Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'Blogger Outreach - What Do They
Think About SEOs?'
Posted by DaveSottimano
Have you ever wondered why bloggers didn't reply to your last outreach email?
Why they refused to link to your shiny new infographic, or what they really
think about SEOs?
I conducted a 26 qu...
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/7VJlcQvsdHA/blogger-outreach-what-do-they-think-about-seos
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Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Monday 30 September 2013
Friday 27 September 2013
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'Solving the Sub-Domain Equation:
Predicting Traffic and Value when Merging Sub-Domains'
Posted by russviranteThis 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.
To...
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/BkawCAef_Ao/solving-the-subdomain-equation-predicting-traffic-and-value-when-merging-subdomains
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Predicting Traffic and Value when Merging Sub-Domains'
Posted by russviranteThis 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.
To...
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/BkawCAef_Ao/solving-the-subdomain-equation-predicting-traffic-and-value-when-merging-subdomains
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[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'Setting Goals (Not Tools) as the
Foundation of Your Marketing - Whiteboard Friday'
Posted by MackenzieFogelson
With new tools introduced so regularly, it's easy for marketers to spend an
inordinate amount of time trying to figure out which ones are most effective for
their own work. That focus, though, shifts our attention from what really
matters: setting the right goals for our companies. In today's Whiteboard
Friday, Mackenzie Fogelson walks us through the five-stage process she uses to
make sure her team's attention is on what really matters.
Setting Goals (Not Tools) as the Foundation of Your Marketing - Whiteboard
Friday
For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!
Video Transcription
Hey there, Moz community! I'm so excited to be here with you today. I wanted
to share something with you that has been really powerful for the businesses
we've been working with in the last year or so about building community. It's a
concept that we call "goals not tools," and it works in this pyramid format
where you start with your goals, you move on to KPIs, you develop a strategy,
you execute that strategy, and then you analyze your data. And this is something
that has been really powerful and helped businesses really grow. So I'm going to
walk you through it here.
We start down at the bottom with goals. So the deal with goals is that you
want to make sure that you're setting goals for your entire business, not just
for SEO or social media or content marketing, because you're trying to grow your
whole business. So keep your focus there. Then once you develop your goals, and
those goals might be to improve customer communication or you want to become a
thought leader. Whatever your goal is, that's where you're going to set it.
Then you move on to determining what your key performance indicators are and
what you're going to use to actually measure the fact that you may or may not be
reaching your goals. So in terms of KPIs, it's really going to depend on your
business. When we determine KPIs with companies, we sit down and we have that
discussion with them before we develop the strategy, and that helps us to have a
very authentic and realistic discussion about expectations and how this is all
going to work and what kind of data they're expecting to see so that we're
proving that we're actually making a difference in their business.
So once you've determined those KPIs, then you move on to developing a
creative strategy, a creative way to meet those goals and to measure it the way
you've determined in your KPIs. So this is your detailed roadmap, and it's two
to three months at a time. A lot of companies will go for maybe 12 months and
try to get that high level overview of where they're going for the year, and
that's fine. Just make sure that you're not detailing out everything that you're
doing for the next year because it makes it harder to be agile. So we'd
recommend two- to-three month iterations at a time. Go through, test things, and
see how that works.
During your strategy development you're also going to select the tools that
you're going to use. Maybe it's Facebook, maybe it's SEO, maybe it's content
marketing, maybe it's email marketing, PPC. There's all kinds of tools that
could be used, and they don't all have to be digital. So you just need to be
creative and determine what you need to plan out so that you can reach the goals
that you've set.
Then once you've got your strategy developed, that's really some of the
hardest part until you get to execution. Then you're actually doing all the
work. You need to be consistent. You need to make sure that you're staying
focused and following that strategy that you've set. You also want to test
things because you want as much data as possible so that you can determine if
things are working or not. So make sure that during execution there are going to
be things that come up, emergent things, shiny things, exciting things. So what
you'll have to do is weigh whether those things wait for the next iteration in
two to three months, or whether you deviate your plan and you integrate those at
the time that they come up.
So once you're through execution, then really what you're doing is analyzing
that data that you've collected. You're trying to determine: Should we spend
more time on something? Should we pull something? Should we determine if
something else needs to completely change our plans so that we're making sure
that we're adding value? So analysis is probably the most important part because
you're always going to want to be looking at the data.
So in this whole process, what we always do is try to make sure that we're
focusing on two questions, and the most important one is: Where can we add more
value? So always be thinking about what you're doing, and if you can't answer
the value question, you know, "Why are we doing this? Does this provide value
for our customers or something internal that you're working on? If you can't
answer that question, it's probably not something valuable, and you don't need
to spend your time on it. Go somewhere else where you're adding the value.
Then the last question is where you can make the biggest difference in your
business, because that's what this is all about is growing your business. So if
you stay focused on goals, not tools, it's going to be really easy to do that.
Thanks for having me today, Moz. Hope I helped you out. Let me know in the
questions if you need any assistance.
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/AEA5j3ausso/setting-goals-not-tools-as-the-foundation-of-your-marketing-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
Foundation of Your Marketing - Whiteboard Friday'
Posted by MackenzieFogelson
With new tools introduced so regularly, it's easy for marketers to spend an
inordinate amount of time trying to figure out which ones are most effective for
their own work. That focus, though, shifts our attention from what really
matters: setting the right goals for our companies. In today's Whiteboard
Friday, Mackenzie Fogelson walks us through the five-stage process she uses to
make sure her team's attention is on what really matters.
Setting Goals (Not Tools) as the Foundation of Your Marketing - Whiteboard
Friday
For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!
Video Transcription
Hey there, Moz community! I'm so excited to be here with you today. I wanted
to share something with you that has been really powerful for the businesses
we've been working with in the last year or so about building community. It's a
concept that we call "goals not tools," and it works in this pyramid format
where you start with your goals, you move on to KPIs, you develop a strategy,
you execute that strategy, and then you analyze your data. And this is something
that has been really powerful and helped businesses really grow. So I'm going to
walk you through it here.
We start down at the bottom with goals. So the deal with goals is that you
want to make sure that you're setting goals for your entire business, not just
for SEO or social media or content marketing, because you're trying to grow your
whole business. So keep your focus there. Then once you develop your goals, and
those goals might be to improve customer communication or you want to become a
thought leader. Whatever your goal is, that's where you're going to set it.
Then you move on to determining what your key performance indicators are and
what you're going to use to actually measure the fact that you may or may not be
reaching your goals. So in terms of KPIs, it's really going to depend on your
business. When we determine KPIs with companies, we sit down and we have that
discussion with them before we develop the strategy, and that helps us to have a
very authentic and realistic discussion about expectations and how this is all
going to work and what kind of data they're expecting to see so that we're
proving that we're actually making a difference in their business.
So once you've determined those KPIs, then you move on to developing a
creative strategy, a creative way to meet those goals and to measure it the way
you've determined in your KPIs. So this is your detailed roadmap, and it's two
to three months at a time. A lot of companies will go for maybe 12 months and
try to get that high level overview of where they're going for the year, and
that's fine. Just make sure that you're not detailing out everything that you're
doing for the next year because it makes it harder to be agile. So we'd
recommend two- to-three month iterations at a time. Go through, test things, and
see how that works.
During your strategy development you're also going to select the tools that
you're going to use. Maybe it's Facebook, maybe it's SEO, maybe it's content
marketing, maybe it's email marketing, PPC. There's all kinds of tools that
could be used, and they don't all have to be digital. So you just need to be
creative and determine what you need to plan out so that you can reach the goals
that you've set.
Then once you've got your strategy developed, that's really some of the
hardest part until you get to execution. Then you're actually doing all the
work. You need to be consistent. You need to make sure that you're staying
focused and following that strategy that you've set. You also want to test
things because you want as much data as possible so that you can determine if
things are working or not. So make sure that during execution there are going to
be things that come up, emergent things, shiny things, exciting things. So what
you'll have to do is weigh whether those things wait for the next iteration in
two to three months, or whether you deviate your plan and you integrate those at
the time that they come up.
So once you're through execution, then really what you're doing is analyzing
that data that you've collected. You're trying to determine: Should we spend
more time on something? Should we pull something? Should we determine if
something else needs to completely change our plans so that we're making sure
that we're adding value? So analysis is probably the most important part because
you're always going to want to be looking at the data.
So in this whole process, what we always do is try to make sure that we're
focusing on two questions, and the most important one is: Where can we add more
value? So always be thinking about what you're doing, and if you can't answer
the value question, you know, "Why are we doing this? Does this provide value
for our customers or something internal that you're working on? If you can't
answer that question, it's probably not something valuable, and you don't need
to spend your time on it. Go somewhere else where you're adding the value.
Then the last question is where you can make the biggest difference in your
business, because that's what this is all about is growing your business. So if
you stay focused on goals, not tools, it's going to be really easy to do that.
Thanks for having me today, Moz. Hope I helped you out. Let me know in the
questions if you need any assistance.
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/AEA5j3ausso/setting-goals-not-tools-as-the-foundation-of-your-marketing-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 26 September 2013
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'On Our Wait-List? You Get a Moz
Analytics!'
Posted by Anthony Skinner
It is with great pleasure that I announce the wait is over! That's right, we
are now letting people from our wait-list into Moz Analytics!
In many ways, I feel like a not-as-cute version of Oprah Winf...
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/ME3hSo7kvfU/moz-analytics-wait-list-announcement
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
Analytics!'
Posted by Anthony Skinner
It is with great pleasure that I announce the wait is over! That's right, we
are now letting people from our wait-list into Moz Analytics!
In many ways, I feel like a not-as-cute version of Oprah Winf...
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/ME3hSo7kvfU/moz-analytics-wait-list-announcement
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, 'Improving Search Rank by
Optimizing Your Time to First Byte'
Posted by ZoompfThis 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.
Back i...
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/eWdCHJ7HNWI/improving-search-rank-by-optimizing-your-time-to-first-byte
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Build Great Backlinks
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Optimizing Your Time to First Byte'
Posted by ZoompfThis 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.
Back i...
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/eWdCHJ7HNWI/improving-search-rank-by-optimizing-your-time-to-first-byte
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
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Build Great Backlinks
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Wednesday 25 September 2013
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'Kill It on Facebook by Being
TAGFEE'
Posted by quietcorey
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.
Last month, I presented a Mozinar on Deconstructing a Niche Market. Much to my
surprise, the Q&A session focused almost entirely on my experience using
Facebook as a niche marketing channel.
It's true that Facebook is a dynamic and oft-misunderstood creature,
especially in marketing. When building a strategy with long-term sustainability
in mind, it's important to avoid relying on any one source of traffic. Any
channel can be fickle, and Facebook has certainly proven to be no exception.
That being said, Facebook still represents the largest share of the social
space, and is at least worth considering for businesses looking to diversify
their channel marketing portfolio, be it niche-targeted or otherwise.
Just 9 months after we decided to give the platform the old college try,
Facebook has become a substantial traffic source for our B2B business.
As I mentioned in the Mozinar, our business has spent the last nine months
developing our Facebook channel. As a result, we've seen traffic from Facebook
increase to the point where it is roughly equal to 30% of our organic traffic.
In this post, I'll be going through the philosophy we use to maximize
engagement and traffic.
Marketing like it's 2013
In a recent post on LinkedIn, marketing wizard Gary Vaynerchuk delivered this
gem: "It's 2013 and 99 percent of people are marketing their products like It's
2004."
His assessment is spot on.
Successfully building social media channels that drive converting traffic is
about more than a content schedule. On Facebook, you have a built-in audience of
anywhere from hundreds to millions of people who have opted in to your message.
Remind you of another platform you use? Email, perhaps?
Social media, of course, adds engagement into the mix. This means that you not
only have the opportunity to push your message out to your droves of fans, but a
responsibility to have conversations, contribute, and be a member of the
community.
If you want to market like it's 2013, you have to learn how to engage your
audience, not just talk at them.
The (not so) curious case of Sue Bryce
Sue Bryce is an award-winning professional photographer that teaches
photography through workshops on CreativeLIVE. If you take a look at her
Facebook page, you'll see that her engagement is off the charts. 43,000 likes
with 8,870 talking about her page.
How does she do it?
First things first, she's not even remotely shy about promoting herself or her
work. As you progress down her page, you'll definitely see the occasional post
promoting her events or cross-promoting her partners.
But therein lies the rub. The occasional post. The promotional posts are woven
into a cloth of intensely personal, fun, and sometimes catty quips about life,
the photography business, and people that she meets along her journey.
Among her most engaged-with recent posts? Sharing a story about getting dental
work done, and how happy it makes her feel. I guarantee that each person who
liked and/or commented on this post feels closer to Sue because of it.
In addition to sharing elements of her personal life, Sue communicates with
her Facebook community in her own voice. There is nothing that feels remotely
fake or forced about her posts. This makes it extremely easy for her fans to
feel a connection to her, and to respond to her posts, which they do quite
regularly.
Finally, Sue takes advantage of the fact that visual media performs
exceptionally well on Facebook. In fact, a 2012 HubSpot study found that photos
on Facebook generated 53% more likes than the average post. As possibly one of
the world's best photographers, of course, Sue has an unfair advantage in this
arena.
Even still, one of her recent photo shares depicting her and fellow
photography guru Kelly Brown in newborn poses garnered 2,174 likes, 156 shares,
and 262 comments. Why? Because it was fun, relevant to the audience, and (let's
be honest) darn cute.
Despite the fact that you're probably not a world-renowned photographer, it's
still extremely important to engage your audience with relevant visual media.
Behind-the-scenes photos, product photos, and event photos are all a good place
to start, and will work for most businesses.
Obviously, as a sole proprietor, Sue Bryce has a much easier time
incorporating her personal voice into her brand, and this type of strategy won't
necessarily work for all types of businesses. If nothing else, this case
exemplifies the possibilities of incorporating personality into your brand to
achieve outlandish levels of engagement.
Channeling your inner Sue by harnessing the power of TAGFEE
Seeing success is great, but this article isn't here to tell you how awesome
Sue is.
Image credit: Nicholas L., from Minneapolis
Interestingly, what makes her such a great example for the Moz audience is
that her Facebook page is a ridiculously great example of being TAGFEE. How can
you incorporate this attitude into your own social endeavors?
Be transparent and authentic
While transparency can get bogged down with organizational hurdles, the lesson
is to be yourself. Decide who your company is, and talk about things that
reflect that, even if they're uncomfortable. For example, if you sell industrial
supplies, don't be afraid to talk about the downsides of certain products.
Modern customers know better than to trust claims that everything you sell is
made out of sunshine, rainbows, and Adamantium.
Be generous
Offer special benefits to your fans that follow you on Facebook. Offer free
trials and products, highlight their success stories on your page, and
intentionally seek to add as much value to them as possible. This means thinking
critically about what you're adding to the conversation, not just extracting
from the platform.
Be fun
Again, being fun is relative, and dependent on company culture. But, as can be
seen in the example of Sue Bryce, fun drives engagement. The same goes for Moz.
It never hurts to take a lighthearted approach, and a good brand personality
will make your fans more engaged.
Be empathetic
On one level, empathy is about following the golden rule. Facebook manners are
no exception. Strive to be professional and respectful on social media at all
times. Additionally, I would argue that empathy is about continually seeking to
understand how your audience feels, what challenges they face, and working hard
to provide a product and resources that help them address those needs and
challenges.
Be exceptional
There is no shortcut to being exceptional. Always seek to try new things, test
new ideas, and be fresh and relevant. This is not only a healthy practice for
your business, but a way for you to add unique value for your fans. Being
exceptional lets you tell exceptional, unique, and fresh stories in a way that
other brands in your industry may not be able to. It's all about setting
yourself apart.
