Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'The Future of User Behavior -
Whiteboard Friday'
Posted by willcritchlow
In the early days of search, Google used only your typed query to find the
most relevant results. We're now increasingly seeing SERPs that are influenced
by all kinds of contextual information â the implicit queries.
In today's Whiteboard Friday, Will Critchlow covers what exactly that means
and how it might explain why we see "(not provided)" in our analytics more often
than we'd like.
WBF - Will Critchlow - The Future of User Behavior
PRO Tip: Learn more about how Google ranks pages at Moz Academy.
For reference, here's a still image of this week's whiteboard:
Video Transcription
Hi, Moz fans. I'm Will Critchlow, one of the founders of Distilled, and I
want to talk today about the future of user behavior, something that I've been
talking about a MozCon this year. In particular, I want to talk about the
implications of query enhancement. So I'm going to start by telling you what we
mean by this phrase.
Old-school query, key phrase, this is what we've talked about for a long
time. In SEO, something like "London tube stations," a bunch of words strung
together, that's the entire query, and we would call it a query or a key phrase.
But we've been defining this what we call the "new query" made up of two parts.
The explicit query here in blue is London tube stations, again, in this example,
exactly the same. What we're calling the "implicit query" is essentially all of
the other information that the search engine knows about you, and this what they
know about you in general, what they know about you at this specific moment in
time, and what they know about your recent history and any other factors they
want to factor in.
So, in this particular case, I've said this is an iPhone user, they're on
the street, they're in London. You can imagine how this information changes the
kind of thing that you might be looking for when you perform a query like this
or indeed any other.
This whole model is something that we've been kind of building out and
thinking about a lot this year. Tom Anthony, one of my colleagues in London,
presented this at a conference, and we've been working on it together. We came
up with this kind of visual representation of what we think is happening over
time. As people get used to this behavior, they see it in the search results,
and they adapt to the information that they're receiving back from the search
engine.
So old school search results where everybody's search result was exactly the
same, if they performed a particular query, no matter where in the world they
were, wherever in the country they were, whatever device they were on, whatever
time of day it was, whatever their recent history, everybody's was the same. In
other words, the only information that the search engine is taking into account
in this case is the old-style query, the explicit part.
Then, what we've seen is that there's gradually been this implicit query
information being added on top. You may not be able to see it from my brilliant
hand-drawn diagram here, but my intention is that these blue bars are the same
height out to here. So, at this point, there's all of the explicit query
information being passed over. In other words, I'm doing the same kind of search
I've always done. But Google is taking into account this extra, implicit
information about me, what it knows about me, what it knows about my device,
what it knows about my history and so forth. Therefore, Google has more
information here than they did previously. They can return better results.
That's kind of what we've been talking about for a long time, I think, this
evolution of better search results based on the additional information that the
search engines have about us. But what we're starting to see and what we're
certainly predicting is going to become more and more prevalent is that as the
implicit information that search engines have grows, and, in particular, as
their ability to use that information intelligently improves, then we're
actually going to see users start to give less explicit information over. In
other words, they're going to trust that the search engines are going to pull
out the implicit information that they need. So I can do a much shorter, simpler
query.
But what you see here is, again, to explain my hand-drawn diagram in case
it's not perfectly beautiful, the blue bars are declining here. In other words,
I'm sending less and less explicit information over as time goes along. But
actually, the total information that search engines have to work with, as time
goes on, is actually increasing, because the implicit information they're
gathering is growing faster than the explicit information is declining.
I can give you a concrete example of this. So I vividly remember giving a
talk about keyword research, and it was a few years ago. I was kind of mocking
that business owner. We've all met these business owners who want to rank for
the one-word key phrase. So I want to rank for restaurant or whatever. I say,
"This is ridiculous. What in the world can you imagine somebody is possibly
looking for when they do a search of 'restaurant.' "
Back then, if you did a search like that, you got a kind of weird mix,
because this is back in these days when there essentially no implicit
information being taken in. You've got a mix of the most powerful websites of
actual restaurants anywhere in your country plus some news, like a powerful page
on a big domain, those kinds of things. Probably a Wikipedia entry. Why would a
business owner want to rank for that stuff? That's going to convert horribly
poorly.
But my mind was changed powerfully when I caught myself. I was in Boston,
and I caught myself doing a search for "breakfast." I went to Google, typed in
"breakfast," hit Search. What was I thinking? What exactly was I hoping the
outcome was going to be here? Well, actually, I've trained myself to believe
that all of this other implicit information is going to be taken into account,
and, in fact, it was. So, instead of getting that old-style Wikipedia entry, a
news result, a couple of random restaurants from somewhere in the country, I got
a local pack, and I got some local Boston news articles on the top 10 places to
have breakfast in Boston. It was all customized to my exact location, so I got
some stuff that was really near me, and I found a great place to have breakfast
just around the corner from the hotel. So that worked.
I've actually noticed myself doing this more and more, and I imagine, given
obviously the industry I work in, I'm pretty much an early adopter here. But I
think we're going to see all users adopt this style of searching more and more,
and it's really going to change how we as marketers have to think, because it
doesn't mean that you need to go out there and rank for the generic keyword
"breakfast." But it does mean that you need to take into account all of the
possible ways that people might be searching for these things and the various
different ways that Google might piece together a useful search result when
somebody gives them such apparently unhelpful explicit information, in
particular, obviously, in this case, local.
I kind of mentioned "not provided" down here. This is my one, I guess, non-
conspiracy theory view of what could be going on with the whole not provided
thing, which is that actually, if Google's model is looking more and more like
this and less like this, and, in particular, as we get further over to this end,
and of course, you can consider something like Google Now would be the extreme
of this where is in fact no blue bar and pure orange, then actually the reliance
on keywords goes away. Maybe the not provided thing is actually more of a
strategic message for Google, kind of saying, "We're not necessarily thinking in
terms of keywords anymore. We're thinking in terms of your need at a given
moment in time."
So, anyway, I hope that's been a useful kind of rapid-fire run through over
what I think is going to happen as people get used to the power of query
enhancement. I'm Will Critchlow. Until next time, thanks.
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!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/q7SRw_daRbk/the-future-of-user-behavior-whiteboard-friday
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Friday 30 August 2013
Thursday 29 August 2013
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'The Web Developer's SEO Cheat
Sheet 2.0'
Posted by DannyDover
It is my honor and privilege today to introduce the brand-new version of The
Web Developer's SEO Cheat Sheet. This free and downloadable document covers all
of the important SEO code and best practices that are needed by online marketers
and developers.
Benefits and features
Save the Google searches for your new inbound visitors: This cheat sheet covers
all of the details you would normally spend hours researching online. This
leaves you with more time for the important things (like laughing at
JennaMarbles or pretending you don't watch Vine compilations).
Available both online and offline: You can store the free downloadable PDF
wherever you want. Save a hard drive, kill a tree! (It's printable.)
Updated for the inbound marketer: With new sections like responsive design and
rel="author", you can uphold your flawless nerd reputation by publicly shaming
those who make syntax errors in their code (and are foolish enough not to
download this cheat sheet!).
Information covered
If it is important, we have you covered!
Page 1
Important HTML Elements
HTTP Status Codes
Canonicalization
URL Best Practices
Webmaster Tools
Page 2
Robot Control Syntax
Important User-agents
Sitemap Syntax
Page 3
Facebook Open Graph
Twitter Cards
Google+
Google+ Authorship
Google+ Publisher
Page 4
Targeting Multiple Languages
Mobile Web Development (Responsive Design)
Backstory:
It has been five years since I created the first version of this cheat sheet.
Frustrated with how hard it was to find technical SEO information, I stayed up
an entire night crafting the original resource. Without getting a second
opinion, I blindly posted it on the company blog and went into the office.
At the time, I was still establishing my professional self and was an intern
at Moz. The company was small, and the future of my unpaid internship was
uncertain.
The blog post announcing the new cheat sheet resource went on to become the
most popular blog post (as judged by thumbs) in the company's history (in fact,
it still is!). The cheat sheet was heavily distributed on popular sites of the
day and drove an incredible amount of much-needed links to the still-developing
SEOmoz domain.
The Moz team was super excited about how many people the resource was
helping, and I gained some desperately needed clout. When Rand tried to show his
excitement over the piece, I learned an incredibly valuable lesson about
intra-office communication.
Note to interns everywhere. Don't actually make vocal sound effects when your
get the opportunity to "blow up" your boss's impromptu pound handshake.
Rand: Great job, Danny! Pound it!
*Reaches out fist in congratulatory manner*
Me: BOOOOM! POW! EXPLOSION!
*Confusion followed by reddened face*â *Saddened apology*
Rand: Erm... good job anyways!
Despite my social mishap :-), Rand and the team continued supporting me and
this resource. Today's version is better than the original and even more
valuable.
Looking back, the Moz team was absolutely fundamental in shaping me into the
person I am today. My career at Moz was some of the most important years of my
life thus far.
After leaving Moz in early 2011, I used the many habits and skills I learned
from the talented team and continued to step up my career.
Thanks to Moz (and partly due to the original version of this cheat sheet), I
am now living my ideal lifestyle by pursuing my bucket list full-time. You can
read more about my story here.
Thank you!
A very special thanks to Cyrus and Dawn Shepard for making this new resource
a reality. Your long hours and persistence have been inspiring. Thanks to the
Moz design team for your artful assets and gleeful glamour (those are good
things!).
Lastly, thanks to all of you for downloading and making this thing a success.
You all rock!
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!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/bKdIvqysWwc/the-web-developers-seo-cheat-sheet-2013-edition
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Sheet 2.0'
Posted by DannyDover
It is my honor and privilege today to introduce the brand-new version of The
Web Developer's SEO Cheat Sheet. This free and downloadable document covers all
of the important SEO code and best practices that are needed by online marketers
and developers.
Benefits and features
Save the Google searches for your new inbound visitors: This cheat sheet covers
all of the details you would normally spend hours researching online. This
leaves you with more time for the important things (like laughing at
JennaMarbles or pretending you don't watch Vine compilations).
Available both online and offline: You can store the free downloadable PDF
wherever you want. Save a hard drive, kill a tree! (It's printable.)
Updated for the inbound marketer: With new sections like responsive design and
rel="author", you can uphold your flawless nerd reputation by publicly shaming
those who make syntax errors in their code (and are foolish enough not to
download this cheat sheet!).
Information covered
If it is important, we have you covered!
Page 1
Important HTML Elements
HTTP Status Codes
Canonicalization
URL Best Practices
Webmaster Tools
Page 2
Robot Control Syntax
Important User-agents
Sitemap Syntax
Page 3
Facebook Open Graph
Twitter Cards
Google+
Google+ Authorship
Google+ Publisher
Page 4
Targeting Multiple Languages
Mobile Web Development (Responsive Design)
Backstory:
It has been five years since I created the first version of this cheat sheet.
Frustrated with how hard it was to find technical SEO information, I stayed up
an entire night crafting the original resource. Without getting a second
opinion, I blindly posted it on the company blog and went into the office.
At the time, I was still establishing my professional self and was an intern
at Moz. The company was small, and the future of my unpaid internship was
uncertain.
The blog post announcing the new cheat sheet resource went on to become the
most popular blog post (as judged by thumbs) in the company's history (in fact,
it still is!). The cheat sheet was heavily distributed on popular sites of the
day and drove an incredible amount of much-needed links to the still-developing
SEOmoz domain.
The Moz team was super excited about how many people the resource was
helping, and I gained some desperately needed clout. When Rand tried to show his
excitement over the piece, I learned an incredibly valuable lesson about
intra-office communication.
Note to interns everywhere. Don't actually make vocal sound effects when your
get the opportunity to "blow up" your boss's impromptu pound handshake.
Rand: Great job, Danny! Pound it!
*Reaches out fist in congratulatory manner*
Me: BOOOOM! POW! EXPLOSION!
*Confusion followed by reddened face*â *Saddened apology*
Rand: Erm... good job anyways!
Despite my social mishap :-), Rand and the team continued supporting me and
this resource. Today's version is better than the original and even more
valuable.
Looking back, the Moz team was absolutely fundamental in shaping me into the
person I am today. My career at Moz was some of the most important years of my
life thus far.
After leaving Moz in early 2011, I used the many habits and skills I learned
from the talented team and continued to step up my career.
Thanks to Moz (and partly due to the original version of this cheat sheet), I
am now living my ideal lifestyle by pursuing my bucket list full-time. You can
read more about my story here.
Thank you!
A very special thanks to Cyrus and Dawn Shepard for making this new resource
a reality. Your long hours and persistence have been inspiring. Thanks to the
Moz design team for your artful assets and gleeful glamour (those are good
things!).
Lastly, thanks to all of you for downloading and making this thing a success.
You all rock!
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!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/bKdIvqysWwc/the-web-developers-seo-cheat-sheet-2013-edition
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Wednesday 28 August 2013
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, '5 Lessons Learned from 100,000
Usability Studies'
Posted by Phil Sharp
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.
It happens all the time.
People get confused, frustrated, and angry while using websites. They sigh,
they groan, and sometimes they even shout. I see it happen with my own eyes each
and every day.
Over the years at UserTesting.com weâve literally watched hundreds of
thousands of usability studies, which gives us a unique perspective into some of
the most common issues that impact users. Iâd like to share five of those
insights with you.
1) Avoid multi-level navs
The person in the video below is struggling to move her mouse through multiple
levels of navigation. Just when she thinks she's made it to the item she's
looking for, the entire navigation disappears. We see this every day on many
different sites and it always frustrates the users.
This person is having a hard time using the site's navigation.
A fix to consider
One possible alternative to this type of navigation is to take an approach
similar to Amazon.com, and have an entire section pop out.
On Amazon.com, the entire section pops out.
This approach makes life much easier for your visitors. Not only does it
remove the need for them to delicately maneuver their mouses, but it also lets
them see all of their options at once. Plus, it gives you the freedom to add
images and other styling to your nav.
For other possible solutions, and a more in-depth look into creating
easy-to-use navigation, check out these resources:
Mega Menus Work Well for Site Navigation
Designing Drop-Down Menus: Examples and Best Practices
2) Your categories might be confusing users
As the video below illustrates, the way we categorize things on our websites
might be confusing our visitors. In fact, it's one of the most common things we
see in all of our user tests.
A person looking for a small vacuum for under $50.
In this particular study, it took our participant 48 seconds to find the
category for a small vacuum. She started her search by looking in "electronics,"
then browsed for something called "household," and finally made her way over to
"Home & Garden."
At this point you're likely thinking one of two things:
Either, "Silly person, it's obvious that a vacuum would be in the 'Home &
Garden' section."
Or, "Silly designer, it's obvious that 'Home & Garden' is a confusing
category."
That's why I need to introduce you to the
"Matt-Damon-and-Good-Will-Hunting-Can-Do-No-Wrong" principle.
The principle is simple: it's not your fault. (Side note: if you don't
understand this reference, then do yourself a favor and watch this video.)
It's not your fault. It's not the user's fault. It's not the designer's fault.
In fact, it's nobody's fault. What's crystal clear to you might be confusing to
me, and no one is to blame for that. It's just something we have to work with.
So, what do we do about it?
One of the best ways to test out your site categorization is to sit someone
down in front of your site and ask them to find a specific item without using
internal search. This is simple, fast, powerful, and very painful to watch.
You're bound to see people struggle to find things that seem obvious to you.
When this happens, remember the
"Matt-Damon-and-Good-Will-Hunting-Can-Do-No-Wrong" principle, make some changes
to your categories, and then test again.
Another way to improve your categories is to use a tool like OptimalSort or
TreeJack. OptimalSort is an online card sorting tool that makes it easy to find
out how people think your content should be organized. Then, once you think you
have everything organized nicely, TreeJack helps you prove that this site
structure will work.
3) Internal search is crucial (and frustrating)
There's a good chance that 10% of your site visitors are using your internal
search. When they search for your most popular items, do you know what the
results look like?
From all our studies, we've found four common types of problems with internal
search:
Search results that don't account for typos, plurals, hyphenations, or other
variants
A search box that isn't long enough
Search results that simply don't make any sense
Search results that aren't sorted by priority
To see an example of #4 in action, let's watch yet another person looking for a
vacuum:
When results aren't sorted by relevance, people are bound to see some weird
things.
Because the search results are automatically sorted by "Most Popular," the
first results are for replacement batteries and filtration paper bags! Yikes!
Or, as my 10th-grade Spanish teacher would say, "que barbaridad!"
If you do only one thing
If you do only one thing, look at your internal search logs and find the top
10-20 keywords that people are searching for on your site. Search for each of
these items yourself to see if you're happy with the results.
Then, search for your company's 10 most important products. How do those
results look?
Lastly, look for some generic, non-product terms. For example, if you're an
e-commerce store, search for "returns," "contact," and "hours." Looking good?
If you can perfect these searches, and change your search results to
automatically sort by relevance, you're most of the way there!
4) Links should look like links
As obvious as it sounds, there are many times when links actually don't look
like links. And, as you probably guessed, this means users don't know they can
click on them.
In the video below, this person is requesting a link to the "basic uploader"
without realizing that "basic uploader" is already a link:
"Okay, that's frustrating. It would make more sense to me that you'd have a
link that I could just click on."
What does a link look like?
This won't come as a big surprise, but to make your visitors happy, links
should be colored and underlined. And, ideally, there should be different colors
for links that have been visited and unvisited.
For more info on the topic, check out this great article from the Nielsen
Norman Group, or this post from Moz.
5) Engage your visitors (in other words, don't be boring)
Sometimes websites are perfectly usable â they have great navigation,
clear categories, helpful internal search, and links that look links â but
they suffer from a major problem: They're boring.
Or, put a nicer way, they're not engaging their visitors. People use the site,
and they could easily buy something if they wanted, but they don't feel a
connection to the brand or the product. Frankly, they just don't care.
In the video below, a person is trying out a mobile app for the first time
ever. Listen to the deep sigh she makes and the tone of her voice:
The sound of boredom.
That's the benefit of watching someone use your website, app or product. You
can hear their tone of voice and pick up on things like boredom that you'd miss
if you were just looking at standard analytics data.
It's tempting to always get wrapped up in analytics or usability, but don't
lose sight of engaging your visitors and building your brand.
Tunnel vision
These are only five of the issues that we see pop up often, but really there
are countless ways that our websites can be turning off our visitors.
Thanks to the amount of time we spend on our own sites, we're blind to many of
the issues that are confusing or frustrating our users. We have tunnel vision.
This is what we look like. Unfortunately, most of us aren't this adorable.
That's why it's so important for us to get our sites in front of real people
with fresh eyes who can give us unbiased feedback. While this feedback is
probably going to be painful to hear, it's going to help us all improve our
sites and make the web a better place.
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!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/jGmI40778BM/5-lessons-learned-from-100000-usability-studies
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Usability Studies'
Posted by Phil Sharp
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.
It happens all the time.
People get confused, frustrated, and angry while using websites. They sigh,
they groan, and sometimes they even shout. I see it happen with my own eyes each
and every day.
Over the years at UserTesting.com weâve literally watched hundreds of
thousands of usability studies, which gives us a unique perspective into some of
the most common issues that impact users. Iâd like to share five of those
insights with you.
