Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'Getting Reviews the Right Way for
Local Businesses'
Posted by katemorris
It's the bane of every business that relies on local traffic: reviews. Reviews
are not new to business. We have been dealing with them in business since we had
businesses and people could talk. In the last few years, we have been able to
participate in the conversations that happen between consumers. Local reviews
are just an extension of word of mouth marketing. It's a permanent record of
consumer's thoughts of your business much like social media.
The worst part is having no reviews, or having reviews (GLOWING reviews) from
real customers, and Yelp doesn't show or count them. Reviews are the links of
the local world. They drive new business and are imperative to growth. However,
if you ask for one or incentivize their posting, they might not count.
Yelp Review Guidelines:
"You shouldn't ask your customers to post reviews on Yelp."
Google+ Review Guidelines:
"Reviews are only valuable when they are honest and unbiased â Don't
offer money or product to others to write reviews for your business or write
negative reviews about a competitor. We also discourage specialized review
stations or kiosks set up at your place of business for the sole purpose of
soliciting reviews."
What's a business owner to do?!
Learn from link building
This is going to come at an odd time as link building (guest posting) is hot
in the search media right now, but the link building world has been through this
exact situation and local businesses can learn from it.
Don't chase tactics. Look for inspiration from other businesses but modify
ideas to your business and your users. Just like link building, if your reviews
show up in a pattern, that pattern is detectable by a computer algorithm and
will likely be discounted.
Anything that is pattern-based is detectable, including:
IP address of the reviewer: Never ask for reviews from your location(s).
Timeline: This means if a number of reviews come in together over a period of
time, think all in one day or one week. It reflects that they were asked to
leave a review in one big push.
Same phrases: If many reviews use the same phrasing, it can look orchestrated.
Scale is the enemy. Along the same lines as the patterns discussion above,
trying to scale reviews is going to produce detectable trends. Don't try to go
out and get reviews en masse. You need them, yes, but a slow trend is the better
way to get them. This brings us to the next point: influence.
Influence and integrate
We just covered what not to do; now let's review how to go about getting
reviews that are approved, shown, and can help grow your business. Just like
links, reviews are best when they are placed there without your interaction, but
that doesn't mean you should ignore the matter completely. Businesses can
influence people to leave reviews. Influence, not entice or coerce. Influence
with communication.
Guaranteed reviews: knock down, drag-out fantastic customer service
This is the one solid way to get reviews without ever having to mention the
word review. I'm talking Zappos, Nordstrom, and Amazon level of customer
service. You treat your customersâall of themâlike they are kings
and queens. Give them no choice but to tell people about you. The following is a
review for one of my favorite food trucks in Seattle:
This is a long time investment though and I know not everyone has the time or
thinks about leaving reviews. You can't make great customer service happen IRL
sometimes, it's not always you in control. Regardless, this is still the best
long-term solution.
But businesses have immediate needs, so here is how to address getting more
reviews now.
Define your customer lifecycle
The key is laying out the standard lifecycle of a customer. I am going to pick
on a favorite local business that inspired this post: Dreamclinic Seattle. The
blue is online interaction, purple is in-person interaction. You can get more
color coded with medium (email, organic, yellow pages, etc.) but I went with
simple.
The main point of outlining the customer lifecycle is to see the cycle part of
it and realize you have more than one opportunity to influence a review. Most
businesses that rely on reviews have a customer lifecycle. If you haven't
defined yours, do that now.
Integrate with all email marketing
1. Define email contact points
Once you have the customer lifecycle, add in when you normally contact your
customers via email. You want to know when they are already online and thinking
about you (this is key to online engagement!). There should be a few
opportunities like newsletters, offers, post-purchase, post-visit, and
confirmations. It doesn't matter if you are selling a good or a service, there
should be communication throughout the customer lifecycle.
2. When will the customer be in the right frame of mind to leave a review?
Now consider when the customer is going to be able to write the best review.
Sometimes it'll be almost immediately after the purchase, sometimes a few weeks
after. For example: Dreamclinic needs to have a "Drink water!" reminder email an
hour after a massage with a mention of social media and scheduling the next
appointment (the mentions being side thoughts and the water being the main
purpose).
3. Communicate for something other than a review.
Once you know when the best time is, line that up with a communication with
the customer that is not about a review. Find another reason to get a hold of
them. It can be a customer service survey or just a check in about their
purchase. In this email, don't attempt to sell them anything, be genuinely
interested in how they are feeling. If you get a reply (an engaged customer),
then be sure to mention (one-on-one) that you would appreciate a review.
Notice that this whole process is basically identifying people that want to
leave a review, are engaged with your brand, and are conversing with you
individually. There is nothing about scale here; it's all about identifying
people individually and helping them help your business.
Mention social media in all communication
Beyond email, you should be mentioning your best converting and favorite
social media outlets for your business to your customers. Not for reviews, but
for engagement. Reviews will come with engagement.
Start with the questions:
Where do you get the most community involvement?
Are you a new business? If so, where do your competitors see more engagement?
List those places, don't just use Facebook and Twitter because you "should."
Once you know your top converting communities, mention them to your customers in
all parts of the life cycle. Think about your business cards, mailers, receipts,
the chalkboard outside, your menu, and more. Check out some inspiration I found
from Heidi Cohen.
Remember, mention your online communities and integrate the mentions into the
whole lifecycle, and the reviews will roll in naturally.
Speaking of local search issues, have you heard about the new Moz Local?
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/V_ULeGYoplc/getting-reviews-the-right-way-for-local-businesses
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Monday, 24 March 2014
Friday, 21 March 2014
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'How Can Mobile SEO Help my
Non-Mobile or Local Business?'
Posted by randfish
Google recently said that mobile search volume could exceed desktop search
volume by the end of 2014. Don't panic, though; there's quite a bit more nuance
to the trend than most people realize.
In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand helps us understand that nuance, and talks
about how we can level-up our mobile game in ways that will benefit our
businesses regardless of whether and when Google's forecast comes true.
Whiteboard Friday - How Can Mobile SEO Help My Non-Mobile or Local
Business_1
For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!
Video transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This
week I thought it was very interesting that Google came out and said mobile
search volume may exceed desktop search volume by the end of 2014, by the end of
year 2014. So next year, 2015, we might be living in a world where there are
more searches on mobile devices than there are on desktops and laptops, which is
fascinating. But I think it's very important to take a few steps back and
realize what's going on here and then apply and say, "All right, how can mobile
SEO, mobile search really help my business, even if I'm not a local-serving or a
mobile-serving business?"
Well, all right. The first thing that I think is very important is in the
statistic are some intricacies. They're not flaws or inaccuracies, they're just
intricacies. Many searchers around the world, particularly in the regions that
are growing the fastest, and we're talking about a lot of parts of Southeast
Asia, the Mid-East, Africa, South America, underdeveloped parts of North
America, and Europe even are getting mobile before they get desktops and
laptops. It's also the case that many young people are using mobile devices
before they're using desktops and laptops, particularly in age groups where
they're not doing professional kinds of work yet.
So it's often the case that you have to ask yourself, "Well, who really are
the people who are really accounting for this growth?" It could very well be
that they are not in your target demographic, psychographic, age range, all
these types of groups, geographic groups.
It's also the case that a lot of mobile devices now are offering a
close-to-laptop experience. I mean one of the things that I was shocked by
mobile not really changing all that much dramatically. It did have a lot of big
changes and has had a lot of big changes on the world of technology and the
world of how we use the Web and software. But one of the things that I was
surprised about that didn't happen is that it hasn't taken away from those
things. In a lot of ways that's because the experience is so close to what you
get with a desktop and laptop, particularly with very advanced devices. You can
do so many of the things, close to almost of the things that you could do with a
desktop or laptop. I almost think of my mobile device as just as a smaller,
slightly-less-convenient-for-long-typing laptop. It's pretty much like that.
So as you're looking at the statistic, I think that a lot of companies, a lot
of executives, a lot of marketing folks are going, "Oh my god, what's our mobile
strategy?" It is good to be asking that question, but you might not want to
panic. One of the things that we did recently at Moz is we took a look at what
is the percent of people who have ever tried to access our websites via mobile
devices, and it turns out the percent was shockingly low. It was like 3% or 4%,
I think less than 4% of people even today, which is up only slightly from last
year, when it was like 3.5%. Now it's like 3.7% or something of all of our
visits come via any type of mobile device.
We don't have responsive design or a great mobile experience on many of our
pages, but we do on a few things, for example, on my personal blog,
moz.com/rand. So we looked at, "Hey, is there a difference between people
accessing moz.com/rand, which is sort of very mobile-friendly versus the main
blog, which is not mobile-friendly," because that might tell us something about
our audiences. We looked and there is a difference. It's the opposite of what
you would expect. The responsive-design-friendly one, my blog, gets an even
lower percent of its traffic from mobile devices than the main Moz blog does.
So really mobile is not, at least not yet our audience. We're still thinking
about it of course, and in fact responsive design is on the list of the Inbound
Engineering team. So in the next few months you should be seeing a
mobile-responsive site for the very small percent of you who do like to browse
Moz on mobile.
Doing that type of work, figuring that out, and looking at trend lines as
well can be really helpful. The other thing I might urge you to do is think very
carefully about, "Hey, I might want to be buying some advertising on places like
Google and Facebook," and looking at the percent of those advertising bodies
that are on mobile versus desktop, because it could be the case that you've just
trained your customers. For example, Moz, maybe we've trained our customers not
to browse us on mobile because we don't have a great mobile experience, and
that's what biasing.
So I would urge you to think about who these groups are, whether they're in
your world, those kinds of things, before you go figuring out whether this is a
critical question to answer. The chances are though eventually it will be an
important question to answer, and when it is, you need to think a little bit
about the mobile user experience and what a mobile user can do for your
business, especially if you're not particularly focused on local or mobile types
of searches today.
So a mobile user has these sort of buckets that I like to put into what
they're doing with their device when they perform searches in Google or in Bing.
Those are sort of needs: I must find this place right now. I must get the hours
for this. I must know when it's open. Their wants: I'm interested in this. I
want to price compare something. Their curiosity: I think probably almost half
of the queries that I do have to do with who was in what particular movie at a
dinner table. I suspect many of you are the same. And then there are fun sorts
of things as well, people looking for games, looking for distractions. I browse
Reddit and Hacker News, which I guess is some combination between work and fun,
a lot on my phone, particularly if I'm in a store with my wife and she's
shopping and I don't need to go shopping right then.
This is a little bit different in fitting into the classic informational,
navigational, transactional models of search usage. But in mobile you can
actually think of the vast majority of mobile queries falling into the
informational and navigational. Transactional is still very low. E-commerce
rates, conversion rates, email entry rates, a lot of those things where people
do something and they enter data in and they complete some sort of call to
action on mobile are still way, way, way lower than they are on desktop. The
caveat to that being if you're targeting a group of folks who mobile is their
primary or only device, be aware that these rates may be much, much higher. If
you're dealing with US consumers who have mobile and have desktop/laptop, well,
then transactional rates are likely to be much lower, and navigational and
informational are most of the things that you're going to want to serve.
Now, when it comes to mobile, I really think of mobile in a lot of the same
ways that I think about social from a funnel perspective. So if I'm thinking
about the marketing funnel and I have discovery, my first discovery of a brand,
my first acknowledgement of its existence, and then my first experience, my
first visit to that website, most of that mobile SEO should be done around these
two things -- the discovery and the first experience. I'll talk about some tips
and ways to do this. But what I really mean here is that you want visitors who
come via these channels, who come via mobile search, in particular, to want to
come back later, and that means providing an experience, providing a brand
experience, providing a message that's really clear about what your company,
product, information can offer them and why they should return in the future,
why they should like you and trust you, why you're a good site for them to check
out in the future when they might have more of those transactional things,
because chances are they're not going to do them on that first mobile
experience.
Now, a few tips for mobile SEO. The first one maybe is the most critical. I
worry most about that experience for informational and navigational searchers,
and because I worry about that, there's actually a way to figure out which pages
are the most important. So what I can do, you can sort in your Google Analytics
or whatever analytic system you've got, you can sort pages receiving traffic
from search engines by mobile device. Then you'll get kind of a list of URLs.
You get that list of pages. These are the pages where Google sends traffic from
mobile devices to my site today.
Now, in addition to obviously fixing up and making sure that these mobile
experiences are positive, the caveat to this is Google does have some biasing on
mobile. So they do look and they'll say, "Hey, this site is not providing a
great responsive design. The pages aren't loading fast. It's not targeted to the
geography that we know the phone is in," all these kinds of things, and so they
may be actually reducing your mobile traffic. Thus, it might pay to do some
experimentation on, "Hey, let's take a group of these pages that are down here,
that aren't receiving much traffic. Let's do some mobile SEO, and let's see what
happens, see if we can't improve that. " If that is the case, implementing some
mobile SEO best practices, speeding up the pages, putting a responsive design in
place, etc., if that can improve these, then you know what your opportunity cost
is and where you might want to invest.
The second thing, you'll see this as a mobile user, and many times pushing or
forcing an app download on someone, while it does mean that you get them more
into your fold potentially, assuming they ever use the app, it's rarely the best
user experience. In fact, oftentimes some of the folks who've done some of the
most extensive testing, the online dating world is one of these where they've
done a lot of testing of this, what they've found is providing a great
experience or pretty good experience on mobile through the Web for searchers and
then having just a slight message that is, "Hey, we have an app. You can do even
more with our app," that kind of thing, almost like an advertisement on the
website actually works better than sort of the experience you get from LinkedIn
or Yelp, where every time you visit on your mobile device they try and force you
to download.
Now, LinkedIn and Yelp are very different because they are very
mobile-centric and they do want that capture. Perhaps they are willing to
sacrifice some of the usability and user experience. But you should be aware
that Google might be looking at that, and if they're seeing that pogo-sticking,
people jumping away from the Yelp or LinkedIn page back to the search results,
remember they might be downgrading and not letting those pages rank so well over
time.
