tactics that pretend that your site is better than it really is.


Esse Quam Videri: When Faking it is Harder than Making It- Presented by Russ Jones

Well, we all know what's happening to them.


Think Panda and Penguin and Medic Update and every single time you get a manual penalty


or Google's ignoring various links, we know that Google is getting better and better and


better at stopping these types of tactics.


And so what I've kind of realized is that there's this evolutionary model of SEO tactics.


And it works exactly like the prey and predation methodology we see in the real world.


You know, first we create content and we use tactics to try and promote it.


Google ingests it and filters it or tries to.


And in the process applies selective pressure, which are the filters, the algorithms, the


penalties, et cetera, in the same way that a predator would be able to identify certain


types of praise that, for example, let's say don't have camouflage.


And then the content that wins, that succeeds, that wasn't caught by the filters ends up


getting more resources because they rank higher.


And now they're able to do more.


There's this redistribution.


And then both the prey and the predator, our sites, our SEOs learn how to get past Google


a little bit better or at least what works.


And Google learns what didn't.


And then we start the cycle over again by creating new content and mutating our techniques


in order to try and get to the top.


But of course, the evolutionary model plays out over time.


So if Google effectively applies the selective pressure to tactics which seem rather than


tactics which are the best, then eventually the two should meet.


And it looks something like this.


Now obviously these aren't real numbers or anything.


But as an SEO, we would constantly come up with new ideas on how to trick Google.


And then there would be a filter that would come in.


And instead of being as effective as it was before, it would become a little bit less.


And then Google would come out with a new algorithm, a little bit less, a little bit


less, and a little bit less.


And at some point in the future, the two cross.


Now one of the questions that I really wanted to know was where exactly are we in this history


or time frame of SEO?


Are we at that point where it really makes sense to just go forward and try to create


the best?


Well, I went back to Twitter and asked some more SEOs.


And apparently we're not quite there yet.


Most SEOs think that earning links is still harder than acquiring them through other methods,


like buying links, which means that instead of being at this imported inflection point,


we're probably somewhere in the middle.


Now what does this mean?


Does this mean that we should just keep going about things the way that we do?


Well, I actually think things are a little bit different than this shows.


See I think there are three important takeaways that we need to remember about this process.


The first is lost investment.


When you use a tactic that pretends that your site is better than it really is, and then


Google actually catches it, that investment is gone.


It's not recoverable.


The second is that when you use tactics that actually make your site better, you end up


placing pressure on your competitors, such that they have to parry your changes.


Because they can't wait for Google to create some sort of algorithm to knock you down,


because Google doesn't want to.


Your content is actually good.


It's the content that they want.


But I think the most important one, and one that has hit me dearly so many times, is what


I call surviving the red.


You see when a seeming tactic, and by seeming I mean these tactics that pretend that we're


better than we're not, is successful, then everything seems to be going great.


You hire more employees.


You buy a bigger building.


Your customer builds a bigger warehouse.


They hire more employees.


They take on more fixed costs.


But then when Google successfully suppresses it, sites dependent on that temporary traffic


dramatically lose substantial revenue.


So the revenue curve is quite different from the efficacy curve.


You see, each time that filter hits and your revenue drops, it's not like magically all


of the employees that you hired stop costing anything.


It's not like magically the warehouse that you filled with all of the products you expected


to sell just magically disappears.


I don't know how many of you have been there, but at my old company, we used to call it


Black November.


It was because every November, marketing agencies or large businesses would start to run out


of their budget.


We would have to sit down after a year of expansion with a list of names on a sheet


of paper and figure out who's got to go right before Christmas.


Now look at this graph.


Notice that the company that is faking it is always making more revenue than the company


that is making it.


But also notice that the company that is faking it is the only one that is ever at risk of


going under.


And I think that that's something we constantly forget about.


We forget about the economics of our industry, and we think only about ranking.


So I think it's inevitable.


I think it's coming.


So how do we stop seeming and start being?


What does that look like?


Well, here's some ideas.


For example, we can qualify our customers, make sure that they are on board with your


vision.


We can commit to tactics that improve the user experience until the page is the best.


It's not to say we don't use the seeming tactics, we just wait until we've already become the


content that deserves to rank.


And we can use those tactics that promote agnostic user experiences after we're the


best.


And for most agencies, this actually just means changing the order of operations.


It might be hard to convince your customers at first, but most of you probably know how


to improve the quality of content, know how to improve page speed, know how to improve


accessibility in UI and UX.


And the question is, are you going to do that first, or are you going to go straight to


the links?


Now, I know what a good percentage of this audience is thinking.


It's the exact same thing I'd be thinking if I were sitting there.


This is a bunch of bullshit.


This is just not how the real world works.


If you want to rank in SEO, it is cutthroat, and you've got to just do anything and everything


it takes to rank, because if you don't, your competitors are going to undermine you and


undercut you, and you're going to win.


But I'm going to challenge you today with the wise words of Billy Madison.


I choose business ethics.


I don't know how many of you are familiar with this film.


If you have not seen it, it is your homework for tonight.


You have to watch it three times to really get it, or once high.


Either way.


So the reality is, though, that the thing that makes SEO so exciting, the parts where


you get to be clever and inventive and really go at the competition, don't disappear because


we've decided to be the best.


You could still be clever and resourceful.


You could be cutthroat while holding to these same standards of ethics.


Let me just run through some of this.


This is the part where we start getting specific and tactical.


This is a scenario.


It's not the exact company, but one that we actually worked with in my old company.


It used to be Verante, now Hive Digital.


It was a law firm that had produced by far the best content on some specific medical


conditions that were related to injuries that would occur in the hospital.


Most of the content out there that was ranking was content from the hospitals themselves.


So it covered the health issues, but it didn't cover the legal issues.


Their content wasn't as thorough.


They had literally built the best content out there.


Now we could open ourselves up to using these tactics because we're not pretending that


this is the best content.


We know that it is.


So we can split test link building.


Here was the steps that we used at the time.


First we registered the.org of the domain because we know that.orgs engender a higher


level of trust.


We duplicated the site exactly with cross-domain canonical tags so that Google knew the one-to-one


page ratio.


Then we split test multiple designs.


We pulled out the kind of information that made it overtly salesy.


And then we linked build to these pages as opposed to the ranking page.


And of course since there's the canonical tag in place, it's passing the link value


to the identical content, albeit slightly rearranged.


For example, we might have images in one or another.


And at the end of the day we were able to maximize the success of the link building


campaign by using the split testing technique.


And once we had done this for all of the content on the site, we just 301 redirected and they


maintained all of their rankings.


But we can be resourceful in other ways.


We can find ways to cut costs.


For example, this one is one of my favorites.


Getting imagery is just tough.


Who can afford a graphic designer in a small agency?


And if you can afford a graphic designer in a small agency, what graphic designer has


enough time to design pictures and imagery for every single piece of content?


So you know what your content needs.


You know it needs unique imagery.


So what's a technique that we can do?


How can we be clever and actually make the best content out there?


Well one of the simplest ideas that I came up with many years ago was to first identify


exactly what we need.


Look at your competitor's sites.


Who has the best imagery?


We find these images and then we go to the best site on the internet, Fiverr.


It turns out that there's a dime a dozen, well I guess it would be a five a dozen, five


dollars a dozen, something like that, of individuals out there who will convert any kind of raster


image, a raster is like a photograph, into a vector image.


Which means we can do something like this.


If you have a website on gardening and you're talking about Dahlias, you can have an inspirational


image converted into a vector image.


So now you have some unique imagery on your site, but then you improve upon it by adding


important information about, for example, how to plant them.


Now it's perfectly fine here to cite the original image.


That image isn't going to outrank you.


The page might, but not the image.


So you can give credit where credit's due, but at the same time you've now made your


site better than that competitor because not only do you have good imagery, but that imagery


is coupled with the important information that they need in order to take advantage


of the content that you've created.


But now for the fun part.


This is my bread and butter.


The ruthless undercutting of competitors.


So you now deserve to rank.


Your site is the most thorough.


It offers the most formats, PDFs, videos.


It's accessible, secure.


It's mobile friendly.


Ask the same questions about all of your competitors.


Every single one of them.


Chances are everyone here in the room has heard about link building off of your competitors'


links.


You know, you'll go and you'll see, okay, what sites have linked to more than one of


my competitors?


Well, forget that because it doesn't need to be more than one of your competitors.


You can poach the links of every single one of your competitors because I promise you,


you will find a flaw on their site that is worthwhile and will give you what's called


inbox justification.


We'll talk about that in a second.


The steps are simple.


First, you download the back links of all of your competitors.


You then determine whether or not your competitor employs accessibility or mobile friendliness,


whether they have certain formats, whether their site is secure, and then you outreach


to all of those sites targeting the competition based on their weakness.


Now real quickly, inbox justification for those who don't know is a really important


part of the link building process.


When you send an email to somebody, you've got to have a good reason.


