Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'Are Links Losing Value in Google's
Algorithm? - Whiteboard Friday'
Posted by randfish
There are some great arguments to be made on both sides of the question of
whether links are losing value in Google's algorithm. In some ways, it seems
that they are -- and in some, they're more valuable than ever. In today's
Whiteboard Friday, Rand explores both sides of the argument, offering some
concrete advice to SEOs on how they can navigate today's waters.
Are Links Losing Value in Google's Ranking Algorithms-WBF_1
Here's the link to coverage of Google's testing removing links from the
algorithm, and to the roundup post where links as a ranking signal are discussed
(in particular, check out Russ Jones' reply in the comments). 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 want to talk a little bit about links losing their value in Google's ranking
algorithm.
So Google recently came out and talked about how they had tested a version of
their search engine, of search quality algorithms, ranking algorithms, that did
not include links as a ranking signal. Of course, a lot of SEOs went "Wait, they
did what?"
But it turns out Google actually said they really did not like the results.
They didn't like what they saw when they removed links from the ranking
elements. So maybe SEOs are going, "Okay, can I breathe easy, or are they going
to keep trying to find ways to take links out of the ranking equation?"
Certainly, links for a long time have been an extremely powerful way for SEOs
and folks to move the needle on indexation, on rankings, on getting traffic from
search engines.
I'm going to personally come out and say that, in my opinion, we will
continue to see links in Google's rankings systems for at least the next five
and probably the next ten years. Whether they continue to be as important and as
powerful as they've been, I think is worthy of a discussion, and I do want to
bring up some points that some very intelligent marketers and SEOs have made on
both sides of the issue.
So, first off, there are some folks who are saying, "No, this is crazy. Links
are actually growing in value." I thought Russ Jones from Virante made some
excellent comments on a recent blog post where some experts had been asked to do
a thought experiment around what Google might do if links were to lose signals.
He made some good points, one of which was as Google filters out . . . so
let's say I've got this webpage on Google, and as I filter out the value that
are passed from some links through algorithms like Penguin or through filtration
systems that remove either Web spam or low-quality links or links that we don't
find valuable in our relevancy algorithms, it actually is the case that these
other links grow in importance. In fact, as Russ wisely pointed out, many of the
other kinds of signals that Google might potentially replace links with, things
around user and usage data, things around social signals, all of those things
actually can be validated through the link graph, and you can use the link graph
to add additional context and information about those other signals. So I think
there's a point to be made.
People have also pointed out that as we get into this world where no-follow
is very, very common, a lot of websites putting no-follow on there, social
sharing is oftentimes a much more common form of evangelizing or sharing
information than linking is. Before we had the popularity of Facebook and
Twitter and LinkedIn and Google+ and all these networks, that social sharing
would have been bloggers and people in forums linking out to these resources.
There's also, unfortunately, created a lot by Google themselves, and Bing to
a certain extent, too, there are many, many webmasters and site owners and
editorial specialists on the Web who have a fear of linking out. They worry that
by linking to something bad or if they link out and then something happens to
that website they link out to, that maybe something will happen to their site.
As a result, it's actually become a greater and greater challenge over time
to earn editorial links for everyone. This is interesting because it actually
suggests that there is more value when you do earn those editorial links. So I
think there's a very credible case to be made.
On the flip side, there are SEOs who are pointing out, hey, look links are
definitely a diminishing signal because there are elements in a ranking system,
and anytime you have elements in a ranking system and you add new signals of
relevancy, new signals of usefulness, of importance, of popularity, whatever
those are, the pie chart has to squish those in. Then, the portion that used to
be links, all of this stuff here, just this portion is still link-
based. So links become a smaller piece of the pie chart.
One good way of explaining this is think of, for example, Olympic ice
skating, where you have judges who give rankings. Those judges, they'll give a
score -- a 7.5 and an 8.5. They have criteria that they look at. As new criteria
get added, the criteria for other pieces necessarily becomes a little bit less
important.
Now, in Google's ranking system, it's not quite the same logic. We don't have
a pie chart that can add signals and remove signals. It's not like everybody has
a score out of just 10. But the ability of pages and sites to move up in the
rankings is influenced by the elements that are in here in a similar fashion.
So what really should SEOs do? What should we take away from this sort of
debate and discussion and this testing of Google by removing links from their
algorithmic signals and not liking those results? Well, in an ideal world, in a
best-case scenario, as a marketer, the way that I believe we should be thinking
about this is to invest in the marketing, in the tactics and channels that
provide value in multiple ways.
By "multiple ways," I mean provide value in terms of branding; provide value
in terms of direct traffic; provide value in terms of growing my social network;
provide value in terms of growing my e-mail network, in terms of growing my
influence and thought leadership in this sphere; all those kinds of things.
If I can get those multiple ways and still earn links? So content marketing
is one that a lot of SEOs and marketers have been investing in because it does
these things. Content marketing means that I get social shares. It means that I
get more social followers. It means that I grow the people who pay attention to
my brand and are aware of my brand. That content can also earn links, which
helps me in the search engine rankings. That's the ideal world. There are many
forms of this. Content marketing isn't the only one.
It can also be good, not quite as good, to refocus the energy that you might
currently be expending on building all kinds of links and instead concentrate
very carefully on the few links that really matter. As we've seen here, even for
those who are arguing, "No, it's becoming less important," it's not becoming
less important. Those folks are saying, "Hey, there are a lot of things getting
filtered out, and it's harder and harder to earn the good editorial links."
Focusing on getting those is still very valuable.
Do not do these things -- keep getting any and every link. We've talked about
this many times on Whiteboard Friday. You guys are all familiar. Especially the
non-editorial kind. It's too dangerous a world. If you're building a site that
you want to last in the search engines for a long period of time, many months
and years in the future, you can't afford to be actively, proactively going and
getting non-editorial links.
Please, don't ignore the value that you get from activities that might not
directly earn you a link -- things that could get you brand mentions and grow
your brand, things that could build up your resource of content, things that
could build up your social channels -- just because those things don't earn you
a link.
A great example of this one is a lot of folks have been talking about guest
posting. Of course, I did a Whiteboard Friday right before Google made their
announcement about guest posting. Guest blogging, guest posting, in that classic
SEO for a link fashion, is not a great idea. But it can still be a great channel
to earn brand awareness and attention, to earn direct traffic. I mean, a lot of
folks can post on forums, on sites that earn them an additional audience, and
that additional audience in the future might turn into people who share and link
and become customers. So that's a beautiful world. Don't ignore the value of
that.
I'm sure there's going to be some great debate and discussion in the
comments, and I really look forward to hearing from all of you. Take care. We'll
see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
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of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
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Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Friday 28 February 2014
Thursday 27 February 2014
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, '3 Steps to Identify Blog Topics
that are Relevant to Your Audience'
Posted by Aleyda
If you're reading this post right now, chances are that you have experienced
this (or know someone who has): You have the deadline of a blog post coming, but
you still don't know what to write about.
Sometimes you get away by writing about breaking news or a trend in your
field, by doing a review of a new product or service, or by covering a recent
conference or meetup that you have attended, but you can't do this all the time.
You also want to write about something that is not only useful but also
attractive, something that allows you to connect with your audience.
And you might be an experienced blogger, copywriter, or marketer. You might
also know your audience pretty well; you have built your personas, completed and
developed keyword research, and have already tried some techniques to get
through the "writer's block." You have browsed through the content of prolific
creators to get inspired and even tried Portent's content idea generator, but
you still have a hard time finding a relevant and exciting blog post idea each
time that your deadline approaches.
This likely happens because although you know where to find the dataâand
might even have it alreadyâto get you inspired and identify ideas, the
hardest part is to make it actionable, since it's so easy to get lost in such a
vast amount of information.
What you need in order to identify blog post ideas that will allow you to
connect with your audience is an actionable and simple process that is easily
repeatable, applicable to any industry, and scalable:
Step 1: Gather the relevant data
How can we avoid getting lost when there's so much data available through so
many sources? By focusing only on gathering the most important data that's
relevant to your goal: Identifying a relevant and attractive blog post idea for
your web audience.
Here's the data that you will need:
1. Your own most popular posts
You don't need to go through all of your previous posts, just select the most
popular ones:
Most visited posts on your blog: Use Google Analytics to identify those blog
posts that have had the highest amount of visits, the most valuable visits
(those that generated the highest amount of conversions) and the most engaged
visits (those that had the highest duration and generated more pageviews on the
blog). Keep only the top 20% of them.
Most shared posts on social networks: Use SocialCrawlytics to crawl your blog
and see which are the posts that have been shared the most by your visitors in
their favorite social networks. Again, only keep the top 20% of them.
After gathering the data, consolidate these two "Top 20%" lists, eliminate the
duplicates, and create a spreadsheet with the following information for each
post:
Title
URL
Visits
Conversions
Visit duration
Shares in each social network (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, etc.)
Now you know which of the posts has been, until now, your own most popular
content. You know what has attracted better traffic and visibility in social
networks, and the social networks that your audience prefers.
2. Your competitors' most popular posts
It's time to collect the most popular posts from your competitors, and
although you don't likely have access to their full analytics, you can still
identify some important statistics:
Most shared posts on social networks: Crawl their blogs with SocialCrawlytics
as you did before.
Most externally linked posts: With Open Site Explorer, check to see which
posts have earned the highest amount of links from other sites.
With this information you can consolidate these two lists into one and create
a spreadsheet for the top 20% of posts by your competitors that includes the
following data:
Title
URL
Shares in each social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, etc.)
External links
Linking domains
Here you have another very valuable and highly targeted source of information:
The most popular blog posts of your competitors!
3. Your community's and influencers' most shared content
Besides your own top content and that of your competitors, you can also
identify which content is most liked in your own social communitiesâthe
different groups that are connected to each other and form your audience.
For Twitter, you can get your communities and the influencers, topics, and
locations per communities by using Tribalytics, just by adding your Twitter
handle:
Once you identify your different communities, their most popular topics, and
influencers, you can get even more specific by using Twtrland to obtain the most
popular tweets for your influencers:
Create a list with the top content shared in your influencers' top tweets and
segment it using the different topic areas identified for your communities.
Complete it with social and search popularity-related data for each one of them:
Title
URL
Shares in each social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, etc.)
External links
Linking domains
Here's another very relevant input for your blog post ideas: The content that
your influencers like to share and that has been popular in your own Twitter
communities.
4. The hottest relevant content in social networks
After having identified the posts topics and pieces that have performed better
for you, your competitors, and in your social communities in the past, you can
identify which have been the overall most popular pieces of content in social
networks about those same topics in the latest times.
Organize the best-performing content that you have now into different topics
categories or areas and use Buzzsumo to search for them.
Download the most shared content in social networks for each category. You
will have a list with the following information:
Title
URL
Shares in each social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, etc.)
Content type
Consolidate the lists, segmenting again per category and organize it by
prioritizing the overall best performing content for your topics in social
networks.
5. Your relevant web industry questions
Another very relevant source of blog post ideas is the questions asked by your
online community in social networks, such as Twitter, and on sites like Quora.
Go to your relevant topic's questions, and create a list with the
highest-voted questions. Automate this process by creating an IFTTT recipe for
their RSS feeds, by adding them directly into a Google Docs Spreadsheet.
You can complete the previous list of questions with the ones that users make
directly in Google by using the SEOchat related keywords tool, a multi-level
suggestion keyword finder that will give you the queries that your audience
searches for in Google about your desired topics.
By doing this, you will learn which are the biggest questions that people ask
on the web about your relevant topics. A direct source of ideas to create posts
that answer them.
6. Your industry web content requests
Subscribe to HARO or ProfNet and get daily email alerts each time a media
outlet asks for the input of a specialist about your selected categories of
content. Create filters to apply a label to those emails that specifically
include one of your relevant content topics:
By doing this you will learn how journalists are looking to cover these topics
and the type of content they're writing about them already. This can serve as an
ongoing reference for content ideas: See what important sites are writing about
your relevant topics at the moment.
Step 2: Ask the relevant questions
Once you have gathered all the previous data you will have a very complete,
but still manageable, prioritized and categorized source of potential blog post
ideas from different type of sources:
Analyze and make this data actionable with the next steps:
Ask yourself which are the characteristics that differentiate this top content
and questions? What do they all have in common? From the areas where they are
focused to the style or format, identify the patterns that they follow and make
a list of criteria with them.
Create a list of potentially attractive posts ideas by taking as an input the
already existing popular content, questions and requests that you have
identified before, applying the criteria that you have identified that they all
share.
Specifically ask the five Ws (who, what, when, where, why) and "how" for the
potential topics, thinking on how these will target your audience needs and
emotions.
Classify each idea with a level of "interest" based on how relevant is for
your audience and the amount of search volume that exists around each topic (you
can validate the keyword planner information with those of SearchMetrics and
SEMRush).
Search and identify which of these post ideas have been already covered,
whether by you, your competitors, or any other site in the past. See which sites
have published the posts and the degree of success they had with them. It's also
important that you specify in which content format (text, infographic, video,
checklist, slides, etc.) and type (guide, news, review, webinar, report,
competition, etc.) they have been published, as well as when they were published
(since it's not the same to have been covered five years ago than just a couple
of months before).
By following these steps you will have a list of blog posts ideas with this
information:
The blog post idea
Interest
Search volume
Relevance level
Coverage status
Publication URL
Content format
Content type
Publication date
Shares in each social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, etc.)
External links
Linking domains
Prioritize those ideas that have the highest level of interest and that
haven't been published yet.
Step 3: Identify your blog post opportunities
For each of the highly prioritized potential ideas for posts, ask the
following questions to filter them further and validate your opportunities:
Is this topic related to your business's vision and goal?
Is this the type of post content that is really interesting and useful for
your audience?
Is it clear how the post will help your audience solve an issue or improve
what they have?
Will you be able to write the post to be easily consumed and understood by
them?
Are the resources needed to write the post feasible for you?
Will it be profitable for you to rank with this post?
The winning idea will be those for which you answer yes to the questions.
In case that you have identified a topic that has been already covered in the
past with a blog post, but it complies with the rest of the previous criteria so
is still attractive to pursue, then think about how you can create a unique
selling proposition that differentiates yours from what came before. Two common
options are:
Do a follow-up post, completing or expanding the initial information.
Reformat the post to build a tool, create a checklist, a guide, a list or
compilation of resources, an infographic, a presentation or a video that makes
it easier and more attractive to consume, and then write a post to announce it.
Some examples; rinse and repeat.
I contribute my writing to Moz, State of Digital, and at WooRank and
it´s fundamental for me to have a process to follow to be able to come up
each month with new blog posts ideas, so I've followed this process in the past
to write these posts:
A follow-up Q&A post after my Mobile SEO Mozinar.
A test challenge after my MozCon presentation in 2012
A checklist compiling the most important International SEO factors and another
for SEO friendly migrations
A compilation of international SEO tools and another of SEO guidelines for 2014
A case study to launch my hreflang tags tool
A presentation and a checklist giving tips for international business travel
A step-by-step guide to do a Mobile SEO audit
A post answering the question I got in social networks about how I create my
slides
It has worked pretty well for me in the past and hopefully it does for you
too!
Do you use a process to identify your blog posts ideas? I would love to hear
about it.
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/~3/4GMdKqFbSFE/identifying-blog-topics-relevant-to-your-audience
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
that are Relevant to Your Audience'
Posted by Aleyda
If you're reading this post right now, chances are that you have experienced
this (or know someone who has): You have the deadline of a blog post coming, but
you still don't know what to write about.
Sometimes you get away by writing about breaking news or a trend in your
field, by doing a review of a new product or service, or by covering a recent
conference or meetup that you have attended, but you can't do this all the time.
You also want to write about something that is not only useful but also
attractive, something that allows you to connect with your audience.
And you might be an experienced blogger, copywriter, or marketer. You might
also know your audience pretty well; you have built your personas, completed and
developed keyword research, and have already tried some techniques to get
through the "writer's block." You have browsed through the content of prolific
creators to get inspired and even tried Portent's content idea generator, but
you still have a hard time finding a relevant and exciting blog post idea each
time that your deadline approaches.
This likely happens because although you know where to find the dataâand
might even have it alreadyâto get you inspired and identify ideas, the
hardest part is to make it actionable, since it's so easy to get lost in such a
vast amount of information.
