called whatever it is, additional resources or resources for the curious or whatever the


Understanding & Harnessing the Flow of Link Equity to Maximize SEO Ranking Opportunity - WBF

hyper, in this case, in my oral health and dentistry example, potentially I want an oral


health page that is linked to from the top level navigation.


And then you get to use that new top level page to link down and flow the link equity


to all these different pages that you care about and currently are getting buried in


your navigation system.


All right, everyone, hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday.


Give us your tips in the comments for how you've seen link equity flow, the benefits


or drawbacks that you've seen to try and controlling and optimizing that flow.


And we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.


Three Ways to Evolve Your Link Building in 2023 — Whiteboard Friday

Hi Moz fans, welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm Paddy Moogan, I'm the


CEO of Aera. Today we're going to talk about link building and how to evolve your link


building to its next phase and to improve what you do at the moment. So we're going


to talk through three methods to improve your link building and evolve it and improve the


results you get for clients. So firstly, number one, there is a bit of an issue sometimes


with link building and the relevance of the content that we produce for link building.


So one way we can actually improve that and make our content as relevant as possible is


to use the customer journey to generate link building ideas. Now there's lots of different


ways of thinking about the customer journey, different funnels, different methodologies.


One thing we use at Aera for this is the awareness, consideration and decision phases where the


customer goes from being aware of the problem, the pain points, something they want to fix,


then looking at their options and trying to figure out, okay, who should I choose to solve


that problem? And then finally, maybe getting their credit card out, picking up the phone,


emailing, that kind of stuff to actually decide who they're going to go with. Now we can use


this model to actually come up with link building ideas. I'm going to share how we do this at


Aera. So there's four pillars we can use to try and figure out content ideas that are


relevant to our customers. Firstly, we start with the audience themselves. So who are our


audience? Who are we trying to speak to? Who are our ideal buyers for the products and


services that we sell? So that's where we start. We then move on to the pain points


of that audience. So what kinds of things they struggle with, what kind of triggers


can actually make them start to look for a product such as yours or a service such as


yours? And then thirdly, what solutions do you offer as a brand or website to try and


fix those pain points for those customers and trying to connect those things together?


Fourthly, what keywords are you trying to rank for? What are you trying to rank for


in Google? How does that connect back to your service and your product? And what it allows


you to do is to tie together these stages into actual rankings, actual keywords that


you're trying to improve with your link building and your content. The nice thing about using


these four areas to try and come up with content ideas for link building is that it forces


relevance. It's really hard to actually do this. If you stray too far away from it, you


come up with ideas that aren't very relevant. So if you stick really closely to it, it's


a bit harder. That's kind of the point. What you're trying to do here is strike out balance


between ideas that can get links, but also content ideas that are very relevant to your


audience and who you're trying to sell your products or your services to. So try and use


these four points here to come up with your ideas and make sure the ideas you come up


with are truly relevant to your customer and not just being done purely for link building.


Second point, the second thing we can do to evolve our link building is to move beyond


big shiny interactive link building campaigns. Now we've built hundreds of these over the


years era. We will continue to build them. I love a good shiny interactive hero campaign,


but I believe there's more we can do when it comes to content led link building. So


there's four things we can do here. So firstly, try and make any campaigns, any content you


come up with evergreen. What I mean by that is it shouldn't be a start and a stop campaign


where you launch a campaign, do your outreach and then forget about it and move on to the


next one. Try and create ideas and campaigns that you can outreach and promote over and


over and over again. If you can do that, it continues to be relevant throughout the year,


across multiple years. It isn't just one off campaign that you're hoping will get links


before you move on to the next one. The second thing you can do is actually not to stop the


outreach. So most SEOs actually will outreach a campaign and then stop once that campaign


is finished and move on to the next one. What you should be trying to do instead is create


campaigns that you can always outreach and always promote. So try not to stop the outreach


and what happens over time is you build up multiple campaigns, multiple content pieces


and you end up with a nice big bank of content that you can continually outreach and get


links to. It's not relying upon one campaign after another to get links. Third point we


can do is to look at existing content. So again, when you're thinking about creating


and building campaigns, the natural tendency is to think of something new, right? To think


about, okay, what can we create that's brand new, hasn't been done for a completely new


campaign for a website or a client? Actually, that's absolutely fine, but there may be some


existing content on that website that is link worthy. So make sure when you start working


with a website or a new brand, look at what they've got already. See which content they've


got that may be link worthy, may have gotten links in the past and try and outreach and


promote that content whilst you're building new campaigns. And this works really well


particularly for agencies because when you're launching a campaign that takes a bit of time


to come up with ideas, do the production, do the design, whilst you're doing all of


that, if you can find existing content on that website that is link worthy, you can


promote that and get links to that whilst you're building the big campaign and you're


offsetting the risk there as well and getting links in the short term as well as the long


term. Fourthly, simplify your execution. Now every content piece has to be big, shiny,


interactive, four page takeovers. It can be as simple as a blog post, it can be a small


mini infographic. Try not to worry too much about big fancy executions. Let the idea lead


the execution and if that means that you write just a very, very simple blog post with a


couple of images, maybe lots of copying, bullet points, that's absolutely fine. If that's


the best way to execute your idea, then that's what you should go with and not worry too


much about making something interactive or big just for the sake of it.


So thirdly, the first thing we can do to elevate our link building is to aim for links that


you didn't ask for. So a lot of the time with link building techniques, they rely upon outreach


and outreach means sending emails, trying to get in touch with webmasters and link prospects


and getting links from them. That's absolutely fine, we should continue doing that. But one


place you want to try and get to is to create content where it naturally gets links on its


own. So you may well do outreach and get links to that content, but as well as that, you're


also getting people linked to that content naturally, so you're not relying too much


just on the outreach. Now there's three examples here of content you can create that actually


will do this. Now the first thing to remember is actually content that ranks tends to get


links because when people are doing research into different areas and trying to write about


certain industries, they may look for content they can also link to. So for example, if


you have a page that's about statistics and trends in your industry, and someone's writing


an article about your industry and trends in 2022, if they find your content, there's


a good chance that they will link to it as well in the content they're producing. But


if it ranks, they've got more chance of finding it. The second area is long form guides, really


in depth, really detailed content. If you can find some good topic ideas to write about


in the long form way, long form guides tend to rank for a lot of long tail and mid tail


keywords. Again, if it ranks really well, it's very detailed, very techie. This works


really well for very technical products and very technical services. If you can create


content about your product or service that's quite technical, it's got a good chance of


ranking well and also being referenced and linked to by other websites. And thirdly,


industry reports. So actually we do this ourselves at Aera. We produced a state of link building


report a few months ago. It's a report that gets referenced a lot by our industry because


it's a standard in industry for link building and people think of it when they're writing


their own content. So in your industry, if you can create industry benchmark reports,


state of industry reports, surveys, that kind of stuff that actually shares knowledge and


shares information with the industry, it's easy for people to reference that in their


own content that they produce as well. But again, it needs to rank well for people to


find it in the first place. So there's three ways to actually evolve your link building


and try to elevate it to the next level beyond campaigns, beyond outreach and actually trying


to get links that you didn't ask for. So that's what we're trying for me. I'm Paddy


Moogan. If you've got any questions, drop them into the comments below. I'll be happy


MozCon 2015 - 24 - Practical, Modern Keyword and Topical Research with Gianluca Fiorelli

Hi everybody. Buenos dias. Buongiorno. How many Italians are here? I think we are two.


Spanish? I know you are from Barcelona. Okay. So let's talk about cable research and topical


research. Okay. We have all here fantastic speakers talking about wonderful campaigns


and so on, but I'm a freelance. I'm a solo consultant. Sometimes I don't have a budget.


