about awareness from a web traffic perspective, what we want to try and center in on is things


How to Build the Right Traffic Metrics Dashboard for 2016 - Whiteboard Friday 1

that are happening largely outside of our site or our properties before people get to


us. Like how are they hearing about us and potentially getting to us? And so from that


perspective, some of the metrics we can think about are things like social media, your social


media mentions, you could potentially put followers in here and fans in here and things


like that. Press and brand mentions, so I like using, you know, I use Moz's Fresh Web


Explorer for this and sort of get a count of mentions that I have, both of them the


Fresh Web as a whole and then in only sources that are in Google News, I like that. Mention.net


is another good one for this. Referring links, you can get that through something like an


Open Site Explorer, you could use Google Webmaster Tools, you could use just your Google Analytics


numbers right in there and branded search volume. I say branded search volume because


what I'm trying to measure is things before they get to me. So I want to know how many


people are searching for my specific branded terms and phrases. How many people are looking


for Moz and for Open Site Explorer and are looking for, you know, Moz Analytics or Follower


Wonk or those kinds of things. Now, what you want to do from there is build a dashboard


with the numbers that you need and you can determine what those are. For some folks,


they might even want to get bigger and broader in here. So you might say, hey, I want to


get statistics on how many keywords SEMrush saw us ranking for and so I'm going to add


that in and I'm going to have my numbers, right, the number of tweets about me, Facebook


posts, brand mentions, new links, referring links, etc., etc., for each of the months


and then have a column in there that's giving me a percentage increase and hopefully some


year over year numbers. You could do that quarterly, you could do that monthly. Now,


now that I have this, if somebody says, hey, we saw traffic decline this month, you can


say, actually, we didn't just see traffic decline, we also saw our brand efforts fall


down. And we can tie that back to, you know what, we did a lot less press and PR this


quarter than we did last quarter. You know what, we did a lot more advertising dollars


spent here and a lot less trade show and it looks like that did not equate to what we


were hoping, which is more stuff at the very top of the funnel building more awareness.


It looks like trade shows were actually a great thing for us. You can't make these perfectly


because these numbers don't tie exactly to every offline kind of activity and word of


mouth, but this will give you a baseline and this will tell you, indicative, what's going


on with our brand on the web, how are people thinking about it, or how much are people


thinking about us versus some competitor. And I do like that you can do this competitively,


right, so I can take these numbers, I can replicate this for a few competitors and then


I can compare myself, right, you know, me versus XYZ and see who's doing well and who's


doing how well. First visit, I like seeing total visits and then I like seeing total


new visits and then I want to look at visits by channel, so channel could be search, it


could be, and I could split that onto paid and organic. I want to look at social, I want


to look at referring links, maybe I want to look at email, whatever it is that are the


channels that are sending traffic to me. And one of the really important things here that


I strongly suggest you do is define some metric of engagement, a minimum metric of engagement.


So for example, I like saying engaged versus non-engaged. And for Moz, that might be something


like, hey, did they browse at least three pages on our site during that visit, or did


they, either that or they spent, you know, four minutes, so it could be three pages per


visit or, you know, a four minute duration time on site equals engaged. And then I can


measure by each channel, did I get non-engaged versus engaged visits from that channel in


new visits, and then I can see over time, like, hey, for example, this happens all the


time. We'll see a huge spike in social and referral traffic to a page that sort of had


some viral component to it, right? Maybe it was a particularly salient article, it got


lots of broad tech media attention, didn't really send us lots of SEO professionals,


right? Folks like yourselves who are in the web marketing field who are deeply interested


in the products that Moz has to offer. And so maybe that's low converting traffic, it's


low engaged traffic, but we see that, you know, like a big spike, and we go, hang on


a sec, what's going on there? Well, now we can say, aha, that was from social, it was


non-engaged, that was, you know, jumping up our visit counts, but it's probably not going


to be an indication of converting traffic later on down the line. And we'll probably


see, you know, nice brand mentions in press and that kind of stuff that could lead to


things further on. Now we know whether we should keep investing in that type of broad


targeted content or whether it's not worth it at all. Great for being able to do that.


Next I want to look at returning visits. So this is like my first time visits, those are


new people in my funnel, new people I can potentially reach. My returning visits, this


is like my, hey, this is my crowd, that's my community, these are people that I'm reaching


with my content and my tools, my software, my whatever my product is, people that I know


are interested, they're coming back, you know, two to ten plus times, and I actually like


segmenting these out. So I've got in here, right, that I like seeing total returning


and then broken down, second, third time, four through nine, ten plus, Google Analytics


actually makes this really easy, so does Omniture if you're using that. And then I, in addition


to this, I want to see two key metrics about engagement levels and that is browse rate


and average time on site. So meaning browse rate, meaning pages per visit, if I see that


start to decline overall or in one of these groups, that tells me something interesting,


right, that tells me that maybe I've made a navigation change that was poor and now


I'm not driving people from one section of my site to others. Maybe I've changed calls


to action inside my content, maybe I'm not linking to my own stuff as much as I used


to with the new content I've been publishing, whatever it is, right? But then I can start


to reverse engineer and say, aha, that's why these things are happening. If I don't have


these kinds of metrics, I can't even answer the question of, well, what are some hypotheses


about what could have happened? If you have this, you're in good shape. And then finally,


conversions, right? And this is going to be, this is the most unique part. Like these three,


there's some variation in top of funnel awareness stuff. These two, really, really consistent


across almost every site if you follow these models. But conversion, that's going to be


totally dependent on what you are converting someone to do, right? If it's an email signup,


that's very different from an e-commerce process, which is very different from a subscription


product, which is going to be pretty different from an advertising-based site, right, where


your conversion might just be a page load or a number of page loads in a visit, those


kinds of things. But what I like to do is I like to segment out the places where conversion


events happen on your site. And for the purposes of this, let's call that the product pages.


So I want visits to the product pages, and I might choose to do new and returning, again,


split out. I want to see the checkout completion rate, so meaning the people who make it through


whatever conversion process that is. Maybe that's just a form field for an email capture.


Maybe it's checking out through a shopping cart, whatever that is. Then I want to see


new versus returning customers, different than visits. This is anyone whose email address


or organization I previously have in my customer database. So I know that, aha, this is a net


new customer. This person has never converted with me in the past, or, oh, I've seen them


before. They're coming back and doing something with me again. And then I want total revenue.


And you can go break this down. I would break this down something like product page visits,


the completion rate of whatever it is that the conversion event is, new buyers, returning


buyers, average revenue per buyer, total transactions and total revenue. That might be a reasonable


e-commerce type of approach. It'll change if you're SaaS. It'll change if you're email


lead capture. But this is fine. What's great about this is if you set this up now, if you


set this up and you have this data for January, you can set it up any way you want. A Google


spreadsheet and you manually fill some stuff in. You pull in some stuff through APIs. You


ask one of your developers to build something for you. Great. You can even set up, it's


very imperfect, but you can set up a custom Google Analytics dashboard that gets closeish


of proximity depending on how much sophistication you need. You won't be able to get any of


this stuff in the awareness side from GA, but the rest of it you can get close to. If


you do this in January and you measure it throughout the year and you can get year over


year data, you know, go back to 2015 or at least in 2017 be able to look back at 2016,


you will set yourself up for so much more success than was ever possible before you


measure things. I tend to find that what we measure is what we're able to improve. If


you measure this stuff, you'll be improving the right stuff. All right, everyone. Congratulations


on making it through 2015. Looking forward to a great 2016 with you and lots of great


How to Use Domain Authority for SEO - Whiteboard Friday

Howdy SEO fans! Welcome to a very special edition of Whiteboard Friday.


I'm Cyrus Shepard. I'm honored to be here today with Moz to talk about the new Domain Authority.


I want to talk about how to use Domain Authority to do actual SEO.


Let's start with a definition of what Domain Authority actually is,


because there's a lot of confusion out there.


A Domain Authority is a metric from 1 to 100, which predicts how well a domain will rank in Google.


Now let's break that down a little bit and talk about some of the myths of Domain Authority.


Is Domain Authority a ranking factor? No. Domain Authority is not a ranking factor.


Does Google use Domain Authority in its algorithm? No. Google does not use Domain Authority in its algorithm.


Now Google may use some domain-like metrics based on links similar to Domain Authority,


but they do not use Domain Authority itself. In fact, it's best if you don't bring it up with them.


They don't tend to like that very much.


So it's not a ranking factor. If Google doesn't use it, what does Domain Authority actually do?


It does one thing very, very well. It predicts rankings.


That's what it was built to do, that's what it was designed to do, and it does that job very, very well.


And because of that, we can use it for SEO in a lot of different ways.


So, Domain Authority has been around since 2010, about eight years now,


and since then it's become a very popular metric, used and abused in different ways.


So what's new about the new Domain Authority that makes it so great and less likely to be abused


and gives it so many more uses?


Before I go into this, big shout out to two of the guys who helped develop this,


Russ Jones and Neil Martinson-Burnell and many other smart people at Moz,


some of our search scientists, did a tremendous job of updating this metric for 2019.


So the first thing is the new Domain Authority is based on a new, bigger link index,


and that is Link Explorer, which was released last year.


It contains 35 trillion links.


There are different ways of judging index sizes, but that is one of the biggest,


or if not the biggest, link indexes publicly available that we know of.


35 trillion links, to give you an idea of how big that is,


if you were to count one link per second, you would be counting for 1.1 million years.


