And we were collecting this data for all these SERPs.


How Many Words Is a Question Worth? - Presented by Dr. Pete Meyers

We were collecting these PAA questions.


Could we kind of do something interesting and mine this?


I built some internal tools.


This turned out to be a more complicated question than I thought.


I want to tell you in advance these tools are not available.


I wish I could say they were available.


But I want to show you kind of what my process was.


And so one of the things we did was we looked at a tool that could take a domain, go into


keyword explorer, find all the keywords that that was ranking for, and mine all of those


PAA's and mine those questions.


And so I put in a site like powdermore.com, Harry Potter fan site, and I get back a question


like what are the qualities of each Hogwarts house?


So here's the problem.


We don't tend to target phrases like that.


We don't tend to target questions very long tail.


And there's a reason.


Because if I go to keyword explorer and I type in this question, what are the qualities


of each Hogwarts house, and thank you, Will, for kind of bringing up this point earlier


today, I get back 11 to 50 a month.


And I'm going to look at that and I'm going to say why bother?


Why am I going to write an entire piece of content for 11 to 50 visits a month?


And I think sometimes we pay lip service to the long tail.


We've talked about the long tail for a decade now.


And we understand that there are all these very long tail queries that add up to a lot.


But when we do our keyword research, we still tend to think in terms of a single phrase.


And we tend to limit ourselves and limit our beliefs around that phrase.


And so our belief around that phrase is that at best we're going to get about 50 people


in.


And I want to show you why that's wrong.


So this is a story of 340,000 questions and ultimately three blog posts.


I didn't write 340,000 blog posts.


So if I go to keyword explorer and I type in Moz.com and I have to change my list at


some point because every time I take a screenshot it has ham questions at the bottom.


And that was from a deck.


But I don't remember which one.


So keyword explorer will come back.


We call this keywords by site.


Instead of entering a keyword, you enter a domain.


And it says Moz is ranking for about 119,000 keywords in our dataset.


That's good for us.


And so I went through, luckily working at Moz, I went through all that raw data.


I looked at those 119,000 keywords.


And because PAAs are so prevalent, I was able to pull back over 340,000 questions.


This was good news in a sense.


And it was bad news in the sense that I realized, holy shit, I don't really know what to do


with 340,000 questions.


And we had done some work with some enterprise clients where we were trying to send them


this data and get them interested.


And they said the same thing.


They're like, this is really great.


What do we do with it?


And I said, I don't know.


And I guess I'm going to have to go back and figure that out.


So the good news is there's an interesting thing is there's a ton of duplication.


So Google is repeating these questions.


And there is a pattern to it.


The way they're generating them, the way the machine itself is generating them often.


And so there's a lot of repetition.


So this got us down to a quite manageable 117,000.


Still a bit more than I wanted to tackle with content.


So how did we go about sorting through this data?


See sorting.


See what I did?


So I did a couple things.


We started to look at how could we see if a question was relevant to our site.


And one, it takes some doing, but one fairly simple approach conceptually is we started


to look at, you know what, if a part of the phrase is ranking well for the site, and we


get a lot of those, it probably tells us it's highly relevant.


So if you look at a question like what is SEO keyword research, Moz is ranking very


well for a lot of parts.


SEO, keyword research, SEO keyword research, what is SEO, SEO keyword, keyword.


And you can pull that back and run some metrics and say, you know what, this looks pretty


relevant.


And then we get a question that Moz was involved in that was appearing on our service for how


much does a nap pod cost?


And nap pods seem nice, I might want one, but this doesn't have a lot of relevance to


Moz.


And so I looked and were we ranking for nap pod cost?


No.


Were we ranking for nap pod?


Were we ranking for nap?


And so I looked at what is this coming from?


The query it was coming from was how much does nap management cost?


And if you're in the local SEO space, you know that nap in this case refers to name,


address, and phone.


It's the consistent profile of our business that we're putting out there.


So obviously nap management tied to Moz local.


But this is not a relevant question that we're trying to answer.


And so we were able to run some metrics and get this relevant score, variations of that,


and try to narrow things down and say, you know what, this is highly relevant, this is


not very relevant at all.


And I came up with a second process.


And I wanted to be clever and I came up with the three Cs and they got a little too clever


and my first pass at this was credible, compete, and cannibal.


I said maybe that wasn't the intent that I wanted.


These are not pictures I hope of real human skulls.


These are pictures also from universal of Kong skull island which was pretty cool and


I hope that all the skulls are fake.


I didn't ask.


So the slightly more intelligible version of the three Cs is credibility, competition,


and cannibalization.


So credibility is what it sounds like.


Am I credible to write about this topic?


I should not just pick the most relevant question and write it up.


Is this something I know something about that I can write about intelligently?


Is this something I can compete on?


You know, moms, we're in a good place, we can compete on some things, but you know,


if everybody up there is a powerhouse, huge DA site, maybe this isn't the question you


want to tackle.


And then the important one, cannibalization.


Am I already ranking for this?


I think it's really easy to go through questions, go to write up content, and not realize that


you have some other piece that's already out there.


Maybe it's a historical piece, maybe it's your main site, and end up kind of overwriting


that.


So that may be a good opportunity to rewrite something, to improve something, to update


it, but it's probably not something you want to tackle with new content.


And I'll give you an example.


I was looking at the question, how do I increase my domain authority?


Mozilla's not ranking, Mozilla's ranking kind of at the bottom of the top 10.


It wasn't for a very relevant page.


It was something we could compete on.


It was being ranked on by competitors and news sites that were not answering the question


very well.


And this is something, this is a branded term, domain authority is our metric, it's kind


of something we want to control.


And so it fit that criteria pretty well, and it was highly relevant.


So I ended up picking three questions.


And what I didn't want to do was pick some question at the top of the list that was going


to be a very kind of viral piece of content that I invested a lot in.


I kind of wanted to show you some more realistic things that you could possibly rank for that


would be more approachable.


And so I picked one branded question, how do I increase my domain authority?


I have mods and brackets there because that's ultimately a Moz question.


A technical post, can you undo a 301 redirect?


And how often does Google update its algorithm?


These are all in my wheelhouse.


These are all things we can compete on.


These are not things that we were ranking for well or that we were ranking on things


like Q&A pages that weren't serving the purpose we might want.


All right.


So let's go through these three case studies.


The first one was the branded case study.


And I wrote a post called how do I improve my domain authority?


I'll call out two things.


I decided that increase was a little bit loaded because some people were abusing domain authority


and I switched it to improve.


I also did a little SEO hack and I put DA at the end of my title.


For all of these posts, I generally followed what I called the inverted pyramid for answers.


We've talked about this in the past.


If you're in journalism or writing, you know the inverted pyramid is an approach to writing


where you essentially you lead with the lead.


You start with summarizing the question and you break down the details.


Originally in journalism I found out this was because nobody knew what page you were


going to end up on if you were going to get cut.


So you would write a long version of the article hoping you made page one, but if you made


page 17, the end of the article wasn't so important and you might be okay.


I think this is great for the web because people naturally have a short attention span.


And we need to give people a scent they can follow.


They need to look at that search result, see the snippet, click through and know they're


in the right place.


So I think this is where featured snippets can be powerful and where going ahead and


answering the question right away can be powerful.


So they all follow this basic approach.


And in this case it was really called out.


I put it in the box, I said the short version, I outlined it.


I was really kind of targeting the snippet and see what I could do with that.


So the good news is we ranked number one for the exact match title.


Again, that's not a really high volume term so that may not seem that exciting.


We weren't ranking for the featured snippet so disappointed but that's okay.


And I went into Moss Pro and I decided to take a bunch of a couple dozen variations


on the question and track those over time.


And if you use Moss Pro, we're hoping to beef this up in the next couple of months, but


if you use the labels, I created a label for each experiment so I could just easily go


back and see how that piece of content was ranking.


And here's what I found.


Yes, we were ranking number one for how do I improve my domain authority.


But when I started to dig in, I was seeing the variance.


I was seeing that Google was interpreting that more broadly.


So I was ranking number one for how do I improve domain authority without the my.


How do you improve domain authority?


How do I increase my domain authority?


So I'd worried about whether I should use increase or improve.


It didn't matter.


Google knew that they were synonyms.


Google saw that that was something that was relevant and so I was ranking number one for


that word that I wasn't using.


How do I improve my DA?


How do I improve DA?


How do you improve DA?


How to queries, they're a little tougher.


Now we dropped the number two.


How to improve domain authority?


How do I increase my DA?


And then we got into some interesting invariants like why isn't my domain score increasing?


I hadn't used domain score anywhere in the post.


This was a different form of the question entirely, but Google understood that this


was relevant.


And then just the phrase improve DA itself, we're ranking number three for.


So if I had made the mistake of just seeing this as a way to rank for this one very limited


long tail phrase, I wouldn't have understood that Google would be matching me to all these


synonyms and matching me to all these different ways to answer the question.


And I was only seeing a really tiny piece of that search real estate that I could possibly


rank for.


The other thing that was interesting was I went in to look at improve DA and I saw that


for that one there are actually two featured snippets and we got the second one.


And this is gonna come up again later, but I think we still tend to think of snippets.


This came up yesterday or today I think.


Oh, Rob was talking about local and how snippets can change with local intent.


