it on Facebook. And we're going to take those winners and we're going to convert them to


The 8 Paid Promotion Tactics That Will Get You to Quit Organic Traffic [MozCon 2017] — Kane Jamison

organic posts in the feed. If I run an ad to my audience and somebody comments on it


and likes it, the only people that are going to see that are the other people that I'm


showing the ad to. If I take those winners and I post them on my wall and then I choose


that as my ad creative, anybody, that same person that likes and comments on it, there's


a chance that their friends and family will see it in their feed and we get free organic


distribution on top of the people we paid to get it in front of. This doesn't always


work. In this example, we paid to get this post in front of 37,000 people. We got around


1,000 organic reach. We probably would have gotten that same organic reach regardless


of whether or not this has been sponsored as an ad. No big deal. We still got what we


paid for. When the effect does work, it's pretty significant. So this was a post where


we paid maybe around $4,000 to get this in front of 750,000 people. And the likes, comments,


shares, clicks from that audience caused it to get seen by another 314,000 people. Now


they all don't fit into our perfect audience. You know, they may not be avid golfers, but


it made it through the Facebook feed algorithm and Facebook thought it was relevant to them


so there's a decent chance that it might be. I'm not going to call this viral, but if you


want your content to have a chance at being seen by millions of people, even on a page


like this that only had 1,000 likes pre-campaign, this is the most reliable way I know to create


that effect without relying on some third party like a journalist to like your content


and spread it for you. It's also the most reliable way I know to consistently get traffic


in that sweet spot under 20 cent cost per clicks. 5 cents, 20 cents, that's a great


range. It's certainly possible to do penny clicks, but I would quit chasing it at that


point and just focus on what's good because if you can reach a million people at this


rate, there's a good chance you can continue to get some of them to convert, get them on


your email list, all of that. So the next thing I want you to try if you're doing outreach


and link building is targeting influencers and journalists with small ad campaigns before


you start your outreach. Now Phil alluded to this yesterday by uploading your link prospecting


list into the Facebook custom audience and showing your content to those people. This


is similar but doesn't necessarily have to be video. There are 66,000 people over


age 22 on Facebook with journalism related job titles, another 35,000 the same age with


blogger or video blogger types of job titles and you can keep going and finding additional


ones beyond this. So what I want you to try is running a campaign that looks a little


bit like this. A few days, maybe a week before you start your cold outreach, you're going


to start showing the content or maybe you get a good press win early on and you can


show off that in an ad so that it's a little bit more of a third party validation. And


the effect that we're looking to create is that when your email lands in their inbox,


they open it up and they say, hey, I saw this going around on social last week. This feels


like something that has word of mouth traction. There's a good chance that maybe I should


write this up before the people at the competing publisher do or competing blog or whatever.


It doesn't always work but we have seen just organic links before we even start outreach


coming out of processes like this, especially from regional journalists and TV and radio


influencers and things like that. So very valuable to test.


It also works on Twitter but I think targeting by a job title in a bio keywords in Twitter


is kind of a waste of Twitter's potential. I'm not a big fan of Twitter ads but what


I do love it for is that I can target individuals by their user name without their permission.


Technically if I wanted to do that on Facebook, I need to have, you know, can spam compliant


opt in to upload that list, right? You're not supposed to do that. But on Twitter, I


can go into decision, I can go into follower wonk and I can start looking up emails, I


can start looking up Twitter handles and I can load those into custom audiences and make


sure the journalists and writers that I want to see my content are. And if you only have,


say, 400 people in that list, you have to get a few thousand to get over Twitter's minimum


threshold for a custom audience. Just load in some of your existing fans or maybe a competitor's


followers and you can get your audience size up and know that a good chunk of those individuals


are bloggers, influencers, journalists, things like that.


The fifth thing I want to share with you is a way of getting your B2B targeting cost down.


So all of you chasing the elusive C-suite or VP level marketers have logged into LinkedIn


and kind of simultaneously laughed and cringed when LinkedIn told you they wanted $20 per


click for that person to read your blog post. I don't really feel like paying LinkedIn $20


when I can pay AdWords $20 for somebody that's actually shopping for my product, but I like


the targeting they've got. I like that I can filter down to specific size companies and


specific industries and that the job title targeting is actually reliable. So there's


a good way that we can avoid paying LinkedIn more than once to get that data. We're going


to create, we're going to take our best performing content, right, the stuff with the highest


click-through rate. We're going to load that into LinkedIn ads. We're going to run it on


a CPM bid to help, you know, knowing that it's going to perform well on a click-through


rate basis to help get those cost per clicks down maybe $5 to $10 or even better. We're


going to get that audience to the site once. We're going to attach a parameter or something


to our URL so that we can create retargeting groups in Google Display Network and in Facebook


ads and I can continue to market to those C-suite and VP level individuals for 12 months,


18 months, however long the cookie lasts on those networks. That's a really valuable way


to use LinkedIn ads without continuing to pay them $15 every time you want them to come


to your site. So the sixth thing is a way of getting more value out of your email list.


One of our superpowers as content marketers is actually giving people a reason to give


us their email address other than discounts, right, whether it's great content or a great


newsletter, whatever we've got going. Maybe it's a good opt-in on the site. But we're


kind of sad to log into our email platform and find out that 70 to 90% of those people


that liked our content don't actually want our emails. That's okay. Those customers aren't


dead to us yet. We can still get value from the fact that we have their email address.


So we can load all of our email haters, the people that love our content and don't want


to open our emails and we can make a custom audience out of them, make sure they're seeing


our most important content releases in their feed instead of their inbox, or if they're


not getting the drip campaign that we find is converting really well on email, we can


just convert that drip campaign to a series of ads on Facebook or LinkedIn or Twitter


or wherever and make sure they're seeing the same messages in another inbox because that's


basically what their feed is. We can also take our best customers and our best email


subscribers, load them into small lookalike audiences, perhaps do some additional filtering


on those lookalike audiences, and now we can do fresh top of funnel marketing to people


that look exactly like our best customers and we can start again right at the top with


our best performing content, get those people down to the site and send them through the


same funnel that everybody else went through. The seventh thing I want to share with you


is a way of using video for super cheap engagement. Now, Phil covered a lot of this stuff last


night, but it really works, especially on platforms like Facebook, although all of the


social platforms really are pushing video pretty hard. This is a case study on marketing


land that just went live a couple weeks ago. It was written by Aiden Andress from Disruptive


Advertising. I'd recommend you read it if you're interested in video or PPC or paid


social because they went and split tested image ads against various qualities of video


run as video ads. They found that even after factoring in those high production costs on


video, they still got a 40% higher ROI on that initial lead gen and a 300% higher ROI


from their highest production quality commercials when they factored in the full lifetime value


of those clients. That's pretty huge. And that's a B2B example on Facebook. So if you're


still skeptical about B2B Facebook, that's a great place to start changing your mind.


Now of course everybody says I don't have the budget for video. That's all good. Phil


showed you how to do one in all of two minutes on stage yesterday with Soapbox. Facebook


has native tools like slide shows being created out of images flipping through. And there's


a lot of other great third party platforms popping up like BigView, Promo, Shaker. These


platforms exist solely to help non-videographers create short 20 second, 60 second videos that


are perfect for social ads. And you can create animated ones, talking head ones, whatever.


All of those are great ways to drive your costs down on multiple social networks.


So the last thing I want to point out is that if we're driving all of this paid traffic


to content on our site, yes, some people will convert. Yes, some people will sign up for


the list. But there's a good chance that 90 to 98 of the percent of the people that we


send there aren't going to do that. So if we're not following up with retargeting, we're


wasting a lot of these people that are being exposed to the brand. The easiest thing you


can do, and this works really well if you have a long sales cycle and you just want


to get people on the list so you can continue to reintroduce yourself to them, is to just


take whatever checklist or white paper, whatever lead gen promo you had on your site for your


email gate, show that to them on Facebook, and maybe test out your other five opt-in,


email opt-in opportunities with ads as well if they don't bite on the first one. But if


you do have a shorter sales cycle, especially e-commerce types of brands, I think it's important


to not be afraid to just retarget for the sale after somebody visits a piece of content.


If somebody is researching backpacking trips and then you happen to sell backpacking stoves,


I don't think it's unreasonable to show them a good deal or a coupon. They might be in


the market for some new gear before their next trip.


So wrapping all of this up, if you're willing to test some of these paid media tactics,


even at reasonable levels, hundreds of dollars per campaign, doesn't always have to be thousands,


if you're willing to take the time to test some of these tactics, figure out what works


for you. I think there's a good chance you can go back to your boss or your stakeholders


and say, look, we're getting a two-month return on investment from that last big content marketing


project instead of 12 months or 24 months. Can we start doing this quarterly instead


of once a year? Can we start doing more video? Can we start doing more paid social and see


Creating Influencer-Targeted Content to Earn Links + Coverage - Whiteboard Friday

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


This week we're going to chat about how to create content that is specifically influencer-targeted


in order to earn the links and attention and amplification that you often need.


So it's the case that most SEO campaigns, as they're trying to earn the rankings that


they're seeking, are trying to do a few things.


You're trying to grow your overall domain authority, you're trying to get some specific


keyword terms and phrases ranking on your site for those terms and phrases.