What you need in order to identify blog post ideas that will allow you to
connect with your audience is an actionable and simple process that is easily
repeatable, applicable to any industry, and scalable:
Step 1: Gather the relevant data
How can we avoid getting lost when there's so much data available through so
many sources? By focusing only on gathering the most important data that's
relevant to your goal: Identifying a relevant and attractive blog post idea for
your web audience.
Here's the data that you will need:
1. Your own most popular posts
You don't need to go through all of your previous posts, just select the most
popular ones:
Most visited posts on your blog: Use Google Analytics to identify those blog
posts that have had the highest amount of visits, the most valuable visits
(those that generated the highest amount of conversions) and the most engaged
visits (those that had the highest duration and generated more pageviews on the
blog). Keep only the top 20% of them.
Most shared posts on social networks: Use SocialCrawlytics to crawl your blog
and see which are the posts that have been shared the most by your visitors in
their favorite social networks. Again, only keep the top 20% of them.
After gathering the data, consolidate these two "Top 20%" lists, eliminate the
duplicates, and create a spreadsheet with the following information for each
post:
Title
URL
Visits
Conversions
Visit duration
Shares in each social network (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, etc.)
Now you know which of the posts has been, until now, your own most popular
content. You know what has attracted better traffic and visibility in social
networks, and the social networks that your audience prefers.
2. Your competitors' most popular posts
It's time to collect the most popular posts from your competitors, and
although you don't likely have access to their full analytics, you can still
identify some important statistics:
Most shared posts on social networks: Crawl their blogs with SocialCrawlytics
as you did before.
Most externally linked posts: With Open Site Explorer, check to see which
posts have earned the highest amount of links from other sites.
With this information you can consolidate these two lists into one and create
a spreadsheet for the top 20% of posts by your competitors that includes the
following data:
Title
URL
Shares in each social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, etc.)
External links
Linking domains
Here you have another very valuable and highly targeted source of information:
The most popular blog posts of your competitors!
3. Your community's and influencers' most shared content
Besides your own top content and that of your competitors, you can also
identify which content is most liked in your own social communitiesâthe
different groups that are connected to each other and form your audience.
For Twitter, you can get your communities and the influencers, topics, and
locations per communities by using Tribalytics, just by adding your Twitter
handle:
Once you identify your different communities, their most popular topics, and
influencers, you can get even more specific by using Twtrland to obtain the most
popular tweets for your influencers:
Create a list with the top content shared in your influencers' top tweets and
segment it using the different topic areas identified for your communities.
Complete it with social and search popularity-related data for each one of them:
Title
URL
Shares in each social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, etc.)
External links
Linking domains
Here's another very relevant input for your blog post ideas: The content that
your influencers like to share and that has been popular in your own Twitter
communities.
4. The hottest relevant content in social networks
After having identified the posts topics and pieces that have performed better
for you, your competitors, and in your social communities in the past, you can
identify which have been the overall most popular pieces of content in social
networks about those same topics in the latest times.
Organize the best-performing content that you have now into different topics
categories or areas and use Buzzsumo to search for them.
Download the most shared content in social networks for each category. You
will have a list with the following information:
Title
URL
Shares in each social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, etc.)
Content type
Consolidate the lists, segmenting again per category and organize it by
prioritizing the overall best performing content for your topics in social
networks.
5. Your relevant web industry questions
Another very relevant source of blog post ideas is the questions asked by your
online community in social networks, such as Twitter, and on sites like Quora.
Go to your relevant topic's questions, and create a list with the
highest-voted questions. Automate this process by creating an IFTTT recipe for
their RSS feeds, by adding them directly into a Google Docs Spreadsheet.
You can complete the previous list of questions with the ones that users make
directly in Google by using the SEOchat related keywords tool, a multi-level
suggestion keyword finder that will give you the queries that your audience
searches for in Google about your desired topics.
By doing this, you will learn which are the biggest questions that people ask
on the web about your relevant topics. A direct source of ideas to create posts
that answer them.
6. Your industry web content requests
Subscribe to HARO or ProfNet and get daily email alerts each time a media
outlet asks for the input of a specialist about your selected categories of
content. Create filters to apply a label to those emails that specifically
include one of your relevant content topics:
By doing this you will learn how journalists are looking to cover these topics
and the type of content they're writing about them already. This can serve as an
ongoing reference for content ideas: See what important sites are writing about
your relevant topics at the moment.
Step 2: Ask the relevant questions
Once you have gathered all the previous data you will have a very complete,
but still manageable, prioritized and categorized source of potential blog post
ideas from different type of sources:
Analyze and make this data actionable with the next steps:
Ask yourself which are the characteristics that differentiate this top content
and questions? What do they all have in common? From the areas where they are
focused to the style or format, identify the patterns that they follow and make
a list of criteria with them.
Create a list of potentially attractive posts ideas by taking as an input the
already existing popular content, questions and requests that you have
identified before, applying the criteria that you have identified that they all
share.
Specifically ask the five Ws (who, what, when, where, why) and "how" for the
potential topics, thinking on how these will target your audience needs and
emotions.
Classify each idea with a level of "interest" based on how relevant is for
your audience and the amount of search volume that exists around each topic (you
can validate the keyword planner information with those of SearchMetrics and
SEMRush).
Search and identify which of these post ideas have been already covered,
whether by you, your competitors, or any other site in the past. See which sites
have published the posts and the degree of success they had with them. It's also
important that you specify in which content format (text, infographic, video,
checklist, slides, etc.) and type (guide, news, review, webinar, report,
competition, etc.) they have been published, as well as when they were published
(since it's not the same to have been covered five years ago than just a couple
of months before).
By following these steps you will have a list of blog posts ideas with this
information:
The blog post idea
Interest
Search volume
Relevance level
Coverage status
Publication URL
Content format
Content type
Publication date
Shares in each social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, etc.)
External links
Linking domains
Prioritize those ideas that have the highest level of interest and that
haven't been published yet.
Step 3: Identify your blog post opportunities
For each of the highly prioritized potential ideas for posts, ask the
following questions to filter them further and validate your opportunities:
Is this topic related to your business's vision and goal?
Is this the type of post content that is really interesting and useful for
your audience?
Is it clear how the post will help your audience solve an issue or improve
what they have?
Will you be able to write the post to be easily consumed and understood by
them?
Are the resources needed to write the post feasible for you?
Will it be profitable for you to rank with this post?
The winning idea will be those for which you answer yes to the questions.
In case that you have identified a topic that has been already covered in the
past with a blog post, but it complies with the rest of the previous criteria so
is still attractive to pursue, then think about how you can create a unique
selling proposition that differentiates yours from what came before. Two common
options are:
Do a follow-up post, completing or expanding the initial information.
Reformat the post to build a tool, create a checklist, a guide, a list or
compilation of resources, an infographic, a presentation or a video that makes
it easier and more attractive to consume, and then write a post to announce it.
Some examples; rinse and repeat.
I contribute my writing to Moz, State of Digital, and at WooRank and
it´s fundamental for me to have a process to follow to be able to come up
each month with new blog posts ideas, so I've followed this process in the past
to write these posts:
A follow-up Q&A post after my Mobile SEO Mozinar.
A test challenge after my MozCon presentation in 2012
A checklist compiling the most important International SEO factors and another
for SEO friendly migrations
A compilation of international SEO tools and another of SEO guidelines for 2014
A case study to launch my hreflang tags tool
A presentation and a checklist giving tips for international business travel
A step-by-step guide to do a Mobile SEO audit
A post answering the question I got in social networks about how I create my
slides
It has worked pretty well for me in the past and hopefully it does for you
too!
Do you use a process to identify your blog posts ideas? I would love to hear
about it.
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
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Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Wednesday 26 February 2014
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'New Study Shows Original Content
Reaches More People on Facebook'
Posted by Chad_WittmanThis 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.
Facebook continues to make significant changes in the news feed. This time
Facebook has decreased the importance (technically the "weight") of status
updates. With these changes occurring so rapidly in the news feed, many brand
managers want to know how to stay on top of it all.
We dug deep into the data to see what the latest change was and wanted to
introduce a philosophy to stay ahead of the constant changes. We analyze and
monitor this type of data for thousands of Facebook pages with a tool called
EdgeRank Checker.
On Jan. 21, Facebook released a blog post explaining that status updates from
pages are less engaging than status updates from friends. In other words, status
updates were going to lose exposure in the news feed.
The change was implemented nearly immediately, as we saw organic reach begin
to dip rapidly. In the graph below, you'll see a ~40% decrease from the two
weeks after Jan. 21, as compared to the two weeks before:
While frustrating for many brands, status updates aren't displayed nearly as
often as links and photos, as they typically don't provide as much value to the
business. Status updates are typically used for gathering general opinions or
quick message updates, whereas links can drive actual traffic.
During this change, the other content types were not significantly impacted.
Most experienced a very moderate decrease, which is most likely due to normal
fluctuations. Interestingly, videos have now become the strongest performer in
the news feed. Our sample size for posts with videos is less than optimal, but
our historical data shows a similar pattern. For brands that have the capability
to deliver engaging videos, it should be considered as an interesting content
outlet in the future.
How does a brand stay ahead?
As we study each change in the news feed, a common theme begins to appear.
Content that creates value tends to bubble to the top. Google has a similar
approach with search results. We see Facebook slowly becoming similar to Google
in that capacity. When we examine the brands that are less impacted by negative
changes, they tend to have strong engagementâspecifically shares. Why is
this? We think we can explain this phenomenon with a concept called Content
Originator.
Content Originator
Brands that actually create the content (thus, Content Originators) are the
ones that experience the most value in the news feed. We've seen Google take a
similar approach with examining inbound links. Content Originators actually have
less to do with Facebook specifically, as compared to the maturation of any
social network. Twitter most likely experiences similar results, which you can
see as a Tweet propagates across the worldâthe Content Originator gets
more exposure.
The reason that Content Originators are able to succeed with an onslaught of
changes is that they are able to utilize natural distribution networks such as
shares. While Facebook's algorithms may not weigh their initial post as heavily
as before, strong engagement and shares are strong signals to distribute the
content further.
The news feed is filled with increasing competition that boasts larger and
larger budgets to gain exposure within the feed. Being a Content Originator
helps slice through the noise created by so many pages re-reporting news. The
re-reporting of news is something that Facebook is attempting to decrease
through these changes. It is also possible that brands will begin to gain
additional exposure through the "Trending" section if they're the Content
Originator of a new and trending topic.
In an example below, you can see the local value that Facebook provides in the
trending result. A story that was shared on Facebook 2,000+ times from
CarolinaLive (not quite a Content Originator, but as close as you can get in a
situation like this, as compared to a CNN-type news source) is given the extra
exposure. The next object listed is from Fox Carolina News, again more of a
Content Originator than the national brand of Fox News.
The example above is meant to illustrate how Facebook perceives Content
Originators elsewhere in their platform. We use things like this as clues to
better understand how the news feed works.
Conclusion
Facebook decreased organic reach of status updates by ~40% on Jan. 21. For
most brands, this doesn't have a large impact on their strategy, as they are
mostly using links and photos to further increase their brand. Using a concept
called Content Originator might help craft a content strategy that stays ahead
of news feed changes. Facebook may be placing additional value on content
originators in the news feed, and is surely valuing brands with strong
engagementâespecially ones with high share levels.
Methodology
We studied roughly 50,000 posts from 800 different pages for the two weeks
before and after Jan. 21. For most metrics, we examined the median of each
page's average performance over the time period analyzed. Engagement is defined
as likes + comments + shares for this study.
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/MlFzcA8aEV4/new-facebook-study-original-content
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
Reaches More People on Facebook'
Posted by Chad_WittmanThis 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.
Facebook continues to make significant changes in the news feed. This time
Facebook has decreased the importance (technically the "weight") of status
updates. With these changes occurring so rapidly in the news feed, many brand
managers want to know how to stay on top of it all.
We dug deep into the data to see what the latest change was and wanted to
introduce a philosophy to stay ahead of the constant changes. We analyze and
monitor this type of data for thousands of Facebook pages with a tool called
EdgeRank Checker.
On Jan. 21, Facebook released a blog post explaining that status updates from
pages are less engaging than status updates from friends. In other words, status
updates were going to lose exposure in the news feed.
The change was implemented nearly immediately, as we saw organic reach begin
to dip rapidly. In the graph below, you'll see a ~40% decrease from the two
weeks after Jan. 21, as compared to the two weeks before:
While frustrating for many brands, status updates aren't displayed nearly as
often as links and photos, as they typically don't provide as much value to the
business. Status updates are typically used for gathering general opinions or
quick message updates, whereas links can drive actual traffic.
During this change, the other content types were not significantly impacted.
Most experienced a very moderate decrease, which is most likely due to normal
fluctuations. Interestingly, videos have now become the strongest performer in
the news feed. Our sample size for posts with videos is less than optimal, but
our historical data shows a similar pattern. For brands that have the capability
to deliver engaging videos, it should be considered as an interesting content
outlet in the future.
How does a brand stay ahead?
As we study each change in the news feed, a common theme begins to appear.
Content that creates value tends to bubble to the top. Google has a similar
approach with search results. We see Facebook slowly becoming similar to Google
in that capacity. When we examine the brands that are less impacted by negative
changes, they tend to have strong engagementâspecifically shares. Why is
this? We think we can explain this phenomenon with a concept called Content
Originator.
Content Originator
Brands that actually create the content (thus, Content Originators) are the
ones that experience the most value in the news feed. We've seen Google take a
similar approach with examining inbound links. Content Originators actually have
less to do with Facebook specifically, as compared to the maturation of any
social network. Twitter most likely experiences similar results, which you can
see as a Tweet propagates across the worldâthe Content Originator gets
more exposure.
The reason that Content Originators are able to succeed with an onslaught of
changes is that they are able to utilize natural distribution networks such as
shares. While Facebook's algorithms may not weigh their initial post as heavily
as before, strong engagement and shares are strong signals to distribute the
content further.
The news feed is filled with increasing competition that boasts larger and
larger budgets to gain exposure within the feed. Being a Content Originator
helps slice through the noise created by so many pages re-reporting news. The
re-reporting of news is something that Facebook is attempting to decrease
through these changes. It is also possible that brands will begin to gain
additional exposure through the "Trending" section if they're the Content
Originator of a new and trending topic.
In an example below, you can see the local value that Facebook provides in the
trending result. A story that was shared on Facebook 2,000+ times from
CarolinaLive (not quite a Content Originator, but as close as you can get in a
situation like this, as compared to a CNN-type news source) is given the extra
exposure. The next object listed is from Fox Carolina News, again more of a
Content Originator than the national brand of Fox News.
The example above is meant to illustrate how Facebook perceives Content
Originators elsewhere in their platform. We use things like this as clues to
better understand how the news feed works.
Conclusion
Facebook decreased organic reach of status updates by ~40% on Jan. 21. For
most brands, this doesn't have a large impact on their strategy, as they are
mostly using links and photos to further increase their brand. Using a concept
called Content Originator might help craft a content strategy that stays ahead
of news feed changes. Facebook may be placing additional value on content
originators in the news feed, and is surely valuing brands with strong
engagementâespecially ones with high share levels.
Methodology
We studied roughly 50,000 posts from 800 different pages for the two weeks
before and after Jan. 21. For most metrics, we examined the median of each
page's average performance over the time period analyzed. Engagement is defined
as likes + comments + shares for this study.
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/MlFzcA8aEV4/new-facebook-study-original-content
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Tuesday 25 February 2014
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, '(Provided): 10 Ways to Prove SEO
Value in Google Analytics'
Posted by JeffalyticsThis 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.
...
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/GdwEKKH1TGU/proving-seo-value-in-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
Value in Google Analytics'
Posted by JeffalyticsThis 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.
...
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/GdwEKKH1TGU/proving-seo-value-in-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
Monday 24 February 2014
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, '6 Steps to Compiling an Integrated
Online Marketing Strategy'
Posted by StephanieChang
The online marketing community is often abuzz with excitement whenever we
discuss the latest trends within our industry, such as omni-channel marketing,
new and clever ways to leverage mobile, or the advent of chang...
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/QNPNIZuxbhQ/integrated-online-marketing-strategy
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
Online Marketing Strategy'
Posted by StephanieChang
The online marketing community is often abuzz with excitement whenever we
discuss the latest trends within our industry, such as omni-channel marketing,
new and clever ways to leverage mobile, or the advent of chang...
