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The 3 Easiest Link Building Tactics Any Website Can Use to Acquire Their First 50 Links - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Without a solid base of links, your site won't be competitive in the SERPs - even if you do everything else right. But building your first few links can be difficult and discouraging, especially for new websites. Never fear - Rand is here to share three relatively quick, easy, and tool-free (read: actually free) methods to build that solid base and earn yourself links.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about how to get those first few links that every website needs to be able to compete. Many folks I know when you get started with link building, it can seem daunting and overwhelming. So let me walk you through what is essentially a half a day of work, maybe three or four hours of work to try these three tactics that will almost certainly get your business or your organization the first handful, let's say 50 links that you need to start being able to compete. Content can you take you a long way. Keywords can take you a long way. Engagement and interaction can take you a long way. But you've got to have a base of links. So let's get started here.

#1. Your brand name, domain name, and founder's/execs names

The first one is basically looking for links that come from your own name, your brand name, your domain name potentially, and the names of the founders or people who run your company.

Step One: Search Google for the names in quotes.

So if it was me and Moz, you'd be searching for "Rand Fishkin" or "Moz.com" in quotes, not the domain name in the URL field. But in the Google search bar, I'd be searching for "Moz.com" in quotes or "Moz + SEO." Moz also has other meanings, including the singer Morrissey, which makes for confusing types of things. If you have that, you'll need to use your brand name plus some sort of signifier or identifier. It's very rare that Morrissey gets mentioned along with search engine optimization. It's very often that Moz gets mentioned along with SEO, and so I can combine those to search for it. So any of these searches will result in a big list of tons of Google results.

Step Two: Manually check the top let's say 50 to 100 results to confirm that...

They link to the right place, and if they don't, if there are mentions of Rand Fishkin that don't link to Moz, we should fix that. We're going to contact those people.

If you can control the anchor text and where the link location points, you can update it. For example, I can go to my LinkedIn. My LinkedIn has a link to Moz. I could update that if I were at a different company or if Moz's domain name changed, for example when it did change from SEOmoz to just Moz.

If it's missing or wrong, I find the right people, I email them, and I fix it. As a result, I should have something like this. Every single mention in Google has a link on the page to my website. I can get that from brand name, from domain name, and from founders and executives. That's a lot of great links.

#2. Sites that list your competition

So this is essentially saying we're going to...

Step One: Identify your top 5 or 10 most visible on the web competitors.

This is a process that you can go through on your own to identify, well, these are the 5 or 10 that we see on the web very frequently for searches that we wish we competed for, or we see them mentioned in the press a ton, whatever it is.

Step Two: Search Google not for each one individually, but rather for combinations, usually two, three, or four of them all together.

For example, if I were making a new whiteboard pen company, I would look for the existing ones, like Pilot and Expo and Quartet and PandaBoard. I might search for Pilot and PandaBoard first. Then I might search for Pilot and Expo. Then I might search for PandaBoard and Quartet and all these various combinations of these different ones.

Step Three: Visit any sites in the SERPs that list multiple competitors in any sort of format (a directory structure, comparisons, a list, etc.)

Then in each of those cases, I would submit or I would try and contact or get in touch with whoever runs that list and say, "Hey, my company, my organization also belongs on here because, like these other ones you've listed, we do the same thing." So if it's here's whiteboard pen brands, Expo, PandaBoard, Quartet, and your site, which should now link to YourSite.com.

This is a little more challenging. You won't have as high a hit rate as you will with your own brand names. But again, great way to expand your link portfolio. You can usually almost always get 20 or 30 different sites that are listing people in your field and get on those lists.

#3. Sites that list people/orgs in your field, your geography, with your attributes.

This is sites that list people or organizations in a particular field, a particular region, with particular attributes, or some combination of those three. So they're saying here are European-based whiteboard pen manufacturers or European-based manufacturers who were founded by women.

So you can say, "Aha, that's a unique attribute, that's a geography, and that's my field. I'm in manufacturing. I make whiteboard pens. Our cofounder was a woman, and we are in Europe. So therefore we count in all three of those. We should be on that list." You're looking for lists like these, which might not list your competitors, but are high-quality opportunities to get good links.

Step One:

List your organization's areas of operation. So that would be like we are in technology, or we're in manufacturing or software or services, or we're a utility, or we're finance tech, or whatever we are. You can start from macro and go down to micro at each of those levels.

List your geography in the same format from macro to micro. You want to go as broad as continent, for example Europe, down to country, region, county, city, even neighborhood. There are websites that list, "Oh, well, these are startups that are based in Ballard, Seattle, Washington in the United States in North America." So you go, "Okay, I can fit in there."

List your unique attributes. Were you founded by someone whose attributes are different than normal? Moz, obviously my cofounder was my mom, Gillian. So Moz is a cofounded-by-a-woman company. Are you eco-friendly? Maybe you buy carbon credits to offset, or maybe you have a very eco-friendly energy policy. Or you have committed to donating to charity, like Salesforce has. Or you have an all-remote team. Or maybe you're very GLBTQIA-friendly. Or you have a very generous family leave policy. Whatever interesting attributes there are about you, you can list those and then you can combine them.

Step Two: Search Google for lists of businesses or websites or organizations that have some of these attributes in your region or with your focus.

For example, Washington state venture-backed companies. Moz is a venture-backed company, so I could potentially get on that list. Or the EU-based manufacturing companies started by women, and I could get on that list with my whiteboard pen company based there. You can find lots and lots of these if you sort of take from your list, start searching Google and discover those results. You'll use the same process you did here.

You know what the great thing about all three of these is? No tools required. You don't have to pay for a single tool. You don't have to worry about Domain Authority. You don't have to worry about any sort of link qualification process or paying for something expensive. You can do this manually by yourself with Google as your only tool, and that will get you some of those first early links.

If you've got additional suggestions, please leave them down in the comments. I look forward to chatting with you there. We'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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fugazi-420-blog · 8 years ago

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The 3 Easiest Link Building Tactics Any Website Can Use to Acquire Their First 50 Links - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

#1. Your brand name, domain name, and founder's/execs names

The first one is basically looking for links that come from your own name, your brand name, your domain name potentially, and the names of the founders or people who run your company.

Step One: Search Google for the names in quotes.

Step Two: Manually check the top let's say 50 to 100 results to confirm that...

They link to the right place, and if they don't, if there are mentions of Rand Fishkin that don't link to Moz, we should fix that. We're going to contact those people.

#2. Sites that list your competition

So this is essentially saying we're going to...

Step One: Identify your top 5 or 10 most visible on the web competitors.

Step Two: Search Google not for each one individually, but rather for combinations, usually two, three, or four of them all together.

Step Three: Visit any sites in the SERPs that list multiple competitors in any sort of format (a directory structure, comparisons, a list, etc.)

#3. Sites that list people/orgs in your field, your geography, with your attributes.

Step One:

Step Two: Search Google for lists of businesses or websites or organizations that have some of these attributes in your region or with your focus.

If you've got additional suggestions, please leave them down in the comments. I look forward to chatting with you there. We'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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fugazi-420-blog · 8 years ago

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Google (Almost Certainly) Has an Organic Quality Score (Or Something a Lot Like It) that SEOs Need to Optimize For - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Entertain the idea, for a moment, that Google assigned a quality score to organic search results. Say it was based off of click data and engagement metrics, and that it would function in a similar way to the Google AdWords quality score. How exactly might such a score work, what would it be based off of, and how could you optimize for it?

While there's no hard proof it exists, the organic quality score is a concept that's been pondered by many SEOs over the years. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand examines this theory inside and out, then offers some advice on how one might boost such a score.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about organic quality score. So this is a concept. This is not a real thing that we know Google definitely has. But there's this concept that SEOs have been feeling for a long time, that similar to what Google has in their AdWords program with a paid quality score, where a page has a certain score assigned to it, that on the organic side Google almost definitely has something similar. I'll give you an example of how that might work.