And so you need kind of three kinds of links.


This is most campaigns.


First one, broad, high-domain authority sites that are pointing – you kind of don't care


anywhere on your site, the homepage, internal pages, to your blog, to your news section.


It's totally fine, right?


So a common one that we use here would be like the NY Times.


I want the NY Times to link to me so that I have the authority and influence of a link


from that domain.


And hopefully lots of domains like them, right?


Very high domain, domain authority domains.


Then I want links to specific high-value keyword-targeted pages, hopefully with specific anchor text.


And that's going to help me boost those individual URLs' rankings, right?


So I want this page over here to link to me and say hairdryers to my page that is keyword-targeted


for the word hairdryers.


Hopefully, fingers crossed, right?


And then three, I'm looking for links to my domain from other sites in my sector or niche,


right, that provide some of that topical authority and influence to help tell Google and the


other search engines that this is what my site is about, that I belong in this sphere


of influence, that I'm semantically and topically related to words and phrases like this.


So I want ApplianceGal.com to link to my site if I'm trying to rank in the world of hairdryers


and other kinds of appliances.


So of these, right, for one and three, we won't talk about two today, but for one and


three, much of the time, the people that you're trying to target are what we call in the industry


influencers, right?


And these influencers are going to be lots of people.


I've illustrated them all here, mostly looking sideways at each other, not exactly sure why


that is.


But bloggers and journalists and authors and conference organizers and content marketers


and event speakers and researchers and editors and podcasters and influencers of a wide,


wide variety.


I could develop a whole board with the types of people who are in the influencer world


or have that title specifically, right?


But they tend to share a few things in common, right?


They are trying to produce content of one kind or another.


They're not dissimilar from us, right?


They're trying to produce things on the web, and when they do, they need certain elements


to help fill in the gap.


And when they're looking for those gap-filling elements, that is your opportunity to earn


these kinds of links.


So a few tactics for that.


First off, one of the most powerful ones, and we've talked about this a little bit here


on Whiteboard Friday, but probably not in depth, is statistics and data.


The reason that this is such a powerful tool is because when you create data, especially


if it's either uniquely gathered by you, unique because you have it because you can collect


it and no one else can, or unique because you've put it together from many disparate


sources, right, you're the editorial curator of that data and statistics, everyone like


this needs those types of statistics and data to support or challenge their arguments or


their assertions or their coverage of the industry, whatever it is, right?


And this works well because this fills that gap, right?


This gives them the relevant stats that they're looking for.


And because numbers are easy to use and easy to cite, right, and you can say, you know,


feel free to link to this, you're welcome to copy this graph, you're welcome to embed


this chart, all those kinds of things.


That can make it even easier, but much of the time, just by having these statistics,


you can do it.


The key, the key is that you have to be visible at the time that these people are looking


for them, and that means usually ranking for very hard to discover through at least normal


keyword research, long tail types of terms that use words like stats, data, charts, graphs,


and kind of these question formats like when, how much, how many, number of, etc.


It's tough because you will not see many of those in your keyword research because there's


a relatively few number of these people searching in any given month for this type of gap-filling


data.


So you have to intuit often what you should title those things, put yourself in these


people's shoes, and start googling around for the, what would I need if I had to write


some industry coverage around this, right, and then you'll come up with these types of


things.


And you can try modifying your keyword research queries or doing some Google suggest stuff


with these words and phrases.


Second one is visual content.


Visual content is exceptionally valuable in this case because, again, it fills a gap that


many of these folks have.


When you are a content marketer or when you're a speaker at an event or when you're an author


or a blogger, you need visual content that will help catch the eye, that will break up


the writing that you've done, and it's often much easier to get someone else's visual content


and simply cite your source and link to it than it is to create visual content of your


own.


You may not even have, these people often don't have the resources to create their own


visual content.


And so for everyone who's doing posts and articles and slide decks and even videos,


right, they say, why not let someone else do the work and you can be that someone else


and fill these gaps.


To do this well, you're going to want to appear in a bunch of visual content search mediums


that these folks are going to use, and those are places like Google Images most obviously,


but also Pinterest, SlideShare, meaning take your visuals, put them up in some sort of


slide format, give some context to them and upload them to SlideShare.


Nice thing about SlideShare, SlideShare actually reproduces each individual slide as a visual,


and then Google Images can search those, and so you'll often see SlideShare's results inside


Google Images, so this can be a great end around for that.


Instagram search, many folks are using that, especially if you're doing photos.


You can see I've illustrated my own hair-drying technique right here.


This is clearly Rand.


Look at me.


I've got more hair than I know what to do with.


Flickr still being used by many searchers, particularly because it has a Creative Commons


search license, and that should bring up using a Creative Commons commercial use license


that requires attribution with a link is your best bet for all of these platforms, and it


will mean you can get on lots of other Creative Commons visual and photography search engines,


which can expose you to more of these types of people as they're doing their searches.


C, the last one I'll cover here, is contrarian or counter opinions to the prevailing wisdom.


You might have an opinion like, in the next three years, hair dryers will be completely


obsolete because of X, and this works well because modern journalism has this idea, and


modern content, in fact, has this idea that they are supposed to create conflict, and


that they should cover both sides of an issue.


In many industry-specific sorts of fields, it's often the case that that is a gap that


goes unfilled, and by being that sort of challenger to conventional wisdom or conventional thinking,


you can fill that gap.


The key here is you want to either rank in Google search engine for some of those mid-


or long-tail research-type queries.


These can be competitive, and so this is challenging, but presenting contrarian opinions is often


great link bait, and so this is kind of a good way to earn links of all kinds in here.


Second, I would also urge you to do a little bit of comment marketing and some social media


platforms, because what you want to start is to build a brand where you are known for


having this contrarian opinion on this conventional topic in your space so that people point all


these influencers to you when they're asked about it.


You're trying to build up this branding of, well, I don't agree with the conventional


wisdom around hairdryers.


Hairdryers might be a tough topic for that one, but certainly these other two can work


real well.


Using these tactics, I hope that you can go reach out and fill some gaps for these influencers,


and as a result, earn two of the three exact kinds of links that you need in order to rank


well in the search results.


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


Why No One Pays Attention to Your Marketing - Whiteboard Friday

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


This week we're going to chat a little bit about why no one is paying attention to your


brand, to your marketing.


It's the perilous pitfall of brand fatigue.


Brand fatigue sucks.


So you have all had this happen to you.


I promise you have.


It's happened in your email, it's happened in your social streams, it's happened through


advertising, in the real world, online and offline.


I'll give you an illustration.


So I sign up for this newsletter, I decide, hey, I want to get some houseplants, my house


has no greenery in it.


So I sign up for GreenDude Houseplants newsletter.


And what do I get?


Well, I get a welcome to our newsletter.


Oh, okay.


And then maybe the next day I get a meet our new hires.


Meet our new hires?


I mean, I'm sure that your new hires are very important to you and your team.


But I just got introduced to your brand.


I'm not sure I care that much.


To me, you're all new hires.


Like you might as well be, right?


I don't know you or the team yet.


Best summer ever event?


Okay, maybe an event.


Edible backyard gardens.


You know, I don't have a backyard.


I was signing up for a houseplant newsletter because it was in my house and see us at the


garden show.


I don't want to go to the garden show.


I was going to buy from you.


That's why I'm online.


We have new flowers.


Okay, thanks.


But it's not just the value of the messaging.


It's the frequency that it happens at, right?


And you've seen this.


I'm on an email list that I signed up for called, I think it's called founder dating.


It's here in Seattle.


I think it's in San Francisco.


And I thought it was a really cool idea when I signed up for it.


And then I have just been inundated with messages from them.


I think some of them are actually worthy of my participation.


Like I should have gone to the forum, I should have replied, I should have checked out what


this particular person wanted.


But I get so much email from them that I've just begun to hit delete as soon as I get


it.


We've actually had this problem at Moz too.


If you're a Moz subscriber, you probably get a new email every time a new crawl is completed


and a campaign is set up and you have new rankings data.


And some of that's really important, right?


Like if you're paying attention to this particular site's rankings and you want to see every


time you get an update, well, yeah, you need that email.


But it's actually kind of tough to opt into which ones you want and with what frequency


and control it all from one place.


And we have found that our email open rates, engagement rates have actually drifted way,


way down over time because probably we've inundated you with so much email.


This is a big mistake that Moz has made in our email marketing, but a lot of brands make


it in tons of places.


So I want to help you avoid that.


Brand fatigue happens when there's too many messages, just too many raw messages on a


medium, right?


You start to see the same brand, the same name, the same person again and again, their


logo, their colors, the association you have, it just becomes background noise.


Your brain goes into this mode where it just filters it out because it can't handle the


volume of stuff that's coming through.


It needs a filtration mechanism and so it starts to identify and associate your brand


or your logo or your name or a person's name with filter.


Filter that out.


That goes in the background.


Also happens when the value provided is too low or too infrequent to deserve attention.


So this might be what I'm talking about with founder dating, right?


One out of every maybe five or six messages, I'm like, oh, yeah, that was interesting.


I should pay attention to that.


But when it becomes too infrequent, that same filtration happens, right?


