All right, so let's talk about what's been happening.


MozCon 2015 - 11 - Surviving Google: SEO in 2020 with Pete Meyers

I apologize, I'm going to talk really fast today.


I've been five minutes over every practice run and it's been fast even when I started.


So a lot's happened in Knowledge Graph in the past year.


And I want to take you through, you may know how this works, but I want to give you a little


taste of what we've had so far.


So you're used to the answer box at the top, what they call the knowledge card, and we


get a question like how tall is a space needle and it comes back 605 feet.


And you see that panel on the right.


And I think sometimes we look at that knowledge panel and we just think of it as a chunk of


text.


And of course it's not.


It's the pre-structured data that Google understands, that they understand semantically.


And so if you look down there you see, okay, height, 605 feet.


That comes from the structured data.


So we can put that to the test.


You see right above that floor 6.


All right, how many stories is a space needle?


I didn't even use the word floors.


We get 6.


You see the architects there?


Let's try again.


Space needle architects, yeah, there they are.


They're in a carousel, a little different format.


And you can use this to keep generating answers out of this structured knowledge graph.


And you might think this can go on forever.


But we hit kind of an impasse.


This is Yahoo circa 2001.


And if you remember Yahoo at the time, it had a search box, but Yahoo was not a search


engine.


It was a directory.


And it was a human edited directory.


And what we learned in the early days of search was that this doesn't scale.


Even then it didn't scale, and now the pace of content creation has exploded.


And every experiment with it after that, services like KGB, sites like Mahalo, unless you're


in a niche that hasn't worked.


And so the irony is that Google came along and said, we have to fully automate this.


This cannot be human edited.


And they built a search engine that was fully automated.


But they've come full circle.


And they're trying to build the knowledge graph off of human curated data, and it's


not working.


So what do they have to do?


They have to dip into our data.


They have to dip into the index and create knowledge, and that's what's happening.


So this is the new answer box.


Google calls this a featured snippet.


I'm trying to use their language.


So you get a question, what color is the space needle?


It's not in the knowledge graph.


So Google goes out and look.


And they come back with a block of text.


And it's pretty good.


With paint colors like orbital olive for the body, astronaut white for the legs, reentry


red for the saucer.


Okay.


And then you get a little bit at the end that doesn't quite make sense.


It was completed in 1962.


All right.


Why is that in there?


And then we see the attribution.


This came from a page on Wikipedia.


And yes, it scraped directly from the middle of that page.


And so Google is trying to build the knowledge graph on the index they already have.


They have to.


They can't scale it manually.


They have to use the massive data they have.


They have to use automation.


You can tell it's automation because some of these answers are a little weird.


You might have seen this recently.


This is stop pickups.


So drink water, plugged ears.


That's grammatically a little strange, but okay.


Pull your tongue out.


Yes, this may be rude.


Well, if I'm gonna pull my tongue out, I'm not worried about rudeness.


I have an orgasm.


I guess that's generally good advice.


I'm not gonna get into your personal lives.


And I'm gonna just walk right past number four.


And I hope you've solved the problem by three.


Let's put it that way.


And so you can tell that this is algorithm.


And it's easy to make fun, but this is an incredibly difficult problem.


And Google is trying to solve it with the algorithm.


They're trying to solve this with deep learning.


And this is incredibly disruptive.


And we're gonna see big changes coming.


The other difficulty they're trying to face is what is a question in the first place?


Stop pickups isn't really a question in the traditional sense, but they know what you're


trying to do.


Sometimes you get questions that don't make sense.


Like what car does Jesus drive?


There you go.


I'm a Honda, so hey, cool.


Bonus points, I hope.


And this comes actually from a site with a what would Jesus drive page, which is the


WWJD.


And it's pretty funny, actually.


But you know, so this is their difficulty.


They're trying to tell what's a question and how do we answer it.


But they are trying to do this with machines.


And they are going to only increase the pace of this.


So we can make fun, but I think we shouldn't lose sight that they really are gonna keep


moving.


We're seeing some new entities.


This is kind of a dual answer box.


So the top is actually probably coming from the knowledge graph and the bottom is coming


from a site.


So they're going to use this new knowledge system.


I don't wanna use knowledge vault, because that's kind of taking on a different meaning.


And they're gonna build the knowledge graph and then they're gonna start to put these


things together.


We've also seen this coming in testing, this people also ask box.


Each of these is an answer.


And so you can expand those.


And Google's trying to build questions.


So if you type in VPN, they don't know what you want.


Do you wanna know what it is?


Do you wanna set one up?


And so they're trying to generate the kind of information you might be interested in.


All right, so why are they doing this?


This is a weird thing.


When they provide this concise answer, they're disrupting the SERP.


And that's not only revolutionary for us, but it changes their model.


It changes their business model.


It disrupts their advertising.


So why would they do it?


Well mobile is one answer.


You know, a small screen, you need a concise information.


You need something that fits.


But there's another reason they have to do this, and hopefully this works.


Okay, Google.


It's me talking to my phone.


What is the cloud?


According to Gizmodo, cloud is a buzzword that vaguely suggests the promise and convenience


of being able to access files from anywhere.


But the reality is that the cloud is hardly floating like mist above our heads.


It's a physical infrastructure.


It's many computers housed in massive warehouses all over the world.


Little wordy, I apologize, but that's voice search on Android.


Voice search is dependent on concise answers.


You can't have a SERP.


And as we get into, as I'll show you later, voice appliances and voice in our car and


voice on our wearables where screen space is limited, this is why they need this.


And this is challenging for them.


It's challenging for us, but they don't know how they're going to monetize this.


They don't know where it's going, but they know they have to have it.


And it's not just basic answers.


We see it in pretty complex stuff.


This is what they call live results.


But they're taking a fairly large amount of information and putting it into one little


box.


And luckily, I could show you that they lost because we won.


Some of you don't know I'm from Chicago, even though I work here at Musk.


And again, this is well suited not just for mobile, but also for voice.


Black Hawks score.


As a casual sports fan, that's all I needed to know.


So this is incredibly disruptive.


They're trying to figure out where they're headed with mobile and with voice, and we're


only going to see more of it.


So let's get tactical.


There is something you can do.


If this is built on my data, can I take advantage of that?


So last year I noticed that for how much does Google make, my post, how much does Google


make, came up in the answer, came up in the enhanced snippet.


And it wasn't a very good answer.


It started a little weird.


This post has nothing to do with SEO.


Okay, thanks.


But every once in a while, blah, blah, blah, they made this in 2010.


Well, this was 2014.


And even though this was my post, that was a pretty lousy answer to the question.


And I thought, well, maybe we could change that.


And so I rewrote the top of the post, and I tried to make it user friendly.


Since this post was written, Google's revenues have roughly doubled.


Here's what they are in 2013.


Here's where they're headed.


Because people landing on this...


It was a weird post.


People landing on this post might just want to know that.


Let's make it friendly.


Let's see what happens.


And it did change.


It took six months.


I talked to Google.


They said that shouldn't have happened, but it won't.


I don't know why.


But it did.


So if it's coming from us, maybe we have some control over it.


This is a very Moz relevant question.


What is page authority?


And we thought, well, maybe we should be in that box.


And interestingly, the number two result was getting in that box.


So don't tweet this, but this is one of the rare things I ever got confirmed by Google.


I talked to Gary, and I said, over drinks, when we'd had a few, I think this is how it


works.


Will you tell me?


And he said yes.


So this is how it works for now.


How it works is, first of all, Google has to think this is a question.


Okay?


They do their processing.


We have the Hummingbird core architecture now.


We can do that kind of thing.


They think it's a question.


They run the coriago.


They decide who's going to land on page one.


But from page one, once you've cleared the page one hurdle, they look at those results


and try to find the one that best matches the question.


And that's really more of a text semantic kind of process.


So once you've cleared the page one hurdle, you're eligible to be in that box.


You don't have to be number one.


So we said, well, we are number one.


We should be able to get in there.


And could we steal that box?


Steal is a, you know, could we occupy it for the users?


I don't want to say steal.


We improve the experience.


And so we rewrote it.


We set our title.


It's not a question.


We're not using what is.


We were kind of wordy in the intro.


And yeah.


Six weeks later, we were able to take that.


Now we lost it again.


So I'm sorry.


But it's a little tricky.


But the interesting thing about this to me is, you know, first of all, realize that you're


ranked, you're twice on the page.


So you can be scared of this and say, oh, no, the rule's taking over.


But you just double dipped.


You're number one and number zero now.


But the other thing I want you to think about and why I want you to try this is, let's say


you're number five in a competitive query and you're trying to get to number one.


That's incredibly difficult.


That takes a lot of money and a lot of links, a lot of authority.


You might be able to jump past number one to number zero with this just by matching


the question better.


So it may actually be easier to get from number five to number zero than it is to get from


number five to number one.


So try it out.


Be a better match.


Be a better answer to the question.


It's good for users.


This isn't spamming.


This is our metric.


We should be able to answer this question.


How much does Google make?


That was a better answer.


So you're improving the search experience and you're making more money.


We don't get that very often.