Being exceptional includes making the most of the platform. Use well designed,
cohesive image posts. Not only do you want each post to be interesting from a
visual perspective, but you want your page as a whole to have a sense of visual
flow. Doing this will not only boost your engagement, but also make your
Facebook page look more professional and put together.
The same goes for copy. Choose a voice that fits your brand, remember to edit,
and deliver your message exceptionally well. Know how you plan to format your
posts, and how formatting works on Facebook. If you mention one of your fans,
tag their name with @Username. Create a style guide and stick to it.
Paying to play
The problem of "pay to play" on Facebook is worth mentioning, as past and
future changes have and will alter your brand's visibility on the platform. As
it stands, our brand's data shows that we can expect to reach between 7% to 32%
of our built-in audience when posting without advertisements.
Facebook indicated in early 2012 that the average reach of an "organic" post
was 16%.
Considering that open rates of between 15% and 25% are, in general, considered
good in email marketing, we can say that non-boosted Facebook posts boast
respectable performance as they are.
The counter-intuitive twist is that paying to play isn't necessarily a bad
thing.
Much like a Google SERP in the dark ages of Internet marketing, a Facebook
feed inundated with an uncomfortable slurry of poorly written brand messages and
uninteresting posts isn't really a worthwhile place for your brand to be.
A realignment in the signal-to-noise ratio is a serious come-up for a brand
that uses Facebook responsibly and thoughtfully, and raises the bar to entry in
a way that benefits brands that have their house in order.
Considering that Facebook advertising is relatively affordable, and allows you
to target a ridiculously granular audience outside of your normal fan base, it
is definitely worth a go. Lauren Vaccarello from Salesforce gave an outstanding
primer on Facebook advertising in a recent WBF, and there's an excellent crash
course on YouMoz. I recommend checking out both of them if you think Facebook
advertising is a good fit for your business.
Additional resources
The social media landscape is constantly evolving, and Facebook is no
exception. Over time, citizens of the Facebook empire will likely grow more and
more desensitized to advertising. While some best practices are bound to remain
exactly the same, it's important to keep an eye out for developments in the
ecosystem.
That said, you can cover most of the basics with the following resources:
6 Facebook Marketing Best Practices
Facebook Timeline: 9 Best Practices for Brands
7 Key Ways to Optimize Facebook Fan Page SEO
And that's a wrap. Enjoy building an outstanding Facebook presence, and
rememberâkeep it TAGFEE!
Have you had great success driving traffic with Facebook? Please share your
experiences 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/mLL7JvC_mdI/kill-it-on-facebook-by-being-tagfee
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
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TAGFEE'
Posted by quietcorey
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.
Last month, I presented a Mozinar on Deconstructing a Niche Market. Much to my
surprise, the Q&A session focused almost entirely on my experience using
Facebook as a niche marketing channel.
It's true that Facebook is a dynamic and oft-misunderstood creature,
especially in marketing. When building a strategy with long-term sustainability
in mind, it's important to avoid relying on any one source of traffic. Any
channel can be fickle, and Facebook has certainly proven to be no exception.
That being said, Facebook still represents the largest share of the social
space, and is at least worth considering for businesses looking to diversify
their channel marketing portfolio, be it niche-targeted or otherwise.
Just 9 months after we decided to give the platform the old college try,
Facebook has become a substantial traffic source for our B2B business.
As I mentioned in the Mozinar, our business has spent the last nine months
developing our Facebook channel. As a result, we've seen traffic from Facebook
increase to the point where it is roughly equal to 30% of our organic traffic.
In this post, I'll be going through the philosophy we use to maximize
engagement and traffic.
Marketing like it's 2013
In a recent post on LinkedIn, marketing wizard Gary Vaynerchuk delivered this
gem: "It's 2013 and 99 percent of people are marketing their products like It's
2004."
His assessment is spot on.
Successfully building social media channels that drive converting traffic is
about more than a content schedule. On Facebook, you have a built-in audience of
anywhere from hundreds to millions of people who have opted in to your message.
Remind you of another platform you use? Email, perhaps?
Social media, of course, adds engagement into the mix. This means that you not
only have the opportunity to push your message out to your droves of fans, but a
responsibility to have conversations, contribute, and be a member of the
community.
If you want to market like it's 2013, you have to learn how to engage your
audience, not just talk at them.
The (not so) curious case of Sue Bryce
Sue Bryce is an award-winning professional photographer that teaches
photography through workshops on CreativeLIVE. If you take a look at her
Facebook page, you'll see that her engagement is off the charts. 43,000 likes
with 8,870 talking about her page.
How does she do it?
First things first, she's not even remotely shy about promoting herself or her
work. As you progress down her page, you'll definitely see the occasional post
promoting her events or cross-promoting her partners.
But therein lies the rub. The occasional post. The promotional posts are woven
into a cloth of intensely personal, fun, and sometimes catty quips about life,
the photography business, and people that she meets along her journey.
Among her most engaged-with recent posts? Sharing a story about getting dental
work done, and how happy it makes her feel. I guarantee that each person who
liked and/or commented on this post feels closer to Sue because of it.
In addition to sharing elements of her personal life, Sue communicates with
her Facebook community in her own voice. There is nothing that feels remotely
fake or forced about her posts. This makes it extremely easy for her fans to
feel a connection to her, and to respond to her posts, which they do quite
regularly.
Finally, Sue takes advantage of the fact that visual media performs
exceptionally well on Facebook. In fact, a 2012 HubSpot study found that photos
on Facebook generated 53% more likes than the average post. As possibly one of
the world's best photographers, of course, Sue has an unfair advantage in this
arena.
Even still, one of her recent photo shares depicting her and fellow
photography guru Kelly Brown in newborn poses garnered 2,174 likes, 156 shares,
and 262 comments. Why? Because it was fun, relevant to the audience, and (let's
be honest) darn cute.
Despite the fact that you're probably not a world-renowned photographer, it's
still extremely important to engage your audience with relevant visual media.
Behind-the-scenes photos, product photos, and event photos are all a good place
to start, and will work for most businesses.
Obviously, as a sole proprietor, Sue Bryce has a much easier time
incorporating her personal voice into her brand, and this type of strategy won't
necessarily work for all types of businesses. If nothing else, this case
exemplifies the possibilities of incorporating personality into your brand to
achieve outlandish levels of engagement.
Channeling your inner Sue by harnessing the power of TAGFEE
Seeing success is great, but this article isn't here to tell you how awesome
Sue is.
Image credit: Nicholas L., from Minneapolis
Interestingly, what makes her such a great example for the Moz audience is
that her Facebook page is a ridiculously great example of being TAGFEE. How can
you incorporate this attitude into your own social endeavors?
Be transparent and authentic
While transparency can get bogged down with organizational hurdles, the lesson
is to be yourself. Decide who your company is, and talk about things that
reflect that, even if they're uncomfortable. For example, if you sell industrial
supplies, don't be afraid to talk about the downsides of certain products.
Modern customers know better than to trust claims that everything you sell is
made out of sunshine, rainbows, and Adamantium.
Be generous
Offer special benefits to your fans that follow you on Facebook. Offer free
trials and products, highlight their success stories on your page, and
intentionally seek to add as much value to them as possible. This means thinking
critically about what you're adding to the conversation, not just extracting
from the platform.
Be fun
Again, being fun is relative, and dependent on company culture. But, as can be
seen in the example of Sue Bryce, fun drives engagement. The same goes for Moz.
It never hurts to take a lighthearted approach, and a good brand personality
will make your fans more engaged.
Be empathetic
On one level, empathy is about following the golden rule. Facebook manners are
no exception. Strive to be professional and respectful on social media at all
times. Additionally, I would argue that empathy is about continually seeking to
understand how your audience feels, what challenges they face, and working hard
to provide a product and resources that help them address those needs and
challenges.
Be exceptional
There is no shortcut to being exceptional. Always seek to try new things, test
new ideas, and be fresh and relevant. This is not only a healthy practice for
your business, but a way for you to add unique value for your fans. Being
exceptional lets you tell exceptional, unique, and fresh stories in a way that
other brands in your industry may not be able to. It's all about setting
yourself apart.
Being exceptional includes making the most of the platform. Use well designed,
cohesive image posts. Not only do you want each post to be interesting from a
visual perspective, but you want your page as a whole to have a sense of visual
flow. Doing this will not only boost your engagement, but also make your
Facebook page look more professional and put together.
The same goes for copy. Choose a voice that fits your brand, remember to edit,
and deliver your message exceptionally well. Know how you plan to format your
posts, and how formatting works on Facebook. If you mention one of your fans,
tag their name with @Username. Create a style guide and stick to it.
Paying to play
The problem of "pay to play" on Facebook is worth mentioning, as past and
future changes have and will alter your brand's visibility on the platform. As
it stands, our brand's data shows that we can expect to reach between 7% to 32%
of our built-in audience when posting without advertisements.
Facebook indicated in early 2012 that the average reach of an "organic" post
was 16%.
Considering that open rates of between 15% and 25% are, in general, considered
good in email marketing, we can say that non-boosted Facebook posts boast
respectable performance as they are.
The counter-intuitive twist is that paying to play isn't necessarily a bad
thing.
Much like a Google SERP in the dark ages of Internet marketing, a Facebook
feed inundated with an uncomfortable slurry of poorly written brand messages and
uninteresting posts isn't really a worthwhile place for your brand to be.
A realignment in the signal-to-noise ratio is a serious come-up for a brand
that uses Facebook responsibly and thoughtfully, and raises the bar to entry in
a way that benefits brands that have their house in order.
Considering that Facebook advertising is relatively affordable, and allows you
to target a ridiculously granular audience outside of your normal fan base, it
is definitely worth a go. Lauren Vaccarello from Salesforce gave an outstanding
primer on Facebook advertising in a recent WBF, and there's an excellent crash
course on YouMoz. I recommend checking out both of them if you think Facebook
advertising is a good fit for your business.
Additional resources
The social media landscape is constantly evolving, and Facebook is no
exception. Over time, citizens of the Facebook empire will likely grow more and
more desensitized to advertising. While some best practices are bound to remain
exactly the same, it's important to keep an eye out for developments in the
ecosystem.
That said, you can cover most of the basics with the following resources:
6 Facebook Marketing Best Practices
Facebook Timeline: 9 Best Practices for Brands
7 Key Ways to Optimize Facebook Fan Page SEO
And that's a wrap. Enjoy building an outstanding Facebook presence, and
rememberâkeep it TAGFEE!
Have you had great success driving traffic with Facebook? Please share your
experiences 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!
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Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Tuesday 24 September 2013
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'When Keyword (not provided) is 100
Percent of Organic Referrals, What Should Marketers Do? - Whiteboard Tuesday'
Posted by randfish
For nearly two years, marketers have been frustrated by a steadily increasing
percentage of keywords (not provided). Recent changes by Google have sent those
numbers soaring. The site Not Provided Count now reports an average of nearly
74% of keywords not provided, and speculation abounds that it won't be long
before 100% of keywords are masked. Without that referral data, our tasks as
Internet marketers become far more difficultâbut not impossible.
In this special Whiteboard Tuesday, Rand covers what marketers can do to make
up for this drastic change, finding data from other sources to stay on top of
their SEO efforts.
Whiteboard Friday - Now that Keyword (not provided) is 100% of Referrals,
What Should Marketers Do_1
For reference, here's a still image of today's whiteboard!
Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday! Today
I'm going to talk about this extremely troublesome and worrisome problem that
Google has expanded "keyword (not provided)" potentially to 100% of all organic
referrals. This isn't necessarily that they've flipped the entire switch, and
everyone's going to see it this week, but certainly over the next several
months, it's been suggested, we may receive no keyword data at all in referrals
from Google. Very troubling and concerning, obviously, if you're a web marketer.
I think it should be very troubling and concerning if you're a web user as
well, because marketers don't use this data to do evil things or invade people's
privacy. Marketers use this data to make the web a better place. The agreement
that marketers have always hadâthat website creators have always
hadâwith search engines, since their inception was, "sure, we'll let you
crawl our sites, you provide us with the keyword data so that we can improve the
Internet together. I think this is Google abusing their monopolistic position in
the United States. Unfortunately, I don't really see a way out of it. I don't
think marketers can make a strong enough case politically or to consumer groups
to get this removed. Maybe the EU can eventually.
But in any case, let's deal with the reality that we're faced with today,
which is that keyword not provided may be 100% of your referrals, and so keyword
data is essentially gone. We don't know when Google sends a visitâBing, to
their credit, and to Microsoft's credit, enduringly has kept that data
accessibleâbut we don't know when Google sends a visit to our sites and
pages, what that person searched for. Previously, we could do some
samplingânow we can't even do that.
There are some big tasks that we use that data for, and so to start with, I
want to try and identify the uses for keyword referral data, at least the very
important ones as I perceive themâthere are certainly many more.
Number one: finding opportunities to improve a page's performance or its
ranking. If you see that a page of yours is receiving a lot of search traffic,
or that a keyword is sending a lot of search traffic (or even a little bit of
search traffic), but the page is not ranking very well, you know that by
improving that page's ranking you have an opportunity to earn a lot more search
traffic. That's a very valuable thing as a marketer. You can also see if a
search query is sending traffic to a page, but that page has a high bounce rate
for that traffic, low pages-per-visit, low conversion rate, you know, "hey, I'm
not doing a good job serving the visitor; I need to improve how the page
addresses that." That's one of the key things we use keyword referral data for.
Secondarily: connecting rank improvement effortsâthings that we do in
the SEO world to move up our rankingsâto the traffic growth that we
receive from them. This is very important for consultants and for agencies, and
for in-house SEOs as well, to show our value to our managers, and our
clientsâit's really, really tough to have this data taken away.
C: Understanding how your searchers perceive your brand and your content.
When we look down the list of phrases that sent us traffic, we could see things
like "oh, this is how people are thinking about my brand, or thinking about this
product I launched, or thinking about this content that I've put out." Really
challenging to do that nowadays.
And D: uncovering keyword opportunities. We could certainly see, "this is
sending a small amount of traffic, this is doing some long-tail stuff,
heyâlet's turn this into a broader piece of content. Let's try and
optimize for some of those keyword phrases that we're barely ranking on." Or, we
have a page that's not really addressing that keyword phrase that we're ranking
on. We can address that. We can improve that.
So I'm going to try and tackle some relatively simplistic ways, and I'm not
going to walk through all the details you would need to do this, but I think
many folks in the SEO and marketing sphere will address these over the weeks and
months to come.
Starting with A. How do I find opportunities to improve a page's ranking or
its performance with users when I can't see keyword referral data? How do I know
which page people are coming to? Thankfully, we can use the connectionâthe
intersection of a few different sources of data. Pages that are receiving search
visits is a big one, and this is going to be used throughoutâinstead of
looking at keyword-level data, we're going to be looking at page-level data.
Which pages received referral visits from Google Search? Thankfully, that's
still data that we do get, and that'll likely stay with us, because we can
always see a referral source, and we know which pages are loaded. So, even if
Google Analytics were to remove that, I think a third-party analytics provider
would step in.
Pages receiving search visits plus rank-tracking data can get us a little
close to this, because we can essentially say, "hey, we know this page is
ranking well for these five or ten keywords that we have some reasonable
expectation that they have keyword search volume. They're receiving search
visits, and yet they're not performing well, or they're not ranking particularly
well, so improving them should be able to drive up our search traffic, improving
their performance with users should be able to drive up our conversion rate
optimization.
Optionally, we could also add in things like Google Webmaster Tools or
AdWords data; AdWords data being used on they keyword side to fill in for, "hey,
what's the volume that a keyword is getting," and Google Webmaster Tools data to
be able to see a list of some keywords that maybe are sending us traffic. Dr.
