You're moving to secure, you're eventually starting to play in this dark traffic abyss.


MozCon 2015 - 17 - Dark Search and Social—Run Rabbit Run! with Marshall Simmonds

And you're setting yourself up to potentially have some pitfalls.


Now, again, the clicks came back really quickly, so to Google's credit,


they indexed a huge site very fast when they went secure.


So, that's not the problem.


The problem is when you go secure, you lose all your shares.


So, if you have a very popular page that has a lot of shares,


on your share buttons, if scoring is a big part of your page,


you're going to lose those because it's a new URL.


So, if you want to maintain your social shares after a site migration,


you may want to look at this. This is an older article that Mike King did.


And it's not necessarily easy, but if there are some key pages


that are important to maintain those social shares so they don't lose,


so they don't go into the dark abyss, you may need to look at this.


It's a little complicated, and like I said, it doesn't necessarily scale.


But this is a deal breaker for several of our publishers.


They won't go secure because they don't want to lose their social shares.


They don't want to start over from zero.


And Cyrus wrote a great article two weeks ago about the meta-referrer tag.


So, say you go secure. If I'm linking to a non-secure site,


that non-secure site won't see where my traffic came from.


It's basically obscure. Now we're playing in the dark traffic hole.


The dark search traffic hole. I'm not sending traffic, referrer traffic.


So, what if I have a partnership deal with these people?


Or what if I want to get on their radar as a viable source,


or somebody or module that I have that's sending them hundreds of clicks


and making for them thousands of dollars?


Unless I have this meta-referrer tag on and my site's secure,


I'm not getting tracked. I'm not doing my part.


So, get this meta-referrer tag on your site as quickly as you can


if you're going secure.


And Cyrus has a great article about it, so we don't need to belabor it.


But when we talk about search, we have to talk about the browsers.


Because something happened very interesting on March 30th.


Now, a couple of clients said, we saw direct traffic increase.


And so we dive in and we start doing our forensic investigation


to figure out what's happening, where is it coming from,


what's the cause, et cetera.


And we were unable to figure out what was going on.


And it wasn't for a long period of time. It was about two days.


Now when something like this happens, when you see direct spike,


the first thing we thought is bot attack.


And we have to think that something is happening here that is not man-made.


So we go into analytics and we look at view settings,


we make sure bot filtering is checked.


But we ran out of reasons.


So what we eventually did was started looking at the browsers.


And we looked at Chrome.


And there's incognito, there's private browsing,


there's a lot of things that are happening.


And cookies are highly unreliable now.


Retargeting is unreliable for the most part.


Maybe that's too big of a statement.


But we need other alternatives.


But as we started looking into the browsers, we found something.


And we saw that over this period of time,


if you look at the orange line over the purple line,


IE was showing that there was something going on,


that direct traffic spiked.


Firefox also showed the same thing.


So it could still be a bot attack.


They're getting pretty savvy.


They're coming from multiple IP addresses and through proxies,


and so it could be.


That could be a problem.


But the point is that we can correlate this loosely


with updates that were made to these browsers around that time, too.


So hopefully that wasn't the problem.


But if, when there are new browser updates,


our first job is to go make sure that direct stays consistent,


that we don't see any spikes.


Because again, it's still an unknown.


So you can go back and look at that date


and see if it's the same for you.


I talked about image search last year,


and so I'm not going to get into it too much.


And we wrote about it on our blog.


But image search is dead.


Google made a big change to their UI,


where they essentially hijack your images now.


They give you credit, but they don't send a link.


If you click on an image on the search results page,


you don't go to the website.


You go into their image gallery.


So image search is no longer a viable option for us


from a marketing standpoint, for these vast image databases


that we have.


But when we were going through this data,


we found a couple of things that I think are fairly interesting.


And they fall under the whole dark search category.


As we were looking through three years of data,


we wanted to see what are the most popular months for search.


We've talked a lot the last two days about,


and yesterday was definitely prevalent,


where the speakers were saying,


it's about how you market, but when you market, too.


And so this kind of falls into that.


And we found that overwhelmingly,


Q4 is the most searched time in a year,


based on three years of data, just hard numbers.


October, November, December.


Now, this might be no-brainer info,


but it sure is good to see.


And not only that, but down at the very bottom,


we get August, July, and poor February


that doesn't have enough days to compete.


So this is the popularity.


This is from top to bottom.


When's the most popular time?


So if there's ever time for a code freeze, right there.


You don't want to be doing anything,


because in general, that's where it's popular.


To that extent, the popular weeks obviously


make up majority of the months.


But interestingly, you look at this data,


a lot of it's happening before Thanksgiving


and after Thanksgiving.


And if you think about it, like, we had a perfect storm


with Hanukkah and Christmas two years ago,


where the internet shut down for like the last three weeks


of December.


And yet, we still see a lot of activity happening


in those weeks.


It's a powerful time.


It's a powerful time to be hawking your wares.


And the most popular day.


Anybody have a guess what the most popular day


of the week is for search?


Well, it's not rocket science, but it basically


falls in line with my school thought and my attention span.


Because by Wednesday, it's the day before the day


before Friday, right?


And so you're kind of checking out at that point.


And it's good to know that we still have Saturdays,


that we still covet Saturdays.


But like Ran said yesterday, you have a shelf life of two


and a half days for an article.


So what day do you want to push that article out?


Hey, agreed, Monday.


So direct traffic.


That's a big chunk of the pie.


And that's across a lot of publishing data.


We look at this number, and it's overwhelming.


And it probably is, if you look at it,


it's probably the biggest source of traffic on your site


as well.


So this is the graph that I was talking to Rand


about in South Africa.


We saw, in 2013, we saw this spike.


Now we're tracking long URLs, not short URLs.


Because by the definition of direct traffic,


it's something that somebody's either bookmarked or typed in.


Now, is somebody typing in this URL right here?


You go in and look at those URLs,


and you see there's three or four directories deep.


And they've got a file name that's half a mile long.


Is somebody actually typing that in accurately?


No way.


So where is that coming from?


There's no way somebody's typing that in.


And yet we find those URLs in that direct bucket.


That's got to be man-made.


So we know that in 2013, iOS 6 rolled out.


That screwed everything up.


iOS 7 came out, screwed more things up.


Android came out.


A lot of stuff were happening in 2013.


But in 2014, it plateaued.


But that's our new normal.


350 billion searches.


Is it million or billion?


Sorry, 350 million visits a month.


That's our new normal.


We've got to figure out what the heck is going on there.


So we take this, and we have a simple formula.


And somebody, if you're looking for a tool idea, here it is.


So we take this data, and we look at that direct bucket.


And we say, OK, let's pull that.


Let's pull that direct bucket, all that traffic.


And let's remove the home page and the section front


and any major popular pages that people are probably bookmarked to.


And what's left over is probably dark social.


Now, stick with me for a second, because we're talking about dark search.


But that's the first step.


So we take that data, and we dedupe it.


We verify it against any social campaigns.


We have access to the social campaign links.


We know what those are.


We can pull those easily.


We dedupe those.


We filter for any new user.


Maybe the last two years, that was the threshold we set.


Any new user that hasn't been on the site in under two years.


And what's left?


Any long URL.


That's dark search.


There it is.


Now, it's not all.


It's not everything.


There's going to be a bunch of noise in there too.


But there's a bunch of traffic that we're leaving on the table.


So we went out and did it.


So we looked at the two top publishers that we have access to.


215 million visits.


Of those, 42 million were direct.


We scrubbed it.


We pulled out the homepage and section fronts and popular pages.


And what was left was 18%.


Now, if you're in your performance review, do you want 18% more?


I do.


I don't care if it's just 2% that search.


I'll take that 2%.


But we ran it through this formula and 18% of it was search and social.


I don't care how it breaks up.


We're not getting credit for the work.


Because the apps aren't sending it.


It's being obscured.


There's a lot of reasons why that's happening.


But that data is there for us to have.


And that leads us to dark social.


Because dark social was kind of, Facebook was kind of the beginning point.


The genesis of dark traffic.


Now, if Google equals search, Facebook equals social.


And there's been a huge bit of growth here.


And it started last August.


But again, they're growing.


Facebook is growing at an unparalleled pace.


And Google is still growing too.


But if you're an in-house SEO, if you're not actively talking and working with that social team,


you're missing a huge opportunity.


If you're not coordinating what the share links are, how the headlines are written,


if you're not coordinating that across multiple departments, you're missing an opportunity.


Because social works.


Social absolutely works and it works hand in hand with search.


That's not news.


Anyone?


And Facebook Insights, Facebook is very aware of this problem.


And they've made some moves to help.


But it's still obscuring data.


Facebook Insights, not telling the whole story.


We need other tools to help us unearth what is that problem,


and where is that percentage, and where is that dark social, and how do we get credit for it.


Facebook did something extremely interesting that everybody here probably saw last August.


They said they're going to help us.


They said, we're going to clean up the spam.


We're going to clean up the spam and we're going to sharpen the newsfeed.


And this was the day that Facebook became a publisher.


Because as a result of them cleaning it up, we saw this huge increase.


August of last year we saw that increase happen.


They cleaned up the newsfeed.


They cleaned it up so much that I went and liked certain publications


because I couldn't get it out of my newsfeed.


And they fixed it since then.


And they've been working with Bitly.


Bitly was a big part of this too because Bitly was saying,


wait, all of a sudden, all these links, whether the video is playing in a,


if it's spawning a new browser, if it's playing in the app, if it's on mobile,


we're not tracking it correctly.


