Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, '4 Conversations That Don't Involve
Rank Reports - Whiteboard Friday'
Posted by Dana DiTomaso
With personalization and (not provided) keywords, there's been plenty of
debate in recent months over the value of keyword rankings in today's world of
marketing. It's important to remember, though, that there are many ways of
showing success without even mentioning keyword rankings.
In today's Whiteboard Friday, Dana DiTomaso tells us about a few important
conversations we can have regardless of our (or our clients') opinions on rank
reports.
Conversations that Don't Involve Rank Reports - Whiteboard Friday
For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard:
Video transcription
Howdy Moz fans. I'm not Rand today. I'm Dana DiTomaso from Kick Point, and I
presented at MozCon about next-level local SEO tactics. One of the things that I
talked about and one of the things people asked me about, I said, this was a
little throwaway comment, "Don't have conversations with your clients that end
in rank reports, because it ends up in a bad conversation, and it focuses on the
wrong kind of metric." People at the party afterwards said to me, "That's nice,
Dana, but seriously we have clients, and they want rank reports. So what are we
supposed to do?"
So today I am doing a Whiteboard Friday on conversations with clients that
don't end in a rank report, because I feel like this is a really important way
for our industry to move. It's a really important conversation you need to learn
how to have, and if you come armed with all this stuff, when you go meet with a
client, eventually when you get to the end and you drag them through this
process, they're going to love you forever. I promise. I promise. If it doesn't
work, then I will send you Smarties, which are delicious chocolate treats from
Canada. I promise, just e-mail me.
So we're going to start with things that we talk to clients about when we
start working with them. The first thing is I say to them, "How much new
business do you want?" Before they say to me, "Oh, I'm not showing up in the
map, or I'm not ranking for these phrases," I say, "How much new business can
your company take in, say, the next month?"
These are actually real numbers from one of our real clients. So this isn't
me just making up some crap. So they said to me, "I can take 200 new customers."
It's a service-based business. So they really do have an upper ceiling on how
much new business they can take before they run out of people and they have to
hire again. Okay, so 200.
Now I say, "So how many calls and people walking in," and it's a medical
industry. It's not a lot of people who walk in, but they mostly get phone calls.
How many new calls do they get now? They said, "Well, we track."
They're good at tracking. If your client isn't good at tracking, then get
them good at tracking. Then they say, "Okay, we got a 148 calls now."
So I know that from the number of people who sign up with them, I say, "How
many people who call actually make an appointment?" They say, "Well, it's about
80%." Okay, so that means that you have 118 new leads.
Okay, so you have 118 new leads that you get, and they look in their numbers
and they say, "Yeah, that seems about right. That seems cool." So then I take a
look at their website visits for the previous month, for the previous time
period, unique, not all visitors, just unique visitors, and I say, "This is how
many you unique visitors you got. It was 3,904. So that means that you have
about a 3% conversion rate from the number of people who go to your website to
the number of people who sign up for your stuff."
So now we have a number that we can work with. Then I say, "Okay, so if you
want to hit 200 pieces of new business, that means that you have to get 250
calls or walk-ins"âperhaps another business, not this oneâ"which
means that you need to get 6,700 visits to your website."
So this is when we say, "Based on the amount of budget that you'd like to
give with us, we don't recommend that you're going to hit this number in this
first month." So then we can figure out a plan with them and say,
"Okay, so next month we're going to start with PPC. We're going to do some
AdWords, because that's going to convert really well for you, and you really
want to get new business in right away. So let's do some AdWords."
Then the next month, we're working on the map stuff in the meantime, and then
we can create a plan for them on when we think we're going to hit these 6,700
visits, when we think that number's going to happen. Then they know how many
months to expect of return.
Then we can also find out from them, "How much is each one of these 118
people worth to you? How much are you willing to spend per lead to get those
people in the door?" Then you can also take the math and break that out and
determine your ROI for your business. So if you charge them a certain amount
each month, which is how we do it, it's a monthly retainer type project, then we
know the exact ROI and the exact cost per lead. So we can say to the client,
"Hey, we're actually making you money." Then they just keep paying the bills
because we're actually making them money. We're not costing them any money.
The second part of this is what you report on. So how do you get to these
6,700 visits? We break out all of our reports into five channels. We say how
much organic traffic you got, how much paid, how much referral, how much social,
how much direct. We show them just the unique visitor counts, and then we try to
break down the conversions, although not every website has strong conversions.
Sometimes we can't say, "Okay, you got X number of calls via social." We
don't necessarily know that. If we have call tracking set up, we can tell some
of that. But it's not foolproof, obviously, like maybe somebody came via your
Facebook page, and then they bookmarked the site, and then they called later. So
of course it's only going to reflect as a social visit, but whatever. So that's
why these raw numbers are so important. You can't track everything, but you can
try to track most of the things.
The other part of social, specifically, actually is a lot of really small
businesses say, "Yeah, this social thing, I don't understand. It's boring, it's
stupid, and only kids are on Facebook. My clients aren't on Facebook, and I
don't need social." So we start reporting on social, and there's a really nice
piece of regex that you can use to break out your social visits. Do not include
them in the referral traffic. Make sure to break them out as their own separate
channel.
Make sure that when you report on social, if you're getting a lot of social
visits, just tell them about it and say, "Hey, I know you're not doing anything
on social right now, but you're getting a lot of social traffic."
Or maybe if they're a home builder, for example, maybe they're getting
Pinterest traffic, or from House.com, which is new house new social network. You
say to them, "I know you're not on any of these places, but people are already
coming to your website from it, and they're converting. So maybe we can put some
effort in. Just imagine the amount of business that you would get." You say, "It
would be this much extra each month for us to help you with your social
strategies." This is a good business development tip for you.
Then the last thing that pulls all of this together, and this is another
throwaway in my presentation, a lot of people say, "Well, advertising agencies,
how do I work with these people?" Part of it is just helping them be better at
their job and helping them show that what they're doing is actually making
money.
So you don't want to go into a client and say, "That advertising company
you're paying all that money to, that stuff is crap. Forget them. You've got to
go with this SEO stuff instead." Then you make enemies instead of making
friends.
So what we do is we say, "Tell us about all the advertising you're doing
right now, all your print ads, all your radio. Who is doing it? How are you
tracking it?" They'll say, "Well, we have a print ad in the local newspaper, and
we do a radio ad on this radio station, which is right in with our demographic."
'I'll say, "That's great. What I would like to do is I would like to put some
call tracking around that, so when you have the ad, and this is, 'We're awesome,
you should call us, visit our awesomecompany.com, or call number,'" instead it
would say, "Visit our awesomecompany.com/radio station name, or this magical
call tracking number."
So people do call from radio. I know they're usually in their car, totally
breaking the law that you're not supposed to use your cell phones. But they do
call. If they visit the website, set up a landing page. It doesn't have to be
like a crazy PPC landing page, where you rip out the navigation and everything
else. Just a landing page that says, "Hey, radio station listener."
In our hometown we have Sonic, so if it's like our awesomecompany.com/sonic,
that's like a new alternative rock station. So if they visit Sonic, then we know
the type of listener who's coming, and then we can write the content in a way
that makes sense to that listener. We know how the DJs are on that radio
station, so we can match the tone of the content to match the tone of the person
who probably came because they heard the ad on Sonic. We know you're not
listening to classical. You're listening to Pearl Jam. So we know the kind of
music that you like, what type of person that you are, and we can write that
content for you. It says basically, "Howdy, Sonic listener, here's the stuff
that we think you should know in order to call. Here's the information you want
to arm yourself with. Hey, give us a call, or fill out this form." There's your
conversion tactic there. So we can see how many visits we got to that web page.
Then what you do is you talk to your radio rep or your media buyer, or
whoever else the client is working with, and you say, "Can I get the media
blocking chart?" This tells you when the ad is running. If it's from the radio
station, for example, they can tell you after it's been done or what hours it
was played in. So maybe they decided to only run the ad from 4:00 p.m. to 10:00
p.m., for example. Then in that case, you can take a look at your analytics on
an hourly basis and compare: Did we get more direct and organic
visitsâthis is typically the two that radio converts toâduring those
times?
You can't tell with a direct visit if they didn't go to that fancy URL, if
they just typed in the main URL, or if they organically typed in the name of
your client and then went to the site. So maybe it's a brand new visit. More
likely it's just not provided for this particular client, where these numbers in
the example, they're actually up to 50% of not provided now, and I think it's
just a lot of cell phone visits.
So we take a look at these metrics. We compare it to the hours in their media
blocking chart, and then we know approximately how much benefit they're
receiving as a result of radio. Then you look good, because you're able to take
an offline piece of advertising and turn it into an online metric, that is a
conversion metric for the client, and the radio station looks great, because,
"Hey, look at this, now we actually know how much benefit you're getting from
radio, which is a really difficult thing."
Then because the radio station likes you, radio station reps are actually
super friendly. You should make friends with them. They usually have like free
swags and stuff and tickets to things. But the other thing is that they work
with a lot of small businesses who first turn to radio. They're not calling you,
they're calling the radio station because they think radio works, and for some
clients it does. It really depends.
But that radio rep will say, "Hey, do you have a website? We want to mention
your website in the ad." The company will say, "No, I don't know about this web
thing." The radio station will say, "I'm working with this amazing company, and
they have done this great tracking for one of our other clients, and look at
what they've done, and look at the stuff they can report on." They'll say,
"That's amazing. I clearly need to spend all my money on these services, except
for the money we're going to spend on radio." Then you get new business out of
it.
Somebody asked on the last day, "How do you get a seat at the table with the
advertisers?" It's by playing nice with them. It's by saying to them, "Look, I
know that you can't do this level of tracking with the offline advertising to
the actual leads, but I bet you can, and I'm going to teach you how. But I'm
also going to show everything and how it relates to the client, all the pieces
and how it all comes together." Then when you, as the business, as your
consultant, when you report on this, that turns into this complete marketing
reporting for the client, and they love this. They get really excited about it.
Like when I give a client a report and I say, "Look at this, your cost per lead
went down two bucks," that's really exciting for a client." They think, "Wow,
this company is making even more money for me. What would happen if I gave them
more money? Then what happens when I refer my friends to them to make more
business?" It's a way to make a rapport that turns into a business building
tactic for you.
I hope you find this helpful. Again, if you didn't, e-mail me and I'll give
you some Smarties. Thanks.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
want to read!
You may view the latest post at
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Build Great Backlinks
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Friday, 8 November 2013
Thursday, 7 November 2013
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'New and Improved Custom Reports
Added to Moz Analytics'
Posted by Miranda.Rensch
Hello everyone! Miranda here. I'm a Product Manager at Moz and I'm excited to
announce that we've added custom, automated reporting to Moz Analytics. This is
something that already existed in PRO (the predecessor to Moz Analytics), but
the new version has some cool upgrades I'd like to point out, so here goes a
quick walk-through.
Walk-through of the new custom reports
With the new version of custom reports, you can select (almost) any
visualization or data list from within Moz Analytics to be included in a custom
PDF and emailed regularly.
To access the new reports, just go into any campaign and click "Custom
Reports" in the top right and then click "Create / Schedule Report" to get
started.
Next, you'll begin filling in the details of your report. You can give it a
name and a description to appear at the top of the PDF:
In the "Add Modules" step you use a left navigation similar to the normal Moz
Analytics experience so you can quickly navigate to your favorite data /
visualizations and click the + sign to select them. In the next step you'll be
able to organize them and add notes.
In the "Design Report" step, you can re-order your modules, add notes, and if
you have access to branded reports, add your brand logo to be printed on the
PDF.
In the next step you can preview your report. Click "Generate PDF Report" to
view and save as an actual PDF.
Finally, you can schedule the report to be emailed regularly to you and any
others that you specify. You can now also customize the text of the email that
gets sent out!
When you've finished setting up your report, you can see all active reports on
the main Custom Reports page. From there you can see the next scheduled send
date and edit your reports.
Other new stuff in Moz Analytics
While we're at it, we'd like to mention a few other improvements in Moz
Analytics:
Crawl diagnostics updates
We made some improvements to the design to make it easier to find the issues
exposed by our custom crawler. You can now see a breakdown of your top High,
Medium, and Low priority issues at the bottom of the Crawl Diagnostics overview
page.
You will also see the issue counts included in the issue drop-down.
We've also made sure that all of the crawl data is included in the .csv
export. We are still working on making views of duplicate pages and titles
visible outside of the .csv.
Keyword opportunities improvement
With this smaller update, we added a button to the keyword opportunities
report in the rankings section, allowing you to quickly add an attractive
keyword to your list for rank tracking.
Fresh Web Explorer alerts
In case you missed it, we also recently released a big update to Fresh Web
Explorer that lets you create and save custom alerts. Use it to get prompt
alerts when someone publishes content mentioning your brand, your competitors,
or even discover interesting link and outreach opportunities. Cyrus even wrote a
whole blog post about it.
What's next for Moz Analytics?
Here are some of the projects that are currently in-progress and up next for
Moz Analytics. This is just the top of our list, but we'd love to know what you
think! Please let us know in the comments or on our feature request forum.