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/QNPNIZuxbhQ/integrated-online-marketing-strategy
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 21 February 2014
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, '6 Ways to Earn Higher Rankings
Without Investing in Content Creation and Marketing - Whiteboard Friday'
Posted by randfish
With all the buzz about content marketing and how wonderful a way it is to
earn higher rankings, it's easy to forget about all the other tools that good
SEOs and marketers have at their disposal. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand
covers six ways to improve your rankings without spending a dime on content
creation and marketing.
6 Ways to Earn Higher Rankings Wihout Investing in Content Creation
& Marketing - Whiteboard Friday_1
For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!
Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This
week I thought I'd address something that's going on in the broader SEO and
inbound marketing communities, which is this idea that the only thing that SEOs
do anymore is create content and do content marketing. So we build some content
and then we go market and we outreach and we try and get people to link to it.
That is truly minimizing the job requirements, which are vast, incredibly
vast and much bigger than this idea. So I thought I'd take a little stab and
drop a pebble in the ocean of things that SEOs are responsible for by tackling
these six ways, six out of probably 600 ways that you can earn higher rankings
without investing in content creation or content marketing.
So, first off, number one, you can make your snippets better and your pages
serve that intent. Let me show you what I'm talking about.
So basically, in the search results page, this is a very small mockup of
that, but I might do a search and I'll see a bunch of titles and then the URL
below it and the meta description below that. I might even see an author
profile. I might see video snippets. If you've got some rich snippet mark-up,
I'll see those in here, and this leads off to your page. By improving both the
snippet here, so that could mean adding rel="author",
that could mean adding a video, that could mean adding some rich mark-up,
that could mean changing the title, tweaking the title to be a little bit more
compelling to click on, changing the description, even actually, surprisingly,
changing the URL. Some studies have show recently that URLs in fact do
contribute to whether people choose to click on them.
Then it's not just about making this compelling, but also making whatever is
on that page, whatever is on that snippet match what's on the page that users
get to, because as we know, pogo sticking, people jumping off of this page hurts
you in two big ways. One, it hurts you because the engines directly look at pogo
sticking behavior and go, "Oh, people click on this and then they go back and
they don't like it. I'm out of here. I don't want to rank this page." Two, you
don't have an opportunity to convert those people into buyers or into potential
sharers or linkers to your content.
All right, so number one, completely outside of content creation can
seriously move your rankings up.
Number two, improving the crawl friendliness and the pages-of-value ratio on
your website.
So I was talking to a very smart SEO over email the other day, and he said
something that I loved. He said, "I have never seen and never worked with a
large site where improving crawl bandwidth didn't mean significant increases in
organic search traffic." I thought that was very wise and well said. That's
certainly been the case that I have seen as well, but I liked his phrasing of it
in particular. So this idea that, well okay, I've got a good page here, a good
page represented by smiley face dude, and smiley face dude is linking out to,
well, three not so great pages, pages that Google doesn't particularly want to
index. They don't provide a ton of value to them or their searchers or to users
in general. It's often the case that websites just have these.
Go and look at your website. I bet you'll click around, and you'll be like,
"Man, why do we even have this page anymore? This doesn't help anybody. It
doesn't help anybody." Well, if you improve the ratio of those pages, get rid of
or toss out or even just remake some of those pages, you can significantly
improve your crawl bandwidth and the happiness that Google sees with your site.
I'm not just talking about sort of penalties, like Panda, that might affect
people who have very large quantities of low quality stuff.
But, in addition to this, in addition to the ratio, you can also look at your
navigation. If you've got something like this, so this is a pretty clean
navigation system. This one page is linking out to six or seven other pages.
That's fine. But what about when I get to this page and he's linking to one
other page, who links to one other page, who links to one other page, who links
to one other page, who links to another page that's actually a duplicate of that
first page I was talking about? Improving this kind of stuff, making these
models of navigation clean, making your site more indexable, making your
navigation get you into deep pages in fewer clicks, and making all of the pages
accessible rather than having to go down these wormholes can really improve your
site's traffic as well.
Number three, probably the simplest one on the list. You make your pages
faster, the Internet will reward you. Some of this is direct. Some of this is
Google essentially saying, "Yes, page speed is a very small portion of our
ranking algorithm. We do take it into consideration." But a lot of it is not
Google directly. A lot of it is users being much happier and doing the same
thing we talked about up here, which is reducing your bounce rate, reducing that
pogo-sticking activity, and meaning that you have an opportunity to convert a
lot more of those people into buyers, sharers, appreciators of your brand.
Number four, I actually really like this one. This is one of my favorite ways
to do link building in general, link earning in general, and that is to leverage
your network to help attract those links, shares, traffic, endorsements, etc.
I've seen a couple people that I really admire in the field who've basically
taken this tactic. They say, "Hey, whenever someone tells us we really love you,
we think your service is amazing", they say,
"Thank you so much. That means the world to us, and it would mean even more
if you would tell someone about it," your friends, your social network, point to
us on your site somewhere.
We don't care if it's a followed link, a no followed link, we're not asking
for links. What we're asking for is if you think you've got something great by
working with us, by buying our product, by using our service, by interacting
with us, we helped you in some way, please share it. That's all I'm asking. I
saw it in one woman's email signature. She just said, "If I have ever been
helpful to you, it would be awesome if you could share our website."
I don't know what the conversion rate is like for her, but it doesn't even
matter if it's 0.001%. That is a bunch more links and shares and help. What a
wonderful way to earn the kinds of signals that will help you rank better.
By the way, for a little bit more on this topic and a specific tactic here,
check out a blog post I wrote a little while ago called "The Help Me Help You
Dinner." It's a little Jerry McGuire I know, but sorry.
Number five, go try this process for me. Identify the pages on your site that
make people happy but that aren't earning organic search traffic. Here's what I
mean. They've got high engagement, a low bounce rate, a good number of visits, a
high browse rate, meaning people are clicking and visiting other pages after
them, but they don't get organic search traffic.
This actually happens quite a bit, that you see pages like this. Oftentimes,
not always, but oftentimes the culprit here is that the keyword targeting and
the keyword optimization just isn't there. Essentially, these are pages that are
created not by SEO folks or by SEOs who just kind of forgot or were targeting
keywords that have long since stopped being searched for. Go improve those. Go
find the keywords that those pages should be ranking for and then update the
page, the titles, the content a little bit. You usually shouldn't have to tweak
much of the content at all on the page in order to get the targeting right and
dialed in just a little bit. Sometimes you might even change the URL, and then
you can do a URL rewrite or a 301. That's fine too.
If you're doing a more significant update process, go ahead and relaunch and
reshare it as well, especially if a lot of people have forgotten about it or
search engines have forgotten about it. Just that update, just that freshness
signal can help you get a little bit more in your rankings.
Last thing I'll mention. I don't know where the ideas come from that classic
link building is entirely dead. It's not, and one of the things that is truly
still alive and still very powerful is what I call classic competitive style
link building. I recognize that kind of low-quality guest posting and directory
link building and a lot of these other more manual, scalable features have
really gone away, but classic competitive link building is still just as
valuable as it ever has been and not just for SEO, but for the traffic you can
earn from those places too.
So go and use your favorite link building tool. We like Open Site Explorer or
Fresh Web Explorer if you're looking at sort of things that have been just
recently published. We do have a tool as well called Link Intersect that helps
you find pages that two or more of your competitors are linked to by but you
have not been, those kinds of things. I think Majestic SEO also has a feature
like that, so you can check them out.
Then you create this sort of prioritized list for outreach and starting to
try to contact some of these people. What I recommend, because a lot of people
get disheartened if they go to the first guy and there's just a bunch of hoops
that they have to jump through and it's very hard to find any contact
information and then it's very hard to get a response and when you do get a
response, it's negative, and you can just get beaten down.
What I like to do, therefore, especially because getting links from a diverse
group of places is often more valuable than just getting one or two here or
there, is to go ahead and prioritize the list by how easy you think it will be.
If there's a journalist who's already following you on Twitter and they've
written about some of your competitors and you figure they're going to keep
writing about this topic, why wouldn't they write about you?
Great! Do a little bit of outreach. Ask them what you can do to be a feature
in the next story. It's probably a relatively simple one. If there's a page
that's listing resources of the kind that you already have, great, go reach out
to them. That's probably a very simple one.
This sort of stuff and hundreds more like it are all in the realm of what
modern SEOs still have to be doing in addition to the newer obligations that we
have around content creation and content marketing, all of this social media
work and those kinds of things. So I try not to forget any of this, but I know
that we have a lot of other obligations as well.
I hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday. We'll see you again
next time. 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/Lzjj0DT_XLY/earn-higher-rankings-without-content-creation-whiteboard-friday
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posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Without Investing in Content Creation and Marketing - Whiteboard Friday'
Posted by randfish
With all the buzz about content marketing and how wonderful a way it is to
earn higher rankings, it's easy to forget about all the other tools that good
SEOs and marketers have at their disposal. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand
covers six ways to improve your rankings without spending a dime on content
creation and marketing.
6 Ways to Earn Higher Rankings Wihout Investing in Content Creation
& Marketing - Whiteboard Friday_1
For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!
Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This
week I thought I'd address something that's going on in the broader SEO and
inbound marketing communities, which is this idea that the only thing that SEOs
do anymore is create content and do content marketing. So we build some content
and then we go market and we outreach and we try and get people to link to it.
That is truly minimizing the job requirements, which are vast, incredibly
vast and much bigger than this idea. So I thought I'd take a little stab and
drop a pebble in the ocean of things that SEOs are responsible for by tackling
these six ways, six out of probably 600 ways that you can earn higher rankings
without investing in content creation or content marketing.
So, first off, number one, you can make your snippets better and your pages
serve that intent. Let me show you what I'm talking about.
So basically, in the search results page, this is a very small mockup of
that, but I might do a search and I'll see a bunch of titles and then the URL
below it and the meta description below that. I might even see an author
profile. I might see video snippets. If you've got some rich snippet mark-up,
I'll see those in here, and this leads off to your page. By improving both the
snippet here, so that could mean adding rel="author",
that could mean adding a video, that could mean adding some rich mark-up,
that could mean changing the title, tweaking the title to be a little bit more
compelling to click on, changing the description, even actually, surprisingly,
changing the URL. Some studies have show recently that URLs in fact do
contribute to whether people choose to click on them.
Then it's not just about making this compelling, but also making whatever is
on that page, whatever is on that snippet match what's on the page that users
get to, because as we know, pogo sticking, people jumping off of this page hurts
you in two big ways. One, it hurts you because the engines directly look at pogo
sticking behavior and go, "Oh, people click on this and then they go back and
they don't like it. I'm out of here. I don't want to rank this page." Two, you
don't have an opportunity to convert those people into buyers or into potential
sharers or linkers to your content.
All right, so number one, completely outside of content creation can
seriously move your rankings up.
Number two, improving the crawl friendliness and the pages-of-value ratio on
your website.
So I was talking to a very smart SEO over email the other day, and he said
something that I loved. He said, "I have never seen and never worked with a
large site where improving crawl bandwidth didn't mean significant increases in
organic search traffic." I thought that was very wise and well said. That's
certainly been the case that I have seen as well, but I liked his phrasing of it
in particular. So this idea that, well okay, I've got a good page here, a good
page represented by smiley face dude, and smiley face dude is linking out to,
well, three not so great pages, pages that Google doesn't particularly want to
index. They don't provide a ton of value to them or their searchers or to users
in general. It's often the case that websites just have these.
Go and look at your website. I bet you'll click around, and you'll be like,
"Man, why do we even have this page anymore? This doesn't help anybody. It
doesn't help anybody." Well, if you improve the ratio of those pages, get rid of
or toss out or even just remake some of those pages, you can significantly
improve your crawl bandwidth and the happiness that Google sees with your site.
I'm not just talking about sort of penalties, like Panda, that might affect
people who have very large quantities of low quality stuff.
But, in addition to this, in addition to the ratio, you can also look at your
navigation. If you've got something like this, so this is a pretty clean
navigation system. This one page is linking out to six or seven other pages.
That's fine. But what about when I get to this page and he's linking to one
other page, who links to one other page, who links to one other page, who links
to one other page, who links to another page that's actually a duplicate of that
first page I was talking about? Improving this kind of stuff, making these
models of navigation clean, making your site more indexable, making your
navigation get you into deep pages in fewer clicks, and making all of the pages
accessible rather than having to go down these wormholes can really improve your
site's traffic as well.
Number three, probably the simplest one on the list. You make your pages
faster, the Internet will reward you. Some of this is direct. Some of this is
Google essentially saying, "Yes, page speed is a very small portion of our
ranking algorithm. We do take it into consideration." But a lot of it is not
Google directly. A lot of it is users being much happier and doing the same
thing we talked about up here, which is reducing your bounce rate, reducing that
pogo-sticking activity, and meaning that you have an opportunity to convert a
lot more of those people into buyers, sharers, appreciators of your brand.
Number four, I actually really like this one. This is one of my favorite ways
to do link building in general, link earning in general, and that is to leverage
your network to help attract those links, shares, traffic, endorsements, etc.
I've seen a couple people that I really admire in the field who've basically
taken this tactic. They say, "Hey, whenever someone tells us we really love you,
we think your service is amazing", they say,
"Thank you so much. That means the world to us, and it would mean even more
if you would tell someone about it," your friends, your social network, point to
us on your site somewhere.
We don't care if it's a followed link, a no followed link, we're not asking
for links. What we're asking for is if you think you've got something great by
working with us, by buying our product, by using our service, by interacting
with us, we helped you in some way, please share it. That's all I'm asking. I
saw it in one woman's email signature. She just said, "If I have ever been
helpful to you, it would be awesome if you could share our website."
I don't know what the conversion rate is like for her, but it doesn't even
matter if it's 0.001%. That is a bunch more links and shares and help. What a
wonderful way to earn the kinds of signals that will help you rank better.
By the way, for a little bit more on this topic and a specific tactic here,
check out a blog post I wrote a little while ago called "The Help Me Help You
Dinner." It's a little Jerry McGuire I know, but sorry.
Number five, go try this process for me. Identify the pages on your site that
make people happy but that aren't earning organic search traffic. Here's what I
mean. They've got high engagement, a low bounce rate, a good number of visits, a
high browse rate, meaning people are clicking and visiting other pages after
them, but they don't get organic search traffic.
This actually happens quite a bit, that you see pages like this. Oftentimes,
not always, but oftentimes the culprit here is that the keyword targeting and
the keyword optimization just isn't there. Essentially, these are pages that are
created not by SEO folks or by SEOs who just kind of forgot or were targeting
keywords that have long since stopped being searched for. Go improve those. Go
find the keywords that those pages should be ranking for and then update the
page, the titles, the content a little bit. You usually shouldn't have to tweak
much of the content at all on the page in order to get the targeting right and
dialed in just a little bit. Sometimes you might even change the URL, and then
you can do a URL rewrite or a 301. That's fine too.
If you're doing a more significant update process, go ahead and relaunch and
reshare it as well, especially if a lot of people have forgotten about it or
search engines have forgotten about it. Just that update, just that freshness
signal can help you get a little bit more in your rankings.
Last thing I'll mention. I don't know where the ideas come from that classic
link building is entirely dead. It's not, and one of the things that is truly
still alive and still very powerful is what I call classic competitive style
link building. I recognize that kind of low-quality guest posting and directory
link building and a lot of these other more manual, scalable features have
really gone away, but classic competitive link building is still just as
valuable as it ever has been and not just for SEO, but for the traffic you can
earn from those places too.
So go and use your favorite link building tool. We like Open Site Explorer or
Fresh Web Explorer if you're looking at sort of things that have been just
recently published. We do have a tool as well called Link Intersect that helps
you find pages that two or more of your competitors are linked to by but you
have not been, those kinds of things. I think Majestic SEO also has a feature
like that, so you can check them out.
Then you create this sort of prioritized list for outreach and starting to
try to contact some of these people. What I recommend, because a lot of people
get disheartened if they go to the first guy and there's just a bunch of hoops
that they have to jump through and it's very hard to find any contact
information and then it's very hard to get a response and when you do get a
response, it's negative, and you can just get beaten down.
What I like to do, therefore, especially because getting links from a diverse
group of places is often more valuable than just getting one or two here or
there, is to go ahead and prioritize the list by how easy you think it will be.
