Search console impression data includes searches done by ranking trackers.


Google My Business: Battling Bad Info & Safeguarding Your Search Strategy

And think about this.


How many keywords do you track for your clients?


How frequently do you run your ranking reports?


Now, this is kind of a funny example.


This is a ranking report that is run periodically when I request it for this client.


It's a large ranking report.


And we're scanning a lot of different keywords for different geo coordinates.


So there's a ton of keywords total.


Guess which day the report runs?


You can kind of see the spikes there.


Sometimes it's not even this obvious, though.


Imagine you're working with a lawyer in New York City and a lot of their competitors are


also using SEO companies.


And all these SEO companies are setting up rank trackers only targeting explicit queries.


You can kind of see how the data starts to break down.


I checked with Darren Cha, who's a friend of mine who runs a local rank tracking software


over at Whitespark.


I asked him, do the crawlers come in from the same device or does it come out as different


devices?


And he said, if you use a tracker that does desktop and mobile, you should get double


the impressions.


But other than that, it should be coming in from the same device.


So theoretically, if you're using Whitespark, every time you run a report, it would count


as one user inside Google My Business Insights for all the different queries, but hundreds


or possibly thousands of impressions in Search Console, depending on how many keywords you


have on your report.


So the takeaways here.


If you work in local search, first of all, Google My Business views should not be a metric


that you report on.


Use search impressions instead.


Second, search impressions inside Search Console should not be used as a method to pick keywords.


Use click data instead.


Third, make sure you are tracking both implicit and explicit queries.


Get rid of this thinking that one is better than the other.


And fourth, start monitoring search queries inside Google My Business Insights.


You'd be kind of surprised to see what you'll find.


And that's it for me.


Here's a link.


If you want to hear more about local search, we have a free newsletter, so feel free to


Understanding and Applying Moz's Spam Score Metric - Whiteboard Friday

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


This week we're going to chat a little bit about Moz's Spam Score.


Now I don't typically like to do Whiteboard Fridays specifically about a Moz project,


especially when it's something that's in our toolset, but I'm making an exception because


there have been so many questions and so much discussion around Spam Score and because I


hope the methodology, the way we calculate things, the look at correlation and causation


when it comes to web spam can be useful for everyone in the Moz community and everyone


in the SEO community in addition to being helpful for understanding this specific tool


and metric.


I want to start by describing the 17-flag system.


As you might know, Spam Score is shown as a score from 0 to 17.


You either fire a flag or you don't.


Those 17 flags, you can see a list of them on the blog post and we'll show that in there,


but essentially those flags correlate to the percentage of sites that we found with that


count of flags, not those specific flags, just any count of those flags that were penalized


or banned by Google.


I'll show you a little bit more in the methodology.


Basically what this means is for sites that had zero spam flags, none of the flags that


we have, the 17 flags that we had fired, that actually meant that 99.5% of those sites were


not penalized or banned on average in our analysis and 0.5% were.


At three flags, 4.2% of those sites, that's actually still a huge number.


That's probably in the millions of domains or subdomains that Google is potentially still


banned.


All the way down here with 11 flags, it's 87.3% that we did find banned, so that seems


pretty risky or penalized.


Seems pretty risky, but 12.7% of those is still a very big number, again, probably in


the hundreds of thousands of unique websites that are not banned but still have these flags.


If you're looking at a specific subdomain and you're saying, hey, gosh, this only has


three flags or four flags on it but it's clearly been penalized by Google, Moz's score must


be wrong.


No, that's pretty comfortable, right?


That should fit right into those kinds of numbers.


Same thing down here.


If you see a site that is not penalized but has a number of flags, well, that's potentially


an indication that you're in that percentage of sites that we found not to be penalized.


This is an indication of percentile risk, not a this is absolutely spam, this is absolutely


not spam.


The only caveat is anything with, I think, more than 13 flags, we found 100% of those


to have been penalized or banned.


Maybe you'll find an odd outlier or two.


Probably you won't.


Correlation is not causation.


This is something we repeat all the time here at Moz and in the SEO community.


We do a lot of correlation studies around these things.


I think people understand those very well in the fields of social media and in marketing


in general, certainly in psychology, in electoral voting and election polling results.


People understand those correlations.


But for some reason in SEO, we sometimes get hung up on this.


I want to be clear.


Spam flags and the count of spam flags correlates with sites we saw Google penalize.


That doesn't mean that any of the flags or combinations of flags actually cause the penalty.


It could be that the things that are flags are not actually connected to the reasons


Google might penalize something at all.


Those could be totally disconnected.


We are not trying to say with the 17 flags these are causes for concern or you need to


fix these.


We are merely saying this feature existed on this website when we crawled it or it had


this feature.


Maybe it still has this feature.


And therefore we saw this count of these features, that correlates to this percentile number,


so we're giving you that number.


That's all that the score intends to say.


That's all it's trying to show.


It's trying to be very transparent about that.


It's not trying to say you need to fix these.


A lot of flags and features that are measured are perfectly fine things to have on a website,


like no social accounts or email links.


That's a totally reasonable thing to have, but it is a flag because we saw it correlate.


A number in your domain name.


I think it's fine if you want to have a number in your domain name.


There's plenty of good domains that have a numerical character in them.


That's cool.


TLD extension that happens to be used by lots of spammers, like a.info or a.cc or a number


of other ones.


That's also totally reasonable.


Just because lots of spammers happen to use those TLD extensions doesn't mean you are


necessarily spam because you use one.


Or low link diversity.


Maybe you're a relatively new site.


Maybe your niche is very small, and so the number of folks who point to your site tends


to be small.


And lots of the sites that organically, naturally link to you editorially happen to link to


you from many of their pages, and there's not a ton of them.


That will lead to low link diversity, which is a flag, but it doesn't always necessarily


a bad thing.


I might still nudge you to try and get some more links because that will probably help


you, but that doesn't mean you are spammy.


It just means you fired a flag that correlated with a spam percentile.


The methodology that we used, for those who are curious, and I do think this is a methodology


that might be interesting to potentially apply in other places, is we brainstormed a large


list of potential flags.


A huge number.


We cut that down to the ones we could actually do, because there were some that were just


unfeasible for our technology team, our engineering team to do.


And then we got a huge list, many hundreds of thousands of sites that were penalized


or banned.


And when we say banned or penalized, what we mean is they didn't rank on page one for


either their own domain name or their own brand name, right?


The thing between the www. and the.com or.net or.info, whatever it was.


So if you didn't rank for either your full domain name, www.moz.com or moz, that would


mean we said, hey, you're penalized or banned.


Now you might say, hey, Rand, there are probably some sites that don't rank on page one for


their own brand name or their own domain name, but aren't actually penalized or banned.


I agree that's a very small number, but statistically speaking, it probably is not going to be impactful


on this dataset.


And so therefore we didn't have to control for that.


We ended up not controlling for that.


Then we found which of the features that we ideated, brainstormed, actually correlated


with the penalties and bans, and we created the 17 flags that you see in the product today.


So there are lots of things that I thought were going to correlate.


For example, spammy looking anchor text or poison keywords on the page like Viagra, Cialis,


Texas Hold'em Online, pornography.


But those things actually turned out, not all of them anyway, turned out to correlate


well, and so they didn't make it into the 17 flags list.


I hope over time we'll add more flags, but that's how things worked out.


When you're applying spam score, I think there's a few important things to think about.


Just like domain authority or page authority or a metric from Majestic or a metric from


Google or any other kind of metric that you might come up with, you should add it to your


toolbox and to your metrics where you find it useful.


And I think playing around with spam, experimenting with it is a great thing.


If you don't find it useful, just ignore it.


It doesn't actually hurt your website.


It's not like this information goes to Google or anything like that.


They have way more sophisticated stuff to figure out things on their end.


Do not just disavow everything with seven or more flags or eight or more flags or nine


or more flags.


I think that we use the color coding to indicate sort of zero to 10 percent of these flag counts


were penalized or banned, 10 to 50 percent were penalized or banned, or 50 percent or


above were penalized or banned.


So that's why you see the green, orange, red.


But you should use the count and line that up with the percentile.


And we do show that inside the tool as well.


Don't just take everything, disavow it all.


That can get you into serious trouble.


Remember what happened with Cyrus, right?


So Cyrus Shepard, Maz's head of content and SEO, he disavowed all the backlinks to its


site and it took more than a year for him to rank for anything again.


Google almost treated it like he was banned.


Not completely, but they seriously took away all of his link power.


Didn't let him back in even though he changed the disavow file and all that.


So be very careful submitting disavow files.


You can hurt yourself tremendously.


The reason we offer it in disavow format is because many of the folks in our customer


testing said that's how they wanted it so they could copy and paste, so they could easily


review, so they could get in that format and put it into their already existing disavow


file.


But you should not do that.


And you'll see a bunch of warnings if you try and generate a disavow file.


