Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'So You Have a Mobile-Friendly
Website. What Now?'
Posted by bridget.randolph
This post is based on a presentation I gave in October at SearchLove London
2013. The full slide deck is embedded at the end of the post. Also, use this
link to watch the video of the presentation for free! :)
----
Lots of people can tell you why you need a mobile-friendly website. And lots
of people can tell you how to build one. Including me. There have been countless
posts and articles and guides written about how to build a mobile-friendly site,
and how to optimize it for search, and how to track mobile visitors, and why
mobile is important.
So at this point, most people would agree that having a mobile-friendly
website is a basic requirement for any online brand:
57% of users won't recommend a business with a poorly designed mobile site, and
40% have turned to a competitor's site after a bad mobile experience.
If you're just starting to think about it, you're falling behind. And you
don't need me to convince you. Instead, I want to talk about what happens next.
This post will cover some big-picture trends, case studies, examples and
tactics, but the overall theme is "online everywhere."
By the year 2017, it is predicted that 85% of the world's population will have
3G coverage. (It could be even more; initiatives like Facebook's Internet.org
campaign have the goal of bringing internet access to 100% of the world's
population.)
Mobile data in the year 2012 was 12x the size of the entire internet in the
year 2000. In other words, it grew by 1200%. And by the year 2018 it is expected
to grow 12x again...meaning the rate of growth is now twice as fast as when we
started (12x growth in 6 years instead of 12).
What all of this means is that we're becoming more connected than ever. And
mobile is now a channel which can empower you to reach people you can't reach
any other way, as the number of mobile users worldwide is set to overtake the
number of desktop users in 2014.
We are increasingly living in a multiscreen, device-agnostic world.
And this means that "mobile" can't just be an add-on anymore. My boss Will
Critchlow likes to say "there's no such thing as mobile." I would disagree
slightly: I'd suggest that instead, "there's no such thing as mobile for the
user."
Mobile is not a separate channel; it's a technology. So although at this point
there's "no such thing as mobile" for the user, don't be fooled: Making it easy
for users is really hard. We can't be lazy. What we need to be doing is asking
the right questions.
What does this look like? Let's take 3 scenarios: Companies A, B, and C.
Company A (call them the "Average Joe Corp.") are asking the question: "how do
we do 'mobile'?" And this means they'll be getting answers based on what
everyone else is doing, regardless of whether it's right for them or their
users. For example:
a separate m. website
an app
SMS promotions
etc.
Company B ("Early Adopters Ltd.") have a slightly better question: "how do we
stay ahead of the next big mobile technology trend?" They're not interested in
what everyone's doing already; they want to be ahead of the curve. So they'll
end up investing in things like
big data tools
Aurasma technology for their app
fun stunts like including a solar charger in their print ads
But Company C is different (let's call them "User-Driven Business, Inc.").
They're looking at it from a different perspective: a user-centric one. They
ask: "how can we take advantage of new technology to anticipate our users'
needs?"
We all need to become more like "User-Driven Business, Inc.", because our
customers are people, and technology is for people. Instead of asking about how
to 'do' mobile, or how to stay on top of new technology, we need to have the
mindset of making mobile a core part of the customers' journey, and keeping the
user at the center.
Which looks something like this:
Phase 1: Discover
77% of mobile searches now take place near a PC. What this means is that
mobile devices are rapidly becoming the device of choice, even when other
options are available. And with new behaviors like sequential screening and
multiscreening, mobile is increasingly an integral part of the customer's
discovery phase. 90% of users use multiple screens sequentially to accomplish a
task over time, and 98% move between devices in a single day. Smartphones are
the most frequent 'companion' devices used while multiscreening (i.e. using
multiple devices at the same time).
So the first big trend we need to be aware of here is the need for a seamless
and consistent user experience across all devices.
There are three main areas in which mobile technology impacts on the Discover
phase:
website
search
social
1. Website
We've all heard the people who say that responsive design is always the
answer. And responsive design is fine. But it's a basic approach. And if you
don't approach it properly, you can end up with a subpar user experience.
Example: Starbucks
Starbucks made a beautiful responsive website; but on the smartphone version
the 'BUY NOW' button has dropped to the bottom of the page, under many many
reviews, a video and other non-essential content.
Desktop version:
Mobile version:
Small Steps
Consider using dynamic serving instead of pure responsive: this allows you to
serve different HTML based on user agent, while maintaining a single URL for
simplicity.
Think in terms of "content everywhere:" the concept of "Create Once Publish
Everywhere," discussed in more depth in the book by Sara Wachter-Boettcher.
"Content Everywhere" is a system which allows you to relate different types of
content using markup for a more search- and user-friendly approach, regardless
of the platform used to access your content.
CASE STUDY: BBC Food used this approach for their recipes and saw an increase
of more than 150,000 visitors weekly from search alone and overall traffic
doubled, from around 650,000 weekly visitors to around 1.3 million. (data from
Content Everywhere book)
Use long-term cookies for login: keep people logged in longer and remove the
extra step of needing a sign-in each time your users visit your site
Sync user accounts across all platforms:
a great EXAMPLE of this is Amazon Kindle: if you leave off in the middle of a
book on the iPhone app, and then pick it up on your Kindle, it will know where
you last left off (cross-device)
Test, test, test: start by visiting your site on a mobile (or use the built-in
emulator in your favorite browser).
TIP: Make sure you test for all the devices your customers use, or at least the
majority (you can find out what these are from your analytics data).
Mobile CRO and user testing: there are loads of tools available for this type of
testing; three that we like at Distilled are Qualaroo, CrazyEgg and Optimizely.
2. Search
The first big trend to keep in mind when it comes to search and discovery:
it's the same person regardless of device. So context and user intent become
more important than asking whether it's a mobile phone or a laptop.
CASE STUDY- Bravissimo
Bravissimo used a tool called WeatherFIT to customize their PPC campaigns
based on individual user context. Basically they would only show lingerie and
swimwear ads to users who had sunny/hot weather in their area.
Results: 600% increase in PPC-driven sales revenue and 103% increase in
conversion rate.
Example: Google
Google is huge for online personalization and context-based content:
Google Implicit Search can understand the context of a query (such as 'how tall
is Justin Bieber?' followed by 'how much does he weigh?') and return the correct
answer.
Google Now aims to provide you the information you need before you ask for it
(such as bus times, weather, metro service information, etc) by figuring out
where you are and what you are doing.
This leads us to the second big trend for discovery via search marketing:
anticipating your users' needs before they themselves are even aware of them. If
you can do this, you will be getting your brand in front of a whole new
audience.
Small Steps
If your business has brick-and-mortar locations, consider optimizing for local
search. Local can be a big vertical for mobile search.
If applicable to your audience, consider applying to get your business
integrated with Google Now (although be forewarned, it's not terribly easy at
this stage)
3. Social
Social is a huge channel for mobile. Four out of every five people who use
Facebook (daily) and Twitter do so on a mobile device. So social marketing is
mobile marketing.
But social is tricky, because brands no longer own the conversation. And the
first big trend we see in social marketing is that permission's not enough
anymore. There is now so much content and so much information available that we
don't have time to read all the emails we sign up for. This has led to 'filter
bubbles'.
You're probably all familiar with the Mark Zuckerberg quote: "A squirrel dying
in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than
people dying in Africa." This may sound extreme but the mindset it shows has a
very real impact on our marketing efforts.
Between technology (like Facebook's EdgeRank, which shows more content for
pages we engage with more frequently) and the people our customers follow (who
only share and curate the content they find worthwhile), we need to be thinking
in terms of peer-to-peer marketing if we want to have any hope of our target
audience even seeing our content. One quick sense check for this is simply to
ask yourself: "is it good enough to tell my friends about it?"
A final point: make sure any content you want to share via social channels is
also mobile friendly. Given that 80% of these users are on mobile devices, you
don't want them to be faced with this:
Small Steps
Allow your social media team to engage in a conversational (rather than a salesy
or overly formal) way.
Create content which people will want to share.
Ensure that all content for social sharing is mobile-friendly.
Phase 2: Explore
Once your users have discovered your brand, that's just the beginning; they
may need to explore their options a bit more before deciding to purchase from
you. And you need to be aware of that whole journey from start to finish.
There are four main areas impacted by mobile in the Explore phase:
Tracking
Showrooming
Personalization
Online/offline integration
1. Tracking
Track the person, not the device. Other people (like Avinash Kaushik and Craig
Bradford) can explain this much better than me, but the short version is:
Stop tracking each session as if it's a different user. Instead, track people
throughout their journey from start to finish - irrespective of device.
In the image above, wouldn't it be better if we knew that:
The 3 online visits + single conversion (CID 111, 222 and 333) and the offline
visit + conversion (CID 444) were actually
One person using 3 different devices plus making an in-store visit with a
second conversion (UID ABC)?
Small Steps
Implement Universal Analytics: this is a great first step towards user-based
tracking. Be aware of the limitations, however: users have to be logged in to
track them across device.
2. Showrooming
It's easy to panic about showrooming (when people look up your products
in-store on a phone and find lower prices online from your competitors).
But this sort of thing is never a good idea:
...and it's unnecessary. Instead, we should view showrooming behavior as an
opportunity; to reinforce the value that our products and our store provide.
CASE STUDY: Best Buy
In 2012, Best Buy decided to tackle showrooming head-on: giving specially
trained staff members tablets to search comparison sites for the lowest price,
and allowing them to match that lowest price in order to complete the sale.
Results: It was successful - I don't have exact metrics, but in February 2013
they rolled out a permanent price matching policy based on the positive results
of this pilot.
3. Personalization
Personalization is huge, and especially so on mobile devices which are much
more 'personal' devices than most (think how frequently laptops are used for
work/school, desktops for families or in other shared environments like
libraries - but smartphones are primarily used by individuals in leisure time).
Small Steps
Implement a recommendation engine for your logged-in customers. You can also do
a form of this with non-logged-in users - Medium are a good example of this.
CASE STUDY: LK Bennett/Qubit
LK Bennett recently ran a campaign using the Qubit tag management system to
personalize their website content by user context. The first test was targeted
at UK-based visitors who had not purchased online within nine months, but had
visited the site more than three times. These users were shown a special offer
for free delivery if they were about to leave again without purchasing.
Results: an 11% increase in conversions from that visitor segment. Another
test offered UK visitors free 14 day returns, and this saw a 14% conversion rate
increase.
4. Online/Offline Integration
Because mobile devices are portable, there are many more opportunities for
integration between the online and offline worlds via mobile devices.
What does this mean? The obvious example would be something like a QR code in
a print ad or on a billboard. A more sophisticated version is something like
Debenham's virtual pop-up stores at famous UK landmarks, which users scanned
with a special app and then were able to view and order clothing (after
virtually trying it on, of course!).
My favorite example of online/offline integration is from IKEA:
Example: IKEA catalogue app
IKEA created an augmented reality app for their recent catalogue, which
allowed users to use their device's built-in camera to try out how different
pieces of IKEA furniture would look in a given location in their home.
All of these examples - Best Buy encouraging showrooming and matching the
lowest price, IKEA allowing people to 'try out' the furniture before they buy,
and LK Bennett providing personalized offers about shipping and returns - play
into the overall brand experience of your users, and help to determine whether
they decide to buy from you or not. Basically, these are all different ways of
helping potential customers past the "uncertainty" phase and giving them the
extra little push to feel confident that they're making the right choices.
Ultimately, whatever examples we use, the big trend for the Explore phase is
to recognize the value of every touchpoint/interaction along the customer
journey. The purchase isn't the only thing that matters anymore. ...and last
click attribution is the devil.
Phase 3: Buy
This is all very well, but...what about the actual conversion? Well, the big
trend here is to make mobile checkout EASY.
There are two main areas we can improve in order to engage mobile users more
effectively in the purchase process:
Smarter checkout paths
Online/offline integration (yes, again!)
1. Smarter checkout paths
We need smarter conversion paths for mobile. My rule of thumb for this is
KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid. ;)
Small Steps
Link the form fields to the correct keyboard - have you ever tried to use a
form on a phone and had the wrong type of keyboard pop up? This is actually
surprisingly easy to fix:
For phone number fields:
<input type="tel" />
for a numeric keyboard, use this:
<input type="text" pattern="\d*" novalidate />
for any email fields, use this:
<input type="email" />
to disable autocorrect:
<input type="text" autocorrect="off" />
Keep people logged in long-term: The fewer steps people have to take to
complete a purchase, the less likely they are to abandon it. Mobile devices
(smartphones in particular, tablets perhaps less so) are often only used by a
single individual, so it is often much more convenient to use websites and apps
which don't require a login every time. By using persistent cookies (on
websites) and saving password details in the phone (for apps) you make the
process easier for your users.
Don't neglect microconversions: It's all very well trying to convince people to
make big purchases via mobile; but don't forget about the smaller stuff. Things
like email signups and social sharing are very important and sometimes don't
work well on mobile devices.
2. Online/offline integration
If you have a physical store location(s), in-store mobile payment can also add
convenience to checkout.
Example: PayPal
If you accept PayPal payments, you can allow people to use the PayPal app to
checkout in-store as well as online.
Phase 4: Engage
Once your customer has purchased, you may feel that you can relax. But you're
not home free yet! You need to keep customers engaged with your brand and your
services/products even after they purchase in order to turn them into repeat
customers and, eventually, brand advocates.
There are three main areas in this phase which are important for mobile:
Apps
Email marketing
Social
1. Apps
The first question you should ask yourself if you're considering creating an
app is: "are you sure you need one?"
The benefit is, of course, that it's a walled garden. The downside is that
it's a saturated market: there are 900,000+ apps in the Apple Store and over 1
million on Google Play. And despite the high volume of apps, only a few rise to
the top: 10% of all iPhone app store revenue in Nov 2012 came from only 7 apps.
So unless you really do need one, it's not worth the extra effort and hassle.
How do you decide? Ask yourself, does my app (idea):
Add convenience?
Offer unique value?
Provide social value?
Offer incentives?
Entertain?