It can't just be please give me a link.


There needs to be a reason.


And because you're now the best, you have tons of reasons.


For example, here we've downloaded all of the links using Moz's new link explorer, and


we're going to do some accessibility link building.


I'll go to a site like tenon.io and find out that Boston Children's Hospital has over 359


accessibility issues on their page about Play GSF.


Imagine how much more effective your email is when it goes to the sites that link to


Boston Children's page here and says instead of could you please give me a link, we've


got great content that says hey, you know, you linked to this great page on Boston Children's


Hospital, but unfortunately it's not accessible, which means it's going to be really difficult


for a lot of users to read.


Would you consider including an accessible version of the same content?


Your conversion rates are going to shoot up, and what's really crazy is they shoot up in


the most important industries, the your money or your life industries.


Health and finance, this is where this kind of stuff matters because the information needs


to get to everybody, including those who use screen readers and all sorts of accessibility


devices.


What about mobile friendly link building?


You can check your competitor's performance easily to see whether or not they're mobile


friendly.


In this case, Virginia Commonwealth University's page is not mobile friendly.


So your pitch now is hey, I see that you linked to this great page, but it's terrible on mobile.


Would you consider linking to a mobile friendly version of the same content on this site?


We've got a format target link building.


This is actually one of my favorite methods.


You take the same content that you already have, put it into a PDF, for example, and


then you send an email out to these competitors saying hey, look, I see that you linked to


this great site, but it's really important that individuals be able to get access to


this information and print it out, et cetera.


We've got this cheat sheet on this topic or we've got some great PDF about the information.


Then what I'll do is I'll put a hash PDF in the URL and then use JavaScript to make it


so that when you visit the page, it automatically downloads the PDF.


So even though the link counts towards the page, the user gets the PDF.


You can do the same things with videos or any other types of link building.


And then another one that's really rarely used but actually very important in your money


or your life sites are security link building.


In this case, that same children's hospital doesn't have a secure certificate.


You kidding me?


Kids with illnesses?


We're talking about the most private and difficult thoughts and decisions that any parent or


child might ever have to deal with.


If being studied on a site that doesn't have a secure certificate, send out that email.


Hey, we know the content's great on Boston's Children's Hospital.


It's a fantastic hospital, but it's not secure.


And you know, there are going to be some parents who want to make sure that everything's private.


Would you consider linking to this one as well?


And notice that in all of my requests, I don't say replace the link.


I say link to it as well.


My goal here doesn't need to be to take down my competitors because I can get the links


from all of my competitors.


And them combined, even if all of the competitors retain their existing links, will allow us


to beat them.


I've got nine minutes left according to this.


So I'm going to level with you for a little bit here.


Get a little bit serious and probably ruin your evening.


Before I joined Moz, I worked at an agency.


And you know, I guess I could say I had the excuse that back then we were earlier along


that path of when faking it was better than making it.


I could probably hold on to that excuse.


But when I think about my legacy over those ten years, I know with certainty that I never


looked at a single client's page or site and asked myself, does this page deserve to rank?


And there are lots of things that I can think about that are positive.


Made great friends.


I helped build businesses.


I built software.


I helped other companies.


Small mom and pops.


But I know deep down that part of my legacy as an SEO for a whole decade was making search


worse for millions of people.


I literally promoted sites day after day after day that were not as good as their competitors


and led people to sites that were more likely to convert them to products that weren't going


to do as well or give them information that wasn't as valuable and that wasted their time.


Now, it's hard to look back on your career.


Even I'm 37.


I'm not as old as Dr. Pete.


It's hard to look back on your career and already start to regret some of the things


you've done.


But at the same time, it's really great to know that you've got a lot of time ahead of


you to make a difference, to do it better.


And I think that that's the one takeaway I want you guys to walk away with today.


It doesn't have to be the way it feels like every day.


It doesn't have to be a situation where you feel like I've got to prove to Google, I've


got to make Google think that my site's the best now, today, it has to happen immediately.


We need to stop sacrificing the long run for the short run.


We need to stop sacrificing our businesses two, three, and five years from now for the


gains that we might get in a week or two.


When we all know in this room that given three to five to six months, Google's going to figure


it out and make it stop working.


So please, when you walk away from this conference, I ask that you just remember one thing, to


be rather than to seem.


Analytics to Drive Optimization & Personalization [MozCon 2017] — Krista Seiden

True story, my very first week at Google, that song you just heard, size Gangnam Style,


hit one billion views on YouTube.


First video to ever break a billion.


Every single company meeting for the next month ended in everybody doing the little


horsey dance.


So welcome to Google.


So today I'm going to talk to you about a theme of fives.


We're going to start with five tips for using analytics to drive CRO.


Then we're going to look at five ways to drive conversion with personalization.


And I'm going to finish with leaving you with five things that you can start doing today.


So I was listening to a talk about a month ago maybe and I heard him say that you can't


do SEO, excuse me, without CRO.


And there's been a lot of speakers so far at Moz that have talked about search or intent


and meeting that search or intent and that's what this is about.


So I want to take this one step further and say that you can't do CRO without analytics.


Because you need to know what's going on on your site when you're doing all of these optimizations.


So by transitive property, you cannot do SEO without analytics.


Sweet.


We have many factors that contribute to low conversion rates on our site.


So first up, user experience.


Are you delivering a good user experience to people when they land on your websites?


Is your site content personalized?


Does it speak to the users when they come to your website?


I think this goes back to that meeting your search or intent.


You have actionable web analytics.


Does your data that you're collecting actually help you to understand what is going on on


your website?


And finally, do you have the development resources that you need to do all of this?


I know that for me personally, in my many years of actually doing analytics and optimization,


this has been a real challenge to the point where I've gone on long endeavors to build


server side testing tools with engineering resources that I scrap together to be able


to get around having web dev resources.


It's a problem.


And it's something that you can solve with tools often.


But you can also solve with grit.


So the first thing I want to talk about is understanding your customer behavior.


And we're going to do that with our tips for using analytics to drive optimization.


So tip number one, implementation to track conversion rate optimization.


If you are using a tag management system, a TMS, you likely have a data layer.


And you can use that data layer to collect custom information.


So let's look at an example of what this might look like.


Now I'm home in my hometown of San Francisco.


And I'm feeling a little lazy.


I'm craving some Italian food.


I go ahead and I do a search for Italian food delivery.


Specifically in this case from Postmates.


And I click on that first result for Tommaso's restaurant.


And I get taken to the Postmates website.


Now this so far is a good experience for me, the end user.


But for Postmates, if you look at that URL, you can see that it's just an individual URL


for this restaurant.


They don't have any indication of a category like Italian food or a city like San Francisco.


And so in their analytics data, they're not actually able to drill in and understand these


characteristics about what users are searching for and arriving to.


I've been given permission to pick on Postmates a little bit here.


My fiancé actually was recently hired to drive growth and SEO there.


So thank you so much for letting me pick on you.


But here's something they could do.


Again, they can use this data layer to collect custom information.


They can have a page subcategory of Italian.


And they can have a city of San Francisco.


And they can take this information from the data layer and send it to a custom dimension


in Google Analytics.


And then they can slice and dice all of that page information, that landing page data in


Google Analytics by these custom dimensions to know so much more about what their users


are looking for and how they can then optimize that process for them.


Another way that you want to use implementation to track what you're doing is to use campaign


tagging to distinguish for variations.


So you guys, if you're familiar with Google Analytics, you might have heard of UTM tracking.


So first case, email testing.


You want to tag all of the different CTA buttons in your emails with UTM parameters.


And specifically you want to tag them with that additional parameter of UTM content to


know the difference between these buttons.


Let's say you have two different emails that you're sending to test headline copy.


You want to make sure that you're tagging them individually to know that one was from


headline A and the other was from headline B so that you can track that traffic all the


way through your website.


Similarly, if you're doing PPC or doing ad testing, use that UTM content field.


I like to use it to track my headlines with my ads.


That way very clearly in analytics I can see which headlines were working well for my business.


And finally, social media.


If you're doing social media, if you're posting on many different channels, you want to have


individual tracking links for each post, for each channel.


Here's an example from my own blog.


This is a little old.


Back in the day when Google Plus was still kind of a thing.


So you'll see some posts on there about Google Plus.


But what I did here was for every post I tagged it for either being from Twitter or from G


Plus.


And in the content field I used the content field to track the headline of the article,


the name of the blog post that I was driving traffic to.


And by doing so, I'm actually able to then do an analysis where I see that when I blog


about Google Analytics, I tend to get a lot more traffic from Twitter.


But when I blog about Google Tag Manager, I actually get a lot more of my traffic coming


from Google Plus.


Did a little more digging and what I figured out was there's actually a very strong Google


Tag Manager community on Google Plus.


And my articles would be shared in this community and that's where all that traffic was coming


from.


