Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'Easing the Pain of Keyword Not
Provided: 5 Tactics for Reclaiming Your Data'
Posted by timresnik
October 18th, 2011, the day Google announced "Secure Search," was a dark day
for many search marketers. We had hope, though; we were told only a small
fraction of search referrals from Google would apply. This was proven false in
just a few weeks as (not provided) quickly hit 10+% for many sites. Then, a year
later, seemingly out of the blue, Google started to encrypt almost all searches.
Today, we are approaching the dreaded extinction of Google organic keyword data:
Oh keywords, how I will miss thee.
Knowing the keywords that send us traffic from Google Search has always been a
major pillar on which search marketers execute and measure the effectiveness of
an SEO strategy. With Google "Secure Search" and keywords being stripped from
the referral string, it's starting to look more like a crutchâor worse, a
crutch that will very soon no longer exist at all. Here are five ideas and two
bonus resources to help nurse keyword targeting and search ROI back to health.
Will they solve all your problems? No. Will they inform a direction for future
"provided" solutions? Maybe. Are they better than nothing? Most definitely.
1. Use custom variables to tag content with categories/topics
Most web analytics software allows site owners to pass custom variables
through. In Google Analytics, a custom variable can be inserted into your code,
and as the name implies, you can pass custom name/value pairs of your choice.
It's one of the most useful analytics tools for web traffic segmentation with
many different applications. Mix this functionality with category, topics or
tags from a page on your site and you can now analyze your organic web traffic
based on those variables. If you are discipline and creative in understanding
and tagging your content, you will get insight about what topics are sending
your traffic.
If you have some programming chops and can extract these variables from your
CMS yourself and append them to your tracking code, more power to you! If not,
and you are a WordPress user, I have some good news: There is a free plugin from
our friends at Yoast. Install it and then simply select the following:
Once it is in GA there are several ways to get at the data. One is to simply
go to Acquisition > Channels > Organic Search, then select the primary
dimension of "landing page" and the secondary dimension with your custom
variable. You now have a list of your landing pages that received organic
traffic and the categories/tags related to each. Valuable stuff.
If you want some ideas of what tags you should be using, there are several
auto-tag generator plugins for WordPress, Zemanta being one.
Requirements:
Programming chops or WordPress and Google Analytics
Being disciplined about entering tags and categories
Watch out:
It's human-powered, for better or for worse, and your data is only as good as
the humanoid at the controls of your CMS
Doesn't help for long-tail targeting and reporting
2. Combining rank data with landing pages from Google Analytics
We can recapture some Google keywords by joining our rankings and analytics
data. Download your rankings data from your favorite rankings tool; the more
data you have the better. In Google Analytics, go to Channels > Organic
Search > Source = Google and add the secondary dimension of "Landing Page."
View the maximum number of rows and download the data into a CSV. Put your data
in two separate tabs in a spreadsheet. Now, all you need to do it join the
keywords from the rankings tab with the keywords from the analytics tab. This
can be done using VLOOKUP. While you're at it, add the ranking data to the
analytics tab. The end result will look like this:
Requirements:
Rankings data
Google Analytics data
Basic Excel or Google Spreadsheet skills
Watch out:
Using the method above with VLOOKUP will only return one keyword per landing
page. With some crafty Excel work, you can figure out how to get all the
keywords for that page
3. Site search: what users are searching for on your site
If you get enough people using the search feature of your site, it can be a
gold mine for keyword data. After all, this keyword data will always be
"provided." Configuring Google Analytics to capture your internal search traffic
is pretty straightforward. Once you have done so, you will be able to see the
top keywords people are searching for on your site.
Step 1: Open the Google Analytics profile you want to set up Site Search for
Step 2: Navigate to Admin > Settings and scroll to the bottom for "Site
Search Settings." Enter in the parameter that is designated for a search query
on your site; for example /search_results.php?q=keyword. If you use a POST-based
method and do not pass through a parameter in the URL you can either configure
your application to append one, or you can trigger a virtual pageview in your
Google Analytics snippet, such as:
analytics.js: ga('send', 'pageview', '/search_results.php?q=keyword')
The category option allows you to look for an additional query parameter that
can later be used to group the site search data. For example, if you had search
on your site in different sections that you wanted to keep separate: help,
content, documentation, etc.
Step 3: Let GA collect some data for a day or so and check out your results.
Navigate to Behavior > Site Search > Search Terms to see a complete list
that users search for on your site. To dig deep add the secondary dimension of
"destination page" to see where the user landed after seeing the search results.
Then, be sure to check out the secondary dimension of "search refinement" to see
which keywords your users searched for after they searched for the original
content. This can clue you into gap between what people are looking for and not
finding on your site.
Requirements:
A search box on your site
Google Analytics
Watch out:
It's a limited data set (on Moz only about 1/2 or one percent of visits end
up using our search)
4. Google (and Bing) Webmaster Tools
Google has created the headache with "Not Provided," but they have also given
us a bit of medicine in the form Webmaster Tools. Released a few years back
within Webmaster Tools, "Search Queries" provides webmasters with some basic
information around their keywords, including average position, impressions,
number of clicks, and click-through rate (CTR).
This data should be used, but has a few major limitations. First, only a
small, Google-selected subset of the keywords is represented. There is no
transparency about how or why they select the keywords, so using it to measure
results of specific content optimization efforts can be inaccurate and even
misleading.
Second, the data is limited to 90 days. If you ranked for a query 91 days ago,
you'll never know. Webmaster Tools also has an API, but unfortunately the
"search queries" data isn't available through it yet. According to Mr. Cutts,
that is imminent. If you want to store your data for longer than 90 days and
know how to program, you can use this PHP library or this Python library.
Finally, there is a limitation in how you can use Webmaster Tools data in
Google Analytics. The good news is that you can integrate this data into Google
Analytics with some basic authentication between the services. The bad news is
that you can only segment the data in Google Analytics with 2 dimensions:
country and Google property. Joining this data with behavior, demographics,
goals, etc. would be extremely valuable.
Requirement:
Google Webmaster Tools account
Watch out:
(Limitations noted above)
5. Deeper topical analysis
Avinash Kaushik, one of my favorite speakers MozCon this year wrote about
understanding the "personality" of the page as a future solution for "not
provided". He says:
"I wonder if someone can create a tool that will crawl our site and tell us
what the personality of each page represents. Some of this is manifested today
as keyword density analysis (which is value-deficient, especially because search
engines got over "density" nine hundred years ago). By personality, I mean what
does the page stand for, what is the adjacent cluster of meaning that is around
the page's purpose? Based on the words used, what attitude does the page
reflect, and based on how others are talking about this page, what other meaning
is being implied on a page?"
I think this could be accomplished by performing topical analysis on body
content of pages as they are published and then passed through to Google
Analytics with custom variables; similar to what I described above with
categories. This could be done by using DBpedia and one of the annotation open
source application that uses it, such as DBpedia Spotlight. Spotlight detects
mentions of terms in your content and scores the relevance of those mentions
against structured data created from Wikipedia. Once the topics of the page are
"extracted" and passed to your web analytics platform, you'll be able to use it
as a dimension against organic search referrals to landing pages. (Thanks to Jay
Leary for walking me through Spotlight)
Bonus: some other "not provided" resources
Mike King is not too worried about "Not Provided." His deck argues we should
be focusing on segmenting our data by personas and affinity groups, and paying
more attention to "implicit" rather than "explicit" intent. Good stuff.
Ten industry experts, including two Mozzers, weigh in here and answer a series
of questions on the "Not Provided" landscape, including tools and techniques
that they use, and even a few "Top Tips for 2014."
Conclusion
Keyword data from Google organic search is owned and controlled by Google and
can never be replaced. Secure Search is here to stay and nearing 100%. There is
no cure-all solution. That being said, search marketers are a GSD and generous
group, and will continue to hack away at the problem and share solutions. What
are some of the data sources and hacks you are using to deal with "not
provided?" Are there future algorithmic solutions to this problem, or are we
doomed to have to take our Google medicine and be happy with what they decide to
provide in Webmaster Tools?
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/iORg5eCwT5g/easing-the-pain-of-google-keyword-not-provided
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Wednesday, 18 December 2013
Tuesday, 17 December 2013
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'All About You: Results of the Moz
Blog Survey'
Posted by Trevor-Klein
Last month, 766 of our readers took a few minutes to tell us what they thought
of the Moz Blog. We were absolutely blown away by the quality of the feedback we
got, and we're excited to share what we learned with all of you.
You told us you're squeezed for time in a constantly changing
"need-it-yesterday" world. You told us you're sick of "ultimate guides," and
that you're (for the most part) already well versed in the basics of SEO, and
are craving more advanced tips, tricks, and tactics. You told us that content
marketing and data analysis are two areas where you could use some help.
We hear you.
The rest of what you told us can be found below, and we'll be incorporating
these takeaways into our planning for the Moz Blog over the coming months. The
entire set of results is available as a Google Spreadsheetâif you're
interested, please feel free to make a copy. If you learn anything beyond what
we show here, please let us know!
Your job titles
One of the things we've wondered as we've made the transition from SEOmoz to
Moz is whether our audience would begin to include a greater number of people
from outside the world of SEO. As Rand explained so well, we can't just be SEOs
anymore. So, we did what anyone would doâwe tossed all of your job titles
into a word cloud.
Two things are immediately obvious:
SEO is still a huge part of what you all do, as it's the largest word in this
cloud
Given how large the word "marketing" is, there are also quite a few of you
whose jobs likely include many other aspects, as well.
It'd be interesting to see how this cloud changed over time. Would those two
words be similar in size six months from now? A year? Time will tell, but for
now, our best course of action might be the T-shaped approach. Lots of advanced
depth in SEO, combined with enough depth in other areas to make sure everyone's
up to speed with the changes in the industry.
Your experience
Along the same lines, as our audience continues to expand and the Beginner's
Guide to SEO continues to be our most successful piece of content, we wanted to
know how experienced our readers were in their lines of work. As it turns out,
we have a pretty good spread:
Your level of SEO expertise
It's no secret that Moz's background revolved around SEO, and so it comes as
no surprise that most of our readers consider their SEO skills to be pretty
advanced. On a scale of 1-5, 86% of respondents rated their SEO expertise a 3 or
better, and 14% labeled themselves "industry experts." Given people's natural
inclination to choose responses toward the middle of a scale like this (central
tendency bias), we might even have more industry experts than these results
show.
Still, there are a significant number of readers who are relatively new to
SEO, so one of our challenges is to find the right line between basic and
advanced SEO content.
One of the ideas we're considering is implementing more of what I call
"pre-read transparency," making it easier to get a feel for what a post is about
and whether it's relevant for you before you even start reading it. If done
well, this could save our readers valuable time and make it easier to find
additional reading that's relevant to your work. (If you've got ideas on ways to
make that happen, we'd love to hear about them in the comments!)
How much SEO?
At the same time, 45% of respondents said they spend less than half of their
time doing SEO work. More than 20% said they spend less than a fifth of their
time on SEO. There are some blurry lines here, for sure (how much of your
day-to-day would you need to spend on SEO before you considered yourself an
expert?), but our read is that even the people who have the most expertise in
SEO are finding themselves doing more and more work outside of that area.
Your greatest challenges
This was one of the more telling sets of responses we received. Our primary
goal with the Moz Blog is to help you all become better marketers, and in order
to do that, we need to know what you all need help with. This was a text-entry
question; people could write as much or as little about their challenges as they
pleased. We noted recurring issues in the responses, and tallied every distinct
mention of each of those issues.
Some issues might seem like they overlap, but we think this paints a pretty
clear picture of what our readers are struggling with in today's world of
marketing:
Challenge
# mentions
1.
Changing industry
93
2.
Content marketing
70
3.
Clients/customers misunderstand my work
67
4.
Time management
52
5.
Politics and buy-in
43
6.
Too much to learn and keep track of
40
7.
Link building and maintenance
39
8.
Measurement and analysis
38
9.
Google and the algorithm
32
10.
Limited budget/resources
29
11.
Ranking
28
12.
Managing people and relationships
24
13.
Clients/customers are difficult
23
14.
Social media integration and management
23
15.
Strategy and goals
22
16.
Reporting
21
17.
Branding
17
18.
Understanding SEO
16
19.
Conversion rate
16
20.
Competition
14
We all work in a rapidly changing industry, and even the experts are
constantly having to learn new techniques. One of our primary jobs involves not
only informing you of those changes, but also offering recommendations on how
you might adapt your work. We'll continue to seek out the best advice in that
respect.
Content marketing is obviously an essential field for today's marketers, and
there are relatively few good resources for people looking to improve their own
content skills. We hope to bring you more posts to fill that niche and help you
level-up.
There were also quite a few responses having to do with workplace
productivity: time management, effective communication, and finding ways to
convey the value of our work to clients and customers. These are areas we
haven't covered much on the Moz Blog, but are vitally important for effective
marketers. Look for more of these posts in the future.
Your reading style
What we were really trying to get at here was how long we felt comfortable
making posts (we've had a few doozies in our time). Given that nearly two-thirds
of our readers try to go for the entire post (and yet only have so much time on
their hands), we're likely to try and keep things compendious so we don't scare
folks away from even starting in.
This also suggests that we shouldn't worry quite so much about the inverted
pyramid, since people generally tend to keep reading anyway, though in our minds
that doesn't hold a candle to Strunk and White's age-old advice to "omit
needless words." =)
The devices you prefer
This was a shocker for us. One of the items that has remained on our back
burner for some time is creating a more mobile-friendly responsive site,
especially for the blog, and we wanted to know how much of a priority it was for
all of you. With mobile devices now accounting for 28% of all web traffic, we
figured this was a high priority for our readership. Boy, were we wrong:
More than 92% of respondents listed "laptop/desktop" as at least one of their
preferred devices; fewer than 8% left the "laptop/desktop" option unchecked.
One of the most interesting comments on the survey's blog post alluded to the
idea that this could simply be a result of what people are used to, not what
their preferences actually are, since many blogs (our own included) still lack
responsive design. That's something we'll absolutely work on when we can, but at
the same time, these numbers are so wildly skewed toward reading on computers
that we feel pretty safe taking care of other priorities first.
Relevancy to your work
This might be more of a baseline to work from than a real metric of how we're
already doing, but we were certainly pleased to see this curve leaning to the
right:
We're planning on diving a little deeper into the data for this one, too. In a
sense, the data behind this graph can provide us with a rudimentary content
audit. We can look at the people who landed toward the top of this graph, and
figure we're providing plenty of content that's relevant to their lines of work.
We can also look at the people at the bottom of this graph and know we're
missing the mark for them.
As a whole, though, it's certainly encouraging to see that most people find
the majority of the posts on the Moz Blog to be pretty relevant. We'll likely
conduct another (perhaps shorter) survey in a year or so in order to measure
progress against data like this.
Accessibility
One debate we have frequently in the Mozplex is whether our posts are
appropriately accessible. In other words, are people bored because they're not
learning anything they don't already know? Or, are they confused because our
posts go right over their heads?
Our customer mentor, Matt Roney, has done some fantastic work with Moz
Analytics subscribers, and has found out that many people seem to be confused by
the complexity of web marketing, and thereby of our tools. That made us wonder
if folks were generally confused by our posts, as well.
As it turns out, most of our audience finds the balance to be about right:
One interesting note is that there are significantly more people who think
posts are too basic than folks who think they're too advanced, confounding our
expectation based on Matt's interactions.
Also interesting is the degree to which people find posts too basic or
advanced. We asked respondents who chose "too basic" to rate just how basic they
were on a scale of 1-5, and asked a similar question for people who chose "too
advanced." The average score for people who thought it was too basic was
2.7âright at the middle of the scaleâand the average score for
people who thought it was too advanced was 3.6âmuch higher on the scale.