That's a lot of links, and that's how many links is in the index


that the new Domain Authority is based upon.


Second of all, it uses a new machine learning model.


Now, part of Domain Authority looks at Google rankings and uses machine learning


to try to fit the model in to predict how those rankings are stacked.


Now, the new Domain Authority not only looks at what's winning in Google search,


but it's also looking at what's not ranking in Google search.


The old model used to just look at the winners.


This makes it much more accurate at determining where you might fall


or where any domain or URL might fall within that prediction.


Next, the new Domain Authority incorporates spam detection.


Spam score is a proprietary Moz metric that looks at a bunch of on-page factors,


and those have been incorporated into the new metric, which makes it much more reliable.


It also, and this is very important, the new Domain Authority detects link manipulation.


This is people that are buying, selling links, PBNs, things like that.


It's much better.


In fact, Russ Jones in a recent webinar said that link buyers


with the new Domain Authority will drop an average of 11 points.


So, the new Domain Authority is much better at rooting out this link manipulation,


just like Google is attempting to do, so it much more closely resembles what Google is attempting.


And lastly, the new Domain Authority is updated daily.


This is a huge improvement.


The old Domain Authority used to update about approximately every month or so.


The new Domain Authority is constantly being updated,


and our search scientists are constantly adding improvements as they come along,


so it's being updated much more frequently and improved much more frequently.


So, what does this mean?


The new Domain Authority is the most accurate domain-level metric


to predict Google search results that we know of.


When you look at ranking factors that we know of, like title tags or even generally backlinks,


they predict a certain amount of rankings.


But Domain Authority blows those out of the water in its ranking potential.


So, the question is, how do we actually use this?


We have this tremendous power with Domain Authority that can predict rankings to a certain degree.


How do we use this for SEO?


So, I want to go over some general tips for success.


The first tip, never use Domain Authority in isolation.


You always want to use it with other metrics and in context, because it can only tell you so much.


It's a powerful tool, but it's limited.


For example, when you're looking at rankings on page,


you're going to want to look at the keyword targeting,


you're going to want to look at the on-page content, the domain history, other things like that.


So, never use Domain Authority by itself. That's a key tip.


Second, you want to keep in mind that the scale of Domain Authority is roughly logarithmic.


It's not linear. Now, what does this mean?


It's fairly easy to move from a zero Domain Authority or a one Domain Authority to a ten Domain Authority.


You can get a handful of links, and that works pretty well.


But moving from like a 70 to an 80 is much, much harder.


It gets harder as you get higher.


So, a DA40 is not twice a DA20.


It's actually much, much bigger, because as you go higher and higher and higher until you get to a 100, it gets much harder.


Sites like Google and Facebook, they're near the 100 range.


And everything else comes into it almost like a funnel.


And next, keep in mind that DA is a relative metric.


When you're using DA, you always want to compare between competitors or your past scores.


Having a DA50 doesn't really tell you much unless you're comparing it to other DA scores.


So, if you're looking in Google and a site has a DA50,


it doesn't make much sense unless you put it in the context, what do the other sites have?


Are they 40? Are they 60?


And in that regard, when you're looking at your own DA, you can compare against past performance or competitors.


If I have a 50 this month and a 40 last month,


that might tell me that my ability to rank in Google has increased in that time period.


So, talking about SEO use cases.


We have this. We understand how to use it.


What are some practical ways to use domain authority?


Well, a very popular one with the old DA as well is judging the potential value of a link.


For instance, you have a thousand outreach targets that you're thinking about asking for a link.


But you only have time for 100 because you want to spend your time wisely,


and it's not worth it to ask all a thousand.


So, you might use DA as a filter to find the most valuable link targets.


A DA 90 might be more valuable than a DA 5 or a 10.


But again, you do not want to use it in isolation.


You'd be looking at other metrics as well, such as page authority, relevance, and traffic.


But still, DA might be a valuable metric to add to that experience.


Judging keyword difficulty.


Judging when you look at SERPs and see what is my potential of ranking for this SERP with this particular keyword.


If you look at a SERP and everybody has a DA 95, it's going to be pretty hard to rank in that SERP.


But if everybody has a lower DA, you might have a chance.


But again, you're going to want to look at other metrics such as page authority, keyword volume, on-page targeting.


You can use MoDS's keyword difficulty score to run these calculations as well.


Very popular in the agency world is link campaign performance or campaign performance in general.


And this kind of makes sense if you're building links for a client and you want to show progress.


A common way of doing this is showing domain authority, meaning that we built these links for you and now your potential to rank is higher.


It's a good metric, but it's not the only metric I would report.


I would definitely report rankings for targeted keywords.


I would report traffic and conversions.


Because ranking potential is one thing, but I'd actually like to show that those links actually did something.


So I'd be more inclined to show the other things.


But DA is perfectly fine to report for campaign performance as long as you show it in context.


And a popular one on the marketplaces is buying existing domains.


Sites like Flippa often show DA or some similar metric like that.


Again, the new domain authority is going to be much better at rooting out link manipulation.


So these scores might be a little more trustworthy in this sense.


But again, never buy a domain just on domain authority alone.


You're going to want to look at a lot of factors such as the content, the traffic, the domain history, things like that.


But domain authority might be a good first-line filter for you.


So where can you find the new domain authority?


It is available right now.


You can go to Link Explorer.


It's available through the Moz API.


The free Moz bar, you can download the Moz bar for free and turn on SERP overlay,


and it will show you the DA of everything as you browse through Google.


It's available in Moz campaigns and also Keyword Explorer.


I hope this gives you some ideas about how to use domain authority.


Please share your ideas and thoughts in the comments below.


And if you like this video, please share.


Thanks a lot, everybody.


How to Use Review Management to Build Consumer Trust

Howdy Moz fans, I'm Zach. And I'm Serena. And we're from the Moz Customer Success


team. Today we'll be talking about business reviews and how you can implement an effective


and scalable reputation management strategy. Reviews are critical factors in building trust


and influencing customer decision making and have become an integral part of customer service


and satisfaction. In fact, one study found that positive reviews have a big impact on


consumers with 94% of consumers saying positive reviews make them more likely to use a business.


Google displays your review count and star rating front and center in local search rankings.


If you have a high star rating, customers may be more likely to choose your business


over your competitors. A strong review management strategy can help you monitor reviews, quickly


catch and correct issues, and build loyalty with customers and prospects. Let's dive in.


Head to the customer feedback tab of your Moz Local dashboard to view all your ratings, reviews,


questions, and photo uploads from your locations. Moz Local is great for consistent reputation


management because it empowers you to view and reply to online reviews across multiple


platforms, all from one dashboard. Look through recent reviews and note any low star ratings.


We recommend using Moz Local's filtering capabilities to identify negative reviews by location,


type of review, or even over a specific period of time. You can also look at the top 100


keywords in your reviews to identify common threads, what your customers like, and what


changes they would like to see. From there, you'll want to put together a strategy for


responding to reviews. Keep in mind that your replies are public and keep your responses


genuine, brief, and courteous. Try to respond to as many reviews as you can and prioritize


the ones that have opportunities for you to share new, additional information. This includes


things like upcoming offers or programs to enhance positive reviews or offering solutions


for explanation in response to negative reviews. A strong reputation management system is only


valuable if you have reviews consistently coming in. Take a proactive approach with


email, text, and in-person review requests. Add review calls to action to your website,


receipts, print assets, and signage. The more reviews your business receives, the more opportunity


you will have to deepen your connection with your customers. If you're ready to take the


next step in your review strategy, MozLocal can help you scale your reputation management


Better Content Through NLP (Natural Language Processing) - Whiteboard Friday

Howdy, Moz fans. I'm Ruth Baridi and I am the Vice President of Strategy at Upbuild,


a boutique technical marketing agency specializing in technical SEO and advanced web analytics.


And I recently spoke at MozCon on a basic framework for SEO and approaching changes


to our industry that thinks about SEO in the light of we are humans who are marketing to


humans but we are using a machine as the intermediary. And those videos will be available online


at some point but today I wanted to talk about one point from my talk that I found really


interesting and that has kind of changed the way that I approach content creation. And


that is the idea that writing content that is easier for Google, a robot, to understand


can actually make you a better writer and help you write better content for humans.


It is a win-win. So to understand how Google is currently approaching parsing content,


understanding what content is about, Google is spending a lot of time and a lot of energy


and a lot of money on things like neural matching and natural language processing which seek


to understand basically when people talk what are they talking about. This goes along with


the evolution of search to be more conversational. There are a lot of times when someone is searching


but they don't totally know what they want and Google still wants them to get what they


want because that's how Google makes money. So they are spending a lot of time trying


to understand the relationships between entities and between words and how people use words


to search. So the example that Danny Sullivan gave online that I think is a really great


example is if someone is experiencing the soap opera effect on their TV. If you've ever


seen a soap opera you've noticed that they look kind of weird. Someone might be experiencing


that and not knowing what that's called. They can't Google soap opera effect because they


don't know about it. So they might search something like why does my TV look funny?