1) Avoid multi-level navs
The person in the video below is struggling to move her mouse through multiple
levels of navigation. Just when she thinks she's made it to the item she's
looking for, the entire navigation disappears. We see this every day on many
different sites and it always frustrates the users.
This person is having a hard time using the site's navigation.
A fix to consider
One possible alternative to this type of navigation is to take an approach
similar to Amazon.com, and have an entire section pop out.
On Amazon.com, the entire section pops out.
This approach makes life much easier for your visitors. Not only does it
remove the need for them to delicately maneuver their mouses, but it also lets
them see all of their options at once. Plus, it gives you the freedom to add
images and other styling to your nav.
For other possible solutions, and a more in-depth look into creating
easy-to-use navigation, check out these resources:
Mega Menus Work Well for Site Navigation
Designing Drop-Down Menus: Examples and Best Practices
2) Your categories might be confusing users
As the video below illustrates, the way we categorize things on our websites
might be confusing our visitors. In fact, it's one of the most common things we
see in all of our user tests.
A person looking for a small vacuum for under $50.
In this particular study, it took our participant 48 seconds to find the
category for a small vacuum. She started her search by looking in "electronics,"
then browsed for something called "household," and finally made her way over to
"Home & Garden."
At this point you're likely thinking one of two things:
Either, "Silly person, it's obvious that a vacuum would be in the 'Home &
Garden' section."
Or, "Silly designer, it's obvious that 'Home & Garden' is a confusing
category."
That's why I need to introduce you to the
"Matt-Damon-and-Good-Will-Hunting-Can-Do-No-Wrong" principle.
The principle is simple: it's not your fault. (Side note: if you don't
understand this reference, then do yourself a favor and watch this video.)
It's not your fault. It's not the user's fault. It's not the designer's fault.
In fact, it's nobody's fault. What's crystal clear to you might be confusing to
me, and no one is to blame for that. It's just something we have to work with.
So, what do we do about it?
One of the best ways to test out your site categorization is to sit someone
down in front of your site and ask them to find a specific item without using
internal search. This is simple, fast, powerful, and very painful to watch.
You're bound to see people struggle to find things that seem obvious to you.
When this happens, remember the
"Matt-Damon-and-Good-Will-Hunting-Can-Do-No-Wrong" principle, make some changes
to your categories, and then test again.
Another way to improve your categories is to use a tool like OptimalSort or
TreeJack. OptimalSort is an online card sorting tool that makes it easy to find
out how people think your content should be organized. Then, once you think you
have everything organized nicely, TreeJack helps you prove that this site
structure will work.
3) Internal search is crucial (and frustrating)
There's a good chance that 10% of your site visitors are using your internal
search. When they search for your most popular items, do you know what the
results look like?
From all our studies, we've found four common types of problems with internal
search:
Search results that don't account for typos, plurals, hyphenations, or other
variants
A search box that isn't long enough
Search results that simply don't make any sense
Search results that aren't sorted by priority
To see an example of #4 in action, let's watch yet another person looking for a
vacuum:
When results aren't sorted by relevance, people are bound to see some weird
things.
Because the search results are automatically sorted by "Most Popular," the
first results are for replacement batteries and filtration paper bags! Yikes!
Or, as my 10th-grade Spanish teacher would say, "que barbaridad!"
If you do only one thing
If you do only one thing, look at your internal search logs and find the top
10-20 keywords that people are searching for on your site. Search for each of
these items yourself to see if you're happy with the results.
Then, search for your company's 10 most important products. How do those
results look?
Lastly, look for some generic, non-product terms. For example, if you're an
e-commerce store, search for "returns," "contact," and "hours." Looking good?
If you can perfect these searches, and change your search results to
automatically sort by relevance, you're most of the way there!
4) Links should look like links
As obvious as it sounds, there are many times when links actually don't look
like links. And, as you probably guessed, this means users don't know they can
click on them.
In the video below, this person is requesting a link to the "basic uploader"
without realizing that "basic uploader" is already a link:
"Okay, that's frustrating. It would make more sense to me that you'd have a
link that I could just click on."
What does a link look like?
This won't come as a big surprise, but to make your visitors happy, links
should be colored and underlined. And, ideally, there should be different colors
for links that have been visited and unvisited.
For more info on the topic, check out this great article from the Nielsen
Norman Group, or this post from Moz.
5) Engage your visitors (in other words, don't be boring)
Sometimes websites are perfectly usable â they have great navigation,
clear categories, helpful internal search, and links that look links â but
they suffer from a major problem: They're boring.
Or, put a nicer way, they're not engaging their visitors. People use the site,
and they could easily buy something if they wanted, but they don't feel a
connection to the brand or the product. Frankly, they just don't care.
In the video below, a person is trying out a mobile app for the first time
ever. Listen to the deep sigh she makes and the tone of her voice:
The sound of boredom.
That's the benefit of watching someone use your website, app or product. You
can hear their tone of voice and pick up on things like boredom that you'd miss
if you were just looking at standard analytics data.
It's tempting to always get wrapped up in analytics or usability, but don't
lose sight of engaging your visitors and building your brand.
Tunnel vision
These are only five of the issues that we see pop up often, but really there
are countless ways that our websites can be turning off our visitors.
Thanks to the amount of time we spend on our own sites, we're blind to many of
the issues that are confusing or frustrating our users. We have tunnel vision.
This is what we look like. Unfortunately, most of us aren't this adorable.
That's why it's so important for us to get our sites in front of real people
with fresh eyes who can give us unbiased feedback. While this feedback is
probably going to be painful to hear, it's going to help us all improve our
sites and make the web a better place.
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!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/jGmI40778BM/5-lessons-learned-from-100000-usability-studies
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, '2 Million Backlinks and 15 SEO
Answers from Google's Matt Cutts'
Ive covered some pretty controversial topics in recent weeks when it comes to
SEO. Revealing Im a scammer, showing how freshness is being abused and then
doing a follow-up blog post to show the same again. Though at times it may seem
like Im being a bit harsh on Google, I have acknowledged that the [...]
You may view the latest post at
http://www.viperchill.com/2-million-backlinks/
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Answers from Google's Matt Cutts'
Ive covered some pretty controversial topics in recent weeks when it comes to
SEO. Revealing Im a scammer, showing how freshness is being abused and then
doing a follow-up blog post to show the same again. Though at times it may seem
like Im being a bit harsh on Google, I have acknowledged that the [...]
You may view the latest post at
http://www.viperchill.com/2-million-backlinks/
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Tuesday 27 August 2013
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'Comparing the Google+ and Google
Places Page Management Interfaces'
Posted by David Mihm
Caveat: I am definitely not a professional interface designer; this task I
leave largely to the experts on our UX & Design team. My goal behind this post
is to increase usage of Places for Business, however, and raise the visibility
of that destination among the small-business-focused marketing community.
Setting aside the difficulty that Google had integrating Zagat into its
product mix, its own branding difficulties in the Local space have been
well-chronicled. Following the zigzag from Local to Maps to Places to
Places-with-Hotspot, back to just Places, then to Plus-Local, and (finally?)
plain ol' Plus has been like observing a misguided exercise in corporate
alligator escapism.
Although the result of this hodgepodge of brands appears largely the same to
consumers, who probably weren't all that keyed into the evolution anyway,
Google's ill-defined brand in Local has almost certainly been a contributing
factor to its deficit in business owner engagement relative to Facebook.
It's just not clear to the average brick-and-mortar business owner, let alone
the average SEO, where she should go to get started at Google. While Google's
"first responders" in the support forums have been darned consistent in their
mantra of using Places for Business to manage this presence, this destination
gets very little love in Google's mainstream advertising â or even
AdWords. It's impossible to get to from Google's primary business-oriented
pages, and a number of searches (including "Google Plus Local Page") return this
answer.
Which is a shame, because the Plus management interface offers a vastly
inferior experience for business owners. Although I recommended it last year,
here's why I no longer encourage business owners (or SEOs) to use it, and why
I've come around to places.google.com.
The deficiencies of the Google+ page management interface
1. No UI hierarchy
This interface is a jumble of Pinterest-like modules, with none more or less
important than the others. If I were to answer my own question ("What am I
supposed to look at?"), my natural inclination would seem to be the big green
box in the middle â "Start a video call with your followers." Hardly
something the average business owner is going to have time for or get any value
out of.
Meanwhile, attributes that are core to a business's success (categories,
hours, location information) are hidden behind a white-on-white button, and my
natural primary activity (posting as my business rather than as myself) is easy
to miss when juxtaposed alongside the "green monster." It's no wonder that even
LinkedIn beats Google+ for social sharing.
2. Mis-targeting the average SMB
The eager-beaver SMBs who explore the navigation beyond the first page are
likely to find themselves pretty lost. They're asked to install plugins,
buttons, and even connect to the Google APIs console (while being consoled that
it's only a 3-step process). Something like 50% of this audience doesn't even
have a website, and 90% doesn't even have a mobile website, for goodness sake.
3. Slightly misleading insights
The Places dashboard hasn't exactly been a paragon of useful information, but
my main complaint with this tab is presentation, rather than data. There's
actually quite a bit of useful information here, but unfortunately it's hidden
in the default view. "Actions" and "Views" are presented flatly, where a view of
a post is treated with the same importance as a click for driving directions or
into a business's website. So a business is likely to miss out on what are
actually some pretty important metrics, or at least see some inflated numbers.
4. No help
The only way to get help with this far-from-simple product is to click first
into settings, and then into "Learn More" on the section that you're interested
in.
The strengths of the Places management interface
1. Extremely clear messaging
Strong calls to action pop right off the page here: the green-backgrounded
"Complete your business information," the blue-backgrounded "Edit information,"
and even the boringness of the grayed-out "Add photo" area all point directly to
what Google and the SMB are both trying to accomplish with this product.
2. Perfect targeting of the average SMB
It's evident that the designers of the Places Dashboard have spent plenty of
time watching business owners using their product. Clicking the question mark
just once brings up tooltips alongside all the major sections of the tool. Not
only does this decrease the number of questions Google is likely to receive from
business owners, but it answers those questions in a clear, friendly tone that
gives less-sophisticated owners a great first impression of Google's products.
3. Clear(er) insights
This simplistic interface is very transparent about the data it's showing
(number of times this listing appeared in a local search result), and presents a
much more representative view of a business's presence at Google (my page only
has 3 actions) without overcomplicating the situation for the business owner.
4. Terrific tooltips and inline help text
Here's where the experience of the Places team really shines through: They
don't take any pre-existing knowledge of how business listings work for granted,
walking the business owner through every step of the page-creation process.
5. Phone support (!)
And of course, if a business owner isn't able to figure things out on their
own, there are plenty of relevant links directly to the most-commonly asked
questions, and the process highlights Google's revolutionary option of phone
support.
Conclusion
Given how much effort has been put into the Local Business Center / Places for
Business Dashboard over the last several years â and the extremely
polished result those efforts have yielded â I'm surprised Google
continues to throw any energy into promoting the Plus management option to small
businesses, let alone developing and maintaining it.
Any business owner who visits Plus should be sent right over to the Places for
Business Dashboard. It seems to be much more empathetic to the typical business
owner's level of sophistication, and solves their most important needs more
directly than Plus.
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!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/LgqKBSa-ggQ/google-local-page-management-comparison
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Places Page Management Interfaces'
Posted by David Mihm
Caveat: I am definitely not a professional interface designer; this task I
leave largely to the experts on our UX & Design team. My goal behind this post
is to increase usage of Places for Business, however, and raise the visibility
of that destination among the small-business-focused marketing community.
Setting aside the difficulty that Google had integrating Zagat into its
product mix, its own branding difficulties in the Local space have been
well-chronicled. Following the zigzag from Local to Maps to Places to
Places-with-Hotspot, back to just Places, then to Plus-Local, and (finally?)
plain ol' Plus has been like observing a misguided exercise in corporate
alligator escapism.
Although the result of this hodgepodge of brands appears largely the same to
consumers, who probably weren't all that keyed into the evolution anyway,
Google's ill-defined brand in Local has almost certainly been a contributing
factor to its deficit in business owner engagement relative to Facebook.
It's just not clear to the average brick-and-mortar business owner, let alone
the average SEO, where she should go to get started at Google. While Google's
"first responders" in the support forums have been darned consistent in their
mantra of using Places for Business to manage this presence, this destination
gets very little love in Google's mainstream advertising â or even
AdWords. It's impossible to get to from Google's primary business-oriented
pages, and a number of searches (including "Google Plus Local Page") return this
answer.
Which is a shame, because the Plus management interface offers a vastly
inferior experience for business owners. Although I recommended it last year,
here's why I no longer encourage business owners (or SEOs) to use it, and why
I've come around to places.google.com.
The deficiencies of the Google+ page management interface
1. No UI hierarchy
This interface is a jumble of Pinterest-like modules, with none more or less
important than the others. If I were to answer my own question ("What am I
supposed to look at?"), my natural inclination would seem to be the big green
box in the middle â "Start a video call with your followers." Hardly
something the average business owner is going to have time for or get any value
out of.
Meanwhile, attributes that are core to a business's success (categories,
hours, location information) are hidden behind a white-on-white button, and my
natural primary activity (posting as my business rather than as myself) is easy
to miss when juxtaposed alongside the "green monster." It's no wonder that even
LinkedIn beats Google+ for social sharing.
2. Mis-targeting the average SMB
The eager-beaver SMBs who explore the navigation beyond the first page are
likely to find themselves pretty lost. They're asked to install plugins,
buttons, and even connect to the Google APIs console (while being consoled that
it's only a 3-step process). Something like 50% of this audience doesn't even
have a website, and 90% doesn't even have a mobile website, for goodness sake.
3. Slightly misleading insights
The Places dashboard hasn't exactly been a paragon of useful information, but
my main complaint with this tab is presentation, rather than data. There's
actually quite a bit of useful information here, but unfortunately it's hidden
in the default view. "Actions" and "Views" are presented flatly, where a view of
a post is treated with the same importance as a click for driving directions or
into a business's website. So a business is likely to miss out on what are
actually some pretty important metrics, or at least see some inflated numbers.
4. No help
The only way to get help with this far-from-simple product is to click first
into settings, and then into "Learn More" on the section that you're interested
in.
The strengths of the Places management interface
1. Extremely clear messaging
Strong calls to action pop right off the page here: the green-backgrounded
"Complete your business information," the blue-backgrounded "Edit information,"
and even the boringness of the grayed-out "Add photo" area all point directly to
what Google and the SMB are both trying to accomplish with this product.
2. Perfect targeting of the average SMB
It's evident that the designers of the Places Dashboard have spent plenty of
time watching business owners using their product. Clicking the question mark
just once brings up tooltips alongside all the major sections of the tool. Not
only does this decrease the number of questions Google is likely to receive from
business owners, but it answers those questions in a clear, friendly tone that
gives less-sophisticated owners a great first impression of Google's products.
3. Clear(er) insights
This simplistic interface is very transparent about the data it's showing
(number of times this listing appeared in a local search result), and presents a
much more representative view of a business's presence at Google (my page only
has 3 actions) without overcomplicating the situation for the business owner.
4. Terrific tooltips and inline help text
Here's where the experience of the Places team really shines through: They
don't take any pre-existing knowledge of how business listings work for granted,
walking the business owner through every step of the page-creation process.
5. Phone support (!)
And of course, if a business owner isn't able to figure things out on their
own, there are plenty of relevant links directly to the most-commonly asked
questions, and the process highlights Google's revolutionary option of phone
support.
Conclusion
Given how much effort has been put into the Local Business Center / Places for
Business Dashboard over the last several years â and the extremely
polished result those efforts have yielded â I'm surprised Google
continues to throw any energy into promoting the Plus management option to small
businesses, let alone developing and maintaining it.
Any business owner who visits Plus should be sent right over to the Places for
Business Dashboard. It seems to be much more empathetic to the typical business
owner's level of sophistication, and solves their most important needs more
directly than Plus.
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!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/LgqKBSa-ggQ/google-local-page-management-comparison
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Monday 26 August 2013
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'From Keywords to Contexts: the New
Query Model'
Posted by Tom Anthony
As SEOs we talk a lot about "search queries" (or simply "searches"), yet I
think search has outgrown our definition of what exactly a search query is. In
this post I'm going to explain how I think the old definition is fast becoming
less and less useful to us, and also how I believe this is going to mean we're
going to talk about keywords less and less.
Traditional query model
I recently spoke at Kahenacon in Israel about the evolution of search (deck),
where I discussed four trends I identified that were influencing the changes I
expect to see in search over the next 3-4 years. I noticed that there was a
common theme that kept coming up amongst them: Our understanding of what we mean
when we say "query" has become too narrow.
The traditional query model is the one where a search query looks like this:
This is the keyword-focused model we have always used, and it has served us
well for two decades. However, things are changing, and I think we are already
at a point where thinking of a search query in this way is inadequate.
First, let's examine things from Google's perspective. They want to understand
the users intent when they did this search: what the expectation of the user is,
what they are looking for, and more specifically, what search results would best
help answer their query. Some questions Google might ask about the "london tube
stations" query:
Is this a schoolchild looking for a history of the tube stations for some
homework?
Is this someone looking for a list of all the tube station names (we have a
fair amount of drinking games in the UK based on these names)?
Is this someone looking for a tube station?
etc.
There are clearly lots more possible situations, and it is quite hard to
determine what the user wants. However, the keyword(s) I type in are not the
entire query; they are not everything Google has to go on in order to answer
this query. It actually looks more like this to Google:
The query consists of the keywords that we explicitly typed in, but also the
implicit portion of our request based on our context.
With this information, it suddenly becomes a lot easier to determine what the
user is likely looking for and what types of response will best help them.
Furthermore, my example above only gives me a 3-4 extra data points (location,
device, potentially a guess at connection type from IP address and connection
speed). However, Google are using a lot more signals than that (at least 57 if
you aren't logged in), so I imagine the implicit aspect of the query probably
contains a lot more.
New query model
I don't think there is a scenario where Google is not using an implicit aspect
to a query â even if we put aside things such as language and which
version of Google you are using. There are multiple facets to what is covered by
this implicit search (see the next section on context), but the main takeaway is
that the search results are always dependent on some implicit aspects.
Therefore, I think we need to adjust our understanding of what a query is.
After some discussion in the Distilled office, our initial proposal is
relatively simple:
If we accept my premise, then it is hard to move backwards from this
realisation of what a query actually is.
However, a good question at this point might be: does it actually change
anything? Before I try to answer that, let me first try to make sure we are all
understanding what I mean when I say context.
Context: the source of the implicit query
We've talked a lot about âmobile search' and âpersonalised search'
over the last few years in the SEO community. However, I believe both of these
phrases are too narrow:
Mobile search: This has traditionally referred to the device that I'm using, but
that is clearly misleading. More and more people are searching on their
smartphones from their houses. People are using tablets and ultrabooks on the
move. Mobile search should talk about the person and their state (staying still
or on the move). However, it doesn't cover every aspect of their state (are they
walking or driving, are they at work or play, etc.) â so we need something
broader.