We tend to think of them as some static thing.


Did I get the featured snippet or did I not get the featured snippet?


Featured snippets are coming from page one rankings.


So they're changing as much as the rankings change.


And as intent changes and as the queries change, you open up new opportunities.


So to say that I was ranking or wasn't, I am for some queries, I'm not for others.


So if I hadn't dug in to see what was going on, I would have missed all these things I


was ranking for, all these things that were happening that actually signaled that this


had been successful way beyond that 11 to 50 kind of range.


All right, number two, non-branded.


This was a technical post.


Can you reverse the 301 redirect?


I had some images and some step-by-step content in there.


Again, I started with a pretty concise answer.


The short answer is yes, you can reverse the 301 redirect, but et cetera, et cetera.


Rank number one for the exact question.


We got the snippet.


I was happy about that.


And what about the variance?


Again, the I in you didn't matter that much.


Rank number one.


Can you reverse a redirect without 301?


Number one.


Can you reverse the 301?


Can I reverse the 301 redirect?


Can I reverse a redirect?


Can I reverse the 301?


All good.


Can you undo a 301 redirect?


I had gone back and forth on whether to use undo or reverse, didn't matter.


Google saw the mis-asson-os, we were ranking number one for that.


Can I undo a 301 redirect?


How do you reverse a 301 redirect?


All the way down to reverse a 301 redirect and undo a 301 redirect with no question words.


So again, there was this whole, even looking at a relatively small amount of queries, there


was this whole realm of interpretations and synonyms and different ways to ask or questions,


not even questions, but statements that we were still ranking for just by targeting this


single question.


Something cool in mouse pro, if you go into rankings, and I didn't know this existed and


apparently it's been there for two years, so I'm a great product evangelist.


I send an excited tweet around.


I'm like, how long have we had this?


When did we build this?


I'm like, dude, that was like 2017.


Like, all right, sorry.


But I'm going to show you anyway because I'm still excited about it.


If you go into campaign rankings, there's a box that shows you how many featured snippets.


That's actually clickable.


It'll bring up a filter in that campaign to show you all the queries with snippets.


In this case, I also filtered by my experiment.


And I was able to see right away which of these queries that I was trying to target


with that post had snippets.


The blue ones are things that were featured in.


And I discovered a different query had a different snippet.


How to reverse the three one redirect was also showing our post, but it was an entirely


different snippet and it was list based.


So Google was saying in this case for the how to, we really want to show step by step.


And because we had written that into the post, the post kind of had that short description


at the top, but it also had step by step guides.


We were not only ranking for snippets on different terms, but for an entirely different snippet.


And so again, if I hadn't dug in, and this was discovery for me, if I hadn't dug in to


these queries and started to see what was actually happening in the SERPs, I would have


missed that this was going on, that people were seeing this.


And that there was a lot of opportunity that wasn't being shown in those few metrics.


All right, last one.


I won't spend a ton of time on this one.


I write a lot about algorithm changes.


I update the mods algorithm change history.


And I've always kind of wanted to put together a post about the exact numbers.


Google releases the numbers, the changes.


They're kind of all over the place, and I wanted to get them in one place.


So I wrote this post, how often does Google update its algorithm?


I wanted to get the answer sort of right up there at the top.


Google reported an incredible 3,234 improvements to search in 2018.


We talk about five, 600 sometimes, 3,000 last year.


Broke down the years.


I went a little more overboard on this one.


I did a SERP warming graphic.


You've seen that in my pinned tweet, I think it's still that, added some things.


Thought I had really kind of pinned this one down.


And yeah, we got number one for the exact phrase again.


Okay.


Didn't get the snippet.


I was disappointed about that.


And then I started to look at what we're ranking for, and it was kind of narrow.


How often does Google update its algorithm?


How often does Google update the algorithm?


It's algo, the algo.


In 2019, I was reaching a little bit, and I felt like I was reaching.


What's going on?


This was a good post.


It got good traction.


I was starting to worry.


What's going to happen with my MozCon talk?


And then I looked at this query, MozAlgorithmUpdates that we were ranking number two for, and I


realized I had kind of broken my own rule.


I was so excited about targeting this really specific idea, and here we're number two for


that query.


And number one is also me.


And this is the MozAlgorithm history.


It's been around a long time.


It's a rankings powerhouse for us.


And so I was competing with myself, and I had kind of broken my own rule.


And I said, you know what?


I'm going to try something different.


I'm going to go full cannibal.


I'm going to see what happens.


I'm going to actually cannibalize my piece of new content.


And I took some of the numbers and the things that I thought were most interesting, and


I rewrote the top of the algorithm update history.


So I kind of took some of the research and redid that, and I rewrote the top of the other


post a little worse, to be honest.


And within about 12 hours, the algorithm history took the featured snippet for that question.


And so I think this is lesson two.


Not only do you need to dig in and really see how you're performing, what you're being


successful at, and not take a narrow view, but sometimes there's something to be learned


from the failures.


And in this case, I felt like I had done something right.


It wasn't working.


I was competing with myself.


So I used that knowledge to improve this post.


I did some other rewrites that actually were pretty beneficial to traffic.


So that other post didn't work out the way I wanted, but this resource benefited from


that in the end.


So I want you to think about whether you're really asking the right questions.


Are you approaching question research and long tail keyword research in a way that you're


really trying to see the whole picture and not limited to this view of a single query


and the volume and the metrics for that single query?


So what if I had looked at...


When I wrote this post originally a few years back, what if I had looked at it that way?


What if I had said, Google algorithm update history, type it into Keyword Explorer, it


only gets 11 to 50 a month, why bother?


I want to show you what the reality of this post looks like years later.


Again, I can type the page into Moss Pro and I get back, we've got 1200 keywords ranking


for this one page.


I said, you know what, I'm just going to pin it down to page one rankings, 137 keywords


ranking on page one for this one.


And I did a little back of the envelope CTR by volume math.


And I said, okay, based just on these queries where that page ranks page one, what would


I estimate the traffic to be?


Now we had that exact match phrase was 11 to 50 a month, right?


I estimated we should get between two and a half and 5,000 visits a month.


And if you've ever done a CTR by volume estimate, you know that they tend to be optimistic.


They're great for sales, they're great to pitch to a client, and then later it doesn't


always turn out that well.


And it doesn't turn out that well because of some of the stats we've seen.


Some of what Rand showed us, no click SERP, SERP features getting in the way, these generic


curves tend to be optimistic.


But in this case, the reality is that in 2019, this post got 21,000 pages a month.


So I think that 1200 queries is actually dramatically underestimating what it's ranking for.


There's such a huge world of long tail queries that a post like that can rank for that I'm


underestimating the value of this by four to eight times with a math that usually overestimates.


And so if I had looked at that title, if I'd looked at that topic and I viewed that as


a 50 visit a month kind of topic, I would have missed out on 20,000 visits a month,


and what's ultimately over a million visitors to this page at this point.


So what if we go back and we look at that original question that we rejected?


What are the qualities of each Hogwarts house?


In Keyword Explorer, if you go to keyword suggestions, I think you get some interesting


stuff here.


So here's that original query, what are the qualities of each Hogwarts house, 11 to 50


per month.


But look at these three.


If you don't Harry Potter, these are three of the houses, Gryffindor, Slytherin, Ravenclaw,


poor Hufflepuff didn't make it to the list, sorry.


So you have these three phrases, Gryffindor traits, Slytherin traits, Ravenclaw traits.


Look at the volume on those, nine to 11,000, 11 to 30,000.


We have something between 30 and 70,000 potential visits from these three phrases.


If you targeted that question well, if you wrote that question of well, what are the


qualities of each Hogwarts house, you would have to answer these questions.


You would need to use these phrases.


And instead of looking at a question that had the potential for 11 to 50 visits a month,


just on this page we're looking at something like 30 to 80,000 potential visits.


Now can you compete on this query?


I don't know, obviously we have to do that math and see whether we're a good source for


that and whether we're credible.


But if we had just looked at that very long-tailed question and not understood the entire context


of it, we'd be missing out on potentially thousands of visits.


So I don't want you to take that narrow view.


I want you to understand that a question can represent dozens of keywords, hundreds of


keywords and many tens of thousands of visits done correctly.


So I think the other thing that's cool about tapping PAA's and something that came up again


and again is that it naturally taps into Google's synonym power, synonym processing power, their


neural matching power and the way that people talk about things.


And so this is a variation on the tool that starts with a topic.


And if I typed in three row cars and we were shopping, nobody says three row cars, but


we were shopping for a bigger vehicle at the time, looking at the PAA's automatically starts


telling me something about what people really ask for.


Three row SUV, third row seats, third row seating, third row leg room.


The second one's interesting to me, seven passenger SUV.


From a traditional SEO standpoint, keyword matching standpoint, seven passenger SUV has


nothing in common with three row cars.


Not a single word matches.


And yet we as humans know that that's a perfect synonym and that's something people really


talk about.


And so what's really interesting about tapping, people also ask and using that is you're really


tapping into Google's own power and starting to understand what are relevant phrases to


use.


And I think what's cool about that is it's not just a matter of which question should


I pick, but all of these questions are telling me something about the context.