These are the attributes of a successful app. If it doesn't do any of these
things, you shouldn't build it.
CASE STUDY: Tesco Homeplus
Tesco Homeplus, in South Korea, are an excellent example of how to use apps to
retain customers (and this is also a great example of using online/offline
integration in the Buy phase). As a mid-/large-sized supermarket brand (trying
to compete against a bigger rival), they knew that their target customers were
very busy, working very long hours and lacking free time to go shopping for
groceries. So they created a 'virtual store' in the subway, which allowed app
users to scan items they wanted to purchase and checkout on their phone. If they
did this before 1pm, the groceries would be delivered to their home that
evening.
Results: their sales increased 130% in three months, and their number of
registered users went up by 76%
Ultimately, the key when it comes to apps is creating a unique experience and
meeting a specific user need. If you can't do this with your app, you probably
don't need one.
2. Email marketing
62% of emails are opened on mobile devices. So email marketing is mobile
marketing. And remember, you can send push notifications via email (dependent on
the user's settings) which gives them a benefit we might have associated
previously only with apps or SMS promotions.
Small steps
Send emails your customers want to open
Example: Innocent Drinks are a great example of email content which is fun,
full of their brand personality and regardless of whether I always have time to
read the emails, I never consider unsubscribing because I don't want to miss out
on it.
Use personalization and context: the average open rate for 'triggered' emails is
4x higher than for email newsletters (45-55% vs 10%)
Example: Smythson - in a blog post on email marketing, Lucy Wilsden described
how Smythson sent her the following email in September (just around the time she
was thinking about purchasing a new diary for 2014). Note the
individual-specific personalization - they used her initials in the product
image.
Use mobile friendly templates: MailChimp and Campaign Monitor are two services
that offer this.
TIP: If your preferred provider doesn't offer this, you can use one of these
services to build your email and then export the HTML into your preferred
provider's template.
Test your email campaigns: we like Litmus; there are also other options.
3. Social
Social isn't just part of the discovery process; it's also a great channel for
maintaining customer loyalty.
Example: Red Bull Wings
Red Bull has an incredible social campaign called Red Bull Wings. They monitor
mentions on Twitter of keywords like 'allnighters', 'midterms', etc; then
contact the tweeters to mail them a care package containing a Red Bull 4-pack
and a personalized note.
This is just one example; but the big trend with post-purchase social
engagement is: make current customers feel appreciated - and make it
individually personalized, if possible.
---
Bonus example
I've covered a lot of things in this post, so now I want to share a campaign
which I think pulls a lot of these together. It's a great example of how to
merge the online and offline worlds...but more importantly, it's an example of
one of the key takeaways from this post: the value of extreme (individual)
personalization and context recognition.
BMW's MINI Salutes You (part of the #MININotNormal campaign)
I love this campaign because it keeps the (individual) customer at the center.
It makes great use of personalization and context, as well as online/offline
integration. And it hits the 'post-buy engagement' part beautifully by showing
loyalty to current customers.
Results: As part of the online aspect, it also had great social reach (as you
might expect). That video alone (part of a larger campaign) showed 1,941 offline
customers were reached during that time...but there are 58,139 views (to date)
of the video on Youtube. (The main campaign video has 1,661,042 views.)
So â what are the final takeaways?
Well, to "do mobile" right:
Make it a core technology
Keep the user at the center
Ask yourself: "How can I use mobile technology to anticipate and fulfill my
users' needs?"
You might be thinking, "surely these are all just marketing principles,
though". Well that's TRUE.
Because mobile isn't separate anymore. In some ways, it's just another
"browser", and we need to test and optimize and create content for it just as we
would for any other browser. This won't be easy, but it will be worth it. So
let's buckle up and enjoy the ride!
----
How do you think we should be approaching the rise of mobile technology in
2014? I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
Here are the slides from the presentation this blog post was based on:
So You Have a Mobile Friendly Website ... What Now? from Bridget Randolph
If you'd like to watch the presentation video (for free!), head on over to our
video store page using this link: http://dis.tl/1hqEyd3. With a free account
(just a username and password), you'll get free access to the video to download
and stream at your hearts content.
If you enjoyed this post and the presentation video, you might also be
interested in our upcoming SearchLove conference in Bostonâparticularly in
the session by Adam Melson, titled "Listening to Your Customersâ Wants to
Achieve Their Needs." It's happening Apr 7-8 at the Joseph B Martin Conference
Center. We'd love to see you there!
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Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Monday 31 March 2014
Friday 28 March 2014
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'Surviving the SEO Slog -
Whiteboard Friday'
Posted by randfish
Working to ingrain SEO best practices in a company can take several months,
and can involve a lengthy period of diminishing returns that we sometimes call
the "SEO slog." To make things worse, our clients and colleagues often expect a
consistent improvement. The difference between those expectations and the
reality is what Rand tackles in today's Whiteboard Friday, offering you four
ways to minimize what he calls the "delta of dissatisfaction." Credit to Scott
Clark at BuzzMaven for the concept (see his original post here).
Surviving the SEO Slog - Whiteboard Friday
For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!
I also made a graphic version of the SEO Slog below (feel free to re-use):
Video transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today
I'm going to talk a little bit about the SEO slog. This is that really tough
experience that many, many SEOs go through where, essentially, you're putting a
lot of effort into improving your rankings, improving your content, improving
your keyword targeting, earning those links and mentions and social signals,
user and usage data things, all the things that are going to help you perform on
search engines, but you're not seeing results. Virtually everyone who's in the
field has experienced this over the course of their career.
It happens because, a lot of the time, Google has got many, many triggers in
their ranking systems to kind of check whether effort is worthy enough, or
signals are organic and ongoing enough, to earn the site continued rankings, or
whether there should be some sort of consideration and then evaluation and delay
between when the effort is put in and things are improved and when results
actually happen.
This is insidiously frustrating for lots of folks in the field. By the way,
Google isn't the only one responsible. Many times what happens is that SEOs make
recommendations for organizations or inside their own organizations. They work
with their marketing and their engineering teams to try and get things done, and
it just takes a long time. It takes a long time to see the results of those.
So I actually really appreciated Scott Clark from BuzzMaven in Lexington. You
can follow him on Twitter on @scottclark. Scott described this very eloquently.
I like the graphic that he put together about the SEO slog. His blog post, by
the way, was called "Thriving In the SEO Slog," and he talked to a number of
industry leaders, particularly those from consulting firms, about this process.
He had a chart very similar to the one that I'm going to show you here.
Essentially, we have on the side here, effort. So a little bit of effort down
on the bottom. Lots of effort and then a ton of effort right up on the top.
Then, sort of month one through six, as you're starting those SEO efforts and
campaigns. This can happen on an entire website level, but this can also happen
on a particular subsection of a website, or a new group of keywords, or a new
set of content that you're targeting.
What frequently happens is you see what's needed to see return on investment,
to see those improvements over time, versus what the expectations are, which
I've got in purple versus orange, kind of diverge. So at the start, what's
needed, a lot of the time at the very start of an SEO campaign, especially if
previous best practices haven't been employed, it's actually really minimal to
start seeing a positive return on investment. But, over time, that effort ramps
up a ton. You've got to do an incredible amount just to see a continued return
on investment over those first few months, and there's a delay between the
effort that you put in here and when you're seeing results towards the latter
few months of a campaign.
Unfortunately, expectations are the opposite. A lot of clients, managers,
teams, the people in your startup with you, the other folks that are in your
consulting group, your client, all of these folks are expecting to see that
effort is a little bit higher at the start, and then you kind of get the ball
rolling and it goes down. That actually is true. The problem is it takes a long
time to get that ball rolling. So what I usually see, what most of us in the
industry see is that that effort ramps up tremendously in those first few
months, and then over time it does go down a little bit. Maintaining those
ongoing best practices is a little bit easier.
But this, right here, the difference between expectations and reality, that's
what I call the delta of dissatisfaction. People just get really frustrated
around this.
There are a few good mitigation strategies, and some of these were mentioned,
actually, by the experts that Scott Clark talked to in his post. The first one,
the one that nearly every consultant mentioned, and I think is very smart, is to
create the right expectations.
If you go into a client meeting, or you sit down with your marketing team, or
you're talking to your CEO about what you can and can't accomplish, if you
create the expectation that SEO is going to be this not necessarily silver
bullet, but that you will make these investments and because things are done so
badly today and the company you used to work for or the other websites that
you've worked on had such success when you implemented these best practices,
that you feel confident you can increase their rankings and their traffic and
the acquisition of customers dramatically.
The problem gets created right then and there, because in the SEO world, for
the last decade, for some reason people have held these two beliefs about SEO.
Number one, that it's a one-time activity, which is just dead wrong as all of
you who are watching know. Number two is that once you optimize for the search
engines, you are now optimal, and that means you don't require additional
ongoing effort, and the search engines will reward your efforts once they see
them. Since Google's crawling us so fast, well, we must get that benefit
immediately.
Neither of these are the case. So creating the right expectations up front
can work wonders. In fact, if you want to go ahead and make this chart and put
it right in your presentations, as you're showing the team, here's what needs to
be fixed. Here's what we need to do. Here's what I think we can accomplish. But,
by the way, you're going to think this can happen a lot faster than it can
happen. If you tell them that up front, you're creating those right
expectations.
Number two, when things are going well, that's a dangerous time, a very
dangerous time. I urge folks not to just sort of celebrate and then create new
projections, like, "Hey, well, we accomplished X. Y is certainly going to
happen, and Y is going to be 2X, and 3X and 4X in six months and seven months
and eight months." Always create both a contingency plan, in case that traffic
increase is temporary, and a conservative budget.
So I actually really like making budgets around traffic, around performance
here at Moz, and in general that contain a best-case scenario and also a "and
here's what we'll spend before we know whether this is the truth." If you don't,
you can end up very, very sad.
Number three, make sure SEO isn't your only inbound traffic channel, and it's
not the only inbound marketing effort that you're working on. If you're doing
social media marketing and content marketing, you're building an email list, and
you're doing branding and PR and outreach and connecting with your industry,
you're speaking at events, you're doing paid forms of advertising as well,
great. Now you've got some mitigation. Now you aren't solely relying on SEO to
provide all of the returns, and, thus, you can handle being off budget. If
Google is 70% of your traffic and you miss by 10%, that's huge. If Google is 20%
of your traffic and you miss by 10%, oh, it's not so bad. It's only 2% off
budget.
Number four, the last thing I'll recommend here is that you measure and
report leading indicators. By leading indicators, I mean not just the pages that
are receiving traffic, but also things like link signals, rankings for long-tail
stuff, looking at social shares, these leading indicators, these things that
tend to, over time, correlate as rankings catch up to how your performance is
going. By reporting on that kind of stuff, higher engagement on pages, those
leading indicators will give you a sense of how things might be going two,
three, four, five, six months from now with your search traffic and your
rankings. That can be extremely helpful.
All right, everyone. Hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard
Friday,and we'll see you again next week. Take care.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/LB7PZB_SNPg/surviving-the-seo-slog-whiteboard-friday
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
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Build Great Backlinks
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Whiteboard Friday'
Posted by randfish
Working to ingrain SEO best practices in a company can take several months,
and can involve a lengthy period of diminishing returns that we sometimes call
the "SEO slog." To make things worse, our clients and colleagues often expect a
consistent improvement. The difference between those expectations and the
reality is what Rand tackles in today's Whiteboard Friday, offering you four
ways to minimize what he calls the "delta of dissatisfaction." Credit to Scott
Clark at BuzzMaven for the concept (see his original post here).
Surviving the SEO Slog - Whiteboard Friday
For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!
I also made a graphic version of the SEO Slog below (feel free to re-use):
Video transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today
I'm going to talk a little bit about the SEO slog. This is that really tough
experience that many, many SEOs go through where, essentially, you're putting a
lot of effort into improving your rankings, improving your content, improving
your keyword targeting, earning those links and mentions and social signals,
user and usage data things, all the things that are going to help you perform on
search engines, but you're not seeing results. Virtually everyone who's in the
field has experienced this over the course of their career.
It happens because, a lot of the time, Google has got many, many triggers in
their ranking systems to kind of check whether effort is worthy enough, or
signals are organic and ongoing enough, to earn the site continued rankings, or
whether there should be some sort of consideration and then evaluation and delay
between when the effort is put in and things are improved and when results
actually happen.
This is insidiously frustrating for lots of folks in the field. By the way,
Google isn't the only one responsible. Many times what happens is that SEOs make
recommendations for organizations or inside their own organizations. They work
with their marketing and their engineering teams to try and get things done, and
it just takes a long time. It takes a long time to see the results of those.
So I actually really appreciated Scott Clark from BuzzMaven in Lexington. You
can follow him on Twitter on @scottclark. Scott described this very eloquently.
I like the graphic that he put together about the SEO slog. His blog post, by
the way, was called "Thriving In the SEO Slog," and he talked to a number of
industry leaders, particularly those from consulting firms, about this process.
He had a chart very similar to the one that I'm going to show you here.
Essentially, we have on the side here, effort. So a little bit of effort down
on the bottom. Lots of effort and then a ton of effort right up on the top.
Then, sort of month one through six, as you're starting those SEO efforts and
campaigns. This can happen on an entire website level, but this can also happen
on a particular subsection of a website, or a new group of keywords, or a new
set of content that you're targeting.
What frequently happens is you see what's needed to see return on investment,
to see those improvements over time, versus what the expectations are, which
I've got in purple versus orange, kind of diverge. So at the start, what's
needed, a lot of the time at the very start of an SEO campaign, especially if
previous best practices haven't been employed, it's actually really minimal to
start seeing a positive return on investment. But, over time, that effort ramps
up a ton. You've got to do an incredible amount just to see a continued return
on investment over those first few months, and there's a delay between the
effort that you put in here and when you're seeing results towards the latter
few months of a campaign.