This implies that our beginner-level readers are more lost than our advanced
readers are bored.
There's a great solution to this, which is to offer help to beginner-level
readers on the more advanced posts. Perhaps this comes in the form of tool tips
with explanations and definitions of more advanced concepts. Maybe it's a couple
of links in the sidebar that lead to relevant "background content," such as a
chapter in the Beginner's Guide to SEO. Whatever the case, we're likely to lean
just a little in the advanced direction while also offering beginners a way to
catch up quickly.
Room for improvement
We asked you all an open-ended question about what you'd like to see different
about the Moz Blog. We coded and tallied mentions of each request, and we have
to say we're pretty happy with the #1 response:
Feedback
# mentions
1.
Nothing
103
2.
More tutorials, how-tos, and action-oriented posts
44
3.
More case studies
39
4.
More video/multimedia content
32
5.
More advanced posts
23
6.
Need to branch out from SEO
20
7.
Needs to be more accessible to beginners/non-SEOs
17
8.
Needs better categorization/navigation
16
9.
Post more frequently
15
10.
Shorter posts
14
11.
Posts should be more data-driven/scientific
13
12.
Posts need more variety
13
13.
Needs mobile-friendly/responsive design
12
14.
More from Rand
11
15.
Needs more varied pool of authors
11
There's a lot of other great feedback in here, too, including a confirmation
of your desire to see more tutorials, case studies, and action-oriented posts
that keep you on top of your game. There was also an echo of the call for more
advanced posts.
More than 30 people requested an increase in posts that include videos, with
many of those expressing an appreciation for Whiteboard Friday. While we're
pretty happy with just one Whiteboard post each week, there's something to be
said for finding other ways to present video content, as there are a great many
examples of successful educational videos. We've even begun offering our own
educational videos to subscribers through Moz Academy. This is an area ripe for
further exploration.
Oh, and for the 11 folks who asked for more from Rand, you may get your wish
before long. =)
Topics
This was one of the most interesting sets of results for us. We asked about
which topics you'd like to learn more about, hoping to gain some direct insight
into the most valuable things we could post about on the blog. Respondents could
select as many of these options as they liked. As you might guess, advanced SEO
came out on top, with nearly 3/4 of responses selecting that option.
If we didn't already have enough evidence that content marketing was at the
forefront of people's minds, this speaks for itself:
We were also interested to see how high data analysis ranked on this list,
although with the volume of data we all deal with on a regular basis, there's no
real surprise. The ability to transform information into knowledge and knowledge
into wisdom is vital for today's marketers, and we'll do everything we can to
equip you all for the task.
We'll use these responses (among other things) as a guide for the distribution
of topics we post on the blog. It won't be an exact scienceâyou won't see
exactly 73 posts out of every 100 covering advanced SEOâbut you can expect
we'll post more about advanced SEO than we do about paid search marketing or
community management, and so forth.
We'll also work hard to draw connections between these categories, realizing
that it's impossible to silo them all away from one another. Social media is
heavily connected to branding, for example, and video marketing is simply a
specific type of content marketing. We'll use what we know about your day-to-day
work as a foundation, and show you what you need to know about the other areas
in this list.
Types of posts
Make no mistake, we will never title any blog post "The Ultimate Guide to ___"
again. =)
This is no typo or data entry errorâout of the 749 people who answered
this question, not a single one indicated they wanted to see more "ultimate
guides" on the blog.
We've talked about this quite a bit in the office, and our theory is that it
is always a false promise. There's no ultimate guide to anything (in any sense
of the word). There are really good guides, and there are some that many people
will consider the best availableâbut if someone else put in enough effort,
they could certainly make a better guide.
One of the many (many) lessons I've learned from Cyrus Shepard is that
headlines are a promise to the readers. If what's behind the headline doesn't
live up to that promise, you've lied about what you have, and are breaking the
hard-earned trust you've built with them over time.
We also think that while some "ultimate guides" are impressive (and are widely
shared as a result), they're usually far too long to actually read through right
away. Given the well established lack of time that folks in our industry have,
these posts often get pocketed indefinitely, undermining their true value.
That isn't the only useful part of these responses, thoughâit's quite
clear that the most valuable posts we can give you all are those that contain
truly actionable content. It isn't about inspiration as much as it is about
helping you stay ahead of industry changes, and showing you step-by-step how to
be more effective and efficient with your work. You can expect to see more
tutorials and case studies as time goes on.
Now we go to work. Thanks to all of you, we have a great sense for what kinds
of content we should seek out in order to provide the most value for you.
Here's a run-down of some of our biggest takeaways:
While our readers are increasingly focusing on other areas of marketing, the
foundation of their work still lies in SEO, and our content needs to reflect
that specialization. We should think of our readers as "T-shaped," focusing on
advanced depth in SEO while drawing connections to areas like content, social,
branding, and others.
Our readers are challenged by a constantly changing industry in which they're
required to continually learn (and evangelize) new techniques to retain their
expertise. They are frustrated by a lack of time and resources, difficulty in
communicating and reporting their work to both colleagues and customers, and a
need for up-to-date best practices in many areasâespecially content
marketing and link building.
Our readers prefer to consume blog posts on desktops or laptops, and if they
choose to read a post, most of them try to get all the way through it.
Our readers generally have an advanced knowledge of SEO, but there are many who
are relatively new to the field and feel lost when reading our more advanced
posts.
There is a great demand for action-oriented posts among our readers, including
tutorials and case studies. This demand vastly overshadows the demand for more
generalized overviews and higher-level strategies.
Given all of that, here are some things you might expect to see on the Moz Blog
as we move forward:
More actionable posts, including tutorials and case studies
A tendency toward more advanced posts related to SEO, along with more basic
posts that connect SEO to other areas of inbound
More help for beginners in getting the background necessary to understand the
more advanced posts
High quality posts to fill the content marketing niche
More posts on data analysis, competitive research, social media, workplace
productivity, and other topics toward the top of the list above
More "pre-read transparency," offering details to help you determine a post's
relevancy to you before you click
Overall: Content that's more relevant and valuable to you and your work. That's
our goal, and we want to keep hearing from you. Please feel free to send us your
thoughts at any time (editor@moz.com), whether about something we posted, topic
suggestions, or anything else related to the blog.
We'd also love to see your analysis of this data: Did we miss anything? Get
something wrong? Let us know in the comments below.
Thanks to everyone who gave their time for this survey; it was immensely
insightful for us Mozzers!
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/~3/269-hoz5x6c/2013-moz-blog-survey-results
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
Blog Survey'
Posted by Trevor-Klein
Last month, 766 of our readers took a few minutes to tell us what they thought
of the Moz Blog. We were absolutely blown away by the quality of the feedback we
got, and we're excited to share what we learned with all of you.
You told us you're squeezed for time in a constantly changing
"need-it-yesterday" world. You told us you're sick of "ultimate guides," and
that you're (for the most part) already well versed in the basics of SEO, and
are craving more advanced tips, tricks, and tactics. You told us that content
marketing and data analysis are two areas where you could use some help.
We hear you.
The rest of what you told us can be found below, and we'll be incorporating
these takeaways into our planning for the Moz Blog over the coming months. The
entire set of results is available as a Google Spreadsheetâif you're
interested, please feel free to make a copy. If you learn anything beyond what
we show here, please let us know!
Your job titles
One of the things we've wondered as we've made the transition from SEOmoz to
Moz is whether our audience would begin to include a greater number of people
from outside the world of SEO. As Rand explained so well, we can't just be SEOs
anymore. So, we did what anyone would doâwe tossed all of your job titles
into a word cloud.
Two things are immediately obvious:
SEO is still a huge part of what you all do, as it's the largest word in this
cloud
Given how large the word "marketing" is, there are also quite a few of you
whose jobs likely include many other aspects, as well.
It'd be interesting to see how this cloud changed over time. Would those two
words be similar in size six months from now? A year? Time will tell, but for
now, our best course of action might be the T-shaped approach. Lots of advanced
depth in SEO, combined with enough depth in other areas to make sure everyone's
up to speed with the changes in the industry.
Your experience
Along the same lines, as our audience continues to expand and the Beginner's
Guide to SEO continues to be our most successful piece of content, we wanted to
know how experienced our readers were in their lines of work. As it turns out,
we have a pretty good spread:
Your level of SEO expertise
It's no secret that Moz's background revolved around SEO, and so it comes as
no surprise that most of our readers consider their SEO skills to be pretty
advanced. On a scale of 1-5, 86% of respondents rated their SEO expertise a 3 or
better, and 14% labeled themselves "industry experts." Given people's natural
inclination to choose responses toward the middle of a scale like this (central
tendency bias), we might even have more industry experts than these results
show.
Still, there are a significant number of readers who are relatively new to
SEO, so one of our challenges is to find the right line between basic and
advanced SEO content.
One of the ideas we're considering is implementing more of what I call
"pre-read transparency," making it easier to get a feel for what a post is about
and whether it's relevant for you before you even start reading it. If done
well, this could save our readers valuable time and make it easier to find
additional reading that's relevant to your work. (If you've got ideas on ways to
make that happen, we'd love to hear about them in the comments!)
How much SEO?
At the same time, 45% of respondents said they spend less than half of their
time doing SEO work. More than 20% said they spend less than a fifth of their
time on SEO. There are some blurry lines here, for sure (how much of your
day-to-day would you need to spend on SEO before you considered yourself an
expert?), but our read is that even the people who have the most expertise in
SEO are finding themselves doing more and more work outside of that area.
Your greatest challenges
This was one of the more telling sets of responses we received. Our primary
goal with the Moz Blog is to help you all become better marketers, and in order
to do that, we need to know what you all need help with. This was a text-entry
question; people could write as much or as little about their challenges as they
pleased. We noted recurring issues in the responses, and tallied every distinct
mention of each of those issues.
Some issues might seem like they overlap, but we think this paints a pretty
clear picture of what our readers are struggling with in today's world of
marketing:
Challenge
# mentions
1.
Changing industry
93
2.
Content marketing
70
3.
Clients/customers misunderstand my work
67
4.
Time management
52
5.
Politics and buy-in
43
6.
Too much to learn and keep track of
40
7.
Link building and maintenance
39
8.
Measurement and analysis
38
9.
Google and the algorithm
32
10.
Limited budget/resources
29
11.
Ranking
28
12.
Managing people and relationships
24
13.
Clients/customers are difficult
23
14.
Social media integration and management
23
15.
Strategy and goals
22
16.
Reporting
21
17.
Branding
17
18.
Understanding SEO
16
19.
Conversion rate
16
20.
Competition
14
We all work in a rapidly changing industry, and even the experts are
constantly having to learn new techniques. One of our primary jobs involves not
only informing you of those changes, but also offering recommendations on how
you might adapt your work. We'll continue to seek out the best advice in that
respect.
Content marketing is obviously an essential field for today's marketers, and
there are relatively few good resources for people looking to improve their own
content skills. We hope to bring you more posts to fill that niche and help you
level-up.
There were also quite a few responses having to do with workplace
productivity: time management, effective communication, and finding ways to
convey the value of our work to clients and customers. These are areas we
haven't covered much on the Moz Blog, but are vitally important for effective
marketers. Look for more of these posts in the future.
Your reading style
What we were really trying to get at here was how long we felt comfortable
making posts (we've had a few doozies in our time). Given that nearly two-thirds
of our readers try to go for the entire post (and yet only have so much time on
their hands), we're likely to try and keep things compendious so we don't scare
folks away from even starting in.
This also suggests that we shouldn't worry quite so much about the inverted
pyramid, since people generally tend to keep reading anyway, though in our minds
that doesn't hold a candle to Strunk and White's age-old advice to "omit
needless words." =)
The devices you prefer
This was a shocker for us. One of the items that has remained on our back
burner for some time is creating a more mobile-friendly responsive site,
especially for the blog, and we wanted to know how much of a priority it was for
all of you. With mobile devices now accounting for 28% of all web traffic, we
figured this was a high priority for our readership. Boy, were we wrong:
More than 92% of respondents listed "laptop/desktop" as at least one of their
preferred devices; fewer than 8% left the "laptop/desktop" option unchecked.
One of the most interesting comments on the survey's blog post alluded to the
idea that this could simply be a result of what people are used to, not what
their preferences actually are, since many blogs (our own included) still lack
responsive design. That's something we'll absolutely work on when we can, but at
the same time, these numbers are so wildly skewed toward reading on computers
that we feel pretty safe taking care of other priorities first.
Relevancy to your work
This might be more of a baseline to work from than a real metric of how we're
already doing, but we were certainly pleased to see this curve leaning to the
right:
We're planning on diving a little deeper into the data for this one, too. In a
sense, the data behind this graph can provide us with a rudimentary content
audit. We can look at the people who landed toward the top of this graph, and
figure we're providing plenty of content that's relevant to their lines of work.
We can also look at the people at the bottom of this graph and know we're
missing the mark for them.
As a whole, though, it's certainly encouraging to see that most people find
the majority of the posts on the Moz Blog to be pretty relevant. We'll likely
conduct another (perhaps shorter) survey in a year or so in order to measure
progress against data like this.
Accessibility
One debate we have frequently in the Mozplex is whether our posts are
appropriately accessible. In other words, are people bored because they're not
learning anything they don't already know? Or, are they confused because our
posts go right over their heads?
Our customer mentor, Matt Roney, has done some fantastic work with Moz
Analytics subscribers, and has found out that many people seem to be confused by
the complexity of web marketing, and thereby of our tools. That made us wonder
if folks were generally confused by our posts, as well.
As it turns out, most of our audience finds the balance to be about right:
One interesting note is that there are significantly more people who think
posts are too basic than folks who think they're too advanced, confounding our
expectation based on Matt's interactions.
Also interesting is the degree to which people find posts too basic or
advanced. We asked respondents who chose "too basic" to rate just how basic they
were on a scale of 1-5, and asked a similar question for people who chose "too
advanced." The average score for people who thought it was too basic was
2.7âright at the middle of the scaleâand the average score for
people who thought it was too advanced was 3.6âmuch higher on the scale.
This implies that our beginner-level readers are more lost than our advanced
readers are bored.
There's a great solution to this, which is to offer help to beginner-level
readers on the more advanced posts. Perhaps this comes in the form of tool tips
with explanations and definitions of more advanced concepts. Maybe it's a couple
of links in the sidebar that lead to relevant "background content," such as a
chapter in the Beginner's Guide to SEO. Whatever the case, we're likely to lean
just a little in the advanced direction while also offering beginners a way to
catch up quickly.
Room for improvement
We asked you all an open-ended question about what you'd like to see different
about the Moz Blog. We coded and tallied mentions of each request, and we have
to say we're pretty happy with the #1 response:
Feedback
# mentions
1.
Nothing
103
2.
More tutorials, how-tos, and action-oriented posts
44
3.
More case studies
39
4.
More video/multimedia content
32
5.
More advanced posts
23
6.
Need to branch out from SEO
20
7.
Needs to be more accessible to beginners/non-SEOs
17
8.
Needs better categorization/navigation
16
9.
Post more frequently
15
10.
Shorter posts
14
11.
Posts should be more data-driven/scientific
13
12.
Posts need more variety
13
13.
Needs mobile-friendly/responsive design
12
14.
More from Rand
11
15.
Needs more varied pool of authors
11
There's a lot of other great feedback in here, too, including a confirmation
of your desire to see more tutorials, case studies, and action-oriented posts
that keep you on top of your game. There was also an echo of the call for more
advanced posts.
