Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'Why Visual Assets >
Infographics - Whiteboard Friday'
Posted by randfish
The marketing industry seems to have a love-hate relationship with
infographics. When they're really done well, they can be effective ways of
conveying a lot of complex information in a way that's easier to digest. The
problem is that relatively few of today's infographics are really done well, and
many are simply created for shallow SEO benefit.
In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand talks about the differences between
infographics and visual assets, and why the latter are far more effective in our
efforts.
Whiteboard Friday - Visual Assets better than Infographics_1
For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard:
Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition to of Whiteboard Friday. This
week I'm going to take a stance. It's a little bit of a strong and contrarian
stance. I'm going to say that I really, really dislike most infographics. In
fact, not even most. The vast majority of infographics I strongly dislike. And
that said, I really like visual assets. Today I'm going to try and explain the
difference to you and show you why I'm a huge believer in one and such a
disrespecter of the other.
So the typical infographic and the thing that frustrates me about it so much
is that it's really designed primarily to get embeds, to get links, potentially
to get some traffic and build some branding. But it's actually not optimized for
a lot of these things. In fact, because the medium has both become so overused
and because the execution on many of them is such poor quality, I find that they
often hurt more than they help. Because of that, I'm not a fan.
So here is your typical infographic. How obsessed are Facebook users with
celebrities? Oh my gosh, look, 35% have liked a celebrity's page, and look, more
and more people have liked more and more celebrity pages over time. Here's a
picture of some people, and here are words in some graphic format that's really
hard to read and unnecessary illustrations on the side just to ornament this
thing up.
Then they hope that someone is going to pick it up and embed it on their news
site, and occasionally this stuff does work. In fact, for a few years now it has
worked. The challenge is it keeps going down and down and down. It's reaching a
point of diminishing returns, and I think that's because audiences are really
tired of the infographic format or are getting very tired, especially more
sophisticated and savvy audiences, which for a lot of B2B and even many B2C
marketers, let's face it, we are reaching those areas.
Also, these things can be tremendously burdensome to try and put on a web
page. They're hard to read a lot of the time. So it makes it challenging even
when someone does embed it. Google has said specifically that they're looking at
algorithmic ways that they can work around infographics that get embedded that
people didn't really mean to or intend to link back, and they are merely doing a
link to the infographic because of the embed itself.
This kind of stuff, eh, I'm just not about that. I don't think that most of
us in the inbound marketing field should be about that, despite the potentially
positive impact that something very similar can have.
So these are visual assets. There are many different kinds of visual assets.
In fact, I would say infographics, traditional infographics are just one type of
visual asset and possibly not the best one. In fact, probably not the best one
in my opinion.
Photos, just a collection of pictures from relevant and interesting people,
events, places, even concepts that are illustrated, these get picked up. They
get shared around the web. They're useful for social media networks. But they're
also useful to have in a photo library that people might take and use for all
kinds of different reasons.
Charts and graphs that illustrate or explain the numbers behind a story or a
phenomenon, these can be incredibly useful, and they get picked up and used all
the time by sources that want to quote the numbers and even by sources that
originated the numbers that are looking for visual ways to represent them. This
is a phenomenal way to build value through visual assets.
Visual representations, I do stuff like this all the time. Think of the SEO
Pyramid. It starts at the base with accessibility, and then we talk about
keywords and links, social, user and usage signals, and all that kind of stuff.
I've done some visuals like that on Whiteboard Friday, things like the ranking
factors by distribution through the pie chart explaining those different things.
I've done stuff like the T-shaped web marketer, talking about going deep in a
particular niche, but having a lot of cross domain expertise. These are not
high-quality graphics. They're made by me. I use Flash 6 to make these things,
because I learned Flash way back in my days as a web designer. I'm lazy and have
not learned to get good at Illustrator or Photoshop in particular. Yet, they get
picked up and sent all over the place, and you can see visual assets doing the
same thing in all sorts of niches.
Comics, illustrations, or storyboards that tell a narrative visually,
incredibly popular and get picked up all the time. Screen shots; even just a
simple screen shot with some annotation and explanation, examples of what to do,
how to use it, how to interpret that information, layering on top some data,
these types of visual assets have huge cach© and value.
You get a lot more opportunity from these kinds of visual assets, in my
opinion and experience, for links, for referencing, being referenced by media
outlets, by industry resources, by third parties, by people in your professional
or personal sphere. You have more of an opportunity for embeds because they're
much simpler to embed, and they can be useful in so many more places than an
infographic, which really needs to take up an entire post about it if it's going
to get referenced at all.
They give a lot more value to people. They're simple to consume, to
understand, and they're useful and usable in ways that infographics often are
not. And, a lot of the time they're far simpler to execute. It doesn't take a
graphic designer to produce a ton of these different types of resources. It
often doesn't cost very much, if anything at all, to make them, and that means
you can produce a far greater quantity of visual assets than you could of
infographics and have potential there to get links, to get references, to build
your brand in really authentic ways.
So I'm sure there will be some vigorous debate and discussion in the
comments, and I look forward to it. We'll see you again next week for another
edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
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Friday, 15 November 2013
Thursday, 14 November 2013
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'Future SERP: A Glimpse at Google
2014'
Posted by Dr-Pete
Watching Google change can quickly become an obsession, and it's easy to jump
at every shadow when they test thousands of ideas per year (and roll out
hundreds). This post is an attempt to take all of the things I've seen in the
past six months and tell a story driven by real data. This is the story of how I
think Google will look by the end of 2014, and what that implies about their
direction and core philosophy.
Two data sources
(1) MozCast Feature Alert
In April of 2012, I launched "Project Algo Alert", a prototype that would
later become MozCast. What was originally one "weather" station, designed to
measure daily fluctuations in top 10 rankings across 1000 keywords, has evolved
into 11 stations and three unique systems. One of those systems is Feature
Alert, which was based on a simple idea â how could we detect when Google
launched new SERP features, without any prior knowledge of what those features
would be?
Feature Alert solves this problem by cataloging the basic building blocks of
Google's source code, the container names and IDs in CSS. Let's say for example,
that Feature Alert sees the following chunk of HTML/CSS code:
The system checks each building block against an archive, and if
"ads-container c mnr-c" is a new object, it's captured and I'm alerted that
something new happened. When I built Feature Alert, I thought something new
might pop up a couple of times a month. As of writing this post, the system has
captured 2,441 unique building blocks.
A side effect of the system is that, at large scale, it frequently catches
Google in the act of testing new features and UI changes. Keep in mind that
Google ran 7,018 "live traffic experiments" in 2012 â while we probably
capture only a small number of them, these tests allow us to get a glimpse into
what's coming next. While any given change may be rejected (Google launched just
over 9% of the changes they tested last year), some changes appear repeatedly in
testing and in different formats over time, strongly suggesting that Google is
intent on launch.
(2) Mobile feature launches
Google is terrified of mobile â the ad landscape that drove 84% of
Google's revenue in Q3 is a completely different animal on mobile, and consumer
behavior is evolving rapidly. One clear pattern in 2013 is that many major UI
changes hit mobile before they hit desktop. Google is designing for tomorrow's
devices and is desperate to make sure that ad CTR and CPC don't fall as mobile
search volume increases and new devices (like Google Glass) come onto the scene.
When we see a new feature in testing and then realize it already exists on
mobile, odds are good that that change is coming to desktop soon. By combining
these two data sources, we've been able to paint a picture of Google's near
future. Based on the past few months, I'm going to make six predictions for 2014
and turn those six predictions into two conceptual screenshots.
Six predictions
For each of the six predictions below, I'll provide evidence from MozCast
and/or mobile search, along with my confidence in the prediction. These
predictions are grouped to tell a story, but are otherwise in no particular
order:
(1) New Knowledge Graph â 98%
Since its launch, the vast majority of Google's Knowledge Graph has been built
on a very few data sources (including Wikipedia, Freebase, and the CIA
Factbook). The core problem is that these sources are limited and only work well
for highly structured data. To expand, Google needs to extract answers from
their entire index of the web. Put simply, Google needs to be able to create
answers from content. Over the past few months, we've seen extensive testing of
Knowledge Graph entries like this one:
Notice the "In context" section, which is the bulk of the informational
content â this is entirely driven by third-party websites. All of the blue
links are links to additional Google searches, but the light-gray links show the
original sources. Put simply, Google will soon be building their Knowledge Graph
on your data.
It's interesting to note that the queries we're seeing this on seem to be
fairly broad and/or have a generic intent. When Google launched "in-depth
articles", they made the following statement:
To understand a broad topic, sometimes you need more than a quick answer. Our
research indicates perhaps 10% of people's daily information needs fit this
category.
It's very likely that this new Knowledge Graph approach is an attempt to solve
the same problem, and that these entries will appear on searches that previously
had no Knowledge Graph data. Long story short, this isn't just a change â
it's an expansion.
Knowledge Graph drives many variations of answer boxes, and so it's not
surprising that we're also seeing new answer boxes in testing. This answer box
was captured from a search for "is pneumonia contagious":
Unlike traditional answer boxes, this information is being extracted from the
index (in this case, kidshealth.org) and treated more like an organic search
result. Given that we've seen multiple variations of new answer boxes and
multiple tests of these new Knowledge Graph entries, my confidence is very high
that some version of these features will roll out in the next few months.
(2) Revamped advertising format â 95%
Recently, we've seen Google aggressively testing a new and somewhat surprising
advertising format (and outside sources have confirmed these tests). It looks
something like this (the search was "paella recipe"):
I've added the (...) in the middle section, which is more organic results, but
the divider marks the top and bottom AdWords blocks. Essentially, Google has
added the marker [Ad] to each advertisement, but they've removed the current
background color and have formatted everything else to be nearly identical to an
organic listing.
It may seem surprising that Google would visibly mark ads in this way. I
suspect that this isn't entirely by choice, but is related to Google's ongoing
battle with regulators and their pending settlement with the European Union. If
this move seems unlikely to you, consider a second piece of evidence. This is a
current search for "paella pans" via my mobile phone (all mobile screenshots
come from Safari/iOS7 on an iPhone 5S):
This new format has been running on mobile browsers for a while now, and
Google's widespread testing makes it look like a foregone conclusion for desktop
search. This change will have huge implications on both organic and paid CTR in
2014, regardless of the final form. Expect Google to also test and iterate
quickly when the new ad format launches.
(3) Ads outside of three blocks â 33%
This prediction is much more speculative and I have no clear evidence to
support it, but the potential impact is big enough that I'm going to say it out
loud. Once Google is individually labeling ads in the left-hand column
(right-hand column ads only get one [Ads] marker at the top, at least in
testing), ads will become stand-alone units. In other words, Google will no
longer be constrained by fixed blocks at the top and bottom. So, what's to keep
the test above from turning into something more like this (the next image is
conceptual, not a captured test):
Individual ads could be interspersed in organic results, impacting the overall
effectiveness of any given position in those results. Once Google has the
flexibility to move ads, I see no compelling reason to believe that they won't
test new options to improve ad effectiveness. I'll conservatively put the odds
of this change at one in three.
(4) Loss of result count/stats â 80%
This one has serious implications for SEOs, but I think it's a move that makes
sense for Google. Let's look at the entire screenshot for the "paella recipe"
search we dug into previously:
Notice something missing? There's no light-gray result count at the top of
this page ("About 3,270,000 resultsâ"). Google has entirely removed that
line of text in this test screen. Truthfully, as much as we rely on these
numbers for SEO research (especially with search operators like "site:"), I
suspect the additional data has almost no value for everyday search users. It's
taking up prime real estate, and Google could very likely get rid of it.
Scroll back up to the mobile search for "paella pans" and you'll see that
result count data is already gone from mobile. On a mobile phone, that data
simply takes up too much valuable space. It's possible that Google could
preserve the data for operators and certain searches, but I have no clear
evidence either way. If you're a search marketer, I would be prepared to lose
this data in 2014.
(5) Boxed design for #1 result â 90%
The current incarnation of an expanded #1 organic result has been around for a
while â it has an indented set of site-links (up to six, on a normal
search, or ten on domain searches) that each have links and short snippets.
Google has been testing a number of variations on boxed designs for expanded #1
results, such as the following:
Notice that the entire entry is boxes, as are the individual site-links. The
main link is in a larger-than-normal font, and some of the site-links have
arrows that pull up related links. Google has been testing many variations on
this theme for a couple of months now, but consider that one variation already
exists in mobile search (this is a search for our own brand, as Ra Sushi
generates local results on mobile):
While the mobile result is constrained to a single column, the overall listing
is boxed, with clear dividers between the main result and site-links. Google has
been testing variations on this one for a while, and they seem to be worried
about getting it right, but by the end of 2014, I'm almost certain that some
variation on boxed results for the #1 organic position will launch.
(6) Boxed design for entire page â 50%
It's easy to assume that this boxed design is purely cosmetic, but I believe
it goes much deeper than that. Consider the look of another Google product,
Google Now (via my iPhone 5S):
Google Now is divided into what Google calls "cards", distinct units of
information that are individually boxed and can be mixed, matched, and sorted as
Google sees fit. Notice how similar this format looks to Google's mobile search
results. As Google expands into new formats, including wearable technology like
Google Glass, and as screen sizes diverge â from phones to tablets to
desktop and everything in between â it's going to be increasingly
important that they can escape the constraints of a single, fixed-format
display. Cards are a natural transition to a flexible and dynamic SERP, allowing
Google to mix and match depending on the device you're using.
Google Now has already started appearing in personalized search results.
Consider the following Knowledge Graph entry, produced when I do a brand search
for "amazon" while being logged into my Google account:
Google has inserted a personalized card into the Knowledge Graph entry that
indicates I have recent orders. Clicking on details produces an answer box
containing yet more personalized information. Even the Knowledge Graph entry
itself and current answer boxes are card-like, with clear outlines and
separation from organic results. Answer boxes are tailor-made for mobile search,
and so are Google Now cards.
So, what if Google took this idea to its logical conclusion and created an
entire SERP that was divided into individual card-like units? This is how mobile
search already looks, as you can see from multiple examples above. This would be
a big change for desktop, and I have not seen an entirely card-based SERP in
testing, but I'll put the odds of that development at about even (50/50).
Two SERP concepts
So, what might Google look like by the end of 2014? I've come up with two
artist's conceptions (I created them, so take the phrase "artist" loosely).
While some aspects of these concepts are based in reality, these are not real
Google results (live or in testing). The first is based on my recent flight on
Virgin America and a fictional brand search for "virgin america" (click on the
image for a full-sized version):
Here we have a completely boxed (card-style) SERP, with the new ad format,
Google Now in the Knowledge Graph, and the redesigned #1 organic result with
site-links. I've added the mobile background color and removed result count
data. While I don't think Google will adopt this exact look and feel, it
combines many of the data-driven predictions in this post.
Just for fun, let's look at a second variation. Here we have a Knowledge Graph
result using "In context" data from 3rd-party sources, plus an answer box
parsing information from a 3rd-party source. The first ad is placed after the
answer box, and a second ad has been inserted after the top two organic results.
