we already have at our fingertips to solve the CMOs of the future's biggest problems.


The CMO Role Has Been Disrupted – Are You Ready for Your New Boss?

Because I've been looking for a while at what drives success for CMOs versus failure,


and I don't have time to get into all the failures today, but when I look at the studies done around


CMOs of the top 2,500 companies in the United States, they're seeing that things like customer


data and analytics, but not just having customer data and analytics, it's knowing how to use that


data to make better decisions. Then we see here the enterprise-wide business mindset,


and we also see voice of the customer at the leadership table with voice of the customer


being their number one goal. And I think that we as search professionals, content marketers,


and marketers that deal with search, I think we've got a really good chance to own the customer


journey because I think that we get more information about the customer journey than pretty


much anybody else does. I just don't think that we're using that data that we're already getting


all that efficiently. So let's start with the story. Once upon a time, there was a CEO, and the


CEO said this, do you all know that 2020 marks the 130-year anniversary of this quote? 130 years ago,


this was a problem that CEOs had about marketing. And you know what? When we think about our role


in understanding the customer and the customer journey, I will tell you that part of what leads


that inefficiency in spend on marketing is the fact that we're spraying broader than we need to


to target our customers. And I will tell you, the less you understand your customer, the more you


are going to have to spend to acquire that customer. But it's all good now, right? 130 years ago, they


didn't have Google Analytics. I'll tell you, having Google Analytics is a lot like having data. It's


not necessarily knowing what to do with it. Why? Because I do a lot of analysis on inefficiency in


marketing spends. And I will tell you that while it may not be 50% 130 years later with all these


cool tools, it wouldn't surprise me if it wasn't 30. And that's not a lot of progress. See, because


so often when we say, well, we've got analytics. I'm like, yeah, but analytics is a lot like being


punched in the face. Don't you wish you know that guy was going to throw that punch 30 seconds


earlier? Analytics is so often a tool that you check it once a week, or you look for certain


things. And by the time you finally look at it, you realize I've been getting punched in the face


for the last three weeks. And my analytics is just now telling me that it's a problem. In this


current environment, more than ever, I would say every dollar is under an extreme amount of


scrutiny right now, which means CMOs are being asked tougher and tougher questions than ever.


And those questions roll down to us. So what are we going to do to help CMOs in this current state


of affairs? But actually, this has nothing to do with COVID. Things were already looking pretty


bad for the CMO when it looks when we look at the C suite. There are articles around why CMOs are


always the first ones to be fired when business objectives aren't hit. Large companies are leading


the charge to completely get rid of the CMO role. And they're oftentimes replacing it with a chief


growth officer or someone else. But they're getting rid of the role. They're reevaluating the


role. And some of these companies are starting to say, whoops, we made a mistake. But still, the


CEOs were thinking, I don't know if I need that CMO anymore. And you can see Gap hires a CMO, gone


in 11 months. They've redefined the role. Lyft, eight months, gone. We shake up the marketing


department. It's like, man, we constantly have these arrows in our backs as marketers. And if the


people who write the checks to us to do marketing for their organizations are these folks, then how


can we help them look more like those successful CMOs that we've seen? Because every single study


that I've looked at shows the data that the CMOs have the shortest tenure in the C suite. All


right. So there's a little bit of a power play here. Let's just break it down in the role of the


CMO. If data is how successful CMOs operate, well, CIOs are the ones that own that data for them to


get. CFOs are the ones who approve their budgets. And CEOs are the ones who hire them and choose


how much to pay them. So the CMO, wow, in the C suite is really at the mercy of so many other


people to be successful in the role. And so often, if they don't all work together, we get the blame


and we're the ones who are fired first. So I have the ear of some CMOs. And you kind of think,


way great, I've got the ear of the CMO, but there's a new sheriff in town. And remember what


I just said, the CMO is always at the whims of the CEO, CIO, and CFO because they own the strings


to help marketers to do their jobs. And this guy has a chance to disrupt that even further


because he's got the ear of the CEO, the CIO, and the CFO. And remember, they got the puppet strings


oftentimes in many organizations over the CMO. And he is really good at translating and building


solutions that help us to take marketing speak into the language of the CEO, CIO, and CFO.


Now think about your job. How easy is it for somebody to connect your work into the language


of a CEO, a CIO, or a CFO? And if you're not doing that, then you're not setting up your CMO


or your marketing leadership to easily translate your work into the way that they look at the


business. I will tell you that that person is Brian Whipple, CEO of Accenture Interactive,


whom we are now starting to compete with on SEO. So the first time I heard a client say,


hey, we're looking at Accenture Interactive to do our SEO. And I have so much respect for Brian,


so much. So I googled it. I googled Accenture Interactive SEO. And I look at the first result,


and it's a Philippines site. And I'm like, man, their hreflang is off. And then the second result


is an old piece of content. And the third result is a PDF. I'm like, oh, we can't do that.


And then I look at Deloitte, who's also starting to offer SEO services and coming into our space.


And I'm like, their Malta site ranks number one, two. And then Glassdoor, they don't even have


regular content that's ranking appropriately to talk about their service offering.


Now, I think a lot of us who do search in the room, we're laughing at these guys a little bit.


They're going to do SEO. They can't even get their hreflang right. Well, let me remind you,


I've never seen the word hreflang in a quarterly report from a CFO or CEO. Do not think that these


guys are not going to come and be in our boardrooms having conversations right next to us. Why?


Because they've done it before. The Omnicoms, the Publicis, the IPGs, and Densers of the world


really fought against these guys. Sorry for the pixelated slide. I couldn't get this one correct.


But then in a matter of just a few years, they went from, they don't do what we do to, oh my


god, they're taking my customers. These guys know how to move fast because they have the ears of the


CEOs, CIOs, and CFOs and organizations. So now I need to understand, how does Brian Whipple talk?


Listen to the things that he's saying, look at this quote, and think that is what is making


CEOs who are over marketing, CIOs who are often needed for marketers to be more data driven,


and CFOs who approve the budgets. This is what he's saying to them and getting their buy-in over


our points of contact. Okay. Now you might be thinking, well, well, consultancies, you're


worried about that because that's your competitive world. But it's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.


If you're in-house somewhere, you have a CEO, a CFO, a CIO, and a CMO, and these dynamics are


happening there too. So how do you set up your in-house chief marketing officer, chief growth


officer to be speaking the language of the CEO and CFO and CIO? Because the result, if we continue


to take our information and not pivot it and turn it into a way that works for those folks in the


C-suite, well, we saw what happened already. The Accenture's, Deloitte's, Cognizant's, and IBM's


did acquisitions, came into the space and are now making the people who owned marketing for


sometimes 50, 60, 80, hundreds of years, they're making them sweat and they're taking their


business. You know, next time somebody starts talking about buzzword bingo about your CEO,


CFO, or CIO, tell them to shut up. Because if this is the language they're speaking,


and we want to change their minds, then maybe we should also be speaking their language as well.


We do not want to be the translator who only speaks one language. If the language you speak


is only SEO and it's not the same language as the CFO, then you're going to make it harder to get


SEO work done. Because I'll tell you this, I don't know a whole lot of CEOs who read Search Engine


land, but they're the ones who write our checks. Zims. Zero. None of them. They don't read it.


Sorry. Which is why on our site, we've got a couple of resources where we talk about how to


use the reports where the CFO and CEOs talk to Wall Street, because that's how they keep their


jobs and how we can translate our digital marketing efforts, whether it's this post or this


one on how to use financial statements to help you do SEO. We're sharing that information with


you because we think it's so critical for us to be a part of helping people to speak the language


of the C-suite so we can get the respect that we deserve at the table. And remember, sometimes SEO


divisions, and I wrote about this in a blog post, are better run by people who aren't in SEO. So


here's Crystal, Larry, and me, talked off on the right, and here's our SEO revenue over some time


period. And you can see what happened to the company. We started flattening out as me, an SEO


guy, was running the SEO division. The people who come in with their backgrounds in, with their


MBAs, and their understanding of business, took our SEO division to levels that I never could on


my own as a day-to-day practitioner because I still needed a little bit of practice on speaking


the language of the C-suite, and it was natural for them. Here's one SEO guy I just respect the


hell out of, Stefan Bajayo, and he said this, and that's hard, that's hard to read, guys, like the


worst thing, but I think he's right, but I'm going to show you in this presentation how to overcome


that issue. So let's start the process of saying, okay, well, you set it up, I get it, there's


different language out there, how do we do that, what does that look like and feel like? Well, first


thing I want to do is remind you of the amount of clues that we have every day at our disposal to


better understand customers. I search for the word transmission. Take a look, I could say, oh, you


rank for the map pack and be done my job, oh, you rank in organic and be done my job, or, oh, a snippet


shows up, but there's a lot more information here. There's not just that a map shows up, but it's the


position that the map shows up. If a map is in the first position, then Google feels really confident


that this is a local-based search. If it's in the 10th position, they feel less confident. That data


point's important. Then I want to be able to understand the distance from where I searched to


all those locations so I can understand where does my client need to locate their new offices


or their new stores. If people showing up and searching on Google is important to them, then I


need to be able to calculate from a zip code to these locations to see what's possible. And then


there's reviews there and there's words in those reviews which will give you clues to what people


think about these different organizations. And then below that, we've got the people also ask questions.


