of that make up for it. Okay, but your customers don't have that type of insight, so they're not seeing it. Again, quick conversion has failed to create real value.
Number three, what is SEO? We're going to have Fred here. Fred's going to do a search for "what is SEO." He's going to get to the free trial of Moz Pro maybe because we were running an advertisement or that kind of thing. Then, Fred's going to go, "All right. Yeah, that sounds good. I want to do SEO on my website. I know that's important. Search traffic is important."
Then, he starts getting into the product and goes through the experience. He has to enter his keywords, and he's like, "Man, I don't know what keywords they mean. What do they mean by keywords? I need to learn more about SEO. I'm out of here. I'm quitting this product. It doesn't make sense to me."
The problem here is an education gap. Essentially, before Fred is able to effectively use and understand the product, he needs education, and unfortunately what we've done is end around and put the conversion message ahead of the education process and thus cost Fred. This, again, happens all the time. Companies do this.
There are ways to solve these. There are three things you can do that will really solve these conversion issues. First, measure your customer journey, not just your conversion path. So many folks look at paths to conversion. You have your reports set up in Google Analytics, and you look at assisted conversions and path to conversions, but you don't look at customer journey, which is what do people do after they convert.
If you're an e-commerce or a retail store, you care about this too, even though it seems like a one-time purchase. Do they come back? Do they buy more stuff from you? Are they amplifying? Are they sharing the product? Do you have a good score with them when you ask people on Net Promoter Score like, "Hey, would you suggest or recommend using this service, using our ecommerce shop? Did you have a good experience?"
If you're seeing low scores there, low return visits, low engagement with the product that you're offering, chances are good that you're doing something like this. You're converting someone too early.
Second, you don't want to cheapen, mislead, or bundle products without evidence that people will actually enjoy them, appreciate them, and that it matches your customer need, as we've done here by bundling all of these things with Followerwonk. It may be the case that this can go one way and not the other.
You might say, as we did, I was like, "Oh, I'm in SEO and I love Followerwonk. It's so useful for all this stuff. But I wasn't thinking about the 600 people a day who go into Followerwonk just for Twitter analytics and don't really have a whole lot of need around other SEO tools."
So optimizing the bundle one way and not the other was probably a mistake. I think it's a mistake that Peter Bray and the team are working on fixing now, my mistake that they're now working on fixing. I apologize for that.
This bundling can also be very misleading. You need to be careful in validating that customers actually want two products, two services, two goods together.
Finally, this is a huge part of how content marketing works. You want to educate before you convert. Educate before you convert and find ways to filter for not right customers.
Imagine if in Fred's process here, he'd searched for "what is SEO," and he got to the Beginner's Guide. Then, he got to the free trial page, and we had identified, "Hey, Fred's never been here before. He just got done with the Beginner's Guide when he got to the keyword page here."
We can nudge him maybe with some proactive suggestions here. But if he goes through and starts entering keywords and he can't figure it out, maybe we need someone from our Customer Success Team to actually email him and say, "Hey, Fred, is there something I can help you with? Can we set up this process for you? Do you want to have a phone call," these kinds of things. We need to provide some assistance.
Likely you're doing one of these things as well. When you get aggressive about converting customers fast and early, yes, you can really juice your revenue. You can turn a low conversion rate into a high one. But you can also in the long run cost your company if you aren't measuring and thinking about the right things.
Hopefully, you'll do that and have a great customer journey experience throughout your conversion process. We will see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
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!
Thursday, September 25, 2014
How Top Restaurants Serve Up and Stack Up in Mobile SEO
How to Work When Nothing Seems to Work
How to Add a Facebook Style Timeline in WordPress
Do you like the Facebook timeline design? Want to add a timeline style design on your site? Well now you can. While there are several WordPress themes that display posts in a Facebook’s timeline style, what if you wanted to display it only for a… Read More »
To leave a comment please visit How to Add a Facebook Style Timeline in WordPress on WPBeginner.
Chasing Google Changes to Authors and HTTPS
17 Quick Wins to Boost Your Social Media Marketing Right Away
When I set up a daily to-do list, I often have a spectrum of tasks that need to get done. There are the big projects that figure to take multiple days to complete. There are medium-sized tasks that will require some long stretches of intense focus. Then there are the quick wins.
I love the quick wins.