Too few high value messages means you're not going to pay attention, you're not going to


engage with that brand, with that company anymore.


The brand, all of us marketers will see that in the engagement rates, right?


No matter the medium, we can look at our numbers and see that those are going down on a percentile


basis and that gets really frustrating.


Or and I mentioned this as well, the messaging can't be effectively tuned or controlled by


the user, right?


This is the problem that Moz is having where we don't have that one email control center


where you say how often you want exactly which messages updating you, of which notifications


about which campaigns and newsletter and da, da, da, da, da, da.


And so your message frequency is either all the time high or very high and so you're,


grrr, grrr.


I don't like any of those options.


Very frustrating.


Now, I do have some solutions and suggestions.


But it's platform by platform, right?


So with email, my suggestion, if you can, if you're early stage, start very conservative


with your email marketing and highly personal.


In fact, I would actually recommend personally sending all the messages out to your first


few hundred users if you possibly can because you'll get a great rapport that you develop


individually with person by person and that'll give you a sense for what your audience is


like and what kind of messaging they prefer and they'll know they can reply directly to


you.


So you'll create that highly engaged experience through email that'll mean that as you scale,


you have the experience from the past to tell you how often you can and can't email people,


what they care about and don't, what they filter and don't, what they're looking for


from you, et cetera.


You can then watch your open, unsubscribe, and engagement rates through your email program,


right?


No matter what program you might be using, you can almost always see these.


And then you can watch for, oh, we had a spike, right?


That spike is a good thing.


That means that people were highly engaged on this email.


Let's figure out what resonated there.


Let's go talk to folks.


Let's reach out to the people who engage with it and just say like, hey, why did you love


this or what did you love about it or what can we do to give you more value like this?


Or you watch for dips and then you can say, oh, man, we sent out the last three email


newsletters that we've sent out.


We've seen successive declines in engagement and open rates and we've seen a rise in unsubscribe


rates.


We're doing something wrong.


What's going on?


What's the root cause?


Is it who we're acquiring that, is it new people that signed up or is it old timers


who are getting frustrated with the new stuff we're sending out?


Does this fit with our strategy?


What can we fix, et cetera?


Be careful.


The thing that sucks about brand fatigue is a lot of platforms, email included, have systems,


algorithmic systems set up to penalize you for this, right?


So with email, if you get high unsubscribes and low engagement, that'll actually kill


your long-term chances for email marketing success because Gmail and Yahoo Mail and Microsoft's


various mail programs and whatever installed mail your targets might have, whatever they're


using, you will no longer be able to break through those email filters.


The email filter that Gmail has says, hey, a lot of people click unsubscribe and report


spam, let's put this in the promotions tab.


Or hey, a lot of people are clicking report spam, you know what, let's just block this


sender entirely.


Or gosh, this person has in the past not engaged very much with these messages, we're going


to not make them high priority anymore, right?


Gmail has that automatic high priority system.


So you're getting algorithmically turned into noise even if you might have had something


that your customers really cared about.


Blogging content.


This is a really interesting one.


I would strongly urge you to read Trevor Klein, Trevor from Moz's blog post about the experiment


that we in HubSpot did around how much content to produce and whether lowering content or


increasing content had positive effects.


There's some fascinating results from that study.


The valuable thing to me in that is if you don't test, you'll never know.


You'll never know the limits of what your audience wants, what will frustrate them,


what will delight them.


I recommend don't create content unless you can have a great answer for the question,


who will help amplify this and why?


I don't mean like, oh, well, I think people who really like houseplants will help amplify


this.


That's not a great answer.


A great answer is, oh, I know this guy named Jerry and Jerry runs a Twitter account that's


all about gardening.


Jerry loves our houseplants.


He's a big fan of this and he's particularly interested in flowering cacti.


I know if we publish this post, Jerry will help amplify it.


That's a great answer.


You have 10 Jerrys?


Great.


Hit publish.


Go for it.


You don't?


Why are you making it?


Watch your browse rate, your conversion rate, and conversion rate, I don't mean necessarily


all the way to whatever you're selling, your e-commerce store products or your subscription


or whatever that is.


Conversion rate could be conversion rate to an email newsletter or to following you on


a social platform or whatever.


You can watch time on site and amplification per post to essentially get a sense for like,


hey, as we're producing content, are we seeing the metrics that would indicate that our content


marketing is being successful?


If the answer to that is no, well, we need to retool it.


It turns out there's actually no prize for hitting publish.


You might think that your job as a content producer or content marketer is to make content


every day or content every week.


That's not your job.


Your job is to have success with the metrics that are going to predict and correlate to


the strategies you need as a business to acquire customers, to grow your marketing channels,


to grow your brand's impact, to help people, whatever it is that your mission is.


I highly recommend finding your audience's sweet spot for both focus and frequency.


If you do those things, you're going to do a great job with avoiding brand fatigue around


your content.


Last one is social.


I'll talk specifically about Twitter and Facebook because most things can be classified in there,


even things like Instagram and LinkedIn and the fading, sadly Google Plus and those sorts


of things.


Twitter, generally speaking, more forgiving as a platform.


Facebook has more of those algorithmic elements to punish you for low engagement.


For example, I've had this happen on my personal Facebook page where I've published a few things


that people just didn't really find interesting.


This is on my Rand Fishkin Facebook page, different from the Moz one.


It turns out that that meant that it was much harder for me next time, even with content


that people were very engaged around, to reach them.


Facebook essentially had pushed in.


They were like, ah, you know what?


That's three or four posts in a row from Rand Fishkin that people did not like to engage


with.


The next one, we're going to make the bar, set the bar much higher for him to have to


climb back up before we decide, hey, we'll show that to more and more people.


Lately, I've been having more success getting a higher percentage of my audience into the


impression count of people who are actually seeing my posts on Facebook by getting better


engagement there.


That's a very challenging platform.


Users of both, however, are pretty sensitive, nearly equally sensitive.


It's not like Facebook users are more sensitive.


It's just that Facebook's platform is more sensitive because Facebook doesn't show you


all the content you could possibly see.


Twitter is just a super simplistic newsfeed algorithm.


It's just who posted last.


Twitter has that real time kind of thing.


I would still say for both these, aim to only share stuff that gets high engagement, especially


as your brand.


Social account, do whatever you want, test whatever you want, but as your brand's account,


you want that high engagement over and over again because that will predict more people


paying attention to you when you do post, going back and looking through your old social


posts, subscribing to you, following you, all that kind of thing, considering you a


leader.


You can watch both Twitter Analytics and your Facebook pages stats to see if you're having


a dip or a spike, where you're having success, where you're not.


I actually love using Twitter and a little bit LinkedIn or Google Plus to see what gets


very high engagement.


Then I know, okay, I should reshare that on Twitter because my audience on Twitter is


very temporal.


Two hours from now, it's going to be less than 1% overlap between who sees a Twitter


post now and who sees a Twitter post two hours from now.


That's a great test bed for Facebook as well.


So if I see something doing extremely well on Twitter, on Google Plus, on LinkedIn, I


go, aha, that's the kind of thing I should post on Facebook.


That'll increase my engagement there.


Now I can go post and get more engagement next time and build up my authority in Facebook's


news feed algorithm.


So with all of this stuff, hopefully, as you're producing content, sharing content, building


an email subscription, building a blog platform, you can have a little less brand fit to your


fatigue, a little more engagement from your users.


Look forward to chatting with you all in the comments and we'll see you again next week


for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.


Driving Traffic from Facebook - Whiteboard Friday

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


Today we're going to talk a little bit about Facebook.


So Facebook has been growing massively, it sends out a tremendous amount of traffic,


and as a result, more and more of us in the field of web marketing as a whole, and because


it's so interesting as a correlated factor with things that tend to perform well in Google,


are interested in the traffic that Facebook can drive and in potentially growing that.


So I'm going to start out with a few stats.


I think it is actually very important that marketers like us understand how statistics


work, especially as they're represented.


I hear from folks all the time, like, oh, my boss emailed me the new shareaholic report


and it says that 25% of all traffic comes from Facebook and we only get 10% of our traffic


from Facebook, so we must be doing Facebook badly.


And that's not actually the case.


And then I'm going to talk a little bit about some rough estimates, just for theoretical


fun purposes around traffic that Facebook might send versus Google, and then I actually


have a bunch of tips for Facebook optimization.


None of this is going to be dramatically brand new, but I've tried to distill down and aggregate


some of the best ones, throw out some of the ones that no longer apply as Facebook has


been maturing and getting more sophisticated, those kinds of things.


So all right, let's start with these stats.


So let's say your boss does send you this shareaholic report, right, and Facebook sends


24% of all referral traffic.


Wow.


And, you know, shareaholic is on 300,000 websites.


That's pretty, I mean, that's a pretty big group.


Like how can we ignore that data?


It's not that you should ignore it, but you should also be aware of why is shareaholic


installed and who uses it.


So these 300,000 sites are almost certainly massively over representative across the,


you know, several hundred million websites that exist on the internet of those that receive


and are optimizing for social media traffic.


So I think this is an excellent stat, and if you are a social media heavy site and you


are getting less than, say, 20%, less than 15% of your traffic from social, well, you


probably have some work to do there and some opportunity to gain there.


I also like this one from Define Media Group.