Third thing, even if you don't have responsive design, and there are still
many, many companies like Moz who don't yet have responsive design, you can do a
lot of things to improve the performance of your mobile pages, and that includes
obviously speeding up download speeds, but limiting ads, particularly overlays.
A lot of folks, especially in the technology and marketing industries and in a
lot of B2Bs, have those popovers, the overlays that ask for an email capture or
ask you to dismiss a message or those kinds of things, that can be a very
frustrating experience on mobile because it's so hard to close those. You have
to sort of zoom in on my phone and then like hit that little tiny x. Extremely
annoying, you can see those pogo-sticking rates going up again. So even just
surfing around with your mobile device on your own site, figuring out if you
should turn those off, that can have a positive impact.
Then number four, a lot of the testing that we've seen from folks who do
conversion rate optimization is that with mobile limiting choice is even more
valuable than it is on a desktop/laptop experience, and I think part of the
reason for that is that you don't have the opportunity to do as much
investigation as easily and as quickly on a mobile device as you do a
desktop/laptop. So limiting the choice on all sorts of things, on navigation,
limiting choice on calls to action, limiting choice on sharing, for example, it
can be really helpful. So a lot of the time, with content marketers, what you're
doing with mobile is trying to attract people whose first experience is going to
be, "Wow, this content is really interesting. I might share this. I might Tweet
it. I might share it on Facebook. I might put it Instagram." Well, maybe
Instagram not so much, but LinkedIn, Google+.
So that is somewhere where we've seen some of the very, very smart content
sites, people like BuzzFeed and Upworthy, what they do is they look at how
mobile traffic shares, and they say, "You know what? We're actually not going to
have four buttons. We're only going to have one button. It's only going to be
the Facebook Share button," or "It's only going to be the Tweet button," or
"We're going to look at how the visitor came to the page, and then we're going
to provide a sharing call to action based on that." So for those of you who are
doing content marketing, you might want to consider limiting that choice as
well.
There's lots and lots of other things that we can do with mobile SEO, but I
think this is a good starting point and, especially considering Google's
announcement here, a timely one. So I look forward to all of the advice and
comments down below, and we'll see you again next week for another edition of
Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten
hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think
of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but
want to read!
You may view the latest post at
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/seomoz/~3/aXMzTtuO43U/how-can-mobile-seo-help-my-nonmobile-or-local-business
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
Non-Mobile or Local Business?'
Posted by randfish
Google recently said that mobile search volume could exceed desktop search
volume by the end of 2014. Don't panic, though; there's quite a bit more nuance
to the trend than most people realize.
In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand helps us understand that nuance, and talks
about how we can level-up our mobile game in ways that will benefit our
businesses regardless of whether and when Google's forecast comes true.
Whiteboard Friday - How Can Mobile SEO Help My Non-Mobile or Local
Business_1
For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!
Video transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This
week I thought it was very interesting that Google came out and said mobile
search volume may exceed desktop search volume by the end of 2014, by the end of
year 2014. So next year, 2015, we might be living in a world where there are
more searches on mobile devices than there are on desktops and laptops, which is
fascinating. But I think it's very important to take a few steps back and
realize what's going on here and then apply and say, "All right, how can mobile
SEO, mobile search really help my business, even if I'm not a local-serving or a
mobile-serving business?"
Well, all right. The first thing that I think is very important is in the
statistic are some intricacies. They're not flaws or inaccuracies, they're just
intricacies. Many searchers around the world, particularly in the regions that
are growing the fastest, and we're talking about a lot of parts of Southeast
Asia, the Mid-East, Africa, South America, underdeveloped parts of North
America, and Europe even are getting mobile before they get desktops and
laptops. It's also the case that many young people are using mobile devices
before they're using desktops and laptops, particularly in age groups where
they're not doing professional kinds of work yet.
So it's often the case that you have to ask yourself, "Well, who really are
the people who are really accounting for this growth?" It could very well be
that they are not in your target demographic, psychographic, age range, all
these types of groups, geographic groups.
It's also the case that a lot of mobile devices now are offering a
close-to-laptop experience. I mean one of the things that I was shocked by
mobile not really changing all that much dramatically. It did have a lot of big
changes and has had a lot of big changes on the world of technology and the
world of how we use the Web and software. But one of the things that I was
surprised about that didn't happen is that it hasn't taken away from those
things. In a lot of ways that's because the experience is so close to what you
get with a desktop and laptop, particularly with very advanced devices. You can
do so many of the things, close to almost of the things that you could do with a
desktop or laptop. I almost think of my mobile device as just as a smaller,
slightly-less-convenient-for-long-typing laptop. It's pretty much like that.
So as you're looking at the statistic, I think that a lot of companies, a lot
of executives, a lot of marketing folks are going, "Oh my god, what's our mobile
strategy?" It is good to be asking that question, but you might not want to
panic. One of the things that we did recently at Moz is we took a look at what
is the percent of people who have ever tried to access our websites via mobile
devices, and it turns out the percent was shockingly low. It was like 3% or 4%,
I think less than 4% of people even today, which is up only slightly from last
year, when it was like 3.5%. Now it's like 3.7% or something of all of our
visits come via any type of mobile device.
We don't have responsive design or a great mobile experience on many of our
pages, but we do on a few things, for example, on my personal blog,
moz.com/rand. So we looked at, "Hey, is there a difference between people
accessing moz.com/rand, which is sort of very mobile-friendly versus the main
blog, which is not mobile-friendly," because that might tell us something about
our audiences. We looked and there is a difference. It's the opposite of what
you would expect. The responsive-design-friendly one, my blog, gets an even
lower percent of its traffic from mobile devices than the main Moz blog does.
So really mobile is not, at least not yet our audience. We're still thinking
about it of course, and in fact responsive design is on the list of the Inbound
Engineering team. So in the next few months you should be seeing a
mobile-responsive site for the very small percent of you who do like to browse
Moz on mobile.
Doing that type of work, figuring that out, and looking at trend lines as
well can be really helpful. The other thing I might urge you to do is think very
carefully about, "Hey, I might want to be buying some advertising on places like
Google and Facebook," and looking at the percent of those advertising bodies
that are on mobile versus desktop, because it could be the case that you've just
trained your customers. For example, Moz, maybe we've trained our customers not
to browse us on mobile because we don't have a great mobile experience, and
that's what biasing.
So I would urge you to think about who these groups are, whether they're in
your world, those kinds of things, before you go figuring out whether this is a
critical question to answer. The chances are though eventually it will be an
important question to answer, and when it is, you need to think a little bit
about the mobile user experience and what a mobile user can do for your
business, especially if you're not particularly focused on local or mobile types
of searches today.
So a mobile user has these sort of buckets that I like to put into what
they're doing with their device when they perform searches in Google or in Bing.
Those are sort of needs: I must find this place right now. I must get the hours
for this. I must know when it's open. Their wants: I'm interested in this. I
want to price compare something. Their curiosity: I think probably almost half
of the queries that I do have to do with who was in what particular movie at a
dinner table. I suspect many of you are the same. And then there are fun sorts
of things as well, people looking for games, looking for distractions. I browse
Reddit and Hacker News, which I guess is some combination between work and fun,
a lot on my phone, particularly if I'm in a store with my wife and she's
shopping and I don't need to go shopping right then.
This is a little bit different in fitting into the classic informational,
navigational, transactional models of search usage. But in mobile you can
actually think of the vast majority of mobile queries falling into the
informational and navigational. Transactional is still very low. E-commerce
rates, conversion rates, email entry rates, a lot of those things where people
do something and they enter data in and they complete some sort of call to
action on mobile are still way, way, way lower than they are on desktop. The
caveat to that being if you're targeting a group of folks who mobile is their
primary or only device, be aware that these rates may be much, much higher. If
you're dealing with US consumers who have mobile and have desktop/laptop, well,
then transactional rates are likely to be much lower, and navigational and
informational are most of the things that you're going to want to serve.
Now, when it comes to mobile, I really think of mobile in a lot of the same
ways that I think about social from a funnel perspective. So if I'm thinking
about the marketing funnel and I have discovery, my first discovery of a brand,
my first acknowledgement of its existence, and then my first experience, my
first visit to that website, most of that mobile SEO should be done around these
two things -- the discovery and the first experience. I'll talk about some tips
and ways to do this. But what I really mean here is that you want visitors who
come via these channels, who come via mobile search, in particular, to want to
come back later, and that means providing an experience, providing a brand
experience, providing a message that's really clear about what your company,
product, information can offer them and why they should return in the future,
why they should like you and trust you, why you're a good site for them to check
out in the future when they might have more of those transactional things,
because chances are they're not going to do them on that first mobile
experience.
Now, a few tips for mobile SEO. The first one maybe is the most critical. I
worry most about that experience for informational and navigational searchers,
and because I worry about that, there's actually a way to figure out which pages
are the most important. So what I can do, you can sort in your Google Analytics
or whatever analytic system you've got, you can sort pages receiving traffic
from search engines by mobile device. Then you'll get kind of a list of URLs.
You get that list of pages. These are the pages where Google sends traffic from
mobile devices to my site today.
Now, in addition to obviously fixing up and making sure that these mobile
experiences are positive, the caveat to this is Google does have some biasing on
mobile. So they do look and they'll say, "Hey, this site is not providing a
great responsive design. The pages aren't loading fast. It's not targeted to the
geography that we know the phone is in," all these kinds of things, and so they
may be actually reducing your mobile traffic. Thus, it might pay to do some
experimentation on, "Hey, let's take a group of these pages that are down here,
that aren't receiving much traffic. Let's do some mobile SEO, and let's see what
happens, see if we can't improve that. " If that is the case, implementing some
mobile SEO best practices, speeding up the pages, putting a responsive design in
place, etc., if that can improve these, then you know what your opportunity cost
is and where you might want to invest.
The second thing, you'll see this as a mobile user, and many times pushing or
forcing an app download on someone, while it does mean that you get them more
into your fold potentially, assuming they ever use the app, it's rarely the best
user experience. In fact, oftentimes some of the folks who've done some of the
most extensive testing, the online dating world is one of these where they've
done a lot of testing of this, what they've found is providing a great
experience or pretty good experience on mobile through the Web for searchers and
then having just a slight message that is, "Hey, we have an app. You can do even
more with our app," that kind of thing, almost like an advertisement on the
website actually works better than sort of the experience you get from LinkedIn
or Yelp, where every time you visit on your mobile device they try and force you
to download.
Now, LinkedIn and Yelp are very different because they are very
mobile-centric and they do want that capture. Perhaps they are willing to
sacrifice some of the usability and user experience. But you should be aware
that Google might be looking at that, and if they're seeing that pogo-sticking,
people jumping away from the Yelp or LinkedIn page back to the search results,
remember they might be downgrading and not letting those pages rank so well over
time.
Third thing, even if you don't have responsive design, and there are still
many, many companies like Moz who don't yet have responsive design, you can do a
lot of things to improve the performance of your mobile pages, and that includes
obviously speeding up download speeds, but limiting ads, particularly overlays.
A lot of folks, especially in the technology and marketing industries and in a
lot of B2Bs, have those popovers, the overlays that ask for an email capture or
ask you to dismiss a message or those kinds of things, that can be a very
frustrating experience on mobile because it's so hard to close those. You have
to sort of zoom in on my phone and then like hit that little tiny x. Extremely
annoying, you can see those pogo-sticking rates going up again. So even just
surfing around with your mobile device on your own site, figuring out if you
should turn those off, that can have a positive impact.
Then number four, a lot of the testing that we've seen from folks who do
conversion rate optimization is that with mobile limiting choice is even more
valuable than it is on a desktop/laptop experience, and I think part of the
reason for that is that you don't have the opportunity to do as much
investigation as easily and as quickly on a mobile device as you do a
desktop/laptop. So limiting the choice on all sorts of things, on navigation,
limiting choice on calls to action, limiting choice on sharing, for example, it
can be really helpful. So a lot of the time, with content marketers, what you're
doing with mobile is trying to attract people whose first experience is going to
be, "Wow, this content is really interesting. I might share this. I might Tweet
it. I might share it on Facebook. I might put it Instagram." Well, maybe
Instagram not so much, but LinkedIn, Google+.
So that is somewhere where we've seen some of the very, very smart content
sites, people like BuzzFeed and Upworthy, what they do is they look at how
mobile traffic shares, and they say, "You know what? We're actually not going to
have four buttons. We're only going to have one button. It's only going to be
the Facebook Share button," or "It's only going to be the Tweet button," or
"We're going to look at how the visitor came to the page, and then we're going
to provide a sharing call to action based on that." So for those of you who are
doing content marketing, you might want to consider limiting that choice as
well.
There's lots and lots of other things that we can do with mobile SEO, but I
think this is a good starting point and, especially considering Google's
announcement here, a timely one. So I look forward to all of the advice and
comments down below, and we'll see you again next week for another edition of
Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
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Thursday, 20 March 2014
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'New Title Tag Guidelines & Preview
Tool'
Posted by Dr-Pete
Google's recent SERP redesign may not seem like a big deal to the casual
observer, but at least one change could have a real impact on SEOs. This post
will explore the impact of the redesign on title tags, and define a new,
data-driven length limit, but first, a new tool...
Title tag preview tool (2014 edition)
Pardon the reverse order of this post, but we wanted to put the tool first for
repeat visitors. Just enter your title and the search query keywords (for
highlighting) below to preview your result in the redesign:
Enter Your Full Title Text:
Enter Search Phrase (optional):
I'm really happy for you, and Imma let you finish, but Beyonce has one of
the best
www.example.com/example
This is your page description. The font and size of the description has not
changed in the latest redesign. Descriptions get cut off after roughly 160
characters ...
Note: Enter keyword phrases as natural queries, without commas. This preview
tool only highlights exact-match text (not related concepts) and is only
intended as an approximation of actual Google results.