Monthly timeframes: We are still working on adding monthly timeframe options
into custom reports and the rest of the Moz Analytics app. We hope to have that
in by the end of the year. Also, we are aware that there are some issues
currently with monthly custom reports in PRO causing them to be delayed. We hope
to build these monthly reports into the new version of custom reports in a more
scalable way and we apologize for the issue in PRO.
Lots of bug / UX fixes: We're working on continually responding to feedback
and bugs in the new application. We've gotten to many, but not all of them.
Thank you for your patience!
Contextual help: We're working on ways to bring help guides and videos
directly into the app so that when you need help you can find it quick.
Add individual keyword history to Custom Reports: There are a couple of
modules that can't be added to custom reports yetâAnalyze a Keyword
(individual keyword history), Grade a Page, and Analyze Page Issues. We hope to
make those available in the next few months as well.
Per-page PDF downloads: We are currently working on allowing PDF downloads
of any page in the app. We hope to have that done in the next month or so.
Customized timeframe options: We're in the process of researching our
ability to provide more customized timeframe options. It's a bit complicated due
to the variety of data we include in our app, but we're looking at our options.
Multi-user accounts: We're working on supporting multiple users per account.
You tell us! If you have any other feedback or ideas for how this software
could be better and save you more time, please let us know on our feature
request forum!
That's all! If you have any questions or comments, chances are other people
will too, so why not ask it on the Moz Q&A forum! Looking forward to hearing
your feedback. If you'd like to volunteer a half-hour to give more in-depth
feedback about this section or reporting in general, please email
miranda@moz.com.
Happy reporting!
Miranda Rensch
Product Manager @ Moz
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/EuNbF2BpsWk/moz-analytics-custom-reports
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
Added to Moz Analytics'
Posted by Miranda.Rensch
Hello everyone! Miranda here. I'm a Product Manager at Moz and I'm excited to
announce that we've added custom, automated reporting to Moz Analytics. This is
something that already existed in PRO (the predecessor to Moz Analytics), but
the new version has some cool upgrades I'd like to point out, so here goes a
quick walk-through.
Walk-through of the new custom reports
With the new version of custom reports, you can select (almost) any
visualization or data list from within Moz Analytics to be included in a custom
PDF and emailed regularly.
To access the new reports, just go into any campaign and click "Custom
Reports" in the top right and then click "Create / Schedule Report" to get
started.
Next, you'll begin filling in the details of your report. You can give it a
name and a description to appear at the top of the PDF:
In the "Add Modules" step you use a left navigation similar to the normal Moz
Analytics experience so you can quickly navigate to your favorite data /
visualizations and click the + sign to select them. In the next step you'll be
able to organize them and add notes.
In the "Design Report" step, you can re-order your modules, add notes, and if
you have access to branded reports, add your brand logo to be printed on the
PDF.
In the next step you can preview your report. Click "Generate PDF Report" to
view and save as an actual PDF.
Finally, you can schedule the report to be emailed regularly to you and any
others that you specify. You can now also customize the text of the email that
gets sent out!
When you've finished setting up your report, you can see all active reports on
the main Custom Reports page. From there you can see the next scheduled send
date and edit your reports.
Other new stuff in Moz Analytics
While we're at it, we'd like to mention a few other improvements in Moz
Analytics:
Crawl diagnostics updates
We made some improvements to the design to make it easier to find the issues
exposed by our custom crawler. You can now see a breakdown of your top High,
Medium, and Low priority issues at the bottom of the Crawl Diagnostics overview
page.
You will also see the issue counts included in the issue drop-down.
We've also made sure that all of the crawl data is included in the .csv
export. We are still working on making views of duplicate pages and titles
visible outside of the .csv.
Keyword opportunities improvement
With this smaller update, we added a button to the keyword opportunities
report in the rankings section, allowing you to quickly add an attractive
keyword to your list for rank tracking.
Fresh Web Explorer alerts
In case you missed it, we also recently released a big update to Fresh Web
Explorer that lets you create and save custom alerts. Use it to get prompt
alerts when someone publishes content mentioning your brand, your competitors,
or even discover interesting link and outreach opportunities. Cyrus even wrote a
whole blog post about it.
What's next for Moz Analytics?
Here are some of the projects that are currently in-progress and up next for
Moz Analytics. This is just the top of our list, but we'd love to know what you
think! Please let us know in the comments or on our feature request forum.
Monthly timeframes: We are still working on adding monthly timeframe options
into custom reports and the rest of the Moz Analytics app. We hope to have that
in by the end of the year. Also, we are aware that there are some issues
currently with monthly custom reports in PRO causing them to be delayed. We hope
to build these monthly reports into the new version of custom reports in a more
scalable way and we apologize for the issue in PRO.
Lots of bug / UX fixes: We're working on continually responding to feedback
and bugs in the new application. We've gotten to many, but not all of them.
Thank you for your patience!
Contextual help: We're working on ways to bring help guides and videos
directly into the app so that when you need help you can find it quick.
Add individual keyword history to Custom Reports: There are a couple of
modules that can't be added to custom reports yetâAnalyze a Keyword
(individual keyword history), Grade a Page, and Analyze Page Issues. We hope to
make those available in the next few months as well.
Per-page PDF downloads: We are currently working on allowing PDF downloads
of any page in the app. We hope to have that done in the next month or so.
Customized timeframe options: We're in the process of researching our
ability to provide more customized timeframe options. It's a bit complicated due
to the variety of data we include in our app, but we're looking at our options.
Multi-user accounts: We're working on supporting multiple users per account.
You tell us! If you have any other feedback or ideas for how this software
could be better and save you more time, please let us know on our feature
request forum!
That's all! If you have any questions or comments, chances are other people
will too, so why not ask it on the Moz Q&A forum! Looking forward to hearing
your feedback. If you'd like to volunteer a half-hour to give more in-depth
feedback about this section or reporting in general, please email
miranda@moz.com.
Happy reporting!
Miranda Rensch
Product Manager @ Moz
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/EuNbF2BpsWk/moz-analytics-custom-reports
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'Must-Have Social Media Meta Tag
Templates for Improved Sharing and SEO'
Posted by Cyrus-Shepard
At Moz, we strive to include social media metadata in all new pieces of
content that we publish. This allows us to optimize for sharing Twitter,
Facebook, Google+ and Pinerest by defining exactly how titles, descriptions,
images and more appear in social streams.
Think of it as conversion rate optimization for social exposure.
The implications for SEO are also significant. We know from experience and
studies that the right data, including optimized images, helps content to
spread, which often leads to increased links and mentions.
Knowing exactly which social meta tags to include can be confusing even to
experienced webmasters. This post by Micheal King is a huge help, and Wordpress
publishers who use Yoast's SEO plugin are well ahead of the game. For the rest
of us, consider the different structures supported by the major social
platforms:
Twitter Cards: Summaries, Images, Galleries, Apps, Video, Audio, and Products
Pinterest Rich Pins: Products, Recipes, Movies, and Articles
Google+: Articles, Blog, Book, Event, Local Business, Organization, Person,
Product, and Reviews
Facebook: Articles, Photos, Audio, Video, and more
To help ease this problem, I created four social media tag templates that you
can fill out, customize for your own use, and share with your team and others.
How to use these templates
Simply copy and paste the template into the text editor of your choice. Make
sure to replace any orange or green text with your own data, and customize,
eliminate or add any tags you find necessary.
The first three of these templates are optimized using a typical "article"
markup and data, ideal for blog posts and most written content. The final
template contains markup for product pages.For other post types, such as book or
recipes, refer to documentation linked at the end of this post for reference on
what to customize.
When you are done, don't forget to test and apply for approval.
1. The Minimal Template
This slimmed back version runs lean and fast. It contains a bare minimum of
data for optimized sharing across Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and Pinterest.
Title tags and meta descriptions are included even though they aren't
technically social media meta tags. This is because they can be used by Google+
and other social media platforms, and it is best practice to include them on
every page you publish.
Minimum Social Media Tag Template: Article
<!-- Place this data between the <head> tags of your website -->
<title>Page Title. Maximum length 60-70 characters</title>
<meta name="description" content="Page description. No longer than 155
characters." />
<!-- Twitter Card data -->
<meta name="twitter:card" value="summary">
<!-- Open Graph data -->
<meta property="og:title" content="Title Here" />
<meta property="og:type" content="article" />
<meta property="og:url" content="http://www.example.com/" />
<meta property="og:image" content="http://example.com/image.jpg" />
<meta property="og:description" content="Description Here" />
2: The Standard Template
The standard template represents a more robust implementation of social tags
and is meant to work across all platforms. In addition to all of the features of
the mimimal template above, the standard template includes the following:
The basic Twitter Summary card
Twitter thumbnail image
Facebook Page Insights
Standard Social Media Tag Template: Article
<!-- Place this data between the <head> tags of your website -->
<title>Page Title. Maximum length 60-70 characters</title>
<meta name="description" content="Page description. No longer than 155
characters." />
<!-- Twitter Card data -->
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary">
<meta name="twitter:site" content="@publisher_handle">
<meta name="twitter:title" content="Page Title">
<meta name="twitter:description" content="Page description less than 200
characters">
<meta name="twitter:creator" content="@author_handle">
<-- Twitter Summary card images must be at least 200x200px -->
<meta name="twitter:image" content="http://www.example.com/image.jpg">
<!-- Open Graph data -->
<meta property="og:title" content="Title Here" />
<meta property="og:type" content="article" />
<meta property="og:url" content="http://www.example.com/" />
<meta property="og:image" content="http://example.com/image.jpg" />
<meta property="og:description" content="Description Here" />
<meta property="og:site_name" content="Site Name, i.e. Moz" />
<meta property="fb:admins" content="Facebook numeric ID" />
3: The Full Monty
This is the monster! In addition to all the data contained in the standard
template, the full template contains:
Google Authorship and Publisher Markup. Although this data doesn't change your
content appearance in Google+, it potentially add links to your Google+ pages in
search results.
Schema.org article markup
Twitter Summary card with large image
Expanded Open Graph article data
Full Social Media Tag Template: Article
<!-- Update your html tag to include the itemscope and itemtype
attributes. -->
<html itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Article">
<!-- Place this data between the <head> tags of your website -->
<title>Page Title. Maximum length 60-70 characters</title>
<meta name="description" content="Page description. No longer than 155
characters." />
<!-- Google Authorship and Publisher Markup -->
<link rel="author"
href="https://plus.google.com/[Google+_Profile]/posts"/>
<link rel="publisher"
href=âhttps://plus.google.com/[Google+_Page_Profile]"/>
<!-- Schema.org markup for Google+ -->
<meta itemprop="name" content="The Name or Title Here">
<meta itemprop="description" content="This is the page description">
<meta itemprop="image" content="http://www.example.com/image.jpg">
<!-- Twitter Card data -->
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image">
<meta name="twitter:site" content="@publisher_handle">
<meta name="twitter:title" content="Page Title">
<meta name="twitter:description" content="Page description less than 200
characters">
<meta name="twitter:creator" content="@author_handle">
<!-- Twitter summary card with large image must be at least 280x150px
-->
<meta name="twitter:image:src"
content="http://www.example.com/image.html">
<!-- Open Graph data -->
<meta property="og:title" content="Title Here" />
<meta property="og:type" content="article" />
<meta property="og:url" content="http://www.example.com/" />
<meta property="og:image" content="http://example.com/image.jpg" />
<meta property="og:description" content="Description Here" />
<meta property="og:site_name" content="Site Name, i.e. Moz" />
<meta property="article:published_time"
content="2013-09-17T05:59:00+01:00" />
<meta property="article:modified_time"
content="2013-09-16T19:08:47+01:00" />
<meta property="article:section" content="Article Section" />
<meta property="article:tag" content="Article Tag" />
<meta property="fb:admins" content="Facebook numberic ID" />
Bonus: The Product Template
For merchants, product markup is very popular, and usually easy for
developers to implement in their shopping cart software. The product template
differs from article markup in only a few ways:
Modified <html> tag to reflect schema.org product data
Twitter Product Card includes required data labels
Open Graph data includes price and currency data
Product Social Media Tag Template
<!-- Update your html tag to include the itemscope and itemtype
attributes. -->
<html itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Product">
<!-- Place this data between the <head> tags of your website -->
<title>Page Title. Maximum length 60-70 characters</title>
<meta name="description" content="Page description. No longer than 155
characters." />
<!-- Schema.org markup for Google+ -->
<meta itemprop="name" content="The Name or Title Here">
<meta itemprop="description" content="This is the page description">
<meta itemprop="image" content="http://www.example.com/image.jpg">
<!-- Twitter Card data -->
<meta name="twitter:card" content="product">
<meta name="twitter:site" content="@publisher_handle">
<meta name="twitter:title" content="Page Title">
<meta name="twitter:description" content="Page description less than 200
characters">
<meta name="twitter:creator" content="@author_handle">
<meta name="twitter:image"
content="http://www.example.com/image.html">
<meta name="twitter:data1" content="$3">
<meta name="twitter:label1" content="Price">
<meta name="twitter:data2" content="Black">
<meta name="twitter:label2" content="Color">
<!-- Open Graph data -->
<meta property="og:title" content="Title Here" />
<meta property="og:type" content="article" />
<meta property="og:url" content="http://www.example.com/" />
<meta property="og:image" content="http://example.com/image.jpg" />
<meta property="og:description" content="Description Here" />
<meta property="og:site_name" content="Site Name, i.e. Moz" />
<meta property="og:price:amount" content="15.00" />
<meta property="og:price:currency" content="USD" />
Tools for testing and approval
A. Twitter Validation Tool
https://dev.twitter.com/docs/cards/validation/validator
Before your cards show on Twitter, you must first have your domain
approved. Fortunately, it's a super-easy process. After you implement your
cards, simply enter your sample URL into the validation tool. After checking
your markup, select the "Submit for Approval" button.