Define, of course, is Marshall Simmons' company, and they measure across major publishers.


So one of the things that you might hear is, you know, BuzzFeed, for example, last year


put out their big article about how they get 70% plus of their traffic from social and


they don't even care about search and search is dead, no one does SEO anymore, blah, blah,


blah.


It turns out, actually, I think BuzzFeed does a tremendous amount of caring about SEO despite


what they say, but they don't want to be perceived as doing that.


And they said, Define said, across all of their 87 major publishers, so these are big


news sorts of publishers and entertainment content publishers and that kind of stuff,


social send about 16% of all traffic, search 41%, direct 43%.


That's a very big difference from the social sharing site.


So again, you're seeing that granularity and disparity as we look across different segments


of the web world.


Worldwide, by the way, according to StatCounter, whose stats I like very much because they're


across such a wide range of distributed websites, many hundreds of thousands, I think even millions


of websites in the US and abroad, so that's really nice, and they share their global statistics


at gs.statcounter.com, which is one of my favorite resources for this type of stuff.


So according to them, worldwide Facebook in January of 2015 driving around 80% of all


social referrals.


In the US, interestingly enough, people like Pinterest and Twitter and LinkedIn and Google


Plus have more of a share than they do in the rest of the world, and so Facebook is


responsible for only about 68% of all social referrals in the US as a conglomerate.


It is the case for anyone measuring Facebook traffic.


The average pages per visit tends to be around one.


Now you compare that to Google where it's around 2, 2.2, 2.5.


You compare that to direct, and direct is usually closer to 3, 4, 5 visits per session.


So Facebook's traffic kind of at the low end of the performance and engagement scale.


It tends to be the case that when you're in that Facebook feed, you're just trying to


consume content, and you might see something, but you're unlikely to browse around the rest


of the website from which it came.


And that's just fine.


Although interestingly enough, Facebook does perform better, slightly better, than Twitter


does by this metric.


So Twitter's traffic is even more ephemeral.


So I try to do some rough statistics and think about like, okay, Rand, I really need a comparison


between how much traffic does Google send and how much traffic does Facebook send.


This is something that people ask about all the time.


There's no terrific sources of data out there, and so we sort of have to back into it.


And I think you can do that by saying, well, we know that Google's getting around 6 billion


searches a day currently, and we know that those send on average, well, we don't know


for sure.


We know that years ago an average Google search resulted in 2.1, 2.2 clicks.


I think that was 2009, so this is many years ago.


So it could have gone down or it could have gone up from there.


I'm going to say between one and a half and three visits on average, somewhere in there.


Facebook has 890 million daily active users, and we don't know the statistics again perfectly


there, but again, several years ago, I think this was, I want to say maybe four years ago,


2011, they had a stat that around two external clicks per day per Facebook user.


So let's say it's probably gone up, maybe two to four, somewhere between there.


So given that, Google is in the 9 to 18 billion referrals per day stage, and Facebook, 1.8


to 3.6 billion.


So if you think Facebook has grown just absolutely huge, it could be as big as a third of the


smallest growth maybe that Google has experienced in terms of referral traffic.


And I think that's possible.


I think the numbers are probably closer to the 9 and 3.6 than they are to the 18 and


That would be my guess.


I think Facebook is somewhere between 15 and 30 percent of the traffic that Google is driving.


So pretty massive, definitely bigger than any of the secondary search engines, right?


Probably driving more traffic than YouTube, driving more traffic than Yahoo, driving more


traffic than Bing, probably driving more traffic than all three of those combined even.


That's quite impressive, just not as impressive as the enormous amounts of traffic that Google


does set.


Still, one of the reasons that we care about Facebook, even if we don't love the traffic


that Facebook sends us because we don't feel that it performs well, Facebook's likes and


shares are very indicative of the kinds of content that tends to perform well in search.


And so if we can nail that, if we understand what kinds of content get spread socially


on the web and engages people on the social web, we tend to also perform well in the kinds


of content we create for search engines.


So some tips.


First off, make sure that the Facebook audience and whoever you're – well, that pen is going


to work beautifully for someone never.


Let's see if I can make it from here.


You guys can't see this, but we'll just pretend I make it.


Oh, yeah, nailed it.


Oh, it almost went in.


It like bounced off the shelf and then almost went in there.


All right, all right.


So make sure that your Facebook audience usage matches your content goals and targets, right?


So if you're saying, hey, we're trying to convert people to a B2B software product in


an industry that really targets technical folks on the engineering side, Facebook might


be really, really tough.


If on the other hand you are selling posters of adorable cats and dogs, whew, that's the


Facebook audience right there.


You should nail that, right?


And so I think you do have to have that concept.


You can't just disassociate those two, right?


You're working for a patent attorney.


Trying to get likes and shares is going to be really hard to their content versus maybe


trying to get some tweets or some shares on LinkedIn or those kinds of things.


All right.


Second, learn what does work in your topics in Facebook.


There's a great tool for this.


It's called BuzzSumo.


You can plug in keywords and see the pieces of content that over the past six months or


a year have performed the best across social networks.


You can actually filter directly by Facebook to see what's done best on Facebook in my


niche with my topics around my subjects.


That's a great way to get at what might work in the future, what doesn't work, what will


resonate, what won't.


Number three, you should set up your analytics to be able to track future visits from an


initial social referral.


There's a great blog post from Chris, I hope I'm not mispronouncing your last name, Mikulan's


post, it's over on – well, I'll link to it in the comments or in this post so you'll


be able to click directly there.


But Chris basically shows us how in Google Analytics you can set up a custom system to


track referrals that come from social and then what that traffic does after it's come


to you from social and left, oftentimes coming back through search.


Very, very common.


Headlines often matter more than content in earning that first initial click.


I'm not going to say they matter more than content overall, but headlines are huge on


Facebook right now and that's why you see things like the listicles and clickbait and


all of those types of problems and issues.


And Facebook says they're working to update that, but for right now there's a ton of


sharing going on that's merely around the text of that five to 15-word headline and


those tend to be extremely important in determining virality and ability to make their way across


Facebook.


Number five, it is still the case – this has been true for many years now across all


the social media platforms – that visuals tend to outperform non-visual content.


And when you have great visuals, the spread and share of those tends to be greater.


Number six, timing still matters a little bit, but actually interestingly not as much


as it used to.


A lot of folks in the social media sphere have been looking at this and saying, gosh,


you know what, we're running the correlations and we're trying these experiments and what


we're seeing actually is that it seems like Facebook has gotten much smarter about timing.


So they're not saying, oh, you posted in the middle of the night and you didn't get


very many likes so we're not going to show your post to as many people.


They're now saying, well, as a percentage of the engagement on average that's received


by this group in these geographies, in these time zones at these particular times, how


did you do?


And I think that relativism has made their algorithm much more intelligent and as a result


we're seeing that posting at a certain time of the day when more people are on Facebook


or less are isn't quite as powerful as it used to be.


That said, if you want to try some timing experiments, watch your Facebook Insights


page and figure those things out.


There's still some optimization opportunity to be gleaned there.


Number seven, the really big driver of Facebook's spread and of the ability to be seen by more


and more people, have a post seen by more and more people on Facebook appears to be,


at least from all the social media experts, and I would validate this myself from my experiences


there, is the percentage of the audience that's seeing the post interacting with that post.


By interacting I mean they like, they comment, they share, they click on the link, or even


I'm fairly certain that Facebook is also using a dwell time metric, meaning that if they're


looking at that post for a considerable amount of time, even if they're not clicking like


or share or comment or clicking, if they're observing it, if that's staying active on


their Facebook feed in the visual portion of the panel, that seems to be a metric that


Facebook is also using.


I would be fairly sure it is.


I think they're pretty smart about that kind of stuff.


Because this is a big driver, what you're trying to do is grow engagement.


You want more people to interact more heavily with your content.


I think that's one of the reasons that, unfortunately, things like clickbait work so well and great


headlines do too.


But, yeah, great, brand page reach is limited.


We know this.


There have been many sort of Facebook algorithmic updates that talk about what's the organic


reach if you post, but you don't pay at all, those kinds of things.


However, the flip side of this is that in order for Facebook to not be overwhelmed by


content because the amount of content that's posted there is simply enormous, they've reduced


some of those things, but that means a little bit more room for individual people.


Individual accounts like your Facebook account, my Facebook account, not my public page, but


my personal Facebook account, your personal Facebook account, those have a little bit


more opportunity to get reach versus brands, which for a while were more dominating than


they are.


Now it's pretty small.


Number nine, if your traffic from Facebook has good ROI, and this is one of those big


reasons why you need to be measuring the second order effects and when that traffic comes


back and those kinds of things, if that Facebook traffic has good ROI, go ahead and pay.


Pay to amplify.


This is just like Google.


If you see that a keyword is performing well and you can turn on AdWords and you can get


more of those visitors and they're going to convert, hey, the same thing is true of Facebook.


Facebook's traffic, generally speaking, is much cheaper on a per-click basis than Google's


is.


It's also much less targeted.


It's not perform as well, but much less expensive.


I would urge you to pay to amplify.


When you see sites that are performing gangbusters, Buzzfeed being a very fair example of that,


they're paying a lot of money to drive all of that traffic to their site and to amplify


their organic reach.