Pete wrote a good post recently about the relative accuracy of Google Webmaster
Tools, and while unfortunately it's not as good as any of the other methods,
it's still not awful, and so that data is potentially usable.
This will give us a list of pages that get search visits, or are targeting
important search terms, that rank, and that have the potential to improve. So
this gets us to the answer to this question. This used to be really simple to
get at, now it's more difficult, but still possible.
B. Connecting our SEO efforts to traffic growth from search. I know this is
going to be tremendously hard, and this is probably one of the biggest tolls
that this change is taking on SEO folks. Because as SEOs, as marketers, we've
shown our value by saying, "look, we're driving up search visits, some of it's
branded, some of it's unbranded, some of it's not providedâbut you get a
rough sense of this. And you really need that percentage: "What percent of the
traffic is actually you going and getting us new visitors that never would have
found us, versus branded stuff that's just sort of rising on its own." Maybe
it's rising because of efforts that marketers are making: investments in
content, and in social media, and in email and all these other wonderful things,
but it's hard to knowâ it's hard to directly map that.
So here's one of the ways. Optionally, we can use AdWords to bid on branded
terms and phrases. When we do that, you might want to have a relatively broad
match on your branded terms and phrases so that you can see keyword volume that
is branded from impression data. That gives you a sense of, "what's the
trajectory, here?" If we're seeing it grow, we can identify "oh, that's not us
driving a bunch of new non-branded new keyword terms and phrases; that's our
brand search increasing." So we can sort of discount that, or apply that in our
reporting effectively. If we see, on the other hand, that it's staying flat, but
that search traffic overall is going up and to the right, then we know that's
unbranded.
Optionally, if we don't want to be bidding and spending a lot of money with
Google AdWords and trying to keep our impression counts high, we can use things
like Google Insights or even downloading AdWords volume data estimates
month-over-month to be able to track those sorts of things.
Certainly one of the things I would recommend doing even prior to this
change is tracking rankings on buckets. Buckets of head terms, versus chunky
middle, versus long-tail; so phrases that are getting lots of search volume, a
good amount of search volume, and very little search volume. You want to have
different buckets of those, so you can see, "oh hey, my rankings are generally
improving in this bucket, or that bucket." Same with branded vs. non-branded;
you want to be able to identify and track those separately. Then, compare
against visits that you're seeing to pages that are ranking for those terms. We
need to look at the pages that are receiving search traffic from those different
buckets.
Again, much more challenging to do these days. But, any time we see the
complexity of our practice is increasing, we also have an opportunity, because
it means that those of us who are savvy, sophisticated, able to track this data,
are far more useful and employable and important. Those organizations that use
great marketers are going to receive outsized benefits from doing so.
C: How do I understand and analyze how searchers perceive my brand? What are
they searching for that's leading them to my site? How are they searching for
terms related to my brand? Again, we can bid on AdWords terms, like I talked
about. You can use keyword suggestion sources like Google Suggest, Ubersuggest,
certainly AdWords's own volume data, SEMRush, etc. to see the keyword expansions
related to your brand or the content that's very closely tied to your brand. And
internal site search data. You've got a search box up in the top-right hand
corner, people are typing in stuff, and you want to see what that "XYZ" is that
they're typing in. Those can help as well, and can provide you some
opportunities that lead to D.
D: How do I uncover new keyword opportunities to target? Of course, there's
the classic methodology that we've all employed, which is keyword research, but
usually we compare that to the terms that are already sending us traffic, and we
go look and say, "oh, okay, we're doing fine for theseâwe don't need to
worry." Now, we need to take keyword research tools and add some form of
rank-tracking data. That could be from Google Webmaster Tools despite its
mediocrity in terms of accuracy. We can use manual rank dataâwe can search
for it ourselvesâor we can use automated data.
One of the criticisms for all rank-tracking data is always, "but there's
lots of personalization and geographic localizationâthese kinds of things
that are biasing searchesâhow do I see all of that?" And the answer is,
well, you can't really. Personalization is going to fluctuate things. It may be
sort of included in the Google Webmaster Tools data, but as Dr. Pete showed in
his post, it looks a little funky right now.
For localization, you can add the geo in the string to be able to see where
you rank in different geographies if you want to track those. That's something
you'll be able to do in Moz Analytics and probably many of the other keyword
tracking tools out there, too.
Optionallyâand this is expensive, and I hate to say this is Google
being evil, but this is probably what Google wants you to do when they give you
"(not provided)"âwhich is run AdWords campaigns targeting those keywords,
so that you can see new expansion opportunities. Areas where, "oh hey, we bid on
this, it sent impressions, it sent some traffic, it looks like it's worthwhile,
we're not ranking for it organically," and again, you can see that through your
rank-tracking data or through pages receiving visits from search, and then
targeting those terms.
So, a lot of this data, and a lot of these opportunities are
retrievableâthey're just a lot harder. I will sayâthis is somewhat
self-promotional, but I think one of Moz's missions and obligations as a company
to the search marketing world is to try and help replace, repair, and make these
processes easier. So, you can guess that over the next 6-12 months that's going
to be a big part of our roadmap: trying to help you folksâand all
marketersâget to this data.
For now, these methodologies can and should be helpful to you, and I expect
to see lots of great discussion about other ways to go about this in the
comments.
Thanks, everyoneâtake care.
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/~3/3N5M5C4z_Zg/100-percent-keyword-not-provided-whiteboard-tuesday
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posted.
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Percent of Organic Referrals, What Should Marketers Do? - Whiteboard Tuesday'
Posted by randfish
For nearly two years, marketers have been frustrated by a steadily increasing
percentage of keywords (not provided). Recent changes by Google have sent those
numbers soaring. The site Not Provided Count now reports an average of nearly
74% of keywords not provided, and speculation abounds that it won't be long
before 100% of keywords are masked. Without that referral data, our tasks as
Internet marketers become far more difficultâbut not impossible.
In this special Whiteboard Tuesday, Rand covers what marketers can do to make
up for this drastic change, finding data from other sources to stay on top of
their SEO efforts.
Whiteboard Friday - Now that Keyword (not provided) is 100% of Referrals,
What Should Marketers Do_1
For reference, here's a still image of today's whiteboard!
Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday! Today
I'm going to talk about this extremely troublesome and worrisome problem that
Google has expanded "keyword (not provided)" potentially to 100% of all organic
referrals. This isn't necessarily that they've flipped the entire switch, and
everyone's going to see it this week, but certainly over the next several
months, it's been suggested, we may receive no keyword data at all in referrals
from Google. Very troubling and concerning, obviously, if you're a web marketer.
I think it should be very troubling and concerning if you're a web user as
well, because marketers don't use this data to do evil things or invade people's
privacy. Marketers use this data to make the web a better place. The agreement
that marketers have always hadâthat website creators have always
hadâwith search engines, since their inception was, "sure, we'll let you
crawl our sites, you provide us with the keyword data so that we can improve the
Internet together. I think this is Google abusing their monopolistic position in
the United States. Unfortunately, I don't really see a way out of it. I don't
think marketers can make a strong enough case politically or to consumer groups
to get this removed. Maybe the EU can eventually.
But in any case, let's deal with the reality that we're faced with today,
which is that keyword not provided may be 100% of your referrals, and so keyword
data is essentially gone. We don't know when Google sends a visitâBing, to
their credit, and to Microsoft's credit, enduringly has kept that data
accessibleâbut we don't know when Google sends a visit to our sites and
pages, what that person searched for. Previously, we could do some
samplingânow we can't even do that.
There are some big tasks that we use that data for, and so to start with, I
want to try and identify the uses for keyword referral data, at least the very
important ones as I perceive themâthere are certainly many more.
Number one: finding opportunities to improve a page's performance or its
ranking. If you see that a page of yours is receiving a lot of search traffic,
or that a keyword is sending a lot of search traffic (or even a little bit of
search traffic), but the page is not ranking very well, you know that by
improving that page's ranking you have an opportunity to earn a lot more search
traffic. That's a very valuable thing as a marketer. You can also see if a
search query is sending traffic to a page, but that page has a high bounce rate
for that traffic, low pages-per-visit, low conversion rate, you know, "hey, I'm
not doing a good job serving the visitor; I need to improve how the page
addresses that." That's one of the key things we use keyword referral data for.
Secondarily: connecting rank improvement effortsâthings that we do in
the SEO world to move up our rankingsâto the traffic growth that we
receive from them. This is very important for consultants and for agencies, and
for in-house SEOs as well, to show our value to our managers, and our
clientsâit's really, really tough to have this data taken away.
C: Understanding how your searchers perceive your brand and your content.
When we look down the list of phrases that sent us traffic, we could see things
like "oh, this is how people are thinking about my brand, or thinking about this
product I launched, or thinking about this content that I've put out." Really
challenging to do that nowadays.
And D: uncovering keyword opportunities. We could certainly see, "this is
sending a small amount of traffic, this is doing some long-tail stuff,
heyâlet's turn this into a broader piece of content. Let's try and
optimize for some of those keyword phrases that we're barely ranking on." Or, we
have a page that's not really addressing that keyword phrase that we're ranking
on. We can address that. We can improve that.
So I'm going to try and tackle some relatively simplistic ways, and I'm not
going to walk through all the details you would need to do this, but I think
many folks in the SEO and marketing sphere will address these over the weeks and
months to come.
Starting with A. How do I find opportunities to improve a page's ranking or
its performance with users when I can't see keyword referral data? How do I know
which page people are coming to? Thankfully, we can use the connectionâthe
intersection of a few different sources of data. Pages that are receiving search
visits is a big one, and this is going to be used throughoutâinstead of
looking at keyword-level data, we're going to be looking at page-level data.
Which pages received referral visits from Google Search? Thankfully, that's
still data that we do get, and that'll likely stay with us, because we can
always see a referral source, and we know which pages are loaded. So, even if
Google Analytics were to remove that, I think a third-party analytics provider
would step in.
Pages receiving search visits plus rank-tracking data can get us a little
close to this, because we can essentially say, "hey, we know this page is
ranking well for these five or ten keywords that we have some reasonable
expectation that they have keyword search volume. They're receiving search
visits, and yet they're not performing well, or they're not ranking particularly
well, so improving them should be able to drive up our search traffic, improving
their performance with users should be able to drive up our conversion rate
optimization.
Optionally, we could also add in things like Google Webmaster Tools or
AdWords data; AdWords data being used on they keyword side to fill in for, "hey,
what's the volume that a keyword is getting," and Google Webmaster Tools data to
be able to see a list of some keywords that maybe are sending us traffic. Dr.
Pete wrote a good post recently about the relative accuracy of Google Webmaster
Tools, and while unfortunately it's not as good as any of the other methods,
it's still not awful, and so that data is potentially usable.
This will give us a list of pages that get search visits, or are targeting
important search terms, that rank, and that have the potential to improve. So
this gets us to the answer to this question. This used to be really simple to
get at, now it's more difficult, but still possible.
B. Connecting our SEO efforts to traffic growth from search. I know this is
going to be tremendously hard, and this is probably one of the biggest tolls
that this change is taking on SEO folks. Because as SEOs, as marketers, we've
shown our value by saying, "look, we're driving up search visits, some of it's
branded, some of it's unbranded, some of it's not providedâbut you get a
rough sense of this. And you really need that percentage: "What percent of the
traffic is actually you going and getting us new visitors that never would have
found us, versus branded stuff that's just sort of rising on its own." Maybe
it's rising because of efforts that marketers are making: investments in
content, and in social media, and in email and all these other wonderful things,
but it's hard to knowâ it's hard to directly map that.
So here's one of the ways. Optionally, we can use AdWords to bid on branded
terms and phrases. When we do that, you might want to have a relatively broad
match on your branded terms and phrases so that you can see keyword volume that
is branded from impression data. That gives you a sense of, "what's the
trajectory, here?" If we're seeing it grow, we can identify "oh, that's not us
driving a bunch of new non-branded new keyword terms and phrases; that's our
brand search increasing." So we can sort of discount that, or apply that in our
reporting effectively. If we see, on the other hand, that it's staying flat, but
that search traffic overall is going up and to the right, then we know that's
unbranded.
Optionally, if we don't want to be bidding and spending a lot of money with
Google AdWords and trying to keep our impression counts high, we can use things
like Google Insights or even downloading AdWords volume data estimates
month-over-month to be able to track those sorts of things.
Certainly one of the things I would recommend doing even prior to this
change is tracking rankings on buckets. Buckets of head terms, versus chunky
middle, versus long-tail; so phrases that are getting lots of search volume, a
good amount of search volume, and very little search volume. You want to have
different buckets of those, so you can see, "oh hey, my rankings are generally
improving in this bucket, or that bucket." Same with branded vs. non-branded;
you want to be able to identify and track those separately. Then, compare
against visits that you're seeing to pages that are ranking for those terms. We
need to look at the pages that are receiving search traffic from those different
buckets.
Again, much more challenging to do these days. But, any time we see the
complexity of our practice is increasing, we also have an opportunity, because
it means that those of us who are savvy, sophisticated, able to track this data,
are far more useful and employable and important. Those organizations that use
great marketers are going to receive outsized benefits from doing so.
C: How do I understand and analyze how searchers perceive my brand? What are
they searching for that's leading them to my site? How are they searching for
terms related to my brand? Again, we can bid on AdWords terms, like I talked
about. You can use keyword suggestion sources like Google Suggest, Ubersuggest,
certainly AdWords's own volume data, SEMRush, etc. to see the keyword expansions
related to your brand or the content that's very closely tied to your brand. And
internal site search data. You've got a search box up in the top-right hand
corner, people are typing in stuff, and you want to see what that "XYZ" is that
they're typing in. Those can help as well, and can provide you some
opportunities that lead to D.
D: How do I uncover new keyword opportunities to target? Of course, there's
the classic methodology that we've all employed, which is keyword research, but
usually we compare that to the terms that are already sending us traffic, and we
go look and say, "oh, okay, we're doing fine for theseâwe don't need to
worry." Now, we need to take keyword research tools and add some form of
rank-tracking data. That could be from Google Webmaster Tools despite its
mediocrity in terms of accuracy. We can use manual rank dataâwe can search
for it ourselvesâor we can use automated data.
One of the criticisms for all rank-tracking data is always, "but there's
lots of personalization and geographic localizationâthese kinds of things
that are biasing searchesâhow do I see all of that?" And the answer is,
well, you can't really. Personalization is going to fluctuate things. It may be
sort of included in the Google Webmaster Tools data, but as Dr. Pete showed in
his post, it looks a little funky right now.
For localization, you can add the geo in the string to be able to see where
you rank in different geographies if you want to track those. That's something
you'll be able to do in Moz Analytics and probably many of the other keyword
tracking tools out there, too.
Optionallyâand this is expensive, and I hate to say this is Google
being evil, but this is probably what Google wants you to do when they give you
"(not provided)"âwhich is run AdWords campaigns targeting those keywords,
so that you can see new expansion opportunities. Areas where, "oh hey, we bid on
this, it sent impressions, it sent some traffic, it looks like it's worthwhile,
we're not ranking for it organically," and again, you can see that through your
rank-tracking data or through pages receiving visits from search, and then
targeting those terms.
So, a lot of this data, and a lot of these opportunities are
retrievableâthey're just a lot harder. I will sayâthis is somewhat
self-promotional, but I think one of Moz's missions and obligations as a company
to the search marketing world is to try and help replace, repair, and make these
processes easier. So, you can guess that over the next 6-12 months that's going
to be a big part of our roadmap: trying to help you folksâand all
marketersâget to this data.
For now, these methodologies can and should be helpful to you, and I expect
to see lots of great discussion about other ways to go about this in the
comments.