So Facebook and Bitly have been working together


to help make this data a little bit more tangible and easier to understand.


So they made this fix and the growth happens.


Probably the leading tool out there right now for mobile data around Facebook is Chartbeat.


Chartbeat issued a fix in December of this year, or excuse me, of last year.


And they said that they now can detect 10 to 50% more of that dark social traffic.


That's a big deal.


And that's one of the first tools that have been able to say that.


So if we're not manually pulling that data like we showed in the formula,


Chartbeat may be your answer, especially if you're dependent on news,


or excuse me, on mobile for Facebook traffic.


Now this is in our chart, and I'm sorry I didn't source this.


I will try and source it before it already went out. Sorry.


This is in our chart.


But one of the charts from one of the sites that we were looking at and doing some research,


we start to see the correlation happening.


We start to see Facebook fixing the problem per se.


We see direct, we see the trajectory of direct going down, we see social going up.


So Facebook is addressing the problem.


But they initially stayed stagnant, but it seems to be figuring itself out.


But we go back to the formula, right?


We pull the direct bucket, we remove the homepage, the section fronts,


we correlate it against any active campaign, there's our social traffic.


Speaking of dark social, when we're looking at this data, obviously the pervasive tool out there,


the pervasive platform out there is Facebook.


If we remove Facebook, it shows us a world, and that is one of Twitter and Pinterest and Reddit


and Stummepan and LinkedIn, et cetera.


And Twitter's coming.


They've kissed and made up with Google, and so they're coming.


And we'll talk about that in a second.


But if we normalize for all this, one thing that we didn't see was YouTube.


And something happened last year with YouTube.


And we've checked this data because we thought, ah, this can't be right.


It's right.


What happened to YouTube?


People, Google Plus is outpacing YouTube traffic.


I hope that's not lost on you.


So what happened?


So you go out and you look at the third-party tools and they're saying, yeah, look, the world is linking to YouTube.


We are, right?


We're linking to YouTube.


33% of outbound traffic goes to YouTube across these publishers that we looked at.


Do you know how much is coming back?


0.001% comes back.


YouTube's dead.


It's one way.


It's a walled garden.


It's a branding experience.


That's it.


Now, this guy knows how to do it.


If you're interested in information about how to build that branding experience, Phil Nottingham's your man.


Because, like Dr. Pete said, there's a lot of video showing up in the web results.


A lot of video showing up.


And a lot of it, shockingly, is YouTube.


So there is an opportunity there, but that juice isn't worth the squeeze for us if it's not sending it back.


I can't close those pop-ups fast enough when I'm watching a video.


And this leads us to dark mobile.


So in January, I was preparing for Search Fest.


And I thought it would be interesting to see when mobile traffic will surpass search based on typical growth patterns, average growth patterns.


So we looked at desktop average growth, which was 5% month over month since July of 2012.


2012, yeah.


And then we said, OK, so how fast is mobile growing?


Mobile's growing at 11%.


And tablet is growing at 8%.


So in January, we're looking at this and like, it's going to happen.


Mobile search is going to surpass desktop sometime between March and July.


The spoiler alert is it hasn't happened yet.


Because we can't account for seasonality, and this was in January that we ran this data.


So we'll update this, but it's interesting. It hasn't happened yet.


And Dr. Pete was talking about it, and Cindy was talking about it as well.


It hasn't happened yet, but it's going to happen.


So the second thing that Google did that they told us, which again, an unprecedented step was mobile friendly.


And we're not going to belabor that because Cindy covered it really well.


But mobile getting didn't come.


Mobile getting has been here.


Right? It's been here.


There's been 122% growth in the last 18 months.


If mobile getting was a surprise to anybody, they were paying attention.


If you've been to any conference, we've been talking about mobile.


But what didn't happen on April was traffic didn't drop out of the bottom of the world.


We're all still here.


And so again, for the second time, Google told us they would do something that would affect your ranking, and it didn't.


Now, it got a lot of publishers off their butts and got them mobile friendly.


So Google, thank you.


Thank you for drawing the line in the sand.


Just do it with different messaging.


Tell us the truth, you know?


So thanks, Red.


The history of mobile is important to know, too.


We wrote about it on our blog.


And if you want the details, check it out.


But basically, the bottom line is any time there's a new iOS version pushed out, with iOS it happened.


With iOS 6 it happened, with iOS 7 it happened.


With iOS 8 it did not.


But two out of three times, iOS has pushed out updates and organic traffic has plummeted.


Because somebody forgot to flip the attribution button.


Oh, this is organic traffic.


Whoops. Who left this off?


They did. A couple times.


And they did it the first time with iOS 6 for a year and a half.


And then Android did it.


For another year.


And so we had to go back and make up numbers.


Because we always think you got this much from mobile.


But they fixed it, and it bounced right back up.


They did it with iOS 6, and then iOS 7 rolled out, and they did it again.


But it only lasted for a couple months, and they fixed it.


They seemed to have a handle on it.


But as soon as, and what the creepy thing is, is after a year and a half,


both Android and Apple turned it on on the same day.


Whoops.


So, they just announced last week, Apple just announced last week that iOS 9 is in beta.


So remember this moment, when it rolls out, it'll take about six weeks for adoption.


First thing you should do is go look at your organic traffic from mobile.


Go look at your direct traffic from mobile to make sure all is well.


Because they've been wrong 66% of the time.


As I mentioned before, Twitter's coming.


And Twitter is coming for desktop.


And Twitter's coming for desktop in search, I should say.


Google has been saying for months now, it's coming.


Google loves to tweak with the algorithm come July and August,


if you've known that, if you've been in the industry for a while.


They like to announce and launch things in July and August.


If I were to place my bets, I would say this is coming soon.


And I would say it's coming in the next six weeks or so.


Because we see it in mobile, and heck, they're indexing me on Twitter in Google.


Now, my immediate thought is, OK, are they measuring this correctly?


Is attribution accurately defined?


And the short answer is yes.


If I run a search on my Android phone, find my tweet, click on it,


the metrics that Twitter gives us, the impression data that Twitter gives us is accurate.


Yay.


We also see something new, and that's in the news module is indexing tweets on mobile.


So if you're in Google News, the number one way people get breaking news is Twitter and direct navigation.


People going to CNN, people going to NYTimes.com.


But the other way is Twitter.


So this is going to open up a whole new world.


So if you're thinking about your Twitter strategy, now's the time, because it's happening.


You're getting indexed.


Google News tweets are getting indexed, and they're getting indexed accurately.


So if you run a search and click on any tweets in iOS on Safari and in the Google app,


it passes accurate organic refer data.


That is good.


If you're running Chrome on Android, the mobile browser passes organic refer data.


However, if you're using the Android search app, it passes the data as direct.


Now, I would test this, but all of our tests continue to show that this was coming through as direct.


Now, the problem is how many people are actually doing that?


I don't know.


But it's out there, and it's dark.


400 million users, 50 billion messages a day.


If that's not reason to remove the Google Plus button, share button, I don't know what is.


Now, when we start talking about this, when we start talking about WhatsApp and adding it to the share buttons,


that's valuable real estate on your article.


You've got Twitter, you've got Facebook, you've got email, and you've got Google Plus.


It's time to pull Google Plus down and replace it with WhatsApp.


It is horrendously popular.


USA Today Sports section put the WhatsApp share button up 18% increase in two weeks.


Huge, huge.


Should you be adding this to your share buttons?


Yes.


Snapchat and Pinterest are the last dying gasp for galleries and slideshows.


And if you haven't tested with it, now's the time.


Because if you have gallery-rich sites, there's your option, because Google isn't going to send you the image traffic anymore.


But there's cautions, of course, and we talked about them.


Adrian talked about it yesterday with Tag Manager.


Adam talked about it today with Tag Manager.


Manage this correctly.


Because what you want to do, if you think about how these companies are operating,


their job is to get users on board and user experience and engagement.


Tracking is an afterthought.


Facebook, tracking is an afterthought.


It's imperative on them that they actually facilitate better metrics, but they haven't done it yet.


So these other companies, it's not important to them yet.


So we need to take the step and track it appropriately, and getting Tag Manager set up so you can track this.


And then it doesn't matter what they do on their end.


You can short circuit that.


There's a full list of schemas if you want to open into deep apps and app optimization, and we're going to talk about that.


Because Google has done a very good job of supplying us information.


If you are building an app, if you've gone so far as to build an app, you've got to pay attention to app indexation.


All the data is there.


They're doing it for iOS, they're doing it for Android, and they quietly announced in May that they're going to be providing some analytics.


Now, it's Webmaster Tools data.


However, they are offering it.


It's now being rolled into the Webmaster Search Console.


They have the SDK for it.


If you're looking for somebody that's following this, Justin Briggs.


He's writing about this often, and can walk you through a lot of the scenarios.


But if you didn't catch this last week, here's the Bible.


When it comes to App Store and App Search Optimization, Emily Grossman wrote, was probably the best article about App Search Optimization that's ever been written.


It's one of three, a series of three.


The iOS version just came out.


We're all waiting any time now for the next two to come out.


But they've got this chart.


I guarantee you're all going to use this chart.


Just give them the link.


And finally, there's the new tools, if you haven't been playing around, that we've been looking at.


Sensor Tower gives you a nice, cool number.


It gives you a grade.


It gives you a score.


It talks about visibility, does some extraction.


It's a pretty score.


App Annie and then Tune.


So the takeaways.


Awareness.


Awareness is the most important thing.