So, for example, if on my site.com I have these three - this is a very simplistic website - but I have these three subfolders: Products, Blog, and About. I might have a page in my products, 14axq.html, and it has certain metrics that Google associates with it through activity that they've seen from browser data, from clickstream data, from search data, and from visit data from the searches and bounces back to the search results, and all these kinds of things, all the engagement and click data that we've been talking about a lot this year on Whiteboard Friday. So they may have these metrics, pogo stick rate and bounce rate and a deep click rate (the rate with which someone clicks to the site and then goes further in from that page), the time that they spend on the site on average, the direct navigations that people make to it each month through their browsers, the search impressions and search clicks, perhaps a bunch of other statistics, like whether people search directly for this URL, whether they perform branded searches. What rate do unique devices in one area versus another area do this with? Is there a bias based on geography or device type or personalization or all these kinds of things? But regardless of that, you get this idea that Google has this sort of sense of how the page performs in their search results. That might be very different across different pages and obviously very different across different sites. So maybe this blog post over here on /blog is doing much, much better in all these metrics and has a much higher quality score as a result.

Current SEO theories about organic quality scoring:

Now, when we talk to SEOs, and I spend a lot of time talking to my fellow SEOs about theories around this, a few things emerge. I think most folks are generally of the opinion that if there is something like an organic quality score...

1. It is probably based on this type of data - queries, clicks, engagements, visit data of some kind.

We don't doubt for a minute that Google has much more sophistication than the super-simplified stuff that I'm showing you here. I think Google publicly denies a lot of single types of metric like, "No, we don't use time on site. Time on site could be very variable, and sometimes low time on site is actually a good thing." Fine. But there's something in there, right? They use some more sophisticated format of that.

2. We also are pretty sure that this is applying on three different levels:

This is an observation from experimentation as well as from Google statements which is...

Domain-wide, so that would be across one domain, if there are many pages with high quality scores, Google might view that domain differently from a domain with a variety of quality scores on it or one with generally low ones.

Same thing for a subdomain. So it could be that a subdomain is looked at differently than the main domain, or that two different subdomains may be viewed differently. If content appears to have high quality scores on this one, but not on this one, Google might generally not pass all the ranking signals or give the same weight to the quality scores over here or to the subdomain over here.

Same thing is true with subfolders, although to a lesser extent. In fact, this is kind of in descending order. So you can generally surmise that Google will pass these more across subfolders than they will across subdomains and more across subdomains than across root domains.

3. A higher density of good scores to bad ones can mean a bunch of good things:

More rankings in visibility even without other signals. So even if a page is sort of lacking in these other quality signals, if it is in this blog section, this blog section tends to have high quality scores for all the pages, Google might give that page an opportunity to rank well that it wouldn't ordinarily for a page with those ranking signals in another subfolder or on another subdomain or on another website entirely.

Some sort of what we might call "benefit of the doubt"-type of boost, even for new pages. So a new page is produced. It doesn't yet have any quality signals associated with it, but it does particularly well. As an example, within a few minutes of this Whiteboard Friday being published on Moz's website, which is usually late Thursday night or very early Friday morning, at least Pacific time, I will bet that you can search for "Google organic quality score" or even just "organic quality score" in Google's engine, and this Whiteboard Friday will perform very well. One of the reasons that probably is, is because many other Whiteboard Friday videos, which are in this same subfolder, Google has seen them perform very well in the search results. They have whatever you want to call it - great metrics, a high organic quality score - and because of that, this Whiteboard Friday that you're watching right now, the URL that you see in the bar up above is almost definitely going to be ranking well, possibly in that number one position, even though it's brand new. It hasn't yet earned the quality signals, but Google assumes, it gives it the benefit of the doubt because of where it is.

We surmise that there's also more value that gets passed from links, both internal and external, from pages with high quality scores. That is right now a guess, but something we hope to validate more, because we've seen some signs and some testing that that's the case.

3 ways to boost your organic quality score

If this is true - and it's up to you whether you want to believe that it is or not - even if you don't believe it, you've almost certainly seen signs that something like it's going on. I would urge you to do these three things to boost your organic quality score or whatever you believe is causing these same elements.

1. You could add more high-performing pages. So if you know that pages perform well and you know what those look like versus ones that perform poorly, you can make more good ones.

2. You can improve the quality score of existing pages. So if this one is kind of low, you're seeing that these engagement and use metrics, the SERP click-through rate metrics, the bounce rate metrics from organic search visits, all of these don't look so good in comparison to your other stuff, you can boost it, improve the content, improve the navigation, improve the usability and the user experience of the page, the load time, the visuals, whatever you've got there to hold searchers' attention longer, to keep them engaged, and to make sure that you're solving their problem. When you do that, you will get higher quality scores.

3. Remove low-performing pages through a variety of means. You could take a low-performing page and you might say, "Hey, I'm going to redirect that to this other page, which does a better job answering the query anyway." Or, "Hey, I'm going to 404 that page. I don't need it anymore. In fact, no one needs it anymore." Or, "I'm going to no index it. Some people may need it, maybe the ones who are visitors to my website, who need it for some particular direct navigation purpose or internal purpose. But Google doesn't need to see it. Searchers don't need it. I'm going to use the no index, either in the meta robots tag or in the robots.txt file."

One thing that's really interesting to note is we've seen a bunch of case studies, especially since MozCon, when Britney Muller, Moz's Head of SEO, shared the fact that she had done some great testing around removing tens of thousands of low-quality, really low-quality performing pages from Moz's own website and seen our rankings and our traffic for the remainder of our content go up quite significantly, even controlling for seasonality and other things.

That was pretty exciting. When we shared that, we got a bunch of other people from the audience and on Twitter saying, "I did the same thing. When I removed low-performing pages, the rest of my site performed better," which really strongly suggests that there's something like a system in this fashion that works in this way.

So I'd urge you to go look at your metrics, go find pages that are not performing well, see what you can do about improving them or removing them, see what you can do about adding new ones that are high organic quality score, and let me know your thoughts on this in the comments.

We'll look forward to seeing you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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fugazi-420-blog · 8 years ago

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It's Here: The Finalized MozCon 2017 Agenda

Posted by ronell-smith

That sound you hear is the coming together of MozCon 2017.

[You can hear that, right? It's not just me.]

With less than two months to go, most of the nuts and bolts of the event have been fastened together to create what looks to be one of the strongest MozCons in history. Yeah, that's saying a lot, but once you've perused the speakers' lineup, we're sure you'll agree.

MozCon has a rich tradition of bringing together the best and brightest minds in digital marketing, creating a place for individuals across the globe to learn from top-notch speakers, network, share ideas, and learn about the tools, services, and tactics they can put to use in their work and their business.

As a bonus, attendees also get to enjoy lots of snacks, coffee and lots and lots of bacon.

Also, this year we'll offer pre-MozCon SEO workshops on Sunday, July 16. Keep reading for more info.

You will, however, need a ticket to attend the event, so you might want to take care of that sooner rather later, since it always sells out:

Buy my MozCon 2017 ticket!

Now for the meaty details you've been waiting for.

The MozCon 2017 Agenda

Monday

08:0009:00am Breakfast

09:0009:20am Welcome to MozCon 2017

Rand Fishkin, Wizard of Moz @randfish

Rand Fishkin is the founder and former CEO of Moz, co-author of a pair of books on SEO, and co-founder of Inbound.org. Rand's an un-save-able addict of all things content, search, and social on the web.

09:2010:05am How to Get Big Links

Lisa Myers, Verve Search @LisaDMyers

Everyone wants links and coverage from sites such as New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the BBC, but very few achieve it. This is how we cracked it. Over and over. Lisa is the founder and CEO of award-winning SEO agency Verve Search and founder of Womeninsearch.net. Feminist, mother of two, and modern-day shield maiden.

10:0510:35am Data-Driven Design

Oli Gardner, Unbounce @oligardner

Data-Driven Design (3D) is an actionable, evidence-based framework for creating websites & landing pages that will increase your leads, sales, and customers. In this session you'll learn how to use the latest industry conversion data to inform copywriting and design decisions that impact conversions. Additionally, I'll share a new methodology for prioritizing your marketing optimization that will show you which pages are awesome (leave them alone), which pages aren't (massive ROI potential here), and help you develop a common language that your teams of marketers, designers, and copywriters can use to work better together to collectively increase your conversion rates.

Oli, founder of Unbounce, is on a mission to rid the world of marketing mediocrity by using data-informed copywriting, design, interaction, and psychology to create a more delightful experience for marketers and customers alike.