More than 30 people requested an increase in posts that include videos, with
many of those expressing an appreciation for Whiteboard Friday. While we're
pretty happy with just one Whiteboard post each week, there's something to be
said for finding other ways to present video content, as there are a great many
examples of successful educational videos. We've even begun offering our own
educational videos to subscribers through Moz Academy. This is an area ripe for
further exploration.
Oh, and for the 11 folks who asked for more from Rand, you may get your wish
before long. =)
Topics
This was one of the most interesting sets of results for us. We asked about
which topics you'd like to learn more about, hoping to gain some direct insight
into the most valuable things we could post about on the blog. Respondents could
select as many of these options as they liked. As you might guess, advanced SEO
came out on top, with nearly 3/4 of responses selecting that option.
If we didn't already have enough evidence that content marketing was at the
forefront of people's minds, this speaks for itself:
We were also interested to see how high data analysis ranked on this list,
although with the volume of data we all deal with on a regular basis, there's no
real surprise. The ability to transform information into knowledge and knowledge
into wisdom is vital for today's marketers, and we'll do everything we can to
equip you all for the task.
We'll use these responses (among other things) as a guide for the distribution
of topics we post on the blog. It won't be an exact scienceâyou won't see
exactly 73 posts out of every 100 covering advanced SEOâbut you can expect
we'll post more about advanced SEO than we do about paid search marketing or
community management, and so forth.
We'll also work hard to draw connections between these categories, realizing
that it's impossible to silo them all away from one another. Social media is
heavily connected to branding, for example, and video marketing is simply a
specific type of content marketing. We'll use what we know about your day-to-day
work as a foundation, and show you what you need to know about the other areas
in this list.
Types of posts
Make no mistake, we will never title any blog post "The Ultimate Guide to ___"
again. =)
This is no typo or data entry errorâout of the 749 people who answered
this question, not a single one indicated they wanted to see more "ultimate
guides" on the blog.
We've talked about this quite a bit in the office, and our theory is that it
is always a false promise. There's no ultimate guide to anything (in any sense
of the word). There are really good guides, and there are some that many people
will consider the best availableâbut if someone else put in enough effort,
they could certainly make a better guide.
One of the many (many) lessons I've learned from Cyrus Shepard is that
headlines are a promise to the readers. If what's behind the headline doesn't
live up to that promise, you've lied about what you have, and are breaking the
hard-earned trust you've built with them over time.
We also think that while some "ultimate guides" are impressive (and are widely
shared as a result), they're usually far too long to actually read through right
away. Given the well established lack of time that folks in our industry have,
these posts often get pocketed indefinitely, undermining their true value.
That isn't the only useful part of these responses, thoughâit's quite
clear that the most valuable posts we can give you all are those that contain
truly actionable content. It isn't about inspiration as much as it is about
helping you stay ahead of industry changes, and showing you step-by-step how to
be more effective and efficient with your work. You can expect to see more
tutorials and case studies as time goes on.
Now we go to work. Thanks to all of you, we have a great sense for what kinds
of content we should seek out in order to provide the most value for you.
Here's a run-down of some of our biggest takeaways:
While our readers are increasingly focusing on other areas of marketing, the
foundation of their work still lies in SEO, and our content needs to reflect
that specialization. We should think of our readers as "T-shaped," focusing on
advanced depth in SEO while drawing connections to areas like content, social,
branding, and others.
Our readers are challenged by a constantly changing industry in which they're
required to continually learn (and evangelize) new techniques to retain their
expertise. They are frustrated by a lack of time and resources, difficulty in
communicating and reporting their work to both colleagues and customers, and a
need for up-to-date best practices in many areasâespecially content
marketing and link building.
Our readers prefer to consume blog posts on desktops or laptops, and if they
choose to read a post, most of them try to get all the way through it.
Our readers generally have an advanced knowledge of SEO, but there are many who
are relatively new to the field and feel lost when reading our more advanced
posts.
There is a great demand for action-oriented posts among our readers, including
tutorials and case studies. This demand vastly overshadows the demand for more
generalized overviews and higher-level strategies.
Given all of that, here are some things you might expect to see on the Moz Blog
as we move forward:
More actionable posts, including tutorials and case studies
A tendency toward more advanced posts related to SEO, along with more basic
posts that connect SEO to other areas of inbound
More help for beginners in getting the background necessary to understand the
more advanced posts
High quality posts to fill the content marketing niche
More posts on data analysis, competitive research, social media, workplace
productivity, and other topics toward the top of the list above
More "pre-read transparency," offering details to help you determine a post's
relevancy to you before you click
Overall: Content that's more relevant and valuable to you and your work. That's
our goal, and we want to keep hearing from you. Please feel free to send us your
thoughts at any time (editor@moz.com), whether about something we posted, topic
suggestions, or anything else related to the blog.
We'd also love to see your analysis of this data: Did we miss anything? Get
something wrong? Let us know in the comments below.
Thanks to everyone who gave their time for this survey; it was immensely
insightful for us Mozzers!
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/~3/269-hoz5x6c/2013-moz-blog-survey-results
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, 16 December 2013
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'An Eight-Step Plan to Get
PR-Driven Links'
Posted by Jess_Champion
In a past life I worked exclusively in traditional print and broadcast PR,
where digital coverage was viewed as a bonus. But since landing a job as a PR
consultant at Distilled, all of that has changed. My goals have shifted.
Previously my goals were things like brand awareness and changing audience
perceptionsâand these were driven by press coverage.
But, while these goals still come in to play, I have a new goal tooâto
build links. And, as most of you know, link building is not easy.
So, eight months down the line, I feel it's time to share what I've learned.
An eight-step plan
There are a few tried and tested methods for PR driven link-building, like
guest posting and pitching for by-lined articles, but these can be slow-burning
processes.
What I'm going to talk you through is a process which, if invested in and
executed well, is much more likely to result in multiple links from high
quality, authoritative news sites.
There's no quick fix. Even before search was on my radar, I'd always believed
in integrated communications. Link-building is just another component of what
should be a multi-faceted approach, and as such, I believe that links are
symptomatic of a well-executed PR campaign.
For any marketing campaign you should be looking to use multiple channels.
However, the purpose of this post is to specifically explore ways of working
with the media, and consequently how to build links on top-tier media sites.
Step one: Find the story
If you want to be in the media, you need to find a story. It's as simple as
that. No amount of spin is going to see your latest annual review on The New
York Times' homepage.
In a recent Distilled blog post, I wrote about the eight criteria that make
something newsworthy. In brief, these criteria are:
Image: @Distilled
Head over to that post if you'd like more details and examples of each one.
Sometimes you'll have things going on that already fit the bill. Maybe you're
launching a new product in time for Christmas. Or perhaps you've got a great
case study which will help you tell a human interest story.
Relating to real people, like Batkid, will help you tell your story
(Picture: Bhautik Joshi/Flickr)
Oftentimes, though, our clients just haven't got anything newsworthy going on.
And this is when you need to create your own story.
Step two: Create a story
There are a few different ways you can create a story, the most obvious being
PR stunts. But these often mean spending big bucks. A cheaper way to create a
credible news story is to conduct a survey.
For example, I recently ran a survey for our client Worldpay Zinc. We only
launched it two weeks ago, but here are some of the results so far:
An article on the website of one of the UK's national newspapers, The
Telegraph, incorporating two links
A write-up on The Guardian, which also included two links
Daily Mail coverage
3 pieces of national print coverage
30+ pieces of online regional coverage
A BBC Radio 2 appearance
A mention on national TV
You'll notice that I've included results that don't include links, but that's
to reiterate a point that I often make at Distilled: Links are symptomatic of
great PR.
That's not to say there aren't ways and means to increase your chances of
getting links, though, and we'll explore these in the steps below.
Step three: Conduct a survey
Once you've decided on a survey topic and incorporated as many of the
newsworthy criteria as you can, you'll need to devise the questions. Here are
some general rules for conducting robust PR surveys:
1. Start with the story and work backwards
It makes a good deal of sense to have an idea of your angle before you start,
so always think about the story you'd like to tell. Each question should
directly relate to this story, regardless of whether you get the results you
expect or not. The aim here is not to manipulate, but to make sure the answers
translate into interesting data points.
2. Choose a reputable market research agency
Journalists are much more likely to cover surveys if they come from a
trustworthy company. The agency will also help you fine-tune your questions and
make sure you're not being unintentionally leading.
3. Think about your demographic
Surveying the general public is fine but sometimes looking at a specific niche
will strengthen your story. If your client is a parenting website, why not run a
survey of parents? As an aside, if you poll the general public then you'll need
to survey at least 2,000 people. 1,000 is generally fine for smaller niches.
4. Split your demographic
A great way of drilling down into a story is by splitting your demographic
into subcategories. Most polling companies will do this by age, gender, and
region as standard but, often at additional cost, it's possible to dig even
deeper. A strong leading stat with lots of subsequent data points will help you
create a much more robust story.
5. Ask as many questions as you can
As a rule, you should ask at least 10 questions. Along with the demographic
splits, this should give you enough data to write a compelling news story with
lots of interesting points. The more details you can add to a story, the more
news copy you'll generate.
6. Use lists
Where you can, compile lists. Journalists love a good "Top 10 list." In fact,
the WPZ survey I mentioned earlier has two articles on the Telegraph site. The
second was titled "The 10 jobs men don't trust women (or men) to do."
Step four: Make your story link-worthy
Once you've analysed your data and come up with a strong story, you then have
to find a way to generate links. Increasingly, newspapers are reluctant to link
out, and in my experience, the only way to get a decent link on a high-tier site
is to create something of value to both the journalist and their readers.
Digital journalists are crying out for great visuals and digital content; if you
can create something that genuinely adds value to the story (and makes the
journalist look good in front of their editor), then you're onto a winner.
For the WPZ story we created a report and an infographic, both of which
garnered links.
Click image to open(via WorldPayZinc).
Step five: Present the story
The press release is something that is hotly debated in the PR industry, with
arguments both for and against.
However, as David Hamilton says in the article linked to above, while the
context may have changed, the need for press releases has not: "The key is to
make sure that they are part of a proper strategy and are a supplement to, not a
substitute for, proper relationships with journalists."
I use press releases to get my ducks in a line, to get to the crux of a story
and to help me establish my key messages. I don't publish them on newswires. For
me, the press release comes at the end of a conversation with a journalist. For
the most part, it's a tidy way of sending them everything they need, after
they've already expressed interest in a story. It's worth noting that I do still
get asked for press releases. When written well, with your target publication in
mind, they can really help out a busy journalist. You should also publish your
press releases on your website, so journalists can find them online if they need
to.
Step six: Writing the press release
Rather than trying to big-up your client with hyperbolic language that will
surely piss off journalists, spend your energy trying to think like a reporter
and find the most interesting elements of your story. You can do this by
thinking about the "w's:"
Who? Who's involved in the story? Who cares?
What? What's the story? What's new?
Where? Where is the story taking place? Is there a local angle and/or local
publications you can target?
When? Is the story relevant now? Can you tie it in with a current or
forthcoming event or "hot topic?"
Why? Why should people care? Why are you telling this story? Why is it
relevant to the media you're targeting?
Structuring your release
Think of a press release as an inverted pyramidâget as many of the w's
as possible in the first paragraph. While doing this, get straight to the point
and keep it simple. Remember to avoid jargon and hyperbole.
The reason for visualising an inverted pyramid is that, historically, editors
would slash a press release from the bottom up if they didn't have space for the
whole thing. So get crucial elements of your story in early. Your following
paragraphs should flesh out the story and give more detail.
(Image: Wikipedia)
Be human: Quotes that'll get you quoted
The majority of the release should be factual and straight to the point. There
is, however, room for some colour in the form of a quote or two. Quotes are
where a little hyperbole is permitted. For survey stories, quotes should be used
to say how you feel about the results. Are you shocked? Saddened? Thrilled? For
further credibility you could also include a quote from an expert, or from a
case study.
You should always include quotes in a press release but never quote someone
who won't be available for interview. This is a guaranteed way to irritate a
journalist calling for a follow-up with your spokesperson.
Most importantly, make sure your quote sounds like a real person. This is the
ideal opportunity to get your passion for the story across. Don't spew mission
statements or company visions, and don't sound like a robotâor worse
still, an advert. Read it out loud, does it sound like something someone would
actually say?
As an aside, if you can, try to ensure that your spokesperson has a profile
page on their website. Journalists will occasionally link to this profile page
if they feel the homepage is too commercial. Similarly, another trick that has
worked for me in the past is to include the website's URL in a spokesperson's
job title.
Freddie Starr Ate my Hamster: getting your headline right
Keep your headline as short and interesting as possible, but don't try too
hard. Occasionally there's scope for a great pun or witticism, but if not, don't
sweat it. It's more important that it actually makes sense and piques interest
in the reader.
Try to keep your headline on one line, and if possible, short enough to be
tweeted with a link. And, tempting as it is, avoid putting the company name in
the headline. Remember, you're offering the journalist an interesting story, not
an advert.
And you're off!
By now you should have a good idea of what makes a decent press release but
here are a few extra pointers to help you on your way:
Make sure you include your contact information (including a phone number), and
make sure you're actually available to respond swiftly to any resulting
enquiries.
Double space your release so it's easy to read.
Try to keep the main body of the release on one side of A4 (roughly 8.5x11").
If you must write more, make sure you don't go over two pages.
Copy the press release into the main body of an emailânever include
attachments.
Similarly, if you have accompanying images, just let the journalist know
rather than clogging up their inboxâthey'll tell you if they want to see
them.
If you'd like to see an example, the Worldpay Zinc press release can be read
here.
Step seven: Find journalists
The most important aspect of pitching a story is making sure you find the
right journalist. And this is nothing that a good old-fashioned Google search
can't help you with. Look at stories on similar subjects, or those written for
similar audiencesâand don't undervalue smaller niche sites.
Once you've found the journalists you want to target, finding their contact
details needn't be too difficult. I'm fortunate in that I have the luxury of a
subscription to a media database. If you can't afford this luxury, here are a
few tips that could help:
Take a look at this post from our COO Rob Ousbeyâit contains tonnes of
great tricks for finding email addresses.
Call the switchboard of the organisation you're targeting. It's fine to call
and either say, "I have a story on X and would like to know who best to pitch it
to," or to simply ask for an email address.
For UK-based journalists, take a look at journalisted.com
For US-based journalists, take a look at helpareporter.com
Contact journalists on Twitter. I've had success just by saying, "I have
something I'd like to pitch to you, mind if I send an email?" Usually they'll
reply with their email address, or at least tell you where to find it.
Step eight: Pitch to journalists
Now that you've got the best possible story and have created valuable,
link-worthy assets, it's time to pitch. Pitching is something that I get asked
lots of questions about and I've met many people that seem terrified of pitching
to top-tier journalists. But let me tell you a couple of secrets:
Secret #1: Journalists are human too
Secret #2: If you've got a great story lined up, pitching isn't hard.
Here are my top pitching dos:
Craft your subject line well. Don't waste space telling journalists who your
client is, tell them about the genuinely newsworthy story you've so lovingly
crafted.
Be human and personable.
Get their name right. You'd be surprised how many times I've heard a journalist
moan about being wrongly addressed.
Reference their work. Tell the journalist about an article you particularly
enjoyed. But use flattery sparinglyâbe genuine.
Build a relationship first. Journalists are more likely to read your emails if
they recognise your name. Twitter's perfect for this.
Leave a reason to follow up. "Just checking" emails don't go down well. Ask
them if you can help with any more information or an embed code, for example.
Pre-pitch. If you have a genuine news story, then you'll need to do all your
pitches in one go. (Use Boomerang to schedule emails.) A tactic I've had a lot
of success with is to pitch the story ahead of the release. Give the journalist
enough information to pique their interest. Use an embargo if you need to. (But
use sparingly and only for genuine news stories.)
