You save it, whatever you want your file name to be, with a dot MD on the end. The dot MD tells Adam.io and by the way, almost any other markdown literate tool out there, that this is a markdown file.


Writing with Markdown for Better Content & HTML: Why & How To - Whiteboard Friday

So that when you open it, it will highlight your syntax correctly. I'm going to get to syntax in a minute. But it will highlight and differentiate between the markup and the actual words and sentences that you're writing.


So it's very easy to spot that you formatted something as a heading, for example. You do more writing. You keep saving. Always save it. They don't crash. I've never had them crash, but apparently other people have.


Then you go to packages in the menu. You click markdown preview and you click toggle preview. Now you can do that at the very start and then what you'll have is two parallel panes where in one pane you're doing your writing and in the other one it's showing you exactly how the page is going to look.


Or you can just do it at the end. I do it at the end because it's distracting. I don't like seeing how it's going to look at the same time. You right click in that preview, click copy HTML and you'll have flawless HTML.


I mean flawless. It even converts little single quotes and double quotes to the correct smart quotes. So double left hand, double right hand, curly quotes, whatever.


Syntax is really simple. Again, I'm going to link to the syntax. I'm not going to give you the complete course on the syntax. The truth is this is 50% of what you'll probably need right here.


But just as an example, if you want to do a level one heading, you do a single pound sign or a hash, a space and then whatever your text is. When you convert it to HTML, it will automatically become H1 heading one closing H1.


Same thing with H2. You just do two hashes. You can imagine what you do for H3. It's three hashes.


Paragraphs are created automatically. So if you write some text and put two, you hit enter or return twice, you'll get a clean paragraph.


If you want, by the way, for this to be a hard break instead, then you just do two spaces and then return and it will put a BR there instead of a paragraph.


Lists become lists and this is one of the toughest things for writers. It was always the thing that slows me down the most is lists are pretty complicated in HTML.


Well here you just go one, two, three, just normally your text and when you save it and convert it, it's going to become ordered list, list item, list item, list item, closing ordered list.


It's that easy. If you want to do a bulleted list, you just use asterisks instead. It will do the same thing.


Links, I got really excited so I had to add this up here. Links are also really simple and in fact, again, super simplified in Markdown.


What you've got here is you put your text in brackets, then in parentheses you put your web address. It will convert to a full link with the text as your proper link text.


You can do the same thing with images. All you do is add an exclamation mark at the start.


So Markdown really lets you take your skills as a writer, focus on those skills, write really well and convert it to equally good HTML.


Then you've got HTML that's ready to be pasted into WordPress or whatever other system you want or just to be used as a separate page.


Daily SEO Fix - Keyword Suggestions Groups

Hey there, my name is Emily and I'm from the onboarding team here at Moz.


In these five short daily fix videos, we'll be talking through a handful of tips and tricks


for collecting more keywords and we'll show you how to organize your keywords into lists


and to start to track them in a Moz Pro campaign to collect even more data on how you're performing.


You can book a one-on-one walkthrough with the Moz onboarding team


and if you're new to Moz, please don't forget to set up a free trial so we can set you on the path to success.


To start your keyword research, head to Keyword Explorer.


This can be accessed from this drop down here or from the side panel.


Enter your seed keyword. This may be a broad industry term or a product type or category on your site.


If you sell bicycles for example, you might enter the keyword, bolding bicycles.


Select the location from this drop down and click analyze.


Within keyword suggestions, there are a bunch of filters that you can play around with.


Grouping keywords by low lexical similarity means that words with similar meanings can be grouped together.


Low lexical means you'll end up with larger groups of keywords.


High lexical means that you'll end up with smaller groups of keywords.


You can click here to add them to a list.


You can repeat this for another seed term like electric bikes or e-bikes and in just a few clicks


we've got two lists that we can review and when we're ready we can add them to a Moz Pro campaign


to track rankings over time. Again check that box and click add to campaign


or alternatively you can add it to a keyword list to continue your research.


Say if you run a bicycle commerce store, think about all the other categories on your site and


enter these as seed terms and create lists that reflect your site architecture. Soon you'll build


up a collection of keyword lists that you can dive into when you're writing product descriptions


How to Post Offers and Updates to Google and Social Media

Howdy Moz fans, I'm Zach and I'm Serena and we're from the Moz Customer Success


team.


Today, we'll be talking about how to use social posting in Moz Local so you can spread


the word about your offers, new products, and your business updates.


Posting to Google, Facebook, and other supported directories is a great way to send important


messages to your customers directly from your business.


These messages can include photos, videos, offers, links, and CTAs, which make them powerful


conversion drivers when used correctly.


Posts can also support your organic search strategy by encouraging customers to click


through to your website, increasing the likelihood of conversions.


Staying on top of your posts, especially when managing multiple locations, can be a true


challenge but tools like Moz Local make posting in bulk a breeze.


Let's dive in.


First, decide on the type of post that makes the most sense.


Are you hosting a grand opening, promoting a holiday offer, or featuring a new exclusive


product?


Tailor your headline based on the type of post you want to publish and keep this to


about 35 characters.


According to research from Joy Hawkins and her team at Sterling Sky, offer type posts


tend to perform the best, so we'll be using that for this example.


Once you've decided on the content of your post, you have about 1000 characters to describe


that offer.


Use descriptive, actionable language and include relevant links where possible.


One of the benefits of using Moz Local is that you can easily publish the same post


in bulk to multiple business listings with one click of a button.


You can also create post templates to save and use again and again later and schedule


posts to run at a future date, saving yourself valuable time.


Once published, you'll be able to review the performance metrics for your post in the right


hand column.


We recommend posting updates, offers, or other information to your business listing at least


once a month.


Moz Local can help you scale your posting strategy and strengthen your online presence


Your First Three SEO Tests — Whiteboard Friday

Howdy, Moz! I'm Emily Potter. I'm Head of Customer Success at SearchPilot. If you haven't


heard of us before, SearchPilot is an A-B testing software that was built specifically


for the SEO industry. We run large-scale SEO tests on enterprise websites. Today, I'm


here to share with you the first three SEO tests that you should run to kickstart your


SEO testing program. But before we get into that, there's some foundations that we need


to cover first. That's how to write a strong SEO hypothesis and then how to prioritize


your SEO tests. Starting with your hypothesis. You might not think of it this way, but every


SEO optimization that you're making is trying to drive the impact one of three mechanisms.


And these three mechanisms are the only way we can improve organic traffic. At SearchPilot,


we call these our three core levers. So that's improving your organic click-through rates


independent of rankings. By that, I mean, yes, you can improve your organic click-through


rates by going from position two to position one, but there's other ways you can do that


as well. That's ways that you enhance your search results so that you stand out against


search competitors like getting rich results or rich snippets. Next, there's ranking for


more keywords. That's ranking for keywords that you didn't before. It's improving your


organic reach. So if you're ranking for more keywords, you're in front of more people,


that's probably going to drive more organic traffic to your website. So that's our second


lever that we can pull. Our last lever is improving our existing rankings. So that's


links, improving core web vitals, adding more content, all those big known ranking factors


that we can target with SEO tests. That's a big driver of organic traffic. So the three


core levers, we need to be pulling at least one of them to have a valid SEO hypothesis.


If you come up with a test idea and you can't actually find a way that it clearly pulls


one of these core levers, then it's probably not a true SEO hypothesis and you probably


shouldn't run it. You might want to consider running it as a CRO only test instead, but


it shouldn't be your SEO testing program. Now we can pull more than one of these levers,


things like title tags, that improves our rankings and it changes our appearance in


the SERP so that improves our click-through rates, maybe independent rankings as well.


But that's okay. We just want to capture that in our hypothesis and we're going to pull


more than one lever. So now that you know how to write a strong SEO hypothesis, let's


talk about how to prioritize your SEO test ideas. At Surgepilot to do this, we use two


core metrics. We look at potential impact and then level of effort or LOE. In this quadrant,


I have on the vertical axis, the high level of effort to low level of effort. And on the


horizontal axis, I have high impact to low impact. In the upper left-hand quadrant, I've


put a void. So those are high level of effort tests that are also low potential impact.


These are tests that are going to have heavy uplift from your engineering team, but aren't


likely to pull a core lever and therefore probably not a good test for you to run and


probably not worth your time. Just rule these tests out, make them not even a priority.


Upper right-hand quadrant, we have high level of impact tests or high impact tests that


are also high level of effort. So those are things like internal links or anything that's


going to involve a lot of engineering support, but you know is going to potentially be a


big win. It strongly pulls one of these levers. So you really want to put these in, but they


probably require project management. It involves multiple teams working together, that sort


of thing. Plan those in later. They shouldn't be your first three tests. In the lower left-hand


quadrant, we have low impact tests that are also low level of effort. I've put this in


Amber because you should have these in your testing program. You still want to run them.