10:3511:05am AM Break

11:1011:30am How to Write Customer-Driven Copy That Converts

Joel Klettke, Business Casual Copywriting & Case Study Buddy @JoelKlettke

If you want to write copy that converts, you need to get into your customers' heads. But how do you do that? How do you know which pain points you need to address, features customers care about, or benefits your audience needs to hear? Marketers are sick and tired of hearing "it depends." I'll give the audience a practical framework for writing customer-driven copy that any business can apply.

Joel is a freelance conversion copywriter and strategist for Business Casual Copywriting. He also owns and runs Case Study Buddy, a done-for-you case studies service.

11:3011:50am What We Learned From Reddit & How It Can Help Your Brand Take Content Marketing to the Next Level

Daniel Russell, Go Fish Digital @dnlRussell

It almost seems too good to be true - online forums where people automatically segment themselves into different markets and demographics and then vote on what content they like best. These forums, including Reddit, are treasure troves of content ideas. I'll share actionable insights from three case studies that demonstrate how your marketing can benefit from content on Reddit.

Daniel is a director at Go Fish Digital whose work has hit the front page of Reddit, earned the #1 spot on YouTube, and been featured in Entrepreneur, Inc., The Washington Post, WSJ, and Fast Company.

11:50am12:10pm How to Build an SEO-Intent-Based Framework for Any Business

Kathryn Cunningham, Adept Marketing @kac4509

Everyone knows intent behind the search matters. In e-commerce, intent is somewhat easy to see. B2B, or better yet healthcare, isn't quite as easy. Matching persona intent to keywords requires a bit more thought. I will cover how to find intent modifiers during keyword research, how to organize those modifiers into the search funnel, and how to quickly find unique universal results at different levels of the search funnel to utilize.

Kathryn is an SEO consultant for Adept Marketing, although to many of her office mates she is known as the Excel nerd.

12:1001:40pm Lunch

01:4502:30pm Size Doesn't Matter: Great Content by Teams of One

Ian Lurie, Portent, Inc. @portentint

Feel the energy surge through your veins as you gain content creation powers THE LIKES OF WHICH YOU HAVE NEVER EXPERIENCED... Or, just learn a process for creating great content when it's just you and your little teeny team. Because size doesn't matter.

Ian Lurie is founder, CEO, and nerdiest marketing nerd at Portent, a digital marketing agency he started in the Cretaceous era, aka 1995. Ian's meandering career includes marketing copywriting, expert dungeon master, bike messenger-ing, and office temp worker.

02:3003:00pm The Tie That Binds: Why Email is Key to Maximizing Marketing ROI

Justine Jordan, Litmus @meladorri

If nailing the omnichannel experience (whatever that means!) is key to getting more traffic and converting more leads, what happens if we have our channel priorities out of order? Justine will show you how email - far from being an old-school afterthought - is core to hitting marketing goals, building lifetime value, and making customers happy. Justine is obsessed with helping marketers create, test, and send better email. Named 2015 Email Marketer Thought Leader of the Year, she is strangely passionate about email marketing, hates being called a spammer, and still gets nervous when pressing send.

03:0003:30pm PM Break

03:3504:05pm

How to Be a Happy Marketer: Survive the Content Crisis and Drive Results by Mastering Your Customer's Transformational Journey

Tara-Nicholle Nelson, Transformational Consumer Insights @taranicholle

Branded content is way up, but customer engagement with that content is plummeting. This whole scene makes it hard to get up in the morning, as a marketer. But there's a new path beyond the epidemic of disengagement and, at the end of it, your brand and your content become regular stops along your customer's everyday journey. Tara-Nicholle Nelson is the CEO of Transformational Consumer Insights, the former VP of Marketing for MyFitnessPal, and author of the Transformational Consumer.

04:0504:50pm Thinking Smaller: Optimizing for the New Wave of Social Video Platforms

Phil Nottingham, Wistia @philnottingham

SnapChat, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Periscope... the list goes on. All social networks are now video platforms, but it's hard to know where to invest. In this session, Phil will be giving you all the tips and tricks for what to make, how to get your content in front of the right audiences, and how get the most value from the investment you're making in social video. Phil Nottingham is a strategist who believes in the power of creative video content to improve the way companies speak to their customers, and regularly speaks around the world about video strategy, SEO, and technical marketing.

07:0010:00pm Monday Night #MozCrawl

The Monday night pub crawl is back.

For the uninitiated, "pub crawl" is not meant to convey what you do after a night of drinking.

Rather, during the MozCon pub crawl, attendees visit some of the best bars in Seattle.

(Each stop is sponsored by a trusted partner; You'll need to bring your MozCon badge for free drinks and light appetizers. You'll also need your US ID or passport.)

More deets to follow.

Tuesday

08:0009:00am Breakfast

09:0509:50am I'd Rather Be Thanked Than Ranked

Wil Reynolds, Seer Interactive @wilreynolds

Ego and assumptions led me to chose the wrong keywords for my own site - yeah, me, Wil Reynolds, Mr. RCS. How did I spend three years optimizing my site and building links to finally crack the top three for six critical keywords, only to find out that I wasted all that time? However, in spite of targeting the wrong words, Seer grew the business. In this presentation, I'll show you the mistakes I made and share with you to approaches that can help you to build content that gets you thanked.

A former teacher with a knack for advising, he's been helping Fortune 500 companies develop SEO strategies since 1999. Today, Seer is home to over 100 employees across Philadelphia and San Diego.

09:5010:35am Winning Value Propositions for Crawlers and Consumers

Dawn Anderson, Move It Marketing/Manchester Metropolitan University @dawnieando

In an evolving mobile-first web, we can utilize preempting solutions to create winning value propositions, which are designed to attract and satisfy search engine crawlers and keep consumers happy. I'll outline a strategy and share tactics that help ensure increased organic reach, in addition to highlighting smart ways to view data, intent, consumer choice theory, and crawl optimization.

Dawn Anderson is an International and Technical SEO Consultant, Director of Move It Marketing, and a lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University.

10:3511:05am AM Break

11:1011:15am MozCon Ignite Preview

11:1511:35am More Than SEO: 3 Ways To Prove UX Matters Too

Matthew Edgar, Elementive @MatthewEdgarCO

Great SEO is increasingly dependent on having a website with a great user experience. To make your user experience great requires carefully tracking what people do so that you always know where to improve. But what do you track? In this 15-minute talk, I'll cover three effective and advanced ways to use event tracking in Google Analytics to understand a website's user

Matthew is a web analytics and technical marketing consultant at Elementive.

11:3511:55am A Site Migration: Redirects, Resources, & Reflection

Jayna Grassel, Dick's Sporting Goods @jaynagrassel

Site. Migration. No two words elicit more fear, joy, or excitement to a digital marketer. When the idea was shared three years ago, the company was excited. They dreamed of new features and efficiency. But as SEOs, we knew better. We knew there would be midnight strategy sessions with IT. More UAT environments than we could track. Deadlines, requirements, and compromises forged through hallway chats. ...The result was a stable transition with minimal dips in traffic. What we didn't know, however, was the amount of cross-functional coordination that was required to pull it off.

Jayna is the SEO manager at Dick's Sporting Goods and is the unofficial world's second-fastest crocheter.

11:55am12:15pm The 8 Paid Promotion Tactics That Will Get You To Quit Organic Traffic

Kane Jamison, Content Harmony @kanejamison

Digital marketers are ignoring huge opportunities to promote their content through paid channels, and I want to give them the tools to get started. How many brands out there are spending $500+ on a blog post, then moving on to the next one before that post has been seen by 500 people, or even 50? For some reason, everyone thinks about Outbrain and native ads when we talk about paid content distribution, but the real opportunity is in highly targeted paid social.

Kane is the founder of Content Harmony, a content marketing agency based here in Seattle. The Content Harmony team specializes in full funnel content marketing and content promotion.

12:1501:45pm Lunch

01:5002:20pm Marketing in a Conversational World: How to Get Discovered, Delight Your Customers and Earn the Conversion

Purna Virji, Microsoft @purnavirji

Capturing and keeping attention is one of the hardest parts of our job today. Fact: It's just going to get harder with the advent of new technology and conversational interfaces. In the brave new world we're stepping into, the key questions are: How do we get discovered? How can we delight our audiences? And how can we grow revenue for our clients? Come to this session to learn how to make your marketing and advertising efforts something people are going to want to consume.

Named by PPC Hero as the #1 most influential PPC expert in the world, Purna specializes in SEM, SEO, and future search trends. She is a popular global keynote speaker and columnist, an avid traveler, aspiring top chef, and amateur knitter.