You even have to edit your disavow file before you can submit it to Google because we want


to be that careful that you don't go and submit.


You should expect the spam score accuracy, right?


So if you're looking at a random 100 sites, which you almost certainly aren't, if you're


doing spam investigation you're probably looking at spamier sites.


But if you're looking at a random 100 sites you should expect that the flags would correlate


with the percentages.


So if I look at a random 100 four-flag spam score sites, 7.5 percent of those I would


expect on average to be penalized or banned.


If you are therefore seeing sites that don't fit those, they probably fit into the percentiles


that were not penalized or down here were penalized, you know, up here were penalized,


down here weren't penalized, that kind of thing.


Hopefully you find spam score useful and interesting.


You add it to your toolbox.


And we would love to hear from you on iterations and ideas that you've got for what we can


do in the future, where else you'd like to see it, where you're finding it useful, not


useful.


That would be great.


And hopefully you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday and will join us again


next week.


Thanks so much.


Breaking Patterns: How to Rewrite the CRO Playbook with Mobile Optimization Presented by Talia Wolf

Hi, everyone. I am extremely excited to be here. It's my first time in Seattle, so thank


you for having me. Okay. So I've spent the past ten years of my life basically researching


human behavior. My main goal is to try to understand what makes people buy. What influences


our purchasing decisions. And I'm not really talking about pricing or features or products.


I'm talking more about emotion. And so I translate that knowledge into thousands of A.B. tests.


And I try to basically optimize websites and web experience for customers and kind of increase


conversions for my customers, for my clients. And so I was really excited last year when


I got a call from the third largest e-commerce site in all of Asia. And they were inviting


me to come for a meeting in Beijing and China, and essentially what they wanted me to do


is help them localize their website to the west. Because they were doing really, really


well in Asia and they weren't doing that well in Europe or in the U.S. So they invited me


over. And this is me. I'm going to go. All excited about it. And I spent weeks, weeks


preparing for this meeting. I did tons of research and I mapped out tons of psychological


triggers and really kind of figured out what makes people buy over here in the west just


to kind of make it sure that they know and they understand how it works. And I really


did prepare. I built personas and I did psychological triggers and really found everything. And


I felt that this was going to be the meeting of my life. So I prepared for the meeting.


But it was only, I think, an hour before my meeting when I was sitting in the cab, taxi,


going to the meeting, when I realized that I haven't really researched China. And it


was starting to dawn at me that at some point someone said to me that my apps might not


work. And when I say apps, I mean, you know, Facebook, Twitter, Gmail. And one insignificant


app called Google Maps. So this was crazy because I was sitting in the cab and I was


giving the taxi driver an address in English and he was looking at me like I was speaking


English. And I didn't understand a word in Chinese and I'm just going, I'm freaking out


because, okay, let's download the equivalent app in Chinese, right? Okay. They must have


a really good one. But they don't accept fonts in English. So beforehand I was pretty sure


I was going to nail this meeting, 9 o'clock, whatever. So I get out of the cab and I start


running around frantically looking for a taxi driver who actually speaks English. And I


find someone who kind of nods and I say, what's the worst that can go wrong? You know, he


seems like he knows what he's talking about. So I get into the cab and I'm thinking, okay,


now I'm on my way, this is happening. Back home I saw it was a 12-minute drive from the


hotel to the office. And I'm thinking, you know, it's 20 minutes, I've got 40 minutes


to get to the meeting. I think it was about 45 minutes later when I was literally pulling


my hair out of my head that we reached this huge building. And I literally just threw


the money at the cab driver and I started running all the way into the building and


I'm kind of just like, oh, really annoyed. And I run into the building and I say, I have


a meeting of so and so, what, you know, where should I go? And they're just staring at me.


Of course they're staring at me, they don't understand English, Talia. They have no idea


what I'm talking about. So I start thinking, okay, I should have maybe learned Chinese


or something. Or how about just like writing the address in Chinese or having it in some


way. So I walk around for like ten minutes searching for someone who speaks English and


I finally find someone and I literally I look like I just came out of the gym and I did


a marathon or something and a guy just looks at me as cool as if he just woke up from a


nap and goes, oh, that's about an hour away, the other side of Beijing. And I'm already


15 minutes late and suddenly I've got an hour's drive to somewhere else. So anyway, he writes


the address in Chinese on the back and I get in the cab and I drive all the way there and


I reach an hour and a half late to this meeting. So needless to say, I did not make it to the


meeting and I was there for like two days and I didn't see them. I didn't meet the Chinese


people. And I didn't get to see them because I didn't do my stupid research and not doing


my research cost me freaking multi-million dollar account. Sorry, just thinking about


it. So it cost me a lot of money. And the thing is that oh, wait, I forgot to say at


this point I was kind of trying to think if I should start drinking. I'm a big drinker.


Anyway, British and half Irish. So just comes with a ‑‑ anyway. So didn't make it to


the meeting. Lost a multi-million dollar account and this is happening every single day. To


businesses all over the world who aren't doing their research, it's not because we don't


bother or maybe it is because we're lazy or maybe it's because we just don't understand.


But because businesses aren't doing research and aren't doing what they should do, by the


end of this year there's going to be a $275 billion loss in online revenues. This is a


huge number. And it's happening because we're not doing our research. You see, even though


the average website has over 65% of mobile traffic, marketers are actually still choosing


to treat their mobile visitors as if they were desktop. And this is what I mean. This


is where you start looking at me weirdly, all the SEO people here. So our go‑to solution


is out of the box template design, responsive design. Essentially taking all of our content,


everything that we have designed and planned for desktop and condensing it into this tiny


screen. And everyone is doing it. We've got Macy's, we've got Bank of America, we've got


Microsoft, Skype, everyone. But the problem is that these mobile visitors are arriving


on the website, they can't find what they're looking for, and we'll find out soon why,


and they leave. And this is causing a 270% gap in conversions between mobile and desktop.


Because mobile experiences suck. And in fact, they suck so badly that a recent neuroscience


study actually found that the level of stress caused by using our phone on the mobile web


is equivalent to the stress we feel when we're watching a horror film. I'm not making this


stuff up, seriously. And I don't like watching horror films. I mean, there's a few people


here and we were talking about this yesterday that love it. But I ‑‑ no, not a big fan.


Okay. So why is this happening? Because when we're on our mobile phones, we're different


people. Right? We have a different state of mind. We're multitasking, we're on the go,


we might be sitting in front of the tele, TV, and using our phone. Or perhaps we're


in a meeting and we're texting someone, or in the middle of a fight, or we're stuck with


our car and we need help, or we're shopping and we're trying to compare prices. Many people


actually do this while in a shop. Or maybe we're just stuck outside our house. But whatever


it is, our state of mind is completely different than this guy. We're no longer on desktop.


We're not in our office, you know, having the time of our life, just passing time, waiting


for 5 p.m. to come and kind of researching and, you know, taking the time to find out


what is the best way to do something. So that's our state of mind. It's completely


different. But it's not just our state of mind. It's also our behavior. We do things


differently. And I thought I'd show you by my search, like, how I do it. So this is me


on desktop. I am a very serious person. I'm on intercom, I'm on Slack, I'm building a


presentation for MozCon. Really serious person. And then I get to mobile. And seriously, I


did screenshots on the same day that I was building this presentation. I didn't really


search for something on purpose. So the first thing I searched for was how to make apple


pie from bananas. Then it was how to color my hair purple, which didn't work because


it came out pink. The third one, well, you know, how to study Chinese. Because that would


have really helped me last year. And the fourth most important one is where is my damn Hogwarts


letter? I still haven't received that one. But it's completely different, right? Now,


if I asked you with show of hands, how many of you, without looking at Google Analytics,


know the percentage of your mobile traffic? How many know that? Just show of hands? Brilliant.


Most of you do without looking at Google Analytics. But what if I asked you, do you know what


mobile visitors search for? To get to your site and on your site itself. Because we're


searching differently. So we're writing for different queries. And that also means that


our landing pages are different too. It's not the same as on desktop. Do you know what


your conversions are on mobile? And even more importantly, do you know how many of your


mobile visitors are making the bridge and going to desktop and converting? Because these


aren't really important details that we need to know. And you see, if we want to convert


more mobile, if we want to turn more mobile visitors into customers, we're going to have


to do two things. And that's one, understand people better. Not the what we want. But what


do our customers actually want? Understand their behavior. And only then can we actually


create an experience that they actually want and need. Conversion. Or oops. A personalized


experience. Yes. There. So why do we need a personalized experience? Well, we live in


a world with hyper information 24 7, things coming at us whenever we want. Basically any


information that we need, we can get. It's at the tip of our fingers, which is fantastic.