Again, they shouldn't be your top priority test, but sometimes they produce surprising


results. So these are things that maybe pull the lever, but are easy to implement. Or they


are low impact changes like adding alt text that we know don't cause big swings in organic


traffic. But again, you might get surprising results or they're just good practice to do


in the test. Lastly, we have what I call the sweet spot. Those are your high impact tests


that are low level of effort. So these ones we want to prioritize. They pull the lever


strongly but they actually don't require that much effort for us to put in. Those are your


biggest return on investment tests and you should prioritize them. So now that we know


how to write a strong SEO hypothesis and we know how to think about prioritizing our test


ideas, let's talk about the first three that you should run. Test number one, title tag


tests. And yes, even if Google is overriding your title tags, definitely still be testing


them. We've seen wins even since that rollout and it's definitely a low hanging fruit that


you can grab. Title tag tests impact both click through rates independent of rankings


and they also impact your rankings. So that's why there's such big swings that we get from


them. So something like adding price to your titles. Good test, probably just targeting


click through rates. Something like adding a really big primary keyword might impact


both your click through rates and your rankings. Put these in. Low level of effort, high impact


tests, they're in our sweet spot. Next, you want to talk about, we want to run on page


keyword targeting tests. So things that are changing the keyword targeting maybe to something


like a higher search volume keyword. This can be adding content. This can be updating


headings. H1 changes fall into this category. I put these as low to medium impact and low


to medium level of effort. So generally still pretty easy to run, not going to cause as


big as swings as title tags, but we definitely want to prioritize those in early on targeting


our rankings. Third, I've put structured data to win rich results. These are medium to high


level of effort, but also medium to high impact. So this is things like adding schema, review


schema to get review snippets. They tend to involve a little bit more effort because oftentimes


you might need engineering resource to get that schema into your HTML, or you might need


to get the data somehow that you want to include in the structured data, but they're important


SEO tests and they tend to have a little bit less lift than other higher impact tests that


are also higher level of effort. For example, I've put a bonus on here, internal linking


tests. These fall into that quadrant that are high impact, high level of effort. Internal


linking tests are high level of effort, not only because you need engineering resource


oftentimes to implement them, it's also really difficult to figure out the measurement for


these tests. That's because we're changing two different pages. We're going to expect


to see an impact on the pages where we're adding the links. We're also going to expect


to see an impact on the pages that are receiving a link, but these cause big wins for SEO.


So we definitely want to plan these tests in, but not one of your first three tests.


These are going to be targeting your rankings. So that's what I have for you today. Again,


your first three SEO tests to run, title tag tests, improving your keyword targeting on


the page and adding structured data to win rankings. As a bonus, planning those internal


linking tests, but it's going to involve a lot of different teams probably get this done.


And then remember, if you're not coming back to one of these three core levers, if you're


not improving either click through rates, independent of rankings, ranking for more


keywords or approving your existing rankings, probably not an SEO test. That's all I have


What Does It Mean to "Write for SEO" in 2018? - Whiteboard Friday

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday.


This week we're chatting about writing for SEO and what that means in 2018.


So writing for SEO has had a long history, and it meant something many years ago that


it does not mean today.


And unfortunately I see a lot of bad advice, terrible advice out there for journalists


and editors and authors of all kinds about what you need to do in terms of writing for


SEO, meaning writing to get you to the top of search engines.


Now, let's be clear.


Some of this stuff is mired in pure mythology, but some of it is mired in historical fact


that just hasn't been updated.


So let's talk about what writing for SEO used to be back in 2001, how it evolved in sort


of the middle era of 2008, let's say, and then what it means today in 2018.


So back in the day, writing for SEO did mean things like keyword stuffing, right?


If you wanted to rank highly in early search engines, especially the late 90s into the


early 2000s, keyword stuffing was a real tactic that really did have effectiveness.


And so SEOs would cram keywords into all sorts of tags and locations.


They would use and reuse a bunch of different variants, slight keyword variants, right?


So if I'm targeting the word, you know, blue watches, I would have blue watch, blue watches,


blue watch accessory, blue watch accessories, blue watches accessory, blue watches accessories.


Ridiculous little variants on plurals because the search engines were not great at figuring


out that all these things sort of had the same intent, meant the same thing, and so


raw, rough keyword matching, exact keyword matching was part of SEO.


Keyword use in every tag possible, right?


If there was a tag, you'd cram keywords into it.


Domain name and subdomain keyword use.


So this is why you saw that brands would be outranked by, to use our example, blue-watch-accessories.blue-watch-accessories.info,


right?


That kind of silly stuff would be ranking, and some of it even maintained for a while.


Basically, SEO writing was writing for engines and then trying not to annoy or piss off users.


And so a lot of the times, people would want to cloak, right?


They'd want to show one set of content to the search engines and another set to searchers,


right, to actual users because they knew that if they showed this dense keyword-stuffed


content to users, they'd be turned off and they wouldn't find it credible and they'd


go somewhere else.


2008, we evolve on a bunch of these fronts, but not all of them and certainly not perfectly,


So in 2008, keywords are still important in important locations, and exact matching still


matters in a lot of places, right?


So unique, people were crafting unique pages even for keywords that shared the same intent.


Blue-watches and blue-timepieces might have the same, might have two different pages.


Blue-watch and blue-watches could even have two separate pages and do effectively well


in 2008.


2018, that's not the case anymore.


Domain names back in 2008 were definitely less powerful, subdomains more so, but still


influential, right?


They still had some play in the engines.


You still saw a lot of debates back in 2008 about whether to create a keyword-rich domain.


And since links in 2008 were overwhelmingly powerful rather than on-page signals, writing


in order to get links is incredibly prized, right?


It was.


In fact, it still is, but we'll talk about the evolution of that a little bit.


So now let's jump another decade forward.


We're in 2018 this year.


What does writing for SEO mean?


Well, a bunch of things.


Because engines have gotten so much better, Google in particular, but Bing as well, have


gotten so much better at essentially optimizing for solving the searcher's task, right, helping


them accomplish the thing that they wanted to accomplish.


The writing that does the best job of solving the searcher's task tends to be the most highly


prized, and stuff that doesn't, writing that doesn't do that, doesn't tend to rank well,


doesn't tend to rank for long.


You can sometimes get to the top of the search results, but you will almost certainly invariably


be taken out by someone who does a great job of solving the searcher's query.


Intent matching matters a lot more in 2018 than exact keyword matching.


Today, no credible SEO would tell you to create a page for Blue Watch and Blue Watches or


Blue Watch accessories and Blue Watch accessories, right, or even blue timepieces and blue watches,


maybe if you're targeting clocks too.


But in this case, right, it's really about figuring out what is the searcher's intent,


and if many keywords share the same intent, you know what?


We're going to go ahead and create a single page that serves that intent and all of the


keywords, or at least many of the keywords, that that intent is represented by.


Only a few tags are still absolutely crucial to doing SEO correctly.


So SEO writing today, there's really only two that are not very fungible, right, and


those are the title element and the body content.


That's not to say that you can't rank without using the keyword in these two places, just


that it would be inadvisable to do so.


This is both because of search engines and also because of searchers.


When you see the keyword that you search for in the title element of the page in the search


results, you are more inclined to click on it than if you don't see it.


So it's possible that some click-baity headline could outrank a keyword-rich headline, but


the best SEO writers are mixing both of those, and we have a Whiteboard Friday about headline


writing on just that topic.


A few other ones, however, a few other tags are nice to have, nice to have in 2018 still,


and those include headline tags, the H1, the H2, the URL field.


So if you can make your URL include the words and phrases that people are searching for,


that is mildly helpful.


It's both helpful for searchers who see the URL and would think, oh, okay, that is referring


to the thing that I want, as well as for people who copy and paste the URL and share it with


each other, or people who link with the URL, and thus the anchor text is carried across


by that URL and those keywords in there.


The meta description, not used for rankings, but it is read by searchers, and when they


see a meta description that includes the words and phrases that they've queried, they are


more likely to think this will be a relevant result and more likely to click it.


And more clicks, as long as the engagement is high, tends to mean better rankings.


And the image alt attribute, which is helpful both for regular search results but particularly


helpful for Google Images, which, as you may know from watching Whiteboard Friday, Google


Images gets a tremendous amount of search traffic even on its own.


All right, next up for SEO writing in 2018, employing words, phrases, and concepts that


Google has identified as sort of commonly associated with the query.


This can provide a significant boost, and we've seen some really interesting experimentation


on this front where folks will essentially take a piece of content, add in missing words


and phrases that other pages have associated, other pages that are highly ranking Google,


have associated with those correct words and phrases.


So in our example of, I frequently use New York neighborhoods and a page that's missing


words like Brooklyn, Harlem, Manhattan, Staten Island, that's weird, right?


Google is going to be much more likely to rank the page that includes these burrow names


than one that doesn't for that particular query because they've learned to associate


that text with relevance for the query New York neighborhoods.


What I do want to make clear here is this does not mean LSI or some other particular


tactic, right?


LSI is an old school, I think late 80s, early 90s computer tactic, software tactic for identifying


words that are semantically connected to each other.


There's no reason you have to use this old school junk, right, methodology that became


like pseudoscience in the SEO world and had a recent revival.


But you should be using words and phrases that Google has related to a particular keyword,


right?


Related topics is a great thing to do.


You can find some via the Moz Bar.


We did a Whiteboard Friday on related topics.


You can check that out.


Okay.


Last but not least, the user experience of the writing and content matters more than


ever, and that is due to engagement metrics.


Essentially, Google is able to see that people who click on a particular result are less


likely to click the back button and choose a different result or more likely to stay


on that page or site and engage further with that content and solve their whole task.


That is a good sign to Google, and they want to rank more of those.