Again, this is purely conjecture:
While I don't expect Google to look exactly like either of these concepts by
the end of 2014, I think the data strongly suggests that many of these concepts
will be in play, and Google will have shifted strongly toward a more card-based
design. Add in the expansion of Knowledge Graph and Google's rush to get mobile
right, and I expect significant changes to SEO in the next year. The best we can
do is keep our eyes open.
This post was adapted from a presentation at ThenSome San Francisco, called
"Future SERP: The Face of Google in 2014" (available on SlideShare). Thanks to
SEOGadget for hosting the event and to the audience for a great discussion that
helped me vet and develop some of these ideas.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
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You may view the latest post at
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posted.
Best regards,
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2014'
Posted by Dr-Pete
Watching Google change can quickly become an obsession, and it's easy to jump
at every shadow when they test thousands of ideas per year (and roll out
hundreds). This post is an attempt to take all of the things I've seen in the
past six months and tell a story driven by real data. This is the story of how I
think Google will look by the end of 2014, and what that implies about their
direction and core philosophy.
Two data sources
(1) MozCast Feature Alert
In April of 2012, I launched "Project Algo Alert", a prototype that would
later become MozCast. What was originally one "weather" station, designed to
measure daily fluctuations in top 10 rankings across 1000 keywords, has evolved
into 11 stations and three unique systems. One of those systems is Feature
Alert, which was based on a simple idea â how could we detect when Google
launched new SERP features, without any prior knowledge of what those features
would be?
Feature Alert solves this problem by cataloging the basic building blocks of
Google's source code, the container names and IDs in CSS. Let's say for example,
that Feature Alert sees the following chunk of HTML/CSS code:
The system checks each building block against an archive, and if
"ads-container c mnr-c" is a new object, it's captured and I'm alerted that
something new happened. When I built Feature Alert, I thought something new
might pop up a couple of times a month. As of writing this post, the system has
captured 2,441 unique building blocks.
A side effect of the system is that, at large scale, it frequently catches
Google in the act of testing new features and UI changes. Keep in mind that
Google ran 7,018 "live traffic experiments" in 2012 â while we probably
capture only a small number of them, these tests allow us to get a glimpse into
what's coming next. While any given change may be rejected (Google launched just
over 9% of the changes they tested last year), some changes appear repeatedly in
testing and in different formats over time, strongly suggesting that Google is
intent on launch.
(2) Mobile feature launches
Google is terrified of mobile â the ad landscape that drove 84% of
Google's revenue in Q3 is a completely different animal on mobile, and consumer
behavior is evolving rapidly. One clear pattern in 2013 is that many major UI
changes hit mobile before they hit desktop. Google is designing for tomorrow's
devices and is desperate to make sure that ad CTR and CPC don't fall as mobile
search volume increases and new devices (like Google Glass) come onto the scene.
When we see a new feature in testing and then realize it already exists on
mobile, odds are good that that change is coming to desktop soon. By combining
these two data sources, we've been able to paint a picture of Google's near
future. Based on the past few months, I'm going to make six predictions for 2014
and turn those six predictions into two conceptual screenshots.
Six predictions
For each of the six predictions below, I'll provide evidence from MozCast
and/or mobile search, along with my confidence in the prediction. These
predictions are grouped to tell a story, but are otherwise in no particular
order:
(1) New Knowledge Graph â 98%
Since its launch, the vast majority of Google's Knowledge Graph has been built
on a very few data sources (including Wikipedia, Freebase, and the CIA
Factbook). The core problem is that these sources are limited and only work well
for highly structured data. To expand, Google needs to extract answers from
their entire index of the web. Put simply, Google needs to be able to create
answers from content. Over the past few months, we've seen extensive testing of
Knowledge Graph entries like this one:
Notice the "In context" section, which is the bulk of the informational
content â this is entirely driven by third-party websites. All of the blue
links are links to additional Google searches, but the light-gray links show the
original sources. Put simply, Google will soon be building their Knowledge Graph
on your data.
It's interesting to note that the queries we're seeing this on seem to be
fairly broad and/or have a generic intent. When Google launched "in-depth
articles", they made the following statement:
To understand a broad topic, sometimes you need more than a quick answer. Our
research indicates perhaps 10% of people's daily information needs fit this
category.
It's very likely that this new Knowledge Graph approach is an attempt to solve
the same problem, and that these entries will appear on searches that previously
had no Knowledge Graph data. Long story short, this isn't just a change â
it's an expansion.
Knowledge Graph drives many variations of answer boxes, and so it's not
surprising that we're also seeing new answer boxes in testing. This answer box
was captured from a search for "is pneumonia contagious":
Unlike traditional answer boxes, this information is being extracted from the
index (in this case, kidshealth.org) and treated more like an organic search
result. Given that we've seen multiple variations of new answer boxes and
multiple tests of these new Knowledge Graph entries, my confidence is very high
that some version of these features will roll out in the next few months.
(2) Revamped advertising format â 95%
Recently, we've seen Google aggressively testing a new and somewhat surprising
advertising format (and outside sources have confirmed these tests). It looks
something like this (the search was "paella recipe"):
I've added the (...) in the middle section, which is more organic results, but
the divider marks the top and bottom AdWords blocks. Essentially, Google has
added the marker [Ad] to each advertisement, but they've removed the current
background color and have formatted everything else to be nearly identical to an
organic listing.
It may seem surprising that Google would visibly mark ads in this way. I
suspect that this isn't entirely by choice, but is related to Google's ongoing
battle with regulators and their pending settlement with the European Union. If
this move seems unlikely to you, consider a second piece of evidence. This is a
current search for "paella pans" via my mobile phone (all mobile screenshots
come from Safari/iOS7 on an iPhone 5S):
This new format has been running on mobile browsers for a while now, and
Google's widespread testing makes it look like a foregone conclusion for desktop
search. This change will have huge implications on both organic and paid CTR in
2014, regardless of the final form. Expect Google to also test and iterate
quickly when the new ad format launches.
(3) Ads outside of three blocks â 33%
This prediction is much more speculative and I have no clear evidence to
support it, but the potential impact is big enough that I'm going to say it out
loud. Once Google is individually labeling ads in the left-hand column
(right-hand column ads only get one [Ads] marker at the top, at least in
testing), ads will become stand-alone units. In other words, Google will no
longer be constrained by fixed blocks at the top and bottom. So, what's to keep
the test above from turning into something more like this (the next image is
conceptual, not a captured test):
Individual ads could be interspersed in organic results, impacting the overall
effectiveness of any given position in those results. Once Google has the
flexibility to move ads, I see no compelling reason to believe that they won't
test new options to improve ad effectiveness. I'll conservatively put the odds
of this change at one in three.
(4) Loss of result count/stats â 80%
This one has serious implications for SEOs, but I think it's a move that makes
sense for Google. Let's look at the entire screenshot for the "paella recipe"
search we dug into previously:
Notice something missing? There's no light-gray result count at the top of
this page ("About 3,270,000 resultsâ"). Google has entirely removed that
line of text in this test screen. Truthfully, as much as we rely on these
numbers for SEO research (especially with search operators like "site:"), I
suspect the additional data has almost no value for everyday search users. It's
taking up prime real estate, and Google could very likely get rid of it.
Scroll back up to the mobile search for "paella pans" and you'll see that
result count data is already gone from mobile. On a mobile phone, that data
simply takes up too much valuable space. It's possible that Google could
preserve the data for operators and certain searches, but I have no clear
evidence either way. If you're a search marketer, I would be prepared to lose
this data in 2014.
(5) Boxed design for #1 result â 90%
The current incarnation of an expanded #1 organic result has been around for a
while â it has an indented set of site-links (up to six, on a normal
search, or ten on domain searches) that each have links and short snippets.
Google has been testing a number of variations on boxed designs for expanded #1
results, such as the following:
Notice that the entire entry is boxes, as are the individual site-links. The
main link is in a larger-than-normal font, and some of the site-links have
arrows that pull up related links. Google has been testing many variations on
this theme for a couple of months now, but consider that one variation already
exists in mobile search (this is a search for our own brand, as Ra Sushi
generates local results on mobile):
While the mobile result is constrained to a single column, the overall listing
is boxed, with clear dividers between the main result and site-links. Google has
been testing variations on this one for a while, and they seem to be worried
about getting it right, but by the end of 2014, I'm almost certain that some
variation on boxed results for the #1 organic position will launch.
(6) Boxed design for entire page â 50%
It's easy to assume that this boxed design is purely cosmetic, but I believe
it goes much deeper than that. Consider the look of another Google product,
Google Now (via my iPhone 5S):
Google Now is divided into what Google calls "cards", distinct units of
information that are individually boxed and can be mixed, matched, and sorted as
Google sees fit. Notice how similar this format looks to Google's mobile search
results. As Google expands into new formats, including wearable technology like
Google Glass, and as screen sizes diverge â from phones to tablets to
desktop and everything in between â it's going to be increasingly
important that they can escape the constraints of a single, fixed-format
display. Cards are a natural transition to a flexible and dynamic SERP, allowing
Google to mix and match depending on the device you're using.
Google Now has already started appearing in personalized search results.
Consider the following Knowledge Graph entry, produced when I do a brand search
for "amazon" while being logged into my Google account:
Google has inserted a personalized card into the Knowledge Graph entry that
indicates I have recent orders. Clicking on details produces an answer box
containing yet more personalized information. Even the Knowledge Graph entry
itself and current answer boxes are card-like, with clear outlines and
separation from organic results. Answer boxes are tailor-made for mobile search,
and so are Google Now cards.
So, what if Google took this idea to its logical conclusion and created an
entire SERP that was divided into individual card-like units? This is how mobile
search already looks, as you can see from multiple examples above. This would be
a big change for desktop, and I have not seen an entirely card-based SERP in
testing, but I'll put the odds of that development at about even (50/50).
Two SERP concepts
So, what might Google look like by the end of 2014? I've come up with two
artist's conceptions (I created them, so take the phrase "artist" loosely).
While some aspects of these concepts are based in reality, these are not real
Google results (live or in testing). The first is based on my recent flight on
Virgin America and a fictional brand search for "virgin america" (click on the
image for a full-sized version):
Here we have a completely boxed (card-style) SERP, with the new ad format,
Google Now in the Knowledge Graph, and the redesigned #1 organic result with
site-links. I've added the mobile background color and removed result count
data. While I don't think Google will adopt this exact look and feel, it
combines many of the data-driven predictions in this post.
Just for fun, let's look at a second variation. Here we have a Knowledge Graph
result using "In context" data from 3rd-party sources, plus an answer box
parsing information from a 3rd-party source. The first ad is placed after the
answer box, and a second ad has been inserted after the top two organic results.
Again, this is purely conjecture:
While I don't expect Google to look exactly like either of these concepts by
the end of 2014, I think the data strongly suggests that many of these concepts
will be in play, and Google will have shifted strongly toward a more card-based
design. Add in the expansion of Knowledge Graph and Google's rush to get mobile
right, and I expect significant changes to SEO in the next year. The best we can
do is keep our eyes open.
This post was adapted from a presentation at ThenSome San Francisco, called
"Future SERP: The Face of Google in 2014" (available on SlideShare). Thanks to
SEOGadget for hosting the event and to the audience for a great discussion that
helped me vet and develop some of these ideas.
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Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Wednesday, 13 November 2013
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'Top 20 Local Search Ranking
Factors: An Illustrated Guide'
Posted by MiriamEllis
First published in 2008 by David Mihm, the Local Search Ranking Factors survey
of Local SEOs around the globe has become a high point in the year in local
search. If you eagerly await this yearly report and comb through it for new
insight, then the information in this guide may not come as news to you. I wrote
this guide for marketers who are new to the field of local SEO and for local
business owners who are flying solo in their efforts to market their companies
on the web.
Local Search Ranking Factors 2013 identified 83 foundational ranking factors.
This guide takes the top 20 most important factors and offers a succinct,
illustrated example of each.
By reading this guide, you will understand both the lingo and the concept of
each local search ranking factor. Use this information and you will be on the
road to promoting local businesses on the web from a firm and educated
foundation. Sound good? Start reading!
1. Proper category associations2. Physical address in city of search3.
Consistency of structured citations4. Quality/authority of structured
citations5. HTML NAP matching place page NAP6. Quantity of structured
citations7. Domain authority of website8. Individually owner-verified local plus
page9. City, state in Places landing page title10. Proximity of address to
centroid
11. Quality/authority of inbound links to domain12. Quantity of native Google
Places reviews (w/text)13. Product/service keyword in business title14. Quantity
of citations from locally relevant domains15. Proximity of physical location to
the point of search16. Quantity of citations from industry-relevant domains17.
Local area code on local Plus page18. City, state in most/all website title
tags19. Quantity of third-party traditional reviews20. Page authority of Places
landing page URL
1. Proper category associations
Proper category associations are important enough to be ranked #1 in the
survey. During the process of creating your Google+ Local page, you will be
choosing categories at two distinct points.
When you enter your initial details, you will be selecting a primary category
for the business. This is the most important category you will choose.
Then, once inside the dashboard, you will be allowed to select up to nine
other categories for your business.
All categories must be chosen from Google's pre-set category taxonomy.
Earlier versions of Google's dashboard allowed the business owner to custom
create categories, but this feature is being phased out.
The concept here is simple. If you wish to appear in the local results for a
search like "dentists in denver", your business must be categorized as a
dentist. If it is categorized as a certified public accountant, you have no hope
of appearing for your important search terms.
To help you determine which categories are available to describe your
business, you can use Mike Blumenthal's free Google Places for Business category
tool. Type in keywords that you feel best describe what your business is and the
tool will show you which categories are available. Your choice of categories
will often be obvious. A dentist will want to choose "dentist" as his primary
category. But, he may wish to perform keyword research and combine that with use
of the above tool to discover additional important categories such as "dental
clinic" or "cosmetic dentist".
You will be building listings for your business in a variety of other local
business directories and indexes. These platforms will not necessarily offer
categories that are identical to those in Google's system. You must take time to
discover the most relevant categories on each platform as you build each
listing.
2. Physical address in city of search
Your business is most likely to appear in Google's pack of local results for
searches that either:
Contain the name of the city in which it is physically located, or
Stem from devices based in that city
If you are a chiropractor in San Francisco, you are most likely to appear in
the local pack of results for a search like "san francisco chiropractor", or if
someone searches for "chiropractor" from a computer or cell phone based in San
Francisco.
This search for "chirporactors san francisco" illustrates this phenomenon, in
that all of the results Google is returning in its local pack are for
practitioners physically located in that city:
In the above screenshot, you will note that there are no chiropractors in
neighboring cities included in these results. It's safe to say that Google has a
very definite bias towards physical location in the city of search. This is a
simple concept, but it represents a major stumbling block for two distinct
business models.
A) Service area businesses (SABs) with employees who might travel to a city
like San Francisco to do plumbing, management consulting, or dog walking, but
who are physically based in another city or town. In other words, the SAB does
not have a physical address in San Francisco.
B) Brick-and-mortar businesses located just outside the borders of a major
city like San Francisco, Dallas, or Denver. An example of this might be a
locally-heralded acupuncturist who is located in Mill Valley, California, but
who has numerous clients who are happy to travel a few miles outside of San
Francisco to visit him.