02:2002:50pm Up and to the Right: Growing Traffic, Conversions, & Revenue

Matthew Barby, HubSpot @matthewbarby

So many of the case studies that document how a company has grown from 0 to X forget to mention that solutions that they found are applicable to their specific scenario and won't work for everyone. This falls into the dangerous category of bad advice for generic problems. Instead of building up a list of other companies' tactics, marketers need to understand how to diagnose and solve problems across their entire funnel. Illustrated with real-world examples, I'll be talking you through the process that I take to come up with ideas that none of my competitors are thinking of.

Matt, who heads up user acquisition at HubSpot, is an award-winning blogger, startup advisor, and a lecturer.

02:5003:20pm How to Operationalize Growth for Maximum Revenue

Joanna Lord, ClassPass @JoannaLord

Joanna will walk through tactical ways to organize your team, build system foundations, and create processes that fuel growth across the company. You'll hear how to coordinate with product, engineering, CX, and sales to ensure you're maximizing your opportunity to acquire, retain, and monetize your customers.

Joanna is the CMO of ClassPass, the world's leading fitness membership. Prior to that she was VP of Marketing at Porch and CMO of BigDoor. She is a global keynote and digital evangelist. Joanna is a recognized thought leader in digital marketing and a startup mentor.

03:2003:50pm PM Break

03:5504:25pm Analytics to Drive Optimization & Personalization

Krista Seiden, Google @kristaseiden

Getting the most out of your optimization efforts means understanding the data you're collecting, from analytics implementation, to report setup, to analysis techniques. In this session, Krista walks you through several tips for using analytics data to empower your optimization efforts, and then takes it further to show you how to up-level your efforts to take advantage of personalization from mass scale all the way down to individual user actions.

Krista Seiden is the Analytics Advocate for Google, advocating for all things data, web, mobile, optimization, and more. Keynote speaker, practitioner, writer on Analytics and Optimization, and passionate supporter of #WomenInAnalytics.

04:2505:10pm Facing the Future: 5 Simple Tactics for 5 Scary Changes

Dr. Pete Meyers, Moz @dr_pete

We've seen big changes to SEO recently, from an explosion in SERP features to RankBrain to voice search. These fundamental changes to organic search marketing can be daunting, and it's hard to know where to get started. Dr. Pete will walk you through five big changes and five tactics for coping with those changes today. Dr. Peter J. Meyers (aka "Dr. Pete") is Marketing Scientist for Seattle-based Moz, where he works with the marketing and data science teams on product research and data-driven content.

07:0010:00pm MozCon Ignite

Join us for an evening of networking and passion-talks. Laugh, cheer, and be inspired as your peers share their 5-minute talks about their hobbies, passion projects, and life lessons.

Be sure to bring your MozCon badge.

Wednesday

09:0010:00am Breakfast

10:0510:50am The Truth About Mobile-First Indexing

Cindy Krum, MobileMoxie, LLC @suzzicks

Mobile-first design has been a best practice for a while, and Google is finally about to support it with mobile-first indexing. But mobile-first design and mobile-first indexing are not the same thing. Mobile-first indexing is about cross-device accessibility of information, to help integrate digital assistants and web-enabled devices that don't even have browsers to achieve Google's larger goals. Learn how mobile-first indexing will give digital marketers their first real swing at influencing Google's new AI (Artificial Intelligence) landscape. Marketers who embrace an accurate understanding of mobile-first indexing could see a huge first-mover advantage, similar to the early days of the web, and we all need to be prepared. Cindy, the CEO and Founder of MobileMoxie, LLC, is the author of Mobile Marketing: Finding Your Customers No Matter Where They Are. She brings fresh and creative ideas to her clients, and regularly speaks at US and international digital marketing events.

10:5011:20am Powerful Brands Have Communities

Tara Reed, Apps Without Code @TaraReed_

You are laser-focused on user growth. Meanwhile, you're neglecting a gold mine of existing customers who desperately want to be part of your brand's community. Tara Reed shares how to use communities, gamification, and membership content to grow your revenue. Tara Reed is a tech entrepreneur & marketer. After running marketing initiatives at Google, Foursquare, & Microsoft, Tara branched out to launch her own apps & startups. Today, Tara helps people implement cutting-edge marketing into their businesses.

11:2011:50am AM Break

11:5512:25am

From Anchor to Asset: How Agencies Can Wisely Create Data-Driven Content

Heather Physioc, VML @HeatherPhysioc

Creative agencies are complicated and messy, often embracing chaos instead of process, and focusing exclusively on one-time campaign creative instead of continuous web content creation. Campaign creative can be costly, and not sustainable for most large brands. How can creative shops produce data-driven streams of high-quality content for the web that stays true to its creative roots - but faster, cheaper, and continuously? I'll show you how.

Heather is director of Organic Search at global digital ad agency VML, which performs search engine optimization services for multinational brands like Hill's Pet Nutrition, Electrolux/Frigidaire, Bridgestone, EXPRESS, and Wendy's.

12:2512:55pm 5 Secrets: How to Execute Lean SEO to Increase Qualified Leads

Britney Muller, Moz @BritneyMuller

I invite you to steal some of the ideas I've gleaned from managing SEO for the behemoth bad-ass Moz.com. Learn what it takes to move the needle on qualified leads, execute quick wins, and keep your head above water. I'll go over my biggest Moz.com successes, failures, tests, and lessons.

Britney is a Minnesota native who moved to Colorado to fulfill a dream of being a snowboard bum! After 50+ days on the mountain her first season, she got stir-crazy and taught herself how to program, then found her way into SEO while writing for a local realtor.

12:5502:25pm Lunch

02:3003:15pm SEO Experimentation for Big-Time Results

Stephanie Chang, Etsy @@stephpchang

One of the biggest business hurdles any brand faces is how to prioritize and validate SEO recommendations. This presentation describes an SEO experimentation framework you can use to effectively test how changes made to your pages affect SEO performance.

Stephanie currently leads the Global Acquisition & Retention Marketing teams at Etsy. Previously, she was a Senior Consultant at Distilled.

03:1503:45pm Reverse-Engineer Google's Research to Serve Up the Best, Most Relevant Content for Your Audience

Rob Bucci, STAT Search Analytics @STATrob

The SERP is the front-end to Google's multi-billion dollar consumer research machine. They know what searchers want. In this data-heavy talk, Rob will teach you how to uncover what Google already knows about what web searchers are looking for. Using this knowledge, you can deliver the right content to the right searchers at the right time, every time. Rob loves the challenge of staying ahead of the changes Google makes to their SERPs. When not working, you can usually find him hiking up a mountain, falling down a ski slope, or splashing around in the ocean.

03:4504:15pm PM Break

04:2005:05pm

Inside the Googling Mind: An SEO's Guide to Winning Clicks, Hearts, & Rankings in the Years Ahead

Rand Fishkin, Founder of Moz, doer of SEO, feminist @randfish

Searcher behavior, intent, and satisfaction are on the verge of overtaking classic SEO inputs (keywords, links, on-page, etc). In this presentation, Rand will examine the shift that behavioral signals have caused, and list the step-by-step process to build a strategy that can thrive long-term in Google's new reality. Rand Fishkin is the founder and former CEO of Moz, co-author of a pair of books on SEO, and co-founder of Inbound.org. Rand's an un-save-able addict of all things content, search, and social on the web.

07:0011:30pm MozCon Bash

Join us at Garage Billiards for an evening of networking, billiards, bowling, and karaoke with MozCon friends new and old. Don't forget to bring your MozCon badge and US ID or passport.

Additional Pre-MozCon Sunday Workshops

12:30pm5:05pm SEO Intensive

Offered as 75-minute sessions, the five workshops will be taught by Mozzers Rand Fishkin, Britney Muller, Brian Childs, Russ Jones, and Dr. Pete. Topics include The 10 Jobs of SEO-focused Content, Keyword Targeting for RankBrain and Beyond, and Risk-Averse Link Building at Scale, among others.

These workshops are separate from MozCon; you'll need a ticket to attend them.

Amped up for a talk or ten? Curious about new methods? Excited to learn? Get your ticket before they sell out:

Snag my ticket to MozCon 2017!