Personalised search: A couple of years ago we fought personalised search, doing
things like manipulating the Google query string to try to disable it, as we
wanted to know what the "real results" were. However, I think a wave of
acceptance is washing over the community as we realise that concept is in our
rear view mirror. However, personalised search is only partially responsible for
that. When we talk about personalised search, the common understanding of it
points to a user's preferences (determined by social connections, search history
etc.). To me this causes confusion â if I run the same search at a
different time of the day at a different location, I get different results. Both
are personalised, but personalisation doesn't capture nearly every aspect of why
my search results are different in each case.
Beyond these two examples I imagine there are a whole host of other facets
that are responsible for the customisation of the search results. I've begun
calling all of these various aspects "context." Context encapsulates both mobile
and personalisation, and a whole host of other signals (including those that
Google has yet to discover/begin using).
The implicit-aspect of queries comes from the users' context, so these two
concepts are completely intertwined.
I expect that we are going to continue to see more and more context signals
being used to drive richer and more detailed implicit-aspects to queries. Just a
couple of months ago at Google's I/O conference they announced this new Android
API:
It allows anyone writing an app for Android to ask the phone whether it
believes the user is walking, cycling, or driving. I can certainly imagine this
being part of the implicit query â a good example being a restaurant
search, which might cover a larger radius if I'm in a car than if I am on foot.
Furthermore, earlier this year Google acquired Behavio, the team behind funf,
the "Social and Behavioural Sensing Framework." This framework basically tries
to predict what a user will be doing next based on the current and past states
of various sensors on their phone (which wifi networks they've connected to at
what times, social proximity, etc.). Imagine a prediction of what you'll be
doing next as part of the context of a search. It sounds crazy, yet in some
aspects we are already there.
Implicit-only searches
When Google was founded, Sergey and Larry dreamed of a world where there was
no search query at all:
He was talking about having no explicit query, and we are rapidly reaching a
situation where such searches are a reality; many people report fantastic
results from Google Now, where the query is entirely context-based:
What does this mean for keywords?
For as long as there has been web search engines, there has been SEO, and for
as long as there has been SEO, there has been a focus on keywords. I believe we
are at a transition point wherein the next 2-3 years is going to see a declining
focus on keywords.
Imagine the absurdity a couple of years ago if a small-restaurant owner said
he wanted to be in position 1 (or even page 1) for the terms "restaurant" or
"breakfast." Sure, there are local results, but actually ranking in the "main"
results is silly! Then along came the Venice update (post via Mike Ramsay) and
suddenly that didn't seem so silly. (Will Critchlow recalls how a 'breakfast'
search worked great for him in this Distilled Live video.) Now it is possible
for small companies to rank for things like "restaurant," or the "divorce
attorney" from Mike's post, but only within certain limited contexts.
There are a couple of other points of consideration around the future of
keywords:
The move towards the knowledge graph, entity searches, and Google's associated
shift from indexing to understanding.
The move from "web search" to "contextual search" (think Google Glass and
Siri).
(not provided) is on the rise, and we're rapidly losing keyword data anyway.
I did cover some of this stuff in the deck, and it is outside of the scope of
this post. However, I will likely be talking about this at SearchLove London in
October, and likely writing more about it over the coming months, as I think
think the combination of these things means we are going to look back on 2013
and 2014 as an inflection point for search.
So, you're saying keywords aren't important?
Not quite. As long as people are doing language-driven searches (be it text or
spoken word) â which is going to be for some time to come â keywords
are obviously going to be important. What the user explicitly enters as part of
their search query is clearly always going to be important.
What I'm saying (in this post) is that we need to stop looking at keywords and
starting looking at queries â which are nowadays so much more than just
the keywords. A query will have explicit and implicit aspects, and the explicit
aspect could be a chain of several keywords and additional metadata.
In addition, the move from indexing to understanding (not really covered in
this post â see the Distilled Live video and my deck) means that even
putting aside the above point, the link between the keywords that the user types
in and the keyword(s) Google for which shows listings is no longer as direct as
it once was. As Google comes to understand the entities involved, the link
becomes far more complex; we'll see some benefits (stop worrying about synonyms
and long tail) and some downsides (Google won't grasp all entities and
relationships perfectly).
Finally, the keywords your users are typing in can be really insightful to
understand what their intent is â what they really want. This is a point
made by AJ Kohn in his recent post on keywords.
So, then... what does this mean for doing SEO?
That is an excellent question, and I'll start by saying I certainly don't have
all of the answers to this. I'm mostly writing this post as this is something
we've been talking about at Distilled, but I would really love to hear from the
Moz community about your thoughts around this and what you guys think it could
mean.
A few initial thoughts:
When you are looking at traffic in your analytics, broken down by keywords, you
need to bear in mind that there was likely a variety of contexts involved (for
any specific keyword, but also across keywords). Working out what contexts you
are performing well in is going to be something that is going to be increasingly
valuable.
We need to begin working out the "context personas" that we think we can serve
with our pages; there are users in a variety of different situations and we need
to identify how their intents differ and how we can best serve them. In the near
future, this might include having landing pages targeting contexts (or intents)
rather than keywords.
The way we report to our clients (or management) needs to begin to change in
some instances. Reporting on raw keywords is going to potentially become less
and less worthwhile, and we need to start educating our clients now such that
they understand this shift.
Final words
I imagine there are potentially going to be some people who rise up to defend
keywords, but please realise I'm not saying keywords are dead â just that
they no longer give the full picture. I think that Google is going to
increasingly consider context, and we should begin working out how we can work
that into our understanding.
Whether you agree/disagree or have a slightly different idea of how we should
model this, I'd love to hear your thoughts 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!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/IP0qTOehXBU/from-keywords-to-contexts-the-new-query-model
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Query Model'
Posted by Tom Anthony
As SEOs we talk a lot about "search queries" (or simply "searches"), yet I
think search has outgrown our definition of what exactly a search query is. In
this post I'm going to explain how I think the old definition is fast becoming
less and less useful to us, and also how I believe this is going to mean we're
going to talk about keywords less and less.
Traditional query model
I recently spoke at Kahenacon in Israel about the evolution of search (deck),
where I discussed four trends I identified that were influencing the changes I
expect to see in search over the next 3-4 years. I noticed that there was a
common theme that kept coming up amongst them: Our understanding of what we mean
when we say "query" has become too narrow.
The traditional query model is the one where a search query looks like this:
This is the keyword-focused model we have always used, and it has served us
well for two decades. However, things are changing, and I think we are already
at a point where thinking of a search query in this way is inadequate.
First, let's examine things from Google's perspective. They want to understand
the users intent when they did this search: what the expectation of the user is,
what they are looking for, and more specifically, what search results would best
help answer their query. Some questions Google might ask about the "london tube
stations" query:
Is this a schoolchild looking for a history of the tube stations for some
homework?
Is this someone looking for a list of all the tube station names (we have a
fair amount of drinking games in the UK based on these names)?
Is this someone looking for a tube station?
etc.
There are clearly lots more possible situations, and it is quite hard to
determine what the user wants. However, the keyword(s) I type in are not the
entire query; they are not everything Google has to go on in order to answer
this query. It actually looks more like this to Google:
The query consists of the keywords that we explicitly typed in, but also the
implicit portion of our request based on our context.
With this information, it suddenly becomes a lot easier to determine what the
user is likely looking for and what types of response will best help them.
Furthermore, my example above only gives me a 3-4 extra data points (location,
device, potentially a guess at connection type from IP address and connection
speed). However, Google are using a lot more signals than that (at least 57 if
you aren't logged in), so I imagine the implicit aspect of the query probably
contains a lot more.
New query model
I don't think there is a scenario where Google is not using an implicit aspect
to a query â even if we put aside things such as language and which
version of Google you are using. There are multiple facets to what is covered by
this implicit search (see the next section on context), but the main takeaway is
that the search results are always dependent on some implicit aspects.
Therefore, I think we need to adjust our understanding of what a query is.
After some discussion in the Distilled office, our initial proposal is
relatively simple:
If we accept my premise, then it is hard to move backwards from this
realisation of what a query actually is.
However, a good question at this point might be: does it actually change
anything? Before I try to answer that, let me first try to make sure we are all
understanding what I mean when I say context.
Context: the source of the implicit query
We've talked a lot about âmobile search' and âpersonalised search'
over the last few years in the SEO community. However, I believe both of these
phrases are too narrow:
Mobile search: This has traditionally referred to the device that I'm using, but
that is clearly misleading. More and more people are searching on their
smartphones from their houses. People are using tablets and ultrabooks on the
move. Mobile search should talk about the person and their state (staying still
or on the move). However, it doesn't cover every aspect of their state (are they
walking or driving, are they at work or play, etc.) â so we need something
broader.
Personalised search: A couple of years ago we fought personalised search, doing
things like manipulating the Google query string to try to disable it, as we
wanted to know what the "real results" were. However, I think a wave of
acceptance is washing over the community as we realise that concept is in our
rear view mirror. However, personalised search is only partially responsible for
that. When we talk about personalised search, the common understanding of it
points to a user's preferences (determined by social connections, search history
etc.). To me this causes confusion â if I run the same search at a
different time of the day at a different location, I get different results. Both
are personalised, but personalisation doesn't capture nearly every aspect of why
my search results are different in each case.
Beyond these two examples I imagine there are a whole host of other facets
that are responsible for the customisation of the search results. I've begun
calling all of these various aspects "context." Context encapsulates both mobile
and personalisation, and a whole host of other signals (including those that
Google has yet to discover/begin using).
The implicit-aspect of queries comes from the users' context, so these two
concepts are completely intertwined.
I expect that we are going to continue to see more and more context signals
being used to drive richer and more detailed implicit-aspects to queries. Just a
couple of months ago at Google's I/O conference they announced this new Android
API:
It allows anyone writing an app for Android to ask the phone whether it
believes the user is walking, cycling, or driving. I can certainly imagine this
being part of the implicit query â a good example being a restaurant
search, which might cover a larger radius if I'm in a car than if I am on foot.
Furthermore, earlier this year Google acquired Behavio, the team behind funf,
the "Social and Behavioural Sensing Framework." This framework basically tries
to predict what a user will be doing next based on the current and past states
of various sensors on their phone (which wifi networks they've connected to at
what times, social proximity, etc.). Imagine a prediction of what you'll be
doing next as part of the context of a search. It sounds crazy, yet in some
aspects we are already there.
Implicit-only searches
When Google was founded, Sergey and Larry dreamed of a world where there was
no search query at all:
He was talking about having no explicit query, and we are rapidly reaching a
situation where such searches are a reality; many people report fantastic
results from Google Now, where the query is entirely context-based:
What does this mean for keywords?
For as long as there has been web search engines, there has been SEO, and for
as long as there has been SEO, there has been a focus on keywords. I believe we
are at a transition point wherein the next 2-3 years is going to see a declining
focus on keywords.
Imagine the absurdity a couple of years ago if a small-restaurant owner said
he wanted to be in position 1 (or even page 1) for the terms "restaurant" or
"breakfast." Sure, there are local results, but actually ranking in the "main"
results is silly! Then along came the Venice update (post via Mike Ramsay) and
suddenly that didn't seem so silly. (Will Critchlow recalls how a 'breakfast'
search worked great for him in this Distilled Live video.) Now it is possible
for small companies to rank for things like "restaurant," or the "divorce
attorney" from Mike's post, but only within certain limited contexts.
There are a couple of other points of consideration around the future of
keywords:
The move towards the knowledge graph, entity searches, and Google's associated
shift from indexing to understanding.
The move from "web search" to "contextual search" (think Google Glass and
Siri).
(not provided) is on the rise, and we're rapidly losing keyword data anyway.
I did cover some of this stuff in the deck, and it is outside of the scope of
this post. However, I will likely be talking about this at SearchLove London in
October, and likely writing more about it over the coming months, as I think
think the combination of these things means we are going to look back on 2013
and 2014 as an inflection point for search.
So, you're saying keywords aren't important?
Not quite. As long as people are doing language-driven searches (be it text or
spoken word) â which is going to be for some time to come â keywords
are obviously going to be important. What the user explicitly enters as part of
their search query is clearly always going to be important.
What I'm saying (in this post) is that we need to stop looking at keywords and
starting looking at queries â which are nowadays so much more than just
the keywords. A query will have explicit and implicit aspects, and the explicit
aspect could be a chain of several keywords and additional metadata.
In addition, the move from indexing to understanding (not really covered in
this post â see the Distilled Live video and my deck) means that even
putting aside the above point, the link between the keywords that the user types
in and the keyword(s) Google for which shows listings is no longer as direct as
it once was. As Google comes to understand the entities involved, the link
becomes far more complex; we'll see some benefits (stop worrying about synonyms
and long tail) and some downsides (Google won't grasp all entities and
relationships perfectly).
Finally, the keywords your users are typing in can be really insightful to
understand what their intent is â what they really want. This is a point
made by AJ Kohn in his recent post on keywords.
So, then... what does this mean for doing SEO?
That is an excellent question, and I'll start by saying I certainly don't have
all of the answers to this. I'm mostly writing this post as this is something
we've been talking about at Distilled, but I would really love to hear from the
Moz community about your thoughts around this and what you guys think it could
mean.
A few initial thoughts:
When you are looking at traffic in your analytics, broken down by keywords, you
need to bear in mind that there was likely a variety of contexts involved (for
any specific keyword, but also across keywords). Working out what contexts you
are performing well in is going to be something that is going to be increasingly
valuable.
We need to begin working out the "context personas" that we think we can serve
with our pages; there are users in a variety of different situations and we need
to identify how their intents differ and how we can best serve them. In the near
future, this might include having landing pages targeting contexts (or intents)
rather than keywords.
The way we report to our clients (or management) needs to begin to change in
some instances. Reporting on raw keywords is going to potentially become less
and less worthwhile, and we need to start educating our clients now such that
they understand this shift.
Final words
I imagine there are potentially going to be some people who rise up to defend
keywords, but please realise I'm not saying keywords are dead â just that
they no longer give the full picture. I think that Google is going to
increasingly consider context, and we should begin working out how we can work
that into our understanding.
Whether you agree/disagree or have a slightly different idea of how we should
model this, I'd love to hear your thoughts 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!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/IP0qTOehXBU/from-keywords-to-contexts-the-new-query-model
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, '3 Conversion Tricks I Use to Get
More Leads Than You (+ Free Squeeze Page Template)'
When I released OptinSkin back at the beginning of 2012, one of the main
marketing angles for the product was that it allows split-testing. Similarly,
when I released my free training guide Cloud Blueprint, split-testing was
stressed so much as something that can take you from being someone who does okay
online to someone who [...]
You may view the latest post at
http://www.viperchill.com/ultimate-squeeze/
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
More Leads Than You (+ Free Squeeze Page Template)'
When I released OptinSkin back at the beginning of 2012, one of the main
marketing angles for the product was that it allows split-testing. Similarly,
when I released my free training guide Cloud Blueprint, split-testing was
stressed so much as something that can take you from being someone who does okay
online to someone who [...]
You may view the latest post at
http://www.viperchill.com/ultimate-squeeze/
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Friday 23 August 2013
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'Solving the Pogo-Stick Problem -
Whiteboard Friday'
Posted by randfish
Getting your site to display at the top of a SERP is quite an accomplishment,
but it also takes quite a bit of effort to keep it there. If people click
through to your site only to click their back buttons and look for another
result, the search engines are going to catch on, and you could fall in the
rankings.
In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand helps us broaden our thinking to satisfy
the searchers and keep them from pogo-sticking back to the SERP.
Whiteboard Friday - Solving the Pogo-Stick Problem
Pro tip: Learn more about on-page optimization for content and UX at Moz
Academy.
For reference, here's a still image of this week's whiteboard:
Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today
I want to talk to you about the pogo-sticking problem.
So here's the story. Basically search engines, Google included, use a lot of
different kinds of data for their ranking algorithms, but one of the pieces
that's in there, we don't know exactly how big it might be, but it's certainly
possible that it's sizeable, is what's called pogo sticking. They measure this
feature or this occurrence where someone performs a search. I performed a search
here for IT consultants, and there are a few listings that come up. I click on
"IT Boston." It takes me to IT Boston's website, and then I decide, maybe in the
first five or ten seconds, "You know what? This site is not solving my problem.
This isn't really what I wanted," and I go right back to the same search result.
Either I click back or I search for it again or I search for something
different, and then I go and click on other results. Maybe I click on this "Is
IT Consulting Dead?" It's sort of a link bait article from some news source,
BuzzFeed maybe, click on that, go to that page, and I stay on it and I don't
come back to the search result.
Google measures these kinds of things. So does Bing. They measure this
pogo-sticking, and they come up with essentially, this is a very simplistic
representation of what actually happens, but X% of people pogo stick away from
IT Boston in their first 5 seconds of visiting the site, Y% do it for this
BuzzFeed page, and Z% do it for IT 101. We're going to calculate some average,
the average pogo-sticking as sorted and weighted by the ranking position for
this particular search result.
Here's the problem. For every search result, there's some different
pogo-sticking rate. But great pages and sites tend to have the trait that
they've got really low pogo-sticking rates. If IT Boston is a great result,
people click it and they stay. Their search query has been satisfied. Google
likes that. That means that a searcher is made happy, and they're not coming
back and doing other searches and clicking other results. Sometimes this might
be okay. Maybe there are some sorts of searches where Google says, "Oh, lots of
people do click multiple times, and lots of people do bounce back and forth and
it's fine." But for the vast majority of searches this is really important to
get right. So I have some tactical tips for you.
If you've got a pogo-sticking problem, a high bounce rate, people are going
back to the search results, clicking on your competitors' links, that kind of
thing, the number one thing you can do is get in the searcher's head. This is
different, might be different from getting in your customer's head. You might
say, "Hey, we've designed this excellent landing page. It's really focused. If
the 10% of people who search, who are our kind of customers, come to this page,
they're going to convert."
The challenge there is you've got to think bigger. You have to think about
all the searchers, the 90% of the searchers who may not be your customer and how
do you answer their query, because otherwise you're probably going to be falling
in those search results. What questions do those people have? What makes them
engage versus leave? What is it, when this person performs a search, that they
want to know? And if you don't know, you can ask.
One of my top recommendations for people who have just kind of a crummy page
is, "I want you to go out and survey people in your office, people who work with
you, people who are long-time customers, people who are in your network. I want
you to survey them, and I want you to ask them, 'Imagine you have performed a
search for X. Tell me the first, most important thing you're looking for. Now
tell me the second thing that you'd probably be interested in, and now tell me
the third thing.' " People will just free-form leave a couple phrases or
sentences in those boxes, send it back to you. Boom. Now you know what people
want. If you don't have that sort of searcher empathy built into your head
already, you can do it this way, through the surveying system, and then you can
make a page that people are going to love. You can answer those questions.
Number two, I see a lot of search results out there that are missing design
and UX elements that are critical to success. If you've got this crappy, crummy
1990s design aesthetic going on or even a more updated thing, but it's just not
a very usable website, the navigation's poor, the images are poor, the content
quality is poor, you've got to work on that. If you can't say with conviction
that you have the highest quality, most usable, beautiful, high visual-quality
page in the results, get to work man. Get to work. This stuff is really
important.
If you're looking, by the way, one of my top suggestions is to check out
Dribbble.com. That's D-r-i-b-b-b-l-e.com. Wonderful designers are available on
there. Some of them are very expensive. Some of them are less expensive. Great
resource to check out.