This is what I want you to do tactically.


And this is going to be hard to hear.


I tend to be a late adopter and I'm changing my tune a bit because things are moving faster.


And so I want you to think about an example which is authorship.


Last year authorship went away.


And a lot of us said, haha, I told you so.


I'm glad I didn't do that.


But authorship was around for two to three, Cyrus is the author, two to three years.


And Cyrus actually did some great stuff showing you could really boost click through, you


know, testing images and things like that.


And so if you were one of those people that said, haha, I'm glad I didn't waste my time


on that.


Think about this.


For two to three years people were getting double digits increases in CTR.


They were making hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of dollars for those two to three


years and they cashed it in.


And that money was in the bank.


And when authorship went away, sure that kind of sucked for them.


But if you said, haha, who was the chump?


The person who waited and then laughed or the person who cashed it in for two years?


So I want you to try these things.


I want you to experiment.


We get emojis recently.


I was in Australia and, you know, we can make fun of them.


Oh, emojis and titles is idiotic.


I talked to a friend, big enterprise search person in Australia that said, hey, I've been


experimenting with this for a month.


I'm getting 16% CTR increases on a huge site.


He made thousands of dollars for two months and it's in the bank.


So who's the chump?


You know, try it out.


It's going to take some investment.


And some of these things, authorship was easy.


You know, take advantage of it while it's there.


All right.


Now onto the scarier stuff.


It's only going to get scarier and scarier.


Google is no longer a content curator.


They are a content creator.


And we have to be aware of this as content marketers.


So let's start where we were with the knowledge graph.


Sometimes knowledge entities, knowledge cards like this are so definitive that they essentially


destroy the search.


When is National Taco Day?


That's a thing.


There's still plenty of time to buy me a present.


And there's the answer.


I trust Google.


I trust them as much as any site below it.


So I'm done.


They've essentially disrupted this entire SERP with definitive content.


Oh, I'm sorry.


I didn't autoplay it.


I thought I'd, you know, I'll be nice.


This is the new mega video format.


This is content.


This isn't just a link to a video.


This is their content.


It's got knowledge panel information.


It dominates the SERP.


They are taking over with their own content.


Eric's popped up earlier this year.


Again, this is content.


They are becoming content creators and they're dominating the top of these SERPs.


Data partnerships like the knowledge cards we saw, you know, this is rich stuff.


This isn't just a score.


You know, they've got logos and they've got information about the schedule.


You can pull down the whole thing.


They got video.


They're building tools.


You know, this is appearing on queries like mortgage calculator, interest rate calculator.


This is competitive stuff.


And they're building content for a better experience and they're disrupting your content.


This is kind of cool and I want to explain to you why.


If you go on desktop and you do a search for best movies in 1985, you get that black carousel.


It's kind of a weird experience on desktop.


But if you go to an Android phone, you get this experience, which is a lot cooler if


it's on the page.


But you notice those colored boxes under the movie posters?


They're algorithmically choosing that color based on the poster.


They are designing content with the algorithm.


So machines are building content for them.


Machines are designing content.


They are not just displaying results.


They're going to make these results richer and more interesting, more disruptive and


less organic in the sense we've come to see it.


You may have seen this earlier this year.


This is the medical knowledge panels.


These are fully custom.


This did not come from the knowledge graph.


They worked with the medical community.


They created this data.


They curated it.


All these images custom.


This is Google as content creator.


They stepped in.


They said we need better content here.


They did it once.


They will do it again.


Incredibly disruptive.


We see testing in the auto insurance space.


We've seen it.


It's been in the UK for a while.


It's going to come to the US.


They will move into more and more verticals.


Don't tweet this yet.


I want you to understand that this screen is fake.


So don't panic.


But where could they go?


I want to show you how easy it would be if you were in real estate.


This looks like a local snack pack.


This looks like a new local result.


What if Google bought the MLS data?


They have the money.


It would be easy.


What if they got tired of everybody posting the same shit over and over on every real


estate site in the world?


Terrible duplicate content.


You know it's true even if you're in the industry.


And they just stepped in and they said, let's put that in a local search result.


And let's filter by bedrooms and bathrooms and price.


They could do it tomorrow if they wanted to.


So be aware.


Google will create more content.


They will step into more spaces.


So what do we do?


Yeah, it's a hard question.


But I want to try and give you at least some strategic advice.


First of all, build deep.


Don't be an easy answer.


If you run a site that says things like, when is Mother's Day, and gives the date, OK, that's


useful, but Google can wipe you off the map.


They've replaced that with the answer, your business model is gone.


So this is one of my babies, the Algo Change History.


This is long content.


It's deep content.


We change it all the time.


We update it.


It's hard to replace this with a little box.


And because it's about the Google Algo, they don't ever want to show that in a little box.


So it's about the safest content I could ever build.


Add real value.


My wife works for one of the big three credit firms.


I won't say which one.


And so it's funny, Credit Karma is one of their competitors, and we often use it and


talk about how great it is and how scary that is for them.


Because if you're in a business where your business is credit scores, what if Google


decided to just put that credit score in a box?


And they might.


So what Credit Karma does that's cool is they actually show you what that score is based


on and how to improve it.


And it's actionable stuff.


It's not vague, weird advice.


We've actually increased our credit score 30 points by using this advice.


And so they're adding real value.


They're adding insight.


They can't put that insight in a box and easily replace you.


And step it up.


This is a site called Euro Sport.


This is from the Women's World Cup.


This is kind of cool.


There's a timeline on the top horizontally.


You click on it and it pops to the event in the vertical timeline.


And you can see highlights or you can see the whole thing.


And you can see tweets and you can see video snippets.


And if you're not a casual sports fan and you're really into it, this is the kind of


thing you want to see.


So if you're in that business and all you want to see is the score, you've already been


replaced.


You're going to have to step it up.


All right.


Real quick, we're going to talk about mobile because we've all been worried about it.


And Mobilegeddon, the mobile-friendly update for anyone from Google listening, they don't


like Mobilegeddon.


And to be fair, how much of ageddon was it?


Well, not much.


This is – don't worry about this, students.


This is data from Monstcast Mobile.


About a month before launch, we rolled out a separate mobile version to see how SurpFlux


was going, how much were rankings changing from day to day.


And average day on Monstcast is tuned to about 70 degrees Fahrenheit.


And so they told us that Mobilegeddon rolled out April 21st and it was going to take a


couple of weeks.


We saw a bump on April 22nd and a bump relative to desktop, but it wasn't a big bump.


And so it was easy to kind of go, all right, well, what was that all about?


I'll tell you a couple of things.


First of all, Google did get what they wanted.


This is two months of data.


There's a little separation at the beginning and the end.


If you look at the number of Surps in our mobile dataset that had the mobile-friendly


tag – number of URLs, sorry – in early April, it was about two-thirds.


It was about 66 percent, which is surprisingly large.


We saw a bump on April 22nd, but unlike the SurpFlux, this number continued to increase.


And now we're closer to 80 percent.


We're about 78.


So about four in five of the Surps we see in mobile have the mobile-friendly tag.


And this is what Google wanted.


And I think it's easy to look at this and say it was just FUD.


This was just them crying wolf to get us to change.


And yes, it was.


Make no mistake, they got us to change because that's cheaper and easier and less risky


than updating the algorithm.


There's incredible collateral damage from an update like this.


So they got us to change.


But because they got us to change, don't make the mistake of thinking that they're


not serious about mobile.


And I want to tell you why quickly.


This is data from Mary Meeker's annual report.


Mobile eclipsed half of usage early this year.


Google has said the same thing.


Mobile has eclipsed half of searches in the U.S. and a few other countries.


Now it's interesting, and Rand pointed this out.


If you see desktop and laptop, it hasn't really gone down that much.


There was a little dip.


But if you're looking at that number and you're saying, my desktop traffic hasn't


gone down, I don't need to worry about this, you're not realizing that you're missing


half of your opportunity.


And so I think you have to be careful.


This is a study, the multi-device world study from 2012 by Google.


In 2012, they determined that 65% of searches started on smartphone, even commercial.


Now what's interesting is that they found out that it's part of a journey.


So sometimes I think we talk like there's smartphone and there's tablet and there's


desktop and those are all different things.


No.


We watch something on TV, we see something happen, we look at our phones, we put it in


our pocket, and later we go follow up on our computers and our panels.


And we go back and forth and this is only going to increase and this was three years


ago.


So mobile is serious.


Google knows it's serious.


And Google is scared.


Believe me.


They saw CTRs drop precipitously on mobile.


They were worried about their $60 billion in advertising.


And they changed their tune and they did this.


Last year there was a pretty big redesign and John Wiley, one of the lead designers


at Google said, towards the end of last year we launched some pretty big design improvements


for search on mobile and tablet, mobile first.


The bolding is mine, the underlining, the exclamation point, and the smiley are all


John's.


Mobile first is serious.


Google felt that they were in danger and they changed to a mobile first design strategy.


If you don't believe me, let's look at a few.


Christopher Lee, a little shout out, passed away earlier this year.


If you don't know it, besides being awesome, he sang metal songs and had a couple of metal


albums.