And if I couldn't compete on something like what's the best three row SUV for 2018, 2019,


obviously there's a lot of people writing that up.


What about which SUV has the most third row leg room?


Is that something I could tackle?


Is that something that would be a niche that would still give me the power to rank on these


broader terms?


I can't release anything.


I'm hoping to one of these days.


We're working on it.


But what I like to do is this.


We have a form on the site.


I'll show you the URL in a second.


If you go there and you give me just your name, email, and either a topic or your domain,


I will email you back 20 questions that come up in our tools, our internal tools.


We don't have access to it yet, but I will send you back 20 questions.


If you're a medium or large domain, I'd say go ahead and use your domain name.


That's fine.


If you're a smaller site that doesn't have a lot of rankings in our system or just doesn't


rank for a lot or have a big link profile, maybe give me a topic or subtopic and I'll


send you something back.


This is at moz.com slash 20 Q.


I'm happy to do that for you.


I'd really just like to get some feedback on how this works and see what kind of things


people use it for.


Just tell me how you like it.


And that's what I have.


Moneyball is the Future of SEO [Whiteboard Friday] — Will Critchlow

Hi Moz fans, Will Critchlow here, CEO at SearchPilot.


I want to start today by talking about the NBA in 2001.


This is what the shot chart looked like.


These are the 200 most commonly shot from locations in the NBA in 2001.


In professional basketball, you can see that they took a load of shots around the rim.


These are the dunks and layups.


They took a load of shots from outside the three-point line.


And they took a lot of these mid-range shots, which are all the jump shots in between.


Something happened in the subsequent 20 years, because today the shot chart looks more like


this.


It's pretty mind-blowing.


You can see there's still a ton of dunks and layups, still a ton of three-point shots.


But the mid-range has all but disappeared.


Why is that?


What happened was they installed advanced camera systems in every NBA stadium, every


NBA arena, and applied a whole load of advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence


to track all of the players and the ball throughout every single game.


And using those advanced statistics, they could track all kinds of things that they


didn't have before, like how closely guarded the player was when they were shooting, whether


they dribbled left, whether they dribbled right, all those kind of little details.


And out of that data, they discovered that these mid-range shots that had been part of


the game forever were less effective than everyone had assumed.


It turned out that they were almost as hard to score as the three-point shots, but of


course worth far less.


The dunks and layups, worth only two points, but easy enough to be worth shooting.


The three-point shots, worth half as much again, worth shooting.


But the mid-range, less so.


But it took the advanced statistics to be able to figure that out.


I'm going to argue that we're undergoing a similar analytics revolution in SEO.


The equivalent of the cameras in every stadium is not cameras watching us type.


It's SEO A-B testing, where you can take a hypothesis, so you can take the particular


on-site change that you're thinking of making that you think is going to bring a big benefit


to your organic search performance.


And you can test it in a scientific way and get the expected impact as well as the confidence


in for on that impact.


I'm not going to get into detail today about how to run those tests.


We've talked about that before, and we'll link in the show notes to more detail on how


you can run those tests.


But the point being, this kind of testing is available now.


And what it's doing is it's bringing a similar kind of realization to especially enterprise


SEO, right?


The enterprise website SEO that happened in the professional basketball game.


And the equivalent, I'm going to argue, is that the mid-range is all of those untested


changes to your website, all the little things that maybe you do because it's best practice,


or you heard something from a Googler, or you heard something from an expert, maybe


even someone like me.


And they said, hey, you should do this thing.


And you roll it out on your website.


But actually, they're way lower percentage than we'd always assumed, just like the mid-range


shot is in the professional basketball game.


And you have all those cases where you get excited.


The equivalent of your crossover is you find maybe an insight from some keyword research,


and you have some new thought about how searchers might be looking for your website.


And you pull up to that mid-range jump shot where you make the change.


So you start modifying your titles and meta information, for example, on a whole bunch


of pages based off these insights.


But too often, that's a massive airball.


We've seen so many cases where we have rolled out changes that are based on that kind of


insight and huge negative impacts, minus 20%, minus 27% organic search performance as a


result of some of those untested changes.


And so my argument that Moneyball is the future of SEO, the strategies that I think those


large websites are going to be building upon in the future is a combination of winning


tests.


Those are our dunks and layups, the things that we're very sure to make those shots.


And the equivalent of the three-point shot, I'm claiming that this is new content.


So new pages, new site sections, super valuable.


If you don't build out new content, you're going to struggle over time, but super hard


as well, just like the three-point shots are in the game.


They're harder, but they're worth more.


So you build the strategy of building out new content and rolling out winning tests,


which are your dunks.


And you cut out the mid-range, which are all those little tweaks, all those untested on-site


changes.


And then the final piece of the strategic puzzle here is that you drive your test cadence


up.


So the basketball equivalent, again, is that over this same time period, possessions per


game are up almost 10% over that time.


And the reason for that is that if you have an edge, if you have an advantage over your


opponents, which is exactly what this kind of advanced insight gives you, you want more


goes, right?


You want more repetitions.


And that's just like you walk into a casino and you play roulette once, maybe you win.


You play roulette 1,000 times, the casino is definitely winning.


And that's because they have the edge.


So if we have the edge, because we're running these tests, we want to drive the number of


tests up and test cadence.


And so the very highest performing teams that I see doing this kind of moneyball SEO approach,


they are building their strategy of this kind of thing, new content and winning tests, and


then they're setting KPIs around test cadence and making sure that they run more of those


tests, they run them more quickly, and that they're driving performance that way.


So I hope you've enjoyed this little ramble through NBA basketball into SEO testing.


I'm Will Critchlow, CEO of SearchPilot.


How to Onboard Clients with Immersion Workshops - Whiteboard Friday

Hey everybody and welcome back to Whiteboard Friday. My name is Heather


Physiok and I'm group director of discoverability at VML Y&R. So I learned


that when you onboard clients properly the rest of the relationship goes a lot


smoother and through some hard knocks and bumps along the way we've come up


with this immersion workshop model that I want to share with you. So I actually


conducted a survey of the search industry and found that we tend to


onboard clients inconsistently from one to the next if we bother to do a proper


onboarding with them at all. So to combat that problem let's talk through the


immersion workshop. So why bother taking the time to pause slow down and do an


immersion workshop with the client? Well first it allows you to get a lot more


knowledgeable about your client and their business a lot faster than you


would if you were picking it up piecemeal over the first year of your


partnership. Next it opens a dialogue from day one. It creates the expectation


that you will have a conversation and that the client is expected to


participate in that process with you. You want to build a relationship where you


know that you can communicate effectively with one another. It also


starts to build relationships so not only with your immediate day-to-day


client contact but people like their bosses and their peers inside their


organization who can either be blockers or advocates for the search work that


your client is going to try to implement.


Naturally the immersion workshop is also a crucial time for you to align with


your client on the purpose of your search program to define the roadmap for


how you're going to deliver on that search program and agree on how you're


going to measure success because if they're measuring success one way and


you're measuring success a different way you could end up at completely different


places. And ultimately the purpose of a joint immersion workshop is to truly


understand the DNA of the brand. What makes them tick? Who are their customers?


Why should they care what this brand has to offer? Which helps you as a search


professional understand how you can help them and their clients. So the setting


for this immersion workshop ideally should be live in person face-to-face


same room same time same place same mission but worst case scenario if for


some reason that's not possible you can also pull this off with video chats but


at least you're getting that face-to-face communication there's going


to be a lot of back-and-forth dialogue so that's really really important. It's


also important to building the empathy communication and trust between people


seeing each other's faces makes a big difference. Now the ideal setting for the


immersion workshop is two days in my opinion so you can get a lot


accomplished it's a rigorous two days but if you need to streamline it for


smaller brands you can totally pull it off with one or if you have the luxury


of stretching it out and getting more time with them to continue building that


relationship and digging deeper by all means stretch it to three days. And


finally you should work with the client to customize the agenda. So I like to


send them a base template of an immersion workshop agenda with sessions


that I know are going to be important to my search work but I work side-by-side


with that client to customize sessions that are going to be the right fit for


their business and their needs. So right away we've got their buy-in to the


workshop because they have skin in the game they know which departments are


going to be tricky they know what objectives they have in their head so


this is your first point of communication to make this successful. So


what types of sessions do we want to have in our immersion workshop? The first


one is a vision session and this is actually one that I ask the clients to


bring to us so we slot about 90 minutes for the client to give us a presentation


on their brand their overarching strategy for the year their marketing


strategy for the year we want to hear about their goals revenue targets


objectives problems they're trying to solve threats they see to the business


whatever's on their mind or keeps them up at night or whatever they're really


excited about that's what we want to hear and this vision workshop sets the


tone for the entire rest of the workshop and the partnership. Next we want to have


stakeholder sessions we usually do these on day one we're staying pretty high


level on day one and so these will be with other departments that are going to


integrate with search so that could be the head of marketing for example like a


CMO it could be the sales team if they have certain sales objectives they're


trying to hit that would be really great for a search team to know or it could be


global regions maybe Latin America and Europe have different priorities so we


may want to understand how the brand works on the global scale as opposed to


just at HQ. On day two is when we start to get a little bit more in the weeds


and we call these our practitioner sessions so we want to work with our


day-to-day SEO contacts inside the organization but we also set up sessions


with people like paid search if they need to integrate their search efforts.


