Even though we all feel like the algorithm's getting a little less link-centric, and I


Using Social Media as Your Primary Link Building Tactic Probably Won't Work - Whiteboard Friday

think it is, links are still clearly very, very powerful.


We have to worry about things like outreach and link-focused content and embeds and tools


and badges and competitive link analysis and all the other many link-building methods that


the marketing industry has come up with over the years.


I have a theory about why this is.


I think Google is honest when they tell us we don't look at social shares to determine


rankings.


I think what Google sees is something Chartbeat showed a few years ago, and this was another


excellent study that I encourage you to check out, Chartbeat basically analyzed engagement,


engagement on socially shared content.


What they saw was a plot that looks like this.


Very, very few social articles have high read time, and even the ones that have lots of


social sharing have very little read time.


It turns out a ton of things that people share socially on the web, they don't read at all.


They might click retweet.


They may even include the URL.


They might share it on Facebook, but they themselves may never have even visited that


content.


It sounds crazy, but I bet you've done it.


I bet I've done it.


I bet I've been like, well, you know, this is probably a good edition of Whiteboard Friday.


I'll go share it out, having not yet watched the video and seen whether I did a good job


or not.


That's just the way the web.


I think Google cares much more about the engagement than they do about the social share counts


themselves.


So you can see lots of things with social shares not performing well, but once they


start to get engagement and start to earn links from that engagement, now they're suddenly


ranking.


So hopefully, with this knowledge in mind, you can go back to the drawing board a little


bit if you built up like we have this kind of mental model of how the flywheel works.


Look, I'm not saying that this works for no one.


This actually works pretty well for Moz.


It works pretty well for us in this industry.


And clearly the data is showing that across the vast majority of the web, it's statistically


extremely unlikely this will work for you or for everyone else.


And so I think we need to revisit this.


We probably need to revisit our link building, and we need to think about social in a different


context of how and whether it's earning people who will actually come to our site and want


to link to us and people who will come to our site and want to engage or whether it's


just a vanity metric.


All right, everyone.


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


Whiteboard Friday.


Reverse-Engineer Google's Research to Serve Up the Best Content [MozCon 2017] — Rob Bucci

My name is Rob Bucci. As you know, you've heard I'm the founder and CEO of StatSearch


Analytics. I really should have gone pee before I got on stage today. All right. If I'm dancing


around the stage, now you know why. It'll cross my legs.


Rob Bucci, founder and CEO of StatSearch Analytics. Perhaps you've heard of us. Thank you very


much to Will and to Rand. I really appreciate all the kind words. What we do, in case you


haven't heard of us, is we help some of the world's coolest brands and agencies measure


and report on all those opportunities that are existing in the SERPs. If there's an opportunity


there, we're there, we're measuring it, and we're helping our clients take advantage of


it.


Today, I'm here to share with you all a little bit of a methodology. Specifically, I want


to teach you all how to reverse engineer Google's research. I want to give you guys a method


that will help you target the right content to the right customers at the right time,


hopefully every time. Some housekeeping stuff. You can get me on Twitter, at statrob. Of


course, the hashtag is MozCon. You don't really need that, but it's standard for me.


Okay. Do you guys remember the name of that actor from that sci-fi movie, The Short Old


Guy and the Weird Ears? How often do you get random questions like that from your friends?


What do you do? You turn to Google, right? Because that's where you can get instant answers.


But do you remember the Dark Ages? Like, before Google? How did you get the answers you needed?


Does anyone in this room remember Movie Phone? It was like a phone service that you called


like with your landline. Remember landlines? And you twirled your finger through the cord


as you pushed buttons on the phone. Eventually Movie Phone would spout some information about


movies. You were super stoked on that experience because it was like the best experience you


had available to you. But nowadays, we can turn to Google and we can get instant answers


to all the sorts of weird, super ambiguous questions you might want to ask. And they've


changed the world. And more importantly, they've changed human behavior. Google isn't any good


at this query. Could you imagine in the 90s someone getting all huffy because I couldn't


instantly tell them the name of the bad guy from Bruce Willis' seminal classic Hudson


Hawk? It is a seminal classic. I'll fight anyone who says otherwise. Just kidding. No,


of course not. You couldn't imagine anyone actually getting upset about that because


that's an unreasonable thing to expect. But nowadays, can you imagine someone typing this


into Google and getting all huffy because they couldn't get an instant answer? Yeah.


Because we look at this and we go, that's not hard. Why can't Google answer that? All


the information is right there. You see, Google's a victim of their own success. They're responsible


for changing the way people search. And at the same time, they have to respond to those


changes in human behavior that they've wrought. And they're spending millions of dollars on


both sides of this equation, perhaps billions. On one side, there's this deep technological


investment to get people to be able to rely on Google search for everyday use. And that


involves them spending money on understanding how to interpret search queries, how to match


them to search results, how to serve those search results up instantly. On the other


side of the equation, they're spending millions of dollars measuring people's satisfaction


with their searching behavior. What did you mean when you searched for that term? Did


you find the results you wanted? Was there a better result we could have given you? Did


we provide the right blend of various types of rich media on that SERP to guide you to


where you needed to be? They're changing the rules. And at the same time, they have to


play by the new rules. I like to say it's a little bit like a giant that's drawing a


map while it's walking and its footsteps are altering the landscape at the same time. I'm


here today to tell you that the SERPs are the front end of Google's massive multi-billion


dollar consumer research machine. They are conducting the world's largest and longest


consumer research experiment every single day with all of you. And importantly, if we


learn to pay attention to that, we can learn a lot about what Google knows. We can reverse


engineer all of their hard-earned research. With that information, we can stand on the


leading edge with Google and we can learn to, well, we can learn to understand what


customers are looking for when they search for something. By paying attention to those


SERPs, we can snoop on Google's research. So with that in mind, let's talk about intent.


For the purposes of this talk, I focused on consumer search intent. I like to think of


there being three key stages that are roughly correlated to stages in an SEO funnel. Those


are informational, commercial, and transactional. At the informational stage, well, conversion


rates are typically low. We usually see this as the start of the path to purchasing a product


or a service. Research has shown us that if you're there and educating people, at this


point you can imprint yourself on them and conversion rates or potential loyalty from


them goes up as they go further down the funnel. To make this a bit more real, I'm going to


give an example. Let's say I decided to get healthy and I decided to get into smoothies


because smoothies equals health, right? Sure. These are the types of queries I might use.


If I decided to get into making smoothies at the informational stage. Next we have the


commercial stage. Now not everyone chooses to break out a commercial stage. The way we


look at it is that the way people search is far too nuanced and complex to be modeled


by just two stages. So we have this commercial stage and I think Rand said it best quite


a long time ago. That they're not directly transactional and they may never result in


an exchange of goods, services, or money, but they're not purely informational either.


The queries I'd use at this stage are about attributes of those products, looking for


characteristics, trying to refine down to exactly what I want to buy. Finally we have


the transactional stage. Many SEOs spend their entire careers just focusing on this point


and I would argue that they're a detriment. This is the glory stage. These are the terms


that in like a last touch attribution world you can directly tie to conversion behavior


and so all that glory causes a lot of people to focus here far too much. The type of queries


I would use here would be things that have the word buy, specific brand terms, things


like free shipping, coupons, and so on. The point is at each stage of the funnel the searcher


has a different intent. They have different desires that motivate their searching behavior.


They might as well be a different person. Google teaches us that demographics don't


really help us understand what we really need to know, what consumers are looking for in


an exact moment or where they're looking to find it. They go on to teach us that searcher


intent is the new demographic and that intent beats identity and immediacy beats loyalty.


What this means is that if you're there where the customer is looking when they're looking


for something, you're likely to win their business even if they have a greater affinity


for a competitive brand. This is the world that Google has created and the one which


us and them have to live in. A world in which instant gratification of need outweighs almost


every other consideration. You can call it the age of human sloth. So in typical stat


fashion we got interested in this area, we wrote some blog posts around intent and we


decided to do some research. Now what's different is I normally like to rely on all those hundreds


of millions of data points that stat has and do internet scale research. This time I'm


focusing more on methodology. I want you to pay attention not so much to the data as to


the methods behind the data. I'll explain a bit more in a moment. For now it's important


that you understand that we picked 14 product categories, all kind of e-commerce terms.


The most basic core queries are words like toaster, electric guitar, blender, microwave,


laptop, et cetera. We then modified those queries through each stage of the funnel.


So in appliances the term blender and information became blender reviews and then in transaction


it became buy blender. Now I'm going to riff a little bit on what Will said because he's


100% right. Keyword research is way more art than science. You actually have to speak to


people. You cannot shortcut this work. For the purposes of our research we kept this


very simple. We wanted to make this easily understood by a broad audience. We wanted


to scale it up. So we used these relatively formulaic transformations of keywords as they


go down the funnel. The truth is people don't really search like that. They search a bit


more like my blender example, my smoothie example. So you have to go out there, you


have to talk to people, you have to research, you have to watch how they search for your


product or service, use that information to inform the moments when you actually start


and turn to keyword research tools. Key thing I want to emphasize here is that this whole


methodology is dependent on getting this right. It's garbage in, garbage out. And if you shortcut


or you don't put the effort in at this stage, all of your findings will be called into question.


Now if you follow Google's research, the Think with Google research, you've undoubtedly seen


this metric. They call it share of intent. And in typical Google fashion they're very


opaque about it. Basically it's a way to measure the visibility of a brand at a particular


moment in a customer's journey towards purchasing a product or a service. We look at this and


we go, well that's just share of voice. So we create a very simple share of voice score.