Unfortunately, expectations are the opposite. A lot of clients, managers,
teams, the people in your startup with you, the other folks that are in your
consulting group, your client, all of these folks are expecting to see that
effort is a little bit higher at the start, and then you kind of get the ball
rolling and it goes down. That actually is true. The problem is it takes a long
time to get that ball rolling. So what I usually see, what most of us in the
industry see is that that effort ramps up tremendously in those first few
months, and then over time it does go down a little bit. Maintaining those
ongoing best practices is a little bit easier.
But this, right here, the difference between expectations and reality, that's
what I call the delta of dissatisfaction. People just get really frustrated
around this.
There are a few good mitigation strategies, and some of these were mentioned,
actually, by the experts that Scott Clark talked to in his post. The first one,
the one that nearly every consultant mentioned, and I think is very smart, is to
create the right expectations.
If you go into a client meeting, or you sit down with your marketing team, or
you're talking to your CEO about what you can and can't accomplish, if you
create the expectation that SEO is going to be this not necessarily silver
bullet, but that you will make these investments and because things are done so
badly today and the company you used to work for or the other websites that
you've worked on had such success when you implemented these best practices,
that you feel confident you can increase their rankings and their traffic and
the acquisition of customers dramatically.
The problem gets created right then and there, because in the SEO world, for
the last decade, for some reason people have held these two beliefs about SEO.
Number one, that it's a one-time activity, which is just dead wrong as all of
you who are watching know. Number two is that once you optimize for the search
engines, you are now optimal, and that means you don't require additional
ongoing effort, and the search engines will reward your efforts once they see
them. Since Google's crawling us so fast, well, we must get that benefit
immediately.
Neither of these are the case. So creating the right expectations up front
can work wonders. In fact, if you want to go ahead and make this chart and put
it right in your presentations, as you're showing the team, here's what needs to
be fixed. Here's what we need to do. Here's what I think we can accomplish. But,
by the way, you're going to think this can happen a lot faster than it can
happen. If you tell them that up front, you're creating those right
expectations.
Number two, when things are going well, that's a dangerous time, a very
dangerous time. I urge folks not to just sort of celebrate and then create new
projections, like, "Hey, well, we accomplished X. Y is certainly going to
happen, and Y is going to be 2X, and 3X and 4X in six months and seven months
and eight months." Always create both a contingency plan, in case that traffic
increase is temporary, and a conservative budget.
So I actually really like making budgets around traffic, around performance
here at Moz, and in general that contain a best-case scenario and also a "and
here's what we'll spend before we know whether this is the truth." If you don't,
you can end up very, very sad.
Number three, make sure SEO isn't your only inbound traffic channel, and it's
not the only inbound marketing effort that you're working on. If you're doing
social media marketing and content marketing, you're building an email list, and
you're doing branding and PR and outreach and connecting with your industry,
you're speaking at events, you're doing paid forms of advertising as well,
great. Now you've got some mitigation. Now you aren't solely relying on SEO to
provide all of the returns, and, thus, you can handle being off budget. If
Google is 70% of your traffic and you miss by 10%, that's huge. If Google is 20%
of your traffic and you miss by 10%, oh, it's not so bad. It's only 2% off
budget.
Number four, the last thing I'll recommend here is that you measure and
report leading indicators. By leading indicators, I mean not just the pages that
are receiving traffic, but also things like link signals, rankings for long-tail
stuff, looking at social shares, these leading indicators, these things that
tend to, over time, correlate as rankings catch up to how your performance is
going. By reporting on that kind of stuff, higher engagement on pages, those
leading indicators will give you a sense of how things might be going two,
three, four, five, six months from now with your search traffic and your
rankings. That can be extremely helpful.
All right, everyone. Hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard
Friday,and we'll see you again next week. Take care.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/LB7PZB_SNPg/surviving-the-seo-slog-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 27 March 2014
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'After a Link-Based Penalty is
Removed, Will Your Traffic Increase?'
Posted by MarieHaynes
Are you familiar with the feeling of dread that comes with seeing this message
in Webmaster Tools?
Or perhaps, you haven't received a message, but have seen something like this
in your analytics:
If you've received a traffic drop because of a link-based Google penalty, the
results can be devastating. There are many articles written on what steps can be
taken to recover, but not many on what to expect once you have done the work to
get out of the penalty. Will your traffic increase suddenly? Will you see any
increase at all? Will you see a decrease in traffic because you have disavowed
links?
If you are looking for good information on understanding these penalties and
how to do the work to remove them, here are some good articles:
The Difference Between Penguin and an Unnatural Links Penalty
Lifting a Manual Penalty Given by Google
Penguins, Pandas and Panic at the Zoo
How WMPU Recovered from the Penguin Update
The remainder of this article will talk about what outcome you can expect if
you are dealing with one of the following scenarios:
1. Removal of a partial manual action penalty
2. Removal of a sitewide manual action penalty
3. Escaping the Penguin algorithm
1. Removal of a partial manual action penalty
To determine whether or not you have a partial action penalty, go to Webmaster
Tools â Search Traffic â Manual Actions and you should see the
following:
The message from the screenshot reads:
Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or
manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. Some links may be outside of
the webmaster's control, so for this incident we are taking targeted action on
the unnatural links instead of on the site's ranking as a whole.
Usually, when you receive a partial action warning you will get the following
message in your Webmaster Tools:
Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected unnatural links to
http://www.example.com
Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.example.com,
We've detected that some of your site's pages may be using techniques that are
outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your
site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural
linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link
schemes.
We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality
guidelines. Once you've made these changes, please submit your site for
reconsideration in Google's search results.
If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or
remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request.
If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our
Webmaster Help Forum for support.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team
Occasionally, you will get a more cryptic message such as the following:
We've detected that some of the links pointing to your site are using
techniques outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
We don't want to put any trust in links that are unnatural or artificial, and
we recommend removing any unnatural links to your site. However, we do realize
that some links may be outside of your control. As a result, for this specific
incident we are taking very targeted action to reduce trust in the unnatural
links. If you are able to remove any of the links, you can submit a
reconsideration request, including the actions that you took.
If you have any questions, please visit our Webmaster Help Forum.
I have noticed that most sites that receive the "cryptic" message usually end
up losing rankings. And, in many cases, the sites were affected by the next
Penguin update. I would recommend that if you have a partial action, no matter
what message you received, you need to take steps to remove the warning. There
may be a few exceptions; if the manual spam action viewer tells you that a
particular page of your site is affected, it is possible that only that page of
your site has been demoted. An example would be if you were running a news site
and had published a story that was beneficial to a particular business. If that
business had built unnatural links to that page on your site in an effort to get
that page to rank higher, this could cause a warning for just that one page. If
this is the case, then you may not need to do anything as only that page is
likely affected and not your whole site.
In my opinion, for the vast majority of sites that have a partial action
message, it is vitally important for you to take the proper steps to get the
penalty removed.
In order to remove these penalties, a very thorough backlink audit must be
done. I have found that it is not enough to just address the worst of the links,
or even the most recently obtained unnatural links. Once you have gone under the
microscope of manual review, Google wants to see that you have made attempts to
remove almost every single manipulative link that was made in the past.
Success: Manual spam action revoked! Now what?
You've done the cleanup, and achieved success! The joy of seeing a manual spam
action revoked message never gets old for me. This message is usually the end
result of many weeks (or often months) of hard work. I love the emails that I
get from relieved site owners after they have seen this message. Invariably, one
of the next questions asked is, "When will I see my rankings improve?" This
question can make my heart drop because quite often, after a partial action
warning is removed, not much changes. I am always careful to explain this to
site owners when I first take them on as clients, but it seems that many of
them, despite my warnings, are still expecting to see a return to top rankings
once their penalty is lifted. Now, don't get me wrong; some sites do show
improvement, as I will show you soon. But with a partial action the improvement
is rarely drastic.
There are three types of traffic patterns that I tend to see once a partial
action warning has been removed:
Outcome #1 (most common): No improvement
Unfortunately, for many sites that have a partial action revoked, here is what
I usually see in their analytics data:
It is heartbreaking for a small business owner to go through months of work
evaluating and removing backlinks that they had paid for a well-known SEO
company to create, get their penalty revoked, and then see absolutely no
improvement.
Why would there be no improvement after a partial manual action is revoked?
For many sites, the only reason why they were ranking well before their penalty
was because of the power of unnatural links. In most cases, these businesses
have paid an SEO company to improve their rankings. Often, the SEO company has
stated that their techniques all fall within the Google Quality Guidelines, and
so the site owners are happy to see the great results and have no idea that a
penalty could happen. (I wrote about this type of problem about 18 months ago.
Many said that I was wrongly criticizing SEOs and that my article should have
been targeted only at cheap overseas link builders, but I have seen many sites
that were penalized after hiring well-known, reputable SEO companies that used
low-quality methods to obtain links on a large scale.)
For the site whose analytics chart is shown above, the rankings were primarily
gained through submissions to low-quality directories, bookmarks, and article
syndication. Once the penalty was given, Google stopped counting the PageRank
that was formerly received from these links. The resulting drop in link equity
resulted in a decrease in rankings. But, the work that was done to remove the
partial action warning, did not do anything to replace that lost link equity.
When those links were removed (or disavowed) there were very few links left to
support rankings. For many sites that have a partial action warning, the result,
once the spam action is revoked is that nothing changes.
So, why would a site even go through the trouble to get the penalty removed?
Are they doomed no matter what? No! It is certainly possible for a site to see
improvement some time later. For example, if a site escapes Penguin (because the
work that was done to get rid of the partial match action is the same work that
needs to be done to escape Penguin), or if a site starts to gain natural links
(either through good SEO efforts or naturally), then improvements can happen.
Those improvements would not have happened if the work was not done to escape
the manual action. I sometimes look at a partial match warning as a bit of a
blessing. Most sites that get demoted by the Penguin algorithm have no way of
knowing whether or not they have done the work necessary to be released from the
jaws of Penguin. But, if you have done the work required to get rid of a partial
match penalty, then you likely know that you have done enough to escape Penguin
as well.
Although many sites see no immediate improvement once their partial match
warning is lifted, there are some sites who do see an immediate improvement.
Outcome #2: Some improvement, but not a complete recovery
This can happen when the manual action is just affecting certain keywords.
But, unfortunately, in my experience, there is no real way of knowing whether
just certain keywords are being penalized or whether the penalty is on the whole
site.
An example of a situation where a site would be penalized just for certain
keywords would be if you had widespread publication of a widget in which you
linked back to your site using keyword anchor text. If you have used the anchor
text, "Widget provided by pretty green dresses," there is a possibility that
Google has given you a keyword penalty for "pretty green dresses." Once the
penalty is lifted, provided that your site has enough natural links and
relevance to support rankings for "pretty green dresses," then you may see some
improvement that happens within days of getting the penalty lifted.
Here is a quote from Matt Cutts where he describes how Google could penalize a
site on a keyword level:
Here is an example of a site that had been penalized for a particular set of
keywords and saw a slight increase in rankings once their partial action was
lifted:
The site had been penalized for some main keywords. Once the penalty was
lifted, some of those keywords started to see a return to first-page rankings
(but only to the bottom of the first page rather than their former #1 rankings,
which is why the recovery is not more dramatic).
In some cases, if a site has been penalized for just certain keywords,
recovery from a partial action can be close to 100% if the site has a really
good base of natural links, but in my experience this does not happen often.
Outcome #3: No immediate recovery, but improvement happens once Penguin
refreshes
A site usually cannot escape from Penguin until Google refreshes the Penguin
algorithm. For sites that see no improvement (or only a small improvement) when
their manual penalty is lifted, it is very possible that there will be further
improvement the next time that Penguin refreshes. For the two analytics charts
shown above, these sites have not seen a Penguin refresh since their penalty was
lifted. (The last refresh at the time of writing this article was October 5,
2013 and both of those sites had penalties lifted later on in October.) I
suspect that once Google refreshes Penguin, these sites will see some
improvement. See the section below on Penguin recovery for more information on
what to expect when a Penguin hit site escapes the Penguin algorithm.
2. Removal of a sitewide manual action penalty
If you have a sitewide penalty, you will see something like this in your
manual actions viewer in Webmaster Tools:
In this case, a yellow alert tells you that "This site may not perform as well
in Google results because it appears to be in violation of Google's Webmaster
Guidelines." Google then adds the following message with a bit more detail:
Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or
manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. These may be the result of
buying links that pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.
In most cases, a site with a sitewide manual action will not be ranking in
Google for their brand terms, and quite often, even a search for their url will
fail to show the site. This type of penalty is devastating. Usually this penalty
comes as a result of very obvious manipulation of the search engine results.
Every site that I have worked on that had a sitewide penalty had been involved
in a variety of link schemes including purchasing links, creating large numbers
of interlinked microsites or very widespread creation of spammy backlinks.
The steps that need to be taken to remove a sitewide penalty are exactly the
same as you would take for a partial match penalty, but the results are usually
more rewarding. Once a sitewide penalty is removed, there is almost always an
increase in traffic, although often it is just for brand terms.
Here is a site that showed a significant improvement once their sitewide
penalty was removed:
It looks impressive, doesn't it? Within a couple of days of getting their
penalty removed, the site started to rank extremely well again for brand terms.
Traffic increased dramatically almost overnight. However, did you notice that I
didn't show you the whole picture? Unfortunately, I don't have a screenshot that
shows the traffic prior to getting penalized. This site previously was getting
several times this amount of traffic. When the sitewide penalty was lifted, the
branded traffic increased, but the site did not regain most of their non-branded
keyword rankings as those were primarily propped up on the power of links that
Google is no longer counting.
While some sites only see a return for brand terms after a sitewide penalty is
revoked, we have seen a number of sites that have had very dramatic improvements
across the board. Here is a site that was hit severely with a sitewide penalty.