If there's a journalist who's already following you on Twitter and they've
written about some of your competitors and you figure they're going to keep
writing about this topic, why wouldn't they write about you?
Great! Do a little bit of outreach. Ask them what you can do to be a feature
in the next story. It's probably a relatively simple one. If there's a page
that's listing resources of the kind that you already have, great, go reach out
to them. That's probably a very simple one.
This sort of stuff and hundreds more like it are all in the realm of what
modern SEOs still have to be doing in addition to the newer obligations that we
have around content creation and content marketing, all of this social media
work and those kinds of things. So I try not to forget any of this, but I know
that we have a lot of other obligations as well.
I hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday. We'll see you again
next time. Take care.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
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Thursday 20 February 2014
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, '#MozCon 2014: Everything You Want
to Know (Including the Kitchen Sink)'
Posted by EricaMcGillivray
MozCon is five months away! What?! And besides my daily countdown to MozCon,
provided by the lovely Sha Menz, many of you out there have asked for the juicy
details of what we're planning this year. This year, MozCon is July 14-16 at the
Washington State Convention Center.
But before I dive further down: If you're already planning on coming to
MozCon, but haven't bought your ticket (or your team's tickets), do it now!
Seriously, we're already almost sold out of early bird MozCon tickets [~60
tickets left], and I know you want to have a happy wallet with a savings of
$200.
For the best deal on MozCon tickets, make sure you're a Moz Pro Subscriber. If
you're not, you can take a 30-day free trial with us and get the Subscriber rate
for you and your teamâeven on trial day number one! Cancel your trial at
any time if it's not for you, and we'll see you at MozCon.
We say MozCon is "not your typical marketing conference," but what does that
truly mean? Many of you are probably familiar with TAGFEE, our company code,
which is woven tightly into MozCon. But what we really aim for is that second E,
which stands for Exceptional. Not exceptional in the "really awesome" way, but
exceptional as in the exception to the rule (which is in itself really awesome).
We want MozCon to be the place where marketers feel the love of being part of
this extraordinary community, and where you can spend three days enveloped in
new knowledge and actionable information from our forward-thinking speakers to
take home with you .
If that's too mushy for you, just watch the video of what happened last year.
:)
MozCon 2014 Ticket Sales Promo
It's all about meeting you!
Before I start talking about the amazing speakers or the bacon, our
communityâthat's YOU!âdrives the force behind MozCon. MozCon humbly
started out as the SEOmoz: PRO Training Series because we wanted to meet our
community and share face-to-face what we were learning about SEO. As we grew,
MozCon became the place for our community to hang out with each other and the
industry experts we bring in.
One of our exceptional goals has been to maintain that community camaraderie
that much smaller conferences embody. I'm pleased to say that we've all leveled
up to the challenge.
Roger has lots of friends!
Our beloved mascot Roger joins us for every MozCon. He loves giving hugs.
Sometimes he even dances around. One time, we hooked up a Kinect with a dance
simulator to the main stage, and late into the lunch break, people could come on
stage and dance as Roger! And then Roger danced as Roger. Seriously, you have to
see it to believe it.
I'm joined by Roger, Roger, and Rand on the stage.
One of the most magical moments from MozCon 2013 was from Wil Reynolds. After
giving his hour-long presentation, Wil gave away a bunch of books, aimed to help
people with their careers, and doled out advice to conference goers. He sat on
stage talking with and listening to person after person during the lunch break.
(Well, until I had to play traffic cop and let our a/v crew set up for the next
speaker.) It probably could've gone on for hours longer.
Wil signs books and talks with attendees at MozCon 2013.
We also give you the chance to be on stage and share your insights! At MozCon
2012, we launched our community speaker program where we opened up four shorter
speaking slots for everyone in our community (YOU) to pitch for.
Every year, we get a ton of emails pitching to speak at MozCon. And for all
those emails, I've sadly had to reply that we don't accept pitches because we
have a selection committee. But now that we have community speakers, we have a
place for everyone to toss their hat in the ring.
The competition is fierce for these spots. Last year, I kept them open for a
week and a half and saw 130 responses! Crazy.
Our past speakers are really successful and amazing people, including A.
Litsa, Dana Lookadoo, Darren Shaw, Fabio Ricotta, Jeff McRitchie, Mike Arnesen,
and Sha Menz. All community speakers get to attend our speaker's dinner, get a
free ticket to MozCon, and of course, get to speak on the MozCon stage.
Every year, our post-MozCon polling says that you love our community speakers,
and many of their talks rank highly. We'll be opening community speaker
solicitations no later than the first week of April. Stay tuned!
Mike Arneson owns that MozCon stage!
All throughout MozCon, you'll have the chance to interact with Mozzers. From
marketing and help, to engineering and operations, Mozzers of all stripes use
MozCon as a chance to learn who you are. Some are looking for direct feedback
about products. MozCon 2013 goers got access to the Moz Analytics beta. And some
just want to hear about you: the people who use the products we make, read the
blog we've fostered, attend the Mozinars we host, and come for MozCon. We're
always elated that people truly join us from around the globe.
Group photo time! All the Mozzers.
Anyone else ever have problems at concerts where you can't see that stage? At
MozCon, our set-up not only ensures there's not a bad seat in the house, but
also that you have plenty of room. You know for your laptop, your tablet, your
work phone, your personal phone, your MozCon swag bag, your moleskine, your
coffee, your soda, your water, and your issue of Thor #337, which introduces
Beta Ray Bill, that you never leave home without.
Attendees sit at tables with power cords and plenty of leg room. MozCon is a
fully accessible conference for all attendees. And before you go asking about
internetâwe know the wifi never works at any conference everâwe're
coming up with some creative solutions. Just stay tuned.
Our speakers are also comfortable with an extra long stage and three huge,
stage-to-ceiling (seriously, maybe a three inch gap up there) screens. The
middle screen projects their live image and the other two show their
presentations. We do our best to ensure that youâyes, you way in the
backâcan see every bit of the action.
Attendees listen to speakers, but also have room to move around.
We're happy to say that people come back to MozCon year-after-year, not to
just learn, but to hang out with the industry friends that they've made. It's
kind of like a big 'ole family reunionâat least with the family you enjoy.
Friends are just the best thing ever.
Learn all the things!
One of my absolute pleasures in life is working with MozCon's exceptional
speakers. Industry leaders from about every niche in online marketing have
graced the MozCon stage, sharing their knowledge, tips, and inspiring you. And
me too!
Dana DiTomaso rocks the MozCon 2013 stage!
Our MozCon selection committee works extraordinarily hard to vet and handpick
the best speakers. And we continually expect more and more from those who we
invite back or invite for the first time when the next year's conversations
start about who should speak. The MozCon stage is large; its audience very
enthusiastic and particular; and because of that, I've seen seasoned
speakersâthe people I know you'd love to have at a dinner party to pick
their brainsâsend emails panicked that their presentations won't be
enough. Don't worry, they always deliver.
Get a taste of MozCon sessions and speaker quality with these two free
sessions. One from Kyle Rush from MozCon 2013 on conversion rate optimization
and Wil Reynolds from MozCon 2012 on Real Company Shit:
MozCon 2013 free video - Kyle Rush - Win Through Optimization and Testing
08-Wil-Reynolds
While we're still working to confirm and select ~11 more speakers for MozCon
2014, here's who is already signed up: Annie Cushing, Dana DiTomaso, Jeremy
Bloom, Justin Cutroni, Kyle Rush, Marshall Simmonds, Nathalie Nahai, Paddy
Moogan, Pete Meyers, Phil Nottingham, Rand Fishkin, Richard Millington, Sarah
Bird, and Wil Reynolds.
And don't worry, since MozCon is a single-session conference and we're all in
one big room together, you won't miss a single presenter!
Let me give you a brief preview of who these amazing people are:
Annie Cushing is an analytics genius and consultant. No, seriously, if there's
something that needs to be reformulated in a spreadsheet and made into a
beautifully digestible report for your client, boss, or CEO, she's your go-to
person. Annie's blog, Annielytics, is full of video tutorials to walk you
through the jungles of Excel. This will be Annie's third MozCon, and in her very
popular 2013 session, she spoke about "not provided" and going beyond keywords
in your analytics.
Dana DiTomaso has her finger on the pulse of small business and local
marketing. She leads as a Partner at Kick Point Inc, a small agency. There, Dana
regularly plays out David and Goliath type stories with the small businesses she
represents. At MozCon 2013, she absolutely wowed our community with her talk
about taking SMBs to the next level of marketing. Dana also may have moonlighted
as Roger one time.
Jeremy Bloom from Integrate.com, a marketing software company, is new to
MozCon, but you might've heard of him before. He's hit the entrepreneur world by
storm, raising lots of venture capital and earning kudos and awards from Forbes,
American Business Awards, and more. Jeremy is also a three-time World Champion,
two-time Olympian, and eleven-time World Cup gold medalist in men's freestyle
skiing. He also had an NFL career with the Philadelphia Eagles and Pittsburgh
Steelers. I think he'll be the first Olympian and NFL star on the MozCon stage.
Need another heavy hitter? Google Analytics Evangelist Justin Cutroni will be
joining us this year. If you need to learn anything about Google
Analyticsâthe more advanced the better!âhe probably has the answer.
Justin is the author of two books, both on Google Analytics. He's also a father,
skier, and cook.
You know that moment when you find out that quiet person sitting next to you
secretly runs the world? That's Kyle Rush, head of optimization at Optimizely
and formerly at The New Yorker and Obama for America. At the latter, he helped
the team that transformed how we think about digital campaigns. (Seriously, go
watch him talk about this.) Now that's some serious conversion rate
optimization! Kyle also has some adorable dogs.
Are there ever enterprise-level sites that make your jaw drop at how much
freaking amazing work went into them? Marshall Simmonds might've been the SEO
behind them, sites like all the New York Times properties, USA Today, CBS,
Toys-R-Us, Gawker Media, and many more. Today, he serves as the founder and CEO
of Define Media Group, Inc., an enterprise-level SEO and consulting group.
Marshall likes to remind us that he's "internet old," meaning that he gave a
talk at the SEOmoz: PRO Training Series in 2010.
Leading the field of web psychology, Nathalie Nahai, the web psychologist,
will be back on the MozCon stage. Her work delves into how to make your site(s)
resonate with your audience based on their culture, gender, or other
psychological need. Do you need an image of happy people or authority figures?
Nathalie's got the answer. She's also an accomplished author and musician and is
doing an upcoming free Mozinar with us.
Besides having a name that's just fun to say, Paddy Moogan's an accomplished
SEO with a knack for link building, and is head of growth markets at Distilled.
He took the stage by storm in 2012, skipped 2013 to hang out with Hobbits in New
Zealand, and now's back for 2014. And we're ready for Paddy and his love of
comic books and Aston Martins (James Bond's car).
Dr. Pete Meyers. Do I really need to intro this guy? Data scientist here at
Moz, Pete's done some killer projects about our collective obsession with
changes in Google's Algo, including MozCast and the Google Algo History.
Recently, he did a Reddit AMA and picks Superman as the winner in a fight
against Batman. (I may disagree with this.) We're crossing our fingers that by
July Chicago's dug itself out of snow, and Pete will be able to make it. :)
Sometimes a pirate, sometimes a video expert, Phil Nottingham is the video
strategist at Distilled. He especially enjoys being able to purchase shiny, new
video equipment. Last year, Phil tickled the audience pink with his video where
he pretended to be Rand for a Whiteboard Friday. His New Year's resolution is to
drink better whiskey; I'm just putting that out there, MozCon goers...
Rand Fishkin, the guy known for his loud shirts and industry championship.
Founder of Moz, former CEO, and now an individual e-team contributor, Rand will
be speaking to the changes in our industry this year at MozCon. He's spoken at
every MozCon, delivering all those actionable tips and inspirational words.
Despite all this, he still blushed as I made him write his own name on the
whiteboard as the first chosen speaker for MozCon 2014.
Founder of FeverBee, Richard Millington has made community building into a
science. Think community is fluffy? Richard will blow your mind. Make sure to
check out his recent free Mozinar. Whether you're wrangling mommy bloggers, gun
enthusiasts, or the ever-popular plumbers, Richard will show you how to start,
build, grow, and reach critical mass with your community.
Our brand-new CEO Sarah Bird will take the MozCon stage again. It's probably
one her new job duties she's most nervous about. Trained as a lawyer, Sarah has
a lifelong passion of learning new things and challenging herself. Good thing;
we've kept her on her toes since 2007! For MozCon, we're planning on introducing
a new format, a fireside chat, with Sarah, so you'll be able to hear all the
good stuff about her and her new role.
Always a crowd-pleaser, Wil Reynolds, founder of SEER Interactive, will be
back to give out inspiration like candy in a suburb on Halloween. The first time
I saw Wil speak (SearchFest 2012) his rousing speech somehow made me feel
confident enough to drive through a snowstorm in a Prius. And minus the
snowstorm, I challenge anyone not to feel transformed by a Wil speech. (Go watch
his MozCon 2012 talk. MozCon talks age like fine wine.)
I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Cyrus Shepard, our exceptional emcee. As the
Senior Content Lead at Moz, he dreams up ways to drive traffic to our site and
pokes people to level up our skills to help. Cyrus keeps speakers on track and
facilitates q&a. If you're worried about his emcee chops, he sent in an audition
tape of that time he won a car on Hollywood Squares.
I hope you're already taking notes of which speakers you can't wait to see. In
the coming months, speakers will be firming up their topics and starting to dive
into exactly what they'll be presenting on at MozCon 2014. They'll also be
joined by around 15 more people, including our four community speakers. While
you'll have to wait for the full agenda until then, you can get an idea of what
kinds of talks happen at MozCon through last year's agenda.
We love hosting you!
We're excited to bring our community from all parts of the world to MozCon.
Whether you live locally in Seattle or have to take two plus connecting flights
from either Cape Town, South Africa or Tampa, Florida to reach us, we want to
share something new with you.
For those of you boarding planes to MozCon, this year you (or your employer)
can save some pennies by flying with either Delta or Alaska Airlines. If flying
on Alaska, head to alaskaair.com and use the code ECMV042 for 5% off. If flying
on Delta, go to delta.com and use the code NMH7W for 2-10% off, depending on
where you depart from.
Once you hit Seattle, we've got some special deals with two great hotels, the
Grand Hyatt and the Olive 8. Both are located in downtown Seattle, just two
blocks away from MozCon, and both are fabulous places to lay your head down
after a long day of learning. Not only is there a discount, but MozCon attendees
also get complimentary wi-fi and $20 per night parking.
MozCon is the far-right pin, and the two hotels are the other pins. So close!
So we got your shelter and your wifi, your next basic need of bacon is also
covered. Did I write bacon? I meant food.
At Moz, we love our food, and since MozCon's like that big reunion with the
good side of the family, we're going to feed you. Every day of MozCon, you'll
have breakfast, lunch, and two snacks with us. We spare no details. In the past,
we've had treats like ice cream and crepes for breakfast. Ever dream of
conference food? (Are you laughing?) Well, MozCon's the exception to that.
Okay, what about the bacon? One of our most popular breakfast items is bacon.
Last year, two mornings featured all the bacon you can eat. (As a long-time
vegetarian, I donate my own bacon portions to one lucky MozCon goer every year.)
And for those of us non-bacon eaters, don't worry, we'll have that covered too.
Enjoying the grub! Sorry, bacon fans, couldn't find a bacon-specific photo.
After a day of learning, you're going to need some downtime. Work hard, play
hard, that's the mantra, right? In years past MozCon's parties have been hosted
at such amazing venues at The Garage, which features a bowling alley, and the
Experience Music Project (EMP), Seattle's own music and sci-fi museum. We're
still nailing down the details, including location, for the Tuesday night bash,
but rest assured, you'll be having the time of your lifeâwhile making some
great new friends.
Hanging out and having fun at the Tuesday party.
Okay, you've come all the way here, and you've seen photos of the new
MozPlex... Yes, we give office tours!
We don't do them during MozCon, since we all attend it. But in the days
surrounding, we open up the office and share our story and our space with you.
We're super thrilled this year to be able to show off our new digs, which will
fully be home sweet home by July. The MozPlex is about eight blocks away from
MozCon, so just a short walk through downtown.
MozPlex tour sign-ups will most likely go up in June when we're much closer to
the event.