Any time you hear about a rollout or a change in an application, in a piece of software, we've got to be aware that that's going to affect traffic somehow.


Or at least we should go make sure it hasn't affected direct traffic.


Because there's a lot of misinformation that continues to bombard us from com score on down.


Going secure is not an SEO strategy.


It is for your users.


Know the way about it.


No matter what.


Search metrics backs up that data.


SMX conference, they had a panel.


They all verified that data.


It is not an SEO strategy.


You will not get the bump.


Check your metrics whenever your browsers are updated.


Poor image search traffic.


It's dead.


And the big takeaway is quantify your direct traffic.


Is it search or social?


We left 18% of the traffic that we worked our asses off to get, and we didn't get credit for it.


That's a big deal.


YouTube is dead.


Facebook is still obscuring data, but it's working.


We like Chartbeat.


We have to be considering the Twitter strategy.


Are we reaching out to influencers?


Are we using Followerwonk?


Are we using Buzzstream's new tool that they're demoing that they're going to be pushing out later this year?


Buzzsumo.


Who are the influencers out there?


Are we thinking about retweets?


Are we thinking about hashtags?


Are we thinking about favorites?


Are we thinking about popularity?


Whenever iOS and Android release a new version, check your referrer data.


Time to archive G Plus and add WhatsApp.


Yesterday, when Cyrus asked, who's new in this room, and all those hands went up, if you're looking for an opportunity, ASO is the new SEO.


Pay attention to app indexation, app store optimization, deep linking.


There's your opportunity.


We write about this a lot on our blog, but we don't write.


I should take that back.


We don't write a lot, but when we do, we use data.


And we get our message out often and powerful.


But I've been saying we up here.


I am the we.


These are the guys that make sure that, or have basically put me here.


This is the we.


And they're smart, wonderful guys.


It's a great pleasure to work with them, and I thank them for allowing me to be up here and giving me this data and facilitating this information so I can share it with you.


Thanks.


Thank you.


So that's a lot of data.


With that much data, can you see Google algorithm updates that are never confirmed that you just know happen that don't even show up elsewhere?


No.


Gotcha.


So a few people on Twitter were asking about UTM tagging, creating special links.


Is that ever sufficient to solve, first of all, can you explain how that works?


And is that ever sufficient to solve this dark problem?


Actually, I'm probably not the best person to answer that question, you know?


I think that with the people that are in this room, they can answer that a heck of a lot better than I can.


Or even maybe Shazad.


I'll put Shazad on the spot.


He can answer that later if you corner him.


Yeah, and that's the process of creating unique URLs that only will trigger in analytics.


If someone hits that URL, then you can figure out if that came from that particular source.


So Rand had a good question over here.


He's that guy.


What is the relative accuracy of Google Search Console data in your experience?


Google came out with a new search.


You asked me this last year.


So we found, it's an interesting question, because last year I just threw it off and said we're not interested in that data.


Okay, so it trends accurately the more you have.


It trends accurately.


However, we haven't ever seen the numbers match up.


Just never seen it.


But I was talking to a guy last week about it who actively, actively scrapes that data.


Because you only get three months worth of the data.


And they've been compiling it for over a year now, and it trends accurately.


So it's obscure, but it's one brush in your toolbox.


Interesting.


So a tweet from Brian Bozarth.


You talked about images today.


Image search basically sort of dead as a traffic source.


For your publishers that you work with, is there any value at all, any value in image search or image optimization to get results?


If you can automate the process, absolutely.


So it raises the contextual relevancy of the page.


Google looks at the image and it doesn't know what it is.


You can add file names, alt text, captions.


Sure, that's important.


But is time better spent, your editorial team or your photo edit team, actually writing headlines and better titles and doing research?


Yes.


Got you.


All right, this was the last question, the most retweeted question for you from some guy named Brian Prabost.


Will the Patriots win the Super Bowl next year?


Go Eagles.


Which of My Competitor's Keywords Should (& Shouldn't) I Target? - Whiteboard Friday

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


So this week we're chatting about your competitors' keywords and which of those competitive keywords


you might want to actually target versus not.


And so many folks use tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs and KeywordSpy and SpyFu and Moz's


Keyword Explorer, which now has this feature too, where they look at what are the keywords


that my competitors rank for that I may be interested in.


And this is actually a pretty smart way to do keyword research.


Not the only way, but a smart way to do it.


But the challenge comes in when you start looking at your competitors' keywords and


then realizing actually which of these should I go after and in what priority order.


And in the world of competitive keywords there's actually a little bit of a difference between


classic keyword research.


So here I've plugged in Hammers and Heels, which is a small online furniture store that


has some cool designer furniture, and Damia Furniture, which is a competitor of theirs.


They're local in the Seattle area, but carry sort of modern Scandinavian furniture, and


industrialhome.com, similar space.


So all three of these in a similar space.


And you can see sort of keywords that return that several of these, one or more of these


rank for, and I put together difficulty, volume, and organic click-through rate, which are


some of the metrics that you'll find.


You'll find these metrics actually in most of the tools that I just mentioned.


So when I'm looking at this list, which ones do I want to actually go after and not, and


how do I choose?


Well, this is the process I would recommend.


First off, try and make sure you first understand your keyword to conversion funnel, right?


So if you've got a classic sort of funnel, you have people buying down here.


This is the purchase.


And you have people who search for particular keywords up here.


And if you understand which people you lose, and which people actually make it through


the buying process, that's going to be very helpful in knowing which of these terms and


phrases, and which types of these terms and phrases to actually go after.


Because in general, when you're prioritizing competitive keywords, you probably don't want


to be going after these keywords that send traffic, but don't turn it into conversions,


unless that's actually your goal.


If your goal is raw traffic only, maybe because you serve advertising or other things, or


because you know that you can capture a lot of folks very well through retargeting, for


example, maybe Hammers & Heels says, hey, biggest traffic funnel we can get, because


we know with our retargeting campaigns, even if a keyword brings us someone who doesn't


convert, we can convert them later very successfully, fine, go ahead.


Second, choose competitors.


So the people you plug in here should tend to be competitors that tend to target the


same audiences.


Otherwise, your relevance and your conversion gets really hard.


For example, I could have used West Elm, which does generally modern furniture as well, but


they're very, very broad, right?


They target just about everyone.


I could have done Ethan Allen, right, which is a sort of very classic old school furniture


maker, probably a really different audience than these three websites.


I could have done IKEA, which is sort of low market, brand for everybody.


Again, not kind of the match.


And so when you are targeting conversion heavy, right, assuming that these folks were going


after mostly conversion focused or retargeting focused rather than raw traffic, my suggestion


would be strongly to go after sites with the same audience as you.


If you're having trouble figuring out who those people are, one suggestion is to check


out a tool called SimilarWeb.


It's expensive but very powerful.


You can plug in a domain and see what other domains people are likely to visit in that


same space and what has audience overlap.


Third, the keyword selection process should follow some of these rules.


Are easiest first, right?


So I would go after the ones that tend to be, that I think are going to be most likely


for me to be able to rank for easiest.


Why do I recommend that?


Because it's tough in SEO with a lot of campaigns to get budget and buy-in unless you can show


progress early.


And so any time you can choose the easiest ones first, you're going to be more successful.


That's low difficulty, right, high odds of success, high odds that you actually have


the team needed to make the content necessary to rank.


I wouldn't go after competitive brands here.


B, are similar to keywords you target that convert well now.


So if you understand this funnel well, you can use your AdWords campaign particularly


well for this.


So you look at your paid keywords and which ones send you highly converting traffic, boom.


If you see that lighting is really successful for our furniture brand, oh, well look, Glass


Globes Chandelier, that's got some nice value.


Let's go after that because lighting already works for us.


And of course, you want ones that fit your existing site structure.


So if you say, oh, we're going to have to make a blog for this.


Oh, we need a news section.


Oh, we need a different type of UI or UX experience before we can successfully target the content


for this keyword.


Yeah, I'd push that down a little further.


C, high volume, low difficulty, high organic click-through rate or SERP features you can


reach.


So basically, when you look at difficulty, that's telling you how hard is it for me to


rank for this potential keyword.


So if I look in here, I see some 50s and 60s, but I actually see a good number in the 30s


and 40s, I would think that Glass Globes Chandelier, S-shaped couch, industrial home furniture,


these are pretty approachable.


That's impressive stuff.


Volume, right?


I want as high as I can get, but oftentimes high volume leads to very high difficulty.


And organic click-through rate percentage, this is essentially saying what percent of


people click on the 10Blue Link style organic search results, and classic SEO will help


get me there.


However, if you see low numbers, like a 55% for this type of chair, you might take a look


at those search results and see that a lot of images are taking up the other organic


click-through, and you might say, hey, let's go after image SEO as well.


So it's not just organic click-through rate, you can also target SERP features.


And then last but not least, I would urge you to go after brands when you carry and


serve them, but not when you don't.


So if this e-corn's chair is something that your furniture store that Hammers & Heels


actually carries, great, but if it's something that's exclusive to Dania, I wouldn't go after


it.


And I would generally not go after competitors' brand names or branded product names with


an exception, and I actually use this site to highlight this.


So industrial home furniture is both a branded term, because the name of this website, Industrial


Home Furniture, is their brand, and it's also a generic.


And so in those cases, I would tell you, yes, it probably makes sense to go after a category


like that.


If you follow these rules, you can generally use competitive intel on keywords to build


up a really nice portfolio of targetable, high-potential keywords that can bring you


some serious SEO returns.