So pragmatically, what does this sort of history and evolution mean?


Well, I think we can craft a brief sort of SEO writing process for 2018 from this.


And this is what I recommend.


If you can do nothing else, do these five steps when you are writing for SEO, and you


will tend to have more success than most of your competition.


First off, assemble all the keywords that a page is targeting.


So there should be a list of them.


They should all share the same intent.


You get all those keywords listed out.


Second, you list what the searchers are actually trying to accomplish when they search those


queries.


So someone searched for blue watches.


What do they want?


Information about them.


They want to see different models.


They want to know who makes them.


They want to buy them.


They want to see what the costs are like.


They want to see where they can get them online.


Probably all of those things.


And those are the intents behind those queries.


Step three, create a visual layout.


Here's going to be our headline.


Here's our sub-headline.


We're going to put this important key concept up at the top in a call-out box.


We're going to have this crucial visual next up.


Then this is how we're going to address all of those searcher intents on the page visually


with content written or otherwise.


Then I'm going to urge you to write first and then go add the keywords and the crucial


related terms, phrases, top concepts, topics that you want into the page, the ones that


will hopefully help boost your SEO, rather than writing first with the keywords and topics


in mind.


You can have a little bit of that, but this would be what I'd suggest.


And then finally, step five, craft the hook.


The hook that will make influential people and publications in this space likely to amplify,


likely to link, because in 2018 links still do matter, still are an important part of


SEO.


If you follow this and learn from this history, I think you can do a much better job, generally


speaking, of writing for SEO than a lot of the common wisdom out there.


All right, everyone, look forward to your thoughts in the comments, and we'll see you


again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.


#WhiteboardFriday: Defense Against the Dark Arts: Why Negative SEO Matters

Music


Alright folks, Ross Jones here and I am so excited just to have the opportunity to do any kind of presentation with the title Defense Against the Dark Arts.


I'm not going to pretend like I'm a huge Harry Potter fan, but in any way, this is just going to be fun.


But what I want to talk about today is actually pretty bad.


It's the reality that negative SEO, even if it is completely ineffective at doing its primary goal, which is to knock your website out of the rankings,


will still play havoc on your website and the likelihood that you or your customers will be able to make correct decisions in the future and improve your rankings.


So today I'm going to talk about why negative SEO still matters, even if your rankings are unaffected.


And then I'm going to talk about a couple of techniques that you can use that will help abate some of the negative SEO techniques and also potentially make it so that whoever is attacking you gets hurt a little bit in the process.


So let's talk a little bit about negative SEO.


So the most common form of negative SEO is someone who would go out and purchase tens of thousands of spammy links, or hundreds of thousands even, using all sorts of different software and point them to your site,


with the hope of what we used to call Google bowling, which is to knock you out of the search results the same way you'd knock down a pin with a bowling ball.


And the hope is that it's sort of like a false flag campaign, that Google thinks that you went out and got all of those spammy links to try to improve your rankings,


and now Google has caught you and so you're penalized, when in reality it was someone else who acquired those links.


Now, to their credit, Google actually has done a pretty good job of ignoring those types of links.


It's been my experience that in most cases negative SEO campaigns don't really affect rankings the way they're intended to in most cases.


And I give a lot of caveats there because I've seen it be effective, certainly, but in the majority of cases, all of those spammy links are just ignored by Google.


But that's not it. That's not the complete story.


You see, the first problem is that if you get 100,000 links pointing to your site, what's really going on in the background is that there's this corruption of data that's important to making decisions about search results.


So, for example, if you get 100,000 links pointing to your site, it is going to push you over the limit of the number of links that Google Search Console will give back to you in the various reports about links,


which means that in the second case there are probably links that you should know about or care about that don't show up in the report simply because Google cuts off at 100,000 total links in the export.


Well, that's a big deal because if you're trying to make decisions about how to improve your rankings and you can't get to the link data you need because it's been replaced with hundreds of thousands of spammy links,


then you're not going to be able to make the right decision.


The other big issue here is that there are ways around it. You can get more than 100,000 links pointing to your site.


You're just going to have to pay for it. I mean, you could come to Moz and use our link explorer tool, for example, but there are other companies as well.


But you'll have to increase the amount of money that you're spending in order to get access to the accounts that will actually deliver all of that data.


And the one big issue sitting behind all of this is that even though we know Google is ignoring most of these links, they don't label that for us in any kind of useful fashion.


So even after we can get access to all of that link data, all of those hundreds of thousands of spammy links, we still can't be certain which ones matter and which ones don't.


That's not the only type of negative SEO that there is out there. It's the most common by far, but there are other types.


Another common type is to take the content that you have and distribute it across the web in the way that article syndication used to work.


So if you're fairly new to SEO, one of the old methodologies of improving rankings was to write an article on your site,


but then syndicate that article to a number of article websites, and these sites would then post your article and that article would link back to you.


Now the reason why these sites would do this is because they would hope that in some cases they would outrank your website,


and in doing so they would get some traffic and maybe earn some AdSense money.


But for the most part, that kind of industry has died down because it hasn't been effective in quite some time.


But once again, that's not the whole picture.


You see, if all of your content is being distributed to all of these other sites, even if it doesn't affect your rankings,


it still means there's a possibility that somebody's getting access to your quality content without any kind of attribution whatsoever.


If they've stripped out all the links and stripped out all the names and all the bylines,


then your hard-earned work is actually getting taken advantage of,


even if Google isn't really the arbiter anymore of whether or not traffic gets to that article.


And then on the flip side of it, if they don't remove the attribution,


all the various internal links that you had in that article in the first place that point to other pages on your site,


those now become syndicated links, which are part of the link schemes that Google has historically gone after.


So in the same sort of situation, it's not really just about the intent behind the type of negative SEO campaign.


It's the impact that it has on your data.


Because if somebody syndicates an article of yours that has, let's say, eight links to other internal pages,


and they syndicate it to 10,000 websites, well, then you've just got 80,000 new internal,


well, what should have been internal links, now external links pointing to your site.


And we actually do know just a couple years back, several pretty strong brands got in trouble


for syndicating their news content to other news websites.


Now, I'm not saying that negative SEO would necessarily trigger that same sort of penalty,


but there's the possibility.


And even if it doesn't trigger that penalty, chances are it's going to sully the waters, so to speak,


in terms of your link data.


And there are a couple of other miscellaneous types of negative SEO that we don't get really talked about a lot.


But, for example, if you have any kind of user-generated content on your site,


like let's say you have comments, for example, even if you nofollow those comments,


the links that are included in there might point to things like malware.


And we know that Google will ultimately identify your site as not being safe if it finds these types of links.


And, unfortunately, in some cases, there are ways to make it look like there are links on your site


that aren't really under your control through like HTML injection.


For example, you can actually do this to Google right now.


You can inject HTML onto the page of a part of their website that makes it look like they're linking to someone else.


And if Google actually crawled itself, which luckily they don't in this case,


if they crawled that page and found that malware link, the whole domain in the Google search results


would likely start to show this site might not be safe.


And, of course, there's always the issue with hacked content, which is becoming more and more popular.


So all of this really boils down to this concept of FUD, fear, uncertainty, and doubt.


You see, it's not so much about bowling you out of the search engines.


It's about making it so that SEO just isn't workable anymore.


Now, it's been at least a decade since everybody started saying that they used data-driven SEO tactics,


data-driven SEO strategies.


Well, if your data is corrupted, if you lose access to critical data, you will not be able to make smart decisions.


How will you know whether or not the reason your page has lost rankings to another


has anything to do with links if you can't get to the link data that you need


because it's been filled with 100,000 spammy links?


And this leads to number two. It's impossible to discern the cause of rankings lost.


It could be duplicate content. It could be an issue with these hundreds of thousands of links.


It could be something completely different.


But because the waters have been muddied so much, it makes it very difficult to determine exactly what's going on.


And this, of course, then makes SEO less certain.


And the less certain it becomes, the more other advertising channels become valuable.


Paid search becomes more valuable. Social media becomes more valuable.


And that's a problem if you're a search engine optimization agency or a consultant


because you have the real likelihood of losing clients because you can't make smart decisions for them anymore


because their data has been damaged by negative SEO.


It would be really wonderful if Google would actually show us in Google Search Console what links they're ignoring


and then would allow us to export only the ones they care about.


But something tells me that that's probably beyond what Google is willing to share.


So do we have any kind of way to fight back? There are a couple.


Chances are, if you've seen some of my other Whiteboard Fridays, you've heard me talk about canonical burn pages.


Real simply, when you have an important page on your site that you intend to rank,


you should create another version of it that is identical and that has a canonical link pointing back to the original.


And any kind of link building that you do, you should point to that canonical page.


And the reason is simple.


If somebody does negative SEO, they're going to have two choices.


They're either going to do it to the page that's getting linked to,


they're going to do it to the page that's getting ranked.


Normally, they'll do it to the one that's getting ranked.


Well, if they do, then you can get rid of that page and just hold on to the canonical burn page


because it doesn't have any of these negative links.


Or if they choose the canonical burn page, you can get rid of that one and just keep your original page.


Yes, it means you sacrificed the hard-earned links that you acquired in the first place,


but it's better than losing the possibility in the future altogether.


Another opportunity here, which I think is kind of sneaky and fun, is what I call embedded styled attribution.