Within 24 hours of receiving notification that their manual spam action was
revoked, they began ranking well for brand terms. A few days later, the majority
of their keyword rankings returned as well:
When a sitewide penalty is removed, in my experience, it usually takes 24-48
hours for brand terms to start ranking highly again. However, sometimes there
can be a very painful tumultuous week where rankings come and go and may change
depending on which data center you are seeing your Google results. We have one
client right now for whom we successfully removed their sitewide penalty a few
days ago. Within two days, we could see them ranking #1 for their URL, but brand
terms were nowhere to be seen. However, the client could not see the #1 URL
ranking. (And no, personalized search was not an issue.) The following day, the
rankings were gone on our searches in the morning and then we could see the URL
and brand terms raking again by the afternoon. Those rankings are still visible
to us. But, the changes took a few extra days to be visible to our client who is
in a different hemisphere and is likely seeing results from a different Google
data center. If you have received notice that your sitewide penalty has been
revoked, then please know that it can take a week (or possibly longer) for the
Google results to fully show that your site is no longer being penalized.
On a similar note, in regards to both sitewide and partial actions, if you
have received a message saying that your penalty has been revoked, but your
manual spam actions tool is still showing a penalty, don't worry, it will lift.
It can sometimes take up to a week for the manual spam actions tool to show "no
manual actions".
3. Penguin recovery
There are not many published cases of Penguin recovery. Escaping Penguin is
certainly possibleâwe have seen it! But, it is not easy. The work that
needs to be done is very similar to what needs to be done to recover from a
manual unnatural links penalty. Start with identifying the links that were made
with the intentions of manipulating the search engine results. Then, disavow
those links. It is debatable whether or not you need to remove links in order to
escape Penguin or whether disavowing is enough. If you control the source of the
links and can easily remove them, then definitely remove them. But, contacting
site owners and keeping a record of your work will not likely make a difference
for an algorithmic issue like Penguin, as no webspam team member is going to be
checking your work. Some would argue that it is good to do so in case you ever
do get manually reviewed, but my personal recommendation at this time is to
remove unnatural links that you control, and then disavow the rest. Make sure
you disavow them on the domain level.
It's also important to note that Penguin is not completely about links. You
will also want to clean up on site issues such as keyword stuffing as well.
To escape Penguin, you will need to wait until Google refreshes the Penguin
algorithm. And, in some cases, you might even need to wait for two refreshes. In
this webmaster central hangout, at the 38 minute mark, John Mueller explains
that in order to completely recover from Penguin, the links in your disavow file
have to all be recrawled and the algorithm has to refresh, and in some cases
that whole process can take six to 12 months to be fully completed. Penguin does
not refresh on a regular basis; it can sometimes be six months in between
refreshes. The last announced refresh was October 4, 2013. (Some believe that
there are occasionally unannounced refreshes, but I'm not sure if I agree.)
So, let's assume that you have done a thorough backlink audit, removed links
where possible, disavowed the vast majority of your unnatural links, cleaned up
any spammy on-site issues, and Penguin has refreshed. Now what? Will you see an
increase in traffic?
The answer to this depends on what remains once you have done the cleanup.
If you have very few truly natural links, then you likely will not see much
improvement once Penguin refreshes. Here is the analytics data from a site that
was affected by the initial rollout of Penguin. The site owner did a thorough
link cleanup and disavow, but unfortunately did not see any improvement when
Penguin refreshed.
The reason for this is most likely that the site was only ranking previously
because of the power of unnatural links. In order to see improvement, they are
going to have to be able to attract some good links and in some niches that is
no easy feat. Gone are the days where a small site can outrank the big brands
simply because an SEO was able to build thousands of keyword anchored links. In
order to rank well these days you truly need to have an exceptional site that
can rank on its own merit and not only because of SEO tricks. A good SEO will
work on ways to improve the entire user experience and promote the site properly
so that it can gain natural links and not just focus on a "quantity" over
"quality" type of linkbuilding campaign.
If you do have a site with a good base of links beneath the unnatural ones,
then it is possible to see some improvement once Penguin refreshes. The Penguin
algorithm is Google's way of saying, "We don't trust this site because they have
a history of cheating to get good rankings in the past." If the Penguin
algorithm is viewing your site unfavorably, then even your good links do not
help you much. But, if you can clean up the signals that caused Penguin to
dislike you, then, when Penguin refreshes, your good links regain their power.
Here is a site that had a decent base of links underneath a large number of
unnatural links. They were hit by Penguin on April 24, 2012. They eventually did
a thorough cleanup, and on October 4, 2013, it appears that they escaped the
algorithm:
In my experience, when a site recovers from Penguin, this type of pattern is
usually what we see. It makes sense that the site would not bounce back to its
original rankings as some of those rankings were propped up by links that are
now recognized as unnatural. It looks like this site was able to attract some
new links but those links had only a small effect until Penguin refreshed and
recognized that the site had now reformed. Now, as this site gains new natural
links, it should continue to improve.
Here is another site that worked extremely hard to clean things up, and was
rewarded on the October 4, 2013 Penguin refresh. This site has an excellent base
of natural links and continues to gain links on a regular basis. They made the
mistake of buying links in the past and those purchased links along with some
low quality directory and bookmark links caused the Penguin algorithm to put the
site in a bad light. Doing a thorough cleanup of the unnatural links allowed the
site to escape Penguin. And now, their new links that have accumulated since
April of 2012 are able to really help the site.
Full Penguin recoveries like this are not common. You will read many articles
of people telling you what you need to do to recover, but I believe that there
are few SEOs out there who are consistently recovering Penguin-hit sites. In my
experience, unless you have a good site that can attract links on its own,
recovery from Penguin is going to be difficult.
As a side note, we have seen sites recover when Penguin refreshed two weeks
after filing a disavow, so it doesn't always have to take as long as six months
to a year to see improvement. But, if you have a good site with good links and
you have done a thorough cleanup, but you are still seeing dismal rankings,
unfortunately you may need to be patient and ride through a couple of Penguin
refreshes before you can tell if things are going to improve. I really wish that
Google would allow site owners have some sort of indication as to whether or not
their site is currently being devalued by Penguin. I can understand that one of
the reasons that they don't do this is because this would help spammers to
determine what is and isn't effective. But, it is extremely frustrating for site
owners whose livelihood depends on business coming from their website and don't
know whether they need to do more clean up or not.
A few added thoughts
Many people believe that once a site has been penalized, it will always be
penalized in Google's eyes. According to John Mueller of Google, this is not
true. In this hangout, John says, "If you've had a manual action on your website
and that's been revoked, then essentially there's no bad history attached to
your site. It's not harder to rank anymoreâ.It's not the case that there
is any kind of a grudge that our algorithms would hold against a site that has
had a manual action."
You may have noticed that I have not shown any examples where rankings dropped
after a penalty was removed. Many people are concerned that filing a disavow
file will cause your site to drop even lower in rankings. The truth is that any
link that is worthy of being disavowed has likely already been discounted by
Google. We have yet to see a site that had its ranking decrease after filing a
disavow file. In theory, this is possible, if you are disavowing truly natural
links. But, even when we have sites where we have had to disavow a large number
of links from authoritative sites (because of things like wide-scale
keyword-anchored guest posting or paid infographic placement), rankings did not
decrease.
Hopefully this article has helped to explain what you can expect once your
link-based penalty has been removed. It's rarely an easy process to recover from
a manual or algorithmic devaluing, but it certainly can be done.
I should also note that the scenarios described above depict my experiences
over the last couple of years of doing penalty removal work. It is certainly
possible that other outcomes can happen. If you have seen something different,
please do leave a comment!
Have a question? Leave a comment and I am happy to see if I can help.
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Removed, Will Your Traffic Increase?'
Posted by MarieHaynes
Are you familiar with the feeling of dread that comes with seeing this message
in Webmaster Tools?
Or perhaps, you haven't received a message, but have seen something like this
in your analytics:
If you've received a traffic drop because of a link-based Google penalty, the
results can be devastating. There are many articles written on what steps can be
taken to recover, but not many on what to expect once you have done the work to
get out of the penalty. Will your traffic increase suddenly? Will you see any
increase at all? Will you see a decrease in traffic because you have disavowed
links?
If you are looking for good information on understanding these penalties and
how to do the work to remove them, here are some good articles:
The Difference Between Penguin and an Unnatural Links Penalty
Lifting a Manual Penalty Given by Google
Penguins, Pandas and Panic at the Zoo
How WMPU Recovered from the Penguin Update
The remainder of this article will talk about what outcome you can expect if
you are dealing with one of the following scenarios:
1. Removal of a partial manual action penalty
2. Removal of a sitewide manual action penalty
3. Escaping the Penguin algorithm
1. Removal of a partial manual action penalty
To determine whether or not you have a partial action penalty, go to Webmaster
Tools â Search Traffic â Manual Actions and you should see the
following:
The message from the screenshot reads:
Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or
manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. Some links may be outside of
the webmaster's control, so for this incident we are taking targeted action on
the unnatural links instead of on the site's ranking as a whole.
Usually, when you receive a partial action warning you will get the following
message in your Webmaster Tools:
Google Webmaster Tools notice of detected unnatural links to
http://www.example.com
Dear site owner or webmaster of http://www.example.com,
We've detected that some of your site's pages may be using techniques that are
outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your
site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural
linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link
schemes.
We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality
guidelines. Once you've made these changes, please submit your site for
reconsideration in Google's search results.
If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or
remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request.
If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our
Webmaster Help Forum for support.
Sincerely,
Google Search Quality Team
Occasionally, you will get a more cryptic message such as the following:
We've detected that some of the links pointing to your site are using
techniques outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
We don't want to put any trust in links that are unnatural or artificial, and
we recommend removing any unnatural links to your site. However, we do realize
that some links may be outside of your control. As a result, for this specific
incident we are taking very targeted action to reduce trust in the unnatural
links. If you are able to remove any of the links, you can submit a
reconsideration request, including the actions that you took.
If you have any questions, please visit our Webmaster Help Forum.
I have noticed that most sites that receive the "cryptic" message usually end
up losing rankings. And, in many cases, the sites were affected by the next
Penguin update. I would recommend that if you have a partial action, no matter
what message you received, you need to take steps to remove the warning. There
may be a few exceptions; if the manual spam action viewer tells you that a
particular page of your site is affected, it is possible that only that page of
your site has been demoted. An example would be if you were running a news site
and had published a story that was beneficial to a particular business. If that
business had built unnatural links to that page on your site in an effort to get
that page to rank higher, this could cause a warning for just that one page. If
this is the case, then you may not need to do anything as only that page is
likely affected and not your whole site.
In my opinion, for the vast majority of sites that have a partial action
message, it is vitally important for you to take the proper steps to get the
penalty removed.
In order to remove these penalties, a very thorough backlink audit must be
done. I have found that it is not enough to just address the worst of the links,
or even the most recently obtained unnatural links. Once you have gone under the
microscope of manual review, Google wants to see that you have made attempts to
remove almost every single manipulative link that was made in the past.
Success: Manual spam action revoked! Now what?
You've done the cleanup, and achieved success! The joy of seeing a manual spam
action revoked message never gets old for me. This message is usually the end
result of many weeks (or often months) of hard work. I love the emails that I
get from relieved site owners after they have seen this message. Invariably, one
of the next questions asked is, "When will I see my rankings improve?" This
question can make my heart drop because quite often, after a partial action
warning is removed, not much changes. I am always careful to explain this to
site owners when I first take them on as clients, but it seems that many of
them, despite my warnings, are still expecting to see a return to top rankings
once their penalty is lifted. Now, don't get me wrong; some sites do show
improvement, as I will show you soon. But with a partial action the improvement
is rarely drastic.
There are three types of traffic patterns that I tend to see once a partial
action warning has been removed:
Outcome #1 (most common): No improvement
Unfortunately, for many sites that have a partial action revoked, here is what
I usually see in their analytics data:
It is heartbreaking for a small business owner to go through months of work
evaluating and removing backlinks that they had paid for a well-known SEO
company to create, get their penalty revoked, and then see absolutely no
improvement.
Why would there be no improvement after a partial manual action is revoked?
For many sites, the only reason why they were ranking well before their penalty
was because of the power of unnatural links. In most cases, these businesses
have paid an SEO company to improve their rankings. Often, the SEO company has
stated that their techniques all fall within the Google Quality Guidelines, and
so the site owners are happy to see the great results and have no idea that a
penalty could happen. (I wrote about this type of problem about 18 months ago.
Many said that I was wrongly criticizing SEOs and that my article should have
been targeted only at cheap overseas link builders, but I have seen many sites
that were penalized after hiring well-known, reputable SEO companies that used
low-quality methods to obtain links on a large scale.)
For the site whose analytics chart is shown above, the rankings were primarily
gained through submissions to low-quality directories, bookmarks, and article
syndication. Once the penalty was given, Google stopped counting the PageRank
that was formerly received from these links. The resulting drop in link equity
resulted in a decrease in rankings. But, the work that was done to remove the
partial action warning, did not do anything to replace that lost link equity.
When those links were removed (or disavowed) there were very few links left to
support rankings. For many sites that have a partial action warning, the result,
once the spam action is revoked is that nothing changes.
So, why would a site even go through the trouble to get the penalty removed?
Are they doomed no matter what? No! It is certainly possible for a site to see
improvement some time later. For example, if a site escapes Penguin (because the
work that was done to get rid of the partial match action is the same work that
needs to be done to escape Penguin), or if a site starts to gain natural links
(either through good SEO efforts or naturally), then improvements can happen.
Those improvements would not have happened if the work was not done to escape
the manual action. I sometimes look at a partial match warning as a bit of a
blessing. Most sites that get demoted by the Penguin algorithm have no way of
knowing whether or not they have done the work necessary to be released from the
jaws of Penguin. But, if you have done the work required to get rid of a partial
match penalty, then you likely know that you have done enough to escape Penguin
as well.
Although many sites see no immediate improvement once their partial match
warning is lifted, there are some sites who do see an immediate improvement.
Outcome #2: Some improvement, but not a complete recovery
This can happen when the manual action is just affecting certain keywords.
But, unfortunately, in my experience, there is no real way of knowing whether
just certain keywords are being penalized or whether the penalty is on the whole
site.