And think about all the data sitting in the people also ask. You've got the question itself. You've


got the answer. You've got a date in this one which tells you freshness of content. You've got


the domain which is Carbrain and you've got the URL. This helps you to get look at all those clues


sitting there to potentially be harvested to better understand the voice of the customer.


You search for the word transmission. Below the map and below the people also ask, you've got


software, information sites, definitions, dictionary.com, Wikipedia. You've got a piece of


content in here that's related to COVID. I bet you weren't thinking COVID when I said the word


transmission. And then there's stores and retail below. And yeah, COVID. Because for a while the CDC


was at the top of the second page or the bottom of the first page. Thank you, Amy, for that one.


For the word transmission. So let's think about something else that's going on here. In order for


us to understand the voice of the customer, that means that we need to also be consistently


monitoring how these things are changing over time. Because we live in such a fluid environment.


And my belief is whether it's a thousand keywords or a million keywords, whoops, whether it's a


thousand keywords or a million keywords, it doesn't matter. We can no longer track a hundred or


two hundred or three hundred keywords and think we've done our jobs. We need to evaluate all those


different clues at scale because we are not clueless. If you were to look at any other


marketing channel out there, I honestly believe that if you can harvest all those clues, we're


actually clue full. But we don't always have the tools to take those clues and turn them into


better customer experiences. And if you're thinking customer experience, remember the people


selling the CEOs, CIOs and CFOs and the successful CMOs are all talking about customer experiences


these days. And we need to make sure that we're constantly challenging ourselves to say, how am I


connecting this work that I'm doing right now to customer experience? For instance, when I just


showed that Malta site ranks for Deloitte, the goal isn't to say that's wrong for HREF Lang,


it's to talk about the customer experience. Are they getting the wrong language? Will they not be


able to complete their tasks? Will you not be able to analyze the impact of the work that you're


doing? We have to get our data out of these inefficient silos. But let's talk about the


coronavirus event. Coronavirus comes and the world changed for almost every marketer out there.


We had CMOs who were like, oh my God, my new reality is my CFO for the US region just said,


I have to cut my budget by 24% next week. And there's panic because then my CMO is going,


I got two days to figure out what I'm going to do. Panic. So what we did is we worked with one


of our clients and we started brainstorming and saying, okay, what can we do to help you here


with the data that we have? And we said, okay, if you're already paying for clicks and paid


and you are ranking an SEO in the top three positions, you might be able to get some of


that traffic for free. But if you're not in the top positions, you might need to keep paying to


get those conversions because you have no way of capturing that user. So let me give you a little


bit of a peek into the system that we built because I didn't want to build that system


for one client and show my team how each person now needs to download some CSVs and then open up


sheets and then transform the data and then use this plugin, that plugin. I didn't want my team


members spending time doing that. I wanted them to open the file and get the answer.


So we engineered the data in BigQuery to say, bring in every search term. We've been doing this


now for years to bring in every search term out of PPC every day. We then run the ranking analysis


on that every day so we can get the rank and we're doing this for every client. So what that means is


here's the file, it's live, where I just said, show me the rank between one and three,


where my client's gotten at least one conversion. And over to the left-hand side here, you can see


that 20.56% of every dime that every client who trusts us to spend money on their behalf on paid


is spent on keywords that fit that criteria. And then on the left side, where you see I have a


client name, I had each individual client and what percentage of their spend are on keywords where


they rank between one and three. So you can see that top client has a 59% of all their search


spend on paid, where on keywords where they already rank in the top three. So if their CFO


comes in and says, you got to get me that answer in two days and I need you to cut 24%, they know


they're safe. That same CFO, if you're the client at the bottom at 13.26%, we got to go find another


11% for you. And this is what it sounds like. Hey client, you spent this much on these many words


that have converted, where you organically rank in the top three, and that represents X of your


budget. And if that number X is over what you've just been asked to cut, we're done, right? Our


work here is done. Or we found other things for clients where we said, hey, let's run an analysis


across every client, where we say where have they spent money on a keyword that's gotten over 20


clicks. So it's got enough action now that if it's not converting yet, maybe it's not going to ever


convert. Where they already do rank in the top 10, so they still have some visibility. And then


the ability to say, hey, that's this percentage of your budget helped our clients to know instantly


where they might be able to make cuts without hurting their overall business. And we did that


for every client in two days, because we had built a highly efficient data flywheel that enabled us


to hypothesize and jump instantly into action. And we wrote a blog post about it. And our system is


so efficient right now that if anybody watching this today said, will I want that, literally from


the time you give us the access, in 48 hours, we could turn around and have that done for you.


Because the system is so efficient. I mean, it would literally run in minutes. And this might


take us a couple of days to do the analysis and get it back to you. So when my clients are


thinking, oh man, Will, when that second wave comes, if I get asked to make cuts, it's like,


whoa, when that second wave comes, all I got to do is we've already done the hard work. So we've


already built the infrastructure underneath. So all I've got to do is hit refresh on the file that


I already have built. One click will update for every client, every data point you saw to help us


help them through that tough time of how they make cuts. Because see, as you start to go and


understand your customer and understand their experience, when you find one-off things, I get


impatient when I find one-off smarts in my organization. And I go, how can I scale this so


every single client can find this kind of thing if it exists in their data with one click on a


refresh button? Let me give you an example. So we were doing an analysis of the words that people


were using pre and post COVID and looking at the impressions, impression growth over time. And one


of the things that we found, COVID hits, people were very, very, very, very worried about the FDIC.


We haven't seen a spike like this since the 2008 financial crisis. So what this tells me is for a


period of time, there was a significant amount of people who were worried about the safety of their


money for the FDIC. So if you're a bank and you're going after banking keywords, maybe for that two


week stretch or so, it would have been better to communicate to people or add into your


communication around how safe you are, not necessarily how high your rates are, because


there's a good chunk of the audience and a good chunk of your customers at the time might've been


worried more about the safety of their money than that return. And what we have here is an analysis


that we are now running currently for every client, where we're able to say, look at the


different engrams, the different word pieces. And I can see for instance, that anatomy is getting


a lot more impressions, but we're not converting those people as well. That's a different strategy.


So I want to be able to say to our clients instantly, Hey, this word people are searching for


people are searching for that word more. And what does that tell us about how we might need to tweak


the customer experience to better match these new concerns that are showing up more and more.


We did this for one client and I already had the highly efficient system and the right team. And


God knows I got a great team who were able to spring into action. And within a matter of weeks,


built this out so that we could do this for every client. That's what it feels like when you've got


a data flywheel at the ready that cuts through all these words and helps you to better understand


your customers. See, we're already getting these clues guys. They just exist in these silos.


It's our job to take the data that everybody else has, just like you and I, you got paid data,


you got scraped data from rankings. I got the same thing, but we're transforming it and making


it accessible and translating it into value for our folks in the C-suite. Because every time you


get a ranking for a word like SEO in your rank software, guess what? You're also getting all


the other clues as well. And the question is, are you ignoring these clues? If you look at the word


SEO company, it makes sense to bid on that word. Yes, it does. I'm an SEO company. I should bid on


the word SEO company, but there's a big clue in organic in the first spot that tells you that


people want local. So if you are a company in Utah and you're bidding on the word SEO company,


Google's learning has already taught us that people want local more than likely. So you might


want to change your bid strategy based on what Google's already learned about the customer,


which is the average person searching for SEO company wants a local solution.


Google's already learned it. We just have to transform our marketing to take advantage of it.


And you see this concept of just getting more data in and saying that, oh, the more data I get,


I can make better decisions is not true. There's a massive roadblock between these things. And it's


interpreting that data to turn it into actual better decisions. We get enough data, don't we,


with all these freaking tools that we have at our availability. We need to find a way to make these


things all work better together. Keep in mind, this isn't just about getting more data. It's


about transforming and translating that exact same data into value for the C-suite. Because remember,


the other thing that successful CMOs, the CMOs were holding onto their jobs longer than their


cohort. They're strong at being the voice of the customer at the leadership table.


Because you know what? A CIO doesn't know what the customer wants all the time.


A CFO, that's not really their thing. So we need to double down on helping the successful CMOs and


chief growth officers at our companies be a stronger and stronger advocate for the customer


by tearing through our data and saying, hey, there's clues that Google's learned.


How can I use those clues to better understand what our customers are seeking?


So let's talk about a few customer journeys. Let's take the word joint. Now I want you to stop and


think about the word joint. Come up with what you think that word could mean. And now let's go


through a journey together. I was staying at this low class joint. The bed was hard as a rock, so


now my joints hurt. I had softer beds when I was locked up in the joint. My day got even worse when


my wife served me papers for joint custody. I would just love a good joint recipe, because man,


I need a good meal right now and a joint to relax. Now look at all the different meanings of the word


joint. And I think this one example will give you a feel for how the word joint can have a lot of


different meanings. And who knows the meanings of those words in context better than anyone else on


the planet? Google does. So when I add the word joint in front of a checking account, I can see


that I'm at a bank. And when I add the word joint in front of a checking account, Google knows


exactly what the right answer is. Now I want you, all you smart marketers out there, to stop and


think, okay, I'm at a bank, and I'm doing marketing for our checking account. And somebody says,


well, what's the best result for joint checking account? Think about what you would, the page you


would build to talk to that customer and give them the best experience possible. And now I'm


at Fulton bank. Ready? Let's go show these old school marketers who don't have data flywheels.