So you could imagine that in your content, you have something that says,


or my content might say, Russ Jones says so and so and so and so.


Well, imagine surrounding Russ Jones by H1 tags and then surrounding that by a span tag with a class


that makes it so that the H1 tag that's under it is normal-sized text.


Well, chances are if they're using one of these copied content techniques,


they're not copying your CSS style sheet as well.


So when that gets published to all of these other sites in giant, big letters, it has your name


or any other phrase that you really want.


Now, this isn't actually going to solve your problem other than just really frustrate the hell out of


whoever's trying to screw with you, but sometimes that's enough to get them to stop.


And the third one, the one that I really recommend is link lists.


This is a feature inside of Moz's Link Explorer, which allows you to track the links that are pointing to your site.


As you get links, real links, good links, add them to a link list.


And that way, you will always have a list of links that you know are good


that you can compare against the list of links that might be solely by a negative SEO campaign.


By using the link lists, you can discern the difference between what's actually being ignored by Google,


at least to some degree, and what actually matters.


I hope this is helpful to some degree, but unfortunately, I've got to say, at the end of the day,


a sufficiently well-run negative SEO campaign can make the difference in whether or not you use SEO


in the future at all.


It might not knock you out of Google, but it might make it so that other types of marketing are just better choices.


So hopefully, this has been some help.


I'd love to talk to you in the comments about different ways of dealing with a negative SEO,


like how to track down who's responsible.


So just go ahead and fill those comments up with any questions or ideas.


I would love to hear them.


How to Be Specific: From-The-Trenches Lessons in High-Converting Copy Presented by Joanna Wiebe

Hello, everybody.


Thank you for that.


If you do go to the site, you will see popups.


Just deal with it.


If you go to copyhackers.com, there will be popups there.


They work.


We can talk about that in another talk.


But thank you for having me here at MozCon, which is obviously a marketer's dream to be


invited here, so I'm really appreciative.


I am John Weeb.


I'm a writer.


More specifically, I'm a copywriter, and more specifically than that, I'm a conversion copywriter.


And as a writer, naturally, I want to start a talk with a poem, because obviously you


should start your talk with a poem.


So you might have heard this part before.


Roses are red.


Violets are blue.


Write to a teacher, which is cutting off, I think, with the same name as you.


Has anybody heard this before?


Has anybody seen this?


If you get emails from DonorsChoose, you might have seen this on Valentine's Day in like


The idea here was that they were going to send out an email that tapped into something


a little bit different, that used a person's name, so my name as a subscriber, somebody


who's donated in the past, I would get an email, my name is Joanna Weeb, I'd get an


email about a project by someone with the same name that I have.


And this was a test that they did.


So they sent out this email, donate to Mr. Weeb, he has the same name as you, so why


not donate to him, and it really worked.


It worked to the tune of getting three times the number of donations, people donated three


times as much, and people who hadn't donated in a long, long time came back and donated.


Because they saw their name.


Like, they saw their name, and that's all it took.


There's nothing even really logical about that, right?


It's good, it's a good thing to donate, but it's always been a good thing to donate.


Now they see their name there, and somebody with their name, and suddenly they're given


their money.


So what was going on there?


This is something we think about a lot when we're writing copy and trying to get people


to act, is how to do these little things that tap into something we're not even thinking


about.


Because by and large, we are, as humans, with so many messages out there, we are always


looking for these cues of relevance.


And just as a side note, this is a spectacular cat.


Like for any, like I know he's kind of cringe-worthy, but it's like super wonderful looking cat,


right?


Like this is a beautiful thing.


It might be looking a bit like ET, I guess, a little.


That might be a sign of relevance.


But we're looking for these cues, right?


Something that says, I should pay attention to this.


This is an important thing.


And why are we doing that?


Because there's so many messages.


There's so many messages out there, you can't even make out the message on this slide.


There's so many messages, which we all know, right?


Like we've all heard this.


We all know that there used to be lots of messages 30 years ago.


And today, there are even more messages.


There's so many messages.


And these numbers are, you know, average out at 5,000.


Some say we encounter about 6,000 messages a day.


Others say four basically averages out at five.


Importantly, we only recognize 50 of those, right?


But even worse is only four of them stick.


Only four, four, remember that number four, jazz hands for four, only four stick.


The reality is that if you're looking for a blank space, a new place to put your message,


that's really rare.


Right?


We know Snapchat was kind of for like eight months a bit of a blank space to shove some


of your messages into, and then marketers found out, and now it's not a blank space


anymore.


Now everybody's in there putting all their messages in there, and that keeps happening,


right?


But we keep looking for those blank spaces.


And the reality is that they don't really exist, and if they do, they won't exist for


very long.


So we are in this world of 5,000 competing messages every single day.


The reality then is that we get pretty tired, right?


We get super tired.


Our brains are exhausted by this.


Again, we know that, but what do we do when we're writing messages, we're putting landing


pages, emails, ads, all the things, when we're putting them together, are we really thinking


about how tired our brains are?


How exhausted the brains are of the people who are supposed to be reading and consuming


our messages?


How are we thinking about that?


Now I mentioned, you know, this 5,000, all of these messages, and that can feel really


overwhelming, that you have to compete with 5,000 other messages, but I don't actually


think you're competing with 5,000 messages.


How many are you actually competing with?


Any idea?


Four, exactly.


You're competing with four.


There are four great messages out there.


Everything else is noise.


Everything else doesn't matter.


There's huge opportunity, huge opportunity in just competing with the four, because none


of the other stuff is getting through.


So we don't have to be scared of these other things, these messages that our competitors


might be putting out there, which is where a lot of us look, right?


Save time and money as the blandest yet most common message out there.


This makes up like 4,000 of those avoided messages.


Save time and money, save cash and hours, all of those things, they're the same thing,


everybody's saying them, they're boring, they're not getting through.


We don't have to compete with that.


Sadly, though, of course, that results in this, like, we're going to just ignore you


because you're not saying anything, nothing's getting in, it's easier for me just to ignore


you.


But there are people outside of ourselves sitting in this room, there are people who


make decisions about the messages we can put out there.


We heard yesterday about the copywriter who wrote 120 pages in, like, seven days, something


really disastrous, like, super fast, and they had to have approved messages.


People are approving these messages, not the copywriter, not the person who lives in messaging,


not people who even sit in this room necessarily.


The C levels are doing it, largely, they're the ones who say, sorry, C levels, but they're


the ones who say, oh, save time and money, that's a great, that says everything, right?


Everybody wants to save time, everybody wants to save money, what do we just say, save time


and money, and that's how we get those messages.


We're so busy thinking of what we should do safely, saying things safely, saying things


that sound succinct, it sounds like a short little snappy little message that feels good


in a boardroom, feels really bad out in the market, though, but it's something that our


competitors are doing, too, and so we have to make a case against our competitors with


their safe messages.


We're busy being distracted by what our competitors are saying.


Thinking about what they're saying, what they're testing, how they're doing things, look what


that guy did, we should do that, too, but that's not where we should, of course, be


looking, because it's not our competitors that are really the problem.


Most of our sales, our lost sales, are lost, too, no decision at all.


I'm just going to ignore everything.


I'm not going to decide.


So the biggest threat is not our competitors, but the force of inertia, the force of just


keeping doing what I'm doing, because that's fine, it's safe, I don't have to make any


decisions, I just keep doing my thing where 5,000 messages are flying by around me and


I don't pay any attention to them.


This is the problem, and this is why we're going to talk about how to solve or get closer


to solving this problem today.


Because we're competing so hard, so here's kind of an example, right?


So if you are, we're in the Pacific Northwest right now, I live on Vancouver Island, which


is just north of here, and it's a hiking culture, right?


As soon as I moved on to the island, I had to show my hiking boots to get access, like


it's totally hiking culture.


So let's say I'm out there with my little hiking app, hiking, walking along, looking


for the most hipster hiking trail I could possibly find, I'm on my app, and then I signed


up the other day for, let's say, a Wistia trial.


We all know Wistia, we love Wistia, Wistia is the best.


So I signed up for this trial, I'm out there doing my thing with people that I like, and


an email pops up, I get a little notification on my phone that I have a new email from Wistia.


I'm interested, I just started this trial, I like Wistia, let's just see, I'm on a trail,


I could do this.


So I open the email, I look at it, and then I go back to my app and back to my life, and


that's how life goes now, like I saw the thing, I did nothing with the thing, and I'm back


to my life, just kept doing what I'm doing.


What do we as marketers do in that reality where we are competing so hard to get noticed?


Not just to get noticed, to win attention, to keep attention, and of course then to monetize


that attention.


Now we all have to worry about these things, and as a copywriter, I get called in to worry


about these things with people and help solve them, and further below that, retention, referrals,


all of those great things.


Today we're going to talk about, for the rest of this presentation, we're going to talk


about how to keep attention.


How to keep it.


That's the most important part that we're going to talk about today, because it is,


without keeping attention, you can't monetize that attention, right?


You can't do anything.


If you grab attention, fabulous.


Now how do you keep it?


How do you actually get people when they open that email and they're on their hike, how


do you get them to read it and care and do something?


And I believe, I hypothesize that one of the biggest ways to do that is to get specific.