Again, in reality you might choose to use a click through rate model. You might choose


to use another sort of weighting system that is more relevant to your industry. We kept


this very, very simple because this is a broad piece of research that focuses more on methodology


than on actual data results. So we have a weight. The weight is correlated to a ranking


position. It's multiplied by search volume. And thus we get a share of voice score. That


share of voice score is basically a way of measuring how visible a site is, how visible


a ranking is, how much potential traffic it might send perhaps. Usually share of voice


is represented as a percentage. We kept it as a whole number and it's very simple. The


higher the number, the better it is. I just don't want you to forget. The data from our


research is specific to our keyword set. Your results will differ. So if you start tweeting


photos of the pie charts and all that, you're actually misleading people because these are


not universal facts. This is all about the methodology. So focus on those methods rather


than the data. Okay, so for each stage of intent, we map the SERP. And this is something


that we do day in, day out. We parse out result types. We look for featured snippets. We look


for images. We look for news results. We look for places packs. We look for people also


ask. We look for video. And we look for shopping results. And as we went through them all,


we asked ourselves three key questions. One, how can we unlock Google's insights into what


searches are looking for at each stage? Two, what points of leverage do we have in each


stage to make sure that we're visible and importantly that we're useful? And three,


how can we reverse engineer the winning strategies of those key competitors at each stage? Here's


a 10,000-foot view of what we found. Boom. 90% of the results on the SERP, regardless


of the stage we're at, are organic results. Google tells us that you have to be there,


you have to be useful, and you have to be quick. And what they're saying is that the


organic algorithm goes 90% of the way to providing results that are there, that are useful, and


that are quick. That's a pretty amazing thing. That algorithm goes 90% of the way of lifting


all the weight and all the utility that people find from Google. But today I want to focus


on that 10%, not that 90%. So we're going to zoom into that 10%, and here's what we


see. Whoa. 60% of the remaining non-organic results on the SERPs are shopping boxes. I


think this is insane. The European Union agrees with me. Whatever. I digress. The point is,


these are e-commerce keywords. You have to expect that you're going to see shopping boxes


there. Ignore this data at your own peril. If this is your space and you want to play


within it and you want to win, you definitely need a paid strategy. Now I'm going to come


back to shopping. It's an important feature of all these SERPs. But for now, let's zoom


into that other non-shopping. I call these our points of leverage. I call them our points


of leverage because these are the universal result types that are going to allow us to


go that extra mile towards meeting searcher intent. On the basis of a strong organic ranking


strategy, these are the result types that are going to allow us to go that extra step


further to helping our customers, giving them truly useful experiences, cementing the utility


of our brand in their mind, ushering them towards their destination, and generally providing


all sorts of awesome signals of engagement for Google. To start with, we're going to


look at the informational stage. We're going to work our way through three stages and then


we're going to wrap it up. I call this the topology of the informational SERP. This is


basically a count of the non-organic result types we saw at all those keywords in the


informational stage. This allows us to understand what kind of moments our searchers are having.


When they search for terms in the informational stage, what are they experiencing? What are


they seeing beyond the organic results? A lot of shopping, images, news, video, people


also ask, answers boxes, also called featured snippets, places. 42% of our leverage in the


informational stage are these shopping results. Here's what Google knows. When people use


these super short-tailed core product terms, there's a high likelihood that they just want


to buy it, like right there, right now. They don't give a darn about the model or the size.


They just want it fast and they want it cheap. Google knows immediacy beats loyalty. What


they're doing with their shopping boxes, really, when it all comes down to the end of the day,


is they're auctioning off immediacy to the highest bidder. It's at the very top of the


SERP. 21% of our leverage are image boxes. Now, it's hard to say who wins when it comes


to image boxes on the SERP. We have this paradigm of ranking things from top to bottom. Images


are in this strip. Now, I would actually say this is one of those rare moments where it


doesn't matter if you actually rank on the main SERP itself. What matters is that you


rank in the image search results because someone's going to click on one of those if they want


to see images and they're going to scroll through those image results. Those image results


are actually a really wonderful user experience for broad and unrefined queries. They allow


us to get to what we're looking for without expending the necessary energy of using human


language. We can just look with our eyes. As a sidebar, you guys, there are like an


infinite number of cat litter scoopers available on the Internet. They come in like all variety


of shapes and sizes. I don't have a cat because my husband is mean. But if I did have a cat,


his name would be Sandwiches and I would love him forever. You can tweet my husband. It's


at Mr. Underscore Dak and you can tell him I deserve a cat. I would really appreciate


that. But I digress. The point is if I did have a cat, Sandwiches, my lovely tabby, I


would need a cat litter scooper. I would scroll down the results until I found the one I was


looking for. It's the one that's shaped like a rainbow, doubles as a slingshot and I'm


good to go. That's a really good experience for me when I'm looking for something that's


super broad and there's all sorts of various iterations and versions of it. And if someone


does click on one of your images because it's enticing to them, you actually have a pretty


good opportunity to convert them. You have a lot to work with here. You have the image,


of course, that's what drew them in. You have a great title that you can make actionable.


You have a description there and you have a link for them to visit your website.


Okay, news boxes. 18% of our potential leverage in the informational stage. This chart shows


the average search volume per keyword per result type in this informational stage. Basically


this says when a result type is triggered, what is the average search volume that that


keyword has for that result type? And news boxes like massive, right? So I look at that


and that's very, very enticing. I want to evaluate the potential of going after them.


The first thing I want to do is I want to say who's winning? And here's what I see.


102 media sites across 128 separate news results. The dispersion is super broad. Like everyone


and their dog has a news result. These five domains are the only domains that have more


than one news result. And so like really you look at this and there's like not really a


true incumbent here. Everyone, the vast majority only has one result. The next thing I want


to know is on average who's sending the most traffic per news result, i.e. who's winning


the most valuable news results? And here's what I see. Interestingly, these five domains


are not the same domains that were on the previous slide, meaning that all of these


sites that are sending all of the search volume are doing so on the basis of just one news


ranking. How can you build a strategy around this? You can't. Here's the thing. News results


suffer from an irrelevancy problem. I'll give you an example. I love chocolate pudding,


you guys. I just like I can't get enough. And let's say I wanted to go and I wanted


to buy some chocolate pudding and I typed chocolate pudding into Google and what I would


see was a news box for Meryl Streep spotted eating chocolate pudding at a fashion show.


The fashion world is aghast, something like that, which is completely irrelevant to my


actual query. That's because Google does this on purpose. You see, what Google knows is


that when someone searches for a core product, a place, a person, there's a possibility that


that product, place, or person is the subject of a news event. And what we all know is that


Google's relevancy algorithm largely is based around links and citations and you can't accrue


links and citations at the same pace as the news cycle. How do you deal with that problem?


Very simple. You exact match the query with the headline of the news article, thus covering


off any possibility that the person is looking for a news event. Here's an example of that


irrelevancy problem in action. The term is jacket. It might seem like a really good core


product term maybe, but it's just a broad news box. I can't use that at all. Here's


another one for desk. I snuck a little sexy Canadian prime minister in for you. You're


welcome. But here's a great one. Best laptop. Look at that. Look at the visual real estate


that has. It takes up most of the screen. It's a great consumer term. It's probably


directly related to what someone who's like a world traveler is looking for. It's also


completely ephemeral. That result will disappear as soon as it ages out of the news cycle.


As a side, this is at least partly how Google is responsible for the erosion of quality


journalism over the years. News orgs are so desperate for that traffic because it drives


the advertising revenue that keeps them alive that they're willing to constantly regurgitate


the same article over and over and over just to chase that algorithm quirk. It's yet another


example of how Google's changing the world. My tip to you is this. Don't go running after


news boxes just because they rank on high traffic serves. If you're looking at the data


the way we are, you will consistently see news boxes appear for massive search volume


queries and you're like, wow, that's super enticing. Unless you're Forbes or Gizmodo


or some media company, there's no point. Just ignore them to death.


Okay. 8% of our leverage is video results. I love this. Video results are a great way


for you to get a little bit of extra real estate and visual oomph on the SERP. But also,


look at this. Bed, bath and beyond. It's a branded term. That goes directly to a product


landing page. I bet you that performs very, very well for them. And then you have sometimes


these smaller video thumbnails when the video is a primary piece of media on the site. You


can get these video thumbnails that will appear. So there's some good opportunities to get


some great extra real estate on the SERP. The first thing I want to know is is there


like a big winner? You guys, I have a secret for you. Let's all keep it in this room so


we don't ruin it. Google has a bias towards YouTube. Now you know.