How the redesign impacts titles
Google's redesign increased the font size of result titles, while keeping the
overall container the same size. Look at the following search result both before
and after the redesign:
The title on the top (old design) has a small amount of room to spare. After
the redesign (bottom), it's lost six full characters. The old guidelines no
longer apply, and so the rest of this post is an attempt to create a new set of
guidelines for title tag length based on data from real SERPs.
It's harder than it sounds
You may be thinking: "Ok, so gimme the magic number!", but unfortunately it's
not that easy. While we try to set a reasonable length limit as a rule of thumb,
the reality is that Arial (the title font) is proportionally spaced. Put simply,
different characters have different widths. For example, the following two
titles are both exactly 40 characters long:
As you can see, these two 40-character titles cover a wide range. Let's break
down what's going on here...
(1) Narrow letters are narrow
Ok, that's probably obvious, but let's just put it out there. The first title
is full of lowercase l's and i's which take up relatively little space.
Meanwhile, m's and w's take up quite a bit more space. In this font, three
lowercase l's are actually narrower than one lowercase w.
(2) ALL CAPS take up more space
Capital letters are wider than lowercase letters â again, not a big
surprise. All-caps titles also tend to be hard to read and are the visual
equivalent of shouting. In some cases, like "LEGO" above, capitalization is
important and necessary. In other cases, like "BRIDGEWATER COMMONS", it's just
noise.
(3) Width varies with the query
Google highlights (bolds) the query keywords, so a longer query will bold more
keywords. Bolded characters take up slightly more space. So, even if you found a
title that just squeezed into the width limit, the actual display of that title
would change depending on the keywords searchers use to find it.
(4) Cut-off titles have less characters
Google is cutting off titles with CSS, and the browser appends "â"
whenever a title is truncated. So, a title that's just slightly too long and
gets cut will actually be shorter than a title that barely squeaks in under the
width limit, due to the additional space required by "â".
Data from real-life searches
In order to really understand what's happening to title tags in the wild, we
need to collect the data. So, we set about looking at real searches to
understand where title tags were getting cut off after the redesign. Before I
get into the methodology, I'd like to thank Bernt Johansson, founder of Swedish
SEO firm Firstly for his generous help in hacking together this particular
jQuery monster.
We looked at page 1 search results for 10,000 queries. Since not all SERPs
have 10 results, this resulted in 93,438 total search results. An encoding error
caused some issues with special characters, requiring us to toss out some bad
data â this left us with 89,787 titles to work with. Query highlighting
was preserved from the original searches. This data was all collected from
Google.com using English search queries.
Since Google is truncating the titles using CSS, we have to replicate them as
rendered (not just look at source code). Once the titles were extracted, each of
them was displayed in a browser (Chrome on Windows 7) at the same size and width
as a Google desktop search (18-point Arial in a 512-pixel wide <div>).
Then, a somewhat bizarre combination of JavaScript, jQuery, AJAX and PHP stored
the display length for analysis. Due to minor variations, our display lengths
could vary from Google's by 2 characters.
Means, distributions & confidence
Sorry, it's about to get mathy up in here. Let's look at just the titles that
were truncated by Google, to find out how their lengths varied. This leaves
28,410 titles for analysis. I can tell you that the mean (average) length of
those titles was 57.7 characters, but don't run off just yet. If the
distribution of these lengths was normal, then setting the mean as a reasonable
limit would mean that half of the titles at that length would still get cut off.
That's hardly ideal. Also, this doesn't account for the titles that weren't cut
off.
Just out of curiosity, though, let's look at the overall distribution of
cut-off title lengths (post-cut-off):
The good news is that this distribution is roughly normal, peaking at about
57-58 characters. Post-cut-off title tags ranged in length from 42 to 68
characters. Here's a title cut off at 42 characters:
Again, all-caps titles take up more space, and the query ("anywho reverse
lookup") is fairly long. Here's a title that makes it up to 68 characters after
being cut off:
In this example, the query is short ("Giftster"), the title only has two
capitalized words, and there are quite a few lowercase l's and i's in play. Keep
in mind that all of the lengths in the graph above are after the cut-off.
Gifster could probably get away with 1-3 more characters beyond what's
displayed. We also need to consider the pre-cut-off length and account for the
ellipsis.
So, how do we turn this all into something that's actually useful? What do we
really want to know? Ultimately, we want to find a reasonable length at which we
can be fairly confident our titles won't get cut off. At each length, I looked
at what percentage of titles were cut off. Since the distribution is fairly
normal, longer titles were (as expected) more likely to get cut off. Here are
the cut-off lengths at five different levels of confidence:
80% - 57 characters (81.6%)
90% - 56 characters (91.6%)
95% - 55 characters (95.8%)
99% - 53 characters (98.7%)
99.9% - 49 characters (99.9%)
Since character lengths are integers, we can't hit the 80%, 90%, etc. marks
right on the money, so these are the closest numbers (the actual percentages are
in parentheses). Maybe I'm biased by my statistics background, but I tend to
think 95% is a pretty reasonable level. Put simply, if all of your title tags
were exactly 55 characters long, then you could expect about 95% of them to be
left alone (1 in 20 would be cut off).
There's no magic number
I feel comfortable saying that 55 characters is a reasonable title-length
limit under the new design, but keep in mind that your title lengths may vary
quite a bit. In addition, a cut-off title isn't the kiss of death â Google
still processes keywords beyond the cut-off (including for ranking purposes),
and other formats, like vertical results and Google+, may display your full
titles. Here's an example from Google news vertical results:
In this example, the first news result actually displays the full title of the
article, whereas the second result is truncated. Ultimately, if you're really
concerned about any given result, you need to see it for yourself. In some
cases, a mysterious trailing "â" may even make a title more clickable (I
wouldn't bank on it, but it's possible).
In many cases, like blog posts titles, it's not worth going back and revising
everything based on this new data. I'd look closely at your core pages, view the
SERPs for your target keywords, and make sure that your snippets look the way
you'd like them to. Use your judgment, and keep the guideline in mind for future
SEO efforts, but don't start hacking at characters. Google could change the
rules again.
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/GxNAdhbhj34/new-title-tag-guidelines-preview-tool
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
Tool'
Posted by Dr-Pete
Google's recent SERP redesign may not seem like a big deal to the casual
observer, but at least one change could have a real impact on SEOs. This post
will explore the impact of the redesign on title tags, and define a new,
data-driven length limit, but first, a new tool...
Title tag preview tool (2014 edition)
Pardon the reverse order of this post, but we wanted to put the tool first for
repeat visitors. Just enter your title and the search query keywords (for
highlighting) below to preview your result in the redesign:
Enter Your Full Title Text:
Enter Search Phrase (optional):
I'm really happy for you, and Imma let you finish, but Beyonce has one of
the best
www.example.com/example
This is your page description. The font and size of the description has not
changed in the latest redesign. Descriptions get cut off after roughly 160
characters ...
Note: Enter keyword phrases as natural queries, without commas. This preview
tool only highlights exact-match text (not related concepts) and is only
intended as an approximation of actual Google results.
How the redesign impacts titles
Google's redesign increased the font size of result titles, while keeping the
overall container the same size. Look at the following search result both before
and after the redesign:
The title on the top (old design) has a small amount of room to spare. After
the redesign (bottom), it's lost six full characters. The old guidelines no
longer apply, and so the rest of this post is an attempt to create a new set of
guidelines for title tag length based on data from real SERPs.
It's harder than it sounds
You may be thinking: "Ok, so gimme the magic number!", but unfortunately it's
not that easy. While we try to set a reasonable length limit as a rule of thumb,
the reality is that Arial (the title font) is proportionally spaced. Put simply,
different characters have different widths. For example, the following two
titles are both exactly 40 characters long:
As you can see, these two 40-character titles cover a wide range. Let's break
down what's going on here...
(1) Narrow letters are narrow
Ok, that's probably obvious, but let's just put it out there. The first title
is full of lowercase l's and i's which take up relatively little space.
Meanwhile, m's and w's take up quite a bit more space. In this font, three
lowercase l's are actually narrower than one lowercase w.
(2) ALL CAPS take up more space
Capital letters are wider than lowercase letters â again, not a big
surprise. All-caps titles also tend to be hard to read and are the visual
equivalent of shouting. In some cases, like "LEGO" above, capitalization is
important and necessary. In other cases, like "BRIDGEWATER COMMONS", it's just
noise.
(3) Width varies with the query
Google highlights (bolds) the query keywords, so a longer query will bold more
keywords. Bolded characters take up slightly more space. So, even if you found a
title that just squeezed into the width limit, the actual display of that title
would change depending on the keywords searchers use to find it.
(4) Cut-off titles have less characters
Google is cutting off titles with CSS, and the browser appends "â"
whenever a title is truncated. So, a title that's just slightly too long and
gets cut will actually be shorter than a title that barely squeaks in under the
width limit, due to the additional space required by "â".
Data from real-life searches
In order to really understand what's happening to title tags in the wild, we
need to collect the data. So, we set about looking at real searches to
understand where title tags were getting cut off after the redesign. Before I
get into the methodology, I'd like to thank Bernt Johansson, founder of Swedish
SEO firm Firstly for his generous help in hacking together this particular
jQuery monster.
We looked at page 1 search results for 10,000 queries. Since not all SERPs
have 10 results, this resulted in 93,438 total search results. An encoding error
caused some issues with special characters, requiring us to toss out some bad
data â this left us with 89,787 titles to work with. Query highlighting
was preserved from the original searches. This data was all collected from
Google.com using English search queries.
Since Google is truncating the titles using CSS, we have to replicate them as
rendered (not just look at source code). Once the titles were extracted, each of
them was displayed in a browser (Chrome on Windows 7) at the same size and width
as a Google desktop search (18-point Arial in a 512-pixel wide <div>).
Then, a somewhat bizarre combination of JavaScript, jQuery, AJAX and PHP stored
the display length for analysis. Due to minor variations, our display lengths
could vary from Google's by 2 characters.
Means, distributions & confidence
Sorry, it's about to get mathy up in here. Let's look at just the titles that
were truncated by Google, to find out how their lengths varied. This leaves
28,410 titles for analysis. I can tell you that the mean (average) length of
those titles was 57.7 characters, but don't run off just yet. If the
distribution of these lengths was normal, then setting the mean as a reasonable
limit would mean that half of the titles at that length would still get cut off.
That's hardly ideal. Also, this doesn't account for the titles that weren't cut
off.
Just out of curiosity, though, let's look at the overall distribution of
cut-off title lengths (post-cut-off):
The good news is that this distribution is roughly normal, peaking at about
57-58 characters. Post-cut-off title tags ranged in length from 42 to 68
characters. Here's a title cut off at 42 characters:
Again, all-caps titles take up more space, and the query ("anywho reverse
lookup") is fairly long. Here's a title that makes it up to 68 characters after
being cut off:
In this example, the query is short ("Giftster"), the title only has two
capitalized words, and there are quite a few lowercase l's and i's in play. Keep
in mind that all of the lengths in the graph above are after the cut-off.
Gifster could probably get away with 1-3 more characters beyond what's
displayed. We also need to consider the pre-cut-off length and account for the
ellipsis.
So, how do we turn this all into something that's actually useful? What do we
really want to know? Ultimately, we want to find a reasonable length at which we
can be fairly confident our titles won't get cut off. At each length, I looked
at what percentage of titles were cut off. Since the distribution is fairly
normal, longer titles were (as expected) more likely to get cut off. Here are
the cut-off lengths at five different levels of confidence:
80% - 57 characters (81.6%)
90% - 56 characters (91.6%)
95% - 55 characters (95.8%)
99% - 53 characters (98.7%)
99.9% - 49 characters (99.9%)
Since character lengths are integers, we can't hit the 80%, 90%, etc. marks
right on the money, so these are the closest numbers (the actual percentages are
in parentheses). Maybe I'm biased by my statistics background, but I tend to
think 95% is a pretty reasonable level. Put simply, if all of your title tags
were exactly 55 characters long, then you could expect about 95% of them to be
left alone (1 in 20 would be cut off).
There's no magic number
I feel comfortable saying that 55 characters is a reasonable title-length
limit under the new design, but keep in mind that your title lengths may vary
quite a bit. In addition, a cut-off title isn't the kiss of death â Google
still processes keywords beyond the cut-off (including for ranking purposes),
and other formats, like vertical results and Google+, may display your full
titles. Here's an example from Google news vertical results:
In this example, the first news result actually displays the full title of the
article, whereas the second result is truncated. Ultimately, if you're really
concerned about any given result, you need to see it for yourself. In some
cases, a mysterious trailing "â" may even make a title more clickable (I
wouldn't bank on it, but it's possible).
In many cases, like blog posts titles, it's not worth going back and revising
everything based on this new data. I'd look closely at your core pages, view the
SERPs for your target keywords, and make sure that your snippets look the way
you'd like them to. Use your judgment, and keep the guideline in mind for future
SEO efforts, but don't start hacking at characters. Google could change the
rules again.
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/GxNAdhbhj34/new-title-tag-guidelines-preview-tool
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Wednesday, 19 March 2014
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'When Building Communities Isn't
the Best Way to Build Links'
Posted by John-HenryThis 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.
I entered SEO as a link builder. In 2010, my job was easy and my toolset
mainly consisted of article marketing software, directory submissions, comment
posting and link networks. Fast forward four years I now solely create visually
engaging content in an effort to scale link building. I didn't make this career
shift because "link building is no longer effective;" quite the opposite: I
changed focus from manual to scalable link building because I now work in more
competitive industries and my clients generally need 100+ links per asset to
move the needleâcontent helps me meet that demand to acquire large amounts
of new linking root domains at once.
Over the past two years I've become obsessed with content (and Reddit,
unfortunately). I've started to keep the companies that are producing the best
and most successful digital content on my radar. Two companies that have
recently started to stick out are Movoto and Airbnb. Both are scaling link
acquisition via content, but they are going about it in entirely different ways.
Airbnb is growing its own grassroots community, while Movoto is actively
targeting existing and passionate online communities with its content marketing.