Joel and Abe in their natural environment at the MozPlex.
We'd be remiss to not give you a welcoming gift (or four) to MozCon. Don't
worry, we always try to fill our swag bags with useful, tasteful, and fun stuff.
Last year, attendees were over the moon to get Roger figurines as part of their
MozCon haul. While I'm under top-secret orders not to mention what we're giving
away this year, let's just say I let out some squees.
That's a lot of Rogers who went out in the world with you.
While you're in Seattle, don't forget to visit Seattle! July is the best time
to explore our city and the surrounding area. I know sometimes when we go to
conferences that we only see beyond the conference and hotel on the to/from
airport-hotel drive (I'm just as guilty!). Don't deprive yourself of digging
into the best of Seattle, whether you want to visit the famous gum wall,
discover the troll under the bridge, or head out to hike Mount Si. Whet your
appetite with Rand's restaurant and bar guide, and discover amazing Seattle
treasures as crowd-sourced by Mozzers.
The great thing about Seattle is that you can be whomever you want to. Whether
you're looking to attend a Sounders game, reenact Macklemore's "Thrift Shop" (I
can tour-guide!), take a hot tub boat on Lake Union, or eat pie and see
Snoqualmie Falls, Seattle has something for everyone.
Highlights from our party last year include karaoke with a live band.
Take me to MozCon!
For those of you still trying to convince your boss (even if that boss is
you!) about the expense, make sure to read the ROI (value vs expense) MozCon
post from last year. MozCon's expenses and our program remains very similar
value-wise. And don't forget to take a 30-day free trial in order to get the Pro
Subscriber rate (if you're not already a Subscriber).
Don't hesitate to ask me anything about MozCon in the comments; I'll do my
best to answer.
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/lE06s50mvTU/mozcon-2014
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 Know (Including the Kitchen Sink)'
Posted by EricaMcGillivray
MozCon is five months away! What?! And besides my daily countdown to MozCon,
provided by the lovely Sha Menz, many of you out there have asked for the juicy
details of what we're planning this year. This year, MozCon is July 14-16 at the
Washington State Convention Center.
But before I dive further down: If you're already planning on coming to
MozCon, but haven't bought your ticket (or your team's tickets), do it now!
Seriously, we're already almost sold out of early bird MozCon tickets [~60
tickets left], and I know you want to have a happy wallet with a savings of
$200.
For the best deal on MozCon tickets, make sure you're a Moz Pro Subscriber. If
you're not, you can take a 30-day free trial with us and get the Subscriber rate
for you and your teamâeven on trial day number one! Cancel your trial at
any time if it's not for you, and we'll see you at MozCon.
We say MozCon is "not your typical marketing conference," but what does that
truly mean? Many of you are probably familiar with TAGFEE, our company code,
which is woven tightly into MozCon. But what we really aim for is that second E,
which stands for Exceptional. Not exceptional in the "really awesome" way, but
exceptional as in the exception to the rule (which is in itself really awesome).
We want MozCon to be the place where marketers feel the love of being part of
this extraordinary community, and where you can spend three days enveloped in
new knowledge and actionable information from our forward-thinking speakers to
take home with you .
If that's too mushy for you, just watch the video of what happened last year.
:)
MozCon 2014 Ticket Sales Promo
It's all about meeting you!
Before I start talking about the amazing speakers or the bacon, our
communityâthat's YOU!âdrives the force behind MozCon. MozCon humbly
started out as the SEOmoz: PRO Training Series because we wanted to meet our
community and share face-to-face what we were learning about SEO. As we grew,
MozCon became the place for our community to hang out with each other and the
industry experts we bring in.
One of our exceptional goals has been to maintain that community camaraderie
that much smaller conferences embody. I'm pleased to say that we've all leveled
up to the challenge.
Roger has lots of friends!
Our beloved mascot Roger joins us for every MozCon. He loves giving hugs.
Sometimes he even dances around. One time, we hooked up a Kinect with a dance
simulator to the main stage, and late into the lunch break, people could come on
stage and dance as Roger! And then Roger danced as Roger. Seriously, you have to
see it to believe it.
I'm joined by Roger, Roger, and Rand on the stage.
One of the most magical moments from MozCon 2013 was from Wil Reynolds. After
giving his hour-long presentation, Wil gave away a bunch of books, aimed to help
people with their careers, and doled out advice to conference goers. He sat on
stage talking with and listening to person after person during the lunch break.
(Well, until I had to play traffic cop and let our a/v crew set up for the next
speaker.) It probably could've gone on for hours longer.
Wil signs books and talks with attendees at MozCon 2013.
We also give you the chance to be on stage and share your insights! At MozCon
2012, we launched our community speaker program where we opened up four shorter
speaking slots for everyone in our community (YOU) to pitch for.
Every year, we get a ton of emails pitching to speak at MozCon. And for all
those emails, I've sadly had to reply that we don't accept pitches because we
have a selection committee. But now that we have community speakers, we have a
place for everyone to toss their hat in the ring.
The competition is fierce for these spots. Last year, I kept them open for a
week and a half and saw 130 responses! Crazy.
Our past speakers are really successful and amazing people, including A.
Litsa, Dana Lookadoo, Darren Shaw, Fabio Ricotta, Jeff McRitchie, Mike Arnesen,
and Sha Menz. All community speakers get to attend our speaker's dinner, get a
free ticket to MozCon, and of course, get to speak on the MozCon stage.
Every year, our post-MozCon polling says that you love our community speakers,
and many of their talks rank highly. We'll be opening community speaker
solicitations no later than the first week of April. Stay tuned!
Mike Arneson owns that MozCon stage!
All throughout MozCon, you'll have the chance to interact with Mozzers. From
marketing and help, to engineering and operations, Mozzers of all stripes use
MozCon as a chance to learn who you are. Some are looking for direct feedback
about products. MozCon 2013 goers got access to the Moz Analytics beta. And some
just want to hear about you: the people who use the products we make, read the
blog we've fostered, attend the Mozinars we host, and come for MozCon. We're
always elated that people truly join us from around the globe.
Group photo time! All the Mozzers.
Anyone else ever have problems at concerts where you can't see that stage? At
MozCon, our set-up not only ensures there's not a bad seat in the house, but
also that you have plenty of room. You know for your laptop, your tablet, your
work phone, your personal phone, your MozCon swag bag, your moleskine, your
coffee, your soda, your water, and your issue of Thor #337, which introduces
Beta Ray Bill, that you never leave home without.
Attendees sit at tables with power cords and plenty of leg room. MozCon is a
fully accessible conference for all attendees. And before you go asking about
internetâwe know the wifi never works at any conference everâwe're
coming up with some creative solutions. Just stay tuned.
Our speakers are also comfortable with an extra long stage and three huge,
stage-to-ceiling (seriously, maybe a three inch gap up there) screens. The
middle screen projects their live image and the other two show their
presentations. We do our best to ensure that youâyes, you way in the
backâcan see every bit of the action.
Attendees listen to speakers, but also have room to move around.
We're happy to say that people come back to MozCon year-after-year, not to
just learn, but to hang out with the industry friends that they've made. It's
kind of like a big 'ole family reunionâat least with the family you enjoy.
Friends are just the best thing ever.
Learn all the things!
One of my absolute pleasures in life is working with MozCon's exceptional
speakers. Industry leaders from about every niche in online marketing have
graced the MozCon stage, sharing their knowledge, tips, and inspiring you. And
me too!
Dana DiTomaso rocks the MozCon 2013 stage!
Our MozCon selection committee works extraordinarily hard to vet and handpick
the best speakers. And we continually expect more and more from those who we
invite back or invite for the first time when the next year's conversations
start about who should speak. The MozCon stage is large; its audience very
enthusiastic and particular; and because of that, I've seen seasoned
speakersâthe people I know you'd love to have at a dinner party to pick
their brainsâsend emails panicked that their presentations won't be
enough. Don't worry, they always deliver.
Get a taste of MozCon sessions and speaker quality with these two free
sessions. One from Kyle Rush from MozCon 2013 on conversion rate optimization
and Wil Reynolds from MozCon 2012 on Real Company Shit:
MozCon 2013 free video - Kyle Rush - Win Through Optimization and Testing
08-Wil-Reynolds
While we're still working to confirm and select ~11 more speakers for MozCon
2014, here's who is already signed up: Annie Cushing, Dana DiTomaso, Jeremy
Bloom, Justin Cutroni, Kyle Rush, Marshall Simmonds, Nathalie Nahai, Paddy
Moogan, Pete Meyers, Phil Nottingham, Rand Fishkin, Richard Millington, Sarah
Bird, and Wil Reynolds.
And don't worry, since MozCon is a single-session conference and we're all in
one big room together, you won't miss a single presenter!
Let me give you a brief preview of who these amazing people are:
Annie Cushing is an analytics genius and consultant. No, seriously, if there's
something that needs to be reformulated in a spreadsheet and made into a
beautifully digestible report for your client, boss, or CEO, she's your go-to
person. Annie's blog, Annielytics, is full of video tutorials to walk you
through the jungles of Excel. This will be Annie's third MozCon, and in her very
popular 2013 session, she spoke about "not provided" and going beyond keywords
in your analytics.
Dana DiTomaso has her finger on the pulse of small business and local
marketing. She leads as a Partner at Kick Point Inc, a small agency. There, Dana
regularly plays out David and Goliath type stories with the small businesses she
represents. At MozCon 2013, she absolutely wowed our community with her talk
about taking SMBs to the next level of marketing. Dana also may have moonlighted
as Roger one time.
Jeremy Bloom from Integrate.com, a marketing software company, is new to
MozCon, but you might've heard of him before. He's hit the entrepreneur world by
storm, raising lots of venture capital and earning kudos and awards from Forbes,
American Business Awards, and more. Jeremy is also a three-time World Champion,
two-time Olympian, and eleven-time World Cup gold medalist in men's freestyle
skiing. He also had an NFL career with the Philadelphia Eagles and Pittsburgh
Steelers. I think he'll be the first Olympian and NFL star on the MozCon stage.
Need another heavy hitter? Google Analytics Evangelist Justin Cutroni will be
joining us this year. If you need to learn anything about Google
Analyticsâthe more advanced the better!âhe probably has the answer.
Justin is the author of two books, both on Google Analytics. He's also a father,
skier, and cook.
You know that moment when you find out that quiet person sitting next to you
secretly runs the world? That's Kyle Rush, head of optimization at Optimizely
and formerly at The New Yorker and Obama for America. At the latter, he helped
the team that transformed how we think about digital campaigns. (Seriously, go
watch him talk about this.) Now that's some serious conversion rate
optimization! Kyle also has some adorable dogs.
Are there ever enterprise-level sites that make your jaw drop at how much
freaking amazing work went into them? Marshall Simmonds might've been the SEO
behind them, sites like all the New York Times properties, USA Today, CBS,
Toys-R-Us, Gawker Media, and many more. Today, he serves as the founder and CEO
of Define Media Group, Inc., an enterprise-level SEO and consulting group.
Marshall likes to remind us that he's "internet old," meaning that he gave a
talk at the SEOmoz: PRO Training Series in 2010.
Leading the field of web psychology, Nathalie Nahai, the web psychologist,
will be back on the MozCon stage. Her work delves into how to make your site(s)
resonate with your audience based on their culture, gender, or other
psychological need. Do you need an image of happy people or authority figures?
Nathalie's got the answer. She's also an accomplished author and musician and is
doing an upcoming free Mozinar with us.
Besides having a name that's just fun to say, Paddy Moogan's an accomplished
SEO with a knack for link building, and is head of growth markets at Distilled.
He took the stage by storm in 2012, skipped 2013 to hang out with Hobbits in New
Zealand, and now's back for 2014. And we're ready for Paddy and his love of
comic books and Aston Martins (James Bond's car).
Dr. Pete Meyers. Do I really need to intro this guy? Data scientist here at
Moz, Pete's done some killer projects about our collective obsession with
changes in Google's Algo, including MozCast and the Google Algo History.
Recently, he did a Reddit AMA and picks Superman as the winner in a fight
against Batman. (I may disagree with this.) We're crossing our fingers that by
July Chicago's dug itself out of snow, and Pete will be able to make it. :)
Sometimes a pirate, sometimes a video expert, Phil Nottingham is the video
strategist at Distilled. He especially enjoys being able to purchase shiny, new
video equipment. Last year, Phil tickled the audience pink with his video where
he pretended to be Rand for a Whiteboard Friday. His New Year's resolution is to
drink better whiskey; I'm just putting that out there, MozCon goers...
Rand Fishkin, the guy known for his loud shirts and industry championship.
Founder of Moz, former CEO, and now an individual e-team contributor, Rand will
be speaking to the changes in our industry this year at MozCon. He's spoken at
every MozCon, delivering all those actionable tips and inspirational words.
Despite all this, he still blushed as I made him write his own name on the
whiteboard as the first chosen speaker for MozCon 2014.
Founder of FeverBee, Richard Millington has made community building into a
science. Think community is fluffy? Richard will blow your mind. Make sure to
check out his recent free Mozinar. Whether you're wrangling mommy bloggers, gun
enthusiasts, or the ever-popular plumbers, Richard will show you how to start,
build, grow, and reach critical mass with your community.
Our brand-new CEO Sarah Bird will take the MozCon stage again. It's probably
one her new job duties she's most nervous about. Trained as a lawyer, Sarah has
a lifelong passion of learning new things and challenging herself. Good thing;
we've kept her on her toes since 2007! For MozCon, we're planning on introducing
a new format, a fireside chat, with Sarah, so you'll be able to hear all the
good stuff about her and her new role.
Always a crowd-pleaser, Wil Reynolds, founder of SEER Interactive, will be
back to give out inspiration like candy in a suburb on Halloween. The first time
I saw Wil speak (SearchFest 2012) his rousing speech somehow made me feel
confident enough to drive through a snowstorm in a Prius. And minus the
snowstorm, I challenge anyone not to feel transformed by a Wil speech. (Go watch
his MozCon 2012 talk. MozCon talks age like fine wine.)
I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Cyrus Shepard, our exceptional emcee. As the
Senior Content Lead at Moz, he dreams up ways to drive traffic to our site and
pokes people to level up our skills to help. Cyrus keeps speakers on track and
facilitates q&a. If you're worried about his emcee chops, he sent in an audition
tape of that time he won a car on Hollywood Squares.
I hope you're already taking notes of which speakers you can't wait to see. In
the coming months, speakers will be firming up their topics and starting to dive
into exactly what they'll be presenting on at MozCon 2014. They'll also be
joined by around 15 more people, including our four community speakers. While
you'll have to wait for the full agenda until then, you can get an idea of what
kinds of talks happen at MozCon through last year's agenda.
We love hosting you!
We're excited to bring our community from all parts of the world to MozCon.
Whether you live locally in Seattle or have to take two plus connecting flights
from either Cape Town, South Africa or Tampa, Florida to reach us, we want to
share something new with you.
For those of you boarding planes to MozCon, this year you (or your employer)
can save some pennies by flying with either Delta or Alaska Airlines. If flying
on Alaska, head to alaskaair.com and use the code ECMV042 for 5% off. If flying
on Delta, go to delta.com and use the code NMH7W for 2-10% off, depending on
where you depart from.
Once you hit Seattle, we've got some special deals with two great hotels, the
Grand Hyatt and the Olive 8. Both are located in downtown Seattle, just two
blocks away from MozCon, and both are fabulous places to lay your head down
after a long day of learning. Not only is there a discount, but MozCon attendees
also get complimentary wi-fi and $20 per night parking.
MozCon is the far-right pin, and the two hotels are the other pins. So close!
So we got your shelter and your wifi, your next basic need of bacon is also
covered. Did I write bacon? I meant food.
At Moz, we love our food, and since MozCon's like that big reunion with the
good side of the family, we're going to feed you. Every day of MozCon, you'll
have breakfast, lunch, and two snacks with us. We spare no details. In the past,
we've had treats like ice cream and crepes for breakfast. Ever dream of
conference food? (Are you laughing?) Well, MozCon's the exception to that.
Okay, what about the bacon? One of our most popular breakfast items is bacon.
Last year, two mornings featured all the bacon you can eat. (As a long-time
vegetarian, I donate my own bacon portions to one lucky MozCon goer every year.)
And for those of us non-bacon eaters, don't worry, we'll have that covered too.