Neural matching helps Google understand that when somebody is searching why does my TV


look funny, one possible answer might be the soap opera effect so they can serve up that


result and people are happy. And as we're thinking about natural language processing


a core component of natural language processing is understanding salience. So salience is


sort of a one word way to sum up to what extent is this piece of content about this specific


entity. So at this point Google is really good at extracting entities from a piece of


content. Entities are basically nouns, people, places, things, proper nouns, improper nouns


that's not what they're called, regular nouns. Entities are things, people, etc. Numbers,


things like that. Google is really good at taking those out and saying okay here are


all of the entities that are contained within this piece of content. Salience attempts to


understand how they're related to each other because what Google is really trying to understand


when they're crawling a page is what is this page about and is this a good example of a


page about this topic. Salience really goes into the second piece. To what extent is any


given entity could that be said to be the topic of a piece of content and it's often


amazing the degree to which a piece of content that a person has created is not actually


about anything. I think we've all experienced that right? You're searching and you come


to a page and you're like this was too vague, this was too broad, this said that it was


about one thing but it was actually about something else. I didn't find what I needed.


This wasn't good information for me. As marketers we're often on the other side of that trying


to get our clients to say what their product actually does on their website or say I know


you think that you created a guide to Instagram for the holidays but you actually wrote one


paragraph about the holidays and then seven paragraphs about your new Instagram tool.


This is not actually a blog post about Instagram for the holidays, it's a piece of content


about your tool. These are the kinds of battles that we fight as marketers and fortunately


there are now a number of different APIs that you can use to understand natural language


processing. IBM has one, there are a few other tools that you can use and guess who has an


API that you can use? That's right, Google. So Google actually has a natural language


processing API that's right here on cloud.google.com. Is it as sophisticated as what they're using


on their own stuff? Probably not but you can test it out, put in a piece of content and


see A of all what entities Google is able to extract from it and B of all how salient


Google feels each of these entities is to the piece of content as a whole. Again, to


what degree is this piece of content about this thing? So this natural language processing


API which you can try for free and it's actually not that expensive for an API if you want


to build a tool with it, will assign each entity that it can extract a salient score


between zero and one saying okay how sure are we that this piece of content is about


this thing versus just containing it? And so the higher, the closer you get to one,


the more confident the tool is that this piece of content is about this thing. Point nine


would be really, really good. Point zero one means it's there but they're not sure how


well it's related. So the example I have here and this is not taken from a real piece of


content, these numbers are made up, it's just an example, is if you had a chocolate chip


cookie recipe, you would want chocolate cookies or chocolate chip cookies recipe, chocolate


chip cookies, something like that to be the number one entity, the most salient entity


and you would want it to have a pretty high salient score. You would want the tool to


feel pretty confident yes, this piece of content is about this topic. But what you can also


see is the other entities it's extracting and to what degree they're also salient to


the topic. So you can see things like you know if you have a chocolate chip cookie recipe,


you'd expect to see things like cookie, butter, sugar, 350 which is the temperature you'd


heat your oven, all of the different things that come together to make a chocolate chip


cookie recipe. And I think that it's really, really important for us as SEOs to understand


that salience is the future of related keywords. Where beyond the time when to optimize for


chocolate chip cookie recipe, we would also be looking for things like chocolate recipe,


chocolate chips, chocolate cookie recipe, things like that. Stems, variants, TFIDF,


these are all older methodologies for understanding what a piece of content is about. Instead


what we need to understand is what are the entities that Google using its vast body of


knowledge, using things like freebase, using you know large portions of the internet, where


is Google seeing these entities co-occur at such a rate that they feel reasonably confident


that a piece of content on one entity in order to be salient to that entity would include


these other entities. So chocolate chip cookie recipe, we're now also making sure we're adding


things like butter, flour, sugar. This is actually really easy to do if you actually


have a chocolate chip cookie recipe to put up there. And this is I think what we're going


to start seeing as a content trend in SEO is that the best way to create content that


is salient to a topic is to have an actual expert in that topic create that content.


Somebody with deep knowledge of a topic is naturally going to include co-occurring terms


because they know how to create something that's about what it's supposed to be about.


And I think what we're going to start seeing is that people are going to have to start


paying more for content marketing frankly. Unfortunately a lot of companies seem to think


that content marketing is and should be cheap and content marketers I feel you on that,


it sucks. And it's no longer the case. We need to start investing in content and investing


in experts to create that content so that they can create that deep rich salient content


that everybody really needs. Now how can you use this API to improve your own SEO? One


of the things I like to do with this kind of information is look at, and this is something


that I've done for years just not in this context, but a prime optimization target in


general is pages that rank for a topic but they rank on page two. What this often means


is that Google understands that that keyword is a topic of the page but doesn't necessarily


understand that it is a good piece of content on that topic, that the page is actually solely


about that content, that it's a good resource. In other words the signal is there but it's


weak. What you can do is take content that ranks but not well, run it through this natural


language API or another natural language processing tool and look at how the entities are extracted


and how Google is determining that they're related to each other. Sometimes it might


be that you need to do some disambiguation. So in this example you'll notice that while


chocolate cookies is called a work of art, and I agree, cookie here is actually called


other. This is because cookie means more than one thing, right? There's cookies the baked


good but then there's also cookies the packet of data. Both of those are legitimate uses


of the word cookie. Words have multiple meanings and if you notice that Google, that this natural


language processing API is having trouble correctly classifying your entities, that's


a good time to go in and do some disambiguation. Make sure that the terms surrounding that


term are clearly saying no, I mean the baked good, not the software piece of data. That's


a really great way to kind of bump up your salience. Look at whether or not you have


a strong salient score for your primary entity. You'd be amazed at how many pieces of content


you can plug into this tool and the top most salient entity is still only at like a 0.01,


a 0.14. A lot of times the API is like I think this is what it's about but it's not sure.


This is a great time to go in and bump up that content, make it more robust and look


at ways that you can make those entities easier to both extract and to relate to each other.


And this brings me to my second point which is my new favorite thing in the world. Writing


for humans and writing for machines, you can now do both at the same time. You no longer


have to and you really haven't had to do this in a long time but the idea that you might


keyword stuff or otherwise create content for Google that your users might not see or


care about is way, way, way over. What's great is that now you can create content for Google


that also is better for users because the tenets of machine readability and human readability


are moving closer and closer together. So what I've done here is I did some research


not on natural language processing but on writing for human readability. That is advice


from writers, from writing experts on how to write better, clearer, easier to read,


easier to understand content and then I pulled out the pieces of advice that also work as


pieces of advice for writing for natural language processing. So natural language processing


again is the process by which Google or really anything that might be processing language


tries to understand how entities are related to each other within a given body of content.


So the first three tips, short simple sentences, write simply, don't use a lot of flowery language,


short sentences and try to keep it to one idea per sentence. If you're running on, if


you've got a lot of different clauses, if you're using a lot of pronouns and it's becoming


confusing what you're talking about, that's not great for readers. It also makes it harder


for machines to parse your content. And then closely connecting questions for answers,


to answers. So don't say what is the best temperature to bake cookies? Well let me tell


you a story about my grandmother and my childhood and 500 words later here's the answer. Connect


questions to answers. What all three of those readability tips have in common is that they


boil down to reducing the semantic distance between entities. If you want natural language


processing to understand that two entities in your content are closely related, move


them closer together in the sentence. Move the words closer together. Reduce the clutter,


reduce the fluff, reduce the number of semantic hops that a robot might have to take between


one entity and another to understand the relationship and you've now created content that is more


readable because it's shorter and easier to skim but also easier for a robot to parse


and understand. Going back to the example of what is the best temperature to bake chocolate


chip cookies at? Now the real answer to what is the best temperature to bake chocolate


cookies is it depends. Hello, hi I'm an SEO and I just answered a question with it depends


and it does depend. That is true and that is real but it is not a good answer and it


is also not the kind of thing that a robot could extract and reproduce in for example


voice search or a featured snippet. If somebody says okay Google what is a good temperature


to bake cookies at and Google says it depends. That helps nobody even though it's true. So


in order to write for both machine and human readability be specific first and then you


can explain nuance, then you can go into the details. So a better just as correct answer


to what is the temperature to bake chocolate chip cookies is the best temperature to bake


chocolate chip cookies is usually between 325 and 425 degrees depending on your altitude


and how crisp you like your cookie. That is just as true as it depends. It in fact means


the same thing as it depends but it's a lot more specific. It's a lot more precise. It


uses real numbers. It provides a real answer. I've shortened the distance between the question


and the answer. I didn't say it depends first. I said it depends at the end. That's the kind


of thing that you can do to improve readability and understanding for both humans and machines.


Get to the point. Don't bury the lead. All of you journalists who tried to become content


marketers and then everybody in content marketing said, oh you need to wait till the end to


get to your point or they won't read the whole thing and you were like don't bury the lead.


You are correct. For those of you who aren't familiar with journalism speak, not burying


the lead basically means get to the point. Up front, at the top, include all the information


that somebody would really need to get from that piece of content. They don't read anything


else. They read that one paragraph and they've gotten the gist and then people who want to


go deep can go deep. That's how people actually like to consume content and surprisingly it


doesn't mean they won't read the content. It just means they don't have to read it if


they don't have time, if they need a quick answer. The same is true with machines. Get


to the point up front. Make it clear right away what the primary entity, the primary


topic, the primary focus of your content is and then get into the detail. You'll have


a much better structured piece of content that's easier to parse on all sides. Avoid


jargon. Avoid marketing speak. Not only is it terrible and very hard to understand and


you see this a lot. I'm going back again to the example of getting your clients to say


what their products do. You work with a lot of B2B companies. You will often run into


this and say yes, but what does it do? It provides solutions to streamline the workflow.