Before we dive in, both companies are growing rapidly in terms of organic
search according to SEMrush:
Airbnb
Movoto
Both of these companies are starting to do exceptionally well in the SERPs,
primarily due to either growing (Airbnb) or targeting (Movoto) an audience.
Perception, product, and content
Airbnb and Movoto are both trying to rank for extremely competitive terms,
however their content marketing strategies couldn't be further from each other,
and that fact hinges mainly on two aspects of these businesses' models:
The length of the customer purchase journey
The probability of repeat purchases
First, let's think about both of these sites' customer purchase journeys and
their customer lifetime value (LTV). Airbnb is selling rentals, which someone
could need multiple times a year. Movoto is selling homes. The price point and
level of commitment required from the customer are wildly different. More
importantly, people generally only look for a new home during or after a major
life event, like marriage, death, having a baby, or getting a new job. On the
other hand, you could decide to take a random weekend ski trip at 4:15 p.m. on a
Friday and book an Airbnb almost instantly. If Airbnb customers really enjoy
their Airbnb experience, there's a good chance that they will rent another
Airbnb and continue to add to the company's bottom line. However, no matter how
awesome a time someone has buying a home, there's a very small chance that they
will decide to repeat the experience anytime soon.
Movoto and Airbnb's business models differ in the sense that Airbnb is
incrementally extracting value out of customers over a long period of time,
while Movoto is most likely getting 100% of the customer's LTV at the first
purchase.
For Airbnb, creating their own community is a pragmatic marketing strategy for
keeping users engaged. I theorize that's why most of Airbnb's content is either
about their business, their community of users and hosts, or about their
product.
Where Airbnb is winning in content
Charitable efforts: During Hurricane Sandy, Airbnb community members put up
displaced New Yorkers for free, generating 300 linking root domains.
Really unique homes: Some of the listings on Airbnb are naturally link worthy,
like this igloo or this treehouse. As Airbnb grows, and more interesting and
unusual listings pop up, these interesting listings will continue to scale
Airbnb's link acquisition.
Dev blog: Airbnb is up to some pretty impressive stuff in terms of technology
and development, and they regularly share their innovations with the dev
community. Like this post on isometric JavaScript which earned more than 130
linking root domains.
Neighborhood guides: These gorgeous neighborhood guides have built 130 links to
date, however, they also accomplish a lot more. I asked Dennis Goedegebuure,
head of SEO for Airbnb, why they created these amazing guides:
"The Airbnb Neighborhoods were created to help guests visiting a certain
city finding the right place to stay. Where hotels tend to be concentrated in
one part of town, Airbnb's are more spread out. We have found that the
Neighborhoods are not only helping our guests to find the right place which
matches their interest, but also help the cities to see guests traveling to
parts of those cities which usually are overlooked by tourists. This has had a
profound economic impact on local businesses, and their Neighborhoods.
The Neighborhood pages have been created with the typical guests & hosts in
mind first. Delivering a best in class user experience, both from a content
standpoint, as well as making it easy to navigate, has proven to be successful
for Airbnb. This is where I would like to point out that content does not only
include the written text, but the story is told in the form of images, which
were specially taken for this project with the storyline in mind. This gives
every page a unique peek into the characteristics of the Neighborhood, which
makes these so useful for people planning to visit that city, as well of the
locals exploring their own city."
Product/community blog: Airbnb has a bit of a leg up here in terms of link
acquisition. Because they are a prominent company disrupting an established
industry, pretty much anything they do is newsworthy. However, when you take a
look at their blog, it's not so much a place for them to market themselves as it
is a forum to address critical issues, consumer concerns, and changes with the
product. It's racked up a lot of links over time (1900+ linking root domains),
but it's racked up way more hearts and mindsâand most likely converted a
fair amount of users into first time renters by alleviating their pain points
while researching the product.
One-off content marketing efforts: The Airbnb Annual Report is an amazing piece
of content marketing â but it also speaks to how savvy Airbnb is when it
comes to marketing itself. By showing the community how quickly Airbnb is
growing (and how much money is out there for hosts to make) Airbnb is educating
people about the company trajectory, its product and the future of the industry
as a whole â all through beautiful, product-centric, interactive content.
The overarching theme of Airbnb's content
All of Airbnb's content keeps the brand, its product and the Airbnb community
in the front of the users mind. Airbnb relies on a community in order to
function, and because that community is inclusive, empathetic and
charitableâit's one of the most marketable aspects of the Airbnb brand.
Airbnb also faces certain challengesâlike regulation and challenges from
the hospitality industry. Because their business model is still being
established, they need those hearts and minds on their side to fight for them
and champion their product.
Movoto is taking a different path
Because a home purchase is so infrequent, constantly trying to grow a
community through ongoing social media and brand-centric content marketing could
get tiresome for readers, especially because those interacting with the brand
would most likely have little motivation to purchase a home until a major life
event occurs. However, Movoto still needs to scale link building, and in order
to do that without building a community of their own, they must engage an
audience in a way that causes them to share and tweet the content they produce.
Targeting existing audiences
Movoto creates content that appeals to pre-existing audiences. They are also
great at picking their subject matterâthey choose topics that are popular
enough to be covered in mainstream press, but also appeal to the hardcore niche
fanboy sites.
Their most successful content takes some type of pop-culture reference or hot
topic, applies it to real estate, and then earns press from both big news sites
and mid-level authority blogs. The Harry Potter Hogwarts Property Evaluation
Infographic may be the best example of this strategy in action:
It's earned links from over 140 domains including mainstream sites like Daily
Mail, Fox News, and Daily Finance, and it also earned links from fan sites like
Nerdophiles, Toy To The World, and Potter Talk.
Movoto is creating and marketing useful, fun and informative content that
directly appeals to a particular niche audienceâbut it also has a larger
mainstream appeal. Because Movoto executes content well in terms of information
and visualsâthey are racking up links and quickly rising in the rankings.
They've also produced a number of successful interactives, like How Many Legos
Would it Take to Build your House, or alternatively How Many Tetris Blocks.
Many of Movoto's blog posts have earned over 100 linking root domains,
primarily due to their ability to target an audience that will engage and share
content online. Because they don't have to structure their communication around
a growing community, like Airbnb, they are free to be pretty creative with their
subject matter and publish things that are going to get a strong response (like
54,000 shares on Facebook for that post alone).
Community building isn't for everyone. It's best suited for communal products
As digital marketers we're quick to champion new strategies that result in
increased traffic, links and social sharesâbut it's important to consider
how our marketing efforts fit with the overall business model. After all, it's
not just links and shares we're after, we are all trying to grow businesses in
the most cost effective manner possible.
Community building really only makes sense for communal products. So, while
it's the perfect growth strategy for a product like Airbnb, it makes no sense
for a real estate site like Movoto. If you're stressing over social singles and
your lack of community engagementâmaybe you don't have a product that the
community can get behind and actively supportâand there's nothing
inherently wrong with that, you just need to go elsewhere for your links because
that's what your business model demands.
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/o6_vSl8tacQ/when-building-communities-isnt-the-best-way-to-build-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
the Best Way to Build Links'
Posted by John-HenryThis 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.
I entered SEO as a link builder. In 2010, my job was easy and my toolset
mainly consisted of article marketing software, directory submissions, comment
posting and link networks. Fast forward four years I now solely create visually
engaging content in an effort to scale link building. I didn't make this career
shift because "link building is no longer effective;" quite the opposite: I
changed focus from manual to scalable link building because I now work in more
competitive industries and my clients generally need 100+ links per asset to
move the needleâcontent helps me meet that demand to acquire large amounts
of new linking root domains at once.
Over the past two years I've become obsessed with content (and Reddit,
unfortunately). I've started to keep the companies that are producing the best
and most successful digital content on my radar. Two companies that have
recently started to stick out are Movoto and Airbnb. Both are scaling link
acquisition via content, but they are going about it in entirely different ways.
Airbnb is growing its own grassroots community, while Movoto is actively
targeting existing and passionate online communities with its content marketing.
Before we dive in, both companies are growing rapidly in terms of organic
search according to SEMrush:
Airbnb
Movoto
Both of these companies are starting to do exceptionally well in the SERPs,
primarily due to either growing (Airbnb) or targeting (Movoto) an audience.
Perception, product, and content
Airbnb and Movoto are both trying to rank for extremely competitive terms,
however their content marketing strategies couldn't be further from each other,
and that fact hinges mainly on two aspects of these businesses' models:
The length of the customer purchase journey
The probability of repeat purchases
First, let's think about both of these sites' customer purchase journeys and
their customer lifetime value (LTV). Airbnb is selling rentals, which someone
could need multiple times a year. Movoto is selling homes. The price point and
level of commitment required from the customer are wildly different. More
importantly, people generally only look for a new home during or after a major
life event, like marriage, death, having a baby, or getting a new job. On the
other hand, you could decide to take a random weekend ski trip at 4:15 p.m. on a
Friday and book an Airbnb almost instantly. If Airbnb customers really enjoy
their Airbnb experience, there's a good chance that they will rent another
Airbnb and continue to add to the company's bottom line. However, no matter how
awesome a time someone has buying a home, there's a very small chance that they
will decide to repeat the experience anytime soon.
Movoto and Airbnb's business models differ in the sense that Airbnb is
incrementally extracting value out of customers over a long period of time,
while Movoto is most likely getting 100% of the customer's LTV at the first
purchase.
For Airbnb, creating their own community is a pragmatic marketing strategy for
keeping users engaged. I theorize that's why most of Airbnb's content is either
about their business, their community of users and hosts, or about their
product.
Where Airbnb is winning in content
Charitable efforts: During Hurricane Sandy, Airbnb community members put up
displaced New Yorkers for free, generating 300 linking root domains.
Really unique homes: Some of the listings on Airbnb are naturally link worthy,
like this igloo or this treehouse. As Airbnb grows, and more interesting and
unusual listings pop up, these interesting listings will continue to scale
Airbnb's link acquisition.
Dev blog: Airbnb is up to some pretty impressive stuff in terms of technology
and development, and they regularly share their innovations with the dev
community. Like this post on isometric JavaScript which earned more than 130
linking root domains.
Neighborhood guides: These gorgeous neighborhood guides have built 130 links to
date, however, they also accomplish a lot more. I asked Dennis Goedegebuure,
head of SEO for Airbnb, why they created these amazing guides:
"The Airbnb Neighborhoods were created to help guests visiting a certain
city finding the right place to stay. Where hotels tend to be concentrated in
one part of town, Airbnb's are more spread out. We have found that the
Neighborhoods are not only helping our guests to find the right place which
matches their interest, but also help the cities to see guests traveling to
parts of those cities which usually are overlooked by tourists. This has had a
profound economic impact on local businesses, and their Neighborhoods.
The Neighborhood pages have been created with the typical guests & hosts in
mind first. Delivering a best in class user experience, both from a content
standpoint, as well as making it easy to navigate, has proven to be successful
for Airbnb. This is where I would like to point out that content does not only
include the written text, but the story is told in the form of images, which
were specially taken for this project with the storyline in mind. This gives
every page a unique peek into the characteristics of the Neighborhood, which
makes these so useful for people planning to visit that city, as well of the
locals exploring their own city."
Product/community blog: Airbnb has a bit of a leg up here in terms of link
acquisition. Because they are a prominent company disrupting an established
industry, pretty much anything they do is newsworthy. However, when you take a
look at their blog, it's not so much a place for them to market themselves as it
is a forum to address critical issues, consumer concerns, and changes with the
product. It's racked up a lot of links over time (1900+ linking root domains),
but it's racked up way more hearts and mindsâand most likely converted a
fair amount of users into first time renters by alleviating their pain points
while researching the product.
One-off content marketing efforts: The Airbnb Annual Report is an amazing piece
of content marketing â but it also speaks to how savvy Airbnb is when it
comes to marketing itself. By showing the community how quickly Airbnb is
growing (and how much money is out there for hosts to make) Airbnb is educating
people about the company trajectory, its product and the future of the industry
as a whole â all through beautiful, product-centric, interactive content.
The overarching theme of Airbnb's content
All of Airbnb's content keeps the brand, its product and the Airbnb community
in the front of the users mind. Airbnb relies on a community in order to
function, and because that community is inclusive, empathetic and
charitableâit's one of the most marketable aspects of the Airbnb brand.
Airbnb also faces certain challengesâlike regulation and challenges from
the hospitality industry. Because their business model is still being
established, they need those hearts and minds on their side to fight for them
and champion their product.
Movoto is taking a different path
Because a home purchase is so infrequent, constantly trying to grow a
community through ongoing social media and brand-centric content marketing could
get tiresome for readers, especially because those interacting with the brand
would most likely have little motivation to purchase a home until a major life
event occurs. However, Movoto still needs to scale link building, and in order
to do that without building a community of their own, they must engage an
audience in a way that causes them to share and tweet the content they produce.
Targeting existing audiences
Movoto creates content that appeals to pre-existing audiences. They are also
great at picking their subject matterâthey choose topics that are popular
enough to be covered in mainstream press, but also appeal to the hardcore niche
fanboy sites.
Their most successful content takes some type of pop-culture reference or hot
topic, applies it to real estate, and then earns press from both big news sites
and mid-level authority blogs. The Harry Potter Hogwarts Property Evaluation
Infographic may be the best example of this strategy in action:
It's earned links from over 140 domains including mainstream sites like Daily
Mail, Fox News, and Daily Finance, and it also earned links from fan sites like
Nerdophiles, Toy To The World, and Potter Talk.
Movoto is creating and marketing useful, fun and informative content that
directly appeals to a particular niche audienceâbut it also has a larger
mainstream appeal. Because Movoto executes content well in terms of information
and visualsâthey are racking up links and quickly rising in the rankings.
They've also produced a number of successful interactives, like How Many Legos
Would it Take to Build your House, or alternatively How Many Tetris Blocks.