An example of a situation where a site would be penalized just for certain
keywords would be if you had widespread publication of a widget in which you
linked back to your site using keyword anchor text. If you have used the anchor
text, "Widget provided by pretty green dresses," there is a possibility that
Google has given you a keyword penalty for "pretty green dresses." Once the
penalty is lifted, provided that your site has enough natural links and
relevance to support rankings for "pretty green dresses," then you may see some
improvement that happens within days of getting the penalty lifted.
Here is a quote from Matt Cutts where he describes how Google could penalize a
site on a keyword level:
Here is an example of a site that had been penalized for a particular set of
keywords and saw a slight increase in rankings once their partial action was
lifted:
The site had been penalized for some main keywords. Once the penalty was
lifted, some of those keywords started to see a return to first-page rankings
(but only to the bottom of the first page rather than their former #1 rankings,
which is why the recovery is not more dramatic).
In some cases, if a site has been penalized for just certain keywords,
recovery from a partial action can be close to 100% if the site has a really
good base of natural links, but in my experience this does not happen often.
Outcome #3: No immediate recovery, but improvement happens once Penguin
refreshes
A site usually cannot escape from Penguin until Google refreshes the Penguin
algorithm. For sites that see no improvement (or only a small improvement) when
their manual penalty is lifted, it is very possible that there will be further
improvement the next time that Penguin refreshes. For the two analytics charts
shown above, these sites have not seen a Penguin refresh since their penalty was
lifted. (The last refresh at the time of writing this article was October 5,
2013 and both of those sites had penalties lifted later on in October.) I
suspect that once Google refreshes Penguin, these sites will see some
improvement. See the section below on Penguin recovery for more information on
what to expect when a Penguin hit site escapes the Penguin algorithm.
2. Removal of a sitewide manual action penalty
If you have a sitewide penalty, you will see something like this in your
manual actions viewer in Webmaster Tools:
In this case, a yellow alert tells you that "This site may not perform as well
in Google results because it appears to be in violation of Google's Webmaster
Guidelines." Google then adds the following message with a bit more detail:
Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or
manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. These may be the result of
buying links that pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.
In most cases, a site with a sitewide manual action will not be ranking in
Google for their brand terms, and quite often, even a search for their url will
fail to show the site. This type of penalty is devastating. Usually this penalty
comes as a result of very obvious manipulation of the search engine results.
Every site that I have worked on that had a sitewide penalty had been involved
in a variety of link schemes including purchasing links, creating large numbers
of interlinked microsites or very widespread creation of spammy backlinks.
The steps that need to be taken to remove a sitewide penalty are exactly the
same as you would take for a partial match penalty, but the results are usually
more rewarding. Once a sitewide penalty is removed, there is almost always an
increase in traffic, although often it is just for brand terms.
Here is a site that showed a significant improvement once their sitewide
penalty was removed:
It looks impressive, doesn't it? Within a couple of days of getting their
penalty removed, the site started to rank extremely well again for brand terms.
Traffic increased dramatically almost overnight. However, did you notice that I
didn't show you the whole picture? Unfortunately, I don't have a screenshot that
shows the traffic prior to getting penalized. This site previously was getting
several times this amount of traffic. When the sitewide penalty was lifted, the
branded traffic increased, but the site did not regain most of their non-branded
keyword rankings as those were primarily propped up on the power of links that
Google is no longer counting.
While some sites only see a return for brand terms after a sitewide penalty is
revoked, we have seen a number of sites that have had very dramatic improvements
across the board. Here is a site that was hit severely with a sitewide penalty.
Within 24 hours of receiving notification that their manual spam action was
revoked, they began ranking well for brand terms. A few days later, the majority
of their keyword rankings returned as well:
When a sitewide penalty is removed, in my experience, it usually takes 24-48
hours for brand terms to start ranking highly again. However, sometimes there
can be a very painful tumultuous week where rankings come and go and may change
depending on which data center you are seeing your Google results. We have one
client right now for whom we successfully removed their sitewide penalty a few
days ago. Within two days, we could see them ranking #1 for their URL, but brand
terms were nowhere to be seen. However, the client could not see the #1 URL
ranking. (And no, personalized search was not an issue.) The following day, the
rankings were gone on our searches in the morning and then we could see the URL
and brand terms raking again by the afternoon. Those rankings are still visible
to us. But, the changes took a few extra days to be visible to our client who is
in a different hemisphere and is likely seeing results from a different Google
data center. If you have received notice that your sitewide penalty has been
revoked, then please know that it can take a week (or possibly longer) for the
Google results to fully show that your site is no longer being penalized.
On a similar note, in regards to both sitewide and partial actions, if you
have received a message saying that your penalty has been revoked, but your
manual spam actions tool is still showing a penalty, don't worry, it will lift.
It can sometimes take up to a week for the manual spam actions tool to show "no
manual actions".
3. Penguin recovery
There are not many published cases of Penguin recovery. Escaping Penguin is
certainly possibleâwe have seen it! But, it is not easy. The work that
needs to be done is very similar to what needs to be done to recover from a
manual unnatural links penalty. Start with identifying the links that were made
with the intentions of manipulating the search engine results. Then, disavow
those links. It is debatable whether or not you need to remove links in order to
escape Penguin or whether disavowing is enough. If you control the source of the
links and can easily remove them, then definitely remove them. But, contacting
site owners and keeping a record of your work will not likely make a difference
for an algorithmic issue like Penguin, as no webspam team member is going to be
checking your work. Some would argue that it is good to do so in case you ever
do get manually reviewed, but my personal recommendation at this time is to
remove unnatural links that you control, and then disavow the rest. Make sure
you disavow them on the domain level.
It's also important to note that Penguin is not completely about links. You
will also want to clean up on site issues such as keyword stuffing as well.
To escape Penguin, you will need to wait until Google refreshes the Penguin
algorithm. And, in some cases, you might even need to wait for two refreshes. In
this webmaster central hangout, at the 38 minute mark, John Mueller explains
that in order to completely recover from Penguin, the links in your disavow file
have to all be recrawled and the algorithm has to refresh, and in some cases
that whole process can take six to 12 months to be fully completed. Penguin does
not refresh on a regular basis; it can sometimes be six months in between
refreshes. The last announced refresh was October 4, 2013. (Some believe that
there are occasionally unannounced refreshes, but I'm not sure if I agree.)
So, let's assume that you have done a thorough backlink audit, removed links
where possible, disavowed the vast majority of your unnatural links, cleaned up
any spammy on-site issues, and Penguin has refreshed. Now what? Will you see an
increase in traffic?
The answer to this depends on what remains once you have done the cleanup.
If you have very few truly natural links, then you likely will not see much
improvement once Penguin refreshes. Here is the analytics data from a site that
was affected by the initial rollout of Penguin. The site owner did a thorough
link cleanup and disavow, but unfortunately did not see any improvement when
Penguin refreshed.
The reason for this is most likely that the site was only ranking previously
because of the power of unnatural links. In order to see improvement, they are
going to have to be able to attract some good links and in some niches that is
no easy feat. Gone are the days where a small site can outrank the big brands
simply because an SEO was able to build thousands of keyword anchored links. In
order to rank well these days you truly need to have an exceptional site that
can rank on its own merit and not only because of SEO tricks. A good SEO will
work on ways to improve the entire user experience and promote the site properly
so that it can gain natural links and not just focus on a "quantity" over
"quality" type of linkbuilding campaign.
If you do have a site with a good base of links beneath the unnatural ones,
then it is possible to see some improvement once Penguin refreshes. The Penguin
algorithm is Google's way of saying, "We don't trust this site because they have
a history of cheating to get good rankings in the past." If the Penguin
algorithm is viewing your site unfavorably, then even your good links do not
help you much. But, if you can clean up the signals that caused Penguin to
dislike you, then, when Penguin refreshes, your good links regain their power.
Here is a site that had a decent base of links underneath a large number of
unnatural links. They were hit by Penguin on April 24, 2012. They eventually did
a thorough cleanup, and on October 4, 2013, it appears that they escaped the
algorithm:
In my experience, when a site recovers from Penguin, this type of pattern is
usually what we see. It makes sense that the site would not bounce back to its
original rankings as some of those rankings were propped up by links that are
now recognized as unnatural. It looks like this site was able to attract some
new links but those links had only a small effect until Penguin refreshed and
recognized that the site had now reformed. Now, as this site gains new natural
links, it should continue to improve.
Here is another site that worked extremely hard to clean things up, and was
rewarded on the October 4, 2013 Penguin refresh. This site has an excellent base
of natural links and continues to gain links on a regular basis. They made the
mistake of buying links in the past and those purchased links along with some
low quality directory and bookmark links caused the Penguin algorithm to put the
site in a bad light. Doing a thorough cleanup of the unnatural links allowed the
site to escape Penguin. And now, their new links that have accumulated since
April of 2012 are able to really help the site.
Full Penguin recoveries like this are not common. You will read many articles
of people telling you what you need to do to recover, but I believe that there
are few SEOs out there who are consistently recovering Penguin-hit sites. In my
experience, unless you have a good site that can attract links on its own,
recovery from Penguin is going to be difficult.
As a side note, we have seen sites recover when Penguin refreshed two weeks
after filing a disavow, so it doesn't always have to take as long as six months
to a year to see improvement. But, if you have a good site with good links and
you have done a thorough cleanup, but you are still seeing dismal rankings,
unfortunately you may need to be patient and ride through a couple of Penguin
refreshes before you can tell if things are going to improve. I really wish that
Google would allow site owners have some sort of indication as to whether or not
their site is currently being devalued by Penguin. I can understand that one of
the reasons that they don't do this is because this would help spammers to
determine what is and isn't effective. But, it is extremely frustrating for site
owners whose livelihood depends on business coming from their website and don't
know whether they need to do more clean up or not.
A few added thoughts
Many people believe that once a site has been penalized, it will always be
penalized in Google's eyes. According to John Mueller of Google, this is not
true. In this hangout, John says, "If you've had a manual action on your website
and that's been revoked, then essentially there's no bad history attached to
your site. It's not harder to rank anymoreâ.It's not the case that there
is any kind of a grudge that our algorithms would hold against a site that has
had a manual action."
You may have noticed that I have not shown any examples where rankings dropped
after a penalty was removed. Many people are concerned that filing a disavow
file will cause your site to drop even lower in rankings. The truth is that any
link that is worthy of being disavowed has likely already been discounted by
Google. We have yet to see a site that had its ranking decrease after filing a
disavow file. In theory, this is possible, if you are disavowing truly natural
links. But, even when we have sites where we have had to disavow a large number
of links from authoritative sites (because of things like wide-scale
keyword-anchored guest posting or paid infographic placement), rankings did not
decrease.
Hopefully this article has helped to explain what you can expect once your
link-based penalty has been removed. It's rarely an easy process to recover from
a manual or algorithmic devaluing, but it certainly can be done.
I should also note that the scenarios described above depict my experiences
over the last couple of years of doing penalty removal work. It is certainly
possible that other outcomes can happen. If you have seen something different,
please do leave a comment!
Have a question? Leave a comment and I am happy to see if I can help.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
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Wednesday 26 March 2014
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'The Science of Great Digital
Content Ideas'
Posted by SimonPenson
"Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and
pretty soon you have a dozen."
â John Steinbeck
John Steinbeck has a point. Outside of being one of America's most celebrated
authors he was also a man that understood the life or death importance of ideas
in the context of content.
As a lowly magazine journalist I remember routinely being told that "ideas are
the lifeblood of content strategy" and that lesson has lived with me ever since.
It's why I have spent thousands of hours since the early 2000s iterating my
own process to maximize the output from time spent working on creating them.
Creativity as a process
It seems strange, then, to suggest that the process of creating brilliant
ideas consistently should be just that: a "process." After all, isn't creativity
best performed in an environment free from constraint and boundaries? There is
evidence to suggest that is the case, but in practice structure ensures that
those ideas are consistently award-winning and hit-you-between-the-eyes awesome.
But why is this even important in the first place? I'm sure I don't have to
convince you, as a learned reader of this blog, that content strategy is now the
heartland of any effective digital strategy. Content, after all, is what has
been creating audiences for thousands of years, and that will not change anytime
soon.
In fact, it's perhaps even more important than you are led to believe, and
nobody puts it better than Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang when he said:
"I think that it's always possible to have a great company if you have great
ideas."
Great ideas permeate every level of an organization, and so while this is
focused squarely on digital content ideation, a similarly structured approach
will produce equally consistent results across the board. And given that the
biological process behind creating ideas (more on this later) is a real process
our best bet is to mimic that as closely as possible in the physical world.
The problem with ideas
By their very nature ideas are subjective. Beauty truly is in the eye of the
beholder, and so without any kind of structure, the ones that make it onto the
final to-do list will often come from one or two that "shout loudest" in any
open brainstorm scenario.
Before we even get into the actual structure, then, it is worth considering
for a moment how you should set up the actual environment in which you plan to
execute your ideation strategy.
Before you start
Deciding how often you want, or need, to create new ideas is the first step in
the process, and this will be different for every business. If you are
agency-side like us at Zazzle Media then the answer will be multiple times per
month, but in house it really depends on how "big" your content ambitions are
and an understanding of your audience in terms of what they want and expect you
to create.
If you are working in-house at a large brand, then with multiple blog and
social channels as well as work "off page" around digital PR, the answer may be
once or twice per month. If you only have a single blog and do a "bit in
social," once every quarter may suffice.
How you answer this comes back to what you know about those you are writing
for and also what resources you have to create the content.
The environment
The "where" of content ideation is critical to the success of the process.
Working in the same room that is cognitively associated with mundane tasks can
inhibit key synapses, or brain connections. What your brain is looking for, in
simple terms, is to "loosen up."
This is because our brains look for new experiences and stimulation and will
work at their most creative when the three main areas known to be involved in
idea creation are at their most relaxed. They are:
The executive attention network
This is the part of the brain used when you are really thinking hard, such as
in a conference or client meeting, where concentration is critical. It links to
memory, so you "store" those ideas for later and block distractions, allowing
you to focus more intently.
The imagination network
This area of the brain is able to process the information and break it down,
mixing it with past, present, and future scenarios to create possible new ideas.