Thanks, everyoneâtake care.
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/~3/3N5M5C4z_Zg/100-percent-keyword-not-provided-whiteboard-tuesday
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 23 September 2013
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'Building Your Marketing Funnel
with Google Analytics'
Posted by dohertyjf
Do you have an idea of the path a user typically takes to convert on your
website? Or, are you simply building traffic from one channel (probably organic)
and wondering why it's not converting better? As I've grown up as a marketer,
I've begun to really appreciate the insights that data can provide us on how
users interact with our sites, and more importantly, on how they convert and
where the experience can be improved to increase our conversion rates, and
thereby our top-line revenue from online channels.
I've recently been very interested in building a full marketing funnel based
on Google Analytics data. While it's one thing to be able to identify where
conversion discrepancies exist, such as low-converting types of visitors, it's
quite another to build a full and informed funnel from your site's data. In
order to do this and have an accurate view of where your conversions are
actually coming from, you need to first have the following in place:
Email URL tracking: Check out Annie Cushing's thoughts here in slides 11-14.
(Actually, look at the whole deck.)
Social network tracking (tagging parameters and using a shortener to see
clickthroughs by link)
Display tagging
Referral links tagged (or at least be aware of HTTPS sites linking to you, like
Medium)
Paid search campaigns tagged
Tagging on affiliates (if applicable)
You can build your campaigns here using Google's tool.
What's a funnel?
Before we get too far into the meat of this post, I want to make sure we're
all talking about the same thing. I'm not referring to one of these. Rather, I'm
referring to one of these:
The funnel is typically broken into three sections:
Top of funnel (TOFU)
Middle of funnel (MOFU)
Bottom of funnel (BOFU)
The goal of this post is going to walk you through how to identify the
channels that are performing best for you in each of these areas. Once you know
those, you know where to invest depending on your company's needs or priorities.
Also, knowing the different areas to which you can contribute will help endear
you to the people running those channels, which will help you avoid being siloed
as "the SEO." Instead, you will start to be seen as part of the marketing team,
which is what you are.
Another note: I'm not teaching you how to integrate into other marketing
channels in this post. Stephanie Chang did a great job of it back in July when
she wrote An Introduction to Integrated Marketing and SEO: How It Works and Why
It Matters. Have a read there after you're finished here.
Understanding attribution
You may already know this, but Google Analytics offers multi-channel
attribution tools within the "Conversions" section:
In the "Assisted Conversions" section, you will see a number of columns. The
ones to pay attention to are:
Assisted Conversions
Last Click/Direct Conversions
It's important to understand the difference between assisted conversions and
last click/direct conversions. According to Google's own Answer Bin, a channel
gets credit for an assisted conversion for any touch that they bring to the site
where the interaction was not the one that led directly to a conversion. Google
says:
This is the number (and monetary value) of sales and conversions the channel
assisted. If a channel appears anywhereâexcept as the final
interactionâon a conversion path, it is considered an assist for that
conversion. The higher these numbers, the more important the assist role of the
channel.
On the other side, a last click or direct conversion is a touch on the site
that led directly to a sale. These are your closer, aka bottom-of-funnel
channels. Google says:
This is the number (and monetary value) of sales and conversions the channel
closed or completed. The final click or direct visit before a conversion gets
Last Interaction credit for that conversion. The higher these numbers, the more
important the channelâs role in driving completion of sales and
conversions.
Make sense? Great. Let's build a funnel.
Identifying channels based on funnel level
As I said above, we're going to use Google Analytics to identify the channels
in the different levels of your funnel. If you use a different Analytics
platform, like Omniture or Piwik, write a guide using that and I'll be happy to
share it out.
Top of funnel
The top of your marketing funnel is where the first interactions with your
brand take place. This is typically attributed to search or organic, but is that
really the case for your website?
First, let's identify the most common channels that people use to discover
your site. To do this, go to Content > Site Content > Landing Pages. Set
your secondary dimension to "Medium." You'll see something like this:
Now, export this data to Excel (I've provided a spreadsheet at the end that
you can plug this data into) and pivot it to see which mediums are driving your
best traffic. If you want to get super fancy, break it down by type of page as
well.
Here's how that pivot table is set up:
For the site shown in these screenshots it is indeed PPC and organic search.
But just knowing the channel isn't enough, so let's take it a step further to
see where the different channels are driving traffic. You'll either need to
manually classify your pages (if you have relatively few like in my example) or
write an Excel script to do this automagically.
I now know that referral is the primary driver of traffic and that the
majority goes to the homepage. One specific referral, which I tagged with a
Medium of "Link," sends the best traffic directly to conversion pages (which
might not necessarily be the best place for people to land for their first
interaction):
Middle of funnel
The middle of your funnel is the area where people are moving from a first
brand interaction to an initial sale, or if they have already made a purchase,
towards another sale. What we're looking for in the data here is channels that
are not necessarily our primary first- or last-touch drivers. Rather, these are
the channels where the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th-time visitors come from in order to
interact with your content again.
We can figure out the most popular and most effective middle-of-funnel
channels a couple of different ways. The first, and by far the easiest, is by
comparing different types of attribution to discover which channels get more
credit based on first click, linear (where each channel gets equal credit), and
last-click. To learn what each of the different attribution models really means,
check out the Google support page.
By sorting the Model Comparison Tool in Analytics by Linear (high to low), you
can find the channels that perform best when given equal credit independent of
where they are in the funnel.
But this doesn't give us great insight into which channels perform best in the
middle. Rather, it's telling us which channels account for the most revenue
overall (which is still important to know), and the place doesn't matter. In the
above example, for Distilled that's Direct, then email, organic search, and
referral, in that order.
To find which channels are the most popular for your users to come back, we
need to do some manipulation in Excel (my favorite tool) to clean out the first-
and last-touch interactions in the Top Conversion Paths report.
What you want to do now is expand the number of rows in Analytics to account
for as many of your paths as possible. For most sites the 5,000-row limit in
Analytics will suffice.
Download all of your conversion paths into Excel. You'll have one column with
the complete paths, followed by the following columns:
Conversions
Conversion Value
To wrangle the data into the format we need, I also added the following
columns:
Steps in Conversion Path
First Touch
All Middle
Last Touch
$/Conversion
If you're a visual person, this screenshot may help you out to see how the
sheet is set up:
Larger version
Note: the hardest part here is figuring out what your cutoff is for
conversion amount. For Distilled, for example, I removed anything under $30,
because we don't do anything with the data underneath that. I also picked a
minimum threshold for the number of conversions that channel brought.
In Distilled's case, five seemed pertinent because it gives enough to get a
decent idea of $/conversion but also eliminates the very long (20+) conversion
paths that we're not going to optimize for anyways. However, also keep in mind
that the length of the path matters. For example, Distilled's median # of steps
before a conversion is eight. With fewer than eight steps, our average per
conversion is 30% higher than it is with eight+ steps in the funnel.
So, to clean up the data, I removed the following:
Paths with conversions < 5
Paths with conversion value < $30
Paths with (unavailable) in the path
Paths with more than 15 steps in the path
After you clean up the data, it will pull into the "Common Middle" sheet
within the Excel workbook I link to below. Then, you can see pretty quickly
which channels are driving the most middle conversions, and which middle paths
give the best $/conversion:
Here's the setup for that pivot table:
Once again, this will automagically work for you in the Excel sheet.
Bottom of funnel
The bottom of the funnel is the last touch that occurs before someone buys.
These channels are incredibly important to know about because you can then build
your strategy around how to get people into those channels and convert them
later.
This one is easy to find. It doesn't take tricky Excel functions. It doesn't
involve crazy data analysis.
Assuming you have Analytics set up correctly, you can find this data in
Conversion > Attribution > Model Comparison Tool. When you set the Model
to Last Interaction, you'll see something like this:
For Distilled, you can see that our highest last-touch channels are direct,
then email, then organic search.
Applying the data
Remember this funnel from the beginning?
Based off the data, I now see that for Distilled, the sections of our funnel
look this way:
Top
Direct
Organic Search
Social
Middle
Organic to Organic
Direct to Email
Direct to Organic
Bottom
Email
Organic
Direct
Now we can build out a marketing plan depending on our needs.
Excel sheet
I promised you an Excel sheet that I have put together for you. Note that it
does not automatically clean out your very long conversion paths, but use the
parameters given above to narrow down your data to make it actionable if that
makes sense for your business.
That said, you can download the spreadsheet here.
Bonus Excel sheet to find profitability by # of touches
I mentioned above about finding the number of touches that perform best for
you. Here is a quick and dirty spreadsheet that allows you to do just this.
Basically, the sheet looks at the number of touches and averages the conversion
amount for each bucket. You can see the results on the far right.
To use this sheet for yourself, download your Multi Channel Funnel groupings
in Analytics (you need to have ecommerce enabled) and enter your data into the
sheet.
Download this bonus spreadsheet here.
Example and conclusion
If we are trying to convert more people to DistilledU, through that goal I
know that Organic converts best for us on the last touch. This means that we
need to invest in content that drives people towards a conversion through
organic, so either blog content with a call to action or larger content teaching
people SEO. We know that email converts 4th best for DU, but it works well
higher in the funnel to convert people eventually. Therefore, we need to get
more people onto our DistilledU email list.
Direct traffic converts well, of course; people are coming to the site because
they know about it. Therefore we need to get top-of-mind and convert them into
email and RSS subscribers so that they become familiar with our content and
eventually buy through email or search.
We've built our funnel. You should go and build yours. I'd love to hear what
insights you have.
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/uVX-RJ6nG3o/building-your-marketing-funnel-with-google-analytics
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
with Google Analytics'
Posted by dohertyjf
Do you have an idea of the path a user typically takes to convert on your
website? Or, are you simply building traffic from one channel (probably organic)
and wondering why it's not converting better? As I've grown up as a marketer,
I've begun to really appreciate the insights that data can provide us on how
users interact with our sites, and more importantly, on how they convert and
where the experience can be improved to increase our conversion rates, and
thereby our top-line revenue from online channels.
I've recently been very interested in building a full marketing funnel based
on Google Analytics data. While it's one thing to be able to identify where
conversion discrepancies exist, such as low-converting types of visitors, it's
quite another to build a full and informed funnel from your site's data. In
order to do this and have an accurate view of where your conversions are
actually coming from, you need to first have the following in place:
Email URL tracking: Check out Annie Cushing's thoughts here in slides 11-14.
(Actually, look at the whole deck.)
Social network tracking (tagging parameters and using a shortener to see
clickthroughs by link)
Display tagging
Referral links tagged (or at least be aware of HTTPS sites linking to you, like
Medium)
Paid search campaigns tagged
Tagging on affiliates (if applicable)
You can build your campaigns here using Google's tool.
What's a funnel?
Before we get too far into the meat of this post, I want to make sure we're
all talking about the same thing. I'm not referring to one of these. Rather, I'm
referring to one of these:
The funnel is typically broken into three sections:
Top of funnel (TOFU)
Middle of funnel (MOFU)
Bottom of funnel (BOFU)
The goal of this post is going to walk you through how to identify the
channels that are performing best for you in each of these areas. Once you know
those, you know where to invest depending on your company's needs or priorities.
Also, knowing the different areas to which you can contribute will help endear
you to the people running those channels, which will help you avoid being siloed
as "the SEO." Instead, you will start to be seen as part of the marketing team,
which is what you are.
Another note: I'm not teaching you how to integrate into other marketing
channels in this post. Stephanie Chang did a great job of it back in July when
she wrote An Introduction to Integrated Marketing and SEO: How It Works and Why
It Matters. Have a read there after you're finished here.
Understanding attribution
You may already know this, but Google Analytics offers multi-channel
attribution tools within the "Conversions" section:
In the "Assisted Conversions" section, you will see a number of columns. The
ones to pay attention to are:
Assisted Conversions
Last Click/Direct Conversions
It's important to understand the difference between assisted conversions and
last click/direct conversions. According to Google's own Answer Bin, a channel
gets credit for an assisted conversion for any touch that they bring to the site
where the interaction was not the one that led directly to a conversion. Google
says:
This is the number (and monetary value) of sales and conversions the channel
assisted. If a channel appears anywhereâexcept as the final
interactionâon a conversion path, it is considered an assist for that
conversion. The higher these numbers, the more important the assist role of the
channel.
On the other side, a last click or direct conversion is a touch on the site
that led directly to a sale. These are your closer, aka bottom-of-funnel
channels. Google says:
This is the number (and monetary value) of sales and conversions the channel
closed or completed. The final click or direct visit before a conversion gets
Last Interaction credit for that conversion. The higher these numbers, the more
important the channelâs role in driving completion of sales and
conversions.
Make sense? Great. Let's build a funnel.
Identifying channels based on funnel level
As I said above, we're going to use Google Analytics to identify the channels
in the different levels of your funnel. If you use a different Analytics
platform, like Omniture or Piwik, write a guide using that and I'll be happy to
share it out.
Top of funnel
The top of your marketing funnel is where the first interactions with your
brand take place. This is typically attributed to search or organic, but is that
really the case for your website?
First, let's identify the most common channels that people use to discover
your site. To do this, go to Content > Site Content > Landing Pages. Set
your secondary dimension to "Medium." You'll see something like this:
Now, export this data to Excel (I've provided a spreadsheet at the end that
you can plug this data into) and pivot it to see which mediums are driving your
best traffic. If you want to get super fancy, break it down by type of page as
well.
Here's how that pivot table is set up:
For the site shown in these screenshots it is indeed PPC and organic search.
But just knowing the channel isn't enough, so let's take it a step further to
see where the different channels are driving traffic. You'll either need to
manually classify your pages (if you have relatively few like in my example) or
write an Excel script to do this automagically.
I now know that referral is the primary driver of traffic and that the
majority goes to the homepage. One specific referral, which I tagged with a
Medium of "Link," sends the best traffic directly to conversion pages (which
might not necessarily be the best place for people to land for their first
interaction):
Middle of funnel
The middle of your funnel is the area where people are moving from a first
brand interaction to an initial sale, or if they have already made a purchase,
towards another sale. What we're looking for in the data here is channels that
are not necessarily our primary first- or last-touch drivers. Rather, these are
the channels where the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th-time visitors come from in order to
interact with your content again.
We can figure out the most popular and most effective middle-of-funnel
channels a couple of different ways. The first, and by far the easiest, is by
comparing different types of attribution to discover which channels get more
credit based on first click, linear (where each channel gets equal credit), and
last-click. To learn what each of the different attribution models really means,
check out the Google support page.
By sorting the Model Comparison Tool in Analytics by Linear (high to low), you
can find the channels that perform best when given equal credit independent of
where they are in the funnel.
But this doesn't give us great insight into which channels perform best in the
middle. Rather, it's telling us which channels account for the most revenue
overall (which is still important to know), and the place doesn't matter. In the
above example, for Distilled that's Direct, then email, organic search, and
referral, in that order.
To find which channels are the most popular for your users to come back, we
need to do some manipulation in Excel (my favorite tool) to clean out the first-
and last-touch interactions in the Top Conversion Paths report.
What you want to do now is expand the number of rows in Analytics to account
for as many of your paths as possible. For most sites the 5,000-row limit in
Analytics will suffice.
Download all of your conversion paths into Excel. You'll have one column with
the complete paths, followed by the following columns:
Conversions
Conversion Value
To wrangle the data into the format we need, I also added the following
columns:
Steps in Conversion Path
First Touch
All Middle
Last Touch
$/Conversion
If you're a visual person, this screenshot may help you out to see how the
sheet is set up:
Larger version
Note: the hardest part here is figuring out what your cutoff is for
conversion amount. For Distilled, for example, I removed anything under $30,
because we don't do anything with the data underneath that. I also picked a
minimum threshold for the number of conversions that channel brought.