And so this is a carousel of his songs.


And on the desktop it's a little weird.


You know, it scrolls horizontally.


It kind of doesn't fit.


It disrupts the SERP.


Well, here's what it looks like on Android.


It's single panel.


It's nice.


It looks good.


You scroll with a finger swipe.


It makes sense.


This was designed for mobile, rolled out to desktop.


The new local snack pack, it's kind of strange.


It floats in space.


This is the snack pack on mobile.


It fits the screen.


It's got a map.


It's easy to filter.


If you scroll horizontally through options, you can actually have a complete local experience


without ever seeing the organic SERPs below it.


This was built for mobile and adapted to desktop.


Remember this?


We just saw this one.


Built for mobile.


Adapted to desktop.


We're going to see this more and more.


So don't look at mobile GEDden and say, this was just a fluke.


This was Google playing around with this.


Google takes mobile incredibly seriously, and that will continue.


And there will be a real mobile GEDden, whether it's all at once or gradual.


I think it will be gradual.


So what do you do?


Well, Cindy's up after me, and she's going to say a lot of smart things about mobile.


And so I'm not going to say anything more because I might sound dumb in retrospect.


But do this.


Run your numbers.


First of all, there are two goals.


One is, are you creating a good mobile experience for your users, and do your users need that?


That depends on you.


That depends on your niche.


That depends on your users and how savvy they are.


The other is, how do we get that mobile-friendly tag and convince Google that we're mobile-friendly?


Those goals right now are not quite the same.


And so what I want you to do is do the math.


Figure out what it would cost you to get there and what you would gain from it, and be serious


about it.


And don't keep putting it off.


So just take it seriously.


Run the numbers.


Decide where you need to be.


All right.


It only gets worse.


We're going to get into paid.


These are what I call the ad hybrids.


The Snack Pack launched and something came with it and rolled out to organic, which was


paid hotel booking.


So if you do a search like Grand Hyatt Seattle, you can book a room right in the Knowledge


Panel.


And this is a little scary because Google has trained us to look at that thing to the


right and think of it as trusted knowledge.


Think of it as unbiased information.


And so what we're starting to see is paid information popping up in there.


And incredibly disruptive.


I mean, if you're looking to book a room, this is useful.


We've got a bunch of these have rolled out.


This is paid product.


It looks like a Knowledge Panel.


Very competitive search for iPhone 6.


You see some specs.


But the entire top is places to buy, and that's all sponsored.


This is an ad.


Movies, another Christopher Lee shoutout.


You can watch it right now on Google Play.


This is an ad in the Knowledge Panel.


Music, another ad.


Books just rolled out this month, we think.


We're not sure.


Video games also rolled out.


We're going to see more.


If they're on Google Play, it's an ad.


This is a tricky one.


You remember those lyrics?


If you go to the bottom, full lyrics on Google Play, guess what?


You can buy the song there.


Why did Google move into the lyric space?


Because Google owns Google Play, and they can sell music.


Google is a commercial ecosystem.


They are more than search.


Yes, they make most of their money on advertising, and that is their strength and their danger.


But they have Google Play now.


They have this app ecosystem.


Rand showed you the app pack.


This is a competitive search.


This is job search.


This isn't Transformers video games or girls' math games or the things you think of as app-related.


This is competitive.


Not only that, but these app packs, they can go up to six results.


And unlike a vertical, you might not know, but news, in-depth, and images take away one


organic spot.


No matter how many there are, they take away one spot.


App packs, every single app on Android takes away a spot.


So if you have six apps, you lose six organic spots on page one.


That's massively disruptive, and all of this is part of Google's paid ecosystem.


If you want to know what's coming, look to mobile.


This is car dealerships nearby.


This is available on mobile.


It comes and goes.


They're testing.


It will come to desktop, I'm pretty sure.


The interesting thing to me about this, this is the intersection of Knowledge Graph, paid


results, and local.


And it's incredibly powerful.


If you're looking to buy, if you're looking for a local dealership, this is incredibly


powerful and it's useful.


And it will change the game if you're in that industry.


All right.


This is fake, again.


So don't screenshot it like it's a real screen.


So I wanted to think ahead a little bit and think, well, what if we did a search for Jurassic


World and we showed no organic results?


What might that look like?


And so we have show times, which you'll see now.


If you don't realize it, show times is paid content.


It's Fandango right now, I think.


This is commercial content.


And then over on the right, let's say we had that Knowledge Panel, but Google said, hey,


if you're interested in this, maybe you'd like to watch the original Jurassic Park,


because that's already out.


So let's put some paid content in there.


And if you're interested in Jurassic World, maybe you'd like to buy some cool shit like


Lego Raptors, which I do.


That sounds awesome.


And what's interesting to me about this concept is that first of all, even though this is


fake, every single one of these pieces exists today.


All Google would have to do is mix and match them.


And I apologize if they do this a month from now, because this would not be that hard.


But the other thing interesting to me about this, first of all, it has no AdWords ads


at all, and yet it's entirely paid.


But it's also a good user experience.


Arguably, this is a good experience.


And this is the problem.


As SEOs, sometimes we play this game, we say this thing, which is basically, well, if Google,


Google's just going to turn everything into ads.


You know, if you don't think so, you're stupid.


Well, that's a little naive, because yes, Google is an advertising company, but Google


needs organic.


They need to bring us back.


They could just replace everything with AdWords ads today, and they'd make a lot more money


for a week or a month, and then we'd never come back.


Google needs the experience.


But this arguably is an entirely paid SERP that is also an experience that might bring


us back, and that's what we're going to see.


This is just a little thing for fun.


Google a while back, they moved from the block, the colored block with the background, where


all the ads were together, to individually labeled ads.


Now that they've done that, I think ads are going to break out.


I think in the next two years, we're going to see ads start to move in between organic


and become a little more seamless.


I don't know when, but I think it'll happen.


So what do you do?


I know we don't like to think about this as SEOs, but I want you to think about it.


If you were in a very competitive niche, this is wedding dress, one organic, images, shopping,


paid, local.


If you're fighting against David's Bridal for that one organic, you're probably going


to lose unless you're a really big player, and it's going to cost you a lot.


So I don't want you to ignore all the things around it.


I want you to be aware of your paid ecosystem, because it's going to get richer, it's going


to get more competitive.


I believe in organic, I believe in it as a long-term investment, but I don't think you


can afford to ignore these things.


So don't hide your head.


Know what's out there.


All right.


Can we make it through?


I'll have three more scary slides, and I'll try and say some nice things.


And I admit, I had a really ambitious title, SEO in 2020, because it sounded nice.


And truthfully, this is more like SEO in 2016 to 2017.


This is coming sooner than we think.


One thing I believed for a long time is that we would see the SERP begin to disappear.


And if you don't think that, look at what we already have.


This isn't mobile.


This is Google Maps for desktop.


Because this is what we want.


We don't want a listing of places.


You see the thing on the left?


That's actually where the snack pack essentially came from.


We want a map.


We have to think of it in terms of location.


This is going to become more and more common.


The SERP is already becoming a more dynamic thing.


We talked about voice, and I think it's easy to take voice for granted, because today we


see voice as something we do with our phone when we can't drive our car, we don't want


to get arrested.


Voice is hands-free.


Don't let the cops see me on Facebook.


Because we still have that screen.


And so we don't take voice seriously.


Well, this is the Amazon Echo.


I bought one earlier, about a month ago.


And it's easy to see it as a toy.


And yes, it's still improving.


But it's not.


This is a voice appliance.


And when you start to use it, you start to understand how powerful voice can be.


And I have two kids, and they understand it already.


If I'm in the room and I need to set a timer or I need to convert some measurements or


I need to know the weather, it's right there.


And I just talk to it.


So I know people have one.


It has this like, Cylon light that follows you.


I didn't know about that.


And it was really creepy the first time, because the microphone sees you and you're like, you


say Alexa is the activation word.


You're like, Alexa.


And it's like, okay, I'm sorry.


So here's a query.


Will it rain tomorrow?


It might rain in Hinsdale tomorrow.


There's a 40% chance.


This isn't what's the weather going to be.


I can ask, will it rain tonight?


This is powerful stuff.


And this is where we're headed.


And this is a challenge for everyone, because the SERP's gone.


And Google's worried too.


How do they monetize this?


We don't know.


This is coming.


You need to be aware.


You've seen Google now.


This is predictive search.


This is search without keywords.


Google is trying to say, I know you're a Cubs fan.


I know where you are.


I know what stocks you're tracking.


I know you seem to be driving to work, and maybe there's a lot of traffic.


They're trying to tell us what we want to know before we type.


What does that mean for keyword research?


Be aware these things are changing.


But two messages I want you to take away.


First of all, today, if you have traffic from Google, and we all do, you have to rank to


get there.


It has to come from a link on the screen.


So this is still our reality today.


We need to be aware, but we also need to keep playing this game.


So the algo change history, this is a document people keep coming back to.


They bookmark, they social, and yet 75% of our traffic still comes from search.


It comes from ranking number one for competitive terms.


So we still live in this reality.