They got gears, but they're old crusty and rusty. Here's Citibank. Now I want you to go back to what


you were just thinking about joint checking accounts and how to market a joint checking


account. Now look at the text. Look at the fact there's only singular person here.


Citizens bank. They actually have a page that ranks number five organically for the word joint


bank accounts, but they're showing this page in their page because they have siloed crusty,


rusty gears. This page doesn't say anything about joint checking accounts, and they've already done


the hard work to build a page that earned the ranking organically. And here's the page we're


driving people to. Customer experience wise, I think we're a bit off folks. Don't you think


so? And then let's look at Fulton bank. And none of these banks mentioned the word joint on the


page. They didn't mention the word joint at all. They're not speaking their customer's language.


When is it a good marketing idea to not speak the language of your customer? And these are the kind


of things that CMOs are under pressure on because a CEO randomly searches for this, finds it and


goes, how is it that we're not doing this? A CIO goes, how are you not using all that data I've


been giving you to fix this problem? And how big of a problem is it? And how often is this happening?


And CMO is going to go, I have no idea. They're going to talk to them, hopefully. They're not


hopefully going to not talk to them about match types, but they're going to ask somebody just like


us, why this has happened and what's going to be our answer. And I'm not going to show you the


other three sites who have the exact same problem. And mind you, these clicks are 12, 13, 14 bucks.


Why spend money to piss your customer off? It makes no sense. Why would you spend money


to send somebody to a page that has no chance of actually solving their problem or speaking their


language? But one marketer, my friends, seems to have some pretty efficient gearing going on.


And it's simple. Look at this page. Is this the kind of page you thought you might build for the


word joint checking account? Because it's the kind of page I would have built. It shows two people.


Because we know what we mean when we say joint checking account. It uses words like share and


yours, mine and ours. And the next image is also of a couple. They talk about together and shared.


And look how often they use the word together. Together means the two of you together. And then


there's a picture of two lovely people on the beach on vacation together. Hmm.


Who do you think is proving that they best understand the customer and that they've got


an ability to understand that the word joint in front of checking account makes the word mean


something different and they're able to execute and react to it? Who do you think has the strongest


flywheel? If you were a marketer and you said, okay, I can hire a marketer from any of those


companies or their agencies, who would you pick? Who seems to have figured something out that


everybody else hasn't? And that my friends is what I consistently show you on this stage at MozCon


for the last few years. All right. So now let's think of another customer journey.


I recently got this ad on Instagram. Instagram is a mobile platform. Yes. Right. We all know


Instagram is a mobile platform. So I'm looking at this ad and I'm going, Holy smokes. I've never


been to their website before. And these are my actual shoes. They are really good at targeting


me on social. And I bet you somewhere, the team who's behind me, they're going to be like,


I bet you somewhere, the team who's behind showing ads to me that are the exact shoes that I have.


They're like, Oh yeah. If you're at Facebook or you're the targeting vendor or you're the


social person or the social team at Nordstrom, you're like, our stuff is so good that we can


target people with the shoes they're currently wearing. Hi freaking five. Not so quick because


they're very efficient gear on social, but everything else around them is old crusty and


rusty. The page wasn't even mobile friendly. How can you drive somebody on an ad from Instagram


to a landing page? That's not mobile friendly. Instagram is a mobile platform. When's the last


time you checked Instagram on your desktop? Right. And what hurt me even more is they only have


a size 10 and a half. As you can see, when you look at the sizes, everything else was sold the


freak out. Man. Now, if I did wear a 10 and a half, I'd have been like, Oh, okay. Maybe.


But now this is a great example of an inefficient set of gears. One really bright, shiny, awesome


gear connected to a bunch of old crusty and rusty gears. And your customer is like, what kind of


fit is that? Like, what is that? Like how, how did this happen? I wanted those shoes. And now if you


showed me those shoes and I love those shoes and you make the experience hard and you don't have


my size, you just paid for me to go find that product somewhere else for somebody who didn't


have to pay. So now I'm going to Zappos. Thank you Nordstrom for paying for Zappos conversions.


This is where we need to adopt an enterprise wide business mindset. How do we get the data


across the enterprise, bring it together and make all these, all these gears come together


and work together. Because if you break down this problem, there's a way this could be solved at


scale. You take every Instagram ad and you get all the URLs that you're driving people to that


data exists. You run those URLs through a tool or an API that can check to see if it's a good


tool or an API that can check to see if it's mobile friendly. And you do this at scale every


day. And then you say, I'm going to take the images in my ads and run an image lookup via an API


to my product database. So I can make sure that I can then pull the inventory for that product.


So now you've got an efficient flywheel that says, I'm checking to make sure my pages are


mobile friendly. I'm looking at the, at the product that I'm targeting that person in that ad.


I'm then looking that product up against my own inventory to see if I actually have a high enough


stock to keep advertising, or maybe I could shut it off. That my friends is how we get out of 50%


of my advertising is wasted. You build the efficient systems to protect those budgets.


And that's why we can't just rely purely on this using the same tools. You know, many of us out


there have a client in the space where we compete with each other. And I'm always thinking, where


can I take data from tools that we all have and pivot them, turn them in a new way and get us and


our clients that information faster. So their flywheel is going faster than ever. You don't


have this. It's going to be hard to compete with somebody who built a system to find the things


that you can only check once a month or once a quarter. Let me give you another customer journey


before I wrap up. Let's take the word enterprise customer support. And I want to show you the


journey. It's not so much a customer journey. It's a journey through siloed data sets and how we can


be better. And this is what I've been talking about on stage forever. So if I take this word


enterprise customer support, and I take it to my SEO team, if they got to make a decision on


whether or not to go after that word, they're going to look at monthly search volume. And they're


going to go, ah, that volume's low. Skip it. 50 searchers a month. Skip it. But if I can combine


my SEO gear and my PPC gear in an efficient way, I will now be able to say, wait a second. My PPC


data is saying, excuse me, my PPC data is saying that word drives some conversions.


So while the volume is low, it seems to drive us some people who pay our checks at this company.


Maybe, just maybe we should target it because now I've got new data, which are, is that word


converting or not? And paid. But we're not done yet. There's analytics. And what you and I know


about analytics is very often analytics will have multiple other goals in there. So let's just say,


now I'm taking my MSB from SEO, whether or not that keyword converts from PPC. And I'm also


saying, wait, does that keyword land people on a page that is highly likely to lead them to


subscribing for emails or signing up for webinars, which I might see as highly valuable as well,


because maybe I've got a great way of getting people from webinars and email into becoming


customers. So now you can see that the siloed SEO was like, nope. SEO PPC together was like,


maybe SEO PPC analytics data together goes, this is looking even stronger, but this is not the


Holy Grail, my friends. The Holy Grail that I'm working towards, because I already have my SEO PPC


and analytics data connected this way. The Holy Grail is for me to get buy-in for my clients


to give us their CRM data, not their customer data. But I want to be able to push data into


their CRM. So in this instance, you could say, wait a second, enterprise customer support.


Yes, monthly search volume was low, but it did convert a good bit. So we had a couple


conversions this year on that word. And then my analytics goes, wait a second. I'm adding data


in too, to that word, to let you know that that word and the page that those people land on,


it does a good job of driving us email subscribers. But the Holy Grail, my friends,


is the CRM. Could you imagine if you could say, wait a second, SEO, we're going after this word,


because I now know that we've got three deals that have closed in my CRM on my CRM.


So I'm going to go after this word. And imagine if you took every word and ran it through these


four things every day with just a refresh. Imagine the decisions you could make and how much quickly,


how much more quickly you could find opportunity to help your clients, your bosses, et cetera,


take advantage of these opportunities before anybody else is even thinking about it.


So I'm going to go after this word. I'm going to go after this keyword. I'm going to go after this


important one and read another question about just getting that root you, what kind of


that you decide to do it.


And I'm going to leave you with a story


about the difference between an architect and a builder.


I'm currently working with an architect.


And what he says to me is he goes, well, life's


not all about vacations.


What makes you fight?


Everybody gets along on vacation,


but that's only seven days a year, 14 days a year.


All the other days of the year, you're


at home with your significant other.


And he says to me, what makes you fight?


We're not looking at houses yet or examples or flooring.


He says, what makes you and your wife fight?


What gets on your nerves about each other?


And I tell him a couple of things that


are going to stay between me and my wife,


because you don't need to know.


And then he says, what makes you smile?


And I go, oh, man, it's seeing my sister pushing my kids


on a seesaw or hanging out and watching my kids just


play together and grow together.


And it's just so meaningful to me


to just be able sometimes to catch


that little peek of them being kind to each other


for a couple seconds.


This is what he talked to me about.


He didn't talk to me about the flooring, which


is our version of the keyword or the H.F. Lang.


He talked about my dreams and what makes me smile.


And he said, I'm going to eventually build you a house


that minimizes the things that upset you


about the relationship with your wife and maximizes your smiles.