Sometimes I feel really lost because Dr. Pitt is substantially telling us that Google is


something like this. It's going to be a devidate from other spots. We all know that semantics


is a governing seat. We all read Bea Yislavsky, Barbara Starr. We all hear Ryan Fishkin talking


about where Google is going to be. But what about doing when we have to put all these


things that we learn, that we read and practice? Especially when you have something like a


client which is a multi-country side, small site in a small niche travel industry and


is saying, okay, we have to do content marketing. We have to find ideas. And is especially targeting


selling solo and small groups, tailor made travelers in places that you don't know anything


about them. So let's start using Google better. I usually start from Google trends. This is


just one slide from a snapshot from USA, but I did the same thing for UK, Australia and New


Zealand. So I was taking the main country they were selling travelers from, and I started


trying to understand the story behind all these kind of noodles and lines. I saw interesting


seasonal spike, which is classic in travel. But I was surprised by Japan because all the


other countries were telling me that Vietnam was a rising country as interest. So first


thing you have to understand, don't be data driven. Being data driven is for bots. Better


to be data informed. Understand the story behind the data. And the story is that Japan is really


searched from away. And why? Because one third of the population of away is Japanese or


Japanese heritage. So they want to go to Japan to find, to visit family or to find their


roots. Another thing you have to understand that you are surely understood it, but I'm not


English speaking. For me, English is doing international SEO. And sometimes one thing that we


forget is that synonyms have a little difference. So I was seeing different things using


Vietnam vacation or using Vietnam holidays. So whenever you have some doubt about language,


especially when you don't really know the language, or maybe you are using English but you are


targeting another English speaking country, go and use word reference. So I understood that I


did a really fast check using keyboard planner in order to see broad topic, the country, and


most important morning keyboard vacation. And so this sort of classification, Thailand, Japan,


Vietnam. Thailand wasn't in the target because Thailand is something like, I don't know, going


to Germany if you are in Italian or going to Benidorm if you are in English and you want to


just relax. It's not for solo or small group traveler. Japan, I understood that before, but it


wasn't really in the target. So it was coming again Vietnam. I was happy because Vietnam was


consistent with all the other countries. Because you know, this was a small client with not


really big budget. So I had to find an idea that would be able to fit for all the countries. So


normally we use keyboard planner just for putting our keywords to see the search volume. Maybe


the competition is just that. This is really, really silly. Use Google. You can do some of


these things also with Facebook. In order to simulate ads, you put your main topic, you put


your niche, industry, really, really simulate also with negative keywords, et cetera, et


cetera, et cetera, and use Wikipedia as your landing page. Google is going to present you a


very beautiful list of topics like the Mekong Delta, the Vietnam cycle. They are all ideas,


wonderful ideas. And all the keywords in the group are all semantically related keywords about


a topic. And then, okay, everybody is talking about use Google Suggest, keyword tool, you


can suggest. But they forget something. The tools usually present you what Google is


suggesting to you in the universal search. Actually, Google is using the Suggest in every


niche. So if you are looking for content more in the news space, go to Google News and see


the Suggest there. If you want something about video or image, use the verticals. And


remember that the Suggest thing is not just a Google thing. If you are looking for money


topics, go on Amazon and see the Suggest in Amazon. If you are looking for broader mainstream


topics, go to Pinterest. I'm doing SEO since so many years, and one of the best tools Google


had was Wonder Wheel. Actually, you can rebuild it. If you go to the Related Searches and


start connecting all the Related Searches over Related Searches. So doing so, you are going


to have a really strong and clear search ecosystem about your topic. Actually, I don't know of


any tools that can do this. So I know that there are many wonderful coders here. Please


create me these tools because I don't want to stay. Then, okay, scrape the scraper. If


Google is scraping information from us, why we cannot scrape information from him? I ask


to Russ Jones of Angular to tell me how many carousel are present in Google. He has a really,


really wide selection of keywords in the search scape. So he told me that, okay, 0.15% of


generic carousel and a little bit more of complex carousel. What are the generic carousel and


what are the complex? The carousel, very simple, are the classic black and with two nails and


a link. The complex ones are the best ones because I was looking for topics about Vietnam.


So Google, one thing that we always forget, that knowledge graph is, okay, entities and


knowledge base. What is the knowledge base? The knowledge base is what every single person in


the world is searching in Google. So what is showing Google to us here is what people are


really searching about Vietnam. And in the complex, Google is also doing us a favor to tell


us for what specific segment, beaches, Vietnam war, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You can


use, as I say, importio or the classic, again. And remember, the carousel are not just on


Google. This is Pinterest. And these are even better because these are done by the people and


so use them. Or use the hashtag on Twitter, hashtag search on Instagram and so on. Obviously,


when you are doing cable research, you want to know what your competitors are doing. I really


like SimilarWeb, especially when I don't know the market. If I'm targeting a country that I


really don't know or where my client is not present, I like to use the industry report,


industry niche analysis of SimilarWeb. But I don't stop on organic search. Especially


because sometimes in certain niches, your real competitors are doing really bad SEO and so are


not really visible. Go for the paid competitors because they are the real keywords. And when


you have individual added your competitors, use a tool like the domain by SEMrush which is


really nice in order to individualize really, really tiny group of keywords. Obviously, you


should have to use your own data if you have it. But 90% of my clients, when I started


auditing them, never implemented the tracking of internal searches. Please do it. And I say


not just because it's information you are recovering keywords where Google is hiding us, but


because internal searches are going, if you match with the conversion information, are going


to tell you what kind of keywords or set of keywords are better sectional one, informational


one, navigational one. And you can match with all the keywords that you have added before in


order to classify the quality and the nature of the keywords. Obviously, when you are


thinking about content for an audience, you have to talk about things your audience is


interested about and talk about language of your audience. So go for forums. Go for Quora. I


see Quora so many times cited but so many times not used. Do it. You can use the


advanced search of Twitter, maybe using the API. And remember, on Twitter you can


geotarget the searches. So if you are interested in Australian, what people in Australia are


saying about the topic, on Twitter you can target it. And you can go also on Facebook, go on


communities, groups, grab the URLs, URL, put it on Feedly, have all the conversation of the


groups in your Feedly, export it, analyze it, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But especially,


you can use all these sources with tools like KNIME or RabbitMiner. And I will, where are


you, Paul? Okay. You have to ask to Paul Shapiro, who is the guy who wrote the wonderful


poster I link here, because with tools like this, you can really go in depth in content


analysis. You can understand the engrams, do TIF, IDF analysis, and especially you can see


the notes and the edge between topics. And this is not just useful for understanding what you


can do about topics, but just imagine knowing the topics, how they are connected, and how you


can use this information for internal linking. Obviously, when you have all this


information, you have to aggregate and measure, use Excel, use these tools, your gadget, use


the MOS keyboard difficulty tool or the new opportunity tool, or grab this link and go


seeing what Mike is saying about creating that huge Excel file that Marshall was showing


yesterday. And then, okay, create. I'm a freelance. I don't create anything. I usually suggest


to my clients what company to hire for creating things. And the guys of Red Mud Media create


this. And it was small budget. We worked really hard. And we had quite a success. Actually,


the most important information, the most important role for my client wasn't really the links.


This content was a lead generation content. So they were the inquirers. And they received


quite a good number of inquirers just after the launch of the content piece. So we win.


And let me finish. Remember always this. The greatest fix SEO ever pulled was convincing


the world it didn't exist. I'm alive. Thank you.


Thank you so much, Gianluca. Sorry, I'm hobbling a bit. We both have bad knees. We have old


SEOs up here.


Yes, we are all old.


Thank you, Gianluca. So I believe that you might get bombarded after. I wanted to first


tell everyone that he has he is going to be at the associates or Q&A table at the birds


of a feather. That was for Trevor. So be sure if you have questions, that's probably the


best place to catch him. I wanted to double check if something specifically came through.


One question I really liked, let's do this one, is what specific tools do you use to


do the stuff that you work on on a daily basis? People want to know what you use.


On a day to day basis. The funny thing is that I've tried substantially I think all


the tools existing in the world, but then I just used free for tools. I mostly do audit.


So what I use is Screaming Frog and the new 4.0 version is just amazing. I use your profiler.


I use obviously a few things. If I have really to have to really go in depth with auditing


sites, I use DeepCrawl, OnPage, Dotorg, because they are really, really wonderful tools. And


then what I usually try to use is my curiosity. That's why I was telling you don't be data


driven. I hate that. Try always to understand the story that a crawl is telling you, that


a keyword is telling you. Be creative in your daily work. But yes, those are the tools.


Keywords Aren't Enough: How to Uncover Content Ideas Worth Chasing - Presented by Ross Simmonds

Fresh Prince, Pogs, Nintendo Capture the Flag, and Pizza Pockets. Those are just some of the best


memories that I had in my childhood. But one of the best had to be the Scholastic Book Fair.


You guys remember the Book Fair, right? There was nothing like the Book Fair. It was Disneyland for


nerds and I was a nerd. So I loved it. There was nothing like when the Book Fair came to town. I


can remember spending weeks in advance just doing all the chores around the house hoping to save


enough allowance money so I could actually buy the latest R.L. Stine book, show it to Goosebumps,


Say Cheese or Die. Anybody remember that book? Gave me Nightmares, the original Chucky. It was so


scary. But I couldn't remember that feeling of the Book Fair. When the Book Fair would come to town,


I would get so excited. I would get so pumped up. There was nothing better. But it wasn't all love.


I hated these books. You guys remember the Magic Guy? Hated them. My friends would put them in my


face. Ross, do you see it? No, I don't see it. A hundred percent. I still can't do the thing that


everybody else can do with their eyes to see what you see when you look at these things. I can't do


it. Still can't figure it out. But I love Waldo. Waldo was my dude. I loved Waldo. I could spend


hours looking for Waldo. Today kids fall asleep with iPads on their face. We used to fall asleep


with Waldo books on our face. Whether it was in Jurassic Park, whether it was on a Viking book,


on a boat somewhere, whatever it may be. I would spend hours looking for Waldo. And the actual


gratification that you would get when you would find Waldo was unbelievable. It was undeniable.


You would find Waldo, hey mom, I found Waldo. Hey dad, I found Waldo. They would get annoyed.