Number three, the last thing I'll mention on tactical tips for this is load
speed and device support. A lot of times I do see this problem where someone
goes to a page and then after two or three seconds if something hasn't loaded,
they go back. You can work on this. Even if you have a relatively robust page,
you can get elements to load in those critical first second, second and a half
time frames. Check out developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed. They've got an
analysis tool and a system you can walk through to make sure that that works.
You should also be multi-device compliant. Make sure that if you don't have
responsive design, you at least have a mobile-friendly site, an iPad-friendly
site. I do love responsive design. I recommend it. But this becomes a challenge
too, because remember, if lots of people are searching on mobile and they're
bouncing back because your page is slow or it doesn't work with a mobile device,
you're in trouble. Those stats are going to hurt you in the results.
All right, everyone. I hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard
Friday. We'll see you again next week. 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!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/w0QrYtwqygk/solving-the-pogo-stick-problem-whiteboard-friday
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Whiteboard Friday'
Posted by randfish
Getting your site to display at the top of a SERP is quite an accomplishment,
but it also takes quite a bit of effort to keep it there. If people click
through to your site only to click their back buttons and look for another
result, the search engines are going to catch on, and you could fall in the
rankings.
In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand helps us broaden our thinking to satisfy
the searchers and keep them from pogo-sticking back to the SERP.
Whiteboard Friday - Solving the Pogo-Stick Problem
Pro tip: Learn more about on-page optimization for content and UX at Moz
Academy.
For reference, here's a still image of this week's whiteboard:
Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today
I want to talk to you about the pogo-sticking problem.
So here's the story. Basically search engines, Google included, use a lot of
different kinds of data for their ranking algorithms, but one of the pieces
that's in there, we don't know exactly how big it might be, but it's certainly
possible that it's sizeable, is what's called pogo sticking. They measure this
feature or this occurrence where someone performs a search. I performed a search
here for IT consultants, and there are a few listings that come up. I click on
"IT Boston." It takes me to IT Boston's website, and then I decide, maybe in the
first five or ten seconds, "You know what? This site is not solving my problem.
This isn't really what I wanted," and I go right back to the same search result.
Either I click back or I search for it again or I search for something
different, and then I go and click on other results. Maybe I click on this "Is
IT Consulting Dead?" It's sort of a link bait article from some news source,
BuzzFeed maybe, click on that, go to that page, and I stay on it and I don't
come back to the search result.
Google measures these kinds of things. So does Bing. They measure this
pogo-sticking, and they come up with essentially, this is a very simplistic
representation of what actually happens, but X% of people pogo stick away from
IT Boston in their first 5 seconds of visiting the site, Y% do it for this
BuzzFeed page, and Z% do it for IT 101. We're going to calculate some average,
the average pogo-sticking as sorted and weighted by the ranking position for
this particular search result.
Here's the problem. For every search result, there's some different
pogo-sticking rate. But great pages and sites tend to have the trait that
they've got really low pogo-sticking rates. If IT Boston is a great result,
people click it and they stay. Their search query has been satisfied. Google
likes that. That means that a searcher is made happy, and they're not coming
back and doing other searches and clicking other results. Sometimes this might
be okay. Maybe there are some sorts of searches where Google says, "Oh, lots of
people do click multiple times, and lots of people do bounce back and forth and
it's fine." But for the vast majority of searches this is really important to
get right. So I have some tactical tips for you.
If you've got a pogo-sticking problem, a high bounce rate, people are going
back to the search results, clicking on your competitors' links, that kind of
thing, the number one thing you can do is get in the searcher's head. This is
different, might be different from getting in your customer's head. You might
say, "Hey, we've designed this excellent landing page. It's really focused. If
the 10% of people who search, who are our kind of customers, come to this page,
they're going to convert."
The challenge there is you've got to think bigger. You have to think about
all the searchers, the 90% of the searchers who may not be your customer and how
do you answer their query, because otherwise you're probably going to be falling
in those search results. What questions do those people have? What makes them
engage versus leave? What is it, when this person performs a search, that they
want to know? And if you don't know, you can ask.
One of my top recommendations for people who have just kind of a crummy page
is, "I want you to go out and survey people in your office, people who work with
you, people who are long-time customers, people who are in your network. I want
you to survey them, and I want you to ask them, 'Imagine you have performed a
search for X. Tell me the first, most important thing you're looking for. Now
tell me the second thing that you'd probably be interested in, and now tell me
the third thing.' " People will just free-form leave a couple phrases or
sentences in those boxes, send it back to you. Boom. Now you know what people
want. If you don't have that sort of searcher empathy built into your head
already, you can do it this way, through the surveying system, and then you can
make a page that people are going to love. You can answer those questions.
Number two, I see a lot of search results out there that are missing design
and UX elements that are critical to success. If you've got this crappy, crummy
1990s design aesthetic going on or even a more updated thing, but it's just not
a very usable website, the navigation's poor, the images are poor, the content
quality is poor, you've got to work on that. If you can't say with conviction
that you have the highest quality, most usable, beautiful, high visual-quality
page in the results, get to work man. Get to work. This stuff is really
important.
If you're looking, by the way, one of my top suggestions is to check out
Dribbble.com. That's D-r-i-b-b-b-l-e.com. Wonderful designers are available on
there. Some of them are very expensive. Some of them are less expensive. Great
resource to check out.
Number three, the last thing I'll mention on tactical tips for this is load
speed and device support. A lot of times I do see this problem where someone
goes to a page and then after two or three seconds if something hasn't loaded,
they go back. You can work on this. Even if you have a relatively robust page,
you can get elements to load in those critical first second, second and a half
time frames. Check out developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed. They've got an
analysis tool and a system you can walk through to make sure that that works.
You should also be multi-device compliant. Make sure that if you don't have
responsive design, you at least have a mobile-friendly site, an iPad-friendly
site. I do love responsive design. I recommend it. But this becomes a challenge
too, because remember, if lots of people are searching on mobile and they're
bouncing back because your page is slow or it doesn't work with a mobile device,
you're in trouble. Those stats are going to hurt you in the results.
All right, everyone. I hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard
Friday. We'll see you again next week. 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!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/w0QrYtwqygk/solving-the-pogo-stick-problem-whiteboard-friday
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Thursday 22 August 2013
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, '40+ Tools to Advance Your
International SEO Process'
Posted by Aleyda
One of the most frequent questions I get is about the tools that I use for
international SEO, and although I included most of them in my international SEO
presentation at MozCon, since I didn't had the time to focus on them, I would
like to share how I use them to support my international SEO activities.
There are tools to support every part of your journey, including identifying
the potential, targeting an international audience, optimizing and promoting the
websites, earning international popularity, and measuring and achieving benefit
with the international SEO process. Let's get started!
Your initial international search status
Google Webmaster Tools
Identify your initial international search visibility, from the volume and
trends of queries to pages' impressions, clicks, and the CTR you get per
country. Use the "Search Queries" report in Google Webmaster Tools and filter by
location.
Google Analytics
In the Google Analytics "Demographics" report, check your current visits,
conversions, conversion rate volume, and trends coming from different countries
and languages, along the traffic sources, keywords, and pages used.
Your international search potential
SEMrush, SearchMetrics Essentials, Moz Keyword Difficulty Tool
Beyond researching the search volume for relevant keywords in the language and
country that you want to target (using the keyword tool of the most popular
search engine in the relevant country), you can also use tools like SEMrush and
SearchMetrics â which support many countries â to identify your
current market activity and competitors.
To find out which search engine is the most popular in your target country,
you can use StatCounter or Alexa, and then use their keyword tools to verify the
specific search volume. It would most likely be Google Keyword Planner for the
western world that mostly uses Google, Yandex Keyword Statistics for Russia, and
Baidu Index for China.
Your international keyword ideas
Ubersuggest, SEOchat Suggestion Keyword Finder
Identify additional keyword ideas with Ubersuggest (where you can choose
between many different languages and countries) and the Suggestion Keyword
Finder tool.
Why I don't recommend Google's Global Market Finder
I'm also frequently asked why I don't recommend (or recommend, but only very
carefully) Google's Global Market Finder in my International SEO advice, and
here's the reason: It's frequently inaccurate with the translations and term
localization, and can easily lead to confusion and misunderstandings.
The tool has an "important note" below the results:
"...since the translations are created using Google Translate, they are not
always perfect so be sure to confirm that the terms you're selecting are
accurate..."
Even so, people usually assume that since it's a Google tool the results should
be okay. In some cases, though, when you're not a native speaker of a language,
it's very hard to know for sure when it's right or not.
Because of this, the tool is useless most of the time, since it only adds
additional complexity to the process. In the end, you'll need native support
anyway, as well as validation with other keyword tools for more accurate keyword
ideas and their search volume.
For example, let's say I'm from an American company looking for the potential
search volume in Mexico related to "apartments" and "rent apartments":
The tool suggests "pisos", "alquiler apartamentos", and "alquilar
apartamentos". These results have the following issues:
The term "pisos" in Mexico is not used as a translation of "apartments," but
instead is what the "floor" is called. It is in Spain where apartments are
called "pisos."
"Alquiler apartamentos" is "apartment rentals," and "alquilar apartamentos" is
"rent apartaments," but while these terms are popular in Spain (and some other
countries), they are not in Mexico. In Mexico, for "Alquiler apartamentos" it
would be "Renta departamentos," and "Alquilar apartamentos" would instead be
"Rentar departamentos."
You can see how if you search for these Global Market Finder-suggested terms
in Google's own keyword research tool, their local search volume is very low
compared to the ones I mention, which are the correct ones to use in this
situation:
Additionally, the term "Alquiler apartamentos" is not grammatically correct,
since it needs a "de" preposition. It should be "Alquiler de apartamentos"
(literally meaning "Rent of apartments" in Spanish). Although it's true this can
also happen with any keyword research tool, in this case it adds even more
confusion to the process. As I mentioned before, you will end-up requiring
native support to be accurate anyway.
Your international audience profile
TNS Digital Life and Google's Consumer Barometer
Understand your target international audience's demographic characteristics
and online buying preferences not only by researching with studies like the
Comscore Data Mine, but by browsing the TNS Digital Life and Google's Consumer
Barometer sites. These sites let you select and interact with their data for
almost every industry, country, and demographic characteristic.
Your international industry's behavior and characteristics
Alexa, Rnkrnk, SimilarWeb, and Google Display Network Research
Identify your competitors in the international market, including their
characteristics and trends, by researching with Alexa, Rnkrnk, Google's Display
Network Research, and SimilarWeb.
You should understand which are their most popular products and content, their
unique selling proposition, their weaknesses and strengths, which marketing
activities they're already developing, and a little about their online
communities.
Your hreflang annotations
MediaFlow's Hreflang Sitemap Tool, DejanSEO Hreflang Validator, Rob Hammond's
SEO Crawler, and Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool.
Make sure to include the correct hreflang annotations on the different
versions of your international pages, indicating the language and country
targeting of each page, following the ISO639-1 format for the language attribute
and ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 for the country attribute.
You can use the DejanSEO hreflang validator to check the usage on a specific
page, or Rob Hammond's SEO Crawler to quickly verify if all the pages are
correctly featuring the notation. If you need to validate more than the 250
internal pages allowed, you can use the filters in Screaming Frog to
specifically identify those pages which contain (or don't contain) the desired
hreflang tags.
Your country-targeted website's geolocation
Google Webmaster Tools Geolocation Feature, Bing Webmaster Tools Geotargeting
Feature, FlagFox extension for Firefox, and Flag for Chrome extension
If you're country targeting and using a top-level domain, you can geolocate it
using Google, Bing, and Yandex Webmaster Tools' geolocation features.
Nonetheless, the best way to geolocate a domain is by using the relevant ccTLD
for each country. Take a look at IANA's database with each country code registry
operator that usually allows domains to be purchased on their sites, or feature
those approved domain registrars in each country.
Additionally, although it doesn't play as important a role as before, take a
look at the example below. Minube, one of the most important travel communities
in Spain, is hosted in Germany. If you can have a local IP for your website
without much effort, that could be beneficial. You can check any website IP by
using the FlagFox extension for Firefox or the Flag for Chrome extension.
Your international web content
Twitterfall, Google Trends, Talkwalker, PROMT, WordReference, and ProZ
It's important that you develop attractive and optimized content for your
international target audience that not only includes the desired keywords, but
is interesting, serves to connect with your visitors, and helps you achieve your
international website goals.
For this, it's fundamental that you have native support. If it's difficult for
you to find that, check out online translator communities such as ProZ.
In order to validate your content, you might want to use professional
translation software (more reliable than Google Translate) that also integrates
with Office for example, making it easier to use. PROMT is one good example.
If at some specific point in the process (hopefully not for long) you don't
have direct access to a native language speaker, or you just want to
double-check something specifically, you should take a look at the WordReference
forum. There's an amazing number of threads around phrases and translations for
many languages.
On a day-to-day basis, you should also keep updated with the international
trends and hot topics in order to identify new content for the website. For
this, you can use Google Trends (take a look at the Hot Searches per country);
Twitterfall, which lets you to easily follow up with a specific topic and has
geotargeting features; and Talkwalker, a tool that supports many languages and
easily generates alerts via email or RSS.
Your international popularity analysis
Open Site Explorer, MajesticSEO, LinkRisk, Social Crawlytics, SimplyMeasured,
and CognitiveSEO
To research and understand your international competitors' link-building
strategies, sources, and the popularity gap you have with them, you can use the
same link- and social-analysis tools you likely already have, like Open Site
Explorer, MajesticSEO, LinkRisk, and SocialCrawlytics.
Nonetheless, in this case, you should pay extra attention to the international
audience's preferences, beyond link quality, volume, trends, sources, and types.
Look at the social activity and profile, the most linked and shared content, the
seasonality, the terms used and sites shared, the local industry influencers,
and the favorite types of content, topics, and formats.
Your international link-building
Link Prospector, FollowerWonk, BuzzStream, Topsy
Promote your international website assets by leveraging relevant local sites,
understanding cultural factors, building relationships with local influencers
and media, and identifying what works best in each country to scale and track
the response to each international version.
For international prospecting you can use Link Prospector, FollowerWonk, and
Topsy, and then follow up and manage your links with BuzzStream.
Your international search visibility
I Search From, Search Latte, FoxyProxy for Firefox and Chrome, Hide My Ass,
and Trusted Proxies
To easily verify how your international search audience sees your site ranking
in their search results, you can use I Search From or Search Latte to quickly
get the desired country and language's results.
Nonetheless, to make sure you're really seeing what your audience from other
locations is seeing, it's best to do so with a local IP by using a proxy
service. This will also let you verify your website from the desired
international location and check to see if there's any types of settings for
them, like a redirect, for example.
For this, you can use a free proxy browser add-on, like the ones from
FoxyProxy, along any of HMA's Public Proxy list. If you want to have more
reliable service, better speed, and select between many IPs, you also have paid
ones, such as Hide My Ass or Trusted Proxies.
Your international search results
Moz Rank Tracker, SEscout, Authority Labs, Advanced Web Ranking, SEO SERP for
Chrome, Rank Checker for Firefox, Google Analytics, and Google Webmaster Tools
Measure each of your International web versions independently, from the
rankings for each relevant country and language to the visits and conversions.
Remember to pay extra attention to the currency settings, cross-domain tracking,
and the country and language traffic alignment.
For each of the international versions, segment and analyze the rankings,
visits, conversions, average conversion value and rate, the used keywords,
pages, sources of traffic per languages, location, and devices.
For your search rankings, you can use web-based tools like Moz Rank Tracker,
SEscout, and Authority Labs, which support international search engines, or use
desktop applications such as Advanced Web Rankings, along with a proxy service
to avoid being blocked. For quick revisions you can use free browser extensions
such as Rank Checker for Firefox and SEO SERP for Chrome.
For the site behavior with the search engines, it is important that you also
follow up with Google Webmaster Tools (or the Webmaster Tools of the relevant
international search engine) along with Google Analytics, from a traffic and
conversion analysis perspective. That will let you to continuously follow-up
with your International SEO results, and allow you to make the appropriate
decisions.
Your international SEO ROI
The International SEO ROI Calculator
Calculate what's required in order to achieve your conversion goals and a high
ROI in your international SEO process while taking the SEO process costs into
consideration. You can use the International SEO ROI calculator to facilitate
this activity.
Last but not least, let's not forget that despite all the help that these
tools might give you the most important tool you have is your own brain.
Unfortunately I've seen how we forget sometimes about turning on an
"autopilot," missing great opportunities (or even making mistakes) as a
consequence.
Tools are not meant to replace you, but to support you, so do your own
analysis, test everything and validate frequently, using your brain.
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!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/SS3v_2ehxZs/40-plus-tools-to-advance-your-international-seo-process
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
International SEO Process'
Posted by Aleyda
One of the most frequent questions I get is about the tools that I use for
international SEO, and although I included most of them in my international SEO
presentation at MozCon, since I didn't had the time to focus on them, I would
like to share how I use them to support my international SEO activities.
There are tools to support every part of your journey, including identifying
the potential, targeting an international audience, optimizing and promoting the
websites, earning international popularity, and measuring and achieving benefit
with the international SEO process. Let's get started!
Your initial international search status
Google Webmaster Tools
Identify your initial international search visibility, from the volume and
trends of queries to pages' impressions, clicks, and the CTR you get per
country. Use the "Search Queries" report in Google Webmaster Tools and filter by
location.
Google Analytics
In the Google Analytics "Demographics" report, check your current visits,
conversions, conversion rate volume, and trends coming from different countries
and languages, along the traffic sources, keywords, and pages used.
Your international search potential
SEMrush, SearchMetrics Essentials, Moz Keyword Difficulty Tool
Beyond researching the search volume for relevant keywords in the language and
country that you want to target (using the keyword tool of the most popular
search engine in the relevant country), you can also use tools like SEMrush and
SearchMetrics â which support many countries â to identify your
current market activity and competitors.
To find out which search engine is the most popular in your target country,
you can use StatCounter or Alexa, and then use their keyword tools to verify the
specific search volume. It would most likely be Google Keyword Planner for the
western world that mostly uses Google, Yandex Keyword Statistics for Russia, and
Baidu Index for China.
Your international keyword ideas
Ubersuggest, SEOchat Suggestion Keyword Finder
Identify additional keyword ideas with Ubersuggest (where you can choose
between many different languages and countries) and the Suggestion Keyword
Finder tool.
Why I don't recommend Google's Global Market Finder
I'm also frequently asked why I don't recommend (or recommend, but only very
carefully) Google's Global Market Finder in my International SEO advice, and
here's the reason: It's frequently inaccurate with the translations and term
localization, and can easily lead to confusion and misunderstandings.
The tool has an "important note" below the results:
"...since the translations are created using Google Translate, they are not
always perfect so be sure to confirm that the terms you're selecting are
accurate..."
Even so, people usually assume that since it's a Google tool the results should
be okay. In some cases, though, when you're not a native speaker of a language,
it's very hard to know for sure when it's right or not.
Because of this, the tool is useless most of the time, since it only adds
additional complexity to the process. In the end, you'll need native support
anyway, as well as validation with other keyword tools for more accurate keyword
ideas and their search volume.