Keep it short and simple (KISS). Journalists don't have time to read long,
rambling emails.
And don'ts:
Take advantage. If you have success once, don't be tempted to go back to the
journalist unless you're certain your story will interest them.
Blanket bomb journalists with a press release. Press releases are still useful
(and journalists still ask me for them) but they should come at the end of a
conversation. It is ok to just send releases to general news@ addresses, but
don't expect these emails to be fruitful.
Call to follow up. Many a PR has been known to call a journalist to say, "Did
you receive my press release?" Don't do itâit will only piss them off!
Call ahead if you like, but never after.
Use hyperbole or buzzwords. It's just plain annoying.
Ramble. If you call them, don't launch into a pitch and ramble on. Ask if they
have a moment to spare first.
A quick recap: remember
The most successful digital PR campaigns incorporate a newsworthy element.
However, they must contain complementary digital assets in order to get links.
Surveys are a great way of creating stories, but be sure to use a credible
research company.
The press release isn't dead. But we'll kill it if we abuse it.
Pitching isn't that hardâas long as you are pitching something worthy.
Links are symptomatic of good PR.
I'm hoping that by now you'll have a better idea of the process of creating a
story and selling it in to the digital press. Just remember that PR isn't an
exact science and there are never any guarantees. When it does pay off, though,
the results really do speak for themselves.
Success for Worldpay Zinc: Coverage (and 2 links) on the Telegraph
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/W1GogOVnNfM/8-step-plan-to-get-pr-driven-links
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
PR-Driven Links'
Posted by Jess_Champion
In a past life I worked exclusively in traditional print and broadcast PR,
where digital coverage was viewed as a bonus. But since landing a job as a PR
consultant at Distilled, all of that has changed. My goals have shifted.
Previously my goals were things like brand awareness and changing audience
perceptionsâand these were driven by press coverage.
But, while these goals still come in to play, I have a new goal tooâto
build links. And, as most of you know, link building is not easy.
So, eight months down the line, I feel it's time to share what I've learned.
An eight-step plan
There are a few tried and tested methods for PR driven link-building, like
guest posting and pitching for by-lined articles, but these can be slow-burning
processes.
What I'm going to talk you through is a process which, if invested in and
executed well, is much more likely to result in multiple links from high
quality, authoritative news sites.
There's no quick fix. Even before search was on my radar, I'd always believed
in integrated communications. Link-building is just another component of what
should be a multi-faceted approach, and as such, I believe that links are
symptomatic of a well-executed PR campaign.
For any marketing campaign you should be looking to use multiple channels.
However, the purpose of this post is to specifically explore ways of working
with the media, and consequently how to build links on top-tier media sites.
Step one: Find the story
If you want to be in the media, you need to find a story. It's as simple as
that. No amount of spin is going to see your latest annual review on The New
York Times' homepage.
In a recent Distilled blog post, I wrote about the eight criteria that make
something newsworthy. In brief, these criteria are:
Image: @Distilled
Head over to that post if you'd like more details and examples of each one.
Sometimes you'll have things going on that already fit the bill. Maybe you're
launching a new product in time for Christmas. Or perhaps you've got a great
case study which will help you tell a human interest story.
Relating to real people, like Batkid, will help you tell your story
(Picture: Bhautik Joshi/Flickr)
Oftentimes, though, our clients just haven't got anything newsworthy going on.
And this is when you need to create your own story.
Step two: Create a story
There are a few different ways you can create a story, the most obvious being
PR stunts. But these often mean spending big bucks. A cheaper way to create a
credible news story is to conduct a survey.
For example, I recently ran a survey for our client Worldpay Zinc. We only
launched it two weeks ago, but here are some of the results so far:
An article on the website of one of the UK's national newspapers, The
Telegraph, incorporating two links
A write-up on The Guardian, which also included two links
Daily Mail coverage
3 pieces of national print coverage
30+ pieces of online regional coverage
A BBC Radio 2 appearance
A mention on national TV
You'll notice that I've included results that don't include links, but that's
to reiterate a point that I often make at Distilled: Links are symptomatic of
great PR.
That's not to say there aren't ways and means to increase your chances of
getting links, though, and we'll explore these in the steps below.
Step three: Conduct a survey
Once you've decided on a survey topic and incorporated as many of the
newsworthy criteria as you can, you'll need to devise the questions. Here are
some general rules for conducting robust PR surveys:
1. Start with the story and work backwards
It makes a good deal of sense to have an idea of your angle before you start,
so always think about the story you'd like to tell. Each question should
directly relate to this story, regardless of whether you get the results you
expect or not. The aim here is not to manipulate, but to make sure the answers
translate into interesting data points.
2. Choose a reputable market research agency
Journalists are much more likely to cover surveys if they come from a
trustworthy company. The agency will also help you fine-tune your questions and
make sure you're not being unintentionally leading.
3. Think about your demographic
Surveying the general public is fine but sometimes looking at a specific niche
will strengthen your story. If your client is a parenting website, why not run a
survey of parents? As an aside, if you poll the general public then you'll need
to survey at least 2,000 people. 1,000 is generally fine for smaller niches.
4. Split your demographic
A great way of drilling down into a story is by splitting your demographic
into subcategories. Most polling companies will do this by age, gender, and
region as standard but, often at additional cost, it's possible to dig even
deeper. A strong leading stat with lots of subsequent data points will help you
create a much more robust story.
5. Ask as many questions as you can
As a rule, you should ask at least 10 questions. Along with the demographic
splits, this should give you enough data to write a compelling news story with
lots of interesting points. The more details you can add to a story, the more
news copy you'll generate.
6. Use lists
Where you can, compile lists. Journalists love a good "Top 10 list." In fact,
the WPZ survey I mentioned earlier has two articles on the Telegraph site. The
second was titled "The 10 jobs men don't trust women (or men) to do."
Step four: Make your story link-worthy
Once you've analysed your data and come up with a strong story, you then have
to find a way to generate links. Increasingly, newspapers are reluctant to link
out, and in my experience, the only way to get a decent link on a high-tier site
is to create something of value to both the journalist and their readers.
Digital journalists are crying out for great visuals and digital content; if you
can create something that genuinely adds value to the story (and makes the
journalist look good in front of their editor), then you're onto a winner.
For the WPZ story we created a report and an infographic, both of which
garnered links.
Click image to open(via WorldPayZinc).
Step five: Present the story
The press release is something that is hotly debated in the PR industry, with
arguments both for and against.
However, as David Hamilton says in the article linked to above, while the
context may have changed, the need for press releases has not: "The key is to
make sure that they are part of a proper strategy and are a supplement to, not a
substitute for, proper relationships with journalists."
I use press releases to get my ducks in a line, to get to the crux of a story
and to help me establish my key messages. I don't publish them on newswires. For
me, the press release comes at the end of a conversation with a journalist. For
the most part, it's a tidy way of sending them everything they need, after
they've already expressed interest in a story. It's worth noting that I do still
get asked for press releases. When written well, with your target publication in
mind, they can really help out a busy journalist. You should also publish your
press releases on your website, so journalists can find them online if they need
to.
Step six: Writing the press release
Rather than trying to big-up your client with hyperbolic language that will
surely piss off journalists, spend your energy trying to think like a reporter
and find the most interesting elements of your story. You can do this by
thinking about the "w's:"
Who? Who's involved in the story? Who cares?
What? What's the story? What's new?
Where? Where is the story taking place? Is there a local angle and/or local
publications you can target?
When? Is the story relevant now? Can you tie it in with a current or
forthcoming event or "hot topic?"
Why? Why should people care? Why are you telling this story? Why is it
relevant to the media you're targeting?
Structuring your release
Think of a press release as an inverted pyramidâget as many of the w's
as possible in the first paragraph. While doing this, get straight to the point
and keep it simple. Remember to avoid jargon and hyperbole.
The reason for visualising an inverted pyramid is that, historically, editors
would slash a press release from the bottom up if they didn't have space for the
whole thing. So get crucial elements of your story in early. Your following
paragraphs should flesh out the story and give more detail.
(Image: Wikipedia)
Be human: Quotes that'll get you quoted
The majority of the release should be factual and straight to the point. There
is, however, room for some colour in the form of a quote or two. Quotes are
where a little hyperbole is permitted. For survey stories, quotes should be used
to say how you feel about the results. Are you shocked? Saddened? Thrilled? For
further credibility you could also include a quote from an expert, or from a
case study.
You should always include quotes in a press release but never quote someone
who won't be available for interview. This is a guaranteed way to irritate a
journalist calling for a follow-up with your spokesperson.
Most importantly, make sure your quote sounds like a real person. This is the
ideal opportunity to get your passion for the story across. Don't spew mission
statements or company visions, and don't sound like a robotâor worse
still, an advert. Read it out loud, does it sound like something someone would
actually say?
As an aside, if you can, try to ensure that your spokesperson has a profile
page on their website. Journalists will occasionally link to this profile page
if they feel the homepage is too commercial. Similarly, another trick that has
worked for me in the past is to include the website's URL in a spokesperson's
job title.
Freddie Starr Ate my Hamster: getting your headline right
Keep your headline as short and interesting as possible, but don't try too
hard. Occasionally there's scope for a great pun or witticism, but if not, don't
sweat it. It's more important that it actually makes sense and piques interest
in the reader.
Try to keep your headline on one line, and if possible, short enough to be
tweeted with a link. And, tempting as it is, avoid putting the company name in
the headline. Remember, you're offering the journalist an interesting story, not
an advert.
And you're off!
By now you should have a good idea of what makes a decent press release but
here are a few extra pointers to help you on your way:
Make sure you include your contact information (including a phone number), and
make sure you're actually available to respond swiftly to any resulting
enquiries.
Double space your release so it's easy to read.
Try to keep the main body of the release on one side of A4 (roughly 8.5x11").
If you must write more, make sure you don't go over two pages.
Copy the press release into the main body of an emailânever include
attachments.
Similarly, if you have accompanying images, just let the journalist know
rather than clogging up their inboxâthey'll tell you if they want to see
them.
If you'd like to see an example, the Worldpay Zinc press release can be read
here.
Step seven: Find journalists
The most important aspect of pitching a story is making sure you find the
right journalist. And this is nothing that a good old-fashioned Google search
can't help you with. Look at stories on similar subjects, or those written for
similar audiencesâand don't undervalue smaller niche sites.
Once you've found the journalists you want to target, finding their contact
details needn't be too difficult. I'm fortunate in that I have the luxury of a
subscription to a media database. If you can't afford this luxury, here are a
few tips that could help:
Take a look at this post from our COO Rob Ousbeyâit contains tonnes of
great tricks for finding email addresses.
Call the switchboard of the organisation you're targeting. It's fine to call
and either say, "I have a story on X and would like to know who best to pitch it
to," or to simply ask for an email address.
For UK-based journalists, take a look at journalisted.com
For US-based journalists, take a look at helpareporter.com
Contact journalists on Twitter. I've had success just by saying, "I have
something I'd like to pitch to you, mind if I send an email?" Usually they'll
reply with their email address, or at least tell you where to find it.
Step eight: Pitch to journalists
Now that you've got the best possible story and have created valuable,
link-worthy assets, it's time to pitch. Pitching is something that I get asked
lots of questions about and I've met many people that seem terrified of pitching
to top-tier journalists. But let me tell you a couple of secrets:
Secret #1: Journalists are human too
Secret #2: If you've got a great story lined up, pitching isn't hard.
Here are my top pitching dos:
Craft your subject line well. Don't waste space telling journalists who your
client is, tell them about the genuinely newsworthy story you've so lovingly
crafted.
Be human and personable.
Get their name right. You'd be surprised how many times I've heard a journalist
moan about being wrongly addressed.
Reference their work. Tell the journalist about an article you particularly
enjoyed. But use flattery sparinglyâbe genuine.
Build a relationship first. Journalists are more likely to read your emails if
they recognise your name. Twitter's perfect for this.
Leave a reason to follow up. "Just checking" emails don't go down well. Ask
them if you can help with any more information or an embed code, for example.
Pre-pitch. If you have a genuine news story, then you'll need to do all your
pitches in one go. (Use Boomerang to schedule emails.) A tactic I've had a lot
of success with is to pitch the story ahead of the release. Give the journalist
enough information to pique their interest. Use an embargo if you need to. (But
use sparingly and only for genuine news stories.)
Keep it short and simple (KISS). Journalists don't have time to read long,
rambling emails.
And don'ts:
Take advantage. If you have success once, don't be tempted to go back to the
journalist unless you're certain your story will interest them.
Blanket bomb journalists with a press release. Press releases are still useful
(and journalists still ask me for them) but they should come at the end of a
conversation. It is ok to just send releases to general news@ addresses, but
don't expect these emails to be fruitful.
Call to follow up. Many a PR has been known to call a journalist to say, "Did
you receive my press release?" Don't do itâit will only piss them off!
Call ahead if you like, but never after.
Use hyperbole or buzzwords. It's just plain annoying.
Ramble. If you call them, don't launch into a pitch and ramble on. Ask if they
have a moment to spare first.
A quick recap: remember
The most successful digital PR campaigns incorporate a newsworthy element.
However, they must contain complementary digital assets in order to get links.
Surveys are a great way of creating stories, but be sure to use a credible
research company.
The press release isn't dead. But we'll kill it if we abuse it.
Pitching isn't that hardâas long as you are pitching something worthy.
Links are symptomatic of good PR.
I'm hoping that by now you'll have a better idea of the process of creating a
story and selling it in to the digital press. Just remember that PR isn't an
exact science and there are never any guarantees. When it does pay off, though,
the results really do speak for themselves.
Success for Worldpay Zinc: Coverage (and 2 links) on the Telegraph
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/W1GogOVnNfM/8-step-plan-to-get-pr-driven-links
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Friday, 13 December 2013
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'Mobile App Metrics that Matter -
Whiteboard Friday'
Posted by adamsinger
Releasing a mobile app to the public is certainly an accomplishment, but
launch day is nowhere near the end of the process. It's just as vital to measure
people's interaction with your apps as it is to measure their interaction with
your web properties.
In today's Whiteboard Friday, Adam SingerâGoogle's analytics
advocateâwalks us through some of the most important metrics to watch to
make sure your app is as successful as possible.
Adam Singer - Mobile App Metrics (that Matter) - Whiteboard Friday
For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!
Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans. I am Adam Singer (Twitter, Google+), Product Marking Manager
on Google Analytics, as well as blogger at TheFutureBuzz.com, and I happen to be
up here in Seattle and the Moz folk asked me if I'd be willing to do a
Whiteboard Friday. So I've actually been watching Whiteboard Fridays for
probably the last six or seven years. It feels like that long. I don't know if
you guys have been doing them that long, but it feels like a long time.
So I'm excited to come in today and chat with you about a subject I've been
talking about at conferences all over the world, we've been sharing on our blog,
on ClickZâI write a once monthly column at ClickZâmobile app
analytics. So app analytics are really important. Pew just did research. More
than half of Americans now own a smartphone. We've also seen a lot of really
interesting pieces of research sharing that for some retailers they're actually
getting more conversions on mobile via apps and via mobile sites than desktop.
So, obviously, apps are really important, and via our own research that we
did on the Analytics Team, last year we found that around 87% of marketers are
actually planning to increase their emphasis on mobile app analytics and app
measurement into 2013. We also found out that around half of marketers were
either completely new or novice at app analytics, so they didn't have much
experience.
So this is an area as a marketer, if you've never measured a mobile app
before, it's an area you're going to need to get into, because in the future I
think pretty much every company that is interested in maintaining a relationship
with their users in a location-agnostic setting, not just in front of their
desktop, but wherever they go, will have a mobile app.