B. Facebook Debugger
https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug
You don't need prior approval for your meta information to show on
Facebook, but the debugging tool they offer gives you a wealth of information
about all your tags and can also analyze your Twitter tags.
C. Google Structured Data Testing Tool
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets
Webmasters traditionally use the structured data testing tool to test
authorship markup and preview how snippets will appear in search results, but
you can also use see what other types of meta data Google is able to extract
from each page.
D. Pinterest Rich Pins Validator
http://developers.pinterest.com/rich_pins/validator/
Like Twitter, Pinterest requires an approval process to enable Rich Pin
functionality. Use the Rich Pin Validator tool to test your data markup and
apply for approval at the same time.
Tips and best practices
Optimizing for images
The image you link to in your social data does not actually have to be on the
page, but it should represent your content well. The image allows you to
controll what people see when they share your content, so it's important to use
quality images.
Every social platform has different standards for sizing. Typically, it's
easier to keep it simple and choose one image size that will work for all
services.
Twitter thumbnail: 120x120px
Twitter large image: 280x150px
Facebook: Standards vary, but an image at least 200x200px works best. Facebook
recommends large images up to 1200px wide.
In short, larger images offer you the most flexibility. When in doubt, test
each page using the appropriate tool below to see exactly how your images will
appear in snippits.
The importance of Open Graph data
If you could choose only one type of meta data to include, your best bet is
Open Graph. That's because all the platforms can use it as a fallback, including
Twitter to a large degree.
Facebook page insights
The meta property "fb:admins" requires that you enter your numeric Facebook
id number, and gives you access to analytics about how your website content is
shared on Facebook. Read more about Page Insights, including how to set it up
and discover your numeric id.
Further resources
Use these templates as a starting point, but you can customize them in
millions of ways. A few valuable resources to aid your journey:
The Web Developer's SEO Cheat Sheet 2.0
18 Meta Tags Every Webpage Should Have in 2014
Twitter Card Documentation
The Open Graph Protocol
Snippet - Google+ Platform
Pinterest Rich Pins for Business
WooCommerce - Free Wordpress toolkit that adds product markup
What are your best tips for optimizing your content for sharing? Let us know
in the comments below.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/GE7CLFi3vNs/meta-data-templates-123
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
Templates for Improved Sharing and SEO'
Posted by Cyrus-Shepard
At Moz, we strive to include social media metadata in all new pieces of
content that we publish. This allows us to optimize for sharing Twitter,
Facebook, Google+ and Pinerest by defining exactly how titles, descriptions,
images and more appear in social streams.
Think of it as conversion rate optimization for social exposure.
The implications for SEO are also significant. We know from experience and
studies that the right data, including optimized images, helps content to
spread, which often leads to increased links and mentions.
Knowing exactly which social meta tags to include can be confusing even to
experienced webmasters. This post by Micheal King is a huge help, and Wordpress
publishers who use Yoast's SEO plugin are well ahead of the game. For the rest
of us, consider the different structures supported by the major social
platforms:
Twitter Cards: Summaries, Images, Galleries, Apps, Video, Audio, and Products
Pinterest Rich Pins: Products, Recipes, Movies, and Articles
Google+: Articles, Blog, Book, Event, Local Business, Organization, Person,
Product, and Reviews
Facebook: Articles, Photos, Audio, Video, and more
To help ease this problem, I created four social media tag templates that you
can fill out, customize for your own use, and share with your team and others.
How to use these templates
Simply copy and paste the template into the text editor of your choice. Make
sure to replace any orange or green text with your own data, and customize,
eliminate or add any tags you find necessary.
The first three of these templates are optimized using a typical "article"
markup and data, ideal for blog posts and most written content. The final
template contains markup for product pages.For other post types, such as book or
recipes, refer to documentation linked at the end of this post for reference on
what to customize.
When you are done, don't forget to test and apply for approval.
1. The Minimal Template
This slimmed back version runs lean and fast. It contains a bare minimum of
data for optimized sharing across Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and Pinterest.
Title tags and meta descriptions are included even though they aren't
technically social media meta tags. This is because they can be used by Google+
and other social media platforms, and it is best practice to include them on
every page you publish.
Minimum Social Media Tag Template: Article
<!-- Place this data between the <head> tags of your website -->
<title>Page Title. Maximum length 60-70 characters</title>
<meta name="description" content="Page description. No longer than 155
characters." />
<!-- Twitter Card data -->
<meta name="twitter:card" value="summary">
<!-- Open Graph data -->
<meta property="og:title" content="Title Here" />
<meta property="og:type" content="article" />
<meta property="og:url" content="http://www.example.com/" />
<meta property="og:image" content="http://example.com/image.jpg" />
<meta property="og:description" content="Description Here" />
2: The Standard Template
The standard template represents a more robust implementation of social tags
and is meant to work across all platforms. In addition to all of the features of
the mimimal template above, the standard template includes the following:
The basic Twitter Summary card
Twitter thumbnail image
Facebook Page Insights
Standard Social Media Tag Template: Article
<!-- Place this data between the <head> tags of your website -->
<title>Page Title. Maximum length 60-70 characters</title>
<meta name="description" content="Page description. No longer than 155
characters." />
<!-- Twitter Card data -->
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary">
<meta name="twitter:site" content="@publisher_handle">
<meta name="twitter:title" content="Page Title">
<meta name="twitter:description" content="Page description less than 200
characters">
<meta name="twitter:creator" content="@author_handle">
<-- Twitter Summary card images must be at least 200x200px -->
<meta name="twitter:image" content="http://www.example.com/image.jpg">
<!-- Open Graph data -->
<meta property="og:title" content="Title Here" />
<meta property="og:type" content="article" />
<meta property="og:url" content="http://www.example.com/" />
<meta property="og:image" content="http://example.com/image.jpg" />
<meta property="og:description" content="Description Here" />
<meta property="og:site_name" content="Site Name, i.e. Moz" />
<meta property="fb:admins" content="Facebook numeric ID" />
3: The Full Monty
This is the monster! In addition to all the data contained in the standard
template, the full template contains:
Google Authorship and Publisher Markup. Although this data doesn't change your
content appearance in Google+, it potentially add links to your Google+ pages in
search results.
Schema.org article markup
Twitter Summary card with large image
Expanded Open Graph article data
Full Social Media Tag Template: Article
<!-- Update your html tag to include the itemscope and itemtype
attributes. -->
<html itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Article">
<!-- Place this data between the <head> tags of your website -->
<title>Page Title. Maximum length 60-70 characters</title>
<meta name="description" content="Page description. No longer than 155
characters." />
<!-- Google Authorship and Publisher Markup -->
<link rel="author"
href="https://plus.google.com/[Google+_Profile]/posts"/>
<link rel="publisher"
href=âhttps://plus.google.com/[Google+_Page_Profile]"/>
<!-- Schema.org markup for Google+ -->
<meta itemprop="name" content="The Name or Title Here">
<meta itemprop="description" content="This is the page description">
<meta itemprop="image" content="http://www.example.com/image.jpg">
<!-- Twitter Card data -->
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image">
<meta name="twitter:site" content="@publisher_handle">
<meta name="twitter:title" content="Page Title">
<meta name="twitter:description" content="Page description less than 200
characters">
<meta name="twitter:creator" content="@author_handle">
<!-- Twitter summary card with large image must be at least 280x150px
-->
<meta name="twitter:image:src"
content="http://www.example.com/image.html">
<!-- Open Graph data -->
<meta property="og:title" content="Title Here" />
<meta property="og:type" content="article" />
<meta property="og:url" content="http://www.example.com/" />
<meta property="og:image" content="http://example.com/image.jpg" />
<meta property="og:description" content="Description Here" />
<meta property="og:site_name" content="Site Name, i.e. Moz" />
<meta property="article:published_time"
content="2013-09-17T05:59:00+01:00" />
<meta property="article:modified_time"
content="2013-09-16T19:08:47+01:00" />
<meta property="article:section" content="Article Section" />
<meta property="article:tag" content="Article Tag" />
<meta property="fb:admins" content="Facebook numberic ID" />
Bonus: The Product Template
For merchants, product markup is very popular, and usually easy for
developers to implement in their shopping cart software. The product template
differs from article markup in only a few ways:
Modified <html> tag to reflect schema.org product data
Twitter Product Card includes required data labels
Open Graph data includes price and currency data
Product Social Media Tag Template
<!-- Update your html tag to include the itemscope and itemtype
attributes. -->
<html itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Product">
<!-- Place this data between the <head> tags of your website -->
<title>Page Title. Maximum length 60-70 characters</title>
<meta name="description" content="Page description. No longer than 155
characters." />
<!-- Schema.org markup for Google+ -->
<meta itemprop="name" content="The Name or Title Here">
<meta itemprop="description" content="This is the page description">
<meta itemprop="image" content="http://www.example.com/image.jpg">
<!-- Twitter Card data -->
<meta name="twitter:card" content="product">
<meta name="twitter:site" content="@publisher_handle">
<meta name="twitter:title" content="Page Title">
<meta name="twitter:description" content="Page description less than 200
characters">
<meta name="twitter:creator" content="@author_handle">
<meta name="twitter:image"
content="http://www.example.com/image.html">
<meta name="twitter:data1" content="$3">
<meta name="twitter:label1" content="Price">
<meta name="twitter:data2" content="Black">
<meta name="twitter:label2" content="Color">
<!-- Open Graph data -->
<meta property="og:title" content="Title Here" />
<meta property="og:type" content="article" />
<meta property="og:url" content="http://www.example.com/" />
<meta property="og:image" content="http://example.com/image.jpg" />
<meta property="og:description" content="Description Here" />
<meta property="og:site_name" content="Site Name, i.e. Moz" />
<meta property="og:price:amount" content="15.00" />
<meta property="og:price:currency" content="USD" />
Tools for testing and approval
A. Twitter Validation Tool
https://dev.twitter.com/docs/cards/validation/validator
Before your cards show on Twitter, you must first have your domain
approved. Fortunately, it's a super-easy process. After you implement your
cards, simply enter your sample URL into the validation tool. After checking
your markup, select the "Submit for Approval" button.
B. Facebook Debugger
https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug
You don't need prior approval for your meta information to show on
Facebook, but the debugging tool they offer gives you a wealth of information
about all your tags and can also analyze your Twitter tags.
C. Google Structured Data Testing Tool
http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets
Webmasters traditionally use the structured data testing tool to test
authorship markup and preview how snippets will appear in search results, but
you can also use see what other types of meta data Google is able to extract
from each page.
D. Pinterest Rich Pins Validator
http://developers.pinterest.com/rich_pins/validator/
Like Twitter, Pinterest requires an approval process to enable Rich Pin
functionality. Use the Rich Pin Validator tool to test your data markup and
apply for approval at the same time.
Tips and best practices
Optimizing for images
The image you link to in your social data does not actually have to be on the
page, but it should represent your content well. The image allows you to
controll what people see when they share your content, so it's important to use
quality images.
Every social platform has different standards for sizing. Typically, it's
easier to keep it simple and choose one image size that will work for all
services.
Twitter thumbnail: 120x120px
Twitter large image: 280x150px
Facebook: Standards vary, but an image at least 200x200px works best. Facebook
recommends large images up to 1200px wide.
In short, larger images offer you the most flexibility. When in doubt, test
each page using the appropriate tool below to see exactly how your images will
appear in snippits.
The importance of Open Graph data
If you could choose only one type of meta data to include, your best bet is
Open Graph. That's because all the platforms can use it as a fallback, including
Twitter to a large degree.
Facebook page insights
The meta property "fb:admins" requires that you enter your numeric Facebook
id number, and gives you access to analytics about how your website content is
shared on Facebook. Read more about Page Insights, including how to set it up
and discover your numeric id.
Further resources
Use these templates as a starting point, but you can customize them in
millions of ways. A few valuable resources to aid your journey:
The Web Developer's SEO Cheat Sheet 2.0
18 Meta Tags Every Webpage Should Have in 2014
Twitter Card Documentation
The Open Graph Protocol
Snippet - Google+ Platform
Pinterest Rich Pins for Business
WooCommerce - Free Wordpress toolkit that adds product markup
What are your best tips for optimizing your content for sharing? Let us know
in the comments below.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/GE7CLFi3vNs/meta-data-templates-123
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Wednesday, 6 November 2013
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, '9,000 Uniques in One Day: A Viral
Marketing Case Study'
Posted by ViperChill
One of the most popularised examples of viral marketing is that of Microsoft's
Hotmail (now Outlook Online) email service. Every single email sent using the
site came attached with a small signature which read "Get your free e-mail at
Hotmail." Doug Rushoff was one of the first people to use the phrase viral
marketing online, and likened the concept to someone who is susceptible to an
idea being infected by another, and then sharing it with others, in turn
"infecting" them.