Look forward to your comments, and we'll see you again next week for another edition of


Whiteboard Friday.


MozCon 2015 - 04 - An SEO's Guide to the Insane World of Content with Matthew Brown

People of Moscon, I am thrilled to be here today back on the stage.


It's been a while.


When I was invited to speak back, I went, hell yeah, I want to speak in Moscon again.


But I was a little bit terrified to speak about content strategy literally after the


person that wrote the book on content strategy.


So Christina, this is a perfect example.


My tiny left brain SEO marketing content strategy versus Christina, you should probably listen


to her about exactly how to build a coherent content strategy at a company.


But I'm going to talk today about how I've looked at it from my viewpoint.


As an SEO, as a marketer, in terms of audience development, what does it mean to me?


And it looks a little like this.


She actually had the slide in her deck.


Content marketing and content strategy, it's a little mixed up for me.


Like content marketing is targeted to a valuable audience and something something profits.


So here's like an actual screen shot of me doing content strategy.


It's like this, right?


Like you make it rain.


There's links and there's money and there's attention and there's audience development.


There's ROI.


So that's not really, you heard Christina, that's not really content strategy.


So this is what happens to SEOs in general.


We do this.


We build links and we drop all this content on the web.


Ran talked earlier about how much content is being created.


And then we hear this.


It's like no, no, no, back up.


Just make great content with your users in mind and stuff like that.


And you know, it's all about making great content.


And this is an actual photograph of me when I hear that.


Like, what's the most annoying noise in the world?


It's people telling you to make great content.


It's empty.


It's childish.


It's juvenile.


It doesn't mean anything.


So I found a definition that this was actually a Christina approved definition that's more


like this.


It's content strategy, planning and management of content creation and distribution that


combines elements of user experience and meets user needs.


I can get behind this because I'm like, yeah, on the strategy side, we really want to do


that.


We have to think about distribution.


This whole field of dreams, like build great content and they will come.


That's not going to work for me as an SEO.


That's not going to work for me as a marketer.


But this actually incorporates all of the elements that I would think make a good content


strategy.


But there's a problem.


So like everything else, Rand did a good job this morning talking about this.


Here come the marketers.


If marketers get a hold of content strategy, get a hold of content marketing, which has


been happening in the last two years, then all of a sudden it's going to be harder to


stand out even if you're thinking about user experience and strategy and distribution and


all of the things that make a great content experience.


So here's some crazy stats.


Here's some graphs that are scary.


We did the SEO industry survey.


And again, Rand said it, content strategy and content creation moved to tied for number


two on the list ahead of mobile, ahead of email, ahead of social, ahead of UX, ahead


of brand, ahead of every marketing activity that we've been tracking over the years.


Link building didn't even make like the bottom.


It was like at the bottom of the list.


But content's way up there.


So we know what happens when SEOs and marketers and digital folks get a hold of that, right?


Two point five million blog posts daily according to Technorati.


So you assume that Technorati doesn't have all of the web, so it's probably even higher.


It's probably like three million every single day.


Sixty-seven percent of marketers say that the most effective form of content is a blog


or an article.


That's crazy, right?


Of all of the content types, we're still hitting blog posts and articles heavier than we're


hitting any other content type.


B2C content creation.


Content Marketing Institute did a study.


It was like 3,000 different marketers.


And they all said the same thing.


We're creating either significantly more, more, or the same amount of content over the


last 12 months than we ever have before.


And over the next 12 months, we're going to create even more than that.


So that should scare everybody a little bit, right?


Like, okay, so this isn't new.


Like content marketing and content strategy isn't something like we're just discovering.


We're deep into it.


And it's all going on Facebook.


B2C content is all on Facebook.


All of the same marketers said, 94% of them said, we're putting it on Facebook.


Yeah, we'll also hit Twitter and YouTube and Instagram and Snapchat and everything else.


But mostly we're concentrating on the king of social, which is Facebook, which is pretty


scary when you think about it.


25% of all social traffic, according to ShareAholic, goes through Facebook.


A lot of estimates are even higher, up to like 90% of your social traffic.


You may run sites where you're like, hey, Facebook's the king.


Facebook's like 80 to 90% of our social traffic.


1.3 million shares a minute.


That's scary.


How much of those blog posts, of those 2.5 million blog posts, can we possibly get in


front of people on Facebook?


It's impossible.


That line that's below Facebook, that's Pinterest.


The only other social network that registers for the last three years, from 2011 to 2014,


is Pinterest.


Other than that, the only up and to the right is Facebook.


So that's a lot of content for very few social networks to compete for our attention.


And so now we're getting desperate, right?


You see this at the bottom of articles.


Now big publishers and small publishers are like, well, we need to monetize our audience.


How can we do that?


And it's like, oh, well, one way we can do it is we can put hot garbage at the bottom


of our page.


I mean, this is actually, I won't even out the site on this.


This is actually from a site where this was a serious article.


You would see on a major media site.


But to get those clicks and to monetize, it's like, oh, well, we're just going to put whatever


Outbrain gives us or Taboola gives us.


And I pick on them, but the reason that they're there is because that's the way that people


are breaking through all the attention problems that we're having, all of the fatigue, is


trying to get clicks on articles like that.


To be fair, SEOs aren't doing much better, right?


So we're still creating content that's very cued to how-to queries and what is queries.


I pick on WikiHow.


I'm picking on them right now.


But seriously, if you're going to write an article on how to handle a dog attack, please


find an artist that's actually seen a dog in real life.


Like, that is a terrifying werebeast.


Like, there's trees to hide behind.


My strategy would be to huddle and wet myself if I saw something that looked like that.


So we're not exactly doing, like, an awesome job of getting through the content glut either.


And now, Daejeon SEO did an awesome study that they said, OK, if you're doing that kind


of content, the how-tos, the answers, the meeting user queries, you're up against the


attention deficit where people are bailing and bouncing fast because they're too impatient


to find answers.


The text is too long.


The formatting is poor.


And this litany of other problems.


So if you're writing how-to content and Google's factoring all of those engagement stats that


we think they are that they're getting through Chrome, like time on site and dwell time and


bounce rate and all of these things, if users are bailing fast, those are going to be pretty


bad signals for Google, right?


As an SEO, this should be a little bit terrifying because you're going, oh, wow, well, if they're


going to bounce back and do another search, that's certainly not going to help my rankings.


So now the new hotness is this.


This is branded content.


So anything that we can do that's new in the content world is going to be done quickly


and done to death.


Branded content is what you see where it's like sponsored by or paid by or this article


is generated by on some of those media sites.


And so it looks a little like this.


79% of marketers are saying, yeah, we're going to shift our budget to branded content now


because paid is getting too expensive.


LinkedIn ads are too expensive.


Reach is hard to get.


But paid content, when we do a partnership with some of these sites, we can shift budget


and do that.


It's actually starting to work.


So the NYT did this article at Cathay Pacific.


And it was a really well-done article about business travel on the bottom line.


And it was really slickly done.


I'm sure they spent months on it and had a lot of designers.


And I've always thought, personally, when you see paid or sponsored posts, you go, oh,


well, I mean, I'm not going to read an advertisement.


It's like the magazine things where you're like, oh, I got to get past this.


This was really well done.


And it was 35% of all of the shares that the NYT had in their business vertical for that


time period.


And the crazy thing about it was they actually had the same number of shares and district


distribution and links and attention and traffic that their other organic articles had.


So instead of users being like, yeah, we see the article, but we're not going to share


it.


We're not going to link to it.


It's an ad.


Users are starting to look at this and say, oh, no, this is good content.


I'll share it.


I'll share it just like I would another piece of content.


So you might say, OK, well, that's the NYT.


They spent probably way ahead of six figures on this.


We can't do that.


Another one on NPR was literally something that you or I could dial up in WordPress in


like 30 minutes.


Like it was poorly formatted and had bullet points.


This was the only picture.


It was about chocolate chip cookies.


That's pretty good.


It was 55% of all of their shares in the health and science vertical.


It was the fourth most shared article on NPR for that time period.


Nobody cared it was paid.


Nobody cared it was sponsored.


It wasn't a big deal at all.


You're like, OK, well, if it's going to be effective now and marketers are going to get


a hold of it, it's just going to become the latest casualty in all of the content marketing


glut, right?


This leads to content fatigue.


Mr. Rand Fish can have this right.


Content fatigue happens when after a certain amount of pieces of content a day that we're


exposed to, the odds of something earning us links, shares, attention, amplification,


anything like that are slim.


It's slim to none.


And the crazy thing is, is he presupposes that's 1,000 pieces of content a day before


we're just like content weary.


Seriously, if you're reading 1,000, go outside, kick a football, drink a beer, throw a Frisbee.


That's a lot of content.


There's one company that's trying to fight content fatigue.


And for SEOs, they're doing a really effective job.


And that is Google.


Now, honestly, it's too soon for me.


If you're a Game of Thrones fan, this is too soon for me on this slide, even after a couple


of seasons.


But Google is incentivized to gently penalize us for content.


That's kind of a reference to that.


But they are incentivized to make sure that there's less content going through than we


want.


It's penalized more often than we want.


It's in their best interest to say there's so much noise and so much content being created


and so much content marketing that the harsher our panda and penguin algorithms are, the


better.


So all of those amplification metrics and all of that engagement and all of the noise


we're trying to break through on Facebook is not helpful for SEOs.


So if we're going to take two facets of it, right, content strategy, content creation


one part, content distribution the other part, I will tackle the question on what the hell


great content is.