So I want to talk about some important mobile app metrics that matter. So,
thank you, Jennifer, on the Moz teamâsorry, Moz, not SEOmoz
anymoreâdrew my little diagram for me. So really the buckets for apps that
matter are really three: acquisition, engagement, and outcomes. So let's go
through these metrics, and it's slightly different than web. So if you've only
measured on web, this will be different, but at the same time there's a sort of
one-to-one with different metrics, for example pages and screens per session.
So let's take a look. For acquisition metrics, app downloads are really
important. So when you're acquiring new users, you definitely want to look at
who's actually downloading your app, what channels are most effective at
acquisition, what channels are actually bringing you high quality users.
You also want to look at new users and active users. So this is important.
You want to make sure you're not just acquiring a whole bunch of new users, but
you want to make sure that you actually have a steady stream of people actively
launching your app. So when we talk about engagement in just a second, we'll
show you why that's important. But I think a lot of marketers make the mistake
of doing a good job bringing people to their app download page, getting people
to install the app, and then they're really not concerned with if that user
sticks around. For apps it's really important. If people download your app, use
it once and then never use it again, you've kind of failed.
Also for acquisition, demographics are really important for apps. So you
especially want to look at where people are coming from; which on apps is really
interesting because they might not be at home, they might be at home; as well as
acquisition channels. So whether you have an android or an iOS app, the channels
that your users come from are going to be pretty important, and if you're
already looking at web analytics, these will be familiar to you. You'll see
acquisition sources from search, hopefully from email campaigns. If you're doing
that to market your app via email, make sure you tag those links. And how people
are coming to your page in the Play Store. In the iOS marketplace, it's a little
bit more of a black box, but certainly you'll still want to take a look.
Next up under engagement, so engagement metrics are really important for
apps. I'd actually say engagements are the most important metrics to look at,
because, again, if people install your app once and never launch it again,
you've kind of failed. So engagement flow is important for apps. These are
reports we have in Google Analytics mobile app analytics, but certainly no
matter what app analytics platform that you're using, there will be a
visualization tool to actually look at how people move through your app, as
well, app screens, so what screens people look at. App screens is an interesting
one because you could have a lot of people viewing multiple screens on your app.
Is this a good thing? Maybe.
You want to take a look at are they actually accomplishing what you want,
because you might have too many screens. What we've seen for apps is that by
reducing the number of screens and perhaps putting more content on one screen
that someone can slide through, get an overview of quickly, and then drill down
into a more specific feature or screen on your app, you can increase the
engagement with your app significantly rather than creating frustration if
someone has to continue to click on different screens on your app to get to what
they want. So I think you'll notice a lot of the apps that are most sticky for
you, at least I find, actually have less screens.
Loyalty and retention is really important. So whatever app analytics tool
you're using, you want to be looking at your loyalty reports to determine who's
launching your app, not just one or two times, but you want to see in a given
month people launching your app 10 times, 11 times, 20 times, even 50 times.
So if your app is really sticky, people will be using it more consistently.
So really, if you have a lot of people downloading your app, but then you notice
those same users aren't very loyal, they're not launching your app a lot of
times throughout the month, you want to reevaluate your app before you go out
and do more acquisition, because there's nothing worse than spending more money
in online advertising and mobile app advertising to get more users if they're
not engaging with your app.
So figure that out soon. Make sure that your app is sticky. This is even more
important than web because what you want ideally is you want to be using your
analytics to make your app better, and you want it to be so good that it's on
the home screen of your user's device. It's not buried on a second or third
screen that they never actually launch on their iPhone or on their Android.
So that gets us to outcomes, everyone's favorite report. So if you're kicking
butt with acquisition and you have a really sticky app that people are using all
the time, you'll want to next focus on outcomes. So outcomes, similar to web,
are really conversion areas for our app, where we're actually making money;
metrics that have economic impact for our business.
So, things like app sales, if people are actually buying your app, that would
show up in outcome reports. Ad monetization, if you have in-app monetization for
ads, that's a great way to monetize your app. Especially if you have a game,
it's a great way to make money from your app using a tool like AdMob. You want
to determine how you can maximize ad revenue without being intrusive, because
you definitely don't want to have an ad experience in an app that's going to
detract from the app.
You want to make sure that's it's a balance. If you're a new site, you want
to make sure that there are not ads coming over your content and causing users
to accidentally click them. You want to make sure that the ads are relevant and
that the ads are useful, and that they're not disruptive to the experience.
You also want to consider in-app purchases. So if you're a game app, for
example, a lot of game apps are really successful at charging users to unlock
secret features or extra things inside your app. Maybe it's a way to get an
advantage over the other players in the game. In-app purchases is a great way to
do that. You want to measure those and determine which in-app purchases are
sticky. I have a few friends that are app developers, and that's the bread and
butter of their monetization for their apps.
You'll also want to look at goal conversion. So if you actually don't sell
anything in your app, if you're, for example, E*Trade - and I have an E*Trade
account, I'm a big fan of theirs - you would want to track goal conversions,
such as maybe to them a goal conversion is me looking at the trade screen or me
looking at my portfolio or some other action in the app. Because what you don't
want is to not know what success looks like in your app.
You want to understand what you want your users doing, and that way you can
actually have some goals to measure against. If you're not selling anything in
your app, just like on web, assign a value to those goals. Because once you do
that, all of these other buckets become more interesting when you can do
segmentation and you want to look at, "Hey, what users on the acquisition side
of the equation are actually coming through to purchase?" Or, "Which users are
engaging really well, but aren't necessarily making me more revenue?"
So you'll want to segment that data, and you'll want to look at which users
are completing your desired goals. So that's just a service level overview.
Some other things that I didn't go through were the developer reports, like
crashes and exceptions. Certainly, if you have an app, those are important as
well. If you're a marketer, look at those reports too, because you want to push
your development team to eliminate any of the crashes in your app. Those aren't
good things. You can suffer attrition, certainly, unless your app is really,
really sticky. People might launch it once, and enough crashes they might not
ever come back. So those are important reports to look at too.
But I just wanted to provide an overview to you guys today. Hopefully, you
are measuring apps right now. We have a free app analytics tool at Google.
But no matter what app tool you use, you definitely want to be measuring.
Data is really important for apps. If you have any questions, feel free to tweet
at me @AdamSinger. Always happy to help out with app measurement, and have an
awesome weekend Mozzers.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/6FmC_kyVdPc/mobile-app-metrics-that-matter-whiteboard-friday
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Whiteboard Friday'
Posted by adamsinger
Releasing a mobile app to the public is certainly an accomplishment, but
launch day is nowhere near the end of the process. It's just as vital to measure
people's interaction with your apps as it is to measure their interaction with
your web properties.
In today's Whiteboard Friday, Adam SingerâGoogle's analytics
advocateâwalks us through some of the most important metrics to watch to
make sure your app is as successful as possible.
Adam Singer - Mobile App Metrics (that Matter) - Whiteboard Friday
For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!
Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans. I am Adam Singer (Twitter, Google+), Product Marking Manager
on Google Analytics, as well as blogger at TheFutureBuzz.com, and I happen to be
up here in Seattle and the Moz folk asked me if I'd be willing to do a
Whiteboard Friday. So I've actually been watching Whiteboard Fridays for
probably the last six or seven years. It feels like that long. I don't know if
you guys have been doing them that long, but it feels like a long time.
So I'm excited to come in today and chat with you about a subject I've been
talking about at conferences all over the world, we've been sharing on our blog,
on ClickZâI write a once monthly column at ClickZâmobile app
analytics. So app analytics are really important. Pew just did research. More
than half of Americans now own a smartphone. We've also seen a lot of really
interesting pieces of research sharing that for some retailers they're actually
getting more conversions on mobile via apps and via mobile sites than desktop.
So, obviously, apps are really important, and via our own research that we
did on the Analytics Team, last year we found that around 87% of marketers are
actually planning to increase their emphasis on mobile app analytics and app
measurement into 2013. We also found out that around half of marketers were
either completely new or novice at app analytics, so they didn't have much
experience.
So this is an area as a marketer, if you've never measured a mobile app
before, it's an area you're going to need to get into, because in the future I
think pretty much every company that is interested in maintaining a relationship
with their users in a location-agnostic setting, not just in front of their
desktop, but wherever they go, will have a mobile app.
So I want to talk about some important mobile app metrics that matter. So,
thank you, Jennifer, on the Moz teamâsorry, Moz, not SEOmoz
anymoreâdrew my little diagram for me. So really the buckets for apps that
matter are really three: acquisition, engagement, and outcomes. So let's go
through these metrics, and it's slightly different than web. So if you've only
measured on web, this will be different, but at the same time there's a sort of
one-to-one with different metrics, for example pages and screens per session.
So let's take a look. For acquisition metrics, app downloads are really
important. So when you're acquiring new users, you definitely want to look at
who's actually downloading your app, what channels are most effective at
acquisition, what channels are actually bringing you high quality users.
You also want to look at new users and active users. So this is important.
You want to make sure you're not just acquiring a whole bunch of new users, but
you want to make sure that you actually have a steady stream of people actively
launching your app. So when we talk about engagement in just a second, we'll
show you why that's important. But I think a lot of marketers make the mistake
of doing a good job bringing people to their app download page, getting people
to install the app, and then they're really not concerned with if that user
sticks around. For apps it's really important. If people download your app, use
it once and then never use it again, you've kind of failed.
Also for acquisition, demographics are really important for apps. So you
especially want to look at where people are coming from; which on apps is really
interesting because they might not be at home, they might be at home; as well as
acquisition channels. So whether you have an android or an iOS app, the channels
that your users come from are going to be pretty important, and if you're
already looking at web analytics, these will be familiar to you. You'll see
acquisition sources from search, hopefully from email campaigns. If you're doing
that to market your app via email, make sure you tag those links. And how people
are coming to your page in the Play Store. In the iOS marketplace, it's a little
bit more of a black box, but certainly you'll still want to take a look.
Next up under engagement, so engagement metrics are really important for
apps. I'd actually say engagements are the most important metrics to look at,
because, again, if people install your app once and never launch it again,
you've kind of failed. So engagement flow is important for apps. These are
reports we have in Google Analytics mobile app analytics, but certainly no
matter what app analytics platform that you're using, there will be a
visualization tool to actually look at how people move through your app, as
well, app screens, so what screens people look at. App screens is an interesting
one because you could have a lot of people viewing multiple screens on your app.
Is this a good thing? Maybe.
You want to take a look at are they actually accomplishing what you want,
because you might have too many screens. What we've seen for apps is that by
reducing the number of screens and perhaps putting more content on one screen
that someone can slide through, get an overview of quickly, and then drill down
into a more specific feature or screen on your app, you can increase the
engagement with your app significantly rather than creating frustration if
someone has to continue to click on different screens on your app to get to what
they want. So I think you'll notice a lot of the apps that are most sticky for
you, at least I find, actually have less screens.
Loyalty and retention is really important. So whatever app analytics tool
you're using, you want to be looking at your loyalty reports to determine who's
launching your app, not just one or two times, but you want to see in a given
month people launching your app 10 times, 11 times, 20 times, even 50 times.
So if your app is really sticky, people will be using it more consistently.
So really, if you have a lot of people downloading your app, but then you notice
those same users aren't very loyal, they're not launching your app a lot of
times throughout the month, you want to reevaluate your app before you go out
and do more acquisition, because there's nothing worse than spending more money
in online advertising and mobile app advertising to get more users if they're
not engaging with your app.
So figure that out soon. Make sure that your app is sticky. This is even more
important than web because what you want ideally is you want to be using your
analytics to make your app better, and you want it to be so good that it's on
the home screen of your user's device. It's not buried on a second or third
screen that they never actually launch on their iPhone or on their Android.
So that gets us to outcomes, everyone's favorite report. So if you're kicking
butt with acquisition and you have a really sticky app that people are using all
the time, you'll want to next focus on outcomes. So outcomes, similar to web,
are really conversion areas for our app, where we're actually making money;
metrics that have economic impact for our business.
So, things like app sales, if people are actually buying your app, that would
show up in outcome reports. Ad monetization, if you have in-app monetization for
ads, that's a great way to monetize your app. Especially if you have a game,
it's a great way to make money from your app using a tool like AdMob. You want
to determine how you can maximize ad revenue without being intrusive, because
you definitely don't want to have an ad experience in an app that's going to
detract from the app.
You want to make sure that's it's a balance. If you're a new site, you want
to make sure that there are not ads coming over your content and causing users
to accidentally click them. You want to make sure that the ads are relevant and
that the ads are useful, and that they're not disruptive to the experience.
You also want to consider in-app purchases. So if you're a game app, for
example, a lot of game apps are really successful at charging users to unlock
secret features or extra things inside your app. Maybe it's a way to get an
advantage over the other players in the game. In-app purchases is a great way to
do that. You want to measure those and determine which in-app purchases are
sticky. I have a few friends that are app developers, and that's the bread and
butter of their monetization for their apps.
You'll also want to look at goal conversion. So if you actually don't sell
anything in your app, if you're, for example, E*Trade - and I have an E*Trade
account, I'm a big fan of theirs - you would want to track goal conversions,
such as maybe to them a goal conversion is me looking at the trade screen or me
looking at my portfolio or some other action in the app. Because what you don't
want is to not know what success looks like in your app.
You want to understand what you want your users doing, and that way you can
actually have some goals to measure against. If you're not selling anything in
your app, just like on web, assign a value to those goals. Because once you do
that, all of these other buckets become more interesting when you can do
segmentation and you want to look at, "Hey, what users on the acquisition side
of the equation are actually coming through to purchase?" Or, "Which users are
engaging really well, but aren't necessarily making me more revenue?"
So you'll want to segment that data, and you'll want to look at which users
are completing your desired goals. So that's just a service level overview.
Some other things that I didn't go through were the developer reports, like
crashes and exceptions. Certainly, if you have an app, those are important as
well. If you're a marketer, look at those reports too, because you want to push
your development team to eliminate any of the crashes in your app. Those aren't
good things. You can suffer attrition, certainly, unless your app is really,
really sticky. People might launch it once, and enough crashes they might not
ever come back. So those are important reports to look at too.
But I just wanted to provide an overview to you guys today. Hopefully, you
are measuring apps right now. We have a free app analytics tool at Google.
But no matter what app tool you use, you definitely want to be measuring.
Data is really important for apps. If you have any questions, feel free to tweet
at me @AdamSinger. Always happy to help out with app measurement, and have an
awesome weekend Mozzers.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/6FmC_kyVdPc/mobile-app-metrics-that-matter-whiteboard-friday
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Thursday, 12 December 2013
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'The Next Domain Gold Rush: What
You Need to Know'
Posted by Dr-Pete
In late 2012 and early 2013, companies were allowed, for the first time, to
apply for new TLDs (Top-Level Domains). There was a lot of press about big
companies buying swaths of TLDs â for example, Google bought .google,
.docs, .youtube, and many more. The rest of us heard the price tag â a
cool $185,000 â and simply wrote this off as an interesting anecdote. What
you may not realize is that there's a phase two, and it's relevant to everyone
who owns a website (below: 544 new TLDs â cloud created with Tagxedo).
Phase 2: TLDs go live
You may have assumed that these TLDs would simply be bought up and tucked away
for private use by mega-corporations, Saudi Princes, and Justin Bieber. The
reality is that many of these TLDs are going to go live soon, and domains within
them are going to be sold to the public, just like traditional TLDs (.com, .net,
etc.). I talked to Steve Banfield, SVP Registrar Services at Demand Media (which
owns eNom and Name.com), to get the scoop on what this process will mean for
site owners.