The Hotmail example fits this ideology perfectly, and helped propel the
service to a point where it was adding in excess of 270,000 new users every
single day.
The concept of something going viral doesn't just apply to the internet of
course. Another phrase associated with the ideaâword of mouthâis
definitely more relevant to the offline world. It may be watching a TV show and
going into work to talk about it, reaching more people who then watch the show
and tell even more people. It may be having a great experience at a restaurant
and telling a friend, who visits that very restaurant and then tells even more
people to go.
The end result is that one person can help something spread to far more people
than themselves. The internet has simply made it much easier for one person to
reach a huge audience with a message that's worth sharing. In the last 10 years,
the number of people using the Internet has gone from being measured in millions
to being measured in billions.
This was a version of the planned introduction for the book Viral Marketing for
Dummies which Wiley asked me to publish a little over a year ago.
Though I actually quit my contract and stopped working on the book (long
story), I've still been involved in various viral marketing campaigns. The one I
would like to share with you right now was built purely to show that the ideas I
was sharing in the book actually had merit.
Join a story rather than creating a new one
Though it's certainly not impossible to create your own viral category to get
some buzz, it makes your job much, much easier if someone is already talking
about a topic that you can leverage for your own gain.
Lyndon Antcliff, most notable for fooling the world's media into thinking that
a teenager stole his Dad's credit card to play Xbox with a hooker, is very good
at this. He often tweets the latest viral trends and helps his clients to
capitalise on hot topics of the moment.
Again, you don't have to only take advantage of what people are saying now.
When Monster Slippers wanted their slipper company to go viral, they created an
elaborate story to say that a Chinese manufacturing incident left one customer
with a size 1,450 shoe, almost as big as a car.
The story was picked up by multiple news outlets, all linking to Monster
Slippers as they were the one to break the story. That was until they all
figured out the customer who received the unusually large footwear actually
looked identical to a staff member of Monster Slippers.
I didn't have anything I actually wanted to promote in my example, besides a
cause that I believed strongly in, so decided to pick up on a news event that a
lot of people were talking about: The demise of Google Reader and, potentially,
Feedburner too.
Stick to one core theme
"What did the fox say?" just wouldn't be the same if we also wanted to know
what the eagle, walrus, and piranha say too.
The Old Spice videos featuring actor Bruce Cambpell basically ran as an idea
that you couldn't be Bruce with his great physique and confidence, but you could
at least smell like him. They didn't run with this theme just once, but used it
in multiple highly successful commercials.
Old Spice is a smell. It doesn't necessarily make you smell better than any
other product. There's nothing inherently amazing about it. Yet after those
commercials ran, you couldn't walk into a supermarket and find it on shelves
very easily. They found one theme and stuck with it, even creating unique videos
for Redditors in an AMA format.
Another reason for sticking to one core theme is that you really have to give
sharing a purpose (next section). If there's no clear message that you want to
spread, it's hard for people to get behind the idea and want to share it with
others, whatever it may be.
I've already mentioned that I wanted my idea to focus on the news events
surrounding the demise of Google Reader as well as the potential demise of
Google's Feedburner product. I think it was much better for me to pick one of
these rather than try to get the message across about both.
You couldn't save Google Reader after it was announced to be shut down, but
Feedburner still has some legs (for now) and that's the one I care about the
most.
Make it easy to share, and give sharing a purpose (!)
This is possibility the most overused advice when it comes to teaching people
how to get ideas to go viral but it is still relevant. Of course, you can't just
stick social media buttons onto a site and expect something to instantly spread
across the social stratosphere (that's what we're calling it these days,
right?).
Not only did I put sharing buttons on my site, but I also decided to actually
give people the text they could use on sites like Twitter and Facebook.
Going back to my earlier point about purpose, people had to believe that they
would actually get a response and that sharing would do something productive.
Whether that's positioning themselves as someone who is intelligent and in on
the latest news (whether it's movies, the next viral video, etc.) or, like me,
they wanted to rally behind a cause.
One of my good blogger friends actually tweeted the story without knowing
about it.
Thanks Steve!
Execute properly
Though I had no real idea if the Feedburner minisite would actually take off,
it was worth a try. I wasn't actually promoting anything besides having a case
study for the book I was writing, but even still, I wanted to at least make it
look semi-professional and not just like a random blog post on a website.
I thought about not only the big detailsâlike why Feedburner might
actually shut downâbut also the small details, like having an upside-down
Feedburner logo as the website favicon. I also decided to take a comic strip
style approach and use my limited skills in Photoshop to put together something
hopefully, as least slightly, humorous.
There was even a comment that said I ripped off the style of the Oatmeal which
I'll take as a compliment judging by Matt's huge success after working here at
Moz.
Finally, I also enlisted the help of three others to throw in the
ever-important cat pictures with the hashtag #pleasedontkillfeedburner. Thanks
to Ramsay and Chris for kindly sharing pictures of their cats which I could also
use in the comic.
To put together the theme of the site, I simply headed over to my usual design
haunt, ThemeForest, and picked up a template. Then I got to work in Photoshop
without caring too much for standards or usability. I viewed the project as
time-sensitive, so I wanted to get something up as quickly as possible.
Just be careful which font you use...
Funny; that's not even Comic Sans.
The end result
Just to clarify, the only piece of promotion I did for this was around two
personal tweets and I emailed no more than six people about the idea. If you
consider that a tweet of mine would only get a few dozen clicks, I was quite
surprised by what happened when I woke up the next day: The site made the
homepage of Hacker News.
Here are the stats for the first week of the site going live:
To give even more transparency, here's a list of some of the sources which
sent traffic. Notice that a lot of the tweets sent a surprising amount of people
to the page:
There are a lot more but that screenshot was getting long enough as it is.
Here are a few other results from this campaign:
The site has between 300-500 backlinks (!) depending on which link checker you
use
The domain is now a PR 4
It has been shared on social media over 1,400 times
The entire website was built in less than one day
Some people might argue that I'm fortunate that the article went viral on
Hacker News (I didn't submit it, and don't know who did). If you're one of those
people, well I'll just say that I'm also "fortunate" to have the idea for the
site, to register the domain, to contact people for cat photos, to spend a day
in Photoshop and to actually execute my idea.
Of course, not everything you create with the idea of 'going viral' is going
to be a hit. But if you keep focusing on creating content that follows this
outline (relevant to hot topics, gives people a reason to share, execute the
idea properly) then no doubt that something you create is going to get a lot of
attention.
Even with this campaign there were a few mistakes I made:
The site looks terrible on mobile devices. Seriously, don't bother opening it in
your iPad
I lost the account access to the email used in the graphic so I have no idea if
Google responded after the initial buzz (duh!)
Ideally this would have been a campaign I could have linked to other web
properties after the traffic burst subsided
Though in recent months I've been a very public advocate on the ViperChill
blog that, quite simply, quality content doesn't rank as well as it should, I
still believe in it. Every time I've showed terrible websites ranking highly in
Google, I've always stated that I would love for the opposite to be the case.
If you would like to hear more about this topic (I wrote 20,000+ words for the
book before scrapping the idea) then please let me know in the comments, and
I'll see what I can do. There is a lot more to cover, but hopefully this post
gave you a bit of inspiration about taking action on those random ideas I'm sure
you have from time to time.
As a final plug, I've actually just started a brand new niche site case study
(introduction post here) where 3 people will be tackling the same niche from
three different angles. One of us is using only SEO, I'm relying purely on
creating great content and the third contributor is a total beginner to creating
sites who has all options available to him.
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/rMSkeW6H8z4/9000-uniques-viral-marketing-case-study
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
Marketing Case Study'
Posted by ViperChill
One of the most popularised examples of viral marketing is that of Microsoft's
Hotmail (now Outlook Online) email service. Every single email sent using the
site came attached with a small signature which read "Get your free e-mail at
Hotmail." Doug Rushoff was one of the first people to use the phrase viral
marketing online, and likened the concept to someone who is susceptible to an
idea being infected by another, and then sharing it with others, in turn
"infecting" them.
The Hotmail example fits this ideology perfectly, and helped propel the
service to a point where it was adding in excess of 270,000 new users every
single day.
The concept of something going viral doesn't just apply to the internet of
course. Another phrase associated with the ideaâword of mouthâis
definitely more relevant to the offline world. It may be watching a TV show and
going into work to talk about it, reaching more people who then watch the show
and tell even more people. It may be having a great experience at a restaurant
and telling a friend, who visits that very restaurant and then tells even more
people to go.
The end result is that one person can help something spread to far more people
than themselves. The internet has simply made it much easier for one person to
reach a huge audience with a message that's worth sharing. In the last 10 years,
the number of people using the Internet has gone from being measured in millions
to being measured in billions.
This was a version of the planned introduction for the book Viral Marketing for
Dummies which Wiley asked me to publish a little over a year ago.
Though I actually quit my contract and stopped working on the book (long
story), I've still been involved in various viral marketing campaigns. The one I
would like to share with you right now was built purely to show that the ideas I
was sharing in the book actually had merit.
Join a story rather than creating a new one
Though it's certainly not impossible to create your own viral category to get
some buzz, it makes your job much, much easier if someone is already talking
about a topic that you can leverage for your own gain.
Lyndon Antcliff, most notable for fooling the world's media into thinking that
a teenager stole his Dad's credit card to play Xbox with a hooker, is very good
at this. He often tweets the latest viral trends and helps his clients to
capitalise on hot topics of the moment.
Again, you don't have to only take advantage of what people are saying now.
When Monster Slippers wanted their slipper company to go viral, they created an
elaborate story to say that a Chinese manufacturing incident left one customer
with a size 1,450 shoe, almost as big as a car.
The story was picked up by multiple news outlets, all linking to Monster
Slippers as they were the one to break the story. That was until they all
figured out the customer who received the unusually large footwear actually
looked identical to a staff member of Monster Slippers.
I didn't have anything I actually wanted to promote in my example, besides a
cause that I believed strongly in, so decided to pick up on a news event that a
lot of people were talking about: The demise of Google Reader and, potentially,
Feedburner too.
Stick to one core theme
"What did the fox say?" just wouldn't be the same if we also wanted to know
what the eagle, walrus, and piranha say too.
The Old Spice videos featuring actor Bruce Cambpell basically ran as an idea
that you couldn't be Bruce with his great physique and confidence, but you could
at least smell like him. They didn't run with this theme just once, but used it
in multiple highly successful commercials.
Old Spice is a smell. It doesn't necessarily make you smell better than any
other product. There's nothing inherently amazing about it. Yet after those
commercials ran, you couldn't walk into a supermarket and find it on shelves
very easily. They found one theme and stuck with it, even creating unique videos
for Redditors in an AMA format.
Another reason for sticking to one core theme is that you really have to give
sharing a purpose (next section). If there's no clear message that you want to
spread, it's hard for people to get behind the idea and want to share it with
others, whatever it may be.
I've already mentioned that I wanted my idea to focus on the news events
surrounding the demise of Google Reader as well as the potential demise of
Google's Feedburner product. I think it was much better for me to pick one of
these rather than try to get the message across about both.
You couldn't save Google Reader after it was announced to be shut down, but
Feedburner still has some legs (for now) and that's the one I care about the
most.
Make it easy to share, and give sharing a purpose (!)
This is possibility the most overused advice when it comes to teaching people
how to get ideas to go viral but it is still relevant. Of course, you can't just
stick social media buttons onto a site and expect something to instantly spread
across the social stratosphere (that's what we're calling it these days,
right?).
Not only did I put sharing buttons on my site, but I also decided to actually
give people the text they could use on sites like Twitter and Facebook.
Going back to my earlier point about purpose, people had to believe that they
would actually get a response and that sharing would do something productive.
Whether that's positioning themselves as someone who is intelligent and in on
the latest news (whether it's movies, the next viral video, etc.) or, like me,
they wanted to rally behind a cause.
One of my good blogger friends actually tweeted the story without knowing
about it.
Thanks Steve!
Execute properly
Though I had no real idea if the Feedburner minisite would actually take off,
it was worth a try. I wasn't actually promoting anything besides having a case
study for the book I was writing, but even still, I wanted to at least make it
look semi-professional and not just like a random blog post on a website.
I thought about not only the big detailsâlike why Feedburner might
actually shut downâbut also the small details, like having an upside-down
Feedburner logo as the website favicon. I also decided to take a comic strip
style approach and use my limited skills in Photoshop to put together something
hopefully, as least slightly, humorous.
There was even a comment that said I ripped off the style of the Oatmeal which
I'll take as a compliment judging by Matt's huge success after working here at
Moz.
Finally, I also enlisted the help of three others to throw in the
ever-important cat pictures with the hashtag #pleasedontkillfeedburner. Thanks
to Ramsay and Chris for kindly sharing pictures of their cats which I could also
use in the comic.