In Distilled's case, five seemed pertinent because it gives enough to get a
decent idea of $/conversion but also eliminates the very long (20+) conversion
paths that we're not going to optimize for anyways. However, also keep in mind
that the length of the path matters. For example, Distilled's median # of steps
before a conversion is eight. With fewer than eight steps, our average per
conversion is 30% higher than it is with eight+ steps in the funnel.
So, to clean up the data, I removed the following:
Paths with conversions < 5
Paths with conversion value < $30
Paths with (unavailable) in the path
Paths with more than 15 steps in the path
After you clean up the data, it will pull into the "Common Middle" sheet
within the Excel workbook I link to below. Then, you can see pretty quickly
which channels are driving the most middle conversions, and which middle paths
give the best $/conversion:
Here's the setup for that pivot table:
Once again, this will automagically work for you in the Excel sheet.
Bottom of funnel
The bottom of the funnel is the last touch that occurs before someone buys.
These channels are incredibly important to know about because you can then build
your strategy around how to get people into those channels and convert them
later.
This one is easy to find. It doesn't take tricky Excel functions. It doesn't
involve crazy data analysis.
Assuming you have Analytics set up correctly, you can find this data in
Conversion > Attribution > Model Comparison Tool. When you set the Model
to Last Interaction, you'll see something like this:
For Distilled, you can see that our highest last-touch channels are direct,
then email, then organic search.
Applying the data
Remember this funnel from the beginning?
Based off the data, I now see that for Distilled, the sections of our funnel
look this way:
Top
Direct
Organic Search
Social
Middle
Organic to Organic
Direct to Email
Direct to Organic
Bottom
Organic
Direct
Now we can build out a marketing plan depending on our needs.
Excel sheet
I promised you an Excel sheet that I have put together for you. Note that it
does not automatically clean out your very long conversion paths, but use the
parameters given above to narrow down your data to make it actionable if that
makes sense for your business.
That said, you can download the spreadsheet here.
Bonus Excel sheet to find profitability by # of touches
I mentioned above about finding the number of touches that perform best for
you. Here is a quick and dirty spreadsheet that allows you to do just this.
Basically, the sheet looks at the number of touches and averages the conversion
amount for each bucket. You can see the results on the far right.
To use this sheet for yourself, download your Multi Channel Funnel groupings
in Analytics (you need to have ecommerce enabled) and enter your data into the
sheet.
Download this bonus spreadsheet here.
Example and conclusion
If we are trying to convert more people to DistilledU, through that goal I
know that Organic converts best for us on the last touch. This means that we
need to invest in content that drives people towards a conversion through
organic, so either blog content with a call to action or larger content teaching
people SEO. We know that email converts 4th best for DU, but it works well
higher in the funnel to convert people eventually. Therefore, we need to get
more people onto our DistilledU email list.
Direct traffic converts well, of course; people are coming to the site because
they know about it. Therefore we need to get top-of-mind and convert them into
email and RSS subscribers so that they become familiar with our content and
eventually buy through email or search.
We've built our funnel. You should go and build yours. I'd love to hear what
insights you have.
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/uVX-RJ6nG3o/building-your-marketing-funnel-with-google-analytics
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
Saturday 21 September 2013
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'Google Authorship Troubleshooting:
Article Attributed to Wrong Author'
Posted by MarkTraphagen
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.
One of the toughest Google Authorship troubleshooting requests we get at the
Google Authorship and Author Rank community on Google+ concerns misattribution
of Authorship in Google search results.
Misattribution (Google Search showing an author photo of someone other than
the actual author of a content piece) occurs because over the past
year-and-a-half or so Google has become more aggressive in trying to attribute
Authorship. In many cases, Google will take what appears to be an "educated
guess" at the author of a piece.
But sometimes, the fault of misattribution is more the site's responsibility,
and that's when some careful troubleshooting (ok, outright sleuthing!) can often
uncover the problem.
Here's an example mystery attribution that we were able to track down and
solve:
Community moderator Ann Smarty asked us to look at this result for a search
for "Time-Saving Apps for Social Media Promotion":
A very nice Google Authorship rich snippet search result, right? Only one
problem. Nwosu Mavtrevor is not the author of that article! A woman named Anna
Fox is, as the author box at the bottom of the article clearly displays:
So how did Google switch authors?
Step one in our investigation was to do a quick on-page search to see whether
Mr. Mavtrevor's name appeared anywhere on the same page as Ms. Fox's article. In
the majority of mis-attribution cases it turns out that Google grabbed the
displayed author from that author's name appearing somewhere on the content
page.
Sure enough, there was Mr. Mavtrevor, early in the post's comment thread:
But out of all the commenters on that page, why did Google latch on to his
name for attributing authorship to the page? His comment isn't even the first
one in the thread.
Perhaps Mr. Mavtrevor has claimed Authorship for the same domain. So our next
step was to search for him on Google+. Thankfully he has a rather unique name,
so we quickly located his Google+ profile.
Sure enough, Mr. Mavtrevor has the netmediablog.com site listed in the
Contributor To section of his profile links:
The Contributor To section of a Google+ profile is where Google looks for
content that the profile owner claims to have authored. The other half of the
required two-way linkage is a link back from that domain to the same Google+
profile.
So why has Mr. Navtrevor put Netmediablog in his Contributor To links? Because
he legitimately is an author there!
Mystery solved! Er...not so fast...
Normally at this point, I would declare case closed and ask my Mr. Watson to
write it up in his journal. But there's more to this case.
Usually a misattribution like this where two people have linked their
Contributor To to the same site occurs when the page author does not have a
clear byline on the page. Google's recent Authorship FAQ recommends "[s]howing a
clear byline on the page, stating the author wrote the article and using the
same name as used on their Google+ profile." Doing that usually clears up most
misattribution problems of this type.
But not in this case. Ms. Fox has a byline at the top of the article, and the
name exactly matches her Google+ profile name:
So what gives now? How could Google possibly misattribute this article when it
appears that every clue to its real authorship is right there on the page?
The answer was just a click away.
Page vs. domain authorship
Google allows for there to be a "default" Authorship for a site. Usually this
is the Authorship profile (if any) associated with the home page of the domain.
When we clicked on Anna Fox's byline on her article, instead of going to a
unique author page for her as we expected, the link takes us to the blog's home
page. And the source code for the home page shows that Mr. Mavtrevor has his
authorship markup on it, and thus is seen as the default author for site.
So it was our conclusion that Google followed the byline link to the home page
and picked up the authorship attribution from there.
An ounce of prevention
Let's get to some practical takeaways from this investigation that can help
prevent Authorship misattribution, particularly for multi-author sites.
1. Give each author on your site a unique author page. Most up-to-date
Wordpress themes and frameworks (such as Genesis) include the option to set up
unique author pages (under the Users tab). These templates automatically create
a byline on each page created by a certain author, and the byline automatically
links to that author's author page. When this is the case, each author only
needs to link to her or his Google+ profile once from their unique author page
(and of course, link back from the Contributor To section of their G+ profiles)
and they are done. Google will follow the links from their bylines to their
author pages to their G+ profiles.
If your site doesn't have such a theme, you should consider coding in author
pages that are linked to by each author's content.
2. Make sure each author's byline name exactly matches her or his Google+
name. As mentioned above, Google now recommends that as a best practice. In most
cases where we've seen misattribution just adding the byline name (in the form
"by firstname lastname"), and placing it at the beginning of the content, are
enough to correct the problem. The only reason that didn't work in our test case
above was the fact that the byline linked to the site's home page.
3. Avoid using domain authorship attribution. Even though many themes and
plugins (such as the popular Yoast SEO Plugin) offer the option to set up
authorship for the home page/domain, we now recommend against using it. Google
recently made clear that Authorship should only be applied when "[t]he URL/page
contains a single article (or subsequent versions of the article) or single
piece of content, by the same author. This means that the page isn't a list of
articles or an updating feed." In addition, they noted that, "Authorship
annotation is useful to searchers because it signals that a page conveys a real
personâs perspective or analysis on a topic. Since property listings and
product pages are less perspective/analysis oriented, we discourage using
authorship in these cases"
Since home pages, and about pages and such don't fit the descriptions above,
authorship is not intended for them. My concern in light of these guidelines is
primarily with watering down one's Author Rank (if and when that becomes a
reality). But in terms of our present topic, I also believe that refraining from
attributing authorship to a homepage or entire domain will help avoid
misattribution issues of the type we saw above.
Conclusion
Google Authorship is an evolving product. It has already gone through some
major changes since the summer of 2011 when it first went public. We can expect
that as time goes by Google will get better and better at correct author
attribution. In the meantime, though, it is best to be vigilant for
misattributions of your content, and to employ a triage similar to the one we
walked through in this post when they happen. Follow the best practices we
outlines above, and there's hope that you'll head those issues off before they
happen.
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/b6nk_dTP-rE/google-authorship-troubleshooting-article-attributed-to-wrong-author
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
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Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Article Attributed to Wrong Author'
Posted by MarkTraphagen
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.
One of the toughest Google Authorship troubleshooting requests we get at the
Google Authorship and Author Rank community on Google+ concerns misattribution
of Authorship in Google search results.
Misattribution (Google Search showing an author photo of someone other than
the actual author of a content piece) occurs because over the past
year-and-a-half or so Google has become more aggressive in trying to attribute
Authorship. In many cases, Google will take what appears to be an "educated
guess" at the author of a piece.
But sometimes, the fault of misattribution is more the site's responsibility,
and that's when some careful troubleshooting (ok, outright sleuthing!) can often
uncover the problem.
Here's an example mystery attribution that we were able to track down and
solve:
Community moderator Ann Smarty asked us to look at this result for a search
for "Time-Saving Apps for Social Media Promotion":
A very nice Google Authorship rich snippet search result, right? Only one
problem. Nwosu Mavtrevor is not the author of that article! A woman named Anna
Fox is, as the author box at the bottom of the article clearly displays:
So how did Google switch authors?
Step one in our investigation was to do a quick on-page search to see whether
Mr. Mavtrevor's name appeared anywhere on the same page as Ms. Fox's article. In
the majority of mis-attribution cases it turns out that Google grabbed the
displayed author from that author's name appearing somewhere on the content
page.
Sure enough, there was Mr. Mavtrevor, early in the post's comment thread:
But out of all the commenters on that page, why did Google latch on to his
name for attributing authorship to the page? His comment isn't even the first
one in the thread.
Perhaps Mr. Mavtrevor has claimed Authorship for the same domain. So our next
step was to search for him on Google+. Thankfully he has a rather unique name,
so we quickly located his Google+ profile.
Sure enough, Mr. Mavtrevor has the netmediablog.com site listed in the
Contributor To section of his profile links:
The Contributor To section of a Google+ profile is where Google looks for
content that the profile owner claims to have authored. The other half of the
required two-way linkage is a link back from that domain to the same Google+
profile.
So why has Mr. Navtrevor put Netmediablog in his Contributor To links? Because
he legitimately is an author there!
Mystery solved! Er...not so fast...
Normally at this point, I would declare case closed and ask my Mr. Watson to
write it up in his journal. But there's more to this case.
Usually a misattribution like this where two people have linked their
Contributor To to the same site occurs when the page author does not have a
clear byline on the page. Google's recent Authorship FAQ recommends "[s]howing a
clear byline on the page, stating the author wrote the article and using the
same name as used on their Google+ profile." Doing that usually clears up most
misattribution problems of this type.
But not in this case. Ms. Fox has a byline at the top of the article, and the
name exactly matches her Google+ profile name:
So what gives now? How could Google possibly misattribute this article when it
appears that every clue to its real authorship is right there on the page?
The answer was just a click away.
Page vs. domain authorship
Google allows for there to be a "default" Authorship for a site. Usually this
is the Authorship profile (if any) associated with the home page of the domain.
When we clicked on Anna Fox's byline on her article, instead of going to a
unique author page for her as we expected, the link takes us to the blog's home
page. And the source code for the home page shows that Mr. Mavtrevor has his
authorship markup on it, and thus is seen as the default author for site.
So it was our conclusion that Google followed the byline link to the home page
and picked up the authorship attribution from there.
An ounce of prevention
Let's get to some practical takeaways from this investigation that can help
prevent Authorship misattribution, particularly for multi-author sites.
1. Give each author on your site a unique author page. Most up-to-date
Wordpress themes and frameworks (such as Genesis) include the option to set up
unique author pages (under the Users tab). These templates automatically create
a byline on each page created by a certain author, and the byline automatically
links to that author's author page. When this is the case, each author only
needs to link to her or his Google+ profile once from their unique author page
(and of course, link back from the Contributor To section of their G+ profiles)
and they are done. Google will follow the links from their bylines to their
author pages to their G+ profiles.
If your site doesn't have such a theme, you should consider coding in author
pages that are linked to by each author's content.
2. Make sure each author's byline name exactly matches her or his Google+
name. As mentioned above, Google now recommends that as a best practice. In most
cases where we've seen misattribution just adding the byline name (in the form
"by firstname lastname"), and placing it at the beginning of the content, are
enough to correct the problem. The only reason that didn't work in our test case
above was the fact that the byline linked to the site's home page.
3. Avoid using domain authorship attribution. Even though many themes and
plugins (such as the popular Yoast SEO Plugin) offer the option to set up
authorship for the home page/domain, we now recommend against using it. Google
recently made clear that Authorship should only be applied when "[t]he URL/page
contains a single article (or subsequent versions of the article) or single
piece of content, by the same author. This means that the page isn't a list of
articles or an updating feed." In addition, they noted that, "Authorship
annotation is useful to searchers because it signals that a page conveys a real
personâs perspective or analysis on a topic. Since property listings and
product pages are less perspective/analysis oriented, we discourage using
authorship in these cases"
Since home pages, and about pages and such don't fit the descriptions above,
authorship is not intended for them. My concern in light of these guidelines is
primarily with watering down one's Author Rank (if and when that becomes a
reality). But in terms of our present topic, I also believe that refraining from
attributing authorship to a homepage or entire domain will help avoid
misattribution issues of the type we saw above.
Conclusion
Google Authorship is an evolving product. It has already gone through some
major changes since the summer of 2011 when it first went public. We can expect
that as time goes by Google will get better and better at correct author
attribution. In the meantime, though, it is best to be vigilant for
misattributions of your content, and to employ a triage similar to the one we
walked through in this post when they happen. Follow the best practices we
outlines above, and there's hope that you'll head those issues off before they
happen.
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/b6nk_dTP-rE/google-authorship-troubleshooting-article-attributed-to-wrong-author
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 20 September 2013
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, '3 Methods Fueled by Data and Tools
to Earn More (and Better) Links - Whiteboard Friday'
Posted by randfish
Most conversations about links today involve terms like "better links," or
"high-quality links." Those are the kinds we all hope to earn, but what exactly
defines a "better link?" How do we know whether a link qualifies, or is only
so-so?
In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand clears up the confusion and offers a few
clear attributes of better links, walking us through three great ways to find
them.
Whiteboard Friday - 3 Data + Tools-Fueled Methods to Earn More & Better Links
PRO Tip: Learn more about reclaiming links at Moz Academy.
For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!
Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today
I'm going to talk a little bit about some data and tools-fueled methodologies to
acquire more and better links and, in fact, some links that you may not have
been able to find in other ways. So I'll start by saying what does it mean to
have a better link? Well, I mean really three things.
(A) Editorially given. By that I mean not a link that you go buy. Not a link
that you go, sort of, acquire or leave on someone's site unbeknownst to them or
get listed in a directory. I mean an editorially given link in that the person
who is giving the link runs the website or at least the page where it's being
given from, and they intended to link to you and want to link to you and it's
out of no other desire other than to share your site or the content that you
have, the work that you are doing. They have a relationship with you, they like
you, they want to recommend you. Editorially given.