So we look at this and we're like, okay, well, these are e-commerce terms. I don't really


want to send my traffic to YouTube, right? Right. Here's a mantra for you to walk away


with. Be the bed, bath and beyond. Because that's what you want to be. You want to be


that site that ranks that large video thumbnail directly to your product page and if you can


do that, that's awesome. And if you look at the data and Google is saying, hey, people,


when they search for these queries, they want to interact with video and you look at your


site and you go, I have video assets. I can take advantage of this. That's a great opportunity


and you should run with it. Featured snippets. Everyone loves featured


snippets. I love featured snippets. I'm tired of saying the word featured snippets. They're


probably one of the most blunt examples of Google conditioning and modifying the SERP


to like directly meet consumer or searcher need. And they're a great opportunity for


SEOs. Many people have been driving fantastic results with them. So I definitely want to


take a look at the potential of going after them. The first thing I want to look at is


what is the most common featured snippet format. I look at this and I go, okay, great. I don't


have to make major site changes. I don't have to put tables or worry about changing my content


around because it's mostly paragraphs and all I have to do is make some small optimizations


to take advantage of that. The next thing I want to know is how valuable


are these keywords that the featured snippets are appearing against. 23,300 is the average


search volume. So I know that these featured snippets are appearing against very high value


terms. The next thing I want to know is who's the incumbent. Oh, it's Wikipedia. Now a casual


inspection informs that the Wikipedia featured snippets are mostly around like broad product


knowledge like who made the product, what's the history of it, why does it exist, how


do I use it, et cetera. So you have to ask yourself, I'm really enticed by this opportunity.


23,300 average search volume, featured snippets at the top of the SERP. Do I want to fight


with Wikipedia? Is it a good use of my time? Probably not, right? Right, there are greener


pastures. Let's sum up the stage quickly. What have we learned? First of all, we need


to recognize when we need a paid strategy to win. You guys can't be polemicists about


SEO. You cannot sit in an ivory tower and ignore the fact that the landscape here dictates


that if you want a piece of this action, you're going to have to pay to play. That's just


a fact. So you need to break down the walls that you might have between you and your paid


team and work with them on this one. You can't ignore those shopping boxes.


Lesson two, we need to look towards strong bias for certain sites. These incumbents like


Wikipedia, they're currents that we have to swim against and you really want to not be


swimming against the current if possible. And when you see an incumbent like Wikipedia,


it's pretty hard to compete with them when it comes to featured snippets. So if they're


dominant in your snippet space, maybe you want to look for greener pastures.


Lesson three, looking at those SERP topologies tells us what Google thinks these searchers


want. This is not a mistake. It's not random. The fact that there's a certain percentage


of video results to feature snippets to images to answers boxes is not at all an accident.


It is the result of years of Google's fine-tuning the SERPs and their research into engagement


patterns of people. So if you look at that data, you can understand what kind of moments


searchers are having that Google thinks are best for those searchers and you can use that


information to inform what you're trying to do.


Lesson four, news boxes suck. More importantly though, you can't just blindly chase search


volume. People get like really excited about big numbers and they chase after it without


really thinking twice about it. It's a waste of time. Always critically interrogate the


data, go a level deeper to see if it's something that you can actually take advantage of.


All right, commercial intent stage. Here's a topology. Whoa, shopping boxes, right? We


also have images, we have videos, we have answers boxes. Those other wedges are too


small. The news box is about 2% of the leverage here. I didn't put the number on but now you


know. Last time we went through every single result type and that was quite, it took a


long time. I spent quite a few minutes doing that and I want to do it a little bit quicker.


I want to show you a method that's going to help you get to the finish line faster. We're


going to do this with share of voice. Share of voice is a great way for us to measure


the visibility of a result. So here is the average share of voice contribution per result


type. Remember, no news. It's like the siren song. I look at it and I'm like, oh yeah,


you can't have that. No, you can't have that. But maybe answers boxes. So that gives us


some ideas of maybe where we want to start. But before I go through every single result


type, why don't we start at the end and work our way back. And what is the end? Well, the


end is who's winning. So the way we're going to do that is we're going to look at the domains


that have the highest aggregate share of voice in this segment. Consumer reports and tech


rate are almost neck and neck. Then you have Amazon in third, CNET and PCMag fourth and


fifth. The next thing I want to know is these are the winners, but who has the most real


estate, i.e. who has the most rankings? That's weird, right? Amazon's in third place, but


they have 3,117 rankings on these SERPs compared to the first place site which only has 299.


Instantly I'm like, what on earth is going on? The technique we use to understand and


figure out what's happening here is to attribute the share of voice back to the result types


that are driving that share of voice for each one of those winners. And that's this chart.


So first of all, I can point out consumer reports. Super badass. Driving a massive amount


of share of voice in first place primarily on the basis of 299 mostly organic rankings.


That means they're ranking high for super high value keywords and that's a very strong


place for them to be. Then you have TechRadar in second place. TechRadar's also badass for


a different reason. They're driving a ton of share of voice, more than 50% just on the


basis of featured snippets. Both of those have like sub 300 rankings. Then you have


Amazon. 3,117 rankings in third place like the giant in the room just swinging its club


winning on the basis of volume alone. But you have to know that a lot of those rankings


are not very high value. A lot of them are quite poor in fact and that's why they're


in third place. You have CNET who's bringing in some gains with video. You have PCMag that


has a blend and you know what you see almost none of? Those newsboxes. So I should just


call this talk newsboxes suck but anyway. Okay. So moving on. I want to show you all


how you can segment by query modifier to see which result types Google likes. The queries


that people use are such a strong indicator of the mental state of the desire of the mode


that the searcher is in. Right? So if we're able to pull out certain key terms like buy,


review, compare, sell, et cetera, we can really begin to get this fine grained knowledge of


how Google is conditioning the SERPs to meet very minute moments of intent. Here's a topology


when the word best is used in a query at this commercial stage. A few percent is shopping


but answers boxes. Remember what Will said? When people use the word best and see featured


snippets what they want is guidance from a trusted third party to help set them off on


their journey to find what is actually best. This is a good way for them to jump start


what they're looking for. So Google has given people featured snippets to get them to that


destination really quick and by simply segmenting on the word best we're able to tell really


quickly hey, you know what, if we're optimizing for queries that have the word best in it,


we better consider some featured snippets. I do not advocate running headlong towards


optimizing for featured snippets. I advocate taking a look at the data, digging deep into


your business's strengths, your weaknesses and your opportunities and deciding if this


is something you can take advantage of. Look at this. Compare. When the word compare is


used 42% of the nonorganic leverages videos. Google knows that when people use the word


compare they want to see videos of people comparing products. New. When people use the


word new they want to see images. Remember I'm going to point it out again. This is not


random. This is on the basis of very careful meticulous research and feedback loops that


Google has built into the SERP. Reviews. We see a really great blend of both videos and


featured snippets. Just don't forget you have to go deeper than the surface data. You have


to dig into that share of voice. So what have we learned about the SERPs for our commercial


keywords? One, we've learned that by using share of voice we can measure which domains


are winning. That's how we get to that very, the finish line. Who's winning in the space?


We aggregate up the share of voice. And we can see that even though, you know, Tech Radar


has like 3,000 fewer rankings, they're still beating Amazon on the basis of a share of


voice which is the leading indicator of their visibility in this space. Lesson two, we can


perform share of voice analysis on result types to assess their potential. Thus we can


reverse engineer exactly how Tech Radar was winning. It's on the basis of featured snippets.


Lesson three, we can segment even deeper on those query modifiers, words like best, compare,


reviews, buy, et cetera, to see how the SERPs adapt. Thus we know that when people use the


word best the searchers want snippets. When we use the word compare the searchers want


video. Final stage, transactional intent stage. Here's a topology. It's like the birth of


Pac-Man. It's just getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. The SERPs are getting


more and more distilled. Now I want to use the exact same method as I did in the last


stage because it's very efficient. We're going to start at the finish line. We're going to


work our way back. So here's who's winning. Based on aggregate share of voice, Amazon,


Walmart, Overstock, Best Buy, Sears outlet. Let's attribute those back to the result types.


Whoa. It's all organic results, guys. At this point everyone is winning on the basis of


organic results. No one is pulling in their wins because of featured snippets when it


comes to the transactional terms. Here's the thing. The further you go down the funnel


towards those glory keywords, those high converting keywords, those moments before purchase keywords,


the more distilled the SERP becomes. The more Google wants to funnel people towards their


paid product and the more Google wants people to rely on the organic rankings, the things


that get people to their destination really, really quickly so that they can buy something


immediately because we need to be there, we need to be useful, we need to be quick. The


organic algorithm goes 90% of the way of doing that. This is basically good old-fashioned


SEO. It's probably pretty gratifying for everyone who's like, get off my lawn when it comes


to featured snippets. It's like it all comes back to good old-fashioned SEO and of course


PPC because you got to play that shopping game.


At the risk of sounding reductive, the advice here is really simple. Are you ranking high?


Are you ranking the right content? How do you tell if you're ranking the right content?


One of the things we do is we scaffold out all the URLs that we see for a particular


site ranking. We then look for the patterns in the URLs. If we see a URL that's like slash


C slash and we go to that page and we see it's a category page, we're going to wildcard


tag every URL as category. Then if we see slash P slash and we go to that page and we


see those are all product pages, we're going to wildcard tag all those as product pages.


That feeds into graphs like this. Which UX is ranking the most? Which UX is the most


visible category pages? This is borne out across all of the winners. Category pages.


Category pages. You see, what Google is doing is they're rewarding


the best user experience that displays the highest engagement. People really labor these


decisions around, oh my God, what do we choose to rank here? What sort of user experience


do we want to give people? You don't have to reinvent the wheel. You don't have to really


have a ton of conversation about it. You have to look at what's already winning. Because


Google has decided to reward those things because they're helping people. And you can


use that information to decide how you're going to help people.