But at the end of the day, there was no better feeling than finding Waldo after spending an


hour looking for this guy in a book. And I think today the modern day marketing equivalent of


looking for Waldo is looking for great content ideas that are actually worth creating. It's


actually spending the time to uncover an idea that you should actually bring to life. There is no


better feeling than actually coming up with a content idea that works. There's no better feeling


to come up with a content idea that ranks, that generates shares, that generates engagement,


that generates links. There's no better feeling in the world than coming up with that. But there's


no question it's hard, right? The same way that finding Waldo many years ago was hard, finding a


content idea worth chasing is extremely difficult today. And to ensure that that content drives


results is becoming even more difficult. We've already heard earlier today about how Google is


becoming a destination. Because of that, it's making our jobs harder. So it's harder than ever


to uncover content ideas worth chasing. But when you find it, when you find that piece of content,


there is no better feeling than seeing the idea that you came up with generating links week after


week, month after month, quarter after quarter. There's no better feeling than creating a piece


of content, getting a notification at 2 a.m. that you were able to generate some sales because of


that piece of content. There's no better feeling. There's no better feeling than creating a piece


of content that results in more subscribers on your YouTube channel, generating more leads to


your email list. There's no better feeling. So how can we get that feeling more often? How can you


ensure that you come up with content ideas that actually drive meaningful and measurable results


for your business? That's what I want to talk about today. I want to give you a framework that


I've used that our industry needs to embrace rather than embracing this idea that it always


has to come back to keyword research. Without question, I do believe that keyword research is


important. But what I think a lot of us are falling into the trap of doing is falling victim


to this idea of only using keyword research to come up with their ideas. There's a lot of


different ideas that you can embrace when it comes to coming up with new topics, coming up with new


pieces of content. And what I want to deliver to you is a framework that you can use in your


business and your career that will help you ensure that you're creating scalable content


efforts for years to come. I also want to get into the nitty-gritty of it. I want to talk about some


tactics that you can use to actually come up with these concepts. I want to talk through some of the


processes that we've taken at Foundation, my agency, to deliver content ideas to our clients, but also


in our own efforts on a regular basis. A lot of people think that coming up with content is kind


of like the Mad Men days, right? But in reality, it often feels a little bit like this. But it doesn't


have to be, right? It doesn't have to be. It doesn't have to be. You can embrace a simple


framework that is without question, in my mind, going to reduce your level of stress and increase


the likelihood of creating content assets that drive results. Three simple steps. Research,


rethink, remix. That's the process. And when I talk about research, I'm not just talking about


keyword research. Keyword research is important, but that's not where it ends. That's not where it


starts, right? I'm talking about understanding the audience that you're trying to connect with,


understanding the channels that they're spending time on, and spending the time to really uncover


insights around whether your audience is spending time on a certain channel, right? What you're


essentially looking for is user channel fit. You learn exactly what type of content that your


audience is consuming. You spend time understanding where they are, what channels they're spending


time on. And once you've done that, once you've uncovered, yes, my audience is on this channel,


it's time to figure out what content they're consuming on that channel that they're engaging


with time after time, right? And when you do that, you start to rethink how you can apply that


insight to your own industry, to the content that you would develop, the content that you would


create related to your own space. Can you rethink the format of a piece of content that is generating


a significant amount of results on a channel that you've already identified? Can you rethink the


title of an article? Can you rethink the format that you would develop? Can you rethink the way


in which you would tell a story from an entire different industry, but in your own space, based


off of the fact that you've already uncovered user channel fit? And once you've done that, you move


into what I call the remix. The remix, I like to say that the industry as a whole, marketing, we


can take a lot of inspiration from music. When we're releasing pieces of content for free, when


we're putting out blog posts for free, when we're writing landing pages, ebooks, resources, all of


this information for free, we're essentially releasing mixtapes, right? There's another thing


that we can do that is similar to the music industry, which is the remix, where you're taking


inspiration from other genres, you're taking inspiration from music of the past, you're applying


it to your own industry, to your current situation, to your own skills, and you're creating assets that


you know your audience is going to love because they loved it in the past, or they loved what


somebody else did, right? That's what you have the opportunity to do. You have the opportunity to


take inspiration from things that have worked in the past, apply that to your own industry, apply


that to your own space, and make great content. Now some of you might be thinking, bro, did you just


say steal people's content? No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm not saying just go out and start


throwing your logo on people's content and calling it yours. That's not what I'm saying at all. I've


had that happen to me with one of my companies, Hustle & Grind, we had this Venn diagram for


purpose, and it went massively viral, made the front page of Reddit, it was shared on a handful


of different Instagram accounts, and people started throwing in our logo. That is not a remix. Or that


time on SlideShare, I created this deck about the ultimate guide to Instagram, had 400,000 views,


an agency took it, put their logo on it. This is not a remix. Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. That's not a


remix. It's not a remix. A remix is when you take inspiration from somebody from an entire different


industry, speaking to your audience, and then coming up with a unique way to leverage that


insight to create content that can scale. Right? Research, rethink, remix. That's the framework,


that's the process. Right? Keyword research still fits into all of this, right? It is still very


important. But I think that a lot of us are falling into a trap. We're falling into a trap of tool


fixedness, where all of us are using the same tools to solve the same problems, to go after the same


keywords, and we find ourselves in a race to see who can update the data on their article faster


than their competitor. We're in this race to see if you have a list of 85 things that you should do


in XYZ, I'm gonna write 86 ways that you can do ABC. Right? All because the keyword research tells


us this is the content that we need to develop. I think that keyword research still has a significant


amount of value and something that we definitely need to consider in the mix. But it is not the


only way. When you use this framework, the step-by-step guide to essentially creating content


ideas that scale, it gives you the ability to accomplish three key things. Channel user fit,


content user fit, and then content market fit. During those first two steps of research and


rethink, you're experimenting, you're tinkering, you're looking for insights that you can use to


inform what you are going to create later. You're trying to find the channels that your audience is


spending time on, you're trying to find the content that your audience is resonating with,


and then once you've unlocked that, you start to use that insight to create content consistently


time and time again. Right? Once you've done that, you start to create content that you know is going


to resonate with your audience, that can be distributed back to those channels, and that


will drive traffic, drive leads, drive revenue, drive meaningful results for your business. Right?


And along the way, you have to ask the right questions. You have to understand the timeline


required to get to channel user fit. You have to understand the key metrics that you should be


looking at across the board, and you have to understand what it is you should actually do next.


Right? Let's go into the research side for a second. The questions that you ask during the


research stage are going to be things that would validate the channels that your audience might be


spending time on. Right? Do we know that our audience is spending time on Quora? Do we know


that our audience is spending time in a Facebook group? Do we know that our audience is spending


time in a competitor's Q&A forum that we have no, we don't have access to? Right? Where are they


spending time? Are they on Facebook? Are they on Twitter? Are they on Instagram? What channels are


they spending time on? You have to research the channels that your audience is spending time on,


and once you've validated that, yes, my audience is here, you move into the rethink phase. You start


to understand the content that was on those channels that stood out against the rest. Right?


This is where you start to look at the angle, the story, the hook, the message, and you rethink how


you can capitalize on that to tell a story that they will also be interested in, but with your


own brand purpose. What questions have the most followers on Quora? What communities have seen


certain pieces of content rise to the top in a subreddit? What articles are generating the most


links in your industry? Right? All of these things will help you uncover content user fit. This is


when you're tracking things like upvotes, you're tracking links, you're tracking comments, you're


tracking shares, you're tracking all of these different engagement metrics, and when you have


that, it's time to move to the remix. It's time to start creating content that you know people in


this community are going to resonate with. This is when you start to actually create the content


that you know your audience is going to engage with because you've already validated the channel,


you've already validated the content that they want, and it's time to start giving it to them.


Right? And you do this until they are fatigued and tired of this content. Right? You don't just


put it up on a blog and call it a day, you take that same idea, that same asset, you turn it into


an infographic, and you submit it to Pinterest. You take that same idea, you turn it into a video,


you upload it to YouTube. You take that same video, you upload it natively to Facebook and


Twitter, and then you upload it to your Instagram story as well. That's the framework. Right? That's


the remix. Across the board, you have to measure things as well though. Right? During research,


you need to think about activity volume. During the rethink phase, you have to think about how


much engagement is happening on your content or the content within these communities, and during


the remix, you have to tie it all back to business and organizational goals. We all know you can't


pay the bills with likes and engagements and shares and even links. Right? You can't pay the


bills with that. I tried once. Mortgage denied. Right? You have to actually tie all of this back


to meaningful and measurable results that drive business results. Right? That's the model. That's


the approach. But again, like I said, while this is the philosophy, research, rethink, remix, right?


This is a model that you can use for a handful of different sites, a handful of different


communities, but you can still even apply the traditional methods of keyword research here as


well. Let's say you run a food blog and you go into your favorite keyword research tool, you type in,


I'm interested in creating something about diet food and Mediterranean diets is showing up as


having a significant amount of search volume and there's an opportunity here for you to create an


asset. That's great. Go for it. I'm not telling you that this is not what you should do. You should


100% still embrace this model of using keyword research to guide maybe what type of blog posts,


what type of articles, what type of landing pages you should develop, but that's not where you end.