I wouldn't have been able to do this level of analysis, though, and figure that out and


then to start sharing my own content there had I not tagged it properly from the get-go.


So tip number two is analytics goals to track CRO success.


So if you use Google Analytics or really any analytics tool, you can set up goals in that


tool.


So prior to my role as the evangelist for Google Analytics, I spent a lot of years as


a practitioner.


And right before I moved to the GA team, I spent two years actually building and running


an analytics and optimization program internally at Google for what was then the Google Apps


for Business group, what is now the G Suite group, if you guys are familiar with that.


And they had a three-step sign-up process to sign up for Google Apps for Business.


You can see it here in this funnel.


Step one, two, three, and the goal is that they completed this form.


And I tracked every step of this funnel with goals, and here we have a goal flow.


And what I love so much about this report is I can actually track my drop-off.


I can see that I have huge drop-off from step one to step two here.


And when I went in and I kind of dug around and tried to figure out what that might be,


I realized that the message that we had on our home page when people went into step one


didn't necessarily resonate from them to what they actually saw on that step one page.


So we experimented with putting different messaging on that page and trying to make


that a less jarring experience, and it definitely helped to improve the drop-off.


But this was a good starting point for knowing where we should look to optimize first.


And this is a custom report in Google Analytics.


I'm looking at just some custom variables, custom dimensions down the side.


Across the top, though, I have all the goals for this web business.


I have goal one, step one of that form, step two, step three, all across the top.


And what I like about this is that I actually am tracking micro conversions, that they went


from step one to step two of that sign-up funnel, and I'm tracking macro conversions


so that they actually signed up and completed that form.


This is a great way to, again, look at that funnel in a different format, in a table format


with much more granularity.


So this is the next one.


They are customer arrives, they're a large publisher out of Europe, and they are doing


a lot of testing.


And they actually count on a lot of their traffic coming from SEO.


That's the majority of their traffic that they get is organic.


So they really care that their user is getting that searcher intent, they're meeting the


goals when they search and land on their website.


And one of the ways that they're tracking that is they actually have their analytics


goals set up to match what they're testing.


So they're using Google Optimize, which is our A B testing software, and what you can


see here is the integration between Google Analytics and Optimize actually uses the same


goals from GA that you have set up to track your business goals right to your optimization


goals.


So they have things that are very publisher-centric.


Maybe you went two pages deep on my website or three pages deep or they clicked on a sidebar


post.


And these are the things that they are optimizing against.


Tip number three, your site can tell you what's important.


So I think many of you are probably familiar with this report in Google Analytics.


This is a site search report.


You see some heads nodding.


Great.


So who has a search box on your websites?


Are you using site search?


Yes?


Good.


If you're not, you should.


This is one of my very favorite reports in Google Analytics because it is actually your


users telling you exactly what they want on your website when they're there that they


can't find right off the bat.


So in this case, we're looking at my blog again.


I see a lot of search terms for tag manager and Google tag manager.


So clearly people are looking for content on GTM.


I might want to consider blogging more about this.


But I think this is especially relevant for SEO because these are the words that you should


be optimizing that content towards to meet that search or intent all the way up the funnel.


So this is another tool.


It's called Crazy Egg.


It's one of my very favorite tools outside of Google Analytics for heat mapping specifically.


Don't use Google Analytics for heat mapping in page analytics.


That thing sucked.


Crazy Egg, though, doesn't suck.


Don't tweet that, please.


I might get fired.


But what I really like about Crazy Egg is it actually tracks all of the different clicks


on your website and you can do a lot of different things with that information.


So prior to my Google days, I worked at a company called the Apollo Group, and I was


specifically working on a career portal.


We spent a lot of time developing this new Web page that brought together a lot of different


resources for our students to find to help them build resumes and find jobs and find


counselors and all of these different things that somebody would need as they're completing


a degree and getting ready to go into the workforce.


So after spending so much time developing this site, we were really excited when it


launched and we started to look at the data.


We had three main calls to action on this page, three big boxes right there above the


fold.


And we were really, really surprised to see that our three main calls to action weren't


getting any clicks.


We were like, what's going on?


We spent all of this time developing this content.


We see that we have a lot of people coming to this page, but they're not actually clicking


on the things we want them to click on.


Why is that?


We put Crazy Egg on there.


And what we found out was, in fact, people were clicking there.


They were clicking a lot on these boxes, these images of what we wanted people to go to.


But my developers hadn't actually made the images clickable.


The only thing that was clickable was a tiny link in the description below, and that was


easily missed.


So that was a huge missed opportunity that we were able to find with Crazy Egg, fix it,


and we saw a huge spike in people actually then going to those resources that we really


wanted to drive them to.


Tip number four.


Key analytics reports to pay attention to.


So normally when you hear about a talk about analytics to drive your optimization, you


think great, somebody's going to tell me about Google Analytics reports the whole time.


I felt like I had to tell you about a few, so that's this section.


So first is our devices report.


And this is just a report looking at all of your different traffic by desktop, mobile,


and tablet.


And that's cool, but that's not the thing I really like about it.


What I like, if you look all the way to the right, is the goals.


So in the conversion section here, you can see that you can actually change, you can


toggle between all of the different goals you have set up in Google Analytics.


And I can see that some of my channels or some of my devices are performing poorly,


in this case tablet and mobile, are significantly underperforming web.


I happen to know that in this case the mobile signup flow was pretty awful, it wasn't optimized,


but I had that data now that I could take back to my teams and say, hey, we're getting


a lot of people coming through here.


They want to complete this funnel.


They can't because it's such a crappy experience.


Let's optimize this.


And we have the browser report.


So here you can see Internet Explorer significantly underperforming our average.


Now, you might say, why do we care?


Who's using Internet Explorer anymore?


There are a number of people still doing that, though.


If we click in, we can see that it's actually a few browser versions that are the culprit


here.


I happen to know that the business had stopped supporting IE 8 some time before, but there


were still a significant number of people that were actually trying to go through our


signup funnel with IE 8.


So maybe I should use that information, take it back to my team and say, we might want


to support this a little longer.


Okay.


Site search.


I already covered this, but this is a little different angle here.


So this is our search term report, and across the top we have all of our goals.


And what I'm doing here is I'm actually looking at which search terms are driving conversions


all the way across my funnel.


So I like this.


This is a custom report.


You can easily build this with any of the different goals that you have set up in Google


Analytics.


Finally, and especially relevant for this audience, our search console integration.


So here we're looking at landing pages as well as queries, and this is the integration


to hook up Google Analytics to search console to be able to get all of that search console


data within GA.


Last tip in this section, qualitative surveys as CRO tiebreakers.


So I'm a huge fan of qualitative surveys.


I can't tell you how many times I have run a quantitative test and it came up flat and


I needed an answer.


So specifically, back in my Google Apps for business days, we worked for months on a whole


site revamp.


Lots and lots of people spending all day, all night, thinking about this website redesign,


doing a lot of work.


Finally, we're ready.


We test it.


What do you think happens?


It fails.


Dang it.


It failed by a couple percentage points.


So we dug into our analytics data, we figured out what were some of the triggers that we


could or the levers that we could pull and try to optimize this, and we did that.


But also, on each version of our test pages, on the tests and the original, we put the


same qualitative survey.


And what we found at the end of all of this was after we made these additional optimizations,


our results were pretty flat between the old site and the new site.


But of course, as any marketer knows, you spent all of this time, your CEOs, your executives,


they want you to go ahead and push out this new site after such an investment, and if


there's not really a big difference, what's the harm?


Maybe it's good, maybe it's bad.


That qualitative survey saved us.


It actually told us that people overwhelmingly preferred the new website.


They found it easier to use.


They were able to find the content that they wanted more.


They liked the look and feel.


It was just more intuitive to them.


So we're able to confidently say even though the quantitative numbers are flat, qualitatively,


we feel good about this.


And I'm not the only one to say this.


I know several people have already touched on surveys being super important here, and


so I just want to add on to that and say this is something that you should definitely be


considering.


It's the voice of customer telling you how they are using your product.


I want to switch gears a little bit now and move into driving conversion with personalization.


So Gartner did a little study.


They found that 89% of companies expected to compete mostly on the basis of customer


experience, which means if you're not trying to deliver that personalized experience, you


are not going to win.


So again, this is a five ways section.


I'm going to go through five ways of using personalization to drive conversion.


So the first one is understanding the market with personalization at mass scale.


And in this case, what I'm going to say is that you don't actually have to do anything


to personalize.


This is the Google apps for business website early on in my days there.


We had a headline that said discover a better way of working.


And our marketing team loved this headline.


They thought it was this holistic message that spoke to the suite of software tools


that we were selling.


We were selling Gmail and docs and drives to businesses.


We were going to help them discover a better way of working.


And engineering took a look at the data and they said that's a load of crap.


We know that 80% of people who sign up for Google apps for business only ever use Gmail.


So let's change the headline.


Thankfully we said let's test it first.


Okay.