The only problem is that a wealth of information also creates a poverty of attention. And when


we have so many things happening, so many people are trying to reach out to us, are


trying to get our attention, and at the same time someone's calling us or the pizza's arrived,


we get really confused. And we don't know what to choose. In fact, it's called analysis


paralysis. When our mind has too many options, our brain's default is just not to choose.


And this is actually what's happening on mobile, because there's so many things going on there,


we just can't find ourselves. And so it's no wonder that 86% of us are willing to pay


so much more just to get better personalization. We want someone to tell us what to do. We


want someone to give us the information that we need. Essentially, we're all like Dumbledore.


I had to throw a Harry Potter reference in here. Sorry. We all want socks, but people


are still trying to shove books at us. And this is what marketers are doing. We're not


listening to our customers. We're not researching who they are and trying to understand who


they are. We're just trying to sell what we want. Now, customers know that we want to


take their money. That's fine. When they want to pay, they will do that. But how are you


helping them find what they're looking for? And this is one of the most important things


when it comes to mobile experience is because people are getting lost. Now, the good news


is you don't have to completely redesign your mobile site. You don't need an army of designers


or developers. I'm not even telling you to get rid of responsive design. I'm just telling


you that we need to start thinking about information hierarchy. We need to start thinking about


what our mobile visitors need and what kind of information we're going to serve them.


How can we make their life better? Basically, we need to use the regular simple mobile equation


I just gave you. Understand their certain mind, understand their behavior, and create


a better experience for them. What we need to do is actually identify the most important


parts of a mobile visitor's journey. Where do they need our help? And then address that.


And thankfully, we actually don't need to do that because Google has done it for us.


Google has actually identified the four micro moments of a mobile journey. The most important


critical parts that a mobile visitor goes through that they need help. And all we need


to do is brainstorm with our customer success, with our clients, understand what our mobile


visitors need in these points, and address them. So what we're going to do now is actually


look at each one of these micro moments. And I'm going to show you a few case studies and


I'm going to give you some advice on how you can take your responsive design that is doing


what it's doing today and make it better. So we start with the first stage. The first


micro moment, which is the I want to know stage. This is someone who is arriving to


your website for the first time and they're not ready to convert. They want more information.


They need to know more about you. And here's the number one rule with anything to do with


it. And actually it's not just mobile. No matter what you're selling, what customers


care about isn't the what, it's the why. No one cares about your product. Not your features,


not your prices. What customers care about is what's in it for them. The actual value.


You see, with every product that you have, you have a story. And every story has two


main characters. There's the hero and there's the mentor. Now, the hero is someone who is


an everyday person just like any one of us. And they go about their everyday life, but


one day they have a challenge. And they don't know what to do and they have, you know, they


go through whatever they go and then they meet the mentor. Now, the mentor doesn't tell


them what to do or does it for them. It just helps them find the greatness within them.


And it's exactly the same in marketing. You're not the hero of the story, your customer is.


This is probably how Yoda would say it. It's the difference between saying that you are


the number one app in the world and saying find your perfect match. It all starts with


a date. Because it's about the customer. It's not about you. Whenever I start working with


a new client, I like to ask them what do you sell? And if I'm working with an insurance


company, many times they'll say, well, we sell insurance policy. Which is rubbish because


that's not what you're selling. What you're selling is peace of mind. And if you happen


to be selling clothes, that's also not what you're selling. What you're selling is self


esteem. Because it's not about the T-shirt that you're selling. It's about how you feel


when you're wearing that shirt. And this is the essence of the I need to know stage. Because


when you're on your mobile phone, there's a lot of things happening. There's people


calling you and texting you or someone has arrived at the door and you've got millions


of messages coming to you. And if you don't get that message within three seconds, if


you don't make it 100% clear what's in it for your customer, they're out of there and


they're not coming back. And why three seconds? Well, because 60% of mobile web visitors expect


a mobile site to load in less than three seconds. Got it. Okay. Three seconds. And this is because


we don't have patience, we don't have time. Hundreds of reasons. But here's what happens


if you have a one second delay in page load time. 11% less page views. 16% decrease in


customer satisfaction. And my favorite, 7% loss in conversion rates. Because of one second.


And why do people actually have delays on their mobile sites? Because they look like


this. Because their images don't load and no one's going to wait around for you to load


your bloody images. Because you're using the same images on desktop and condensing them


and not thinking about how much they weigh, what they look like on mobile. This website,


for example, a third of their mobile site is a logo. How relevant is that? How important


is it? And the image in the back, which is probably, you know, amazing on desktop, does


absolutely nothing on mobile. It's killing their conversions. So you really have to start


thinking about the images that you're using. They might not be relevant, you might want


to change one, you might just need to work on the weight of how much it weighs. Now,


on mobile, as we said, in this stage, people don't know and they're not ready to convert


yet. But what you can do is help them find the information they need. Or one of the things


that we love to do is help them save stuff for later. Simple. Easy. If we identify that


someone is on the product page or on a checkout page and they've been idle for more than six


seconds, we'll just ask them if they want to save their item for later. Insert your


email, you get an email that says here's your product and they can convert later. And doing


this has helped us increase our customers' conversion rates between 12 to 54% by a simple,


stupid little save for later button we can all add to our website. But what we also need


to do is offer the relevant information. Now, this is a website that actually helps you


buy tickets for any event from an Adele concert to football. What you call soccer. To football


games. So basically what we do is we identify the page they've landed on, the search crew


they've used, and then we'll say watch Barcelona live because we know that this is what you're


looking for. Need more information? Call us now. 87% increase just by giving people the


right call to action at the right time. Okay. Next micro moment. The I want to go stage.


Now this is usually assumed that we're talking about brick and mortar stores when you want


to go to the actual store. But if you have a customer success team or sales team that


answers the phone, this is relevant for you, too. You need to help people get to you and


you need to help people call you and reach you on the phone or via email. So a couple


of weeks ago I was searching for an American Eagle store and I was in a sentence date in


the United States and yet it was asking me which country I'm in. Which is really annoying


because you have this information. And the same goes for Apple, by the way. Why are you


asking me what state I'm in? By simply identifying the location a customer is in, we were able


to increase for this insurance company their conversion rates by 25%. Just helping them


click on navigate to the nearest location to you. And they could. They don't need to


search for the closest place. We're telling them where it is according to their location.


What about the contact us page? This is a yellow pages page where you're supposed to


be able to contact people and I can't for the life of me find how to contact anyone


here because there's so much information. Now I told you, you don't need to completely


redesign your website, but your contact page is one of the most important pages in your


entire website. Why not make it easier to contact you? Have your phone number clear.


Have a simple form that people can fill in and contact you. And just one other thing


about contacting you, there's nothing more frustrating when you're calling a company


at 8 o'clock in the evening and they say, I'm sorry, we're not here to answer your call


right now. If you can't answer my call, don't ask me to call. Give me an option to leave


my number for a call back. It's a simple thing and it's easy for you to identify within your


website the time that person comes to your website. Okay. First stage, the I want to


do stage. This actually happens before or after a purchase. People are trying to get


information. Every day millions of people are Googling and on YouTube trying to figure


out how to do a certain look with makeup or how to bake a certain cake, maybe apple pie


from bananas. And also, maybe how to create better ads on Facebook, how to do SEO better.


And it's a perfect place for you to actually start collecting leads and nurturing those


leads. This is not the way to do it. Neither is this. Neither is this. There's like 100


things, like, oh, now that you've reached the middle of this post, can I please have


your email address? Last chance to give me your email address. No. But digital marketers


is a really cool blog we've been working for about six months now. And they provide amazing


content about marketing. So if you search for Facebook ads or you want to learn more


about SEO, you can go to their website and learn stuff. And one of the things they've


been doing with us is identifying the pages that people are on and offering the right


tutorial. So if you landed on a Facebook guide, they would prompt you to download the Facebook


guide and have it right in your computer. And they also actually A B tested it with


a click to link. And they saw 30,000 more content views and they also saw 3,300 more


leads just by offering the right offer at the right time. And it wasn't only that. It


was also the fact that they were able to bring down their bounce rate by half and triple


the amount of page views on their site. Because people were getting the relevant content,


so they were staying on and seeing more content. This is probably the most important one, right?


We all want to get to the part where people convert. The I want to buy stage.


Here's a couple of things that really annoy me when I'm trying to buy something or I'm


trying to sign up for something. Having the wrong bloody keyboard. So you're trying to


put in your e mail or your credit card number or just sign up for something and you get


the wrong keyboard. This is so easy to fix and so simple and all you have to do is talk


to the developers and make sure that when someone clicks on a certain field, the right


keyboard comes up. And companies have seen hundreds of percent of increase in conversion


rates just by adjusting that keyboard. Number two, stop using desktop solutions from


mobile. Pop ups. Desktop pop ups that also work on mobile. Amazing. Fantastic. And thank


God actually Google has decided to actually do something about it in January because they're


blocking all of the content. You're arriving on a website and you have this huge pop up


that basically says nothing. You can't touch the field. You can't click on X to exit it.