What does it do? This is the kind of thing that can be really, really hard for companies


to get out of their own heads about, but it's so important for users, for machines. Avoid


jargon. Avoid marketing speak. Not to get too tautological, but the more esoteric a


word is, the less commonly it's used. That's actually what esoteric means. What that means


is the less commonly a word is used, the less likely it is that Google is going to understand


its semantic relationships to other entities. Keep it simple. Be specific. Say what you


mean. Wipe out all the jargon. By wiping out jargon and kind of marketing speak and kind


of the fluff that can happen in your content, you're also once again reducing the semantic


distances between entities, making them easier to parse. Organize your information. Organize


it and map it out to the user journey. Think about the information somebody might need


and the order in which they might need it and then break it out with subheadings. This


is like very, very basic writing advice and yet y'all aren't doing it. So if you're not


going to do it for your users, do it for machines. You can also really impact skimmability for


users by breaking out lists with bullets or numbers. The great thing about that is that


breaking out a list with bullets or numbers also makes information easier for a robot


to parse and extract. If a lot of these tips seem like they're the same tips that you would


use to get featured snippets, they are because featured snippets are actually a pretty good


indicator that you're creating content that a robot can find, parse, understand, and extract


and that's what you want. So if you're targeting featured snippets, you're probably already


doing a lot of these things. Good job. And the last thing, which I shouldn't have to


say but I'm going to say, is that grammar and spelling and punctuation and things like


that absolutely do count. They count to users. They don't count to all users but they count


to users. They also count to search engines. Things like grammar, spelling, punctuation


are very, very easy signals for a machine to find and parse. And Google's been specific


in things like the quality rater guidelines that a well-written, well-structured, well-spelled,


grammatically correct document, that these are signs of authoritativeness. I'm not saying


that having a greatly spelled document is going to mean that you immediately rocket


to the top of the results. I am saying that if you're not on that stuff, it's probably


going to hurt you. So take the time to make sure everything's nice and tidy. You can use


vernacular English. You don't have to be perfect AP style guide all the time but make sure


that you are formatting things properly from a grammatical standpoint as well as a technical


standpoint. What do I love about all of this? This is just good writing. This is good writing.


It's easy to understand. It's easy to parse. And it's still so hard, especially in the


marketing world, to get out of that world of jargon, to get to the point, to stop writing


2,000 words because we think we need 2,000 words, to really think about are we creating


content that's about what we think it's about. So my hope for the SEO world and for you is


that you can use these tools not just to think about how to dial in the perfect keyword density


or whatever to get an almost perfect score on the salience and the natural language processing


API. What I'm hoping is that you will use these tools to help yourself understand how


readable, how parseable, and how understandable your content is, how much your content is


about, what you say it's about, and what you think it's about so you can create better


stuff for users. It makes the Internet a better place and it will probably make you some money


as well. So these are my thoughts. I'd love to hear in the comments if you're using the


natural language processing API now, if you've built a tool with it, if you want to build


a tool with it, what do you think about this, have you used this, how's it gone, tell me


Where Clickbait, Linkbait, and Viral Content Fit in SEO Campaigns - Whiteboard Friday

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


This week we're chatting about when and where you might use clickbait and linkbait and viral-focused


content as compared to other types for your SEO-driven campaigns.


There's a lot of savvy sort of folks at the intersection of SEO and content marketing


who are practicing things like this right now.


We've actually spoken to a few agencies who are specifically focused on this, and they


have really solid businesses because many brands understand that these types of investments


can produce significant returns.


But you have to apply them in the right scenarios and the right spaces.


So let's walk through that.


Let's say that you're a payroll software provider.


Your goal is to increase traffic and conversions, and so you're considering what types of content


investments you and your consultant or agency or in-house team might be making on the content


front.


That could be things like what we've got here, A, viral, newsworthy sort of linkbait.


I don't necessarily love the word linkbait, but it still gets a lot of searches, so we're


putting it in the title of the Whiteboard Friday because we practice what we preach


here, baby.


This might be something like the easiest and hardest places to start a company.


Maybe it's countries, maybe it's states, regions, whatever it is.


Here's the easy ones and the hard ones and the criteria, and you go out to a bunch of


press and you say, hey, we produced this list.


We think it's worth covering.


Here's the criteria we used.


You go out to a bunch of companies.


You go out to a bunch of state governments.


You go out to a bunch of folks who cover this type of space.


And hopefully you can get some clickbait, right?


Some folks actually clicking, some folks linking.


It doesn't necessarily have the most search volume, right?


Folks aren't necessarily interested in, oh, what are the hardest places to start a company,


or what are the hardest versus easiest places to start a company?


Maybe you get a few, but it's not necessarily going to drive direct types of traffic that


this payroll software provider can convert into customers.


But there's other options for that, like searcher-focused solutions.


So they might say, hey, we want to build some content around how to set up payroll as an


LLC.


That gets a lot of searches.


We serve LLCs with our payroll solution.


Let's try and target those folks.


So here's how to set up payroll as an LLC in six easy steps.


There's the six steps.


C, competitor comparison content.


They see that lots of people are looking for them versus other competitors.


So they set up a page that's QuickBooks versus Gusto versus Square.


Which software is right for your business?


So that they can serve that searcher intent.


They have D, right?


The conversion funnel serving content.


So they see that people, after searching for their brand name, people also search for,


can I use this for owner employees, businesses that have owner employees only?


So no employees who are not owners.


What's the payroll story with them?


How do I get that sorted out?


So you create content around this.


All of these are types of content that serve SEO.


But this one, this viral-focused stuff, is the most sort of non-direct.


And many times brands have a tough time getting their head around why they would invest in


that.


So do SEOs.


So let's explain that.


If a website's domain authority, their sort of overall link equity at the domain level,


is already high, they've got lots and lots of links going to lots of places on the site,


and additional links that don't go to the conversion-focused pages that they're specifically


trying to rank for focused keyword targets isn't really required, then really B, C, and


D are where you should spend your time and energy.


A is not a great investment.


It's not solving the problem you want to solve.


But if the campaign needs more raw brand awareness, people knowing who the company is, they haven't


heard of them before, you're trying to build that first touch or that second touch so that


people in the space know who you are, or you're trying to get additional visitors who might


fit into your target audience so that you can retarget and remarket to them, reach them


again, or you have a need for more overall links, really to anywhere on the domain, just


to boost your authority, to boost your link equity so that you can rank for more stuff,


then A, that viral-focused content makes a ton of sense, and it is a true SEO investment,


even though it doesn't necessarily map very well to conversions directly.


It's an indirect path to great potential SEO success.


Why does this work?


Why is it that if I create a piece of viral content on my site that earns a lot of links


and attention and awareness, the other pieces of content on my site will suddenly have a


better opportunity to rank?


That's a function of how Google operates fundamentally.


Well, Google and people.


From Google's perspective, it works because in the case where Google sees domainx.com,


which has lots of pages earning many, many different links from all around the web, and


domainy.com, which may be equally relevant to the search query and maybe has just as


good content but has few links pointing to it.


Those links, maybe the same number of links are pointing to the specific pages targeting


a specific keyword, but overall across the domain, x is just much, much greater than


y.


Google interprets that as more links spread across the content on x makes the search engine


believe that x is more authoritative and potentially even more relevant than y is.


This content has been referenced more in more different ways from more places.


Therefore, its relevance and authority are perceived as higher.


If y can go ahead and make a viral content investment that draws in lots and lots of


new links, it can potentially compete much better against x.


This is true for people and human beings too.


If you're getting lots and lots of visitors all over domainx but very few on domainy,


even if they're going in relatively similar proportion to the product-focused pages, the


fact that x is so much better known by such a broader audience means that conversions


are likely to be better.


People know them.


They trust them.


They've heard of them before.


Therefore, your conversion rate goes up and domainx outperforms domainy.


For people and for search engines, this viral-focused content in the right scenario can be a wonderful


investment and a wise one to make to serve your SEO strategy.


All right, everyone.


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


of Whiteboard Friday.


Content, Rankings, and Lead Generation: A Breakdown of the 1% Content Strategy- by Andy Crestodina

Hi, I'm super excited to be here.


I'm a Moz fan and an evangelist from way, way back.


Never even attended this event.


It's an honor to be on this stage and a pleasure to be able to teach you some of the best that


I've learned in all these years.


18 years in SEO and 12 years in content marketing, so Cyrus, thanks for that.


This one I am going to do a content strategy presentation that tries to combine all the


most effective techniques I know into one united strategy.


I'm going to make the case that this is a strategy used by only 1% of content programs,


statistically used by only 1%.


I'm going to start with a breakdown.


This is how I explain how content and SEO work together.


If you read a lot of the blogs, it makes it sound like just write some good stuff and


visitors find that through search, social and email and they go from your blog post


to that service page, right?


From there they go to your about page, the contact page where they fill out a form, the


thank you page.


We are building a bridge, digital marketing is about building a bridge between Google


and your thank you page.


That may be true, but it's even if the blog content is driving a lot of traffic on this


account, more than a million visitors a year, these people do not have commercial intent


and they are in fact extremely unlikely to ever become a lead.


Take a little segment in Google Analytics for people who start their visit on a blog


post and look at the conversion rate.


On this account it's.03%.


These people just aren't that likely to become a lead.


If you were to make another segment to show people who start their visit on a sales page,


a service page, a product page, that number is like 50 times higher, right?