In both cases, the business owner understandably wants these major city
audiences to know his services are available, but because of Google's bias
toward physical location, these businesses are unlikely to ever appear in the
local pack of results. As things presently stand with Google, the best hope for
these types of business owners is to begin developing city landing pages that
showcase their professional association with these other cities, whether this
involves windows they wash on the skyscrapers of Dallas or lectures they give at
a Denver hospital. The goal here is to gain additional visibility in the organic
results for these other geographic terms.
There are some exceptions that may overcome Google's bias. If you search for
a niche business model in or around a major city, or search for any business
model in a rural location, you may see listings in the local pack of results
that stem from several cities. For example, if there is only one gas station
serving a large radius in a rural area, it may pop up as a local result for any
of the towns in that region. This scenario, however, tends to be the exception
rather than the rule.
In sum, it is generally wise for local business owners to set the goal of
earning local pack rankings for searches related to their city of location, and
organic rankings for any other geographic terms they feel are important.
3. Consistency of structured citations
A citation is any web-based mention of your company's partial or complete
name, address, and phone number (NAP). A "structured citation" refers to a
listing of your business in an online local business directory such as YP.com,
HotFrog, or Best of the Web.
Inconsistent citations might involve:
A difference in the business name (i.e. Smile Dentistry vs. Smile Dental
Clinic)
A wrong street address, a typo in street address numbers, or a missing suite
number
A wrong or different phone number, a toll free or call tracking number
A different or wrong website URL
Citation inconsistencies may arise from simple carelessness during the
citation-building process and these mistakes may then be duplicated across the
local search ecosystem. Inconsistencies also commonly arise if a business has
moved at any time in the past decade or so. Apart from causing confusion for
humans, these discrepancies hinder Google's ability to trust the data they have
gathered from around the web about a given business. A lack of trust on Google's
part can spell ranking difficulties for the business.
Here is an illustration of a randomly-chosen dental practice in Sacramento,
California which recently moved. The new location of the practice is on
Riverside Blvd., but a search in Google reveals that many structured citations
for the business still list its old location on Freeport Blvd. As can be seen in
the Google+ Local area of the results, the business currently has two listings
that reflect this inconsistency, meaning that their authority is being split up
instead of consolidated into one correct listing.
If you have to move locations, it's a given that you'll need to put in some
hours editing your old citations so that they reflect your new address. You'll
see this being referred to as "citation cleanup." However, many businesses that
haven't moved will discover that they have inconsistent NAP data out there on
the web, too.
An easy way to begin searching for this is to simply type your business name
into Google's main search engine and see what comes up. Go through the results
by hand and make sure that each part of your NAP is identical across all
listings of your business. Edit where necessary.
4. Quality/authority of structured citations
It's just good horse sense that having your business listed on high-quality
websites is going to help you more than being listed on sites of low quality. As
a rule of thumb, businesses should initially concentrate on getting listed on a
handful of really authoritative local business indexes and directories. Use the
tool at GetListed.org to be sure that you have a listing in the dozen or so
basic, authoritative directories highlighted there.
Once you have all your ducks in a row with these basic citations, you want to
continue down the citation building path to further enhance your company's
visibility and authority. Perform searches for category terms, service terms,
and geographic terms to see what comes up in the search engine results. The
websites that come up may be places you would like to list your business, if
possible.
There is no standard process for judging the quality of a citation source.
Metrics you might consider could include domain authority, domain age, link
profile quality, and even simpler quality signals such as whether the website
looks fresh or neglected. Darren Shaw of Whitespark has written a good blog post
entitled "How to Identify Quality Citation Sources". If you are in a competitive
market, you may need to build numerous citations to compete and may find that
using a paid tool like Whitespark's Local Citation Finder makes your work both
easier and more effective.
5. HTML NAP matching place page NAP
Google will be looking at the website page you've linked to from your Google
Places/Google+ Local page to cross reference the name, address and phone number
of your business. If all elements match, as shown in this screenshot, you're
good to go:
However, if there is a discrepancy in the NAP you have on your +Local page
and the NAP on the website page your +Local page links to, then Google will
become "confused" about the data they have about your business. Small
discrepancies like Ste. vs Suite or Hwy. vs Highway do not matter. Reference
Point 3 in this guide for a list of discrepancies that do matter. Your task is
to ensure that your NAP is cohesive in both places.
There is a specific scenario in which Google may not be able to cross
reference the complete NAP in the +Local Page dashboard with the NAP published
on a website. This relates to home-based businesses which, for reasons of
privacy, do not publish their street address on their website. It is speculated
that this decision may put the business at some disadvantage, given what an
authoritative source the website is, but to date, I am unaware of any in-depth
studies that have been conducted surrounding this interesting topic.
One might guess that if there are five home-based seamstresses in a town and
only one of them publishes her home address on her website, she might have an
edge over the other four, because Google is able to confirm that the Google+
Local page dashboard address matches the one found on the website. This is a
subject that is deserved of further study!
6. Quantity of structured citations
Again, a structured citation is a listing of your business name, address, and
phone number (NAP) on an online local business directory. While the quality of
these structured citations counts most, quantity is definitely important, too.
Each unique local business owner will find he needs to build a different
number of citations in order to be competitive. Typically, the more competitive
your market is, the more citations you will need to build.
A simple way to find new structured citations for your business is to type
your business category terms into Google's main search engine to see what comes
up. For example, a Boston-based search for "doctors" highlights these two
directories where it may be smart for any doctor to get listed.
For a more sophisticated approach, you might use a tool like Whitespark's
Local Citation Finder (Moz members get a 20% discount!) which will not only help
you find new citations to build, but will also keep track of the numeric
quantity of citations you have earned:
For businesses in less competitive markets, an initial session of citation
building followed up by a very modest, occasional effort to build new citations
may be all that's needed to become dominant in the search engine results. If
you're in a tough market, however, ongoing citation building will likely need to
be an integral part of your local search marketing strategy.
7. Domain authority of website
At present, the overall strength of a local business' website plays a major
role in how it ranks both locally and organically. Simply stated, "Domain
Authority" is a metric used to predict how well a website may perform in search
results compared to other websites. Moz offers a Domain Authority toolbar called
the MozBar that makes it easy to see the DA of any website in the search engine
results. See the bottom of this screenshot, below:
There are many factors that make up the domain authority of a website. Some
of these include the age of a website and the number and quality of links
pointing to it. For a great explanation of DA, read this blog post by Matt
Peters.
In general, every local business will want to publish the strongest possible
website. This means having a user-friendly, optimized site with excellent
content that earns links and social mentions over time. You will always be
working to build your domain authority, and the higher it is, the better your
chances of ranking well for your most important terms.
8. Individually owner-verified local Plus page
Creating your Google+ Local page for your local business is your first step
to being included in Google's index. Your second step is to verify your
ownership of the listing. These days, this typically involves receiving a
postcard/letter from Google containing a pin number which you must enter in
order to complete verification.
Avoid letting anyone else act as a go-between for your company, putting your
Google+ Local page into some master Google account of their own. It's fine to
have a Local SEO help you with the steps of verification, but this should be
done with your own Google account and not the account of any third party. You
need to be in direct control of your Google+ Local page, and while you will find
unverified listings managing to rank in some local packs, it is always wiser for
any local business owner to take the time to verify his or her listing. It's
easy to do!
9. City, state in Places landing page title
Your Google+ Local page should link to a page on your website. This page on
your site will have an element in its code called a "Title Tag." This is
typically located in the <head> section of the code and the words
contained in it send a very important signal to both search engine bots and
human users regarding the topic of the page in question. The title tag of a page
typically displays in the upper left hand corner of your browser window:
In the above screenshot, you can see that the title tag of the page contains
both the city and state name. Local Search Ranking Factors 2013 cites the
inclusion of these geographic terms as being especially important on the landing
page to which your Google+ Local page links. For many local businesses, the
landing page will simply be the homepage of the website. However, for
multi-location or multi-practitioner business models, specific landing pages may
have been developed on the website to reflect this diversity, and the Google+
Local pages created for these locations or practitioners will often link to
these landing pages instead of the homepage.
By including your city and state names in your landing page title tag, you
will be letting both search engine bots and human visitors know that your
business is local to a specific geographic locale.
10. Proximity of address to centroid
Traditionally, the centroid in Local Search has been defined as the city
center identified by Google in its Maps product. You can go to maps.google.com,
type in a city and state and get a result that looks like this, with Google
putting a red pin on the presumed city centroid:
However, expert Local SEO Mike Blumenthal has recently pointed out that the
centroid can change position relative to different industries and may often have
nothing to do with the the designated center of a city. In other words, Google
can decide that the center of business for auto dealers is different than the
center of business for chiropractors. This is a somewhat complex topic and I
recommend you read Linda Buquet's forum thread, Google+ Local Centroid - Not
City Center! to see illustrations of this concept of the shifting center of
business.
Proximity of address to centroid is one of those factors over which your
business will have little control. Some businesses located outside this
centroid/center of business radius may discover that they are at a disadvantage
in comparison to competitors who are within the radius. Short of moving to a new
location, (not a realistic suggestion) your proximity to Google's designated
center of business for your industry isn't something you can change.
11. Quality/authority of inbound links to domain
Because organic signals play a big part in local rankings, earning high
quality links from authoritative sources will help your business to improve its
visibility in the search engine results. A tool like the Open Site Explorer can
help you to begin understanding both the number and quality of links currently
pointing to your website:
For a local business, high quality, authoritative links may come from a
variety of places, including local and national newspapers, local business
indexes, high profile bloggers and professional industry associations.
These days, strategies surrounding the acquisition of links have evolved from
link building (the process of actively seeking web pages on which links can be
placed) to link earning (the process of generating links without having to build
or request them due to some outstanding aspect of the website).
Local businesses can both build links, as in the case of having their domain
linked to from their local business listings, and earn links via forms of
marketing like content development and social sharing. The more authoritative
the sources that link to your website, the better your chances of gaining
visibility for your important search terms.
12. Quantity of native Google Places reviews (w/text)
This is a simple one! It is currently felt that the number of reviews your
business earns on its Google+ Local page influences rank more than reviews you
might earn on other review platforms. You can easily see how many reviews you
have by clicking either on the "reviews" link on your Google+ Local link in the
main search engine results, or by visiting your + Local page directly. You'll
see something that looks like this:
No local business needs to earn a ton of Google-based reviews at once. In
fact, if you earn reviews at too great a velocity, you may find that some of
them get filtered out. Rather, best practices for this revolve around slowly
acquiring positive reviews from happy customers, one by one, over time. You want
to earn more reviews than your direct competitors have, but you don't need 10
times as many reviews to see the benefits. In fact, if you've got many more
reviews that your competitors, it may look suspicious to Google and human users.
Google allows you to ask for reviews, but not to offer money or incentives in
exchange for explicitly-required positive reviews. Reviews must come directly
from your customers' Google accounts. Never hire a third party marketer to pose
as a customer and post fake reviews or post reviews on behalf of real customers.
Create an internal process in your company for requesting reviews either at the
time of service or shortly thereafter. Remember, a slow, steady acquisition of
reviews is the goal here, so that you are gradually building a great online
reputation, over time.
You will note that this ranking factor relates to the quantity of Google
Places reviews rather than the quality or rating of them. At this point in the
evolution of Local Search, sheer numbers seem to matter most.
13. Product/service keyword in business title
The business title of your business is its legal name or DBA. It is believed
that having the name of a core product or service in your business name may give
you some advantage over competitors who lack this. Here's an example of some
auto body shops in Boston with the full or partial keyword phase "auto body" in
their business names:
If your business name currently doesn't contain a product or service term,
don't take a wrong turn by simply adding keywords to the business title field on
your Google+ Local page or other citations. This is not allowed!
Ostensibly, you could take the legal steps to change your business name so
that it includes a keyword phrase, but be advised that if you do, you will be
signing up for a mountain of work editing all web-based references to your old
name, in addition to offline re-branding in your signage and marketing. Often,
it is simply more realistic to concentrate on other promotional efforts.
However, if you are starting a new business, it will be good to take note of
this bias on Google's part and consider including your core product/service term
in the naming of your company.
14. Quantity of citations from locally relevant domains
Having your business NAP (name, address, phone number) mentioned on a website
that relates specifically to your geographic community acts as a
locally-relevant citation. This type of citation reinforces Google's trust in
your relevance to your locale. Here's an example of a locally-relevant citation
for an accounting firm, listed on the Livermore, California Chamber of Commerce
website:
Apart from Chamber of Commerce websites, other locally-relevant domains on
which you might earn citations could include local news sites, local
professional association sites and local blogs that publish content about
businesses or happenings in your community.
Remember, a citation does not necessarily have to link to your website, but
that's always nice, too!
15. Proximity of physical location to the point of search (searcher-business
distance)
For many searches, it is no longer necessary to include a geographic term in
your search in order to be shown local results. If Google feels that your search
term has a local intent, they will automatically detect your physical location
and show you local results. For example, a user located in Laramie, Wyoming can
simply search for "wood stoves" in order to be shown a local pack of results
containing businesses near him.
This phenomenon of proximity demonstrates Google's bias towards businesses
with a physical location within a specific geographic area. If your business is
physically near to the searcher, your chances are good of showing up in the
local results, but if it's too far away, it is unlikely to be included in the
results.
For Google Maps app users looking for local businesses on their cell phones,
this concept of proximity is especially sensitive. If you run a local auto body
shop on the north side of your city, your chances are good that you will be
shown to searches who are driving around that part of town, but if you are on
the south side, there is a chance you won't appear as a result for that specific
searcher at that time. He'd need to drive or walk closer to you to see you as a
result.
Obviously, local business owners have no control over where a particular
searcher is physically located at the time he performs a search, but it's
important to understand that the closer a searcher is to you, the better your
chances of being shown as a result for his search.
16. Quantity of citations from industry-relevant domains
Just as it can be helpful to earn to have your name, address and phone number
listed on locally-relevant websites, being included on industry-relevant sites
can improve your authority and rankings, too.
An industry-relevant website can be defined as one that is widely recognized
to be authoritative within a particularly category of industry, be that
automobiles, hospitality or health care. GetListed.org partnered with
Whitespark.ca to create a great data set highlighting The Best U.S. Citation
Sources By Category. Here's an example of the data you'll find on this page:
Definitely check that resource out if you are looking for citation sources
that are relevant to your industry. You can also perform manual searches for
your industry category and create a list of the authoritative websites that come
up most frequently for your terms. Once you have created this list, you can
visit each of the sites to see if they allow local businesses to be listed in a
directory-type feature, or if there are other opportunities for earning a
citation, such as guest blogging.
17. Local area code on local Plus page
Using your local area code phone number as your primary phone number on your
Google+ Local page is considered a best practice. The area code of the phone
number should match the area code/codes traditionally associated with your city
of location. This may seem obvious, but the local search engine results reveal
that some businesses take a wrong turn here and publish a toll free number,
instead. Alternatively, they might publish a cell phone number or call tracking
number with a different area code.