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fugazi-420-blog · 8 years ago

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Strategic SEO Decisions to Make Before Website Design and Build

Posted by Maryna_Samokhina

The aim: This post highlights SEO areas that need to be addressed and decided on before the website brief is sent to designers and developers.

Imagine a scenario: a client asks what they should do to improve their organic rankings. After a diligent tech audit, market analysis, and a conversion funnel review, you have to deliver some tough recommendations:

“You have to redesign your site architecture,” or

“You have to migrate your site altogether,” or even

“You have to rethink your business model, because currently you are not providing any significant value.”

This can happen when SEO is only seriously considered after the site and business are up and running. As a marketing grad, I can tell you that SEO has not been on my syllabus amongst other classic components of the marketing mix. It's not hard to imagine even mentored and supported businesses overlooking this area.

This post aims to highlight areas that need to be addressed along with your SWOT analysis and pricing models - the areas before you design and build your digital 'place':

Wider strategic areas

Technical areas to be discussed with developers.

Design areas to be discussed with designers.

Note: This post is not meant to be a pre-launch checklist (hence areas like robots.txt, analytics, social, & title tags are completely omitted), but rather a list of SEO-affecting areas that will be hard to change after the website is built.

Wider strategic questions that should be answered:

1. How do we communicate our mission statement online?

After you identify your classic marketing 'value proposition,' next comes working out how you communicate it online.

Are terms describing the customer problem/your solution being searched for? Your value proposition might not have many searches; in this case, you need to create a brand association with the problem-solving for specific customer needs. (Other ways of getting traffic are discussed in: “How to Do SEO for Sites and Products with No Search Demand”).

How competitive are these terms? You may find that space is too competitive and you will need to look into alternative or long-tail variations of your offering.

2. Do we understand our customer segments?

These are the questions that are a starting point in your research:

How large is our market? Is the potential audience growing or shrinking? (A tool to assist you: Google Trends.)

What are our key personas - their demographics, motivations, roles, and needs? (If you are short on time, Craig Bradford's Persona Research in Under 5 Minutes shows how to draw insights using Twitter.)

How do they behave online and offline? What are their touch points beyond the site? (A detailed post on Content and the Marketing Funnel.)

This understanding will allow you to build your site architecture around the stages your customers need to go through before completing their goal. Rand offers a useful framework for how to build killer content by mapping keywords. Ideally, this process should be performed in advance of the site build, to guide which pages you should have to target specific intents and keywords that signify them.

3. Who are our digital competitors?

Knowing who you are competing against in the digital space should inform decisions like site architecture, user experience, and outreach. First, you want to identify who fall under three main types of competitors:

You search competitors: those who rank for the product/service you offer. They will compete for the same keywords as those you are targeting, but may cater to a completely different intent.

Your business competitors: those that are currently solving the customer problem you aim to solve.

Cross-industry competitors: those that solve your customer problem indirectly.

After you come up with the list of competitors, analyze where each stands and how much operational resource it will take to get where they are:

What are our competitors' size and performance?

How do they differentiate themselves?

How strong is their brand?

What does their link profile look like?

Are they doing anything different/interesting with their site architecture?

Tools to assist you: Open Site Explorer, Majestic SEO, and Ahrefs for competitor link analysis, and SEM rush for identifying who is ranking for your targeted keywords.

Technical areas to consider in order to avoid future migration/rebuild

1. HTTP or HTTPS

Decide on whether you want to use HTTPS or HTTP. In most instances, the answer will be the former, considering that this is also one of the ranking factors by Google. The rule of thumb is that if you ever plan on accepting payments on your site, you need HTTPS on those pages at a minimum.

2. Decide on a canonical version of your URLs

Duplicate content issues may arise when Google can access the same piece of content via multiple URLs. Without one clear version, pages will compete with one another unnecessarily.

In developer's eyes, a page is unique if it has a unique ID in the website's database, while for search engines the URL is a unique identifier. A developer should be reminded that each piece of content should be accessed via only one URL.

3. Site speed

Developers are under pressure to deliver code on time and might neglect areas affecting page speed. Communicate the importance of page speed from the start and put in some time in the brief to optimize the site's performance (A three-part Site Speed for Dummies Guide explains why we should care about this area.)

4. Languages and locations

If you are planning on targeting users from different countries, you need to decide whether your site would be multi-lingual, multi-regional, or both. Localized keyword research, hreflang considerations, and duplicate content are all issues better addressed before the site build.

Using separate country-level domains gives an advantage of being able to target a country or language more closely. This approach is, however, reliant upon you having the resources to build and maintain infrastructure, write unique content, and promote each domain.

If you plan to go down the route of multiple language/country combinations on a single site, typically the best approach is subfolders (e.g. example.com/uk, example.com/de). Subfolders can run from one platform/CMS, which means that development setup/maintenance is significantly lower.

5. Ease of editing and flexibility in a platform

Google tends to update their recommendations and requirements all the time. Your platform needs to be flexible enough to make quick changes at scale on your site.

Design areas to consider in order to avoid future redesign

1. Architecture and internal linking

An effective information architecture is critical if you want search engines to be able to find your content and serve it to users. If crawlers cannot access the content, they cannot rank it well. From a human point of view, information architecture is important so that users can easily find what they are looking for.

Where possible, you should look to create a flat site structure that will keep pages no deeper than 4 clicks from the homepage. That allows search engines and users to find content in as few clicks as possible.

Use keyword and competitor research to guide which pages you should have. However, the way pages should be grouped and connected should be user-focused. See how users map out relationships between your content using a card sorting technique - you don't have to have website mockup or even products in order to do that. (This guide discusses in detail how to Improve Your Information Architecture With Card Sorting.)

2. Content-first design

Consider what types of content you will host. Will it be large guides/whitepapers, or a video library? Your content strategy needs to be mapped out at this point to understand what formats you will use and hence what kind of functionality this will require. Knowing what content type you will producing will help with designing page types and create a more consistent user interface.

3. Machine readability (Flash, JS, iFrame) and structured data

Your web pages might use a variety of technologies such as Javascript, Flash, and Ajax that can be hard for crawlers to understand. Although they may be necessary to provide a better user experience, you need to be aware of the issues these technologies can cause. In order to improve your site's machine readability, mark up your pages with structured data as described in more detail in the post: “How to Audit a Site for Structured Data Opportunities”.

4. Responsive design

As we see more variation in devices and their requirements, along with shifting behavior patterns of mobile device use, 'mobile' is becoming less of a separate channel and instead is becoming an underlying technology for accessing the web. Therefore, the long-term goal should be to create a seamless and consistent user experience across all devices. In the interest of this goal, responsive design and dynamic serving methods can assist with creating device-specific experiences.

Closing thoughts

As a business owner/someone responsible for launching a site, you have a lot on your plate. It is probably not the best use of your time to go down the rabbit hole, reading about how to implement structured data and whether JSON-LD is better than Microdata. This post gives you important areas that you should keep in mind and address with those you are delegating them to - even if the scope of such delegation is doing research for you (“Give me pros and cons of HTTPS for my business” ) rather than complete implementation/handling.

I invite my fellow marketers to add other areas/issues you feel should be addressed at the initial planning stages in the comments below!

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fugazi-420-blog · 8 years ago

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Refurbishing Top Content - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by BritneyMuller

You've got top-performing content on your site that does really well. Maybe it's highly converting, maybe it garners the most qualified traffic - but it's just sitting there gathering dust. Isn't there something else you can do with content that's clearly proven its worth?

As it turns out, there is! In today's Whiteboard Friday, Moz's resident SEO and Content Architect, Britney Muller, shares three easy steps for identifying, repurposing, and republishing your top content to juice every drop of goodness out of it.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hey, Moz fans, welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm Britney Muller, Moz's SEO and Content Architect, and I'm so excited to talk to you today about refurbishing your top content. Any of you watching likely have top content, either on your site or a client's site, that does really, really well. Whether that's getting the most traffic or converting the most users, it does really well. The problem is that we let it just sit there, and we're not getting the amplification that we could out of that content. So I'm going to talk to you today about how to sort of funnel in more qualified leads. So how do we do that?

Step 1: Identify your site's top traffic pages.

Analytics is so great for this and to further evaluate which of those pages are converting the highest, have the most engagements, and are bringing in most of your traffic. It's super important to keep in mind that there are other forms of content. It's not always necessarily just a page on your website. It could be a video somewhere, it could be a really great podcast, it could even be a printout, and I've run into this a few times where the information isn't currently digital, but they use it in a clinic or in an office setting that could do really great things for the website. So keep that in mind.