It's just in your face. There are so many other options and ways to use pop ups within


mobile that look native, that perfect trust, but they're also personalized to the experience.


Another rule about conversion which should be really simple is if you give me too many


calls to action, I'm not going to convert. I actually don't understand why this website


even has, like, share buttons on their home page or landing pages because have you ever


landed on a page and said, oh, I'm going to share this on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn,


Google plus? No one's going to read. No one's going to take the time to do this. Tell them


what to do. Get to the point. So this is actually one of our customers and


one of the things that they have is they have a cool app, but it only works on Android.


And so far anyone that was coming to the website was getting the exact same calls to action.


So what we did is we identified the device. If you came in from an iPhone, we said, hey,


why don't you subscribe and we'll tell you when the app is ready. And if you came in


from an Android device, we asked you to download the app. But we didn't tell you to do it immediately


when you landed on the page. We told you to do it when you scrolled 900 pixels. So you've


done three front scrolls and now I know that you're actually interested in the content?


Okay. So with mobile design, it's all about immediate,


being immediate, having one call to action and looking native because we're all accustomed


to different looks and feels and we can use that in our design.


Oh, oops. Okay. Now, the last thing I want to talk about within this specific micro moment


is incentives. People don't always like to convert on mobile, but you can use small techniques


to help them do that. For example, have a specific coupon just for mobile. If you check


out on mobile, you're going to get 10% off site wide. 260% increase by a stupid coupon


for 10%. Then you have the easiest thing, free shipping. Free shipping increased conversions


and everyone knows this, right? Everyone knows this from Amazon. 79% by telling people that


we shipped to their specific area. Okay. So what do I want you guys to take


away from me today? We're not using mobile as a replacement for desktop. This is really


crucial for people to understand. We're using mobile in a completely different way. And


it's only once we all understand that mobile visitors are not mini desktop visitors are


we going to be able to convert them more. We need to start treating mobile visitors


as different people. We need to treat our customers as people that have emotion and


value and they care about what we're actually giving them. They don't want to be in a horror


film. So build better experiences for mobile. Don't lose multimillion dollar accounts because


you didn't do your research. That's it. That's me. That's my dog. Thank you very much, guys.


Thank you. Oh, you are teasing us with your picture of your cute dog. Thank you. Okay.


We've got a couple of minutes for questions, I guess. So someone was asking in particular


about all these things, understanding the users, the micro moments and everything else.


The work you're doing to benefit the site and help those users sounds fantastic on mobile.


A lot of this would probably have benefits on desktop as well.


For sure. That's what essentially we've been doing for over ten years. I've been running


an agency that all it does is optimize websites. And we were focusing a lot on desktop. And


for many years both worked. We were doing desktop and it also worked on mobile. And


it was only the past two or three years that we realized that mobile was suffering and


the things we were using for desktop were no longer working for mobile. And that's why


we made the transition to kind of focus more on mobile.


But all of these things about consumer psychology and understanding what experience your customers


actually want works everywhere. And it's important for every single experience that you create.


Real quick, someone was looking for an example on the need to know, I want to know micro


moment. Is there any particular websites that you think are great for I want to know or


any particular tactics that you've seen where you're like that nails that moment?


Well I think one of the most important parts and that's why I kind of made it more a longer


part of this section is kind of understanding what your customers are looking for. As I


said, they're not really looking for information about the product or the actual, you know,


features that you have because they can do that later. What they're really trying to


figure out is the value. So one of the things that I think is most important is before you


even go about changing stuff on your mobile site and getting to kind of convert that,


you really want to understand the different personas that you have, what people are looking


for and really dig into your data. And we all have this within Google Analytics. It's


just segmenting out desktop and looking only at mobile and understanding what people are


looking for, what pages they're on and being able to just identify the information that


people need. And then it will be so much more easier for us to supply that information and


give that value in our content.


Okay, thanks so much for being here at Moscon.


Thank you very much guys.


Daily SEO Fix - On-page optimization

Hi, I'm Olaf from the onboarding team at Moz. Today I'm going to show you a daily fix you


Daily SEO Fix - On-page optimization

can use for your on-page SEO. Let's get started. So within the ranking section of your campaign,


Daily SEO Fix - On-page optimization

head over to the tracked keywords overview and clicking on the optimize button runs a


Daily SEO Fix - On-page optimization

report within a score of 1 to 100 helping you identify high priority items for your


Daily SEO Fix - On-page optimization

on-page SEO. Clicking on that button also automatically tracks the keyword and URL pairing


Daily SEO Fix - On-page optimization

so that you can track the impact of your work over time. So once you're in the page optimization


Daily SEO Fix - On-page optimization

section you're able to see how well your page is optimized for the keywords that you're


Daily SEO Fix - On-page optimization

trying to optimize it for. The goal is to score above 80 and the way to improve on that


Daily SEO Fix - On-page optimization

score is to review these items listed down here. You start off with a red exclamation


Daily SEO Fix - On-page optimization

mark then the next issues are the orange exclamation marks and then you can now look at the blue


Daily SEO Fix - On-page optimization

suggestions down here. The content suggestions also help you identify tangential keywords


Daily SEO Fix - On-page optimization

and topics that you might use to grow your content. And that's our daily fix for today.


Daily SEO Fix - On-page optimization


Tie Marketing Metrics to the Data Boards, CxOs, & Investors Care About - Whiteboard Friday

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


This week we're going to chat about tying marketing metrics that marketers use to the


things that CEOs, CXOs, whatever the C-level titles that you've got are, investors, board


members, to the metrics and data that they care about.


This is a problem that I've talked about with many marketers over the last few weeks, especially


at some conferences and events, where folks say, hey, we've got our metrics dialed in,


we know what we're doing, but when we present it to the board or when we present it to our


CMO or our CEO, when we show it to our investors, not only do they not get it, it's like we're


not speaking the same language, and therefore we're not able to have a conversation productively


about where investments should and shouldn't be made.


And they're not able to give input into whether they think our idea is a good one or whether


they think there's a good return on investment there.


And this can be tough.


So what happens is, you're a marketer, you're presenting here to your board of directors


or to your executive team, and you say, hey, look, we've got traffic growing in every category.


SEO is up, social is up, we've grown our link profile, which is going to help us with search,


all these great things.


Fantastic, but the board is sort of sitting there like, well, I don't really know how


to contribute, and how does that tie into higher lifetime value of customers, because


that's the thing that I know and the thing that I care about, and I'm not sure this marketer


person is really investing in the right kinds of ways for the organization.


That sucks.


As a marketer, that totally sucks, because it means that you are not communicating your


message and that means you're unlikely to get buy-in from all these people that you


really care about and need their permission and their acceptance in order to make the


investments you need.


The thing is, marketers are very focused on the funnel, right?


We care about metrics that show top of funnel growth, we care about which channels send


that top of funnel traffic, we care about how people are moving through the funnel,


we want to see conversions and conversion rate, which is why we work so much on conversion


rate optimization, and we care about marketing metrics that predict better retention or greater


recidivism, meaning people are buying again or coming back and becoming customers again.


This is our world and we live in it.


It does translate okay, decently, to the board level, but if you think about what folks care


about at the highest levels of a company's strategic imperatives, that could be a board


of directors, could be investors, could be C-level folks, they're really focused on things


like market size, meaning how big is our addressable market?


Who could we potentially reach?


What if we run out of those people?


Can we keep growing?


Are more of them coming into the fold or are people exiting this market and going somewhere


else?


They care about cost of customer acquisition, how much does it cost us to get one new customer?


They care about customer revenue, the revenue that we actually get from those customers


that we're bringing in, whether that's going up, and overall growth rate, are we getting


more customers over time?


Is that rate of growth expanding, meaning acceleration?


They care about customer lifetime value.


Customer lifetime value is something that pretty much every metric we calculate as marketers


should tie back to that, especially when we're having conversations with these kinds of people.


Essentially, it is when a new customer comes in and they make any kind of purchase from


us, they spend any type of dollars with us, a product, a service, a subscription, whatever


it is, how much do we get over their customer lifetime?


Meaning, if it's an e-commerce play, it could be the case that they come and they buy five


things from us over the course of two years on average, and that dollar total is $360,


and 40% of that is gross margin for us.


Essentially, the rest is cost of goods.


Okay, that's customer lifetime value.


Or if you have a subscription business, like Moz is a subscription business, if you subscribe


to our tools, we'll charge you $99 a month or $149 a month, and I think on average, our


customer lifetime value is essentially $120 times the average customer lifetime span,


which is somewhere around 11 months all in, and so that number multiplied out, so $1,200,


$1,300, somewhere around there.


That's customer lifetime value.


That doesn't actually count recidivism.


People who quit and then come back again, we're trying to get to that metric and we


need it, right, because you want to be able to speak to true customer lifetime value.