Great.


So this is what we tested.


We had our headline of discover a better way of working against a whole bunch about Gmail.


Engineering especially like this last one, get email for your domain.


Marketing really hated it.


You can imagine that is not a marketing friendly message to put out in market.


But marketing also said there's no way that's going to win.


That's laughable.


I don't care.


I just want to test it, put them at ease.


What do you think happened?


That's right.


Get email for your domain.


Not only one.


It blew it away.


20% increase in signups for Google apps for business with this headline.


I happened to be on the other side of the world for a conference when this test finished.


Two weeks later I was getting ready to go to bed and I started getting frantic pings


from my VP of engineering saying you better launch that site.


And then I got frantic pings a few minutes later from my VP of marketing saying don't


you dare launch that new headline.


I was like crap, I'm stuck in the middle, I'm not even there, I can't really talk to


them in realtime.


After several hours of negotiation, well into the night, what happened was we decided that


we would go ahead and launch this new headline mainly because engineering said you know that


testing tool that we built for you, well, if you don't launch our headline, we're going


to stop supporting that.


So we launched it.


But I spent the next several hours of my night building some follow-up test plans that we


ended up launching within the next two days to again test a more marketing-friendly version


of this headline.


And after a couple more weeks what we ended up with was get Gmail for your business with


subtext of and docs drive and hangouts and all these other things that you can do with


the suite.


Couple lessons there.


One, again, you don't have to do anything but understand who your users are to personalize.


And two, when you're going to test, make sure that you have sign-off from all of the different


parties involved.


Otherwise you too may lose many hours of sleep trying to get everybody on the same page.


Okay.


Testing the market with personalization at a local level.


Again, Google Apps for Business.


This is our U.S. website.


And I don't know what your business is, but at Google it's very common that you will have


one marketing template that you translate for all of the locales that you want to have


a website in.


So this was our Japanese website.


U.S., Japan, they look pretty similar, right?


Have you ever seen a Japanese website?


They don't look like this.


In fact, they are busy.


They are so busy.


They have confetti flying all over the screen and widgets everywhere.


You know, me as an American looking at this, I'm like, oh, it's overwhelming.


I can't even understand what the message is.


But this is how they do business.


This is what they like.


This is what speaks to them.


And so as you can imagine, this website did not speak to them.


And we heard this over and over and over again from our Japanese team.


And finally we said, okay, let's test something a little bit more local.


We didn't go all the way to crazy widgets all over the screen quite yet.


But one of the things that they said was, hey, you see that gray button in the upper


right-hand corner?


Let's go back to the English version.


It says contact sales.


Nobody in Japan is going to click that button and submit a lead form online.


That is not how you do business in Japan.


We want you to they want a hand-held process.


They want to meet with the sales team and understand a walk through and have printouts


to take back to their executive teams.


This doesn't work.


So let's get rid of that button.


Let's replace it with a guide.


So we did.


We tested this.


We created this guide.


It was a three-step flow.


Poorly translated to flow of available.


They called it a guided flow of what you had to do during this 30-day trial process.


And it was printable.


A big print button on it.


They could print it out, give it to their executives.


It was much more of a Japanese way of doing business.


And it killed it.


693% increase in clicks on that guide and an 8% increase in people actually signing


up for a trial of Google Apps for Business.


Hugely successful.


And because we didn't learn that we needed to do things at a local level, we tried to


test this in the U.K. and the U.S. and it failed miserably because that's not how we


buy enterprise software.


We took this a few steps further and we tested many more things in a more Japanese style.


So on the left was a mock that we made of various things that we wanted to test.


In the middle we wanted to do a much more local hero image.


And on the right, about a year later, this is the website that we ended up launching.


And it was the first time for that business that we broke the template at Google and gave


a unique website to a unique audience.


And it performed so much better for them.


The third level of personalization.


Understanding the referral source with personalization at the traffic level.


Slightly newer version of the Google Apps for Business website.


We had a Gmail landing page.


If you clicked on an ad that led to a landing page for Gmail, you would land here.


And it just had a headline of Gmail.


We had an inclination that if we tried to bring over the headline of the ad onto the


landing page, it might help with conversion.


So we tested a headline that said get Gmail for your business or for work.


And we made the landing page say that too.


It worked.


It had a very nice increase in continuation through our trial signup flow process.


And that's because we were using consistency of message.


Number four, understanding the customer with personalization at the action level.


So last year I had the opportunity to speak at the Wharton customer analytics initiative


conference.


Really cool conference if you've ever had a chance to check it out.


It's the best of academia with the best of analytics.


Loved it.


This was their event website.


And I had gone to this website to sign up for the event as a speaker to register.


And a couple days before the conference, I came back because I wanted to check the agenda.


And this is what I saw.


The event is sold out.


But they knew that I had actually already been here, already signed up.


And so instead of sending me this kind of bland experience, they could have tried something


like this.


Just by knowing that I had already been there before, I'd fill out their form, they could


say we're looking forward to seeing you there.


And that would go a long way for me to feel like it was a personalized experience.


Just by knowing that I had already taken action on that website.


So the last level of personalization is understanding the customer with personalization in real


time.


So this is light in the box.


It's an online vendor, kind of like an Amazon.


And I'm on their website and I'm searching for digital cameras.


And I do a lot of research.


I may even add one to my cart.


But I don't check out.


Now as a good marketer, if I put on my marketer analyst hat, I'm going to go into Google Analytics.


This is a report in Google Analytics 360.


It's called a custom funnels report.


And I'm going to build this funnel.


I want to understand what's going on in this process.


So I see that a lot of people have visited this website.


Many have looked at that digital camera page.


Some may have even added to their cart.


But very, very few have checked out.


Pretty bad.


I'm going to check out conversion right here.


What's cool about this report is if I click that red arrow pointing down from any of those


steps, I'm going to get a box.


In this case it says, hey, we know that 2,346 people fell off at this stage.


They didn't check out.


Would you like to create a segment and remarket to these people?


Of course I do.


I'm a great marketer.


I want to bring them back to my site.


So I'm going to go ahead and do that, create an audience and remarket to those users.


I can also share that same audience with something like Google Optimize.


And I can make sure that not only am I giving them a message in the ad I'm remarketing to


to them with, something like get free shipping on your next order, but when they come back


to the site, I can then serve them a personalized experience with that same message to that


same audience that says welcome back, get free shipping on your next order.


So my last section, taking action.


Five things that you can start doing today.


First, make sure that you implement to track your relevant data.


Remember that Postmates example.


Second, explore your analytics data for optimization opportunities.


Third, identify your key metrics and your secondary objectives.


Make sure that you're tracking them in goals so that you can use that information across


all sorts of reporting.


Fourth, build personalized examples, experiences.


I give you five examples of how you can do this all the way from doing literally nothing


but understanding who your customer is all the way down to providing a very personalized


experience based on the action somebody has taken on your site.


And finally, measure, analyze and repeat.


So we had a theme of fives today, five tips for using analytics to drive optimization,


five ways to drive conversion with personalization and five things you can start doing today.


And remember, you can't do SEO without analytics.


And one last thing I want to leave you with.


This is a little bit of a side note.


I am very, very passionate about the women in tech, women in analytics community.


I spent the last few years of my career really promoting this.


And so I just wanted to leave you with a few resources.


If you're interested in analytics or data of any sorts, the digital analytics association


has a women in analytics group.


It's an amazing community to have conversations and meetups.


If you're on measure slack, there's a women in analytics channel.


If you're not on measure slack, you should join it.


You can join at join.measure.chat.


It's a wonderful place to talk about anything and everything, measurement, data, digital


related.


You can start a group within your own company.


I know so many people have done this.


At Google, we started a women at analytics group.


And we have meetups within our analytics group to get our women on the marketing side and


the sales side to meet up with our engineering women and hear that tech versus business perspective


and really promote each other.


And we have men involved in this organization, too.


And it's really been a very fruitful effort to get people excited and to really build


allies within our own company.


The Google analytics handle on Twitter has created a women in analytics list.


This is a list of well over 100 really excellent women in the data and measurement space.


Great list to follow.


Finally, I blog about this topic fairly often.


I've got several posts up on my blog.


And this sticker, I actually have a few of these with me.


If you track me down, if you want a women in analytics sticker for your laptop, go ahead


and find me.


I've got a few to hand out.