These are the tasks that can be done in a matter of minutes. They’re super fast fixes or experiments that take little time but pay ...
The post 17 Quick Wins to Boost Your Social Media Marketing Right Away appeared first on Social.
Accidents Are Great for Link-Building
The 2014 #MozCon Video Bundle Has Arrived!
Posted by EricaMcGillivray
Your advanced course, the videos from MozCon 2014, is finally here. Whether you're looking for the latest dive into SEO, wondering what you should be doing with mobile, or figuring out how to step up your PR, the MozCon videos have a bit of everything from leading industry experts.
For MozCon 2014 attendees, you should've received an email with your unique URL for a "free" copy of the videos, included in your ticket cost.
MozCon 2014 was the best ever! I know, we say that every year, but I swear on Roger's antenna that it really was. We've settled into our new home at the Washington State Convention Center, and hosted 1,400 people at this year's gathering (a sellout crowd!). There were 28 future-focused sessions, cram-packed with advice and actionable recommendations from some of the industry's most innovative minds. Topics ranged from SEO and A/B testing to analytics and content marketing. Here's a taste:
How did attendees like the sessions?
This year, 43% of attendees took our post-MozCon survey, and here's what they had to say about the content:
56.3% said 80%+ were perfect and 36.6% said 50%+ were interesting.
Tell me more about these videos
If you're wondering why it takes two months to produce and perfect these videos post-MozCon, it's because we go the extra mile to create something easy-to-digest for you. Our videos show both the presenter and their presentation, so you don't have to hide the presenter's face to flip through a slide deck. You can also download each deck, so you've got easy access to links and reference tools.
- 28 videos (over 17 hours) from MozCon 2014
- Stream or download the videos to your computer, tablet, phone, phablet, or whatever you've got handy
- Downloadable slide decks for all presentations
Non-subscribers: Save $100 by signing up for a free 30-day trial of Moz Pro!
The 2014 free presentation
Each year, we release one of the top presentations for everyone to watch for free. Last year, we gave away Kyle Rush's on CRO, and the year before, Wil Reynold's #RCS.
This year, check out "Prove Your Value" with Dana DiTomaso, partner at Kick Point; she talks you through the best ways of reporting your work to your client or boss.
Still not convinced? Enjoy our cat Pinterest board. Or, if you're super-excited about MozCon and interested in the live show, buy your early bird ticket for MozCon 2015. We sold out this year, and expect to do so again, so get 'em while they last!
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!
Wednesday, September 24, 2014
Google's New Structured Snippets Pull Facts Into a Page's Search Results
Cortana Makes Her Way to Windows 9
Recover From Panda? Follow These 5 Steps to Avoid Future Panda Hits
Maximize Your Holiday Prep for Google Shopping
How to Connect Google Drive to your WordPress Media Library
Google Drive offers 15 GB of free cloud storage to all Google account users. With newer Android phones people can auto upload photos to their Google Drive account. Recently one of our users asked us if if it was possible to connect Google Drive with… Read More »
To leave a comment please visit How to Connect Google Drive to your WordPress Media Library on WPBeginner.
Broken Link Building Bible: The New Testament
Posted by russvirante
It was a little over a year ago that I first wrote the "Broken Link Building Bible" and it seemed like it was time for an update. If you haven't had a chance yet, please head over to the original, as most of it is still highly relevant today, and it contains the basics which will not be covered in this post.
Table of contents
Ethical guidelines: The BLB Commandments
Content commandments
- Thou shalt not cloak: Cloaking with broken link building usually takes the form of recreating content and then using either the canonical tag or traditional IP delivery techniques to point Googlebot towards a more commercial site. You really aren't going to get a huge boost out of using this technique, and more importantly, you are missing out on the opportunity to build a genuinely great site. If you are already creating content that's good enough to form a successful BLB campaign, why not just expose that content on your site? It's a big risk for a little reward.
- Thou shalt not plagiarize: Sorry, folks, but you can't just copy the old site or page off of Archive.org and expect to get away with it. You're asking for a DMCA complaint. How hard is it to update content? Also, link to the original creator's website for good measure!
- Thou shalt not bait and switch: This is just like slow cloaking. Why kill really good content on your site that deserves links, only to redirect to a page that doesn't? Use BLB as a platform for developing a great, content-rich website.