I think we have to have a dual mentality.


We have to have this awareness.


We have to know what's coming.


But today, this is still our reality, and this still matters.


And I think you also just have to look wider.


This is a fairly, it doesn't seem that competitive.


It's a SERP for stencils.


And if you think purely in terms of organic, and purely in terms of your ranking, and purely


in terms of where you are, it's going to look like there's only two opportunities on this


page.


And as much as I believe in SEO, I want you to realize that in some ways, there are 22


opportunities on this page.


And if you're missing them, you're missing 90% of the potential opportunity.


Are they all the same?


Are they all relevant to you?


Are all the same?


Are they all right?


No, they're not.


But don't hide your head in the sand.


Be aware of this.


And finally, I want to say this.


I want you to think short-term tactically and long-term strategically.


And I want to explain why with this example.


And I needed a couple slides to justify wearing a superhero t-shirt.


So, you know.


I know I can probably get away with it, but I have to have a little justification.


If you haven't seen it, this is Marvel Studios' phase three plan.


Earlier this year, they announced every one of their movies until 2019.


So, titles and dates.


Can you imagine five years ago, any movie or studio doing this?


What are they doing?


It's incredibly risky.


They're telling us what products are going to launch four years from now.


What is their tactical SEO plan for 2019?


They don't know.


They don't fucking care what their tactical SEO is going to look like in 2019.


Nobody knows what's going to happen in 2019.


But you know what?


They've told us today they're building a product.


They are building links.


They are building social.


They are building mentions.


They are getting articles four years in advance of the product even existing.


This is how I want you to think.


Today we have to be tactical.


And I know people always say it, and it's tough because I do a lot of, you know, obviously


data science.


And people go, oh, we need actionable.


We need it tactical.


But if you don't have this product plan, if you don't have something worth marketing later,


you will fail.


This is a company that's saying we will release this product in four years, and we're already


building links to them, and we're already building mentions to them.


And when their SEO kicks in in mid-2018, they'll already be winning.


Can you say that?


That's what I want you to work towards.


And it's difficult, no doubt.


All right.


Please don't tweet this yet because we don't know if it's going to break.


But we're doing a little test.


We're going to launch a little tool today.


It's at mozcast.com slash keo, K-E-Y-O-P-P.


And it's based on what we're talking about, something we're working on for future metrics.


And essentially what we're building is a keyword opportunity score.


So it's based on the idea that 10 blue links is 100 percent opportunity in the way we're


used to thinking of it organically.


And as we get these things like knowledge panels and ads and shopping and verticals,


each of these things subtracts away from that.


And so along with some of our other metrics like keyword difficulty, we want to see like


what's left for organic.


So here's a sample.


This is Starbucks.


And you may say, wow, holy shit, five percent?


Why?


Well, OK, we have six site links.


And that means that basically organic positions two, three and four are all gone.


Organic position number one is Starbucks.com.


And unless you're not unless you are Starbucks.com, you're not going to rank number one for Starbucks.


So one through four and the entire top of the CTR curve are gone.


The next one after that is news.


And there's an in-depth and there's an ad and there's a knowledge panel.


And if you look at it from a click through rate perspective, all you're left with is


the bottom four essentially organic.


And that's not much.


So why are you going after this?


Unless you're Starbucks, this makes no sense.


And so we would love you to play around with this.


Just tell us what you think.


This is super, super beta.


I don't know if that's a thing, beta, beta, beta, whatever you call it.


But yeah, let us know what you think.


If it says sorry, try again later, that means just like try again in five minutes, not an


hour.


So please let us know what you think.


And that's it.


I'm sorry, where can people find that tool?


Where is it?


So it's at MozCast.com slash K-E-Y-L-P-P.


We're just not sure how much load it can handle, so don't put it out there quite yet.


No, I should know this.


I'm sorry I don't read my emails.


We have the keyword difficulty tool at Moz.


Is there any chance of like incorporating this someday?


Well, so the idea is to see how useful this is and potentially we're working on some new


metrics and I don't know how much I'm supposed to say about, can we talk about ME?


And yes, we're working on Moz Explorer and some new tools.


So this is hopefully going to be part of that whole package and some new ways to look at


our keywords.


But for now, this is just a test.


It will move into product at some point hopefully.


I want to read a question from Ryan Ricketts.


Good question.


If I change our page to get a featured snippet, won't users just digest the answer and not


click through to our site?


It's a big question a lot of people have.


Yeah, it's a big question.


It's a hard question.


The folks from Stone Temple who are here, Mark and Eric, obviously big names, the SEO,


have done some studies and we've seen some data.


It looks like the answer is no.


Unless that answer is really, really definitive and it ends the question essentially, people


will click on that link.


We're actually seeing some click through boosts.


And again, keep in mind that you've also still got that organic result.


So you've got two positions, whether people only have one.


So it's not as scary as it looks.


For now, we are getting decent click through boosts.


The other thing is if you're looking at something like your competitor in that spot, the game's


already in play.


So would you rather you be in the box or they be in the box?


We can verify that on Moz for some of our snippets that have shown.


We've seen it for a couple, yeah.


Yeah, and no traffic change really at all.


Matt Brown yesterday talked about how Google is acting as its own filter for too much content.


Panda, Penguin, there's too much content, they're filtering it themselves.


You showed some examples where they're further filtering it with the answer boxes.


Are we in danger of Google going away as a stop being a search engine or being an answer?


Not everything can be answered.


Let's put it that way.


I think they have to adapt to these new modalities.


They have to adapt to things like voice and mobile.


And I think it's tough for them because if they give you the answer and you leave, you're


not buying anything.


So they're kind of struggling with that too.


So no, I don't think so.


There are going to be search results.


It's actually interesting even on Echo, if I do a search, if it can't answer it, I have


an Echo app on my phone, it sends me the Bing URL on my phone.


So I can go back later and look up the URL.


We're going to see more of that cross-modality kind of search.


You know, I think we're going to see a world where we can swipe the phone screen to the


TV.


You know, that's not that far off.


And move our search experience around so there will be bigger screens, there will be more


results.


So if it's the kind of query where people naturally need to dig in, there's always going


to be results.


You know, we're always going to have to filter information somehow and not everything has


an answer.


So I think it really depends.


I think the hard thing is it's really hard to stand up here and give you one size fits


all advice for the next couple of years because it's so query dependent.


It's so niche dependent.


So a lot of us in this room, agencies, we have clients, we report rankings.


So this is a really good question from Paul Sherland.


Given Google personalization, how repeatable are any measurements of search rank with Google


in 2020?


Yeah, it's tough.


The short answer is we don't know.


And obviously we build rank tracking software and we're very aware of this.


For now, we don't usually see personalization have a profound impact.


But again, it's like answers.


Not everything can be personalized.


But we're going to see more and more of that.


We're going to see Google now pop up more.


They just launched, what do they call that?


They basically rolled out the Google now ecosystem to apps.


So they want to see that via more things.


I mean, you can only do so much with predictive search.


But yeah, it's going to matter.


It's going to matter more.


And it's going to be a challenge for all of us.


How do we track that?


How do we know what people are seeing?


Google's going to have some of that data and we're going to have to find some of that data.


So yeah, it's a challenge.


And I know easy answer.


I don't want you to predict too much in the future.


But do you ever see regulation coming to Google?


I mean, I agree with what was said.


They're one of the biggest lobbyists in the US right now.


We know they're a near monopoly.


But they will work hard to say they are.


I don't know.


It's tough because I give Google crap.


But I use a lot of Google stuff.


And it's generally a good experience.


I think truthfully, I think something disruptive will come along before regulators shut down


Google.


I think a lot about Google and I think about this a lot.


We think of them as kind of this unstoppable giant.


They're barely a 15-year-old company.


And they are entirely dependent on advertising revenue.


So if our advertising behavior changes, Google's world could change overnight.


And so I don't think they're going to be what they are forever.


But I don't think it's going to be the SEC who changes that truthfully.


It's all about disruption.


Yeah, it's going to be who comes along next.


All right.


Got a lot of questions.


I think a lot of people are going to corner you at lunch today.


So Dr. P, thank you so much for being with us today.


When and How to Listen to Google's Public Statements About SEO - Whiteboard Friday

Howdy, Moz fans.


Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday.


This week we're going to chat about the public statements that Googlers make and how we as


marketers, as SEOs, should be interpreting and understanding those statements.


So I actually wrote down a few things that Googlers have said.


These are quotes taken from websites that have quoted them.


So they may not be perfect.


For example, if you are someone from Google who actually made these statements, you might


say, that's not exactly how I phrased that.


Well, it's how the websites quoted you.


So search engine roundtable and SEM posts and search engine land, places like that is


where I got these quotes.


So for example, someone from Google says, 301, 302, 307, don't worry about it.


Use whatever makes sense for you.


They all pass page rank.


And so you might have seen over the last few weeks there's been a lot of tweets and stories,


blog posts written about how we no longer as SEOs have to worry about the type of 30x


redirect that we put in place.


If there are 302s, that's fine.


Google seems to be passing page rank through them.