We might set up time with analytics so this will be where we demo our standard


SEO reporting dashboards and then we work with the client to customize it for


their needs. This is a time where we find out who they're reporting up to and what


kinds of metrics they're measured on to determine success. We talk about the


goals and conversions they're measuring how they're captured why they're


tracking those goals and their existing baseline of performance information.


We also set up time with developers technology is essential to actually


implementing our SEO recommendations so we set up time with them to learn about


their workflows and their decision-making process. I want to know if


they have resource constraints or what makes a good project ticket in JIRA to


get our work done. Great time to start bonding with them and give them a say


in how we execute search and we also want to meet with content teams. Now


content tends to be one of the trickiest areas for our clients. They don't always


have the resources or maybe the search scope didn't include content from day


one. So we want to bring in whoever the content decision makers or creators are.


We want to understand how they think their workflows and processes are they


currently creating search driven content or is this going to be a shift in


mentality. So a lot of times we get together and talk about process


editorial calendaring brand tone and voice whatever it takes to get content


done for search. So after all of these we always close with a summary and next


steps discussion. So we work together to think about all the things that we've


accomplished during this workshop and what our big takeaways and learnings are


and we take this time to align with our client on next steps. When we leave that


room everybody should know exactly what they're responsible for. Very powerful


and you want to send a recap after the fact saying here's what we learn and


here's what we understand the next steps to be. Are we all aligned? Heads nod. Great.


So a couple of tools that we've created and we'll make sure to link to these


below. We've created a standard onboarding checklist. The thing about


search is when we're onboarding a new client we pretty commonly need the same


things from one client to the next. We want to know things about their history


with SEO. We need access and logins or maybe we need a list of their


competitors. Whatever the case is this is a completely repeatable process so


there's no excuse for reinventing the wheel every single time. So this


standard onboarding checklist allows us to send this list over to


the client so they can get started and get all the pieces in place that we need


to be successful. It's like mise en place when you're cooking. We've also created


some really helpful session discussion guides. So we give our clients a little


homework before these sessions to start thinking about their business in a


different way. We'll ask them open-ended questions like what kinds of problems


are your business unit solving this year or what is one of the biggest obstacles


that you've had to overcome or what's some work that you're really proud of. So


we send that in advance of the workshop and then in our business unit


discussions which are part of the stakeholder discussions we'll actually


use a few of the questions from that discussion guide to start seeding the


conversation. But we don't just go down the list of questions checking them off


one by one. We just start the conversation with a couple of them and


then follow it organically wherever it takes us. Open-ended follow-up and


clarifying questions because the conversations we are having in that room


with our clients are far more powerful than any information you're going to get


from an email that you just threw over the fence. We also do a pretty awesome


little sticky note exercise. It's really simple. So we pass out sticky notes to


all the stakeholders that have attended the sessions and we ask two simple


questions. One, what would cause this program to succeed? What are all the


factors that can make this work? And we also ask what will cause it to fail? And


before you know it the client has revealed in their own words what their


internal obstacles and blockers will be. What are the things that they've run


into in the past that have made their search program struggle? And by having


that simple exercise it gets everybody in the mind frame of what their role is


in making this program a success. And the last tool, and this one's pretty awesome,


it is an assessment of the client's organic search maturity. Now this is not


about how good they are at SEO, this is how well they incorporate SEO into their


organization. Now we've actually done a separate whiteboard Friday on the


maturity assessment and how to implement that, so make sure to check that out. But


a quick overview. So we have a survey that addresses five key areas of a


client's ability to integrate search with their organization. It's stuff like


people, do they have the right resources? Process, do they have a process? Is it


documented? Is it improving capacity? Do they have enough budget to actually make


search possible? Knowledge, are they knowledgeable about search and are they


committed to learning more? Stuff like that. And so we've actually created a


five-part survey that has a number of different questions that the client can


answer, and we try to get as many people as possible on the client side to


answer these questions as we can. And then we take those, the numerical answers


and the open-ended answers, and compile that into a maturity assessment for the


brand after the workshop. So we use that workshop time to actually execute the


survey, and we have something that we can bring back to the client not long after


to give them a picture of where they stand today and where we're going to


take them in the future and what the biggest obstacles are that we need to


overcome to get them there. So this is my guide to creating an immersion workshop


for your new clients. Be sure to check out the Whiteboard Friday on the


maturity assessment as well. We'd love to hear what you do to onboard your clients


MozCon 2015 - 06 - The Perfect Pair: Using PPC Data to Influence SEO with Stephanie Wallace

I just have to say, I am so excited to be up here. Big thanks to Moz for having me.


So let's jump right in. SEO and PBC go great together, right? You get increased visibility


in the SERPs, increased perceived authority, and so forth. And while those classic talking


points are true, they are simply not reality. It's not as easy as it sounds. Often, teams


are very siloed and there's very little collaboration or sharing of data. As SEOs, the perception


is that all we care about is traffic and rankings. And all the PBCers care about is click-through


rate and quality score. That image of SEO and PBC as the perfect team simply isn't reality.


We understand why the two should work together, but it's very theoretical and abstract. We


really fall short on the how, on the execution. How often do you actually collaborate and


work on strategy with the PBC team? I know I'm guilty more often than not of skimming


through PBC reports instead of deep diving like I should be, and I'm willing to bet most


of us are. So what can we do about it? How can we bridge this gap? The key to effectively


leveraging PBC lies in understanding how to test your SEO tactics and apply the results.


So we're going to talk through four tactics that will help you test and optimize based


on real metrics. First, we'll talk through how to test for effective metadata. We're


going to talk about the


Optimizing your website is typically a very long-term process. Once you implement changes,


it takes time for search engines to crawl the site and update their index. It takes


even longer to get statistically significant results that you can base success off of.


So by using PBC ads to test metadata, we can expedite this process. So I start by using


the search analytics report in Google Webmaster Tools and filter for pages rather than queries.


And I like to look at all of the data so that we're looking at all of the angles, not just


click-through rates specifically. Once you have defined the pages that you want to focus


on, start testing. I like to create an organic sandbox campaign so that I can keep all of


my SEO tactics in one place and separate from the traditional PBC campaigns. And I create


three to four unique ad variations, so unique title tags or headlines and unique descriptions


or ad copy. The key is that the landing page for each of these ads will be the same. This


is the landing page that we are testing optimization for. I also like to set my ad delivery to


show the best performing ad most often so that we can see a clear winner sooner. On


the other hand, if you want more unbiased results, you can use Google experiments within


AdWords to have your ads display with a more 50-50 even split. This will take a little


longer and it's still in beta, but it is an option. Once you have statistically significant


results and you can see a clear winner, you can then apply these tactics to your on-page


strategy starting with your title tag and meta description. Which keywords perform better


in the headline? Which messaging performed better in the description? And one thing I'm


sure everyone is thinking is the difference in character limitations between your ad copy


and real metadata. So you'll be able to use the themes that you defined, but you will


have to elaborate on these for the actual metadata creation. Beatport is one of the


world's largest online EDM music stores for DJs. And the professional DJ community really


has a language all their own. Dance, techno, house, these are all different genres of music.


So defining key messaging was really important for SEO success for Beatport. Through using


this method, Beatport saw an increase in organic entrances to their website by 65% specifically


to the genre pages. Next we will talk through how to identify content gaps. So for this


tactic, I start by looking at the multi-channel funnels report in Google Analytics and look


at the top conversion paths. I set the look back window to 90 days just so that we're


looking at a substantial amount of data and set the path length to all for the same reason.


Next set the secondary dimension to keyword and filter for paths that begin with paid


search. The idea is that if paid search is driving traffic to the website where organic


is not part of the buyer journey, then we probably have low organic visibility for these


search terms. We're probably not ranking well if at all. Most often that means paid is the


only path to the website or the first path, the first interaction. So next steps to optimize


your website are really based on a few questions. One, are we targeting this keyword from an


organic perspective? If not, why? And if so, why is it not working? Do we need to expand


existing content on the website so that we can speak to these terms or do we need to


create new content altogether?


Hubbell's Chance branded website used this method and found that there was a lot of opportunity


for Helical Peers. They specialized in foundation repair solutions. So not very exciting stuff.


But once Chance added new content on the website that spoke to Helical Peers, they saw an increase


in organic entrances to the Helical products page by over 50%.


Next we'll talk about how to define striking distance ranking opportunities. So first off,


what do I mean by striking distance? Ranking opportunities that are performing a keyword


that are performing very well for PPC, high conversions, high conversion rate, high click


through rate, et cetera, that we are not targeting from an SEO perspective, but we are currently


ranking for these search terms. Probably not very well, maybe towards the bottom of page


one or even on page two or three of Google. But the idea is if we are already showing


relevance for these search terms, PPC is driving qualified site traffic, then with a little


effort, we can really improve our rankings for these keywords. They're within our reach


or within striking distance. So for this tactic, I start by looking at


the top performing keywords in Google AdWords, and I filter for conversions greater than


one, just so that we are not including any extraneous data that we don't need. And I


also set the time frame so that it's long enough that we have a substantial amount of


data to look at. Once I get in Excel, I start by removing a


lot of the extraneous data that you get in the initial export. All we really need to


look at are keywords, clicks, impressions, click through rate, and conversions. Once


we have that data, we want to know if we're already targeting this keyword and how well


we're ranking for this keyword. Based on all of that data, you can see where the opportunity


is and start assigning value. So again, tier one opportunities would be anywhere we are


ranking towards the bottom of page one in Google search results, and tier two would


be anywhere where we're on page two. And we all know that rankings aren't simply


one through ten anymore. So as you're assigning value, you can take into consideration things


like knowledge boxes, local results, mobile results, et cetera, on an as needed basis.