People who start their visit on a sales page are 50 times more likely to become a lead


because they have commercial intent.


That arrow, that first arrow that connects the blog post as if visitors go from blog


posts to service pages, it is vanishingly small.


These leads are so unlikely that when they happen, I actually take a screenshot.


I'm like, wow, somebody who read a blog post actually needed our services.


It's just that unlikely.


Also unlikely is that people will ever link to your sales pages, right?


That almost never happens.


Why would someone link to your service page?


What people do link to all day every day is helpful, useful articles.


This is how I explain domain authority, content strategy, SEO to people like my mom.


We make this helpful, useful content to give the universe something to link to.


Those links pass authority to every page on our domain, making every one of our URLs more


likely to rank, which is how we get that service page to rank for the money phrase, attracting


a qualified visitor, that visitor who's more likely to become a lead, literally 50 times


more likely to become a lead.


We would never attract that qualified visitor and guide them toward our thank you page if


we didn't have sufficient ranking for that page, which we will never have if we don't


have sufficient domain authority, which we'll never have if we don't have links to our website,


which we'll never have if we don't have helpful, useful articles.


That's how I break it down.


People that understand this have a better strategy and you put it all together.


Here's a little video.


I love this.


This is the story of the blue shirts versus the red shirts.


It's a soccer game.


The good strategies versus the bad strategies.


It's a tale of quality versus quantity.


Watch this game.


The blue shirts are literally going to run circles around the red shirts.


They've got a better strategy.


They know what they're doing.


They're collaborating.


They've got some interconnected content.


It's all about quality.


They know exactly how to pay.


They're not worried at all.


It doesn't matter.


The red shirts, watch this.


They've got like 10 goalies.


No problem.


Do you think that bothers them at all?


No way.


The blue shirts easily win.


That's digital.


That is digital every day.


Why do some people get so much better results than others?


Some content strategies are a crush.


They outperform everybody.


That's what I want to do for you today.


I'm going to show you the specific things that separate those blue shirts from the red


shirts because it's not that good content is good and bad content is not so good.


It's that good content is amazing and bad content is basically worthless.


You could put twice as many red shirts on that field, same outcome.


You could have half as many red shirts on that field, same outcome.


Most content gets no results at all.


My first point, I've got like four or five things for you.


My first point is about original research.


Definitely what the blue shirts are going to do.


Steve Racin, Maz and Buzz Sumo collaborated to analyze a million articles to figure out


what correlates with links and shares.


The output was the scariest hockey stick curve in all of digital marketing.


Showed that 75% of content nobody ever links to.


50% get two or fewer Facebook interactions.


Then he concludes that there are two things that are the outperformers.


What are they?


It's the opinion forming authoritative content and it's the well researched and evidenced


content.


I'm going to paraphrase Steve here.


Strong opinion and original research.


Plug any competitor, any brand, any website into the link explorer and you'll see exactly


what people are linking to.


Look at your own site in search console.


The original research is crushing all other formats for content.


Why?


Because it makes that brand, that website, that domain, the primary source.


People link to original research all the time.


I'm going to give you three examples and you can do this.


Anyone can do this.


You can do it for yourselves.


Here's three ways in which we've done it.


No mystery.


What is the lifespan of a website?


Anyone I didn't know.


Who knows, right?


Kind of a missing piece of data.


So downloaded a list of the top marketing websites.


Alexa.com has a list of everything.


Gave it to a virtual assistant to go look at all these websites in the way back machine,


archive.org and came back and produced a statistic for us.


The average lifespan of a website happens to be two years and seven months.


We produced an original statistic that did not exist on the internet before.


We solved for X.


We answered a question that was where there was missing data.


Wikipedia links to this article.


I'm not saying that's an equity passing link.


I am saying that's indication that it's quality content.


And I'm not doing this for fun, right?


I have to generate demand for my services and it's attracted links.


And actually more than 100 websites have linked to this.


Haven't done any link building or outreach for this.


It's just organically attracted links as it's become visible to other people.


Example two.


What features are standard on websites?


We build websites.


We've built thousands of websites.


We build 40 sites a year.


We build a website for a company.


The guy calls me afterwards.


This is like my tiny phone.


The guy calls me afterwards and says, where's my search tool?


You didn't put a search tool on my website.


Okay.


He's got a narrow site map, very shallow, not a lot of content.


Good descriptive navigation.


He doesn't need a search tool.


But his question really was, isn't that standard?


Why isn't there a search tool?


Isn't that standard on websites?


Great question.


What is standard on websites?


What features are standard on websites?


Same exercise.


Download my list of websites, give it to a virtual assistant, give that virtual assistant


a list of attributes and elements that might be on websites and produce this chart.


I have credibly answered the question, what is standard on websites?


You can see right here, right?


75% or more had that.


I called that a website standard.


It's just an example of how you can create data where there wasn't data solving an information


gap.


That page ranks number two for web design standards.


It may actually rank even higher.


I might be outranking the.gov.


We should take the day off, team, if we're outranking.gov.


But it ranks right above the standard setting body for the internet.


Look, I'm outranking the World Wide Web Consortium.


It turns out they're not very good at SEO over there.


They don't have to be.


They control the internet.


They're fine.


That page has created lots of visibility on its own, more than 100,000 visits over time.


Yes, it's also been a magnet for links.


It's the primary source.


It gives the universe something to link to.


More than 200 websites have linked to that URL.


Remember, 75% of websites nobody ever links to, of web pages nobody ever links to.


One more quick example.


This one we're actually even better known for.


For this we use survey data, because data's not available otherwise, asking people, how


long does it take to write a blog post?


How long does it take to write a blog post?


I don't know.


Do you know?


Does anyone know?


We reached out to 1,000 bloggers, asked them 15 questions.


One of them was, how long it takes to write a blog post.


We did this year after year.


The first year we did it, the answer was two hours and 24 minutes on average.


Last year it was three and a half hours.


The time to write a blog post has gone up 40% over the last five years.


This URL is the source of that information.


Having done this and we repurposed the same URL over and over, 1,800 websites have linked


to that one content program.


That's good.


That's helpful.


That's a good thing.


That's with zero outreach.


The only outreach was to the bloggers to get them to take the survey.


I should do link building.


I plan to do it one day.


I'm going to give it a try.


The format for this, the way the scalable, repeatable approach for you guys is this.


Whatever industry you're in, any industry works for any.


Just ask yourself, what do people often say but rarely support with evidence?


What is the frequently asserted but rarely supported statement in your field?


Find and publish and promote the missing statistic and you will win the internet for the day.


You will have contributed to your industry.


You will have added to the conversation.


You have made yourself the primary source in your field.


Everybody does this, right?


Nope.


According to Michelle Lin at Mantis Research, only 47% of brands have ever published original


research in the last 12 months.


Our blogger survey shows it's less than that.


It's like one in five.


Hinge marketing shows that high growth brands are three times more likely to create original


research as part of their content strategy.


Probably because it's harder.


We spend, I'll do six to eight, maybe 10 hours of writing on each article with counting the


editing time and images.


This is like 15 hours per article.


That blogger survey takes us 150 hours each year to produce one URL.


150 hours.


Why would I spend 150 hours on one content, on one piece of content?


Sounds crazy, right?


It's because I will do anything possible to move myself even a little bit farther over


on this graph.


This is the most important, least scientific graph I'm going to show.


This is how I think about it.


Time and effort are linear, but results, every chart in digital, have you noticed this?


They're all exponential curves.


Everywhere.


Every chart in digital is an exponential curve.


Why don't you do whatever you can to move yourself even a little bit farther over there?


Makes a huge difference.


Literally, 15 hours to 150, that's 10x the effort.


1,800 websites have linked to that content program.


I don't do this because I have time.


I do this because I'm super busy, and I can't waste my efforts making more red shirts.


The world is not waiting for another medium quality blog post.


Just skip it.


Just don't do that.


Do something that pushes yourself way farther over here, because I don't have time to write


a lot of medium quality stuff.


I'm busy.


I've got to take selfies.


That's my little girl, Ada.


She's one year old.


I make these... You put frozen mangoes and yogurt in a smoothie, and then there's popsicle


charms.


Look, she loves that.


She gets along pretty well with Eli, my three year old.


This is why I spend more time.


This is why I work harder on each piece.


This is why I only publish once every two weeks, is for these guys.


By the way, they are doing great.


These kids are super smart.


They're well on their way.


They say don't... Sonia Simone, one of my content heroes, my two mentors from afar,


the ones I learned the most from in the early days.


Sonia Simone, Chief Content Officer of Copyblogger, and Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer of


Marketing Props.


Sonia says, don't take shortcuts.


They take too long.


Not worth it.


You'd rather have one red shirt than 100 of those, or one blue shirt than 100 red shirts.


Okay.


The second thing, collaborate with influencers.


I'm going to break it all down now.


I'm going to start at the beginning and break it all down.


What do you need to stay in business?


I'm doing B2B lead gen.


This should work for anybody, but I'll do B2B lead gen.


You want to lead?


You need two things.


Traffic and the conversion rate.


Cheese and mousetrap.


You want traffic?


Three classic sources of traffic in digital or in content marketing.


Search, social, email.


Search though are the much more likely to convert visitors.


We'll focus on search.


They have stronger intent.


Look at your analytics conversion rate for your default channel groupings you'll see.


We're talking about rankings.