Well, there's actually been a bunch of discussion about this because the evidence is on the


totally other side that if you have a website with a bunch of redirects that are not 301s,


302s, 307s, and you change them to 301s, which is the permanent redirect status code, it


sure looks like Google organic search traffic sends more visits to those redirected pages


or to the target of the redirected pages.


And why would that be if it didn't matter in the first place?


Is it just a bunch of correlation but not causation results because it looks way too


consistent or is there something else going on here?


Many folks, for example, pointed to the fact that the word page rank might be the operative


thing here.


In fact, this is one of the things that I would say personally.


When Google says they all pass page rank or they all pass the same amount of page rank,


remember page rank is Google's original ranking formula from 1997 that Larry and Sergey developed


in college.


It is not a comprehensive holistic representation of every possible signal that is in Google's


ranking algorithm, 200 or 500 plus of them.


It's not everything that a machine learning system could possibly interpret.


Maybe the machine learning systems that are in place at Google for spam or for relevancy


or for importance, for trust, whatever they are, have determined the 301s are in fact


the better one to use or should be interpreted as a stronger signal.


So you've got to be careful when reading a statement like this.


It does generate a lot of discussion in our field, but it's not the only case.


This has happened for a decade and a half now in the SEO world where people from Google


say things publicly.


For example, you might remember a couple years ago, the mobile-friendly update will be bigger


than Panda and Penguin combined.


Then of course the mobile update rolled out, what was that, June of 2014?


We all scratched our heads and went, gosh, that was not much of an update at all.


It seems like things didn't shake up very much.


Even Google explained, well, a lot of websites did end up updating and oh, I guess we had


a more staggered update roll out of it than we were expecting and so maybe you didn't


see a lot of change.


Well, certainly that seems awkward in comparison to that statement.


This statement I actually love.


I love statements like this from Google.


So this is when Eric Engy from Stone Temple was interviewing Matt Cutts and he asked Matt


about whether a 301 redirect would lose some amount of relevancy or ranking ability when


it was being moved over, whether there was any risk to moving a page.


Matt replied, I am not 100% sure whether the crawling and indexing team has implemented


that sort of natural page rank decay so I'll have to go and check.


Then there was a note in the text that said, note in a follow-up email, Matt confirmed


there is some loss of page rank through a 301, well, page rank or link ranking factors,


whatever you want to call it.


That's great, right?


This is, I don't know but I'll go check with the team that does know and then a response


of, yes, the thing that you assumed is in fact the case and I can confirm it.


And that's awesome.


I love, love, love statements like this.


I sort of wish we could nudge Google into doing more of that of the, hey, we ask a question


and you go, well, I think it's this but I'm going to go check with exactly that team that's


responsible for writing the code that implements that piece so that we can tell you an honest


and complete answer.


That's terrific.


But then you might get statements like this one, which are real tough.


External links to other sites isn't specifically a ranking factor but it can bring value to


your content and that in turn can be relevant for us in search.


Whether or not they are followed doesn't really matter.


That is a hard, hard statement to interpret because the first sentence says external links,


we don't use them.


They're not a ranking factor.


The second sentence says, but those links might bring value to your content and that


in turn can be relevant for us in search, which almost seems to contradict the first


sentence, right?


Those two things don't go together.


And then I think this statement was from, not from Gary, who was this?


This is John Mueller, I think, said this one.


Okay.


So if you are using them, followed or not followed, doesn't matter.


Tough statement to interpret.


I'm not sure what to take away from that.


The only thing I think I might be able to do is to say, I should probably test it.


I should figure it out for myself.


And in fact, I've got some recommendations for you when you are analyzing these words


from Google because it can be really tough to say, how do I know which statements I can


trust?


Which one is the external link statement?


Which one is the I'll go check and I'll tell you which one is the flat out wrong statement?


Which one is the, well, maybe this is right, but maybe it's just not telling me the whole


story.


First off, consider all the ways that the statement could be true while the surface


level info is technically wrong, right?


So for example, on the external links one, maybe the statement is true that it's not


specifically used as a ranking factor or not separately used, but maybe it's used in concert


with other signals.


And that's what was trying to be said there by John.


And it just came out in a funny way that the language would be parsed on the surface as


very misinterpreted, right?


So if someone from Google says A does not equal C, you might say, aha, so that means


B or D could equal A. There you go.


Or C, right?


Give statements some time to be amended or modified, at least a few weeks.


For example, you'll remember that this statement about 301s and 302s and 307s, there was a


statement made by Gary from Google and Gary said this.


And then just a couple weeks later, he amended the statement to say, oh, right, there's also


canonicalization issues, which is separate maybe from ranking issues, but probably you


don't care because canonicalization will affect your rankings.


And 301s do help with canonicalization in Google, whereas 302s and 307s might not help


as much, which is sort of saying, wait, so they are interpreted differently and there


could be some reasons why when I change 302s to 301s, rankings and traffic go up.


Aha, all right, that statement took a little while to come out, but it did kind of correct


the record.


C, I like data and I like experiments over opinions and public statements.


So for example, the folks at Reboot Online, this was a few months ago now, but the folks


at Reboot Online did a great study about external links.


They created some fake words and built up a bunch of web pages.


Some of the web pages did have external links on them, some of them didn't.


And they saw that Google was extremely consistent in always ranking the ones that had external


pointing links that were followed versus external but not followed or no external links or internal


links only, that kind of stuff.


And I think their results were pretty conclusive.


There's all sorts of reasons why this statement might have been wrong.


Maybe when John said it, it was correct.


Or maybe his second sentence is really the truth here and the first sentence is more,


well, it's not its own separate specific thing, right?


And so the interpretation is what matters.


In either case, that data, that experimentation, hugely valuable and important for us as an


industry and I really like paying attention to those things and then trying to verify


and replicate and apply on our own sites.


And D, the last thing I'll say is, look, we need to be empathetic and forgiving.


A lot of Googlers are working in a giant, giant corporation, right?


Tens of thousands of employees at Google, hundreds of different teams that potentially


contribute, right?


There's just the ones that we know of, right?


There's core ranking folks, there's web spam folks, there's crawling and indexing folks


and search quality folks and webmaster tools folks and webmaster trends analysts and all


these many different departments.


It's not always the case that Gary or John or any of the representatives and Andre can


go and talk to the engineers who wrote the code and have them look, pull that right up


and say, aha, yes, this exactly is what's going on here and here's why and here's how


we wrote it.


You just don't get that level of clarity and sophistication.


So they have to operate with the knowledge that they have and with the information that


they are being told.


We likewise need to give them some room to amend their statements.


We need to follow up ourselves with our own data and we need to be careful about how we


interpret and parse the sentences and phrasing that they give us.


All right, everyone, look forward to your comments and your thoughts about things Google


has said over the years, how they've been helpful to you, potentially harmful to you,


and hopefully we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.


Technical Tips: How to Isolate 404 Links

Hey everybody, I'm Dr. Pete, the marketing scientist for Moz, and I'd like to welcome


you to another edition of Technical Tips for Moz.


So today I'd like to talk about how to prioritize site crawl errors, and in particular 404 errors.


Technical SEO, the challenge about it is that it's something that's just never done.


You're never going to check off everything on the list.


And it's really about trying to figure out what's the highest priority, where can you


get the best bang for your buck, and dealing with those tasks.


And this is especially true if you're dealing with outside teams, where bandwidth is limited


and where you have to make your case.


So I want to talk about how we can figure out which problems are really the most dire,


how to dive into those, and hopefully how to begin solving those.


So let's look at how we might tackle this issue in Moz Pro.


So I'm here at the site crawl overview page, that's the homepage for site crawl.


And I'm going to go ahead and click through to critical crawler issues.


That's going to pull up my serious errors, my 500s, my 400s, the things that really do


need to fix.


They're not subjective.


And we're going to focus today on those 400 series errors.


You can see here that we've got about 300 of those, and they're going to mostly be 404s,


that's where we're going to focus.


I don't just want to export this and hand it off to someone.


Obviously I can do that for my team.


It's a nice capability to have.


But I don't want to dump it in someone's lap because probably 20% of these are accounting


for 80% of our lost traffic or lost authority or internal page rank loss.


And if we really focused on that, it'd be easier to pitch to someone else.


It's going to be easier to get done and it's really going to make a difference.


So let's look at how we would prioritize those errors.


Couple things right away on the left, you see what's new, what our crawler hasn't seen


before.


Definitely check that out.


Something might've happened.


You made a change, caused a problem you weren't aware of.


Over on the right, I want you to take a look at page authority column.


We're going to sort that from highest to lowest.


Page authority is our score of what we believe is the ranking power of that page.


And really a lot of that is the internal and inbound link authority.


So here's a pretty high PA page.


It's coming from our MozCon FAQs to a speaker submission form.


Okay, this is a page that's not active right now because MozCon is over, but we don't want


it to go nowhere.


We might want to tell people that the show's coming next year, give them the dates, tell


them what they might need to do or when to come back.


Next to that is crawl depth.


And in this case, we want to look at the lowest score.


Crawl depth is essentially how far did our crawlers have to go before they reached the


page from their entry point.