Here is a screenshot of a business which has done this correctly, publishing
a 505 area code phone number consistent with the city of Santa Fe, New Mexico:
Google allows you to enter a secondary number (such as a toll free number)
when creating your listing. This is especially important for businesses like
hotels who receive calls from all over the world and want their guests to be
able to make a charge-free phone call to book a room. Just be sure that, when
you create your listing, you are putting the local area code number in the
primary number field.
18. City, state in most/all website title tags
As referenced in point #9 of this guide, the title tag is an extremely
important element of any website page. Local Search Ranking Factors 2013 posits
that inclusion of your city/state name in most or all of your title tags can
have a positive impact on how your local business ranks. Here's a screenshot
from Open Site Explorer showing how these geo terms have been included in many
of the title tags for a carpet cleaning company in Livermore, California:
While it isn't necessary to include your city/state in every single title tag
of your website, it makes sense to include it on major pages such as the home
page, contact page, service description pages and bio pages. You want to send
the clearest possible signals to search engine bots and human users that you are
a local business and the title tag really helps transmit that message.
19. Quantity of third-party traditional reviews
In point #12 of this guide, we discussed the importance of earning customer
reviews on your Google+ Local page. Beyond this, there are many third-party
platforms on which it can be useful to get reviews. In ranking your local
business, Google takes into account the quantity of reviews you have earned
around the web. Take a look at how the famed New Orleans restaurant, Antoine's,
is the recipient of reviews on a variety of sites:
How do we know that Google takes this third party data into account? For one
thing, they link out to third party review sites right on the Google+ Local
page:
In the above screenshot, you can immediately see that Google is aware that
reviews exist for Antoine's Restaurant at UrbanSpoon, TripAdvisor and
Switchboard. Consider this a hint!
When trying to decide where it would be best for your local business to win
reviews, it can help to look at the +Local pages of your direct competitors to
see which third party platforms, if any, are being highlighted, as in the above
screenshot.
You should also research which review sites appear to be most active in your
locale. For example, in California, Yelp is an incredibly active website, but it
may be less so in other parts of the country. Your state or city may even have
locally-relevant review sites that your community is using. The idea is to get
your business profiled anywhere that your potential customers might leave a
review so that you are building a broad, web-based portfolio of positive reviews
over time.
20. Page authority of Places landing page URL
Similar to the concept of Domain Authority of a whole website described in
point #7 of this guide, this ranking factor relates to the authority of the
specific website page linked to from your Google+Local page. For many companies,
this will simply be the homepage of the website, but for businesses with
multiple locations or practitioners, other pages on the website may have been
designated as the landing pages. You can get a sense of your landing page's Page
Authority using www.opensiteexplorer.org.
Open Site Explorer uses Page Authority to predict a specific page's ability
to rank well, based on an algorithmic combination of link metrics, MozRank,
MozTrust and other factors. For a detailed explanation of this concept, read
What Is Page Authority. Because of the influence organic factors have on local
rankings, the higher your landing page's Page Authority, the better your chances
of becoming dominant in the local search results.
Whew, you made it!
Now you're off to a good start! You understand the top twenty most important
local search ranking factors. Your next task is to move on to the rest of the
eighty-three foundational factors, and from there to the competitive difference
maker factors and then the negative factors. I consider the study of Local
Search Ranking Factors to be essential and exciting homework for every Local SEO
and local business owner on the planet. Taking the time to understand the
concepts represented by each factor can spell success for any local business you
own or market.
The smartest Local SEOs I know are the ones who study hardest. I'm here to
help you in the Moz Q&A Forum if you hit a stumbling block. In the meantime, let
me wish you good luck in the learning process!
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
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Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Factors: An Illustrated Guide'
Posted by MiriamEllis
First published in 2008 by David Mihm, the Local Search Ranking Factors survey
of Local SEOs around the globe has become a high point in the year in local
search. If you eagerly await this yearly report and comb through it for new
insight, then the information in this guide may not come as news to you. I wrote
this guide for marketers who are new to the field of local SEO and for local
business owners who are flying solo in their efforts to market their companies
on the web.
Local Search Ranking Factors 2013 identified 83 foundational ranking factors.
This guide takes the top 20 most important factors and offers a succinct,
illustrated example of each.
By reading this guide, you will understand both the lingo and the concept of
each local search ranking factor. Use this information and you will be on the
road to promoting local businesses on the web from a firm and educated
foundation. Sound good? Start reading!
1. Proper category associations2. Physical address in city of search3.
Consistency of structured citations4. Quality/authority of structured
citations5. HTML NAP matching place page NAP6. Quantity of structured
citations7. Domain authority of website8. Individually owner-verified local plus
page9. City, state in Places landing page title10. Proximity of address to
centroid
11. Quality/authority of inbound links to domain12. Quantity of native Google
Places reviews (w/text)13. Product/service keyword in business title14. Quantity
of citations from locally relevant domains15. Proximity of physical location to
the point of search16. Quantity of citations from industry-relevant domains17.
Local area code on local Plus page18. City, state in most/all website title
tags19. Quantity of third-party traditional reviews20. Page authority of Places
landing page URL
1. Proper category associations
Proper category associations are important enough to be ranked #1 in the
survey. During the process of creating your Google+ Local page, you will be
choosing categories at two distinct points.
When you enter your initial details, you will be selecting a primary category
for the business. This is the most important category you will choose.
Then, once inside the dashboard, you will be allowed to select up to nine
other categories for your business.
All categories must be chosen from Google's pre-set category taxonomy.
Earlier versions of Google's dashboard allowed the business owner to custom
create categories, but this feature is being phased out.
The concept here is simple. If you wish to appear in the local results for a
search like "dentists in denver", your business must be categorized as a
dentist. If it is categorized as a certified public accountant, you have no hope
of appearing for your important search terms.
To help you determine which categories are available to describe your
business, you can use Mike Blumenthal's free Google Places for Business category
tool. Type in keywords that you feel best describe what your business is and the
tool will show you which categories are available. Your choice of categories
will often be obvious. A dentist will want to choose "dentist" as his primary
category. But, he may wish to perform keyword research and combine that with use
of the above tool to discover additional important categories such as "dental
clinic" or "cosmetic dentist".
You will be building listings for your business in a variety of other local
business directories and indexes. These platforms will not necessarily offer
categories that are identical to those in Google's system. You must take time to
discover the most relevant categories on each platform as you build each
listing.
2. Physical address in city of search
Your business is most likely to appear in Google's pack of local results for
searches that either:
Contain the name of the city in which it is physically located, or
Stem from devices based in that city
If you are a chiropractor in San Francisco, you are most likely to appear in
the local pack of results for a search like "san francisco chiropractor", or if
someone searches for "chiropractor" from a computer or cell phone based in San
Francisco.
This search for "chirporactors san francisco" illustrates this phenomenon, in
that all of the results Google is returning in its local pack are for
practitioners physically located in that city:
In the above screenshot, you will note that there are no chiropractors in
neighboring cities included in these results. It's safe to say that Google has a
very definite bias towards physical location in the city of search. This is a
simple concept, but it represents a major stumbling block for two distinct
business models.
A) Service area businesses (SABs) with employees who might travel to a city
like San Francisco to do plumbing, management consulting, or dog walking, but
who are physically based in another city or town. In other words, the SAB does
not have a physical address in San Francisco.
B) Brick-and-mortar businesses located just outside the borders of a major
city like San Francisco, Dallas, or Denver. An example of this might be a
locally-heralded acupuncturist who is located in Mill Valley, California, but
who has numerous clients who are happy to travel a few miles outside of San
Francisco to visit him.
In both cases, the business owner understandably wants these major city
audiences to know his services are available, but because of Google's bias
toward physical location, these businesses are unlikely to ever appear in the
local pack of results. As things presently stand with Google, the best hope for
these types of business owners is to begin developing city landing pages that
showcase their professional association with these other cities, whether this
involves windows they wash on the skyscrapers of Dallas or lectures they give at
a Denver hospital. The goal here is to gain additional visibility in the organic
results for these other geographic terms.
There are some exceptions that may overcome Google's bias. If you search for
a niche business model in or around a major city, or search for any business
model in a rural location, you may see listings in the local pack of results
that stem from several cities. For example, if there is only one gas station
serving a large radius in a rural area, it may pop up as a local result for any
of the towns in that region. This scenario, however, tends to be the exception
rather than the rule.
In sum, it is generally wise for local business owners to set the goal of
earning local pack rankings for searches related to their city of location, and
organic rankings for any other geographic terms they feel are important.
3. Consistency of structured citations
A citation is any web-based mention of your company's partial or complete
name, address, and phone number (NAP). A "structured citation" refers to a
listing of your business in an online local business directory such as YP.com,
HotFrog, or Best of the Web.
Inconsistent citations might involve:
A difference in the business name (i.e. Smile Dentistry vs. Smile Dental
Clinic)
A wrong street address, a typo in street address numbers, or a missing suite
number
A wrong or different phone number, a toll free or call tracking number
A different or wrong website URL
Citation inconsistencies may arise from simple carelessness during the
citation-building process and these mistakes may then be duplicated across the
local search ecosystem. Inconsistencies also commonly arise if a business has
moved at any time in the past decade or so. Apart from causing confusion for
humans, these discrepancies hinder Google's ability to trust the data they have
gathered from around the web about a given business. A lack of trust on Google's
part can spell ranking difficulties for the business.
Here is an illustration of a randomly-chosen dental practice in Sacramento,
California which recently moved. The new location of the practice is on
Riverside Blvd., but a search in Google reveals that many structured citations
for the business still list its old location on Freeport Blvd. As can be seen in
the Google+ Local area of the results, the business currently has two listings
that reflect this inconsistency, meaning that their authority is being split up
instead of consolidated into one correct listing.
If you have to move locations, it's a given that you'll need to put in some
hours editing your old citations so that they reflect your new address. You'll
see this being referred to as "citation cleanup." However, many businesses that
haven't moved will discover that they have inconsistent NAP data out there on
the web, too.
An easy way to begin searching for this is to simply type your business name
into Google's main search engine and see what comes up. Go through the results
by hand and make sure that each part of your NAP is identical across all
listings of your business. Edit where necessary.
4. Quality/authority of structured citations
It's just good horse sense that having your business listed on high-quality
websites is going to help you more than being listed on sites of low quality. As
a rule of thumb, businesses should initially concentrate on getting listed on a
handful of really authoritative local business indexes and directories. Use the
tool at GetListed.org to be sure that you have a listing in the dozen or so
basic, authoritative directories highlighted there.
Once you have all your ducks in a row with these basic citations, you want to
continue down the citation building path to further enhance your company's
visibility and authority. Perform searches for category terms, service terms,
and geographic terms to see what comes up in the search engine results. The
websites that come up may be places you would like to list your business, if
possible.
There is no standard process for judging the quality of a citation source.
Metrics you might consider could include domain authority, domain age, link
profile quality, and even simpler quality signals such as whether the website
looks fresh or neglected. Darren Shaw of Whitespark has written a good blog post
entitled "How to Identify Quality Citation Sources". If you are in a competitive
market, you may need to build numerous citations to compete and may find that
using a paid tool like Whitespark's Local Citation Finder makes your work both
easier and more effective.
5. HTML NAP matching place page NAP
Google will be looking at the website page you've linked to from your Google
Places/Google+ Local page to cross reference the name, address and phone number
of your business. If all elements match, as shown in this screenshot, you're
good to go:
However, if there is a discrepancy in the NAP you have on your +Local page
and the NAP on the website page your +Local page links to, then Google will
become "confused" about the data they have about your business. Small
discrepancies like Ste. vs Suite or Hwy. vs Highway do not matter. Reference
Point 3 in this guide for a list of discrepancies that do matter. Your task is
to ensure that your NAP is cohesive in both places.
There is a specific scenario in which Google may not be able to cross
reference the complete NAP in the +Local Page dashboard with the NAP published
on a website. This relates to home-based businesses which, for reasons of
privacy, do not publish their street address on their website. It is speculated
that this decision may put the business at some disadvantage, given what an
authoritative source the website is, but to date, I am unaware of any in-depth
studies that have been conducted surrounding this interesting topic.
One might guess that if there are five home-based seamstresses in a town and
only one of them publishes her home address on her website, she might have an
edge over the other four, because Google is able to confirm that the Google+
Local page dashboard address matches the one found on the website. This is a
subject that is deserved of further study!
6. Quantity of structured citations
Again, a structured citation is a listing of your business name, address, and
phone number (NAP) on an online local business directory. While the quality of
these structured citations counts most, quantity is definitely important, too.
Each unique local business owner will find he needs to build a different
number of citations in order to be competitive. Typically, the more competitive
your market is, the more citations you will need to build.
A simple way to find new structured citations for your business is to type
your business category terms into Google's main search engine to see what comes
up. For example, a Boston-based search for "doctors" highlights these two
directories where it may be smart for any doctor to get listed.
For a more sophisticated approach, you might use a tool like Whitespark's
Local Citation Finder (Moz members get a 20% discount!) which will not only help
you find new citations to build, but will also keep track of the numeric
quantity of citations you have earned:
For businesses in less competitive markets, an initial session of citation
building followed up by a very modest, occasional effort to build new citations
may be all that's needed to become dominant in the search engine results. If
you're in a tough market, however, ongoing citation building will likely need to
be an integral part of your local search marketing strategy.
7. Domain authority of website
At present, the overall strength of a local business' website plays a major
role in how it ranks both locally and organically. Simply stated, "Domain
Authority" is a metric used to predict how well a website may perform in search
results compared to other websites. Moz offers a Domain Authority toolbar called
the MozBar that makes it easy to see the DA of any website in the search engine
results. See the bottom of this screenshot, below:
There are many factors that make up the domain authority of a website. Some
of these include the age of a website and the number and quality of links
pointing to it. For a great explanation of DA, read this blog post by Matt
Peters.
In general, every local business will want to publish the strongest possible
website. This means having a user-friendly, optimized site with excellent
content that earns links and social mentions over time. You will always be
working to build your domain authority, and the higher it is, the better your
chances of ranking well for your most important terms.
8. Individually owner-verified local Plus page
Creating your Google+ Local page for your local business is your first step
to being included in Google's index. Your second step is to verify your
ownership of the listing. These days, this typically involves receiving a
postcard/letter from Google containing a pin number which you must enter in
order to complete verification.
Avoid letting anyone else act as a go-between for your company, putting your
Google+ Local page into some master Google account of their own. It's fine to
have a Local SEO help you with the steps of verification, but this should be
done with your own Google account and not the account of any third party. You
need to be in direct control of your Google+ Local page, and while you will find
unverified listings managing to rank in some local packs, it is always wiser for
any local business owner to take the time to verify his or her listing. It's
easy to do!