You're going to then take that and look over into Pinterest and see are people talking about


Mediterranean diets on this channel as well? Is there an opportunity to create a hierarchy of


needs for the Mediterranean diet? Right? Can you then take that and submit it into Pinterest? Can


you submit that as a slide share presentation? What can you do? Right? I think we are falling


victim to only using keyword research tools as a crutch and not taking the next step, which results


in you diving into communities, diving into different spaces where you can uncover content


ideas that go beyond what your competition may be doing. Research, rethink, remix. I talk a lot


about communities for a few reasons. One, I love spending time in communities not only to get


content ideas, but also because communities are a great place to distribute your content as well.


Right? So, I love talking about communities because this is something that I think oftentimes


is ignored, but it is where you can get some of the most authentic feedback from your customers,


where you can get some amazing insights around what type of content they want, and very easily


you can get access to the content that always rises to the top. And you can try, you can uncover


trends here. Let's say you're trying to speak to a very technical audience. You're targeting


CTOs, you're targeting engineers, people who are working in the tech space, who are developers.


You go to a community like Hacker News. You sort that content by the top posts. You know that your


audience is there because that's a user channel fit, and in its essence, the developers, the


technical people that you're trying to connect with are using this channel, so you sort the


content by the top posts. Right? This is like reverse engineering the content that you know


they want. The content that is generating engagement rises to the top. So, you start to


look for trends, you start to look for insights. What is it that I'm seeing they want over and


over again, and how can I recreate this as an asset that I can then submit back to Hacker News?


Right? That's the process. Research, rethink, remix. If you're trying to target marketers,


maybe you're going after growth marketers or growth hackers. You go to growthhackers.com.


You sort content by the top posts again, and you can quickly see the posts that generated the most


comments, the most upvotes, and you can use that to, again, uncover content ideas that will work


for you. Right? Let's say you're trying to target SEOs, and you go into a community that has been


around for a very long time, the Moz community, and you sort the content by the posts of all time


that generated the most responses, and you see this post from 2011. This post generated hundreds


of comments. It had tons of engagement. You clearly can see that people were interested in


this question back in 2011. What's your best hidden SEO secret? What can you do with that?


You can write a blog post where maybe you reach out to 10 different influencers in the SEO space,


and you ask them, what is your best SEO hidden secret? Then you create an article about that.


Maybe you do a video interview series where you're asking the same question. You do a tweet storm


where you're capturing that content, and you're seeding it out to your community. That's where


the opportunity lies. You then can take the same information, submit it to a site like Reddit,


like I did a few weeks ago, with the exact same question to a small community called Big SEO,


and you can start to see that in seconds, this was able to generate 65 comments, 32 upvotes.


I took something that was created in 2011, submitted it to this community, and people


responded the same way they did back then. It's simple. Research, rethink, remix. That's the model.


There's a lot of different tools that you can use to do this. This entire process of reverse


engineering, or as I like to call it sometimes, the Sherlock Homeboy effect, is really simple.


Right? You dive deep into content that you know will work based off of content that worked in the


past, and you apply that to your audience, to your industry, to your space. Another great tool to do


this is Quora. Quora recently announced that they have an ads platform where you can definitely


reach people for relatively cheap right now because it is so new, but beyond that, what's


great about this platform is you can type in a keyword that is relevant to your industry, that


is relevant to your target audience, and they will show you a handful of questions related to that


phrase. If you're not familiar with Quora, it's kind of like Yahoo Answers, but with a way better


design, and people go to this site and they ask questions. Right? So you go into Quora and you


type in a keyword that is relevant to your industry. Their ads platform will now tell you


how many weekly views different questions are generated. You can also plug these into your


favorite SEO tool, and you can see how much organic traffic the different questions are getting.


And you can gain insight into what type of content you should be creating based off of this data.


Not only that, once you've created that piece of content, you can go back to that question and you


can answer it with the content that lives on your site, with the YouTube video that you created as a


result of this. All of that can be seeded back into these communities. One of the first places


that I used this model on was Reddit. I love Reddit. I've been banned a few times, but I'm back.


I love it. Right? Reddit is my jam. I love Reddit as a user. It's helped me win many fantasy football


championships, but it's also a great site for just gaining great insights into different sub


communities. Right? If you're not familiar with Reddit, it's essentially a bunch of different


forums. And in each of these forums, people are very passionate about specific topics. So for me,


I was interested in connecting with entrepreneurs. So I went into an entrepreneurship community and


I started to look at what are the trends that I can notice that are rising to the top of Reddit.


I started to realize that people on Reddit want authentic content. They want people to break down


numbers. They want you to be very tactical. They want tips. They want tricks. They want you to


break it all down. So I go into Reddit and I deliver that. I create a piece that's breaking


down how you can grow your Instagram account. I throw in a little bit of swag by saying how to


grow your Instagram, take your Instagram account from zero to 50,000 real quick, real freaking


quick. Showed up to Drake. There's a couple of Canadians here who were on stage earlier.


And then I also responded to a post with the same strategy where I broke down in detail how you can


monetize an Instagram account. Right? All of these posts were able to generate more than 40,000 views.


They were able to generate a handful of upvotes, 200 here, 800 there, and they both made it to the


front page of this sub community. Right? All because I spent the time to reverse engineer


what worked in the community before. Let's say you're trying to speak to people who are


futurology and they're interested in the future, electric cars, plant based food, et cetera. You


can go into that entire community and again, sort the content by top posts. And you might notice


that all of these posts have over 40,000 upvotes and they all have one thing in common. They're


talking about Elon Musk. That's interesting. Right? You know that if you're trying to speak


to people who are future thinking, they're going to be in a community about the future.


So you have user channel fit. Now you see that they're interested in Elon Musk. Okay? Content


market fit. What can you do now? You can dive into your keyword tool. You can start to type in Elon


Musk and see what else is showing up. And you can start to say, okay, I see that people are


interested in content about Elon Musk memes. They're interested in how much money Elon Musk


makes. Can we start to create articles about this? Right? If you're in Seattle or you're in Canada,


you can have a nice little puff puff and use these ideas and this inspiration to come up with an


amazing idea. Right? That's what you have the opportunity to do. If you start to see, okay,


people are talking about Elon Musk books, you create that as a blog post. You create that as


an article. You let that live and then you submit it back to the community that resonated with you


months ago. We did this exact same philosophy a few months back with this picture that we


essentially put Elon Musk in an Iron Man outfit. We submitted it to the same community, made the


front page of Reddit. Right? It's very straightforward. Research, rethink, remix.


That's the model. And the best thing about using Reddit is the fact that Redditors love


links. We did this study where we analyzed the top subreddits in a handful of different communities.


And there was a lot of different things that were different. There was a few things that were


similar. And one of the things that was most interesting is that across the board, the most


popular type of content was links. And why is this important? Because it gives you an opportunity to


also reverse engineer the links that have generated a lot of love on Reddit. So, let's say you're in a


space like the healthcare space. You can take WebMD, you can type site colon WebMD.com, press


enter, and Reddit will give you every single post on Reddit that ever included that URL and you can


sort that content by the top post to better understand what type of content you should be


creating. You can understand exactly what pieces of content Redditors loved from a different URL,


from your competition, from people, from a site that your users are spending time on. And you can


use that to gain insight. Right? For example, let's say Investopedia is a competitor or you are


Investopedia. You submit your site into Reddit and you're going to see a handful of articles and


links that are relevant to your space. Right? So, there's two instances here where it's talking


about how banks have therapists known as wealth psychologists who are so their sole focus is to


help people in the 1% figure out what to do with all their money and how to keep their mind straight


dealing with the billions of dollars that they have. That's interesting. So, maybe you reach out


to all of these wealth psychologists and you ask them what is your tip for the average Joe who will


never get access to you when it comes to thinking about their money. Or maybe you create an article


that just breaks down the fact of how much these banks are investing in wealth psychologists and


compare that research to how much your country is investing in psychologists on a global scale or


in comparison to them. Right? There's tons of different angles, tons of different opportunities


that you can get just by embracing this model of research, rethink, remix. Another great site for


doing this is Product Hunt. I'm sure a lot of you have heard of it. If you're not familiar with


Product Hunt, it's essentially this site where people submit products that are cool and


interesting and they are able to get upvotes. They get upvotes based off of whether or not people


think they're cool or not. Right? So, when somebody is launching an app, somebody is


launching a new book, somebody is launching a new podcast, whatever they're launching,


they go to Product Hunt, they submit it, and people have the opportunity to then


download the app, download the service, learn a little bit about it. Or, I said about it,


my Canadian's coming out, it's flaring up. About, about, this is when people typically start to


figure out the, it's all happening. But Product Hunt gives you the opportunity to really


understand what products people want in this space. Right? A lot of great products have launched there.