The salience network
This monitors what is happening around you and passes the information to the
appropriate area of the brain. It is the "switch," if you like.
New surroundings help stimulate all of these key areas, and if you can get
those participating in a meeting to go for a walk first, then you'll also tick
another key "creativity box" in releasing endorphins, which will serve to boost
mental capacity even further.
To this end, we will often choose to run content meetings in the caf©
within our offices, at a local bar/pub, or even outside (if the UK weather
allows!).
The brainstorm
The key to great content strategy, of course, is variation. I have written
previously about how you can check content flow, and it's really important that
you first understand the importance, and second are aware of how well you are
performing against this critical content metric.
It's important because of the way humans are built. For decades print
publishersâespecially in the world of magazinesâhave worked on
improving the "flow" of their titles to ensure that avid readers keep coming
back for more.
You can easily reverse engineer this and check it for yourself to see what I
mean, but take my word for it; the more you are able to vary the type of content
you produce, the better your return visitor stats will look and the larger your
audience will grow.
This means that your brainstorm needs to be built to extract as many different
ideas as possible, giving you the ammunition necessary to create such a
strategy.
Here's how. The chart below may look relatively simple, but it is the result
of 12 years of trial and error, testing, blood, sweat, and tears to define the
most effective roadmap for eking out the right mix of content, irrespective of
niche.
The version you see here is a static version of the animated process you can
play with by clicking on the image or right here (a version on our own site,
which then links through to the various tools we use to make the process as
effective as possible).
The idea is that you split each brainstorm into eight constituent parts. Let's
run through each stage in turn nowâ
1. The brief overall strategy
A critical component of any content process is to ensure there is a clear,
shared understanding of the overall aim or strategy of the campaign. Like a
company vision statement, it should permeate every level of the business and
everyone working on the campaign should be able to recite personas and align
everything to the overall aim of the work they are doing.
Sounds simple, but the number of times we see businesses without this kind of
alignment has made this a very important first-port-of-call in the process.
It is a relatively easy entry into the overall ideation process and requires a
simple conversation and initial centering of all ideas around the objective.
For instance, that may be "to grow an audience of 30-40-year-old white-collar
workers who are into skiing." Centering all ideation on that will keep ideas
focused and in line with overall objectives.
An example idea: A series of image-based "how to" guides covering ski
techniques (this site does a good job of this), distributed via targeted social
amplification to our target demographic.
2. Data/personas
This then ties into a deeper conversation around what key data we have, or can
create, to improve existing or "reach" audience insight.
A previous post of mine on the Moz Blog detailed a way in which we leverage
data from social to help inform audience understanding, and often we will run
this process beforehand to give us an initial swathe of audience profiling data.
This is also where existing persona detail will be shared so we can ensure
that we are coming up with ideas fit for the different "types" of audience being
targeted.
A 35-year-old married father of two working in insurance will be intrigued by
very different content than a 60-year-old widower looking to invest cautiously
for retirement when they are considering financial services businesses, for
instance.
This is where we create those audience-centric ideas, and this section can
often be one with the greatest depth.
Based on insight into our skiing business example, we may discover that there
is a high correlation between our audience and those that also like surfing. If
that is the case, an example idea may be a list-based feature looking at X ways
in which surfing techniques can help you become a better skier.
3. Long-tail opportunity
Long tail is an increasingly major opportunity, especially for those leading
their digital marketing charge with content creation. Google's Hummingbird
update is also designed to better surface more precise answers to queries, and
that should mean more traffic for what traditionally we had traditionally known
as the long tail.
Creating content that is based squarely on existing search volume as opposed
to simply guessing and hoping it may attract visits is a critical component of
any strategy.
The research for this can be carried out beforehand, but often we find it more
useful to run tools such as Ubersuggest and Grepwords during the session to make
it inclusive and more interesting. More people suggesting input phrases can also
mean you end up with a wider selection of potential terms to run through.
The idea then is to prioritize those phrases either on potential search volume
or 'fit' with the mix of the overall content plan.
Here is a snippet of what the former tool has surfaced for our skiing example;
clearly there is opportunity to utilize this information in the formation of a
daily article creation strategy:
4. Semantic phrases
The marketing world is awash with talk of entity search and semantic
association. For those that haven't the time or inclination to go away and read
awesome guides on this area by the likes of Aaron Bradley or Moz's own Matthew
Brown, in simple terms it is the concept of organizing information by
understanding individual "things" (entities) and their relationships with other
"things," without there already being an explicit link between them.
Semantic search understands those relationships, and therefore (in theory) the
implicit part of any query, and can thus deliver a richer list of results.
Understanding what other phrases, or words, may be semantically linked can be
useful in ensuring that you are "whole-of-market" going forwards, and can expand
laterally into relevant content areas.
Few tools really help with this at present, well but one we do use is LSI
Keywords, which provides a very simple way of exporting other similar or
relevant keywords. Google's own database of entities, Freebase, is also quite
useful, and its search functionality will list other associated entries, giving
you a simple map of subjects you could still cover while staying relevant. If
you type the word into the top search bar, you are presented with a list of
themes relevant to the topic:
You can further expand the list by clicking on the "view more" link at the
bottom of the drop-down. This list can give you an amazing framework from which
you can work on wider topic areas.
5. Trending content
One of the easiest ways to capture large amounts of new visitor traffic is to
jump on existing conversations around trending content themes.
Again, it can pay to get everyone involved in the brainstorm to spend five
minutes before the meeting researching news-related blogs, news sites, and
social channels for ideas to expedite the process, but it is not impossible to
do this live, either. Google Trends, Social listening tools, Fresh Web Explorer,
and other tools can be great to get the latest angles on relevant themes.
These will obviously be time-sensitive, so it is important that you brainstorm
for this content on a regular basis and leave placeholders within your content
calendar for what you find. So, for instance, once a week (say every Wednesday)
you'll enter [news-led article], and the subject matter will be decided based
upon the maximum possible impact.
The idea, also, is that you move the debate forward. Don't simply rewrite what
has already been said. Look for exclusive, interesting angles to throw in the
mix.
For instance, if I use Social Mention to look at the latest skiing chatter, I
soon discover that there is some cool content being shared via Facebook (use the
search filtering options in the left column to drill down to specific platforms,
sort by sentiment, and look for top users, etc.). Perhaps you can come up with
Part Two to the epic "Star Wars Meets The Winter Olympics?"
6. Evergreen content
And then we come to one of the most important areas of all: evergreen content.
Why is it so important? Quite simply, it's the content you will put the most
effort into perfecting, that will attract the most traffic, and that will have
the most longevity.
It is imperative that you really understand the core concerns, frustrations
and gaps in knowledge your audience has so you can fill those gaps in great
detail and build trust, association, and engagement with your brand.
So, how do you go about working out what kind of content you should be
producing here? The answer lies in keyword analysis, competitor analysis and
audience data insight once again.
Tools like Searchmetrics can also help here; its long-tail opportunity tool
can help you see what some of the most successful sites rank for alongside their
traffic volumes and value. This makes finding the opportunities you don't have
and ranking them in order of priority that much easier. Sort by either volume or
opportunity, and you have a list of content creation to-dos right there!
For this section to run smoothly, you should prepare a spreadsheet of keywords
with search volumes for your target country. This will help validate any ideas
that come out of the brainstorm. Ensuring that what you think is a good idea for
a lengthy evergreen piece actually matches real-world search demand. If you're
putting in a heap of effort then this is crucial in ensuring positive ROI from
the activity.
You should end up with a list of five to 20 ideas to go away and begin work
on.
7. Content types
By now you should have a long list of possible ideas. The key at this point is
to start classifying them into "content type" piles. To do this, create a
spreadsheet with all the relevant content types for the brand along the top, and
then drop in your ideas below. That way you can see which content types may be a
little light on the ideas front, and you can further brainstorm around that
specific area, filling in the gaps. Here's an example of such a table:
8. Purchase funnel
The final discussion centres squarely on ensuring that the range of content
covers the entire purchase funnel. For those that do not have the classic funnel
engrained, you can see the various stages to the right here in the widely
accepted classic purchase funnel, based on the AIDA principles first set out by
marketer E. St Elmo Lewis.
AIDA stands for:
A - attention (or awareness): Attract the attention of the customer.
I - interest: Raise customer interest by focusing on and demonstrating
advantages and benefits (instead of focusing on features, as in traditional
advertising).
D - desire: Convince customers that they want and desire the product or service
and that it will satisfy their needs.
A - action: Lead customers towards taking action and/or purchasing.
What regularly happens with ideation is a team will end up with lots of
content that sits at the top of that funnel, helping with brand discovery and
touching on consideration.
It is critical, however, to brainstorm content ideas that help people through
that buying process and also help turn them into evangelists and long-term
clients/customers.
This is where in-depth, unbiased buying guides and looking after your posts
comes in. You can also improve retention with work to build a community around
your offering (Moz is the perfect example!), offers and competitions,
"exclusive" member clubs and offers, and so on.
We had this missing from the mix until around six months ago, but since
introducing it we have managed to add a powerful new dimension to the overall
content plan, and it works really well.
So, you now have your list of ideas. The next phase is then what we class as
content planning, which is a subject all of its own. In short, you then need to
distill those ideas into realistic, deliverable, concepts, and once you have
that editing process complete you then place those ideas into an editorial
calendar that can be delivered with the resources you have available.
Example for each stage of this funnel may include:
Exposure/awareness: The "Star Wars Meets the Winter Olympics" idea mentioned
above.
Discovery: A thought-leadership piece on why the brand believes a new country
is the next big "skiing Mecca"
Consideration: An expert buyer guide on the products and wider choices, such as
the "best skiing holiday for under $1,000"
Conversion: Trust-building content, such as an honest comparison table
comparing our brand with other competitors, proving why we are best.
Customer relationship: An amazing editorial email concept introducing them to
the brand initially, with offers, etc.
Retention: Exclusive offers for those "in-the-club/VIPs" (existing customers).
That's the process; here are the tools to help
There are a number of tools we use on a regular basis to make this entire
process more efficient and effective. I have listed the best of them below to
help you through the ideation process:
1. Ubersuggest â a popular long tail opportunity finder based on
Google's suggest feature of previously searched for phrases.
2. Grepwords â The Instant Keyword Tool provides downloadable 'csvs' of
related keywords along with search volumes and CPCs.
3. Google Trends â This is generally a very useful tool to find trending
content and check for demand but it's especially useful when you use the 2013
round up of top searches. The how to guides could be gold dust for the right
businesses?
4. Magazines â A less obvious "tool," but certainly a great resource for
great content ideas. Choose a specialist title for your niche.
5. Bottlenose â A great content-curation engine built to aggregate
content based on social "noise" and sharing.
6. Content Idea Generator â not the best tool on the list here but it
can help with idea structuring.
7. Topsy â An awesome Twitter-based analytics and analysis tool that can
be used to see most shared content.
8. Inboxq â A great tool for surfacing key questions being asked so you
can answer them and create content based on them.
9. Murally â This is a useful tool for helping to curate related
concepts and ideas in one place
10. Flickr â A fantastic resource for visual content cues. Stick those
you like on a Mural.ly board and you soon have a look and feel understanding.
11. Followerwonk â Useful for finding influencers around specific
subject matter to see what's being shared and engaged with in a space.
12. Trello â This is a great tool for organizing more complex ideas.
13. Quora â A fantastic resource for discovering longer-tail content
opportunities to answer questions being asked.
14. Google+ circles â Follow the right groups, and they can be fantastic
idea resources.
15. Ifttt â Not an idea tool in its own right, but the automation of
certain tasks can make collating ideas so much easier.
16. Alltop â An easy one-stop-shop for latest subject matter articles
and other content to 'borrow' ideas from!
17. Google Alerts â A must-have for the latest on your niche to help
with trending content.
18. Zanran â A brilliant "search engine" for stats and facts, which
helps with content based on compelling data.
19. Moz Alerts â Another useful tool for keeping an eye on trending
content ideas and competitor activity.
20. LinkedIn Groups â Like Google+ Circles, these are fantastic for
finding questions to answer.
21. Link Bait Title Generator â We love this simple tool. It may be
limited in terms of ideas but it's quick and simple to use.
22. Delicious âThe original shareable content aggregator and still a
great place to discover fantastic content ideas.
23. Trapit â A clever content curation tool that gets the right content
to you efficiently
Pulling it together
The next stage of the process, as explained, is to then edit your final list
of ideas down into a realistic list of concepts that you CAN deliver with the
time and resources you have available, and that can be a significant amount of
work in its own right.
Get it right though and you will end up with a content calendar filled to the
brim with ideas that grow and engage your audience across every digital channel.
That plan becomes the heartbeat of your entire digital marketing strategy.
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
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peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Content Ideas'
Posted by SimonPenson
"Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and
pretty soon you have a dozen."
â John Steinbeck
John Steinbeck has a point. Outside of being one of America's most celebrated
authors he was also a man that understood the life or death importance of ideas
in the context of content.
As a lowly magazine journalist I remember routinely being told that "ideas are
the lifeblood of content strategy" and that lesson has lived with me ever since.
It's why I have spent thousands of hours since the early 2000s iterating my
own process to maximize the output from time spent working on creating them.
Creativity as a process
It seems strange, then, to suggest that the process of creating brilliant
ideas consistently should be just that: a "process." After all, isn't creativity
best performed in an environment free from constraint and boundaries? There is
evidence to suggest that is the case, but in practice structure ensures that
those ideas are consistently award-winning and hit-you-between-the-eyes awesome.
But why is this even important in the first place? I'm sure I don't have to
convince you, as a learned reader of this blog, that content strategy is now the
heartland of any effective digital strategy. Content, after all, is what has
been creating audiences for thousands of years, and that will not change anytime
soon.
In fact, it's perhaps even more important than you are led to believe, and
nobody puts it better than Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang when he said:
"I think that it's always possible to have a great company if you have great
ideas."
Great ideas permeate every level of an organization, and so while this is
focused squarely on digital content ideation, a similarly structured approach
will produce equally consistent results across the board. And given that the
biological process behind creating ideas (more on this later) is a real process
our best bet is to mimic that as closely as possible in the physical world.