Once you have identified where the opportunity is, then you want to apply these terms to


your on page strategy. PureTalk USA is a no contract cell phone provider. So as you can


imagine, it's a very competitive market. Using this opportunity to find content gaps,


they began to shift their focus from the affordability of what they were offering to the unlimited


aspect of what they were offering. And they saw an increase in organic entrances of over


30% in Q1. And they also earned four new keyword rankings in the top three of Google search


results for those unlimited keyword themes. So lastly, we'll walk through how to leverage


PPC for CRO. And I wanted to talk a little bit about CRO because even though it's not


directly SEO, it is critical to improving user experience. And that's really what SEO


is all about at its core. So when we're defining keywords to different


sections and pages of our website, there are often a number of pages that could be appropriate


for any given keyword theme. There's a natural overlap as part of any website. And with keyword


not provided, making things a little more complicated for us, and semantic search and


Google's algorithm getting better at understanding the meaning behind keywords, we really can't


look at defining our keyword themes as a semantic exercise anymore. We have to look at it from


a buyer journey perspective and think about what a user would expect to see when they're


searching for these different keyword themes. Should the landing page be more navigational


or transactional? So by testing our landing pages using PPC,


again, we can expedite this process a little more. And I like to use my organic sandbox


campaign and create three unique ad variations. They will be very similar because we're testing


one keyword theme, but the key is that each landing page will be to a unique landing page


on the website. Again, I like to set my ad delivery to optimize


for the best performing ads so that we can identify a clear winner sooner. And once you


have defined the best performing page in terms of click-through rate or conversions, you


can apply your on-page strategies to that page for the given keyword theme.


Jekyll Island Club Hotel is a historic resort hotel in Georgia, and they have a lot of overlapping


pages on their website, especially for the different accommodations. So there's a page


for rooms, a page for rates and reservations and so forth. So the question was which page


will resonate most with the users where there's a little bit of overlap and blurry intent.


So by using this method in testing landing pages, Jekyll Island saw an increase in organic


conversions of about 48%. So just a few more tips for you to keep in


mind as you guys move forward and create your own tactics. Some things work better together.


SEO needs PPC data, and they have keyword data. We should absolutely be using that.


You can also curate your own tactics. I mentioned four, but maybe we can find off-page opportunities


by looking at retargeting data. Maybe you can change some things about the tests that


I've talked about. I like to set my ad delivery to optimize to show the best ad more frequently,


but maybe you want to use Google experiments so that you have a 50-50 split.


And lastly, embrace collaboration. It's more than just data mining and optimizing. We should


be working with the PPC team. They shouldn't just be our coworkers across the office. Thank


you.


Excellent. Thank you. We have a number of questions that are coming through on Twitter.


I thought I'd jump right into a couple of these. I'm going to steal this from you, and


hopefully I'll remember to give it to Adrian.


The next person.


Yeah, exactly. Okay. So one question that has come up. I see it a couple times here.


The question is, so how do you select which pages are the best ones to actually take a


look at and good targets for testing in Google Webmaster Tools?


So in Google Webmaster Tools, you can look at the search analytics report, and for testing


effective metadata, I want to look at those pages that have the lowest click-through rate


specifically. So you can filter for pages instead of queries. You guys can take a closer


look at the slide when you download the deck, but it's all outlined there. And then you


can look at impressions, clicks, click-through rate, average position, and so forth. So I


like to look for the lowest click-through rate.


All right. Makes sense. And another good one is, how do you match up keywords across PPC


and SEO that are similar but aren't exactly the same?


Yeah, so a lot of the tactics that I talked about were really focused on keyword themes.


So for my clients, we like to kind of group the different keywords that are overlapping


and similar by theme, and it works better for some of the tactics that I talked about


than others, but the idea is to have a general grouping.


Are there specific tools or something that you use that helps you to find the keywords


that are on that second and third page, kind of that within striking distance?


So a lot of that is based on the keywords that we're targeting through AdWords. So I


look at those keywords, and I do like to look at the different ad types, the different keyword


types, because they are truly different search queries. So if there are a lot of broad match


terms, then it may take a little more research and a little more digging, but it is a very


manual process.


Cool. This one, this is a great one for SEO. How do you mitigate ranking loss risks deploying


PPC pages organically? Yeah, regarding testing landing pages on AdWords.


Can you repeat that one? Yeah, so it's about testing landing pages


on AdWords. How do you mitigate ranking loss risks by deploying those PPC pages organically?


I don't know if that's a, I'm assuming... In terms of overlap with PPC and the organic?


Yeah, I'd say your landing pages ranking organically that you've deployed for PPC.


So for the landing pages that I'm referring to, they're not strictly PPC landing pages.


They're pages on your website that are organic landing pages as well.


Okay, so pages that already exist and... Yeah, exactly.


Okay, that makes sense. Sorry. I almost read that question out loud. That is about our


Wi-Fi. I'm not going to read that question.


I don't have answers to that. I don't have answers to that. Do you test individual


elements on landing pages or design three completely different landing pages when you


test? That's... Yeah, so the idea behind testing landing pages


is testing existing pages that overlap and could use the same keyword themes. So the


Jekyll Island example was a rooms page, a reservations page, and a rates page. So they're


all very similar. They're all talking about reservations, but they already exist. We just


want to know which one is more likely to convert for the reservation keyword theme.


All right. And then I think we have one more question here. What is your suggestion for


tracking user journeys for specific keywords and phrases and how those kind of work together


there? Yeah, so that's where using AdWords PPC data


comes in. They are the ones that have keyword data. We can look at that in AdWords and Analytics


both. So that's really where we're limited to keyword data.


Remember the old days? Finding keywords. All right. Thank you.


MozCon 2014 - 15 - Justin Briggs - Talking Back to Conversational Search

Hi everyone.


I feel like working in SEO these days feels a lot like this.


It's felt a bit toxic recently, right?


And it seems like everyone is trying to get out of SEO, trying to disassociate.


Even some of the biggest brands, biggest businesses in this industry are even going as far as


changing their brand names away from SEO.


From Moz to Gadget, you have agencies who are known for link building like Sia writing


blog posts about throwing in the towel on SEO.


And it's really easy to understand why, because I think doing SEO these days is a lot like


going down these stairs.


It's scary.


You have no idea what's waiting for you at the bottom.


There might be some horrific panda in a clown outfit just waiting to kill you.


And this has really kind of changed the way that we think and we talk and we write and


we investigate in SEO.


I think this tweet from Matt Cutts accurately sums it up.


It's really only us SEOs who are sitting around worrying about penalties these days.


Well, everyone else in search has moved on to things like contextual search, to conversational


search, and this is really where search is going.


I think this is important to kind of get away from this fear of the penalties and get away


from things like traditional link building, because if we stay stagnant, we're not just


going to miss the bus on where the future of search is going and correspondingly where


SEO is going, but we're going to burn it to the ground.


And so instead of being a little bit nervous about the future of SEO, I think we should


be excited, because I think we're really at the beginning of some of the possibilities.


And I think this change is getting really started because search is changing.


Historically search was this thing that existed in the web for the web, and we really just


searched against web documents.


All we did is we took keywords and we put them in titles and we put them in URLs and


we put them in body copy.


We linked them together and we used more keywords.


And it's effectively been the same thing for the last 10 to 15 years and it hasn't really


fundamentally changed.


But we're really moving into a different world, to a much more mobile world, to a device centric


world.


And in this world we're not limited to our desktop with just keyword queries and documents


being returned to us.


We're moving to a world where we have devices in our pockets with us all the time.


We have watches on our wrist and devices on our face.


And in this world, search is becoming much more conversational.


We'll ask for things like what is Limburger to discover that it's a cheese.


Or we might ask and say something like play say it ain't so, where the intent is not to


return a document, but it's to open up an application and play a song.


And how do we do search in a world like this?


It completely changes the way that we're doing search and the way that we think about doing


optimization.


Or we search for something like schedule a meeting with Lynn where it uses my location,


the time of day to determine that I'm at work.


Maybe it reviews my contacts and my recent e-mails to figure out who Lynn is and ultimately


executes this query by opening up an application and sending an invite.


Or lastly, something like okay, Google, navigate to grandma's house where it has to look at


my contacts to figure out who grandmother is, it has to use local data, traffic information,


maps, and then executes your query not through Web documents but through your car.


And I think this is where search is going.


And the most exciting thing about these queries and also the most frightening thing about


this is that they never touch the Web in traditional sense.


And the answers don't come from the Web either.


And so really what we see is happening is that search is getting elevated out of the


Web as kind of this function that exists across everything.


And the Web is being shrunken down into a particular type of capability, which is document


search.