He said, I'm going to build you a house with a courtyard.


This is not my house.


But he said, I'm going to build you a house with a courtyard.


And I'm going to make every room face the courtyard.


Your office will face the courtyard.


Your bedroom will face the courtyard.


Your kitchen will face the courtyard.


Your living room will face the courtyard.


And he goes, why?


Because your kids are going to spend time out there playing.


And I want you to be able to see your kids.


Even if you're working, I want you


to be able to lean over to the right a little bit,


look around your monitor, and always


be able to see your kids if they're out there playing.


And he tapped into my dream.


And he also said, hey, if you think


your wife keeps a sloppy closet, how about I


build your walk-in to where you walk into your closet first,


and hers is actually behind yours


so you never see her mess?


And I was like, we're going to stay together


because of this guy.


But he attached to my why.


And he understood that my language wasn't


about the flooring just yet.


Eventually, it is going to be about flooring.


But it was about the dream, which is to keep us married


and to help us to easily always see our kids growing up


together.


Now, there's another person working on my project


right now.


And this is how this person looks at their job.


I come to the site.


I lay bricks for some tech dude that does conferences.


That was how they see their job.


The problem with not seeing the bigger picture of where


you fit in the larger ecosystem around the customer experience


and dream is this.


If you wake up every day to lay bricks and you're 50,


you'll be all right.


If you're 25, this machine's coming for you.


And then what are you going to do?


That's why it's so important for you


to connect to the why of the customer


and use that same search data to connect to their why.


I think this is my eighth or ninth straight MozCon.


And I just want to remind all of you


that there's an architect inside of each of you.


But many of you have that architect hiding


behind a bricklayer mentality.


You have all the tools at your disposal.


You get ranking results.


You can look at all the titles and descriptions


of things that are ranking.


You can see the transmission just changed.


You get that paid data, join it to your SEO data,


which I showed you all how to do three years ago.


You have the tools to be architects.


I just can't wait to see all of you


take advantage of those tools.


Thank you so much for your time.


I'm Will Reynolds.


Hang in there.


And hopefully, I'll see you next year.


Have a great rest of your MozCon.


Take care.


Custom Extraction with an SEO Crawler - Whiteboard Friday

Hey, Marius. What's up? Wow. Can I just say, incredible. I'm here in Seattle right now


doing a White Ball Friday. I can't wait to share this cool stuff with you. So, thanks


for joining me. My name is Luke Carthy, as you can probably tell, I'm from the UK. And


I want to talk to you about custom extraction, specifically in the world of e-commerce. However,


what I will say is this works beautifully well in many of the verticals as well. So,


real estate, in job listings. In fact, any website that can pretty much spit out HTML


in a web crawler, you can use custom extraction. So, let's get started. What is custom extraction?


Well, as I kind of just alluded to, it allows you to, when you're crawling, using like a


screaming frog, for example, or deep crawl or whatever it is you want to use, then it


allows you to grab and extract specific parts of the HTML and export it to a file, CSV and


Excel, whatever you prefer. And as a principle, okay, great. But I'm going to give you some


really good examples of how you can really leverage that. So, e-commerce, right here,


we've got a product page that I've beautifully drawn. And everything in red is something


that you can potentially extract, although, as I said, anything on the page you can. These


are just some good examples. So, think about this for a moment. You're an e-commerce website,


you're a listing site and, of course, you have listing pages, you have product pages.


Wouldn't it be great if you could very quickly, at scale, understand all of your product's


pricing, whether you've got stock, whether it's got an image, whether it's got a description,


how many reviews it has and of the reviews, what's the aggregate score, whether it's four


stars, five stars, whatever it is. That's really powerful because you can then start


to understand how good pages perform based upon the information that they have, based


upon traffic, conversion, customer feedback and all sorts of great stuff, all using custom


extraction and spit that out on, say, a CSV or an Excel spreadsheet file. But where it


gets super powerful and you get a lot of insight from is when you start to turn the lens to


your competitors and you think about ways in which you can get those really good insights.


So, you may have three competitors, you may have some aspirational competitors, you may


have a site that you don't necessarily compete with, but you use them on a day-to-day basis


or you admire how easy their site was to use and you can go away and do that. You can fire


up a crawl and there's no reason why you couldn't extract that same information from other competitors


and see what's going on. So, see what pricing your competitors are selling an item at. Do


they have that in stock or not? What are the reviews like? What FAQs do people have? Can


you then leverage that in your own content? So, let me give you a perfect example of how


I've managed to use this. I've managed to identify that a competitor doesn't have a


specific product in stock and as a result of that I've been able to increase our prices


because they didn't sell it. We did at that specific time and we could identify the price


point, the fact that they didn't have it in stock and it was awesome. So, think about that.


Really powerful insights at massive amounts of scale. So, another example I wanted to


talk to you about. Trying to think of the best place to stand, so let's swap over. Category


pages, again, incredibly gorgeous illustration. So, category pages, we have filters, we have


a category page and just to switch things up a little bit, I've also got like a listings


page as well. So, whether it's, as I said, real estate jobs or anything in that environment.


If you think about the competition again for a second, there is no reason why you wouldn't


be able to extract via custom extraction the best filters that people use, the top filters,


the top facets that people like to select and understand. So, you can then see whether


you're using the same kind of combinations of features and facets on your site and maybe


improve that. Equally, you can then start to understand what specific features correlate


to sales and performance and impacts and really start to improve the performance of how your


website performs and behaves for your customers. And the same thing applies to both environments


here. So, if you are a listing site and you list jobs or you list products or classified


ads, is it location filters that they have at the top? Is it availability? Is it reviews?


Is it scores? And you can crawl a number of your competitors across a number of areas


and identify whether there's a pattern, see a theme and then see whether you can leverage


and better that and take advantage of that. So, that's a great way in which you can use


it. But on top of that and the one that I am most fascinated with is by far recommendations.


So, in the MozTalk I did earlier, wow, what a blur. Anyway, I had a statistic and I think


I can recall it. It was 35% of what people buy on Amazon comes from recommendations and


75% of what people watch on Netflix comes from suggestions, from recommendations. So,


think about how powerful that is. You can crawl your own site, understand your own recommendations


at scale, identify the stock of those recommendations, the price, whether they have images, in what


order they are and you can start to build a really vivid picture as to what products


people associate with your items. And you can do that on a global scale. You can crawl


the entire of your product portfolio or your listing portfolio and get that. But again,


back to powerful intelligence, your competitors, especially when you have competitors that


might have multi-variable facets or multi-variable recommendations. And what I mean by that is,


we've also in sites where you've got multiple carousels, so you've got recommended for you.


You might have people also bought alternative suggestions. The more different types of recommendations


you have, the more data you have, the more intelligence you have, the more insight you


have. So, going back to say a real estate example, you might be looking at a property


here, it's at this price, what is your main aspirational real estate competitor recommending


to you that you may not be aware of? And then you can think about whether the focus is on


location, whether it's on price, whether it's a number of bedrooms, et cetera. And you can


start to understand and behave how that can work and get some really powerful insights


from that. So, to summarise and bring it all to a close, custom extraction is all about


great granular data at scale. And the really powerful thing about it is you can do all


of this yourself. So, there's no need to have to have meetings, send elaborate emails, get


permission from somebody, fire up Screaming Frog, fire up Decrawl, fire up whatever kind


of crawler you want to use. Have a look at custom extraction and see how we can make


your business more efficient. Find out how you can get some really cool competitive insights.


MozCon 2015 - 26 - Useful Applications of Facebook Search for Marketers with David Mihm

Well, thank you for that overly generous introduction, Cyrus. I'm not sure who got a better one,


Matt Brown or me. So thank you very much. I am indeed here to talk to you guys for a


few minutes today about Facebook search. And before I do, I do want to lead with a brief


disclaimer, which is I am by no means a Facebook marketing expert. You know, that's the domain


of friends of mine like Marty Weintraub and Will Scott and Matt Siltila. But as Cyrus


said, I have been spending a lot of time experimenting and researching a little bit into Facebook


search products and had my interest piqued by a number of stories that have come out


about Facebook search this spring. And so I wanted to share some things with you and


hopefully by the end of this 30 minutes, I've convinced you that it's something that you


too should probably think about paying more attention to. So that's really the goal. Brief


outline of what I plan to cover here today. A little bit of context, again, about why


you should care. Some of the history involved with Facebook search, which I think is incredibly


important to look at for where they might be going. Then I'll dive into some tactical


ways to construct queries, especially structured search queries using the graph piece of Facebook


search and use cases for those queries before getting into tactical implications for the


future. So with that, a little bit about why I think you should care and why you should


be paying attention to Facebook search. So I'm sure all of you have seen some variation


of this graphic, basically Facebook's user growth in the last seven years. The main point


to me is that despite what we hear about, oh, Instagram and WhatsApp and Snapchat and


all of these things bleeding Facebook users, they're still growing at a pretty good clip.