(B) From a high-quality, trusted, and trafficked, well-trafficked website,
something that actually might get you clicks in addition to providing link value
from a search ranking perspective.
And (C) you've actually got a half-decent shot of getting that link. If I'm
just showing you link methodologies that are going to show you, "Oh, yeah, it'd
be real nice to get a link on that Whitehouse.gov page," it's not going to
happen, man. Bad news, that's going to be a tough one.
But these three, if we aim for these three, in particular aim for a decent
shot at getting it, I think we get some good ones out of this.
So method number one, follower outreach, essentially, the practice of
outreach for links, reaching out to someone and saying, "Hey, we have this piece
of content you might like" or "We have this potential relationship we could
build" or "Hey, I notice that you do some things that are interesting and maybe
we could have some overlap here. Perhaps I could contribute in some way to
something that you're doing."
Cool, works a lot of the time. But it's very hit or miss. Except that the
odds go way higher, way in your favor if you actually have a relationship, a
pre-existing knowledge of one another and a mutual "like-and-respect" situation.
That's why outreach to followers, to people who actually already know you and
like you is way more effective.
So this is Followerwonk. You could use a tool of your choice. You might find
people on Plus or some of the other social metrics tools.
But Followerwonk, I can go right in here, and on the Sort Followers tab,
once I've logged in, I can sort my followers and say, "Show me a list of them."
Then I can export to CSV. The only trick, once I export to CSV, I'm looking for
people with high social authority who have websites that I might want to do
outreach to, and this is such a simple thing. If you want, you can get a little
fancier. You can do things like put data in here, add a column and use Richard
Baxter's Mozscape plug-in, so that you can filter by domain authority of the
website that's in their bio and only outreach to people who haven't already
linked to you.
But, generally speaking, I've found that even if somebody's linking to you
from one page, doing outreach to them, getting that second link, reaching out to
folks, especially when you've targeted some of these people, this is huge value.
I've seen outreach of this kind work tremendously well, especially because since
they already know you, this guy and some dude in marketing are like, "They're
all following me. They're following my account. That means they care about what
I have to say."
So if I outreach them and they say "Oh, yeah I checked out, I know something
about them too. I've got their bio. I know what site they represent. I know who
they are. I can interact with them on Twitter." This works wonderfully. This is
one of my favorite, favorite outreach methodologies. It starts with social.
Method two: Just-discovered competition. So many of you are probably already
aware, but in Open Site Explorer, there's this new tab called Just Discovered
Links, way over on the right. It's technically in beta, but it gets a lot of
great links. It surfaces a lot of great links that are pointing to your website
or to a competitor's website.
This is the key. What I want you to do is go plug in a competitor. Start
with just one, one of your competitor's websites. Go over to the Just Discovered
tab, and take a look at what people are writing about them and linking to them
right now. I try and go for direct competitors, the kind of competitors where it
seems like a surprise if an editorial, like a news publication or a blogger or
someone in the field, an industry thought leader writes about them, but doesn't
write about you. That's always like, "Oh, if you're going to mention one, you
should mention several."
This is where the key comes in, because you go here and you look at stuff
that was literally just published in the last few hours or couple of days, and
then you do the outreach right then. You could do it through commenting and just
saying something about yourself like, "Hey, I'm not going to link drop because I
don't want to be spammy, but if you haven't already checked out Moz, we're a
competitor to site XYZ, and we'd love to connect and follow up. Maybe you'd be
interested in writing a story about some of the stuff that we're doing. I'd
happy to fill you in. Reach out to me at Rand@Moz." Something like that.
Or you could go find their e-mail contact information if you don't want to
make it public in the comments and reach out in that way. The trick is because
these things have just been written, just been published, your outreach attempts
go way higher. And you can look at domain authority. You can sort in order of
domain authority. So you can sort of look at and say, "Oh, yeah, I don't want to
reach out to that guy, but yes, yes, yes." Ideal.
Methodology number three: "Why you no link? Why?" I'll show you what I'm
talking about.
So this is Fresh Web Explorer. You could use another service. You could use
Mention.net. By the way, I don't mean to say that Open Site Explorer is the only
way to do this. You could use Majestic or something like that for this same
thing, if you're not a Moz subscriber. But assuming you are, all three of these
are part of your subscription.
So Fresh Web Explorer, I can go in and search for, this is key. I know the
Fresh Web Explorer search query, it's sort of like the Yahoo! of old, where'd
you do like very sophisticated links types of searches. So make sure you're
familiar with all the modifiers. But this one, in particular, I love. It's Moz,
my brand name, minus RD:moz.com. There's a space in between here, but no space
otherwise.
The reason this works so well is because I'm essentially saying, "Show me
people who have mentioned my brand name, Moz, but are not linking to any page on
my site, and show me the ones that have just done that." Because this is Fresh
Web Explorer, so it's going to show me recent stuff. Then, if I want, I can
click on a specific day or those kinds of things. I can export the CSV over
here.
But, basically, I look at these and I go, "Huh. Interesting. So this is four
days old. They mentioned Moz, but they didn't link to us. Man, that's a good,
reasonable feed authority." You can get domain authority as well in the CSV.
"Man, I should reach out to them. That reporter, that blogger, that writer, that
person who owns that website, why did they talk about me and not link to my
site?"
It tends to be the case that this is just oversight. And if you just reach
out and are like, "Hey, I loved that you covered us, really appreciated it. By
the way, noticed you didn't link. Was that intentional? Could we get a link
back?" Boom. It's just super easy, high-quality link building right off the bat.
These three methodologies will all help you with those. And for those of you
who are doing link-building on a regular basis, I love this format. Whether you
use our tools or someone else's, it's a great way to go.
All right, everyone. 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/HUfrhByj3J8/3-methods-fueled-by-data-and-tools-to-earn-more-and-better-links-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
to Earn More (and Better) Links - Whiteboard Friday'
Posted by randfish
Most conversations about links today involve terms like "better links," or
"high-quality links." Those are the kinds we all hope to earn, but what exactly
defines a "better link?" How do we know whether a link qualifies, or is only
so-so?
In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand clears up the confusion and offers a few
clear attributes of better links, walking us through three great ways to find
them.
Whiteboard Friday - 3 Data + Tools-Fueled Methods to Earn More & Better Links
PRO Tip: Learn more about reclaiming links at Moz Academy.
For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!
Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today
I'm going to talk a little bit about some data and tools-fueled methodologies to
acquire more and better links and, in fact, some links that you may not have
been able to find in other ways. So I'll start by saying what does it mean to
have a better link? Well, I mean really three things.
(A) Editorially given. By that I mean not a link that you go buy. Not a link
that you go, sort of, acquire or leave on someone's site unbeknownst to them or
get listed in a directory. I mean an editorially given link in that the person
who is giving the link runs the website or at least the page where it's being
given from, and they intended to link to you and want to link to you and it's
out of no other desire other than to share your site or the content that you
have, the work that you are doing. They have a relationship with you, they like
you, they want to recommend you. Editorially given.
(B) From a high-quality, trusted, and trafficked, well-trafficked website,
something that actually might get you clicks in addition to providing link value
from a search ranking perspective.
And (C) you've actually got a half-decent shot of getting that link. If I'm
just showing you link methodologies that are going to show you, "Oh, yeah, it'd
be real nice to get a link on that Whitehouse.gov page," it's not going to
happen, man. Bad news, that's going to be a tough one.
But these three, if we aim for these three, in particular aim for a decent
shot at getting it, I think we get some good ones out of this.
So method number one, follower outreach, essentially, the practice of
outreach for links, reaching out to someone and saying, "Hey, we have this piece
of content you might like" or "We have this potential relationship we could
build" or "Hey, I notice that you do some things that are interesting and maybe
we could have some overlap here. Perhaps I could contribute in some way to
something that you're doing."
Cool, works a lot of the time. But it's very hit or miss. Except that the
odds go way higher, way in your favor if you actually have a relationship, a
pre-existing knowledge of one another and a mutual "like-and-respect" situation.
That's why outreach to followers, to people who actually already know you and
like you is way more effective.
So this is Followerwonk. You could use a tool of your choice. You might find
people on Plus or some of the other social metrics tools.
But Followerwonk, I can go right in here, and on the Sort Followers tab,
once I've logged in, I can sort my followers and say, "Show me a list of them."
Then I can export to CSV. The only trick, once I export to CSV, I'm looking for
people with high social authority who have websites that I might want to do
outreach to, and this is such a simple thing. If you want, you can get a little
fancier. You can do things like put data in here, add a column and use Richard
Baxter's Mozscape plug-in, so that you can filter by domain authority of the
website that's in their bio and only outreach to people who haven't already
linked to you.
But, generally speaking, I've found that even if somebody's linking to you
from one page, doing outreach to them, getting that second link, reaching out to
folks, especially when you've targeted some of these people, this is huge value.
I've seen outreach of this kind work tremendously well, especially because since
they already know you, this guy and some dude in marketing are like, "They're
all following me. They're following my account. That means they care about what
I have to say."
So if I outreach them and they say "Oh, yeah I checked out, I know something
about them too. I've got their bio. I know what site they represent. I know who
they are. I can interact with them on Twitter." This works wonderfully. This is
one of my favorite, favorite outreach methodologies. It starts with social.
Method two: Just-discovered competition. So many of you are probably already
aware, but in Open Site Explorer, there's this new tab called Just Discovered
Links, way over on the right. It's technically in beta, but it gets a lot of
great links. It surfaces a lot of great links that are pointing to your website
or to a competitor's website.
This is the key. What I want you to do is go plug in a competitor. Start
with just one, one of your competitor's websites. Go over to the Just Discovered
tab, and take a look at what people are writing about them and linking to them
right now. I try and go for direct competitors, the kind of competitors where it
seems like a surprise if an editorial, like a news publication or a blogger or
someone in the field, an industry thought leader writes about them, but doesn't
write about you. That's always like, "Oh, if you're going to mention one, you
should mention several."
This is where the key comes in, because you go here and you look at stuff
that was literally just published in the last few hours or couple of days, and
then you do the outreach right then. You could do it through commenting and just
saying something about yourself like, "Hey, I'm not going to link drop because I
don't want to be spammy, but if you haven't already checked out Moz, we're a
competitor to site XYZ, and we'd love to connect and follow up. Maybe you'd be
interested in writing a story about some of the stuff that we're doing. I'd
happy to fill you in. Reach out to me at Rand@Moz." Something like that.
Or you could go find their e-mail contact information if you don't want to
make it public in the comments and reach out in that way. The trick is because
these things have just been written, just been published, your outreach attempts
go way higher. And you can look at domain authority. You can sort in order of
domain authority. So you can sort of look at and say, "Oh, yeah, I don't want to
reach out to that guy, but yes, yes, yes." Ideal.
Methodology number three: "Why you no link? Why?" I'll show you what I'm
talking about.
So this is Fresh Web Explorer. You could use another service. You could use
Mention.net. By the way, I don't mean to say that Open Site Explorer is the only
way to do this. You could use Majestic or something like that for this same
thing, if you're not a Moz subscriber. But assuming you are, all three of these
are part of your subscription.
So Fresh Web Explorer, I can go in and search for, this is key. I know the
Fresh Web Explorer search query, it's sort of like the Yahoo! of old, where'd
you do like very sophisticated links types of searches. So make sure you're
familiar with all the modifiers. But this one, in particular, I love. It's Moz,
my brand name, minus RD:moz.com. There's a space in between here, but no space
otherwise.
The reason this works so well is because I'm essentially saying, "Show me
people who have mentioned my brand name, Moz, but are not linking to any page on
my site, and show me the ones that have just done that." Because this is Fresh
Web Explorer, so it's going to show me recent stuff. Then, if I want, I can
click on a specific day or those kinds of things. I can export the CSV over
here.
But, basically, I look at these and I go, "Huh. Interesting. So this is four
days old. They mentioned Moz, but they didn't link to us. Man, that's a good,
reasonable feed authority." You can get domain authority as well in the CSV.
"Man, I should reach out to them. That reporter, that blogger, that writer, that
person who owns that website, why did they talk about me and not link to my
site?"
It tends to be the case that this is just oversight. And if you just reach
out and are like, "Hey, I loved that you covered us, really appreciated it. By
the way, noticed you didn't link. Was that intentional? Could we get a link
back?" Boom. It's just super easy, high-quality link building right off the bat.
These three methodologies will all help you with those. And for those of you
who are doing link-building on a regular basis, I love this format. Whether you
use our tools or someone else's, it's a great way to go.
All right, everyone. 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/HUfrhByj3J8/3-methods-fueled-by-data-and-tools-to-earn-more-and-better-links-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 19 September 2013
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'From Zero to a Million: 20 Lessons
for Starting an Internet Marketing Agency'
Posted by NiftyMarketing
Mike's disclaimer: This is not a post about how awesome I am, or how there is
only one way to build an internet marketing agency. It's a combination of
stories and thoughts about what I have gone through building Nifty Marketing.
When I started in 2009 there was very little information online about
starting, running, or growing an Internet Marketing Agency. The ones that did
exist were from superstars that charged a billion dollars an hour. I am not a
superstar. My company started in Burley, Idaho. Here's a rap about my town I
wrote.
My hope with this post is that a few of you who are out there hustling will
benefit from doing some of the things that I did, and most of the things that I
didn't.
Start smart
I was in my final semester at BYU-Idaho and had accepted a job to be the chief
marketing officer of Rove Pest Control after spending my summers during college
as a door-to-door salesman for them. I thought my future was set. But, due to
some changes at Rove I knew that I was going to have to have to find a different
career. My wife was pregnant, we had just started building a house in Burley,
and I had a full load of credits. My two favorite classes were a basic HTML
class (that used Don't Make Me Think as the textbook) and a web business class
for which we had to start an online business and make/lose money. Naturally, as
any true Idahoan would do, I started HugeIdahoPotato.com and sold potatoes
bigger than heads to people across the country. The website sucks; I'm pretty
sure I got it penalized within a year of creating it. But I fell in love with
internet marketing in the process of building that site, and I keep it up as a
remembrance of where I started.
Lesson 1: Start with a reason that's more than money
After making around $100 on the site I knew that I had found my career choice.
I also knew that I was going to live in Burley, Idaho, and that I wanted to
bring non-agricultural jobs to the town. I can't tell you how sad it is for many
of my friends who grew up in a town they knew they couldn't move back to if they
wanted to make a decent living. I wanted to change that. I still do. It's one of
the main driving points for me. Of course you need to make money, but if that is
the only thing you are looking for as a business owner then eventually you will
fail. You will make decisions that aren't for your clients, or for your staff,
or for the community; you will get short-term gains and create a long term
failure.
Lesson 2: Start by interning/working at an agency
This is possibly my biggest regret of my career. I started Nifty Marketing
with literally no experience at all. I had no friends in the industry, I had no
idea what I was doing, how SEO companies were structured, or even how to do
anything beyond what I had learned in college. I dove into blogs, but at that
time I didn't know who to trust and read some really awful advice. I was not a
good SEO. I was not a good PPC advertiser. I could have saved myself at least
two years if I had worked for someone who could have pointed me in the right
direction first.
Lesson 3: Focus on something specific
Business wasn't going very well. I had a few clients, and I decided I needed
some help, so I signed up for SEOBook. There was a feedback forum, so I posted
my super-awful website for Nifty Marketing. I didn't even own the domain at the
time. (I had TheNiftyWay.com, and it wasn't until laterâby some good grace
of the heavensâthat the person who owned NiftyMarketing.com let it go, and
I bought it for $7.99 with a GoDaddy code.) When I posted my site on SEOBook, I
got brutal feedback. People told me it sucked. But someone in the forum said
something that changed my life forever.