So thank you very much.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

Hello and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

My name is Carly Schoenhoven and I'm a Senior SEO Manager here at Obility.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

We're a digital marketing agency focused on B2B in beautiful Portland, Oregon.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

Now, one of the biggest struggles I find that B2B companies have when working on


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

a content strategy is how to create content that's able to effectively rank


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

for those top of funnel, higher search volume, more conversational queries.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

A lot of times B2B companies are really focused on mid funnel.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

They've got great eBooks, lots of good gated content, but they tend to


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

neglect the top of the funnel content.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

However, that type of content is so important because it allows for your


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

potential customers to perform self discovery and really learn more about


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

your brand, learn more about the industry you're in before they're ready to take


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

a more meaningful step like filling out a form or requesting a demo.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

So one great content strategy for a B2B company is creating a pillar page.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

Pillar pages, you might've heard them referred to as hub and spoke


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

content or umbrella content, but whatever you want to call it,


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

it's essentially the same thing.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

So the idea is that you start with your pillar page.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

So this is one large piece of content that's really optimized for one very


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

broad topic that's really relevant to your business and then it internally


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

links out to your cluster pages, which are targeted at those longer tail,


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

secondary keywords, and really well optimized to answer the questions


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

that your customers may have.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

And it's so important that you're linking back from the cluster pages


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

to the pillar page and from the pillar page out to your clusters.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

Again, this has multiple benefits.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

One that your customers are able to navigate to this content and get


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

their questions answered themselves.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

And then at the same time, it's great for SEO because it's so easy for Google


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

to tell what this content is about since it's all internally linked to each other


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

and it's all focused on one specific topic.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

So if this sounds like something for you, I'm going to walk you through


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

step-by-step how to go about creating a pillar content strategy.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

So step one, of course, is you have to pick a topic.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

So there's a couple of things you want to keep in mind when you're doing this.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

One of which is that you want it to be broad, but not too broad.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

So obviously it has to be somewhat broad because you need to be able to find


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

enough secondary keywords that also have search volume that it's worth


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

your time putting the work in.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

But if it's too broad, it's going to be really difficult to create one piece


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

of content that covers everything you need to cover in this content.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

So for example, a pillar page about SEO as a whole, that


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

might be a little bit too broad.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

There's a lot of stuff you're going to have to cover, and it's going to be


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

really difficult to rank for a lot of those keywords, but something like SEO


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

content strategy, that's a little bit more focused, there's still a lot of


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

potential there, you can talk about ideating content for B2B, you can


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

talk about onsite optimization.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

So something that is definitely broad, has lots of keywords, but not so broad,


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

you're biting off more than you can chew.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

So speaking of keywords, obviously you have to do keyword research.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

This is SEO, so important.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

So you can start with that one topic, but then you really need to expand


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

your list of keywords to find all of those secondary keywords


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

that you want to include.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

Moz's Keyword Explorer is a great tool for this because you're able to put in


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

your topic and then it'll generate all those related keywords for you, along


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

with things like search volume and keyword difficulty.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

I also love that you can filter down to just see keywords that are questions,


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

because again, it's so important to make sure that you're answering your


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

potential customers' questions in your content.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

So you've got your list, you've got your keywords, but don't forget to look at


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

your existing content as well.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

So you're going to be putting a lot of work in, find ways you can save yourself time.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

Maybe you'll have some content buried in your blog or buried in your resource


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

section that you can repurpose and include as part of this strategy.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

So definitely make sure you're not neglecting content that you already have.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

Up next, planning your structure.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

So you're going to be creating a great new piece of content.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

You need to know where you're going to put it.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

You know, you can just link to it in your top navigation, or maybe you just want


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

to feature it on your resources section.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

But one thing to keep in mind is that you want to make sure that your cluster pages


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

are in a subfolder of your pillar page.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

All right.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

Step five, start writing.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

You actually get to start putting these pieces together.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

So ultimately, what do you want them to look like?


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

Now, ideally for your main pillar page, what you want is to have sort of just


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

an introductory section talking about the topic area as a whole.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

But really, this page serves as that hub that links out to all


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

of your other secondary pages.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

So you want to make it really easy to navigate.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

You want to make sure you're including lots of mid-funnel CTAs within that content.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

So ultimately, this is that hub piece of content where everyone's going to


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

navigate to from those cluster pages.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

So, you know, start with your intro and then have a nice table of contents.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

And then a little header for each of your cluster pages with a little bit of a summary,


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

but then that ultimately links out to those cluster pages so that someone can visit


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

that page if they really want to learn more and get more in-depth into that topic.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

As far as your cluster pages, this is where you really want to get in-depth,


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

spend a lot of time putting your content together, make sure you're covering it.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

I think that the question and answer format is a really good approach for this type


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

of content because it really helps you optimize for featured snippets or for the


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

people also ask feature.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

So you want to make sure that you're putting your question in the header and then,


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

you know, summarize the answer to that question in about 40 to 50 words if you're


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

optimizing for a snippet.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

All right.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

Number six is promotion.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

So you've created your content, you've figured out where to put it,


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

you've published it, you did all this work, you want to make sure people see it.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

So, you know, promote it internally, make sure you're sharing it on your social


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

media, share it with your team, but then also flex your link building skills and


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

reach out to anyone in your industry who you think would benefit from this content


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

or be willing to share it as well.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

Number seven is measure.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

So of course, you put all this work and you want to see how does it do?


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

Did it perform well?


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

So you have your list of keywords, so use Moz to track your keyword rankings,


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

take a look to see if there's, you know, new keywords you weren't able to


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

rank for, keywords you weren't expecting to rank for.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

Obviously, keywords are super important.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

And also, look at Google Analytics, check out your landing page reports,


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

see are you getting organic traffic, are people actually converting?


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

See what you can learn from that if you need to make tweaks,


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

swap out your CTAs, you know, just make sure you're measuring,


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

you don't let this content go to waste, you're bringing in this new traffic,


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

make sure you're converting those people.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

And step eight, repeat.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

So once you have the process down, do it again, find other topics that are


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

really relevant to your industry you can create a pillar page about.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

And when you do, tell me about it.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

I really hope that this was helpful for you and I hope you go out there


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday

and create some pillar content.


B2B Pillar Pages — Whiteboard Friday


Runtime: The 3-Ring Circus of Technical SEO

Alright, alright, let's stretch it out, stretch it out.


Everybody stand up.


Jumping jacks.


Okay, our next speaker, those are terrible jumping jacks, I apologize.


Our next speaker, you're excited, I'm excited, I've introduced him so many times and every


time he kills it without fail.


Yes, I am talking about Michael King, aka I-Pull Rank, runs I-Pull Rank Agency in New


York, he's a former rapper, he's a polymath, he does everything.


Mike wrote a blog post a few years ago called the Technical SEO Renaissance, still one of


the best SEO articles ever written in the history of SEO, still relevant today, you


can go read it on the Moz blog.


I'm happy that he's speaking here today.


Let's kick it over, Mike King.


You know, Elon Musk was right, artificial intelligence is definitely going to destroy


the world, it just needed a little help from me.


When I saw that his company, Open AI, had a technology that could generate messages


as though a human wrote them, I was intrigued, not impressed.


But when they said it was too dangerous to release to the public, I knew I had to get


my hands on it.


Now here we are.


I've had enough machines running GPT-2 to clock every protocol and messaging system


in New York City from the stock market to air traffic control with coherent gibberish


for the past 108 days.


The world has fallen into chaos and no one has proven savvy enough to solve my puzzles


and take back control.


It's simple.


Really?


Step right up to my three ring circus and try your luck at ranking in my virtual search


engine.


Send in your so-called SEO gurus, your marketing geniuses, let's see what they're made of.


Oh, looks like our favorite repeat contender's back.


Let's see if her 71st attempt is any better than her others.


It's been 108 days and no one has beat my game.


Only the future of the city depends on it.


This time I know I've got it.


I've seen all of the combinations, so I'll definitely make it through.


Okay.


It's the e-commerce site.


First let's get data and Alyssa competitors, run Screaming Frog from the command line and


extract some key data points and parse it out to big query since the site is so big.


Lots of duplicate content.


Two page types are exactly the same.


Last time I canonicalized those, the net effect was a traffic loss of about 15%.


Let's set up a split test to make sure that the page to page canonical is worth deploying.


No to the canonicalization.


This is actually pretty fun.


Normally a test like this could take 30 days, but this game simulates that in a few seconds.


Looks like there's been some sort of migration, but the internal linking structure has not


been updated.


Luckily, he made this easy.


All of the URLs are the same except for the removal of the product subdirectory.


I can fix this quickly on the database layer.


It's basically like find and replace in a word document.


Let's back up the database in case something goes wrong.


Okay.


Let me get these going quickly in the spreadsheet.


Remove the product string from the URL and set up the mapping.


Now I can run a batch string replaced in MySQL from node.


I'll just open the spreadsheet as a CSV and loop it through.


Bam.


It'll take a while to run, but everything is fixed.


Oh, she's getting better this time.


She knows about submitting a request for a crawl increase from the crawl team in search


console.


Who knows?


Maybe she'll finally get to the next ring.


There can't be much more for me to knock out on this challenge.


This site is pretty much optimized on page.


Now let's set up some Google ad scripts with a few business rules based on absolute rankings,


user features from SERP API and external conditions to get integrated search going.


I'm sure that's got to give me some brownie points and get me out of here.


I wish I could make the site's internal linking structure update in reaction to these changes


too.