The percentage growth rate has obviously slowed down, but it's a linear growth pattern. They


have almost 1.5 billion users on Facebook today. So it's a huge number of people. And


more importantly, something that many of you probably didn't know, I certainly didn't know


it before I put this presentation together, as early as September of 2012, Facebook was


already getting a billion search queries a day, which is kind of a crazy number. And


in fact, I wanted to see how crazy a number it was. So I went back and I looked at the


com score data from this time period, September of 2012. And I know Marshall's presentation


yesterday was spot on. This is not perfectly precise numbers probably, but I think it's


directionally accurate. And if you look at this time period, September of 2012, you see


Google's at about 110 billion searches a month. And Facebook's 30 billion searches a month


already in September of 2012 would have made it a very strong number two search engine at the


time. And I think that a lot of us just don't realize how much search activity was already


happening on Facebook three years ago and has continued to increase in the last few years.


And I think this becomes even more important when you look at slides like this and the one


that Rand showed from the RKG studies in his initial presentation, the overall growth rate


of referrals from Google search and especially from Google organic search, thinking about


Dr. Pete's presentation, the number of those referrals is continuing to level off at the


very least. And so we as marketers, if we want to continue to try to grow our audience


through search, I think we need to start thinking about different opportunities. And Jeremy


Stoppelman, Yelp's CEO, actually echoed this sentiment a few months ago in one of their


earnings calls, basically saying that the age of users going to Google and typing a query and


clicking a link and visiting a website and hopefully converting on that website, you know,


the traditional funnel that I think a lot of us have kind of built our businesses on and are


generally evaluated on, that era has kind of peaked. We've kind of maxed out on that. And so


if we want to continue to grow our audience through search, I think Facebook represents a


really good opportunity to do that. The picture becomes even clearer when you look at what's


happening on mobile. So this is a slide from Flurry Analytics. Time spent on mobile phones. We


probably, hopefully you guys already know this, but 86% of the time is spent in app and only


14% in mobile browsers. Obviously it's a huge threat to Google and one of the reasons that


they're pursuing all of these alternative strategies in mobile. And in particular, if you


look at the specific apps that we're spending time on, Facebook dominates. 17% of all time on


mobile devices is spent in the Facebook app compared to 12% in both browsers, basically Chrome


and Safari. That's browser time. That's not search time. That's browser time. So Facebook


basically has become the home page, the home app for pretty much everyone on mobile phones.


And so as we look at, again, the growth rate in search volume declining at Google, the share


of organic search as a function of web visits declining from Google, I think Facebook is


generally very well positioned to help us make up some of that gap. And for those of us who


are paying attention in the early days of Facebook search, I think it represents a great


opportunity. And yet, I don't know how many people are really aware of the amazing search


infrastructure that Facebook already has. So my favorite industry news site, search engine


land, you can see here comparing the number of articles they've written on Facebook search


which is Google search, it's a dramatic difference. We all sort of have these Google blinders


on, even especially at Moz, the same search for articles published on the Moz blog. And even


when we publish articles on Facebook search on the Moz blog, two of the top three results are


about Facebook influencing Google results. Incidentally, the top result here, the


marketers guide to Facebook graph search, an excellent guest post that I'll refer to at the


end of the deck. But at any rate, I think we all sort of have these blinders on when it comes


to search that it's so Google focused. And I think that Facebook is really poised to present a


great opportunity to those of us who are paying attention. So let me walk you through a


little bit about where Facebook search has been, where it's come from, and where I think it


might be going. As I said, Mark Zuckerberg was quoted three years ago as saying they're


already getting a billion daily queries. This was even before they actually had a formal


search product. So graph search launched in January of 2013. And graph search was and still


is, I think, most useful and kind of primarily focused on returning people results. So this is


from their initial press release, people who like cycling and live in Seattle, Washington. These


kinds of queries are really what graph search was designed for. And Mark Zuckerberg kind of


backed that up in one of the initial articles that was written about graph search on Wired


saying one of his primary use cases was really around recruiting, which is obviously very


people focused. But we do see that he has his eye on Google search more broadly, whether you're


looking for a top restaurant or a museum or what's to say, the favorite tunes of art majors in


Montreal. So much more general queries that Facebook search will eventually apply to. So graph


search was rolled out to all English users soon after that. Not much really happened from a


product standpoint in the interceding year and a half. And then in December of last year, I


think something pretty important happened. Graph search became just search. And really what


that entailed was posts as a result type. So instead of people as a result type kind of being


prioritized, I think posts now got a much bigger boost in terms of the types of results that


Facebook was showing for searches. And simultaneously to that, or roughly simultaneously,


Facebook dropped Bing from back filling its web search results within their app. And so I think


that these two things combined were a pretty important development. In March of this year,


they acquired a company called The Find, which I've never heard of. But I think directionally


it's kind of important. The Find is a product search startup. And I think if you look at the


markets that anybody really can monetize and search, product search is a big one. So this


strikes me as a real start of a real move into an actual search engine that they can monetize,


as I said. And then just recently, these two I think are really interesting. Came out in May,


just two months ago. The ad link feature, which only some users have on iOS, this is


essentially the ability to look for stories related to keywords that you want to share with


your audience without ever having to leave the Facebook app. So you don't have to go to


Google and search for a story, or you don't have to be in Firefox or whatever and pull a


story link. You can do it right from within the Facebook app. And to this end, Facebook says


it has indexed over a trillion posts that reference web content that this feature is built


on. So they already have a pretty amazing sort of library of content that people can share and


that can be searched from directly within the Facebook app. And just two days later, they


formally announced this partnership with a select group of publishers that you can now


browse content from certain publishers, again, directly in the Facebook app. And so this I


think speaks to a more complete Facebook search ecosystem where more and more and more of our


behavior, search and social related, is all happening within Facebook. And as far as where


they're going, I don't pretend to know the entire future, but I do know that this is really


kind of just the beginning. We're sort of in the beginning to middle phase of the evolution of


the product. And how I know that is that Mark Zuckerberg has come out and said that Graph


Search is really a five-year thing. And so we're really in year two and a half to three of


Facebook's kind of really investment in search. And so I think the next two years, we're going


to see a tremendous amount of innovation and new features and new opportunities provided by


Facebook to us as marketers. And so although right now, and a lot of this presentation is


going to focus on the potential and the opportunities presented by this kind of people-focused


Graph Search, I think in the future, Facebook Search is going to be as what represents a


tremendous opportunity in terms of audience building, again, to help us make up the loss of


traditional organic referral traffic that I think is kind of inevitable from Google. Okay, a


few slides about how to construct some of these Graph Search type queries. So for all of you


grammarians out there, my mom is a grammarian, so I had to include this slide. Some parts of


Facebook Speech, you have subjects and objects, modifiers, verbs, and set relationships. And


that's really complicated. I'll explain to you in an example kind of how this works. But


Facebook Graph Search only interprets very specifically structured types of queries. And so


I'll show you kind of how that works. Here you can see a lonely single entry of Matthew Brown


as the only current Moz employee who likes the Portland Timbers. You know, Matt doesn't have a


lot of friends generally, but it actually makes sense in the context of this result because Moz,


of course, is based in Seattle. The Sounders are the Timbers' number one rival, and so not


very many Mozers probably like the Timbers. But anyway, so here's how this query is


constructed. You have the subject, you're looking for employees who like the object, the


Portland Timbers, and then the modifiers of current Moz employees. And so, again, just an


example, only certain types of structured queries will work in terms of returning these


people-focused results. Here is a non-exhaustive list of parameters that you may find useful as


you do your own experiments. And I'll just leave it here for you to refer to in the slide decks


that you can download. But, you know, a few ideas of things are, you know, visitors to a


particular venue, employees we already saw, professions, apps used, pages liked. These are


the kinds of subjects and objects that I think provide a lot of interest or offer a lot of


opportunity for marketers. And professions in particular are one of my favorite areas that


I've discovered, which makes sense given that Zuckerberg's, one of his primary use cases for


Graph Search early on was recruiting. And if you want to know what professions are kind of


possible to perform these queries around, just go in and perform a fake edit to your own


Facebook personal profile and see the kinds of professions that are returned there in the


drop-downs. These look pretty similar to me to how Freebase taxonomizes their professional


sort of categories. And some of the content that you see on pages about these professions that


Facebook has generated is pulled from Wikipedia. So those might also give you some


alternative ideas for professions to try. Next slide. There we go. Interests are also


something that you can search around. Basically, professions and interests are sort of two node


types within the Facebook graph. Here's an example of a page, again, that Facebook has


created with Wikipedia content around this interest that's accessible on a particular graph


ID, URL, small business. There's a million of these things. You can, again, look at Freebase,


look at Wikipedia. You could also potentially pretend to run a Facebook ad campaign and see


the interests against which you can advertise. These are all really useful parameters around


which to perform these structured searches. And sometimes people, people can also be nodes


in the graph, particularly if they're well-known figures or have some sort of authority within


the overall Facebook graph. And just one example of a very specific query that only returns


four results worldwide. Political junkies will understand why that is. But let me explain


how this works. Basically, if you're looking at it from a URL perspective, every URL for


a Facebook search result starts with HTTPS, facebook.com slash search. You then get the


graph ID of Senator Jim Emenhoff's page and then likers of that page. Append that, append


to that the ID of the interest page about environment and then likers of that interest.