This is sort of the underpinning of all the rest of this, but other things these folks


are going to care about, comparison of cohorts.


It's not the case that all customers are exactly the same.


You know this as a marketer because you know that it costs you a different amount of money


to acquire folks through one channel, and they perform differently than folks who are


acquired through a different channel.


You know that different cohorts of personas, for example, people who are, let's say, who


work in an agency versus who work in-house.


Maybe those are two different kinds of people that you serve in a B2B model, or you know


that folks who are higher income versus lower income spend different amounts at your e-commerce


shop, right, that type of stuff.


That comparison is very interesting to these folks as well.


Another comparison that matters is a competitive comparison.


How big are we?


How big are they?


How fast are they growing?


How fast are we growing?


What's their customer lifetime value?


What's ours?


What's their retention and recidivism rate?


Those things are massively interesting to this group as well.


There's a bunch of other stuff that they care about like cost of goods and teams and market


dynamics, et cetera.


Marketers generally don't touch that stuff and don't usually need to worry about it,


but the solution to our problem here is to speak this language.


Let's go back to our initial story, right?


Instead of saying, here's traffic growth from all these different channels, and here's how


we're investing in search versus social versus paid ads versus trade shows, all this kind


of stuff, what we want to say is something like, hey, here's the traffic from SEO and


here's the traffic from social, and as those have been growing, our cost to acquire a new


customer has been falling because those channels are organic.


That means we don't pay each time we get a new customer from them.


We only pay for the upfront investment in sweat equity and creativity and engineering


needs, web engineering needs and whatever we're doing, but then it keeps paying dividends.


Because of that, you can see this CAC falling as our search traffic has risen.


Now you have the attention of these folks.


Now you've engaged them in a way that they care about because they say, aha, more organic


search, lower cost to acquire a customer, which is great because CLTV to CAC ratio,


the ratio of lifetime value to acquisition cost, this ratio right here, is something


that every investor, every board of directors member, every CXO cares deeply about.


It's the underpinnings of the company.


That's what makes a profitable company work and what gives it the ability to grow.


When you speak their language, you get this type of response.


So what I'm going to urge you to do as a marketer is to take any metric, any data point, any


story you're trying to tell around return on investment, around a project you have,


and turn it into something that makes sense to the group of people that you're talking


to, especially at that strategic level.


You want to tie those to tangible improvements or to issues.


It could be problems.


It may not just be positive things.


It could be negative things too in the areas your CXO or board or investor cares about.


So let's imagine, and this is a conversation that many, many folks have, they say to me,


Rand, you know, we want to hire an SEO consultant or we want to bring an SEO in-house full-time,


but we've been having trouble getting buy-off from our CEO or our CMO or our board.


Well, let's change the conversation.


Instead of we need to hire an SEO consultant because SEO is really important, search engines


send a lot of traffic, and search traffic is something we're not competing in well right


now, two, CAC is high, right?


CAC is too high.


Our cost to acquire a new customer right now is too high, and our CLTV is too low for customers


that we buy via paid search.


So we're spending a lot of money on paid search ads right now, and the customers we get via


that have this high customer acquisition cost because we have to spend money to get them,


and the CLTV isn't as high because customers who come through paid on average usually tend


to underperform compared to those who come through organic.


It's just a fact of who clicks on ads versus who clicks on organic results.


But if we ranked organically for more of these keywords and we could get more SEO traffic


compared to our PPC traffic, we could stop, A, losing those searches to our competitors


who are outranking us now, and B, we would bump up the CLTV and we'd be lowering costs


of customer acquisition.


Boom.


You have changed the conversation to something that this group of folks really gets, and


you've made it much more likely that they are going to say yes to your proposal.


Same thing here.


Let's say you say, hey, we're going to do something crazy.


We want to actually spend more on trade shows, on events, on speaking, on going places physically


in person.


It's expensive.


We don't reach as many people as we do over web channels or over traditional ad channels,


but we've been getting good customers via events.


That's a real tough sell unless you do this.


Dear board, here's a comparison of customers acquired via our five major marketing channels.


Here's SEO, here's PPC, here's our Facebook ads, here's organic social, and this is events.


You can see costs to acquire, you can see lifetime value, you can see the ratio, and


you can see the numbers of folks that we've gotten via each of those channels and the


revenue they bring in.


Awesome.


Now, repeat buyers and referrals are so much stronger from events, from this group over


here, that even though it costs much more, the math works out that it is the best investment


we can make over the next couple of quarters.


We want to bring this up by two or threefold.


If we keep seeing continued investment or continued metrics in the same way we have


the last few months, we're going to have the highest positive ROI from that investment


versus any of these other channels.


Change the conversation, made it something these folks understand, speak their language,


and you get the buy-in you want.


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


next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.


What to Do When the Wrong Page Ranks for Your Keyword(s) - Whiteboard Friday

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


This week we're chatting about what to do when the wrong page is ranking for the keywords


that you care about.


This happens to pretty much every site I've ever dealt with.


People have this big frustration that, hey, searchers are performing a query, I'm trying


to come up with this URL and instead Google is ranking this other URL for my website.


It's not universal on every query, but it happens to nearly every site on at least a


few of their queries.


There are ways that you can deal with it.


First off, I'd urge you to prioritize, when you're going through this process, prioritize


only the ones that matter the most to you.


Take good care to look through your Google Webmaster Tools slash search console now and


look at the keywords that are sending you the most traffic.


Look at the URLs that are receiving the most traffic from Google search, which you can


see in your web analytics or your Moz Analytics account.


If you notice that there are particular high-value queries that are sending traffic to URLs that


you would prefer would go to other URLs because you believe those are more relevant or would


perform better, then you should prioritize this particular process.


Let's start here.


It's an example that I just discovered recently.


If you do a search for metal frame eyeglasses, you will find a couple of websites that are


ranking brilliantly.


Coastal dot com with their buy metal glasses frames online and save money.


Thirty-nine dollar glasses dot com with their metal frame glasses.


These are both super relevant to metal frame eyeglasses.


Clearly I've expressed the query intent that I want metal frames.


These two results are giving them to me.


Look at the third result.


This is LensCrafters, which obviously is a big brand, at least here in the United States.


The page that's ranking for them in the third position is women's eyeglasses and designer


glasses.


Now, LensCrafters is a much bigger brand than either of these.


They have dramatically more domain authority.


The vast majority, overwhelming majority of their pages, at least at this top level of


category, have far more links pointing to them than either of these do.


I would guess that if LensCrafters had a good page, the correct page here, they could at


least outrank potentially thirty-nine dollar glasses and maybe even rank number one above


coastal dot com.


Although I do like the coastal guys quite a bit.


And so LensCrafters, why is their women's eyeglasses and designer glasses page ranking


for this?


Look, browse glasses for women online or stop into a LensCrafters, find the perfect pair,


filter by metal.


Filter by metal?


That suggests to me that if I were to go to this page and filter by metal, I would then


get to a page that might be relevant for metal frames.


But this is not that page.


I'm guessing, and I bet the data would back me up here, right, that the click-through


rate on this third one is worse than it probably is for number four, maybe even number five


or number six because this does not look like a relevant page for that query.


It is not saying these are LensCrafters metal frames.


I don't even know if LensCrafters has metal frames that I could potentially get to.


And in fact, one of the frustrating things you'll see is that they've got this filter


by titanium.


If you go to the page and then you try and filter by titanium, the filter is grayed out.


You can't actually click it.


So, okay, maybe LensCrafters has some other issues.


But certainly if I'm doing SEO for them, I don't want this page ranking.


I want my metal frames pages ranking.


And so we can go through a process like this, right?


Because in this case, it's probably killing not only their click-through rate, which hurts


not just this page but could hurt the LensCrafters.com website overall in how Google considers them,


right, as click-through rate could be potentially a signal that's applied across a domain, as


is pogo sticking, right?


People are clicking it and then bouncing back to the search result because they're not happy


with the result.


But it probably is killing their conversion rates too, which potentially sucks even worse.


So step one, you want to diagnose what the underlying issue here is.


And to do this, one of the things that I do is I do a search that looks like this.


I did a search for metal frame eyeglasses site colon LensCrafters.com, right?


I want to see, does LensCrafters even have a page on the site with those keywords that


is well targeted?


And then I searched through the first couple of pages of results and found nothing.


So in LensCrafters' case, the problem is A, a relevant page doesn't even exist on the


website.


So step one for their SEO person, talk to the team, get someone to create a metal frames


page, right?


And in fact, that's probably true of many of their other filters too.


If it's true for metal frames, it's undoubtedly true for other things.


They also will have to do some work because, remember that LensCrafters' site right now


is bifurcated into women's and men's classes, and they probably need a landing page that


is specifically metal frames for either women or men, and then you choose based on this.


When you have those bifurcated or multifaceted search elements that you need to serve, you


often need to create very different kinds of landing pages.