- Thou shalt not commit identity theft: This one is really egregious. If you find a whole domain that is now expired, don't simply recreate the whole site and then send emails from that site as if you are the original owner. Seriously, I can't believe I have to write this, but I have seen it in the wild.
Outreach commandments
- Thou shalt not automate sends: The fastest way to kill a campaign is to just send out thousands of automated emails. You will get terrible conversion rates, piss off webmasters, get your IP blacklisted, and waste good prospects. Take your time to hand-select your targets and customize your emails.
- Thou shalt not send unrelated emails: Not all broken links are good opportunities. Only send emails to prospects whose sites have a good likelihood of playing ball. I have seen campaigns where success rates are 10%+ because the link builder was careful enough in the prospecting process. If you send too many requests to unrelated sites, your deliverability will suffer.
- Thou shalt not misrepresent: There is no need to lie to your prospect. Don't pretend to be some kid working on a project or say "I was visiting your site when...". You will see in the outreach templates below that there are some really strong pitch emails that don't require you lie. You'll sleep better at night, and trust me, genuine-sounding emails do a lot better than disingenuous ones.
Advanced prospecting techniques
Section discovery
- Go through the normal procedures of identifying relevant BLB opportunities following the steps outlined in the BLB Bible.
- Use a backlink tool like Open Site Explorer to export the Top Pages from the site that has the broken link opportunity. For example, if you found a broken link to http://www.joesite.com/important-page.html, you would want to run a Top Pages report for the joesite.com domain.
- Export the results by setting "filter by status codes 400 or greater" (this will pick up both 404s and error pages). Finally, visit the archive.org versions of these pages to see if any are strong opportunities.
- Click on the list icon next to the opportunity you want to examine for section 404s
- Click on the Archive link to look at the archive pages to see if it matches your campaign
- [Pro Tip] If you find a great opportunity, mine its backlinks for more broken link opportunities or use it as a URL campaign inside BrokenLinkBuilding.com
Site discovery
- Register the domain using your valid contact information
- Do not re-launch the site
- Begin reclaiming links through Broken Link Building like you always have
- If and when the original webmaster reaches out to ask why you now own the domain s/he accidentally dropped, offer to transfer it back to them and build a relationship that could earn you a link from that site as well.
Advanced content creation
- Think Panda: If you have never read through the Panda Questionnaire before, take a look at it here in the section labeled "Briefly: What is the Panda Algorithm". Your BLB content should try and hit these guidelines with perfect precision. Make sure your content is insightful, well written, thorough, and cleanly designed. Spending extra time with your content will make a huge difference in conversion rate.
- Be obvious about the publish date: The last thing that a webmaster wants to do is replace one broken link with another. They need to feel confident that the replacement you are offering them won't get outdated any time soon. The easiest way to do this is make it clear that the content has been updated by a certain date. In fact, I recommend including this in the outreach email, saying something like... "this one was updated recently and seems to cover the same content..."
- Be thorough: The webmaster you reach out to may only be interested in a small part of the page they once linked to. A giant resource page on cancer may have a specific statistic they are citing, or a description of a particular treatment option. Make sure that your content covers all the bases. Once again, this ties into the outreach itself and explains why the one-to-one email campaigns do better than automated campaigns. If you look at your target's site before emailing them, you know which sections to point out in the outreach email that show why the new link you propose meets her/his needs.
- Citations: Unless your site is already a well known and respected brand, chances are you need to build up your credibility a bit before you start asking people to link to your content. Make sure your site is Wikipedia-esque in its outbound linking and citations. You will often find that many of the sites which you are reaching out to actually have great content that you can cite in your own work. Nothing increases the likelihood of a converted outreach email than the webmaster finding their own content properly cited as part of the body of research behind a strong content piece.
Advanced outreach
Short-form
- Subject: found a broken link on ##page##
- Body: Just wanted to let you know there is a broken link to ##broken## on your page ##page##. Found this instead ##replacement##. Might want to fix it.
Long-form
- Inbox justification
- Custom pitch
- Thank you
- Inbox Justification: Go ahead and get out on the table why you are emailing the webmaster. They don't know who you are and the least you can do is offer them early on a reason to read your email. Don't lie. You don't have to say "I was reading your website and I found...". Just say something to the effect of: "Hi, I am ##name## and I noticed that you have a broken link to ##broken resource name## (##broken resource link##) on your ##page name## (##page url##)." No need to mention the replacement yet.