And then you look at the intersection of those groups. So for those of you who don't know,


the reason that there's only four very confused souls who show up for this result, Senator


Jim Emenhoff is the head of the Senate Committee on the Environment who happens to believe


that global warming is a hoax. So if you are one of these four people, I'm sorry, I'm not


entirely sure how you reconcile those two differences. So, but I just put that up there


as an illustration of the amazing specificity that you can sometimes find with these Facebook


search queries. And who knows, if your target market is a very small subset of people, those


kinds of queries might be really helpful in identifying your audience.


Okay. You can also construct undefined queries, a little less formal, less structured or less


structured in the results using the STR parameter, URL parameter. There's a great, couple of


great tutorials that I've linked to here in the slide deck that show you how to use this.


Essentially you're looking for keywords on a particular page type that, as opposed to


sort of nodes in the graph. And just an example of where this might be useful is here I'm


looking at professional profiles that people have created where they might mention blogging.


And you can see here these are all three very well-known bloggers that showed up for this


type of search. And I'm looking for the intersection of people who mention blogging on their employment


profiles.


Even less structure. You can try a URL that looks something like this with what pages


in Portland talk about float tanks. Facebook, as you can see, doesn't really know how to


interpret that in terms of returning structured results for that query. So they think that


means cities of people named float tank that are in Portland, Oregon. So these kinds of


things, again, don't always work. Sometimes you don't get these structured results. But


if you just do this search more broadly as a keyword, you can see the URL sort of down


at the bottom of that screen shot. Here you can see the primary role that I think post


results are going to continue to play in the Facebook interface. And you can see that the


top result here within posts is something that was shared by a friend of mine within


my social graph, a piece of content about it happens to be about a float tank conference


happening in Portland. But a piece of content that is relevant to those keywords from out


there across the web.


So this is where I think the intersection of that ad link capability and the ability


to browse content directly within Facebook, this is where that I think is really going


to come together in a big way in the future. But for now, let's talk about a few use cases


around which these structured Facebook graph queries might be valuable to you as marketers


today. So one of them is around content marketing. We heard Matt and Christina in their earlier


presentations talk about the importance of targeting your content to a specific persona.


And here's a query that can kind of help you figure out what kind of content might be a


good target. As well as Will Reynolds talking about what do people aspire to, not just what


are they searching for.


Here you can see what are the interests of people that like my page. This is Perch Furniture,


a friend of mine who runs a small furniture store in Portland. Interior design you might


expect is a pretty good overlap for a furniture store, but things like gardening, knitting,


sewing. If there's a creative way that you can get content out there in front of your


audience, you know they're already interested in these topics, probably going to have a


better chance of spreading virally among the key audience you're interested in than just


writing about furniture all day long.


Another thing, especially if you work with small businesses who have a hard time creating


content on their own, thinking about using photos as content, specifically photos taken


at your place of business. Reach out to these folks who took a great photo at your business,


maybe ask them permission to reuse their photo in your newsletter, but maybe ask them for


a quick interview about what it was like when they were under the needle or whatever they


were for your orthodontic practice. I think thinking about content that your users have


already created is a good use case as well.


Audience intelligence. Here's one, pages liked by people who like Moz Local. Of course, search


engine land shows up at the top of the list, not surprising. Maybe you didn't know this


if you haven't performed this query before. You might discover additional pages that are


surprising that your fans are already liking. I think it's a great opportunity for you to


reach out and potentially get a guest article on some of these places. For those of you


who are lazy like me, you can target these sites explicitly in the Google Display Network.


That is a good way to not only capture people that are evangelists for your brand, but also


other sort of lookalike folks that might be interested in what you have to offer.


You can even add a local lens to this. Of course, I always have local on the brain.


So here's an example of pages liked by Portland, Oregon residents who like perch furniture.


I see a calendar here, so I might promote an event that I have on this calendar or even


put a banner at the top for fans of this website who also like my business.


Influencer research. This is where I think is maybe the most powerful area that Graph


Search has to offer. So if you're thinking about who do I talk to about helping me get


the word out about my content, this professional search. Journalists who live in your town,


Portland, Oregon. If you want to take it one step further and know where you have a sort


of soft intro already. Friends of my friends who are journalists and live in Portland,


Oregon. Kind of a great search. And then journalists who live in your town and work at a particular


outlet. I mean, this kind of thing is amazing in terms of figuring out who to reach out


to, who to build a relationship with when you want your content to be spread in your


community. If you aren't locally focused, you can do


a similar thing, which using that STR parameter for the less structured results. Who's writing,


who's a blogger or journalist or whatever. Who's also interested in your topic. So this


URL is people interested in golf and blogging on their professional profiles. You can go


one step further and look at golf as an interest. Golfers who are journalists and live in Portland,


Oregon. Journalists who like Small Business Saturday, which is a page, not an interest,


and live in Portland, Oregon. There's a lot of possibilities for these kinds of phrases.


This is another one that I think has a lot of potential, probably more for big brands


than small ones. But you can look at the profession of presidents or vice presidents or owners


or whatever sort of decision maker job title that you want, who like your page and live


in a given market. So if you're doing a product launch or you're hosting an event, these are


people that you want to reach out to as VIPs, asking them to spread the word about your


event or product to their networks, et cetera, et cetera. I think this could be a really


valuable thing for a lot of brands out there. And then this one is a tip that I actually


brought up at our local up conference back in February that a lot of people like, so


I thought I'd share it with a broader audience. People who use Yelp, who use the Yelp app


and like perch furniture. So Yelp obviously frowns upon asking people specifically to


leave you a review on Yelp. But you can do this in a white hat way. So these are people


you know are active Yelp users who've already expressed that they like your business. You


can reach out and ask them to actually check in the next time that they come into your


shop, tell them you have some kind of special for people who check in, et cetera, et cetera.


Make sure they feel like a VIP. Yelp is totally fine with you asking people to check in. They


actually came out and said that publicly about two months ago or three months ago. And Yelp


will then actually prompt people who check in to a given business to leave a review through


the Yelp app. So it's a way, it's a totally white hat way that you can kind of segment


your audience and identify who is a good possible reviewer and get reviews that are really hard


to get. Some final use cases around business development. So if you sell a product and


you're trying to get it distributed in a new market, one potential graph search you might


do, bars in Seattle, Washington, like by people who like Breakside Brewery. So if you run


the distribution operation at Breakside and you're trying to get into Seattle, why not


get your product out in stores that you, or bars in this case, where you know you already


have a built-in fan base. And I think that that can really help you seed, potentially


seed your presence in additional markets beyond your kind of home base. And if you're more


on the B2B side, this is a potentially valuable search. People who like your business and


work at another business if you're looking for an internal cheerleader to help you with


a proposal or getting executive buy-in. And then a couple of locally focused examples


here just to kind of close out. You can get really creative with targeted offers. So this


is one based on relationship status. Singles who like one of my favorite coffee shops,


Kova Coffee Roasters, and live in Portland, Oregon. You know, potentially you can reach


out to them and say, hey, you know, here's a $5 coupon or here's a free coffee the next


time you come in on a date, you know, hope it works great for you. Something like that.


Or if you're a day spa, you know, engage people who like your spa. You know, you can reach


out to them and say, hey, we noticed you just got engaged, congratulations, we'd like to


offer your bridal party a 20% discount on our bridal party spa package, something like


that. And this is all stuff that you can do organically that Facebook helps you identify


who these people are. If you want to take it to the next level, there is a bonus couple


of slides here. Number one, you can plug in Facebook profiles. Hopefully many of you know


about this tactic already. You can plug in individual Facebook profiles into the full


contact API. And full contact will then tell you all of the other social networks that they


know about that this person is on. Which is really neat. So if LinkedIn is a more appropriate


venue for you to actually reach out to this person or if Twitter is a more appropriate venue


to actually reach out to this person, the full contact API can, you know, inform you of those


opportunities. And again, for those of you who are lazy like me and don't want to learn about


all of those grammar rules and are frustrated by the fact that Facebook doesn't always return


structured results for really creative searches that you thought they should, intelligence


software has built this amazing little widget. I don't know these guys. Just happened to come


across it as I was doing research for this presentation where you can punch in all of the kind


of various parameters that you're interested in and they will construct the most appropriate URL


to return results for you. So if you don't want to spend a lot of time learning how this works


and just want to do it, this is a great, great resource for you. Okay. Looks like I've got


about five minutes left, more or less on time. Let's look into the Palantir. I had to throw in


a Christopher Lee reference. I'm glad Dr. Pete did. What an amazing actor. RIP. So what are


the implications, the tactical implications for maintaining a strong Facebook presence,


or Facebook search presence as they grow that product? Number one, I would encourage you


guys to move beyond the page like. Hopefully most of you who are bigger brands are already


doing this. But it kills me when I walk into a small business still to this day and see these


big signs on the front counter that say, like us on Facebook. You know, it doesn't really do


you that much good these days. Fewer or less than 2% of any of your page posts are actually


going to be seen by your fans. Meanwhile, shared posts, first of all, get a lot of


visibility in people's news feeds among their friends and their friend circles. So I think


you're going to get, A, that shared post much more visible on the initial share, and B, the


shared posts have this permanent life in the kind of ad link ecosystem that Facebook is


building. So if I do this search, best beer in Portland today in Facebook, the number one


result that pops up for me is this post by Ben Lloyd that he shared about an article, it


wasn't even about the business itself, but an article that mentioned, it wasn't from the


business itself, an article that mentioned a friend of his business, Produce Row. And so


now Produce Row is at the top of my search results for best beer in Portland. So encourage


your fans, encourage your audience to share your stuff much more than like. That's what's


going to give it, I think, this kind of permanent or longevity in Facebook search results.