Enjoying the grub! Sorry, bacon fans, couldn't find a bacon-specific photo.
After a day of learning, you're going to need some downtime. Work hard, play
hard, that's the mantra, right? In years past MozCon's parties have been hosted
at such amazing venues at The Garage, which features a bowling alley, and the
Experience Music Project (EMP), Seattle's own music and sci-fi museum. We're
still nailing down the details, including location, for the Tuesday night bash,
but rest assured, you'll be having the time of your lifeâwhile making some
great new friends.
Hanging out and having fun at the Tuesday party.
Okay, you've come all the way here, and you've seen photos of the new
MozPlex... Yes, we give office tours!
We don't do them during MozCon, since we all attend it. But in the days
surrounding, we open up the office and share our story and our space with you.
We're super thrilled this year to be able to show off our new digs, which will
fully be home sweet home by July. The MozPlex is about eight blocks away from
MozCon, so just a short walk through downtown.
MozPlex tour sign-ups will most likely go up in June when we're much closer to
the event.
Joel and Abe in their natural environment at the MozPlex.
We'd be remiss to not give you a welcoming gift (or four) to MozCon. Don't
worry, we always try to fill our swag bags with useful, tasteful, and fun stuff.
Last year, attendees were over the moon to get Roger figurines as part of their
MozCon haul. While I'm under top-secret orders not to mention what we're giving
away this year, let's just say I let out some squees.
That's a lot of Rogers who went out in the world with you.
While you're in Seattle, don't forget to visit Seattle! July is the best time
to explore our city and the surrounding area. I know sometimes when we go to
conferences that we only see beyond the conference and hotel on the to/from
airport-hotel drive (I'm just as guilty!). Don't deprive yourself of digging
into the best of Seattle, whether you want to visit the famous gum wall,
discover the troll under the bridge, or head out to hike Mount Si. Whet your
appetite with Rand's restaurant and bar guide, and discover amazing Seattle
treasures as crowd-sourced by Mozzers.
The great thing about Seattle is that you can be whomever you want to. Whether
you're looking to attend a Sounders game, reenact Macklemore's "Thrift Shop" (I
can tour-guide!), take a hot tub boat on Lake Union, or eat pie and see
Snoqualmie Falls, Seattle has something for everyone.
Highlights from our party last year include karaoke with a live band.
Take me to MozCon!
For those of you still trying to convince your boss (even if that boss is
you!) about the expense, make sure to read the ROI (value vs expense) MozCon
post from last year. MozCon's expenses and our program remains very similar
value-wise. And don't forget to take a 30-day free trial in order to get the Pro
Subscriber rate (if you're not already a Subscriber).
Don't hesitate to ask me anything about MozCon in the comments; I'll do my
best to answer.
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/lE06s50mvTU/mozcon-2014
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Wednesday 19 February 2014
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'Why Every Business Should Spend at
Least $1 per Day on Facebook Ads'
Posted by briancarterThis 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.
For the last three years I've constantly recommended Facebook ads. I recommend
them to both B2C or B2B businesses. I recommend them to local theaters and
comedians here in Charleston, SC. I recommend them to everyone who wants to grow
awareness about anything they're doing.
How advertising has changed since the 20th century
Before the Internet, it was unlikely that the average person would advertise.
Many businesses used the Yellow Pages or radio, but not all. Even in the first
decade of the 21st century, only a percentage of companies used search
advertising. Many found that pay-per-click was too expensive or too complicated
for them.
Why Facebook Ads are the biggest marketing opportunity ever
With Facebook ads, we have a totally unique opportunity. There are several
things about them never before seen together:
They can reach as many people or more people as radio or TV, and in whatever
country.
They have sophisticated targeting like AdWords, albeit on different criteria.
The minimum spend is just $1 per day.
They are the lowest cost per 1,000 impressions ad in history. They average
around $0.25 per 1,000, which is only 1% of the cost of TV. Are you kidding me?
Nope, it's for real.
In other words, Facebook ads are mega-awareness raising, have good targeting,
require very little commitment, and are unbelievably affordable.
Here's the one thing I tell people about Facebook ads that usually gets
through:
If you just spend $1 per day on Facebook ads, you will get in front of 4,000
people that wouldn't have seen you otherwise. If you are doing that and your
competitors aren't, you win the awareness game in your niche.
You can't sell to someone who doesn't know you exist, and you can't sell a
product or service the consumer has never heard of.
If you can't spare $30 a month, you shouldn't be in business.
Facebook Ads for awareness and ROI
In my opinion, because of AdWords, many companies now underestimate the
importance and value of awareness and mindshare. I drank the instant-ROI kool
aid too; I was Mr. AdWords from 2004 until 2010. We still do it, but we also
know its limits. It can harvest the low-hanging fruit and look good in terms of
attribution, but it can't raise awareness affordably.
There are people in SEO and PR who look down on ads. I understand that
aesthetic, but it's not as important as this opportunity. We know that organic
Facebook without advertising is a tough road that's becoming more and more
impassable. Pages with millions of fans find themselves only reaching 10s of
thousands with their posts. Adding advertising to promote your posts ensures you
get 10-100x the exposure of page posting alone. We have one big national brand
client that's receiving $0.01 engagement clicks on several of their most
engaging posts.
There are enough case studies of companies getting positive ROI from Facebook
advertising to know that it's feasible. But there are a lot of companies doing
Facebook poorly or without sufficient analytics. One stat said that 41% of B2B
companies didn't have the tracking in place to know what Facebook was doing for
them either way. In fact, as of a 2013 HubSpot survey, 34% of businesses either
cannot or do not calculate their inbound ROI at all.
There's Facebook conversion tracking code you can use, and you can create ads
that automatically optimize for conversions. Here's how to use it:
Go to the Facebook Ad Manager.
Look on the left for Conversion Tracking, and click on it.
Click on the green box "Create Conversion Pixel."
Give it a name you'll recognize, and choose what kind of conversion it is
(e.g. a check, lead, or add to cart).
Copy the JavaScript code and give it to your website person, or place it
yourself. They actually recommend placing it in the <head> section.
Facebook Advertising targeting options
If you're not super-familiar, here are some of your targeting options (use
one, a combination, or all):
Geography
Language
Age
Gender
Workplace
College
Interests (including job titles)
Categories
Your own email lists
Relationship status
Education level
College major
School
I have worked on and seen other great case studies (a few examples are Marketo,
InfiniGraph, Hubspot) of B2B Facebook advertising for lead gen. I've targeted
media, bloggers, and journalists, and secured interviews I wouldn't have
received otherwise.
Facebook also has retargeting options like AdWords does if you want to
diversify your owned media beyond email and fans.
They're also great for promoting events. You can not only get people to join
your event for sometimes as low as $0.15 each, you can also reach the friends of
the people who've already said they're going.
Do at least $1 per day!
Altogether, Facebook advertising is a powerful platform with a lot of options,
and given its power, your company should have someone testing our Facebook ads
for it, even if it's just at $1 per day!
---
You may also want to participate in The Carter Group's 2014 Digital
Advertising Survey, Sponsored by Moz. Here it is!
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/XU9CWjxRn58/1-dollar-per-day-on-facebook-ads
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
Least $1 per Day on Facebook Ads'
Posted by briancarterThis 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.
For the last three years I've constantly recommended Facebook ads. I recommend
them to both B2C or B2B businesses. I recommend them to local theaters and
comedians here in Charleston, SC. I recommend them to everyone who wants to grow
awareness about anything they're doing.
How advertising has changed since the 20th century
Before the Internet, it was unlikely that the average person would advertise.
Many businesses used the Yellow Pages or radio, but not all. Even in the first
decade of the 21st century, only a percentage of companies used search
advertising. Many found that pay-per-click was too expensive or too complicated
for them.
Why Facebook Ads are the biggest marketing opportunity ever
With Facebook ads, we have a totally unique opportunity. There are several
things about them never before seen together:
They can reach as many people or more people as radio or TV, and in whatever
country.
They have sophisticated targeting like AdWords, albeit on different criteria.
The minimum spend is just $1 per day.
They are the lowest cost per 1,000 impressions ad in history. They average
around $0.25 per 1,000, which is only 1% of the cost of TV. Are you kidding me?
Nope, it's for real.
In other words, Facebook ads are mega-awareness raising, have good targeting,
require very little commitment, and are unbelievably affordable.
Here's the one thing I tell people about Facebook ads that usually gets
through:
If you just spend $1 per day on Facebook ads, you will get in front of 4,000
people that wouldn't have seen you otherwise. If you are doing that and your
competitors aren't, you win the awareness game in your niche.
You can't sell to someone who doesn't know you exist, and you can't sell a
product or service the consumer has never heard of.
If you can't spare $30 a month, you shouldn't be in business.
Facebook Ads for awareness and ROI
In my opinion, because of AdWords, many companies now underestimate the
importance and value of awareness and mindshare. I drank the instant-ROI kool
aid too; I was Mr. AdWords from 2004 until 2010. We still do it, but we also
know its limits. It can harvest the low-hanging fruit and look good in terms of
attribution, but it can't raise awareness affordably.
There are people in SEO and PR who look down on ads. I understand that
aesthetic, but it's not as important as this opportunity. We know that organic
Facebook without advertising is a tough road that's becoming more and more
impassable. Pages with millions of fans find themselves only reaching 10s of
thousands with their posts. Adding advertising to promote your posts ensures you
get 10-100x the exposure of page posting alone. We have one big national brand
client that's receiving $0.01 engagement clicks on several of their most
engaging posts.
There are enough case studies of companies getting positive ROI from Facebook
advertising to know that it's feasible. But there are a lot of companies doing
Facebook poorly or without sufficient analytics. One stat said that 41% of B2B
companies didn't have the tracking in place to know what Facebook was doing for
them either way. In fact, as of a 2013 HubSpot survey, 34% of businesses either
cannot or do not calculate their inbound ROI at all.
There's Facebook conversion tracking code you can use, and you can create ads
that automatically optimize for conversions. Here's how to use it:
Go to the Facebook Ad Manager.
Look on the left for Conversion Tracking, and click on it.
Click on the green box "Create Conversion Pixel."
Give it a name you'll recognize, and choose what kind of conversion it is
(e.g. a check, lead, or add to cart).
Copy the JavaScript code and give it to your website person, or place it
yourself. They actually recommend placing it in the <head> section.
Facebook Advertising targeting options
If you're not super-familiar, here are some of your targeting options (use
one, a combination, or all):
Geography
Language
Age
Gender
Workplace
College
Interests (including job titles)
Categories
Your own email lists
Relationship status
Education level
College major
School
I have worked on and seen other great case studies (a few examples are Marketo,
InfiniGraph, Hubspot) of B2B Facebook advertising for lead gen. I've targeted
media, bloggers, and journalists, and secured interviews I wouldn't have
received otherwise.
Facebook also has retargeting options like AdWords does if you want to
diversify your owned media beyond email and fans.
They're also great for promoting events. You can not only get people to join
your event for sometimes as low as $0.15 each, you can also reach the friends of
the people who've already said they're going.
Do at least $1 per day!
Altogether, Facebook advertising is a powerful platform with a lot of options,
and given its power, your company should have someone testing our Facebook ads
for it, even if it's just at $1 per day!
---
You may also want to participate in The Carter Group's 2014 Digital
Advertising Survey, Sponsored by Moz. Here it is!
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/XU9CWjxRn58/1-dollar-per-day-on-facebook-ads
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Tuesday 18 February 2014
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'Why Your Brand Shouldn't Fear
Assigning Authorship'
Posted by MarkTraphagen
Over the past two years I've spoken at numerous conferences and written
articles beyond counting (including one here at Moz) on the subject of Google
Authorship and author authority online. By far the most frequently aske...
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/5RMZqNR9dw4/your-brand-shouldnt-fear-assigning-authorship
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
Assigning Authorship'
Posted by MarkTraphagen
Over the past two years I've spoken at numerous conferences and written
articles beyond counting (including one here at Moz) on the subject of Google
Authorship and author authority online. By far the most frequently aske...
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/5RMZqNR9dw4/your-brand-shouldnt-fear-assigning-authorship
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 17 February 2014
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'Google Analytics Checklist for New
Projects'
Posted by GeoffKenyon
When on-boarding a new client, there is a lot that needs to get done. Usually
the list includes a tech audit, reviewing content, and combing through back
links to name a few tasks. A review of the analytics implementation is often
overlooked though.
If you don't review how the analytics account is set up, you could set
yourself up to waste a lot of time down the road, even finding yourself
investigating an organic traffic drop that doesn't exist.
Below is my Google Analytics checklist that I review when starting a new
account. Many of these items joined the checklist as the result of previous
"learning experiences." My hope is that this list will help you avoid those same
experiences.
The basics
Exclude internal IP addresses
If we don't exclude internal and partner IP addresses, we will over-report
traffic and reduce our conversion rate.
To implement, go to Admin > Filters (in the appropriate view) > New
Filter.
Documentation can be found here.
Pro Tip:
Create a copy of the profile, and apply the filter to that copy. If your
filter creates a problem, you wonât be able to get back any lost data, so
itâs nice to have a backup.
Google Analytics code on all pages
If GA code is missing from pages, we will get incorrect site engagement metrics
and misappropriated conversion data. A quick way to check this is to look at
your referrals report. Do you have any self referrals?
It is not uncommon for pages in the checkout process to not include GA code. If
this is the case, you will see almost all conversions are from "referral" or
"direct."
To check this more thoroughly, fire up Screaming Frog and update the custom
field to check for the proper UA ID
UA account is only listed one time
Running two GA codes simultaneously is ok. Two instances of the same code is
not.
The two separate instances of Track Pageviews will mess up metrics such as
pageviews, time on site, bounce rate, and pages per visit.
The best way to find this one is to pull up the source code and search for
"ua-".
Linking related accounts
Link Google Analytics and AdWords
This will allow you to share data across Google Analytics and AdWords
Documentation can be found here
Link Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools
This will allow you to share Webmaster Tools data with Google Analytics
Documentation can be found here.
Ensure proper campaign tracking implementation
Auto tagging is enabled for Google Analytics
If you don't have auto tagging enabled, odds are your paid search traffic is
showing up in Google Analytics as organic traffic
To check the status of auto tagging, log into your AdWords account, go to
Account Settings, and then to Preferences.
Documentation can be found here.
Non-Google paid search campaign URLs contain UTM tags
If you're not including UTM parameters in your non-Google paid campaigns, the
traffic is most likely being counted as organic search visits.
Google Analytics interprets utm_medium=cpc and utm_medium=ppc as paid search
traffic, so one of these should be used for the medium.
Documentation can be found here.
Vanity domains redirect using UTM parameters
This will allow you to easily attribute visits and conversions from the vanity
domain to the campaign associated with the vanity domain
Email campaign links use UTM parameters
This will allow you to properly attribute visits and conversions to the right
email marketing effort
Conversions and interactions
Set up goals
This should be a wide range of activities such as purchases, contact form
completions, creating an account, time on site, signing up for a newsletter,
etc.
Associate monetary value with these goals if possible.
Documentation can be found here.
Set up e-commerce tracking
Ecommerce tracking will allow you to understand not only how much revenue you're
making but what channels are responsible for driving revenue
Documentation can be found here.
Set up event tracking
Event tracking is a simple way to track how users are interacting with your
site.
You can track just about anything such as videos played, submitted forms, if
people scroll through your content, or downloads.
Here's an overview of event tracking from the SEER blog.
Further documentation can be found here.
Content grouping
Create content groupings
These can be groups of pages like blog posts, ecommerce category, landing pages,
or any other group of related pages.
Here's a useful RegEx Guide from LunaMetrics.
Documentation can be found here.
What else do you always check in your Google Analytics implementations? Let me
know in the comments.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/OvWD1eVJ9F0/google-analytics-checklist-for-new-projects
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
Projects'
Posted by GeoffKenyon
When on-boarding a new client, there is a lot that needs to get done. Usually
the list includes a tech audit, reviewing content, and combing through back
links to name a few tasks. A review of the analytics implementation is often
overlooked though.
If you don't review how the analytics account is set up, you could set
yourself up to waste a lot of time down the road, even finding yourself
investigating an organic traffic drop that doesn't exist.
Below is my Google Analytics checklist that I review when starting a new
account. Many of these items joined the checklist as the result of previous
"learning experiences." My hope is that this list will help you avoid those same
experiences.