- Personal Touch: Here is where you explain why your replacement is a good fit and why you are personally invested in it. Go ahead and say if you are the business owner. If you created excellent content, there is nothing to be ashamed of! Tell them why you care about people finding the right content and how yours improves upon the one you are replacing. Give them a reason to believe if they add your link that it will stay updated for the long haul. Normally, you want to touch 3 main points: it's new and improved, it's here for the long run, and you are personally invested in guaranteeing that.
- Thank You: Finally, be cordial and grateful that someone took the time out of their day to read your email. Don't just say "thanks," but actually express some gratitude for not hitting the delete button the second it showed up in their inbox. You'd be surprised, but genuine thankfulness is so rare in emails these days that many people are shocked to just have someone be nice. Honestly, when is the last time you wrote an email where the send off was something more than "thx" or just your name?
Double tap
Slow play
The bandwagon
Revelation
- There is a limited, although renewable, supply of opportunities
- Content creation is often necessary for success
- Quality drives conversion rates
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!
Tuesday, September 23, 2014
Bing Unveils Responsive Design for Image Search
How to Create and Manage the Perfect Facebook Page for Your Business: The Complete A to Z Guide
As small business owners and brand managers, you’ve probably heard that you need to be on Facebook.
Great! So where should you start? And is there an easy blueprint to follow?
We’ve experimented a lot with various Facebook marketing tips over the past several months, and we’ve enjoyed figuring out the best way to create and manage our Facebook page here at Buffer. I’d love to share with you how the process has worked so far!
Since things continue to change regularly with Facebook ...
The post How to Create and Manage the Perfect Facebook Page for Your Business: The Complete A to Z Guide appeared first on Social.
Bing Announces Responsive Design for Image Search
Responding to Device Changes in Google and Bing
Links, FUD, and Webmaster Guidelines
7 Best Live Chat Support Software for Your WordPress Site
Did you know that nearly 67% users on eCommerce websites abandon their shopping carts without ever making to the checkout page? People like to get answers for their questions, and they want them instantly. This is where live chat comes in. It offers users the… Read More »
To leave a comment please visit 7 Best Live Chat Support Software for Your WordPress Site on WPBeginner.
A Content Strategy Template You Can Build On
Posted by Isla_McKetta
Picture it. A room full of executives from a company you never thought you could land as a client. They're so engaged in what they are saying that they're leaning forward in their chairs. The CEO looks poised to ask a question but you can tell she doesn't want to interrupt your flow.
This is the moment content strategists dream of.
But if you're like me, it's easy to get caught up in how new the field is and wonder, "Am I even doing this right?" There are lots of posts to help you, such as How to Build a Content Marketing Strategy and Content Strategy: You're Doing it Wrong. There are also comprehensive guides to creating content strategies. There's even an epic list of content strategy resources. And there are books (my favorite is Kristina Halvorson and Melissa Rach's Content Strategy for the Web).
Still, sometimes you just want to peek over someone else's shoulder at a concrete example to see if there's anything you can learn. This can be especially true if you're working in-house and don't have anyone to bounce ideas off of.
So, I built a template.
What a content strategy should look like
Content strategies take many forms, from a 50-page word document to an hour-long PowerPoint presentation. That means this template is not meant to be gospel. Instead, it introduces you to the many moving parts that make up a content strategy and gives you an example of how I, based on the years I spent consulting on content strategies for everything from stock photography to software as a service, would write it up.
Peek over my shoulder to get your next strategy started, or just to get a glimpse of how someone else approaches a strategy. Build on this template and make it your own. You'll find that the template is written from an agency perspective (with lots of references to "the client") but it works equally well if you are in-house and are writing for that one, all-important client—your boss.
What goes into a content strategy
The content strategy template walks you through researching and writing up the three key elements of a content strategy: what content looks like now, what it should look like, and the ecosystem in which content is created.
Content today
A strategy should provide an assessment of the client's current content, as well as insight into their competitors' content. That assessment may include any or all of the following:
- Personas
- Stakeholder interviews
- Content inventory
- Content audit
- Gap analysis
- Competitive analysis
Content in the future
Then you want to show your client where the content should take them and how they can use various channels to get there. Some of many places content resides are:
Onsite content
- Homepage
- Landing pages
- Category pages
- Product descriptions
- Blog
- Error pages
- Etc.