Many of Movoto's blog posts have earned over 100 linking root domains,
primarily due to their ability to target an audience that will engage and share
content online. Because they don't have to structure their communication around
a growing community, like Airbnb, they are free to be pretty creative with their
subject matter and publish things that are going to get a strong response (like
54,000 shares on Facebook for that post alone).
Community building isn't for everyone. It's best suited for communal products
As digital marketers we're quick to champion new strategies that result in
increased traffic, links and social sharesâbut it's important to consider
how our marketing efforts fit with the overall business model. After all, it's
not just links and shares we're after, we are all trying to grow businesses in
the most cost effective manner possible.
Community building really only makes sense for communal products. So, while
it's the perfect growth strategy for a product like Airbnb, it makes no sense
for a real estate site like Movoto. If you're stressing over social singles and
your lack of community engagementâmaybe you don't have a product that the
community can get behind and actively supportâand there's nothing
inherently wrong with that, you just need to go elsewhere for your links because
that's what your business model demands.
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/o6_vSl8tacQ/when-building-communities-isnt-the-best-way-to-build-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
Tuesday, 18 March 2014
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'Announcing Moz Local: Simultaneous
Listing Management on All Major Aggregators for $49/Year'
Posted by David-Mihm
One of the many things that appealed to me about joining forces with Moz 18
months ago was the empathy that every Mozzer has for business owners and
marketers trying to keep up with the frenetic pace of change in local search.
Although it's generally thought of as less competitive than a lot of other
disciplines (like news, video, or e-commerce SEO), the prerequisite set of tasks
for success in local search continues to grow.
In the shift from desktop to mobile, local search is fragmenting more than
ever, and business listings are an increasingly critical foundation. NAP
consistency (establishing a canonical Name, Address, and Phone Number for your
business location) is one of the top local search ranking factors every year.
Establishing a consistent NAP is vital to ranking in local results. All the link
building and social media in the world won't help a business if Google can't
trust its information, and customers can't reach it.
Whether you're a small agency trying to serve dozens of mom-and-pops on a
limited budget, or a large brand manager tasked with managing listings for
hundreds of stores, the time it takes to ensure the accuracy and visibility of
business information is overwhelming. Let alone the time it takes to correct
errors, align categories, deal with PIN or postcard verifications, or add
missing listings. And it's often prohibitively expensive.
So as we thought about how to evolve GetListed's original product, we decided
to start by helping solve the fundamental pain point of local search: ensuring
accurate, consistent business listing information on the most important sites on
the web.
What does Moz Local do?
For a high-level overview, check out this video:
Our goal is to make Moz Local the most efficient option for location
management, with an easy-to-use interface and an affordable price point.
In a nutshell, Moz Local allows you to upload a spreadsheet of all of your
locations, which we then standardize and distribute to all five major U.S. data
aggregators:
Infogroup
Neustar Localeze
Acxiom
Factual
Foursquare
and three important local directories:
Superpages
eLocal
Best of the Web Local
for $49/year per location.
After submitting your locations, we provide you with full reporting about the
status of each listing (with links to those listings live on the web, where
available). We'll also surface possible duplicate listings we discover across
the ecosystem, provide you with the fastest path to correcting or closing those
duplicates, and notify you of any unauthorized changes to your NAP that we come
across in our local web crawl.
To dive into the product, visit Moz.com/local and download our CSV template.
If you currently manage your locations at Google Places, though, you can get a
head start by simply uploading that spreadsheet to Moz Local (we accept all the
same field names and categories). Full documentation for the product is
available here, and FAQs and a deeper description of how the product works are
here.
Key features
Upgraded Listing Details page (free to all Moz Community members)
The original single-location lookup functionality from GetListed is still
available at moz.com/local/searchâand you can also access these Listing
Details from your Moz Local dashboard. As part of the Moz Local changeover,
we've upgraded it with a much snazzier results page and a quicker visual
indication of how a business is doing and where you should focus your efforts.
Category Research Tool (free to all Moz Community members)
One of my persistent headaches back when I was a full-time local search
consultant was performing category searches for slight wording variations as I
was submitting listings across every single local search site.
With that in mind, we designed the Moz Local Category Research Tool to be a
huge time- and energy-saver. Start typing the keywords or industry your business
is in, and we'll start refining the list of categories right before your eyes.
Selecting a category will then show you how it maps to different search engines
or directories when we publish your listing.
If there's a more specific category on a particular search engine that you'd
rather submit for a given listing, simply add it to the Category Overrides field
in your CSV spreadsheet.
Duplicate listing notifications
As I mentioned above, we provide reporting on possible duplicate listings in
the ecosystem, and where possible, we present you a direct path to closing them.
Right now you'll see a relatively tight set of possible duplicates, but going
forward you'll see a wider possible set to help you clean up old addresses,
changed business names, or unwanted tracking phone numbers.
Expanded Learning Center (free to all Moz Community members)
Huge thanks to Miriam Ellis for her assistance in compiling, updating, and
editing this greatly expanded version of the GetListed Learning Center. We now
offer 41 pages full of local marketing background and best practices. The top
pages from the original Learning Center like the local search glossary,
marketing priority questionnaire, and the local search ecosystems are all still
available.
Features we're already working on
We've already gotten some terrific feedback from our Customer Advisory Board
and other customers during a private beta period, and the product we're
releasing today is much better as a result. Going forward, we're anxious to hear
from the Moz community what feature areas you'd like to see us expand into.
Features currently on our list include:
allowing for the editing of single locations in-app
building custom-branded and emailed reports
showing individual listing progress over time
adding additional search engine and data partners
(if you're interested in a data partnership with Moz, please email Ryan
Watson!)
I have a feeling it will be a common request, but at this point Moz Local only
supports U.S. business locations. International versions of this product aren't
in our near-term roadmap for development.
Thanks all around
There are a lot of people to thank, with such a big product releaseâit
has definitely been a team effort:
the entire Local Engineering and Inbound Engineering teams here at Moz
the Marketing and Community teams, especially my "point person" for
coordinating those efforts, Elizabeth Crouch
the Executive Team for giving us the leeway and the budget to build this
product
Derric Wise and Nick Santos for the amazing new branding and look-and-feel
Josh Mortenson, Elijah Tiegs, and Elizabeth Crouch for our video
Jackie Immel and Courtney Davis for their help in coordinating our beta
period
our beta testers for their participation and patience!
the data aggregators and directories who have partnered with us
the users of GetListed who have given us so much great feedback over the
years
I'm sure that's leaving dozens, if not hundreds of people outâbut I'm
truly grateful for the support of everyone in the local search community over
the years. As with many software endeavors, it's taken us a little longer to get
here than we'd hoped, but we also hope that you in the Moz community think it
was worth the wait!
The formal press release announcing Moz Local can be found here.
Start using Moz Local
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/EUFHFW4jgIs/announcing-moz-local
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
Listing Management on All Major Aggregators for $49/Year'
Posted by David-Mihm
One of the many things that appealed to me about joining forces with Moz 18
months ago was the empathy that every Mozzer has for business owners and
marketers trying to keep up with the frenetic pace of change in local search.
Although it's generally thought of as less competitive than a lot of other
disciplines (like news, video, or e-commerce SEO), the prerequisite set of tasks
for success in local search continues to grow.
In the shift from desktop to mobile, local search is fragmenting more than
ever, and business listings are an increasingly critical foundation. NAP
consistency (establishing a canonical Name, Address, and Phone Number for your
business location) is one of the top local search ranking factors every year.
Establishing a consistent NAP is vital to ranking in local results. All the link
building and social media in the world won't help a business if Google can't
trust its information, and customers can't reach it.
Whether you're a small agency trying to serve dozens of mom-and-pops on a
limited budget, or a large brand manager tasked with managing listings for
hundreds of stores, the time it takes to ensure the accuracy and visibility of
business information is overwhelming. Let alone the time it takes to correct
errors, align categories, deal with PIN or postcard verifications, or add
missing listings. And it's often prohibitively expensive.
So as we thought about how to evolve GetListed's original product, we decided
to start by helping solve the fundamental pain point of local search: ensuring
accurate, consistent business listing information on the most important sites on
the web.
What does Moz Local do?
For a high-level overview, check out this video:
Our goal is to make Moz Local the most efficient option for location
management, with an easy-to-use interface and an affordable price point.
In a nutshell, Moz Local allows you to upload a spreadsheet of all of your
locations, which we then standardize and distribute to all five major U.S. data
aggregators:
Infogroup
Neustar Localeze
Acxiom
Factual
Foursquare
and three important local directories:
Superpages
eLocal
Best of the Web Local
for $49/year per location.
After submitting your locations, we provide you with full reporting about the
status of each listing (with links to those listings live on the web, where
available). We'll also surface possible duplicate listings we discover across
the ecosystem, provide you with the fastest path to correcting or closing those
duplicates, and notify you of any unauthorized changes to your NAP that we come
across in our local web crawl.
To dive into the product, visit Moz.com/local and download our CSV template.
If you currently manage your locations at Google Places, though, you can get a
head start by simply uploading that spreadsheet to Moz Local (we accept all the
same field names and categories). Full documentation for the product is
available here, and FAQs and a deeper description of how the product works are
here.
Key features
Upgraded Listing Details page (free to all Moz Community members)
The original single-location lookup functionality from GetListed is still
available at moz.com/local/searchâand you can also access these Listing
Details from your Moz Local dashboard. As part of the Moz Local changeover,
we've upgraded it with a much snazzier results page and a quicker visual
indication of how a business is doing and where you should focus your efforts.
Category Research Tool (free to all Moz Community members)
One of my persistent headaches back when I was a full-time local search
consultant was performing category searches for slight wording variations as I
was submitting listings across every single local search site.
With that in mind, we designed the Moz Local Category Research Tool to be a
huge time- and energy-saver. Start typing the keywords or industry your business
is in, and we'll start refining the list of categories right before your eyes.
Selecting a category will then show you how it maps to different search engines
or directories when we publish your listing.
If there's a more specific category on a particular search engine that you'd
rather submit for a given listing, simply add it to the Category Overrides field
in your CSV spreadsheet.
Duplicate listing notifications
As I mentioned above, we provide reporting on possible duplicate listings in
the ecosystem, and where possible, we present you a direct path to closing them.
Right now you'll see a relatively tight set of possible duplicates, but going
forward you'll see a wider possible set to help you clean up old addresses,
changed business names, or unwanted tracking phone numbers.
Expanded Learning Center (free to all Moz Community members)
Huge thanks to Miriam Ellis for her assistance in compiling, updating, and
editing this greatly expanded version of the GetListed Learning Center. We now
offer 41 pages full of local marketing background and best practices. The top
pages from the original Learning Center like the local search glossary,
marketing priority questionnaire, and the local search ecosystems are all still
available.
Features we're already working on
We've already gotten some terrific feedback from our Customer Advisory Board
and other customers during a private beta period, and the product we're
releasing today is much better as a result. Going forward, we're anxious to hear
from the Moz community what feature areas you'd like to see us expand into.
Features currently on our list include:
allowing for the editing of single locations in-app
building custom-branded and emailed reports
showing individual listing progress over time
adding additional search engine and data partners
(if you're interested in a data partnership with Moz, please email Ryan
Watson!)
I have a feeling it will be a common request, but at this point Moz Local only
supports U.S. business locations. International versions of this product aren't
in our near-term roadmap for development.
Thanks all around
There are a lot of people to thank, with such a big product releaseâit
has definitely been a team effort:
the entire Local Engineering and Inbound Engineering teams here at Moz
the Marketing and Community teams, especially my "point person" for
coordinating those efforts, Elizabeth Crouch
the Executive Team for giving us the leeway and the budget to build this
product
Derric Wise and Nick Santos for the amazing new branding and look-and-feel
Josh Mortenson, Elijah Tiegs, and Elizabeth Crouch for our video
Jackie Immel and Courtney Davis for their help in coordinating our beta
period
our beta testers for their participation and patience!
the data aggregators and directories who have partnered with us
the users of GetListed who have given us so much great feedback over the
years
I'm sure that's leaving dozens, if not hundreds of people outâbut I'm
truly grateful for the support of everyone in the local search community over
the years. As with many software endeavors, it's taken us a little longer to get
here than we'd hoped, but we also hope that you in the Moz community think it
was worth the wait!
The formal press release announcing Moz Local can be found here.
Start using Moz Local
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/EUFHFW4jgIs/announcing-moz-local
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
Monday, 17 March 2014
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'A Startling Case Study of Manual
Penalties and Negative SEO'
Posted by YonDotanThis 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.
This January, I was at a talk at SMX Israel by John Mueller â
Googleâs Webmaster Trends Analyst â about how to recover from a
manual penalty. The sessionâs moderator opened the talk by asking the
hundreds of people seated in the room to raise their hands if they had ever been
affected by or had a client that was affected by a manual penalty. Nearly the
entire room raised their hands â myself included.
Setting the Plot
I am the head of SEO at yellowHEAD, an online marketing agency. One of our
clients, whom we are very lucky to have, is a company called Ginger Software.
Ginger has a set of context-sensitive grammar and spell check tools that can be
integrated with e-mails, browsers, Microsoft Office, and more. When we began
working with Ginger, they were in a great state from an SEO perspective. I
wonât get into traffic specifics, but their site has an Alexa ranking of
around 7,000.
Ginger was getting traffic from thousands of different keywords. They had
links from news portals, review websites, forums, social bookmarks â all
part of a really great backlink profile. Ginger could be in a whole separate
case study about the benefits of a content strategy. They have put months of
work into online tools, sections about spelling mistakes, grammar rules, and
more. These things have attracted great traffic and links from around the world.
The Plot Thickens
Given the above, you can imagine our surprise when one day in my inbox I found
the dreaded notice from Google that gingersoftware.com had a site-wide manual
penalty for unnatural inbound links. We quickly set up a call and went through
the tooth-rattling ordeal of explaining to our client that they werenât
even ranked for their brand name. Organic traffic dropped by a whopping 94% -
and that for a website that gets 66% of its traffic from Google-based organic
search.