Why do things rank?


The two big search ranking factors, authority and relevance, as in links and content.


Now we get to the best question in digital.


Why do people link to things?


Two simple reasons.


That you have relationships with people who create content and you have something worth


linking to.


We already said that the something worth linking to is original research.


Now we're going to do the next part of this, which is creating relationships with other


content creators.


I want to collaborate with content creators.


You see a lot of people on social media.


Not all of them are content creators.


What you need as a content marketer and an SEO is to have this circuit in your brain


for when you see content creators.


You're going to spend 10 minutes on social later today.


Radar should be up.


When you see people who, bloggers, editors, journalists, they're the 1%.


The 1% rule.


1% of us, we are here today, make the internet.


99% of people just consume the internet.


They're the lurkers.


They might comment or amplify or share, but they're not creating content.


People who don't create content don't create links.


I have to selfishly pay special attention to those people that are creating content.


Several people have mentioned BuzzSumo the last few days.


Just filter for bloggers and journalists.


Boom.


Everyone you find in that category is going to be a content creator.


BuzzSumo licenses links the domain authority data.


You can see right there the search and social benefits for each.


Pretty handy.


When you collaborate, this is organic influencer marketing.


Not paying for this.


I don't have a budget.


I spend money on marketing.


We're going to do contributor quotes.


We're going to do expert roundups.


We're going to do deep dive interviews with those people.


Not just anybody, but the columnist, the journalist, the academic researchers, the event directors,


the podcasts, and the bloggers and editors so that we can make stuff together.


You worked really hard on that influencer, that giant piece of research, right?


How do I get the big time publishers and researchers and influencers to see the awesome research


I made?


Boy, 150 hours of work went into it.


I would love it if Jay Baer knew about my research.


That would be great because he writes for some really high domain authority websites.


So does Michael Brenner.


If Jay and Michael knew about this article, that'd be great for me.


Oh good, I put him in it.


They know all about it.


If I could get... John Hall writes for all... He's a columnist for all the big publications.


If John knew about my article, that'd be fantastic.


Oh, perfect.


I included him in it.


You're stacking the deck.


You feel like you're cheating.


You've just... And by the way, it's what we should do anyway, right?


If you want links and mentions, you should give people links and mentions.


Give people what you want to get.


It's going to come back.


It works out somehow in the end.


You want LinkedIn recommendations?


Write people LinkedIn recommendations.


You want comments on your blog?


Write comments for people.


But yeah, this is a collaborative approach to marketing.


We'll break it down.


Red shirts and blue shirts.


The blue shirt reaches out to their community, socializes the topic, asks about headlines.


What do you think of this?


Then they include people in the article.


These two articles go live.


Who do you think gets greater social reach?


It's the blue shirt.


Blue shirt wins.


What's the difference?


Collaborative content marketing.


Everybody knows that content should be optimized to be promoted well, right?


Content is optimized for search.


Include your key phrase in the title, header, and body text.


Include semantically related phrases.


But what not everyone seems to have figured out is that content optimized for social media


includes people.


There should be people and faces and names.


The act of creating something is a networking act.


If you want to build relationships with those people that are going to one day mention you,


this is how you do it, right?


A journalist would never write an article without a source.


Why would a content marketer write an article without contributor quotes?


Everything I write has contributor quotes.


Why wouldn't I do that, right?


Because an ally in creating content is an ally in promoting content.


I got to interview John Rampton, who's a big time columnist and influencer.


I love this.


One in 10 people you help will help you back.


One in 100 will become a lead like some financial relationship.


He says, one in 10,000 it's going to help enough people and it's really going to come


back at you in a big way.


First of all, these contributor quotes make your content better.


Secondly, there's going to be greater social reach.


They sometimes call that ego bait.


It grows your professional network.


Just go check your analytics.


The friendship report, you'll see that line going up and to the right.


That's a joke slide.


We're fine.


We're going to move on.


I'm going to pretend that was funny.


The fun spikes right then.


Look at that.


I'm doing great.


Having a great day in marketing.


Actually, it's true.


The most important things in life are not in your analytics.


Have you noticed that?


Way more to life than data.


So everyone's doing it, right?


Nope.


Only 15% of B2B brands have ongoing influencer marketing programs.


Very similar.


The best content strategies don't just publish on their own website.


They publish everywhere.


They have a PR mindset.


The red shirt writes two articles.


The blue shirt writes two articles and pitches one to an editor who publishes it, wins a


link back to their site.


That's the dotted line.


And they got another contributor to write for their site.


So they've got more content associated with their brand.


They've got a network.


They've got friends and links.


Round two.


Round four.


Yeah.


Nice blog, buddy.


But this is what great web marketing looks like.


What's the difference?


Collaborative content marketing.


Right?


Pitching.


Reaching out to other websites.


Putting things that you made in front of a new group of people.


So everybody does this, right?


Nope.


Only 65% of bloggers in our survey ever write for other websites.


A third of them are trapped on their own site.


Just pumping out the post.


Just hitting the publish button in WordPress one after the other.


So I've written 380 articles about digital marketing.


12 years of content I mentioned.


Still, to this day, a third of my articles are guest posts.


Why would I ever stop doing that?


Why wouldn't I ever want to reach a larger audience?


I will never stop doing that.


I'll let you read that.


The fourth tactic.


Update older posts.


This one took me a while to figure out.


The aggregate, the total amount of traffic and brand awareness that you create is the


sum of all the URLs on the website, right?


So the more of these you have, that's the analytics for this one URL that got performance


at first from email and social.


Then that long tail of traffic from SEO, right?


The thing ranks, it's visible.


The more of these you create, the more total brand awareness you have.


So how do you make more of these?


I'm going to bust the...


Many of you probably already know this.


I'm going to break down one of my most reliable wins in SEO.


I call this how to get higher rankings in five minutes.


It works like this.


Go to the acquisition search console queries report.


A little easier to use in here than in search console.


And then you can see all the phrases you rank for and how high you rank for them.


I'm going to create an advanced filter to just filter to say, hey Google, just show


me the phrases for which I rank high on page two.


So far this has taken me 10 seconds.


Literally Google is making me a list, right?


Include for average position greater than 10.


If you rank greater than 10, you rank on page two.


This is a list, sort by position.


This is a list of all the phrases for which you rank high on page two.


Go confirm the ranking in Google search results.


See how high you rank and ask yourself if that's the best page it can be.


If not, we're going to go update that page.


Don't do keyword research outside.


Do keyword research inside using the keyword data of what's already working.


Maybe that's why they call it optimization because we keep improving it.


It's supposed to get better.


So after doing this for a while, I realized that there's a small set of pages that are


much more important to pay attention to because they're the big traffic magnets.


This is the best cheese.


It's attracting the most people.


Like I said, every curve in digital is an exponential curve.


Look at this.


Some of our pages are getting 24,000% more traffic than the average page.


That's a lot more traffic.


Maybe these are the ones that I should be paying special attention to.


And I have Moz for me.


Moz is an early warning system.


The rank is starting to decline.


So I have these ways of learning which articles need a little love.


Moz tells me this article needs a little love.


Needs help.


Starting to decline.


It's a good page.


It has strong authority.


There's lots of links to it according to Google search console.


And it has high page authority according to Moz.


It's just not the best page on the internet anymore.


It's a trustworthy URL, but it is no longer the best page on the internet for its topic.


The first thing I do is I put these things on a list because I need to pay attention


to them.


I don't want to forget about them.


These are the ones that I have to carefully protect because they may, a drop in traffic


for these might mean massive traffic drop for my overall website.


So the strategy is something I heard Brian Dean mention.


This is like at the bottom of a very long interview.


Really interesting.


This is, I'll paraphrase, only if all of my content is up to date and ranking where he


thinks it should be, will he write something new?


Otherwise, Brian just goes back and rewrites and reupdates and relaunches something old.


Bruce Lee is way more fun.


Think of it this way.


I fear not the man who practiced 10,000 kicks once, the red shirts, but I fear the man who


practiced one kick 10,000 times.


So I go rewrite this page.


I knew the rank was slipping.


I go rewrite the page.


Users are happy.


70% more time on the page and the ranking reversal, the ranking slip reverses.


Now the rank is coming back up.


I do this all the time.


As soon as the page starts to decline, rewrite it.


And this is not a light coat of paint.


I'm actually recreating the page.


It's about an 80% rewrite.


I'm going back to these things that were older and doing everything possible to add as much


value to them as I possibly can.


100% increase in, it takes about half the time of writing a new article.


We'll call this twice the traffic in half the time.


Almost exactly.


This one was almost falling on page two.


Look at that.


It's going off the cliff, right?


Where's the best place to hide a dead body?


Page two of Google.


It's right there.


It's about to fall.


Rewrite that one.


This is a 460% increase in traffic to that one URL, right, for making it a better page.


And then this one, I wrote this a long time ago.


Six web design tips.


I've been part of the planning process for like more than a thousand websites.


Six web design tips based on brain science.


That sounds pretty good.


It ranked for a while.


Time to update this thing.


It's no longer very visible.


What should it include?


We've seen this tip before, right?


It's Google Suggest.


It's giving me ideas.


I'm going to make a list of these related phrases for beginners, tricks, layout.


Put those into keywordtool.io.


It's going to scrape all of them out at once.


152 related phrases.


This is Andy's bootstrapped approach to semantic SEO.


I'm finding all the closely related phrases.