It means getting rid of voiceless copy, of uncertain copy, of bag copy, of abstracted


messages, those save time and money messages.


Those aren't going to cut it.


They just don't cut it.


I'm going to show you what I mean by that.


So for the rest of this talk, I'll be breaking down this case study.


These are eight emails that Wistia sent out.


We worked with Wistia in the spring to optimize.


They have this onboarding sequence where you get three different triggered sets of onboarding


emails, and this is the third one that we worked on, this set, this time-based sequence


of emails to move trial users into paid users.


That was the whole goal.


So Wistia, as a lot of us know, if you use Wistia, you engage with their marketing, they're


really good marketers, right?


They're really good at it.


They say compelling things.


They get us to care.


They write good copy.


We knew the copy and the control emails we were going to test ours against.


We knew that their control email copy was strong.


It wasn't underperforming.


It was doing well.


We had to do better.


We had to make it really fantastically better.


And we managed to do that.


I'm going to walk you through.


We managed to do that where we turned.


We got results of 3.5 times the paid conversions with our sequence.


3.5 times the paid conversions.


So trial to paid.


The control converts 100 people into paying customers.


Ours converts 350 people into paying customers, just to spell it out for you because we're


getting specific here, right?


This is not inconsequential.


This is not a coincidence.


These things that we tested to significance actually worked.


This is the kind of stuff that C levels, frankly, and all of us need to hear.


And now I'm going to talk to you about three, conveniently three, three is a good number,


three ways that you can get specific based on what we did with these Wistia emails.


So the first, the first way to get specific, to move past good copy to really great copy,


that's high converting copy, is to make sure that what you're saying is obviously, obviously,


not possibly, but obviously about the person who's reading it.


Customers reading your copy needs to believe that it is obviously about them.


That's the trick.


So I'm going to be doing a bit of reading with some emails as well.


So just like bear with me as I read copy aloud to you and you'll be reading it on the screen


and typing as I'm doing it, it will be the same message coming at you again and again.


But we're going to do that because that's part of the exercise.


So this is a control email.


You don't have to read it.


It will blow up this copy largest that you can read it.


The control email for Wistia.


This is the first one in the sequence that we optimized.


So here's how it reads kind of in context.


Okay.


Ready?


You can read along too.


I'm going to read it aloud, though.


Your video is live.


Let's see how it's doing.


Party time.


Ready to dive into some data?


Analytics help determine if your videos are helping you achieve your business goals.


Wistia stats will explain who is watching your videos, how they're interacting with


it, and how to improve your video ROI.


Good copy, right?


Nothing really stands out as bad copy here.


It's a good message.


Is it obviously about the reader?


This would be sent to you, right?


Like this exact one.


If you were a Wistia trial user, you would get this email.


Would you, sitting walking around on your lunch break or sitting wherever you're sitting,


would you look at this and say this is obviously about me?


You know I'm leading you to say no, obviously, right?


So like maybe you think yes.


Is it obviously about me?


We hypothesized that it was not.


So we put together a different email.


A different email that was going to be more specific, that was going to try harder to


make it really clear that this was about the person who's opening the email.


So here we go.


This is the new copy.


I'm going to read some of it, not all of it.


I'm a copywriter.


Conversion copy is always longer.


We can talk about that.


Almost always longer.


Good news, Joanna.


People are watching your video.


Fantastic, right?


Now, here is the question.


How can you put your new video data to work for you?


You may be wondering what's the good in knowing that, say, 10% of people are playing my video


and 90% are not?


Or that viewers are dropping off two minutes into a 10-minute video?


Or that some people are rewatching a particular part of a video?


And then we go into explaining what you can do with that information, educating them a


bit.


And then we have two calls to action here, intentionally, strategically.


We were tagging people based on what they were doing here.


And they are in the first person.


I want to try those ideas out or show me more about video analytics.


And then we finish the email off.


It's not the longest email I've ever written.


Is this more obviously about me?


When I open this email, do I see myself more in the copy?


Now, there's always room for further optimization.


And the more you know about the people you're sending to, the better.


Let's say you can segment your list or if it's any other way that you're doing it, the


better you can get people down into narrower segments, the better you can get specific


with them and the more specific you can get.


But is this more obviously about me?


If I'm walking around and I'm busy or I'm sitting at my desk and I'm busy and I can


be distracted by a billion other things, is this at least more obviously about me?


Turned out, of course, that it was.


We saw the great results that we saw.


Now, here's what we were doing with it.


Here's how you can do it, too.


Not can, but probably should do it as well.


We're working to feed their ego.


People love to hear about themselves.


They love it.


They don't just love it for vanity's sake, but again, so that they know that they should


pay attention to this message.


Feed their ego.


Connect it to their lives.


What do I do with this information now that I know it?


Great.


People are viewing my video.


What do I do with that?


We have to help them understand specifically what they can do with it.


Empower them to then go act on it with specifics.


Not with, oh, use this to grow your business, which we can say about every B2B solution,


but specifically what can I do with this information now?


Then, of course, we put CTAs in the first person to make it more obviously about them.


That's the first way to go about this.


The second way to get specific is to connect the dots for your reader.


Connect the dots, every single dot.


The things you're saying that are summarized or vague in any way won't make it through.


They can't.


It's not my job.


As your reader, which is a good thing to call people who are reading your copy rather than


subscribers or leads, as your reader, it's not my job to figure out what you're trying


to tell me.


We all know we're too busy.


We're not, and everybody, and we've always been, even in 1986, it's not like this is


a new thing.


We've always been too busy to figure out what you're trying to tell us.


Connect the dots for people.


Here's the control.


Again, I'm going to read this one.


It's not very long.


Customize your player.


18% is a lot.


That's the improvement in play rate that Wistia customers see by customizing the color of


their video player appearance to reflect their company branding on their website.


It's that easy.


Get more plays on your videos by customizing your player colors.


So our takeaway, if we what's our immediate takeaway from that?


I should customize my video player colors.


I don't really that doesn't form anything for the average person.


I don't live in a world where I think about video players or think about video player


colors.


I don't care enough to really figure out what am I supposed to actually do?


Now, like, help me.


Spell it out for me.


What do I do with this information that you've given me?


How am I supposed to put this into practice in my life and make my life better?


The easiest thing for me to do is just, like, ignore this.


Like, okay, great, thank you.


I don't actually think 18% is a lot.


So I don't really know how to do anything with what you just told me.


But it's going to move on.


And that's the problem, right?


Our job is to take this, like, vague blob of stuff that we're telling people and really


connect the dots for them.


Help them really understand and get inside the message we're trying to get them to get


inside of.


So here's what we did.


We wrote, of course, another email.


And here's how we did it.


I'm going to move through this somewhat quickly.


We saw 18% more people click play when we did this, Joanna.


Again, a little personalization goes a long way.


We customized the color of our video players.


That's all it took to get nearly 20% more views of our videos.


The Wistia player defaults to gray, which is nice, but gray.


So why stick with gray when you can go with hot pink or dollar bill green or, well, Wistia


blue?


And then we have a little JPG in there.


You can change video's player color in two clicks in Wistia.


And then it goes on to say that videos that used to get 100 views a day now get 118 views


a day.


In a month, that's an extra 500.


Type over there.


500 views.


And it only takes something like 11 seconds to make this very simple but very powerful


change to your videos.


So what have we done there?


What have we done there to connect those dots for people?


Getting more specific for our reader.


We made concepts concrete.


Right?


We didn't just say, like, what's a color?


Like, okay, change your color.


I don't know what to do.


Like, what does color look like?


Like, everybody thinks color is something different.


It's a bit conceptual.


Color isn't a thing you can point at.


It's all things.


So we had to say something that was more concrete.


Like hot pink.


I know what hot pink looks like.


My brain doesn't have to work through that.


I know what it looks like.


Dollar bill green.


Most of us know what dollar bill green looks like.


Those are important things to spell out.


That's how you get your copy better.


By pushing harder on those concepts and not settling for the summarized noun in this case.


We also connected all the dots.


Because 18% doesn't sound like anything.


I don't know what 18% will do for my business.


It might do something for my business, but what will it really do?


So we had to spell out 18% looks like this many more views in this week, in this month.


We could go further and say 6,000 more views in a year.


Multiply that by all the videos you have.


Turn on Wistia turnstiles.


Get all those leads.


Convert them to X.


Here's how it will work for your business.


We could go through that and help people really understand by getting specific how to get


those results and what that means for their business.


So here is the last technique we're going to talk about.


And for this I'm going to borrow from Zeph's book and ask you to close your eyes.


Please just do me a favor and close your eyes.


People are doing it.


That's awesome.


You're not doing it though.


I can see you.


When you sit up front I can see you.


Close your eyes.


I'll tell you when to open them.


All I want you to do, I'm going to read this copy to you.


Just clear your mind.


Don't work hard on trying to figure out what I'm saying.


Just be yourself with closed eyes and I'll read it to you and think through what images


are forming in your head as I do it.


And then I'll tell you when to open.


Don't worry.


Meet Wistia customer ZBlue.


There are a lot of creative ways to grow your business with video.


Collecting email addresses is an easy way to fill your database with sales-ready leads.


We thought you'd enjoy reading how ZBlue, a digital marketing firm, collects leads with


video for their client, the Santa Barbara Chicken Ranch, and uses coupons to connect


with their customers.