Damn it.


I forgot that external data is tied to the real world and the real world data is.


Sorry, your 71st try was no better than the first.


Thanks for playing.


We have lovely parting gifts.


Actually we don't, but you knew that already.


Enhance.


I can help you beat this.


Who is this?


Based on some of your techniques, you know exactly who this is.


You're right, but I haven't learned anything from you in years, my cool king.


Listen, you're the only player left now.


What do you think happens when this mad man gets bored of you?


I went to meet up at your office once.


Is this still in the same place?


Of course.


I'll be there when you're ready to win this thing.


You guys make your class without me?


Great.


Now I get to hang out with some has been SEO Liberty so we can save the world together.


This better not be a waste of my time.


Wow.


I haven't been here since that I pull rank meet up.


This place is really falling apart.


Mike, what did you invite me here for?


To film some whiteboard Fridays?


Where are you?


You know, magic is just creepy after a certain age, man.


It's nice to meet you too.


We've met.


I know Casey.


I also know why you keep going in there.


Cool.


Keep it to yourself.


Why don't you tell me what happened to you?


Me?


Yes, you.


You used to be the go to guy.


Honestly, I really admired your work before or after I lost my entire team to that mad


man.


Oh, so you did notice.


Yeah.


I mean, I didn't take out an ad in the New York Times or anything, but I wish it was


me instead of them every single day.


You're going to have to do better than that.


I don't.


I have a family.


It'd be irresponsible of me to go in there.


I thought I taught them all better and I thought they'd be able to beat the game, but they


couldn't.


And I got to live with that.


Help.


They all got further than you, but they don't have what you have.


My superior skill set and coding ability?


Nope.


Your relationship with the clown.


We're not going to talk about that.


Do you know why you keep failing?


I'm guessing you're going to tell me and then we break into some sort of training montage.


This ain't a movie, Mike.


If you know so much, why didn't your team make it the whole way through?


You keep failing because you're thinking logically.


You're not accounting for the accelerated chaos that the dark clown is introducing into


the SERPs.


He's got all the same rules and all the same systems as what you'd expect in real life.


It's just that everything is faster and is a layer of randomness.


All the sites you're competing with in the simulation are being immediately reactive


to your changes.


So why am I not getting out of the first ring?


Well, here's an example.


Your fix for the internal linking structure changes was smart, but I think you know you


can go a lot further than that.


And if it's possible, then the dark clown's game expects it.


From what I've observed, he's looking for the most complete solutions possible.


Have you ever seen what eBay does with their internal linking structure?


The legendary Dennis G. blocked about this a couple years back.


There are parts of it that are directly reactive to what happens in the SERP.


If something ranks in page two, they programmatically build enough internal links to that page and


pop it up to page one.


A lot of the big e-commerce sites have figured this one out, but every site has a different


threshold for the number of internal links that you've got to build to see position changes.


Say what now?


Let's take a step back for a second.


The web is just a series of programs.


The output from a program that is your web server and front-end stack is the input to


the program that is a search engine.


Obviously.


Our programs need some composite metrics.


Those can be used to drive some changes to the logic of the output.


The first step is identifying keyword owners.


In other words, how do we identify which URL on a site owns which keyword?


You can pull position, page authority, and clicks or traffic and devise a keyword ownership


score.


I didn't send my team in there.


They all went in there on their own accord.


Some of them were the first to go in, but none of them were given the second chances.


Only you got that.


Taking those three values, position, traffic, and page authority, or whatever URL level


link authority metric you're comfortable with, we run this equation on all the pages ranking


for a given keyword.


Using that, we can determine the best URL for each keyword throughout the site.


Then we can adjust the weights needed to get the best values.


What about the on-page targeting?


What if a page is better targeted in the page title or on-page copy than the one that the


score determines as the owner?


Yeah, this is just a quick and dirty, but you could add edit distance from the page


title, entity salience, or LDA scores to augment the keyword ownership score.


Oh, that easy, huh?


Well, now you have a way to quickly know which page should own which keyword.


With that list of keyword owners, you could bulk update the anchor text for links across


the site on a database level like you did with the URLs.


It'd be a string replaced on the database level within the primary content block based


on the anchor text.


Although you may want to review it a little closer than just a string replace.


You may want to use a DOM person.


And you can add and subtract links at scale based on where pages rank.


If something ranks on page two, inject the wealth of links into the body copy and other


link blocks and voila, you got page one rankings.


But you should A-B test until you find that sweet spot in the number of links that you


need to build first.


Okay, that's a solid tactic.


What else you got, old man?


Hmm, well, the Dark Clowns game is just a simulation.


We have one too.


We built it on the back of the common crawl and the way back machine data.


It's just one of the many use cases of the common crawl.


And if you're not familiar with it, the common crawl is an incredibly powerful data set of


billions of pages in their metadata.


You could use it to build a link database or for broken link identification or web scale


data extraction or to build a seed set of URLs for anything really.


I can show you some things that'll help you get through all three rings of the circus.


But first, let's talk some more about composite metrics.


Those will really help you drive scalable optimizations.


Okay, two more composite metrics.


These help with the scalability of making decisions around whether or not you should


optimize or retire a piece of content.


When you perform a quantitative content audit in a tool like URL Profiler, there's a lot


of quantitative metrics to choose from.


If we take some linked metrics like page titles, meta descriptions, and word count, and then


combine them with numbers of images and videos and then sprinkle in some analytics metrics


like time on page, unique page views, and bounce rate, then add the total number of


links and social shares as well as the mobile and page feed scores, we can compute a composite


content performance metric.


You sure you got enough metrics in that formula?


Similarly, we can take the ranking search volume and keyword difficulty of keywords


associated with a given URL, and then you can calculate a keyword performance potential.


Let me guess, Y equals something, something times LN, something plus something.


It's fundamentally the same equation with different values plugged in, R is the ranking


score and the values changed based on the ranking.


Now once you compute the CPP and CPS values, you compare the two and determine the threshold


of whether or not something is performing well enough.


And if it's not, does it have enough potential for you to optimize it further or should you


delete it?


The rules can be as simple as if CPS is less than 50 and CPP is less than 50, then we delete


it.


If CPS is greater than 50 and CPP is less than 50, then we keep it as is.


If CPS is less than 50 and CPP is greater than 50, then we optimize.


Okay, okay, cool.


Enough with the scores though, give me something else I can use.


You know you don't have to do things in the order that everyone else does them, right?


What?


Doing things the way that everyone else does them is going to get you everyone else's results.


Find your own way.


You don't have to start with the first ring.


I didn't know that.


Okay, I've mentioned getting data out of Google Search Console a couple times now.


Yeah, I'm surprised you like that data so much.


It is what it is.


And it's the best keyword level data we can get as far as your site's organic search performance.


The UI limitations are obvious.


You can only get a thousand rows per filter.


On the API side, you can get 25,000 rows per filter.


The real question is, how do you filter?


Okay, so how do you filter?


Actually the first question is, where do you want to store it?


The answer to that is BigQuery because when we talk about manipulating this data, we want


to make it easy to pull things from across the Google ecosystem.


Yeah, App Script, Data Studio, Sheets, makes sense.


In fact, all these metrics we've been talking about should be pushed to BigQuery.


That way we have persistent URL and keyword level metadata that can be used programmatically


to improve a website.


BigQuery, right.


Okay, now back to getting data out of Search Console.


It's done most effectively using a data structure called a tree or keyword tree.


The thing about using trees though is that you end up getting a lot of the same repeated


keywords and you need a seed set of keywords to calculate trees from.


So to shortcut that, I have a JSON object with the common prefixes and suffixes to use


as filters.


Keep in mind that you can do 200 queries per minute and 100 million queries per month.


Okay, that was cool.


Now let's speed up your analysis with App Script.


Since we're storing all our data in BigQuery, we can create a series of Google Sheets and


functions to automate the analysis.


You can use BigQuery to do heavy lifting for your ETL functions and bring back the rollup


data to your Google Sheet.


You should consider creating template tables and aligning that with the output from your


tools.


You can make sheet templates and build functions that you can run regularly.


For instance, you could calculate all those composite metrics and store them after you


collected the data.


Or you can open a CSV, run a series of functions, and then print the results to your Sheet.


What are some of the common things you're doing with these?


De-duplicating, counting, summing, looking for patterns, searching, concatenating, the


usual.


Okay, good.


How about filling in reports, preparing deliverables, emailing data?


Well, I am an SEO.


Sheets, Drive, Analytics, Docs, Slides, Calendar, Gmail all have services you can connect to


via App Script.


You can basically have anything in the ecosystem be a trick.


Ah, I'd only been using App Script to do integrated search work based on your absolute


rankings model.


I was pulling data from APIs, but it looks like this App Script ecosystem is much more


built out than I knew.


Yeah, and it's all basic JavaScript.


That's why I recommend it over VBA or trying to tie everything together in Python using


Colab.