The entry point can change, but essentially, how close is this page to the top of the site


or to the top of a common entry point for people?


And these pages with the lower crawl depth are typically pages that are going to have


more links, more traffic and such as that.


So if we look at this one, we've got a link on the keyword research page and it's going


to this keyword research guide.


So the referring URL is kind of where the link lives and this URL on the left is where


the actual 404 errors.


That's a page we can't find.


So how do we dive into that and know what to do with it?


We realize, okay, this is probably something we want to fix.


If we click on the referring URL, we can go to the page where that error is occurring.


And we see that the link we're looking for is called keyword research guide.


We'll use that in a minute.


So I'm going to click over to that.


I'm going to go ahead and look at the source code.


This is in Chrome and I'm going to search for that link.


You can see here, it has some anchor text starting with our keyword research master


guide.


So let's go back here.


Starting with, and you know what?


It's right at the top of the page here.


So here's an orphan link right at the beginning, probably causing some trouble.


And yes, indeed, there's a 404.


So you know, if we can do this for the people, we're going to hand it off to show them where


the error is, show them what they need to fix.


We're much more likely to get them to go along with us, to get the job done, to get it done


quickly.


So I hope I've kind of given you a sense of how to dig into these, how to prioritize and


just pick a few and try it out, try and get some things fixed and see what kind of impact


it has.


Thank you for joining me for technical tips from us.


And I hope to see you next time.


Data-Driven Design [MozCon 2017] — Oli Gardner

🎵Music🎵


Nice suit, yeah!


Uh, who are you? What's-


It's me.


Who's me?


Your inner voice.


This is not the time! I'm trying to give a talk here.


That can wait.


Nah, this is MozCon. There's 1500 people here.


I'm actually trying to impress some people right here.


They don't care. Look at them. Half of them are still asleep.


Maybe so, but what do you want?


I just saw what you did to the homepage. What is that all about?


Oh, it's going to be amazing. We're doing a complete brand refresh.


Lame.


No, no, no. It's going to be amazing.


It's going to be about the day in the life of the marketer.


We're going to have cinematic background video, parallax scrolling.


Boring!


No, no. A giant thing at the top with all these promos coming back and forth.


It's going to be really special.


That sounds awful.


No, no, no. But we're also going to have an explainer video.


Like, it's going to be an epic explainer video.


It'll increase the conversion by 20%. Guarantee. I read a blog post.


Okay, but what if it doesn't win the test?


Well, you know, I want this on the homepage regardless.


We put a lot of time and money into this.


Oh, no. You just became one of those marketers who doesn't care about performance.


Shut up.


You shut up.


God, it's like this all day, every day in here.


You just never stop talking.


So how's the test going?


Test's going, losing by 9%.


But that doesn't matter.


So it doesn't work.


We need to find a way to make it work.


But data says it doesn't.


You know what? Fuck data.


That's what today's talk is about.


Not really. I do like data.


I wasn't angry at data.


I wasn't even angry at the explainer video.


They can be great if they're done properly.


I was angry because the results didn't confirm our assumptions and our biases.


We all thought this was going to crush it.


How could it not?


How could it not win this video on the homepage?


How could it not get it lost by 20%?


And the team was crushed.


Like everybody worked so hard on it and it was just an epic failure.


The problem was there wasn't a single piece of data.


Anecdotal, qualitative, quantitative that suggested we should do this.


I didn't give a single piece of data to the copywriter and the designer at the start of this project.


I researched 67% of marketers say they don't have enough data to do their job properly.


And 51% said their analytics isn't even set up correctly.


That's terrible. It's not good enough.


We didn't do it for the right reasons.


We did it because everyone else was doing it.


It's just flooded with requests to do this kind of thing.


And that's not how we should be operating.


We have to make decisions based on insights and available information.


Not just because it suggests that we should do it.


Because this happens with every trend.


There will be 400 blog posts about why you should use an explainer video.


Followed by 150 videos in the form of explainer videos explaining why you should use an explainer video.


It's too much.


Now you laugh. I promise I didn't do this on purpose.


This is one of our dogs.


I thought I'd give him a mohawk, but I used human clippers.


It just got so messy I had to go all the way down to the skin.


I had to put sunscreen on him so he wouldn't fry in the sun.


Sorry, is there anyone from PETA here? I didn't mean it.


Everything will be at this link.


There's a little landing page there that has all the slides, everything I'm talking about.


I'll share that a couple of times throughout.


See what you mean, Rand?


In my research, over 700 people in marketing teams.


I think marketing teams are dysfunctional.


I've seen it. I've seen their frustration.


I think I know how to fix it.


I interviewed marketers, designers, and copywriters primarily.


We're going to have a little look at how they feel about one another.


We'll give them each three lives, and then we'll hear what they have to say.


A marketer.


It's not a marketer. It's the designer.


They have no understanding of customer behavior.


Okay, he loses a life.


The designer's job is to make it look good, like make it pretty.


He can just make this pretty.


Designers hate hearing that.


That's a life away from him.


Writers don't understand the difference between people and search engines.


They want to make the designer begin before giving them the content.


This is so common, and it's a massive problem.


81% of designers say they have to begin before they have any copy.


No data, no copy.


Now they're just building templates based on their imagination,


or copying someone, or downloading a theme, even worse.


That's a big problem.


Marketers are myopic and enjoy navel gazing.


Someone Google that. I don't even know what navel gazing means.


I guess it's not good.


It's good for the mic volume, but...


They don't respect what design is, and they think they know how to do it.


98% of marketers I surveyed have to give design feedback to designers,


and 87% of them think they're qualified to do that.


Bullshit. Total bullshit.


I've been on both sides of this for 20 years.


That's way overconfident.


It's not actually true.


They don't understand and really trust or believe in what the other people are doing.


It's just a messy, dysfunctional system.


And then...


You can't say that to a designer.


That's just the worst possible thing you could say.


Right, now, quick hands up.


Put your hand out if you're a designer.


Wrong!


We're all designers.


Designers are problem solvers. We're all problem solvers.


That's the job of a designer.


It's the job of all of us.


This is my biggest hero.


Because he can take any terrible situation and fix it using anything available to him.


We, as marketers, designers, and copywriters, need to start living our lives through the lens of an optimizer.


Because when you do that, when you find things that are broken or annoy you in your day to day,


if you imagine or actually try and fix them, you'll become a better designer, a better marketer, a better business person as a result.


This is our bathroom. Nicole will hate me for sharing this on a big screen.


But you can see there the shower curtain.


If you're having a bath there, she has a bath every day.


It's blocking the light. It's annoying. It's kind of, you know...


Easy fix. Bungee cord. Now it looks like an expensive hotel.


Look how classy that is. I mean, I know it's a bungee cord, but still.


You know, it's all nicely wrapped. It's beautiful.


This is what we should be doing all day, every day. It's my favorite pastime.


It's all about empathy.


Understanding our visitors and customers, obviously, but also understanding one another on the team.


Understanding what it means to be a designer or a writer and how they feel.


Having empathy for how they would actually like to do their job.


It's not about just taking what you see other people doing and implementing it.


So, there are a lot of design trends out there that are all kind of coming together to cause this problem.


Every year, more and more of them come out. Some years, way more than others.


And the problem is, they typically don't go away.


They just build and build. And I blame theme designers, in part, because they're not...


Well, they're salespeople. Right? They take every possible interaction model and design trend


and they put them all inside these themes so they're so bloated and slow and they're a usability nightmare,


and hence a conversion nightmare. That's just... they're trying to make sales.


And that's not fair on the people who buy these because they get them because they're non-technical.


They don't know that it's messing with their performance.


So, this slide... this is from Google Trends.


The red line is Pinot Noir. The blue line is a different kind of wine.


I want to take you back to 2004. Something profound happened.


Pinot, you see, was down at the bottom and then changed forever until now.


So, I went to see a movie with a good friend of mine.


It was a movie about wine. And because we're adults and incredibly childish,


we decided... this is Jeremy, our CMO, and me...


we decided to sneak in a couple of bottles of Pinot inside our jackets.


Because that's what you do. And so we're in the middle of the movie and we're taking turns.


It's my turn. I'm like this, trying to pour the wine.


Nothing in the cup. Nothing in the cup. And there's a wine tasting scene.


Guy two rows in front of me goes,


Holy crap! This is amazing! I can smell the wine!


Because I'm not tilting it enough to get it.


It's just running around the edge and it's going all over the floor.


There's red wine everywhere.


Do not sabotage me.


Then this scene happened. It changed history forever.


Aye, aye, captain. You got it.


And if they want to drink Merlot, we're drinking Merlot.


If anybody orders Merlot, I'm leaving. I am not drinking any f***ing Merlot!


Okay, okay. Relax, my...


So Merlot is in the blue line.


And that's when the movie came out.


I predicted it at the time. And sure enough, four years later,


the sideways effect was confirmed.


They're powerful. I think this quote...


this came from a box of matches at one point, but...


it only takes one tree to make a thousand matches.


One match to burn a thousand trees.


That's the kind of power that trends have to influence us.