And we see these other things being pulled in as capabilities like databases and knowledge


graph and schema, applications to things like mobile app indexing, and we're really engaging


with them differently.


And this is just going to continue to grow.


What happens when we bring in purchase information or financial information or health records


or your family relationships or all your social data?


And all of that starts to become things that you search against and you action against,


but it doesn't have anything to do with the Web document.


And so this really starts to kind of show us where we can go in SEO and illuminates


a lot of really exciting possibilities, but it also kind of begs the question, okay, how


do we get started?


I think one of the best places to get started is a better understanding of how natural language


processing works.


And this is fundamentally what Hummingbird was.


It was really about better understanding queries, breaking them down and turning them into search


terms in a natural language process.


And there's four parts to this.


The first part is pretty straightforward.


You take a string, a sentence, a question, and you break it into tokens or usable chunks,


single words, phrases.


And then once you've done this, you can go through parts of speech tagging.


To understand how this works, you want to go back to second, third, fourth grade and


think about sentence diagramming.


When you'd have to get up on the board and say this is the subject and this is the predicate,


this is the noun, this is a verb, this is an adjective, that's effectively what parts


of speech tagging is.


You take a phrase like who directed Pulp Fiction and say this is a WH pronoun, this is a verb


past tense, this is a singular proper noun.


And now not only do we have words, but we have meaning of those words within a particular


language.


We can use this meaning to imply and to infer what we should do with these words.


We can infer the relationship between words by using the structure of language.


But language is really complicated and there's lots of different ways that you can say something


and ask a question.


So, limitization is the process of converting things down that are similar words.


So am, are, is, and be are effectively all the same thing with different uses, different


sentences, et cetera.


A better way of thinking this is you're converting words down into their canonical word.


So there might be 150 ways to express a particular statement and it all gets summed down in just


one way of asking that question.


And lastly, and this is the one that everyone's probably the most familiar with, is named


entity extraction.


We're not just trying to determine what these words mean within language, we're trying to


figure out what these words mean within the context of the real world.


Do they have relationships, do they have attributes, what do they mean, people, places, things,


events, et cetera.


And if you're nerdy like me, you can actually replicate a lot of this type of stuff.


You can actually build tools and programs around this yourself.


You can download something like open NLP which can do tokenization, parts of speech tagging


and named entity extraction as well.


And the better we understand how natural language processing works, the better we understand


things like knowledge graph and hummingbird.


So what you see in a situation like this effectively all Google is doing is they're breaking down


the sentence who directed Pulp Fiction based off of natural language.


They understand then how they can go and do a query against the database.


And we can replicate this ourselves.


So you can use a language called MQL or M-Q-L, which is a structured query language that


allows you to talk to Freebase and you can send it over through a Google API.


And using this, you can take a natural language question such as who directed the movie Pulp


Fiction and you can understand that what this actually means is can you return the name


of the person of type people who has the attribute directed for the film Pulp Fiction.


And when you push this against the database, you actually get a structured reply that says


Quentin Tarantino.


And this is effectively how knowledge graph is working.


This is how Google Now is working.


This is how they're answering these questions very rapidly without actually going to a particular


Web page to get that result.


But let's say you're a little less comfortable with coding.


You don't want to do this yourself.


So there's this really cool Python library called Quippy that actually has built-in natural


language processing and it can take a string and convert it into a MQL query for you directly.


So you can ask something like who is the author of Game of Thrones and it will spit out queries


that will allow you to directly engage with DBpedia and Freebase themselves.


And this is really exciting because it starts to illuminate a lot of the possibilities that


we can do things differently in terms of content creation, content optimization, link building


and development of technical SEO.


And so, for example, I'm working on something at Getty where we're trying to curate all


of our content around known entities.


So we have thousands and tens of thousands of photos of Emma Watson.


How do we go about creating a more curated experience by layering in information from


the knowledge graph?


And once you tie a tagged photo with a known entity in it, I can tie that to Freebase and


start pulling in attributes and relationships between that entity, other people and locations,


you can use that for internal linking, navigation, content and targeting as well.


But once you start doing this type of stuff and you get into the space of entities, it


really changes the way that we think about keyword targeting and keyword research.


So both of these two people are named Brad Pitt.


One is a famous actor who you might know.


The other one is a little less famous.


It's an Olympic boxer.


And traditional keyword research would suggest or keyword targeting would suggest that we're


going to put Brad Pitt in the title and the URL and the H1 and somewhere in the body copy


at the beginning, at the end, et cetera, and this is how we target stuff.


But that process doesn't make either one of the two pages more or less targeted for either


Brad Pitt.


And so we're really changing the way that we're going to think about targeting and writing


content.


And so really as we're moving into this kind of next level of keyword targeting, it's really


understanding that natural language plays a role and that things have attributes.


And so I can use attributes to help disambiguate which entity I'm talking about.


If I want to target Brad Pitt the actor, I might use things like actor, producer, Angelina


Jolie, fight club, so that I don't just have to use the same as tag and schema to help


disambiguate who I'm talking about or I might use martial arts boxing Olympics to let them


know that I'm talking about the Olympic boxer Brad Pitt.


But it's also really exciting when you start to think of how they can use natural language


processing.


So I can take a sentence like Getty has great photos of Brad Pitt.


And they can determine that Getty images is a known entity that is a company that has


an associated website.


And then it says they have photos of Brad Pitt.


And we're effectively generating what are implicit links, implicit citations.


You can look at the mention of the entity as effectively being the age reference and


the kind of connection at the end of has Brad Pitt photos as being the anchor text.


And so you can see ways that they can start to use natural language processing to better


understand the content that is associated with different entities, including real-life


things as well as online businesses.


And so one way to start getting at what are the attributes that you should be targeting


is a quick little hack you can do with Ubersuggest, which effectively scales out search suggest.


Find an entity that you're targeting of a particular type.


So let's say NFL quarterbacks.


From that I will find a couple of high-profile quarterbacks that say Russell Wilson and Peyton


Manning.


By putting this in here with question words, I can start to find all the attributes that


people are searching for relative to them, compile those all to a list, strip out all


the entities and do a pivot and account to determine what attributes people are searching


for the most.


And I can determine that with NFL quarterbacks people want to know how fast do they run the


40, where do they go to college, and what is their salary.


And you can start using this in your content targeting.


You can also use Freebase to dynamically pull in content for your title tags, for example.


So in this example of Russell Wilson, you can pull in the name, the number, the position,


the team, the city and the state, all programmatically using Freebase and MQL.


And why this is also useful is you can start targeting what I like to call implicit entity


searches, which is where you're searching for something that implies the result of an


entity but doesn't expressly mention it.


So examples of that would be Seahawks number 3 or Seattle quarterback, where that actually


means a real entity but I'm not searching for that entity's name.


And by going in and looking at the most popular attributes that people are searching for around


entities, we can back our way into those implicit queries.


You can also use these attributes for categorical targeting.


So I can figure out the entity type and attributes associated with them, use a logic chart to


kind of change the way I'm targeting.


So Emma Watson, she's an actress, so I'm going to go after publicity, events or premier photos.


Whereas Seahawks is a sports team, so I'm going to go after team photos or player photos.


And Justin Bieber as a musician, I might target things like concert photos.


And so you can get a little bit more sophisticated in how you're doing your keyword targeting.


And this makes me excited because it starts to breathe new life into something that I


think historically was a little stagnant, like keyword research.


You also want to make sure that you're marking everything up with schema.


I'm not going to get into the details of how.


Just Google it.


It's been written about a lot.


Go to schema.org.


But the reason why this is important is schema takes you from Web to data.


Schema effectively allows your Web site in the form of a document to become queryable


in the same way that we were using Mikkel earlier.


It builds structured databases out of your Web site.


And so by better implementing schema, you can start to move into this more advanced


world.


And you see Google move in this direction.


You see schema.org move in this direction with the support of JSON-LD.


And JSON-LD is a JSON link data format that allows you to mark up schema and JSON, not


just an inline copy using microdata.


And this is really important as we move into a world that's focused on app indexation.


And so now you can actually map a subsection of your mobile app to a page on your Web site


using rel alternative.


And so this is where we start getting into that world of how do I perform a query that


executes an application function?


How do I say a query that opens up a map and drives my car?


And that's through things like app indexation.


And not only can you make apps crawlable and we start moving technical SEO into the world


of application optimization, but we can mark up schema inside of mobile applications as


well.


So this is a deep section within the Spotify application where they're actually saying


this part of the application is Imagine Dragon.


And so as it's indexing this, they're actually looking at schema information to tie what's


inside of an app back to the knowledge graph.


And so personally I think it's a really exciting time for SEO, and I'm looking for kind of


where the next couple of years go.


And I think that it's really easy sometimes to think that we're at the end of the party,


that we're at the end of the curve in terms of where is SEO going and what can we do with


it.


I actually think the opposite is true.


I think we're at the very beginning of search.


I mean, we've really only solved document analysis and we've not even really done that


very well.


And so I think there's a lot of opportunity in terms of the things that we can optimize


and where we can go.


And I think this is important because I think search is going to be the basis for what a


lot of us want to be kind of AI.


If you've ever seen the movie Her, I think that's where search is going.