Iâm not going to highlight where they got the penalty â because I
think you can tell.
Full Disclosure
Before we go on any further with this case study, I should come clean. In the
years of my working in SEO, I have shamelessly bought links, posted crappy blog
and forum comments, and run programs that automatically build thousands of spam
links. I have bought expired domains, created blog networks, and have ranked
affiliate sites with every manner of blackhat technique.
With that off my chest â I will say with as clean a conscience as
possible, we did absolutely nothing of the sort for Ginger. While everyone at
yellowHEAD has experience with all manners of SEO tactics, in our work as an
agency we work with big brands, the presence of which we are categorically not
willing to risk. Ginger is a true example of a site that has ranked well because
of an extensive and well-thought out content strategy; a strategy driven by
creating valuable content for users. When analyzing Gingerâs backlinks, we
were amazed to see the kinds of links that had been created because of this
strategy. Take, for example, this forum link on the Texas Fishing Forums.
I was positive that this link would be a spam forum comment or something of
the sort. Turns out that itâs a page on a fishing forum about Zebra
Mussels. Someone got confused and called them Zebra Muscles; a veteran user
corrected them by linking to Gingerâs page about muscle vs mussel.
The Plot Thickensâ More.
As we dug deeper into Gingerâs backlinks, we quickly began to find the
problem. Ginger had recently accrued a large number of extremely spammy links.
Bear with me for a little bit because these links require some explanation.
GingerSoftware.com was being linked to from random pages on dozens of different
websites in clearly spun articles about pornography, pharmaceuticals, gambling,
and more. These pages were linking to random marginal articles on Gingerâs
website like this page always using the same few keywords â
âoccurred,â âsubsequently,â and a few other similar
words. The only thing these words had in common was that Ginger was ranked in
the top three for them in Google.
I had to blur most of the text from this page, as it was inappropriate.
Now, needless to say, even if we were trying to rank Gingerâs site
letâs call it âunconventionally,â we wouldn't have done it to
unimportant pages that were already ranking in the top three from articles about
pornography.
Now hereâs where it gets REALLY interesting
Further investigation into these pages found the same exact articles on dozens
of other websites, all linking to different websites using exactly the same
keywords. For example:
Link to Wiktionary.org
Link to TheFreeDictionary.com
Link to Thesaurus.com
So â What the $#@!%!#$^ are these links?!
As I mentioned in my disclosure previously â I am no newcomer to link
spam, so I happen to know a bit about what these links are. These articles were,
first and foremost, not created by us or by anyone else at Ginger. They were
also not posted with Ginger Software or any of the other websites linked to in
those articles in mind. These articles were posted by spammers using programs
which automatically build links (my guess is GSA Search Engine Ranker) in order
to rank websites. Each one of these articles linked to some spam website (think
something like the-best-diet-pills-green-coffee-beans-are-awesome . info or some
nonsense like that) in addition to linking to Ginger.
These programs find places on the internet where they can automatically post
articles with links. As a way to âtrickâ Google into thinking the
links are natural, they also include links to other big websites in good
neighborhoods. Common targets for these kinds of links include Wikipedia, BBC,
CNN, and other such websites.
Ginger was not the victim of negative SEO, but was simply caught in the
crossfire of some spammers trying to promote their own websites.
We Had Doubts
Once we found these links, we honed our search to find all of them. We were
able to do this using Ahrefs, which is a fantastic tool for any sort of link
analysis. We organized all of the links to Ginger by anchor text and went after
all of the ones with the aforementioned keywords. We removed as many of these
links as possible, disavowed the rest, and filed for reconsideration as
described above.
As confident as we were on the face of it all â we had serious doubts.
We knew how important it was for Gingerâs business to get over this
penalty as quickly as possible and didn't want to get anything wrong. We
couldn't find any other âbad linksâ besides these ones but we kept
thinking to ourselves âthereâs no way that Google completely slapped
a website due to some spam links to these random pages.â There had to be
more to it than that!
Ginger themselves handled this situation incredibly. Where they could have
yelled and gotten angry, instead they said, in a sentence âOk â
letâs fix this. How do we help?â With Gingerâs help, we
mobilized dozens of people inside their company, trained them on finding bad
links, manually reviewed over 40,000 links, contacted all domains which had spam
links on them, disavowed everything we couldn't get to, and submitted the
request for reconsideration on December 17th, only five days after the site got
penalized. The extreme sense of urgency behind this came both because of the
importance of organic traffic for Ginger Software, and because the upcoming
Christmas and New Yearâs holidays. We knew that everyone going on vacation
would significantly increase the amount of time it took to have the
reconsideration request reviewed. You can find a very long and detailed
explanation of the process we used to clean up Ginger's links here.
Despite the speed with which we were able to submit the request, it took
nearly a month to hear back from Google. On January 15th, we received a message
in Google Webmaster Tools that the penalty had been revoked. We, and the staff
at Ginger, were ecstatic and spent the next few days glued to our ranking
trackers and to Google Analytics to see what would happen. Rankings and traffic
quickly began to rise and, as of the writing of this article, traffic is at
about 82% of pre-penalty levels.
Lo and Behold â Rankings!
The (Very) Unofficial Response from Google
Getting over the manual penalty, in some ways, was almost as surprising as
getting it. The fact that all we did was remove and disavow the negative SEO
links and the penalty was removed indicates that, indeed, the penalty may have
been caused entirely by those links.
At the manual penalty session of SMX, towards the end of the talk, I crept
slowly towards the front of the room and as soon as the talk was over, as
unexpectedly as a manual penalty, I pounced to the front of the speakersâ
podium to talk to John Mueller before everyone else. I explained to him (in a
much shorter version than this article) the situation with Ginger and asked if
they were aware of this at Google and what they plan to do about it.
John responded with something along the lines of the following:
âYou mean like when somebody creates spam links but also links to
Wikipedia? â We have seen it happen before. Sometimes we can tell but
sometimes itâs a little bit harderâ but [if] you get a manual
penalty from it you will know about it so you can just disavow the links.â
I have to say, I was pretty surprised with that response. While it wasn't
exactly an admission of guilt, it wasn't a denial either. He basically said yes,
it can happen but if it happens you will get a manual penalty, so youâll
know about it!
So What Does It All Mean?
One wonders if Google understands the impact a manual penalty can have on a
business and if they truly accept the responsibility that comes along with
handing out these kinds of punishments. Ginger, as a company, relies on search
traffic as their main method of user acquisition and they are not unique in that
sense. There are a few important takeaways here.
1.) CHECK YOUR BACKLINKS
No matter who you are â big or small, this is crucial. This kind of
thing can happen, seemingly, to anyone. We have instated a weekly backlink scan
for Ginger Software in which we look through all of their new links from
Webmaster Tools, AHREFS, and Majestic SEO. If we find any more spam links (which
we still are finding), we try to remove them and add them to the disavow list.
Time consuming? Yes. Critical? Yes.
2.) Negative SEO is Alive and Real
It has been my thinking for a long time that links should not be able to hurt
your website. At the most, a link should be discounted if it is considered bad.
The current system is dangerous and too easy to game. With Ginger, it was
obvious (to us at least) that these links were no doing of their own. The links
were in absurd places of the lowest quality and linked to low-benefit
unimportant pages of Gingerâs website. If this was actually a negative SEO
attack, imagine how easy it would be to make it look like it was the
companyâs doing.
3.) Google is making themselves look REALLY bad.
The action that Google took in this case was far too drastic. The site
didnât receive a partial penalty, but rather a full-blown sitewide
penalty. According to the keyword planner, for the top four branded terms for
Ginger, there are 23,300 searches per month. In this case that became 23,300
searches per month where people could not find exactly what they were looking
for.
Google has an amazing amount of work on their hands staying ahead of the
spammers of the world, but they have also become the foundation of the business
models of companies worldwide. To quote from FDR and Spiderman (who can argue
with that???), âwith great power comes great responsibility.â We can
only hope that Google will heed these words and, in the meantime, we will be
happy with the fact that Ginger are back up and running.
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/iSEsm7K43j4/a-startling-case-study-of-manual-penalties-and-negative-seo
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
Penalties and Negative SEO'
Posted by YonDotanThis 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.
This January, I was at a talk at SMX Israel by John Mueller â
Googleâs Webmaster Trends Analyst â about how to recover from a
manual penalty. The sessionâs moderator opened the talk by asking the
hundreds of people seated in the room to raise their hands if they had ever been
affected by or had a client that was affected by a manual penalty. Nearly the
entire room raised their hands â myself included.
Setting the Plot
I am the head of SEO at yellowHEAD, an online marketing agency. One of our
clients, whom we are very lucky to have, is a company called Ginger Software.
Ginger has a set of context-sensitive grammar and spell check tools that can be
integrated with e-mails, browsers, Microsoft Office, and more. When we began
working with Ginger, they were in a great state from an SEO perspective. I
wonât get into traffic specifics, but their site has an Alexa ranking of
around 7,000.
Ginger was getting traffic from thousands of different keywords. They had
links from news portals, review websites, forums, social bookmarks â all
part of a really great backlink profile. Ginger could be in a whole separate
case study about the benefits of a content strategy. They have put months of
work into online tools, sections about spelling mistakes, grammar rules, and
more. These things have attracted great traffic and links from around the world.
The Plot Thickens
Given the above, you can imagine our surprise when one day in my inbox I found
the dreaded notice from Google that gingersoftware.com had a site-wide manual
penalty for unnatural inbound links. We quickly set up a call and went through
the tooth-rattling ordeal of explaining to our client that they werenât
even ranked for their brand name. Organic traffic dropped by a whopping 94% -
and that for a website that gets 66% of its traffic from Google-based organic
search.
Iâm not going to highlight where they got the penalty â because I
think you can tell.
Full Disclosure
Before we go on any further with this case study, I should come clean. In the
years of my working in SEO, I have shamelessly bought links, posted crappy blog
and forum comments, and run programs that automatically build thousands of spam
links. I have bought expired domains, created blog networks, and have ranked
affiliate sites with every manner of blackhat technique.
With that off my chest â I will say with as clean a conscience as
possible, we did absolutely nothing of the sort for Ginger. While everyone at
yellowHEAD has experience with all manners of SEO tactics, in our work as an
agency we work with big brands, the presence of which we are categorically not
willing to risk. Ginger is a true example of a site that has ranked well because
of an extensive and well-thought out content strategy; a strategy driven by
creating valuable content for users. When analyzing Gingerâs backlinks, we
were amazed to see the kinds of links that had been created because of this
strategy. Take, for example, this forum link on the Texas Fishing Forums.
I was positive that this link would be a spam forum comment or something of
the sort. Turns out that itâs a page on a fishing forum about Zebra
Mussels. Someone got confused and called them Zebra Muscles; a veteran user
corrected them by linking to Gingerâs page about muscle vs mussel.
The Plot Thickensâ More.
As we dug deeper into Gingerâs backlinks, we quickly began to find the
problem. Ginger had recently accrued a large number of extremely spammy links.
Bear with me for a little bit because these links require some explanation.
GingerSoftware.com was being linked to from random pages on dozens of different
websites in clearly spun articles about pornography, pharmaceuticals, gambling,
and more. These pages were linking to random marginal articles on Gingerâs
website like this page always using the same few keywords â
âoccurred,â âsubsequently,â and a few other similar
words. The only thing these words had in common was that Ginger was ranked in
the top three for them in Google.
I had to blur most of the text from this page, as it was inappropriate.
Now, needless to say, even if we were trying to rank Gingerâs site
letâs call it âunconventionally,â we wouldn't have done it to
unimportant pages that were already ranking in the top three from articles about
pornography.
Now hereâs where it gets REALLY interesting
Further investigation into these pages found the same exact articles on dozens
of other websites, all linking to different websites using exactly the same
keywords. For example:
Link to Wiktionary.org
Link to TheFreeDictionary.com
Link to Thesaurus.com
So â What the $#@!%!#$^ are these links?!
As I mentioned in my disclosure previously â I am no newcomer to link
spam, so I happen to know a bit about what these links are. These articles were,
first and foremost, not created by us or by anyone else at Ginger. They were
also not posted with Ginger Software or any of the other websites linked to in
those articles in mind. These articles were posted by spammers using programs
which automatically build links (my guess is GSA Search Engine Ranker) in order
to rank websites. Each one of these articles linked to some spam website (think
something like the-best-diet-pills-green-coffee-beans-are-awesome . info or some
nonsense like that) in addition to linking to Ginger.
These programs find places on the internet where they can automatically post
articles with links. As a way to âtrickâ Google into thinking the
links are natural, they also include links to other big websites in good
neighborhoods. Common targets for these kinds of links include Wikipedia, BBC,
CNN, and other such websites.
Ginger was not the victim of negative SEO, but was simply caught in the
crossfire of some spammers trying to promote their own websites.
We Had Doubts
Once we found these links, we honed our search to find all of them. We were
able to do this using Ahrefs, which is a fantastic tool for any sort of link
analysis. We organized all of the links to Ginger by anchor text and went after
all of the ones with the aforementioned keywords. We removed as many of these
links as possible, disavowed the rest, and filed for reconsideration as
described above.
As confident as we were on the face of it all â we had serious doubts.
We knew how important it was for Gingerâs business to get over this
penalty as quickly as possible and didn't want to get anything wrong. We
couldn't find any other âbad linksâ besides these ones but we kept
thinking to ourselves âthereâs no way that Google completely slapped
a website due to some spam links to these random pages.â There had to be
more to it than that!
Ginger themselves handled this situation incredibly. Where they could have
yelled and gotten angry, instead they said, in a sentence âOk â
letâs fix this. How do we help?â With Gingerâs help, we
mobilized dozens of people inside their company, trained them on finding bad
links, manually reviewed over 40,000 links, contacted all domains which had spam
links on them, disavowed everything we couldn't get to, and submitted the
request for reconsideration on December 17th, only five days after the site got
penalized. The extreme sense of urgency behind this came both because of the
importance of organic traffic for Ginger Software, and because the upcoming
Christmas and New Yearâs holidays. We knew that everyone going on vacation
would significantly increase the amount of time it took to have the
reconsideration request reviewed. You can find a very long and detailed
explanation of the process we used to clean up Ginger's links here.