Meerkat, Inbox by Google, Periscope, Ship Your Enemies Glitter. Anybody ever hear of that site?


It's hilarious. You can literally do what it says, ship your enemies glitter. Or if you're like me,


you can send glitter to your fantasy football teammates and people you're competing with.


It was funny until somebody opened it and their kid got into it, but that's a different story.


Either way, Product Hunt is a great place where you can get insights around what type of products


people want. But it's also an opportunity for marketers. Why? Because sometimes the products


that are getting launched here are just content. Right? There's this site called First Users,


which is nothing but a landing page dedicated to showing how Dropbox, Instagram, Shopify, Airbnb,


PayPal, et cetera, got their first users. And all they did was they had their logo and they had


snippets beside them. This post made the front page of Product Hunt. It had over 2,000 upvotes


and it generated like 10,000 visits on its first day. It's no longer alive. It's gotten shut down.


It no longer exists. But back in 2017, this was a very hot product. Right? Frontendless. It's a


very similar approach. It's just a landing page that is links to a handful of resources that you


need to know about if you were trying to be a frontend developer or a frontend designer. Right?


Again, that product no longer exists. It had tons and tons of engagement. It had thousands of upvotes.


But it's currently dead. It is now in a product that is called the Product Graveyard, which was


also hunted on Product Hunt and had 2,000 upvotes. This is where good or bad products go to die.


When they don't last, they don't live for a long time, they go into the Product Graveyard. Funny


enough, though, the Product Graveyard is also in the Product Graveyard. It's a 404 page now.


But somebody caught on that this product had a bunch of engagement when it first launched.


So, they took that and they decided that they were going to remix this idea into Product Hunt,


which is a new platform where you can actually check out all of the products that are now dead


on Product Hunt. So, you can go through this and you can see what products generated the most


engagement on Product Hunt and use that to guide your own approach and your own approach to


creating content. Facebook groups are also gold for this type of stuff. There's tons of Facebook


groups. There's billions of hundreds of thousands of Facebook groups and billions of people are


using them every single day and you can go into them and you can get similar insights.


You can go into these different communities. Let's say you're a coffee company. You go into


a coffee roasters forum group and you can start to see that there are questions that people are


asking. And when you start to see these questions, you can start creating blog posts answering them.


So, you see, we are looking for a good quote on our wall. What's your favorite coffee quote?


So, you create an article, 20 great coffee quotes for your wall of your cafe. That's the content


that you can create all by doing that research. And there's millions of Facebook groups. It's not


just them. There's sports Facebook groups. There's SaaS Facebook groups. There's software Facebook


groups. There's SEO Facebook groups. You can join these communities and start to reverse engineer


and again, research and rethink the content that floated to the top and remix it for your own


industry and your own space. But you can also just use your good old eyeballs when it comes to


looking at SERP, right? You can actually just do it, type in a search like best CRMs and you can


start to analyze and understand what is showing up. Instead of always relying on a keyword tool,


just use your eyes and look and see, okay, so there's a list here. There's a list there. There's


a directory and there's another list here. That's interesting. So, maybe if we want to compete in


our industry as the best of something, we should create a list post. And then you go down a rabbit


hole where you're not just looking at your competitors. You go to an entire different


industry to understand what's best in class of lists. And you come across Wirecutter and you say,


huh, what's Wirecutter strategy for creating these lists that are ranking time and time again for


best noise canceling headphones, for the best headphones under a hundred dollars. You start


to understand what they did to differentiate themselves. Then you go a little bit deeper.


You see Zapier has done the same thing, but they're generating hundreds of thousands of dollars


of value by simply creating lists of best free CRM, the best URL shortener, the best to-do list


app. They're killing this list strategy, right? And if you're a coffee roaster, you can do the


same thing. The best Keurig machine, the best coffee press, the best French press, you start


to embrace this strategy all because you're embracing research, rethink, and remix, right?


And then maybe you dive into looking at in another industry like Investopedia. And you see that


they've created this keyword glossary where they're defining different keywords related to


investments. And if you're in a new space like esports or crypto or something that's very new


to the industry where people are looking for definitions, this again is gold, right? You can


rethink what is working in other industries and that has worked for years. It's not just


Investopedia either. Moz has done the same thing. They have tons of definitions when you're first


into SEO where you can understand what is a domain, right? What is a backlink? What's domain


authority? All of these phrases you can understand using their glossary. And you can use this for


your own industry. Salesforce, multi-billion dollar company does the exact same thing.


And when you dive deeper into the pages on their site that generate the most value, it's actually


definitions. What is a CRM, right? What is cloud computing? These pages are generating the most


value of their entire site. If you can research, rethink, and remix this inspiration and this info


into your own industry, your own space, you can unlock similar results for your business.


That's the model. That's the framework. And there's tons of other ideas that you can embrace


as well, right? It's not just using the various things that you're finding in Facebook groups,


subreddits. You can go out to Flippa. You can go out to Instagram and sort the content on the top


popular feeds. There's tons of different things that you can do. But you have to also look at


the hierarchy of content marketing needs, right? It all starts by understanding, is this going to


align with our ROI, right? When you are left with a handful of pieces of content ideas, you look at


this and you say, are we going to accomplish ROI? Check. Okay, next one. Is this within our circle


of competence? Check. Okay, what's the cost to create this? Do we have the budget? Do we have


the time? If it's a check, you go to the last one and you ask, is this going to be shareable? Is this


linkable? Is it rankable? What's our competition like? And if you are still met with a significant


list, I tell you this. Start to do the things that have the least resistance, but also give you the


greatest opportunity to succeed, right? Go through your list, look at that list and say, do we have


ROI? Is it in our competence? Do we have the time to create this? Do we actually have the opportunity


to surpass our competition and give different weights to different things? And if something has


a very easy path for you to succeed, embrace it. Go down that path. And if even then, after you've


started to chuck out some ideas, some of the things are trash and you are met with still way too many


content ideas, whew, friends, congratulations. You've just met the modern day version of the Scholastic


5 Surprising SEO Test Results — Whiteboard Friday

Howdy Moz fans, I'm Emily Potter. I'm Head of Customer Success at SearchPilot.


If you haven't heard of us before, we're an SEO A.B. testing platform.


We run large scale SEO tests on enterprise websites.


So that's websites in industries like travel, e-commerce or listing websites.


Anything that has lots of traffic and lots of templated pages.


Today, I'm here to share with you five of our most surprising test results that we've run at SearchPilot.


Part of a successful SEO testing program is getting used to being surprised a heck of a lot.


Whether that's because something you really thought was going to work ends up not.


An SEO best practice test that ends up actually hurting your organic traffic.


Or something that you've tested just because you could that ends up being a winner.


All of our customers and us as well get surprised all the time at SearchPilot.


But that's what makes testing so important.


If you're a large enterprise website, then testing is what gives you a competitive edge.


It helps you find those things that your competitors maybe wouldn't, especially if they're not testing.


And it helps you stop yourself from rolling out changes that would harm your organic traffic that you maybe would have had you not been able to test them.


Or sometimes it's as simple as giving you a business case to get the backing that you need to roll out something on your website that you were going to do anyway.


But maybe didn't have the buy in from other stakeholders.


If you want to learn more about how we run tests at SearchPilot and how we control for things like seasonality, algorithm updates and all that.


Go to our website and there's lots of resources there.


OK, the first test I'm going to share with you today is a customer that used the data no snippet attribute to force Google to respect its meta descriptions.


As you probably know, Google now overrides meta descriptions as well as title tags.


And this can be really frustrating. In the case of meta descriptions, sometimes it brings in text that's strung together with ellipses.


It's not very readable. It doesn't have good grammar. And a lot of SEOs find this frustrating.


So to get Google to show our meta descriptions instead, our customer added the data no snippet attribute to the body tag.


What the data no snippet attribute does is it tells robots like Googlebot, I don't want you to scrape any of this content.


So by putting it on the body tag, we effectively force Google to use what was in the head, i.e. the meta description.


As you can see, this was negative. It led to a 3% loss in organic traffic.


As far as SEO test go, that's actually a pretty small loss, but that's still not something you want to deploy.


And why would you lose any traffic at all if you know not that something's going to hurt?


So in this case, it turns out Google maybe is actually better at writing meta descriptions than we are.


So maybe meta descriptions aren't a thing we should be spending so much time on as SEOs.


Meta descriptions we're finding at SearchPilot are very hard to ever come up with something that's positive.


And oftentimes we've run this a couple times on different industries and different websites.


Actually, Google's better at writing them than we are anyway. So maybe let's just let the robots do the work.


Our second test was on an e-commerce website.


This was on the blog portion of their website where they had blog content related to their products.


At the bottom of every article, there was two related article links. In this test, we increased that from two to four.


Now, running internal linking experiments is complicated because we're impacting both the pages where we're adding the links and we're impacting the pages that received the links.


So we have to make sure that we're controlling for both.


Again, if you want to learn more about how we do that, you can check out our website or follow up with me after.


Now, in this case, this was an 11 percent increase to organic traffic, which maybe doesn't seem surprising because in links we know that they work.