Offsite content
- Emails
- Social media
- Brochures
- Packaging
- Invoices
- Voicemail messages
- Etc.
Governance (aka the content ecosystem)
Finally, you want to think about the environment in which the content gets created—the governance of content. This includes:
- Brand, voice, and style guidelines
- Workflow analysis
- Best practices for writing on the web
- SEO tips
- Editorial calendar
See the template for more in-depth descriptions of all of these elements as well as some of my favorite tools to get them done.
Again, take these pieces and use them to create your own template. Each strategy you do will require its own tweaks, but this will give you the leg up to put your own stamp on this emerging field.
The storytelling of content strategy
My brand of content strategy, and you'll see this reflected a little in the template, is that a content strategy is a story. For a deeper understanding of this, check out the Mozinar I gave a few weeks ago, The Storytelling of Content Strategy.
Basically, I advocate for taking the elements of fiction and using them to get a fresh perspective on a brand's journey toward a goal.
Here's how the five elements of a story are also the basis of a content strategy:
1. Brands and customers are heroes
A content strategy can either be about a brand's journey to land a customer (useful when a brand is new or has lost its way), or a content strategy can be about a customer's journey and how the brand can help. See the webinar for an example of each.
2. Your current landscape is your ground situation
You can't start a strategy until you know where your hero is coming from. Most of the initial research you do—from stakeholder interviews to content inventories and audits—is to understand the starting point of your strategy. This is where the journey begins. You will be measuring all future success against the understanding you build of this landscape.
3. Goals articulate your central desire
You can't plot a strategy if you don't know what direction the brand wants to grow. Goals should come from the brand itself, but you might find that the brand needs a little coaching. It's helpful if you distinguish overall business goals from content goals. They are related, but there are some goals (e.g. reducing employee turnover) that content plays a much smaller role in achieving. Setting specific goals for your content strategy also lets you get more granular about some goals in which content is the star player (e.g. increasing email open rate).
4. Competitors are antagonists
Even if you're going to write the most TAGFEE content strategy ever, you still need to figure out where your competitors are and how you can learn from their example. And it's important to remember that because of the way search engines work, your business competitors might be different than your SERP competitors. Ideally a content strategy will address both.
5. Plot is strategy
At this point in the story, you know who the players are, what's working and what's not, and have some ideas about how to move forward to achieve those goals.
When I write up a strategy, I think about them as though I were plotting a novel. Each tactic or channel is a way to move the brand closer to those goals. What obstacles might they encounter? Who are they competing with in the space? How can they master this tactic or channel? And how can content help them achieve their goals and ride happily off into the sunset?
Making a content strategy your own
Now it's time to download that template and see what story your content strategy is trying to tell. Once you're confident in the strategy you're presenting, you'll have the complete attention of every executive in that conference room. And, with any luck, they'll refer you to their friends.
I want to learn from you, too. Is there anything you'd include in the template that I haven't covered? Do you have any strategies for success in presenting content strategies or any lessons learned? Please share your ideas and stories in the comments.
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!
Monday, September 22, 2014
Bing Ads Reveals Dynamic Sitelinks
How to use Keyword Research to Find New Landing Page Testing Ideas
Squarespace vs WordPress – Which one is better? (Pros and Cons)
WordPress is the most popular content management system in the world, but it is not the only option. There are other platforms that can help you build your website. Recently, one of our users asked us to to compare Squarespace vs. WordPress because they were… Read More »
To leave a comment please visit Squarespace vs WordPress – Which one is better? (Pros and Cons) on WPBeginner.
The 15 Best Browser Extensions to Improve Your Social Media Marketing
There are a few actions I perform over and over again as I work through my social media marketing plan. Do you know the feeling? You click on the same few buttons or type in the same URL.
And then, one day, someone shows you a browser extension that completely rocks your world for the better.
I’d love to share some of those world-rocking browser extensions with you today. There’re several great options out there to supercharge your browser and streamline the ...
The post The 15 Best Browser Extensions to Improve Your Social Media Marketing appeared first on Social.