The basics
Exclude internal IP addresses
If we don't exclude internal and partner IP addresses, we will over-report
traffic and reduce our conversion rate.
To implement, go to Admin > Filters (in the appropriate view) > New
Filter.
Documentation can be found here.
Pro Tip:
Create a copy of the profile, and apply the filter to that copy. If your
filter creates a problem, you wonât be able to get back any lost data, so
itâs nice to have a backup.
Google Analytics code on all pages
If GA code is missing from pages, we will get incorrect site engagement metrics
and misappropriated conversion data. A quick way to check this is to look at
your referrals report. Do you have any self referrals?
It is not uncommon for pages in the checkout process to not include GA code. If
this is the case, you will see almost all conversions are from "referral" or
"direct."
To check this more thoroughly, fire up Screaming Frog and update the custom
field to check for the proper UA ID
UA account is only listed one time
Running two GA codes simultaneously is ok. Two instances of the same code is
not.
The two separate instances of Track Pageviews will mess up metrics such as
pageviews, time on site, bounce rate, and pages per visit.
The best way to find this one is to pull up the source code and search for
"ua-".
Linking related accounts
Link Google Analytics and AdWords
This will allow you to share data across Google Analytics and AdWords
Documentation can be found here
Link Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools
This will allow you to share Webmaster Tools data with Google Analytics
Documentation can be found here.
Ensure proper campaign tracking implementation
Auto tagging is enabled for Google Analytics
If you don't have auto tagging enabled, odds are your paid search traffic is
showing up in Google Analytics as organic traffic
To check the status of auto tagging, log into your AdWords account, go to
Account Settings, and then to Preferences.
Documentation can be found here.
Non-Google paid search campaign URLs contain UTM tags
If you're not including UTM parameters in your non-Google paid campaigns, the
traffic is most likely being counted as organic search visits.
Google Analytics interprets utm_medium=cpc and utm_medium=ppc as paid search
traffic, so one of these should be used for the medium.
Documentation can be found here.
Vanity domains redirect using UTM parameters
This will allow you to easily attribute visits and conversions from the vanity
domain to the campaign associated with the vanity domain
Email campaign links use UTM parameters
This will allow you to properly attribute visits and conversions to the right
email marketing effort
Conversions and interactions
Set up goals
This should be a wide range of activities such as purchases, contact form
completions, creating an account, time on site, signing up for a newsletter,
etc.
Associate monetary value with these goals if possible.
Documentation can be found here.
Set up e-commerce tracking
Ecommerce tracking will allow you to understand not only how much revenue you're
making but what channels are responsible for driving revenue
Documentation can be found here.
Set up event tracking
Event tracking is a simple way to track how users are interacting with your
site.
You can track just about anything such as videos played, submitted forms, if
people scroll through your content, or downloads.
Here's an overview of event tracking from the SEER blog.
Further documentation can be found here.
Content grouping
Create content groupings
These can be groups of pages like blog posts, ecommerce category, landing pages,
or any other group of related pages.
Here's a useful RegEx Guide from LunaMetrics.
Documentation can be found here.
What else do you always check in your Google Analytics implementations? Let me
know in the comments.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/OvWD1eVJ9F0/google-analytics-checklist-for-new-projects
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 14 February 2014
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'The Best Way to Suck at Marketing
- Whiteboard Friday'
Posted by randfish
When we take a data- and profit-driven approach to marketing, we can get so
caught up in maximizing returns that we forget we're dealing with people,
treating our customers as simple transactions. If we're looking for loyalty, we
need to change that approach.
In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand details the virtues of marketing for
long-term success and moving away from that transactional model.
The Best Way to Suck at Marketing - Whiteboard Friday
For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!
Video Transcription
Howdy Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This
week I wanted to talk about something I see from a lot of marketers where we
just kill ourselves, people. We're dying. We're really sucking at our jobs, and
the reason seems to be very consistent. It seems like this is almost the best
way, the most popular way to suck at marketing. I'll show you what I'm talking
about.
So here's our marketer, and he or she has good intentions in mind, but he
goes out and looks at every opportunity with the same lens on. So goes out and
looks at partnerships and sees only the possibility of business development.
Goes out and looks at other blogs and other places in the industry where they
might contribute and sees only a guest post opportunity, a chance to earn a
link. Goes and looks at their landing pages and sees customers, potential
customers coming to their site and thinks only: "How many? What's the highest
percent of those people that I can possibly convert to put in their credit card
right now and buy something or make a transaction happen?"
They look at conferences and events and see only, "All right, how do I speak
there?" Or "Should I sponsor it?" And "How do I get the most customers I
possibly can out of that event? How do I get coverage from press, media, and
bloggers? How do I turn this advertising placement into ROI? How do I turn these
people on social media, who are interested in my topic, into people who follow
me, become my customers, and amplify my content?"
This transactional model of thinking is actually really similar to how we do
a lot of discussion in the marketing field. I'm guilty of this myself. I talk
about: "Oh, well, if you're looking for folks on social media, how do you turn
them into followers of yours? How do you turn them into amplifiers?"
These are important topics. They're good tactics, but this view, this idea
that all these people are just a chance to make money, just an opportunity, it's
almost like the prostitution of marketing. If you think about the difference
between dating and paying for a physical relationship, they're thought of in
such different ways. One has all sorts of positive and romantic and long-term
associations in the world, and the other has incredibly negative connotations. I
won't get into the morality of our different views on these things, but this
same thinking applies in the marketing world. We've all been on the receiving
end of it. We've all been these people who are reached out to by this
transactional marketer.
Transactional marketing results in only one thing -- transactional
relationships. Those transactional relationships are representative because
every interaction is viewed exclusively through this "how are you going to
become money for me," which is an ugly, ugly way to think and an ugly way to be
thought of. We all can feel it when it's coming from someone else. It means
treating people merely as conduits. They're conduits for either attracting or
becoming customers. When you think in this model, you prioritize something
that's actually dangerous to your long-term success -- your short-term success.
It's funny how the inverse correlation works. But if you're constantly
focused on the short-term return over the long-term relationship or relationship
potential, the transactional model means that people and customers are going to
abandon your brand as soon as it's no longer the best transaction for them
because they have no preexisting relationship. They have no loyalty. They have
no love for you or your company or your product. It's merely, "What are you
doing for me right now because I'm giving you dollars?"
No one is cheering for your success. That's so frustrating. How do you build
a community? How do you build a social following? How do you attract an audience
if no one's cheering for your success? These folks are somewhere between
ambivalent and sometimes antagonistic.
I'm sure you can think of brands. A lot of times people complain about this
when it comes to utilities. Think of your relationship with your cable
television provider or with an airline with whom you've been very disappointed.
These kinds of classic transactional models apply. There's no brand loyalty.
Occasionally, when there is, it's so special, so unique, so rare and weird, that
we talk about it and blog about it and tweet about it and share it. Perhaps the
worst part is there's no long-term magnification.
One of the things that I always talk about, that Moz always talks about, and
that we've had a lot of success in investing in channels of all kinds is that
because there is a long-term focus, because there's a relationship that's being
built, we are essentially biasing to get long-term returns over short-term
returns. That means, over the long term, more and more people magnifying,
amplifying, saying nice things, helping us out when they don't need to because
they have that connection with the brand.
If you're missing that, the flywheel that you should be building with things
like SEO, with things like social media marketing, with things like content
marketing encounters too much friction, and it actually becomes a transactional
model, just like paid advertising, and you lose a ton of the benefit that you
would normally get from inbound channels. So don't do it.
Instead of doing this, I would urge you to seek common ground with every kind
of relationship that you build and seek common ground apart from purely the
relationship, although business and professional topics are certainly great
places to start with those. If you can find the things that you have in common
-- these two for these guys -- among any of these kinds of partners that you're
interacting with and any type of outreach that you're doing, any type of
relationship that you encounter, it's going to remove the purely transactional
from the model.
The thing is it has to be authentic. You can't do this in such a way that
you're sort of going down a checklist of, "Oh, yeah, hi Fred. It's nice to meet
you. Are you also a Seahawks fan, because I am a fan of this football team?"
It's insanity. It's obvious.
Authentically seeking out relationships as you're going relationship
building, rather than biasing and prioritizing the transactional model, can be
felt in every interaction that you have. Go out of your way to help. Go out of
your way to help, and do it before you're asked to do it.
One of the things that I love to do is when I encounter someone who impresses
me, a product that impresses me, a company that impresses me, I like to share
it. Because I have a reasonably nice social following, that actually turns into
a lot of amplification, and those people are often very appreciative. But when
someone shares something of mine, even if they have five followers on Twitter,
no presence on Facebook, they pinned something on Pinterest, and they have four
followers on their Pinterest board, it doesn't matter. Especially if they're
doing it before there's any kind of interaction or before there's any kind of
ask from me, it shows me that they truly care and they value something of mine,
and that feels good. That's a great way to start a relationship.
Don't negotiate hard to get every last penny. I think that one of the things
that we're trained to do again as marketers is, in these kinds of marketing
opportunities, we go out and we see, "Well, what's the maximum that I can
possibly get? I'm going to push this other person up against the wall until
they're getting minimum return and I'm getting maximum return."
This is actually a terrible way to build a relationship. Of course, it
results in this feature where people abandon the brand as soon as you're not
providing the best service to them or as soon as you're not the best
transactional option for them.
So if you can follow these things and go and change the way you do outreach,
the way you do social media marketing, the way you do business development, the
way you do advertising placements, the way you do pitches, generally speaking, I
think you're going to see a much greater return.
All right, everyone. Hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday.
We'll see you again next time. 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/kEWTKUqq0EI/the-best-way-to-suck-at-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
- Whiteboard Friday'
Posted by randfish
When we take a data- and profit-driven approach to marketing, we can get so
caught up in maximizing returns that we forget we're dealing with people,
treating our customers as simple transactions. If we're looking for loyalty, we
need to change that approach.
In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand details the virtues of marketing for
long-term success and moving away from that transactional model.
The Best Way to Suck at Marketing - Whiteboard Friday
For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!
Video Transcription
Howdy Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This
week I wanted to talk about something I see from a lot of marketers where we
just kill ourselves, people. We're dying. We're really sucking at our jobs, and
the reason seems to be very consistent. It seems like this is almost the best
way, the most popular way to suck at marketing. I'll show you what I'm talking
about.
So here's our marketer, and he or she has good intentions in mind, but he
goes out and looks at every opportunity with the same lens on. So goes out and
looks at partnerships and sees only the possibility of business development.
Goes out and looks at other blogs and other places in the industry where they
might contribute and sees only a guest post opportunity, a chance to earn a
link. Goes and looks at their landing pages and sees customers, potential
customers coming to their site and thinks only: "How many? What's the highest
percent of those people that I can possibly convert to put in their credit card
right now and buy something or make a transaction happen?"
They look at conferences and events and see only, "All right, how do I speak
there?" Or "Should I sponsor it?" And "How do I get the most customers I
possibly can out of that event? How do I get coverage from press, media, and
bloggers? How do I turn this advertising placement into ROI? How do I turn these
people on social media, who are interested in my topic, into people who follow
me, become my customers, and amplify my content?"
This transactional model of thinking is actually really similar to how we do
a lot of discussion in the marketing field. I'm guilty of this myself. I talk
about: "Oh, well, if you're looking for folks on social media, how do you turn
them into followers of yours? How do you turn them into amplifiers?"
These are important topics. They're good tactics, but this view, this idea
that all these people are just a chance to make money, just an opportunity, it's
almost like the prostitution of marketing. If you think about the difference
between dating and paying for a physical relationship, they're thought of in
such different ways. One has all sorts of positive and romantic and long-term
associations in the world, and the other has incredibly negative connotations. I
won't get into the morality of our different views on these things, but this
same thinking applies in the marketing world. We've all been on the receiving
end of it. We've all been these people who are reached out to by this
transactional marketer.
Transactional marketing results in only one thing -- transactional
relationships. Those transactional relationships are representative because
every interaction is viewed exclusively through this "how are you going to
become money for me," which is an ugly, ugly way to think and an ugly way to be
thought of. We all can feel it when it's coming from someone else. It means
treating people merely as conduits. They're conduits for either attracting or
becoming customers. When you think in this model, you prioritize something
that's actually dangerous to your long-term success -- your short-term success.
It's funny how the inverse correlation works. But if you're constantly
focused on the short-term return over the long-term relationship or relationship
potential, the transactional model means that people and customers are going to
abandon your brand as soon as it's no longer the best transaction for them
because they have no preexisting relationship. They have no loyalty. They have
no love for you or your company or your product. It's merely, "What are you
doing for me right now because I'm giving you dollars?"
No one is cheering for your success. That's so frustrating. How do you build
a community? How do you build a social following? How do you attract an audience
if no one's cheering for your success? These folks are somewhere between
ambivalent and sometimes antagonistic.
I'm sure you can think of brands. A lot of times people complain about this
when it comes to utilities. Think of your relationship with your cable
television provider or with an airline with whom you've been very disappointed.
These kinds of classic transactional models apply. There's no brand loyalty.
Occasionally, when there is, it's so special, so unique, so rare and weird, that
we talk about it and blog about it and tweet about it and share it. Perhaps the
worst part is there's no long-term magnification.
One of the things that I always talk about, that Moz always talks about, and
that we've had a lot of success in investing in channels of all kinds is that
because there is a long-term focus, because there's a relationship that's being
built, we are essentially biasing to get long-term returns over short-term
returns. That means, over the long term, more and more people magnifying,
amplifying, saying nice things, helping us out when they don't need to because
they have that connection with the brand.
If you're missing that, the flywheel that you should be building with things
like SEO, with things like social media marketing, with things like content
marketing encounters too much friction, and it actually becomes a transactional
model, just like paid advertising, and you lose a ton of the benefit that you
would normally get from inbound channels. So don't do it.
Instead of doing this, I would urge you to seek common ground with every kind
of relationship that you build and seek common ground apart from purely the
relationship, although business and professional topics are certainly great
places to start with those. If you can find the things that you have in common
-- these two for these guys -- among any of these kinds of partners that you're
interacting with and any type of outreach that you're doing, any type of
relationship that you encounter, it's going to remove the purely transactional
from the model.
The thing is it has to be authentic. You can't do this in such a way that
you're sort of going down a checklist of, "Oh, yeah, hi Fred. It's nice to meet
you. Are you also a Seahawks fan, because I am a fan of this football team?"
It's insanity. It's obvious.
Authentically seeking out relationships as you're going relationship
building, rather than biasing and prioritizing the transactional model, can be
felt in every interaction that you have. Go out of your way to help. Go out of
your way to help, and do it before you're asked to do it.
One of the things that I love to do is when I encounter someone who impresses
me, a product that impresses me, a company that impresses me, I like to share
it. Because I have a reasonably nice social following, that actually turns into
a lot of amplification, and those people are often very appreciative. But when
someone shares something of mine, even if they have five followers on Twitter,
no presence on Facebook, they pinned something on Pinterest, and they have four
followers on their Pinterest board, it doesn't matter. Especially if they're
doing it before there's any kind of interaction or before there's any kind of
ask from me, it shows me that they truly care and they value something of mine,
and that feels good. That's a great way to start a relationship.
Don't negotiate hard to get every last penny. I think that one of the things
that we're trained to do again as marketers is, in these kinds of marketing
opportunities, we go out and we see, "Well, what's the maximum that I can
possibly get? I'm going to push this other person up against the wall until
they're getting minimum return and I'm getting maximum return."
This is actually a terrible way to build a relationship. Of course, it
results in this feature where people abandon the brand as soon as you're not
providing the best service to them or as soon as you're not the best
transactional option for them.
So if you can follow these things and go and change the way you do outreach,
the way you do social media marketing, the way you do business development, the
way you do advertising placements, the way you do pitches, generally speaking, I
think you're going to see a much greater return.
All right, everyone. Hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday.
We'll see you again next time. 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/kEWTKUqq0EI/the-best-way-to-suck-at-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 13 February 2014
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'Social Engagement Metrics That
Matter - Measuring, Tracking, and Reporting FTW'
Posted by jennita
Let's be real here, measuring your social efforts is a pain in the butt. I
mean, there are tons of metrics to track, and data to look at, but actually
knowing if you're making an impact to the organization, that's a bit trickier.