And it's tough because it's in the eye of the beholder.


This should all be prefaced with this is kind of in my opinion.


But I will give you some examples of content forms and how they break through that I think


work.


First of all, relevant and recent.


Casey Henry, one of my favorite curmudgeons, used to be a monster.


He's at Wistia now.


He did a great article on Hillary Clinton's video campaign and how they do email capture.


And he's like, this is terrible.


Like their content like their email capture, it's up at the top left.


It runs at the wrong part of the video.


Here's some ways that she could do it differently, that her campaign could do it differently,


where they would up her capture rate to right around 10% following Wistia's best practices,


which would mean like 8 to $10 million of new campaign donations.


This is a great way to do this sort of how-to content because instead of just being like,


this is the latest, like how to do email marketing, how to do video email capture, they tied it


to a relevant and recent event.


Wistia will get visitors that never knew who Wistia was, that get there, that are now content


lawyer or brand loyal to Wistia, like, oh, yeah, they had great content about Hillary


Clinton's email capture campaign.


And I didn't even know who they were.


They're developing content loyalty by targeting something that's relevant and recent and isn't


just a how-to list.


The other way to do it is long form.


This is much tougher, but a site like Wait But Why, and if you haven't seen the site,


it's awesome.


You should go to it.


They do long piece explainer forms, like they do something on, this is the Fermi paradox.


And what it is is why isn't there life on other plants?


Why haven't we found it?


Odds are we should have found other civilizations.


And they did a great piece that's like, well, it's one of two reasons.


There's a great filter here, and either we're the magical civilization that's past it now,


or we're about to get wiped out by dinosaurs or asteroids or nuclear war or something like


that.


But it's great.


Like, they actually make the stuff fun.


It's approachable.


It's accessible.


It took them a long time to get here.


It took them two years.


And now they get, they've had 32 million uniques.


They get like 5 million uniques a month.


They finally developed content loyalty for their audience, but it wasn't something on


long form.


It wasn't something you can be one and done on.


Their founders actually said, oh, well, we didn't push on paid social.


We didn't do promotion.


We didn't do link building.


We didn't factor in SEO.


They just kept at it until people were willing to seek out their content on social, to find


it on Facebook, to see it on Twitter.


They no longer have to push on it because they've developed a loyal audience for their


specific kind of content.


That's hard to do.


At Moz, one thing that we've done that's actually worked really well is we've targeted specific


personas with some of our content.


So this is the web developer's cheat sheet for SEO.


And we're really targeting people that may not ever come to our site.


Maybe they're on TechCrunch or they're on Hacker News or on Quora and they're like, oh, it's


SEO.


Like, I don't do SEO.


But I may need to do SEO for 10 minutes or 30 minutes or a couple times a month for my


job and this is directed solely at them.


And we get shares on Hacker News.


We get that attention from that community that may never come back to Moz.


Or maybe when they need something for SEO or they want to consume content, maybe they


will.


But by targeting our content specifically for them, it's not for everybody.


It's not like some of our other content where we're hoping that everybody who does SEO or


marketing comes in.


This is just for them.


And that's another strategy that breaks through that works is if you target a specific persona.


Which leads us to the evergreen 10 times content.


This is what Rand calls 10 times better than other content that you'll see in search and


social.


This is really, really hard to do.


This is flagship content.


Our beginner's guide to SEO is like our entrance into the doorway of Moz for more people than


any other piece of content on the site.


It's really, it takes a ton of work.


A ton of work from our audience team, from our designers, from outside contributors.


This is not easy to do.


And especially if we want to maintain it.


If we want to be 10 times better on this kind of content than the next people, whoever's


chasing us in the SERPs, whoever's distributing this in social, we're going to have to constantly


revise it and improve it and make it better.


So how much content, how much budget and attention and time can you make for this kind of content?


That's pretty hard.


But assuming it's an evergreen piece that's 10 times better, it's going to take a long,


long time.


But all of these presuppose something.


All of these are pieces or articles.


Some of them are infographics.


But most of them are what we consider top to bottom, scroll up and down.


We see that 2.5 million blog posts a day.


There's certain types of content that we're seeing stand out now that break the mold just


a little bit.


And that attracts user attention.


And we know this because they get links, they get shares, and they get commentary from other


organizations like other media will be like, whoa, that article was something special or


that piece of content was different than what we're usually reading.


And here's a couple ways that they're doing that.


Land Rover did a branded piece with a British author where they paid him a princely sum


of money and said, you know, write us a story.


And if it involves Land Rover, even better.


Like, if you can make Land Rover like, maybe just a little central point of the story,


that'd be awesome.


And so they did that.


And he wrote a story.


And it was good.


Yeah, they had a Land Rover in it.


But what they did is they let the users control the story experience here.


The narration, all of these controls to the side.


You can have text on or off.


You can have narration on or off.


You can pause.


You can repeat.


You can just see the animations.


And this was notable.


Like, people were like, wow, that's not just like an e-book.


That's just not like flipping page to page or scrolling up or down.


This is really good.


This is really something that we can get into.


And I mean, the story was great.


You can't there's no substitute for great writing.


But if you can do a content piece that's like, how can we make this different?


How can we make this noticeable to users where they haven't seen something like this before?


And nobody cared it was branded content.


Everybody read the story.


That's another thing about branded is if you do it right, the paid component of it is not


as visible.


The N.Y.T. did something else that was interesting too.


They had a piece which is like, these are the best and worst places to grow up by county


based on your income mobility on that county.


But when you hit the site, it said, oh, hey, you're in Multnomah County.


Multnomah County, if you're a girl, you should probably move to Washington County where you'll


make 10% more of a lifetime.


And if you're a boy, you should stay here because your mobility is 66% better than other


counties around you.


And I'm telling you, people lost their absolute minds about this.


It was like, the N.Y.T., they're wizards.


They've done it again.


They've made a story about me.


It's a personalized article.


How did they know I was in Multnomah County?


And you're like, oh, come on.


Seriously, most people in this room are like, oh, you can just check an IP address.


They'll tell you where you are.


It's like Comcast, 97219.


But people lost it.


And then they had text at the bottom of the screen that was like, oh, well, depending


on what you click and your gender and your income type, they changed the words at the


bottom of the page.


Wow.


Everybody commented on this.


Everybody thought it was magic.


So if you can personalize that, even simple tricks, that's just spun text based on your


IP address detected.


If you can even make simple tricks like that, people will be like, that article's for me.


That can happen.


That's cool.


That's better than just scroll up and down.


We've got graphs and charts about income mobility.


So that leads me to this.


If you guessed which site this was, this is Bloomberg Business.


This isn't even, this isn't boing boing.


This isn't wired.


This is Bloomberg Business.


The demographic has to be Wall Street Journal readers, predominantly East Coast financial


traders.


Bloomberg Business is about as buttoned up as an organization.


You'll see they wrote an article about Paul Krugman and battling other Austerians, battling


other macro economists.


Looks like Street Fighter.


Like, I'm in.


I'll consume this content.


And so they do the whole thing.


This is awesome.


I was like, I'm so into this.


That's me.


You're talking to me now.


Like the text on the right, I can't think of too many things that are more boring than


economists sniping at each other.


And one thing it did, the Kotter Business Attention, that meta commentary again, like


why is this notable?


People were like, oh, I scrolled and it went left to right, like that.


It's like, oh, so it wasn't an article where you just scroll up and down?


It's like, no, it was like scrolling fighting game.


It went on the screen.


A little bit of research.


And they're like, how do they do it?


I mean, two jQuery plugins and a couple lines of JavaScript.


I could do this.


A web developer would be like, that's trivial, right?


If you think along those lines of how you can break that article template, that can


be super, super powerful to get people to actually consume your content and think of


it differently than those other 1,000 pieces or articles a day.


One piece of content in particular has really broken all the mold on all this.


And so I think this is like the magnum opus of content for the year.


And it's also from Bloomberg Business.


And it's called What Is Code?


And here's what happened with What Is Code.


They took a really talented writer.


The editor said, Paul Ford, he's F train on Twitter.


He's an amazing writer.


There's no substitute for that.


They said, all of these tech valuations in Silicon Valley and all the stuff that's happening


now, what is code?


Like can you explain it to our business readers on like exactly what the difference is between


codes and scripts and how that works?


He said, sure.


What do you want, 1,000 words?


They're like, no, just surprise us.


He came back with 38,000 words.


38,000 words.


That's 10 times the average length of a Wait But Why article.


Like how are you going to get users to consume 38,000 words?


Well, you start by like with Clippy from hell right here, right?


This follows you throughout the entire article.


But the ingenious part of What Is Code is how did they get people through 38,000 words?


How did you get users to not be like, whoa, we're not doing this?


It's instructive.


First of all, every 1,000 to 1,500 words, there's something to do in What Is Code.


So in this case, you type in some words.


And it's like, here's how you type in things to a keyword.


And it goes to op code instructions and to machine language.


And then it comes out the other side on your monitor.


So if you're technical, you're like, ah, that's pretty funny.


If you're not technical, it's like, whoa, I didn't know that that's how a keyboard worked.


And so they did a little something in this article where it's like some of it is for


people who are super technical.


And some of it is for people that are like, oh, I get it now.


I get how code works, how scripting works.


And so they made this really fun and accessible for a lot of different types of readers.


But most importantly, every 2,000 words or so, they made it interactive.


They made fun topics hard to grasp.


So they made something that's like, instead of Tinder, it's called Coder.