The Star Trek computer, and I think that there are a few other professions that are better


suited to help optimize and make accessible the source content that we're going to be


using for machine learning and AI.


And honestly, I think if we're all going to go to content marketing, who's actually going


to be doing this stuff?


And so personally I'd like to give the Star Trek computer faster.


And so hopefully everyone will continue to look at some of the new opportunities that


come up in search and SEO as well.


Thank you.


I told you, mind blown.


So I'm pretty sure that we're going to have a lot of questions, but I want to ask you


a personal question.


I want to ask you what are some things that you would do to if I wanted to, say, rank


for my name, Jennifer Lopez, what are some fun things that I could do to focus on?


Any ideas?


Oh, man, that's hard.


On the spot.


J-Lo.


So I think it's relatively straightforward.


I mean, if it's your personal site, obviously try to get your exact match domain or something


related to that.


I think it just makes it a little bit easier.


Sorry.


It would.


But beyond that, really focusing on building your personal brand.


I think getting into speaking and blogging not only has it helped me rank for my own


name, kind of to the detriment of every other Justin Briggs in the world, but it's fundamentally


changed my life.


So I think there's a lot of additional benefits that you can get out there in terms of try


to say something new and something different.


I think every single time I try to talk or I try to write, my goal is to say something


that's never been said before.


Find the smartest person in the room, find like a Will Reynolds, find a Rand, find the


people who taught you and say what can I teach them.


And I think the more often you try to do things like that, the more successful it will be


for you'll passively just rank for your name without having to try to.


So I'll try that.


It's a little harder.


Thank you.


Or you could just spam some links and it would probably still work too.


I'm pretty sure she already does that well, but thank you.


It looks like we have a question right out here.


We'll start out here.


All right.


So it seems like you're getting a lot of, over here, getting a lot of mileage out of


natural language processing, which is great to see as a community I think we're getting


a lot of mileage out of an LP.


I'm curious about related technologies like say computer vision.


You're sitting on this gold mine of images.


Have you thought about using computer vision techniques to be able to say things like Brad


Pitt brushing his teeth and similar?


Yeah, we have.


So obviously I don't work on that myself directly inside of Getty, but we do have a team.


There's a few different ways that we've tackled it.


We do have a tool called Pig Scout which can do some type of image recognition.


It crawls the entire Internet and tries to determine where our photos are being used


and we can grab a lot of information from that.


We also do some image processing to help us with our tagging.


So we do some basic stuff.


It's hard to do something more sophisticated.


So like we can't detect color, whether or not there's a person in this photo.


I wouldn't say that it's as advanced as something like Google's, but we are getting there.


We kind of use people to actually confirm that the attributes that are getting assigned


to it are correct.


But it's very cost intensive.


So right now for the most part it's really focused on tagging the photos during the intake


process, but there are technologies that we're working on trying to get better at doing processing


to understand what's in that photo.


But I think if you look at the Google research blog, there's some really great stuff there.


I'm not sure if you read it.


They have a whole article where they share where they've been trying to figure things


out.


They're like this is a false positive.


This is where we thought a dog was actually a bear.


And so they'll go through some examples of what they're trying to do there.


Excellent.


Before we head to lunch, do we have any more questions for Justin?


I'm pretty sure that as soon as you walk off this stage you're about to get pummeled with


questions.


I'll be around online if you want to chat.


Okay.


Thank you so much, Justin.


That was amazing.


Keyword Targeting and On-Page Optimization - The One-Hour Guide to SEO, Part 4

Howdy, Moz fans.


Welcome to another edition of our special one-hour guide to SEO.


We are now on Part 4, Keyword Targeting and On-Page Optimization.


So hopefully you've watched Part 3, where we talked about searcher satisfaction, how


to make sure searchers are happy with the page content that you create and the user experience


that you build for them, as well as Part 2, when we talked about keyword research and


how to make sure that you are targeting the right words and phrases that searchers are


actually looking for, that you think you can actually rank for, that actually get real


organic click-through rate because Google's zero-click searches are rising.


Now we're into on-page SEO.


So this is essentially taking the words and phrases that we know we want to rank for with


the content that we know will help searchers accomplish their task.


And now how do we make sure that the page is optimal for ranking in Google?


Well, this is very different from the way it was years ago, right?


A long time ago, and unfortunately many people still believe this to be true about SEO, it


was how do I stuff my keywords into all the right tags and places on the page?


How do I take advantage of things like the meta keywords tag, which hasn't been used


in a decade, maybe two?


How do I take advantage of putting all the words and phrases stuffed into my title, my


URL, my description, my headline, my H2 through 7 tags, all these kinds of things?


And most of that does not matter, but some of it still does.


Some of it is still important and we need to run through what those are so that you


give yourself the best possible chance for ranking.


So what I've done here is created a sort of brief on-page SEO checklist.


This is not comprehensive, especially on the technical portion, because we're saving that


for part five of the technical SEO section, which we will get into of this guide.


But in this checklist, some of the most important things are on here, many of the most important


things are on here, and those include things like a descriptive, compelling, keyword-rich


but not stuffed title element, or also called a page title or a title tag.


So for example, if I am a tool website like toolsource.com, I made that domain up, I assume


it's registered to somebody, and I want to rank for the best online survey tools.


Well, best online survey tools for 2019 is a great title tag.


And it's very different from best online survey tools, best online survey software, best online


survey software 2019, best survey software.


You've seen title tags like that, you've seen pages that contain stuff like that, that is


no longer good SEO practices.


So we want that descriptive, compelling, makes-me-want-to-click.


Remember that this title is also going to show up in the search results as the title


of the snippet that your website appears in.


Second, a meta description.


This is still used by search engines, not for rankings, though.


It is used as part of the sort of – think of it like ad text.


You are drawing the click or you're attempting to draw the click.


And so what you want to do is have a description that tells people what's on the page and


inspires them, incites them, makes them want to click on your result instead of somebody


else's.


That's your chance to say, here's why we're valuable and useful.


An easy-to-read, sensible, short URL.


For example, toolsource.com slash reviews slash best online surveys 2019.


Perfect.


Very legible, very readable.


I see that in the results.


I think, okay, I know what that page is going to be.


I see that copied and pasted somewhere on the web.


I think I know what's going to be at that URL.


That looks relevant to me.


Or reviews.best-online-tools.info, okay, well, first off, that's a freaking terrible domain


name, slash old sex question mark SEQS sequence, question mark ID equals 17, bunch of weird


letters and tab detail equals this and UTM parameter equals that.


I don't know what this is.


I don't know what all this means.


And by the way, having more than one or two URL parameters is very poorly correlated with


and not recommended for trying to rank in search results.


So you want to try and rewrite these to be more friendly, shorter, more sensible, readable


by a human being.


That will help Google as well.


That first paragraph, the first paragraph of the content or the first few words of the


page should be optimized for appearing in what Google calls featured snippets.


Now featured snippets is when I perform a search, I don't just see, for many queries,


I don't just see a list of pages.


Sometimes I'll see this box, often with an image and a bunch of descriptive text that's


drawn from the page, often from the first paragraph or two.


And so if you want to get that featured snippet, you have to be able to rank on page one and


you need to be optimized to answer the query right in your first paragraph.


This is an opportunity for you to be ranking in position three or four or five but still


have the featured snippet answer above all the other results.


Awesome when you can do this in SEO, very, very powerful thing in featured snippet optimization.


There's a bunch of resources on Moz's website that we can point you to there too.


Uses the keyword target intelligently, so if I'm trying to rank for best online survey


tools, I would try and use that in my headline.


Generally speaking, I like to have the headline and the title of the piece nearly the same


or exactly the same so that when someone clicks on that title, they get the same headline


on the page and they don't get this cognitive dissonance between the two.


The first paragraph we talked about.


The pages content, you don't want to have a page that's talking about best online survey


tools and you never mention online surveys.


That would be a little weird.


And internal link anchors, so if other places on your website talk about online survey tools,


you should be linking to this page.


This is helpful for Google finding it, helpful for visitors finding it, helpful to say this


is the page that's about this on our website.


I do strongly recommend taking the following advice, which is we are no longer in a world


where it makes sense to target one keyword per page.


For example, best online survey tools, best online survey software, and best online survey


tools 2019 are technically three unique keyword phrases.


They have different search volumes, different results, slightly different results will show


up for each of them, but it is no longer the case, whereas it was maybe a decade ago, that


I would go create a page for each one of those separate things.


Instead, because these all share the same searcher intent, I want to go with one page,


just a single URL that targets all the keywords that share the exact same searcher intent.


If searchers are looking to find exactly the same thing, but with slightly modified or


slight variations in how they phrase things, you should have a page that serves all of


those keywords with that same searcher intent, rather than multiple pages that try to break


those up, for a bunch of reasons.


One, it's really hard to get links to all of those different pages.


Getting links just period is very challenging, and you need them to rank.


Second off, the difference between those is going to be very, very subtle, and it will


be awkward and seem to Google very awkward that you have these slight variations with


almost the same thing.


It might even look to them like duplicate or very similar or low-quality content, which


can get you downranked.


Stick to one page per set of shared intent keywords.


Next, you want to leverage appropriate, rich snippet options.


For example, if you are in the recipes space, you can use Schema markup for recipes to show


Google that you've got a picture of the recipe and a cooking time and all these different


details.