For example, let's say I'm from an American company looking for the potential
search volume in Mexico related to "apartments" and "rent apartments":
The tool suggests "pisos", "alquiler apartamentos", and "alquilar
apartamentos". These results have the following issues:
The term "pisos" in Mexico is not used as a translation of "apartments," but
instead is what the "floor" is called. It is in Spain where apartments are
called "pisos."
"Alquiler apartamentos" is "apartment rentals," and "alquilar apartamentos" is
"rent apartaments," but while these terms are popular in Spain (and some other
countries), they are not in Mexico. In Mexico, for "Alquiler apartamentos" it
would be "Renta departamentos," and "Alquilar apartamentos" would instead be
"Rentar departamentos."
You can see how if you search for these Global Market Finder-suggested terms
in Google's own keyword research tool, their local search volume is very low
compared to the ones I mention, which are the correct ones to use in this
situation:
Additionally, the term "Alquiler apartamentos" is not grammatically correct,
since it needs a "de" preposition. It should be "Alquiler de apartamentos"
(literally meaning "Rent of apartments" in Spanish). Although it's true this can
also happen with any keyword research tool, in this case it adds even more
confusion to the process. As I mentioned before, you will end-up requiring
native support to be accurate anyway.
Your international audience profile
TNS Digital Life and Google's Consumer Barometer
Understand your target international audience's demographic characteristics
and online buying preferences not only by researching with studies like the
Comscore Data Mine, but by browsing the TNS Digital Life and Google's Consumer
Barometer sites. These sites let you select and interact with their data for
almost every industry, country, and demographic characteristic.
Your international industry's behavior and characteristics
Alexa, Rnkrnk, SimilarWeb, and Google Display Network Research
Identify your competitors in the international market, including their
characteristics and trends, by researching with Alexa, Rnkrnk, Google's Display
Network Research, and SimilarWeb.
You should understand which are their most popular products and content, their
unique selling proposition, their weaknesses and strengths, which marketing
activities they're already developing, and a little about their online
communities.
Your hreflang annotations
MediaFlow's Hreflang Sitemap Tool, DejanSEO Hreflang Validator, Rob Hammond's
SEO Crawler, and Screaming Frog SEO Spider Tool.
Make sure to include the correct hreflang annotations on the different
versions of your international pages, indicating the language and country
targeting of each page, following the ISO639-1 format for the language attribute
and ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 for the country attribute.
You can use the DejanSEO hreflang validator to check the usage on a specific
page, or Rob Hammond's SEO Crawler to quickly verify if all the pages are
correctly featuring the notation. If you need to validate more than the 250
internal pages allowed, you can use the filters in Screaming Frog to
specifically identify those pages which contain (or don't contain) the desired
hreflang tags.
Your country-targeted website's geolocation
Google Webmaster Tools Geolocation Feature, Bing Webmaster Tools Geotargeting
Feature, FlagFox extension for Firefox, and Flag for Chrome extension
If you're country targeting and using a top-level domain, you can geolocate it
using Google, Bing, and Yandex Webmaster Tools' geolocation features.
Nonetheless, the best way to geolocate a domain is by using the relevant ccTLD
for each country. Take a look at IANA's database with each country code registry
operator that usually allows domains to be purchased on their sites, or feature
those approved domain registrars in each country.
Additionally, although it doesn't play as important a role as before, take a
look at the example below. Minube, one of the most important travel communities
in Spain, is hosted in Germany. If you can have a local IP for your website
without much effort, that could be beneficial. You can check any website IP by
using the FlagFox extension for Firefox or the Flag for Chrome extension.
Your international web content
Twitterfall, Google Trends, Talkwalker, PROMT, WordReference, and ProZ
It's important that you develop attractive and optimized content for your
international target audience that not only includes the desired keywords, but
is interesting, serves to connect with your visitors, and helps you achieve your
international website goals.
For this, it's fundamental that you have native support. If it's difficult for
you to find that, check out online translator communities such as ProZ.
In order to validate your content, you might want to use professional
translation software (more reliable than Google Translate) that also integrates
with Office for example, making it easier to use. PROMT is one good example.
If at some specific point in the process (hopefully not for long) you don't
have direct access to a native language speaker, or you just want to
double-check something specifically, you should take a look at the WordReference
forum. There's an amazing number of threads around phrases and translations for
many languages.
On a day-to-day basis, you should also keep updated with the international
trends and hot topics in order to identify new content for the website. For
this, you can use Google Trends (take a look at the Hot Searches per country);
Twitterfall, which lets you to easily follow up with a specific topic and has
geotargeting features; and Talkwalker, a tool that supports many languages and
easily generates alerts via email or RSS.
Your international popularity analysis
Open Site Explorer, MajesticSEO, LinkRisk, Social Crawlytics, SimplyMeasured,
and CognitiveSEO
To research and understand your international competitors' link-building
strategies, sources, and the popularity gap you have with them, you can use the
same link- and social-analysis tools you likely already have, like Open Site
Explorer, MajesticSEO, LinkRisk, and SocialCrawlytics.
Nonetheless, in this case, you should pay extra attention to the international
audience's preferences, beyond link quality, volume, trends, sources, and types.
Look at the social activity and profile, the most linked and shared content, the
seasonality, the terms used and sites shared, the local industry influencers,
and the favorite types of content, topics, and formats.
Your international link-building
Link Prospector, FollowerWonk, BuzzStream, Topsy
Promote your international website assets by leveraging relevant local sites,
understanding cultural factors, building relationships with local influencers
and media, and identifying what works best in each country to scale and track
the response to each international version.
For international prospecting you can use Link Prospector, FollowerWonk, and
Topsy, and then follow up and manage your links with BuzzStream.
Your international search visibility
I Search From, Search Latte, FoxyProxy for Firefox and Chrome, Hide My Ass,
and Trusted Proxies
To easily verify how your international search audience sees your site ranking
in their search results, you can use I Search From or Search Latte to quickly
get the desired country and language's results.
Nonetheless, to make sure you're really seeing what your audience from other
locations is seeing, it's best to do so with a local IP by using a proxy
service. This will also let you verify your website from the desired
international location and check to see if there's any types of settings for
them, like a redirect, for example.
For this, you can use a free proxy browser add-on, like the ones from
FoxyProxy, along any of HMA's Public Proxy list. If you want to have more
reliable service, better speed, and select between many IPs, you also have paid
ones, such as Hide My Ass or Trusted Proxies.
Your international search results
Moz Rank Tracker, SEscout, Authority Labs, Advanced Web Ranking, SEO SERP for
Chrome, Rank Checker for Firefox, Google Analytics, and Google Webmaster Tools
Measure each of your International web versions independently, from the
rankings for each relevant country and language to the visits and conversions.
Remember to pay extra attention to the currency settings, cross-domain tracking,
and the country and language traffic alignment.
For each of the international versions, segment and analyze the rankings,
visits, conversions, average conversion value and rate, the used keywords,
pages, sources of traffic per languages, location, and devices.
For your search rankings, you can use web-based tools like Moz Rank Tracker,
SEscout, and Authority Labs, which support international search engines, or use
desktop applications such as Advanced Web Rankings, along with a proxy service
to avoid being blocked. For quick revisions you can use free browser extensions
such as Rank Checker for Firefox and SEO SERP for Chrome.
For the site behavior with the search engines, it is important that you also
follow up with Google Webmaster Tools (or the Webmaster Tools of the relevant
international search engine) along with Google Analytics, from a traffic and
conversion analysis perspective. That will let you to continuously follow-up
with your International SEO results, and allow you to make the appropriate
decisions.
Your international SEO ROI
The International SEO ROI Calculator
Calculate what's required in order to achieve your conversion goals and a high
ROI in your international SEO process while taking the SEO process costs into
consideration. You can use the International SEO ROI calculator to facilitate
this activity.
Last but not least, let's not forget that despite all the help that these
tools might give you the most important tool you have is your own brain.
Unfortunately I've seen how we forget sometimes about turning on an
"autopilot," missing great opportunities (or even making mistakes) as a
consequence.
Tools are not meant to replace you, but to support you, so do your own
analysis, test everything and validate frequently, using your brain.
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!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/SS3v_2ehxZs/40-plus-tools-to-advance-your-international-seo-process
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Wednesday 21 August 2013
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'The Day the Knowledge Graph
Exploded (+50.4%)'
Posted by Dr-Pete
The morning of July 19th there was a major Google update, and no one is
talking about it. Put simply: We missed it, because we just weren't looking for
it. Overnight, the number of queries we track in the MozCast 10K beta system
that show some kind of Knowledge Graph jumped from 17.8% to 26.7%, an increase
of over 50%. This was not a test or a one-day fluke â here's a graph for
all of July 2013 (as of August 20th, the number has remained stable near 27%):
So, let's get to the meat of it â who were the big overnight winners?
What did those "new" Knowledge Graph boxes look like, and were there any clear
patterns?
The overnight winners
There were 908 queries that picked up Knowledge Graph (KG) entries on July
19th in our data, so the full list is a bit much for a blog post, but let's look
at 20 high-volume queries (this data was actually pulled on August 16th, since
some queries had lost KG boxes in the interim):
garmin
primark
avianca
ancestry
suntrust
toms
royal caribbean
cheap tickets
oakley
forex
tractor supply
discount tire
ulta
casio
nectar
famous footwear
new balance
david's bridal
gander mountain
philippine airlines
At a glance, 16 of these seem to be known brands (I think we can count
"ancestry" and "cheap tickets" as brand queries in 2013), with "forex", "tractor
supply", "discount tire", and "nectar" not having obvious brand associations.
We'll come back to "forex" (I discovered something interesting there), but
Google is treating both "tractor supply" and "discount tire" as brand queries.
The Knowledge Graph for "tractor supply" shows:
A search for "discount tire" shows a smaller, expanding KG entry, below ads
and a map (for my search, at least):
The one clear outlier in this group was the search for "nectar", which pulled
up two KG-style entries (we classify them pretty loosely, to throw a wide net):
(1) an answer-box style entry (but in the right-hand column), and (2) a
disambiguation box:
Across the entire data set, "brand" queries seemed to fare well in this
Knowledge Graph gold rush, although there were exceptions. Let's look at an
interesting case â the search for "forex".
The Forex oddity
"Forex" is a highly competitive search term, and pretty notorious for being
spammed. When I went to check the query, I wasn't seeing a Knowledge Graph
entry, so I took a look at the history since mid-July. The #1 position has
bounced back and forth between Wikipedia and Forex.com. Across 32 days of data
(since July 19th), Wikipedia has ranked #1 (in our data set) 10 of those days.
Every day Wikipedia has ranked #1, the SERP has shown a Knowledge Graph entry:
On the 22 days where Forex.com ranked #1 (and Wikipedia ranked #2), a
Knowledge Graph entry only appeared three times (13.6%). As you can see, the KG
entry is informational, suggesting that Google is interpreting the query as an
information-seeking search. While this is highly speculative, it's possible that
the informational interpretation that drives this KG entry is also pushing
Wikipedia into the #1 spot. When, for whatever reason, Google interprets the
query more loosely or as a navigational query, then Forex.com ranks #1 and the
KG entry often disappears. Again, this is just speculation, but it does
demonstrate that â like rankings â KG entries are being interpreted
and displayed in real-time and can fluctuate from search to search.
The Wikipedia connection
You can see even from these few examples that many of the new results are
using data from Wikipedia. When Google launched Knowledge Graph in May of 2012,
they stated that "Google's Knowledge Graph isn't just rooted in public sources
such as Freebase, Wikipedia and the CIA World Factbook." Of course, this implies
that Freebase, Wikipedia, and the CIA Factbook are sources, and observations of
KG data seem to support this.
What's interesting about the new Knowledge Graph entries coming from Wikipedia
is that they suggest that the data itself isn't new. It's unlikely that
Wikipedia entries/data exploded overnight, so that leaves us with two theories:
(1) Google imported more existing Wikipedia data, or (2) Google chose to let
more queries display a Knowledge Graph entry and lowered some kind of
algorithmic threshold. As large as Wikipedia is, it's unlikely that storage
capacity is a major issue for Google, so I think that (2) is the more likely
explanation â Google has simply loosened the restrictions on which queries
can trigger the Knowledge Graph.
The entity connection
So, what's tipping these new Knowledge Graph entries? I try to avoid the word
"brand" when talking about the algorithm, because it carries a lot of bias and
we all seem to mean something a little different. I do think, however, that
there is an entity connection that certainly looks brand-like. Here's another
odd query that gained a KG entry on July 19th â "chicken recipes":
For most of us, I think Lee's Famous Recipe Chicken is a bit of stretch for
"chicken recipes", which is clearly an informational query. Even Google organic
results clearly recognize the intent, with actual recipes for chicken dishes
taking up the entire top 10.
Here's another odd query that generated a suggestion for an entity â
"army games":
What's funny is that Google doesn't display a "Showing results forâ"
spelling correction or seem to think that I actually meant "armor" when I typed
"army". They've just chosen to give a fairly unrelated entity a bit of extra
credit. All of the top 10 rankings are based on "army" and there is no mention
of Armor Games outside of the KG entry.
The entity/brand connection is a nice theory, but then we have a query like
"vegetarian recipes", which also picked up a KG entry on July 19th:
Here, the Knowledge Graph entry is informational, and doesn't seem to have a
brand/entity association. So, before we go off on the "BIG BRANDS GET ALL THE
BREAKS!" warpath, I think we have to take a deep breath and try to get a handle
on the facts. My gut feeling is that Google has bumped up the volume on the
Knowledge Graph, letting KG entries appear more frequently.
In many cases, this seems to have benefited brands, but keep two things in
mind: (1) Many of these brands are small, and (2) That could be a side effect
and not the primary intent. The simple fact is that brands are entities, and as
Google builds a "web of things," entities are going to gain ground and pages are
likely going to lose ground.
Update (August 21st)
In the comments, Will Critchlow pointed out that Nectar is a well-known brand
in the UK. When you search "nectar" on Google.co.uk, the entity/brand
association is much clearer:
So, essentially, 19 out of the 20 queries on that list were brand-related, with
"forex" being ambiguous depending on the context. This also clearly shows the
impact of localization and the complexity of how KG entries are being triggered.
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!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/G1iTNe8OuEg/the-day-the-knowledge-graph-exploded
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Exploded (+50.4%)'
Posted by Dr-Pete
The morning of July 19th there was a major Google update, and no one is
talking about it. Put simply: We missed it, because we just weren't looking for
it. Overnight, the number of queries we track in the MozCast 10K beta system
that show some kind of Knowledge Graph jumped from 17.8% to 26.7%, an increase
of over 50%. This was not a test or a one-day fluke â here's a graph for
all of July 2013 (as of August 20th, the number has remained stable near 27%):
So, let's get to the meat of it â who were the big overnight winners?
What did those "new" Knowledge Graph boxes look like, and were there any clear
patterns?
The overnight winners
There were 908 queries that picked up Knowledge Graph (KG) entries on July
19th in our data, so the full list is a bit much for a blog post, but let's look
at 20 high-volume queries (this data was actually pulled on August 16th, since
some queries had lost KG boxes in the interim):
garmin
primark
avianca
ancestry
suntrust
toms
royal caribbean
cheap tickets
oakley
forex
tractor supply
discount tire
ulta
casio
nectar
famous footwear
new balance
david's bridal
gander mountain
philippine airlines
At a glance, 16 of these seem to be known brands (I think we can count
"ancestry" and "cheap tickets" as brand queries in 2013), with "forex", "tractor
supply", "discount tire", and "nectar" not having obvious brand associations.
We'll come back to "forex" (I discovered something interesting there), but
Google is treating both "tractor supply" and "discount tire" as brand queries.
The Knowledge Graph for "tractor supply" shows:
A search for "discount tire" shows a smaller, expanding KG entry, below ads
and a map (for my search, at least):
The one clear outlier in this group was the search for "nectar", which pulled
up two KG-style entries (we classify them pretty loosely, to throw a wide net):
(1) an answer-box style entry (but in the right-hand column), and (2) a
disambiguation box:
Across the entire data set, "brand" queries seemed to fare well in this
Knowledge Graph gold rush, although there were exceptions. Let's look at an
interesting case â the search for "forex".
The Forex oddity
"Forex" is a highly competitive search term, and pretty notorious for being
spammed. When I went to check the query, I wasn't seeing a Knowledge Graph
entry, so I took a look at the history since mid-July. The #1 position has
bounced back and forth between Wikipedia and Forex.com. Across 32 days of data
(since July 19th), Wikipedia has ranked #1 (in our data set) 10 of those days.
Every day Wikipedia has ranked #1, the SERP has shown a Knowledge Graph entry:
On the 22 days where Forex.com ranked #1 (and Wikipedia ranked #2), a
Knowledge Graph entry only appeared three times (13.6%). As you can see, the KG
entry is informational, suggesting that Google is interpreting the query as an
information-seeking search. While this is highly speculative, it's possible that
the informational interpretation that drives this KG entry is also pushing
Wikipedia into the #1 spot. When, for whatever reason, Google interprets the
query more loosely or as a navigational query, then Forex.com ranks #1 and the
KG entry often disappears. Again, this is just speculation, but it does
demonstrate that â like rankings â KG entries are being interpreted
and displayed in real-time and can fluctuate from search to search.
The Wikipedia connection
You can see even from these few examples that many of the new results are
using data from Wikipedia. When Google launched Knowledge Graph in May of 2012,
they stated that "Google's Knowledge Graph isn't just rooted in public sources
such as Freebase, Wikipedia and the CIA World Factbook." Of course, this implies
that Freebase, Wikipedia, and the CIA Factbook are sources, and observations of
KG data seem to support this.
What's interesting about the new Knowledge Graph entries coming from Wikipedia
is that they suggest that the data itself isn't new. It's unlikely that
Wikipedia entries/data exploded overnight, so that leaves us with two theories:
(1) Google imported more existing Wikipedia data, or (2) Google chose to let
more queries display a Knowledge Graph entry and lowered some kind of
algorithmic threshold. As large as Wikipedia is, it's unlikely that storage
capacity is a major issue for Google, so I think that (2) is the more likely
explanation â Google has simply loosened the restrictions on which queries
can trigger the Knowledge Graph.
The entity connection
So, what's tipping these new Knowledge Graph entries? I try to avoid the word
"brand" when talking about the algorithm, because it carries a lot of bias and
we all seem to mean something a little different. I do think, however, that
there is an entity connection that certainly looks brand-like. Here's another
odd query that gained a KG entry on July 19th â "chicken recipes":
For most of us, I think Lee's Famous Recipe Chicken is a bit of stretch for
"chicken recipes", which is clearly an informational query. Even Google organic
results clearly recognize the intent, with actual recipes for chicken dishes
taking up the entire top 10.
Here's another odd query that generated a suggestion for an entity â
"army games":
What's funny is that Google doesn't display a "Showing results forâ"
spelling correction or seem to think that I actually meant "armor" when I typed
"army". They've just chosen to give a fairly unrelated entity a bit of extra
credit. All of the top 10 rankings are based on "army" and there is no mention
of Armor Games outside of the KG entry.
The entity/brand connection is a nice theory, but then we have a query like
"vegetarian recipes", which also picked up a KG entry on July 19th:
Here, the Knowledge Graph entry is informational, and doesn't seem to have a
brand/entity association. So, before we go off on the "BIG BRANDS GET ALL THE
BREAKS!" warpath, I think we have to take a deep breath and try to get a handle
on the facts. My gut feeling is that Google has bumped up the volume on the
Knowledge Graph, letting KG entries appear more frequently.