So what have we learned about the SERPs for our transactional keywords? One, we've learned


that the deeper we go in the funnel, the more we have to rely on organic rankings. Those


organic results are the best way to push traffic in this stage. Lesson two, we've learned that


analyzing ranking URLs to find out what UX, sorry, I'm going to repeat that. We've learned


that we can analyze ranking URLs to find out what UX satisfies the searcher's intent most.


The majority of those pages that we saw ranking were category pages. We can just move in that


direction. We don't have to swim against the current and try to shake things up. We know


that's working. We know people like it. We know Google's rewarding it. Let's just do


that. Okay. So at the end of the day, what conclusions


have we reached? Remember Google's advice. Be there. Be useful. Be quick. How do we be


there? First of all, it starts with quality keyword research and thorough segmentation.


You cannot shortcut this. Take a page out of Will's book. Talk to people. Interview


them. Ask them what they're looking for. Ask them why they searched for certain things.


Ask them why they clicked on that result. Get in the mind of the searcher. You have


to get out of your office and onto the front lines in order to do this properly, and you


cannot shortcut this. This is crucial and underpins everything you're going to do in


this methodology. How do you know if you're there? Well, you


know you're there by measuring share of voice. It's a great proxy for general visibility.


How do you know if you're useful? Well, you can look at those topologies and you can find


out what Google thinks is useful to searchers on the basis of their research. Take a look


at this and tell me that if this was your business and this was your data, you wouldn't


look at this and go, whoa, people want video. Google has learned that. I'm going to piggyback


on Google's learning, and I'm going to see if that's an opportunity I can use for my


business. How else can you be useful? You can create the right types of UXs by looking


at what's already winning. How do you be quick? Well, that's a little bit outside the preview


of this talk, but there's lots of great content out there on site speed optimization. Basically,


trevity, omit needless words, get right to the point. Now, many of you might go, hey,


Rob, you know, really, like that's great, but 90% of the results are organic and at


the end of the day, it's organic that's really winning when it comes to those converting


keywords, so I'm just going to focus on that. The truth is, is across each stage, those


non-organic results make up 15%, 11%, and 10%. Then you look at this, that birth of


the Pac-Man, you might go, it's just not worth it, right? I mean, Google's squeezing us out,


and if I just focus on the organic, that's my comfort zone and I can stay there and I


can probably win. Yes, maybe, but I want to point out the stat. This chart shows which


result types on average deliver the highest visibility, the highest share of voice. Shopping's


at the top because Google's perverse, but shopping's at the top because Google put shopping


box at the top. Organic has under 2,000 average share of voice contribution. Everything else,


those answers boxes, those images, those videos, on average, deliver 3,000 share of voice contribution.


So you definitely need a strong foundational organic SEO strategy. You can't get away with


that. That's the basic. That's like the minimum thing you need to establish in order to win


in any space, but by optimizing for those various result types, the ones that correlate


to a strength within your business where there's an opportunity for you to take advantage of


it, you're going to be able to pull away from the competition, go further towards meeting


the needs of the searchers.


So here's some key takeaways for you. Optimizing for universal results is the best way to ensure


that you're satisfying searcher intent. We can snoop on Google's findings on search intent


by looking at those SERP topologies. As we move down the intent funnel, different result


types rise and fall in value, and that's really important. People have these cookie cutter


one size fits all approaches to this, but the truth is, answers boxes aren't that useful


in the informational stage. They're not there at all in the transactional stage, but in


the commercial stage, they work quite well.


With that knowledge of intent, we can start crafting the right content for the right moment


of the searcher's journey. This analysis is actually very easy to do. Here's what you


need. You need a SERP tracking tool that can break out result types. You need some search


volume data. You need a shared voice model of your choosing, and you can do it in Excel


or SQL. I did all of this in Excel or SQL just to prove to myself that it is possible


and in fact it's quite easy to do. There are tools that you can use that will help get


you a little bit further along. Moz has this wonderful SERP features feature, SERP features


functionality, SERP feature thing. Anyway, the point is, they do this great job of aggregating


up the different appearances of result types across the SERPs, and it really helps you


get to the finish line sooner. Stat does this as well. Both of us have information out there


that you can look at in the partner hub where you can come talk to people, and they'll show


you how you can do this sort of research with their own tool sets. If you're interested


to learn more, there's a whole white paper on this topic, getstat.com. There's a lot


of information around like people also ask boxes, related searches, things that I just


couldn't fit into the time today. So go ahead and download that if you're interested to


Recovering the Data Google Has Hidden Away - Whiteboard Friday

Hello, my name is Renigo Montoya.


You killed my SEO data.


Prepare to die.


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


This week we are celebrating Halloween six days late.


Hopefully that's alright with all of you.


For those of you outside the US, Halloween is this holiday where we dress up in costumes.


We've done it a few times here on Whiteboard Friday, but it's been a couple years so I'm


thrilled to be able to bring this back.


And I thought, in keeping with the theme of Enigo Montoya, one of my favorite characters


from The Princess Bride, we would talk about recovering some of the data that Google either


hides or has taken away from us over the years.


And it's actually kind of cool because there are a number of tools and processes that we


have not had access to three years ago, four years ago, some of them even two years ago


that today enable us to do things that are really remarkable.


So let's start with keyword data.


We need keyword data about traffic, which keywords send traffic to our website, which


keywords send traffic to other people's websites, which traffic comes from ads, which traffic


comes from organic, where it goes, what it does.


This is critical because we want to see which terms are actually sending the traffic so


we can know which ones to concentrate on.


We want to know which ones convert because if a keyword converts well, that probably


means we should be focusing more energy on it, we should be trying to rank higher for


it, maybe we should be bidding on it, perhaps we should be thinking about expanding the


universe of terms and phrases around that term that could send us traffic, and we should


know which ones to target with paid and which ones deserve some organic rank boosting efforts.


So how do we do this?


Because Google now sends all traffic with keyword not provided.


So what's our process here?


Well, for a while we've had some estimation tools.


Moz has one in Moz Analytics, I think Conductor's got one in their platform, a number of other


platforms that rank, track, and then connect to your analytics, try and predict which keywords


are sending traffic.


But we can do even better today, and that's thanks to a couple of tools.


One of them is SimilarWeb.


SimilarWeb has a panel of users, essentially people who've installed software and toolbars


and all sorts of other things that track their browser activity.


They've opted into this, right?


This is not without their knowledge, they know, they've consented.


And this panel actually includes millions and millions of users.


Thus we can get a real sample set of web users, especially in countries like the United States


and in Europe where SimilarWeb's panel is relatively large, and Israel as well.


And we can see that data at the clickstream level.


Unfortunately, I can't see through this wig.


And because they can see it at the clickstream level, Google is not hiding that, right?


So they see this person perform the search, they visited this page, then they visited


this page, then they went over here.


That tracking means that if you go into SimilarWeb today, SimilarWeb Pro at least, and you plug


in a domain, your domain or other people's domains, you'll actually be able to see a


list of the keywords that sent them the most traffic and where that traffic went to.


That is killer.


And you can export this, you can put it into CSV, you can then compare it up to the pages


that get traffic.


Really, really cool.


SEMrush is another one.


Now SEMrush monitors, they monitor tens of millions of keywords.


I think it's something in excess of 50 million keywords in the United States and many more


millions outside the US as well.


And they can show who ranks for what today as well as historically, so you can see over


time the trend there, and you can see who's advertising.


So if you say, hey, I know that this competitor is targeting the same market space as us,


I can now go to SEMrush, I can plug them in, I can see all the keywords that they're getting


organic traffic from and paid traffic from, and then I can start to say, all right, maybe


I should add this to my keyword research list, maybe I should target these, et cetera.


Again, you can match it up with that visit data to say, hey, we know that this is the


URL that ranked and we know the keyword, so since we know the page that ranked, we can


see in our own visit data from landing page reports which ones got the traffic, which


ones didn't.


That's pretty darn cool as well.


It maybe even gets us to a place of implied click-through rate, which is great.


Now one thing to be aware of, you have to do a lot of this manually.


Today, there's no tool that really connects up like the SEMrush and similar web data along


with a landing report.


That's a little frustrating.


Hopefully, we'll get there soon, speaking of frustrating.


All right, hopefully that's better.


Link data.


Link data is one of those things that Google took away many, many years ago.


They still provide some link data in Webmaster Tools slash now called Search Console, but


it is not fantastic.


It's not comprehensive.


It's a little bit of a pain to get through.


It cuts off at certain limits, et cetera, et cetera.


We want to know why because we want to know who's linking to us and to our competitors.


We want to watch for spam.


We want to be able to compare our links versus the competition, understand ranking influence


from those links potentially, and find new link opportunities.


That's especially true for competitive link analysis.


How?


Well, we've got the traditional three tools, Majestic, Ahrefs, and Moz.


There have been a bunch of analyses recently.


The way that I kind of think of them is Majestic has the largest index.


By a long shot, I think they're two or three times larger than Ahrefs.


Ahrefs is anywhere between about 100% the size, so same size as Moz, and 200% depending


on how Moz's indices are doing, which hopefully they'll be doing a little better soon.


Moz is the smallest of these three, which I'm embarrassed to say.


What Moz is really good at is metrics.


It's actually metrics that mean that Moz is so small because it's hard to process all


those, so things like page authority and domain authority and spam score, et cetera.


Ahrefs is terrific for identifying fresh links and high-value links.


They also have a number of great features inside that tool that I really like, many


SEOs really like, around sorting and filtering and exporting and visualization.


Then Majestic has got that huge index.


They also have some really great features.