Google offers this in a wide variety of places.


When you're doing reviews, they offer you the star ratings.


Schema.org has a full list of these, and Google's rich snippets markup page offers a bunch more,


so we'll point you to both of those as well.


Last but certainly not least, because image search is such a huge portion of where Google's


search traffic comes from and goes to, it is very wise to optimize the images on the


page.


Image search traffic can now send significant traffic to you, and optimizing for images


can sometimes mean that other people will find your images through Google Images and


then take them, put them on their own website, and link back to you, which solves a huge


problem.


Images is very hard, images is a great way to do it.


The images on your page should employ descriptive keyword-rich file names, meaning if I have


one for type form, I don't want it to be pick one, two, three.


I want it to be type form logo or type form survey software as the name of the file.


Descriptive alt attribute, the alt attribute or alt tag is part of how you describe that


for screen readers and other accessibility-focused devices, and Google also uses that text, too.


Caption text, if that's appropriate, if you have like a photograph and a caption describing


it, you want to be descriptive of what's actually in the picture.


These files need to be – in order to perform well, they generally need to be hosted on


the same domain and subdomain.


If for example all your images are stored on an Amazon Web Services thing and you don't


– domain and you don't bother rewriting or making sure that the domain looks like


it's on whatever we are, toolsource.com slash photos or slash images here, that can cause


real ranking problems.


Oftentimes you won't perform at all in Google Images because they don't associate the image


with the same domain.


Same subdomain as well is preferable.


If you do all these things and you nail searcher intent and you've got your keyword research,


you are ready to move on to technical SEO and link building and then start ranking.


So we'll see you for that next edition next week.


MozCon 2014 - 11 - Stacey MacNaught - Scaling Creativity: Making Content Marketing More Efficient

So I'm Stacey McNaught.


I'm Search Director at Techmark.


And a few years ago, we took our first voyage into a big


content project purely for link acquisition.


And we did an infographic, because apparently that's just


what you do.


And it was in a pretty boring area, compensation claims for


people who've been injured at work.


I think it's boring.


Planned it, sold it into the client, convinced them this


was going to be a link building gold mine.


Wrote the copy, got the graphics, launched it.


And we all merrily boarded this ship, set sail for a


brave new world of link building.


And the ship sank.


That content bombed, like, spectacularly.


We were left with some red faces, pretty pissed off


client, handful of social shares, and links from six


borderline crap websites.


Oh, yeah.


That was a really bad day.


And failure, like, it's human, and it's going to happen to us


all a lot, but it doesn't feel OK.


In fact, I was really close to locking


myself in a dark room.


Not really.


I'm not that way inclined.


But it's not OK.


It doesn't feel OK.


And I didn't want to feel like that again.


So we set about picking apart what we'd done, analyzing our


processes, or spectacular lack thereof, scrutinizing one


another a little bit, to put in place some processes and


tactics that would minimize the risk of this ever happening


to us again.


And the key thing is these had to be scalable.


We're a growing agency.


And scale and creativity, I've had conversations with people


who really think scale is a dirty word.


I'm not talking about spitting content.


I'm talking about strategies and tactics that mean that you


can apply this across the board for a number of clients


and a number of different projects.


So what I want to do today is share some of the tactics that


we've employed that have had the greatest success for us in


increasing our efficiency and success rates with content


marketing.


The one conclusion I've come to is that the best way to


waste a load of time and money in content marketing isn't


actually by producing crap content.


I think it's actually by producing really awesome


content for completely the wrong audience.


Doesn't matter how awesome what your produce is, if you've


misunderstood your audience, you're not going to have a


particularly easy time hitting your goals.


And you set yourself up for a situation that's potentially


as awkward as that time I showed South Park to my nana.


I did that.


She didn't like it.


So she wasn't feeling very well.


And me being a good granddaughter, I thought I'd


cheer her up.


South Park's been going for nearly 20 years.


Millions of people think South Park is funny content.


So off I went up to a house armed with season one.


My objective, make Nan laugh.


The result, Nan pulled this face, said that, and


told me that I'd been brought up better.


Nan does not like South Park.


It's an extreme example, but we really do need to


understand our audience better.


And me as an SEO, and I'm sure a lot of people who've come


from an out and out SEO background would probably


agree, I'd over relied on keyword data to inform content


marketing decisions.


The keyword planner or traffic coming to your site, what are


they typing in?


Obviously, we don't need to worry about keyword data and


analytics anymore.


Remember that?


I'm over it.


Honest.


Thanks for that, Google.


So keyword data might be disappearing.


But at least for now, we've got a lot more social data


until the EU or some government somewhere takes


that away, too.


And it's social data that's powered for us.


The biggest change we've made to our


audience insight process.


So for every big piece of content we launch now, we


create these content consumer personas.


And they're a little bit different to buyer personas.


Sometimes you're targeting a different audience.


And even if it's the same audience as your buyers, you


need different information.


So we're doing things like this.


In addition to the regular information that you'd have in


a persona, we're looking for things like the companies that


our audience likes already on social.


The interests that they've publicly affiliated themselves


with already.


And we're getting all this data through


Facebook Graph Search.


So Facebook Graph Search, I believe, rolled out for English


speakers in the US last year.


In the UK, we're a bit behind.


So only some of us have got it.


We got electricity last week.


So we're expecting Graph Search any time now.


But some of us do have it.


And this is a content marketer's dream.


So I'm going to show you a few examples of how we're using


this to get insight into the audience.


We work with a client called Travelbag.


They're a big UK travel company.


They do flights, hotels, packages.


And one of our goals is to keep their audience engaged


all year round on social so that when they come to book


their travel, they book it with Travelbag.


To do that, we need to understand what, apart from


traveling, do Travelbag's fans get a kick out of.


So we can start by running queries like this.


Pages liked by people who like Travelbag.


And at the moment, it just reads like a list of travel


companies that Travelbag's fans are cheating on us with.


But then you can filter it by page type.


Athlete, musician, film, region, language, whatever.


If I want to know what TV shows Travelbag's fans are


watching, I can find out.


And I can start to build a picture of the kind of things


that they really get a kick out of, and therefore the kind


of content they might engage with.


But for me, the best thing about Graph Search is that it


doesn't care about your privacy.


So you don't have to have admin rights on


the page to query it.


One of Travelbag's biggest competitors is Virgin


Holidays, who've got a massive market share.


I want some of their customers.


So I can run the same query.


Pages liked by people who like Virgin Holidays.


I can get really weird and stalker-y.


Bars in London visited by people who like Virgin


Holidays.


I'm not suggesting that you should follow all of your


competitors' fans around bars.


They will arrest you for that.


But checking data is available through Graph Search.


So you can find out where your customers shop offline.


Shops and retail outlets visited by people


who like whatever.


This goes into outreach, but it's worth mentioning while


we're on the topic of Graph Search.


Journalists who like Virgin Holidays.


You can query people by job title and interest.


Bloggers who like Virgin Holidays and


Travelbag and gardening.


A really great one is journalists who work at


self-employed and who like specify any interest.


Because that gives you freelance journalists.


Get a list of them, and then you can filter that list by


relationship status, if it's relevant,


current city, employer.


There's all kinds of things you can do.


Now, my personal view, and I've got no facts whatsoever


to back this up with, I will find journalists on Facebook,


but I don't contact them through Facebook.


For me, at least, Facebook's a more personal platform.


I've usually met somebody before I become friends with


them on Facebook.


And I just, I don't know.


Like I said, I've got no facts.


There's every possibility that I'm completely talking out of


my ass here.


But I personally wouldn't contact them


through Facebook first.


I'd go and research them, check them out on Twitter,


find a public email address.


There's loads of these queries.


I've not got time to go through them all today.


But you can download from that URL, which I'll tweet later, a


bit of a cheat sheet that talks about query structure


and the kind of things that you can query.


Another tool that I've more recently started using is one


that does a similar kind of thing on


Twitter, tribolytics.com.


You can put a brand in there, and you can find out the kind


of things that the fans of that brand like on Twitter,


the sort of content they're engaging with, worth a try.


There's so many variables in any given content marketing


project that it's almost impossible to say that one


tactical change has had x impact on whatever part of the


process, but very unscientifically, analyzed a


few time sheets for projects before we started doing these


personas with Graph Search and a few after.


And we reckon that we're saving about 40% on our


outreach time, which makes sense.


When you become really familiar with your audience,


your outreach plan pretty much starts right in itself.


The next big challenge that we've had to overcome is


something that Pete talked about, generating ideas.


Nothing's as dangerous as an idea when it's the


only one we have.


So that's a quote by Emile Chatier, and that makes me


cringe, because I think back to that first failed


infographic that still haunts my dreams to these days.


And I can see it.


We didn't pick the best idea of a bunch.


We had one idea, and we all convinced ourselves it was


absolutely epic, when in reality, it was really boring.


So I think that you need pretty much a stream of ideas,


which is all good and well, if you're the kind of person who


has ideas falling out of the backside.


I'm not.


We had to make this process driven.


I'm not saying that you can make creativity


process driven.


But I believe if you've got people, you've probably


already got loads of ideas.


And you just need to put a process behind getting those


ideas out.


And we needed to make this more efficient.