Okay, open your eyes.


What did you visualize?


Did anything come to life in your head?


The Chicken Ranch?


Because you can imagine what a Chicken Ranch is.


Anything else?


Did you see anything?


Was your brain then engaged?


Maybe fill your database because fill you can visualize what a filling up is.


Database is a little harder.


But it's extraordinarily difficult for our brains to know what to do when we're passively


consuming messages and nothing is really coming to life in our minds.


Our whole job, that's what words do.


That's all words do.


Users are there to bring things to life in our head, to engage our imagination, to pull


us into something.


That's what they do.


We do our words, our business, our customers, and their brains a huge disservice when we


don't get specific and bring things to life for them.


I am a huge fan of Mad Men.


His misogyny aside, obviously that's a problem in the show.


But other than that, there's a lot of good stuff you can learn.


If you don't watch Mad Men, you should watch it.


I'm so sad.


I've been here for a while and I just can't believe it.


But this is why we need to get into our prospects, our readers' imaginations.


Because that's where we live.


That's where we don't have to keep paying, paying and paying for more people to come


and try to become customers and so on and so forth.


When we get inside their head, we actually live as a brand inside their head.


It's a real thing.


They didn't have to work.


We're actually alive in their minds.


And so with that in mind, we rewrote that control email, which I just kind of flipped


by.


And I'm not going to read this whole one because this is a long one.


But what I do want to point to is this part where we talk about the Wistia turnstile.


Every feature you have has a story of some point.


And I know the idea of story can feel pretty conceptual and kind of hard in marketing.


But it has a beginning, a middle, and an end.


It has a before, a during, and an after.


Your features have those things.


So we decided to help people understand the story of the turnstile in their lives.


Here's how we described it in the email.


Describing a turnstile.


It's a really elegant content gate in Wistia.


Here's how it turns your marketing and demo videos into lead collection machines.


One, prospects land on your page.


Two, they see your video front and center, not squished next to an ugly form.


Three, they click play.


Four, they watch.


And then just at that moment when you're about to reveal an incredible data point or the


climax of a killer story, voila, the turnstile appears.


So we're walking them through the story of the feature.


We're using word pictures throughout the email to try to help them, their brains, which are


disengaged, get engaged.


We're trying to bring them into this and walk them through the story so that they're actually


living it with us.


So not just reading some copywriter's copy that was approved by a marketer who got it


approved by the C level, but something that's real and that's pulling them in.


Now, of all of these examples, you saw they were all longer.


And I know I hear it all the time.


I heard it from Andrew at Wistia when we sent over these emails for his consideration.


And he was like, great, but people don't read that much.


People don't read online.


We've all heard that.


Sadly, someone's lying out there and they keep saying it, but they do read online.


They just don't read boring stuff online.


They don't read boring short copy or long copy.


If it's boring, it won't get read.


So don't even worry about it if it's boring.


It goes long or short as you want.


It's dull.


They don't care.


They also don't want to do your work for you.


I'm not going to read long copy if you don't help me get to a better place with it.


If I'm just reading it and still actively working to connect the dots, to visualize,


to figure out how this is about me.


That's our job.


That's your job when you're writing copy.


Don't make me do the work that you should be doing.


These generalized, summarized, vague messages, they do not work.


They don't work.


It's a myth that they work.


They are the 4,996 that we don't care about.


We need to be the four, those four specific messages that really get inside your head.


Now I know it takes organizational change to get away from those summarized messages.


They're uncomfortable for a lot of us.


It's safer to stay short because we've heard that's a good thing at some point, but it


doesn't work.


It doesn't work as well as it could.


It works well.


We saw Wistia was doing well, but we 3.5 times better when we worked harder and wrote even


more as long as we were specific about it.


We need to do these things because we're working hard to win attention, keep attention, and


monetize that attention.


We'll never get to monetization if we do not keep their attention.


Keep these in mind when you are writing copy next.


And if you have any questions, I'm around to talk.


Thank you.


Hi, that was awesome.


So obviously we have some questions.


Obviously.


Here, let me pull those up.


Shockingly, the Wi-Fi isn't always working as well as it should.


Okay.


Here we go.


In your Wistia examples, what subject lines were you using and what was an important factor


in the strategy?


We kept some of the subject lines the same.


So we did change some of the subject lines, but we were working for the open, which I


know we learned yesterday isn't the point, but we can talk about that all day.


Yeah, so we kept some of them the same, but most of them were different where, again,


we were going for the open, and then once they're inside the email, making sure we match


what was promised to get that open, but then build upon that so that it's not just like


just all about the subject lines.


So the subject line becomes a TLDR, which is boring, and nobody needs to open your email.


Get them to open it.


But they were really the same subject lines and some different ones, depending on how


we measured if the control was already doing really well for opens, then we didn't see


a need to optimize.


So another thing that someone said was they noticed that the emails in your case study


were two to three times longer than the original emails.


Do you feel that that specific personalization holds user attention longer and increases?


Yeah, it's kind of like the they won't read it if it's boring thing, right?


Like sure, if it was dull and they couldn't see themselves in it, and there will be some


people who will say like I won't read this, it's too long, tell me the short form.


But they're like their own worst enemy.


They don't understand that this is how they come to appreciate the product and understand


why they should turn from just passively using it to actively going in and getting better


results by like in this case continuing to use Wistia and then pay for it.


I think we have time for at least one more.


Do you have success metric comparisons for the control versus treatment emails in the


Wistia examples?


Did the new copy results lead to better results?


I think you just said that actually.


Never mind.


Yeah.


Let's try a different one.


What subject lines were you using and was that an important factor in the strategy?


Crap, I asked that already.


Save.


We could talk about it more.


I'm going to leave now.


Maybe I need a new answer.


Yeah, I'm never coming back.


So the one other one they said was how do you make meta descriptions and AdWords copy


obvious for large audiences?


That's like your question.


Oh.


Well, and it's, you know, the more you know about the people who are going to click, the


more specific you can get.


I would just one part of the takeaway is just don't be vague.


So if there is a vague kind of concept or sort of like a term that isn't specific, then


obviously you're probably matching and doing what you have to do with that term.


But what can you do to bring that to life?


It's very easy because we write so much copy just to let it, just like to jot out your


first idea and then because you don't know how to optimize it, you just like leave it


there and it ends up being, again, very vague and nonspecific and voiceless and timid.


But if you can go back in and apply, I don't know if that's helping with this for this


particular thing, but it really is just like a matter of pushing harder to get through


those, really doing the test, like read that or have somebody read the copy to you.


And if it doesn't trigger anything in your brain, then just rewrite it until it does.


And that should be, that's what we do.


That's what our team does.


The problem now is now I have chicken farms seared into my brain.


I know.


Chicken ranch.


See?


Yeah.


Thank you so much.


Thank you.


Rethinking Information Architecture for SEO and Content Marketing Presented by Joe Hall

Isn't this amazing? I feel like I'm on an Oscar for nerds. Okay, my name is Joe Hall,


and today I'm talking about rethinking information architecture for SEO and content marketing.


And really what I'm talking about mostly for this talk is a problem that I've seen over


the last couple of years. And I'm sure if you're an SEO, you probably come across this


issue as well. And that is that I come in contact with a lot of clients that have really


great SEO. They have Chuck Norris SEO. They've got great technical structures. They've got


phenomenal markup. Their server does great. They have a decent backlink profile. And not


only that, but they also do a really good job with content marketing as well. But for


some strange reason, they aren't getting traffic or rankings. Okay? And they might be getting


traffic and rankings in some areas, okay, like maybe parts of their blog are doing really


well. Or maybe they're getting rankings in areas that they don't really need to get rankings


in. Okay? But their primary product pages or their service pages or the pages that talk


about their company aren't ranking like they want them to. And so when a client comes to


me with this issue, a lot of times I'm like this guy right here. I think, well, that's


bad information architecture. And I feel like that guy too. Because a lot of people are


like, what are you talking about? You know? That makes no sense to me at all. So today


I'm going to talk about how we can, one, identify bad information architecture and then, two,


how we can redefine it to start building sites that rank better. So what exactly is information


architecture? It's basically just the structural design of shared information environments.


And so what does that mean for us in a web setting? This is typically what we see. We


see a loose structure of different page types. And this is how we've been building websites


for the last 20 years or so. The problem with this is that as you can see, these are not


really anything to do with marketing. Okay? These are page types. And this is how a developer


will weigh out the structure of a site. This is problematic for us as content marketers


because this doesn't help us at all promote the entire site or the entire domain. For


example, we see we have a completely separate section for the blog. And if you're doing


content marketing, that means that all of your traffic and links are going to an isolated


section of your website. That is problematic for us. I'll show you why. So bad IA simply


means that you have an increased likelihood for duplicated content and taxonomies, right? So


if you have a product category for tennis shoes and you have a blog category for tennis


shoes, that doesn't make any sense. Okay? We need to try to figure out a way to bring those


taxonomies together. And also because of that, creates poor internal linking. You might have a


ton of links pointing to a piece of content. But if those links are not being transferred


onto the pages that matter, like your product pages or pages that you want to rank, that


link equity is pretty much wasted. Distributed topic authority. This is really important right


now. Google is employing lots of machine learning algorithms and lots of natural language


processing. And they can understand the main topics of your site. And if they're all


distributed across the domain, it makes it very difficult for them to understand what your


site is about. Confusing or incomplete navigation and an overall lower user experience. So


information architecture has a lot to do with the entire marketing aspect of your site. So


we're back to this slide, right? How do SEOs traditionally fix a problem like this? Well, many


SEOs will recommend doing something like an internal linking structure or strategy, right?