They're getting organic and paid reach.


The last one, number 10, Facebook's really hard to game anymore, didn't use to be this


case, with direct signals.


It used to be the case that if you posted something on Facebook, you could have a bunch


of your friends like, hey, everyone go check their Facebook feed now.


Make sure you subscribe to me.


If you don't see it in your feed, go over to my specific feed, click it, like it, share


it, comment it, but whatever.


And then we can sort of amplify its organic reach because Facebook cares a ton about those


first five or 10 minutes and what the engagement is like there.


That doesn't work very well anymore.


Facebook is very, very careful, I think, nowadays to look at who did we organically show this


to in the news feed.


How many of them interacted and engaged with it?


What's their history of interacting and engaging with stuff on this particular site?


Are they somehow connected?


Is there gaming going on here?


Have they consistently liked everything that's come from this site and the first five minutes


of it being published?


All those kinds of things that you would expect them to eventually get to, they've really


gotten to.


And so gaming it is much more hard.


But gaming people is not much harder because unfortunately our software has not been considerably


upgraded in the last few hundred years of evolution.


And so as a result, gaming human psychology is really how to, I don't want to say manipulate,


but certainly to get much more reach on Facebook.


If you can find the angles that people care about, that they're vocal about, that they


get engaged, excited, angry, passionate of any emotional variety about those things,


that's how you tend to trigger a lot of activity on Facebook.


And this is a little different than how it works on other social networks.


Certainly LinkedIn, parts of Twitter, Instagram, different.


Facebook very much this kind of controversy, passion, excitement, tribalism tends to rule


the day on this platform.


And I think that's part of why you see some of these clickbait and headline heavy sites


performing so well.


But if you want to find ways to make Facebook work for you, you might want to marry the


things that are on brand, on topic, helpful to you, actually will earn you good visits,


but do take into account some of that human psychology that exists on Facebook.


All right, everyone, what I would love, and I don't always ask for this, but I would love


if you have great tips or things that you've seen work really well on Facebook, please


share them in the comments below.


Would love to read through them.


I'm guessing there's some folks in the Moz community who have extensive wonderful experience


here.


I'd love to hear from you.


All right, everyone, take care.


Improve Your UX & SEO through Navigation Optimization Presented by Robyn Winner

This is awesome.


All right, cool.


So I'm just going to dive straight into this.


This is a heavy topic.


But I want to kick it off by saying navigation optimization came around.


Essentially I was agency side doing a lot of best practices and seeing zero impact.


It was insanely frustrating.


And then I got this magical client that kind of changed my life.


They came in and they had this animated dropdown navigation that broke the more you used it


and had about six pages of indexable readable content, which was just nuts when they were


in an extremely, extremely competitive environment.


So I said, okay, guys, let's hold our horses here and let's actually dive into what's going


on in your user experience because how can we as SEOers put out content on a site that


doesn't allow you to scale whatsoever?


So for us, I think the best place to start is really diving into how do you diagnose


what's going on?


What defines a bad navigation?


So what are some of the usual suspects?


So the first one is the concept of simple is better, no, not better, best.


This is so common nowadays.


With mobilegeddon, or as I like to say mobilefirstageddon, we're seeing all of these websites like this,


a desktop with where's that navigation?


There it is.


It's infuriating for all of us.


And granted, I am very huge when it comes to mobilefirst.


I'm all about redesigns and making sure that our website caters to all of these different


platforms.


However, using your mobile design, especially, this is a B2B company, using your mobile design


on a site that only gets 25% mobile traffic is a problem.


There is a recent study done by the Nielsen Norman Group, amazing, amazing study, by the


way.


They tested 179 different individuals across three different navigation types.


We've got the hidden navigation, which is your hamburger menu that we just saw, a combo


navigation which is extremely normal, that dropdown navigation, as well as a visible


navigation structure.


And they tested that across desktop and mobile.


What's fascinating about this is look at how much time it takes for someone to find the


navigation comparing the combo nav and the hidden nav.


It takes eight more seconds on desktop to find the navigation.


That is huge in a time that we don't measure in seconds anymore.


We measure in microseconds.


The next one that I decided to highlight, they actually go into really great detail,


download this, read this, it's amazing.


Content discoverability.


Content discoverability declines over 20% when a user went from using a combo nav to


a hidden nav on both desktop and mobile.


A 20% drop.


We need to be cognizant of this as marketers.


It is our job to make sure that we are providing the right user experience for people to access


the great content that we're putting out there.


And so agency side was diving into conversations with the developers, with the designers saying,


excuse me, but your navigation is broken.


We can't actually access pages because the animation faults and we're stuck on the home


page.


Now the next one is pushing the envelope too far on design and aesthetics.


We are probably all aware that this is happening, especially in 2016, websites are starting


to look like this.


And this was actually featured in an article that was talking about the latest trends of


like 2016 design.


As far as Google's concerned, well, number one, where's that nav?


Oh, there it is.


Number two, this is what this website looks like as far as Google's concerned.


Now I'm showing you an extreme to prove a point here.


Those sorts of trends, this sort of stuff feeds into how redesigns go and how we as


normal marketers that probably don't do as much outbound as they do and more inbound,


this feeds into how our websites look.


And so we really need to be aware of what is this design doing to our site and our user


experience?


Is it hiding content?


Actually on one of my client's sites, we discovered that the blog didn't actually exist because


the design team wanted it to dynamically display.


And there was three years of just three years of content that was nowhere to be found.


One page sites, I'm not going to like this one.


We have been it has been hammered home.


As far as anyone is concerned, when it comes to a one page site, it is not a good thing.


And Google, again, the only thing that exists is your homepage and like a weird about us


page that lives somewhere else.


But again, you only get rankability for this one page.


And then the final one, my favorite, especially because, again, the heavy emphasis on B2B


agency side, narcissistic navigation.


This is a navigation that literally only feeds into terminology that your marketing team


uses.


Yes, you guys are great at using your site.


Your sales team is great at using your site.


You know who isn't?


New users.


They have no idea what to do with your own internally created concepts as a navigation.


So all the time we would take this and turn it into something like this.


This is a very standard B2B navigation structure.


Now what is the goal of a website anyway?


You guys will probably recognize this.


The marketing funnel.


We need to make users aware that we exist.


We have to help them consider us.


We have to help them convert on our site and we have to retain them.


I bring this up because, yes, we are all aware.


We're like, yes, we love the marketing funnel.


But it actually doesn't get applied to many websites.


Again, why we all have jobs.


And especially us agency side, when you end up on these websites that are the Frankenstein's


monster of the sales team and the marketing team and the social media team all putting


content together, but it ends up somewhere in the corner and the core of the website


doesn't address any of these core subjects.


So now let's get tactical.


This is my favorite part of this stuff.


So first thing you need to do to diagnose and fix what I like to call a wonka doodle


navigation.


It's not really a word, but it's a thing.


You need to utilize your marketing personas.


So we need to be empathetic marketers.


We need to step outside of ourselves and step into the shoes of the people that we're marketing


to and go through our sites, actually do this.


And for those of us, again, agency side folks, when you first get a client and you complain


to your client, hey, by the way, I'm not really sure I can use your site or I'm not really


sure what's going on here, if you have that gut feeling that you're not super aware of


like where's everything located, it doesn't necessarily mean that you don't know their


product well enough, it may be a sign that their site just isn't organized well enough.


So really try to be your persona and step through your website as that person and see


if you can meet each of those different goals of the funnel.


Or of course you could run a usability test, which we all know what those are.


I had a client who I kept telling them like your navigation, it's just not right, it's


not right.


They ran a usability test finally and they're like, oh, hey, you SEO person, you're right,


it doesn't work.


This is all of the people that were in the test.


Extremely valuable information here.


Google analytics session data.


So this is an actual example of a client.


When I dive into Google analytics and I look at session data to identify if there's gaps


in my user experience, if there's bottlenecks, what I like to look at, I like to segment


it out and I compare everything back to all users.


So here I pulled out sessions with transactions, sessions with conversions.


Look at these numbers.


Bounce rate as expected is actually pretty low because these people engaged.


Sessions with transaction, 12.63 pages to convert and an average session duration of


15 and a half minutes.


The general manager of the company was in on this meeting and she looks at me and she


says, so you're telling me we're making it difficult for people to give us money?


I was like, yes, you are making it extremely difficult for people to give you money.


And again, this is an average.


Take yourself through your buying process.


Do not be a step away from your website.


You are your website.


Go through that.


I went through that process.


It was miserable.


I had to pick up the phone and call my own community reps to help figure out how to use


my own website.


Keyword rank analysis.


This actually connects really well to what Dr. Pete was saying earlier.


What you need to do when you're running a keyword rank analysis is get your keywords


and apply those keywords to a category or a concept just like he was talking about this


morning.


Then take that concept, look at where it's ranking or where the keyword is ranking and


look at that ranking URL and ask yourself, is this the right URL to be ranking there?


This is a question that gets missed time and time again when we're doing optimizations.


We say, hey, we're on page two for this blog from 2014 for running shoes.


Well, page six here, but ignore that.


How about we just rank higher?


How about we just optimize that page?


No.


No, no, no.