Despite the speed with which we were able to submit the request, it took
nearly a month to hear back from Google. On January 15th, we received a message
in Google Webmaster Tools that the penalty had been revoked. We, and the staff
at Ginger, were ecstatic and spent the next few days glued to our ranking
trackers and to Google Analytics to see what would happen. Rankings and traffic
quickly began to rise and, as of the writing of this article, traffic is at
about 82% of pre-penalty levels.
Lo and Behold â Rankings!
The (Very) Unofficial Response from Google
Getting over the manual penalty, in some ways, was almost as surprising as
getting it. The fact that all we did was remove and disavow the negative SEO
links and the penalty was removed indicates that, indeed, the penalty may have
been caused entirely by those links.
At the manual penalty session of SMX, towards the end of the talk, I crept
slowly towards the front of the room and as soon as the talk was over, as
unexpectedly as a manual penalty, I pounced to the front of the speakersâ
podium to talk to John Mueller before everyone else. I explained to him (in a
much shorter version than this article) the situation with Ginger and asked if
they were aware of this at Google and what they plan to do about it.
John responded with something along the lines of the following:
âYou mean like when somebody creates spam links but also links to
Wikipedia? â We have seen it happen before. Sometimes we can tell but
sometimes itâs a little bit harderâ but [if] you get a manual
penalty from it you will know about it so you can just disavow the links.â
I have to say, I was pretty surprised with that response. While it wasn't
exactly an admission of guilt, it wasn't a denial either. He basically said yes,
it can happen but if it happens you will get a manual penalty, so youâll
know about it!
So What Does It All Mean?
One wonders if Google understands the impact a manual penalty can have on a
business and if they truly accept the responsibility that comes along with
handing out these kinds of punishments. Ginger, as a company, relies on search
traffic as their main method of user acquisition and they are not unique in that
sense. There are a few important takeaways here.
1.) CHECK YOUR BACKLINKS
No matter who you are â big or small, this is crucial. This kind of
thing can happen, seemingly, to anyone. We have instated a weekly backlink scan
for Ginger Software in which we look through all of their new links from
Webmaster Tools, AHREFS, and Majestic SEO. If we find any more spam links (which
we still are finding), we try to remove them and add them to the disavow list.
Time consuming? Yes. Critical? Yes.
2.) Negative SEO is Alive and Real
It has been my thinking for a long time that links should not be able to hurt
your website. At the most, a link should be discounted if it is considered bad.
The current system is dangerous and too easy to game. With Ginger, it was
obvious (to us at least) that these links were no doing of their own. The links
were in absurd places of the lowest quality and linked to low-benefit
unimportant pages of Gingerâs website. If this was actually a negative SEO
attack, imagine how easy it would be to make it look like it was the
companyâs doing.
3.) Google is making themselves look REALLY bad.
The action that Google took in this case was far too drastic. The site
didnât receive a partial penalty, but rather a full-blown sitewide
penalty. According to the keyword planner, for the top four branded terms for
Ginger, there are 23,300 searches per month. In this case that became 23,300
searches per month where people could not find exactly what they were looking
for.
Google has an amazing amount of work on their hands staying ahead of the
spammers of the world, but they have also become the foundation of the business
models of companies worldwide. To quote from FDR and Spiderman (who can argue
with that???), âwith great power comes great responsibility.â We can
only hope that Google will heed these words and, in the meantime, we will be
happy with the fact that Ginger are back up and running.
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/iSEsm7K43j4/a-startling-case-study-of-manual-penalties-and-negative-seo
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
[Build Great Backlinks] TITLE
Build Great Backlinks has posted a new item, 'Content Outliers: Learning from
the Web's Most Viral Content'
Posted by jamesporter
Let's start with some questions.
Do you want coverage for your brand in major publications?
Do you want significant increases in your backlink profile?
Do you want a larger, more engaged community?
Do you want thousands of new visitors to your site?
If you answered yes to any of those questions, then you should be thinking
about creating viral content.
What can viral content do for you?
This is a piece of content we launched 4 months ago.
Since launch it has been featured on CNN, ZDNet, and Fast Company, has hit
over 500 linking root domains, has earned over 95k social shares, and most
importantly, has driven 270k+ unique visitors to the client's site.
So, how can you start creating viral content?
First things first: What do we mean by viral content?
Any sort of content where the viewership grows rapidly as the result of
sharing. Here's a good primer.
Secondly, how do we get good at viral content?
Looking back at past viral success is a great way of understanding what's
going to be successful in the future, so we need to get our hands on some data!
To get that data, I worked with the team at BuzzSumo, a content marketing
research tool I highly recommend.
We dug into their database to find the 2,000 most-shared pieces of content on
the web that were published within the last six months.
For each of those domains, we then pulled the second-most shared pages, which
gave us a great opportunity to do some maths and identify the "content
outliers"âthe pages on a site that have massively outperformed other
content on the same site.
(source)
For this analysis we looked for content outliers within the top 2,000 list,
and also took a deep dive into the top 50 most-shared pages.
So, what did we learn from the analysis?
1. Make visual content, because it's easy to engage
Of the top 50 most-shared pieces of content, 48% were video, and 24% were
image-based.
That means 72% of the viral content analysed was primarily visual.
So why is visual content so successful? Visual content is incredibly easy for
people to understand and engage with. By reducing the engagement demands on the
viewer, we're increasing the amount of people that take the time to engage with
our content and therefore increasing the size of our audience that engage and
share.
2. The quality of your idea is EVERYTHING
This sounds obvious, but it's worth drilling into. In his excellent book,
"Contagious: Why Things Catch On," Jonah Berger flips contemporary thinking on
his head by saying that mavens (influencers) are less important than we think.
The real key to viral success is the quality of the idea.
This piece of content from Mirabeau Wines, "How to Open A Bottle of Wine
Without A Corkscrew," is an incredible example of a winning idea.
To date, this piece has been shared nearly 1 million times, featured in The
Telegraph, The Mirror and Time Magazine, and has been viewed over 5 million
times on YouTube.
Content marketing tip: Forget everything else, just get your idea right. How?
To start, read this.
3. Create your content around scalable themes
What stood out in the data from BuzzSumo was the broad appeal (scalability) of
the topics that were being shared. Marriage, friendship, family, cancer, and
personal improvement featured in more than 30% of the top 50 posts.
But why did they feature so heavily?
These concepts are relevant to a large audience and provide the opportunity
for wide-scale sharing.
As a content marketer, when ideating content, you need to make the distinction
between targeting a niche audience and targeting a broad audience.
Niche audience
More viral due to shared values ideals and interests of the niche
Broad audience
Less viral due to the disparate nature of the group, but with opportunity to
operate at a much larger scale
The audience that you choose to target has a major effect on the level of
success that your content is likely to achieve.
Content marketing tip: A third way is to target a broad niche. This involves
creating content that is interesting to a specific niche audience, which then
stimulates interest in the larger market.
By doing this you get the benefits of the concentrated sharing of a highly
passionate user base, which then stimulates interest in the larger market.
Using 'The History of Dance Music' as an example, you can see the way the
content could spread through the web, from:
Highly active and passionate dance music fans > Interested dance music fans
> General music lovers
4. Make content interactive
Interestingly, the two most shared pieces of content pulled from BuzzSumo were
both quizzes:
Content
Social Shares
http://www.buzzfeed.com/ashleyperez/what-career-should-you-have
4,419,323
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/12/20/sunday-review/dialect-quiz-map.html
3,478,306
There are many reasons why this content killed it, but one of the key reasons
is the interactive nature of each piece. By forcing users to interact with a
piece of content to fully experience it, you increase their level of engagement.
The more people that engage with a piece, the more people will share it.
Content marketing example: This interactive piece detailing the tech sector's
acquisitions since 1999 has been a great success.
Why it worked: The content encourages engagement via scrolling or zooming to
drill into the data.
5. Stimulate an emotional reaction
A key way to create viral content is to stimulate an emotional reaction.
Why is emotional content so often viral?
At a simplistic level, our emotional experiences are amplified through
sharing. So when we experience a strong emotional reaction, we want to share it.
Think of social buttons as a vent for expressing our emotional experiences.
What's really interesting though is that the emotion you stimulate (positive
versus negative) is less important than the strength of the emotional reaction.
Recent research has found that the strength of the emotional reaction is
absolutely key in viral content.
I defy anyone to read this article about a mountain pathway in China without
experiencing some sort of emotional reaction (mine: seriously sweaty palms!).
This piece has been shared over 1 million times and it's the strength of the
emotional reaction that has stimulated people to share.
(source)
Content marketing example: As a content marketer, it can be pretty difficult to
create an emotional reaction if you're in a boring industry. But you need to
look beyond your products to your audience and the things they love and care
about. Think of the Dove Real Beauty campaign. Soap is boring. They took an
existing emotional issue that their consumers cared about and developed it into
an incredible marketing campaign.
6. Leverage social triggers
Hat tip to Jonah Berger again for this one. If we can link our content to
existing environmental cues, then it's more likely that we will get our content
noticed by our target audience. This works because we are leveraging existing
audience awareness to get cut through.
By playing off issues that are already front of mind for our audience, we
increase a piece's chances of success.
There were various examples of this throughout the BuzzSumo data, but a key
one (not in the list) was from Time, titled "The Selfiest Cities in the World."
Selfies are a major social trigger at the moment, so Time have hooked their
content into that.
7. Personalised content
What can you teach people about themselves? Content that allows people to
better understand themselves and their relative standing with the rest of the
world performed really well in the data sample.
The following is a great example of this type of content. By making content
specifically about a user you automatically stimulate interest.
8. Target an audience likely to share
We all know that you need to create content for a specific audience (and
ideally for your customers). But you can increase your chances of virality by
targeting audiences that are highly likely to share...
If your content is targeted towards a group of people that don't share a lot,
then it is going to be harder to create viral content in that space.
Pro tip: An audience that Buzzfeed target their content towards is the "Bored
in Work, Bored in Line" audience. Basically this audience is a group of people
who are bored, surfing the web, looking to be entertained or surprised.
The "What Career Should I Actually Have" is a classic example of Buzzfeed
targeting this audience.
Content marketing example: Another great example of audience targeting comes
from the site "Wait But Why," called Why are Generation Y Yuppies So Unhappy. By
specifically creating content for and about Generation Y (a highly active
sharing group) they were able to increase their chances of success. This article
was syndicated to the Huffington Post and became that site's most shared piece
of content (1.2 million shares).
Pro tip: According to viral kings Upworthy, "middle-aged women are the biggest
sharers on the web. If you can target them, do!"
9.Take a contrarian viewpoint
A great way of stimulating an emotional response is by taking a contrarian
viewpoint. An example from the buzzsumo list of contrarian content was this:
Content
Total Shares
Christopher Columbus Was Awful
1,164,991
By taking an entrenched viewpoint and flipping it on it's head, you're making
a piece of content a must read because you are challenging people's existing
views.
10. Reinforce viewpoints people already have
Another viral content approach is to make people feel right. Creating content
that reinforces what people already think and feel is a great way to stimulate
sharing.
This video is about people using their phones too much and not living in the
moment.
It expresses a sentiment that a lot of people related to, which in turn
increases their propensity to share.
Content marketing example: Upworthy focus the majority of their content
towards existing viewpoints that people already have. Whether it's LGBT,
education, parenting, guns and crime, by playing off existing emotionality, they
increase the virality of their content.
Here is the full data list of BuzzSumo's 50 most-shared pieces of content on
the web along with the sharing statistics:
URL
Total Shares
What Career Should You Actually Have
4,419,323
How Y'all, Youse and You Guys Talk
3,478,306
If Only For A Second - You Need To Watch This
3,296,397
Como fazer um batuque com seu porco de estimao
3,229,795
39 Test Answers That Are 100% Wrong But Totally Genius At The Same Time
2,508,120
Russian Mother Takes Magical Pictures of Her Two Kids With Animals On Her
Farm
2,494,802
Best coin ever spent.
2,404,200
Compilation of Cats Stealing Dog Beds
2,144,399
30 Naughtiest Dogs: Youâll Crack Up When You Find Out What They Did
2,133,342
This Might Be The Scariest Trail In The World. But Youâll NEVER Guess
Where It Leads. Unbelievable.
2,108,904
I Can't Believe How Funny This Is. I Am In Tears, Make Sure Your Sound Is
Turned On!
2,048,539
Homeless dog living in a trash pile gets rescued, and then does something
amazing! Read more:
http://www.trueactivist.com/gab_gallery/homeless-dog-living-in-a-trash-pile-gets-rescued-and-then-does-something-amazing/
1,992,817
While Their Kids Sleep, These parents Pull Of This Amazing Stunt...
1,860,502
Marriage Isn't For You
1,848,969
Creative Mom Turns Her Baby's Naptime Into Dream Adventures (Updated)
1,787,279
Compilation of Cats Stealing Dog Beds
1,717,782
Beware Of The 5 lb. Bag Of Sugarless Gummy Bears On Amazon.com â The
Reviews Are Priceless!
1,646,695
After I saw this, I put down my phone and didn't pick it up for the rest of
the day...
1,631,432
This Three Minute Commercial Puts Full-Length Hollywood Films to Shame
1,599,884
WestJet Christmas Surprise Will Make You Believe in Santa
1,594,405
Murmuration
1,575,770
Marijuana Overdoses Kill 37 in Colorado On First Day of Legalization
1,529,580
A Big Butt Is A Healthy Butt: Women With Big Butts Are Smarter And
Healthier
1,514,008
Icomania
1,512,417
This Is What Happens When A Kid Leaves Traditional Education
1,464,780
See That Box? That's Where They Put the Babies. And Itâs the Most
Remarkable Thing You'll See All Week
1,462,126
Riding A Bike Over 72ft Canyon - Amazing!