B, the case could be, this isn't the case for LensCrafters, but it could be that the


relevant page is having indexing or crawling or content or link issues.


So indexing and crawling, crawling could mean that you've blocked it by robots.txt.


It could mean, and that could be the case, by the way, with LensCrafters.


I didn't try and look on their own site, but it could be that the indexing is having a


problem because there's a meta robots tag.


It could be that the content itself is not crawlable and parsable by Google.


Maybe it's all image content or it's all behind some complicated JavaScript framework or a


it's all post-loaded through Ajax or something like that that Google can't access it.


It could be a content issue where essentially you have a page about metal frames, but there's


not enough content or not enough unique content or not enough unique value provided by that


content for Google to feel like it deserves to be indexed and ranked.


Or it could be a link issue, meaning that there are not enough internal or external


links or not important enough ones pointing to that page to make it separately valuable


and to show Google that it deserves to rank.


Or C, it could be that it has all these things going on, but unfortunately, and this does


definitely happen, is that the ranking ability is overwhelmed by another page, meaning that


this, again, isn't LensCrafters' deal, but imagine if their women's eyeglasses page heavily


focused on metal frames and talked about a bunch of the nice metal frames that they have


for women, mentioned words like titanium and aluminum and the flexibility that metal provides


and all these kinds of benefits that you would expect to find on the metal frames page but


that Google is seeing on this other page.


And this page is also getting a lot of links for it.


Maybe external websites have linked to it for some reason.


Internal links are pointing to it incorrectly or just in large quantity.


And so then you need to fix that ranking ability issue.


Step two, you want to create and bolster, create and or bolster the relevant page for


it.


So in this case, LensCrafters has to create that page, but in your case, you may already


have a page that you know should be ranking, and so you want to promote that page.


You want to bolster that page's potential ranking signals.


That's things like content.


We're talking about keywords here.


We're also talking about related terms and phrases.


We are talking about uniqueness of value that is provided through the content.


Then we're talking about internal link signals, so looking at the pages on your website that


link to that page and link to other pages on your site and making sure that in the grand


scheme of things, you're pointing the right links from the right pages to this page internally.


It's user and usage data.


We know that Google is looking at some forms of user and usage data, and I think many of


us speculate that they are including those elements in their ranking algorithms and certainly


we've seen lots of cases where when one of these pages gets much more use, you can see


that it tends to rank better.


Correlation causation, but user and usage data is something you should look at.


For example, if you see that your metal frames page was doing much more poorly, was converting


visitors much worse, was having a much higher bounce rate than the women's eyeglasses page,


well now I've got a theory that this page is ranking because Google saw that people


were performing much better there than they were on the metal frames page.


I need to go fix up that metal frames page.


I need to get that user and usage data back up.


Then external link signals, so looking through Open Site Explorer or Majestic or Ahrefs and


seeing what are the external links that point to this page versus my other page.


Could it be the case that external link signals are overwhelming everything else and maybe


I need to go talk to those external linkers and get them to point to the correct pages?


Step three, I want to do something that is very unusual in the SEO world.


I want to actually degrade the ranking signals of the non-relevant page.


So I would say do things like A, take away keywords and related terms or make them harder


for the engines to parse.


For example, if I saw, hey, this has this filter by metal on here, maybe I'm going to


make that filter an image or maybe I'm going to make it behind a tab or maybe I'm going


to make it post-loaded JavaScript or that kind of thing.


Or maybe I'm going to just make sure that that mention of metal is the only mention


of metal on the page.


I'm going to remove the other ones on there.


I also want to re-point internal links, right?


So I'm going to basically look at those internal links that probably should have been pointing


to the metal page, take them away from the women's eyeglasses page, point them to the


right version.


Then I want to make sure that there's an obvious, at least one, obvious anchor text rich link


from this page as well as any other pages that I saw ranking for that metal eyeframes


or metal frame eyeglasses site colon lenscrafters.com.


I want to see that I've got that great anchor text link, internal anchor text link pointing


from all those pages to the target page that I want ranking.


Finally, if I need to, I might request some external link changes.


I might go to someone from the press or a blogger or a forum or whatever external website,


a partner of mine that's linking.


I might say, hey, you're linking to the wrong page of mine.


Can you re-point that?


Or hey, you're linking with this anchor text.


I'd really prefer you link with this other anchor text.


Step four, last but potentially not least, if everything else is failing and you have


a page that's only ranking for this particular keyword phrase.


In this case, lenscrafters probably don't want to kill their women's eyeglasses page


because that's probably ranking for lots of other things.


Let's say it was a particular page that was deeper in the site.


What you might do is you might consider taking that page, which we're going to call X, and


301 redirecting it to the page you do want ranking, page Y.


Then you take the content that was at X and you recreate that content at an entirely new


URL, which you are then going to modify and re-link up in your site's architecture, but


you're going to continue 301ing this one over here.


That way, any external links that are pointing here and many of the internal links that might


have been pointing here are now redirected so that they go over to Y, the page that you


want ranking.


When you recreate this page X2, make sure that you're thinking about modifying the content.


What you don't want to do is confuse Google by taking exactly the content that was on


X and recreating it precisely on X2 because Google could interpret that as, oh, oh, oh,


they just moved the page over here.


We see the 301 here, but we're pretty sure they didn't mean that 301.


What they really meant was this page is now here, and so we're going to continue ranking


this one.


That's bad, bad news for you and for your rankings and for your search traffic.


All right, everyone.


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


Whiteboard Friday.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

Hey Moz fans, welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

Today we're talking about all things BERT and I'm super excited to attempt to really


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

break this down for everyone.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

I don't claim to be a BERT expert.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

I have just done lots and lots of research, I've been able to interview some experts in


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

the field, and my goal is to try to be a catalyst for this information to be a little bit easier


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

to understand.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

There's a ton of commotion going on right now in the industry about you can't optimize


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

for BERT.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

While that is absolutely true, you cannot, you just need to be writing really good content


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

for your users, I still think many of us got into this space because we're curious by nature.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

And so if you're curious to learn a little bit more about BERT and be able to explain


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

it a little bit better to clients or have better conversations around the context of


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

BERT, then I hope you enjoy this video.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

If not and this isn't for you, that's fine too.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

So excited to jump right in.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

The first thing I do want to mention is I was able to sit down with Allison Edinger,


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

who is a natural language processing researcher.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

She is a professor at the University of Chicago.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

And when I got to speak with her, the main takeaway was that it's very, very important


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

to not overhype BERT.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

There's a lot of commotion going on right now, but it's still far away from understanding


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

language and context in the same way that we humans can understand it.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

So I think that's important to keep in mind that we're not overemphasizing what this model


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

can do, but it's still really exciting and it's a pretty monumental moment in NLP and


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

machine learning.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

So without further ado, let's jump right in.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

I wanted to give everyone a wider context to where BERT came from and where it's going.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

And I think a lot of times these announcements are kind of bombs dropped on the industry


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

and it's essentially a still frame in a series of a movie.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

And we don't get the full before and after movie bits, we just get this one still frame.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

So we get this BERT announcement, but let's go back in time a little bit.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

Traditionally computers have had an impossible time understanding language.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

They can store text, we can enter text, but understanding language has always been incredibly


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

difficult for computers.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

So along comes natural language processing, the field in which researchers were developing


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

specific models to solve for various types of language understanding.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

So a couple examples are named entity recognition, classification, we see sentiment, question


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

and answering.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

All of these things have traditionally been solved by individual NLP models.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

And so it looks a little bit like your kitchen.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

If you think about the individual models like utensils that you use in your kitchen, they


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

all have a very specific task that they do very well.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

But when along came BERT, it was sort of the be all end all of kitchen utensils.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

It was the one kitchen utensil that does 10 plus or 11 natural language processing solutions


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

really, really well after it's fine tuned.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

This is a really exciting differentiation in the space.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

That's why people got really excited about it because no longer do they have all these


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

one off things.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

They can use BERT to solve for all of this stuff, which makes sense in that Google would


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

incorporate it into their algorithm.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

Super, super exciting.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

And where is this heading?


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

Where is this going?