Sometimes we're not even aware that they're doing it.


It's a true fact.


I love judging wine by its cover. I'll pick one up and go,


Oh, it looks amazing! Ooh, it's Merlot.


And I just put it down again. I can't help it.


Okay, so I've created this process, Datadroom design, 3D.


I like alliteration. I actually prefer data-informed design,


but that doesn't have 3Ds.


And it's a process to help marketing teams work better together,


understand one another better, collaborate better,


and also deal with these influences that come at us from trends


and from requests from clients and that kind of thing.


So it's very simple. The first thing you do is you consult the 3D playbook,


which is a kind of look-up table.


So in this case, I'm interested in working on creating or optimizing


the hero shot on my page.


So I should look at Visual ID, false, bottom, stock photos.


What this does, this takes all the data that's out there,


which is overwhelming, and it'll just say,


Just pay attention to these few things.


Just simplifying. This is what it looks like.


It's a big Google sheet. Again, it's that link.


Now, what it does, along the top here is all the data types and sources.


And down the left are the objects that you're interested in.


And there's notes on all of these cells explaining what it is


and why you should care about it for that particular object.


And there's a custom menu at the top.


When you click on that, it has them all.


And when you click one of those, it will isolate that in the table


so you can just look at that alone.


It speeds up the process.


Then you collect the data.


Ideally, as a team, this is a simple checklist.


You've seen which data you should collect from the Playbook.


You just put it in here so you can run through this, have a note,


where you're getting it from, what tool, how much you need, sample size.


That kind of information will be in the Playbook.


It just helps you get aligned with what you're supposed to be doing.


Third, make observations. This is the start of the really fun stuff.


And you need to do this as a team.


Look at the data you've collected, whether it's graphs, charts, spreadsheets,


heat maps, recordings of users and usability tests.


Look at it together, because that's when the empathy begins,


not just with the visitor, but with the people in the room


when they see and react to these things.


Then you just jot them down. Print this out and do it by hand.


That's the best way. It's just a better process that way.


And you make your observations.


You put them in here, and then you rate them by severity.


If it's a blocker, something stopping people from continuing,


that's an instant five. Otherwise, just do that to help prioritize.


And then you go into the design phase.


Now, copying a bit from Google's Sprint model,


what's great to do here is have the team leave the room for like ten minutes


and go and sketch their own way of solving these problems,


how to MacGyver these solutions.


When you come back, you present in front of each other,


and you learn, and it can all evolve collectively.


So you can either, two ways of doing this,


you can either take each one and sketch how to solve that problem.


So maybe we need bigger underpants.


Maybe we need to put more toilet humor in our coffee.


Pandas are always good for conversions, and we have to be unique.


So you can do it that way, or you can combine all of it into one kind of idea


that you would use to solve this problem.


Depends how you think.


Right? Product idea. Someone grab a domain.


All right.


Then the latest trend I saw last year was something called conversational forms.


Fascinating new thing.


Came from an agency in Denmark, in Copenhagen, called Space Ten.


They were really interested in human behavior and interaction.


Now, what it is, it's a simple script that you put on your page,


and it will take a regular form and change it into a chat, like this.


So it's like a seemingly more human-style interaction.


So I wanted to validate this, and they were super stoked,


because we don't have the capacity or ability to test this.


I'm like, awesome, I'll do it with you. I'll collaborate.


So first thing we do, check the playbook.


What should we be looking at?


Let's look at session recordings, do some mobile QA, usability tests,


scroll and click maps, and lead data.


They're the things that I want to focus on to understand and validate this new trend.


Collecting the data, going to use Hotjar, my phone, Camtasia, and Unbounce for these things.


Different things require different sample sizes.


Scroll maps, one or two thousand.


A usability test, maybe six people, and so on.


Okay, so what did I observe from this?


Now, these are the six data points I want, and these yellow bubbles,


this is basically the notes that appear in the playbook,


so that's kind of what it's going to tell you in there to help you figure out what you should be doing.


So I put one on a form, I launched it on a page, launched it,


put Hotjar on there to record the session.


This is five minutes after I launched.


Lots of scrolling up and down.


Then it starts to get a little wacky, get a bit panicky all over the place.


Then there's an error, and he can't escape, and it just gets more and more crazy.


And this goes on and on, and then he refreshes the page and does it all over again.


And this is where the empathy comes from.


I'm like, oh my God, I'm ruining this guy's day. This is awful.


So my observations, lots of wild scrolling, and there was a bug with the error handling.


So what do I do? Well, first of all, I freaked out.


Then Nicole, who's much smarter than me, this is my fiance,


was like, but Bruce put his email address in, you should reach out.


Brilliant. So I sent him an email. I'm so sorry, Bruce.


I was testing something, and I saw a recording, it was terrible, I apologize.


Here's the content you were looking for. Again, I'm really sorry.


Two minutes later, he replies.


In 25 years, the best way of owning up to a mistake I've ever seen,


much more likely to engage with the Unbounce the brand as a result.


So took a horrible experience and turned it into something special.


Spotted the bugs, fixed them within the first hour, and pushed it back out there.


What was it like on a phone?


This is what it looks like when you get to the form.


Looks pretty good. It's kind of hard to tell what it is.


But more importantly, when you click where you have to type,


the keyboard comes up and you can't see the question anymore.


So you don't know what you're answering.


Now, this is when it's integrated in a system like you put on an Unbounce page,


because it's not designed for that.


Their standalone, it's actually beautiful interaction.


So this was just like, oh, it's not quite set up.


So I took it off mobile for the time being.


Usability test. Now, this is so easy and so little done.


People talk about it, but I slacked people around the company.


I said, hey, do you have two minutes? Ten people.


And I was like, yeah, sure, because people love being involved.


And this is, again, how you develop a culture of optimization.


I say, the instructions, they're standard.


It's like we are evaluating this page, not you.


You can't do anything wrong.


If something doesn't work, it's the page's fault, not your fault.


So I'll give you a task. Read it out loud.


This gets them in the kind of how they should be doing it.


Read it out loud, and then verbalize everything you do


as you are going through this experience.


And so the task.


You're looking for a landing page course in Google.


You find one. Find a way.


I recorded with Camtasia. Find a way to take the course.


Now, the reason I recorded it with that, lots of tools,


is so I could see the screen, but also the person's face,


so you can see how they react to things, which is really important,


especially with something so new.


Quite a few observations.


Although the three dots kind of represent like, okay,


am I typing or is somebody else typing?


Because we're used to that from any chat devices


where when the dots are animated,


it's like someone on the other end is typing.


So A, this is like, oh, there's someone else there.


Also, it didn't stop because it's just an animation.


There's nothing there, and that person's already typed.


So that, she continued, but it gave her a reason to pause and go,


I'm not really sure what's going on.


I gave us a very, too, because it wasn't that big a deal, but interesting.


Now, if you have a drop-down list, it converts into a series of buttons.


If it's a long list, you have to filter by starting to type,


and it will give you the right answers.


It's really cool, but you still have to click the button.


Some people would type, see the correct answer, and go, oh, and hit enter.


What that did is it submitted the first or default value.


So now we're getting a bit of fake data


because that's not what they intended to do.


So that's a bit of a problem.


Give that a four.


How much information am I going to be asked for?


No.


So I'm like, oh my god, am I going to be having to do this for a long time,


and I don't know how long it's going to take me,


and this is a great benefit for them, but is it a great benefit for me?


Because it's not a standard form with four form fields or whatever,


she had no idea how long it was going to take.


It's like, how am I talking to someone?


Is it a bot?


How many questions are involved here?


So another great insight.


All right, click map.


Now, I had scroll map on here, too.


I won't show you that because it didn't really show much.


And if you do a click map, you're going to capture the scroll map, too.


Have a look.


In this case, it didn't do much.


It's a very short page.


On the click map, I saw something really interesting.


I guess I could check it out.


Okay, I can't click on what my first thing is.


That's the first question.


That's not what you type.


I'm going to type it down here.


She kept clicking on it.


12% of all visitors did the same thing, and I don't want them to be doing that.


I want them to get straight to the entry field.


So we need to try and change behavior there.


Okay, so because it's so different, my biggest concern was that people would put fake email addresses in there


because they're like, I don't know who or what this is.


I'm a little sketched out.


So that was a big fear I had.


And sure enough, two and a half times as many fake email addresses came through this.


I think it's because of that fear and not being familiar with this kind of interface.


Oh, rewinding a bit, so spam, talking about that.


So trends over time, some of them get better, some don't.


But in 97, this was the first interrupted device on the web, even before pop-ups came two years later.


Sometimes funny, but usually just a pain.


But then 10 years later, a group got together to do reCAPTCHA, which is actually for good


because when you type in here, you're helping crowdsource digitize old books that machines can't interpret yet.


So you're actually helping.


And then Google acquired them two years after that.


So I don't mind when I'm filling out this kind of thing because it's doing good.


Now, however, I mean, I know that's great for accessibility,


but there are some books that I don't believe should be continued in their life.


I think there's a couple of exceptions.


I promise, I was not reading that book at the time.


There was not my intention at all.


It's a thing.