Step 2: Simplify and repurpose

For the sake of our example, I'm going with a long-form content of how to choose the right college. Maybe this brings in lots of applicants for a particular school or university. So what could they better be doing with this piece of content? So that brings us to step two, which is simplify and repurpose. We all want to consume information differently. There are different use cases, you name it. So to take a long-form piece of content and to put it together in a PowerPoint, really simplify it and break it up into slides. From there, you can use those slides or take new raw footage to make a really, really powerful video on how to choose the right college.

If you have these two steps done, you're kind of set up for success for images. You could either take images from your PowerPoint or your video and have really great informational text below it. Lastly, audio, how easy would it be to take this long-form piece and to make it into an audio option or a podcast even, allowing your visitors maybe another option when they get to this page? So it's fun to experiment with that as well.

You can interweave some of these other forms of content back into the original piece, and now you're learning a lot more about your audience and a lot more about how they want to consume your content.

Step 3: Publish on popular platforms

I can already feel people getting really squeamish about this, but you shouldn't. Let me say there are two big reasons why you should be taking advantage of this. One, these are all really, really powerful sites. They rank really well. Two, they have a huge audience, and their audiences are actively seeking information that you're providing on your site. So if you're not going to be providing expertise and information on these sites, someone will, right? So you want to take advantage of that, and you want to take the opportunity.

So you could take your PowerPoint and upload it to SlideShare. SlideShare ranks so, so well. You could take your video and upload it to YouTube, with the caveat of putting it on Vimeo or Wistia first. You want to make sure that you are self-hosting for up to three months, and then you can transfer your video to YouTube. That way you're getting the authority of that video, and Youtube.com isn't ranking first for it.

Instagram is great for those images, but, again, I would always put the text below it and keep your images really clean and not have too much text on them, and then to obviously hashtag appropriately.

Then Pinterest, Quora, people are actively asking questions that you have all the answers to, so to be the expertise in the field and to take advantage of people asking, "How do I choose the right college?" Reddit and LinkedIn are other options to further amplify.

Step 4: Measure the referral metrics

Measure the impact of republishing on these sites. There are a couple of ways to do this. These are some of my favorite engagement metrics. So you have number of viewed pages, you have time on site, bounce rate is always good to look at, and, obviously, conversions. So this really starts to paint a picture of: Where are you seeing the qualified leads? Where is your qualified traffic coming from?

Then the next time you go to a new content strategy, maybe you leave out these three because you didn't get much traffic from them, but maybe you saw a bunch of qualified leads from SlideShare. So that brings you to pivot, like the "Friends" episode. It allows you to pivot. So now, we have a strategy moving forward. We know what platforms work best for your website or your business, and you're kind of setting yourself up for success down the road. I would love, love, love to hear if you have experimented with these strategies, what has worked for you, what hasn't. Also feel free to ask me any questions down below. Thank you so much for joining us for this edition of Whiteboard Friday, and I will see all again soon. Thank you. Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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fugazi-420-blog · 8 years ago

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Uber Will Pay FTC $20 Million To Settle Claim It Misled Drivers On Pay

Uber will pay $20 million to settle allegations from the Federal Trade Commission that the ride-hail giant advertised inflated estimates of how much its drivers earn on its website and in Craigslist job postings to entice them to join the platform.

Uber claimed drivers in San Francisco earn more than $74,000 annually and that those in New York make more than $90,000 a year, according to the FTC's complaint, filed in a California court. Less than 10% of drivers earn that much money, and the median income is $29,000 less in New York and $21,000 less in San Francisco, according to the complaint.

In 17 cities across the country, Uber advertised inflated hourly wages in job postings on Craigslist from at least January to March 2015, the FTC alleges, though the company's own data showed that in several of those markets, less than 10% of its drivers had recently earned that rate.

“During and after the time period Uber has made these unsubstantiated earnings claims, in many markets, most Drivers have not made the claimed amount,” the complaint reads. “In many instances, Drivers have not made the promised amounts even when factoring in non-hourly earnings, such as payments for time-limited promotions and other incentives.”

Federal Trade Commission / Via documentcloud.org

Based on leaked documents and internal Uber calculations provided in response to the leak, BuzzFeed News reported in June that the net pay for drivers in some markets is comparable to that of a Walmart worker. BuzzFeed reported then that drivers in Denver take home an average of $13.17 an hour, those in Houston take home $10.75, and those Detroit take home $8.77.

The FTC also claimed that Uber promised to connect drivers with the “best financing options available” for a vehicle through third-party partner companies, but “Uber has not had any basis for making these claims.”

“Uber's communications with at least one auto company have acknowledged payment terms and conditions that are inconsistent with Uber's promises to Drivers,” the complaint reads.

As part of the settlement, Uber did not admit or deny the FTC's allegations.

"We're pleased to have reached an agreement with the FTC,” an Uber spokesperson said in a statement. “We've made many improvements to the driver experience over the last year and will continue to focus on ensuring that Uber is the best option for anyone looking to earn money on their own schedule.”

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fugazi-420-blog · 8 years ago

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Oracle Is Getting Sued For Discrimination - By The US Government

Michael Short / Getty Images

Just two weeks after filing suit against Google, the Department of Labor has brought suit against another big tech company: Oracle. On Wednesday morning the agency filed a complaint of racial discrimination against the database giant, which employs some 45,000 people in the US.

The complaint alleges that Oracle engaged a "systemic practice of paying Caucasian male workers more than their counterparts in the same job title," resulting in pay discrimination against women and African-American and Asian employees, especially in technical and product development positions.

The complaint further alleges that Oracle favors Asian applicants - "particularly Asian Indians" - when hiring, in part because "targeted recruitment, and referral bonuses ... encouraged its heavily Asian workforce to recruit other Asians."

In a statement, Oracle spokesperson Deborah Hellinger denied allegations of discrimination, decrying the Department of Labor's complaint as "politically motivated, based on false allegations, and wholly without merit. Oracle values diversity and inclusion, and is a responsible equal opportunity and affirmative action employer, Our hiring and pay decisions are non-discriminatory and made based on legitimate business factors including experience and merit."

Oracle CEO Safra Catz joined President-elect Donald Trump's transition team last month, following a meeting between Trump and leaders in the tech industry. "I plan to tell the president-elect that we are with him and will help in any way we can," Catz said ahead of the meeting. "If he can reform the tax code, reduce regulation and negotiate better trade deals, the US technology industry will be stronger and more competitive than ever.”

Oracle has many contracts with the federal government, which are worth hundred of millions of dollars. As such, the company has to meet certain requirements when it comes to equal employment opportunity and the provision of certain data. The Department of Labor in its complaint alleges that Oracle "refused to produce" compensation data, hiring data, and "any material demonstrating whether or not it had performed an in-depth review of its compensation practices."

If government contractors don't provide necessary information, the government can sue - and it has, filing similar suits against Google earlier this month and Palantir last fall. The agency also sued JPMorgan today over similar allegations of gender pay discrimination.

The Department of Labor itself is in a transitional moment, with Trump's inauguration coming up on Friday and the Obama administration on its way out. The confirmation of Trump's pick for labor secretary, Andrew Puzder, has been delayed following revived accusations of spousal abuse and reports that widespread criticism from unions and Democrats has left Puzder less than enthusiastic about taking the job. (Puzder has more or less denied these claims.)

Oracle, meanwhile, did not immediately respond to a BuzzFeed News request for recent diversity numbers. According to the company's website, less than a third of the company is female, but 37% of its staff are "minority employees." Whether Oracle includes Asians in the "minority employees" category is unclear. Oracle's diversity website makes no mention of compensation parity.

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fugazi-420-blog · 9 years ago

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Content Gating: When, Whether, and How to Put Your Content Behind an Email/Form Capture - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

Have you ever considered gating your content to get leads? Whether you choose to have open-access content or gate it to gather information, there are benefits and drawbacks you should be aware of. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand weighs the pros and cons of each approach and shares some tips for improving your process, regardless of whichever route you go.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about content gating.

This is something that a lot of content marketers use, particularly those who are interested in generating leads, individuals that their salespeople or sales teams or outreach folks or business development folks can reach out to specifically to sell a product or start a conversation. Many content marketers and SEOs use this type of content as a lure to essentially attract someone, who then fills in form fields to give enough information so that the sales pipeline gets filled or the leads pipeline gets filled, and then the person gets the content.