Right? It's simple to track followers and see which platforms send you traffic,
but how do you know that you're meeting your goals? How do you make sure
everyone understands social's impact on the organization?
Follower counts are boooooooring.
These are the types of questions I often hear when people are grasping with
"proving their worth" or getting management and other team members on board with
making social a focus. It's so easy to get caught up in doing the things, that
you sometimes forget to measure and understand why the things need to be done.
Today I want to walk you through the process we use here at Moz for measuring
our social efforts. This is a process we're constantly working to improve, and
we have just recently added new metrics and changed our goals a bit. It's
something that you don't do once, then set aside.
Social Media Goals
Before I dig into the specific metrics, it's important to take a look at your
business goals. At Moz, we use the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) system
throughout the organization. This helps to ensure that we're all measuring
things in a similar way and that we're all working toward meeting and impacting
the company's overall objectives.
Since social media is pretty top-of-the-funnel, you'll often have goals around
increasing engagement and traffic to your site, or growing community and
improving customer service, and not as much around increasing sales or
subscriber numbers. Moz has always been a very customer/community-centered
organization, so while the community team will always be focused on customer
service and expanding the community, on a quarterly basis we additionally focus
on helping to meet the goals of the marketing team as a whole.
Let's take a look at one of these examples:
Marketing Objective: Increase Site Traffic, Engagement, and Customer Flow
through Site Funnel
Key Result: Improve Non-paid traffic to the site from all sources by 25% by end
of Q2
Social roadmap: Increase engagement with community by 5% on Social channels in
order to increase traffic from social by 15%
Engagement Metrics That Matter
Ok, so you know how you want to use social media to reach goals for your
organization. Engagement is a great goal, because it can impact the business by
increasing traffic, growing brand awareness, talking with community members,
showing your voice. But "engagement" isn't a simple number like followers. It's
a fuzzy word we like to use to mean "interactions with your brand." Plus, every
social channel is completely different, and engagement isn't the same for each,
so how can you measure it? On top of that, how are you going to gather all the
information? Which tools will you use, or do you have to go to each network to
grab the info?
But what if I told you that actually all the social networks (including your
blog!) really do have the same engagement metrics? Several years ago, Avinash
Kaushik wrote a post where he touts the best social media metrics are
Conversation, Amplification, Applause, and Economic value.
We've adopted this method of engagement tracking, and actually use this not
only for our social sites, but also for engagement on the blog and in other
areas of the site. Let me explain what each of these means for different
platforms, and how they're really all the same. :)
Conversation rate â This one is fairly straightforward in that it's based
on the number of conversations per post. On Twitter, this is replies to a tweet,
or on Pinterest, Facebook, and Instagram, it's a comment on the pin, post, or
photo.
Amplification rate â Any time a post is retweeted or re-shared, it's
being amplified. All the networks allow you to do this, so think of this one as
the number of re-pins, retweets, or reshares of a particular post.
Applause rate â Every social network out there has an "easy" touch point
to show appreciation, or applause, if you will. Twitter has favorites, Facebook
has likes, Google+ has plusses, heck even most blogs (such as our own) have
thumbs up or up-votes. So the applause rate is based on the number of "likes"
each post gets.
Economic value â This is the sum of short- and long-term revenue and cost
savings. Now, I have to be honest, we don't have the economic value part all
worked out yet for the community side of things yet. But it will be a focus over
the next few months to have things set up correctly.
Relative Engagement Rates â This is something that actually gets me all
giddy. :D So, you have all these engagement metrics, but what do those numbers
even mean? How can you compare the conversation rate on Facebook with the
conversation rate on Instagram? This is where the relative rates come in, think
of it as the average number of conversations happening per post, per follower
(fan, encircle, etc.).
Think about it this way, using the relative engagement rates, you can start to
compare followers to followers on different networks. Now, Facebook and Twitter
(or Pinterest, or G+, or Instagram, etc.) are obviously not the same, but if you
can determine the engagement rate per follower, per channel, you can then work
to improve those rates accordingly.
This way, when you increase your follower count, you can also focus on
sustaining (which is actually an improvement all on its own) or improving the
engagement rate per follower. So you can show your boss or client, that not only
have you increased followers, you've also increased engagement per follower. And
at this point, the traffic to the site from social has probably increased as
well.
Ok, these numbers aren't rocket science, and honestly they're not that hard to
get, I mean it's mostly math. But the very smart folks over at TrueSocialMetrics
have made it super easy on all of us by essentially creating the tool that
Avinash pleaded for in his initial post. (Also, bravo on seeing a need and
making it happen!)
How to track them
As I mentioned previously, you could go about grabbing these numbers on your
own and calculating them by handâ but why in the world would you do that
when TrueSocialMetrics has already done all the work for you?
Your first step is to run over to TrueSocialMetrics and sign up for a free
account. With the free plan you get 12 social networks and a month of data
history. I personally prefer the "small" plan which is only $30/month and gives
you a year of data history. (FYI, we have no affiliation with them, we're just a
happy customer!)
Once you sign up, you'll add connections to all your social networks,
including your blog, and then start calculating the data right away. The initial
dashboard looks something like this:
Holy numbers, Batman! Remember, right now we're just at the point of tracking
the data, we'll make this look a bit prettier in the next step.
Here at Moz, we capture our metrics on a weekly basis, and then send a monthly
email to the entire staff, showing how we did during the previous month. We've
toyed with a number of ways to show this data, and make it clear what's moving
the needle.
Every Monday morning, Megan logs into TrueSocialMetrics and grabs the
following numbers for each channel for the previous week, and adds them to our
spreadsheet:
Posts
Replies
Shares/RTs
Favorites/Likes/Plusses
Conversation Rate
Amplification Rate
Applause Rate
Channel Growth
Visits from each channel
What I like about this is that you're essentially using this for data storage,
and anyone can do it. It's not a method that only one person knows how to do,
it's a simple process of adding numbers to a spreadsheet. Then you'll make
something a bit easier to digest that you send around to the rest of the team,
or to your client.
How to report it
Having the data and doing something with the data are two different things.
Not only do you need to use the information to help meet your goals, but there
are always other folks who are dying to know the ROI of what you do each day. So
how can you take these metrics, and report them to the team in a way that is
easily digestible? In a way that shows performance over time and helps everyone
understand what's going on from a social perspective.
Community action plan
The first thing we did, was to create a Community Action Plan, which is a
quick and easy way to see where we're at with reaching our goals at any given
time. It shows our weekly KPIs, the baseline for each metric, the percent
increase for this current period, our goal by the end of the period, and where
we're at with that goal.
On a weekly basis we grab the data, throw it in the spreadsheet, and then our
action plan magically shows us how we're doing against our goals. I <3 magic.
You can download a sample version of spreadsheet that we use for this here:
Sample Social Media Action Plan
Monthly email
In addition to having this easy-to-read dashboard, we also send out a monthly
email to the entire staff which shows our engagement rates over the past six
months, traffic from the social channels, as well as a few other community
metrics we look at that aren't social specific. We lovingly call this email the
"Community Chronicle." :)
Here's a taste of what it looks like this:
Notice the downward spiral of Facebook engagement and traffic, while Twitter
continues to soar? This is a trend we've been noticing for the past few months,
ever since Facebook made some algo changes to their feeds that shows less and
less updates from brands. *insert sad face here*
But this is exactly the kind of trend we want to know about, so we can react
to it. We've been testing various ways of increasing engagement on Facebook, and
we've seen a slight up-tick. We'll all surely be watching this over the next few
months to see if we can get those numbers back up organically, or if we'll be
forced to pay the man! The Facebook man that is.
What's next?
Well, now it's your turn to take action. Capturing the data is the easy part,
the tough part is to do something with it. You'll need to decipher the trends,
determine when to make changes, what works, and what doesn't work. Since it can
be different for every organization, I'd love to see how you set up your action
plans and if you add other metrics to it. If you do create one, send it over,
I'll add a link in this post.
Social media can be a tough one to explain to the boss/client, but it doesn't
have to be. Put it into simple terms and track it over time. Let me know how it
goes!
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/HHldsyTFl5Q/social-engagement-metrics-that-matter
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
Matter - Measuring, Tracking, and Reporting FTW'
Posted by jennita
Let's be real here, measuring your social efforts is a pain in the butt. I
mean, there are tons of metrics to track, and data to look at, but actually
knowing if you're making an impact to the organization, that's a bit trickier.
Right? It's simple to track followers and see which platforms send you traffic,
but how do you know that you're meeting your goals? How do you make sure
everyone understands social's impact on the organization?
Follower counts are boooooooring.
These are the types of questions I often hear when people are grasping with
"proving their worth" or getting management and other team members on board with
making social a focus. It's so easy to get caught up in doing the things, that
you sometimes forget to measure and understand why the things need to be done.
Today I want to walk you through the process we use here at Moz for measuring
our social efforts. This is a process we're constantly working to improve, and
we have just recently added new metrics and changed our goals a bit. It's
something that you don't do once, then set aside.
Social Media Goals
Before I dig into the specific metrics, it's important to take a look at your
business goals. At Moz, we use the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) system
throughout the organization. This helps to ensure that we're all measuring
things in a similar way and that we're all working toward meeting and impacting
the company's overall objectives.
Since social media is pretty top-of-the-funnel, you'll often have goals around
increasing engagement and traffic to your site, or growing community and
improving customer service, and not as much around increasing sales or
subscriber numbers. Moz has always been a very customer/community-centered
organization, so while the community team will always be focused on customer
service and expanding the community, on a quarterly basis we additionally focus
on helping to meet the goals of the marketing team as a whole.
Let's take a look at one of these examples:
Marketing Objective: Increase Site Traffic, Engagement, and Customer Flow
through Site Funnel
Key Result: Improve Non-paid traffic to the site from all sources by 25% by end
of Q2
Social roadmap: Increase engagement with community by 5% on Social channels in
order to increase traffic from social by 15%
Engagement Metrics That Matter
Ok, so you know how you want to use social media to reach goals for your
organization. Engagement is a great goal, because it can impact the business by
increasing traffic, growing brand awareness, talking with community members,
showing your voice. But "engagement" isn't a simple number like followers. It's
a fuzzy word we like to use to mean "interactions with your brand." Plus, every
social channel is completely different, and engagement isn't the same for each,
so how can you measure it? On top of that, how are you going to gather all the
information? Which tools will you use, or do you have to go to each network to
grab the info?
But what if I told you that actually all the social networks (including your
blog!) really do have the same engagement metrics? Several years ago, Avinash
Kaushik wrote a post where he touts the best social media metrics are
Conversation, Amplification, Applause, and Economic value.
We've adopted this method of engagement tracking, and actually use this not
only for our social sites, but also for engagement on the blog and in other
areas of the site. Let me explain what each of these means for different
platforms, and how they're really all the same. :)
Conversation rate â This one is fairly straightforward in that it's based
on the number of conversations per post. On Twitter, this is replies to a tweet,
or on Pinterest, Facebook, and Instagram, it's a comment on the pin, post, or
photo.
Amplification rate â Any time a post is retweeted or re-shared, it's
being amplified. All the networks allow you to do this, so think of this one as
the number of re-pins, retweets, or reshares of a particular post.
Applause rate â Every social network out there has an "easy" touch point
to show appreciation, or applause, if you will. Twitter has favorites, Facebook
has likes, Google+ has plusses, heck even most blogs (such as our own) have
thumbs up or up-votes. So the applause rate is based on the number of "likes"
each post gets.
Economic value â This is the sum of short- and long-term revenue and cost
savings. Now, I have to be honest, we don't have the economic value part all
worked out yet for the community side of things yet. But it will be a focus over
the next few months to have things set up correctly.
Relative Engagement Rates â This is something that actually gets me all
giddy. :D So, you have all these engagement metrics, but what do those numbers
even mean? How can you compare the conversation rate on Facebook with the
conversation rate on Instagram? This is where the relative rates come in, think
of it as the average number of conversations happening per post, per follower
(fan, encircle, etc.).
Think about it this way, using the relative engagement rates, you can start to
compare followers to followers on different networks. Now, Facebook and Twitter
(or Pinterest, or G+, or Instagram, etc.) are obviously not the same, but if you
can determine the engagement rate per follower, per channel, you can then work
to improve those rates accordingly.
This way, when you increase your follower count, you can also focus on
sustaining (which is actually an improvement all on its own) or improving the
engagement rate per follower. So you can show your boss or client, that not only
have you increased followers, you've also increased engagement per follower. And
at this point, the traffic to the site from social has probably increased as
well.
Ok, these numbers aren't rocket science, and honestly they're not that hard to
get, I mean it's mostly math. But the very smart folks over at TrueSocialMetrics
have made it super easy on all of us by essentially creating the tool that
Avinash pleaded for in his initial post. (Also, bravo on seeing a need and
making it happen!)
How to track them
As I mentioned previously, you could go about grabbing these numbers on your
own and calculating them by handâ but why in the world would you do that
when TrueSocialMetrics has already done all the work for you?
Your first step is to run over to TrueSocialMetrics and sign up for a free
account. With the free plan you get 12 social networks and a month of data
history. I personally prefer the "small" plan which is only $30/month and gives
you a year of data history. (FYI, we have no affiliation with them, we're just a
happy customer!)
Once you sign up, you'll add connections to all your social networks,
including your blog, and then start calculating the data right away. The initial
dashboard looks something like this:
Holy numbers, Batman! Remember, right now we're just at the point of tracking
the data, we'll make this look a bit prettier in the next step.
Here at Moz, we capture our metrics on a weekly basis, and then send a monthly
email to the entire staff, showing how we did during the previous month. We've
toyed with a number of ways to show this data, and make it clear what's moving
the needle.
Every Monday morning, Megan logs into TrueSocialMetrics and grabs the
following numbers for each channel for the previous week, and adds them to our
spreadsheet:
Posts
Replies
Shares/RTs
Favorites/Likes/Plusses
Conversation Rate
Amplification Rate
Applause Rate
Channel Growth
Visits from each channel
What I like about this is that you're essentially using this for data storage,
and anyone can do it. It's not a method that only one person knows how to do,
it's a simple process of adding numbers to a spreadsheet. Then you'll make
something a bit easier to digest that you send around to the rest of the team,
or to your client.
How to report it
Having the data and doing something with the data are two different things.
Not only do you need to use the information to help meet your goals, but there
are always other folks who are dying to know the ROI of what you do each day. So
how can you take these metrics, and report them to the team in a way that is
easily digestible? In a way that shows performance over time and helps everyone
understand what's going on from a social perspective.
Community action plan
The first thing we did, was to create a Community Action Plan, which is a
quick and easy way to see where we're at with reaching our goals at any given
time. It shows our weekly KPIs, the baseline for each metric, the percent
increase for this current period, our goal by the end of the period, and where
we're at with that goal.
On a weekly basis we grab the data, throw it in the spreadsheet, and then our
action plan magically shows us how we're doing against our goals. I <3 magic.
You can download a sample version of spreadsheet that we use for this here:
Sample Social Media Action Plan
Monthly email
In addition to having this easy-to-read dashboard, we also send out a monthly
email to the entire staff which shows our engagement rates over the past six
months, traffic from the social channels, as well as a few other community
metrics we look at that aren't social specific. We lovingly call this email the
"Community Chronicle." :)
Here's a taste of what it looks like this:
Notice the downward spiral of Facebook engagement and traffic, while Twitter
continues to soar? This is a trend we've been noticing for the past few months,
ever since Facebook made some algo changes to their feeds that shows less and
less updates from brands. *insert sad face here*
But this is exactly the kind of trend we want to know about, so we can react
to it. We've been testing various ways of increasing engagement on Facebook, and
we've seen a slight up-tick. We'll all surely be watching this over the next few
months to see if we can get those numbers back up organically, or if we'll be
forced to pay the man! The Facebook man that is.
What's next?
Well, now it's your turn to take action. Capturing the data is the easy part,
the tough part is to do something with it. You'll need to decipher the trends,
determine when to make changes, what works, and what doesn't work. Since it can
be different for every organization, I'd love to see how you set up your action
plans and if you add other metrics to it. If you do create one, send it over,
I'll add a link in this post.
Social media can be a tough one to explain to the boss/client, but it doesn't
have to be. Put it into simple terms and track it over time. Let me know how it
goes!
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/HHldsyTFl5Q/social-engagement-metrics-that-matter
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
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