In many cases, this seems to have benefited brands, but keep two things in
mind: (1) Many of these brands are small, and (2) That could be a side effect
and not the primary intent. The simple fact is that brands are entities, and as
Google builds a "web of things," entities are going to gain ground and pages are
likely going to lose ground.
Update (August 21st)
In the comments, Will Critchlow pointed out that Nectar is a well-known brand
in the UK. When you search "nectar" on Google.co.uk, the entity/brand
association is much clearer:
So, essentially, 19 out of the 20 queries on that list were brand-related, with
"forex" being ambiguous depending on the context. This also clearly shows the
impact of localization and the complexity of how KG entries are being triggered.
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!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/G1iTNe8OuEg/the-day-the-knowledge-graph-exploded
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Tuesday 20 August 2013
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'Amazing Correlation Between Google
+1s and Higher Search Rankings'
Posted by Cyrus-Shepard
Every two years, Moz runs a scientific correlation study to discover the
qualities of web pages that have a strong association with ranking highly in
Google. This year, for the first time, Dr. Matt Peters and the Moz Data Science
Team measured the correlation between Google +1s and higher rankings.
The results were surprising.
After Page Authority, a URL's number of Google +1s is more highly correlated
with search rankings than any other factor. In fact, the correlation of Google
+1s beat out other well known metrics including linking root domains, Facebook
shares, and even keyword usage.
Moz isn't the only one to discover this relationship. Searchmetrics, using a
slightly different methodology, found Google +1s to be the highest-correlated
factor they studied, and other studies have found similar results.
Here's the million-dollar question: Can Google+ activity actually help your
pages rank higher?
Beyond correlation: Why it matters this time
Back in 2011, folks may remember the controversy that erupted when Moz found a
similar correlation between higher rankings and Facebook activity. At the time,
Google claimed they didn't use Facebook shares for ranking websites. Dr. Peters
concluded that the relationship between Facebook activity and higher rankings
was likely not directly related, but probably caused by overlapping factors such
as links and high-quality content.
Now in 2013, there's strong reason to suspect it's different with Google+, and
that the relationship between +1s and higher rankings goes beyond correlation
into the territory of actual causation. (Edit: This should say "posting on
Google+" instead of Google +1s. It's clear that Google doesn't use the raw
number of +1s directly in its search algorithm, but Google+ posts have SEO
benefits unlike other social platforms.)
Not only is the correlation for +1s higher than that for Facebook activity,
but the Google+ platform has qualities that make it a far superior platform for
SEO. These qualities suggest sharing content on Google+ has the potential to
influence search rankings in significant ways.
Intentional or not, the engineers who made Google+ built it for SEO. Consider
the factors that make sharing content on Google+ far different than sharing on
other social networks:
1. Posts are crawled and indexed almost immediately
One of the original goals for Google+ was using it to power real-time search
after Twitter cut off Google's firehose access to its data in 2011. Since then,
Google has been using Google+ to discover new content, and many web
professionals have discovered that URLs shared on Google+ are crawled and
indexed very quickly.
Compare this to Facebook, where because of privacy settings and restrictions
on data sharing, it's not uncommon for posts to never be crawled or indexed by
Google at all.
Unlike Facebook, which hides data from Google, or Twitter, which directs
Google not to follow most of its links, Google+ data is immediately and fully
accessible to the company that built it.
2. Google+ posts pass link equity
Pages and posts on Google+ not only accumulate PageRank, but because links to
posts are followed, they pass link equity on as well.
Using the free MozBar, you can see all of the followed links on a typical
Google+ page.
When you share a link on Google+, the anchor text becomes the title of the
page you are sharing. Some important things to remember about followed links
within Google+:
Only "shared" links (the links that show up beneath your post) are followed. Any
external links you add withing the post body itself are nofollowed, so these
don't pass any link equity.
For obvious reasons, uploaded images don't pass external link equity. Some
people like to upload a screenshot of a page and then link to it in the body of
the post. While a good image may increase post popularity and click-through
rate, these posts do not pass link equity.
Certain links in your Google+ "About" page are also followed and pass link
equity.
3. Google+ is optimized for semantic relevance
Unlike Facebook or Twitter, each post you make in Google+ has most of the
characteristics of a full-blown blog posting.
Each post has its own URL.
The first 45-50 characters of the post appear in the title tag.
Just like a blog post, entries can be long and complex in order to explore a
subject deeply. Various correlation studies have show a strong relationship
between longer pages and higher rankings.
If a post is reshared, it can accumulate internal links from the Google+
platform, all with relevant anchor text.
Because of these factors, each post has the potential to send strong semantic
signals to Google's search algorithm. This not only helps the post itself to
rank in Google's search results, but potentially sends relevancy signals to a
URL shared by the post.
What about Author Rank and Publisher Rank?
Many publishers have added Google+ authorship information to their websites in
order for author photos to appear in Google search results. Another hope is that
someday Google will use authorship information (and perhaps publisher
information) connected to Google+ accounts to actually rank websites.
While there is no evidence that Google uses anything like Author Rank at the
moment, many believe it will be here very soon. In the above video, Matt Cutts
of Google suggests this is a path he'd like to see Google explore.
Roadmap to rankings: taking advantage of Google+ for SEO
While there are hundreds of ways to optimize your Google+ experience, the most
important activities can be summed up by these nine points:
1. Start building relationships now on Google+
It's never too late to start. Google+ is a social network. Following great
people, commenting on posts, and sharing great content not only helps to
increase your own influence, but it can be extremely educational as well.
2. Post share-worthy content on Google+ to attract natural links
When you share content, don't just post a link and walk away. Add additional
value with commentary and relevant information.
Consider these examples of long Google+ posts. Each acts like a mini blog post
and adds highly shareable, linkable context. I don't recommend replacing your
personal blog with Google+ entirely, but sometimes a few lines of context makes
all the difference.
3. Add Google authorship information to your online content
Adding rel="author" to your website is a no-brainer. If you guest post or
otherwise contribute content to other high quality sites, ask the publisher if
they will add author markup to your bio. Kane Jamison recently did this for me
when I contributed content to his blog.
4. Link out to all relevant profiles from your Google+ "About" page
Think of Google+ as a primary hub of your online virtual identity. Google
offers you several places to link to other online profiles, sites that you
contribute content to, and simply sites that you want to share.
5. Take advantage of rel="publisher" by connecting your website to your Google+
brand page
If you are a business, organization or brand, follow these instructions.
6. Make your content easy to share on Google+ with relevant social sharing
buttons
You would think everyone wants to add social sharing buttons to their content,
but some folks are just stubborn. Don't be stubborn.
7. Completely fill out your Google+ profile with relevant and engaging
information
The information you provide in your profile influences how you show up in
Google+ search results and also plays a role in whom Google suggests others to
follow.
8. Make it easy for people to add you to your circles
Use Google's easy-to-create badges, or create your own to place on your own
online profiles so that others can easily add you to their circles.
9. Make your posts public
Posts shared privately don't pass the same juice as publicly shared post. For
SEO purposes, you likely want your posts spread as wide as possible. Philipp
Steuer made this great Google+ infographic simplifying the complexities of who
sees your posts:
Google+ Infographic by Philipp Steuer, used with permission
Additional resources for success
Entire books can now be written on using Google+ to boost your SEO efforts. In
reality, there are exactly 3 articles that contain 99% of everything you need to
know:
Google Plus SEO: Everybody Talks About It â How Do You DO It? by Mark
Traphagen
Google+ SEO by AJ Kohn
10 Dead Simple Tips to Take Advantage of Google+ for SEO
What's your favorite Google+ tip? Please share in the comments below.
Update
Matt Cutts of Google responded to this post on Hacker News implying +1s aren't
used directly in Google's algorithm.
Matt and I are in perfect agreement.
It's clear Google isn't using +1s to rank webpages, but Google+ posts do pass
other SEO benefits not found easily in other social platforms, such as Pagerank
and anchor text. If this is not the case, I'm hoping Google will clarify.
The point is not to go out and accumulate a bunch of +1s. The point is, and
the evidence seems to suggest, that earning a link on Google+ is like earning
any other type of editorial link, and these links have actual value with real
benefits.
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!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/DDHB6-hJ0ZM/google-plus-correlations
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
+1s and Higher Search Rankings'
Posted by Cyrus-Shepard
Every two years, Moz runs a scientific correlation study to discover the
qualities of web pages that have a strong association with ranking highly in
Google. This year, for the first time, Dr. Matt Peters and the Moz Data Science
Team measured the correlation between Google +1s and higher rankings.
The results were surprising.
After Page Authority, a URL's number of Google +1s is more highly correlated
with search rankings than any other factor. In fact, the correlation of Google
+1s beat out other well known metrics including linking root domains, Facebook
shares, and even keyword usage.
Moz isn't the only one to discover this relationship. Searchmetrics, using a
slightly different methodology, found Google +1s to be the highest-correlated
factor they studied, and other studies have found similar results.
Here's the million-dollar question: Can Google+ activity actually help your
pages rank higher?
Beyond correlation: Why it matters this time
Back in 2011, folks may remember the controversy that erupted when Moz found a
similar correlation between higher rankings and Facebook activity. At the time,
Google claimed they didn't use Facebook shares for ranking websites. Dr. Peters
concluded that the relationship between Facebook activity and higher rankings
was likely not directly related, but probably caused by overlapping factors such
as links and high-quality content.
Now in 2013, there's strong reason to suspect it's different with Google+, and
that the relationship between +1s and higher rankings goes beyond correlation
into the territory of actual causation. (Edit: This should say "posting on
Google+" instead of Google +1s. It's clear that Google doesn't use the raw
number of +1s directly in its search algorithm, but Google+ posts have SEO
benefits unlike other social platforms.)
Not only is the correlation for +1s higher than that for Facebook activity,
but the Google+ platform has qualities that make it a far superior platform for
SEO. These qualities suggest sharing content on Google+ has the potential to
influence search rankings in significant ways.
Intentional or not, the engineers who made Google+ built it for SEO. Consider
the factors that make sharing content on Google+ far different than sharing on
other social networks:
1. Posts are crawled and indexed almost immediately
One of the original goals for Google+ was using it to power real-time search
after Twitter cut off Google's firehose access to its data in 2011. Since then,
Google has been using Google+ to discover new content, and many web
professionals have discovered that URLs shared on Google+ are crawled and
indexed very quickly.
Compare this to Facebook, where because of privacy settings and restrictions
on data sharing, it's not uncommon for posts to never be crawled or indexed by
Google at all.
Unlike Facebook, which hides data from Google, or Twitter, which directs
Google not to follow most of its links, Google+ data is immediately and fully
accessible to the company that built it.
2. Google+ posts pass link equity
Pages and posts on Google+ not only accumulate PageRank, but because links to
posts are followed, they pass link equity on as well.
Using the free MozBar, you can see all of the followed links on a typical
Google+ page.
When you share a link on Google+, the anchor text becomes the title of the
page you are sharing. Some important things to remember about followed links
within Google+:
Only "shared" links (the links that show up beneath your post) are followed. Any
external links you add withing the post body itself are nofollowed, so these
don't pass any link equity.
For obvious reasons, uploaded images don't pass external link equity. Some
people like to upload a screenshot of a page and then link to it in the body of
the post. While a good image may increase post popularity and click-through
rate, these posts do not pass link equity.
Certain links in your Google+ "About" page are also followed and pass link
equity.
3. Google+ is optimized for semantic relevance
Unlike Facebook or Twitter, each post you make in Google+ has most of the
characteristics of a full-blown blog posting.
Each post has its own URL.
The first 45-50 characters of the post appear in the title tag.
Just like a blog post, entries can be long and complex in order to explore a
subject deeply. Various correlation studies have show a strong relationship
between longer pages and higher rankings.
If a post is reshared, it can accumulate internal links from the Google+
platform, all with relevant anchor text.
Because of these factors, each post has the potential to send strong semantic
signals to Google's search algorithm. This not only helps the post itself to
rank in Google's search results, but potentially sends relevancy signals to a
URL shared by the post.
What about Author Rank and Publisher Rank?
Many publishers have added Google+ authorship information to their websites in
order for author photos to appear in Google search results. Another hope is that
someday Google will use authorship information (and perhaps publisher
information) connected to Google+ accounts to actually rank websites.
While there is no evidence that Google uses anything like Author Rank at the
moment, many believe it will be here very soon. In the above video, Matt Cutts
of Google suggests this is a path he'd like to see Google explore.
Roadmap to rankings: taking advantage of Google+ for SEO
While there are hundreds of ways to optimize your Google+ experience, the most
important activities can be summed up by these nine points:
1. Start building relationships now on Google+
It's never too late to start. Google+ is a social network. Following great
people, commenting on posts, and sharing great content not only helps to
increase your own influence, but it can be extremely educational as well.
2. Post share-worthy content on Google+ to attract natural links
When you share content, don't just post a link and walk away. Add additional
value with commentary and relevant information.
Consider these examples of long Google+ posts. Each acts like a mini blog post
and adds highly shareable, linkable context. I don't recommend replacing your
personal blog with Google+ entirely, but sometimes a few lines of context makes
all the difference.
3. Add Google authorship information to your online content
Adding rel="author" to your website is a no-brainer. If you guest post or
otherwise contribute content to other high quality sites, ask the publisher if
they will add author markup to your bio. Kane Jamison recently did this for me
when I contributed content to his blog.
4. Link out to all relevant profiles from your Google+ "About" page
Think of Google+ as a primary hub of your online virtual identity. Google
offers you several places to link to other online profiles, sites that you
contribute content to, and simply sites that you want to share.
5. Take advantage of rel="publisher" by connecting your website to your Google+
brand page
If you are a business, organization or brand, follow these instructions.
6. Make your content easy to share on Google+ with relevant social sharing
buttons
You would think everyone wants to add social sharing buttons to their content,
but some folks are just stubborn. Don't be stubborn.
7. Completely fill out your Google+ profile with relevant and engaging
information
The information you provide in your profile influences how you show up in
Google+ search results and also plays a role in whom Google suggests others to
follow.
8. Make it easy for people to add you to your circles
Use Google's easy-to-create badges, or create your own to place on your own
online profiles so that others can easily add you to their circles.
9. Make your posts public
Posts shared privately don't pass the same juice as publicly shared post. For
SEO purposes, you likely want your posts spread as wide as possible. Philipp
Steuer made this great Google+ infographic simplifying the complexities of who
sees your posts:
Google+ Infographic by Philipp Steuer, used with permission
Additional resources for success
Entire books can now be written on using Google+ to boost your SEO efforts. In
reality, there are exactly 3 articles that contain 99% of everything you need to
know:
Google Plus SEO: Everybody Talks About It â How Do You DO It? by Mark
Traphagen
Google+ SEO by AJ Kohn
10 Dead Simple Tips to Take Advantage of Google+ for SEO
What's your favorite Google+ tip? Please share in the comments below.
Update
Matt Cutts of Google responded to this post on Hacker News implying +1s aren't
used directly in Google's algorithm.
Matt and I are in perfect agreement.
It's clear Google isn't using +1s to rank webpages, but Google+ posts do pass
other SEO benefits not found easily in other social platforms, such as Pagerank
and anchor text. If this is not the case, I'm hoping Google will clarify.
The point is not to go out and accumulate a bunch of +1s. The point is, and
the evidence seems to suggest, that earning a link on Google+ is like earning
any other type of editorial link, and these links have actual value with real
benefits.
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!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/DDHB6-hJ0ZM/google-plus-correlations
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Monday 19 August 2013
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'Online Marketing Tips for
Nonprofits'
Posted by SteveOllington
What's this about?
Having worked in-house at one charity and provided some volunteer consulting
to a couple of others, I decided it would be good to write about some useful
ways that charities can increase their online exposure, without the need to
drain too much of their already limited resources.
Many of the examples below are from my experiences working as the digital
strategist for the British Humanist Association, where I learned that it can be
very different from working at an agency, or in-house for a for-profit company.
How is online marketing for charities different?
There are advantages and disadvantages in digital marketing for charities. The
advantages are the passion of the staff, the compassion of the audience, and the
natural, powerful content that comes about through its work. The disadvantages
are primarily the lack of resources and budget in comparison to the business
world. What resources exist come from the generosity of people through donations
and volunteering, and the willingness by staff to work twice the number of hours
for half the pay.
So, here are a few tips that might help to offset the resource limits.
Google Grants for AdWords
As long as you have a registered charity number you can apply to Google Grants
and receive $329 USD per day in free advertising with Google AdWords. Whilst
this has to be in USD, itâs not confined to America only; UK charities
(and others internationally) get the equivalent amount to spend on their ads.
Until recently, it was difficult to use up this budget, as there was a maximum
per-click bid limit of $1.00. This meant you could only really go for keywords
which didnât have very much competition (and thereâs a reason for
that). However, in early 2013 this was increased to $2.00 per click, which makes
a huge difference, allowing you to advertise with more highly searched keywords
and bringing you more of the traffic you want.
How to set up Google Grants
Setting up Google Grants can take a few weeks because once you apply Google
will need to assess your eligibility. The eligibility criteria and restrictions
on use for Google Grants can be found here, but the main items are:
Restrictions on use
Only run keyword-targeted campaigns
Only appear on your countryâs version of Google (this will differ
depending on where your charity is based)
Only run text ads
Eligibility guidelines
Hold current and valid charity status
Acknowledge and agree to the application's required certifications regarding
nondiscrimination and donation receipt and use.
If you have a registered charity number and are not yet using Google Grants,
set up a Google AdWords account here (donât complete the billing section
upon setup), then apply to Google Grants here. Once you get going youâll
be offered the help you need from Google and youâre on your way to getting
free advertising that can make a big difference to your online presence.
*Where Iâve taken so long about writing this, I have been pipped to the
post (pun intended) by another Mozzer. Theyâve got lots more detail on
Google Grants in their post here.
Effective use of video
Videos can have a huge impact for charities because they offer a chance to
show viewers the problems theyâre trying to combat, allowing them to
spread awareness about the charity and/or individual campaigns whilst triggering
an emotional response that other media types might not.
Video doesnât have to be expensive. There are plenty of volunteers out
there at both the amateur and the professional level who will help out
(thereâs more on recruiting volunteers later), and for the video content
there are student actors to act, staff members to interview, or people who have
been affected by issues youâre campaigning on that are happy to talk about
those issues.
If your charity is environment- or wildlife-based, contact Environment Films
to have a video created. Theyâre a non-profit organisation too, and if
youâre lucky you might even end up with Distilledâs Margarita Iosif
working on your video!
Have a look at these clips worked on by a team including Margarita:
Whips Hurt. Ban Them. â A video for Animal Aid. This is a campaign-based
video about horsewhipping (45 seconds).
The Soi Dog Foundation â A trailer for the Soi Dog Foundation. This is a
video about the charity itself (4 minutes, 19 seconds).
In just a few minutes, the clips above are able to communicate their message
in a way that people are often more willing to engage with than with plain text,
and the short duration means theyâre more likely to be both watched and
shared online.