As opposed to the classic model that we're used to in a more open content marketing and open SEO world of, "Let me give you something and then hopefully get something in return," it's, "You give me something and I will give you this thing in return." This is a very, very popular tactic. You might be familiar with Moz and know that my general bias and Moz's general bias is against content gating. We sort of have a philosophical bias against it, with the exception of, on the Moz Local side, some enterprise stuff, that that marketing team may be doing, may in the future include some gating. But generally, at Moz, we're sort of against it.

However, I don't want to be too biased. I recognize that it does have benefits, and I want to explain some of those benefits and drawbacks so that you can make your own choices of how to do it. Then we're going to rock through some recommendations, some tactical tips that I've got for you around how you can improve how you do it, no matter whether you are doing open content or full content gating.

Benefits of gating content

The two. This is the gated idea. So you get this free report on the state of artificial intelligence in 2016. But first, before you get that report, you fill in all these fields: name, email, role, company website, Twitter, LinkedIn, what is your budget for AI in 2017 and you fill in a number. I'm not kidding here. Many of these reports require these and many other fields to be filled in. I have filled in personally several that are intense in order to get a report back. So it's even worked on me at times.

The opposite of that, of course, would be the report is completely available. You get to the webpage, and it's just here's the state of AI, the different sections, and you get your graphs and your charts, and all your data is right in there. Fantastic, completely free access. You've had to give nothing, just visit the website.

The benefits of gating are you actually get:

More information about who specifically accessed the report. Granted, some of this information could be faked. There are people who work around that by verifying and validating at least the email address or those kinds of things.

Those who expend the energy to invest in the report may view the data or the report itself as more valuable, more useful, more trustworthy, to carry generally greater value. This is sort of an element of human psychology, where we value things that we've had to work harder to get.

Sales outreach to the folks who did access it may be much easier and much more effective because you obviously have a lot of information about those people, versus if you collected only an email or no information at all, in which case would be close to impossible.

Drawbacks of gating content

Let's walk through the drawbacks of gating, some things that you can't do:

Smaller audience potential. It is much harder to get this in front of tons of people. Maybe not this page specifically, but certainly it's hard to get amplification of this, and it's very hard to get an audience, get many, many people to fill out all those form fields.

Harder to earn links and amplification. People generally do not link to content like this. By the way, the people who do link to and socially amplify stuff like this usually do it with the actual file. So what they'll do is they'll look for State of AI 2016, filetype:pdf, site:yourdomain.com, and then they'll find the file behind whatever you've got. I know there are some ways to gate that even such that no one can access it, but it's a real pain.

It also is true that some folks this leaves a very bad taste in their mouth. They have a negative brand perception around it. Now negative brand perception could be around having to fill this out. It could be around whether the content was worth it after they filled this out. It could be about the outreach that happens to them after they filled this out and their interest in getting this data was not to start a sales conversation. You also lose a bunch of your SEO benefits, because you don't get the links, you don't get the engagement. If you do rank for this, it tends to be the case that your bounce rate is very high, much higher than other people who might rank for things like the state of AI 2016. So you just struggle.

Benefits of open access

What are the benefits and drawbacks of open access? Well, benefits, pretty obvious:

Greater ability to drive traffic from all channels, of course - social, search, word of mouth, email, whatever it is. You can drive a lot more people here.

There's a larger future audience for retargeting and remarketing. So the people who do reach the report itself in here, you certainly have an opportunity. You could retarget and remarket to them. You could also reach out to them directly. Maybe you could retarget and remarket to people who've reached this page but didn't fill in any information. But these folks here are a much greater audience potential for those retargeting and remarketing efforts. Larry Kim from WordStream has shown some awesome examples. Marty Weintraub from Aimclear also has shown some awesome examples of how you can do that retargeting and remarketing to folks who've reached content.

SEO benefits via links that point to these pages, via engagement metrics, via their ranking ability, etc. etc. You're going to do much better with this. We do much better with the Beginner's Guide to SEO on Moz than we would if it were gated and you had to give us your information first, of course.

Overall, if what you are trying to achieve is, rather than leads, simply to get your message to the greatest number of people, this is a far, far better effort. This is likely to reach a much bigger audience, and that message will therefore reach that much larger audience.

Drawbacks of open access

There are some drawbacks for this open access model. It's not without them.

It might be hard or even totally impossible to convert many or most of the visits that come to open access content into leads or potential leads. It's just the case that those people are going to consume that content, but they may never give you information that will allow you to follow up or reach out to them.

Information about the most valuable and important visitors, the ones who would have filled this thing out and would have been great leads is lost forever when you open up the content. You just can't capture those folks. You're not going to get their information.

So these two are what drive many folks up to this model and certainly the benefits of the gated content model as well.

Recommendations

So, my recommendations. It's a fairly simple equation. I urge you to think about this equation from as broad a strategic perspective and then a tactical accomplishment perspective as you possibly can.

1. If audience size, reach, and future marketing benefits are greater than detailed leads as a metric or as a value, then you should go open access. If the reverse is true, if detailed leads are more valuable to you than the audience size, the potential reach, the amplification and link benefits, and all the future marketing benefits that come from those things, the ranking benefits and SEO benefits, if that's the case, then you should go with a gated model. You get lots of people at an open access model. You get one person, but you know all their information in a gated content model.

2. It is not the case that this has to be completely either/or. There are modified ways to do both of these tactics in combination and concert. In fact, that can be potentially quite advantageous.

So a semi-gated model is something we've seen a few content marketers and companies start to do, where they have a part of the report or some of the most interesting aspects of the report or several of the graphics or an embedded SlideShare or whatever it is, and then you can get more of the report by filling in more items. So they're sharing some stuff, which can potentially attract engagement and links and more amplification, and use in all sorts of places and press, and blog posts and all that kind of stuff. But then they also get the benefit of some people filling out whatever form information is critical in order to get more of that data if they're very interested. I like this tease model a lot. I think that can work really, really well, especially if you are giving enough to prove your value and worth, and to earn those engagement and links, before you ask for a lot more.

You can go the other way and go a completely open model but with add-ons. So, for example, in this, here's the full report on AI. If you would like more information, we conducted a survey with AI practitioners or companies utilizing AI. If you'd like the results of that survey, you can get that, and that's in the sidebar or as a little notification in the report, a call to action. So that's full report, but if you want this other thing that maybe is useful to some of the folks who best fit the interested in this data and also potentially interested in our product or service, or whatever we're trying to get leads for, then you can optionally put your information in.

I like both of these. They sort of straddle that line.

3. No matter which one or which modified version you do, you should try and optimize the outcomes. That means in an open content model:

Don't ignore the fact that you can still do retargeting to all the people who visited this open content and get them back to your website, on to potentially a very relevant offer that has a high conversion rate and where you can do CRO testing and those kinds of things. That is completely reasonable and something that many, many folks do, Moz included. We do a lot of remarketing around the web.

You can drive low-cost, paid traffic to the content that gets the most shares in order to bump it up and earn more amplification, earn more traffic to it, which then gives you a broader audience to retarget to or a broader audience to put your CTA in front of.

If you are going to go completely gated, a lot of these form fields, you can infer or use software to get and therefore get a higher conversion rate. So for example, I'm asking for name, email, role, company, website, Twitter, and LinkedIn. In fact, I could ask exclusively for LinkedIn and email and get every single one of those from just those two fields. I could even kill email and ask them to sign in with LinkedIn and then request the email permission after or as part of that request. So there are options here. You can also ask for name and email, and then use a software service like FullContact's API and get all of the data around the company, website, role and title, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc., etc. that are associated with that name or in that email address. So then you don't have to ask for so much information.

You can try putting your teaser content in multiple channels and platforms to maximize its exposure so that you drive more people to this get more. If you're worried that hey this teaser won't reach enough people to be able to get more of those folks here, you can amplify that through putting it on SlideShare or republishing on places like Medium or submitting the content in guest contributions to other websites in legit ways that have overlapped audiences and share your information that you know is going to resonate and will make them want more. Now you get more traffic back to these pages, and now I can convert more of those folks to the get more system.

So content gating, not the end of the world, not the worst thing in the world. I personally dislike a lot of things about it, but it does have its uses. I think if you're smart, if you play around with some of these tactical tips, you can get some great value from it.