To put together the theme of the site, I simply headed over to my usual design
haunt, ThemeForest, and picked up a template. Then I got to work in Photoshop
without caring too much for standards or usability. I viewed the project as
time-sensitive, so I wanted to get something up as quickly as possible.
Just be careful which font you use...
Funny; that's not even Comic Sans.
The end result
Just to clarify, the only piece of promotion I did for this was around two
personal tweets and I emailed no more than six people about the idea. If you
consider that a tweet of mine would only get a few dozen clicks, I was quite
surprised by what happened when I woke up the next day: The site made the
homepage of Hacker News.
Here are the stats for the first week of the site going live:
To give even more transparency, here's a list of some of the sources which
sent traffic. Notice that a lot of the tweets sent a surprising amount of people
to the page:
There are a lot more but that screenshot was getting long enough as it is.
Here are a few other results from this campaign:
The site has between 300-500 backlinks (!) depending on which link checker you
use
The domain is now a PR 4
It has been shared on social media over 1,400 times
The entire website was built in less than one day
Some people might argue that I'm fortunate that the article went viral on
Hacker News (I didn't submit it, and don't know who did). If you're one of those
people, well I'll just say that I'm also "fortunate" to have the idea for the
site, to register the domain, to contact people for cat photos, to spend a day
in Photoshop and to actually execute my idea.
Of course, not everything you create with the idea of 'going viral' is going
to be a hit. But if you keep focusing on creating content that follows this
outline (relevant to hot topics, gives people a reason to share, execute the
idea properly) then no doubt that something you create is going to get a lot of
attention.
Even with this campaign there were a few mistakes I made:
The site looks terrible on mobile devices. Seriously, don't bother opening it in
your iPad
I lost the account access to the email used in the graphic so I have no idea if
Google responded after the initial buzz (duh!)
Ideally this would have been a campaign I could have linked to other web
properties after the traffic burst subsided
Though in recent months I've been a very public advocate on the ViperChill
blog that, quite simply, quality content doesn't rank as well as it should, I
still believe in it. Every time I've showed terrible websites ranking highly in
Google, I've always stated that I would love for the opposite to be the case.
If you would like to hear more about this topic (I wrote 20,000+ words for the
book before scrapping the idea) then please let me know in the comments, and
I'll see what I can do. There is a lot more to cover, but hopefully this post
gave you a bit of inspiration about taking action on those random ideas I'm sure
you have from time to time.
As a final plug, I've actually just started a brand new niche site case study
(introduction post here) where 3 people will be tackling the same niche from
three different angles. One of us is using only SEO, I'm relying purely on
creating great content and the third contributor is a total beginner to creating
sites who has all options available to him.
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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Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Tuesday, 5 November 2013
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'The One Thing I Would Change as
the CEO of Moz'
Posted by wilreynolds
Editor's note: This post is Wil's wrap-up of October's CEO Swap, where Moz CEO
Rand Fishkin and SEER Interactive CEO Wil Reynolds traded jobs for one week. To
read the partner post, written by Rand for the team and community at SEER, check
out the SEER blog.
What many of you might not know is that this CEO Swap scared me. It didn't
scare me because I would have a hard time letting go, and not because I would be
allowing Rand to view every little thing about my life with no filter by
managing my inbox and experiencing everything that I experience everyday. What
scared me the most was that I wouldn't add value to Moz. Let's be honest: Moz is
two times the size of SEER, has more money in the bank, and has more senior
leadership. So I was scared that I would learn so much personally and would
contribute very little back to the team, and I went to bed every single night
worried about it.
My belief about worry is this: If you are concerned for one reason or another
and can do something about it, stop worrying and start WORKING. If you can't do
anything about it, let it go! Based on this belief, during the CEO swap I
started working every night to build something of value for Moz; something that
could help Rand make as many millionaires in Seattle as possible.
Every night when I got home, I sketched out what I learned that day and how it
might help Moz achieve their organizational goals. To me, Moz Analytics seemed
to be the biggest bet that they were making, but I wasn't sold, so I asked
myself: Why not be sold? To be honest, we don't use it very much at SEER.
Instead, we use Open Site Explorer and its toolbar like mad; Moz Analytics is
rarely used. I decided that if this was Moz's big bet, I wanted to help them to
win it.
I took an in-depth look into Moz's goals and core values and made a pitch to
Rand that I thought would fit. I started with the problems below:
Problem #1: We get rankings from Google in a way that they don't like very
much, which to me is risky. I feel that the industry would be forced to steer
clear of keywords as the major KPI and that rankings will still be important
when it comes to direction, but not so much in a functional manner when it comes
to day-to-day impact.
Problem #2: The "big bet" on Moz Analytics integrates very nicely with Google
Analytics, but kicking the hornet's nest on rankings was a problem. A big
problem. Betting on analytics is the future while betting on rankings is the
past, and we're risking this analytics relationship so that we can focus on the
way SEO was done in the past.
Problem #3 â Rand hardly ever talks about tracking rankings anymore, at
least not in a positive light. He's been placing the concept of inbound and
content marketing as a theme in every slide deck he creates. I literally went
through about 10 of his decks and tried to find him speaking about a positive
side of rankings. While it might get a mention here or there, not a single one
of his decks are themed around the critical nature of rankings.
Problem #4: Both Rand and Dr. Pete believe that social metrics have a pretty
strong correlation to rankings.
So that we can address these problems appropriately, it's best to develop an
understanding of Moz's mission:
Moz is all about better marketing and not just better rankings. One of their
initiatives is to reach a marketing audience that's a bit more broad:
Rand's presentations even talk about how having a high ranking doesn't always
mean maximum traffic:
He says it again:
And again:
I have many more examples, but i'm sure you get the point by now. Rand doesn't
believe that our jobs are all about rankings. He knows it and presents that
philosophy everywhere he speaks. So why does Moz believe that rankings have to
be provided? Let's start trying to answer that question by taking a look at true
love.
Rand likes to talk about building true love with your community:
Even Roger realizes the power of community and true love:
Every day, Rand inspires an entire industry to level-up, to become strong
content marketers, and to make their audiences fall in love with them. Yet,
Roger goes around the web looking for "rankings"?
Each night I went home (to Rand's home, that is) and I presented a personal
challenge by asking myself: If Rand's True Love is great marketing (which is a
distant second to Geraldine), then why doesn't Roger tell me when my competitors
are starting to achieve "True Love" with their audiences? We both want to help
marketers, and I feel that with the tools that Roger has and the team behind
him, that he can be deployed in many new ways.
Both Rand and I want to see the industry level-up and we don't talk about
rankings often. This is because we realize that:
And then, eureka! It hit me. More people care about competitors than they do
about rankings. A small number of businesses care about rankings, but almost
every business wants to know what their competition is up to.
Roger is focused on my analytics and my rankings, and as we have seen, Google
has started to meld these things together. This is exactly where I see a major
risk to Moz. During one of my meetings at Moz, I got a much-needed reminder from
Adam, Moz's Chief Product Officer on the E-team, that we have to add value over
what Google can provide. And it was a GREAT reminder.
The fear within this is that right now I can get:
Adwords + Rankings in Google Analytics
Adwords + Natural Search in Google Webmaster Tools
Rankings in Google Webmaster Tools
In my eyes, the big threat to Moz, to Roger, and to the amazing people I met
that week is that Google is bringing together its own data in ways they never
did before.
So I decided, what if Roger took a stand and went to a place that Google will
NEVER go? I'm talking competitive analysis. Google barely wants to give us our
own rankings, much less the rankings of a competitor. (See? I still believe that
rankings have a role, just that they shouldn't be a KPI.)
I believe that more people care about competitors than they do about rankings.
To this point, I haven't checked SEER's rankings in months, but I check on my
competitors regularly.
There are so many businesses out there; hotels, the creators of tablets,
potato chip companies, food distributors, and they all have something in common.
They all have competitors, and they all want to know what these competitors are
doing on the web.
And I think Roger can help with that and it also connects to one of Moz's
goals:
Google's "True Love" lies within the attempt to rank great content, and it
always has been. They might not be able to rank this content well in every
instance just yet, but they are working on it:
Think about what happens when your competitor goes and sees this guy at a
conference.
After the conference, they decide to change their ways and to work at becoming
better marketers who think more broadly about the role of search in marketing.
They start to become content marketers, inbound marketers, email marketers, all
in addition to already being SEOs. They start working their tails off and their
rankings start moving from 50, to 45, to 30, to 17, to 7, and so on.
Roger isn't so smart (not yet anyway, but some people are working on this.
Shh, it's a secret.) He has the capability, but he isn't smart enough to find
the competitors that you might want to track that are growing their community
and their links, producing videos, content, whitepapers, and a whole host more.
The issue with what we consider to be "typical" competitor tracking is that we
all take a look, see who is ranking highly, and put them into the competitor
box.
Roger isn't saying, "Hey! Someone you ignored for years isn't on the content
marketing bandwagon just yet, but they are building community. So get on it!"
When he should be saying just that.
Think of it Scooby Doo-style. ROGER, where are you?
Roger, where are you to warn me when I need you to that someone just read
everything that Rand has written over the past three years, has started
implementing it, and is moving on. See, Roger, I need your help because by the
time I even get the hint that someone is taking me over, it's too late. What am
I supposed to do when they are producing five times more content than me, have
grown their community ten times, and 25% of major influencers are following them
on Twitter, while I only have a mere 5%?
By then, it's too late for me to do anything about it. So help me out, Roger.
You need to show me not only the people who are ranking in the top spot right
now, but those that will be later so I can catch them before it's too late. I
need to know who is developing content that might be relevant to my audience AS
they are developing it.
You can do this, Roger. What about your own Followerwonk? You show me a Venn
diagram with overlap in audiences. Here I look at SEER and SEOGadget's common
audience- wouldn't it be great to let me know when their content is getting more
shares from our overlapping audiences, with a little Topsy magic?
It all comes down to what both Rand I believe in:
Cyrus Said it:
Rand said it:
Zappos didn't become Zappos by doing everything for rankings. Instead they
cared about their customers, and now they dominate rankings because they
combined love for their customers and a love of rankings. Right now I have a
client that is dominating their space in a similar way in that their competitors
never saw them coming. They climbed from 50, to 40, to 33, to 27, to 15, to 6 in
the rankings for major terms, and by then it was too late for their competitors
to catch up. Now they are on top of the rankings for thousands of keywords, and
their competitors are just beginning to do what they've been doing for years.
Could Roger have helped competitors to see us coming?
Can he help me to see the next competitor coming before it's too late?
Over time, could the correlations above take the place of "rank tracking from
a directional sense?" This would help to minimize the strain that Google has
with scraping, which is a major risk.
When it comes to specific types of content like videos, I want Roger to tell
me when a competitor (tracked or untracked) produces 10 videos that are
receiving engagement on a topic relevant to a brand and/or keyword that I am
targeting. Ultimately, that competitor knows that video content is a long game,
and therefore they are in it for just that, which will eventually reward them
with rankings. So naturally I want to know about it.
I don't care about my rankings. Instead, I care when a competitor is producing
more content, getting more visibility with influencers (social authority) to
their content, and growing community.
"Wil, I'll tell you when the industry is getting hot with content from
competitors named and unnamed (big thanks to David Weiser, Tom McElroy, and
Shawn Edwards). I'll watch your back. I'll catch people who are creating great
content well before they start to outrank you and hurt your business. Moz is all
about great content, so we can even point you to Moz blog posts that can help
you fight back."
"Wil, your competitor was followed by an influencer with high social
authority. I saw it with Followerwonk. That's ten in the last three months!
Eventually, with this growing community of influencers sharing their content,
they will outrank you, get more press, more branded search, and beat you in
rankings."
"Influencers are tweeting their content seven times more than yours." (Shout
out to Matt Peters for helping me realize this was possible.)
"The new Thai joint that opened 5 months ago is still getting rave reviews
and at a faster pace than you are. Eventually this will lead to (unless they are
fake, of course) them getting: more customers + higher rankings = MONEY!"
"Wil, I'll tell you when videos are going to show up, and if my named
competitors are producing that video on critical keywords."
"I got your back, Wil. I'll monitor the velocity in your competitors'
Linkedin, YouTube, local reviews, Slideshare, blogs, and more. I'll keep an eye
out anywhere they are producing great content, and if that velocity of content
marketing is greater than yours, I'll point you to our content, slideshare,
video, or whatever I can that can help you keep from getting beat."
In this scenario, Roger's got me covered so that no company can come out of
the blue and take rankings. Roger also knows that great content often drives
conversions and not just rankings, so as such, this will also alert you to when
your competitor might be getting more conversions from great content marketing.
I know that something like this will take time, but with the many things that
I saw on the back end of Moz's business, I know that people are already working
on a lot of these things in many different ways.
Going back a little bit to my first day and first meeting at the Moz offices,
I was in a (not provided) discussion. I was joined by Senior Product Manager
Miranda, Dr. Pete, Adam, and a few others. The objective was simple in that
parts of the Moz toolset would show zeros and (--)'s given that keywords were no
longer provided.
I listened for the first part of the meeting and then started to ask
questions. A big one was if people really use keyword rankings as a major KPI.
As SEER expects to no longer have rankings be a major KPI by the end of 2014, we
believe our work can have a much larger impact while also boosting rankings.