Okay, let's talk about entities and topics.


You're going to need text analysis to do optimization and scale and to understand the relationship


between pages.


There's four things you need to master.


Named entity recognition, LDA, edit distance, and engramming.


This seems like a spot where I should be taking notes.


Well, those are the most actionable things to compute when you're considering optimization


and where to drop links.


There's some of the primary NLP operations that search engines will use when processing


pages.


We do this with a combination of libraries, tools, and coding functions.


If you want a shortcut, you can use Phrase's open search API to quickly derive this based


on search.


If you aren't technical, their front end will give you just the same data in a simplified


manner.


Yeah, yeah, give me the technical version.


Okay, I personally recommend doing the named entity recognition using Google's NLP API


because your data will then be limited to the entities that Google knows and cares about.


Everything else, you can use Spacy and a couple other JavaScript libraries to compute.


You'll need the Spacy, LDA, edit distance, WYNC NLP utils, and engram packages to be


able to build out enough of an NLP pipeline.


I love how this is all JavaScript.


Yeah, Python is great and all, but Node is much easier to get into production.


Okay, so for competitive comparisons, you want to pull SERP data using SERP API, then


crawl the results, extract the content, run it through that NLP pipeline, and then store


the scores for comparison.


If in your site, you do the same thing and then use that to inform internal linking and


surface the data in the CMS for content optimization.


And then I could do edit distance against the keyword owners in the various tags and


use that to further determine how I'll optimize the pages.


Exactly.


The use cases for this are pretty crazy.


This really helps me turn content into a more technical effort.


Yeah, we call it technical content optimization at IPOL RANK.


Okay, Ahrefs has an endpoint for identifying broken link targets.


You can monitor that, check the content of the dead pages in your database, the wayback


machine or previous common crawls, and programmatically set up redirect rules at the edge, in your


application, or in the server config.


If you have the content, make sure you look for the closest entity matches on your site


because it's highly likely that Google's comparing the redirect target to what they had indexed.


Oh, that must be why when sometimes we redirect broken link targets, there's no impact.


It depends.


That's the longest I've ever heard you speak without saying that.


All right, let's talk about scraping.


If you're anything like me, you spend more time fussing with XPath than actually extracting


content.


XPath is the only thing that annoys me more than regular expressions.


Yeah, I prefer CSS selectors.


They're more elegant and more intuitive.


Chrome will give you XPath or CSS selectors for a given element in the Inspect tab, but


CSS selectors just naturally click them.


Yeah, I don't know why I wasn't using these before.


I know, right?


Chrome will also generate the commands for making an HTTP request, a node, cURL, and


the command line.


You can find it in the Network tab by each request.


Nice.


I didn't know that was a feature.


Yeah, I just noticed it myself recently.


Okay.


So we got two types of clients for our purposes, cURL, which is an HTTP request library, and


a headless browser, which is a browser with a...


Yeah, I've been hearing you talk about these for almost 10 years now.


Yeah, yeah, yeah.


cURL is something that every SEO should be familiar with.


It's a command line library that powers many of the tools used to crawl the web, and it's


available for every programming language.


I use it mostly as a low overhead way to check things like HTTP headers and response bodies.


I find myself using it most often to check for cloaking.


People are still cloaking?


Oh, absolutely.


It's much more of a gray area than it was before.


Here's a few commands that I run to do those types of checks.


Seems easy enough.


I take it this doesn't come native with my machine.


No, but it's pretty easy to find, and it's a JavaScript library.


So you can grab the server-side render code and store it as needed.


Now, for headless browsing, we use a JavaScript library called Puppeteer.


It's made for controlling headless Chrome.


I typically use it in Node, so let's install it real quick.


CDNs and some reasonably sophisticated websites have started to aggressively check for headless


browsers.


So you want to get the Puppeteer extra stealth plugin to make sure that you don't get blocked.


I always knew you had a little hacker in you, Mike.


Can't leave hacks alone.


The game needs me.


Okay, so if Puppeteer, unless you're building a crawler, what we really want to do is capture


the full DOM of all the pages that we want and save them to BigQuery.


Then we can manipulate and extract the data that we need later.


Decoupling tasks like this really helps you when you need to scale.


Now that we've got the pages in the database, we can take our time parsing the HTML using


the CSS selector using a library called Chariot.


It's basically jQuery for the server side.


If you're having any trouble scraping, open the page, right click the element, then grab


the CSS selector, pop that into your code, and then abstract the text like so.


Nice.


That's really easy to get anything out of any page, especially when there are JavaScript


transformations.


Exactly.


Is this what working at IPOL rank is like?


I feel like I just drank from a fire hose and I just want to play with all these tools


and libraries.


Depends who you ask.


All right, I'm getting some sleep.


You keep practicing and committing what we discuss to memory.


We'll make a game plan in the morning.


After tomorrow night, my hack will go global and cast us back into a technological dark


age.


I have something for you.


Don't you want to know what happened last night?


Yeah, that tells me everything I need to know.


Google Glass, they still make those?


Of course not.


I noticed that they operate on a protocol that the dark clown is somehow not him.


It'll make it easy for me to communicate with you and see what you see.


This time we going together.


Yeah, yeah.


Don't get all Disney movie on me.


I'm ready.


I see you went in a different order this time.


Yeah, yeah, yeah.


He gave me the media site this time.


Okay.


After you run your Screaming Frog crawls from the command line, pull your GSC data and then


compute your keyword ownership, content performance and content potential scores.


I was up practicing all night.


I got this.


I'll set up the automated test.


Most media sites are using single page applications and bogged down by ads these days.


Check GSC to make sure they aren't blocking the API endpoint for Google.


That can cause rendering issues.


Oh, and check to see how long scripts are taken in the performance tab.


That can cause Google to cancel execution.


That's a good call.


Yeah, and Google adheres to robots.txt on ad networks.


So when you're checking your speed measures, make sure you're ignoring the ads that are


blocked by robots.txt too.


Gotcha.


I've found some conflicting canonicals being set between HTTP headers and XML sitemaps.


Let's do a crawl request and we should be set.


Mike, I've done everything I usually do.


I always get tripped up trying to do something extra.


What am I missing?


Hmm.


It's an e-commerce site.


He's looking for speed hacks.


How are the core web vitals looking?


Nothing new under the sun.


How about the code coverage?


Surprisingly, every page type on this site has 100% code coverage.


Okay.


Let's use rel prerender.


Chrome updated it to be a no state prefetch, so it doesn't load everything in the invisible


tab the way it used to, but it'll still speed things up.


I saw about an 83% speed increase on my site from it.


So what we can do is use the instant click library to pick the next page based on where


the mouse hovers.


That's a slick hack.


Word.


Let's optimize on the database layer too.


More of the performance gains will be there than on the front end.


What's the tech stack?


PHP 5.6, WordPress 4.7, WooCommerce 3, and MySQL 5.6 on AWS.


Let's upgrade all the software.


Let's get them to PHP 7.4 and bump them up to Aurora.


Let's set up op caching, implement memcache, create indexes, optimize queries, and pre-process


some of the derived data.


Nice.


We're getting one second load times now, but still no indication that we're done yet.


Okay.


Here's one that I don't share often.


Let's pull a list of competitor URLs and scrape them for inventory.


In cases where the competitor inventory is low, let's use that to inform how we boost


the internal linking structure.


Hey, let's hear it for structured data.


Fancy meeting you here.


I always wanted to say that.


I had my suspicions.


You always were a bit off and you're still making the same mistakes.


And I thought you'd be the one to solve this by now.


We can't all be right.


So what, this is all an elaborate scheme to get back at iPole rank for not hiring you?


You were always too confident.


It may have started that way, but I've beaten the whole iPole rank team and I've beaten


you 72 times.


Now I just need you and Mike King to know I've surpassed you both.


So this is a rat beef?


Everything has always been a joke to you, yet you've come here for the past 72 days.


Well, there's nothing else to do and I'm the only one who can save the world.


Or maybe it's because you wanted to know what happened to Jamie.


Well, this has been fun.


I'm out.


This room looks just like the others.


It's just green.


You'd expect this guy to be a little more creative.


We don't know what happens when you make it this far.


I'm on standby to help you work through anything that comes up.


Cool.


I probably won't need you, but at least this way you can be a footnote to history.


Wait.


This is one of the sites I optimized before.


The only thing I couldn't solve was how to get viable copy on the category pages at scale.


Is the JSON that composes the page accessible?


Look through the XHR requests in the network tab in DevTools.


Yes, I got it.


There's a lot of features here that could be used to generate copy, but how?


This stuff is the future.


There's a whole subset of natural language generation called data to text, where people


are taking structured data and turning it into paragraphs.


Unfortunately, the implementations are mostly academic right now.


Some help you are.


Well, at least I picked a cool outfit if this is the last time anyone sees me.


No, we can take what we do know and apply it to this.


Content spinning?