There are lots of different types of videos that your charity could consider,
including trailers, animations, discussions, interviews, and debates. The most
important thing in the video is the message.
Video marketing
Itâs important to determine the goals for your video before you market
it (or even create it). Is the primary goal to spread awareness, or to encourage
donations? The goals of the video will make a difference in how you should
market it, such as on which platform (because itâs not always YouTube that
you should go for).
Phil Nottingham, whom I have the honour to sit opposite, is the video
marketing specialist, and if youâre going to make a video, you HAVE to
watch this video of Phil explaining how to do it right. Also, check out the
Distilled Video Marketing Guide.
Video outreach
Videos, just like any other content, should be promoted through outreach.
Outreach in its simplest form is contacting others in the relevant field with
the hope they will publish, share, or promote something for you (thereâs
more on this later).
Below are two videos that were released by the BHA.
Video One was published on July 30, 2012, and Video Two was published on
December 3, 2012. So there is more than four months between them, but look at
the difference in the number of views. By the time the first video reached 8-9
months in (as the second has now) it had a lot more than 8,575 views. In fact,
it had that within the first couple of weeks. Why is that? Both videos feature
the same people, and are on the same subject appealing to the same audiences.
Itâs because the first video had a lot more outreach done for it. At the
time the second video was released, there was a lot else happening with a new
site going live, etc. As a result, not as much outreach was done as with the
first video, where many people were contacted early and offered the story on the
day of the release so it was still new news for all. Lots of people were emailed
and asked if they could tweet or blog about it, and they did. Outreach is an
important component of online marketing, and it can mean the difference between
success or failure of a marketing campaign.
YouTube Nonprofit Program
If you have videos, you likely have at least some of them on YouTube (any/all
videos for which the primary goal is lots of views). But do you know about the
free benefits you can have on your channel if youâre a charity?
If you sign up to YouTubeâs Nonprofit program, you will have access to a
number of exclusive features, and features you would normally have to pay for.
Donation button
There is the option of a Donation button on your channel page, which could
increase your donations if you get many visitors to your channel. Youâll
need to sign up to Google Wallet for this, if you donât already have an
account.
Call-to-action overlay
Any videos uploaded to YouTube can have annotations applied, but with the
Nonprofit Program you can have a call-to-action overlay containing a link, which
is usually something youâd have to pay for. The overlay shows up at the
bottom of the video screen and encourages people to take an action such as
following a link or sharing.
Live streaming
If your charity stages events, such as protest rallies, talks, or anything
else, you can live stream the event directly to your YouTube channel for all
those supporters who couldnât attend. The most important thing to remember
about doing this, is that youâll need to publicize that people can watch
this live first; thereâs no point in live streaming to no audience. When
you promote your event, be sure to let everyone know that if they canât
make it, they can watch live, providing the date, times (including for different
time zones), and a link to the channel.
For details on how to set up live streaming, see this video from YouTube.
Community forum
The Nonprofit Program supplies access to a Community Forum which can be
helpful in terms of support. However, most of this support will tend to come
from other users (many of whom are very helpful and will do their best to solve
your problems) rather than actual Google staff.
Donating on Facebook
If you have a significant Facebook audience, or are working towards one,
itâs worth considering adding a way for people to donate through Facebook.
If you add a story to Facebook that becomes well shared and brings more people
to your page, then some of those people may want to help out in any way they
can.
There are a number of solutions for taking Facebook donations. There is an app
by JustGiving which can appear in the Facebook navigation, as shown below on the
Dogs Trust Facebook page.
You will need a JustGiving account to set this up, but itâs relatively
simple to do. You can find out more about it in these slides.
Another option is DonateApp. This solution takes a small commission, but if
itâs donations that would not have been received otherwise, then
itâs still a net gain.
DonateApp reports that:
A 2012 study of 3,500 nonprofits found about half of them (46%) have raised
funds on Facebook.
The most popular way to raise funds was to solicit Facebook supporters for
individual donations.
The average value of a Facebook donor was found to be $214.81 over 12 months.
Advertising on Facebook
Sadly, there is no Facebook equivalent to Google Grants, so there is no free
advertising for charities (or even discounted), but due to the way audiences can
be targeted by their interests itâs worth looking at as an option.
Whatever your charityâs causes are, youâre likely to find plenty
of people on Facebook who have declared those causes in their interests, and you
can target just those people with your ads. Of course this applies to
businesses, too, but the difference is in the number people who tend to join
relevant groups or state relevant interests. There are plenty of
âlikesâ for brands, and some products, but generally thereâs
going to be a lot more people who have interest in causes such as eco-issues
than there are for kitchen appliance parts, and you can take advantage of this.
There are plenty of other targeting options too, including location, age,
gender, and more.
You can put just a small amount of budget into a Facebook ad campaign to run a
test and see how it goes, but donât forget to track the results in your
analytics so you know if itâs working or not!
You can find out more about and sign up for Facebook advertising here.
Media Trust (and Community Newswire)
For UK charities, Media Trust is an organisation that provides a variety of
support for promoting charities, from marketing and PR classes to information
sharing and new initiatives. As far as I can tell, the closest match to this in
the US would be Charities.org. However, I can only really talk about Media Trust
as I donât have any experience with other similar organisations.
One thing which your charity may find particularly useful from Media Trust is
The Community Newswire. You can submit press releases here that will have
increased opportunities to get picked up by news outlets. Media Trust has good
relationships with the Press Association and journalists who report in the
charity sector. Press releases that go through their system will be monitored by
some journalists who know that Media Trust is a credible source and are
therefore more likely to run with something that comes through them.
Do have a look at what Media Trust has to offer as a whole (if you
havenât already), but also make sure you submit your press releases
(ensuring theyâre well written, contain at least one image, and are about
something interesting) to the Community Newswire.
GrowYourCharityOnline.com
At the start of this year I attended an opening event for an initiative by
Google and the Media Trust. There were lots of charities there, and some Google
staff to answer questions. It was the launch of a new website called
GrowYourCharityOnline.com. Here you can find information and action steps on the
Google products discussed in this post, including Google Grants and the YouTube
Nonprofit Program, as well as advice on using Google Plus to promote your
campaigns and causes.
Have a look at the website, itâs got some useful tips and will help you
organise your efforts with promotion through the Google products.
Text to donate
Most charities will likely already know about donations via text. As I
learned, this is not always the best option, as it depends entirely on your
channels of promotion. If youâre campaigning mainly online through your
website and social media, then people generally seem to prefer following links
to donate with something like JustGiving or Razoo. Text-based donations were
very few when I tried this. However, if youâre also going to be promoting
offline then itâs definitely worth it, as it gives people a way to donate
if they donât have a link to follow. This can be on any literature
youâre handing out, or in press releases for local print newspapers, on
billboards, presentation slides, T-Shirts and other merchandise, or speaking to
people on the street.
This is relatively easy to set up. See JustTextGiving to do so; then all
people need to do is text a campaign code and an amount to a particular number.
Quiz apps
This one went fantastically: Everyone loves a quiz, right? At least if
itâs a nice short quiz that tells you something about yourself, anyway.
At the end of January 2013, the British Humanist Association launched the
simple quiz "Are You a Humanist?"
Since then, itâs been taken over 70,000 times, and continues to be taken
a few thousand times per month. This is important because many of the people who
are taking the quiz had never heard of humanism before, but they have now. That
was the quiz's objective from the start â to spread awareness to a new
audience â which it continues to do.
The quiz has been taken so many times largely because it offers to share the
results at the end:
Not everyone shares their results. Many people donât (and wonât)
but there were and are still enough to keep it spreading, and therefore to
generate new interest.
Some of the tweets made by people after having taken the quiz indicated their
new realisation of humanism as a concept, and sometimes even their intention to
become a member of the organisation.
The percentage scores are actually irrelevant in this quiz, and werenât
originally going to be included. However, people like scores. Scores make such
things more shareable, and since the point in the quiz was to spread awareness
of humanism with a bit of fun, scores worked best.
Your charity should think about doing something like this. Once you come up
with the right quiz, meaning something that gives people results theyâll
be happy to share, you can find a volunteer developer to help you build it into
an app (thereâs more about volunteers later).
Giving away content for social shares
Every online marketer looks for existing resources to utilise or recycle. One
of the first things youâll do if you start a new in-house position is poke
around in archives both online and offline â in storage cupboards for
forgotten leaflets or on the old network drive for forgotten PDFs. Usually,
somewhere, thereâs some great content lurking about that people will like
and share.
On to my example â The charity I worked for gave away hard copies of an
interesting book at events, and also to new members. The aim of the book wasn't
about profit, it was about awareness and education, so giving the books away
suited just fine. Of course there were limits as to how many could be given
away, because printing and binding the book cost money (and so did sending it),
and then there were only so many event attendees and new members to whom the
book could be given away.
However, it turned out we had it in PDF format, too. So, we set it free as a
PDF eBook and offered it via the Pay With a Tweet system. Using Pay With a Tweet
meant the only thing people had to do was tweet (or share on Facebook) about the
book, and they got a free copy to download. A win-win situation. One click of a
button and the user gets a free, interesting eBook, and the charity gets to see
more of its books being read. Itâs a great book actually, and chances are
that at least some of the people who read it will agree with its philosophy
enough that they use the included membership form to join the charity.
Thereâs been over 7,700 downloads since it was launched in October 2012,
and hopefully there will be many more downloads in the future, too.
If you want to see how it works by downloading a copy and paying with a tweet,
grab it from here: Humanism: A Short Course.
Getting into Google News
Whether or not you currently release news, you should. If you want publicity
for your charity and its work, itâs important to get yourself in front of
other news sources, and Google News is a great way to do that.
Here are some benefits to being in Google News:
It can provide high search engine rankings, potentially bringing your site more
visitors (the right visitors, too, if theyâre arriving because they
clicked on your news result after searching something relevant).
It can mean your content gets republished elsewhere. Other publishers use
Google News to draw inspiration on what to write about. This could be anything
from bloggers with a small but targeted audience to journalists from national
media outlets. Lots of news sources monitor Google News to see recent
developments, and often they will pick up stories to run with themselves.
It may gain you some backlinks to your website (which can help your website
with its traffic, and its search rankings overall, especially if the links are
coming from a large and popular news site).
Getting into Google News is easier said than done, as Google has strict
guidelines as to what passes as acceptable news and it can take a while to get
your news pieces right. When submitting your news to Google to appear in Google
News, you will provide the URL for the news section of your site, and then you
will likely need to wait up to several weeks before being accepted or rejected.
Reasons for rejection may include format, the type of news, or many other
issues including being "overly self-promotional." Now, the overly
self-promotional issue is a problem for a lot of charities since they are by
their nature releasing news about campaigns and causes they are undertaking
themselves. For example, if a charity were to challenge an unjust law at the
ECHR then the news is that the charity is fighting the government over a policy
at court, for the charity to then exclude itself from that news would be
difficult.
One way of dealing with this is to divide your news through categorisation or
tagging. On your website's news section, you can tag or categorise less
"promotional" articles to appear under a particular URL away from the rest, then
submit only this URL to Google.
Your news releases may well be made up of your general press releases. From my
understanding, this wonât work with Google News submissions, and press
releases will need to be rewritten as news items in order to get in.
Content and sharing
There can obviously be a lot of impact from having celebrities tweet about
your campaigns and charity work, and some charities are very fortunate in having
celebrity support for their causes, but of course there are limits to how much
you can ask for help from high-profile individuals (especially as many of these
people are inundated with requests from charities every day).
The right content on the right subject can still get plenty of traction on
Twitter, Facebook, and elsewhere without the need for celebrities (although it
helps, of course). Charities are in a great position when it comes to getting
social shares because their content is often naturally interesting â maybe
controversial in some way â and likely to trigger some kind of emotion in
people (whether it makes them happy, sad, or angry, if it triggers an emotion
then people will want to show it to others). However, you still have to do what
businesses do, and think about how youâre going to present this content in
the first place.
Due to the nature of charity work, a lot of the content to share will come
naturally, through stories of campaign successes or losses. Thereâs bound
to be other stuff you can share, too. The trick here is to keep an eye on what
others are sharing and how successful their content is on social media
platforms. This would be a large and complex task if done manually, but there is
a tool for it, and itâs free! Yousaf Sekander of RocketMill created a tool
called Social Crawlytics which allows you to enter a web address, and provides
you with information on content from the website such as how much it has been
shared and on what platforms. Doing this will show you examples of what works,
and what doesn't, so you can adapt similar content strategies for yourself!
Also, have a look at the 2012 Nonprofit Social Network Benchmark Report, which
offers up tactics that have proven successful for other charities along with
data about which channels have been most effective for various types of
fundraising and campaigning.
Tracking your success with Google Analytics
In order to know whatâs working and what isnât, you need to track
your campaigns. Iâll assume you already have some analytics software such
as Google Analytics installed on your website. You can see a lot with that, but
you can see and organise far more by using the Google Analytics URL Builder.
How to use the URL Builder is beyond the scope of this article, but here are a
couple of posts from Chris Gilchrist of HitReach if youâd like to learn
more:
Why you should use the Google Analytics URL Builder
How to use the Google Analytics URL Builder
Your authority staff as a marketing asset
Someone in your charity is an authority on the issues youâre campaigning
for. You need to use that. Itâs important that theyâre getting out
there in front of people on every possible occasion.
Referring back to the charity I worked for, the CEO Andrew Copson was very
good at this. He seemingly worked 168 hours per week, what with running the
organisation and travelling around the country (the world even) to give talks
and feature in debates. When it comes to the charity and its causes, he is an
authority. That means when secular issues come up in the news, journalists want
to hear from him. For that reason, heâs often quoted in newspapers,
interviewed on TV and radio, and asked onto panel shows to discuss current
issues. This exposure of course means more people get to hear him, and if they
agree with him (heâs so very reasonable itâs hard not to), it brings
more awareness to the charity.
Rand Fishkin gave a talk on using your CEO to spread awareness at the 2013
LinkLove Conference. Normally youâd have to buy this video, which
isnât actually even available to buy yet, but since youâre reading
this article, you get to access the video right now, and for free (Itâs a
must-watch!). Just follow the steps below.
Go to How to Transform Your CEO into a Link Building, Social Sharing Machine
Click âBuyâ (Not buy as bundle). Donât worry, you
wonât be charged.
If you have an account, sign in. If you donât have an account, create
one (itâll only take a minute).
Enter this code: MOZSL2013RANDFISH
Watch the video and have a notepad to hand, thereâs some great tips in
there!
Note: If you enjoyed the video, Distilled is hosting another conference in
SearchLove San Diego three weeks from today! This will be our first time heading
West, and we'd love for you to be there. Early bird pricing on tickets ends
soon, and the kind folks at Moz have even lined up a discount for your ticket
over on the Pro Perks page.
Finally, make sure you film every time your CEO (or whoever they might be)
talks at any event!
Look at what happened with Philip Wollen. He gave an impassioned speech which
went viral on YouTube (there are many videos of the whole debate but
hereâs one with just the speech to save you time). Lots of people became a
fan of his after seeing that, and it brought a lot of attention to The Kindness
Trust and all of the charities he supports through it.
Getting volunteers to help with your online marketing
Many of the recommendations in this article are relatively inexpensive, but
some funding may still be needed to hire copywriters, developers, designers, a
video agency, etc. You donât have to spend a fortune for this though
â not if you get volunteers.
If your charity has followers, fans, connections, and whatever else on its
social platforms, use them to recruit volunteers. You may well be doing this
already, but remember thereâs a difference this time: The types of
professions youâre looking for in this case are technology based, meaning
thereâs a greater chance of them being accessible online than with a lot
of other professions.
Tweet for help, and thereâs a good chance itâll get retweeted. The
same with Facebook; people may not be able to help with certain tasks but
theyâll often tag others into a response who they think might be
interested, such as their friend who makes apps and is a keen environmentalist.
Many tech savvy professionals will use software to monitor social media channels
and alert them when there are mentions offering work. A tweet asking for a
copywriter recommendation will often result in copywriters tweeting back because
theyâre watching any tweets that have that keyword of
âcopywriterâ in it.
There are also websites that may be useful. Reach exists to hook up volunteers
from different professions with charities in need of specialist help. Get
yourself listed on there and provide a description of what you need, and someone
may well get in contact with the expertise youâre looking for. Reach is a
UK organisation, so if youâre in America, try CatchaFire instead.
Iâm not sure about other locations but Iâm guessing there will be
similar organisations in other countries.
Build a contacts list, and do outreach
Regular Moz.com readers and those in the industry know this well, but if
youâre reading this as someone who is volunteering or working at a charity
and donât have much experience in online marketing, then this is important
for you.
Remember the two videos above, where one had a lot more views than the other?
If you have a great piece of content, whether itâs a video, an app, an
eBook, or anything else, tell people about it! Too often there are great pieces
of content that get uploaded somewhere on the web, tweeted or shared by a couple
of people, and then left without any real promotion (many businesses are guilty
of this too).
Build your list of contacts. Find relevant blogs, forums, Facebook groups,
Twitter accounts, niche news sites, or anything with an online community, and
send them a polite message about your content. If you do it right and your
content is related to the type of thing they usually post or share, then
thereâs a good chance they will publish or share your content, too.
Build your outreach list larger and larger over time, and the contents of the
list will often help to get the ball rolling for many of your campaigns. Look
after it, donât abuse it, and keep it secure (itâs a contact list
and it contains people's data, so just be careful with it).
Got any tips to add? Let me know 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!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/_7_paVb3g3o/online-marketing-tips-for-nonprofits
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Nonprofits'
Posted by SteveOllington
What's this about?
Having worked in-house at one charity and provided some volunteer consulting
to a couple of others, I decided it would be good to write about some useful
ways that charities can increase their online exposure, without the need to
drain too much of their already limited resources.
Many of the examples below are from my experiences working as the digital
strategist for the British Humanist Association, where I learned that it can be
very different from working at an agency, or in-house for a for-profit company.
How is online marketing for charities different?
There are advantages and disadvantages in digital marketing for charities. The
advantages are the passion of the staff, the compassion of the audience, and the
natural, powerful content that comes about through its work. The disadvantages
are primarily the lack of resources and budget in comparison to the business
world. What resources exist come from the generosity of people through donations
and volunteering, and the willingness by staff to work twice the number of hours
for half the pay.
So, here are a few tips that might help to offset the resource limits.
Google Grants for AdWords
As long as you have a registered charity number you can apply to Google Grants
and receive $329 USD per day in free advertising with Google AdWords. Whilst
this has to be in USD, itâs not confined to America only; UK charities
(and others internationally) get the equivalent amount to spend on their ads.
Until recently, it was difficult to use up this budget, as there was a maximum
per-click bid limit of $1.00. This meant you could only really go for keywords
which didnât have very much competition (and thereâs a reason for
that). However, in early 2013 this was increased to $2.00 per click, which makes
a huge difference, allowing you to advertise with more highly searched keywords
and bringing you more of the traffic you want.
How to set up Google Grants
Setting up Google Grants can take a few weeks because once you apply Google
will need to assess your eligibility. The eligibility criteria and restrictions
on use for Google Grants can be found here, but the main items are:
Restrictions on use
Only run keyword-targeted campaigns
Only appear on your countryâs version of Google (this will differ
depending on where your charity is based)
Only run text ads
Eligibility guidelines
Hold current and valid charity status
Acknowledge and agree to the application's required certifications regarding
nondiscrimination and donation receipt and use.