And the whole thing was, OK, look at this code.


If you think it's good code, swipe left.


If you think it's bad code, swipe right.


And this was really clever and well done.


And so you'd swipe left, it'd be like, no, no, that was terrible code.


You should have canceled it.


It was improperly formatted.


It won't compile its garbage.


And if you swiped left, it would tell you to explain all of these things on, oh, yeah,


we can do this.


Like, we can make things fun like that.


Like, something as technical as what's properly formatted code.


Somebody who's not technical is going to be like, ugh.


This is a good way to make hard concepts that are hard to grasp a little bit more fun.


SEOs take note.


It had linkable assets.


So throughout the article, there were pieces of content that were on their own shared and


linked to and distributed through social just outside the regular what is code article.


So for example, on one of these, AngularJS is the most popular development language in


the Ukraine.


And you go, wow, that got its own AngularJS community picked up on that.


And the other languages in other countries, those were distributed widely on their own.


So there was all of this content in this article that even taken outside the context of the


rest of the article was notable.


So that's another way.


If you're going to have a long form content piece, break up some of the assets so that


even on their own, it's something that people want to share and want to comment on and want


to link to.


And notice you're not reading 38,000 words in one sitting.


That's ridiculous.


So Clippy from hell follows you around and says, welcome back.


You visited here two times.


You spent 32 minutes here.


You want me to take you back to where you last read this?


You want to pick it up again?


Like they did just some basic personalization tactics like that that make it personalized


to you, that make it about you.


They know you've been there.


This OK, here's what happens.


Like four days after the article is published, somebody actually I'm sure they linked it.


It said, oh, well, if you enter the Konami code, on what is code, you get a dancing reggae


bear, you get flash animations, you get an egg, you get a boombox.


And it's like, oh, the Konami code.


They're speaking my language again just to make sure I can do it.


Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A. I would be super embarrassed if I didn't


know that on stage.


So there's life after publishing this article.


Like this went viral again.


There were social shares and links and attention.


And what else does the article do?


It's amazing what they did on this.


So even after that, those engagement metrics I talked about with Google, right?


What's Google think when it's like, well, we saw all of this activity and then it kind


of went down.


And then we saw all of this activity again.


That sounds like something that's going to rank for a long time if you can keep that


going.


And finally, they made it about me.


This is ridiculous.


I don't wear sunglasses when I read at the computer.


I don't even know what that's about.


But at the end of the article, they're like, do you want to turn on your camera and we'll


give you a certificate of completion?


Like 38,000 words, that's no joke.


Like that's for real.


So people shared.


I mean, it sounds like it's kind of trivial.


But people actually passed this around.


And this was a thing on its own, like making it about you.


It knew its targeted personas.


I mentioned the web developers cheat sheet for Moss.


They committed everything they did for what is code onto GitHub.


And it had a whole afterlife in the development community.


Developers went in and went, oh, Paul, your JavaScript is garbage.


Your C++ is terrible.


The Python doesn't work.


We're going to go ahead and fork all of this and make our own fixed code.


And there was discussion.


And it was on Hacker News again.


And Paul was like, yeah, you're right.


I'm a terrible developer.


Do it.


And then the development community had its own afterlife on what is code.


During and after the article was published, just by putting little pieces of it and committing


the entire article onto GitHub, they had their own targeted persona on this.


And people are still right now.


They're still in this branch.


And they're still doing things to it.


I can't imagine a better way to have different pieces of one single article for different


people.


And finally, it knew a distribution plan.


It had a distribution plan.


And it knew where to hit all the channels on it.


So for example, in print, that was their entire print edition.


50 lines of Python on the cover.


And the entire article was what is code in print form.


So they adapted it and made sure that people that subscribe to Bloomberg Business Week


had something to do.


Mobile, same thing.


They did something interesting with mobile, not just making it responsive.


But what they did is they took it and they said, oh, you know what?


This is going to be terrible on a cell phone.


It's going to be bad on a tablet.


We're going to remove specific pieces of functionality in this article just to make it a better mobile


experience.


So it's faster.


It's responsive.


You can actually scroll.


It doesn't freeze up.


It doesn't require you to find your place again.


So our mobile strategy is kind of like I've always thought of it as like make sure that


the mobile version is just as good as the desktop version and go from there.


Like that was the goal.


Like make mobile equal the desktop.


Sometimes a better mobile experience for users is going to be removing things or taking things


away or off the table.


So that's another way to think about it is, OK, all the distribution channels, right?


What does that mean?


That leads us to our second part of content strategy.


Like the second part is something like this.


What's the goal for distribution?


If I was up here saying, OK, here's a distribution plan for everybody in the room, it would look


different for all of your sites and all of your companies.


Like saying there's one distribution plan is silly, but there is something we can target


as a goal.


My friend Ross Hudgens had a great tweet on this that illustrated pretty clearly the differences


between or the problems that we're having with our content strategy, which is there's


two problems.


No distribution plan.


We don't have a plan for what we're doing.


And number two is we're not defining success metrics.


So here's what happens.


We try to develop a content strategy or a content marketing plan as marketers and SEOs


and we start here, right here.


And it's like, OK, well, we would love it if we got 200 tweets, 437 likes, or a bunch


of G plus shares or anything.


We want links and traffic and attention.


We set arbitrary targets.


But really, this is a bad way to do it.


A better way to do it is something that BuzzFeed has found.


So this is Dao Wen.


She's the publisher of BuzzFeed and she is, in my estimation, one of the best minds in


content marketing and content strategy on the planet.


So you're probably thinking, well, yeah, BuzzFeed, like lists, quizzes, things like that.


But what BuzzFeed did is they created something called POUND, which is Process for Optimizing


and Understanding Network Diffusion.


And so right now, there's a little bit of cognitive dissonance, right?


You're thinking, BuzzFeed, network diffusion?


This is the company that gave us what is your inner potato.


That's one of the dumbest things that I could find on a site full of dumb things.


But no, what POUND is is this.


They took something that said, OK, normally we look at what we saw and were like Facebook


likes, led to more Facebook likes, led to shares, led to more activity on Facebook.


And Pinterest did the same thing.


We got pins that led to other pins and Twitter, all these scoreboard.


We stacked up the scoreboard on each of these.


What they found is they took a piece of content and went, it doesn't work like that.


What actually happens is a tweet leads to a Facebook like, leads to a Facebook share,


leads to another tweet, bounces back to a website, comes back to Facebook, Pinterest,


and over and over again.


So network diffusion doesn't just happen linearly on Facebook and Twitter and Pinterest.


What happens is people jump from social network and link back and forth.


And this is what it looks like top down.


It looks like this crazy high school science experiment where the blue nodes are Facebook,


the light blue nodes are Twitter, and the white nodes that you see right there, those


are links.


And so one of Dow's takeaways on the article, you should definitely follow her on Twitter.


One of the takeaways that she wrote up was, hey, we get links just because we get so much


diffusion across social networks.


It's a byproduct of all of this social sharing.


And so links are important for SEO.


We don't even need to focus on link building because we know the more that we optimize


that network diffusion, the more links we'll see from people bouncing around social networks.


So a light bulb, I mean, the light bulb goes off for me.


I'm like, I don't even care anymore whether or not the search engines use social shares


as a ranking factor.


Why would I care?


I know that if I optimize this process that goes from links to social network and bounces


back and forth, that that's going to be enough, that that's going to be good enough for link


building.


So maybe outreach a little bit.


But honestly, if you look at social, it's like it's not link building, it doesn't really


work, social shares don't really matter.


Buzzfeed actually has the data to disprove it because it doesn't work like you're stacking


it up.


It doesn't work like this anymore.


The old way, they said, okay, you put a piece of content, every SEO is going to be like,


this is the way.


You put a piece of content up and then you build links to it.


The more links you build to it, the more shares you build to it, the higher it's going to


rank, the more social traffic, the more uniques, that's the way to do it.


Get all the links and shares to the hub.


That was the Buzzfeed strategy.


This is the new way.


Publish all of your content to the right streams for the right audience.


They found out, okay, for fashion content, we might want to push harder on Pinterest


and Instagram and maybe we do paid Pinterest pins or maybe we do promoted tweets for our


political coverage or our news coverage.


Or maybe we know that we need to push harder on Facebook for certain topic types because


that creates the fastest network diffusion.


So that's the strategy.


Instead of optimizing for one single content hub, you're optimizing for which social streams


move the fastest for the specific topic.


So that's great.


I mean, we know now, okay, well, yeah, you've got to take that.


You don't just build links and you build your social strategy.


Like you want to optimize for who's looking for what where.


But for breaking through the noise, and I've said this a few times about the content pieces,


you're targeting this.


Content loyalty.


That's the goal of any distribution plan is because to break through all of those 2.5


million blog posts and all of it going on Facebook and all of the time that people are


trying to spend wading through content on Twitter and email and LinkedIn, the way to


create an actual sustainable content strategy is to create content loyalty.


And it's hard.


So partially took a network and they said, okay, we've got, you know, a thousand publishers.


Let's figure out what the stats are across these publishers.


2.6 days is the median page view peak for most articles.


And so after 2.6 days, everything just kind of falls off.


And if you get at least 20% of your traffic from social, that's a little bit better.


It's 3.2 days.


But for any single piece of content, unless you just hit a home run, you're probably going


to have that peak at two between two and three days and then everything's going to fall apart.


And maybe you'll get an afterlife on it.


Maybe it'll be shared again.


Maybe you'll get traffic for a couple of years and maybe it's an evergreen piece.