How do you know that you shouldn't do that?


Because apply your categories to the stage in your funnel.


And immediately you can identify, aha, so based on this category and all these keywords


that have been grouped into this category and this stage in the funnel, I know what


type of content needs to be created here.


And it's probably not going to be a blog content piece per se.


So this is an extremely helpful move to make when you are developing out your new navigation


structure and honestly I'm being dead serious.


I use my keyword list to develop out my navigation.


Now to be fair, I don't use, like, you have to caveat and make room for the fact that


there are going to be some intangibles.


There are going to be some places in your navigation that doesn't necessarily have search


volume but that's where your personas come into play.


And so as I'm developing out my keyword categories and aligning them with funnel stages, I then


place them into a hierarchy and this is where Excel, my love, comes into play.


And I take everything and I just keep lumping them and lumping them and lumping them together


and what you'll find is all of your product-based keywords will lump together into a product


section.


All of your solution-based keywords will eventually lump together in a solutions-based section


or in this instance we've got shoes.


Those will probably lump together eventually by gender or by type.


But this is so key and it's so simple.


At the end of the day, navigations are so simple.


We're here to tell the story of our company to people accessing our website.


So why do we make it so hard?


And then finally, I take all this information, put it in Excel, create a new column and say,


okay, what's my URL?


And I don't care what is currently ranking.


I go through and I decide myself based on the funnel stage that this category needs


to be or this keyword group needs to focus on.


I decide this is the kind of content I need here.


Now immediately I can see what's ranking and decide, okay, do I need to refresh that?


Do I need to add in a new page?


When I did this for my client I was mentioning in the beginning, we added I think over 70


new pages to the site and added around 20 to the navigation.


Just insane.


But doing something like this, kicking off your campaign like this or refreshing your


site with this, you're immediately unlocking so much information.


Implementation, double, triple, quadruple, check your work.


This is essentially a redesign you're going through.


301s, get them in place, update your site map, check Google Analytics and Search Console


of course.


Now impact.


This is what happened to that first client I was talking to you guys about.


This is what happened.


This went from about 5,000 a month to by the time I left the agency around 50,000.


It's insane.


This is not link building.


This is purely content organization restructuring and developing out new content and making


it accessible to users.


And the beauty of having a site that works and is a positive feedback loop.


So what you can end up doing is you create content, people can access that content and


the more they access it the higher it ranks because Google says, oh, hey, that's relevant.


And so it's just insane how much growth we saw.


Of course they were stoked to have to rebuild out their entire sales team because we gave


them too many conversions from it.


And this is another example of a client who had a lot of bad SEO they got hit with and


then went through redesign, kept segmenting out content and then we came in and said,


okay, let's kind of rethink your navigation structure.


Immediately unlocked those bottlenecks and saw immediate growth.


Again.


It just comes down to thinking about it from a very organized standpoint.


So here's some final thoughts on this.


Your navigation tells the story of your website to your users and search engines.


Avoid the narcissistic navigation as great as it is that it exists because it maintains


us having job security as SEOers.


It is really frustrating.


Do not let that happen.


And you don't need to go whole hog immediately.


This is a massive undertaking to do.


That being said, one of my favorite things to do, internally I put this all together,


I have Robin's ideal navigation mockup and I present that to the client or my team and


they say we can't do all of this.


I say that's fine.


Let's do this piece right here.


We do one section at a time.


But when you show this insane result from such a small section, suddenly there's buy


in.


Much like we've been hearing with AB testing, much like we've been hearing with test, test,


test.


Use a small piece.


Prove that this works.


And then immediately the number of clients that I go through redesigns, one of them is


here right now, it was just insane how they're like, all right, this seems to work.


Let's redesign or let's at least restructure how our navigation is focused and you just


see these immediate results.


And finally, have fun with it.


What we do as marketers is awesome.


We are the detectives of the Internet.


We get to sift through data and understand how people work and this is the best way to


take that information, put it into practice and see immediate results from it.


Thank you guys so much.


This has been awesome.


That was really good.


You increased my vocabulary by about 10%.


With made up words.


So we've got a couple of questions.


How do you marry accessible navigation UX with I'm sorry, accessible navigation UX with


excessive internal linking?


That's a great question.


So one thing and it's kind of an intangible answer and I wish that I could answer this


succinctly for every single person out there.


But there is a gut feeling that you get when you're looking at a navigation and there's


too much going on.


I am not a believer of take all your links and put it in the nav.


You need again to use your personas to understand what does somebody need to have from a high


level standpoint that any page they access my site from right?


Because in organic you can end up on any page of the site.


But what needs to be up there so they can access all parts of that user funnel and really


get to the level of information that they need.


But it's such an intangible.


It really depends from company to company.


One thing that was being mentioned to me by Rob off stage is that a lot of fashion companies


use denim in their navigation when what they mean is jeans.


The bias of the people who are making the product versus the people who are buying the


product.


Exactly.


Makes things more difficult.


I've gotten into arguments with clients over you're using X terminology but your customer


base has no idea or they don't care about that.


We have to go with what they're doing.


Can you run tests on making these kinds of changes?


Is there any way to check what the outcome might be before you do it all?


I personally have not.


What I end up doing is like I mentioned at the end not going whole hog immediately.


Doing a small piece of it in a section of your website.


Literally what we did is found some solutions pages and actually just put one of them in


the navigation to see how much impact that page would get from a visibility standpoint


within the site itself as well as from an organic ranking standpoint.


That helps you understand how much leverage your site has with certain terms.


There's again so many intangibles that the testing piece of it besides showing two different


examples of your site and then testing it from a user standpoint it's very hard from


a Google search standpoint to have two versions of your site showing.


I'll bet that the same is true of what Alex was talking about too.


This is going to be something that's worked a lot better on bigger sites that already


have some authority rather than you know.


Yes that is a key.


I'm glad you brought that up.


This is something that you see results like that when you already have a company that


has really decent domain authority and is extremely competitive and what they're missing


is the content piece.


Do you think the DA threshold that he gave is about right to like between 30 and 40 in


that range?


Again depending on industry but like in the B2B world 30, 40, 50 you're like spot on


and being extremely competitive.


Daily SEO Fix Video: Extra Tips & Tricks for Designing Reports

Hi again, I'm Varad from the onboarding team and thanks for joining me for this edition


of the daily SEO fix.


In the previous videos, we got to see that how we can add additional modules to the custom


reports even though we're using like a specific template.


But did you know that those modules can be personalized as well?


And for that, what we have to do is we have to go to the design report stage in the report


creation and in this report, now we can see that there are all of these modules.


We are going to scroll down to take an example of the keyword modules.


Now there are two keyword modules here as you can see track keywords review.


This particular module is telling you about the track keywords that have increased in


the rankings and then this module, the second one is telling you about the track keywords


that have decreased, that have dropped in the rankings.


You can use this edit option just besides the title of any particular module to explain


about what this module is about.


Now we have two modules for the track keywords.


This one we are going to do, let's say drop rankings and the other one, what we can do


is for this one, we can do increase rankings.


Now once we have this inserted here, we can also use this option to add a note as well.


Now what we have to do is we need to simply just click on this icon and drag this module


to anywhere in the report that we want this note to be.


And once we have added it here, we can insert specific details about the particular module


like above this, we have the track keywords module that explains us the keywords that


have increased in the rankings.


We can add specific information in the module as well and that'll help you in making this


report transparent to the stakeholders and it'll be helpful for them to understand what


this data is about and how is it important.


You can also use the markdown option at the bottom of the notes module or you can also


choose to add even a few colored borders as well in case you want to make this note stand


out.


Now these tips and tricks are available with the custom reports, but it depends on the


subscription level that you're on.


Just keep this in mind that once you're on a medium plan, you can have all the report


templates, but don't worry, the custom reports are fairly customizable.


Even if you choose to start from scratch, you can do everything from scratch and the


report will be fantastic.


Thanks again for joining me for this edition of the daily SEO fix.


Ranking Fluctuations: What to Expect + How to React - Whiteboard Friday

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


This week we are chatting about rankings fluctuations.


So many of you who monitor your rankings in Google might do so weekly or daily or monthly.


And for those of you who do it daily, you probably observe something like this.


I made this up.


This is not actually the keyword I tracked, but these are the numbers that I saw.


So basically, you might see that over the course of four or five days, you hop around


from number one, number two, one, one, one.


But as you go down this list right to the ranking position four or five or six, you're


seeing things like, oh, number five, and then I'm ranking number 21, number 19, seven, eight.


Gosh, it's just going all over the place.


And this happens quite a bit, actually.


And many folks ask questions on the Moz Q&A platform and all over the web.


And to their SEO professionals, like, why are my rankings jumping around so much?


And is this bad?


Is there something I should do?


The answer, generally speaking, is no.


Rankings bounce around like this in most search results, especially in the sort of bottom


half of page one and especially page two, three, four, five, quite a bit, a tremendous


amount in fact.


We see SERP fluctuation as being quite high, quite common, and consistently so.


It is rarely actually the case that you see that number one, number two, number three


positions that stay that way for extended periods of time, many weeks or months, without


moving at all.


Some random days you will check it and you'll see some of these changes.


Others, you'll see them in their consistent positions.