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

So Allison had said, I think we'll be heading on the same trajectory for a while.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

Building bigger and better variants of BERT that are stronger in the ways that BERT is


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

strong and probably with the same fundamental limitations.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

So there's already tons of different versions of BERT out there and we're going to continue


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

to see more and more of that.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

And it will be interesting to see where this space is headed.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

All right.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

So how about we take a look at a very oversimplified view of how BERT got so smart.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

And I find this stuff fascinating.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

It is quite amazing that Google was able to do this.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

So Google took Wikipedia text and a lot of money for computational power, TPUs, in which


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

they put together in a V3 pod, so this huge computer system that can power these models.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

And they used an unsupervised neural network.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

And what's interesting about how it learns and how it gets smarter is it takes any arbitrary


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

length of text, which is good because language is quite arbitrary in the way that we speak


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

and the length of text, and it transcribes it into a vector.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

So it will take a length of text, encode it into a vector, which is a fixed string of


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

numbers to help sort of translate it to the machine.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

And this happens in a really wild n-dimensional space that we can't even really imagine.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

But what it does is it puts context and different things within our language in the same areas


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

together.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

And so similar to Word2Vec, it uses this trick called masking.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

So it'll take different sentences that it's training on, and it will mask a word.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

And it uses this bidirectional model to look at the words before and after it to predict


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

what the masked word is.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

And it does this over and over and over again until it's extremely powerful.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

And then it can further be fine-tuned to do all of these natural language processing tasks.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

Really, really exciting and a fun time to be in this space.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

So in a nutshell, BERT is the first deeply bidirectional, and all that means is it's


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

just looking at the words before and after entities and context, unsupervised language


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

representation pre-trained on Wikipedia.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

So it's this really beautiful pre-trained model that can be used in all sorts of ways.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

So what are some things BERT cannot do?


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

So Alison Edinger wrote this really great research paper called What BERT Can't Do.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

There is a bit.ly link that you can use to go directly to that.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

And the most surprising takeaway from her research was this area of negation diagnostics,


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

meaning that BERT isn't very good at understanding negation.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

For example, when inputted with a robin is a predicted bird, which is right, that's


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

right.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

But when entered, a robin is not a, it also predicted bird.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

So in cases where BERT hasn't seen negation examples or context, it will still have a


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

hard time understanding that.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

There's a ton more really interesting takeaways.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

I highly suggest you check that out.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

Really good stuff.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

Now, finally, how do you optimize for BERT?


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

Again, you can't.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

The only way to improve your website with this update is to write really great content


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

for your users and fulfill the intent that they're seeking.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

And so you can't.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

But one thing I just have to mention, because I honestly cannot get this out of my head,


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

is there is a YouTube video where Jeff Dean, we'll link to it.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

It's a keynote by Jeff Dean, where he's speaking about BERT.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

And he goes into natural questions and natural question understanding.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

And the big takeaway for me was this example around, okay, let's say someone asks the question,


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

can you make and receive calls in airplane mode?


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

And the block of text in which Google's natural language translation layer is trying to understand


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

it is all this text.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

It's a ton of words.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

It's kind of very technical, hard to understand.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

With these layers leveraging things like BERT, they were able to just answer no out of all


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

of this very complex, long, confusing language.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

It's really, really powerful in our space.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

Consider things like featured snippets.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

Consider things like just general SERP features.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

This can start to have a huge impact in our space.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

So I think it's important to sort of have a pulse on where it's all heading and what's


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

going on in this field.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

So I really hope you enjoyed this version of Whiteboard Friday.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

Please let me know if you have any questions or comments down below.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday

And I look forward to seeing you all again next time.


What is BERT? - Whiteboard Friday


How to Audit for Inclusive Content - Presented by Emily Triplett Lentz

So should I demonstrate how to...


I am a neurodivergent person.


And what that means for me is that I have an anxiety disorder that among other things


sometimes makes me actually pass out.


Public speaking isn't usually one of the triggers, so you should be okay in the front row.


It's not particularly debilitating.


It's just a fact about me.


It doesn't affect my speech or my mobility or my job prospects.


It's just a fact, like that I have red hair or that my grandmother was a professional


clown.


That is true.


But it is a disorder, and it's something I've seen doctors about and take medication for,


and I've been the emergency medical situation on an airplane before, which isn't like a


barrel of laughs.


So it probably makes me a little more sensitive to ableist language than the average person.


And I'm an editor, so I'm already sensitive to language.


In fact, one of the things I've been trying to do in recent years to be a more thoughtful


person and a better ally is to refrain from using language that groups of people find


hurtful, to remove microaggressions from my vocabulary.


And that includes trying not to call mixed gender groups of coworkers guys, things like


that.


And it also includes not using words associated with disability to connote negative meanings.


Things like crazy and lame and blind and insane and so on.


So I got to tell you, when I see brands using ableist terminology in their copy, which unlike


our speech is subject to several layers of internal review, it's like, eh, because you're


kind of drawing a line between people's physical and mental conditions and that which is unfortunate


or undesirable.


And I think we can do better.


Fortunately I work for a pretty thoughtful company, Help Scout, without making it sound


too much like a commercial, is a certified B Corp.


We have a fully remote team.


We have a diverse staff.


We advocate for, we support organizations that advocate for environmental sustainability


and human rights and increasing representation of women and people of color in tech.


It's a pretty special company full of lovely people who care a lot about other people.


And last year, one of those lovely people, our VP of engineering, Megan Chinberg, called


for removing the word cripple from Help Scout's vernacular.


She said, I realize this is a common word used in English to emphasize how destructive


a particular pattern or event can be.


However, there are several other words that mean the same thing and don't compare dire


or sub-ideal situations with the physical state of another human.


She was totally right.


Even with the words I was trying to be careful about, though, like even with my sensitivity


to ableist language, cripple wasn't a word that was on my radar, which made me feel bad


because words are like my whole job.


And it made me wonder how many times in eight years of publishing history at Help Scout


we had inadvertently used ableist or other problematic terminology in our content.


So I decided to audit our site for ableist and other problematic language.


This is where the actionable stuff comes in that I know y'all like.


So to start with, we needed a comprehensive list of the words we were looking for.


So I consulted various sources, which are linked to, by the way, the best ones are linked


to in the landing page you see at the top of every slide here, along with the slides


and some other goodies.


And I invited the team to contribute to the list.


And we put a list together.


So that's the first step I would recommend, is figure out the language you're looking


for.


And what we came up with looked something like this.


Just as an aside, if you're looking at that list and you're feeling a little bit like,


whatever lady.


I get it.


Nobody likes the feeling of tools being removed from their toolkits or of their language being


policed.


And I am not interested in policing anyone's language either.


But what I am saying is that there's some nuance here.


So if you're thinking like, what, I can't say stupid now?


Not exactly.


I still use the word stupid sometimes, although I'm trying to cut back.


But yeah, there's a difference between words you might use in casual conversations with


your friends and content your company publishes on its website.


The next step was to crawl our site for these words.


We used the Screaming Frog SEO Spider, although of course there are plenty of other tools


you could use, methods you could use.


And it spat out 72 matches.


72 times we had used some variation of these words in our content.


We hadn't used every bad word in the book.


But here are the ones we had discovered we had misused on Help Scout's site.


Lots of these were within phrases we leaned on over and over again.


Help Scout makes customer service software for small to medium sized businesses.


So we write a lot about customer experience.


And there were a lot of cliches like there are no stupid questions.


And don't leave your support team flying blind.


That kind of thing.


Next we needed alternatives to these words.


And there are plenty of great alternatives.


But a global find and replace wasn't going to be an option.


Because A, not every instance of these words is necessarily inappropriate.


One of the blog posts told a story about a legally blind customer.


And that's fine.


That's just a statement of fact.


Again, it's not equating someone's physicality with anything negative.


And then B, we use words like crazy and dumb to mean dozens of things.


These words tend to be kind of lazy placeholders for more precise language.


So every update I made led to clearer, better writing.


The word dumb would become trivial or silly.


The word crazy became hectic or wild.


The word insane became abundant in one case.


Making all of these updates all at the same time made it really clear how frequently and


reflexively we lean on a discourse of disability in signifying that which is undesirable.


So many times I changed the word dumb to mean some variation of bad.


Which felt bad.


But it felt really good to make these edits and to take that step toward making our entire


body of content more welcoming to everyone.


After these changes were made, we updated our style guide to clarify what we mean about


using inclusive, neutral language.


And for good measure, bullet points, sorry Greg, we quoted subject matter experts from


underrepresented groups, added language about that.


We are currently, we added language also about soliciting images that showcase different


axes of diversity outside the standard stock images you'd expect from your average software


blog.


We're also currently working on captioning all of our videos.


We're aiming for broader representation across our illustration style and in our customer


testimonials.


And then we're aiming for better accessibility across our entire site and our product line


in general.


And just as a side note here, I know a lot of you are already familiar with this, but


it bears reinforcing.


What is good for accessibility is also often good for SEO.


Things like really descriptive, image captions and alt text and super descriptive anchor


link text.


Things like that.


There's a lot of overlap there and I've included links to resources in that URL at the top


of every slide.


Anyway that's how we got here.


We identified the words and phrases we wanted to look for.


We identified where those words were used.


We edited those instances with more precise, inclusive language and then we institutionalized


their usage in our style guide.


After the project was done, I wrote a blog post about it.


And the cool thing about that was on top of it being generally pretty well received, that


readers started raising their hands to tell us what else we might want to be careful about.


They called us out on using words like madhouse and bananas as synonyms for crazy, words that


weren't in that original list.