1,429,648
Sexiest Twerk Choreography... Ever?
1,415,268
How to interact with the introverted...
1,409,372
KitKat Break Labs
1,400,393
You're a stay-at-home mom? What do you DO all day?
1,396,121
Robert Downey Jr Sings With Sting And Absolutely Kills It.
1,381,969
This is one happy fox.
1,358,921
What a Choir of Silent Monks Does Will Make You Laugh
1,336,482
Share This with All the Schools, Please
1,284,285
Airline Pulls Amazing Christmas Stunt on Passengers
1,276,863
What You Get When You Pour Molten Aluminum Into An Ant Hill
1,273,036
Police Chief writes EPIC letter to Kanye After He Compared Himself to a
Police Officer & Soldier
1,262,817
A Boy Makes Anti-Muslim Comments In Front Of An American Soldier. The
Soldier's Reply: Priceless.
1,231,198
Why Generation Y Yuppies Are Unhappy
1,230,618
Chase Mission Main Street Grants
1,220,665
After Reading This, Youâll Never Look At A Banana In The Same Way
Again
1,217,816
Khan Academy
1,215,464
17 Things That Happen When You've Been Friends With Someone For, Literally,
Ever
1,197,644
Hidden Camera Catches Beagle Stealing Chicken Nuggets In Epic Style (VIDEO)
1,181,805
Christopher Columbus was awful (but this other guy was not) - The Oatmeal
1,164,991
What Little Girls Wish Daddies Knew
1,114,981
Twins were born, but haven't realized that
1,075,449
Pope Francis Condemns Racism and Declares that "All Religions Are True" at
Historic Third Vatican Council
1,075,410
Married or not... you should read this.
1,040,203
Hope you enjoyed the post. Fire any questions to me in the comments. Up and to
the right!!!
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the Web's Most Viral Content'
Posted by jamesporter
Let's start with some questions.
Do you want coverage for your brand in major publications?
Do you want significant increases in your backlink profile?
Do you want a larger, more engaged community?
Do you want thousands of new visitors to your site?
If you answered yes to any of those questions, then you should be thinking
about creating viral content.
What can viral content do for you?
This is a piece of content we launched 4 months ago.
Since launch it has been featured on CNN, ZDNet, and Fast Company, has hit
over 500 linking root domains, has earned over 95k social shares, and most
importantly, has driven 270k+ unique visitors to the client's site.
So, how can you start creating viral content?
First things first: What do we mean by viral content?
Any sort of content where the viewership grows rapidly as the result of
sharing. Here's a good primer.
Secondly, how do we get good at viral content?
Looking back at past viral success is a great way of understanding what's
going to be successful in the future, so we need to get our hands on some data!
To get that data, I worked with the team at BuzzSumo, a content marketing
research tool I highly recommend.
We dug into their database to find the 2,000 most-shared pieces of content on
the web that were published within the last six months.
For each of those domains, we then pulled the second-most shared pages, which
gave us a great opportunity to do some maths and identify the "content
outliers"âthe pages on a site that have massively outperformed other
content on the same site.
(source)
For this analysis we looked for content outliers within the top 2,000 list,
and also took a deep dive into the top 50 most-shared pages.
So, what did we learn from the analysis?
1. Make visual content, because it's easy to engage
Of the top 50 most-shared pieces of content, 48% were video, and 24% were
image-based.
That means 72% of the viral content analysed was primarily visual.
So why is visual content so successful? Visual content is incredibly easy for
people to understand and engage with. By reducing the engagement demands on the
viewer, we're increasing the amount of people that take the time to engage with
our content and therefore increasing the size of our audience that engage and
share.
2. The quality of your idea is EVERYTHING
This sounds obvious, but it's worth drilling into. In his excellent book,
"Contagious: Why Things Catch On," Jonah Berger flips contemporary thinking on
his head by saying that mavens (influencers) are less important than we think.
The real key to viral success is the quality of the idea.
This piece of content from Mirabeau Wines, "How to Open A Bottle of Wine
Without A Corkscrew," is an incredible example of a winning idea.
To date, this piece has been shared nearly 1 million times, featured in The
Telegraph, The Mirror and Time Magazine, and has been viewed over 5 million
times on YouTube.
Content marketing tip: Forget everything else, just get your idea right. How?
To start, read this.
3. Create your content around scalable themes
What stood out in the data from BuzzSumo was the broad appeal (scalability) of
the topics that were being shared. Marriage, friendship, family, cancer, and
personal improvement featured in more than 30% of the top 50 posts.
But why did they feature so heavily?
These concepts are relevant to a large audience and provide the opportunity
for wide-scale sharing.
As a content marketer, when ideating content, you need to make the distinction
between targeting a niche audience and targeting a broad audience.
Niche audience
More viral due to shared values ideals and interests of the niche
Broad audience
Less viral due to the disparate nature of the group, but with opportunity to
operate at a much larger scale
The audience that you choose to target has a major effect on the level of
success that your content is likely to achieve.
Content marketing tip: A third way is to target a broad niche. This involves
creating content that is interesting to a specific niche audience, which then
stimulates interest in the larger market.
By doing this you get the benefits of the concentrated sharing of a highly
passionate user base, which then stimulates interest in the larger market.
Using 'The History of Dance Music' as an example, you can see the way the
content could spread through the web, from:
Highly active and passionate dance music fans > Interested dance music fans
> General music lovers
4. Make content interactive
Interestingly, the two most shared pieces of content pulled from BuzzSumo were
both quizzes:
Content
Social Shares
http://www.buzzfeed.com/ashleyperez/what-career-should-you-have
4,419,323
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/12/20/sunday-review/dialect-quiz-map.html
3,478,306
There are many reasons why this content killed it, but one of the key reasons
is the interactive nature of each piece. By forcing users to interact with a
piece of content to fully experience it, you increase their level of engagement.
The more people that engage with a piece, the more people will share it.
Content marketing example: This interactive piece detailing the tech sector's
acquisitions since 1999 has been a great success.
Why it worked: The content encourages engagement via scrolling or zooming to
drill into the data.
5. Stimulate an emotional reaction
A key way to create viral content is to stimulate an emotional reaction.
Why is emotional content so often viral?
At a simplistic level, our emotional experiences are amplified through
sharing. So when we experience a strong emotional reaction, we want to share it.
Think of social buttons as a vent for expressing our emotional experiences.
What's really interesting though is that the emotion you stimulate (positive
versus negative) is less important than the strength of the emotional reaction.
Recent research has found that the strength of the emotional reaction is
absolutely key in viral content.
I defy anyone to read this article about a mountain pathway in China without
experiencing some sort of emotional reaction (mine: seriously sweaty palms!).
This piece has been shared over 1 million times and it's the strength of the
emotional reaction that has stimulated people to share.
(source)
Content marketing example: As a content marketer, it can be pretty difficult to
create an emotional reaction if you're in a boring industry. But you need to
look beyond your products to your audience and the things they love and care
about. Think of the Dove Real Beauty campaign. Soap is boring. They took an
existing emotional issue that their consumers cared about and developed it into
an incredible marketing campaign.
6. Leverage social triggers
Hat tip to Jonah Berger again for this one. If we can link our content to
existing environmental cues, then it's more likely that we will get our content
noticed by our target audience. This works because we are leveraging existing
audience awareness to get cut through.
By playing off issues that are already front of mind for our audience, we
increase a piece's chances of success.
There were various examples of this throughout the BuzzSumo data, but a key
one (not in the list) was from Time, titled "The Selfiest Cities in the World."
Selfies are a major social trigger at the moment, so Time have hooked their
content into that.
7. Personalised content
What can you teach people about themselves? Content that allows people to
better understand themselves and their relative standing with the rest of the
world performed really well in the data sample.
The following is a great example of this type of content. By making content
specifically about a user you automatically stimulate interest.
8. Target an audience likely to share
We all know that you need to create content for a specific audience (and
ideally for your customers). But you can increase your chances of virality by
targeting audiences that are highly likely to share...
If your content is targeted towards a group of people that don't share a lot,
then it is going to be harder to create viral content in that space.
Pro tip: An audience that Buzzfeed target their content towards is the "Bored
in Work, Bored in Line" audience. Basically this audience is a group of people
who are bored, surfing the web, looking to be entertained or surprised.
The "What Career Should I Actually Have" is a classic example of Buzzfeed
targeting this audience.
Content marketing example: Another great example of audience targeting comes
from the site "Wait But Why," called Why are Generation Y Yuppies So Unhappy. By
specifically creating content for and about Generation Y (a highly active
sharing group) they were able to increase their chances of success. This article
was syndicated to the Huffington Post and became that site's most shared piece
of content (1.2 million shares).
Pro tip: According to viral kings Upworthy, "middle-aged women are the biggest
sharers on the web. If you can target them, do!"
9.Take a contrarian viewpoint
A great way of stimulating an emotional response is by taking a contrarian
viewpoint. An example from the buzzsumo list of contrarian content was this:
Content
Total Shares
Christopher Columbus Was Awful
1,164,991
By taking an entrenched viewpoint and flipping it on it's head, you're making
a piece of content a must read because you are challenging people's existing
views.
10. Reinforce viewpoints people already have
Another viral content approach is to make people feel right. Creating content
that reinforces what people already think and feel is a great way to stimulate
sharing.
This video is about people using their phones too much and not living in the
moment.
It expresses a sentiment that a lot of people related to, which in turn
increases their propensity to share.
Content marketing example: Upworthy focus the majority of their content
towards existing viewpoints that people already have. Whether it's LGBT,
education, parenting, guns and crime, by playing off existing emotionality, they
increase the virality of their content.
Here is the full data list of BuzzSumo's 50 most-shared pieces of content on
the web along with the sharing statistics:
URL
Total Shares
What Career Should You Actually Have
4,419,323
How Y'all, Youse and You Guys Talk
3,478,306
If Only For A Second - You Need To Watch This
3,296,397
Como fazer um batuque com seu porco de estimao
3,229,795
39 Test Answers That Are 100% Wrong But Totally Genius At The Same Time
2,508,120
Russian Mother Takes Magical Pictures of Her Two Kids With Animals On Her
Farm
2,494,802
Best coin ever spent.
2,404,200
Compilation of Cats Stealing Dog Beds
2,144,399
30 Naughtiest Dogs: Youâll Crack Up When You Find Out What They Did
2,133,342
This Might Be The Scariest Trail In The World. But Youâll NEVER Guess
Where It Leads. Unbelievable.
2,108,904
I Can't Believe How Funny This Is. I Am In Tears, Make Sure Your Sound Is
Turned On!
2,048,539
Homeless dog living in a trash pile gets rescued, and then does something
amazing! Read more:
http://www.trueactivist.com/gab_gallery/homeless-dog-living-in-a-trash-pile-gets-rescued-and-then-does-something-amazing/
1,992,817
While Their Kids Sleep, These parents Pull Of This Amazing Stunt...
1,860,502
Marriage Isn't For You
1,848,969
Creative Mom Turns Her Baby's Naptime Into Dream Adventures (Updated)
1,787,279
Compilation of Cats Stealing Dog Beds
1,717,782
Beware Of The 5 lb. Bag Of Sugarless Gummy Bears On Amazon.com â The
Reviews Are Priceless!
1,646,695
After I saw this, I put down my phone and didn't pick it up for the rest of
the day...
1,631,432
This Three Minute Commercial Puts Full-Length Hollywood Films to Shame
1,599,884
WestJet Christmas Surprise Will Make You Believe in Santa
1,594,405
Murmuration
1,575,770
Marijuana Overdoses Kill 37 in Colorado On First Day of Legalization
1,529,580
A Big Butt Is A Healthy Butt: Women With Big Butts Are Smarter And
Healthier
1,514,008
Icomania
1,512,417
This Is What Happens When A Kid Leaves Traditional Education
1,464,780
See That Box? That's Where They Put the Babies. And Itâs the Most
Remarkable Thing You'll See All Week
1,462,126
Riding A Bike Over 72ft Canyon - Amazing!
1,429,648
Sexiest Twerk Choreography... Ever?
1,415,268
How to interact with the introverted...
1,409,372
KitKat Break Labs
1,400,393
You're a stay-at-home mom? What do you DO all day?
1,396,121
Robert Downey Jr Sings With Sting And Absolutely Kills It.
1,381,969
This is one happy fox.
1,358,921
What a Choir of Silent Monks Does Will Make You Laugh
1,336,482
Share This with All the Schools, Please
1,284,285
Airline Pulls Amazing Christmas Stunt on Passengers
1,276,863
What You Get When You Pour Molten Aluminum Into An Ant Hill
1,273,036
Police Chief writes EPIC letter to Kanye After He Compared Himself to a
Police Officer & Soldier
1,262,817
A Boy Makes Anti-Muslim Comments In Front Of An American Soldier. The
Soldier's Reply: Priceless.
1,231,198
Why Generation Y Yuppies Are Unhappy
1,230,618
Chase Mission Main Street Grants
1,220,665
After Reading This, Youâll Never Look At A Banana In The Same Way
Again
1,217,816
Khan Academy
1,215,464
17 Things That Happen When You've Been Friends With Someone For, Literally,
Ever
1,197,644
Hidden Camera Catches Beagle Stealing Chicken Nuggets In Epic Style (VIDEO)
1,181,805
Christopher Columbus was awful (but this other guy was not) - The Oatmeal
1,164,991
What Little Girls Wish Daddies Knew
1,114,981
Twins were born, but haven't realized that
1,075,449
Pope Francis Condemns Racism and Declares that "All Religions Are True" at
Historic Third Vatican Council
1,075,410
Married or not... you should read this.
1,040,203
Hope you enjoyed the post. Fire any questions to me in the comments. Up and to
the right!!!
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/QH6WIbIN27I/content-outliers
You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are
posted.
Best regards,
Build Great Backlinks
peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com
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