Is it 2007?


Exactly.


The format technology works by taking prompts and guessing the next word.


It tends to get facts wrong, but the copy is otherwise coherent.


We can fine-tune the model by scraping copy from competitor websites and then get the


structured data into sentences using a library called Rosé NLG or by using Wink and LPU


cells.


Then we pull variants on the phrase from the paraphrase.org project.


Using each sentence from the spinner, you can then have a prompt to generate a paragraph


using GPT.


Then boom, we have descriptive text.


Why do the bad guys always give us a way to stop them?


The Dark Clown saga came to a head last night in Coney Island.


Google hacker Casey Robbins was able to crack the code after 73 attempts.


Thirty-six missing search marketers were recovered at the scene.


No word on the Dark Clown's whereabouts, but law enforcement is on a manhunt throughout


the tri-state area.


Stay tuned for these stories after the break.


Wall Street rallies after the Dark Clown, and is it time for Google to be broken up?


Tech entrepreneur Elon Musk is courting controversy once again.


His artificial intelligence firm OpenAI is said to be ready to release its GPT-3 as an


API for commercial use.


No official release date has been set.


Daily SEO Fix Video - Discover Linking Domains with SERP Analysis

Hi guys, I'm Varabh from the onboarding team here at Fox.


In this daily fix, I'll show you how to use the SERP analysis feature on MossPro to find


out who is linking to your competitors' pages.


The SERP analysis feature on MossPro helps you in looking at the first live page of SERP


results for any keyword along with some key metrics for each result.


In this case, we will see what are the linking domains to the top ranking pages.


This is particularly helpful for you for your own link building strategy as it helps you


identify high quality and relevant linking domains that could be beneficial for your


website when we get a backlink from them.


Let's jump into MossPro.


To begin with, you want to head to the keyword research and then click on the SERP analysis


section.


Here, what we have to do is insert a target keyword.


In this case, I will go with SEOAgency and then hit the analyze button.


That is when it will show you how the first page of the search engine looks like when


people in the UK are searching for SEOAgency on the search engine.


You can see a list of websites that are ranking on the first page and there's SEOworks.co.uk


SEOAgency page.


This is exactly ranking in the first position.


Underneath that, we can see the linking root domains to this exact page as well as the


linking root domains to the whole SEOworks website.


In this case, we will be looking at the linking root domains to this page.


So we just click on the number here.


Then open the linking domain section of the link research into another tab.


Here basically, we will see a list of root domains that are providing a backlink to this


SEOAgency page of SEOworks.co.uk.


And here again, if you want to export any of these root domains into a CSV file or add


them to a link tracking list, you just have to check the box beside these root domains


and then use either of these options, either export to CSV or add it to a link tracking


list.


Now you know how to analyze the search results for your top competitors' linking domains.


By practicing this workflow, you will become more adept in finding out promising link building


opportunities in MossPro.


Use your competitions top pages to bolster your SEO efforts - Whiteboard Friday

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


This week we're going to chat about how you can use your competitors' top pages, data


from a number of reports from a bunch of different tools, about which pages are the most important


or highest ranked or most linked to URLs on your competitors' websites in order to boost


your SEO efforts.


And there's a bunch of cool things that you can do with these beyond the obvious, and


I'll walk you through a few of them today.


So first off, there's five, really five kinds of top pages reports.


These can be further filtered and augmented with data that you could craft or create,


and some of these tools add in additional data too, so you could do other things with


them.


But basically, these five are top pages by links.


So this is essentially what are the most linked to, either by URLs or by root domains or highest


page authority, those kinds of things.


The three tools that have that, Moz, Ahrefs, and Majestic, the primary link tools out there


on the web.


Top pages by social shares.


This is looking at Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Twitter.


Important caveat on this.


Okay, so Moz technically has top pages by social shares, but only from Facebook and


Google+.


I'll probably be replacing Google+, with LinkedIn, soon.


Ahrefs has it, but same story.


They don't have Twitter data.


BuzzSumo are the only folks who can show you Twitter data, but they only have it if they've


already recorded the URL and started tracking it, because Twitter took away the ability


to see Twitter share counts for any particular URL, meaning that in order for BuzzSumo to


actually get that data, they have to see that page, put it in their index, and then start


collecting the tweet counts on it.


So it's not perfect data, but they're certainly the best source as far as social share numbers


go.


You can also get some data from sharedcount.com, but it's been sort of up and down lately.


Top pages by estimated search traffic.


So this is essentially where SEMrush shines.


Ahrefs also has this, and basically what they're doing is they're looking at, here are all


the keywords that we've seen this URL or this path or this domain ranking for, and here


is the estimated keyword volume.


I think both SEMrush and Ahrefs are scraping Google AdWords to collect their keyword volume


data.


Ahrefs actually, I think maybe Ahrefs is also doing what Moz does now, where they bolster


that with data that they buy from Jumpshot or possibly another clickstream provider.


And so essentially they're saying, these pages are the ones we think are getting the most


organic search traffic.


Super valuable report from both of those guys as well.


Number four, top pages by number of ranking keywords.


So this is different from estimated search traffic.


There could be a page on a domain that only ranks for one keyword, but it gets tons of


searches and it ranks number one, so it gets an incredible amount of search traffic.


But there could be pages that rank for a ton of different keywords, but they rank number


six through 10, or they rank number 11 through 50, and they rank for all these different


numbers of keywords, but none of them particularly well, or none of them all that awesome, and


so they don't show up in the top estimated search traffic reports.


Again, SEMrush and Ahrefs provide those.


And then number five, top pages by total traffic.


So this would be SimilarWeb and Jumpshot provide these.


Alexa does too.


I mean Alexa, not Amazon's voice search app, but the like old Alexa rankings system.


I don't know why they, why did they name it then both the same thing?


It makes it really confusing.


Does it frustrate you?


It frustrates me.


So you can use SimilarWeb or Jumpshot to see the top pages by total traffic.


So that's all sources.


That's search traffic, social traffic, direct, email, links, et cetera, et cetera.


These five I'm going to reference as we dive into problems to solve and questions to answer.


But before we do that, I'm a little under the weather, so I'm going to blow my nose.


I know this is unusual on Whiteboard Friday, but you don't want to see anything gnarly


happening on the video.


A, this is the proof that we only do one shot, right, that I really do want to take.


What is my competition doing that's bringing them success along various vectors?


This is the most obvious one.


This is the one that everybody uses the top pages reports for.


So they go, okay, what's the most link to?


What has the most social shares?


Fine.


So I can see what content has been most successful in any different one along any of those vectors.


It's obvious.


It's good to use.


It can answer some questions, but check out these other ones.


So B, where has my competition created broad content, but they've left gaps of specific


queries that I could potentially fill, potentially fill with answer boxes, featured snippets


I could potentially fill by having a more targeted page that answers that query directly


better, and so doesn't need as many links to rank because it's very, very hyper-targeted.


You can do that by looking at things that your competition has done really well on number


four, top pages by number of ranking keywords, but has not done as well with total organic


estimated search traffic.


The gap between those two will give you those kinds of content opportunities, hyper-focused


content and keyword targeting opportunities, which is killer.


C, what content has done really well, like resonated with social or direct traffic audiences,


but then it's done poorly in SEO.


So for that, I can look at number two, top pages by social shares, or number five by


total traffic, but then look at ones that have performed poorly on number of keywords


and estimated search traffic.


D, what content has helped my competitors grow their link profile, but may not be ranking,


or maybe it used to be ranking, but it's not ranking anymore because they haven't kept


the content up to date.


Maybe people were looking for stuff around 2017, and they created this content way back


in 2015, and even though they got a bunch of links to it, it's just not ranking that


well anymore.


These are huge opportunities, and so you can look for number one being very high, right?


High number of links, but lower number of ranking keywords and estimated search traffic.


And then last, but certainly not least, what content is low on links, but high on getting


search traffic and getting lots of keywords ranking for it, which means that there's a


strong opportunity that if you can out link build them, you can probably overtake them,


right?


Because if it's weak on number of links, but it's strong on estimated search traffic and


number of ranking keywords, there's probably a golden opportunity.


So you can see how by mixing and matching these things, and by comparing top pages data


from multiple sources against one another, you can get some really cool, powerful, advanced


SEO opportunities in your content and keyword targeting.


I look forward to hearing your thoughts on this, how you've done it in the past, and


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


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Welcome to another MozCon.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Thrilled to have you here.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Have an incredible, incredible show for you.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

But before we do that, I've got some interesting stuff that I've got to show you.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

So as always, I like to kick off MozCon by talking about some of the big changes in the


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

SEO world, some of the big changes at Moz, and of course, the show itself.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

So we're going to do all three of those, starting with some big changes in search.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

All right.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

First one.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Thanks to SimilarWeb.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

I think SimilarWeb is actually here, which is phenomenal.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

It's great to have you folks here.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

So they collect a lot of clickstream level data.