Google also asked Box.


It's going to tell me all kinds of stuff I need to include on this.


Also, the top ranked website for that phrase, if you put that into Moz and see every phrase


that that page ranks for, these are more clues for what the semantically related phrases


are.


I have my list now.


These are all the semantically related phrases.


How do you manage this list?


A Google Doc.


You can do it on paper.


It doesn't matter.


Here comes the magic.


I hit the article, and as I rewrite, I cross them off the list.


Just cross those items off the list.


I cover it off on the topic.


The new article is 27 research-backed web design tips.


How to design a website that works.


The original was maybe 800 some words.


Literally, I had to pan way out.


I squished it down in Photoshop so you could see the whole thing.


It's 43.


It's a big topic.


The length of an article is driven by the size of the topic.


4,300 words.


I've got five contributor quotes, 27 sections, and tons of original charts and diagrams.


Okay.


My goal, as always, my goal is to make the best page on the internet for the topic.


That's my most important slide.


If you're not doing that, I don't think you're really doing SEO.


This was Russ's point, right?


To make the best page.


If you deserve to rank, Google thinks it is the best page on the internet for the topic.


It ranks number one today.


That's the difference in traffic before and after the rewrite.


200 visitors a month to 2,000 visitors a month.


15 hours of work.


Was it worth it?


Yeah.


That's the fun part is to compete when it's attracted 148 links over time.


Kind of a radical idea.


Maybe you don't need to have 1,000 articles.


Maybe you need 100 really good ones.


Don't change the URL.


I'm in a group of people here who basically understand this, right?


No canonicals, no 301s.


Why change it at all?


Not only should we not change the URL, but as we go forward, here's a trick that took


me like 10 years to learn.


Write URLs that are easy to reuse.


Don't put a number in your URL because if one day you go rewrite that, you might have


25 different tips, right?


Then others you'd mismatch between the URL and the content.


Don't put formats in URLs because if that URL was for an infographic and two years later


you're going to repurpose that URL to make a long form piece of content, a long article.


URLs should just be short with no numbers and no formats.


I want to tell a true story now for a single piece of content that I wrote three years


ago.


That may sound familiar to you.


You guys were all here yesterday.


We were all here.


I was sitting right over there.


When Dr. Pete stood up and said that he found a key phrase he wanted to target and that


he thought he could beat the other pages that rank for that.


Yeah, I'm one of the guys who wrote one of the pages that yesterday he stood up and said,


I'm going to beat these websites.


I wrote an article called How to Increase Your Domain Authority.


This is one thing I wrote.


I wrote it years ago.


In SEO you don't usually meet the people you compete with, much less have them come up


on stage and tell you they're going to kick your ass.


How did this happen?


Thanks Dr. Pete.


Wow, that was rough.


Okay, I have a disadvantage.


I'm not a data scientist.


Here's my bootstrap way to do what he did in a much more exhaustive way.


He found 320,000 questions.


I'm going to find like 20, 31.


I go to answer the public, I find a bunch of questions related to domain authority and


I write an article.


Pete, I promise I worked really hard at this thing.


I did my best.


It answered 11 questions.


It had 2100 words.


I interviewed one of the Moz engineers who manages domain authority.


That's how serious I am about this.


I go on social, I find someone who works on Linkscape, I talk to them.


There's the total traffic over time, 7,000 visits.


Still the day that the Dr. Pete truck ran me over.


Thanks Pete.


Aw, bummer.


No, totally forgivable.


I'm not kidding myself.


I'm targeting a branded key phrase.


No, right.


She would definitely... Moz should outrank me for that phrase.


Okay, last tip.


We're going to upgrade our content to visuals.


Here's a surefire guaranteed works every time tactic.


Turn your top X into Y.


It will work.


Turn your top blog post into an infographic.


Turn your top blog post into a video.


Because basically I could argue this is the point of analytics, is to find the out performers.


In Larry Kim's words, your job is to find the unicorns so you can go make baby unicorns.


Find those blue shirts and clone the blue shirts so you have more of them.


It's going to work.


Here's my time management tips for you.


Creating high performing content is more valuable than creating new content.


Creating visuals is more valuable than writing articles.


Writing articles is still a better use of your time than responding to email day to


day.


Write something useful in the morning before you open your inbox.


Yes, it's true.


Responding to emails is still more valuable than scrolling through Facebook and Instagram.


Delete Facebook from your phone.


You'll be more productive immediately.


That's my best productivity tip for you.


Make your phone boring and you'll get more done.


Eli knows that visual content is important.


He produces it all the time.


I rarely teach this tactic.


I taught this once before.


I'm going to show you guys about one of the magical powers of creating high value visuals.


We create diagrams and charts for all these articles.


Then we build relationships with influencers.


You saw me do that.


I give links and mentions and promote other people as much as I can.


Then some of those people eventually reach out to me and ask me to contribute in their


content.


The person says, hey, would you mind contributing to my post?


Another true story, I practiced this on my wife who said, why do you have Seth MacFarlane


in your presentation?


I'm like, who's that?


Oh, it's the creator of Family Guy.


Oh, I just searched for guy and found that.


I'm like, labeled for reuse.


It's okay.


His image ranks for guy.


I randomly chose him without knowing who he was.


I'm like, Seth MacFarlane never reaches out to me for the record.


I never contribute to his blog posts.


Does he write blog posts?


I've never seen Family Guy.


Of course, I go look up the authority of that site, estimate the value of the contribution.


Then I go look at that list of the posts that need a little love.


Each of these is going to have diagrams on it because I worked really hard on my visual


assets.


Then I suggest the topic from that list.


Yeah, sure, I'd love to contribute.


How about something on this topic?


Sure, sounds great, buddy.


Then my contribution has the image in it, and below the image is an image source link.


That's a link that is very unlikely to get removed.


I'm doing... Is that a thing?


Image source link building?


Maybe it's a thing already.


We can make it a thing.


In the article, it appears there because when you do contributions to things and you have


strong visual assets, you have a magical opportunity to make sure that the link isn't removed or


that it refers back to the site because it would almost be unethical to remove the image


source link.


I'm going to wrap it up.


I'm going to put all this together now.


I'm going to give you an example of a strategy.


I'm going to pick a company.


It's a coffee delivery service company.


This is a real company in Chicago.


I don't know them.


They're not here.


Best Buy's not here.


I'm going in.


It's all based on this nucleus.


There's a sales page right in the middle, the money page.


It's optimized for the money phrase because visitors of this page that start here are


50 times more likely to become a lead.


My job is to get this page to rank for what phrase?


The commercial intent key phrase.


What's that phrase?


Office coffee delivery service.


The page is also conversion optimized.


It answers all the sales questions.


It's got testimonials and calls to action.


Cheese and mousetrap.


The key phrase, difficulty 22.


My site's authority is only 16.


This is not going to be an easy road.


22 is actually substantially higher than 16, right?


Another exponential curve.


Domain authority is on a log scale.


Fortunately, I've got a strategy to include original research.


I've got a piece of original research where I reached out to 50 of the top offices, asked


them what perks they offer.


I produced a long form piece of content with original data solving for X, finding the missing


statistic including influencers in it.


I've never gated any content, but if that's your style, get your content and people can


give their email address, grow your list.


I'm going to write the how to article.


I'm going to write the how not to article and pitch that as a guest post.


Editors love these.


I call it the evil twin.


If you write the best practices piece, write the mistakes piece.


You wrote the how to, write the how not to.


Pitch that to another website.


I've repurposed my content into an infographic.


I pitched the infographic.


Yellow is offsite publishing.


Pitch the infographic to another website.


I find an interview an expert on this topic as my influencer strategy.


I pitched myself as an influencer to another website.


By the way, Blue Ocean podcasters often don't get pitched.


It's a really great opportunity.


Show notes link back to things.


Pitch yourself to podcast to talk about your new research.


Then I'm going to go update some blog posts.


They were doing well before.


I'm going to improve them.


I'm going to write some other blog posts.


This is a unified content strategy that combines tactics that very few brands would do.


How often could I do this?


Let's do it quarterly.


I'm going to do it quarterly.


Now remember, the key phrase difficulty is 22.


Why?


Because the other high ranking websites have a bunch of links to them.


Between 100 and 200 links to them.


I'm starting with 42.


If I want to get into that range of 100 plus websites linking to me, let's say each round


of this content strategy produces 25 new links to my website.


Yes, I know not all links are created equal, but 45, I started at 42 plus 25 plus 25 plus


Certainly by next spring, I'm going to rank for office coffee delivery service.


I am 100% confident in this content strategy.


Didn't cost me money.


It just took me time.


It's the blue shirts.


You can do this.


Anyone can do this.


There's no magic to it.


Okay, 25%.


Only 25% of people's brands ever publish original research.


Only 20% are powered by influencers.


Only 65% ever publish content on other websites.


Only 35% are consistently updated.


0.25 times 0.20 times... I'm bad at math, worse than anyone in this room, but I can


do that much.


Only 1.23% of strategies would combine these tactics.


Guys, easy pickings.


Only 1% of strategies are anchored in research, influencer-powered, PR-focused, and updated


consistently.


99% of people just didn't make it to Moz today.


Too bad for them.


We're going to crush those guys.


This was super fun.


MozCon 2014 - 01 - Welcome! with Rand Fishkin

My goodness gracious. It is wonderful to see all of you again. It's been a long time. You


know, I haven't had these yellow shoes out of my closet for a year. It's kind of crazy.