9. City, state in Places landing page title
Your Google+ Local page should link to a page on your website. This page on
your site will have an element in its code called a "Title Tag." This is
typically located in the <head> section of the code and the words
contained in it send a very important signal to both search engine bots and
human users regarding the topic of the page in question. The title tag of a page
typically displays in the upper left hand corner of your browser window:
In the above screenshot, you can see that the title tag of the page contains
both the city and state name. Local Search Ranking Factors 2013 cites the
inclusion of these geographic terms as being especially important on the landing
page to which your Google+ Local page links. For many local businesses, the
landing page will simply be the homepage of the website. However, for
multi-location or multi-practitioner business models, specific landing pages may
have been developed on the website to reflect this diversity, and the Google+
Local pages created for these locations or practitioners will often link to
these landing pages instead of the homepage.
By including your city and state names in your landing page title tag, you
will be letting both search engine bots and human visitors know that your
business is local to a specific geographic locale.
10. Proximity of address to centroid
Traditionally, the centroid in Local Search has been defined as the city
center identified by Google in its Maps product. You can go to maps.google.com,
type in a city and state and get a result that looks like this, with Google
putting a red pin on the presumed city centroid:
However, expert Local SEO Mike Blumenthal has recently pointed out that the
centroid can change position relative to different industries and may often have
nothing to do with the the designated center of a city. In other words, Google
can decide that the center of business for auto dealers is different than the
center of business for chiropractors. This is a somewhat complex topic and I
recommend you read Linda Buquet's forum thread, Google+ Local Centroid - Not
City Center! to see illustrations of this concept of the shifting center of
business.
Proximity of address to centroid is one of those factors over which your
business will have little control. Some businesses located outside this
centroid/center of business radius may discover that they are at a disadvantage
in comparison to competitors who are within the radius. Short of moving to a new
location, (not a realistic suggestion) your proximity to Google's designated
center of business for your industry isn't something you can change.
11. Quality/authority of inbound links to domain
Because organic signals play a big part in local rankings, earning high
quality links from authoritative sources will help your business to improve its
visibility in the search engine results. A tool like the Open Site Explorer can
help you to begin understanding both the number and quality of links currently
pointing to your website:
For a local business, high quality, authoritative links may come from a
variety of places, including local and national newspapers, local business
indexes, high profile bloggers and professional industry associations.
These days, strategies surrounding the acquisition of links have evolved from
link building (the process of actively seeking web pages on which links can be
placed) to link earning (the process of generating links without having to build
or request them due to some outstanding aspect of the website).
Local businesses can both build links, as in the case of having their domain
linked to from their local business listings, and earn links via forms of
marketing like content development and social sharing. The more authoritative
the sources that link to your website, the better your chances of gaining
visibility for your important search terms.
12. Quantity of native Google Places reviews (w/text)
This is a simple one! It is currently felt that the number of reviews your
business earns on its Google+ Local page influences rank more than reviews you
might earn on other review platforms. You can easily see how many reviews you
have by clicking either on the "reviews" link on your Google+ Local link in the
main search engine results, or by visiting your + Local page directly. You'll
see something that looks like this:
No local business needs to earn a ton of Google-based reviews at once. In
fact, if you earn reviews at too great a velocity, you may find that some of
them get filtered out. Rather, best practices for this revolve around slowly
acquiring positive reviews from happy customers, one by one, over time. You want
to earn more reviews than your direct competitors have, but you don't need 10
times as many reviews to see the benefits. In fact, if you've got many more
reviews that your competitors, it may look suspicious to Google and human users.
Google allows you to ask for reviews, but not to offer money or incentives in
exchange for explicitly-required positive reviews. Reviews must come directly
from your customers' Google accounts. Never hire a third party marketer to pose
as a customer and post fake reviews or post reviews on behalf of real customers.
Create an internal process in your company for requesting reviews either at the
time of service or shortly thereafter. Remember, a slow, steady acquisition of
reviews is the goal here, so that you are gradually building a great online
reputation, over time.
You will note that this ranking factor relates to the quantity of Google
Places reviews rather than the quality or rating of them. At this point in the
evolution of Local Search, sheer numbers seem to matter most.
13. Product/service keyword in business title
The business title of your business is its legal name or DBA. It is believed
that having the name of a core product or service in your business name may give
you some advantage over competitors who lack this. Here's an example of some
auto body shops in Boston with the full or partial keyword phase "auto body" in
their business names:
If your business name currently doesn't contain a product or service term,
don't take a wrong turn by simply adding keywords to the business title field on
your Google+ Local page or other citations. This is not allowed!
Ostensibly, you could take the legal steps to change your business name so
that it includes a keyword phrase, but be advised that if you do, you will be
signing up for a mountain of work editing all web-based references to your old
name, in addition to offline re-branding in your signage and marketing. Often,
it is simply more realistic to concentrate on other promotional efforts.
However, if you are starting a new business, it will be good to take note of
this bias on Google's part and consider including your core product/service term
in the naming of your company.
14. Quantity of citations from locally relevant domains
Having your business NAP (name, address, phone number) mentioned on a website
that relates specifically to your geographic community acts as a
locally-relevant citation. This type of citation reinforces Google's trust in
your relevance to your locale. Here's an example of a locally-relevant citation
for an accounting firm, listed on the Livermore, California Chamber of Commerce
website:
Apart from Chamber of Commerce websites, other locally-relevant domains on
which you might earn citations could include local news sites, local
professional association sites and local blogs that publish content about
businesses or happenings in your community.
Remember, a citation does not necessarily have to link to your website, but
that's always nice, too!
15. Proximity of physical location to the point of search (searcher-business
distance)
For many searches, it is no longer necessary to include a geographic term in
your search in order to be shown local results. If Google feels that your search
term has a local intent, they will automatically detect your physical location
and show you local results. For example, a user located in Laramie, Wyoming can
simply search for "wood stoves" in order to be shown a local pack of results
containing businesses near him.
This phenomenon of proximity demonstrates Google's bias towards businesses
with a physical location within a specific geographic area. If your business is
physically near to the searcher, your chances are good of showing up in the
local results, but if it's too far away, it is unlikely to be included in the
results.
For Google Maps app users looking for local businesses on their cell phones,
this concept of proximity is especially sensitive. If you run a local auto body
shop on the north side of your city, your chances are good that you will be
shown to searches who are driving around that part of town, but if you are on
the south side, there is a chance you won't appear as a result for that specific
searcher at that time. He'd need to drive or walk closer to you to see you as a
result.
Obviously, local business owners have no control over where a particular
searcher is physically located at the time he performs a search, but it's
important to understand that the closer a searcher is to you, the better your
chances of being shown as a result for his search.
16. Quantity of citations from industry-relevant domains
Just as it can be helpful to earn to have your name, address and phone number
listed on locally-relevant websites, being included on industry-relevant sites
can improve your authority and rankings, too.
An industry-relevant website can be defined as one that is widely recognized
to be authoritative within a particularly category of industry, be that
automobiles, hospitality or health care. GetListed.org partnered with
Whitespark.ca to create a great data set highlighting The Best U.S. Citation
Sources By Category. Here's an example of the data you'll find on this page:
Definitely check that resource out if you are looking for citation sources
that are relevant to your industry. You can also perform manual searches for
your industry category and create a list of the authoritative websites that come
up most frequently for your terms. Once you have created this list, you can
visit each of the sites to see if they allow local businesses to be listed in a
directory-type feature, or if there are other opportunities for earning a
citation, such as guest blogging.
17. Local area code on local Plus page
Using your local area code phone number as your primary phone number on your
Google+ Local page is considered a best practice. The area code of the phone
number should match the area code/codes traditionally associated with your city
of location. This may seem obvious, but the local search engine results reveal
that some businesses take a wrong turn here and publish a toll free number,
instead. Alternatively, they might publish a cell phone number or call tracking
number with a different area code.
Here is a screenshot of a business which has done this correctly, publishing
a 505 area code phone number consistent with the city of Santa Fe, New Mexico:
Google allows you to enter a secondary number (such as a toll free number)
when creating your listing. This is especially important for businesses like
hotels who receive calls from all over the world and want their guests to be
able to make a charge-free phone call to book a room. Just be sure that, when
you create your listing, you are putting the local area code number in the
primary number field.
18. City, state in most/all website title tags
As referenced in point #9 of this guide, the title tag is an extremely
important element of any website page. Local Search Ranking Factors 2013 posits
that inclusion of your city/state name in most or all of your title tags can
have a positive impact on how your local business ranks. Here's a screenshot
from Open Site Explorer showing how these geo terms have been included in many
of the title tags for a carpet cleaning company in Livermore, California:
While it isn't necessary to include your city/state in every single title tag
of your website, it makes sense to include it on major pages such as the home
page, contact page, service description pages and bio pages. You want to send
the clearest possible signals to search engine bots and human users that you are
a local business and the title tag really helps transmit that message.
19. Quantity of third-party traditional reviews
In point #12 of this guide, we discussed the importance of earning customer
reviews on your Google+ Local page. Beyond this, there are many third-party
platforms on which it can be useful to get reviews. In ranking your local
business, Google takes into account the quantity of reviews you have earned
around the web. Take a look at how the famed New Orleans restaurant, Antoine's,
is the recipient of reviews on a variety of sites:
How do we know that Google takes this third party data into account? For one
thing, they link out to third party review sites right on the Google+ Local
page:
In the above screenshot, you can immediately see that Google is aware that
reviews exist for Antoine's Restaurant at UrbanSpoon, TripAdvisor and
Switchboard. Consider this a hint!
When trying to decide where it would be best for your local business to win
reviews, it can help to look at the +Local pages of your direct competitors to
see which third party platforms, if any, are being highlighted, as in the above
screenshot.
You should also research which review sites appear to be most active in your
locale. For example, in California, Yelp is an incredibly active website, but it
may be less so in other parts of the country. Your state or city may even have
locally-relevant review sites that your community is using. The idea is to get
your business profiled anywhere that your potential customers might leave a
review so that you are building a broad, web-based portfolio of positive reviews
over time.
20. Page authority of Places landing page URL
Similar to the concept of Domain Authority of a whole website described in
point #7 of this guide, this ranking factor relates to the authority of the
specific website page linked to from your Google+Local page. For many companies,
this will simply be the homepage of the website, but for businesses with
multiple locations or practitioners, other pages on the website may have been
designated as the landing pages. You can get a sense of your landing page's Page
Authority using www.opensiteexplorer.org.
Open Site Explorer uses Page Authority to predict a specific page's ability
to rank well, based on an algorithmic combination of link metrics, MozRank,
MozTrust and other factors. For a detailed explanation of this concept, read
What Is Page Authority. Because of the influence organic factors have on local
rankings, the higher your landing page's Page Authority, the better your chances
of becoming dominant in the local search results.
Whew, you made it!
Now you're off to a good start! You understand the top twenty most important
local search ranking factors. Your next task is to move on to the rest of the
eighty-three foundational factors, and from there to the competitive difference
maker factors and then the negative factors. I consider the study of Local
Search Ranking Factors to be essential and exciting homework for every Local SEO
and local business owner on the planet. Taking the time to understand the
concepts represented by each factor can spell success for any local business you
own or market.
The smartest Local SEOs I know are the ones who study hardest. I'm here to
help you in the Moz Q&A Forum if you hit a stumbling block. In the meantime, let
me wish you good luck in the learning process!
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/~3/5wWS9Do7zYo/top-20-local-search-ranking-factors-an-illustrated-guide
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Tuesday, 12 November 2013
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'The 2013 #MozCon Video Bundle is
Live!'
Posted by EricaMcGillivray
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want to read!
You may view the latest post at
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Live!'
Posted by EricaMcGillivray
The 2013 MozCon Video Bundle is finally here. Yes, finally! We apologize for
the delay, but hope you're still excited. MozCon 2013 attendees: You should've
gotten an email with your special code for your video access, which was included
with your ticket price (if you didn't, let us know at community@moz.com).
MozCon 2013 was spectacular! This year, we moved our conference to its new
home at the Washington State Convention Center, and we were able to host 1,200
people, including Moz staff and other people helping out. This year saw a
monumental 35 speakers! That's a lot of inbound marketing knowledge.
What MozCon goers said about MozCon's content
Let's get down to business. Why should you purchase the MozCon videos? We
always try to give you plenty of takeaways to inspire and kick off your next
brilliant marketing move. Here's what MozCon 2013 attendees said about our
speakers' content:
All the details on the video bundle
Our videos show both the presenter and their deck, and we include a download
of the slide deck so you can flip through it at your leisure. Or just click on
those important links. You can stream or download them directly to enjoy on your
desktop, laptop, iPad, tablet, Surface, Android phone, iPhone, Windows phone,
and those rare Andromeda 4000s, which only work on Mars.
Our dream is that you keep pausing every single talk in order to send emails
and IMs filled with new ideas to your team or clients. There are 37
videosâ35 speakers + a q&a session + a special Rand Fishkin
introductionâto level-up your skills.
For $299 Moz Analytics subscribers ($399 non-subscribers) get instant access
to:
37 videos (over 19 hours) from MozCon 2013
Stream or download the videos to your computer, iPhone, or Android device
Downloadable slide decks of presentations
Non-subscribers, sign up for a free 30-day Moz Analytics trial and save.
A full-length talk for free!
Last year, we gave away Wil Reynolds' talk, and this year, we're continuing in
the tradition of giving you a taste of one of the best MozCon talks. The New
Yorker's Kyle Rush talks about the conversion-rate optimization he did as part
of the one of the most famous internet campaigns to-date, Obama for America.
MozCon 2013 free video - Kyle Rush - Win Through Optimization and Testing
If that doesn't convince you that these MozCon videos are all that jazz,
here's a really cute kitten hanging with adorable ducks. Or if you're
dance-party excited, we have a super early-bird deal on MozCon 2014 tickets.
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
want to read!
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[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, '5 Strategic Steps to Big Content'
Posted by MackenzieFogelson
Content is an incredibly powerful integrated marketing tool. Among other
things, content can:
cultivate relationships
increase brand trust and credibility
build links and domain authority
build your audience and your reach
grow your community
convert the right customers
If you're using content to accomplish these types of goals for your business,
you're on the right track. But keep in mind that everything you write should
serve a higher purpose. It's not about creating content just to check it off
your list of things to do for your marketing. It's about using content to make a
difference for your business.
Stepping into big content
Until recently, all of the content we had created for our brand at Mack Web
Solutions had been blog posts, infographics, and slide decks. A few weeks ago we
released the biggest piece of content we'd ever written: a 147 page guide on how
to build online communities.
What follows is an account of the five major steps we took to release this
sucker, what we learned, and the higher purpose this big content has served in
our company.
My intention with this post is not to promote our guide. Rather, it's to
document the strategic stages we executed on our first path to big content in
hopes of inspiring and informing your own similar journeys.
To date, we've had nearly 1,900 downloads and many other indicators of
success. It has been quite the effort to pull all of this together. Here's the
strategic tips I'd like to share and a little about how the story goes.
Strategic big content step #1:
Figure out the who
â¨If you're thinking about investing in big content, definitely
figure out the why, but also the who. We wanted our guide to be an accurate
representation of the effort required to actually build a community.
We knew that at 147 pages not everyone was going to be willing to put in the
work to read it. And that's OK. We built it for the people who are. They're the
ones who we knew would put it to use.