So to the Moz community, employees, and leadership, the CEO swap pushed me to
develop something for you that could at least spark internal conversations at
Moz, and I hope this write-up does. Rand inspires me to do great content
marketing, get better at building community, and be better to my customers. He
inspires me to find True Love. This may very well be on your roadmap, so maybe
all I am doing is validating what you already know, but Roger needs a "True
Love" meter for me and my competitors both named and unnamed. We all know that
the time is now. Every single day, Google is integrating more and more data from
their tools, which does present a threat. But Google jumping into the
competitive tool business is highly unlikely, so maybe the team at Moz can get
there first.
--Wil Reynolds
CEO
Moz
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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Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
the CEO of Moz'
Posted by wilreynolds
Editor's note: This post is Wil's wrap-up of October's CEO Swap, where Moz CEO
Rand Fishkin and SEER Interactive CEO Wil Reynolds traded jobs for one week. To
read the partner post, written by Rand for the team and community at SEER, check
out the SEER blog.
What many of you might not know is that this CEO Swap scared me. It didn't
scare me because I would have a hard time letting go, and not because I would be
allowing Rand to view every little thing about my life with no filter by
managing my inbox and experiencing everything that I experience everyday. What
scared me the most was that I wouldn't add value to Moz. Let's be honest: Moz is
two times the size of SEER, has more money in the bank, and has more senior
leadership. So I was scared that I would learn so much personally and would
contribute very little back to the team, and I went to bed every single night
worried about it.
My belief about worry is this: If you are concerned for one reason or another
and can do something about it, stop worrying and start WORKING. If you can't do
anything about it, let it go! Based on this belief, during the CEO swap I
started working every night to build something of value for Moz; something that
could help Rand make as many millionaires in Seattle as possible.
Every night when I got home, I sketched out what I learned that day and how it
might help Moz achieve their organizational goals. To me, Moz Analytics seemed
to be the biggest bet that they were making, but I wasn't sold, so I asked
myself: Why not be sold? To be honest, we don't use it very much at SEER.
Instead, we use Open Site Explorer and its toolbar like mad; Moz Analytics is
rarely used. I decided that if this was Moz's big bet, I wanted to help them to
win it.
I took an in-depth look into Moz's goals and core values and made a pitch to
Rand that I thought would fit. I started with the problems below:
Problem #1: We get rankings from Google in a way that they don't like very
much, which to me is risky. I feel that the industry would be forced to steer
clear of keywords as the major KPI and that rankings will still be important
when it comes to direction, but not so much in a functional manner when it comes
to day-to-day impact.
Problem #2: The "big bet" on Moz Analytics integrates very nicely with Google
Analytics, but kicking the hornet's nest on rankings was a problem. A big
problem. Betting on analytics is the future while betting on rankings is the
past, and we're risking this analytics relationship so that we can focus on the
way SEO was done in the past.
Problem #3 â Rand hardly ever talks about tracking rankings anymore, at
least not in a positive light. He's been placing the concept of inbound and
content marketing as a theme in every slide deck he creates. I literally went
through about 10 of his decks and tried to find him speaking about a positive
side of rankings. While it might get a mention here or there, not a single one
of his decks are themed around the critical nature of rankings.
Problem #4: Both Rand and Dr. Pete believe that social metrics have a pretty
strong correlation to rankings.
So that we can address these problems appropriately, it's best to develop an
understanding of Moz's mission:
Moz is all about better marketing and not just better rankings. One of their
initiatives is to reach a marketing audience that's a bit more broad:
Rand's presentations even talk about how having a high ranking doesn't always
mean maximum traffic:
He says it again:
And again:
I have many more examples, but i'm sure you get the point by now. Rand doesn't
believe that our jobs are all about rankings. He knows it and presents that
philosophy everywhere he speaks. So why does Moz believe that rankings have to
be provided? Let's start trying to answer that question by taking a look at true
love.
Rand likes to talk about building true love with your community:
Even Roger realizes the power of community and true love:
Every day, Rand inspires an entire industry to level-up, to become strong
content marketers, and to make their audiences fall in love with them. Yet,
Roger goes around the web looking for "rankings"?
Each night I went home (to Rand's home, that is) and I presented a personal
challenge by asking myself: If Rand's True Love is great marketing (which is a
distant second to Geraldine), then why doesn't Roger tell me when my competitors
are starting to achieve "True Love" with their audiences? We both want to help
marketers, and I feel that with the tools that Roger has and the team behind
him, that he can be deployed in many new ways.
Both Rand and I want to see the industry level-up and we don't talk about
rankings often. This is because we realize that:
And then, eureka! It hit me. More people care about competitors than they do
about rankings. A small number of businesses care about rankings, but almost
every business wants to know what their competition is up to.
Roger is focused on my analytics and my rankings, and as we have seen, Google
has started to meld these things together. This is exactly where I see a major
risk to Moz. During one of my meetings at Moz, I got a much-needed reminder from
Adam, Moz's Chief Product Officer on the E-team, that we have to add value over
what Google can provide. And it was a GREAT reminder.
The fear within this is that right now I can get:
Adwords + Rankings in Google Analytics
Adwords + Natural Search in Google Webmaster Tools
Rankings in Google Webmaster Tools
In my eyes, the big threat to Moz, to Roger, and to the amazing people I met
that week is that Google is bringing together its own data in ways they never
did before.
So I decided, what if Roger took a stand and went to a place that Google will
NEVER go? I'm talking competitive analysis. Google barely wants to give us our
own rankings, much less the rankings of a competitor. (See? I still believe that
rankings have a role, just that they shouldn't be a KPI.)
I believe that more people care about competitors than they do about rankings.
To this point, I haven't checked SEER's rankings in months, but I check on my
competitors regularly.
There are so many businesses out there; hotels, the creators of tablets,
potato chip companies, food distributors, and they all have something in common.
They all have competitors, and they all want to know what these competitors are
doing on the web.
And I think Roger can help with that and it also connects to one of Moz's
goals:
Google's "True Love" lies within the attempt to rank great content, and it
always has been. They might not be able to rank this content well in every
instance just yet, but they are working on it:
Think about what happens when your competitor goes and sees this guy at a
conference.
After the conference, they decide to change their ways and to work at becoming
better marketers who think more broadly about the role of search in marketing.
They start to become content marketers, inbound marketers, email marketers, all
in addition to already being SEOs. They start working their tails off and their
rankings start moving from 50, to 45, to 30, to 17, to 7, and so on.
Roger isn't so smart (not yet anyway, but some people are working on this.
Shh, it's a secret.) He has the capability, but he isn't smart enough to find
the competitors that you might want to track that are growing their community
and their links, producing videos, content, whitepapers, and a whole host more.
The issue with what we consider to be "typical" competitor tracking is that we
all take a look, see who is ranking highly, and put them into the competitor
box.
Roger isn't saying, "Hey! Someone you ignored for years isn't on the content
marketing bandwagon just yet, but they are building community. So get on it!"
When he should be saying just that.
Think of it Scooby Doo-style. ROGER, where are you?
Roger, where are you to warn me when I need you to that someone just read
everything that Rand has written over the past three years, has started
implementing it, and is moving on. See, Roger, I need your help because by the
time I even get the hint that someone is taking me over, it's too late. What am
I supposed to do when they are producing five times more content than me, have
grown their community ten times, and 25% of major influencers are following them
on Twitter, while I only have a mere 5%?
By then, it's too late for me to do anything about it. So help me out, Roger.
You need to show me not only the people who are ranking in the top spot right
now, but those that will be later so I can catch them before it's too late. I
need to know who is developing content that might be relevant to my audience AS
they are developing it.
You can do this, Roger. What about your own Followerwonk? You show me a Venn
diagram with overlap in audiences. Here I look at SEER and SEOGadget's common
audience- wouldn't it be great to let me know when their content is getting more
shares from our overlapping audiences, with a little Topsy magic?
It all comes down to what both Rand I believe in:
Cyrus Said it:
Rand said it:
Zappos didn't become Zappos by doing everything for rankings. Instead they
cared about their customers, and now they dominate rankings because they
combined love for their customers and a love of rankings. Right now I have a
client that is dominating their space in a similar way in that their competitors
never saw them coming. They climbed from 50, to 40, to 33, to 27, to 15, to 6 in
the rankings for major terms, and by then it was too late for their competitors
to catch up. Now they are on top of the rankings for thousands of keywords, and
their competitors are just beginning to do what they've been doing for years.
Could Roger have helped competitors to see us coming?
Can he help me to see the next competitor coming before it's too late?
Over time, could the correlations above take the place of "rank tracking from
a directional sense?" This would help to minimize the strain that Google has
with scraping, which is a major risk.
When it comes to specific types of content like videos, I want Roger to tell
me when a competitor (tracked or untracked) produces 10 videos that are
receiving engagement on a topic relevant to a brand and/or keyword that I am
targeting. Ultimately, that competitor knows that video content is a long game,
and therefore they are in it for just that, which will eventually reward them
with rankings. So naturally I want to know about it.
I don't care about my rankings. Instead, I care when a competitor is producing
more content, getting more visibility with influencers (social authority) to
their content, and growing community.
"Wil, I'll tell you when the industry is getting hot with content from
competitors named and unnamed (big thanks to David Weiser, Tom McElroy, and
Shawn Edwards). I'll watch your back. I'll catch people who are creating great
content well before they start to outrank you and hurt your business. Moz is all
about great content, so we can even point you to Moz blog posts that can help
you fight back."
"Wil, your competitor was followed by an influencer with high social
authority. I saw it with Followerwonk. That's ten in the last three months!
Eventually, with this growing community of influencers sharing their content,
they will outrank you, get more press, more branded search, and beat you in
rankings."
"Influencers are tweeting their content seven times more than yours." (Shout
out to Matt Peters for helping me realize this was possible.)
"The new Thai joint that opened 5 months ago is still getting rave reviews
and at a faster pace than you are. Eventually this will lead to (unless they are
fake, of course) them getting: more customers + higher rankings = MONEY!"
"Wil, I'll tell you when videos are going to show up, and if my named
competitors are producing that video on critical keywords."
"I got your back, Wil. I'll monitor the velocity in your competitors'
Linkedin, YouTube, local reviews, Slideshare, blogs, and more. I'll keep an eye
out anywhere they are producing great content, and if that velocity of content
marketing is greater than yours, I'll point you to our content, slideshare,
video, or whatever I can that can help you keep from getting beat."
In this scenario, Roger's got me covered so that no company can come out of
the blue and take rankings. Roger also knows that great content often drives
conversions and not just rankings, so as such, this will also alert you to when
your competitor might be getting more conversions from great content marketing.
I know that something like this will take time, but with the many things that
I saw on the back end of Moz's business, I know that people are already working
on a lot of these things in many different ways.
Going back a little bit to my first day and first meeting at the Moz offices,
I was in a (not provided) discussion. I was joined by Senior Product Manager
Miranda, Dr. Pete, Adam, and a few others. The objective was simple in that
parts of the Moz toolset would show zeros and (--)'s given that keywords were no
longer provided.
I listened for the first part of the meeting and then started to ask
questions. A big one was if people really use keyword rankings as a major KPI.
As SEER expects to no longer have rankings be a major KPI by the end of 2014, we
believe our work can have a much larger impact while also boosting rankings.
So to the Moz community, employees, and leadership, the CEO swap pushed me to
develop something for you that could at least spark internal conversations at
Moz, and I hope this write-up does. Rand inspires me to do great content
marketing, get better at building community, and be better to my customers. He
inspires me to find True Love. This may very well be on your roadmap, so maybe
all I am doing is validating what you already know, but Roger needs a "True
Love" meter for me and my competitors both named and unnamed. We all know that
the time is now. Every single day, Google is integrating more and more data from
their tools, which does present a threat. But Google jumping into the
competitive tool business is highly unlikely, so maybe the team at Moz can get
there first.
--Wil Reynolds
CEO
Moz
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/HeSmgX2ep18/the-one-thing-i-would-change-as-the-ceo-of-moz
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Monday, 4 November 2013
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'Be the Result that Google Wants to
Rank'
Posted by Kristina Kledzik
As SEOs, we're the only type of online marketers who pay little to no
attention to the people who actually visit our websites. PPC'ers watch visitors'
responses to ads via click through rates, social media managers converse with
users directly, writers write for readers, and designers design for visitors.
But SEOs give advice based on Google.
Google, like the rest of online marketers, is primarily concerned with the
opinions of visitors to Google.com. Its goals is to deliver the most satisfying
webpages as results to searchers (and possibly charge for those results through
ever-more-subtle paid ads). Thus, we SEOs eventually have our effect on actual
visitors, as our techniques to attract search engines allow our sites to rank
well and get visits from actual humans.
Why don't we just make changes for visitors so that Google will want to rank
us well?
In the dawn of SEO, Google was stupid
When Google was first created, it couldn't see nearly as much as it can now,
and focusing on user experience alone could leave your site virtually unreadable
to Google. I only started in this industry in 2010, and even then, SEOs had to
focus on specific keyword usage, tagging, link building, and anchor
textâall things that are virtually meaningless to visitors. But over the
past few years, Google's near-daily algorithm updates have made its crawler
interpret webpages more and more like a human would.