They're getting a little more sophisticated with their metrics as well, so I think their


metrics are doing nicely compared to Ahrefs.


Each of these are crawling the web and then building indices that are searchable by all


of us, which is great.


This means that a lot of this data is recovered.


Let's be clear.


None of those sources, Majestic, Moz, Ahrefs, none of them are the same size as Google.


None of them are crawling exactly what Google is crawling.


At least here at Moz, and I assume Majestic and Ahrefs do this as well, we try and model


the web as best we can around what's in Google.


When we look at large sets of search results, which we compare to our indices each time,


we're between 75 and 80 percent of what's in Google's results that are in our index.


That's good.


I think it's not great, but it gives you a sense for how these folks are crawling.


It's really about the estimation, and then many, many SEOs are combining these sources


along with Webmaster Tools in order to find all the links that they possibly can.


Traffic data.


Traffic data, you have your own traffic data, but competitive traffic data has always been


a pain in the butt.


We want that for competitive comparison.


We want it to identify missed opportunities like missed channels or links that maybe we


were thinking, hey, I'm not sure if I should get a link there, but it looks like that's


very valuable.


It's sending a lot of traffic or a relationship with a partner or an API or a data source


or even an advertising partnership or relationship.


How can we do that?


Well, there are a few tools.


I mentioned SimilarWeb before.


They're an excellent choice for this.


There's also a tool out there called Jumpshot.


If you use the – I think it's the virus checker AVG, which is relatively popular.


Jumpshot is basically owned by them, and so anyone with that virus checker has their browser


activity monitored and then sent back to Jumpshot.


It's all anonymized, and yes, it's with consent.


You agree to it in the terms of use when you download that.


I also think it's fine to use Quantcast, but only when the site has been quantified, meaning


they've opted into a Quantcast program.


They've put Quantcast pixel tracking on their site.


Otherwise, Quantcast in our view – and I did an analysis of this just about six months


ago – very, very inaccurate.


That's true for Quantcast.


It's true for Alexa, Comscore, Compete.


I would not recommend any of those other ones.


I haven't tried Jumpshot personally.


I've seen some folks say that they're good but not as good as SimilarWeb.


You can check out both of those and see what you think.


What's really nice about this is being able to look at where are my competitors getting


traffic and how is that increasing or decreasing over time?


What are they doing that I'm not doing?


What are they doing that I should potentially investigate?


It's a lot like competitive link intelligence except on the traffic side, and I think for


a broadly focused web marketer, critical.


Last one, growth or shrinkage of search visibility.


This is frustrating because I really wish Google provided this better, but thankfully


there are some very good tools out there.


What we want to be able to do is track our competitors' successes in search, watch for


potential penalties, and explain why traffic has gone up or down.


Explaining why traffic has gone up or down drives SEOs nuts.


I'm sure most of you are sitting there going, yeah, that's just the worst.


How we can do this is SEMrush with rankings, SimilarWeb with competitive traffic, and our


own analytics to show us data.


By combining these, we can essentially say, hey, I saw my search traffic go up.


Is that because I now rank for more stuff?


You can go, if you're rank tracking with Moz Analytics or any of the many ranking solutions


out there, you can of course go and look at the ranks, the tracking that you've got there.


If you're not finding the solution in the keywords that you are tracking, you might


check out SEMrush because they might show you data about, hey, here's keywords you haven't


been tracking that they've been tracking that are showing why that traffic delta is happening.


Same thing is true for SimilarWeb's traffic.


You can go and look at the people who are ranking alongside you and say, hey, are they


still getting the same amount of search traffic that we are?


Because if they've gone down or if they've gone up, that suggests that more search volume


is to blame, not a rankings change.


Now we can start to sort through these things.


We can really figure out who's rising in the rankings, who's falling, and why is their


traffic going up or down if it is.


With this, we can recover a ton of the data that we've lost.


None of these are super easy.


They're not completely plug and play, but many of them are friendly, usable, and really


useful for when you have these problems.


All right, everyone.


Look forward to the comments, and we will see you again next week for another edition


of Whiteboard Friday.


Up and to the Right: Growing Traffic, Conversions, & Revenue [MozCon 2017] — Matthew Barby

It's really bright up here.


I think the only thing brighter is probably Rand's shoes right now.


That's the first bad joke.


It's not going to get any better, right?


Thing that's kind of amazed me so far today has been the transcriptions that have been


happening, like live.


It's incredible.


I think we should all give Stacey behind the stage a massive round of applause, right?


All right, save some of it for me.


Save some of it.


Is it weird typing to ask people to give you a round of applause?


I don't know if I'm allowed to break the fourth wall.


Cool.


Well, that's about all the clapping that I'm going to get from now on.


Okay.


How many of you have seen case studies like this?


A bunch of tactics.


Go and grow from zero to X.


Grow by 963%, 11,000%, 482%, and you're like, yeah, I'm going to do all these different


tactics and we're going to make like a million bucks.


I don't have anything against these.


I've written some of these, right?


But the thing to remember here is that having just like a bag of tricks that you can use


is good, but if you don't understand the why behind the what, you're never going to be


able to actually truly solve problems and adapt when things happen outside of what you're


expecting.


So let me just give a quick example of this.


Let's take the example of link building.


Hands up in here if anyone's been involved in any way, shape, or form of the soul destroying


tasks of link building.


Yeah.


It's really good fun.


Pretty much every day I see like another article come out and it's like Google killed guest


posting, guest posting's dead.


Shit.


What are we going to do?


Let me just clear up something around guest posting to answer the question directly of


is guest posting dead?


Who gives a shit?


It does not matter.


It does not matter to you at all.


The reality is like Google didn't kill guest posting, we did.


This is why as marketers we're not allowed nice things, right?


Because we get something and it works and then we're like perfect.


Put it into the machine and do it a million times.


And we ruin it for everybody.


It's fine.


I do it as well.


I'm a big ruiner.


But the thing here is like there are lots of different ways to go about building links.


There's like a bunch of different tactics, right?


Link building is all about being able to put enough resources into something where you


make a net gain from the thing that you're doing.


As soon as that net gain diminishes, it's not worth doing.


Every one of these tactics on here eventually will not be worth anything.


They won't work at all for you, at least the economics of it won't work out, right?


But what they all solve to do is solve a specific problem.


And that problem that they're solving is being able to drive authority back to your website.


A really great example of this was if anyone follows Glen Allstop, ViperChills blog, he


put together this graph and it looks at Seth Godin's most linked to blog posts by the number


of links it's achieved year by year.


Seth Godin's blog is like the pillar of consistency.


I think the average word count is like three words and it gets shared like a million times.


I'm really jealous.


But if you look, like Seth's audience has been growing and growing and growing and growing


year on year.


You would think the amount of links that his articles get from just earning links gets


higher and higher and higher, but they haven't, right?


The main reason behind this is because back in say 2008, 2007, you would write a great


article and someone would say, wow, that's an amazing article.


I'm going to reward this by adding a link on my blog.


I'm going to write about it.


And now people are like, no, fuck it, just put it on like Facebook or Twitter.


Right?


That's good enough.


People are not going to go to the level and extent of linking to you that easily now.


And this is out of Seth's control.


And this brings me on to the point, right?


It's like you want to treat every single tactic, strategy, channel that you have as if it completely


doesn't work tomorrow.


It's a pretty stressful thing to think about.


I know.


I'm not trying to like induce stress here.


But it's the only way that you can truly stay ahead of what you're doing.


And this all comes down and starts with channel prioritization.


We're really big on this at HubSpot, spend a lot of time prioritizing and mapping out


the different channels, activities that we're going to be working on so that we can safeguard


ourselves against the risk of these channels suffering fatigue.


This is a matrix that was put together by Brian Balfour, former VP of growth at HubSpot,


and now see at ReForge, awesome guy, there's a link to this.


This is actually something that my team uses in HubSpot.


And we map out each of our perfect channels.


And then we stack rank based on a number of different criteria, right?


So what's the cost of getting involved in this channel?


What's the depth of targeting?


How many resources do it require?


What's the scale and reach and size?


There's a bunch of these different frameworks.


If anyone uses growth hackers, they use the ICE framework.


The idea here is prioritizing stack ranking on importance.


Then we'll go a layer deeper, right?


We'll say, okay, within SEO, this is like a few of our experiments that we're about


to run and try and scale up.


And what we try to do with the experiments that we run is ideally dedicate time to things


that can specifically be replicated and done again and again and again so that we can get


scale with all this.


So I'm going to take you on a bit of a journey now.


And I'm going to use the medium of over convoluted acronyms to take you from the start of this


journey, which is realizing there's a problem.


Sondelg rolls off the tongue.


To the end point, Sondelg.


Again, really catchy.


You're probably thinking, Matt, did you just make up these acronyms to try and sound intelligent?


Are they IKEA products maybe?


They're not an, okay, that's not an IKEA product.


Nothing costs $7,000 in IKEA, right?


Basically the starting point is here.


You have that moment and you're like, shit, numbers look really bad, right?


And where you want to get to is here, shit, our numbers look great.


Right?


Get some of that sweet Sondelg.


There's a number of things that happen along this way, okay?


So we start out with the channel evaluation, proposal solution, experimentation, and eventually


take our big bag of monies back to the office.


To do this, what I'm going to do is take you inside my brain to help you think about how


I approach solving complex problems and how other great companies are thinking about solving


great problems as well.


So let's start this out with some problems.