And so it began
When I was at MozCon 2012, I had breakfast with Jon Henshaw, the co-founder of
Raven Tools. I told Jon I was interested in speaking at conferences and wondered
how I would begin to build a name for myself and my company in the industry.
Jon's advice was to build a tool and give it away for free.
It took several months before I had any even remotely clever idea that could
be developed into a useful tool. I heard the word "tool" and started thinking
way too literally. I was trying to come up with an SEO-type tool. Something that
would need to be programmed and developed like an app or a plugin. Although that
may come in another stage in our company, that just wasn't going to work with
our existing resources. Our tool needed to be something that naturally resonated
with what we did, and it also needed to be something we were really passionate
about, because we would be spending the next eight months working on it.
Once I thought about it that way, it was kind of a lightbulb moment. The one
thing we both do and love the most is building online communities. What better
way to help other people and businesses than to develop a "tool" that would help
them build their communities?
As I discussed the idea with the team, we knew that if we wanted this tool to
really work, that we had to follow the advice we had been giving businesses all
along: It couldn't be about us and what we wanted; it needed to be about our
community and what they needed.
Going for itâ¨
We decided to redefine "tool" as "guide" and write one as our first piece of
big content because:
We wanted to fill a needâ¨
Before we decided to create a community building guide, we did some research
and discovered there wasn't another resource like it. What we were planning on
building would add unique value to the community building knowledge that was
already out there. Plus, with the pace at which the SEO industry evolves, we
knew it would be something that would serve SEOs, marketers, agencies, and
businesses who were trying to keep up with the evolution and think beyond
keywords and Google's algorithms.
We wanted to drive a movementâ¨
Not only did we want to begin establishing our company as a leader in the
industry, but we wanted to begin changing the way companies look at and value
marketing. â¨Our philosophy is that marketing efforts most certainly
can accomplish company-wide goals and bring in revenue. But they can also change
the way you run your business and engage with and cultivate a community of
lifelong customers. We thought this guide would be a baby step in that
direction.
We wanted to provide an experience
â¨Not only did we want to have a strong resource that would assist
us in moving potential clients further down the funnel, but we also wanted this
resource to be something that indirectly told the story of what it's like to
work with us. We wanted this guide to make a statement about our expertise,
personality, quality of product, drive, level of service, and commitment to
helping businesses reach their goals.
So who is your who? If you're thinking about big content, whom do you really
want to get your message in front of? Whom do you really want to connect with?
What are your values and philosophies and how can you communicate that in your
big content so that you're attracting the right audience with your efforts?
Strategic big content step #2:
Focus on relationships
I'd definitely recommend using LaunchRock in your pre-planning efforts for big
content, but even more important would be to build relationships. Not just for
the sake of getting more people engaged with your big content, but to make some
valuable friends.
I didn't realize the power of this until the guide had launched.
The whole time we were building the guide, we were focusing on growing the
email list via LaunchRock. Every blog post we wrote, every conference I spoke
at, every chance we had we were asking people to go sign up for our guide. And
in the end, we had 343 people who chose to be on that list. That's really great
for our first go at this, and for the size of our community, but we certainly
were hoping for a bigger splash.
What made the most difference in the reach of the guide wasn't necessarily the
people on the email list. It was the people we had built relationships with
during the 8 months leading up to its launch. So, instead of 343 people
downloading the guide in the first week of the launch, we had more than 1,200.
It was really humbling to watch the effect of relationships on social media.
The amplification of your efforts can be pretty remarkable if you've made the
effort to actually care about people and be genuinely interested in what they're
doing (rather than always working on furthering your own cause). There's no
scientific way we can quantify this, but I know it's made an enormous difference
in the guide's success.
Yes or noâ¨
So when we had decided on a guide, we took Distilled's lead on their
pre-outreach efforts with DistilledU and built a LaunchRock page. Essentially,
the purpose of LaunchRock is to gauge interest, but also to build an email list
that becomes your first marketing audience once your product is finished. For
this project, the team decided that if we received 100 signups it would be worth
building.
Within the first few weeks, we hit our mark, so it was a go. We then had eight
months to build the guide and continue building that list. During the first six
months we didn't do a whole lot to build our list other than referring to the
guide indirectly in blog posts, talking about it on social media, and telling
people about it at conferences.
What really gave us the boost was our efforts in the final two months leading
up to the launch and then once the guide was actually here.
It takes a village
Initially we had set a soft deadline for completion of the guide for the end
of summer or early fall. After we put the LaunchRock page up, we created an
outline and general schedule for completion, but then let it sit untouched for a
couple months. It became pretty clear in the beginning that if we never set a
hard deadline, this thing would never see the light of day.
â¨â¨So in June when we were working through strategic
operations and setting company-wide goals, we created a Mack Web Branding
initiative and set a hard date for launch on October 15. Setting this goal
helped us to get a big picture strategy down, since there was a lot more to do
than simply write the guide.
We had a team of six to put this whole thing together, but we also had client
work to take care of and a company to grow. So we assigned chunks of the project
to each person on the team in order to start making some progress.
The writing chunkâ¨
We knew that Courtney (the voice of our brand and our lead content strategist)
would do the majority of the writing and compile the first draft of the guide.
But we also knew that I had to supply her with the actual bones. So Courtney and
I worked together on an outline and agreed to a collaboration schedule.
Courtney lives in Chicago so we made arrangements to have our meetings and
communication via email, chat, and G+ hangouts. For the first six months,
Courtney and I would check in every few weeks on progress. It really wasn't
until the last 60 days that we would be meeting daily in order to ensure we were
going to make our deadline.
(Sounds silly, but we also gave the guide a nickname. You'll have to read it
to get the full story, but when the project started, we didn't have a title and
we all kept calling it different things. So Courtney came up with the pet name,
deemed him a llama, and from then on we affectionately referred to the guide as
Arthur).
The design chunk
Natalie, our designer, would take on the design portion of the guide. Because
Nat wouldn't be able to design the actual meat of the guide until it was
written, she worked on cover pages, section dividers, and promotional art for
LaunchRock, social, email marketing, and the website.
The (pre and post) promotion chunk
The rest of the team was assigned to pre- and post-launch promotional stuff,
including the re-messaging and re-designing of our website. Things like blog
posts, social, video, and email marketing were scheduled and assigned to the
team.
There's no way that any of our big content efforts would have come together if
we didn't have the entire team working together to make it happen. We also never
would have made as much of an impact, so soon after its launch, had we not built
credibility with friends in the industry. In the end, it's the latter that means
more and will help carry a company further than one piece of big content.
Strategic big content step #3:
Get to that tiny little resting place between done and perfect
I won't deny that I'm a bit of an over-achieving perfectionist and I certainly
drive hard. I really have to work on exercising the just ship it mentality that
many companies embrace. That said, there definitely is something to be said
about putting in the extra effort to do what's right for the customer.
We certainly could have left the guide in its original, first-draft, narrative
form. And I'm sure people would have loved it all the same. But there would have
been a lot more people who didn't bother to read it.
The extra time we spent on structure, formatting, and design really helped us
to improve the user experience and show our readers that they mattered to us. We
didn't want the guide to be stuck on a hard drive and forgotten. We wanted it to
be used, applied, iterated, and re-worked. And we knew that wasn't going to
happen in its original state.
This was definitely one of those times where I'm glad we didn't just ship it.
I'm proud of the team for thinking about what would make it better for our
readers and making the decision to put in the extra work to make it a better
experience.
Addressing hurdles
After we had all the pieces assigned to the team, I worked with Courtney to
get her all the bones of the guide. Because I had already written and spoken a
great deal about building community on the Moz blog and at conferences, Courtney
was able to take those bits and match it to the outline. After she wrote each
chapter, I would review and provide feedback. Sounds like a brilliant plan, but
as we got closer to our deadline, we ran into some problems.
Stuff was evolving
As Courtney was putting together the first draft of the guide, we were
learning a lot as a company. So even though we were technically on schedule with
the parts that Courtney had written, by the time I had reviewed the most
important part of the guide (the how), it was missing some pretty important
pieces that I hadn't yet written or spoken about. Things that we had discovered
to be integral to community building and had learned from experimentation with
our company and with our clients.
We didn't want to release a guide that was outdated as soon as it hit the
streets, so just one month before the guide was to launch, we went back to the
drawing board in a couple places and did what it took to get those more current
pieces incorporated into the guide.
We figured this was going to set us back a bit, but not as much as the
structural issues we discovered just weeks before launch.
The first draft was a narrative, not a guide
As Courtney and I worked back and forth with the first draft of the guide, we
were really focused on getting the pieces in place which meant we hadn't paid
much attention to the actual shape of the guide and how it would read.
When the team finally read the finished first draft, we all agreed that
Courtney had done an amazing job of putting the Mack Web voice to the
information in the guide. The problem was that the whole thing read as a
narrative instead of a guide. All of the knowledge and pieces were there, but it
lacked the actual structure that makes the "how-to" of a guide. Essentially
there was no consistent format that would make it easy for the reader to digest
and actually apply the information.
At this point, we were 13 days away from launch. I talked with the team and we
all agreed that we needed to make the necessary changes to provide a better UX.
But in order to not completely re-write the entire guide, we decided that I
would provide Courtney with a framework that she could apply in retrospect.
Because time was scarce and we were on such a tight turn around, Courtney and
I would piggy-back. For days, as soon as she finished a section, I would go in
and do any final edits and get the approved draft over to Natalie to style. We'd
communicate all of this through chat:
Courtney, Nat, and I didn't sleep much in the weeks prior to launch.
Re-structuring the guide for UX was a huge feat at that stage in the game. I'm
really glad we pulled it off and I'm really glad we put in the extra effort.
Based on the feedback, I think our readers appreciated it as well.
Taking the extra time to improve your big content (or anything for that
matter) so that your user will have a better experience isn't about perfection.
It's about going the extra step because you know you should. That's a reflection
on how much you care and who you are as a company. And for us, investing that
time was really important.
Strategic big content step #4
Know when to take a break
Big content alone takes so much effort. Then you add all the pre and post
promotion to it and you have quite the project. Creating this guide has been
incredibly rewarding, but it also has put a tremendous amount of stress on our
team and our company.
During the final weeks of getting the guide ready, we pushed incredibly hard.
Many of us weren't sleeping or resting as much as we should have. We were
working nights and weekends. And although we were all reminded to take breaks,
none of us wanted to because we really just wanted to get the thing done.
So once we finally reached the finish line, the team scheduled a day to take
a collective break and celebrate. We left the office and hit the trails. It was
a well earned and much needed day.
This day was actually kind of a double victory for me personally. It's really
difficult for me not to drive forward all the time. It takes a concerted effort
for me to slow down and bask in our accomplishments. I've asked the team to be
aware of this and they remind me when it's time to walk away for a bit.
Getting stuff done
We did all kinds of promotional stuff both leading up to and once the guide
launched. Clearly our goal with all of our efforts was to build awareness and
increase signups (and eventually downloads) to the guide. This is what we
accomplished:
We redesigned our website
â¨I know, we're nuts. We were hoping the guide would drive a whole
bunch of traffic to our website and our existing website didn't really say what
we actually did. So, we hunkered down and re-designed and re-messaged all at the
same time (and barely lived to tell the tale). â¨â¨We also
redesigned the site so that we could effectively optimize a page on the website
for the guide. We took Moz's lead on how they structured their Beginner's Guide
to SEO so that it would be easy to access and build links to.
The day the guide launched, we had nearly 1,200 visits to our site.
And we also had the same amount of traffic driven the day the guide made the
Moz Top 10 (at #8).
Based on the traffic we received, it was well worth our effort to redesign
the site alongside the launch of our big content. Just as we built the guide to
be a reflection of what our company was all about, we needed the website to
mirror our priorities and personality. A disconnect between the product and the
shop wouldn't have left a very good impression. Having our website, blog,
social, and the guide completely aligned with design and messaging seems to have
made a big difference in its success.
We created some videos and held a hangoutâ¨
For the final weeks leading up to launch, we used our blog to release weekly
videos that communicated some key community building takeaways.
It was our first time with this medium, so lucky for us Tyler had some video
background, and we also had Wistia guiding us through a great deal of the
pre-planning process.
The videos were quite successful. We got some great engagement for all five
of them. They were really fun to make and it really helped to give our audience
a new look at who we were.
In addition to the videos, we also held a Google+ hangout with some of the
best community managers in the search marketing industry.
â¨â¨The video of the recorded hangout received over 3,300
views. G+ alone brought 36 new guide signups. But more than that, we established
new relationships with some pretty great innovators in social and community.
Our pre-launch efforts with videos and the hangout really helped to boost
LaunchRock signups. Prior to those efforts we had 245 signups. At launch we had
343.
We told our clients
â¨A few days before the launch, we told our existing clients what
was going on (both with the website and the guide). It's easy to forget about
the people who are already in the funnel. They might not care so much about the
reading the guide itself since they've got us doing that work for them, but an
accomplishment and milestone like this builds a whole lot of trust.
â¨â¨In addition to spreading the news with our existing
clients, I also reached out to potential clients that we had been talking with.
Sending personal emails sharing the guide actually helped to get meetings
scheduled and move some of those leads further down the funnel.
We got into our communityâ¨
The day of the launch the entire team worked to answer tweets, emails, and
questions. We made a little breakfast party out of it and it was actually kind
of fun. We were all extremely happy to have the guide finally finished and in
our readers' hands.
Throughout the weeks following the launch of the guide, Ayelet (our community
manager) would look for people who had completed the guide and sent them a
personal note from Arthur.
As you work on your big content, if at all possible, make sure you leave some
padding and schedule in some breaks. Look for places where you can lighten your
regular work load (I know I spent less time on social media during the month
leading up to launch). Look for parts of the project that you can outsource and
bring in some outside help. You certainly don't want to drive your company into
the ground just to launch big content. So be thoughtful of the stress it may
cause and do what you can to alleviate the pressure.
Strategic big content step #5
Leverage
There are a ton of ways to squeeze more out of the big content you've built.
Think of it as a product that you can evolve into blog posts, case studies, or
maybe even new tools. Asking your audience is the first step in determining the
pieces of value that can spin out of your original creation.
Right now, we're listening to the reception. We're talking to people and
asking them what they really thought. We're working on getting tangible feedback
and real stories of application. These will be the seeds of what we do next.
Finally on the downhill
The week of the launch was the easy part. Of course there was a lot of
excitement. It's in the weeks and months following the launch of big content
that really count. Now that we made the effort, how can we squeeze the most
value out of what we've already done?
So we've got some stuff planned. We're thinking it would be great to put
together an HTML version that we would then update (just like Moz updates their
SEO beginner's guide). That's a whole beast in itself, but we kind of knew that
going into it. Generating the HTML version will also allow us to do any further
structural work that we want to do for UX but didn't have time for in the PDF.
We're also thinking about doing some additional videos that will allow readers
to work along with the guide itself. We can then address questions and
challenges our readers have and create additional resources that would
supplement the guide (and perhaps embed into the HTML version).
We'd also like to get some testimonials and further develop the landing page
of the guide itself. We're hoping that we'll continue to build all kinds of
links to that page, and if we do, it would most certainly be worth updating and
adding more value through social proof and other community building resources.