Also Geraldine told me this is the only shirt in my closet that goes with yellow shoes.


So apparently they're not easy to match. We have a lot to get through. We have just a


phenomenal event. And I want to say how much it means to me and to all of us at Moz that


you guys are here for this. It is a wonderful experience to know that the community that


we've been building together as an industry gets to have an event as special as this one.


And believe me, this is going to be something. All right. So apparently we're going to get


to see my face again. I'm going to talk about a couple of big trends as always, as is tradition


from the last year in web marketing. And then I'll be diving into a little bit about what


Moz has been up to and prep you for some of what to expect here at the conference.


So first off, I'm of the opinion that the search marketing field and the web marketing


field more broadly is actually on the verge of serious regulation for potentially the


first time. First time in a big way. And obviously there's a few things that have led to this.


Those of you from the UK probably remember the lovely cookie law that your government,


I don't know, came up with. I really like this graph. I thought it illustrated the trend


perfectly. Helped with one of those two things. And luckily, luckily this policy was so ridiculous


that I believe it was repealed just before the penalty actions took place. So thank you,


I guess. That looks like a lot of the regulation stuff that I see around cookies.


But cookies aren't the only thing, right? So Canada had this very aggressive email spam


law that went into effect recently. I believe you can get fined a million dollars per incorrectly


sent email or per email you're not supposed to. The EU is right to be forgotten, though.


This is the big one. This is the one that really has me thinking that the EU might be


more serious about cracking down on Google. And you can see the requests are pouring in.


Google's handling of it has been I think a little bit cheeky. They've sort of I think


they've leaned to making things feel a little bit broken in that they don't want the regulators


to feel like they implemented something effectively. That's not to say the regulators aren't not


to blame either. The FTC obviously in the U.S. has some disclosure guidelines. And the


U.S. I was kind of shocked about how close we came to legislation of digital marketing


in the U.S. back in May and sort of narrowly avoided it probably through some combinations


of lobbying and promises of campaign donations. Google themselves has staved off regulation


much more intelligently in my belief than Microsoft did, for example, in the 90s. And


you can see why and how. So this is a wonderful chart from the Washington


Post showing that Google has now become the second largest lobbying spender in the United


States, which is a little bit scary but also makes good sense, right? Google is an incredibly


powerful company. They control a ton of data and technology. No wonder.


The sucky part, the part that really frustrates me and I think frustrates a lot of people


in this room is that, yeah, well, Google has this clout. They have this influence. We don't.


I'm actually disappointed to say that over the last 15 to 20 years, even though the search


marketing industry is one of the closest, most tight-knit, most wonderful groups of


people I've ever been around in my professional or personal life, we have really failed to


put together an organizational governing body, something like what they have in the e-mail


marketing world, something like what they have in the web analytics world. And I'm really


hopeful that this doesn't come back to bite us in the ass.


And respect to Sempo for trying. I believe they have tried, but it's been an effort met


with futility thus far. Number two. This is a little weird. So I have


been a champion, as many of you probably know, of the term inbound marketing for a long time.


I liked how it condensed me having to say SEO and social and content and community and


all the other things that are not paid but generate traffic to your website for free,


but you have to work on them hard. That was a mouthful. Inbound marketing was an easy


way to say all of those things together. But it's a little weird. Take a look. So you can


see back in 2012, right, when I was like, hey, I think this inbound marketing thing


is taking off, 2012 it really looked like it was taking off. And then someone shot by


it like a rocket. In the last year, this is from Simply Hired's


data, you can see job posts using inbound marketing down 46%. Job posts using content


marketing up 90%. And so you and I know the difference, right? Inbound marketing based


on earning attention rather than buying it. Interrupting. Content marketing, producing


and promoting content to earn customers. Okay. There's a difference. But outside of our industry,


these subtleties are not seen. What we call SEO and social and content and community and


earned media and these kinds of things, content marketing, that will do just fine for 90%


of these job posters. Such is the way. Google. I have seen their penalties take a


huge toll on spam, a very effective toll over the last couple of years. But they have also


hurt a lot of businesses and hurt a lot of marketers and people who hire marketers. And


I think they've made our industry, well, challenging in a lot of fascinating ways.


So, you know, Google has their sort of milestones for spam fighting that you can find on their


Web site. And what's interesting to me is for the first 15 years of Google, what they


said is you worry about making a great site, we'll worry about making taking care of spam.


Great. You take care of spam, I'll make a great site. I'm on it. Now it's, you know


what, make a great site and you worry about your own spam and anybody else's spam because


it might hurt you, even if you had nothing to do with it. And you should check in, I


don't know, every hour or so in your Webmaster Tools account, make sure there's no spam pointing


to you. I mean, it's not that bad. But this has sparked huge amounts of fear and uncertainty


and doubt around things like negative SEO. I actually like this post by Craig Addyman


from Bronco, works with Dave Naylor out in the UK, did a great job explaining that what


most of us fear as negative SEO, which is bad links pointing to me, that generally speaking


will not hurt you on its own. But there's a lot of very illegal, very unethical, very


nasty hacking type things that can potentially hurt you. And what to watch out for there.


Marshall Simmons, who's speaking here, I'm proud to say this here, I really like what


he said at SMX. He said, Google is the new IRS and we are the new tax accountants. It's


true, right? Like if we're constantly having to audit and maintain and monitor, Google


is essentially saying, you know, full employment for anyone doing SEO. You have to always keep


your eye on that ball. It's kind of crazy. Number four. I'll show you some fascinating


data on this. So from 1997 to 2010, which was a good long run, people kind of called


themselves SEOs, right? But today, today, that is changing. SEO in your job title, there's


17,625 profiles in the United States on LinkedIn with SEO in their job title. There are 133,000


with SEO in the job description. That's a big difference.


From kind of 2011 to modern day, we're seeing less of the SEO is my job title and rather


SEO is part of my job. It is one of my tactics, one of my activities, one of the things I'm


responsible for, but it is not my job title. At least nowhere near where many of us thought


it might be. Number five, Google. Shortening a searcher's


journey. So okay. I am as frustrated and pissed off about this as many people, right? Essentially


this idea that Google can just ‑‑ we had a deal, right? Back in the day, we had


a deal. 1998 rolls around, Google comes out and they say, hey, we want to be able to crawl


all y'all's websites and in exchange, any content we get from you that we list, we will


send traffic to you. We'll refer traffic to you. We'll take a little snippet and we'll


send traffic to you. And that is not what they are doing anymore, right?


This is not ‑‑ here's a snippet. This is essentially I'm going to take your content,


I'm going to show it to people. You'll never know that anyone or who might have seen it.


You will get no ad impressions, you won't get to control the experience, you'll have


no analytics data about it. Your content is now mine because I'm the 800 pound gorilla


and you don't have a lobbying body. So hey, that's how it goes.


Title type ‑‑ I think Dr. P, you're going to be showing some cool stuff on this later


on as well. I actually looked this up while making a presentation. If you click that seven


more items, it will drop down. If I didn't know better, I'd say Google was just like,


oh, Microsoft, yeah, let's take all their content and put it right in here. Actually,


I do have some feedback now that you mention it. You guys are dicks.


If you don't feel like Lando Calrissian yet, you will. You will. So here's where I want


to have some empathy for Google. In order to feed their revenue engine, Google has to


grow not search market share because they have 90% plus share in virtually every country


outside of China, South Korea and Russia, maybe the Czech Republic. Even in the United


States they have 85 to 90%. Comm scores data is almost certainly wrong. And what they want


to provide is instantaneous answers that don't require a click because our psychology as


users of the web, as users of mobile devices is getting more and more demanding. More and


more demanding. And because of that demandingness and crazy amount of demand, we need instant


answers and if we don't get them, we will go to someone who provides them for us. And


so I'm of the opinion that what Google is doing here is trying to grow queries and grow


addiction to search. And it could be the case that if they succeed, this will actually grow


the pie for all of us. Maybe. You know. It's like Vader saying hey, once I conquer all


the planets, I'm going to bring peace to the empire. And you decide if you believe it.


If you're in our space, you really only have two logical courses of action in my opinion.


Number one, you've got to diversify your traffic channels. And this means investing heavily


in things that might be very hard. In a lot of spheres, social is a very hard channel


to grow. In a lot of spheres, content marketing is a hard channel to grow. Direct and brand,


tough channel to grow. But what choice do you have? And number two is to become more


important to Google and Google searches than Google's traffic is to you. It's a rock and


a hard place. All right. So the year at Moz, this last year has been a very challenging


one. In fact, the last 12 months have certainly been the hardest of my professional career.


And there's a lot of reasons for that. I'm not going to go into all of them. But I will


say we have done some remarkable things. We launched a new platform, Moz Analytics, had


kind of a rocky start, but I think is under Matthew Brown's stewardship. Hate to compliment


Matt Brown, but boy, he's done a good job. Under his stewardship, I think it's become


a really great product. We have a new CEO, Sarah Bird, who you'll get to spend a little


bit of time with. Oh, yeah. She's fantastic. She's one of my longest and closest friends


and is doing a wonderful job as CEO. I emailed her the other day and said, I almost


feel a little bit bad because no one has told me that they wish I was back in the role.


Not one person ever. It's almost it's a little it's fine. Don't tell me that. I won't believe


you anymore anyway. We launched a new tool this January, February,