Still, we continue to panic about every change Google makes. What are their
next steps? Are they going to do something that will crush your site?
Here's a hint: If we're optimizing our sites for visitors, there's little to
no chance that a Google algorithm update will penalize us. That means that we're
on Google's side: We're trying to make our site better for visitors, which makes
Google look good when visitors click through to our sites. Help them help us.
The good news is, if you're a white hat SEO who keeps up on search engine
trends, Google has probably led you into doing some good online marketing
without even realizing it. To explain this a little more clearly, here's a
comparison of some of the top white-hat SEO strategies from 2010, when I
started, and how you should handle them in 2013:
On-page keyword usage â content strategy
2010: The best way to rank #1 for a keyword was to use it in the
<title>, the <h1>, maybe an <h2>, and a few times in the text
(but no keyword stuffing! Google had figured that out, at least.)
2013: Google understands synonyms now, so you can use a keyword once and show
that it's highly relevant with other similar terms. Experts recommend using
keyword groups (an idea that I had been hinting at for ages but didn't think of
concretely until I read Cyrus's awesome post): Use a number of keywords that all
mean approximately the same thing, so you can be relevant for all of them.
How to be even better with content strategy
Don't focus so much on keywords with the most local searches a month, on
average (Google Keyword Planner is so vague). Instead, use phrases that your
current and potential customers use.
There are hundreds of easy, reliable, cheap online survey tools, so take your
pick. Reach out to your email list and ask them to complete a survey that asks:
How they describe your products/services
What emotions they attribute to your products/services
Why they want/need your products/services
The ideal brand personality that would sell your products/services
Allow survey takers to write in the responses free-form, so they won't be
restricted to the words you think they'll use.
Once you have the right keywords, work them into the copy in a way that speaks
to them. This will take a great content strategy, something that I can't
describe to you briefly here. But these blog posts will get you on the right
path:
How to Build a Content Marketing Strategy
Kill it in Content Creation by Knowing Your Customer Conversion Funnel
Avoiding Disaster: How to Prevent the 3 Most Common Content Marketing #Fails
On-page structure/tagging â design
2010: You had to mark up the important parts of a webpage with HTML tags:
<h#>, <strong>, and <em>.
2013: Google can see where text will show up on a page, and how prominent it
will be to visitors. You can't just tag text to make it relevant to search
engines, it has to be integrated into the design.
Design isn't just a "nice to have." It's a necessary part of the online
marketing world now, and it absolutely pays off. If you didn't come to MozCon
2012, Jenny Lam's presentation discusses how people are much more likely to
trust attractive things. Google knows that design builds trust: Remember how
Panda slapped websites covered in ads? As Google begins to understand how people
interpret design better and better, having a good design will become a necessary
part of both online marketing and SEO.
How to be even better with good design
PAY FOR GOOD DESIGN.
Many of you reading this blog are technical, possibly able to build a very
solid HTML website. That does not make you a good web designer.
Go out there and find a good web designer. Your input will be to remind the
designer you hired that good web design does include a lot of text, both for
search engines and for visitors.
Resources:
9 Principles for Great Branding by Design
Designing for SEO
Link building â online public relations
2010: Google was already getting pretty good at devaluing links from crappy
sites, but a good link network could still work, and it certainly hadn't started
penalizing you yet!
2013: Many sites have gone down because of Penguin alone, and others are still
reeling from it. We can't buy links anymore, yet almost all bloggers understand
the value of a link and want to be paid for it.
At Distilled, we now do what we like to call "online PR," where we focus on
building relationships with bloggers and sites. The important thing is to focus
on building a partnership where they rely on us as much as we rely on them. With
a one-sided relationship, site owners are bound to take your link down or forget
about you eventually, but when they look to you as a source of knowledge, and
valuable to their readers, they'll keep reaching out to you.
And that's very much likeâgaspâreal PR!
How to get better with online PR
Don't look for a link with DA [blank]. Look for a site that is genuinely a
good match for what you or your client has to offer. Pitch the link or mention
to the other site the way you would explain it if you weren't you and just
thought it was a good match. Be flexible, so you can build a long-term
relationship and keep sharing things through that channel in the future.
Here are a few great resources to point you in the right direction for great
outreach:
The Blogger Outreach Equation
8 Tips for Blogger Outreach
Why Link Building Strategies Fail
Anchor text manipulation â branding
2010: The strongest way to rank for a keyword was to get a link with that
keyword in the anchor text. Ecommerce sites across the nation paid for links
with their target keyword in it and slipped those links in unrelated articles.
2013: It occurred to Google that if you have a million links to your site for
"slinkies" but no links to your site about your brand name, no one knew who you
were. There's just too much information out there, and too many scams. People
feel more comfortable with brands, and are more likely to click on links to
recognizable brands.
At the same time, Google realized that link profiles full of unbranded links
were probably paid for, and that contributed to penalties.
Now, it's better to focus on brand awareness than the specific anchor text to
your page. The more people are talking about your brand, the more likely they'll
be to search for you specifically, and then you won't even have to worry about
competing for #1 position in SERPs, you'll just be there!
How to get better with more brand awareness and loyalty
I think we've always known the value of branding. After all, why do so many
Americans pay $2.50 for $0.05 worth of water, carbonation, sugar, and a bit of
caffeine?
It's just been easier to match your content with search terms than to get
people to actually search for you. Building brand awareness and loyalty involves
building relationships with people you don't know yet, which is absolutely
terrifying. It means you can try your hardest but fail, and have no idea why.
But, let's look at this a different way. Competing in the world of online
marketing without a brand means that you're relying 100% on Google to continue
to send you visitors. This is a very one-sided relationship. If Google changes
things, or if your competitors get slightly better and edge you out of the first
page of results, your business will collapse completely, and Google won't even
notice. No company should rely so heavily on another, especially not one that
barely knows you exist. Building a brand is planning for the future, and
protecting you against the whims of Google.
Instead, make your company into something you're excited about, so it can
excite your customers too. Put as much money into building your brand as you do
other online marketing activities; it'll pay off. Joanna Lord gave one of the
best "how to" speeches on building brand loyalty at SearchLove this year:
slideshare or video.
So, all this means SEO is dead, right?
NO.
For one thing, as smart as Google will get, it will always have its quirks, so
technical SEO is here to stay.
For another, a big part of SEO is identifying and understanding your
competitors for certain search terms, since that can be very different from your
competitors in real life.
But, SEO alone can't make your business. Even if, for some reason, it does
right now, it won't in the future. SEO is one aspect of good online marketing,
but you have to be a great marketer overall to make it in the long run.
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/Vqt60RE1Omk/be-the-result-that-google-wants-to-rank
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
Rank'
Posted by Kristina Kledzik
As SEOs, we're the only type of online marketers who pay little to no
attention to the people who actually visit our websites. PPC'ers watch visitors'
responses to ads via click through rates, social media managers converse with
users directly, writers write for readers, and designers design for visitors.
But SEOs give advice based on Google.
Google, like the rest of online marketers, is primarily concerned with the
opinions of visitors to Google.com. Its goals is to deliver the most satisfying
webpages as results to searchers (and possibly charge for those results through
ever-more-subtle paid ads). Thus, we SEOs eventually have our effect on actual
visitors, as our techniques to attract search engines allow our sites to rank
well and get visits from actual humans.
Why don't we just make changes for visitors so that Google will want to rank
us well?
In the dawn of SEO, Google was stupid
When Google was first created, it couldn't see nearly as much as it can now,
and focusing on user experience alone could leave your site virtually unreadable
to Google. I only started in this industry in 2010, and even then, SEOs had to
focus on specific keyword usage, tagging, link building, and anchor
textâall things that are virtually meaningless to visitors. But over the
past few years, Google's near-daily algorithm updates have made its crawler
interpret webpages more and more like a human would.
Still, we continue to panic about every change Google makes. What are their
next steps? Are they going to do something that will crush your site?
Here's a hint: If we're optimizing our sites for visitors, there's little to
no chance that a Google algorithm update will penalize us. That means that we're
on Google's side: We're trying to make our site better for visitors, which makes
Google look good when visitors click through to our sites. Help them help us.
The good news is, if you're a white hat SEO who keeps up on search engine
trends, Google has probably led you into doing some good online marketing
without even realizing it. To explain this a little more clearly, here's a
comparison of some of the top white-hat SEO strategies from 2010, when I
started, and how you should handle them in 2013:
On-page keyword usage â content strategy
2010: The best way to rank #1 for a keyword was to use it in the
<title>, the <h1>, maybe an <h2>, and a few times in the text
(but no keyword stuffing! Google had figured that out, at least.)
2013: Google understands synonyms now, so you can use a keyword once and show
that it's highly relevant with other similar terms. Experts recommend using
keyword groups (an idea that I had been hinting at for ages but didn't think of
concretely until I read Cyrus's awesome post): Use a number of keywords that all
mean approximately the same thing, so you can be relevant for all of them.
How to be even better with content strategy
Don't focus so much on keywords with the most local searches a month, on
average (Google Keyword Planner is so vague). Instead, use phrases that your
current and potential customers use.
There are hundreds of easy, reliable, cheap online survey tools, so take your
pick. Reach out to your email list and ask them to complete a survey that asks:
How they describe your products/services
What emotions they attribute to your products/services
Why they want/need your products/services
The ideal brand personality that would sell your products/services
Allow survey takers to write in the responses free-form, so they won't be
restricted to the words you think they'll use.
Once you have the right keywords, work them into the copy in a way that speaks
to them. This will take a great content strategy, something that I can't
describe to you briefly here. But these blog posts will get you on the right
path:
How to Build a Content Marketing Strategy
Kill it in Content Creation by Knowing Your Customer Conversion Funnel
Avoiding Disaster: How to Prevent the 3 Most Common Content Marketing #Fails
On-page structure/tagging â design
2010: You had to mark up the important parts of a webpage with HTML tags:
<h#>, <strong>, and <em>.
2013: Google can see where text will show up on a page, and how prominent it
will be to visitors. You can't just tag text to make it relevant to search
engines, it has to be integrated into the design.
Design isn't just a "nice to have." It's a necessary part of the online
marketing world now, and it absolutely pays off. If you didn't come to MozCon
2012, Jenny Lam's presentation discusses how people are much more likely to
trust attractive things. Google knows that design builds trust: Remember how
Panda slapped websites covered in ads? As Google begins to understand how people
interpret design better and better, having a good design will become a necessary
part of both online marketing and SEO.
How to be even better with good design
PAY FOR GOOD DESIGN.
Many of you reading this blog are technical, possibly able to build a very
solid HTML website. That does not make you a good web designer.
Go out there and find a good web designer. Your input will be to remind the
designer you hired that good web design does include a lot of text, both for
search engines and for visitors.
Resources:
9 Principles for Great Branding by Design
Designing for SEO
Link building â online public relations
2010: Google was already getting pretty good at devaluing links from crappy
sites, but a good link network could still work, and it certainly hadn't started
penalizing you yet!
2013: Many sites have gone down because of Penguin alone, and others are still
reeling from it. We can't buy links anymore, yet almost all bloggers understand
the value of a link and want to be paid for it.
At Distilled, we now do what we like to call "online PR," where we focus on
building relationships with bloggers and sites. The important thing is to focus
on building a partnership where they rely on us as much as we rely on them. With
a one-sided relationship, site owners are bound to take your link down or forget
about you eventually, but when they look to you as a source of knowledge, and
valuable to their readers, they'll keep reaching out to you.
And that's very much likeâgaspâreal PR!
How to get better with online PR
Don't look for a link with DA [blank]. Look for a site that is genuinely a
good match for what you or your client has to offer. Pitch the link or mention
to the other site the way you would explain it if you weren't you and just
thought it was a good match. Be flexible, so you can build a long-term
relationship and keep sharing things through that channel in the future.
Here are a few great resources to point you in the right direction for great
outreach:
The Blogger Outreach Equation
8 Tips for Blogger Outreach
Why Link Building Strategies Fail
Anchor text manipulation â branding
2010: The strongest way to rank for a keyword was to get a link with that
keyword in the anchor text. Ecommerce sites across the nation paid for links
with their target keyword in it and slipped those links in unrelated articles.
2013: It occurred to Google that if you have a million links to your site for
"slinkies" but no links to your site about your brand name, no one knew who you
were. There's just too much information out there, and too many scams. People
feel more comfortable with brands, and are more likely to click on links to
recognizable brands.
At the same time, Google realized that link profiles full of unbranded links
were probably paid for, and that contributed to penalties.
Now, it's better to focus on brand awareness than the specific anchor text to
your page. The more people are talking about your brand, the more likely they'll
be to search for you specifically, and then you won't even have to worry about
competing for #1 position in SERPs, you'll just be there!
How to get better with more brand awareness and loyalty
I think we've always known the value of branding. After all, why do so many
Americans pay $2.50 for $0.05 worth of water, carbonation, sugar, and a bit of
caffeine?
It's just been easier to match your content with search terms than to get
people to actually search for you. Building brand awareness and loyalty involves
building relationships with people you don't know yet, which is absolutely
terrifying. It means you can try your hardest but fail, and have no idea why.