We just want to make sure we get the most out of the investment we've made in
big content. And that's what's so great about it. If you put in the strategic
effort, it becomes an asset. It lives as evergreen content that will organically
work for you for years to come.
Totally worth the ride
There are a lot of ways in which our big content continues to pay dividends.
Hands down it has given us momentum to move forward and has provided quite the
learning experience for our company. Our mistakes this time will lessen the pain
next time (and perhaps our story will help you avoid the bruises altogether when
it's your turn).
Big content has also been a source of pride for the whole team and in the
whole team. Not to mention all the things we've already pointed out: brand
awareness, reach, trust, credibility, relationships, authority, and links.
But while we're certainly not complaining about all of these benefits, they're
just side effects.
The real reason we built the guideâthe real reason to put the work into
big contentâis that we wanted to further the mission of our company,
which, in our case, is to help companies build better businesses by building
their own communities. Lucky for us, our journey through big content has also
made a really big difference in our own company
I'm hoping our story will inspire yours. What big content could you build to
serve your company's higher purpose?
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/pj6XDAmh7OM/5-strategic-steps-to-big-content
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Posted by MackenzieFogelson
Content is an incredibly powerful integrated marketing tool. Among other
things, content can:
cultivate relationships
increase brand trust and credibility
build links and domain authority
build your audience and your reach
grow your community
convert the right customers
If you're using content to accomplish these types of goals for your business,
you're on the right track. But keep in mind that everything you write should
serve a higher purpose. It's not about creating content just to check it off
your list of things to do for your marketing. It's about using content to make a
difference for your business.
Stepping into big content
Until recently, all of the content we had created for our brand at Mack Web
Solutions had been blog posts, infographics, and slide decks. A few weeks ago we
released the biggest piece of content we'd ever written: a 147 page guide on how
to build online communities.
What follows is an account of the five major steps we took to release this
sucker, what we learned, and the higher purpose this big content has served in
our company.
My intention with this post is not to promote our guide. Rather, it's to
document the strategic stages we executed on our first path to big content in
hopes of inspiring and informing your own similar journeys.
To date, we've had nearly 1,900 downloads and many other indicators of
success. It has been quite the effort to pull all of this together. Here's the
strategic tips I'd like to share and a little about how the story goes.
Strategic big content step #1:
Figure out the who
â¨If you're thinking about investing in big content, definitely
figure out the why, but also the who. We wanted our guide to be an accurate
representation of the effort required to actually build a community.
We knew that at 147 pages not everyone was going to be willing to put in the
work to read it. And that's OK. We built it for the people who are. They're the
ones who we knew would put it to use.
And so it began
When I was at MozCon 2012, I had breakfast with Jon Henshaw, the co-founder of
Raven Tools. I told Jon I was interested in speaking at conferences and wondered
how I would begin to build a name for myself and my company in the industry.
Jon's advice was to build a tool and give it away for free.
It took several months before I had any even remotely clever idea that could
be developed into a useful tool. I heard the word "tool" and started thinking
way too literally. I was trying to come up with an SEO-type tool. Something that
would need to be programmed and developed like an app or a plugin. Although that
may come in another stage in our company, that just wasn't going to work with
our existing resources. Our tool needed to be something that naturally resonated
with what we did, and it also needed to be something we were really passionate
about, because we would be spending the next eight months working on it.
Once I thought about it that way, it was kind of a lightbulb moment. The one
thing we both do and love the most is building online communities. What better
way to help other people and businesses than to develop a "tool" that would help
them build their communities?
As I discussed the idea with the team, we knew that if we wanted this tool to
really work, that we had to follow the advice we had been giving businesses all
along: It couldn't be about us and what we wanted; it needed to be about our
community and what they needed.
Going for itâ¨
We decided to redefine "tool" as "guide" and write one as our first piece of
big content because:
We wanted to fill a needâ¨
Before we decided to create a community building guide, we did some research
and discovered there wasn't another resource like it. What we were planning on
building would add unique value to the community building knowledge that was
already out there. Plus, with the pace at which the SEO industry evolves, we
knew it would be something that would serve SEOs, marketers, agencies, and
businesses who were trying to keep up with the evolution and think beyond
keywords and Google's algorithms.
We wanted to drive a movementâ¨
Not only did we want to begin establishing our company as a leader in the
industry, but we wanted to begin changing the way companies look at and value
marketing. â¨Our philosophy is that marketing efforts most certainly
can accomplish company-wide goals and bring in revenue. But they can also change
the way you run your business and engage with and cultivate a community of
lifelong customers. We thought this guide would be a baby step in that
direction.
We wanted to provide an experience
â¨Not only did we want to have a strong resource that would assist
us in moving potential clients further down the funnel, but we also wanted this
resource to be something that indirectly told the story of what it's like to
work with us. We wanted this guide to make a statement about our expertise,
personality, quality of product, drive, level of service, and commitment to
helping businesses reach their goals.
So who is your who? If you're thinking about big content, whom do you really
want to get your message in front of? Whom do you really want to connect with?
What are your values and philosophies and how can you communicate that in your
big content so that you're attracting the right audience with your efforts?
Strategic big content step #2:
Focus on relationships
I'd definitely recommend using LaunchRock in your pre-planning efforts for big
content, but even more important would be to build relationships. Not just for
the sake of getting more people engaged with your big content, but to make some
valuable friends.
I didn't realize the power of this until the guide had launched.
The whole time we were building the guide, we were focusing on growing the
email list via LaunchRock. Every blog post we wrote, every conference I spoke
at, every chance we had we were asking people to go sign up for our guide. And
in the end, we had 343 people who chose to be on that list. That's really great
for our first go at this, and for the size of our community, but we certainly
were hoping for a bigger splash.
What made the most difference in the reach of the guide wasn't necessarily the
people on the email list. It was the people we had built relationships with
during the 8 months leading up to its launch. So, instead of 343 people
downloading the guide in the first week of the launch, we had more than 1,200.
It was really humbling to watch the effect of relationships on social media.
The amplification of your efforts can be pretty remarkable if you've made the
effort to actually care about people and be genuinely interested in what they're
doing (rather than always working on furthering your own cause). There's no
scientific way we can quantify this, but I know it's made an enormous difference
in the guide's success.
Yes or noâ¨
So when we had decided on a guide, we took Distilled's lead on their
pre-outreach efforts with DistilledU and built a LaunchRock page. Essentially,
the purpose of LaunchRock is to gauge interest, but also to build an email list
that becomes your first marketing audience once your product is finished. For
this project, the team decided that if we received 100 signups it would be worth
building.
Within the first few weeks, we hit our mark, so it was a go. We then had eight
months to build the guide and continue building that list. During the first six
months we didn't do a whole lot to build our list other than referring to the
guide indirectly in blog posts, talking about it on social media, and telling
people about it at conferences.
What really gave us the boost was our efforts in the final two months leading
up to the launch and then once the guide was actually here.
It takes a village
Initially we had set a soft deadline for completion of the guide for the end
of summer or early fall. After we put the LaunchRock page up, we created an
outline and general schedule for completion, but then let it sit untouched for a
couple months. It became pretty clear in the beginning that if we never set a
hard deadline, this thing would never see the light of day.
â¨â¨So in June when we were working through strategic
operations and setting company-wide goals, we created a Mack Web Branding
initiative and set a hard date for launch on October 15. Setting this goal
helped us to get a big picture strategy down, since there was a lot more to do
than simply write the guide.
We had a team of six to put this whole thing together, but we also had client
work to take care of and a company to grow. So we assigned chunks of the project
to each person on the team in order to start making some progress.
The writing chunkâ¨
We knew that Courtney (the voice of our brand and our lead content strategist)
would do the majority of the writing and compile the first draft of the guide.
But we also knew that I had to supply her with the actual bones. So Courtney and
I worked together on an outline and agreed to a collaboration schedule.
Courtney lives in Chicago so we made arrangements to have our meetings and
communication via email, chat, and G+ hangouts. For the first six months,
Courtney and I would check in every few weeks on progress. It really wasn't
until the last 60 days that we would be meeting daily in order to ensure we were
going to make our deadline.
(Sounds silly, but we also gave the guide a nickname. You'll have to read it
to get the full story, but when the project started, we didn't have a title and
we all kept calling it different things. So Courtney came up with the pet name,
deemed him a llama, and from then on we affectionately referred to the guide as
Arthur).
The design chunk
Natalie, our designer, would take on the design portion of the guide. Because
Nat wouldn't be able to design the actual meat of the guide until it was
written, she worked on cover pages, section dividers, and promotional art for
LaunchRock, social, email marketing, and the website.
The (pre and post) promotion chunk
The rest of the team was assigned to pre- and post-launch promotional stuff,
including the re-messaging and re-designing of our website. Things like blog
posts, social, video, and email marketing were scheduled and assigned to the
team.
There's no way that any of our big content efforts would have come together if
we didn't have the entire team working together to make it happen. We also never
would have made as much of an impact, so soon after its launch, had we not built
credibility with friends in the industry. In the end, it's the latter that means
more and will help carry a company further than one piece of big content.
Strategic big content step #3:
Get to that tiny little resting place between done and perfect
I won't deny that I'm a bit of an over-achieving perfectionist and I certainly
drive hard. I really have to work on exercising the just ship it mentality that
many companies embrace. That said, there definitely is something to be said
about putting in the extra effort to do what's right for the customer.
We certainly could have left the guide in its original, first-draft, narrative
form. And I'm sure people would have loved it all the same. But there would have
been a lot more people who didn't bother to read it.
The extra time we spent on structure, formatting, and design really helped us
to improve the user experience and show our readers that they mattered to us. We
didn't want the guide to be stuck on a hard drive and forgotten. We wanted it to
be used, applied, iterated, and re-worked. And we knew that wasn't going to
happen in its original state.
This was definitely one of those times where I'm glad we didn't just ship it.
I'm proud of the team for thinking about what would make it better for our
readers and making the decision to put in the extra work to make it a better
experience.
Addressing hurdles
After we had all the pieces assigned to the team, I worked with Courtney to
get her all the bones of the guide. Because I had already written and spoken a
great deal about building community on the Moz blog and at conferences, Courtney
was able to take those bits and match it to the outline. After she wrote each
chapter, I would review and provide feedback. Sounds like a brilliant plan, but
as we got closer to our deadline, we ran into some problems.
Stuff was evolving
As Courtney was putting together the first draft of the guide, we were
learning a lot as a company. So even though we were technically on schedule with
the parts that Courtney had written, by the time I had reviewed the most
important part of the guide (the how), it was missing some pretty important
pieces that I hadn't yet written or spoken about. Things that we had discovered
to be integral to community building and had learned from experimentation with
our company and with our clients.
We didn't want to release a guide that was outdated as soon as it hit the
streets, so just one month before the guide was to launch, we went back to the
drawing board in a couple places and did what it took to get those more current
pieces incorporated into the guide.
We figured this was going to set us back a bit, but not as much as the
structural issues we discovered just weeks before launch.
The first draft was a narrative, not a guide
As Courtney and I worked back and forth with the first draft of the guide, we
were really focused on getting the pieces in place which meant we hadn't paid
much attention to the actual shape of the guide and how it would read.
When the team finally read the finished first draft, we all agreed that
Courtney had done an amazing job of putting the Mack Web voice to the
information in the guide. The problem was that the whole thing read as a
narrative instead of a guide. All of the knowledge and pieces were there, but it
lacked the actual structure that makes the "how-to" of a guide. Essentially
there was no consistent format that would make it easy for the reader to digest
and actually apply the information.
At this point, we were 13 days away from launch. I talked with the team and we
all agreed that we needed to make the necessary changes to provide a better UX.
But in order to not completely re-write the entire guide, we decided that I
would provide Courtney with a framework that she could apply in retrospect.
Because time was scarce and we were on such a tight turn around, Courtney and
I would piggy-back. For days, as soon as she finished a section, I would go in
and do any final edits and get the approved draft over to Natalie to style. We'd
communicate all of this through chat:
Courtney, Nat, and I didn't sleep much in the weeks prior to launch.
Re-structuring the guide for UX was a huge feat at that stage in the game. I'm
really glad we pulled it off and I'm really glad we put in the extra effort.
Based on the feedback, I think our readers appreciated it as well.
Taking the extra time to improve your big content (or anything for that
matter) so that your user will have a better experience isn't about perfection.
It's about going the extra step because you know you should. That's a reflection
on how much you care and who you are as a company. And for us, investing that
time was really important.
Strategic big content step #4
Know when to take a break
Big content alone takes so much effort. Then you add all the pre and post
promotion to it and you have quite the project. Creating this guide has been
incredibly rewarding, but it also has put a tremendous amount of stress on our
team and our company.
During the final weeks of getting the guide ready, we pushed incredibly hard.
Many of us weren't sleeping or resting as much as we should have. We were
working nights and weekends. And although we were all reminded to take breaks,
none of us wanted to because we really just wanted to get the thing done.
So once we finally reached the finish line, the team scheduled a day to take
a collective break and celebrate. We left the office and hit the trails. It was
a well earned and much needed day.
This day was actually kind of a double victory for me personally. It's really
difficult for me not to drive forward all the time. It takes a concerted effort
for me to slow down and bask in our accomplishments. I've asked the team to be
aware of this and they remind me when it's time to walk away for a bit.
Getting stuff done
We did all kinds of promotional stuff both leading up to and once the guide
launched. Clearly our goal with all of our efforts was to build awareness and
increase signups (and eventually downloads) to the guide. This is what we
accomplished:
We redesigned our website
â¨I know, we're nuts. We were hoping the guide would drive a whole
bunch of traffic to our website and our existing website didn't really say what
we actually did. So, we hunkered down and re-designed and re-messaged all at the
same time (and barely lived to tell the tale). â¨â¨We also
redesigned the site so that we could effectively optimize a page on the website
for the guide. We took Moz's lead on how they structured their Beginner's Guide
to SEO so that it would be easy to access and build links to.
The day the guide launched, we had nearly 1,200 visits to our site.
And we also had the same amount of traffic driven the day the guide made the
Moz Top 10 (at #8).
Based on the traffic we received, it was well worth our effort to redesign
the site alongside the launch of our big content. Just as we built the guide to
be a reflection of what our company was all about, we needed the website to
mirror our priorities and personality. A disconnect between the product and the
shop wouldn't have left a very good impression. Having our website, blog,
social, and the guide completely aligned with design and messaging seems to have
made a big difference in its success.
We created some videos and held a hangoutâ¨
For the final weeks leading up to launch, we used our blog to release weekly
videos that communicated some key community building takeaways.
It was our first time with this medium, so lucky for us Tyler had some video
background, and we also had Wistia guiding us through a great deal of the
pre-planning process.
The videos were quite successful. We got some great engagement for all five
of them. They were really fun to make and it really helped to give our audience
a new look at who we were.
In addition to the videos, we also held a Google+ hangout with some of the
best community managers in the search marketing industry.
â¨â¨The video of the recorded hangout received over 3,300
views. G+ alone brought 36 new guide signups. But more than that, we established
new relationships with some pretty great innovators in social and community.