Gold rush 2014
ICANN had more than 1,900 applications for TLDs, and of those Name.com
currently lists 544 that will be available for sale in the near future. These
domains cover a wide range of topics â here are just a few, to give you a
flavor of what's up for grabs:
.app
.attorney
.blog
.boston
.flowers
.marketing
.porn
.realtor
.store
.web
.wedding
.wtf
This is an unprecedented explosion in available domain names, and you can
expect a gold rush mentality as companies scoop up domains to protect trademarks
and chase new opportunities and as individuals register a wide variety of vanity
domains. So, when do these domains go on sale, and how much will they cost? As
Steve explained to me, this gets a bit trickyâ
"Sunrise" & Pre-registration
Understandably, ICANN is reluctant to simply release hundreds of TLDs into the
wild all at once and upset the ecosystem. As the TLDs have been granted, they've
been gradually delegated to the global DNS and are coming online in batches. As
each TLD becomes available, it has to undergo a 60-day "sunrise" period. This
period allows trademark holder to register claims and potentially lock down
protected words. For example, Dell may want to lock down dell.computer or
Amazon.com may grab amazon.book. These domains must still be registered (and
paid for), but trademark holders get first dibs across any new TLD. Trademark
disputes are a separate, legal issue (and beyond the scope of this post).
Some registrars will allow pre-registration during or immediately following
the sunrise period. While you can't technically register a domain without a
trademark claim during the 60 day sunrise, they'll essentially add you to a
waiting list. This gets complicated, as multiple registrars could all have
people on their waiting list for the same domain, so there are no guarantees.
Some registrars are also charging premium prices for pre-registration, and those
premiums could carry into your renewals, so read the fine print carefully.
Facts and figures
Once sunrise and pre-registration end, general availability begins. You may be
wondering â when is that, exactly? The short answer is: it's complicated.
I'll attempt to answer the big questions, with Steve's help:
When do the new domains go on sale?
The first group of domains began their sunrise period on November 26, 2013,
and it ends on January 24, 2014. After that, additional domains will come into
play in small groups, throughout the year. To find out about any particular
domain/TLD, your best bet is to use a service like Name.com's TLD watch-list,
which sends status notifications about specific domains you're interested in.
Your own registrar of choice may have a similar service. The specifics of any
given TLD will vary.
How much will the new domains cost?
Unfortunately, it depends. Each TLD can be priced differently, and even within
a TLD, some domains may go for a premium rate. A few TLDs will probably be
auction-based and not fixed-price. Use a watch-list tool or investigate your
domains of choice individually.
What kind of a land grab can we expect?
With over 500 TLDs in play over the course of months, it's nearly impossible
to say. Some domains, like .attorney, will clearly be competitive in local
markets, and you can expect a gold rush mentality. Other domains, like .guru may
be popular for vanity URLs. Regional and niche domains, like .okinawa or .rodeo
are going to have a smaller audience. Then there are wildcards, like .ninja,
that are really anyone's guess.
SEO implications
Naturally, as a Moz reader, you may be wondering what weight the new TLDs will
have with search engines. Will a domain like seattle.attorney have the same
ranking benefit as a more traditional domain like seattleattorney.com? Google's
Matt Cutts has stated that the new TLDs won't have an advantage over existing
domains, but was unclear on whether keywords in the new domain extensions will
act as a ranking signal. I strongly suspect they will play this by ear, until
they know how each of the new TLDs is being used. In my opinion, exact-match
domains are no longer as powerful without other signals to back them up, and
it's likely Google may lower the volume on some of the new TLDs or treat them
more like sub-domains in terms of ranking power. In other words, they'll
probably have some value, but don't expect miracles.
There may be indirect SEO benefits. For example, if you own seattle.attorney,
it's more likely people will link to you with the phrase "Seattle attorney", and
since that's now your brand/domain, it's more likely to look natural (because
it's more likely to be natural). A well-matched name may also be more memorable,
in some cases, although it may take people some time to get used to the new
TLDs. To quote Steve directly:
What will matter is the memory of the end user and branding. Which is better:
hilton.com or hilton.hotel, chevrolet.com or chevrolet.cars, coors.com or
coors.beer? Today, it's easy to say the .com is "better" for brand recall, but
over time we'll have to see which works better for brand marketing.
My conservative opinion is this â don't scoop up dozens of domains just
in the hopes of magically ranking. Register domains that match your business
objectives or that you want to protect â either because of your own
trademarks or for future use. If you hit the domain game late and have a .com
that you hate (this-is-all-they-had-left.com), it might be a good time to
consider your options for something more memorable.
Todd Malicoat wrote an excellent post last year on choosing an exact-match
domain, and I think many of his tips are relevant to the new TLDs and any domain
purchase. Ultimately, some people will use the new TLDs creatively and
powerfully, and others will use them poorly. There's opportunity here, but it's
going to take planning, brand awareness, and ultimately, smart marketing.
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/~3/2c5MJBnbHnQ/next-domain-gold-rush
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
You Need to Know'
Posted by Dr-Pete
In late 2012 and early 2013, companies were allowed, for the first time, to
apply for new TLDs (Top-Level Domains). There was a lot of press about big
companies buying swaths of TLDs â for example, Google bought .google,
.docs, .youtube, and many more. The rest of us heard the price tag â a
cool $185,000 â and simply wrote this off as an interesting anecdote. What
you may not realize is that there's a phase two, and it's relevant to everyone
who owns a website (below: 544 new TLDs â cloud created with Tagxedo).
Phase 2: TLDs go live
You may have assumed that these TLDs would simply be bought up and tucked away
for private use by mega-corporations, Saudi Princes, and Justin Bieber. The
reality is that many of these TLDs are going to go live soon, and domains within
them are going to be sold to the public, just like traditional TLDs (.com, .net,
etc.). I talked to Steve Banfield, SVP Registrar Services at Demand Media (which
owns eNom and Name.com), to get the scoop on what this process will mean for
site owners.
Gold rush 2014
ICANN had more than 1,900 applications for TLDs, and of those Name.com
currently lists 544 that will be available for sale in the near future. These
domains cover a wide range of topics â here are just a few, to give you a
flavor of what's up for grabs:
.app
.attorney
.blog
.boston
.flowers
.marketing
.porn
.realtor
.store
.web
.wedding
.wtf
This is an unprecedented explosion in available domain names, and you can
expect a gold rush mentality as companies scoop up domains to protect trademarks
and chase new opportunities and as individuals register a wide variety of vanity
domains. So, when do these domains go on sale, and how much will they cost? As
Steve explained to me, this gets a bit trickyâ
"Sunrise" & Pre-registration
Understandably, ICANN is reluctant to simply release hundreds of TLDs into the
wild all at once and upset the ecosystem. As the TLDs have been granted, they've
been gradually delegated to the global DNS and are coming online in batches. As
each TLD becomes available, it has to undergo a 60-day "sunrise" period. This
period allows trademark holder to register claims and potentially lock down
protected words. For example, Dell may want to lock down dell.computer or
Amazon.com may grab amazon.book. These domains must still be registered (and
paid for), but trademark holders get first dibs across any new TLD. Trademark
disputes are a separate, legal issue (and beyond the scope of this post).
Some registrars will allow pre-registration during or immediately following
the sunrise period. While you can't technically register a domain without a
trademark claim during the 60 day sunrise, they'll essentially add you to a
waiting list. This gets complicated, as multiple registrars could all have
people on their waiting list for the same domain, so there are no guarantees.
Some registrars are also charging premium prices for pre-registration, and those
premiums could carry into your renewals, so read the fine print carefully.
Facts and figures
Once sunrise and pre-registration end, general availability begins. You may be
wondering â when is that, exactly? The short answer is: it's complicated.
I'll attempt to answer the big questions, with Steve's help:
When do the new domains go on sale?
The first group of domains began their sunrise period on November 26, 2013,
and it ends on January 24, 2014. After that, additional domains will come into
play in small groups, throughout the year. To find out about any particular
domain/TLD, your best bet is to use a service like Name.com's TLD watch-list,
which sends status notifications about specific domains you're interested in.
Your own registrar of choice may have a similar service. The specifics of any
given TLD will vary.
How much will the new domains cost?
Unfortunately, it depends. Each TLD can be priced differently, and even within
a TLD, some domains may go for a premium rate. A few TLDs will probably be
auction-based and not fixed-price. Use a watch-list tool or investigate your
domains of choice individually.
What kind of a land grab can we expect?
With over 500 TLDs in play over the course of months, it's nearly impossible
to say. Some domains, like .attorney, will clearly be competitive in local
markets, and you can expect a gold rush mentality. Other domains, like .guru may
be popular for vanity URLs. Regional and niche domains, like .okinawa or .rodeo
are going to have a smaller audience. Then there are wildcards, like .ninja,
that are really anyone's guess.
SEO implications
Naturally, as a Moz reader, you may be wondering what weight the new TLDs will
have with search engines. Will a domain like seattle.attorney have the same
ranking benefit as a more traditional domain like seattleattorney.com? Google's
Matt Cutts has stated that the new TLDs won't have an advantage over existing
domains, but was unclear on whether keywords in the new domain extensions will
act as a ranking signal. I strongly suspect they will play this by ear, until
they know how each of the new TLDs is being used. In my opinion, exact-match
domains are no longer as powerful without other signals to back them up, and
it's likely Google may lower the volume on some of the new TLDs or treat them
more like sub-domains in terms of ranking power. In other words, they'll
probably have some value, but don't expect miracles.
There may be indirect SEO benefits. For example, if you own seattle.attorney,
it's more likely people will link to you with the phrase "Seattle attorney", and
since that's now your brand/domain, it's more likely to look natural (because
it's more likely to be natural). A well-matched name may also be more memorable,
in some cases, although it may take people some time to get used to the new
TLDs. To quote Steve directly:
What will matter is the memory of the end user and branding. Which is better:
hilton.com or hilton.hotel, chevrolet.com or chevrolet.cars, coors.com or
coors.beer? Today, it's easy to say the .com is "better" for brand recall, but
over time we'll have to see which works better for brand marketing.
My conservative opinion is this â don't scoop up dozens of domains just
in the hopes of magically ranking. Register domains that match your business
objectives or that you want to protect â either because of your own
trademarks or for future use. If you hit the domain game late and have a .com
that you hate (this-is-all-they-had-left.com), it might be a good time to
consider your options for something more memorable.
Todd Malicoat wrote an excellent post last year on choosing an exact-match
domain, and I think many of his tips are relevant to the new TLDs and any domain
purchase. Ultimately, some people will use the new TLDs creatively and
powerfully, and others will use them poorly. There's opportunity here, but it's
going to take planning, brand awareness, and ultimately, smart marketing.
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/~3/2c5MJBnbHnQ/next-domain-gold-rush
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Wednesday, 11 December 2013
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'Simplify Your Inbound Marketing
Process: Focus on Content Assets'
Posted by kaiserthesage
Content ties everything in the digital marketing realm togetherâthat's
why it is king.
Content creation has been the core part of my blog/business' inbound marketing
strategy this year, which was around 70% of my entire marketing effort. The
other 30% was allocated to content promotion/distribution, relationship
building, site optimization, and analytics.
So this post is basically a case study of how I simplified a very complex
process by only focusing on one integral part of inbound marketing (content),
and how that led to hundreds of service leads for our company this year.
On content strategy
Content assets help brands communicate their messages to their target
audiences. These may come in the form of visual guides, web-based tools,
extensive resources and many more (as also listed by Cyrus Shepard on his recent
Moz post).
In my case, I aim for every blog post I publish to be an asset that I can
continuously optimize and improve.
So in order for my overall campaign to be really scalable (and for me to be
able to easily integrate other inbound marketing practices), I based my content
development efforts on these core principles:
Create content that contains ideas/information that isn't found anywhere else.
Make the content very comprehensive and evergreen if possible.
And as for the content formats, I mostly focused on creating:
Case studies
Extensive and evergreen blog posts (how-to's)
Reusable content (newsletters, slide presentations, PDFs, etc.)
If in case you're wondering about the content assets I've repurposed, here are
few samples:
2 months ago, I released a 4 part newsletter series that talks about 12
different scalable link building tactics.
After a couple of weeks, I decided to publish the entire series as a long-form
blog post here on Moz.
Another sample is with one of my most popular guides this year (that was also
featured on Moz's top-10 monthly newsletter) entitled 22 link building tips from
@xightph, which I just recently turned into a SlideShare presentation:
22 Link Building Tips from Xight Interactive from kaiserthesage
Perhaps this approach of allocating the majority of my efforts into content
development is easier for me to accomplish because I established my blog's
readership 2 years before I tried it, and also given that I've already built
relationships with other online marketers who habitually share my new blog
posts.
I still believe that this exact process is replicable for those who haven't
yet established themselves. Since it always comes down to what you can provide
to your industry and finding ways to let others know you have it.
Content = links
Content assets are able to attract and build links over time, knowing that it
is in the nature of content to be genuinely linkable.
Link building becomes automatic when you focus on creating useful and
actionable content on a regular basis (and, of course, letting other people
who're interested in your content's topic know that your content exists).
Your content won't stand on its own and be linkable by itself, so it's also
important to make an effort for it to be more visible to your target audience.
Here are a few things you can do to ensure it'll get to your audience:
Outreach: Connect with other content publishers, industry influencers, and
enthusiasts, and see if they're interested in checking out your content.
Social ads: Use content placement services from Facebook or StumbleUpon to get
more eyeballs to your content.
Conversations: Participate and share your content on relevant discussions from
online communities in your space (forums, groups, blogs, Q&A sites, etc.).
Distribution: Promote your content assets through other content distribution
channels such as guest blogging, regular columns, newsletters, slide
presentations, videos, or podcasts.
Further reading:
How to promote and build links to your great content
32 experts share their best content promotion tips
Content = relationships
Providing high-value content assets on a regular basis will also help you
easily connect and engage other content publishers in your industry.
This can somehow impact how other people perceive your brand as a publisher,
especially when other thought leaders are sharing your content, interacting with
your brand, and inviting you to contribute to their websites (which is quite
similar to what Moz has done in past years).
Relationships, partnerships, and alliances are vital in this age of marketing,
as they can help increase your readership and follower base, and can
particularly help improve the shareability of your site's content.
Here are a few pointers on how to engage and build relationships with industry
influencers:
Mention or use their works as a reference for your content. You can also ask
them to review and validate the information within your content to build a
rapport (which is also a great way to get them to see the quality of your work).
Make sure that your content appeals to their audience/followers; this increases
the likelihood of getting your content shared.
Don't worry. You don't have any reason to be afraid to reach out to influencers
when you're really confident with the caliber of your content.
Content = social activity
With the right push, a well-thought-out piece of content will almost always do
well in terms of social sharing. Most content assets are designed to be
share-worthy, and the common factors that make most content assets shareable
are:
Their design and if they're visually appealing.
If they've been shared by popular/influential entities in their industries.
If the content is emotionally compelling, educational, useful, and/or just
simply adds unique value to the industry.
Making your linkable assets timeless or evergreen can also amplify its social
activity, given that every time it gets a new visitor the content remains
relevant, which can continuously increase the amount of social shares it is
getting.
And the more you create content assets on your website, the more you can grow
your following base and network. Which is why content plays a big role in social
media - because it's what people are sharing.
For more actionable tips on increasing your content assets' social activity,
you might want to also check the post I wrote a few weeks ago at Hit Reach on
how to get more social shares for your site.
Content = search rankings
The ways in which search engines determine web pages' importance (and whether
they really deserve to be prominently visible in search results) have evolved
over the years.