A few things to note, one, there is obviously more fluctuation in the lower down results


on average, usually, than there are in the higher results.


So if I get my rankings up here, can I expect no flux?


Not exactly.


When you first gain rankings in the top three, four, five, let's say, you will usually see


more fluctuation than after you've been there for a sustained period.


So what's unusual is to see a ton of rankings fluctuation for a URL that's been ranking


for a keyword in position one or two or three for two or three months in a row.


That's pretty uncommon.


You might see one or two position changes, but you usually don't see four or five or


six.


You should also expect to see more fluctuation, even in the top results, when there's a highly


temporal topic or result.


That you can observe by looking at the search results and seeing if Google's got that gray


text that says three hours ago or two days ago or they give a specific date of when it


came out, March 15th.


When you see those and lots of them, you should expect more fluctuation.


What should you do about this?


Well, first off, please, please, please, please do not freak out.


A lot of people just lose their cool with their SEOs or with their team or with themselves,


right?


They panic.


I would urge you not to arbitrarily change your tactics.


If you're observing rankings fluctuation like the kind I'm describing, so down here in the


five, six, seven positions, up here in the three, four, five positions from day to day,


that's okay.


You are not doing something wrong or bad, at least not necessarily and not usually.


I would urge you to use weeks as your time period, not days, and measure at least four


to six weeks of rankings before you start to freak out over, hey, there's too much rankings


fluctuation.


You should also compare your own fluctuation to your competitors.


So if you see, hey, I'm ranking here and I'm fluctuating a bunch, oh, but it turns out,


actually, the positions around me are also fluctuating.


Guess what?


It's not you.


It's the SERP.


It's Google.


Don't blame yourself for this.


I would try and compare your rankings to traffic.


So it can be the case that if you're hitting your rankings on a particular day or from


a personalized device or a geographic area or something like that, that you could be


getting different kinds of rankings than what's actually being seen by most people.


Now, rank trackers like Moz's or SEM rushes or AATREFs or search metrics or any of these


folks who do rank tracking at scale use a non-personalized, non-geo biased system.


I'll show you how to replicate it in the comments if you're interested.


But you should expect that you might see some of that bias.


So what I'd urge you to do is also look at your page traffic.


So if you look at traffic to your pages and then organic search, and if this is me over


here with Healthline, maybe I should check how many visits from organic search did this


page get.


Oh, actually, it looks pretty consistent from day to day and week to week.


Well, maybe I shouldn't panic then.


Probably you shouldn't.


The thing to be concerned about is precipitous falls over many pages in a quick period of


time.


So if you see that you've got 20 pages on your site, 50 pages on your site, they all


lost rankings yesterday and fairly significantly.


Okay, that's cause for real concern.


Now I would go investigate.


I'd see if you did something wrong or if maybe Google caught something that they thought


was sketchy that you were doing or if they devalued some of your links or you had some


site problems, whatever.


But normal flux, right, so two to four positions regularly at the top or more down at the bottom,


that is to be expected.


Don't panic.


You're going to be okay.


Google fluctuates all the time.


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


Why Every Website Should Invest in Local Links and Citations - Whiteboard Friday

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


This week we're going to talk about why websites, every website, not just local websites, should


be thinking about tactics and a strategy to get local listings and local citations.


This might sound counterintuitive.


I've actually encountered a lot of folks who run especially online-only businesses or even


blended online and local businesses who think, are local links really that important to me


or are they off-topic?


Could they potentially cause problems and confusion?


Should I be trying to get those?


And I'm going to try and make the case to you today that you absolutely should.


So recently I got to visit Scotland to talk to several folks.


I visited Skyscanner.


I spoke at the Digital Excellence event and spoke of course at the Turing Festival, which


was a remarkable event in Edinburgh.


But we actually landed in Glasgow on a Saturday and drove up to a little town called Inveraray.


So I'm going to use some examples from Inveraray, Scotland.


And I apologize if my accent is miserable.


But a few of the businesses we visited there, Loch Fine Whiskies.


Loch Fine Whiskies makes their own.


They have their own living cask, where they essentially add in whiskies and blends to


this cask that keeps evolving.


Whisky Shop, which is an online-only shop.


And then Inveraray Castle, which is a local business, entirely a local business, centered


around this lovely castle and estate that I think, if I understood correctly, is run


by the Duke of Argyll, Argyll being the region around there.


Apparently Scotland still has dukes in business, which is fantastic.


So for a local and online business like Loch Fine Whiskies, they sell whiskies in their


specific store.


You can go in, and I did, and buy some stuff.


They also sell on their website.


I believe just in the United Kingdom, unfortunately, for those of you watching around the rest


of the world.


But there are certainly reasons why they would want to go and get local links from places


that link to businesses in Inveraray or in Argyll or in Scotland as a whole.


Those include boosting their maps visibility, so that when you're searching in Google Maps


for whiskey or whiskey shops, you potentially, if you're near Inveraray, Google Maps will


make their business show up higher.


It also can boost their local rankings, so that if you're searching for whiskey shop


Argyll or whiskey shop Scotland or whiskey shop near me and you happen to be there, Google


will show this business higher for that ranking as well.


It also boosts their domain authority, meaning that those local links are contributing to


overall ranking ability.


That means they can rank for longer tail terms.


That means they can rank more competitively for classic web search terms that are not


just in local or maps.


Finally, of course, it sends valuable traffic.


If you think about a listing site like thelist.co.uk has them on there.


TripAdvisor has them on there.


A bunch of local Chamber of Commerce.


It's not actually Chamber of Commerce there, but Chamber of Commerce type sites list them


on there.


That sends valuable direct traffic to their business.


That could be through foot traffic.


It could be through referrals.


It could be through people who are buying whiskey online for them.


So a bunch of real good reasons why a local and online business should do this.


But if you're an online only business, I think a lot of folks make the case of, wait a minute,


Rand, isn't it true that if I am getting local links and local citations, those may not be


boosting my relevance, my ranking ability as much as they are boosting my local ranking


ability, which I don't actually care about because I'm not focused on that.


So for example, whiskeyshop.com, I think they are also based in Scotland, but they don't


have physical locations in an online only shop.


So getting a local link for them in whatever part of the region of Scotland they are actually


in would boost their domain authority, give them more ranking ability for long tail terms.


It's also really hard for their competitors to compete for those links.


And this makes link acquisition for an online only business, even from local sources, a


beautiful thing because your competitors are not in that region and therefore they can't


go get those same links that you can get simply by virtue of being where you are as a business


physically located.


Even if you're just in an office space or working from home, wherever your domain is


registered, you can potentially get those.


These links can also yield some solid anchor text.


There are a bunch of local sources that will not just point out who you are but also what


you do.


And when they point out what you do, they can link to your product pages or your different


site sections, individual URLs on your site, and provide anchor text that can be powerful


depending on how those submissions are accepted and how they're processed.


Some local listings, obviously you're not going to get them, others you are.


And there's one more that I should include here too, which is that local information,


even citations by themselves, can be a trust signal for Google where they essentially say,


hey, you know what?


We trust that this is a real business that is really in this place.


We see citations for it.


That tells us we can trust this site.


It's not spammy.


It doesn't have these spam signals around it.


That's a really big positive as well.


And so I'd have that, right?


Spam issues.


All right.


Spam trust issues.


Trust too.


Lastly, a local-only business.


I think this is the most obvious one, right?


We know that it boosts maps visibility.


We know that they boost local rankings.


We know they can boost your long tail ranking ability.


And of course, these local links send valuable direct traffic just like they do to a local


and online business.


If you're going to go out and look for some local links, a few quick recommendations that


are real easy to do.


You can do a search for a business name, not necessarily your business name.


In fact, not your business name, right?


Any of your competitors or anyone in the region.


It doesn't have to necessarily be your business.


It could be someone in the county or the territory, the state, the city, the town, minus their


site, right?


Because you don't want results from their site.


You're actually looking for what are all the places where their business is talked about.


And you can add in, if you'd like, the region or city name, right?


You can also search for one local business and another one.


So for example, if I was Whisky Shop and I were in Inverary or I were in Argyle, I could


search for Lockfine Whiskies and Inverary Castle, and I would come back with a list


of places that have both of those on their website.


That often turns out to be a great source of a bunch of listings, listing opportunities


and link opportunities.


You can Google just by itself the city plus the state or region or country and get lots


and lots of places, first off, that describe that place, but then also that note notable


businesses or that have business listings.


You can add the word listings to this query and get some more great results too.


You can also try out some tools here, Link Intersect in Moz or Majestic or AATRAFS, and


get lots of results by plugging in two of these and excluding the third one and seeing


who links to these that doesn't link to this third one.


And you can use business names in the same fashion that you do in Google in tools like


a mention, a talk walker, Google Alerts, or Moz's Fresh Web Explorer and see who is talking


about these local businesses or regions from a news or blog or forum or recent perspective.


So with that, I hope you'll do me a favor and go out, try and get some of those local


links.


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


of Whiteboard Friday.


Getting SEO Value from rel="nofollow" Links - Whiteboard Friday

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


This week we're going to chat about how you can get SEO value from no-followed links.


So in the SEO world, there are sort of these followed links.