Our pre-launch efforts with videos and the hangout really helped to boost
LaunchRock signups. Prior to those efforts we had 245 signups. At launch we had
343.
We told our clients
â¨A few days before the launch, we told our existing clients what
was going on (both with the website and the guide). It's easy to forget about
the people who are already in the funnel. They might not care so much about the
reading the guide itself since they've got us doing that work for them, but an
accomplishment and milestone like this builds a whole lot of trust.
â¨â¨In addition to spreading the news with our existing
clients, I also reached out to potential clients that we had been talking with.
Sending personal emails sharing the guide actually helped to get meetings
scheduled and move some of those leads further down the funnel.
We got into our communityâ¨
The day of the launch the entire team worked to answer tweets, emails, and
questions. We made a little breakfast party out of it and it was actually kind
of fun. We were all extremely happy to have the guide finally finished and in
our readers' hands.
Throughout the weeks following the launch of the guide, Ayelet (our community
manager) would look for people who had completed the guide and sent them a
personal note from Arthur.
As you work on your big content, if at all possible, make sure you leave some
padding and schedule in some breaks. Look for places where you can lighten your
regular work load (I know I spent less time on social media during the month
leading up to launch). Look for parts of the project that you can outsource and
bring in some outside help. You certainly don't want to drive your company into
the ground just to launch big content. So be thoughtful of the stress it may
cause and do what you can to alleviate the pressure.
Strategic big content step #5
Leverage
There are a ton of ways to squeeze more out of the big content you've built.
Think of it as a product that you can evolve into blog posts, case studies, or
maybe even new tools. Asking your audience is the first step in determining the
pieces of value that can spin out of your original creation.
Right now, we're listening to the reception. We're talking to people and
asking them what they really thought. We're working on getting tangible feedback
and real stories of application. These will be the seeds of what we do next.
Finally on the downhill
The week of the launch was the easy part. Of course there was a lot of
excitement. It's in the weeks and months following the launch of big content
that really count. Now that we made the effort, how can we squeeze the most
value out of what we've already done?
So we've got some stuff planned. We're thinking it would be great to put
together an HTML version that we would then update (just like Moz updates their
SEO beginner's guide). That's a whole beast in itself, but we kind of knew that
going into it. Generating the HTML version will also allow us to do any further
structural work that we want to do for UX but didn't have time for in the PDF.
We're also thinking about doing some additional videos that will allow readers
to work along with the guide itself. We can then address questions and
challenges our readers have and create additional resources that would
supplement the guide (and perhaps embed into the HTML version).
We'd also like to get some testimonials and further develop the landing page
of the guide itself. We're hoping that we'll continue to build all kinds of
links to that page, and if we do, it would most certainly be worth updating and
adding more value through social proof and other community building resources.
We just want to make sure we get the most out of the investment we've made in
big content. And that's what's so great about it. If you put in the strategic
effort, it becomes an asset. It lives as evergreen content that will organically
work for you for years to come.
Totally worth the ride
There are a lot of ways in which our big content continues to pay dividends.
Hands down it has given us momentum to move forward and has provided quite the
learning experience for our company. Our mistakes this time will lessen the pain
next time (and perhaps our story will help you avoid the bruises altogether when
it's your turn).
Big content has also been a source of pride for the whole team and in the
whole team. Not to mention all the things we've already pointed out: brand
awareness, reach, trust, credibility, relationships, authority, and links.
But while we're certainly not complaining about all of these benefits, they're
just side effects.
The real reason we built the guideâthe real reason to put the work into
big contentâis that we wanted to further the mission of our company,
which, in our case, is to help companies build better businesses by building
their own communities. Lucky for us, our journey through big content has also
made a really big difference in our own company
I'm hoping our story will inspire yours. What big content could you build to
serve your company's higher purpose?
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/pj6XDAmh7OM/5-strategic-steps-to-big-content
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Monday, 11 November 2013
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'Last Chance! Take the 2013
Industry Survey #ShareYourVoice'
Posted by jennita
Holy wow! Over the past two and half weeks we've gathered more than 2,500
responses from marketers across the globe for this year's Moz Industry Survey.
We'd like to send a huge THANK YOU to everyone who's participated so far.
The thing is, we'd love to get at least 3,000 responses to insure we have a
good set of data. We're planning on closing the survey next week though, so if
you haven't taken it yet, please jump in there now (also, you don't want to miss
out on the killer prizes do you?).
#ShareYourVoice
Yes, while it's super important for you to take the survey, it's also
essential for you to help us get the word out as well. We'd love to get your
help by tweeting, plussing, facebooking, and even vineing (yea, I'm just making
stuff up now), to remind folks to get in there.
The other day, I had the crazy idea that I would make a vine of me singing,
aka "Sharing my voice" and tweet it out with a link to the Industry Survey. I
asked a few other folks to jump in as well, and what happened next was pretty
amazing!
Pssst! And if you make one, use the #ShareYourVoice hashtag, and I'll add it
to the page:
[View the story "#ShareYourVoice Take the @Moz Industry Survey" on Storify]
We'd love your help spreading the word as well. Would you create a video,
image, or even just a tweet and get the word out?
Tweet #ShareYourVoice
Sneak Peek
Now, you didn't think we'd ask you to help out without showing a bit of data
now would you? I thought it was interesting to see the salary range of folks
who've taken the survey so far. Remember though that people across the globe
have taken this and this isn't taking into account that someone making $30-40k
in the US is different to someone making the same thing in another country.
Prizes
Don't forget we're giving away some great prizes as well! Cyrus laid it all
out in the initial post, but here's the rundown again:
Grand Prize: Attend MozCon 2014 in Seattle
Including flight, hotel, and lunch with an industry expert.
Two First Prizes: iPad 2
Ten Second Prizes: $100 Amazon.com gift cards
Well, what are you waiting for?
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/soPFe6iPmJc/reminder-take-the-2013-industry-survey
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
Industry Survey #ShareYourVoice'
Posted by jennita
Holy wow! Over the past two and half weeks we've gathered more than 2,500
responses from marketers across the globe for this year's Moz Industry Survey.
We'd like to send a huge THANK YOU to everyone who's participated so far.
The thing is, we'd love to get at least 3,000 responses to insure we have a
good set of data. We're planning on closing the survey next week though, so if
you haven't taken it yet, please jump in there now (also, you don't want to miss
out on the killer prizes do you?).
#ShareYourVoice
Yes, while it's super important for you to take the survey, it's also
essential for you to help us get the word out as well. We'd love to get your
help by tweeting, plussing, facebooking, and even vineing (yea, I'm just making
stuff up now), to remind folks to get in there.
The other day, I had the crazy idea that I would make a vine of me singing,
aka "Sharing my voice" and tweet it out with a link to the Industry Survey. I
asked a few other folks to jump in as well, and what happened next was pretty
amazing!
Pssst! And if you make one, use the #ShareYourVoice hashtag, and I'll add it
to the page:
[View the story "#ShareYourVoice Take the @Moz Industry Survey" on Storify]
We'd love your help spreading the word as well. Would you create a video,
image, or even just a tweet and get the word out?
Tweet #ShareYourVoice
Sneak Peek
Now, you didn't think we'd ask you to help out without showing a bit of data
now would you? I thought it was interesting to see the salary range of folks
who've taken the survey so far. Remember though that people across the globe
have taken this and this isn't taking into account that someone making $30-40k
in the US is different to someone making the same thing in another country.
Prizes
Don't forget we're giving away some great prizes as well! Cyrus laid it all
out in the initial post, but here's the rundown again:
Grand Prize: Attend MozCon 2014 in Seattle
Including flight, hotel, and lunch with an industry expert.
Two First Prizes: iPad 2
Ten Second Prizes: $100 Amazon.com gift cards
Well, what are you waiting for?
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/soPFe6iPmJc/reminder-take-the-2013-industry-survey
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, 'How to Track the Online ROI of
Offline Advertising'
Posted by GeoffKenyon
While I love online marketing and often times think that is a much better
marketing investment than offline marketing and advertising, offline ads are
important and add value. While we are going to see budget shift significantly
from offline efforts to online campaigns, there is still going to be a ton of
money going into offline ads.
Much of the value from offline advertising is actually online and is typically
attributed to the direct channel. If an ad gives out a website URL, they almost
always send visitors to their homepage. When ads don't give users a website to
go to, typically one of the search channels will receive credit for the value
created by the ad. The KTM ad below is a prime example of a print ad that will
create value, but the value will be attributed to either the search channel or
direct channel if the user is already aware of (or simply searches for) the URL
for KTM.
As you can see below, in 2012 82% of ad-spend was offline; that is a lot of
visitors and conversions that aren't being properly attributed.
This isn't just a problem for companies with big ad budgets. In fact, this is
more important for small businesses with smaller budgets because often times
these expenses come out of the owner's pockets. Real estate agents are probably
the best example of why this is so important. If my friend Hailey is a real
estate agent and if she wants to market her self and her properties, she has a
lot of options. She could advertise on a big real estate site like Zillow, a
niche site, through SEO or PPC, and it's easy for her to track leads from these.
It gets harder, though, when she invests in offline efforts like signs, door
hangers, print ads, or any other form of offline advertising. Hailey, and almost
all real estate agents, are doing their marketing campaigns on a tight budget,
so it is critical for real estate agents (and professionals in many other
industries) to understand exactly what is producing value and what isn't.
The good news is that it's actually pretty easy to figure out which offline
ads are helping you and which ones aren't doing anything.
Create a custom URL for your ads
The first step is to either buy a vanity domain or to create a unique landing
page for each offline effort.
Depending on your niche and ad, it can be important to incentivize the user
typing in the full URL (and not just stopping once they type in the homepage) if
you are not going to use a vanity domain. This can mean offering the user a
special promotion or gift. You would want to reinforce the offer with the URL as
well, using something like /free-gift or /special-promo.
Set up redirects and campaign parameters
Once you've created your vanity domain or landing page, you'll need to set up
a 301 redirect to the page you want visitors to land on (your home page or a
specific landing page) AND include Google Analytics campaign parameters (shown
below by ?utm=*)
If you're not super familiar with Google Analytics, this guide is a good
starting point. If you need help creating the campaign URL, the Google URL
Builder and GA Config are really useful tools. Keep in mind, while there are
five different parameters you can use, the following three are required at
minimum:
Source â This should be the specific source of the ad and referral such as
"Seattle Times," "For Sale Sign," "Flier," etc. The source parameter will allow
you to assign conversions to a specific source.
Medium â The medium is simply the high-level channel that your effort is
part of. Some examples of good mediums would be radio, magazine ad, or TV. When
you consistently use the medium attribution parameter, over time, you will be
able to see what high-level channels produce the best ROI for you.
Campaign name â The campaign name should refer to specific campaign you
are running. You can use this to pull together ads across mediums and sources
that are part of a larger campaign, or you can differentiate between different
campaigns within the same source.
Track your ROI
At this point, you've done all the hard work and have everything set up for
Google Analytics to be able to track visitors coming to the site from your ads
as well as how many people convert in some form. You will be able to find the
number of visitors from your ads under the campaigns tab in Google Analytics,
and the number of conversions in the Ecommerce, Goals, or Events tab depending
on how you are tracking your conversions.
The campaign view in Google Analytics is where you'll monitor the success of
your offline campaigns.
With this in place you will be able to better invest your offline marketing
budget knowing that the channels and campaigns are going to give you the best
online ROI.
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/EpPAk7ZZAQs/how-to-track-online-roi-of-offline-advertising
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
Offline Advertising'
Posted by GeoffKenyon
While I love online marketing and often times think that is a much better
marketing investment than offline marketing and advertising, offline ads are
important and add value. While we are going to see budget shift significantly
from offline efforts to online campaigns, there is still going to be a ton of
money going into offline ads.
Much of the value from offline advertising is actually online and is typically
attributed to the direct channel. If an ad gives out a website URL, they almost
always send visitors to their homepage. When ads don't give users a website to
go to, typically one of the search channels will receive credit for the value
created by the ad. The KTM ad below is a prime example of a print ad that will
create value, but the value will be attributed to either the search channel or
direct channel if the user is already aware of (or simply searches for) the URL
for KTM.
As you can see below, in 2012 82% of ad-spend was offline; that is a lot of
visitors and conversions that aren't being properly attributed.
This isn't just a problem for companies with big ad budgets. In fact, this is
more important for small businesses with smaller budgets because often times
these expenses come out of the owner's pockets. Real estate agents are probably
the best example of why this is so important. If my friend Hailey is a real
estate agent and if she wants to market her self and her properties, she has a
lot of options. She could advertise on a big real estate site like Zillow, a
niche site, through SEO or PPC, and it's easy for her to track leads from these.
It gets harder, though, when she invests in offline efforts like signs, door
hangers, print ads, or any other form of offline advertising. Hailey, and almost
all real estate agents, are doing their marketing campaigns on a tight budget,
so it is critical for real estate agents (and professionals in many other
industries) to understand exactly what is producing value and what isn't.
The good news is that it's actually pretty easy to figure out which offline
ads are helping you and which ones aren't doing anything.
Create a custom URL for your ads
The first step is to either buy a vanity domain or to create a unique landing
page for each offline effort.
Depending on your niche and ad, it can be important to incentivize the user
typing in the full URL (and not just stopping once they type in the homepage) if
you are not going to use a vanity domain. This can mean offering the user a
special promotion or gift. You would want to reinforce the offer with the URL as
well, using something like /free-gift or /special-promo.
Set up redirects and campaign parameters
Once you've created your vanity domain or landing page, you'll need to set up
a 301 redirect to the page you want visitors to land on (your home page or a
specific landing page) AND include Google Analytics campaign parameters (shown
below by ?utm=*)
If you're not super familiar with Google Analytics, this guide is a good
starting point. If you need help creating the campaign URL, the Google URL
Builder and GA Config are really useful tools. Keep in mind, while there are
five different parameters you can use, the following three are required at
minimum:
Source â This should be the specific source of the ad and referral such as
"Seattle Times," "For Sale Sign," "Flier," etc. The source parameter will allow
you to assign conversions to a specific source.
Medium â The medium is simply the high-level channel that your effort is
part of. Some examples of good mediums would be radio, magazine ad, or TV. When
you consistently use the medium attribution parameter, over time, you will be
able to see what high-level channels produce the best ROI for you.
Campaign name â The campaign name should refer to specific campaign you
are running. You can use this to pull together ads across mediums and sources
that are part of a larger campaign, or you can differentiate between different
campaigns within the same source.
Track your ROI
At this point, you've done all the hard work and have everything set up for
Google Analytics to be able to track visitors coming to the site from your ads
as well as how many people convert in some form. You will be able to find the
number of visitors from your ads under the campaigns tab in Google Analytics,
and the number of conversions in the Ecommerce, Goals, or Events tab depending
on how you are tracking your conversions.
The campaign view in Google Analytics is where you'll monitor the success of
your offline campaigns.
With this in place you will be able to better invest your offline marketing
budget knowing that the channels and campaigns are going to give you the best
online ROI.
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