He said something like:
"You offer SEO, Web Design, and PPC. That is exactly the same as 100,000s of
companies around the world, who by the looks of things are better than you at
it. What can you be the best at? What can you become known for?"
The comment hit me like a ton of bricks. The few clients I had at the time
were really small businesses in Idaho, and I had been spending a lot of time in
Google Maps. I realized that I enjoyed that aspect of marketing, and was getting
clients ranked. So, I redesigned my site, changed my messaging, and decided to
focus. I became a local SEO.
Lesson 4: Start with networking, not cold calls
I remember quite vividly trying to use my door-to-door sales skills to try and
cold call businesses to get work. I grabbed a phone book and called people with
big ads and no websites because I figured that they had budget. What I found was
that I was caller #5 for that week offering the same thing as everyone else.
Worst of all, everyone "knew a guy who knows a guy who could do it" for them.
So, I put away the phonebook and started talking to my friends and asking if
they knew people who needed websites and marketing. That's when leads started
coming in. Then, I wrote an email to David Mihm on August 7, 2009, and asked him
how I could become an expert in the local search field. This was his response:
The best advice I can give you is to optimize the local listings of a bunch of
clients. The more you "play" in the space, the better you'll get at teasing out
the parts of the algorithm that really matter.
Beyond that, subscribe to these blogs:
http://www.blumenthals.com/bloghttp://www.localsearchnews.nethttp://gesterling.wordpress.comhttp://www.searchinfluence.com/bloghttp://solaswebdesign.net/wordpresshttp://www.smallbusinesssem.comhttp://www.hyperlocalblogger.comhttp://www.sixthmanmarketing.com/bloghttp://www.expand2web.com/bloghttp://www.devbasu.comhttp://www.martijnbeijk.comhttp://www.seoverflow.com/blog
I immediately dove into every one of these sites and learned everything I
possibly could about local search. I took notes, and then I started testing and
haven't ever stopped.
While doing that, I realized the most valuable networking lesson I ever
learned was to simply share. I started blogging, which led to guest posts on
SEJ, and I attended a few small conferences, one of which was the first ever
LocalU. I offered to help any way that I could. Fast forward to 2013, and I am a
LocalU Faculty Member and speak at conferences year-round. It isn't because I am
special. It's because I am passionate about the space and I am willing to share
information and help as much as I can. Almost every client we have at Nifty
Marketing comes as a referral from clients, friends, blog posts, webinars, and
conferences. Not one client came from a cold call. I will forever be in debt to
David Mihm and the rest of the local search community for teaching me such a
valuable lesson.
Lesson 5: It's good to have funding, it's better to have partners, and it's best
to bootstrap alone
From the first year of my business until now I have had opportunities to get
funding and take on partners. I have never done it. I am not saying that it's
bad to do either of these things, but if you take a close look at our industry
you will see that a lot of funded companies and partnerships don't make it.
I remember very clearly going to dinner with some guys from Blueglass in my
first year and thinking, "Man, I wish I could be part of that company." And
while I respect the founders a great deal they took a massive risk and it didn't
workout. Many of them had successful businesses before then, and while the idea
of a Mega Company that can make tens or hundreds of millions is alluring, the
chance of you being successful and earning more on your own is better. Sure,
extremely fast growth and funding means you come to market quicker. But by
growing at the slow rate of 2x per year (which isn't that slow), I have been
able to continually innovate and offer better services without taking do-or-die
risks.
I am very glad I bootstrapped. I own 100% of my company. I can make 100% of
the decisions about its future. I don't have to pay a silent partner a large
chunk that makes cash flow an issue. I don't have to make short-term decisions
for a board that hurts the long-term vision I have. And I make enough that I
stopped caring about the money around year three; slow and steady wins the
prize.
I know that there are many successful companies that haven't gone the way of
solo bootstrapping. At the top of the partnership list for me is Avalaunch
Media. But in order to do what they have done you have get big enough to support
multiple owners and find amazing partners that can all pull in the same
direction. With around 50% of marriages failing, how many partnerships in
business actually work out? They are definitely not the norm, and I respect them
immensely for it.
Grow smarter
Lesson 6: You are in the business of providing a service, not SEO
I remember becoming a good SEO. I also remember getting amazing results for
clients and still getting complaints from them. I thought they were the problem.
Then I realized I was. I thought back to the days of pest control and remember
the company training techs to take their time at customers' houses. You see, you
could service a house in 15 minutes or even less if you hustled. But if you did
that, customers would complain that the work was sloppy and it shouldn't cost so
much. Instead, you should take your time, get down on your hands and knees, and
look around. Take notes and pace yourself. Then, customers felt like the service
was worth it. They weren't paying for the product. They could buy the product at
Home Depot. They were paying for the service.
Comparing this to Internet marketing, I knew I had done a great job gaining
more traffic, but the clients had no idea what was being done. They didn't
understand what they were paying for and subsequently thought that I was
unnecessary. Most small businesses don't care or understand what a title tag,
meta description, an exact match, a naked URL, duplicate content, etc is. So
telling them you changed/created these in a report without actually showing them
physical pictures is pointless.
We started creating custom reports with tons of arrows and screenshots
explaining the work that we were doing. We starting giving them a complete list
of the links and citations we were building. We stopped sending over a raw list
of traffic counts and started providing analysis of the traffic that websites
were getting, and our clients stopped complaining that they didn't know what we
were doing. Clear communication is what the business of service is all about.
Lesson 7: Read The E-myth
I was doing everything myself. Everything. Then, I tried to have some people
on oDesk help me. My wife even did some of the citation work. The only problem
was all the information was in my head. I had very little of the processes and
information organized, and I didn't have time to focus on organization when I
had so much client work, sales, and bookkeeping to do. That is what The E-myth
is about. It talks about the difference between being a technician and being a
business owner. It talks about the need to build your business like a franchise
with training manuals, easy to follow processes, and the need to not burn
yourself or your first few employees out.
When I read this book, I changed my business, and I have never looked back. We
were able to start hiring people locally instead of having contractors on oDesk,
and we centralized information and grew. While we aren't perfect at systems and
delegation, we could have never grown without improvement in those areas. It's
still the case.
Lesson 8: Raise your prices; raise your minimums
When I was the only employee in my company, doing everything myself, I could
still make good margins and be the lowest price around. I took clients at
$200-$500 per month, built some websites, and put tons of hours in, and as long
as I could get to where I had $40-50k per year in revenue, I had a decent wage
for Burley. That was my first goal. I could be flexible with what I made and
could literally have no cost other than a couple of tools and my personal time.
Employees, though, cost more than time. Employees cost money. And regardless of
how much money you bring in, an employee's wage is constant. If I wanted
employees that were good, there way no way I could maintain my pricing and
minimums, providing the level of service that was needed. We had to raise
prices. We changed our minimum to $1,500 and determined that we would do work
for no less than $100 per hour. The types of clients got better, and we had
enough revenue to bring in talented people who increased the quality of our
work. I know that many SEO firms/companies can charge a lot more than $100 per
hour, and we do as well, depending on the type of projectâbut for the
average small/medium business this is a price that they can afford and you can
do good work for.
Lesson 9: Learn when to pass on bad clients
When I was hungry I took whatever client walked through the door. I took
abuse. Emails that called me names, clients who would not listen to my advice
and would then blame me when things went wrong. Clients that paid three or four
months late but would complain when I didn't answer my phone on the first ring.
I kept them because I felt like I had to have the revenue. What I didn't
realize is that if I had taken the time I was putting into their project and put
it elsewhere, I could have replaced the revenue plus a lot more and had a much
better quality of life.
If you are not happy, then no amount of money will make up for it, so fire
your bad clients, pass on the red flags, and figure something else out. Remember
Lesson 1.
Retain
Lesson 10: Be trustworthy
The fastest way to lose clients and employees is to lie to them. If you want
both to stick with you through thick and thin, then there has to be 100% trust.
I personally think that the more transparent you can be all around the more you
will be trusted.
One of our core values at Nifty is to be "willingly naked." Not literally, but
figuratively. We have to be willing to share what we learn, take feedback, tell
our clients the brutal truth even if we know they don't want to hear it. But you
have to be willing to take feedback yourself.
Lesson 11: Reward your team
I am not going to pretend to be good at this. I know I should say "thank you"
about a thousand times more than I do. Instead, I find myself more apt to
criticize when things go poorly. It's something I am hoping to constantly get
better at. The team at Nifty is amazing and they take a ton of stress,
responsibility, and problems on themselves and do an awesome job.
Here's a few things that I have done at times:
Thank-you gift cards
Revenue sharing
Company lunches
Pop-Tarts (long story)
Big Christmas parties
The best office in Burley, Idaho (complete with a moose, a monster, bricks, and
staked firewood)
Lesson 12: Auto-renew your contracts
When it comes to smaller businesses, I have found that month-to-month
contracts that auto-renew and are paid by automatic credit card last longer than
contracts that are 3, 6, or 12 months with renegotiations required. Bottom line,
people don't like re-signing up for a committed amount of time. Especially small
business owners who believe the word "contract" is a cuss word.
Change
Lesson 13: Never stop learning new things
There are many search companies that fall behind. It's because they don't
change. They keep blasting away at the same spammy links, the same old school
designs, and the same tactics from 5-10 years ago, and they wonder why a massive
amount of their client portfolio drops in rankings.
I personally start every morning by reading blogs, and I have for years. The
staff spends the first part of every day doing the same thing, and we pass
around articles that make an impression. It keeps us constantly thinking about
innovation and learning from our great community. Another way to keep up is to
constantly pitch to speak at conferences. You have deadlines around which you
can build tests and case studies, and you will do everything you possibly can to
be up on the latest news in the industry because you never know what questions
the attendees might ask you.
Lesson 14: Request feedback
The best way to find issues in your organization is to request feedback from
your staff and clients. The other day, we had a client that paused his account.
This is usually a soft way to end the relationship. But, upon asking for his
feedback, he said he loved working with his project manager and the work we had
done, saying he would be back on track in 2 months. Then he mentioned he was
hoping for faster results on a side project we were doing for him. Whose fault
was it that he felt that way? It was ours. I took the opportunity to clear up
the miscommunication and he was very grateful for it. If we hadn't asked for the
feedback, we might not have ever heard from him again and he definitely would
have had the issue on his mind.
Lesson 15: Be pleased, but never satisfied
Nobody is perfect. Which means there is always room for improvement. There is
always more than can be done, and there is always a better way. The day you stop
growing and say that "it's good enough" is the day that a competitor is going to
come in and do more that you are willing to.
We have redone our proposal process multiple times. We haven't ever been bad
at it, but every time we go back to the drawing boards there is something more
that we find that helps to bring in better clients. Right now we are testing out
a live walk-through of the proposal, as compared to just sending over a PDF and
asking for questions.
SAVE
Lesson 16: Content isn't king, cash is
If you want to run a successful business of any type, then ensure that you
aren't running cash-poor. I have followed Dave Ramsey's personal financial
guidelines for my business and find that it's very conservative. While it might
limit the speed at which we grow, it eliminates a massive amount of risk.
Dave recommends having a personal emergency fund (and in this case business
fund) of 3-6 months of expenses on hand at all times. That means that if you are
going to pay yourself (your only start-up expense) $3,000 per month, then you
should have between $9,000-$18,000 in cash before starting up. At $65,000 per
month of expenses, you should have between $195,000-$390,000 in reserves. That's
a lot of cash on hand for a small business, but if clients unexpectedly drop, or
major industry changes necessitate a completely new model, you will have the
cash to make good decisions and not desperate ones. I started out around the
six-month reserve when I was smaller, and as time has gone by and we have a more
diversified revenue stream, I am comfortable between 3-4 months of cash on hand.
Lesson 17: Pay yourself modestly, and get out of personal debt
I pay myself $4,000 per month. The rest goes to growing the business, savings,
and other ventures. Now, you need to realize that I live in Burley, Idaho, and
it's literally hard to spend money here. I could pay myself $2,000 if it wasn't
for Amazon Prime. But, at a very young age, my wife and I decided that we would
have no personal debt and worked really hard to pay off our house and buy cars
with cash.
I know many financial experts will tell you that leveraging your home is the
best financing you have but let me tell you that the freedom of owning your
house outright means that you can make better business decisions over the course
of your life. You wont have the "what if I lose my family's home" question
circling around in the back of your mind and you can actually take bigger risks,
and never make business financial decisions based off of your personal financial
needs.
Lesson 18: Don't sign up for every Internet marketing tool under the sun
Tool subscriptions are reoccurring costs. It's very easy to spend thousands of
dollars a month on different tools you don't have the cash to do that when you
start up. When I first started, I only used Raven Tools, but quickly added a
list of 10 to 15 tools like Moz. Occasionally, we have to go through the list of
tools and find out what we are actually using and get rid of the rest. I'm not
going to pretend there is one tool to rule them all, because everyone has very
different needs. The key is to quickly identify which tools work for you and
which don't, and to stop paying monthly for the ones that don't.
Lesson 19: Diversify
If you get to where you own a successful guest-blogging company, or a
successful SEO company, or a successful content-marketing company, or whatever
niche you decide to work in, then realize the problem with a niche is that you
are putting all of your eggs in one basket. If that basket disappears, you're
screwed.
Try going after more than one niche. We opened a division focused on SEO and
website development for lawyers called NiftyLaw.com. I also owned a newspaper in
my home town, and am working on some new projects so that I am not 100% reliant
on Internet marketing revenue.
Lesson 20: Find a few things to help save yourself
Owning a business is hard work. It's mentally draining, and it's very hard to
shut down your mind after constantly thinking. There will be times where you
need to save yourself from burning out, so ensure that you have hobbies that can
get your mind completely off of work. I golf, mountain bike, and travel with my
family. I also don't do any work on Sundays at all.
Overall
I have loved starting an Internet marketing company. It's been hard; I'm going
gray and I'm only 29.
I know that you might not agree with certain things I think are important, and
that's fine. The best part about business is that it's a "choose your own
adventure" storybook with no "right" answers.
Please add your own questions and advice in the comments. I hope that this is
a post that can have more insight in the comments than the article itself, and I
look forward to learning from all of you!
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
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for Starting an Internet Marketing Agency'
Posted by NiftyMarketing
Mike's disclaimer: This is not a post about how awesome I am, or how there is
only one way to build an internet marketing agency. It's a combination of
stories and thoughts about what I have gone through building Nifty Marketing.
When I started in 2009 there was very little information online about
starting, running, or growing an Internet Marketing Agency. The ones that did
exist were from superstars that charged a billion dollars an hour. I am not a
superstar. My company started in Burley, Idaho. Here's a rap about my town I
wrote.
My hope with this post is that a few of you who are out there hustling will
benefit from doing some of the things that I did, and most of the things that I
didn't.
Start smart
I was in my final semester at BYU-Idaho and had accepted a job to be the chief
marketing officer of Rove Pest Control after spending my summers during college
as a door-to-door salesman for them. I thought my future was set. But, due to
some changes at Rove I knew that I was going to have to have to find a different
career. My wife was pregnant, we had just started building a house in Burley,
and I had a full load of credits. My two favorite classes were a basic HTML
class (that used Don't Make Me Think as the textbook) and a web business class
for which we had to start an online business and make/lose money. Naturally, as
any true Idahoan would do, I started HugeIdahoPotato.com and sold potatoes
bigger than heads to people across the country. The website sucks; I'm pretty
sure I got it penalized within a year of creating it. But I fell in love with
internet marketing in the process of building that site, and I keep it up as a
remembrance of where I started.
Lesson 1: Start with a reason that's more than money
After making around $100 on the site I knew that I had found my career choice.