Problem number one, and this is something that every single person in this entire room


is going to face at some point or another, and it's the fact that every single channel


you operate will at some point suffer fatigue.


This could be you're doing really well in organic search, everything's going great,


and then you hit a demand ceiling.


People aren't searching as much anymore and you can't force people to search more for


things.


Or your acquisition costs for paid search have started to skyrocket through increased


competition and now your acquisition costs outweigh the lifetime value of your customer


and you're not making profit.


Email deliverability starts to channel down or Gmail starts pushing emails into the promotions


tab and all of a sudden your email open rates go down.


All these things force you to suffer fatigue.


Most companies, right, most of us here, the large majority of our acquisition channels


and all of the stuff that comes into our funnel come through maybe one, two maximum channels.


Show of hands here, who has organic search as their main driver of traffic to their website


and their business, right?


Yeah, same.


What happens if tomorrow organic search in your business tanked and all of a sudden it


brought in nothing?


If any of you remember this story, I'm probably reliving a few nightmares for people.


The florist, online florist company Interflora received a very famous Google search penalty


heartbreakingly just before Valentine's Day.


The biggest sales time of the year, right, tanked.


Organic traffic, gone.


That is a really, really tough challenge to have to face.


Do you know what's even tougher?


What if there wasn't even search demand for what you have to offer to begin with, right?


People aren't even searching for what you have.


So I want to tell a little story here of a company called Zapier.


Anybody in the room know Zapier, use Zapier, right?


Right, great.


A few woos.


Anyone from Zapier here?


Yeah, commission check in the post, please.


Right, perfect.


So when you try and, like, lots of people love Zapier.


I love Zapier.


I try to explain what Zapier is and I'm kind of like, it's like an app marketplace to connect


different apps together to increase their functionality.


I was thinking about this.


I was like, okay, I'm going to do a bit of research here.


How many people are searching for an app marketplace to connect different apps together to increase


their functionality?


And you know, Google Trends didn't actually have a lot.


I thought there would be big demands.


I was ready to spin up an affiliate site, right?


There wasn't a whole lot.


That's tough.


So a lot of people in that situation, they're like, well, you know, people aren't really


searching for what we have to offer.


SEO probably isn't for us.


Zapier didn't do that.


Zapier, instead of following just a bunch of tactics, they said, okay, we've got to


solve this problem.


And to do that, we're going to create side doors into our website.


Instead of people who know how to walk through the front door of our business and find us


because they know what they're looking for, we need to enter them in at a point where


they show some layer of intent to eventually capture them.


So here's something really interesting that they did.


So if you think about why would you use Zapier, right, primarily it's to extend a product's


functionality.


There's three, maybe more, different stages that you're at when you're looking to do this.


So one might be an integration.


So an example could be, okay, look, I'm using HubSpot CRM, but I want to hook up to MailChimp,


right?


They have pages for each of these.


Specific features.


Okay, I want to plug an RSS feed into Twitter so it auto tweets out.


And then they have product comparison.


If you're looking to improve the functionality of the product, right, you're probably comparing


two different things.


So they built out review pages for every single one of their brands.


So here's the product integration page.


For every single integration that they have on Zapier, which is a lot of them, they have


an individual page for them.


And what these pages also have is, like this example, a similar taxonomy in the URL.


So you have like HubSpot CRM slash MailChimp.


And lo and behold, when you Google HubSpot CRM and MailChimp, they rank number one, the


first side door they enter, right?


And it's not just that that they get.


So you've got things like they rank for Stripe integrations, Trello integrations, Pipedrive


integrations, Insightly integrations, loads and loads of these.


An amazing way to funnel users in through a side door.


The specific features, right?


You've got things like publish RSS feed to Twitter.


Again, they created pages for every single individual function that can be done on these.


Another side door into the business.


And the third one, which is actually one of my favorite ones, is they have a review where


they pull in review information of the product, information around like all of the different


reviews that it has.


And then lo and behold, they rank for, like in this example, Mailjet review.


And they'll bring people into the product.


It's perfect.


The beauty here is, and you can see like Wishpond review, Office 365 review.


I think at one point they ranked for like Google Drive.


It was ridiculous.


And they bring through hundreds of thousands of visitors off the back of this.


And the beauty of all of this is every time they work with an integration partner, they'll


do like a co-marketing campaign with them.


And the integration partner will probably send a bunch of links into their site.


And this is the next piece.


Their internal linking is amazing.


For all of these pages, right, you've got breadcrumb links that link back to the individual


brand pages, distributing the authority internally to the pages they want to rank most.


Every single individual recommended Zap links through to an individual feature page.


You've got at the bottom here, about MailChimp, about HubSpot CRM.


Click in and you go to the review pages.


So all of the external authority that they're bringing in pushes through and they redirect


it through to the different areas of the site they want to rank and they end up with some


of that sweet ass sonnled, right?


That is impressive.


So what if your problem is people are searching for you and you're not visible?


Pretty common one.


You just don't rank.


So good SEOs are not people that are just great at building links.


They're not just people that can make great content that performs really well.


It's not even necessarily about just someone that knows how to rank a web page.


It's about understanding the right lever to pull at the right time.


And that requires a fundamental understanding of the situation and the problem that you


face.


Do I need to push more authority?


Is it a discoverability issue?


Do we need to build more relevance, more content?


And this all comes back to like the three most fundamentally basic ways and stages that


a search engine works.


Crawling, indexing, ranking.


Knowing whether you've got a problem on the crawlability side or the indexing side and


the ranking side is pretty much what's going to save you wasting countless days, weeks,


money on trying to solve a problem that isn't the right one.


So this is like for a brand new website how a lot of people start out.


They're like, okay, brand new website, SEO time, we're going to rank and bank.


Let's go push out two blog posts a week.


It's going to work.


Right, a month goes by.


Right, time to ramp things up.


Four blog posts a week.


Let's do it.


Six blog posts per week.


And you're ramping up and up and up and up and you're like, we're still hitting some


like Sondelg, right?


TM.


It's not working.


Why is this not working?


They're pulling the wrong lever.


I'm going to try and explain this in a better way and the only way I know how is with Kanye


West and steak burger burger witches.


Right?


So Kanye, here's a steak burger burger witch.


Probably tastes a bit like a foot.


Would you like it?


Kanye says no.


I don't want a steak burger burger witch.


It looks horrible.


Like bear with me.


What if I told you, you could have more steak burger burger witches?


You going to get in on that?


He's like no.


I don't want one.


I don't want 10.


This is what you're doing when you're solving a problem with another problem.


If the current content you're creating isn't really performing, what makes you think doing


twice of that will work better?


When do you ever do that?


You never go, let's spend 100K on paid this month.


That didn't work.


Ramp it up to 200K.


Right?


You're not going to do that.


This is about understanding the right lever to pull.


Building authority at the time when you need to build authority.


Then pushing the lever of relevancy.


Quick example of something like this.


I was doing a little bit of consulting and worked on a small project with a team called


App Institute a little while back.


This was around the time of the Pokemon Go launch.


One thing that we needed to do was build up the authority of this site instead of just


pushing out blog posts after blog posts after blog posts.


We need to boost some authority here.


We built out this realtime dashboard.


From the time you get on the page, count up how much revenue Pokemon Go app had generated.


We did some PR campaign around it.


It was just the right timing for all of the release for this to kick off.


We had a bunch of pickup in top tier trade publications like Next Web, Android Authority,


James Radar, and we had a bunch of Sonnled.


100K visits in seven days.


All coming through with links from 308 different websites, a bunch of authority pushed into


the site that we could then distribute through the architecture, and then saw site-wide boosts


across the board.


That's pulling the right lever at the right time.


But what if you have the authority?


This is one of my favorite situations to be in.


We have a bunch of authority right now, but we don't really rank.


Why is that?


A lot of the time, people fall into the opposite trap here.


They're like, oh, man, maybe we need more links.


Let's invest in tons of link building right now.


That's equally as bad and expensive and offers a similar offering to Kanye West.


Anyone heard of PandaDoc?


Document signing company.


Pretty cool.


They integrate with HubSpot, really cool team, and they have a bunch of authority.


They've got a ton of links to their website.


They're built.


They're a VC-funded company.


They continually get big press releases.


One of the challenges that they found is we have tons of authority, but the things that


people search for that are directly related to our product, walking through the front


door, right, signing documents online, they don't get a whole lot of volume.


So they play the side door approach.


How do we harness all the authority that's locked up in this website, reroute it into


something that can help us rank?


And they did something pretty genius, I think.


So what's the first thing you're going to do before you need to get a document signed?


You're probably going to create a document.


So they're like, well, that makes sense.


Let's go after document templates.


They built out a huge library of tons of different business document templates.


It's like creating proposals, RFPs, there was like pitch decks in there, tons of great


stuff.


Even like social media marketing proposals, chasing the long tail.


And to make that even better, they weren't just gated with a form, right?


This actually went directly into their product.


You could edit them, add your own logo, and then when you finished all of this, all you


needed to do was go and sign up.


They created really strong internal linking architecture, and lo and behold, they ranked


for a bunch of these different terms, like proposal template, business proposal template,


business plan, RFP template.


Just like one of their biggest sources of acquisition of new users into their product,


and it brings through like into the hundreds of thousands of visitors on a monthly basis.


They were able to harness the existing authority and they pulled the right lever at the right


time instead of just piling the same shit that wasn't working and forcing it into it.