These are basically plus ones that will actually mean something. And for those of you who


are really old school SEOs, you might remember a website, a product called Cool. This is, I


think Facebook is kind of building what Cool's idea was. Cool was a little bit ahead of its


time. But essentially Facebook has this amazing index of curated links that your own social


network has shared with you and with their circles. This is completely independent of any


kind of link data other than that initial share. And so for us as marketers, I think we


should be really excited about this. We don't have to worry about, oh, should we ask for this


anchor text or do we pay for this link? How much is that worth? Is that going to get us in


trouble with Google? Who freaking cares, right? Get people to, first of all, write great


content, get people to share that content, and that's what's going to give you long-term search


presence in Facebook. And Marshall pointed out yesterday in his presentation, sometimes that


content itself is paid, that Cathay Pacific article on the New York Times. That was New York


Times' most popular post. There's a lot of opportunities here, I think, in an algorithm that


is not dependent on link relationships. Number two, so in addition to making sure that your


app is incredibly indexable using the protocols that I think Marshall and Cindy mentioned


yesterday, I would encourage you to try to drive as many app authentications of people's


Facebook accounts as possible. From the initial wired coverage of the graph search launch, you


can see another big agenda item is assimilating the massive amounts of data generated by third


party applications. It's very clear that this is becoming a thing, not only for Facebook, but


Google now on tap is very much after the same kind of activity, the same kind of data. And so


I think that the extent, again, that your app can be indexable and that Facebook can see the


activity of its users in your app will probably help you in the long term as we see the mobile


ecosystem evolving. Okay, 90 seconds left for, again, my favorite topic, local search.


Facebook did basically ignore local search in its last update in December. Greg Sterling was


not the only one to lament this. Basically all of us in the local search community have kind of


been waiting for Facebook to make a real play in local. But the reality is they already have a


pretty good set of results. And this is maybe why it's so frustrating for us. If you do a


search, even a very long tail search, bankruptcy lawyers in my hometown, Decatur, Illinois,


you get a pretty decent looking search result page, the one there on the left. And golf


courses in Portland, bigger metro area, sort of less long tail query, you get a great list of


search results. Those really are kind of the top public courses in Portland. And what's very


clear about this is that check-ins and reviews are in large measure driving a big part of this


algorithm in terms of what's showing up. And so I think regardless of when or exactly how


Facebook releases a local search app or embeds more local search results in standard search


results, I think driving check-ins and reviews now is a great idea. In fact, 50% this is a


2012 slide here on the left. 50% of people way back in 2012 were already actively looking for


local businesses on social networks. I think this behavior is happening more and more and


more than we realize. And in fact, Mike Blumenthal did a study last year that Facebook was


the number two preferred destination for people to leave reviews of local businesses. So


people are already doing a lot of this behavior. Make sure they know about it. Give them a


call to action to do it on behalf of your business. And in fact, it can even help you get


more attractive search results in Google now that Facebook reviews show up as rich snippets in


Google search results. Facebook is getting much more serious about local, I think. It's


pretty clear there's been a couple of additional innovations that have happened. They


basically replicated Google's click to call. They're giving out free beacons to any SMB in


the world who wants them. I think we're going to see major movement from Facebook and local in


the next nine months to a year. So just to kind of sum up, promote sharing, not liking, not


only for immediate news feed visibility but also for kind of permanent archival search


visibility. Connect your apps. Make sure they're indexable. And promote, if you're a local


business, promote reviews and check-ins to stay ahead of the curve. So I'm just going to


leave this up. I'm basically out of time and out of slides. But this is a great post by Simon


Penson that I mentioned earlier. Might give you even more ideas on how to use graph search to


build your business. So hopefully I've convinced you. Start paying more attention to


Facebook search. I think it's going to be really big. And thanks very much for listening.


Okay. So a year from now we're going to be saying David Mim told us. Or you're going to be


saying, man, that was a waste of 35 minutes. But hey, we'll see. I'll be back next year.


Okay. We're a little over time. So just a couple questions here. One on Twitter, James


Loonsene, thank you for the tweet. If I do Facebook graph search, are the results


personalized to me or unfiltered? Not signed in.


Yes. You have to be signed in as a person in order to do these queries. So all of those are


going to be personalized. However, basically there's a pretty clear demarcation in terms of


people that you know and then sort of generic results below that. So yes, the results are


personalized, but it can still be useful to find people outside your network.


Okay. A couple people were asking, Susan Simalgo, one of them, can you segment the audience


from these search queries into custom audience for ads?


I didn't see that you could do that, but you would have to think Facebook would want you to.


So either they're going to build this functionality into their ad platform or make that a sort of


drag and drop similar to AdWords.


That might be a question we follow up with Marty on that part.


Yeah, exactly. That is a great question for Marty.


Okay. Finally, I had a question. So you talked about finding influencers, finding people to


leave reviews on Yelp. I thought that was brilliant. What is the next step for actually


reaching out to those people? Do you message them within the Facebook app?


Sure. Well, that's why I said, I mean, you kind of have to, it sort of depends on the business,


I think. Personally, I'd love to get a Facebook message from my favorite coffee shop or if the


owner of Breakside reached out and said, hey, you want a free pint next time you come in. I think


it depends on the business. You may be not that cool if you're in the insurance world or


something like that. So I would just be discreet and act like you would in the real world.


That's kind of my best advice for anybody.


That's awesome. David, thank you so much for stopping by again.


Your SEO checklist when launching a new website - Whiteboard Friday

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


This week we're going to talk about launching a new website and the SEO process that you've


got to go through.


Now, it's not actually that long and cumbersome, but there are a few things that I put into


broad categories where if you do these as you're launching a new site or before you


launch that new site, your chances of having success with SEO long-term and especially


in those first few months is going to go way up.


So let's get started with number one here.


And what I'm suggesting that you do is as you look across the site that you've built,


go and do some keyword research.


And there's a lot of Whiteboard Fridays and blog posts that we've written here at Moz


about great ways to do keyword research.


But do that keyword research and create a list that essentially maps all of the keywords


you are initially targeting to all of the URLs, the pages that you have on your new


website.


So it should look something like this.


It's got the URL, so ransanimals.com, targeting the keyword, amazing animals, and here's the


page title and here's the meta description.


And then I've got ransanimals.com slash lemurs, which is my page about lemurs, and that's


targeting lemurs and lemur habits.


And there's the title.


You want to go through these and make sure that if you have an important keyword that


you have not yet targeted, you do so.


And likewise, that if you've got a URL, a page on your website that you have not yet


intentionally targeted a keyword with, you make sure to do that as well.


This can be a great way to go through a small site in the early stages and make sure that


you've got some terms and phrases that you're actually targeting.


This will be also helpful when you do your rank tracking, your on-page optimization later


on.


All right, number two, accessibility, crawl, and UX.


So what I want you to do here is to ask yourself, are the pages and the content on my website


accessible to search engines?


And there's some great ways to check these.


You can use something like Screaming Frog or Google Search Console.


You could use Moz Pro or onpage.org to basically run a scan of your site and make sure that


crawlers can get to all the pages, that you don't have duplicate content, that you don't


have thin content or content that's pages that are perceived to have no content at all.


You don't have broken links.


You don't have broken pages, all that kind of good stuff.


Next, we're going to ask not about search engines and their crawlers, but about the


audience, the human beings, and whether your content is accessible to all the audiences,


devices, and browsers that it could be.


So this could mean things like screen readers for blind users, mobile devices, desktop devices,


laptops, browsers of all different kinds.


You're going to want to use a tool like a browser checker to make sure that Chrome and


Using Paid Media to Drive Loyalty & Advocacy - Whiteboard Friday

Hi, my name is Samantha Noble and I'm the Director of Strategy over at Koozai in the


UK. We're a digital marketing agency specialising in paid media, SEO and content marketing.


And I'm really, really excited to be here today to share with you some tips on how we


can use paid media to basically drive loyal customers and get those loyal customers recommending


us to others. I think what I've seen over the years when it comes to paid media is people


tend to focus on the buying stage, right? They think that they're going to put money


into a paid media channel and they're going to get return out of it, which is essentially


true. But when it comes to using paid media for loyalty and advocacy, it's something that


I don't tend to see very often and there's lots of stuff that we can do. So over the


next sort of eight minutes or so, we're going to look at 10 different strategies, so five


for loyalty and five for advocacy. And I'm hoping to be able to share with you some ideas


and some inspiration that you can take away and use within your paid media campaigns.