Major factors such as relevance (which can be measured through usage/page
activity) and authority (measured through social, links, domain authority, brand
signals, etc.), though, still play a huge role in terms of search rankings.
These metrics are also elements that most successful content assets embody.
Great content generates rankings.
A couple of pointers on making the most out of your site's content pool to
boost your SEO:
Turn the pages on your website that target key industry terms into evergreen
content assets.
Optimize your important pages/content assets for interaction, conversions, and
user-experience. For example, test your pages' CTAs, encourag people to share
the content, etc. These are the key areas that will make your pages rank better
in search results.
Further reading:
How to optimize content for search
Content = email subscribers
Email marketing is an essential part of inbound marketing, because it's a
marketing platform that many businesses have full control of (owned media).
Growing your email list is a whole lot easier when you're consistently putting
new content up on your site (and especially when you consider every piece of
content you launch as an asset).
The more content you publish, the more people get to discover your brand,
which can ultimately increase your chances of getting them to subscribe or sign
up for your email newsletter.
Tips on how to increase email sign-ups:
Make your opt-in form(s) very visible on the site's key landing pages.
Incentivize sign-ups by offering free content such as ebooks, whitepapers,
newsletter series, and/or access to free web-based tools.
Content = conversions
Content assets can definitely lift conversions, mainly because they can
strongly demonstrate the brand's domain expertise and authority.
If you've planted a lot of useful and actionable content on your site, then
these things are influencing your site's ability to convert visitors.
More on improving your content assets' conversions:
Identify which landing pages/assets are constantly driving sales/new
customers/service inquiries to your business. Make them more visible by building
more internal/incoming links to them, improving or updating the content itself
to earn better search rankings, sharing them on social networks, or basically
anything that can improve their traffic.
Continually test and improve the content's calls to action.
Becoming a better inbound marketer
Before I became an SEO in 2010, I was a freelance writer. It never occurred to
me that I'd be doing both in the futureâand actually more.
But I guess knowing how to get the right traffic and having a better grasp of
the kinds of content that my audience needs and wants to read made me a better
inbound marketer.
I would love to hear your ideas about this approach to inbound marketing, or
if you have questions, I'd also love to see them in the comments section. You
can also follow me on Twitter @jasonacidre.
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/uwE3pKU0zTc/simplify-your-inbound-marketing-process-focus-on-content-assets
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
Process: Focus on Content Assets'
Posted by kaiserthesage
Content ties everything in the digital marketing realm togetherâthat's
why it is king.
Content creation has been the core part of my blog/business' inbound marketing
strategy this year, which was around 70% of my entire marketing effort. The
other 30% was allocated to content promotion/distribution, relationship
building, site optimization, and analytics.
So this post is basically a case study of how I simplified a very complex
process by only focusing on one integral part of inbound marketing (content),
and how that led to hundreds of service leads for our company this year.
On content strategy
Content assets help brands communicate their messages to their target
audiences. These may come in the form of visual guides, web-based tools,
extensive resources and many more (as also listed by Cyrus Shepard on his recent
Moz post).
In my case, I aim for every blog post I publish to be an asset that I can
continuously optimize and improve.
So in order for my overall campaign to be really scalable (and for me to be
able to easily integrate other inbound marketing practices), I based my content
development efforts on these core principles:
Create content that contains ideas/information that isn't found anywhere else.
Make the content very comprehensive and evergreen if possible.
And as for the content formats, I mostly focused on creating:
Case studies
Extensive and evergreen blog posts (how-to's)
Reusable content (newsletters, slide presentations, PDFs, etc.)
If in case you're wondering about the content assets I've repurposed, here are
few samples:
2 months ago, I released a 4 part newsletter series that talks about 12
different scalable link building tactics.
After a couple of weeks, I decided to publish the entire series as a long-form
blog post here on Moz.
Another sample is with one of my most popular guides this year (that was also
featured on Moz's top-10 monthly newsletter) entitled 22 link building tips from
@xightph, which I just recently turned into a SlideShare presentation:
22 Link Building Tips from Xight Interactive from kaiserthesage
Perhaps this approach of allocating the majority of my efforts into content
development is easier for me to accomplish because I established my blog's
readership 2 years before I tried it, and also given that I've already built
relationships with other online marketers who habitually share my new blog
posts.
I still believe that this exact process is replicable for those who haven't
yet established themselves. Since it always comes down to what you can provide
to your industry and finding ways to let others know you have it.
Content = links
Content assets are able to attract and build links over time, knowing that it
is in the nature of content to be genuinely linkable.
Link building becomes automatic when you focus on creating useful and
actionable content on a regular basis (and, of course, letting other people
who're interested in your content's topic know that your content exists).
Your content won't stand on its own and be linkable by itself, so it's also
important to make an effort for it to be more visible to your target audience.
Here are a few things you can do to ensure it'll get to your audience:
Outreach: Connect with other content publishers, industry influencers, and
enthusiasts, and see if they're interested in checking out your content.
Social ads: Use content placement services from Facebook or StumbleUpon to get
more eyeballs to your content.
Conversations: Participate and share your content on relevant discussions from
online communities in your space (forums, groups, blogs, Q&A sites, etc.).
Distribution: Promote your content assets through other content distribution
channels such as guest blogging, regular columns, newsletters, slide
presentations, videos, or podcasts.
Further reading:
How to promote and build links to your great content
32 experts share their best content promotion tips
Content = relationships
Providing high-value content assets on a regular basis will also help you
easily connect and engage other content publishers in your industry.
This can somehow impact how other people perceive your brand as a publisher,
especially when other thought leaders are sharing your content, interacting with
your brand, and inviting you to contribute to their websites (which is quite
similar to what Moz has done in past years).
Relationships, partnerships, and alliances are vital in this age of marketing,
as they can help increase your readership and follower base, and can
particularly help improve the shareability of your site's content.
Here are a few pointers on how to engage and build relationships with industry
influencers:
Mention or use their works as a reference for your content. You can also ask
them to review and validate the information within your content to build a
rapport (which is also a great way to get them to see the quality of your work).
Make sure that your content appeals to their audience/followers; this increases
the likelihood of getting your content shared.
Don't worry. You don't have any reason to be afraid to reach out to influencers
when you're really confident with the caliber of your content.
Content = social activity
With the right push, a well-thought-out piece of content will almost always do
well in terms of social sharing. Most content assets are designed to be
share-worthy, and the common factors that make most content assets shareable
are:
Their design and if they're visually appealing.
If they've been shared by popular/influential entities in their industries.
If the content is emotionally compelling, educational, useful, and/or just
simply adds unique value to the industry.
Making your linkable assets timeless or evergreen can also amplify its social
activity, given that every time it gets a new visitor the content remains
relevant, which can continuously increase the amount of social shares it is
getting.
And the more you create content assets on your website, the more you can grow
your following base and network. Which is why content plays a big role in social
media - because it's what people are sharing.
For more actionable tips on increasing your content assets' social activity,
you might want to also check the post I wrote a few weeks ago at Hit Reach on
how to get more social shares for your site.
Content = search rankings
The ways in which search engines determine web pages' importance (and whether
they really deserve to be prominently visible in search results) have evolved
over the years.
Major factors such as relevance (which can be measured through usage/page
activity) and authority (measured through social, links, domain authority, brand
signals, etc.), though, still play a huge role in terms of search rankings.
These metrics are also elements that most successful content assets embody.
Great content generates rankings.
A couple of pointers on making the most out of your site's content pool to
boost your SEO:
Turn the pages on your website that target key industry terms into evergreen
content assets.
Optimize your important pages/content assets for interaction, conversions, and
user-experience. For example, test your pages' CTAs, encourag people to share
the content, etc. These are the key areas that will make your pages rank better
in search results.
Further reading:
How to optimize content for search
Content = email subscribers
Email marketing is an essential part of inbound marketing, because it's a
marketing platform that many businesses have full control of (owned media).
Growing your email list is a whole lot easier when you're consistently putting
new content up on your site (and especially when you consider every piece of
content you launch as an asset).
The more content you publish, the more people get to discover your brand,
which can ultimately increase your chances of getting them to subscribe or sign
up for your email newsletter.
Tips on how to increase email sign-ups:
Make your opt-in form(s) very visible on the site's key landing pages.
Incentivize sign-ups by offering free content such as ebooks, whitepapers,
newsletter series, and/or access to free web-based tools.
Content = conversions
Content assets can definitely lift conversions, mainly because they can
strongly demonstrate the brand's domain expertise and authority.
If you've planted a lot of useful and actionable content on your site, then
these things are influencing your site's ability to convert visitors.
More on improving your content assets' conversions:
Identify which landing pages/assets are constantly driving sales/new
customers/service inquiries to your business. Make them more visible by building
more internal/incoming links to them, improving or updating the content itself
to earn better search rankings, sharing them on social networks, or basically
anything that can improve their traffic.
Continually test and improve the content's calls to action.
Becoming a better inbound marketer
Before I became an SEO in 2010, I was a freelance writer. It never occurred to
me that I'd be doing both in the futureâand actually more.
But I guess knowing how to get the right traffic and having a better grasp of
the kinds of content that my audience needs and wants to read made me a better
inbound marketer.
I would love to hear your ideas about this approach to inbound marketing, or
if you have questions, I'd also love to see them in the comments section. You
can also follow me on Twitter @jasonacidre.
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/uwE3pKU0zTc/simplify-your-inbound-marketing-process-focus-on-content-assets
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, 10 December 2013
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, '4 Lessons From a Year of MozCast
Data'
Posted by BenMorel86This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the
main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The
author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz,
Inc.
We all know that over the past year, there have been some big updates to
Google's algorithms, and we have felt what it has been like to be in the middle
of those updates. I wanted to take a big step back and analyse the cumulative
effects of Google's updates. To do that, I asked four questions and analysed a
year of MozCast data to find the answers.
Looking back over the last year â or more precisely the last 15 months
through 1st September 2013 â I aimed to answer four questions I felt are
really important to SEOs and inbound marketers. These questions were:
Are there really more turbulent days in the SERPs than we should expect, or are
all SEOs British at heart and enjoy complaining about the weather?
If it's warmer today than yesterday, will it cool down tomorrow or get even
warmer?
It sometimes feels like big domains are taking over the SERPs; is this true, or
just me being paranoid?
What effects have Google's spam-fighting had on exact and partial domain
matches in SERPs?
Before We Start
First, thanks to Dr. Pete for sending me the dataset, and for checking this
post over before submission to make sure all the maths made sense.
Second, as has been discussed many times before on Moz, there is a big caveat
whenever we talk about statistics: correlation does not imply causation. It is
important not to reverse engineer a cause from an effect and get things muddled
up. In addition, Dr. Pete had a big caveat about this particular dataset:
"One major warning - I don't always correct metrics data past 90 days, so
sometimes there are issues with that data on the past. Notably, there was a
problem with how we counted YouTube results in November/December, so some
metrics like "Big 10" and diversity were out of whack during those months. In
the case of temperatures, we actively correct bad data, but we didn't catch this
problem early enoughâ
All that's to say that I can't actually verify that any given piece of past
data is completely accurate, outside of the temperatures (and a couple of those
days have been adjusted). So, proceed with caution."
So, with that warning, let's have a look at the data and see if we can start
to answer those questions.
Analysis: MozCast gives us a metric for turbulence straight away: temperature.
That makes this one of the easier questions to answer. All we need to do is to
take the temperature's mean, standard deviation, skew (to see whether the graph
is symmetric or not), and kurtosis (to see how "fat" the tails of the curve
are). Do that, and we get the following:
Mean
68.10F
Standard Deviation
10.68F
Skew
1.31
Kurtosis
2.60
What does all this mean? Well:
A normal day should feel pretty mild (to the Brits out there, 68F is 20C). The
standard deviation tells us that 90% of all days should be between 46F and 90F
(8C and 32C), which is a nicely temperate range.
However, the positive skew means that there are more days on the warm side than
the cool side of 68F.
On top of this, the positive kurtosis means we actually experience more days
above 90F than we would expect.
You can see all of this in the graph below, with its big, fat tail to the
right of the mean.
Graph showing the frequency of recorded temperatures (columns) and how a normal
distribution of temperatures would look (line).
As you can see from the graph, there have definitely been more warm days than
we would expect, and more days of extreme heat. In fact, while the normal
distribution tells us we should see temperatures over 100F (38C) about once a
year we have actually seen 14 of them. That's two full weeks of the year! Most
of those were in June of this year (the 10th, 14th, 18th, 19th, 26th, 28th, 29th
to be precise, coinciding with the multi-week update that Dr. Pete wrote about)
And it looks like we've had it especially bad over the last few months. If we
take data up to the end of May the average is only 66F (19C), so the average
temperature over the last three months has actually been a toasty 73F (23C).
Answer: The short answer to the question is "pretty turbulent, especially
recently". The high temperatures this summer indicate a lot of turbulence, while
the big fat tail on the temperature graph tells us that it has regularly been
warmer than we might expect throughout the last 15 months. We have had a number
of days of unusually high turbulence, and there are no truly calm days. So, it
looks like SEOs haven't just been griping about the unpredictable SERPs they've
had to deal with, they've been right.
Analysis: The real value of knowing about the weather is in being able to make
predictions with that knowledge. So, if today's MozCast shows is warmer than
yesterday it would be useful to know whether it will be warmer again tomorrow or
colder.
To find out, I turned to something called the Hurst exponent, H. If you want
the full explanation, which involves autocorrelations, rescaled ranges, and
partial time series, then head over to Wikipedia. If not, all you need to know
is that:
If H<0.5 then the data is anti-persistent (an up-swing today means that there
is likely to be a down-swing tomorrow)
If H>0.5 the data is persistent (an increase is likely to be followed by
another increase)
If H=0.5 then today's data has no effect on tomorrow's
The closer H is to 0 or 1 the longer the influence of a single day exists
through the data.
A normal distribution â like the red bell curve in the graph above
â has a Hurst exponent of H=0.5. Since we know the distribution of
temperatures with its definite lean and fat tails not normal, we can guess that
its Hurst exponent probably won't be 0.5. So, is the data persistent or
anti-persistent?
Well, as of 4th September that answer is persistent: H=0.68. But if you'd
asked on 16th July â just after Google's Multi-week Update but before The
Day The Knowledge Graph Exploded - the answer would have been "H=0.48, so
neither": it seems that one effect of that multi-week update was to reduce the
long-term predictability of search result changes. But back in May, before that
update, the answer would again have been "H=0.65, so the data is persistent".
Answer: With the current data, I am pretty confident in saying that if the last
few days have got steadily warmer, it's likely to get warmer again tomorrow. If
Google launches another major algorithm change, we might have to revisit that
conclusion. The good news is that the apparent persistence of temperature
changes should give us a few days warning of that algo change.
Analysis: We've all felt at some point like Wikipedia and About.com have taken
over the SERPs. That we're never going to beat Target or Tesco despite the fact
that they never seem to produce any interesting content. Again, MozCast supplies
us with a couple of ready-made metrics to analyse whether or not this is true or
not: Big 10 and Domain Diversity.
First, domain diversity. Plotting each day's domain diversity for the last 15
months gives you the graph below (I've taken a five-day moving average to reduce
noise and make trends clearer).
Trends in domain diversity, showing a clear drop in the number of domains in
the SERPs used for the MozCast.
As you can see, domain diversity has dropped quite a lot. It dropped 16% from
57% in June 2012 to 48% in August 2013. There were a couple of big dips in
domain diversity â 6th May 2012, 29th September 2012, and 31st January
2013 â but really this seems like a definite trend, not the result of a
few jumps.
Meanwhile, if we plot the proportion of the SERPs being taken over by the Big
10 we see a big increase over the same period, from 14.3% to 15.4%. That's an
increase of 8%.