Centralizing Location Data: 3 Steps to Local SEO Success
Tuesday, September 16, 2014
4 Things Search Marketers Can Do to Ensure a Happy Holiday
How to Auto Adjust WordPress Sidebar to Match Content Height
Widgets make it super easy to add cool things to our WordPress sidebar. However, sometimes your sidebars can become much longer than the actual content area. Recently a user asked if there was a way to automatically make the sidebar height the same as the… Read More »
To leave a comment please visit How to Auto Adjust WordPress Sidebar to Match Content Height on WPBeginner.
Why Retailers Should Start Their Pay-Per-Click Christmas Campaigns Now
How to Combine Screaming Frog Data with Google Analytics Data
Posted by Iamoldskool
This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.
I love Screaming Frog. It is without doubt the best SEO tool I use on a daily basis (no offense, Moz). The sheer amount of data you can get about your website, or someone else's website, is incredible. You can find broken links, you can check for your Google Analytics (or any other) code on all pages through the custom search, and you can even go so far as to follow all the redirects and find out the redirect paths in a website.
In this quick guide, I'm going to show how Screaming Frog data can be used to help perform a content audit.
The data in Screaming Frog is incredible, but one thing it can't do (yet…give it time) is tell you how popular your pages are. For that, you need an analytics package. We're going to be working with Google Analytics on this one, as it's probably the most well known (and well used) of the analytics services out there, and we're going to combine the two data streams into one to give you a full overview of your content and just how popular it is. As this data is from a website I work with (rather than my own), I'm going to hide the URLs in the screenshots for obvious reasons.
Why would you want to do this?
Combining Google Analytics data with your Screaming Frog data has a myriad of advantages. You can get an overall picture of your site and identify any issues that are occurring on popular pages. You can see which pages within your site have no page views at all, or the ones that have very few page views. Maybe there are issues on these pages that become immediately apparent when you combine the two datasets.
Getting your data
Step 1: Screaming Frog
Spider the website you're working with in Screaming Frog. Just type the URL in the box and click go, and off it goes getting all the data from your website.
Filter the list to just include HTML and hit export:
Step 2: Google Analytics
Head over to Google Analytics and go to the "All Pages" tab:
Set a decent data range of a couple of months so you get some decent data (especially if it's a low traffic site), and set "show rows" at the bottom to 5,000 so you get as much data as possible.
"Hang on a minute, Jim," you're saying….I have a lot more than 5,000 in my list. How do I get the rest? Well, that's a simple hack. Go to the URL at the top and look at the end of it for the 5000. It will look something like this:
Now just up that figure to cover all of your page views, and you'll have a huge long list. I have 9,347 on my list, so I'm going to up it to 10,000.
Great. Now export that data to an Excel file:
Now you have the two sets of data in Microsoft Excel format. Next, we're going to combine these two data sources into one
First step. Open them up and put them both into a single excel file on different worksheets, then label them so you know which is which:
Now, make a third empty worksheet for your compiled data. Here's a view of the worksheets you should have at this point:
To make this work, we'll need the URL (page name column) to be the same on both sheets. The Screaming Frog data contains the domain, where as the GA data doesn't, so use find and replace on the Screaming Frog data to remove the domain up to the first trailing slash. The two data sources should now have URLs that match.
With me so far? Great. Now it's time to link the data sets together and get that lovely combined data in your third worksheet.
Linking the data
OK. Go to your Screaming Frog worksheet and select all the data and on the formula tab, click define name – give it an easily identifiable name (I would name it the same as your worksheet).
Then do the same with the GA data: Select it > Formula Tab > Define name > Name it the same as the worksheet.
Got both of them defined? Groovy, time to put this data together.
Save your file.
Go to your third worksheet, named "compiled data."
Then on the data tab, select "From Other Sources" then From Microsoft Query.
It will then ask you to choose your data source, choose excel file from the options and click OK. Then, find your saved Excel file and select it; you'll be given the option to include your two named data sources.
Select both, and add them to columns in your query. Click next, you'll then be presented with what looks like an error message (but isn't really).
Click OK.
Then drag "Page" on the GA Data onto "Address" on the Screaming Frog Data like this
And, you'll notice all the data from the two data sources below will reorganise itself.
Then, click file > "Return data to Microsoft Excel."
On the next one, just click ok… and that's it. You should now have a single worksheet with the combined data from Screaming Frog and Google Analytics to play with and do what you want.
Hope my little tutorial made sense and people find it of use. I'd love to hear what other people use this tutorial to accomplish in the comments :-)
Thanks all!
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!