The problem with ideas
By their very nature ideas are subjective. Beauty truly is in the eye of the
beholder, and so without any kind of structure, the ones that make it onto the
final to-do list will often come from one or two that "shout loudest" in any
open brainstorm scenario.
Before we even get into the actual structure, then, it is worth considering
for a moment how you should set up the actual environment in which you plan to
execute your ideation strategy.
Before you start
Deciding how often you want, or need, to create new ideas is the first step in
the process, and this will be different for every business. If you are
agency-side like us at Zazzle Media then the answer will be multiple times per
month, but in house it really depends on how "big" your content ambitions are
and an understanding of your audience in terms of what they want and expect you
to create.
If you are working in-house at a large brand, then with multiple blog and
social channels as well as work "off page" around digital PR, the answer may be
once or twice per month. If you only have a single blog and do a "bit in
social," once every quarter may suffice.
How you answer this comes back to what you know about those you are writing
for and also what resources you have to create the content.
The environment
The "where" of content ideation is critical to the success of the process.
Working in the same room that is cognitively associated with mundane tasks can
inhibit key synapses, or brain connections. What your brain is looking for, in
simple terms, is to "loosen up."
This is because our brains look for new experiences and stimulation and will
work at their most creative when the three main areas known to be involved in
idea creation are at their most relaxed. They are:
The executive attention network
This is the part of the brain used when you are really thinking hard, such as
in a conference or client meeting, where concentration is critical. It links to
memory, so you "store" those ideas for later and block distractions, allowing
you to focus more intently.
The imagination network
This area of the brain is able to process the information and break it down,
mixing it with past, present, and future scenarios to create possible new ideas.
The salience network
This monitors what is happening around you and passes the information to the
appropriate area of the brain. It is the "switch," if you like.
New surroundings help stimulate all of these key areas, and if you can get
those participating in a meeting to go for a walk first, then you'll also tick
another key "creativity box" in releasing endorphins, which will serve to boost
mental capacity even further.
To this end, we will often choose to run content meetings in the caf©
within our offices, at a local bar/pub, or even outside (if the UK weather
allows!).
The brainstorm
The key to great content strategy, of course, is variation. I have written
previously about how you can check content flow, and it's really important that
you first understand the importance, and second are aware of how well you are
performing against this critical content metric.
It's important because of the way humans are built. For decades print
publishersâespecially in the world of magazinesâhave worked on
improving the "flow" of their titles to ensure that avid readers keep coming
back for more.
You can easily reverse engineer this and check it for yourself to see what I
mean, but take my word for it; the more you are able to vary the type of content
you produce, the better your return visitor stats will look and the larger your
audience will grow.
This means that your brainstorm needs to be built to extract as many different
ideas as possible, giving you the ammunition necessary to create such a
strategy.
Here's how. The chart below may look relatively simple, but it is the result
of 12 years of trial and error, testing, blood, sweat, and tears to define the
most effective roadmap for eking out the right mix of content, irrespective of
niche.
The version you see here is a static version of the animated process you can
play with by clicking on the image or right here (a version on our own site,
which then links through to the various tools we use to make the process as
effective as possible).
The idea is that you split each brainstorm into eight constituent parts. Let's
run through each stage in turn nowâ
1. The brief overall strategy
A critical component of any content process is to ensure there is a clear,
shared understanding of the overall aim or strategy of the campaign. Like a
company vision statement, it should permeate every level of the business and
everyone working on the campaign should be able to recite personas and align
everything to the overall aim of the work they are doing.
Sounds simple, but the number of times we see businesses without this kind of
alignment has made this a very important first-port-of-call in the process.
It is a relatively easy entry into the overall ideation process and requires a
simple conversation and initial centering of all ideas around the objective.
For instance, that may be "to grow an audience of 30-40-year-old white-collar
workers who are into skiing." Centering all ideation on that will keep ideas
focused and in line with overall objectives.
An example idea: A series of image-based "how to" guides covering ski
techniques (this site does a good job of this), distributed via targeted social
amplification to our target demographic.
2. Data/personas
This then ties into a deeper conversation around what key data we have, or can
create, to improve existing or "reach" audience insight.
A previous post of mine on the Moz Blog detailed a way in which we leverage
data from social to help inform audience understanding, and often we will run
this process beforehand to give us an initial swathe of audience profiling data.
This is also where existing persona detail will be shared so we can ensure
that we are coming up with ideas fit for the different "types" of audience being
targeted.
A 35-year-old married father of two working in insurance will be intrigued by
very different content than a 60-year-old widower looking to invest cautiously
for retirement when they are considering financial services businesses, for
instance.
This is where we create those audience-centric ideas, and this section can
often be one with the greatest depth.
Based on insight into our skiing business example, we may discover that there
is a high correlation between our audience and those that also like surfing. If
that is the case, an example idea may be a list-based feature looking at X ways
in which surfing techniques can help you become a better skier.
3. Long-tail opportunity
Long tail is an increasingly major opportunity, especially for those leading
their digital marketing charge with content creation. Google's Hummingbird
update is also designed to better surface more precise answers to queries, and
that should mean more traffic for what traditionally we had traditionally known
as the long tail.
Creating content that is based squarely on existing search volume as opposed
to simply guessing and hoping it may attract visits is a critical component of
any strategy.
The research for this can be carried out beforehand, but often we find it more
useful to run tools such as Ubersuggest and Grepwords during the session to make
it inclusive and more interesting. More people suggesting input phrases can also
mean you end up with a wider selection of potential terms to run through.
The idea then is to prioritize those phrases either on potential search volume
or 'fit' with the mix of the overall content plan.
Here is a snippet of what the former tool has surfaced for our skiing example;
clearly there is opportunity to utilize this information in the formation of a
daily article creation strategy:
4. Semantic phrases
The marketing world is awash with talk of entity search and semantic
association. For those that haven't the time or inclination to go away and read
awesome guides on this area by the likes of Aaron Bradley or Moz's own Matthew
Brown, in simple terms it is the concept of organizing information by
understanding individual "things" (entities) and their relationships with other
"things," without there already being an explicit link between them.
Semantic search understands those relationships, and therefore (in theory) the
implicit part of any query, and can thus deliver a richer list of results.
Understanding what other phrases, or words, may be semantically linked can be
useful in ensuring that you are "whole-of-market" going forwards, and can expand
laterally into relevant content areas.
Few tools really help with this at present, well but one we do use is LSI
Keywords, which provides a very simple way of exporting other similar or
relevant keywords. Google's own database of entities, Freebase, is also quite
useful, and its search functionality will list other associated entries, giving
you a simple map of subjects you could still cover while staying relevant. If
you type the word into the top search bar, you are presented with a list of
themes relevant to the topic:
You can further expand the list by clicking on the "view more" link at the
bottom of the drop-down. This list can give you an amazing framework from which
you can work on wider topic areas.
5. Trending content
One of the easiest ways to capture large amounts of new visitor traffic is to
jump on existing conversations around trending content themes.
Again, it can pay to get everyone involved in the brainstorm to spend five
minutes before the meeting researching news-related blogs, news sites, and
social channels for ideas to expedite the process, but it is not impossible to
do this live, either. Google Trends, Social listening tools, Fresh Web Explorer,
and other tools can be great to get the latest angles on relevant themes.
These will obviously be time-sensitive, so it is important that you brainstorm
for this content on a regular basis and leave placeholders within your content
calendar for what you find. So, for instance, once a week (say every Wednesday)
you'll enter [news-led article], and the subject matter will be decided based
upon the maximum possible impact.
The idea, also, is that you move the debate forward. Don't simply rewrite what
has already been said. Look for exclusive, interesting angles to throw in the
mix.
For instance, if I use Social Mention to look at the latest skiing chatter, I
soon discover that there is some cool content being shared via Facebook (use the
search filtering options in the left column to drill down to specific platforms,
sort by sentiment, and look for top users, etc.). Perhaps you can come up with
Part Two to the epic "Star Wars Meets The Winter Olympics?"
6. Evergreen content
And then we come to one of the most important areas of all: evergreen content.
Why is it so important? Quite simply, it's the content you will put the most
effort into perfecting, that will attract the most traffic, and that will have
the most longevity.
It is imperative that you really understand the core concerns, frustrations
and gaps in knowledge your audience has so you can fill those gaps in great
detail and build trust, association, and engagement with your brand.
So, how do you go about working out what kind of content you should be
producing here? The answer lies in keyword analysis, competitor analysis and
audience data insight once again.
Tools like Searchmetrics can also help here; its long-tail opportunity tool
can help you see what some of the most successful sites rank for alongside their
traffic volumes and value. This makes finding the opportunities you don't have
and ranking them in order of priority that much easier. Sort by either volume or
opportunity, and you have a list of content creation to-dos right there!
For this section to run smoothly, you should prepare a spreadsheet of keywords
with search volumes for your target country. This will help validate any ideas
that come out of the brainstorm. Ensuring that what you think is a good idea for
a lengthy evergreen piece actually matches real-world search demand. If you're
putting in a heap of effort then this is crucial in ensuring positive ROI from
the activity.
You should end up with a list of five to 20 ideas to go away and begin work
on.
7. Content types
By now you should have a long list of possible ideas. The key at this point is
to start classifying them into "content type" piles. To do this, create a
spreadsheet with all the relevant content types for the brand along the top, and
then drop in your ideas below. That way you can see which content types may be a
little light on the ideas front, and you can further brainstorm around that
specific area, filling in the gaps. Here's an example of such a table:
8. Purchase funnel
The final discussion centres squarely on ensuring that the range of content
covers the entire purchase funnel. For those that do not have the classic funnel
engrained, you can see the various stages to the right here in the widely
accepted classic purchase funnel, based on the AIDA principles first set out by
marketer E. St Elmo Lewis.
AIDA stands for:
A - attention (or awareness): Attract the attention of the customer.
I - interest: Raise customer interest by focusing on and demonstrating
advantages and benefits (instead of focusing on features, as in traditional
advertising).
D - desire: Convince customers that they want and desire the product or service
and that it will satisfy their needs.
A - action: Lead customers towards taking action and/or purchasing.
What regularly happens with ideation is a team will end up with lots of
content that sits at the top of that funnel, helping with brand discovery and
touching on consideration.
It is critical, however, to brainstorm content ideas that help people through
that buying process and also help turn them into evangelists and long-term
clients/customers.
This is where in-depth, unbiased buying guides and looking after your posts
comes in. You can also improve retention with work to build a community around
your offering (Moz is the perfect example!), offers and competitions,
"exclusive" member clubs and offers, and so on.
We had this missing from the mix until around six months ago, but since
introducing it we have managed to add a powerful new dimension to the overall
content plan, and it works really well.
So, you now have your list of ideas. The next phase is then what we class as
content planning, which is a subject all of its own. In short, you then need to
distill those ideas into realistic, deliverable, concepts, and once you have
that editing process complete you then place those ideas into an editorial
calendar that can be delivered with the resources you have available.
Example for each stage of this funnel may include:
Exposure/awareness: The "Star Wars Meets the Winter Olympics" idea mentioned
above.
Discovery: A thought-leadership piece on why the brand believes a new country
is the next big "skiing Mecca"
Consideration: An expert buyer guide on the products and wider choices, such as
the "best skiing holiday for under $1,000"
Conversion: Trust-building content, such as an honest comparison table
comparing our brand with other competitors, proving why we are best.
Customer relationship: An amazing editorial email concept introducing them to
the brand initially, with offers, etc.
Retention: Exclusive offers for those "in-the-club/VIPs" (existing customers).
That's the process; here are the tools to help
There are a number of tools we use on a regular basis to make this entire
process more efficient and effective. I have listed the best of them below to
help you through the ideation process:
1. Ubersuggest â a popular long tail opportunity finder based on
Google's suggest feature of previously searched for phrases.
2. Grepwords â The Instant Keyword Tool provides downloadable 'csvs' of
related keywords along with search volumes and CPCs.
3. Google Trends â This is generally a very useful tool to find trending
content and check for demand but it's especially useful when you use the 2013
round up of top searches. The how to guides could be gold dust for the right
businesses?
4. Magazines â A less obvious "tool," but certainly a great resource for
great content ideas. Choose a specialist title for your niche.
5. Bottlenose â A great content-curation engine built to aggregate
content based on social "noise" and sharing.
6. Content Idea Generator â not the best tool on the list here but it
can help with idea structuring.
7. Topsy â An awesome Twitter-based analytics and analysis tool that can
be used to see most shared content.
8. Inboxq â A great tool for surfacing key questions being asked so you
can answer them and create content based on them.
9. Murally â This is a useful tool for helping to curate related
concepts and ideas in one place
10. Flickr â A fantastic resource for visual content cues. Stick those
you like on a Mural.ly board and you soon have a look and feel understanding.
11. Followerwonk â Useful for finding influencers around specific
subject matter to see what's being shared and engaged with in a space.
12. Trello â This is a great tool for organizing more complex ideas.
13. Quora â A fantastic resource for discovering longer-tail content
opportunities to answer questions being asked.
14. Google+ circles â Follow the right groups, and they can be fantastic
idea resources.
15. Ifttt â Not an idea tool in its own right, but the automation of
certain tasks can make collating ideas so much easier.
16. Alltop â An easy one-stop-shop for latest subject matter articles
and other content to 'borrow' ideas from!
17. Google Alerts â A must-have for the latest on your niche to help
with trending content.
18. Zanran â A brilliant "search engine" for stats and facts, which
helps with content based on compelling data.
19. Moz Alerts â Another useful tool for keeping an eye on trending
content ideas and competitor activity.
20. LinkedIn Groups â Like Google+ Circles, these are fantastic for
finding questions to answer.
21. Link Bait Title Generator â We love this simple tool. It may be
limited in terms of ideas but it's quick and simple to use.
22. Delicious âThe original shareable content aggregator and still a
great place to discover fantastic content ideas.