So let's get started. To start with, let's look at loyalty. And the first thing that


we're going to look at is how we can use remarketing lists for search ads, so also known as RLSA's,


to basically bid on competitor names. So let's say we've got a customer that has been with


you time and time again, or even they might have just bought from you once. If they then


go back to Google and search for a competitor, you can then start displaying ads to that


particular customer at that moment in time to try and encourage them to remain a loyal


customer of yours by including a unique discount in the advert. So this really works well if


the competitor names that you're using aren't trademarked, otherwise you will come up with


a few sticky situations there that may not work. So it's worth looking to see whether


you can try it or not, but it's a great way of trying to capture people at the stage when


they may potentially be looking to go off and buy from a competitor. The second idea


is using unique discounts within your search ads. So in the same way that we were talking


about remarketing lists for search before, you can do this by either uploading a list


of email addresses, so your CRM database of customers, or as a remarketing list for search


ads, so your remarketing list of your existing customers. Now, when they go and search, again


for any of your other products or services that you could do, you can start to show them


unique offers within the ads to say, hey, as a loyal customer, you get an extra 10%


off if you buy a second purchase from us. So again, this can work really, really well


to drive loyalty. Third idea, dedicated landing pages. If you've got a customer that comes


into a store that you know they come to you every single week and they buy from you time


and time again, you're not going to greet them necessarily in the same way as what you


would a first time customer that you're not aware of. And this should be the same when


it comes to search advertising. So if you've got a unique customer that's bought from you


time and time again, why not show them a landing page when they land on the site that is targeted


to them, that's talking in a language that shows that you're talking to them as a loyal


customer rather than as a first time buyer. So again, you can do this with customer match


lists or with remarketing lists for search. Fourth idea is countdown ads. So countdown


ads are the ads where you see times ticking down if there's a unique offer that's going


to expire in say a week's time. If you've got a customer that's brought from you once


and you want to try and encourage a repeat purchase, why not show them a limited time


offer so that it's saying, look, if you buy from us a second time within the next week,


month, two months, whatever it is that you want to put in there and show the offers ticking


down, this can create a real sense of urgency and drive people to buy from you and make


a second purchase. And the final idea I'm going to talk about, as I say, there's lots


of other ideas that you can do here, but the final idea we're going to look at is using


remarketing to cross-sell or up-sell to customers. This works really well if you've got a product


or a service that people can buy from you again, or it might be that you've got a product,


so let's say a mobile phone provider as an example. Somebody might have brought a mobile


phone, the next logical purchase for that particular customer could be that they're


looking to get a cover or a case for that phone. If you know that somebody's brought


a particular model or make of a phone, why not start following them around with remarketing


ads, highlighting the fact that you also sell covers and cases. This can be a really good


way of driving extra loyalty from people that have just brought from you. The reason that


I think it's important to consider loyalty when it comes to paid is there was a study


done via Access Development that basically shows that 80% of customers would actually


consider switching brands or stores if they were offered the right compelling discount.


So I think that's just really, really important to remember that even though you've worked


hard to gain a customer, they can still leave you and go to a competitor.


So moving on from here, let's look at some ways that we can use advocacy. What I mean


by advocacy is you've got a loyal customer base, you've spent all this money and time


and resource growing that audience. What we want to do now is help them to market you,


help them to do that word-of-mouth marketing and actually recommend you to others. There's


five ways that we're going to look through in terms of how we can drive advocacy using


paid media.


First one is Gmail ads. Gmail ads are really, really – what's the word? They're really


good if you are using them and targeting them at the right people. I've seen this work really


well if you're trying to promote forward to a friend discounts. So if you've got a list


of all your customers, whether it's again a remarketing list or a customer match list


of email addresses, upload those. When those particular customers are looking at their


emails on Gmail and they're not using a business Gmail account and they're in the promotions


tab, they can see various ads at the top. So you're typically seeing two ads at the


moment at the top of Gmail.


And in here what we can do is we can show an advert that's saying, hey, as a loyal customer


of ours, why not recommend us to others? And you can show them and you can give them a


unique discount code to pass on to their friends or family. So you can do this and try and


encourage people when they're opening up that ad. You can make it look like a nice HTML


advert, a nice HTML page and try and drive them to say, hey, forward this discount on


to a friend and your friends or family can benefit from this unique offer that we're


offering to them.


Next option that we can do is remarketing. So similar to what we were talking about before


in terms of using remarketing to generate upsells and cross-sells, you can also do remarketing


to try and encourage your existing audience base to go and leave a review of your product


or service. And whether that's on your own website or whether you're using a third-party


review site, if you are using a third-party review site, I'd recommend that you make sure


that it's a site that Google can aggregate that data from because that's going to come


on to the sell ratings that we're going to look at next.


But you can follow people around saying, hey, how did you find your experience with us?


What was your product like? What was the service like? And try and encourage them to go and


leave you a review so that other people can then experience what your existing customer


base had a kind of experience from their product or service they've practiced from you.


So as I say, that leads me on to sell ratings. So sell ratings are the ads where you see


the stars in the listings. And these can be really, really good, especially if your competitors


aren't doing this. There is a stipulation, I think it's 120 reviews you need in the past


12 months. So you need to make sure that you're getting reviews frequently enough. But Google


will then aggregate that data and pull that within your search ads. And as I say, if your


competitors aren't doing it and you are, and you're seeing that you've got a four or five-star


rating, that really entices people to click through. And it gives that sense of, yeah,


they're a good company to buy from, so I'm going to go and investigate them more.


Fourth idea that we've got is, again, back to Gmail. But if you've got a recommend a


friend scheme or a refer a friend scheme that you're wanting to try and promote, people


that are signed up to recommend a friend type schemes are kind of looking to get something


in exchange for what they're doing. So the idea here is, what you can do is, you can


upload a load of cashback site domains. So it could be all of the different cashback


sites in a particular niche or just the cashback sites that you want to go after. Upload all


of those as keywords. And if somebody is receiving an email from a cashback site, your ad can


say at the top, hey, we've got this great refer a friend scheme. You can earn money


for doing X, Y and Z with us. So it's a way of tapping into not necessarily your existing


customer base, but trying to tap into a new audience, but get them referring you to others


as well. And this can work really, really well.


Final idea that we've got here is making sure that the same what we were talking about before


about using dedicated landing pages for our loyal customers. What we also want to do on


the landing pages for new customers that are coming into a site is make sure that we're


talking about testimonials from our existing customer base. Making sure that we put the


reviews on there. People buy from people. I'm hearing the term human to human banded


around a lot recently. So rather than B to C, B to B, it's H to H. And this is really,


really important because people do buy from people. And people like to feel that the product


or service that they're buying has helped somebody else or somebody else has enjoyed


that particular product. So making sure that you're using reviews and testimonials on landing


pages can really help boost your conversion rate.


Now, the reason that advocacy is really important, again, another study that was done via Bright


Local, this basically shows that 92% of people that they surveyed said that they regularly


read online reviews. So it's really important in this day and age that we focus on driving


reviews and getting our existing customers to recommend us to others.


So as I said, there's lots of other ways that we can use paid media to target loyalty and


advocacy. And I'd love to hear what you guys are doing. What other ideas have worked for


you? What strategies have worked well for you? If you can leave those in the comments


below, that would be fantastic. If you've got any questions or you want to run anything


past me, then you can get me on my Twitter handle, which is Sam Jane Noble. And thank


MozCon 2014 - 16 - Marshall Simmonds - Keep the Focus on the Doughnuts

Hello, MozCon. How are you? As Cyrus said, my name is Marshall Simmons. I work and am


the founder of Define Media Group. We focus on audience development, enterprise, search


engine optimization, and business management. A lot of our focus is primarily in the publishing


industry, but we play with e-commerce and in the investment community as well. I think


it's important to set a little context for this, for the presentation here. I think it's


important to give you guys a little bit of idea, because I come from Boise, Idaho, which


for those of you who don't know is just right next door. I grew up in Boise, Idaho, moved


to Oregon for another 18 years, and now I'm back in Idaho. So when you live in those


places you have a tendency to go outside a lot. And so as a result, I've been known to


climb things. And not always enjoyably climbing these things, but climbing them nonetheless,


because what I've found is that when I'm outside, I find things that nurture my soul. I'm able


to see things and experience things that I've never seen before, kind of like this. And


when you're out there, it's a tremendous experience, because you can all of a sudden come upon


this huge meadow of the flower that you named your daughter after. That's powerful. Not


only that, but you can surprise Mother Nature. I don't advise it, but you can. Sometimes


it's dangerous, but it's nice to see. So when you're trudging up a mountain and you're hungry


and you're hot, and you don't have anything but your own thoughts, some things pop into


your head. And usually it's the song that you like, but quite often it's the song that


you don't like. And that can be terrorizing. Does anybody know who this is, other than


Matthew Brown? Yes, that's right. It is Striper. I don't know any song from the band Striper,


but a song from Striper popped into my head on the last hike that I was on, and I don't


know why. So of these things that continue to come into your head and pop into your brain,


you lose focus. And so you have to have those songs that you sing or those things that you


think about. And when you're hungry, I think about food. I think about good food, and I


think about donuts. That's the focus, and that's the discipline that when you're on


30 miles and you're out there and you're pushing up this hill, you think about food. Now, when


I started doing all this, I did it wrong. That's my pack on the left. And we were on


a three-day, 50-mile hike, and I took 16 ‑‑ excuse me, 62 pounds on my back, because it


was the Boy Scout experience. I wanted to be prepared for everything. I took every tool.


And these other guys just laughed at me. And that's dangerous to do, and I don't advise