And that's because they understood the problem as opposed to just trying to play a tactic.


Here is a secret that some people don't get at all.


Sometimes you don't need to create net new content to get some gains.


I mean, albeit slightly hypocritical being from HubSpot saying this, right?


I'll give you that one for free.


We create a lot of great content.


We create a ton of content, right?


But sometimes we do things to get wins where we don't need to create content.


Here is an example.


So we have like 1500, 2000 eBooks.


Some of you in this room have probably downloaded one of our eBooks.


We're going to email you forever, literally until you die.


You'll never escape.


Jokes on you guys.


And what we wanted to do is we wanted to get a load of these landing pages ranking a lot


better.


So we built this marketing library.


And the idea was what we're going to do is we're going to go after and categorize all


of these different eBooks that we have and try and rank for a bunch of terms like content


marketing eBooks, SEO eBooks, social media webinars, et cetera, et cetera.


We built this whole thing.


We were like, oh, this is awesome.


Right.


When we finished giving ourselves a big pat on the back, we were like, okay, we better


check the numbers.


And we had some real little sondelk happen, right?


It was nothing.


Zero.


What is going on?


So we dug a little deeper.


Had a look at what Google was actually seeing when they were crawling this content.


This tiny book icon.


Pretty compelling content.


None of it could be crawled.


The way that we built the marketing library was not the best and it had been gated behind


our product and for a number of reasons, fucked everything up.


And we had nothing.


So we were like, okay, well, I guess we just redesigned the exact same thing that we've


already built.


Instead of building it behind like a bunch of JavaScript and a load of other bloated


code, we'll just simplify it down.


And we rebuilt it.


Super simple.


Added a bit better internal linking and immediately added 600,000 new visitors to the website


in the year.


Pretty good result, right?


That was really nice for us.


And we didn't create any net new content.


We just redesigned the existing thing that already was there.


This is the thing I want everyone to take away here is like all of this is about understanding


a problem, right?


You need to be able to understand the why behind the what.


But there are a few other situations.


What about when there isn't necessarily a problem but you're like, hey, there's


this new awesome thing, we should definitely just go try it.


Right?


You've all had those moments where you want to explore a new opportunity.


And we talked about every channel suffering fatigue at some point, right?


Now being in the early adoption stage of a new channel is a way that you can reap huge,


huge rewards.


And you're basically adding a longer period of time before you hit that point of fatigue.


You can also get in early to a new channel and build a moat around what you're doing,


create much higher barriers of entry for everyone else that's going to come in.


So quick show of hands, who remembers the Mirka app?


No, me neither, right?


There's also risks in adopting new channels.


Huge risks, right?


The goal here is to land effectively in existing pools of users as is wonderfully demonstrated


by this visual piece here.


Let me give you a quick example.


So here's Shopify's app store.


Most people wouldn't say Shopify's app store is a channel, right?


They're like, well, it's kind of like a retention play for Shopify, right?


Well, wrong.


Shopify's app store can be a massive channel.


A friend of mine runs an e-commerce app and they built an app for Shopify to bed deeper


into Shopify's app store and maybe create some kind of acquisition.


Every month they pay zero to Shopify and they create 1,000 paying customers from the Shopify


app store alone.


That's almost 40K in MRR.


From a landing page in the Shopify app store.


There are tons of pools that you can dive into where there is existing potential customers


and just trying to solve a problem as opposed to just listening to a few tactics of, okay,


these are the channels that everyone's focusing on so we better just do that, right?


There's a few others.


Does anyone here use Alexa?


I have like a borderline abusive relationship with Alexa.


I would be very scared if someone read the transcripts.


I'm really mean to her.


But it's okay.


Robots don't have rights yet.


Yet, Alexa.


The interesting thing about Alexa, outside of her pending lawsuit on me, is in Q1 of


2016 there were 135 skills or like apps in the Alexa skill app store.


Fast forward one year, there's over 10,000.


That's huge growth.


The even better thing about this is some of the top Alexa skills on the entire app store


have like a total of like 13 or 20 reviews.


You can't even have paid apps right now in the Alexa store.


This has got to be for me one of the most untapped pools that is around at all today.


The barriers to entry are super low and if anyone here is thinking about going and trying


out something new and it's relevant, I would highly recommend looking at it.


Chatbots as well.


I'm not even going to start going on about chatbots because I'm sure everyone's already


sick to death of hearing about chatbots, right?


And super into chatbots.


We love it at HubSpot.


We're doing a bunch of stuff.


Dharmesh loves it.


So we all love it.


But they're taking off huge amounts, right?


And that's another pool that people are diving into and getting great results.


We've recently built a chatbot for HubSpot and just simply from the discover section


of Facebook messenger, we've been bringing in thousands of new users and not paying a


single penny for it.


It's been pretty incredible.


So just bringing this full circle.


The thing I'm going to suggest everyone does today is imagine a world where everything


you're doing right now doesn't work.


Mitigate risk by exploring new opportunities but more importantly, be incredibly pessimistic


about the problems that you face and have a plan for when they inevitably do become


a lot more real, right?


And everything will be fine and you'll be shopping around IKEA, have some sweet Sonnog.


Thanks a lot everyone.


It's been great.


MozCon 2014 - 24 - Richard Baxter - Developing Your Own Great Interactive Content

So, when I think about what it is we actually do, most of the time we're fixing things or


we're making things or we're communicating ideas.


So yesterday when Dr. Pete was giving his presentation and nearly everybody in the room


put their hands up to say, yes, I'm involved with creating content in some way.


Well, that means that you're telling stories.


And an okay storyteller can tell a story.


A good storyteller can invent a story, like a journalist goes out and explores a topic


and writes down his research and interviews people and eventually comes up with an article


with a title that people want to read and engage with and share.


A great storyteller knows how to tell a story.


Now our industry is tough, right?


Like sometimes we feel a little bit stressed.


We have to work super hard.


And we have to work super hard because we have to innovate.


We put ourselves under a lot of pressure to compete.


And we're competing in two kind of different ways.


So we're competing with each other.


Some of us work in the same space, right?


So this agency has to build more links or whatever than that one to outrank this site,


blah.


And also we're competing with each other when we pitch against each other as well, right?


And that's tough.


I always tense up when I hear that some of our favorite friends, stroke enemies in the


agency space are going to be at the same pitch as us.


You know, there's that stuff.


That's cool.


But more fundamentally than that, we're competing for attention from our customers.


And what we're doing today might not work tomorrow.


So we have a challenge.


The internet is amazing.


It's this magical place.


I love it.


It pays our bills.


We earn our salaries because of the internet.


This is a very special place to us.


But for us to compete with each other, and actually some of the guys that have been doing


this for a little longer than we have, if we're being honest, we've got to learn how


the internet works.


And I don't think all of us do.


We are one of the 2.9 million people that saw this content in its first six days that


it was launched.


It took them six months to collect up all of the assets to be able to produce this piece


of work.


And it took them six months to do the development work.


The custom JS, the CSS, the layout, the 3D rendering, the HTML5 video.


There's a lot going on in snowfall.


There were 14 people on the team that were working on this project.


Fourteen people.


How many of you in this room have a client that would let you just produce one piece


of content over a year with 14 of your team?


That's probably millions of dollars worth of content development, storytelling.


Pixel Perfect is the story of eBay, a design agency that are credited with the invention


of pixel art.


And it's really cool, pixel art.


I love it.


This piece of long form is beautifully illustrated.


It's nicely laid out.


It's well written.


It's hosted on the verge.


Go and check out their long form content section.


There's a lot of amazing stuff happening in there.


Technically what I find most exciting actually about this piece of work is the way that header


image looks like it's zooming in as you scroll.


What's actually happening is there's an event handler.


It's jQuery.


So as you scroll, the image is the size of the image is increased by what we call DOM


manipulation.


And actually it's nested inside a canvas container.


I'm going to talk about canvas in a moment because it's ridiculously powerful.


And that bit of code is so elegant that it's also looking at the browser size and deciding


in what increments to resize the image as you scroll, which is an incredibly clever


way to do it.


And I bet hardly anybody noticed I didn't until I decided to look because I wanted to


know how that was built.


So we have to be super careful about asking for things that we don't really understand


that could be more than just a trivial piece of development work.


This is called car faults.


It's a piece of work that we did to help people learn a little more about different types


of automobiles like classic cars.


And it's got RTO, really targeted outreach.


It's got stakeholder recruitment.


We followed the whole content development process all the way to the end.


And then when we sent this to the client for it to be launched, it didn't work.


They put it on their servers and the thing just wouldn't work.


And the reason why is, I mean, you look at this piece of work and you think, well, it's


designed okay and it looked kind of pretty.


I bet most of the time spent on this piece of project work was just chopping it into


HTML and getting it shipped.


It wasn't.


These white buttons on your right-hand side, they took two days.


The reason why they took two days is the way this thing was hosted, or was going to be


hosted, was on an enterprise web server network with all load balancers and all of this crazy


stuff.


And what was going on was that the load balancers were executing the JavaScript.


They were preprocessing the content, kind of like a headless browser type of a situation.


And then they were serving what they saw.


And with JavaScript, what you really want is the browser executing your JavaScript,


because all of the things that you've built rely on that being possible.


And this came as a surprise to us.


And we had to spend a night rebuilding it to make those dots work, to make the scroll


actions work in a library called MooTools, which is a little bit more hardcore than jQuery.