Maybe it's that 10 times content you created and that's and that's going to go on forever.


But typically on a single piece of content, you don't have a lot of time.


And this was the stat from those Parsley publishers that literally like, this stopped me in my


tracks.


There's one takeaway where I think that says this is the opportunity.


It's this slide.


Those publishers said that loyal visitors, as defined by visitors that hit their site


weekly or monthly, only 11% of their visitors were what they considered a loyal reader.


That to me is like a huge, that's 89%.


If you can get that number from 11% to 20%, that's going to be a knockout in your account.


If you can get that category, 30%, you can get that wait but why strategy where people


are actively looking for your content on Facebook or looking for it on Twitter or email and


they're actually clicking through on your content.


If you can move that number, that's going to be the most sustainable content strategy


and content distribution that you can do.


So how to do it.


Vulture.com did a study with Chartbeat.


And what they did is they said, okay, we're going to cast aside page views and links and


shares and all of those social metrics for a little bit.


We want to figure out what leads our readers to come back more.


And they found if we can get on their first page a reader to come back five times in a


single month, we got them.


They're going to be a Vulture reader ongoing after that.


How do they do that?


How did they figure out what creates a five times reader?


So they looked at all of these content attributes and it was genius.


They said, is it page length?


Is it ads on the page?


Is it content?


Like is it the formatting?


Is it if we have an image in the middle?


Is it embedded video?


What is it that creates that five times or more loyal visitor?


And they found out it was height of the first page scene.


It was actually the most correlating factor was how many words were on the first part


above the full.


And then they factored in a lot of other things like where the ads were placed, what the font


was.


And they optimized for that.


But instead of optimizing which pieces had certain attributes that got the most traffic


or the most links or most shares, their goal was to find out which content attributes got


to that five times, that loyal reader.


So that's the first step is change the goalposts on that to what is your goal for content loyalty?


Is it somebody coming back in a week?


Is it somebody coming back twice a year?


And then optimize for that and study those attributes.


I guarantee you that for your site or your company, it may not be page height.


It may be number of ads.


It may be whether or not you have video.


It may be infographics.


Like what Vulture did probably won't work for every site, but the strategy that they


had, which is dialing in those attributes specific for their site to your site, that's


something I would absolutely adopt.


Same thing with content type.


So we know this for SEO.


And SEO is actually a good industry to benchmark this.


Which content types are shared most to create the most loyalty in SEO?


We know it's tools.


We know it's blogs.


We know it's news.


So that makes sense, right?


Like Moz has tools and resources.


Search Engine Land has news.


SEO Book has a lot of tools and news.


We know that those content types create the strongest loyal readers for our industry.


So what content types do that for your industry?


What content types do that for your site?


What loyalty goal should you set for your readers?


There is bad news.


This takes 12 to 17 months.


And so this is a little bit disheartening for people doing content marketing because


a lot of content programs do this like every 90 days.


Did we get ROI in the first 60 days?


Did we make enough money in the first six months to make this work over and over again?


How did this happen?


And that's probably the number one thing that's killing content marketing programs right now


is you're not giving it enough time to build those loyal readers.


You're trying to make it work like paid search when you should make it work more like SEO


and set a program together, make a plan, and then let it go for two or three years.


So all of the Content Marketing Institute respondees on this survey, and there was a


lot of them.


And one of the awesome publishers said that the shortest time for ROI is 12 months.


Seventeen to 20 months was the high end.


Fifteen months was the average.


So that's something to think about when you're doing a content marketing program or a content


strategy program is it's not something that's going to work in the first 90 days.


So here's how you get started on it.


Starting out with a content audit.


This is the most painful part of it to start that content strategy plan, but it's necessary.


And this output, and this is something that Mike King did for Authority Rainmaker, and


I linked to it in my deck.


This is a great template.


You're taking all of the data that you need to find the strongest performing content on


your site.


And then you're aggregating that data and figuring out what's working for your readers,


what's creating loyalty, what's creating that network diffusion that Buzzfeed did like,


oh, the most shares between different social networks was this content type.


So you have to do that content audit to start.


So I like there's another guide on Moz from Everett Sizemore of Inflow, which is literally


a whole template on how to do a content audit and how to do content inventory.


People have done the legwork on this for you, including the spreadsheets, so that you don't


have to, which is pretty nice.


I love SEMrush over the last year, what they've done with their tool.


You can benchmark your organic value in SEMrush just by putting in a URL.


So for example, on this, the beginner's guide to SEO over our time period was worth $111,000


worth of traffic.


And I don't even know if I believe that it was really worth $111,000, but this is a good


way to get trended value for your content.


Like you can plug in URLs or your competitor URLs, and you can start making a business


case on, if we did a successful content strategy and content marketing program across a long


enough timeline, this is what the organic value of your traffic would be.


I'd mentioned Ross Hudgens and his company Siege Media.


They did a content marketing calculator that I think is genius, which is for this program,


for your content strategy and the different content marketing programs that you will use,


here's the ROI.


We can plug in how much it'll cost in terms of creation.


We can plug in what we think we'll get in terms of links and shares and loyal visitors.


You can start backing into that loyalty.


And then you can lay out your business case to your clients or who you're working with


or your company and say, this is what it's going to take.


This is what it's going to take for the next nine to 12 months, the next 15 months, the


next 18 to 24 months to scope out your potential ROI.


If you haven't started yet, I love BuzzSumo, and here's why.


If you don't have a content audit that you can do for a lot of inventory, you're just


getting started, you can use BuzzSumo to measure social performance across topics for all of


your competitive landscape.


So by the time you're getting started, you have a complete list of topics and categories


that you want to optimize for, even if you don't have a strong content inventory that


you can work with.


So that's a great way to do it.


I love it.


I love BuzzSumo for that, so that you can get a lay of the landscape without having


to go 12 months into a content strategy before you realize we've been optimizing for the


wrong topics, for the wrong audience.


We haven't got this dialed in yet.


That's a great way to do it.


So this led us to one metric, and one metric is something that Trevor Klein, who's on our


audience team here at Moz, worked with our data science team and Dr. Pete, who's not


a medical doctor.


If he tells you he's a medical doctor, he's not.


It's not true.


So what one metric does is they took all of these metrics and said, OK, we want to wait


social, but we also want to wait traffic and links and on-page attention and reader engagement


into one content performance score that we think is going to be something that's actually


better than just looking at social sharing or looking at vanity metrics or looking at


time on site or links.


We want to weight this together to get a more organic content score across all of our sites.


And people responded really well to this.


People were like, that's awesome.


We want to build this for our site.


We want to build this for our audience.


This is a great way to measure our content efforts for us.


And that's kind of when the light bulb went off for us.


We went, oh, OK.


So over the last six months, we've been developing Moz content as part of our content offering


and what we want to release today.


So for six months, we've been working on what can we do to help users with content audits?


What can we do to help with content measurement?


And today, we're going to release that to you.


This is only for MozCon attendees.


We're going to have a private beta that's just for MozCon.


So I feel OK about shilling for a little bit.


So the details on it.


Here's the problem.


Automating content audits, this is actually this output.


This is one of the better ones I've ever seen.


It looks really, really terrible.


But it's awesome.


Mike did an awesome job stitching together different data elements that you actually


need for your content strategy, not just links and shares, but word count, reader difficulty


level and all these different things.


But you do have to do work to get all of this together.


What we want to do with Moz content is we want to make that easier.


We want to automate that process by crawling and then integrating the different data sources


that we have here at Moz into something that looks more like this.


It has your content types, your author performance, your social shares, your links, your traffic.


We want to get to the point where we can make that first step that you need to take into


doing a content audit much easier.


Another thing we built is we built a Moz context API.


Our data science team worked on this this year.


It's really awesome.


If you know what Outcoming API is and you know what natural language processing is,


we can take a site, we can take something like Jurassic World, and we extract the most


relevant topics and keywords into something that looks more like this.


We're tuning this extraction based on what we've learned and what we know at Moz from


SEOs and the marketing world and what people are looking at in online marketing so that


instead of taking a branch that is just for scientists or just for research, we want to


train it against actual marketing data and improve it that way.


So we can give you what topics and what keywords are the most relevant for your page or your


site or across the web and get there with this, with Moz context.


So we can create a topic inventory for your site.


If we crawl you and we see that you're most relevant, this is Kotaku, for Batman news


or Arkham or Tokyo news, then you can start developing, okay, based on performance, here's


what readers are engaging with most.


Now can we figure out how we make them loyal readers?


How can we do what Christina was saying earlier, which is the right content in the right format


in the right place at the right time?


If you have the topics that you know are resonating with your audience first, that's a good start.


Later on in the year, we're not even close to done with this, later on in the year we're


going to release additional functionality that allows you to see those topics across


the web.


So you can see for different audiences and different sites what's getting the most social


sharing, what's getting the most social traction, which pieces of content are resonating with


your audience, what's going to create that content loyalty for you?


So by doing research across the web on what's working for what sites, you can start baking


that all the way back into your content strategy and figure out what's going to be most relevant


for your readers.


So a couple details on this beta.


It's free, we're not charging you for it, it's not even close to a release product until


later this year, but it is valuable right out of the gate.


It will crawl your site and it will give you that topic inventory.


It lives at beta.moz.com slash content.


You will need a Moz account, but if you don't have one, you can sign up for a free community


account and then you use your MozCon registered email as a login.


So the private beta is only going to be for a few weeks and it's only going to be for


people that have registered for MozCon.