If you have a registered charity number and are not yet using Google Grants,
set up a Google AdWords account here (donât complete the billing section
upon setup), then apply to Google Grants here. Once you get going youâll
be offered the help you need from Google and youâre on your way to getting
free advertising that can make a big difference to your online presence.
*Where Iâve taken so long about writing this, I have been pipped to the
post (pun intended) by another Mozzer. Theyâve got lots more detail on
Google Grants in their post here.
Effective use of video
Videos can have a huge impact for charities because they offer a chance to
show viewers the problems theyâre trying to combat, allowing them to
spread awareness about the charity and/or individual campaigns whilst triggering
an emotional response that other media types might not.
Video doesnât have to be expensive. There are plenty of volunteers out
there at both the amateur and the professional level who will help out
(thereâs more on recruiting volunteers later), and for the video content
there are student actors to act, staff members to interview, or people who have
been affected by issues youâre campaigning on that are happy to talk about
those issues.
If your charity is environment- or wildlife-based, contact Environment Films
to have a video created. Theyâre a non-profit organisation too, and if
youâre lucky you might even end up with Distilledâs Margarita Iosif
working on your video!
Have a look at these clips worked on by a team including Margarita:
Whips Hurt. Ban Them. â A video for Animal Aid. This is a campaign-based
video about horsewhipping (45 seconds).
The Soi Dog Foundation â A trailer for the Soi Dog Foundation. This is a
video about the charity itself (4 minutes, 19 seconds).
In just a few minutes, the clips above are able to communicate their message
in a way that people are often more willing to engage with than with plain text,
and the short duration means theyâre more likely to be both watched and
shared online.
There are lots of different types of videos that your charity could consider,
including trailers, animations, discussions, interviews, and debates. The most
important thing in the video is the message.
Video marketing
Itâs important to determine the goals for your video before you market
it (or even create it). Is the primary goal to spread awareness, or to encourage
donations? The goals of the video will make a difference in how you should
market it, such as on which platform (because itâs not always YouTube that
you should go for).
Phil Nottingham, whom I have the honour to sit opposite, is the video
marketing specialist, and if youâre going to make a video, you HAVE to
watch this video of Phil explaining how to do it right. Also, check out the
Distilled Video Marketing Guide.
Video outreach
Videos, just like any other content, should be promoted through outreach.
Outreach in its simplest form is contacting others in the relevant field with
the hope they will publish, share, or promote something for you (thereâs
Below are two videos that were released by the BHA.
Video One was published on July 30, 2012, and Video Two was published on
December 3, 2012. So there is more than four months between them, but look at
the difference in the number of views. By the time the first video reached 8-9
months in (as the second has now) it had a lot more than 8,575 views. In fact,
it had that within the first couple of weeks. Why is that? Both videos feature
the same people, and are on the same subject appealing to the same audiences.
Itâs because the first video had a lot more outreach done for it. At the
time the second video was released, there was a lot else happening with a new
site going live, etc. As a result, not as much outreach was done as with the
first video, where many people were contacted early and offered the story on the
day of the release so it was still new news for all. Lots of people were emailed
and asked if they could tweet or blog about it, and they did. Outreach is an
important component of online marketing, and it can mean the difference between
success or failure of a marketing campaign.
YouTube Nonprofit Program
If you have videos, you likely have at least some of them on YouTube (any/all
videos for which the primary goal is lots of views). But do you know about the
free benefits you can have on your channel if youâre a charity?
If you sign up to YouTubeâs Nonprofit program, you will have access to a
number of exclusive features, and features you would normally have to pay for.
Donation button
There is the option of a Donation button on your channel page, which could
increase your donations if you get many visitors to your channel. Youâll
need to sign up to Google Wallet for this, if you donât already have an
account.
Call-to-action overlay
Any videos uploaded to YouTube can have annotations applied, but with the
Nonprofit Program you can have a call-to-action overlay containing a link, which
is usually something youâd have to pay for. The overlay shows up at the
bottom of the video screen and encourages people to take an action such as
following a link or sharing.
Live streaming
If your charity stages events, such as protest rallies, talks, or anything
else, you can live stream the event directly to your YouTube channel for all
those supporters who couldnât attend. The most important thing to remember
about doing this, is that youâll need to publicize that people can watch
this live first; thereâs no point in live streaming to no audience. When
you promote your event, be sure to let everyone know that if they canât
make it, they can watch live, providing the date, times (including for different
time zones), and a link to the channel.
For details on how to set up live streaming, see this video from YouTube.
Community forum
The Nonprofit Program supplies access to a Community Forum which can be
helpful in terms of support. However, most of this support will tend to come
from other users (many of whom are very helpful and will do their best to solve
your problems) rather than actual Google staff.
Donating on Facebook
If you have a significant Facebook audience, or are working towards one,
itâs worth considering adding a way for people to donate through Facebook.
If you add a story to Facebook that becomes well shared and brings more people
to your page, then some of those people may want to help out in any way they
can.
There are a number of solutions for taking Facebook donations. There is an app
by JustGiving which can appear in the Facebook navigation, as shown below on the
Dogs Trust Facebook page.
You will need a JustGiving account to set this up, but itâs relatively
simple to do. You can find out more about it in these slides.
Another option is DonateApp. This solution takes a small commission, but if
itâs donations that would not have been received otherwise, then
itâs still a net gain.
DonateApp reports that:
A 2012 study of 3,500 nonprofits found about half of them (46%) have raised
funds on Facebook.
The most popular way to raise funds was to solicit Facebook supporters for
individual donations.
The average value of a Facebook donor was found to be $214.81 over 12 months.
Advertising on Facebook
Sadly, there is no Facebook equivalent to Google Grants, so there is no free
advertising for charities (or even discounted), but due to the way audiences can
be targeted by their interests itâs worth looking at as an option.
Whatever your charityâs causes are, youâre likely to find plenty
of people on Facebook who have declared those causes in their interests, and you
can target just those people with your ads. Of course this applies to
businesses, too, but the difference is in the number people who tend to join
relevant groups or state relevant interests. There are plenty of
âlikesâ for brands, and some products, but generally thereâs
going to be a lot more people who have interest in causes such as eco-issues
than there are for kitchen appliance parts, and you can take advantage of this.
There are plenty of other targeting options too, including location, age,
gender, and more.
You can put just a small amount of budget into a Facebook ad campaign to run a
test and see how it goes, but donât forget to track the results in your
analytics so you know if itâs working or not!
You can find out more about and sign up for Facebook advertising here.
Media Trust (and Community Newswire)
For UK charities, Media Trust is an organisation that provides a variety of
support for promoting charities, from marketing and PR classes to information
sharing and new initiatives. As far as I can tell, the closest match to this in
the US would be Charities.org. However, I can only really talk about Media Trust
as I donât have any experience with other similar organisations.
One thing which your charity may find particularly useful from Media Trust is
The Community Newswire. You can submit press releases here that will have
increased opportunities to get picked up by news outlets. Media Trust has good
relationships with the Press Association and journalists who report in the
charity sector. Press releases that go through their system will be monitored by
some journalists who know that Media Trust is a credible source and are
therefore more likely to run with something that comes through them.
Do have a look at what Media Trust has to offer as a whole (if you
havenât already), but also make sure you submit your press releases
(ensuring theyâre well written, contain at least one image, and are about
something interesting) to the Community Newswire.
GrowYourCharityOnline.com
At the start of this year I attended an opening event for an initiative by
Google and the Media Trust. There were lots of charities there, and some Google
staff to answer questions. It was the launch of a new website called
GrowYourCharityOnline.com. Here you can find information and action steps on the
Google products discussed in this post, including Google Grants and the YouTube
Nonprofit Program, as well as advice on using Google Plus to promote your
campaigns and causes.
Have a look at the website, itâs got some useful tips and will help you
organise your efforts with promotion through the Google products.
Text to donate
Most charities will likely already know about donations via text. As I
learned, this is not always the best option, as it depends entirely on your
channels of promotion. If youâre campaigning mainly online through your
website and social media, then people generally seem to prefer following links
to donate with something like JustGiving or Razoo. Text-based donations were
very few when I tried this. However, if youâre also going to be promoting
offline then itâs definitely worth it, as it gives people a way to donate
if they donât have a link to follow. This can be on any literature
youâre handing out, or in press releases for local print newspapers, on
billboards, presentation slides, T-Shirts and other merchandise, or speaking to
people on the street.
This is relatively easy to set up. See JustTextGiving to do so; then all
people need to do is text a campaign code and an amount to a particular number.
Quiz apps
This one went fantastically: Everyone loves a quiz, right? At least if
itâs a nice short quiz that tells you something about yourself, anyway.
At the end of January 2013, the British Humanist Association launched the
simple quiz "Are You a Humanist?"
Since then, itâs been taken over 70,000 times, and continues to be taken
a few thousand times per month. This is important because many of the people who
are taking the quiz had never heard of humanism before, but they have now. That
was the quiz's objective from the start â to spread awareness to a new
audience â which it continues to do.
The quiz has been taken so many times largely because it offers to share the
results at the end:
Not everyone shares their results. Many people donât (and wonât)
but there were and are still enough to keep it spreading, and therefore to
generate new interest.
Some of the tweets made by people after having taken the quiz indicated their
new realisation of humanism as a concept, and sometimes even their intention to
become a member of the organisation.
The percentage scores are actually irrelevant in this quiz, and werenât
originally going to be included. However, people like scores. Scores make such
things more shareable, and since the point in the quiz was to spread awareness
of humanism with a bit of fun, scores worked best.
Your charity should think about doing something like this. Once you come up
with the right quiz, meaning something that gives people results theyâll
be happy to share, you can find a volunteer developer to help you build it into
an app (thereâs more about volunteers later).
Giving away content for social shares
Every online marketer looks for existing resources to utilise or recycle. One
of the first things youâll do if you start a new in-house position is poke
around in archives both online and offline â in storage cupboards for
forgotten leaflets or on the old network drive for forgotten PDFs. Usually,
somewhere, thereâs some great content lurking about that people will like
and share.
On to my example â The charity I worked for gave away hard copies of an
interesting book at events, and also to new members. The aim of the book wasn't
about profit, it was about awareness and education, so giving the books away
suited just fine. Of course there were limits as to how many could be given
away, because printing and binding the book cost money (and so did sending it),
and then there were only so many event attendees and new members to whom the
book could be given away.
However, it turned out we had it in PDF format, too. So, we set it free as a
PDF eBook and offered it via the Pay With a Tweet system. Using Pay With a Tweet
meant the only thing people had to do was tweet (or share on Facebook) about the
book, and they got a free copy to download. A win-win situation. One click of a
button and the user gets a free, interesting eBook, and the charity gets to see
more of its books being read. Itâs a great book actually, and chances are
that at least some of the people who read it will agree with its philosophy
enough that they use the included membership form to join the charity.
Thereâs been over 7,700 downloads since it was launched in October 2012,
and hopefully there will be many more downloads in the future, too.
If you want to see how it works by downloading a copy and paying with a tweet,
grab it from here: Humanism: A Short Course.
Getting into Google News
Whether or not you currently release news, you should. If you want publicity
for your charity and its work, itâs important to get yourself in front of
other news sources, and Google News is a great way to do that.
Here are some benefits to being in Google News:
It can provide high search engine rankings, potentially bringing your site more
visitors (the right visitors, too, if theyâre arriving because they
clicked on your news result after searching something relevant).
It can mean your content gets republished elsewhere. Other publishers use
Google News to draw inspiration on what to write about. This could be anything
from bloggers with a small but targeted audience to journalists from national
media outlets. Lots of news sources monitor Google News to see recent
developments, and often they will pick up stories to run with themselves.
It may gain you some backlinks to your website (which can help your website
with its traffic, and its search rankings overall, especially if the links are
coming from a large and popular news site).
Getting into Google News is easier said than done, as Google has strict
guidelines as to what passes as acceptable news and it can take a while to get
your news pieces right. When submitting your news to Google to appear in Google
News, you will provide the URL for the news section of your site, and then you
will likely need to wait up to several weeks before being accepted or rejected.
Reasons for rejection may include format, the type of news, or many other
issues including being "overly self-promotional." Now, the overly
self-promotional issue is a problem for a lot of charities since they are by
their nature releasing news about campaigns and causes they are undertaking
themselves. For example, if a charity were to challenge an unjust law at the
ECHR then the news is that the charity is fighting the government over a policy
at court, for the charity to then exclude itself from that news would be
difficult.
One way of dealing with this is to divide your news through categorisation or
tagging. On your website's news section, you can tag or categorise less
"promotional" articles to appear under a particular URL away from the rest, then
submit only this URL to Google.
Your news releases may well be made up of your general press releases. From my
understanding, this wonât work with Google News submissions, and press
releases will need to be rewritten as news items in order to get in.
Content and sharing
There can obviously be a lot of impact from having celebrities tweet about
your campaigns and charity work, and some charities are very fortunate in having
celebrity support for their causes, but of course there are limits to how much
you can ask for help from high-profile individuals (especially as many of these
people are inundated with requests from charities every day).
The right content on the right subject can still get plenty of traction on
Twitter, Facebook, and elsewhere without the need for celebrities (although it
helps, of course). Charities are in a great position when it comes to getting
social shares because their content is often naturally interesting â maybe
controversial in some way â and likely to trigger some kind of emotion in
people (whether it makes them happy, sad, or angry, if it triggers an emotion
then people will want to show it to others). However, you still have to do what
businesses do, and think about how youâre going to present this content in
the first place.
Due to the nature of charity work, a lot of the content to share will come
naturally, through stories of campaign successes or losses. Thereâs bound
to be other stuff you can share, too. The trick here is to keep an eye on what
others are sharing and how successful their content is on social media
platforms. This would be a large and complex task if done manually, but there is
a tool for it, and itâs free! Yousaf Sekander of RocketMill created a tool
called Social Crawlytics which allows you to enter a web address, and provides
you with information on content from the website such as how much it has been
shared and on what platforms. Doing this will show you examples of what works,
and what doesn't, so you can adapt similar content strategies for yourself!
Also, have a look at the 2012 Nonprofit Social Network Benchmark Report, which
offers up tactics that have proven successful for other charities along with
data about which channels have been most effective for various types of
fundraising and campaigning.
Tracking your success with Google Analytics
In order to know whatâs working and what isnât, you need to track
your campaigns. Iâll assume you already have some analytics software such
as Google Analytics installed on your website. You can see a lot with that, but
you can see and organise far more by using the Google Analytics URL Builder.
How to use the URL Builder is beyond the scope of this article, but here are a
couple of posts from Chris Gilchrist of HitReach if youâd like to learn
more:
Why you should use the Google Analytics URL Builder
How to use the Google Analytics URL Builder
Your authority staff as a marketing asset
Someone in your charity is an authority on the issues youâre campaigning
for. You need to use that. Itâs important that theyâre getting out
there in front of people on every possible occasion.
Referring back to the charity I worked for, the CEO Andrew Copson was very
good at this. He seemingly worked 168 hours per week, what with running the
organisation and travelling around the country (the world even) to give talks
and feature in debates. When it comes to the charity and its causes, he is an
authority. That means when secular issues come up in the news, journalists want
to hear from him. For that reason, heâs often quoted in newspapers,
interviewed on TV and radio, and asked onto panel shows to discuss current
issues. This exposure of course means more people get to hear him, and if they
agree with him (heâs so very reasonable itâs hard not to), it brings
more awareness to the charity.
Rand Fishkin gave a talk on using your CEO to spread awareness at the 2013
LinkLove Conference. Normally youâd have to buy this video, which
isnât actually even available to buy yet, but since youâre reading
this article, you get to access the video right now, and for free (Itâs a
must-watch!). Just follow the steps below.
Go to How to Transform Your CEO into a Link Building, Social Sharing Machine
Click âBuyâ (Not buy as bundle). Donât worry, you
wonât be charged.
If you have an account, sign in. If you donât have an account, create
one (itâll only take a minute).
Enter this code: MOZSL2013RANDFISH
Watch the video and have a notepad to hand, thereâs some great tips in
there!
Note: If you enjoyed the video, Distilled is hosting another conference in
SearchLove San Diego three weeks from today! This will be our first time heading
West, and we'd love for you to be there. Early bird pricing on tickets ends
soon, and the kind folks at Moz have even lined up a discount for your ticket
over on the Pro Perks page.
Finally, make sure you film every time your CEO (or whoever they might be)
talks at any event!
Look at what happened with Philip Wollen. He gave an impassioned speech which
went viral on YouTube (there are many videos of the whole debate but
hereâs one with just the speech to save you time). Lots of people became a
fan of his after seeing that, and it brought a lot of attention to The Kindness
Trust and all of the charities he supports through it.
Getting volunteers to help with your online marketing
Many of the recommendations in this article are relatively inexpensive, but
some funding may still be needed to hire copywriters, developers, designers, a
video agency, etc. You donât have to spend a fortune for this though
â not if you get volunteers.
If your charity has followers, fans, connections, and whatever else on its
social platforms, use them to recruit volunteers. You may well be doing this
already, but remember thereâs a difference this time: The types of
professions youâre looking for in this case are technology based, meaning
thereâs a greater chance of them being accessible online than with a lot
of other professions.
Tweet for help, and thereâs a good chance itâll get retweeted. The
same with Facebook; people may not be able to help with certain tasks but
theyâll often tag others into a response who they think might be
interested, such as their friend who makes apps and is a keen environmentalist.
Many tech savvy professionals will use software to monitor social media channels
and alert them when there are mentions offering work. A tweet asking for a
copywriter recommendation will often result in copywriters tweeting back because
theyâre watching any tweets that have that keyword of
âcopywriterâ in it.
There are also websites that may be useful. Reach exists to hook up volunteers
from different professions with charities in need of specialist help. Get
yourself listed on there and provide a description of what you need, and someone
may well get in contact with the expertise youâre looking for. Reach is a
UK organisation, so if youâre in America, try CatchaFire instead.
Iâm not sure about other locations but Iâm guessing there will be
similar organisations in other countries.
Build a contacts list, and do outreach
Regular Moz.com readers and those in the industry know this well, but if
youâre reading this as someone who is volunteering or working at a charity
and donât have much experience in online marketing, then this is important
for you.
Remember the two videos above, where one had a lot more views than the other?
If you have a great piece of content, whether itâs a video, an app, an
eBook, or anything else, tell people about it! Too often there are great pieces
of content that get uploaded somewhere on the web, tweeted or shared by a couple
of people, and then left without any real promotion (many businesses are guilty
of this too).
Build your list of contacts. Find relevant blogs, forums, Facebook groups,
Twitter accounts, niche news sites, or anything with an online community, and
send them a polite message about your content. If you do it right and your
content is related to the type of thing they usually post or share, then
thereâs a good chance they will publish or share your content, too.
Build your outreach list larger and larger over time, and the contents of the
list will often help to get the ball rolling for many of your campaigns. Look
after it, donât abuse it, and keep it secure (itâs a contact list
and it contains people's data, so just be careful with it).
Got any tips to add? Let me know 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!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/_7_paVb3g3o/online-marketing-tips-for-nonprofits
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