But, let's look at this a different way. Competing in the world of online
marketing without a brand means that you're relying 100% on Google to continue
to send you visitors. This is a very one-sided relationship. If Google changes
things, or if your competitors get slightly better and edge you out of the first
page of results, your business will collapse completely, and Google won't even
notice. No company should rely so heavily on another, especially not one that
barely knows you exist. Building a brand is planning for the future, and
protecting you against the whims of Google.
Instead, make your company into something you're excited about, so it can
excite your customers too. Put as much money into building your brand as you do
other online marketing activities; it'll pay off. Joanna Lord gave one of the
best "how to" speeches on building brand loyalty at SearchLove this year:
slideshare or video.
So, all this means SEO is dead, right?
NO.
For one thing, as smart as Google will get, it will always have its quirks, so
technical SEO is here to stay.
For another, a big part of SEO is identifying and understanding your
competitors for certain search terms, since that can be very different from your
competitors in real life.
But, SEO alone can't make your business. Even if, for some reason, it does
right now, it won't in the future. SEO is one aspect of good online marketing,
but you have to be a great marketer overall to make it in the long run.
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/Vqt60RE1Omk/be-the-result-that-google-wants-to-rank
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Friday, 1 November 2013
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'Using Google+ to Appear in the Top
Results Every Time - Whiteboard Friday'
Posted by randfish
Many marketers are wondering about the effects of Google+ on search results,
and for anyone with a Google+ profile, a few personalized searches make those
effects quite apparent. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Marshall Lee the vampire
king (don't be afraid, it's just Rand) explains how having the right circlers on
Google+ can lead to top-ranked results for even the broadest of queries in their
SERPs.
Whiteboard Friday - Using Google+ to Appear in the Top Results Every Time
In case you're unfamiliar, Rand is Marshall Lee the Vampire King.
For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard:
Video transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to a spooooky Halloween edition of Whiteboard
Friday! I'm wearing some fangs this week, so if you have some trouble
understanding me, don't worry, all the text is right down there below.
I wanted to talk a little about using Google+ to appear in Google's top
results. It's really interesting what we've been observing over the last few
weeks and months of Google's development, so check this out. If I do a search
for "data science," and I'm logged into my Google+ account (which is "randfish,"
rightârandfish@gmail), I see under data science "How Moz's Data Science
Team Works." Which is pretty weird, actuallyâI think that's very strange,
because this was just posted on our Dev Blog, which isn't on our main site. It's
a subdomain, and it doesn't rank very well. If you search and you're not logged
in, you won't find it in the first 100 results at all. It's showing up here
because it's been shared by an account that I follow. It'll say, "Moz shared
this." And that's happening because of the Google+ integration.
You might say, "Okay, that's moderately interesting." I can search for very
broad things, too, like "industry survey," and getâyes, the S&P Industry
Survey of the Americas, the Standard & Poorsâbut then I get "Take the 2013
Moz Industry Survey." Whoa! Suddenly Moz is ranking all over the place. Again,
this is happening because Jonathon Colman, Dharmesh Shah, Pete Meyers, and one
other person I follow on Google+ +1'd it. Google+ biasing again.
And there's more. I tried some queries for "happy Halloween." Happy
Halloweenâthink how broad a search query that is. There was a post by
Gianluca that he had shared today with a photo, and that showed up in my
results. Consumer purchasing powerâa Google+ post by Avinash Kaushik
showed up because it was shared and I follow him. Patrick Stewart! Patrick
Stewart, I mean it's a celebrity query that gets millions of searches a month
(well, probably hundreds of thousands because Star Trek TNG hasn't been on for a
while, but in our hearts it's always been on). A post by George Takei, right? I
follow George Takei on Google+ so a post from him about Patrick Stewart is in
there (it was a delightful post, by the way).
What this means for marketers, particularly SEOs who are using search and
social and content together in their marketing, is the audience on Google+ is
becoming more and more valuable to us. These are search-savvy, tech-savvy folks
who are potentially reachable, and reachable without the classic kinds of
ranking signals. I don't have to do one tenth of the work that I had to do to
rank for these types of queries before. All I have to do is get you to follow me
on Google+.
Even if these people aren't using Google+ as a social networkâeven if
they're not visiting plus.google.com, and they're not sharing things and
following people and +1'ingâit doesn't matter, because they're still being
biased so long as they follow your account. So long as you're encircled by those
individuals, it's valuable. And by the way, this is not just happening to people
who have set up Google+ and are actually following you. It happens to anyone who
is logged into a Google account, and has connected with you over email. Meaning,
they've exchanged one or a few emails back and forthâit can't just be you
spamming them, it's got to be that you're actually receiving email from them as
well.
Gmail is another way to get this same sort of bias. You can see it in there if
you're logged into your Gmail account, and you can see "Hey, I'm not following
this person on Google+. Oh, we've exchanged emails, so they're showing me these
results higher that they've +1'd."
Google+ sharing obviously is critical because of these influential factors, to
SEOs in particular. But, be very careful, because think about thisâif I
shared every single page that I wanted to rank on just so that anyone who
followed me on Google+ would be biased to seeing it? I would soon lose
subscribers. In fact, I'm sure I would lose them very fast. People would be
like, "What the hell is Rand doing filling up my stream? None of these have
+1s." It wouldn't surprise me at all if Google is using some indication of
metrics around usage to actually determine, "Hey, wait a minute, this is getting
no +1s, no shares, no comments; why would I show this to anybody? I'm pushing it
down in the results. I'm not going to show it."
These are all things that did receive quite a lot of activity. Well, actually,
Gianluca's post hadn't received any activity yet, but it was very recent and
lots of his posts do receive activity. So, if you overshare, you have to be
carefulâI like to say I think discretion is key here. Also, even if you
don't have a Google+ audience, it doesn't matter because
influencersâpeople who do have audiences on Google+âmight be sharing
your stuff.
That's fascinating to imagine. It's almost like "Hey, I don't use Twitter, but
if I can just get someone to tweet some of this stuff for me, I know I'll get
traffic." Well, on Google+, it's not just the traffic you'll getâyou'll
also get high rankings from all of their audience. It's really remarkable.
By the wayâone thing of warning. There is a time decay on this stuff. I
don't see all of the posts that George Takei has historically made
(historically, I can barely say "historically" with these teeth)âthat he's
historically made about Patrick Stewart, I only see the ones from just recently.
So, there's a time decay factor, it looks like between a week and a month,
depending on which accounts you're following and what types of queries you're
doingâat least that's what I'm seeing in my accounts. Being aware of that
time decay means that if there's a topic that's very valuable, and you know you
have a potential social audience to reach that's either following you on Google+
or connecting with you through email, that might mean that publishing on a
regular basisâI might say "Hey, if ranking for consumer purchasing power
is really important to me, maybe I want to put up a blog post every month or two
about consumer purchasing power."
What's crazy is you don't need exact keyword matching. The post about Patrick
Stewart here did not have exact keyword matching, so this is a very broad
algorithm that's currently biasing to show these Google+ results. This is an
incredibly powerful tool for search marketers and social marketers, and I think
it's something that is going to get a lot more attention in the year to come.
With that, everyone, happy Halloween!
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/~3/1FauTYC-5dw/using-google-plus-to-appear-in-the-top-results-every-time-whiteboard-friday
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Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Results Every Time - Whiteboard Friday'
Posted by randfish
Many marketers are wondering about the effects of Google+ on search results,
and for anyone with a Google+ profile, a few personalized searches make those
effects quite apparent. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Marshall Lee the vampire
king (don't be afraid, it's just Rand) explains how having the right circlers on
Google+ can lead to top-ranked results for even the broadest of queries in their
SERPs.
Whiteboard Friday - Using Google+ to Appear in the Top Results Every Time
In case you're unfamiliar, Rand is Marshall Lee the Vampire King.
For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard:
Video transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to a spooooky Halloween edition of Whiteboard
Friday! I'm wearing some fangs this week, so if you have some trouble
understanding me, don't worry, all the text is right down there below.
I wanted to talk a little about using Google+ to appear in Google's top
results. It's really interesting what we've been observing over the last few
weeks and months of Google's development, so check this out. If I do a search
for "data science," and I'm logged into my Google+ account (which is "randfish,"
rightârandfish@gmail), I see under data science "How Moz's Data Science
Team Works." Which is pretty weird, actuallyâI think that's very strange,
because this was just posted on our Dev Blog, which isn't on our main site. It's
a subdomain, and it doesn't rank very well. If you search and you're not logged
in, you won't find it in the first 100 results at all. It's showing up here
because it's been shared by an account that I follow. It'll say, "Moz shared
this." And that's happening because of the Google+ integration.
You might say, "Okay, that's moderately interesting." I can search for very
broad things, too, like "industry survey," and getâyes, the S&P Industry
Survey of the Americas, the Standard & Poorsâbut then I get "Take the 2013
Moz Industry Survey." Whoa! Suddenly Moz is ranking all over the place. Again,
this is happening because Jonathon Colman, Dharmesh Shah, Pete Meyers, and one
other person I follow on Google+ +1'd it. Google+ biasing again.
And there's more. I tried some queries for "happy Halloween." Happy
Halloweenâthink how broad a search query that is. There was a post by
Gianluca that he had shared today with a photo, and that showed up in my
results. Consumer purchasing powerâa Google+ post by Avinash Kaushik
showed up because it was shared and I follow him. Patrick Stewart! Patrick
Stewart, I mean it's a celebrity query that gets millions of searches a month
(well, probably hundreds of thousands because Star Trek TNG hasn't been on for a
while, but in our hearts it's always been on). A post by George Takei, right? I
follow George Takei on Google+ so a post from him about Patrick Stewart is in
there (it was a delightful post, by the way).
What this means for marketers, particularly SEOs who are using search and
social and content together in their marketing, is the audience on Google+ is
becoming more and more valuable to us. These are search-savvy, tech-savvy folks
who are potentially reachable, and reachable without the classic kinds of
ranking signals. I don't have to do one tenth of the work that I had to do to
rank for these types of queries before. All I have to do is get you to follow me
on Google+.
Even if these people aren't using Google+ as a social networkâeven if
they're not visiting plus.google.com, and they're not sharing things and
following people and +1'ingâit doesn't matter, because they're still being
biased so long as they follow your account. So long as you're encircled by those
individuals, it's valuable. And by the way, this is not just happening to people
who have set up Google+ and are actually following you. It happens to anyone who
is logged into a Google account, and has connected with you over email. Meaning,
they've exchanged one or a few emails back and forthâit can't just be you
spamming them, it's got to be that you're actually receiving email from them as
well.
Gmail is another way to get this same sort of bias. You can see it in there if
you're logged into your Gmail account, and you can see "Hey, I'm not following
this person on Google+. Oh, we've exchanged emails, so they're showing me these
results higher that they've +1'd."
Google+ sharing obviously is critical because of these influential factors, to
SEOs in particular. But, be very careful, because think about thisâif I
shared every single page that I wanted to rank on just so that anyone who
followed me on Google+ would be biased to seeing it? I would soon lose
subscribers. In fact, I'm sure I would lose them very fast. People would be
like, "What the hell is Rand doing filling up my stream? None of these have
+1s." It wouldn't surprise me at all if Google is using some indication of
metrics around usage to actually determine, "Hey, wait a minute, this is getting
no +1s, no shares, no comments; why would I show this to anybody? I'm pushing it
down in the results. I'm not going to show it."
These are all things that did receive quite a lot of activity. Well, actually,
Gianluca's post hadn't received any activity yet, but it was very recent and
lots of his posts do receive activity. So, if you overshare, you have to be
carefulâI like to say I think discretion is key here. Also, even if you
don't have a Google+ audience, it doesn't matter because
influencersâpeople who do have audiences on Google+âmight be sharing
your stuff.
That's fascinating to imagine. It's almost like "Hey, I don't use Twitter, but
if I can just get someone to tweet some of this stuff for me, I know I'll get
traffic." Well, on Google+, it's not just the traffic you'll getâyou'll
also get high rankings from all of their audience. It's really remarkable.
By the wayâone thing of warning. There is a time decay on this stuff. I
don't see all of the posts that George Takei has historically made
(historically, I can barely say "historically" with these teeth)âthat he's
historically made about Patrick Stewart, I only see the ones from just recently.
So, there's a time decay factor, it looks like between a week and a month,
depending on which accounts you're following and what types of queries you're
doingâat least that's what I'm seeing in my accounts. Being aware of that
time decay means that if there's a topic that's very valuable, and you know you
have a potential social audience to reach that's either following you on Google+
or connecting with you through email, that might mean that publishing on a
regular basisâI might say "Hey, if ranking for consumer purchasing power
is really important to me, maybe I want to put up a blog post every month or two
about consumer purchasing power."
What's crazy is you don't need exact keyword matching. The post about Patrick
Stewart here did not have exact keyword matching, so this is a very broad
algorithm that's currently biasing to show these Google+ results. This is an
incredibly powerful tool for search marketers and social marketers, and I think
it's something that is going to get a lot more attention in the year to come.
With that, everyone, happy Halloween!
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/~3/1FauTYC-5dw/using-google-plus-to-appear-in-the-top-results-every-time-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
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