Trends in the five-day moving average of the proportion of SERPs used in the
MozCast dataset taken up by the daily Big 10 domains.
Answer: The diversity of domains is almost certainly going down, and big
domains are taking over at least a portion of the space those smaller domains
leave behind. Whether this is a good or bad thing almost certainly depends on
personal opinion: somebody who owns one of the domains that have disappeared
from the listings would probably say it's a bad thing, Mr. Cutts would probably
say that a lot of the domains that have gone were spammy or full of thin content
so it's a good thing. Either way, it highlights the importance of building a
brand.
Analysis: Keyword-matched domains are a rather interesting subject. Looking
purely at the trends, the proportion of listings with exact (EMD) and partial
(PMD) matched domains is definitely going down. A few updates in particular have
had an effect: One huge jolt in December 2012 had a particular and long-lasting
effect, knocking 10% of EMDs and 10% of PMDs out of the listings; Matt Cutts
himself announced the bump in September 2012; and that multi-week update that
cause the temperature highs in June also bumped down the influence of PMDs.
Trends in the five day moving averages of Exact and Partial Matched Domain
(EMD and PMD) influence in the SERPs used in the MozCast dataset.
Not surprisingly, there is a strong correlation (0.86) between changes in the
proportion of EMDs and PMDs in the SERPs. What is more interesting is that there
is also a correlation (0.63) between their 10-day volatilities, the standard
deviation of all their values over the last 10 days. This implies that when one
metric sees a big swing it is likely that the other will see a big swing in the
same direction â mostly down, according to the graph. This supports the
statements Google have made about various updates tackling low-quality
keyword-matched domains.
Something else rather interesting that is linked to our previous question is
the very strong correlation between the portion proportion of PMDs in the SERPs
and domain diversity. This is a whopping 0.94, meaning that a move up or down in
domain diversity is almost always accompanied by a swing the same way for the
proportion of SERP space occupied by PMDs, and vice versa.
All of this would seem to indicate that keyword matching domains is becoming
less important in the search engines' eyes. But hold your conclusions-drawing
horses: this year's Moz ranking factors study tells us that "In our data
collected in early June (before the June 25 update), we found EMD correlations
to be relatively high at 0.17â just about on par with the value from our
2011 study". So, how can the correlation stay the same but the number of results
go down? Well, I would tend to agree with Matt Peters' hypothesis in that post
that it could be due to "Google removing lower quality EMDs". There is also the
fact that keyword matches do tend to have some relevance to searches: if I'm
looking for pizzas and I see benspizzzas.com in the listings I'm quite likely to
think "they sound like they do pizzas â I'll take a look at them". So
domain matches are still relevant to search queries, as long as they are
supported by relevant content.
So, how can the correlation stay the same but the numbers of results drop?
Well, the ranking factors report looks at how well sites rank once they have
already ranks. If only a few websites with EMDs rank but they rank very highly,
the correlation between rankings and domain matching might be the same as if a
number of websites rank way down the list. So if lower quality EMDs have been
removed from the ranking - as Dr. Matt and Dr. Pete speculate - but the ones
remaining rank higher than they used to, the correlation coefficient we measure
will be the same today in 2011.
Answer: The number of exact and partial matches is definitely going down, but
domain matches are still relevant to search queries â as long as they are
supported by relevant content. We know about this relevance because brands
constantly put their major services into their names: look at SEOmoz (before it
changed), or British Gas, or HSBC (Hong Kong-Shanghai Banking Corporation).
Brands do this because it means their customers can instantly see what they do
â and the same goes for domains.
So, if you plan on creating useful, interesting content for your industry then
go ahead and buy a domain with a keyword or two in. You could even buy the exact
match domain, even if that doesn't match your brand (although this might give
people trust issues, which is a whole different story). But if you don't plan on
creating that content, buying a keyword-matched domain looks unlikely to help
you, and you could even be in for a more rocky ride in the future than if you
stick to your branded domain.
Whew, that was a long post. So what conclusions can we draw from all of this?
Well, in short:
Although the "average" day is relatively uneventful, there are more hot, stormy
days than we would hope for
Keyword-matched domains, whether exact or partial, have seen a huge decline in
influence over the last 15 months â and if you own one, you've probably
seen some big drops in a short space of time
The SERPs are less diverse than they were a year ago, and the big brands have
extended their influence
When EMD/PMD influence drops, ERP diversity also drops. Could the two be
connected?
If today is warmer than yesterday, it's likely that tomorrow will be warmer
still
What are your thoughts on the past year? Does this analysis answer any
questions you had â or make you want to ask more? Let me know in the
comments below (if it does make you ask more questions I'll try to do some more
digging and answer them).
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/~3/7BrC1p1LrGU/4-lessons-from-a-year-of-mozcast-data
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
Data'
Posted by BenMorel86This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the
main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The
author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz,
Inc.
We all know that over the past year, there have been some big updates to
Google's algorithms, and we have felt what it has been like to be in the middle
of those updates. I wanted to take a big step back and analyse the cumulative
effects of Google's updates. To do that, I asked four questions and analysed a
year of MozCast data to find the answers.
Looking back over the last year â or more precisely the last 15 months
through 1st September 2013 â I aimed to answer four questions I felt are
really important to SEOs and inbound marketers. These questions were:
Are there really more turbulent days in the SERPs than we should expect, or are
all SEOs British at heart and enjoy complaining about the weather?
If it's warmer today than yesterday, will it cool down tomorrow or get even
warmer?
It sometimes feels like big domains are taking over the SERPs; is this true, or
just me being paranoid?
What effects have Google's spam-fighting had on exact and partial domain
matches in SERPs?
Before We Start
First, thanks to Dr. Pete for sending me the dataset, and for checking this
post over before submission to make sure all the maths made sense.
Second, as has been discussed many times before on Moz, there is a big caveat
whenever we talk about statistics: correlation does not imply causation. It is
important not to reverse engineer a cause from an effect and get things muddled
up. In addition, Dr. Pete had a big caveat about this particular dataset:
"One major warning - I don't always correct metrics data past 90 days, so
sometimes there are issues with that data on the past. Notably, there was a
problem with how we counted YouTube results in November/December, so some
metrics like "Big 10" and diversity were out of whack during those months. In
the case of temperatures, we actively correct bad data, but we didn't catch this
problem early enoughâ
All that's to say that I can't actually verify that any given piece of past
data is completely accurate, outside of the temperatures (and a couple of those
days have been adjusted). So, proceed with caution."
So, with that warning, let's have a look at the data and see if we can start
to answer those questions.
Analysis: MozCast gives us a metric for turbulence straight away: temperature.
That makes this one of the easier questions to answer. All we need to do is to
take the temperature's mean, standard deviation, skew (to see whether the graph
is symmetric or not), and kurtosis (to see how "fat" the tails of the curve
are). Do that, and we get the following:
Mean
68.10F
Standard Deviation
10.68F
Skew
1.31
Kurtosis
2.60
What does all this mean? Well:
A normal day should feel pretty mild (to the Brits out there, 68F is 20C). The
standard deviation tells us that 90% of all days should be between 46F and 90F
(8C and 32C), which is a nicely temperate range.
However, the positive skew means that there are more days on the warm side than
the cool side of 68F.
On top of this, the positive kurtosis means we actually experience more days
above 90F than we would expect.
You can see all of this in the graph below, with its big, fat tail to the
right of the mean.
Graph showing the frequency of recorded temperatures (columns) and how a normal
distribution of temperatures would look (line).
As you can see from the graph, there have definitely been more warm days than
we would expect, and more days of extreme heat. In fact, while the normal
distribution tells us we should see temperatures over 100F (38C) about once a
year we have actually seen 14 of them. That's two full weeks of the year! Most
of those were in June of this year (the 10th, 14th, 18th, 19th, 26th, 28th, 29th
to be precise, coinciding with the multi-week update that Dr. Pete wrote about)
And it looks like we've had it especially bad over the last few months. If we
take data up to the end of May the average is only 66F (19C), so the average
temperature over the last three months has actually been a toasty 73F (23C).
Answer: The short answer to the question is "pretty turbulent, especially
recently". The high temperatures this summer indicate a lot of turbulence, while
the big fat tail on the temperature graph tells us that it has regularly been
warmer than we might expect throughout the last 15 months. We have had a number
of days of unusually high turbulence, and there are no truly calm days. So, it
looks like SEOs haven't just been griping about the unpredictable SERPs they've
had to deal with, they've been right.
Analysis: The real value of knowing about the weather is in being able to make
predictions with that knowledge. So, if today's MozCast shows is warmer than
yesterday it would be useful to know whether it will be warmer again tomorrow or
colder.
To find out, I turned to something called the Hurst exponent, H. If you want
the full explanation, which involves autocorrelations, rescaled ranges, and
partial time series, then head over to Wikipedia. If not, all you need to know
is that:
If H<0.5 then the data is anti-persistent (an up-swing today means that there
is likely to be a down-swing tomorrow)
If H>0.5 the data is persistent (an increase is likely to be followed by
another increase)
If H=0.5 then today's data has no effect on tomorrow's
The closer H is to 0 or 1 the longer the influence of a single day exists
through the data.
A normal distribution â like the red bell curve in the graph above
â has a Hurst exponent of H=0.5. Since we know the distribution of
temperatures with its definite lean and fat tails not normal, we can guess that
its Hurst exponent probably won't be 0.5. So, is the data persistent or
anti-persistent?
Well, as of 4th September that answer is persistent: H=0.68. But if you'd
asked on 16th July â just after Google's Multi-week Update but before The
Day The Knowledge Graph Exploded - the answer would have been "H=0.48, so
neither": it seems that one effect of that multi-week update was to reduce the
long-term predictability of search result changes. But back in May, before that
update, the answer would again have been "H=0.65, so the data is persistent".
Answer: With the current data, I am pretty confident in saying that if the last
few days have got steadily warmer, it's likely to get warmer again tomorrow. If
Google launches another major algorithm change, we might have to revisit that
conclusion. The good news is that the apparent persistence of temperature
changes should give us a few days warning of that algo change.
Analysis: We've all felt at some point like Wikipedia and About.com have taken
over the SERPs. That we're never going to beat Target or Tesco despite the fact
that they never seem to produce any interesting content. Again, MozCast supplies
us with a couple of ready-made metrics to analyse whether or not this is true or
not: Big 10 and Domain Diversity.
First, domain diversity. Plotting each day's domain diversity for the last 15
months gives you the graph below (I've taken a five-day moving average to reduce
noise and make trends clearer).
Trends in domain diversity, showing a clear drop in the number of domains in
the SERPs used for the MozCast.
As you can see, domain diversity has dropped quite a lot. It dropped 16% from
57% in June 2012 to 48% in August 2013. There were a couple of big dips in
domain diversity â 6th May 2012, 29th September 2012, and 31st January
2013 â but really this seems like a definite trend, not the result of a
few jumps.
Meanwhile, if we plot the proportion of the SERPs being taken over by the Big
10 we see a big increase over the same period, from 14.3% to 15.4%. That's an
increase of 8%.
Trends in the five-day moving average of the proportion of SERPs used in the
MozCast dataset taken up by the daily Big 10 domains.
Answer: The diversity of domains is almost certainly going down, and big
domains are taking over at least a portion of the space those smaller domains
leave behind. Whether this is a good or bad thing almost certainly depends on
personal opinion: somebody who owns one of the domains that have disappeared
from the listings would probably say it's a bad thing, Mr. Cutts would probably
say that a lot of the domains that have gone were spammy or full of thin content
so it's a good thing. Either way, it highlights the importance of building a
brand.
Analysis: Keyword-matched domains are a rather interesting subject. Looking
purely at the trends, the proportion of listings with exact (EMD) and partial
(PMD) matched domains is definitely going down. A few updates in particular have
had an effect: One huge jolt in December 2012 had a particular and long-lasting
effect, knocking 10% of EMDs and 10% of PMDs out of the listings; Matt Cutts
himself announced the bump in September 2012; and that multi-week update that
cause the temperature highs in June also bumped down the influence of PMDs.
Trends in the five day moving averages of Exact and Partial Matched Domain
(EMD and PMD) influence in the SERPs used in the MozCast dataset.
Not surprisingly, there is a strong correlation (0.86) between changes in the
proportion of EMDs and PMDs in the SERPs. What is more interesting is that there
is also a correlation (0.63) between their 10-day volatilities, the standard
deviation of all their values over the last 10 days. This implies that when one
metric sees a big swing it is likely that the other will see a big swing in the
same direction â mostly down, according to the graph. This supports the
statements Google have made about various updates tackling low-quality
keyword-matched domains.
Something else rather interesting that is linked to our previous question is
the very strong correlation between the portion proportion of PMDs in the SERPs
and domain diversity. This is a whopping 0.94, meaning that a move up or down in
domain diversity is almost always accompanied by a swing the same way for the
proportion of SERP space occupied by PMDs, and vice versa.
All of this would seem to indicate that keyword matching domains is becoming
less important in the search engines' eyes. But hold your conclusions-drawing
horses: this year's Moz ranking factors study tells us that "In our data
collected in early June (before the June 25 update), we found EMD correlations
to be relatively high at 0.17â just about on par with the value from our
2011 study". So, how can the correlation stay the same but the number of results
go down? Well, I would tend to agree with Matt Peters' hypothesis in that post
that it could be due to "Google removing lower quality EMDs". There is also the
fact that keyword matches do tend to have some relevance to searches: if I'm
looking for pizzas and I see benspizzzas.com in the listings I'm quite likely to
think "they sound like they do pizzas â I'll take a look at them". So
domain matches are still relevant to search queries, as long as they are
supported by relevant content.
So, how can the correlation stay the same but the numbers of results drop?
Well, the ranking factors report looks at how well sites rank once they have
already ranks. If only a few websites with EMDs rank but they rank very highly,
the correlation between rankings and domain matching might be the same as if a
number of websites rank way down the list. So if lower quality EMDs have been
removed from the ranking - as Dr. Matt and Dr. Pete speculate - but the ones
remaining rank higher than they used to, the correlation coefficient we measure
will be the same today in 2011.
Answer: The number of exact and partial matches is definitely going down, but
domain matches are still relevant to search queries â as long as they are
supported by relevant content. We know about this relevance because brands
constantly put their major services into their names: look at SEOmoz (before it
changed), or British Gas, or HSBC (Hong Kong-Shanghai Banking Corporation).
Brands do this because it means their customers can instantly see what they do
â and the same goes for domains.
So, if you plan on creating useful, interesting content for your industry then
go ahead and buy a domain with a keyword or two in. You could even buy the exact
match domain, even if that doesn't match your brand (although this might give
people trust issues, which is a whole different story). But if you don't plan on
creating that content, buying a keyword-matched domain looks unlikely to help
you, and you could even be in for a more rocky ride in the future than if you
stick to your branded domain.
Whew, that was a long post. So what conclusions can we draw from all of this?
Well, in short:
Although the "average" day is relatively uneventful, there are more hot, stormy
days than we would hope for
Keyword-matched domains, whether exact or partial, have seen a huge decline in
influence over the last 15 months â and if you own one, you've probably
seen some big drops in a short space of time
The SERPs are less diverse than they were a year ago, and the big brands have
extended their influence
When EMD/PMD influence drops, ERP diversity also drops. Could the two be
connected?
If today is warmer than yesterday, it's likely that tomorrow will be warmer
still
What are your thoughts on the past year? Does this analysis answer any
questions you had â or make you want to ask more? Let me know in the
comments below (if it does make you ask more questions I'll try to do some more
digging and answer them).
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/~3/7BrC1p1LrGU/4-lessons-from-a-year-of-mozcast-data
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
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