And why do I have this included on five surprising test results then?


I have this included because actually this was to the donor pages.


So by that, I mean the pages where we added the links.


The pages that were receiving the links, actually, we didn't see any detectable impact to organic traffic.


That was really surprising. And it goes to show that links do more than just pass on link equity.


They actually help robots understand your page better.


They can be a way to associate different bits of content together. And so they actually might have benefit to both pages.


This is also why it's so important to make controlled experiment if you're doing internal linking tests.


One, if we were just measuring the impact on the pages that were receiving them, we wouldn't have found this win at all.


Or oftentimes, not often, but sometimes at SearchPilot, we've actually seen this be positive for one group and negative for another.


So it's really important to find out the net impact.


Our third test that I'm going to share with you today is when we localized content on product pages for an e-commerce website in the U.S.


So that was changing things like trousers to pants.


This was a website that was originally based in the U.K.


They rolled up a U.S. market and they just kept the U.K. content when they did that.


So we wanted to figure out what happened if we updated that and made it actually fit the market that we were in.


This was a 24 percent increase in organic traffic.


Now, to me, that was surprising the magnitude of how much of a difference that made.


But I suppose that isn't surprising if you think about it.


If trousers doesn't get very many searches per month in the U.S. but pants does, then I guess you would expect localizing that content to improve your organic traffic.


So places where this content existed was like the meta title, the meta description, H1, things like that.


If nothing else, this is just a nice indication that sometimes normal SEO recommendations actually work.


And this was a great example of one that they were able to make a business case to get their devs to implement a change that they might not have been able to convince them was very important otherwise.


Test number four, adding prices to the titles.


Again, an e-commerce website.


And you would think best practice recommendation have the price in the title.


That's something users want to see.


But as you can see here, this was actually negative.


And it was a 15% drop to organic traffic.


So pretty substantial.


Important context here, though.


One of our hypotheses was our competitors in the SERP weren't using prices in the title tag, but instead had price snippets that were coming from structured markup.


So maybe users just didn't respond well to seeing something different to what other users, other competitors had in the SERP.


It's also possible that our prices weren't as competitive and putting them front and center in our title tag didn't help us because it made it clear that some of the other search competitors we had have better prices.


In any case, we didn't deploy this change.


But this is an important lesson in no two websites are the same.


We've run this test a lot of times at SearchPilot.


And we've seen positive, we've seen negative, we've seen inconclusive results with this.


So there is no one size fits all approach with SEO.


And there's nothing that's an absolute truth and even something as simple as adding prices to your title tags.


The final test I'm going to share with you today was when we added keyword rich alt text to images on the product page.


As you can see, this had no detectable impact, which this is a common SEO recommendation.


This is a common thing that comes up in things like tech audits or big deliverables that you give to a potential new customer.


And here we found it actually didn't have much of an impact.


And that suggests that alt text doesn't have much impact on rankings.


However, there's other really important reasons we would implement alt text and we decided to deploy this anyways.


Number one being accessibility.


Alt text helps your images become more accessible for those that maybe can't see them.


And it helps bots be able to explain what's on the page or something's just not rendering.


Then it helps people be able to still know what they're looking at.


So alt text, although maybe not a big winner for SEO traffic, is still an important implementation and not something we want to forget about.


That's all that I have to share with you today. If you saw this was interesting and you want to get more case studies like these,


you can sign up to our case study email list, which every two weeks we release a case study email.


And that includes a different case study. You can also find all the ones that we've done in the past on our website.


So even if you can't run SEO tests or you're not a large enterprise website,


you can still use the learnings that we have to help you make some business cases at your company.


How to Combat 5 of the SEO World's Most Infuriating Problems - Whiteboard Friday

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


This week we're chatting about some of the most infuriating things in the SEO world,


specifically five problems that I think plague a lot of folks and some of the ways that we


can combat and address those.


So I'm going to start with one of the things that really infuriates a lot of new folks


to the field, especially folks who are building new and emerging sites and are doing SEO on


them, right?


And you have all these best practices lists, right?


So you might look at the web developer's cheat sheet or sort of a guide to on-page and on-site


SEO, and you go, hey, I'm doing it, right?


I got my clean URLs, my good unique content, my solid keyword targeting and schema markup


and useful internal links and my XML site maps and my fast load speed and I'm mobile-friendly


and I don't have manipulative links.


Great.


Where are my results?


What benefit am I getting from doing all these things because I don't see one?


I took a site that was not particularly SEO-friendly.


Maybe it's a new site when I just launched or an emerging site, one that's sort of slowly


growing but not yet a power player.


And I do all this right stuff and I don't get SEO results.


And this makes a lot of people stop investing in SEO, stop believing in SEO and stop wanting


to do it.


And I can understand where you're coming from.


The challenge is not one of you've done something wrong.


It's that this stuff, all of these things that you do right, especially things that


you do right on your own site or from a best practices perspective, they don't increase


rankings.


They don't.


That's not what they're designed to do.


This stuff, all of these best practices are designed to protect you from potential problems.


They're designed to make sure that your site is properly optimized so that you can perform


to the highest degree that you are able.


But this is not actually rank boosting stuff, unfortunately.


And that is very frustrating for many folks.


So following a best practices list, the idea is not, hey, I'm going to grow my rankings


by doing this.


On the flip side, many folks do these things on larger, more well-established sites, sites


that have a lot of ranking signals already in place.


They're bigger brands.


They have lots of links to them.


They have lots of user and usage engagement signals.


And you fix this stuff.


You fix stuff that's already broken and boom, rankings pop up and things are going well


and more of your pages are indexed and you're getting more search traffic.


And it feels great.


This is a challenge on our part of understanding what this stuff does, not a challenge on the


search engine as part of not ranking us properly for having done all of these right things.


Number two, my competition seems to be ranking on the back of spammy or manipulative links.


What's going on?


I thought Google had introduced all these algorithms to kind of shut this stuff down


and this seems very frustrating.


How are they pulling this off?


I look at their link profile and I see a bunch of directories and web 2.0 sites.


I love that the spam world decided that that's web 2.0 sites.


Article sites, private blog networks, dofollow blogs.


You look at this stuff and you go, what is this junk?


It's terrible.


Why isn't Google penalizing for them for this?


And the answer, the right way to think about this and to combat this is, are these really


the reason that they rank?


I think we need to ask ourselves that question.


One thing that we don't know, that we can never know is, have these links been disavowed


by our competitor here?


So I've got my hulk'sincrediblestore.com and their competitor, evil competitor, hulktastrophe.com.


So Hulktastrophe has got all these terrible links but maybe they disavowed those links


and you would have no idea.


Maybe they didn't build those links.


Perhaps those links came in from some other place.


They are not responsible.


Google's not treating them as responsible for it.


They're not actually what's helping them.


If they are helping, and it's possible they are.


There are still instances where we've seen spam propping up sites, no doubt about it.


I think the next logical question is, are you willing to lose your site or brand?


Because what we don't see anymore is we almost never see sites like this who are ranking


on the back of these things and have generally less legitimate and good links ranking for


two or three or four years.


You can see it for a few months, maybe even a year, but this stuff is getting hit hard,


getting hit frequently.


So unless you're willing to lose your site, pursuing their links is probably not a strategy.


Then what other signals that you might not be considering, potentially links but also


non-linking signals could be helping them rank?


I think a lot of us get blinded in the SEO world by link signals and we forget to look


at things like, do they have a phenomenal user experience?


Are they growing their brand?


Are they doing offline kinds of things that are influencing online?


Are they gaining engagement from other channels that's then influencing their SEO?


Do they have things coming in that I can't see?


If you don't ask those questions, you can't really learn from your competitors and you


just feel the frustration.


Number three, I know that many people in the SEO world, and myself included sometimes,


have frustration around not understanding or having no visibility into why, why rankings


might go up or down.


On my hulk's incredible store.com, I've got my infinite stretch shorts, which I don't


know why he never wears.


You should really buy those.


My soothing herbal tea and my anger management books.


I look at my rankings and they kind of jump up all the time, jump all over the place all


the time.


Actually, this is pretty normal.


I think we've done some analyses here and the average page one search results shift


is one and a half or two position changes daily.


That's sort of the MozCast dataset, if I'm recalling correctly.


That means that over the course of a week, it's not uncommon or unnatural for you to


be bouncing around four, five, six positions, up, down, those kinds of things.


I think we should understand what can be behind these things.


That's a very simple list.


You made changes.


Google made changes.


Your competitors made changes.


Or searcher behavior has changed in terms of volume, in terms of what they're engaging


with, what they're clicking on, what their intent behind searches are.


Maybe there was just a new movie that came out in one of the scenes, Hulk talks about


soothing herbal tea and so now people are searching for very different things than they


were before.


They want to see the scene.


They're looking for the YouTube video clip.


Those kinds of things.


Suddenly, Hulk's soothing herbal tea is no longer directing as well to your site.


Changes like these things can happen.


We can't understand all of them.