They came forward and they said, hey, you know, I don't particularly love it when these


other words are used either.


This person commented, those of us with large vascular birthmarks definitely would appreciate


it if you would remove stained as a pejorative.


I had no idea about that.


I had used the phrase political correctness run amok in my blog posts and someone else


pointed us toward this Wikipedia page.


Sudden mass assault, psychopathological behavior in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of


Mental Disorders.


Again, I had no idea.


Maybe the rest of you in this room familiar with the etymology of that phrase.


I was not.


But anyway, it was really cool because our community was coming forward and saying, you


want to do a better job making me feel included?


Here's how.


And we said, great, thank you.


We will get that changed.


And we did.


And people appreciated it.


Help Scout is lucky to have a pretty loyal, lovely community already.


But making these kinds of changes really validates our customers' choice to do business with


us.


To be clear, we did not do this for the PR.


We did it because it's the right thing to do.


But there's also something pretty magical about speaking up about your values as an


organization and having your audience notice and say, hey, I like that about that company.


I feel good about doing business with them.


And no, these aren't grand gestures.


Maybe there are more important things going on in the world.


We don't claim to have solved any massive problems here, like whether a company blog


uses the word insane is probably pretty trivial compared to most other injustices.


But on the other hand, little things add up.


And taking these kinds of steps can be an important step toward shifting the public


discourse and making the world a safer, more welcoming place for everyone.


What I keep coming back to is when we can choose between behavior that upsets some people


versus behavior that upsets no one, why wouldn't we choose to upset no one?


Let's go back to the word cripple as an example.


It makes some people feel bad.


Not everyone, but some people.


And let's say that in context, in the context you're using it, that a more precise synonym


would be the word stifled.


The word stifled is neutral.


It doesn't make anyone feel bad.


So it's a better writing choice and a more inclusive one.


I would challenge us all to just listen to people.


Let's do our own research, our own Googling.


We're all good at that.


Maybe read some first-hand accounts of what it feels like to constantly be on the receiving


end of microaggressions and thoughtless language.


And then consider what a rich, beautiful language English is to work with.


And that we almost always have neutral synonyms that generally strengthen our communication.


And practice substituting those more inclusive words.


Because very little harm is going to come of it.


And some of your readers will notice and appreciate you for it.


The stats and definitions vary, but anywhere from 15 to 25% of people worldwide experience


some form of disability.


That is a not insignificant chunk of our audience.


And maybe, yeah, not everybody in that demographic cares about this stuff.


But disability is just one factor among many intersecting axes of privilege and oppression.


I don't know if you've been paying attention to the news, but there are a lot of people


who aren't young, rich, straight, able-bodied, good-looking white guys.


And like me, they are starting to notice when brands are using images or language that makes


them feel excluded.


Now, I just did this project because I could.


I run a blog.


So it was within my power.


And if you, as digital marketing professionals, have some influence over the content your


company has published over the years, then efforts like these are within your power,


too.


If you're concerned you'll run up against resistance, like maybe your leadership isn't


convinced it's worth the resources.


Or they don't want to get involved in anything that might be perceived as too political.


Let me just share a quick story about what worked in a conversation with one of the leaders


at my company.


This person was generally on board with the idea.


He just didn't want to stop personally using the word crazy, which I totally get.


The word is everywhere.


Everybody uses it.


You could totally make an argument that its usage is several generations removed from


its origin.


So I said, yes, fine.


You're right.


But again, words like crazy tend to be kind of lazy stand-ins for more precise language.


So if you choose which word you really mean in context, you'll strengthen your communication.


You'll sound smarter.


Your content will be more valuable.


And then just as a side effect, like some of those people who are used to feeling marginalized


might notice that you're taking steps to make them feel more included, and that may well


impact their loyalty to your brand.


So even if you have a cold, dead heart and you don't care about anybody, it has a positive


effect.


Plus, it takes very little actual work.


What it comes down to for me, though, is my desire to make a particular word choice doesn't


supersede someone else's need for safety and inclusion.


It's not my place to question or put more pressure on already marginalized groups of


people to defend themselves or to explain why it's hurtful when I make certain language


choices.


So why wouldn't we default to neutrality?


Why wouldn't we default to clearer writing and better communication?


And why wouldn't we make our content as welcoming as possible to everyone who comes across it?


Thank you.


Long Tail SEO: When & How to Target Low-Volume Keywords - Whiteboard Friday

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


This week we're going to chat about long-tail SEO.


Now, for those of you who might not be familiar, there's basically a demand curve in the search


engine world.


Lots and lots of searchers are searching for very popular keywords in the NBA world, like


NBA Finals, and then we have a smaller number of folks who are searching for basketball


hoops but it's still pretty substantial, right?


Probably hundreds to thousands per month.


And then maybe there's only a few dozen searches a month for something like Miami Heat box


ticket prices, and then we get into the very long tail where there's one, two, maybe three


searches a month, or maybe not even.


Maybe it's only a few searches per year for something like retro supersonics customizable


Jersey Seattle, right?


Now, this is pretty tough to do keyword research anywhere in this long tail region.


The long tail region is almost a mystery to us because the search engines themselves don't


get enough volume to where they'd show it in a tool like AdWords or in Bing's research,


and even search suggest or related searches will often not surface these kinds of terms


and phrases.


They just don't get enough volume.


But for many businesses, and yours may be one of them, these keywords are actually quite


valuable.


There's really two ways to think about long tail keyword targeting.


The first one is I think that there's this small set of hyper-targeted specific keyword


terms and phrases that are very high value to my business.


I know they're not searched for very much, maybe only a couple of times a month, maybe


not even that, but when they are, if I can drive the search traffic to my website, it's


hugely valuable to me, and therefore it's worth pursuing a handful of these.


A handful could be half a dozen or it could be in the small hundreds that you decide these


terms are worth going after even though they have a very small number of keyword searches.


Remember, if we were to build 50 landing pages targeting terms that only get one or two searches


a month, we still might get a hundred or a couple hundred searches every year coming


to our site that are super valuable to the business.


These terms in general, when we're doing this hyper-specific, they need to be conversion


likely, meaning that we know we're going to convert those searchers into buyers if we


can get them or searchers into whatever we need them to do.


They should be very low competition because not a lot of people know about these keywords.


There's not a bunch of sites targeting them already.


There's no keyword research tools out there that are showing this data.


It should be a relatively small number of terms that we're targeting, like I said, maybe


a few dozen, maybe a couple hundred, generally not more than that.


And we're going to try and build specifically optimized pages to turn those searchers into


customers or to serve them in whatever way we need.


The second way is to have a large-scale sort of blast approach where we're less targeted


with our content but we're covering a very wide range of keyword targets.


And this is what a lot of user-generated content sites, large blogs, large content sites are


doing with their work.


Maybe they're doing some specific keyword targeting but they're also kind of trying


to reach this broad group of long-tail keywords that might be in their niche.


That tends to be the case that there's a ton of content being produced.


It's less conversion-focused in general because we don't know the intent of all these searchers,


particularly on the long-tail terms.


We are going to be targeting a large number of terms here and there's no specific keyword


targets available.


And so in general, we're focused more on the content itself and less on the specificity


of that keyword targeting.


Now, let's start with the niche and specific.


The way I'm going to think about this is I might want to build these pages, right, my


retro supersonic jerseys that are customizable.


With my standard on-page SEO best practices, I'm going to do my smart internal linking.


I really don't need very many external links.


One or two will probably do it.


In fact, a lot of times when it comes to long-tail, you could rank with no external links at all,


internal links only.


Quality content investments still essential, right?


I need to make sure that this page gets indexed by Google and it has to do a great job of


converting visitors, right?


So it's got to serve the searcher intent.


It can't look like automated content.


It can't look low quality.


And it certainly can't dissuade visitors from coming because then I've wasted all the investment


that I've made getting that searcher to my page, especially since there's so few of them.


I better make sure this page does a great job.


PPC is a great way to go.


You can do a broad term PPC buy in AdWords or in Bing and then discover these hyper specific


opportunities, right?


So if I'm buying keywords like customizable jerseys, I might see that sure, most of them


are for teams and sports that I've heard of, but there might be some that come to me that


are very, very long-tail.


And this is actually a reason why you might want to do those broad PPC buys for discovery


purposes even if the ROI isn't paying off inside your AdWords campaign.


You look and you go, hey, it doesn't pay to do this broad buy, but every week we're discovering


new keywords for our long-tail targeting that does make it worthwhile.


And that can be something to pay attention to.


Next, you can use some keyword research tools, just not AdWords itself, right?


Because AdWords biases to show you more commercial terms and it biases to show you terms and


phrases that do actually have search volume.


What you want to do is actually find keyword research tools that can show you keywords


with zero searches, no search volume at all.


So you could use something like, you know, Moz's Keyword Explorer, you could use keyword