I look forward to your ideas, suggestions, and experiences with content gating, and we'll see you next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

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fugazi-420-blog · 9 years ago

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How to Influence Branded Searches and Search Volumes to Earn Big Rewards - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

What have you been doing with branded searches? If the answer is "not much," it may be time to shift your focus a bit. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand explores the huge benefits of turning some of your unbranded searches into branded and offers some key tactical advice.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat a little bit about how to influence branded search and get a load of benefit out of that. Some of these things that I'm going to talk about today are more theoretical. Like we think they work. We've experimented. We've seen some other folks experiment. We're pretty sure. Then some of them are solid. We know that these things influence. Regardless, I think I can persuade you that trying to turn more of your unbranded search into branded search is a hugely positive thing. Generating more branded search in general is also hugely positive. Let me show you what I mean with some examples first.

Non-branded search

Non-branded search, these are essentially the search terms, the queries and phrases that we are all pursuing. We're trying to rank for them. This is searchers who have not yet expressed a brand preference. They're searching. Let's say we're talking to a chemist or a lab instructor at a school and they're trying to put together all their materials for their lab. So they're searching for things like test tubes and lab equipment and chemical safety goggles. They're trying to figure out the best prices and the best products, the ones that'll be the safest, the ones that'll be best for their class. Those are unbranded. They have expressed no brand preference. They haven't said, "Oh I want this kind and I know that."

Branded search

Branded searches are more like, "Oh I know I want a Fisher test tube, Fisher Scientific." Fisher test tubes is what I'm looking for, or lab equipment from Thermo. Thermo Scientific makes a bunch of lab equipment that you can buy prepackaged, kind of all together. Or chemical goggles, "I know I want the 3M variety." 3M has, like, these awesome chemical goggles. They're very safe, very good for this stuff.

These branded searches are preferable in many ways for the brands that own and control these companies than the non-branded searches. Here's why.

A. Increase ease of ranking and conversion

Obviously it is way, way easier to rank well for "3M chemical goggles" if you are 3M than ranking for just "chemical goggles" if you're 3M. You're competing against far fewer folks. A lot of people won't even use your brand name. Even the people who do, like maybe on Amazon.com, you'll still get some benefit from that because they're searching for your brand.

It also increases the propensity to convert, meaning that if someone performs that branded search, they're more likely to actually buy that product. They're generally speaking further down the funnel. They've sort of decided to at least investigate your brand, and now you have a chance to pitch them. They're familiar. They know your brand name at least. That's a real positive thing.

B. Affecting search suggest

The second thing that's nice is you can affect search suggest, meaning that if lots of people, for example, started searching for "3M chemical goggles" instead of "chemical safety goggles" or "chemical goggles," it would actually be the case that over time what you'd see Google do is in the dropdown box for "chemical safety goggles," 3M, the word, would start to be associated with it. You'd see that in search suggest. It might be at the very bottom.

For example, if you do a search for "whiteboard," today in Google, Whiteboard Friday is somewhere on that list, but it's usually way down towards the bottom. In some geographies it's probably not there at all. Over time if we get more and more people searching for Whiteboard Friday, it'll move up in search suggest. So that means people will be more likely to perform that query. At least they'll see it and say, "Oh that must be a brand," or "I must have some association with that, or maybe I'm supposed to," or "I want to investigate that, I'm curious about it."

C. Improve rankings for non-branded queries

This is one of those speculative things. We believe that right now search volume for branded terms does have an impact on ranking for the non-branded version of the query.

We saw Google file some patents around this, but we also saw some tests in this direction that looked promising, basically saying that if . . . Let's do Fisher for this one. Let's say people start searching for Fisher test tubes a lot more. Google might say, "You know, I think Fisher is very relevant to the search query 'test tubes.' Let's move Fisher up in the rankings for just the unbranded phrase 'test tubes,' because that volume is suggesting to us that this brand is more relevant to this query than maybe we initially presumed." That's huge as well. If you can drive up that search volume, now you can start to get benefit in the non-branded rankings.

D. Appear in "related searches" feature

You can appear in the related search feature. Related searches is usually somewhere between the middle of the page and the very bottom of the page, most of the time at the very bottom of the search page. That's a powerful way for those 10% to 20% of people that scroll all the way to the bottom before making a click selection or before deciding to change their query, those related searches are a powerful way to suggest, just like search suggest is, that they should, instead of searching for the non-branded term, search for your branded query. The related searches, by the way, is also we think influenced by content, which I'll talk about in a second.

E. Create an association between your brand and a keyphrase

Create an entity-style association. This is essentially the idea of co-occurring keywords. If Google is crawling the web and they see tons of documents, high-quality, trustworthy documents that contain the word "test tubes" that also contain the word "3M," oftentimes in close proximity to the word "test tubes," they'll over time start to associate the word "test tubes" with the word "3M." That can impact suggest. It can impact related. It can impact rankings. It has a bunch of positive potential impact. That can make you more relevant for all sorts of things around search that are just awesome.

F. Affect future searches and personalization

Then the last one, which is also cool and powerful, is that this can affect search personalization, meaning, for example, let's say someone does a search for "3M chemical goggles." They click on 3m.com. Maybe they buy them. Maybe they don't. Next time they do a search, for example let's say "chemical aprons," well it turns out that Google already knows that person has visited 3M in the past. They might see that behavior and, because they're logged into their account, they might show them 3M higher up in the rankings. They might show them 3M higher in the search suggest as they start typing. That personalization is another powerful way that you're getting benefit from branded search.

There are all these benefits. We want to make this happen. How do we do it?

What are the tactics that an SEO can actually use?

It turns out SEOs, we're going to have to work pretty cross-departmentally in our marketing teams to be able to make this happen because some of the best tactics require things that SEO doesn't always own and control entirely. Sometimes you do, sometimes not.

The first one, if we can create curiosity and drive search volume via brand advertising, that's an awesome way to go.

You've seen more and more of this. You have seen advertisements probably on television and YouTube ads. You've seen branded ads on display ads. You've probably heard things on the radio that say search for us, all that kind of stuff. All that classic media, everything from billboards to radio - I know I'm drawing televisions with rabbit ears still. There are probably no TVs in the US that still have rabbit ears. Magazines, print, whatever, billboards, all of that brand advertising can drive people to then be curious about the brand and to want to investigate them more. If you hear a lot about 3M goggles and the cool stuff they're doing, well, you might be tempted to perform a search.

You can embed searches as well.

Be careful with this one. This can get spammy and manipulative and could get you into trouble. You can do it. If you do it in authentic white hat ways, you'll probably be okay.

The idea is basically telling customers like, "Hey, if you want to research us, learn more about 3M's goggles, don't just take our word for it. Search Google. Go find what people are saying, what reviews are saying about our product." You see I think it was LG or Samsung ran a big one of these where they were suggesting people do a Google search, because it turns out their phone had been very, very highly rated by all the top folks who'd done a review of them. You can do that in email. You could do it over social networks. You could do it in content. You're essentially driving people directly to the Google search result page. That could be an embedded link, or it simply could be a suggestion to search and check people out.

You can also use public relations and content marketing, especially guest contributions and content marketing.

You can use events and sponsorship, all of that stuff to essentially drive latent interest and curiosity, kind of like we did with brand advertising but in a little more organic fashion. If The New York Times writes a piece about you, if you speak at a conference . . . This is me wildly gesticulating at a conference. It looks like I'm very dangerously, precariously perched to fall into the crowd there. Guest contributions on a website, maybe something like a Fortune.com, which takes some guest posts, driving people to want to learn more about the brand or the product that you've mentioned.

Then finally, you can create those keyword associations that we talked about, the entity-style associations, through word proximity and co-occurrence in web documents.

I put just web documents here, but really it's important, trustworthy web documents from sources that Google likes and trusts and indexes. That means looking at: Where are all the places potentially on the web that lab equipment is talked about or would be talked about maybe in the future? How do I influence those authors, those creators, those publications to potentially consider including my brand, Thermo Scientific, in their documents? Or how do I create content for places like these that include my brand and include the unbranded term "lab equipment?"

Bunch of tactics, bunch of great opportunities here. I'd love to hear from you folks about what you've done around influencing branded search and how you've seen it affect your SEO campaigns overall. I'll look forward to catching up with you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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