I think what's up to us to determine is the degree of analysis and action that's actually


going to provide a return on investment.


Looking at these day over day or week over week and throwing up our hands and getting


frustrated probably provides very little return on investment.


Looking over the long term and saying, hey, over the last six months we can observe 26


weeks of ranking change data and we can see that in aggregate we are now ranking higher


and for more keywords than we were previously and so we're going to continue pursuing this


strategy.


This is the set of keywords that we've fallen most on and here are the factors that we've


identified that are consistent across that group.


I think looking at rankings in aggregate can give us some real positive ROI.


Looking at one or two one week or the next week probably very little ROI.


Number four, many of us feel frustrated that we can't influence or affect change in our


organizations because we can't accurately quantify, predict, or control SEO.


That's true.


Especially with things like keyword not provided and certainly with the inaccuracy of data


that's provided to us through Google's keyword planner inside of AdWords, for example, and


the fact that no one can really control SEO, not fully anyway.


You get up in front of your team, your board, your manager, your client, and you say, hey,


if we don't do these things traffic will suffer.


They go, well, you can't be sure about that and you can't perfectly predict it.


Last time you told us something, something else happened.


Because the data is imperfect we'd rather spend money on channels that we can perfectly


predict, that we can very effectively quantify, and that we can very effectively control.


That is understandable.


I think that businesses have a lot of risk aversion naturally and so wanting to spend


time and energy and effort in areas that you can control feels a lot safer.


Some ways to get around this are, first off, know your audience.


If you know who you're talking to in the room you can often determine the things that will


move the needle for them.


For example, I find that many managers, many boards, many executives are much more influenced


by competitive pressures than they are by we won't do as well as we did before or we're


losing out on this potential opportunity.


Saying that is less powerful than saying this competitor who I know we care about and we


track ourselves against is capturing this traffic and here's how they're doing it.


Show multiple scenarios.


Many of the SEO presentations that I see and have seen and still see from consultants and


from in-house folks come with kind of a single, hey, here's what we predict will happen if


we do this or what we predict will happen if we don't do this.


You've got to show multiple scenarios, especially when you know you have error bars because


you can't accurately quantify and predict.


You need to show ranges.


Instead of this, I want to see, well, what happens if we do it a little bit?


What happens if we really over-invest?


What happens if Google makes a much bigger change on this particular factor than we expect


or our competitors do a much bigger investment than we expect?


How might those change the numbers?


I really do like bringing case studies, especially if you're a consultant, but even in-house,


there's so many case studies in SEO on the web today.


You can almost always find someone who's analogous or nearly analogous and show some of their


data, some of the results that they've seen.


Places like SEMrush, a tool that offers competitive intelligence around rankings, can be great


for that.


You can show, hey, this media site in our sector made these changes.


Look at the delta of keywords they were ranking for versus are over the next six months.


Correlation is not causation, but that can be a powerful influencer showing those kinds


of things.


Then last but not least, any time you're going to get up like this and present to a group


around these topics, try, if you very possibly can, try to talk one-on-one with the participants


before the meeting actually happens.


I have found it almost universally the case that when you get into a group setting, if


you haven't had the discussions beforehand about like, what are your concerns?


What do you think is not valid about this data?


Hey, I want to run this by you and get your thoughts before we go to the meeting.


If you don't do that ahead of time, people can gang up and pile on.


One person says, hey, I don't think this is right.


Everybody in the room kind of looks around and goes, yeah, I also don't think that's


right.


Then it just turns into warfare and conflict that you don't want or need.


If you address those things beforehand, then you can include the data, the presentations,


and the, I don't know the answer to this and I know this is important to so and so in that


presentation, in that discussion.


It can be hugely helpful.


Big difference between winning and losing with that.


Last challenge, number five, Google seems to be biasing to big brands.


A lot of people are feeling this hopelessness, hopelessness in SEO about competing against


them.


I get that pain.


In fact, I've felt that very strongly for a long time in the SEO world and I think the


trend has only increased.


This comes from all sorts of stuff, right?


Brands are now showing, they have that little dropdown next to their search result listing.


There's these brand and entity connections and as Google is using answers and knowledge


graph more and more, it's feeling like those entities are having a bigger influence on


where things rank and where they're visible and where they're pulling from.


User and usage behavior signals on the rise means that big brands who have more of those


signals tend to perform better.


Brands in the knowledge graph, right, brands growing links without any effort, they're


just growing links because they're brands and people point to them naturally.


Well, that is all really tough and can be very frustrating and I think you have a few


choices on the table.


First off, you can choose to compete with brands where they can't or won't, right?


This is areas like we're going after these keywords that we know these big brands are


not chasing.


We're going after social channels or people on social media that we know big brands aren't.


We're going after user-generated content because they have all these corporate requirements


and they won't invest in that stuff.


We're going after content that they refuse to pursue for one reason or another.


That can be very effective.


You can also build, grow, well, you better be building, growing and leveraging your competitive


advantage.


Whenever you build an organization, right, you've got to say, hey, here's who's out there.


This is why we are uniquely better or a uniquely better choice for this set of customers than


these other ones.


If you can leverage that, you can generally find opportunities to compete and even to


win against big brands.


But those things have to become obvious.


They have to become well-known and you need to essentially build some of your brand around


those advantages or they're not going to give you help in search.


That includes media.


That includes content.


That includes any sort of press and PR you're doing.


That includes how you do your own messaging, all of these things.


You can choose to serve a market or a customer that they don't or won't.


That can be a powerful way to go about search because usually search is bifurcated by the


customer type.


There will be slightly different forms of search queries that are entered by different


kinds of customers and you can pursue one of those that isn't pursued by the competition.


Last but not least, I think for everyone in SEO, we all realize we're going to have to


become brands ourselves.


That means building the signals that are typically associated with brands.


Authority, recognition from an industry, recognition from a customer set, awareness of our brand


even before a search has happened.


I talked about this in a previous Whiteboard Friday but I think because of these things,


SEO is becoming a channel that you benefit from as you grow your brand rather than the


channel you use to initially build your brand.


All right, everyone.


Hope these have been helpful in combating some of these infuriating, frustrating problems


and that we'll see some great comments from you guys.


I hope to participate in those as well.


We'll catch you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.


Why Listing Accuracy is Important - Whiteboard Friday

Music


Hi, my name is George Freitag with Moz Local and today I wanted to talk about listing accuracy.


And the reason why I wanted to talk about it was because it's one of those topics that is brought up a lot in local search.


If you work in local search directly or if you work with an agency or an SEO on local search,


it's one of those things that you've probably heard a lot about. You understand that it's something you have to do.


You understand that it's very important because it is, but you might not understand exactly what it means,


why it's important, or how come you have to do it, or why it takes as much time as it does.


So today I wanted to spend the time to go over why listing accuracy is important, how it works, and how you can do that.


So to start out, let's just look at an actual local search result.


So let's say this is a search for what you do. This is a search for a burger restaurant, if you run a burger restaurant.


You've got your three local results. It's on a phone, so that's pretty much all you get is those three listings.


And this is where you want to be, but you aren't. So why aren't you? How come your customers, I mean,


how come your clients, your competitors, are on this search result, but you aren't?


And it has to do with trust. So to demonstrate why trust is so important, I want to go over just a quick story


about me when I was looking for a bank a few years ago. And so I don't go to the bank that often,


so when it came time, I got out my phone, punched out Google Maps, and then proceeded to walk for the next seven blocks


with my face buried in my phone, checking my Twitter and email and whatever, and when the little lady inside told me it arrived,


I looked up and saw that the place was closed. Not even just closed for the day, it was closed altogether.


So that is Google's greatest fear, because if there's one reason why you, me, anyone will stop using Google,


it's if that happens over and over again. If I repeatedly get sent to businesses that don't exist,


if I try to call them and the call information is incorrect, then I'm going to stop using Google.


And so Google takes that very seriously. In fact, Google has put itself even more on the line with additional business information.


If you've done a local search lately, and I assume that you have if you've watched this video,


you'll see that in this knowledge graph, they're giving you all sorts of information.


They're telling you whether or not the store is open, they're linking you to reviews,


they are just giving a ton of information in their local search results, and if they're not confident in all the information that they have,


then they're not going to show it, because if they repeatedly show that a place is closed when it's not,


then you're going to stop using Google. So Google takes trust very seriously.


So how does Google determine trust? That is where listing accuracy comes into play.


Listing accuracy is Google's method for determining whether or not it can trust a local business search result.


So to show how that works, let's go over here and say this is your business.


And let's say that you've already set up your Google My Business page.


You've already set up your name, address, phone, your nap, if you haven't done anything along those lines.


There's plenty of information on our website and on other places online about how to do that.


But let's say that you've already set up your Google My Business.


It's absolutely perfect with your business name, all your hours, all the images are filled out,


and it's still not showing up here. Well, one of the reasons may be because of this concept of listing accuracy.


So here's your listing, but what you might not know of or you might be kind of aware of


is these other slight variations that exist elsewhere online.