And that's good. That helps in some cases. But in the end, it's just a Band-Aid. Because you


have to constantly work on that. You have to constantly build internal links. You have to


constantly think about where your link equity is and that kind of thing. And some SEOs will


recommend moving content. Okay? And sometimes that works as well. But the difficult part


about that is, one, putting together a successful plan on how that's going to be executed


without losing rankings. Like doing things like redirections and that kind of thing. And also,


it's hard to find out where exactly you should put the content. And then some are even tempted


to get involved in unnatural links or unnatural link profiles, which can get you in a lot of


trouble. And the reason that happens is because a lot of SEOs will look at or a lot of


business owners will look at their content marketing budget and they'll see, gosh, people


spent so much money on content marketing, we're not getting the rankings we want. So I'll


just buy 5,000 links for 10 bucks and point them at our product pages. That's horrible. Do


not do that. That's going to really get you in a lot of trouble. So all of these are just


Band-Aids that really solve a problem that shouldn't exist to begin with. And so what I want


to talk about today is how we can design kick-ass information architectures. In order to do


that, I must tell you a story. And I'm an expert only at two things. And that's SEO and


wheelchairs. And the only reason I'm an expert at wheelchairs is because I've used one my whole


life. So I'm going to tell you a quick story. When I first, when I was a kid, my first chair


was a manual wheelchair. And there's two different types of wheelchairs you understand. There's


basically manual wheelchairs and electric wheelchairs like I have now. But when I was a kid, I


used a manual wheelchair mostly. And I did that up until I was about 13, I think in eighth grade.


And I got my first power chair when I was in eighth grade. It was amazing, right? But guess


what happened? I was so awkward. At 13, I was already awkward, right? Like having a power chair,


I became even more awkward because this is what would happen. I would go like this. I


would go very slow like that, right? But if I wanted to turn, I'd have a complete stop.


And I would do a 90-degree angle like this. It took me forever to get anywhere. It was


horrible. My friends hated it. They were like, God, you're so awkward. I hate this. It was


like for a week they hated it, you know? So a week went by after I got my first power


chair, and my dad took me to the mall. And when you're 13 in the early 90s, the mall


is where you have to hang out, right? But for me, because I was such a nerd, the place


I really enjoyed going was Radio Shack, you know? But my dad parked over my K-Mart, okay?


And so to get to Radio Shack, I had to go all the way across the mall, right? But I


was so excited to get there, but I did something different. Instead of focusing on what I was


doing, I looked forward, and I focused on where I was going. I focused on my direction


and my destination. And the reason I tell you this story today is because in order to


design successful information architectures, we need to focus on where we are going and


less about what we're doing. And what that means basically is that where you're going


is called marketing, and what we are doing effectively is web development. I'm not saying


throw web development out. That's how I got started. But what you need to do is look for


that sweet spot right in between the middle, between marketing and web development and


find SEO. So let's start off with some main ideas, okay? When you're building an information


architecture, you need to start thinking about main concepts that define an organization.


I mean, it can be popular ideas within an industry or broad user intent. These main


ideas will be the foundation of how the site is structured. So we'll put them right there.


The second thing you want to do, and this is something that's going to happen over the


lifetime of the site, is start to develop supporting content. And when I say supporting


content, you know, we often think about blog posts, you know? But it can be really anything.


Any page on the site can be supporting content. This includes product pages. This includes


anything really. Complete blog posts, articles, evergreen content. And you should really focus


on targeting user intent and focus on your sales funnel. So when you think about a traditional


sales funnel, you're thinking about, you know, you're thinking about awareness, building


awareness. You're thinking about comparison or education of your product. And you're thinking


about a conversion point. Those are the three main sections of most search sales funnels


that should be included within your supporting content. And that would go ‑‑ oh, pressed


the wrong button here. That would go right below that. So after you've developed your


supporting content, you're going to want to think about your conversion points. And these


can be product pages, lead generation forms, user signups. And those need to fit inside


that same main category section. Okay? And after that is completed, we can put them down


here. And then we want to start thinking about our main taxonomy. Now, the main taxonomy


is actually one of the easiest things. Because you can leverage those main ideas to get started.


They can define main navigation. They can influence URL structures. They can develop


a category hierarchy. And they can influence content development. It's very important that


you think about how your main ideas and your main taxonomy will work in with the rest of


the objectives of the site. Because it will be how the rest of the site is structured


going forward. After you've done that, you know, this would be our main taxonomy up here,


up at the top. And this can influence your main navigation as well. It doesn't have to,


but it probably should. The second thing we're going to want to think


about ‑‑ oh, this is a main taxonomy in action. This is kind of interesting. We'll


see here, this is a ‑‑ the query is furniture. And we'll see that positions one, two and


three in organic are all main taxonomy sections. Now, of course, everything above those organic


listings are ads and the local seven pack. And I can't do a presentation without complaining


about Google. So this is ‑‑ this is kind of bullshit, to be honest with you. Like,


really is this cool for us? No, it's not. So if you really need to stay competitive,


I recommend sticking with a good understanding of your information architecture. Otherwise,


you know, if you're not in the top three, nobody's going to go any further down. And


this is ‑‑ that actually was below ‑‑ way below the fold of my computer.


So next we need to talk about supporting taxonomies. And these are things that can define the relationship


between content in separate sections. And so if you understand how a blog works or you


ever used a blog, you might identify things like tags and other aspects of your content


that can show a connection between other pieces. And because of that, it helps grow internal


linking organically. It can act as a secondary navigation. So some folks will use these actually


as a sub navigation. Or they might use them as a navigation within your sidebar. These


definitely can grow and change over time. So this is the kind of thing where you want


to utilize your supporting taxonomy if you're introducing new content that's not so much


related specifically to a main idea, but you still want to tag it or you still want to


keep that content organized in some way. And then we go down here. And as you can see,


it's kind of randomized how they're connected. Because these are the sections of the site


that connect all the other parts together. And what's cool about this, it's becoming


much, much easier to create supporting taxonomies. We have all these new tools now. And these


are natural language processing companies. And what these do, you can tie into their


APIs and they will automatically go through your content library and tag the main concepts


or ideas for each piece of content. And that's very effective when we're building a supporting


taxonomy that can really easily show you the relationships between all the various pages


on your site. And I'll draw special attention to the one


below called cloud natural language API. That is the API from Google. And that API actually


is open to the public. And what's great about that is that it runs on the same natural language


processing engine that Google uses. They talked about it recently. They call it parse specific


parse phase, I think. But anyways, that's the exact same API that they use. So I'm really


excited about that one. The other three have been around for a while.


And they're phenomenal. All of them are really great. So let's take a look at that in action.


So check this out. The query here is dog leashes. And we can see that positions one and two


are responsible for from the supporting taxonomies. So it's important to understand that, you


know, a dog leash may not be a main idea of a site, right? But it's definitely a supporting


piece of content or supporting taxonomy along with it.


So the final thought, this is a final thought here is this tweet from Rand. This is a very


popular tweet for them. The best way to sell something is don't sell anything at all. Earn


the awareness, respect and trust of those who might buy. And it seems kind of abstracted.


But for me, building the right information architecture should aid in that pursuit. Because


it increases your user experience. It increases a amount of respect because all your content


is in the right position. It definitely increases awareness because your sites will start to


rank better and trust as well. Thank you very much. My name is Joe Ho. Thank you.


Joe, thank you very much. I'm being sent questions as we speak. Thank you for submitting everything.


We have a lot of time left. Someone asked our company uses a lot of one-off


landing pages with a short life span. Where should you out these types of pages in the


infrastructure? Okay. So that's a good question. One-off landing


pages. There was a I think about a year ago Google mentioned that they were going to be


more aggressive around something called doorway pages or doorway kind of aspects of a site.


And for those that don't understand, a doorway page is a page that is created specifically


just for SEO. Right? And it may be found outside of the main navigation. It may not be part


of the site. Right? So my recommendation is to if you're doing


these one-off landing pages, to figure out a way to integrate those pages as much as


possible into your existing architecture. And that may mean like creating a special


section within your main navigation. It might mean developing a specific category. But whatever


it may be, make sure that you're including these landing pages in your overall like internal


linking structure. You know? And it may seem like maybe it doesn't make a lot of sense


to put those in your main navigation. That might be true. But if you're trying to avoid


some type of Google filter or penalty, it would make sense then.


Okay. Someone wants a bit more detail about why having your blog in a separate section


is bad. Yes.


They want some justification on this. Very good question. Okay. So like I get it.