They're the normal ones that you find on almost every website, but then you can have no-followed


links, which are essentially in the HTML code of a website.


You will see these, you know, the normal thing is a href equals and then, you know, some


website in here.


If you see this rel equals nofollow, that will mean that essentially the search engines,


Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc., will not count this link as passing link equity, at least certainly


not in the same way that a followed link would.


And so when you see these, you can see them by, you know, you could look in the source


code yourself, you could turn on the Moz bar and use the, you know, show nofollow links


on the page button and see these.


But the basic story is that you're not getting the same SEO value from them.


But there are ways to get it.


And as more and more sites recently, you might have seen in the SEO news world that Inc.


and Forbes and a few other sites like them, last year was Huffington Post, started applying


nofollow tags to all the links that were sent that belonged to articles from contributors.


You know, so if I go and write an article for Inc. today, the links that I point out


from my, you know, from my bio and, you know, my snippet on there, they're not going to


pass any value because they have this nofollow applied.


So there are a bunch of types of links that use this.


Social media, so Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, which is one of the reasons why you can't


just boost your link profile by going to these places and leaving a bunch of links around.


Comments, so from, you know, news articles or blogs or forums, where there's discussion,


Q&A sites, those comments, all the links in them that you leave, again, nofollowed.


Open submission content, so places like Quora, where you could write a post or Reddit, where


you could write a post, or YouTube, where you could upload a video and have a post and


have a link.


Most of those, in fact, almost all of them now, have nofollows as do the profile links


that are associated, right?


Your Instagram account, for example, that would be a social media one, but it's not


just the pictures you post in Instagram.


Your profile link is one of the only places in the Instagram platform where you actually


get a real URL that you can send people to, but that is nofollowed on the web.


And some publishers now with these less stringent publishing review systems, so places like


Inc., Forbes, Buzzfeed in some cases with their sponsored posts, Huffington Post, LinkedIn's


Pulse platform, a bunch of others, all use this rel nofollow.


So basic formula that we need to go to here is how do you contribute to all of these places


in ways that will ultimately result in followed links, and that will provide you with SEO


value.


And so we're essentially saying I'm going to do X.


I know that's going to bring me a nofollowed link, but that nofollowed link will result


in this other thing happening that will then lead to a followed link, and this other thing


happening can be a bunch of different things.


It could be something indirect, right?


You post something with your site on one of these places.


It includes a nofollowed link.


Someone finds it.


We'll just call this guy over here.


This is our friendly editor who works for a publication who finds it and says, hmm,


that link was actually quite useful, or the information pointed to was useful, the article


was useful, your new company seems useful, whatever it is.


Later, as that editor is writing, they will link over to your site, and this will be a


followed link.


Thus, you're getting the SEO value.


You've indirectly gained SEO value essentially through amplification of what you were sharing


through your link.


Google likes this, right?


They want you to use all of these places to show stuff, and then they're hoping that if


people find it truly valuable, they'll pick it up, they'll link to it, and then Google


can reward that.


Some examples of places where you might attempt this in the early stages.


These are a very small subset of what you could do, and it's going to be different for


every industry and every endeavor, but Quora contributions, especially those if you have


relevant or high-value credentials or very unique specific experiences, that will often


get picked up by the online press.


There's lots of editors and journalists and publications of all kinds that rely on interesting


answers to Quora questions to use in their journalism, and then they'll cite you as a


source or they'll ask you to contribute, they'll ask you for a quote, they'll point to your


website, all that kind of stuff.


Early comments, especially in, I know this is going to sound odd, but low-popularity


blogs rather than high-popularity ones.


Why low-popularity?


Because you will stand out, you're less likely to be seen as a spammer, especially if you're


an authentic contributor, you don't get lost in the noise, you can create intrigue, give


value, and that will often lead to that writer, that blogger, picking you up with followed


links in subsequent posts.


If you want more on this tactic, by the way, check out our Whiteboard Friday on comment


marketing from last year, on a deep dive into this topic.


Number three, following and engaging with your link targets on Twitter, especially if


your link targets are heavily invested in Twitter, like journalists, B2B bloggers and


contributors and authors or people who write for lots of different publications.


It doesn't have to be a published author, it can just be a writer who writes for lots


of online pieces.


Then sharing your related content with them or just via your Twitter account, if you're


engaging with them a lot, chances are good you can get a follow back and that will lead


to a lot of followed up links with a citation.


Instagram accounts, when you post images on Instagram, if you use the hashtags, hashtag


marketing is kind of one of the only ways to get exposure on Instagram, but if you use


hashtags that you know journalists, writers, editors, publications of any kind in your


field are picking up and need, especially travel, activities, current events, stuff


that's in the news or conferences and events, many times folks will pick up those images


and ask you for permission to use them.


If you're willing to give it, you can earn link citations, another important reason to


associate that URL with your site so that people can get in touch with you.


If you're using some of these platforms that are completely no follow or platforms that


are open contribution and have followed links but where we suspect Google probably doesn't


count them, Medium being one of the biggest places, you can use the republishing tactic.


Essentially, you're writing on your own website first, writing on your own website first,


but then you're republishing on some of these other places.


I'm going to go to Forbes, I'm going to publish my column on Forbes, I'm going to go to Medium,


I'm going to publish in my Medium, I'm going to contribute to Huffington Post with the


same piece.


I'm republishing across these multiple platforms.


Essentially, you can think of this as it's not duplicate content, you're not hurting


yourself because these places are all pointing back to your original.


It's technically duplicate content, but not the kind that's going to be bothersome for


search engines.


You're essentially using these the same way you would use your Twitter or Facebook or


LinkedIn where you are pushing it out as a way to say, here, check this out if you're


on these platforms and here's the original back here.


You can do that with a full article just like you would do full content in RSS or full content


for email subscribers and then use those platforms for sharing and amplification to get into


the hands of people who might link later.


No followed links, not a direct impact, but potentially a very powerful indirect way to


get lots of good links and lots of good SEO value.


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


We'll see you again next week.


#WhiteboardFriday: Every Metric Is A Vanity Metric

Hi everybody, welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday.


I'm Dr. Pete, the Marketing Scientist for Moz, and I want to talk to you today about


vanity metrics.


So I think we all have an intuition of what that means, but what I want to discuss today


is I think we get caught up in this being about specific metrics.


And to me the problem isn't the metrics themselves, the problem is the vanity.


And so I want to talk about us and what we bring to metrics and how to do better no matter


what the metric is.


So I want to start with this kind of simplistic SEO funnel of metrics, starting with ranking.


Ranking via click-through rate delivers traffic, traffic via conversion rate delivers leads


or sales or conversions, whatever you want to call them, the money.


And then beyond that we might have some more advanced metrics like lifetime value that


kind of get into revenue over time or profit over time.


And naturally over time we've moved down this funnel and kind of put our attention more


at the bottom, at the bottom line in the dollars.


And that makes sense.


And I think it's good that we've gotten away from metrics like hits, you know, in the early


days when a page counted more because it had 200 images and 73 JavaScript files.


That's not so great, right?


And we know now that's probably bad in some cases.


But it's possible to hold that mirror up to any of these metrics and get caught up in


the vanity.


And I know we're used to this with rankings and traffic.


We've all had customers that wanted to go after certain very specific head terms or


vanity terms as we call them that really weren't delivering results or maybe cost a lot or


were very competitive.


And traffic, okay, traffic is good.


But if you've ever had a piece of viral content that went really big but ended up not driving


any conversions because it had nothing to do with your site, you know, that's not so


great.


And in fact, traffic by itself could be bad.


You know, you could be overloading your server, you could be stopping legitimate customers


from buying.


And so bringing people to your site for no reason or the wrong people isn't that great.


And so I know it's easy to look at this and say, okay, but come on, sales, you know, the


bottom line is the bottom line.


I'll give you an example.


Let's say you have a big sale and you set everything to 50% off and you bring in a ton


of new sales and a ton of revenue.


But let's say I tell you that your profit margins were 20%.


Is that a good thing?


You just cost yourself a lot of money.


Now, maybe you had another agenda and you're hoping to bring them back or there's a branding


aspect.


But by itself, we don't know necessarily if that's a great thing.


You know, just making more revenue isn't so great.


And even profit or something like lifetime value, this is an example based in real life,


but I'm going to change it a little bit to protect the innocent.


Let's say you were a small company and you owned some kind of an asset.


You own some intellectual property or you own a piece of physical property and you sold


that one year at significant profit, big margins.


And then you look and you say, wow, this year we made 50% profits and next year we're going


to try to make 70% based on that number.


That would be a really terrible idea because that was a one-time thing and you're not taking


that into account.


And you know, this is a bit of a stretch, but it's possible even to take profit or something


like lifetime value or EBITDA even, you know, out of context.


And even though it's a more complex metric or it's farther down the funnel, you could


miss something important about what that number really means.


And so that's the first thing, you know, is this a real result?


Is that number going up necessarily good by itself?


Without the context, you can't know that.


The second thing where I think we really need to look at the entire funnel and not get focused


too far down is repairs, fixing what's broken.


So let's say you track sales, sales are going great, everything's going well, everybody's


happy, the dollar bills are coming in, and then it stops or it starts to drop significantly.


If you don't know what happened above this, you can't do anything to fix it.