And these might just exist somewhere.


So let's say you've got one variation where the address is slightly different,


like it's a suite number that you don't want to have, but sometimes it mentions a suite number.


Maybe it's an old phone number or an old cell phone number that somehow got indexed or an old tracking number.


Maybe it's just some general bad information just about specifically where you are or a website that's slightly different.


Then over here you've got another variation.


Maybe this is a different business name. Maybe this is a business that was in your location before you moved in.


So these places just sort of exist out there on the web somewhere,


and they might even be in a place that you don't even know about.


They might be on a place, an obscure website, that you don't ever see, you're not really that worried about


because it's something that you know isn't really being seen by your customers.


So why should you worry about it?


Why should you care about a website that's got bad information that's on a source that you're never going to go to,


you know your customers aren't ever going to go to, and probably isn't driving that much traffic to your website instead?


Well, it has to do with this concept of listing accuracy


because again this is how Google is measuring how much you can trust your information.


So over here we've got what we call the local ecosystem,


and you might have seen our graphic on our website which sort of explains what the different data sources are.


I just want to demonstrate how it works.


And so for your listing, Google can give us information from a bunch of different places.


One of them, of course, is you.


So this is you providing your information directly to Google My Business.


My business can also be the report a problem in Google Maps or Google Map Maker.


But in addition to that, it's got all these other places that Google knows it can get business information from.


And some of these places provide information directly to Google through feeds,


and some of them Google just knows about because it can crawl them


because it can basically just crawl anything on the web.


And these are places like phone directories, phone books,


business directories for specific businesses like OpenTable or HealthGrades,


review sites like City Search Insider pages, news sites,


a restaurant review about your business, government websites.


And each time one of these places mentions your business information,


it increases the confidence that Google has in the information that you provided.


So this place and this place both mention you.


That works to increase the confidence that Google has in the business information that you provided,


making it more likely for it to show your business and its search results.


So the more times it mentions you, the greater confidence it has in your information.


But if you have these other variations sort of floating around out there,


then all of a sudden Google's got some conflicting sources about your business information.


So let's say that all these places are mentioning you the way that you want to be mentioned,


but these places are giving slight variations.


So all of a sudden Google is getting two different addresses,


and so it's becoming a little bit less confident in the information that you provided.


Maybe now this place is giving a completely different phone number,


so now it doesn't really want to show you


because it doesn't want to have that call button on your search result.


And each time it mentions one of these, it decreases the amount of confidence,


and you also lose the opportunity to build confidence in your website.


In fact, if there's enough sources out here saying one thing


that are contradictory to what you're saying in your own Google My Business page,


these places can actually override what you're providing,


and Google will deem them more trustworthy than the information that you're directly providing to them.


So if all these places are saying that you're open till 6


and you're telling Google you're open till 8,


all of a sudden Google is telling everyone that you're closed when you're not,


which can be absolutely detrimental to your business.


So how do you fix this, and what do you do about it?


Well, it should be pretty clear from this graph.


You want to find all these instances of Google locating business information


that is not consistent with you and making it consistent.


So you're going to go out and find the source where that's pointing at one of these variations,


fix it so it's pointing at your own place,


and then all of a sudden instead of taking away from the confidence


and trust Google has in your listing, it's building towards it.


So the way that you find those variations


can just be through doing some pretty straightforward Google searches.


So let's go down here to some examples.


You're going to use a quoted search to look for different types of information.


So if you already know about some bad information out there,


you already know that there's an old business name that you used to go under


or a variation of your address,


you can just do a quoted search for that information directly,


find all the sources that bring up that bad information,


go to the website, fix it, and then move on


and all along you're building the trust that Google has in your business listing.


For those places that you're not yet sure about,


like I said, there might be some directories that you don't even know about


or there might be some variations of your business information


that you might not be aware of so you can't search for it directly.


The best way to do that is to search for your phone number in different formats.


And Darren Shaw of Whitespark did a great Whiteboard Friday


just a few weeks ago about exactly this,


about how to find all of your NAP variations in Google.


I recommend reading it if you want to follow through with this.


There's also some tools you can use.


Andrew Shotland of Local SEO Guide has a Chrome plug-in


called Local Citation Finder that will just open up a whole bunch of different variations


of your business information in different Chrome tabs


and can really, really help with that.


So this might work if you've got one, a couple dozen, or maybe a hundred or so businesses.


You can probably do this by hand and find all these places yourself.


But if you have a ton of businesses, a few hundred or even a few thousand businesses,


then this is not that scalable all of a sudden,


and then it's time to move to one of these solutions


where you're working with some of the primary data sources.


And so these are the sources that provide the information to all of these places.


And the big ones are LocalEase, Newstar, Infogroup, Axiom, and Factual.


We're getting into the paid options right now,


but basically some of these places have been around for decades.


They're the ones who provided the phone books with their information.


You might have gone to Yelp and tried to sign up


and saw that you were already on there and wondered why.


This is why.


They're getting their information from these places,


and they push out all the information to these other places.


And so if you go to one or more of these either directly or through a service


like MozLocal or Yext, you can correct your information on one of these platforms.


It will push it out to every place on its network.


That will correct the information here, and again,


which in turn will make its way over to building Google's confidence


in your Google My Business, which will increase the likelihood of it


putting your business in its search results.


It will even, if one of these places finds an inaccurate listing,


it will correct it.


So let's say that this phone book is in Infogroup's network


and encounters the inaccurate data.


It will hit it, fix it, and then all of a sudden instead of hurting you,


this is again building confidence in your Google My Business listing.


Another benefit of working with these places is that they'll get you into places


that you probably weren't even aware of.


And so in addition to fixing points of bad data,


it's also creating new points of accurate data


that didn't even exist in the first place, which again,


build the confidence in your business listing


and then increase the likelihood to show up in those local search results.


The last step for this is related to maintenance.


And so this is not a one-time thing.


Over time, this information can be corrupted


because these places not only get their information from a primary data provider,


but they also get their information from each other.


In some cases, a primary data source might be crawling these sites


that it indirectly provides information to.


And so if you ever played a game of a telephone,


you kind of know how this will end up.


And so you do need to go back and revisit these exercises from time to time,


looking for business inaccuracies through Google manually


or keeping up in a relationship with one of these top-level data providers.


So in summary, what you want to do is start here.


Make sure you've got your Google My Business listing set up.


Find all the variations and inaccuracies in your data.


Fix them.


Work with a primary data provider to push out the correct information.


And then all of these places will build up the confidence


that you are already providing Google in your Google My Business listing,


making it more and more likely for Google to show you in its search results.


Thanks for watching.


If you want to keep up with the latest in local search news,


you can follow us on our brand-new social accounts,


at mozlocal, on Twitter and Facebook.


Once again, my name is George Freitag with mozlocal,


Content Gating: Puting Your Content Behind an Email/Form Capture - Whiteboard Friday

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


This week we're going to chat about content gating.


So this is something that a lot of content marketers use, particularly those who are


interested in generating leads, individuals that their salespeople or sales teams or outreach


folks or business development folks can reach out to specifically to sell a product or start


a conversation.


And many content marketers and SEOs use this type of content as a lure to essentially attract


someone who then fills in form fields to give enough information so that the sales pipeline


gets filled or the leads pipeline gets filled and then the person gets the content.


So as opposed to the classic model that we're used to in a more open content marketing and


open SEO world of let me give you something and then hopefully get something in return,


it's you give me something and I will give you this thing in return.


This is a very, very popular tactic.


You might be familiar with Moz and know that my general bias and Moz's general bias is


against content gating.


We sort of have a philosophical bias against it with the exception of on the Moz local


side some enterprise stuff that that marketing team may be doing may in the future include


some gating.


But generally at Moz we're sort of against it.


However I don't want to be too biased.


I recognize that it does have benefits and I want to explain some of those benefits and


drawbacks so that you can make your own choices of how to do it.


And then we're going to rock through some recommendations, some tactical tips that I've


got for you around how you can improve how you do it no matter whether you are doing


open content or full content gating.


The two, this is the gated idea.


So you get this free report on the state of artificial intelligence in 2016.


But first before you get that report you fill in all these fields, name, email, role, company,


website, Twitter, LinkedIn, what is your budget for AI in 2017 and you fill in a number.


I'm not kidding here.


Many of these reports require these and many other fields to be filled in.


I have filled in personally several that are intense in order to get a report back.


So it's even worked on me at times.


And the opposite of that of course would be the report is completely available.


You get to the web page and it's just here's the state of AI, the different sections and


you get your graphs and your charts and all your data is right in there.


Fantastic.


Completely free access.


You've had to give nothing.


Just visit the website.


The benefits of gating are you actually get more information about who specifically accessed


the report.


Granted, some of this information could be faked.


There are people who work around that by verifying and validating at least the email address


or those kinds of things.


But you also get the benefit of having those who expend the energy to invest in the report


may view the data or the report itself as more valuable, more useful, more trustworthy


to carry generally greater value.


This is sort of a human element of human psychology where we value things that we've had to work