I understand. People love blogs. Right? People love content marketing. They want to produce


their infographics or whatever. I don't know. But here's the thing. If you have one section,


let's say you have WordPress, for example, in a subdirectory. Right? That's how it usually


happens. Okay? What happens then is that WordPress has its own taxonomy structure. It has its


own kind of system, content management system inside of its own directory. And so oftentimes


what happens is you will do a stellar content marketing campaign. Okay? And you'll attract


tons of links and tons of visitors. And the value of those links and visitors stays on


the blog. It doesn't transfer over to the other sections of the site. And like I mentioned


earlier, let me ‑‑ I can't pull it up anymore. But anyways, as I mentioned earlier,


doing things like internal linking and moving content, that can help fix that problem. But


it's just a Band-Aid. And so we need to start growing sites that are not kind of partitioned


off based on page type. We need to start putting content right alongside our product pages


or put content right alongside our lead generation forms. There's no reason we can't do all that


together in the same sections. It's difficult because it might mean, you know, looking at


a different technology infrastructure outside of WordPress. But it's going to help in the


long run.


Is there a technology answer that you've recommended to people?


Technology? No. I don't ‑‑


Because when it comes to WordPress ‑‑


No. So let's ‑‑ okay. Let's say if you're ‑‑ if you're hardcore WordPress ‑‑ and


I am. I love WordPress. And if you have a reasonably manageable product inventory, if


you're selling products, you might want to look into something like WooCommerce, which


is a kind of an eCommerce platform for WordPress. There's other ones out there that might be


good. If you want to get outside of that, you might want to look at something like Drupal


and think about, you know, Drupal is great, but it's all about how the site is built,


you know. And so if you're going to build a site in Drupal, really think about having


it laid out like I had before and not having a separate section just for the blog or just


for content.


You and Lauren can argue over Drupal versus WordPress. You and Lauren can argue about


Drupal and WordPress. There's a few differences of opinion. Someone had also followed up with


a question about local topic authority, which you touched on.


Local topic authority?


Yeah. Topical authority for pages.


Yeah, yeah. So is that the question?


Specifically the question was also what is local topical authority?


There you go. So that's a great question, actually. So topic authority is simply having


everything that's topical that you want to rank for in the same sections, right? So when


Google was looking at your site, if you want to rank for, like, you know, tennis shoes,


tennis, and, like, that's the only thing you want to rank for, but to build supporting


content, you build a bunch of other stuff. You build stuff about athletes. You build


a ton of other things. And you've got your authority about tennis shoes spread out across


the entire site. It's hard for Google to make sense of what the site's actually about. So


if you can integrate your content in a way that's segmented, and some people like to


use the term silos, I'm not a fan of that term, but if you want to look at silos, that's


kind of the direction that I'm talking in. You're going to want to try to organize your


topics in ways that makes it very easy for Google to understand what you're trying to


achieve with the website.


Perhaps a quite traditional SEO question. But someone had asked about just making sure


you've got pages that are well optimized.


Maybe they would.


That are well optimized.


Yeah.


And what can we do to give Google the best indication of what we're talking about and


everything else? Beyond maybe some of the classic answers, anything new or any developments


in making sure that Google's been understanding your search terms and the terms you're targeting


with a particular page?


Yeah. Can you repeat the last part?


So the question was, I wish I could know who this is and ask them exactly what they were


trying to get at, but they'd asked about creating a bunch of organic content that they want


to pass the six different ways. They want to know about optimizing it as best as possible.


And whether you had any recommendations for this is how we're going to do that.


Yeah, optimizing content. Yeah. I mean, I guess SEO best practices is ideal.


From an IA standpoint, you're going to want to make sure that that content is in the right


sections, that it's tagged correctly, that it has the right internal link structure to


drive to that content. And then also from an IA standpoint, think about simple things


like breadcrumbs and how breadcrumbs influence topical authority by giving the site, by giving


Google a clear structure for what that page is about. If you're using things like breadcrumbs,


you can use structured markup like schema to help Google understand exactly what that


page is about. And that includes also some of your main navigation, too. You know, you


could have certain aspects of your main navigation where you're on a specific page and that page


within the navigation has like an active CSS class. So Google will know, oh, this is an


active, you know, this is a page that's active on this topic. You know, yeah.


Fantastic. Joe, thanks so much for being here.


Thank you.


The 8 Paid Promotion Tactics That Will Get You to Quit Organic Traffic [MozCon 2017] — Kane Jamison

Hello everyone. Thank you, Maz, for having me. So I've got a link there with some slides


and other resources. I'm not going to mention it again until the end, but I just tweeted


it out as well. So as SEOs and content marketers, I'm guessing most of you have been involved


in a project that looked a little bit like this at some point. You send your newsletter,


you do your email outreach, you do your social promo. Nothing really seems to stick. So you


kind of move on to the next project. You hope it builds up some long tail rankings over


the next few months. And even for those projects that do eventually rank, I'm guessing you've


been through this sad six month, 12 month waiting period, watching it climb from page


five of the SERPs to page three. We've all been through it. As an organic marketer and


an SEO at heart, I live for that stuff at the end, right? All the stuff that happens


a year after we publish with the traffic coming in, that's when it really pays off. But as


a content marketer, I need to have better launches that aren't just going to be viral


every time, right? So my team has been trying to solve this problem over the last couple


years of how do we launch a piece of content, knowing that a lot of the value is going to


come a year down the road, but show some return on investment within a month or two, not six


months. How do we do projects that look a little bit less like this if the email outreach


doesn't go well, and a little bit more like this at the beginning, regardless of whether


or not somebody at BuzzFeed wants to link to it. So today I'm going to cover eight paid


media tactics that we've been using to solve this problem. Show faster return on investment


on content marketing for the first week or first month after you launch something, and


really just make sure that our projects are successful from the day they launch, not a


year or two years later. The first thing I want you to think about is using paid media


for audience acquisition and not just customer acquisition. Now, when I say paid media, almost


everybody in the room thinks of paid search down here, right? We have our PPC friends


building high converting ads on high intent keywords, people that have their wallet out


in their hand ready to buy something, clicking on those ads. A lot of us forget about paid


media and paid social at the top of the funnel. I think that's reasonable. Everybody's gut


reaction is, well, that stuff doesn't convert. How am I supposed to get budget for paid media


that's not going to drive a sale? That's a waste. It actually can drive conversions,


and even when you're promoting content marketing instead of ads and paid social, you can actually


drive sales at a similar cost per acquisition to paid search if you can make the numbers


work right. And that equation looks a little bit like this. If you're doing a $10 cost


per click on the bottom in paid search at a 10% conversion rate, you need to drop those


numbers down and be able to drive 50 cent cost per click traffic at a half percent conversion


rate to get a similar number of conversions for a similar amount of spend. The difference


between these two, and I'm never going to advocate that somebody doesn't do the paid


search that's going to convert first if that's not covered already, but the difference between


these two for me as a just full funnel marketer is that I've got another 19,000 people that


I can expose my brand to. Those people can love our content, sign up for our email newsletter,


and perhaps more importantly, I can retarget to them pretty cheaply for a long time afterwards


and start moving them through the funnel. So obviously a lot of this is reliant on getting


those cheap cost per clicks to drive traffic to things like content. I'm going to go through


a couple of steps to help you get there. The first part is segmenting your audience and


split testing to find the winning ad combinations. Now a lot of this is not going to be rocket


science to anyone in the room that's done PPC before, but bear with me for the first


part. The second part is where it pays off. The first step is we have to segment our audience,


right? So if we have 9.5 million people in the U.S. over 40 who are golfers, and let's


say we are promoting like a chain of golf resorts or something like that, there's a


good chance if we're running ads to this audience that 9.3 million of them don't care. When


you start getting into audiences over a half million people, on paid social at least, the


majority of them are probably not going to respond to whatever creative you're putting


in front of them. The goal is not to spend $4,000 reaching one audience. Our goal here


in this method is to spend $400 reaching ten audiences and give them creative that they


actually care about. So maybe we segment down to an audience that looks more like this.


We still have people that are passionate about golf and some top golf brands, but now we're


segmenting into two groups by gender. We're just focusing on people that live in South


Carolina in this example, and we're going to filter down further by behavior that suggests


people are frequent travelers or perhaps business travelers. This is the kind of audience that


I can reach each one of these for maybe $100 or $300. And more importantly, and moving


on to step two, I can show them creative they actually care about. If you're a passionate


golfer in South Carolina, there's a good chance you're not going to click on a post about


the best golf courses you can play in the U.S. But if I show you one that says the best


golf courses you can play in South Carolina, I'm guessing there's a good shot you're going


to click on it to see if you've played that course before. So we can put creative together


that really speaks to them. Gets better click-through rates, that's going to help drive our costs


down. Now, the next thing we're going to do in a campaign setting is split test a few


headlines and a few pieces of, a few graphics for each ad and for each segment. So maybe


we have these nine ad combinations. We're going to run 10 or 20% of our total content


launch budget testing these ads in each segment. So 10 or 20% total across all of our segments.


And what we're just looking to do is find the winners, right? Whatever has the best


click-through rate, the best cost per click, highest relevant scores. We want to pick out


those ads for each audience and spend the remainder of our budget promoting that content,


right? Those ones that are driving the best results. And the effect that we're producing


here is that we spend a small amount of our budget on average CPCs and we spend the majority


of our budget on the winners, right? The ones that are going to have better average results.


Again, not rocket science if you've done PPC before. This is a pretty basic campaign template.


Where it really gets powerful is when we mix in two things. One is that we're going to


be promoting content, which is likely to get a lot better engagement than most typical


sales-oriented ads. The second thing is that, in at least this example, we're going to do