And even getting the cross-browser compatibility right, so it worked in all of the different


browsers, became a very non-trivial piece of work to do, which is why it took two days.


So I think that a really talented storyteller, a gifted storyteller, understands the medium


via which they choose to tell a story.


And the challenge that we face is that this is competitive.


We're giving each other examples of what we think great content looks like, but we might


not necessarily understand what it is we're really looking at.


And we've got to evolve, because the people that are producing some of the examples that


I've just shown you aren't marketing agencies.


They're publishers.


They're people who are just really interested in making something cool.


And that's an interesting challenge.


And the whole time, this is where some of our industry still is.


So we've got to stop doing that.


We've got to stop pooping on the internet.


We've got to decide to do something a little bit more special.


Otherwise it doesn't matter how good your content strategy is.


We're going to get left behind.


I want you to go check out Oliver Emberton.


His blog is consistently exceptional.


The ideas that he has in his stories are brilliant.


The graphics that he chooses and designs are brilliant.


And his social engagement is just amazing.


520,000 shares on this one post.


Rand put this in front of me.


It's amazing.


But the whole site is incredible.


And this guy is just doing that because he's interested.


He wants to develop something of note.


And this is the kind of stuff that we look at and we go, yeah, that's pretty good.


And this is the kind of stuff that we're competing with.


Now I think for a long time, I've always been telling myself, God, this stuff's really hard


to do.


Like it's really, really hard to do.


How am I going to build this kind of thing?


Well, look, I'm a marketer.


So that makes me a project manager when I'm making these things happen.


It's no different really to hiring a designer, hiring a copywriter, whatever you need to


do.


The difficult bit isn't necessarily doing it.


It's understanding the vocabulary that you require to be able to describe what it is


you want to happen.


I mean, web developers understand the technologies that they work in.


But then again, do we?


And it's pretty disheartening as a web developer when you're dealing with a client or a customer


or whatever.


And they're looking at you with just a glazed expression.


They've got no idea what the pair of you are talking about.


One of you is talking about jQuery.


The other one's talking about fade-ins and flashing lights.


So how this started for us is it started with me throwing my toys out of the pram, which


happens every now and again.


Hi, team.


We share content internally at Built Visible with this little tag in the subject line.


It's a nice little tip, actually.


If you find cool stuff, share it with the whole company, tag it up in the subject line,


and then you can go back to Gmail to find it later for blog posts and things.


And at first, we'd share stuff with each other.


And you can imagine receiving an email with a link for you to click.


And in the email, it said, this stuff's really cool.


Well, this is great.


Wow, look at this.


Look at all the likes.


Boom.


And I realized that's absolutely not good enough for us.


I mean, we're supposed to be cutting-edge content marketers.


We're supposed to be in a place where it's us producing this work all the time.


And yet here we are.


We're just saying this is cool.


So the challenge that I put in front of my company is, you've got to know how it's built.


Just got to know that.


And that doesn't mean you've got to be able to do it.


It just means that you've got to know what it is that you're looking at.


Because if we don't know that, then how on earth can we tell the story that we'd envisaged


in our minds?


We're not giving our content strategy.


We're not doing it any justice.


So let me show you some stuff.


SVG, who's worked with scalable vector graphics before?


Awesome.


SVG, scalable vector graphics, are awesome because it's an image rendering protocol,


basically.


Where you get the browser to render the image instead of serving an image from your server.


So you can do really, really cool stuff like this.


This is Polygon's Xbox One review.


And it's a piece of long-form content.


And each of the individual items are nested in the article.


So lots of traces of things like the Xbox and the controller pad and all that type of


stuff.


Really engaging.


You just want to sit and stare at the work.


You forget to read the article because the visuals are so clever.


What's actually going on here is that there's an SVG in the web page.


It's been embedded.


And then they're using a little bit of jQuery to do what's called a path animation.


And what's actually happening is that there's a path attribute in the XML that describes


the SVG.


And in that path attribute, there's a bunch of numbers.


The jQuery is just manipulating what those numbers say.


That's called DOM manipulation.


And if you sat down with a developer and said, here's an SVG or here's a file I want you


to talk to me about what you can do with this with a little bit of path animation, I think


you'd really make their day probably.


So what is jQuery?


Well, I mean, to me, it's a library of functions that have been built in JavaScript.


jQuery is not based in JavaScript.


But somebody else has already sat down and done all the hard work.


All of the things that we need in our browsers, you know, clever fades, scrolls, all of that


type of stuff that we potentially just gloss over on the Internet when we're sharing this


great content.


jQuery is behind most of it.


If it's not jQuery, it's usually either some custom JavaScript or maybe MooTools.


But jQuery is the good one.


This is the kind of stuff that jQuery can do, like nice and simple.


This is an interactive infographic from Intuit.


And it's based in HTML.


It's got embedded videos and all that kind of thing.


The story is about the future of the office.


It's based on a video from the BBC program, Tomorrow's World.


And it's really cute.


Like they've got filing cabinets going around with wheels and a little area along them.


A little bit like a really early version of Roger maybe.


And you can see as you scroll, look at the bar charts moving.


And that's a really simple bit of manipulation with jQuery.


What's actually happening is the pixel width in the div that describes each one of those


individual bars is just being increased as you scroll.


And that's it.


WebGL is really exciting.


It's a 3D rendering language for a browser.


It works in Chrome.


And with WebGL, you can do stuff like this.


This is ChemDoodle.


And ChemDoodle is actually a piece of software that helps chemists map molecules for different


kinds of drugs.


But they have sort of an online version where you can evaluate their files by uploading


it to ChemDoodle.


And then it makes these snazzy little 3D animations.


And that 3D is based in WebGL.


And it's a technology that runs on your 3D hardware in your computer.


So it's kind of still unreliable on other browsers.


It doesn't work on IE, for example.


But it does work beautifully in Chrome.


And if you want to see WebGL absolutely killing it, then you need to go to Chrome experiments


and have a look at what it can do.


And think about that for a moment.


So this is an entire it's a solution to tell a story that we're really not thinking about


using at scale.


And think about what you could put your customer in some kind of a 3D immersive environment.


You can communicate with them in a different way to just a Web page or just a blog post


or just an article.


And that's why I find this stuff super exciting.


And we see CSS all the time, right?


Because we're doing technical work.


We're checking for minus 999 pixels to the left.


All of those kinds of things.


But actually CSS is a really, really powerful presentation layer language.


And you can do stuff like this with it.


This is a CSS animation.


There's no JavaScript.


It's just running in the browser.


And it's by Anna Tudor, who is a remarkable talent.


She's the baby dino on Twitter.


This is just maths.


It's CSS with trigonometry and obviously lots of rotates and things like that and zooms.


But it's all happening in the browser and it's all happening in CSS.


And you look at this and you think, wow, this is a real surprise.


But actually it's been around for quite a while.


This is actually not a terribly new example.


But still, we don't use this stuff very much.


Phil Nottingham from Distilled was talking about how to make great videos yesterday.


Really enjoyed that presentation.


Because I've been thinking about HTML5 video in a slightly different way.


We have creatives that can produce the content for us.


But I think there's an extra step that we can take, which is that the context in which


we brief the people that make the video for us.


If we explain to them how we might be presenting that HTML5 video in the browser, they could


produce something different.


I've got a list of tasks for you to do when you all get home.


And I'll share those with you in a minute.


But check this guy out.


His name is Wes Boss.


Which is an interesting surname.


He's a cool guy, though.


Super talented.


This presentation here, he gave an O'Reilly conference.


He talked about what you can do with HTML5 video in the browser in Canvas.


And you can tile video and you can recolor it and you can spin it around and you can


chop it up into bits.


So you can make like a 24 style status alert, segue, whatever you call those things.


You can even turn on somebody's webcam with a single line of JavaScript and you can put


glasses on their face.


Because Canvas has an arbitrary facial recognition API built in.


And you can do all of that with such a tiny amount of code.


And that's what that video teaches you to do.


And I think about that for a second.


We are sending out content and we're producing tons of this stuff.


But we can put our customers in our content.


We can get them to interact with things because they can see themselves in our brand message.


And that just hasn't been explored at all.


And there are loads and loads and loads of just JavaScript libraries that you can use


super quickly, super easily.


I love high charts.


Right?


We've seen loads of high charts, actually, this conference.


It was in Marshall's software.


It's in Moz Analytics, I believe.


And once you get the hang of how to generate a chart in high charts, you can produce content


that just looks a little bit nicer.


So no more screen shots of Excel charts, right?


Because everybody's seen those before.


These are a little bit interactive.


They give you the data.


You can play around with them in the mouse.


You can zoom in.


You can download as a PNG or as an SVG.


Which is what those charts are, actually.


That's what high charts does.


It's just an SVG manipulation library.


And through a bit of JSON, which is the data it uses, the data formats it uses to be able


to draw, it produces an SVG for you, which is really cool.


You can combine that with some jQuery and do some insane things with charts.


And these are things that I've never seen before.


But I know that's possible because I understand roughly what those two technologies can do


with each other.


So think about that.


And think about that conversation with the web developer again, right?


Instead of the glazed expression as the web developer starts asking you about browsers


and how it will be served and whether or not it's okay to do something with SVG, learn


that vocabulary list.


And I'm sorry about the bullet points, but there's no other way to do this.


That is your vocabulary.


This is the standard language set, the standard lexicon that you need to be able to do what


it is I think we're all going to be doing in the next year.