We would love your feedback on it.


It will make it a better product when we release it later in the year.


We'll be at the booth out here, out front, if you can't log in for some reason or you


want to give us feedback or ask us questions.


We'll be available all week on it and it is live now.


With that, have an awesome MozCon.


Thank you very much for coming out and thank you for having me out.


That is evolution.


So the beta is you don't even have to be a pro member.


It's free to just anybody in this room as long as they're registered.


Anybody in the room.


That's exciting.


I want to start at the beginning.


You talked a lot about what we call big content, maybe.


Big content pieces.


Content with a lot of investment.


We got quite a few questions on Twitter about cost.


They were asking how much did it cost to produce the beginner's guide.


But the bigger question is how do you justify this cost and when you're just trying to do


a blog post or two a week, how do you sell this to your boss?


I think part of the problem, this is what's leading to that content marketing, I think


framing it into a hey, we want to do one or two blog posts a week, how do we build a content


strategy out of that?


That's probably two steps ahead of where it needs to be.


If your audience, if you track that loyal visitor and you set a goal of what do we think


is going to create somebody that's going to come back again and again for our content,


it might not be a blog.


It might be.


But it might be one infographic or it might be that beginner's guide where you put six


months and whatever investment you can into it.


But I think that too often we fall into let's start a blog or let's publish articles.


That gets a little traction and then maybe dies out a little bit and then it's like okay,


we're going to shift back to whatever we were doing before content marketing.


I think I would spend more than 50% of my time in that research, audience development


and creation phase before I got into here's what we're going to deliver for users and


when.


I think we're jumping ahead too quickly.


It's almost like PCC people using keyword research before they buy the ad.


The more of that time.


That's right.


Let's talk about some of the more advanced concepts you talked about.


One metric that we use at Moz.


One criticism that I've heard about one metric is like how do you measure content in one


metric?


Do you ignore everything else?


What's the value of just using one metric to measure all your content?


I think it takes us out of the vanity metrics thing.


In other words, if I had somebody tell me we don't even care about social shares.


We just care about uniques and traffic and time on site and the things you can get in


like Google Analytics.


I think that's fine.


If you had people that said we just track social sharing and things like that, I think


that's probably that might not lead to those loyal visitors or return visitors or a lot


of traffic.


I think that's a little bit dangerous.


What I like about one metric is it says okay, engagement's important and for SEOs, we know


Google's figuring out some way to measure engagement.


Time on site is important.


Users interacting with your site and coming back is important.


Traffic's also important.


Links are also important.


Then baking in social shares, you don't lean one way too hard.


You actually get a balanced look at what's happening on the site.


It's a holistic picture.


It makes a lot of sense.


One thing I was really excited on this new tool was the extracted keywords, the extracted


topics.


Explain to us what's a use case for that?


How can we use that in our content marketing?


This is one of the things that I didn't go over but it does.


It extracts a topic or a keyword and says there's a Wikipedia entry here for it.


If you're doing semantic SER, you've heard about semantic SER, what Google's doing with


Hummingbird or things like that, you know that those entities are important for them


figuring out that your site just isn't about Jurassic World but it's about Steven Spielberg


and it's about the movie and it's about all of these other things.


If you wanted to look at, well, is this page going to be relevant for all of the searches


around it, you'd want to see a lot of connected Wikipedia entities right there in what we're


tracking.


We think that's going to be, as Google evolves on that, we think that's going to be useful


for marketers to say, oh, these are semantically related.


These are connected.


These are the kind of things Google's going to look for.


I think that's one of the things that extracting topics, you can figure out from a standpoint


for an SEO.


It's not just keyword derivatives.


It's also other related topics that we need to be relevant for.


It helps both your audience and has SEO benefits as well.


Right.


You can kind of figure out back into what your audience might be looking for.


People who want to download that, it's in your deck which they can get on the moz.com


site.


Matt, thanks so much.


Everybody, great job.


The Not-So-Secret Value of Podcast Transcripts - Whiteboard Friday

Hey Moz fans, here's another edition of Whiteboard Friday.


I'm Nikki Mosier, a tech SEO manager at SEER Interactive, and I'm here today to talk to


you about the not-so-secret value of podcast transcripts.


So I got the idea to play around with podcast transcripts after hearing Moz's Brittany Mueller


talk about machine learning and podcast transcripts at TechSEO Boost last fall.


I ended up getting the opportunity to play around with this a little bit with a pro bono


client we had at a previous job, the Davis Phinney Foundation.


They do Parkinson's research and Parkinson's education.


So they were already podcasting and then they also had a pretty robust blog, but they weren't


adding their podcast transcripts.


So after about three months of adding a couple of podcast transcripts, we saw some pretty


good value for them.


We saw a 15% increase in organic traffic to the website and a 50% increase to some keyword


lift around the keywords that we were tracking.


Why we think this is relevant right now, as you may know, Google announced at IO a couple


weeks ago that they are indexing podcasts.


If you do a search for your favorite podcast, you'll see that come up in the Google search


results now.


So adding that podcast transcript or any audio transcript to your website, whether that's


video, webinar, anything just has some really good value.


I'm going to walk you through the process that I use for them super easy and you can


turn around and apply it to your own website.


So obviously download the audio file, whether that's MP3, MP4, whatever you have from your


video podcast or your webinars, if you're doing those.


Transcribe it, you need to be able to get that text transcript.


So running it through either Temi or otter.ai, both two resources that I've used, both really


good.


Otter.ai seems to be a little cleaner out of the gate, but I would definitely obviously


go through and edit and make sure that all of your text and speaker transitions and everything


is accurate.


Next steps, figuring out what keywords that you want that content to rank for.


So doing some search volume research, figuring out what those keywords are, and then benchmarking


that keyword data.


So whether your website's already ranking for some of those keywords or you have new


keywords that you want those pages or those posts to be ranking for.


Next step is getting a competitive snapshot.


So looking at who's ranking for those keywords that you're going to be trying to go after,


who has those answer boxes, who has those featured snippets, and then also what are


the people always ask.


People also ask features for those keywords.


On site, so obviously getting that content on your site, whether that's creating brand


new content, either a blog or a page to go with that podcast, video, webinar, whatever


it is, or adding it to existing content.


Maybe you have some evergreen content that's not performing well for you anymore.


Adding a transcript to that content could really kind of give it a lift and make it


work better for you.


Next step is optimizing the content on your site.


So adding in those keywords to your metadata, to your image alt tags, your H1 tags, and


then also adding any relevant schema.


So whether that's blog post schema most likely or any other schema type that would be helpful,


getting that up there on the page as well.


Once you've done all the hard work, you've got the transcript up there, you have your


content, you have it optimized, you obviously want to tell Google.


So going into Search Console, having them index that page, whether it's a new page or


an existing page, either way dropping that URL in there, making sure Google's crawling


it, and then if it is a new page, making sure it's in your site map.


And then last thing is you want to be able to track and figure out if it's working for


you.


So annotating that in Google Analytics so you know what page, when you added it, so


you can have that benchmark date, looking at where you're ranking, and then also looking


at those SERP features.


Have you gotten any featured snippets?


Are you showing up in those answer boxes?


Anything like that.


So it's kind of the process, super easy, pretty straightforward.


Just play with it, test it out.


And then kind of lastly, why is this still important if Google's already indexing podcasts?


They may come out and do their own transcription of your podcast or your video or whatever


content you have on the site.


Obviously you want to be in control of what that content is that's going on your site.


And then also just having it on there is super important from an accessibility standpoint.


You want Google to be able to know what that content is, and you want anyone else who may


have a hearing impairment, they can't listen to the content that you're producing.


You want them to be able to access that content.


And then as always, just the more content, the better.


So get out there, test it, and have fun.


Technical Tips: Getting Started with Technical SEO

Welcome to the first episode of Technical Tips from Moz. I'm so excited to kick off this series with you.


I'm Kavi from the Moz Learning team. I'm a senior learning specialist focused on developing coursework for Moz Academy, as well as some of our other learning resources like our awesome Help Hub.


Each week in this series, we're going to walk you through some of our favorite technical strategies to help you streamline your workflows and simplify complex SEO tasks.


In this episode, we'll cover why tech SEO is important for your website and your career, what technical SEO is and also what it isn't, and we'll begin diagnosing technical SEO issues by using site search for indexation status, Google search console's coverage report, and we'll take our first look at Moz's Site Crawl tool.


So what is technical SEO and why is it so important?


Technical SEO is generally the things you do to make it easier for search engines to find, crawl, interpret, and index your website.


The result of the search engines being able to do those things without encountering any issues along the way is good search visibility.


So technical SEO involves using technical processes to help Google place you more prominently in relevant SERPs, which leads to more and better qualified customers finding and using your site.


Technical strategies work hand in hand with on-page tactics, like the creation of content that's optimized for your target keywords, and off-page tactics, which help to amplify the content you've created.


While technical SEO ensures that your content can be found and easily consumed, it generally doesn't include content development, on-page optimization, external link building, social media, branding, or traditional customer and competitor analysis.


Instead, technical SEO is focused on enabling a comprehensive understanding of your website by the search engines and the appropriate delivery of your pages to your users.


When your site is in good technical shape, you'll have a solid foundation to ensure that those on- and off-page strategies actually affect your rankings and your site traffic.


You can create and share the most valuable content in the world, but if the search engines can't discover, crawl, and index your website, it will never be seen.


Throughout this series, we'll take a closer look at many of the tactics you can use to improve your site's overall technical health.