I also knew that I was going to live in Burley, Idaho, and that I wanted to
bring non-agricultural jobs to the town. I can't tell you how sad it is for many
of my friends who grew up in a town they knew they couldn't move back to if they
wanted to make a decent living. I wanted to change that. I still do. It's one of
the main driving points for me. Of course you need to make money, but if that is
the only thing you are looking for as a business owner then eventually you will
fail. You will make decisions that aren't for your clients, or for your staff,
or for the community; you will get short-term gains and create a long term
failure.
Lesson 2: Start by interning/working at an agency
This is possibly my biggest regret of my career. I started Nifty Marketing
with literally no experience at all. I had no friends in the industry, I had no
idea what I was doing, how SEO companies were structured, or even how to do
anything beyond what I had learned in college. I dove into blogs, but at that
time I didn't know who to trust and read some really awful advice. I was not a
good SEO. I was not a good PPC advertiser. I could have saved myself at least
two years if I had worked for someone who could have pointed me in the right
direction first.
Lesson 3: Focus on something specific
Business wasn't going very well. I had a few clients, and I decided I needed
some help, so I signed up for SEOBook. There was a feedback forum, so I posted
my super-awful website for Nifty Marketing. I didn't even own the domain at the
time. (I had TheNiftyWay.com, and it wasn't until laterâby some good grace
of the heavensâthat the person who owned NiftyMarketing.com let it go, and
I bought it for $7.99 with a GoDaddy code.) When I posted my site on SEOBook, I
got brutal feedback. People told me it sucked. But someone in the forum said
something that changed my life forever.
He said something like:
"You offer SEO, Web Design, and PPC. That is exactly the same as 100,000s of
companies around the world, who by the looks of things are better than you at
it. What can you be the best at? What can you become known for?"
The comment hit me like a ton of bricks. The few clients I had at the time
were really small businesses in Idaho, and I had been spending a lot of time in
Google Maps. I realized that I enjoyed that aspect of marketing, and was getting
clients ranked. So, I redesigned my site, changed my messaging, and decided to
focus. I became a local SEO.
Lesson 4: Start with networking, not cold calls
I remember quite vividly trying to use my door-to-door sales skills to try and
cold call businesses to get work. I grabbed a phone book and called people with
big ads and no websites because I figured that they had budget. What I found was
that I was caller #5 for that week offering the same thing as everyone else.
Worst of all, everyone "knew a guy who knows a guy who could do it" for them.
So, I put away the phonebook and started talking to my friends and asking if
they knew people who needed websites and marketing. That's when leads started
coming in. Then, I wrote an email to David Mihm on August 7, 2009, and asked him
how I could become an expert in the local search field. This was his response:
The best advice I can give you is to optimize the local listings of a bunch of
clients. The more you "play" in the space, the better you'll get at teasing out
the parts of the algorithm that really matter.
Beyond that, subscribe to these blogs:
http://www.blumenthals.com/bloghttp://www.localsearchnews.nethttp://gesterling.wordpress.comhttp://www.searchinfluence.com/bloghttp://solaswebdesign.net/wordpresshttp://www.smallbusinesssem.comhttp://www.hyperlocalblogger.comhttp://www.sixthmanmarketing.com/bloghttp://www.expand2web.com/bloghttp://www.devbasu.comhttp://www.martijnbeijk.comhttp://www.seoverflow.com/blog
I immediately dove into every one of these sites and learned everything I
possibly could about local search. I took notes, and then I started testing and
haven't ever stopped.
While doing that, I realized the most valuable networking lesson I ever
learned was to simply share. I started blogging, which led to guest posts on
SEJ, and I attended a few small conferences, one of which was the first ever
LocalU. I offered to help any way that I could. Fast forward to 2013, and I am a
LocalU Faculty Member and speak at conferences year-round. It isn't because I am
special. It's because I am passionate about the space and I am willing to share
information and help as much as I can. Almost every client we have at Nifty
Marketing comes as a referral from clients, friends, blog posts, webinars, and
conferences. Not one client came from a cold call. I will forever be in debt to
David Mihm and the rest of the local search community for teaching me such a
valuable lesson.
Lesson 5: It's good to have funding, it's better to have partners, and it's best
to bootstrap alone
From the first year of my business until now I have had opportunities to get
funding and take on partners. I have never done it. I am not saying that it's
bad to do either of these things, but if you take a close look at our industry
you will see that a lot of funded companies and partnerships don't make it.
I remember very clearly going to dinner with some guys from Blueglass in my
first year and thinking, "Man, I wish I could be part of that company." And
while I respect the founders a great deal they took a massive risk and it didn't
workout. Many of them had successful businesses before then, and while the idea
of a Mega Company that can make tens or hundreds of millions is alluring, the
chance of you being successful and earning more on your own is better. Sure,
extremely fast growth and funding means you come to market quicker. But by
growing at the slow rate of 2x per year (which isn't that slow), I have been
able to continually innovate and offer better services without taking do-or-die
risks.
I am very glad I bootstrapped. I own 100% of my company. I can make 100% of
the decisions about its future. I don't have to pay a silent partner a large
chunk that makes cash flow an issue. I don't have to make short-term decisions
for a board that hurts the long-term vision I have. And I make enough that I
stopped caring about the money around year three; slow and steady wins the
prize.
I know that there are many successful companies that haven't gone the way of
solo bootstrapping. At the top of the partnership list for me is Avalaunch
Media. But in order to do what they have done you have get big enough to support
multiple owners and find amazing partners that can all pull in the same
direction. With around 50% of marriages failing, how many partnerships in
business actually work out? They are definitely not the norm, and I respect them
immensely for it.
Grow smarter
Lesson 6: You are in the business of providing a service, not SEO
I remember becoming a good SEO. I also remember getting amazing results for
clients and still getting complaints from them. I thought they were the problem.
Then I realized I was. I thought back to the days of pest control and remember
the company training techs to take their time at customers' houses. You see, you
could service a house in 15 minutes or even less if you hustled. But if you did
that, customers would complain that the work was sloppy and it shouldn't cost so
much. Instead, you should take your time, get down on your hands and knees, and
look around. Take notes and pace yourself. Then, customers felt like the service
was worth it. They weren't paying for the product. They could buy the product at
Home Depot. They were paying for the service.
Comparing this to Internet marketing, I knew I had done a great job gaining
more traffic, but the clients had no idea what was being done. They didn't
understand what they were paying for and subsequently thought that I was
unnecessary. Most small businesses don't care or understand what a title tag,
meta description, an exact match, a naked URL, duplicate content, etc is. So
telling them you changed/created these in a report without actually showing them
physical pictures is pointless.
We started creating custom reports with tons of arrows and screenshots
explaining the work that we were doing. We starting giving them a complete list
of the links and citations we were building. We stopped sending over a raw list
of traffic counts and started providing analysis of the traffic that websites
were getting, and our clients stopped complaining that they didn't know what we
were doing. Clear communication is what the business of service is all about.
Lesson 7: Read The E-myth
I was doing everything myself. Everything. Then, I tried to have some people
on oDesk help me. My wife even did some of the citation work. The only problem
was all the information was in my head. I had very little of the processes and
information organized, and I didn't have time to focus on organization when I
had so much client work, sales, and bookkeeping to do. That is what The E-myth
is about. It talks about the difference between being a technician and being a
business owner. It talks about the need to build your business like a franchise
with training manuals, easy to follow processes, and the need to not burn
yourself or your first few employees out.
When I read this book, I changed my business, and I have never looked back. We
were able to start hiring people locally instead of having contractors on oDesk,
and we centralized information and grew. While we aren't perfect at systems and
delegation, we could have never grown without improvement in those areas. It's
still the case.
Lesson 8: Raise your prices; raise your minimums
When I was the only employee in my company, doing everything myself, I could
still make good margins and be the lowest price around. I took clients at
$200-$500 per month, built some websites, and put tons of hours in, and as long
as I could get to where I had $40-50k per year in revenue, I had a decent wage
for Burley. That was my first goal. I could be flexible with what I made and
could literally have no cost other than a couple of tools and my personal time.
Employees, though, cost more than time. Employees cost money. And regardless of
how much money you bring in, an employee's wage is constant. If I wanted
employees that were good, there way no way I could maintain my pricing and
minimums, providing the level of service that was needed. We had to raise
prices. We changed our minimum to $1,500 and determined that we would do work
for no less than $100 per hour. The types of clients got better, and we had
enough revenue to bring in talented people who increased the quality of our
work. I know that many SEO firms/companies can charge a lot more than $100 per
hour, and we do as well, depending on the type of projectâbut for the
average small/medium business this is a price that they can afford and you can
do good work for.
Lesson 9: Learn when to pass on bad clients
When I was hungry I took whatever client walked through the door. I took
abuse. Emails that called me names, clients who would not listen to my advice
and would then blame me when things went wrong. Clients that paid three or four
months late but would complain when I didn't answer my phone on the first ring.
I kept them because I felt like I had to have the revenue. What I didn't
realize is that if I had taken the time I was putting into their project and put
it elsewhere, I could have replaced the revenue plus a lot more and had a much
better quality of life.
If you are not happy, then no amount of money will make up for it, so fire
your bad clients, pass on the red flags, and figure something else out. Remember
Lesson 1.
Retain
Lesson 10: Be trustworthy
The fastest way to lose clients and employees is to lie to them. If you want
both to stick with you through thick and thin, then there has to be 100% trust.
I personally think that the more transparent you can be all around the more you
will be trusted.
One of our core values at Nifty is to be "willingly naked." Not literally, but
figuratively. We have to be willing to share what we learn, take feedback, tell
our clients the brutal truth even if we know they don't want to hear it. But you
have to be willing to take feedback yourself.
Lesson 11: Reward your team
I am not going to pretend to be good at this. I know I should say "thank you"
about a thousand times more than I do. Instead, I find myself more apt to
criticize when things go poorly. It's something I am hoping to constantly get
better at. The team at Nifty is amazing and they take a ton of stress,
responsibility, and problems on themselves and do an awesome job.
Here's a few things that I have done at times:
Thank-you gift cards
Revenue sharing
Company lunches
Pop-Tarts (long story)
Big Christmas parties
The best office in Burley, Idaho (complete with a moose, a monster, bricks, and
staked firewood)
Lesson 12: Auto-renew your contracts
When it comes to smaller businesses, I have found that month-to-month
contracts that auto-renew and are paid by automatic credit card last longer than
contracts that are 3, 6, or 12 months with renegotiations required. Bottom line,
people don't like re-signing up for a committed amount of time. Especially small
business owners who believe the word "contract" is a cuss word.
Change
Lesson 13: Never stop learning new things
There are many search companies that fall behind. It's because they don't
change. They keep blasting away at the same spammy links, the same old school
designs, and the same tactics from 5-10 years ago, and they wonder why a massive
amount of their client portfolio drops in rankings.
I personally start every morning by reading blogs, and I have for years. The
staff spends the first part of every day doing the same thing, and we pass
around articles that make an impression. It keeps us constantly thinking about
innovation and learning from our great community. Another way to keep up is to
constantly pitch to speak at conferences. You have deadlines around which you
can build tests and case studies, and you will do everything you possibly can to
be up on the latest news in the industry because you never know what questions
the attendees might ask you.
Lesson 14: Request feedback
The best way to find issues in your organization is to request feedback from
your staff and clients. The other day, we had a client that paused his account.
This is usually a soft way to end the relationship. But, upon asking for his
feedback, he said he loved working with his project manager and the work we had
done, saying he would be back on track in 2 months. Then he mentioned he was
hoping for faster results on a side project we were doing for him. Whose fault
was it that he felt that way? It was ours. I took the opportunity to clear up
the miscommunication and he was very grateful for it. If we hadn't asked for the
feedback, we might not have ever heard from him again and he definitely would
have had the issue on his mind.
Lesson 15: Be pleased, but never satisfied
Nobody is perfect. Which means there is always room for improvement. There is
always more than can be done, and there is always a better way. The day you stop
growing and say that "it's good enough" is the day that a competitor is going to
come in and do more that you are willing to.
We have redone our proposal process multiple times. We haven't ever been bad
at it, but every time we go back to the drawing boards there is something more
that we find that helps to bring in better clients. Right now we are testing out
a live walk-through of the proposal, as compared to just sending over a PDF and
asking for questions.
SAVE
Lesson 16: Content isn't king, cash is
If you want to run a successful business of any type, then ensure that you
aren't running cash-poor. I have followed Dave Ramsey's personal financial
guidelines for my business and find that it's very conservative. While it might
limit the speed at which we grow, it eliminates a massive amount of risk.
Dave recommends having a personal emergency fund (and in this case business
fund) of 3-6 months of expenses on hand at all times. That means that if you are
going to pay yourself (your only start-up expense) $3,000 per month, then you
should have between $9,000-$18,000 in cash before starting up. At $65,000 per
month of expenses, you should have between $195,000-$390,000 in reserves. That's
a lot of cash on hand for a small business, but if clients unexpectedly drop, or
major industry changes necessitate a completely new model, you will have the
cash to make good decisions and not desperate ones. I started out around the
six-month reserve when I was smaller, and as time has gone by and we have a more
diversified revenue stream, I am comfortable between 3-4 months of cash on hand.
Lesson 17: Pay yourself modestly, and get out of personal debt
I pay myself $4,000 per month. The rest goes to growing the business, savings,
and other ventures. Now, you need to realize that I live in Burley, Idaho, and
it's literally hard to spend money here. I could pay myself $2,000 if it wasn't
for Amazon Prime. But, at a very young age, my wife and I decided that we would
have no personal debt and worked really hard to pay off our house and buy cars
with cash.
I know many financial experts will tell you that leveraging your home is the
best financing you have but let me tell you that the freedom of owning your
house outright means that you can make better business decisions over the course
of your life. You wont have the "what if I lose my family's home" question
circling around in the back of your mind and you can actually take bigger risks,
and never make business financial decisions based off of your personal financial
needs.
Lesson 18: Don't sign up for every Internet marketing tool under the sun
Tool subscriptions are reoccurring costs. It's very easy to spend thousands of
dollars a month on different tools you don't have the cash to do that when you
start up. When I first started, I only used Raven Tools, but quickly added a
list of 10 to 15 tools like Moz. Occasionally, we have to go through the list of
tools and find out what we are actually using and get rid of the rest. I'm not
going to pretend there is one tool to rule them all, because everyone has very
different needs. The key is to quickly identify which tools work for you and
which don't, and to stop paying monthly for the ones that don't.
Lesson 19: Diversify
If you get to where you own a successful guest-blogging company, or a
successful SEO company, or a successful content-marketing company, or whatever
niche you decide to work in, then realize the problem with a niche is that you
are putting all of your eggs in one basket. If that basket disappears, you're
screwed.
Try going after more than one niche. We opened a division focused on SEO and
website development for lawyers called NiftyLaw.com. I also owned a newspaper in
my home town, and am working on some new projects so that I am not 100% reliant
on Internet marketing revenue.
Lesson 20: Find a few things to help save yourself
Owning a business is hard work. It's mentally draining, and it's very hard to
shut down your mind after constantly thinking. There will be times where you
need to save yourself from burning out, so ensure that you have hobbies that can
get your mind completely off of work. I golf, mountain bike, and travel with my
family. I also don't do any work on Sundays at all.
Overall
I have loved starting an Internet marketing company. It's been hard; I'm going
gray and I'm only 29.
I know that you might not agree with certain things I think are important, and
that's fine. The best part about business is that it's a "choose your own
adventure" storybook with no "right" answers.
Please add your own questions and advice in the comments. I hope that this is
a post that can have more insight in the comments than the article itself, and I
look forward to learning from all of you!
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