23. Trapit â A clever content curation tool that gets the right content
to you efficiently
Pulling it together
The next stage of the process, as explained, is to then edit your final list
of ideas down into a realistic list of concepts that you CAN deliver with the
time and resources you have available, and that can be a significant amount of
work in its own right.
Get it right though and you will end up with a content calendar filled to the
brim with ideas that grow and engage your audience across every digital channel.
That plan becomes the heartbeat of your entire digital marketing strategy.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
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Tuesday 25 March 2014
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'Knowledge Graph 2.0: Now Featuring
Your Knowledge'
Posted by Dr-Pete
Sometime in January, Google quietly rolled out a change that I believe could
revolutionize organic search. Currently, the impact is limited, and it may take
months or years for the full effect to be felt, but the underlying shift is
fundamental to the future of the Knowledge Graph and the delicate symbiosis
between Google and webmasters.
Answer box 1.0
Let's start at the beginning. I've written a lot about the current generation
of answer boxes (sometimes called "direct answers" or "one-box answers"). These
display quick answers to what are usually concrete questions. For example, if I
want to know when the Willis Tower here in Chicago is open, I can search for
[Willis tower hours] and get:
Google's ability to understand questions has expanded significantly in the
past couple of years, probably pushed forward even more by the Hummingbird
update. For example, I can get the same answer box by querying [when is the
Sears Tower open].
So, where is this data coming from? Typically, it's coming directly from the
Knowledge Graph, and you can spot it pretty easily. Here's the Knowledge Panel
for [Willis tower]:
I've added the red arrow â as you can see, the information in the answer
box is taken directly from a property in the Knowledge Graph. You can easily
reverse it, too, to create endless examples. Let's take the property
"Construction started: 1970" and turn it into a query, like [when was the sears
tower built]. You'll get another answer box:
Most of this information comes from a very limited number of sources,
including Freebase, Wikipedia, and Google+. Freebase is structured in terms of
entities and properties (think object-based, as opposed to article-based), which
makes it a perfect fit for Knowledge Graph.
Google's dilemma
There's a problem, though. The main sources of data for the Knowledge Graph
are curated by people. Ironically, Google is facing the same dilemma with
Knowledge Graph in 2014 that led to the creation of internet search engines in
the first place. Put simply, the scope of information is much too large, and
growing too quickly, for any human-edited approach to scale. Google can't just
hire Wikipedia editors â they need a new data source.
Google is hardly blind to this problem. In a research paper published just
this year, Google outlines the basic issue (hat-tip to Andrew Isidoro):
The paper goes on to explain a method of extracting missing knowledge graph
data on demand, using Google's existing search technology. Welcome to...
Answer box 2.0
Luckily (for them), Google already has one of the largest data sources on the
planet â their index of the worldwide web. What if, instead of looking for
answers in a limited set of encyclopedic sources, Google could generate answers
directly from our websites?
That's exactly what they've done. For example, here's what you'll see at the
top of a recent search for [social security tax rate]:
Unlike answer boxes based on the Knowledge Graph, this new format pulls its
answer directly from third party websites, giving them attribution via the page
title and link. In many ways, this is an additional organic result, and like all
answer boxes in the left-hand column, it appears above "#1".
These longer answers look more like search snippets, but there's also a second
version, triggered when Google can find a definitive answer on a third-party
site. Here's the new answer box for the query [September birthstone]:
This example includes a longer snippet, but the direct answer â
"Sapphire" â is highlighted, more in the style of a traditional answer
box. Again, the source page's title and URL is shown below the snippet.
How do we know, beyond the third-party attribution, that this isn't coming
from the traditional Knowledge Graph? Try a variation on the query, like
[september's birthstone]. I get this result:
Here's the answer box for a longer query [what is september's birthstone]:
Interestingly, the short answer ("sapphire") is no longer capitalized, because
that's how Google found it on the source page. In my personal testing, these
variations weren't consistent, so Google may be using some kind of query
refinement. Regardless of that, it's pretty clear that these answers are being
generated on the fly.
The new number one
These answer boxes are essentially a new organic result, and clearly disrupt
the traditional top results. So, where are these answers coming from, and how do
you get one? We don't have a lot of data yet, but in every case I've seen, the
URL used to create the answer box also appears on page one of Google results.
So, you have to already be ranking well on the term.
In most of the cases that I've seen so far (again, the data set is small), the
answer is coming from the #1 organic position. For example, here's the answer
box and #1 result I get for [marine corps' birthday]:
So, military.com is essentially getting two listings on this SERP. In some
cases, though, the answer is coming from a result lower on page 1. Here's the
answer box and part of page 1 for [richest man in the world]:
In this case, Time Magazine gets credit for the answer box, even though it's
all the way down in #8, and Forbes has all three of the top organic spots.
What's even worse is that Time article directly cites Forbes as the source, even
in the search snippet. So, what's going on here?
I suspect this comes down to fairly basic on-page factors. The main Forbes
article is a bit design-heavy (it has limited crawlable text) and uses an
"infinite" scroll approach. None of the Forbes pages directly mention the phrase
"richest man in the world", especially in proximity to Bill Gates' name.
What if I change my query to something that Forbes targets better, like
[world's richest people]? Here's the result I get (all of these searches are
incognito, but I can't rule out some sort of query history effect):
It's interesting that Google seems to be inferring that I want to know the
world's richest person (and is bolding "Bill Gates"), but doesn't feel that the
answer is definitive enough to break it out as a short answer. Even since
starting this post, Google has made refinements to the matching system, but
currently it seems like on-page keyword targeting is fairly critical.
It's just the beginning
Google clearly has a long way to go. Some of the answer boxes are pretty
ridiculous. Take, for example, a search for [hair color]:
This is a pretty ambiguous query, and it doesn't seem well suited for any kind
of answer box (let alone one that's one step away from a salon advertisement).
Expect Google to put a lot of time and money into improving this system over the
next year.
While this post is focused on answer boxes, Google is using a similar approach
to expand knowledge panels. For example, here's a search for [biology]:
Notice the "Related topics" section â only one of those results is
coming from Wikipedia. Google is building a decent chunk of this knowledge panel
on sites in their index. The attribution on these is much more subtle â
only the small, gray text goes to the source site. The blue links (except for
"Wikipedia" at the top) go directly to more Google searches.
Is the balance shifting?
It's easy to see how this progression is inevitable â Google has to
expand the Knowledge Graph, and they can't rely on human editors and static data
sources. While this data may be good for users, it represents a shift in the
balance between Google and webmasters. There's always been an implied symbiosis
â Google crawls our sites and extracts information, but they send us
traffic in return. We may not always like how they do things, but the end result
has benefitted millions of site owners.
What happens when a user can get a simple answer quickly, and that answer is
extracted from a third party page and cannibalizes the organic clicks? What
happens when third-party data is being used not to drive traffic to the source,
but to more Google searches? It seems to me that the symbiosis is threatened.
For now, there's not much you can do. You can work to retune your on-page
content to appear in these new entities, but you do so at the risk of harming
your own organic traffic. It's probably better to be in the answer box than let
your competitor be there, but it's hardly an ideal choice. The best I can say is
to be aware of your money terms â not just how you're ranking, but how
those SERPs actually look in context. At some point, we may all have to decide
if giving away our data is worth what we get in return.
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/ijtpHSZxJqg/knowledge-graph-2-now-featuring-your-knowledge
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
Your Knowledge'
Posted by Dr-Pete
Sometime in January, Google quietly rolled out a change that I believe could
revolutionize organic search. Currently, the impact is limited, and it may take
months or years for the full effect to be felt, but the underlying shift is
fundamental to the future of the Knowledge Graph and the delicate symbiosis
between Google and webmasters.
Answer box 1.0
Let's start at the beginning. I've written a lot about the current generation
of answer boxes (sometimes called "direct answers" or "one-box answers"). These
display quick answers to what are usually concrete questions. For example, if I
want to know when the Willis Tower here in Chicago is open, I can search for
[Willis tower hours] and get:
Google's ability to understand questions has expanded significantly in the
past couple of years, probably pushed forward even more by the Hummingbird
update. For example, I can get the same answer box by querying [when is the
Sears Tower open].
So, where is this data coming from? Typically, it's coming directly from the
Knowledge Graph, and you can spot it pretty easily. Here's the Knowledge Panel
for [Willis tower]:
I've added the red arrow â as you can see, the information in the answer
box is taken directly from a property in the Knowledge Graph. You can easily
reverse it, too, to create endless examples. Let's take the property
"Construction started: 1970" and turn it into a query, like [when was the sears
tower built]. You'll get another answer box:
Most of this information comes from a very limited number of sources,
including Freebase, Wikipedia, and Google+. Freebase is structured in terms of
entities and properties (think object-based, as opposed to article-based), which
makes it a perfect fit for Knowledge Graph.
Google's dilemma
There's a problem, though. The main sources of data for the Knowledge Graph
are curated by people. Ironically, Google is facing the same dilemma with
Knowledge Graph in 2014 that led to the creation of internet search engines in
the first place. Put simply, the scope of information is much too large, and
growing too quickly, for any human-edited approach to scale. Google can't just
hire Wikipedia editors â they need a new data source.
Google is hardly blind to this problem. In a research paper published just
this year, Google outlines the basic issue (hat-tip to Andrew Isidoro):
The paper goes on to explain a method of extracting missing knowledge graph
data on demand, using Google's existing search technology. Welcome to...
Answer box 2.0
Luckily (for them), Google already has one of the largest data sources on the
planet â their index of the worldwide web. What if, instead of looking for
answers in a limited set of encyclopedic sources, Google could generate answers
directly from our websites?
That's exactly what they've done. For example, here's what you'll see at the
top of a recent search for [social security tax rate]:
Unlike answer boxes based on the Knowledge Graph, this new format pulls its
answer directly from third party websites, giving them attribution via the page
title and link. In many ways, this is an additional organic result, and like all
answer boxes in the left-hand column, it appears above "#1".
These longer answers look more like search snippets, but there's also a second
version, triggered when Google can find a definitive answer on a third-party
site. Here's the new answer box for the query [September birthstone]:
This example includes a longer snippet, but the direct answer â
"Sapphire" â is highlighted, more in the style of a traditional answer
box. Again, the source page's title and URL is shown below the snippet.
How do we know, beyond the third-party attribution, that this isn't coming
from the traditional Knowledge Graph? Try a variation on the query, like
[september's birthstone]. I get this result:
Here's the answer box for a longer query [what is september's birthstone]:
Interestingly, the short answer ("sapphire") is no longer capitalized, because
that's how Google found it on the source page. In my personal testing, these
variations weren't consistent, so Google may be using some kind of query
refinement. Regardless of that, it's pretty clear that these answers are being
generated on the fly.
The new number one
These answer boxes are essentially a new organic result, and clearly disrupt
the traditional top results. So, where are these answers coming from, and how do
you get one? We don't have a lot of data yet, but in every case I've seen, the
URL used to create the answer box also appears on page one of Google results.
So, you have to already be ranking well on the term.
In most of the cases that I've seen so far (again, the data set is small), the
answer is coming from the #1 organic position. For example, here's the answer
box and #1 result I get for [marine corps' birthday]:
So, military.com is essentially getting two listings on this SERP. In some
cases, though, the answer is coming from a result lower on page 1. Here's the
answer box and part of page 1 for [richest man in the world]:
In this case, Time Magazine gets credit for the answer box, even though it's
all the way down in #8, and Forbes has all three of the top organic spots.
What's even worse is that Time article directly cites Forbes as the source, even
in the search snippet. So, what's going on here?
I suspect this comes down to fairly basic on-page factors. The main Forbes
article is a bit design-heavy (it has limited crawlable text) and uses an
"infinite" scroll approach. None of the Forbes pages directly mention the phrase
"richest man in the world", especially in proximity to Bill Gates' name.
What if I change my query to something that Forbes targets better, like
[world's richest people]? Here's the result I get (all of these searches are
incognito, but I can't rule out some sort of query history effect):
It's interesting that Google seems to be inferring that I want to know the
world's richest person (and is bolding "Bill Gates"), but doesn't feel that the
answer is definitive enough to break it out as a short answer. Even since
starting this post, Google has made refinements to the matching system, but
currently it seems like on-page keyword targeting is fairly critical.
It's just the beginning
Google clearly has a long way to go. Some of the answer boxes are pretty
ridiculous. Take, for example, a search for [hair color]:
This is a pretty ambiguous query, and it doesn't seem well suited for any kind
of answer box (let alone one that's one step away from a salon advertisement).
Expect Google to put a lot of time and money into improving this system over the
next year.
While this post is focused on answer boxes, Google is using a similar approach
to expand knowledge panels. For example, here's a search for [biology]:
Notice the "Related topics" section â only one of those results is
coming from Wikipedia. Google is building a decent chunk of this knowledge panel
on sites in their index. The attribution on these is much more subtle â
only the small, gray text goes to the source site. The blue links (except for
"Wikipedia" at the top) go directly to more Google searches.
Is the balance shifting?
It's easy to see how this progression is inevitable â Google has to
expand the Knowledge Graph, and they can't rely on human editors and static data
sources. While this data may be good for users, it represents a shift in the
balance between Google and webmasters. There's always been an implied symbiosis
â Google crawls our sites and extracts information, but they send us
traffic in return. We may not always like how they do things, but the end result
has benefitted millions of site owners.
What happens when a user can get a simple answer quickly, and that answer is
extracted from a third party page and cannibalizes the organic clicks? What
happens when third-party data is being used not to drive traffic to the source,
but to more Google searches? It seems to me that the symbiosis is threatened.
For now, there's not much you can do. You can work to retune your on-page
content to appear in these new entities, but you do so at the risk of harming
your own organic traffic. It's probably better to be in the answer box than let
your competitor be there, but it's hardly an ideal choice. The best I can say is
to be aware of your money terms â not just how you're ranking, but how
those SERPs actually look in context. At some point, we may all have to decide
if giving away our data is worth what we get in return.
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/ijtpHSZxJqg/knowledge-graph-2-now-featuring-your-knowledge
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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