Come on.


Unexpected gifts from the animals of Africa.


And if you're from Canada, this is the best spam filter of all.


You put a red dot in your mailbox, they don't put junk mail through your drawer anymore.


It's amazing.


It's like a little-known Canada Post hack.


Sorry, it doesn't work here, but maybe someone will do that one day.


It's amazing and good for the environment.


Okay, so all these observations, now it's time to try and solve these problems through some design exercises.


So this is what it looks like with my sketches on here.


I'll go through a couple of them, show what I did.


So the first one, the animated dots.


I went to Space 10, the creator, their GitHub account.


There was a discussion, and someone else had observed the same thing about these


and had a line CSS to just hide it.


So I stuck that in an ambulance, hid it, perfect.


That was dead easy.


Now, people clicking on the, typing instead of clicking on these buttons,


I simply made them look more like buttons, classic kind of orange CTA color,


because orange always converts better than any other color.


And I put instructions in the thing.


So do you work for an agency?


Click yes or no below.


So I explicitly told them how they should interact with this.


I don't really want to go to that length,


but I'm trying to validate if I can change on-page behavior, which is the goal of optimization.


And then I put a subhead, just four quick questions,


so people knew what to expect from this experience.


Now, from the, which one was this?


From the click map.


Okay, I didn't want people clicking on that first question.


So all I did was say, instead of what's your work email,


I said, which email address would you like us to send the course link to?


That's not what I'm talking about.


Is it?


I can't remember.


No, it's not.


It is not.


No, no, no.


I changed the entry field to look like a CTA,


to draw people's attention to it instead of that first question, right?


Because none of it's familiar, but an orange button is familiar.


So that was my goal, to bring them down there right away.


And then this one, I just said, yeah, which email address?


Trying to reduce the spam.


Because if you think, well, I have to give them a real email address to start the course,


you'd be more likely to do so.


That was my hypothesis, at least.


So now you have all of these from all of the team.


You've got all this data and research around it, your decisions,


your observations, and then how you solved that through design.


You did this as a team, so you got all this stuff.


Now the designer can go away with this and start doing meaningful work


that is all informed by data and the collective opinion of the team


and how they all think these things should be.


Team-led hypotheses, which is a much smarter way.


They can take the original one, show how they changed it,


annotate all of the things they changed based on the numbers you put on the worksheets.


Now you have something to present and to launch that's actually meaningful.


But the extra step, if you're running AB test, it's not just about the conversion rate.


Everything we've learned there becomes a micrometric.


We're trying to change behavior so all of those numbers get better.


Everything we saw that was a problem all has to get better.


And it's a much smarter way of thinking about optimization.


Instead of just going, we want to move this one number, no, we want to change behavior.


So the first one, percentage of people clicking on the first question, awesome.


That went way down because of that design treatment.


Number of fake emails, way down again, succeeding a lot in these micrometrics.


But then on the number of personal email addresses,


I want professional email addresses at moz.com, at unbounce.com.


I don't want Gmail or Hotmail because then when I'm doing my email marketing,


it's not going business hours to their business inbox.


That went way up in the wrong direction.


And I think because in my research in prior years,


doing the word work or business in the email address label


gets a lot more pro email addresses.


I took that out by mistake when I changed this question.


So I need to put that back in somehow.


Good learning there.


And the conversion rate, it's basically flatlining.


It's been running for four weeks. It's a low traffic page.


It probably needs about eight or nine weeks, which is a really long time.


But I think it's just going to flatline.


So the good thing is this didn't hurt conversions.


And the previous test was against a regular form and that also didn't lose.


So we're starting to validate this design trend


instead of just implementing it blindly.


So it looks like it's actually going to be a good thing


and might be something we want to consider.


I remember this guy at the start.


This is actually Corey, one of our marketing directors at Unbounce.


Sad Corey, we call him.


And I asked him, there were a couple of...


It was for a video he did. He had to look sad.


And I asked him, I texted him late one night, I'm like,


hey, you were on the team that did the explainer video.


What do you remember about it?


Well, we made up a bunch of shit.


And we started the project because we thought we needed a video.


Like, completely wrong reasons.


And it brought some of the pain back.


And he was like, I really hated that video.


I'm just going to give you a little sneak peek at this offensive piece of creative.


Every marketing campaign needs a landing page.


We need them often and we need them fast.


I could use some help from design, but she's in the middle of a big project.


And I'll need a developer to actually code the page for me.


Our developers are busy and building a landing page is not at the top of their list.


That's how getting landing pages built used to be.


Now I use Unbounce.


With the Unbounce landing page builder, I can start with a template


or I can build my landing page from scratch.


It's quick and it's easy.


I'm like watching it.


It was on and on. It was terrible.


And we hated the way he spoke at the end.


In the integrations part, he went Salesforce.


And we're like, don't say it like that.


But in the take where he didn't say that, he couldn't say our name right.


He said, Unbounce! Unbounce!


God, you're fired.


This is a Venn diagram of frustration between these three disciplines.


And you can see most of it is between the marketer and the designer.


The rest are stung there, but it's not as bad.


32% of marketers are frustrated, 45% are designers.


And that's because of this dysfunctional relationship.


I believe this process fixes that problem.


So there was a lot of frustration at the beginning.


So I want to try and leave on a more positive note.


So I reached out again in my research and I said,


what's awesome about working with these people?


A few of the responses.


Marker is talking about designers.


The word magic came up a lot.


Because they do special things that we don't know how to do.


Superpowers. This is great stuff.


How about the flip side?


Designers talking about marketers.


They're enthusiastic and motivated.


Yeah, marketing.


Full of ideas.


Still got some work to do on that one.


Designers talking about copywriters.


They're intelligent.


And finally,


our symbiotic organism.


We die without them.


Okay, that's sincere.


That's some serious passion that is under the surface.


There's a lot of respect there,


but it doesn't often get to come out


because we don't collaborate and follow this kind of process.


I think this will change it.


Because when it's data-driven, data-informed,


that leads to more empathy, which leads to results.


Thank you very much.


That's the link again.


But I want to start by thanking you for your time.


I've wanted to speak at MOSH for a long time.


You're probably going to hear this a lot.


Rand's a good friend, and we've always looked up to them.


So I want to just, if you'll indulge me,


I want to take an old-school selfie on this Instax thing.


So it's not wide-angle. This could be horrible.


Can we get the lights up, please?


Good job. All right.


Okay, so if you can all do like a,


actually, I'm a designer, and I just go, woo!


Woo!


And then this side, too.


I'm not going to wait for it to develop, don't worry.


All right. Woo!


Come on, come on. Recharge.


Daily SEO Fix: Explore a Competitor’s Top Ranking Keywords

Hi guys, I'm Varabh from the Onboarding team and today we'll look at how to look for your


competitors top ranking keywords.


Now you may already be aware who your competitors are, but are you really aware how to look


for their top ranking keywords?


Let's jump in the MOS Pro's Keyword Explorer and look at the same.


Now while we are in the MOS Pro, we want to click on the keyword research menu on the


left hand side and then click on the explore by site.


Now here we can insert our website at the top and then we can insert two of our competitors


websites here as well.


And while inserting the website, we can insert a root domain, sub domain or an exact age


URL.


In this case, we'll be inserting the root domains in here.


Once we insert all of the websites here, we can then click here on this drop down to select


the country that we are searching in.


In this case, it is United Kingdom and then we click on compare sites.


Now this is when we are going to see the total number of keywords all of these websites are


ranking for and from the total number of keywords, we'll see the ones in the top positions along


with the page authority score as well as the domain authority score of these websites.


Now when we click on top ranking keywords, this is when we'll be able to get an idea


about the keywords a bit more in detail.


When we click here, at first, we are presented with this Venn diagram.


With the help of this, we are able to understand what is the share of keywords for each of


these three websites.


And these intersections here tell you if you are sharing any set of keywords with our competitors


or not.


In this case, if you look at this particular intersection, then there are 78 keywords all


of these three websites are sharing and we can scroll down below to get a list of all


the keywords and see the ranks that all of the websites are getting for these keywords


along with the metrics like the difficulty score that tells us how difficult it is to


rank for a particular keyword and the monthly volume that tells us the average amount of


search queries for any particular keyword in a month.


Now in this section, you can click on these small arrows here to sort out the data from


the highest to lowest in order to find the keywords that are having the lowest difficulty


score.


And you can also export this data to a CSV file or add the keywords to the campaign as


well.


I hope this video helped you in understanding how to look for the competitors top ranking


keywords.


Great Expectations: The Truth About Digital PR Campaigns

Our next speaker is a PR campaign genius.


Shannon McGurk has strategically been crafting campaigns and honing effective outreach for years.


And when I reached out to her current boss, Patty Mugen, for some fun insights,


he mentioned that she also has a newish puppy named Hudson, such a cute name.


She's a huge lover of cheese, pasta and carbs in general.


And in fact, she actually set off the office fire alarm once while making toast and firemen arrived.


That is unbelievable, Shannon. You are my hero.


So buckle up. Here is the head of content and PR at era Shannon McGurk.


So we've got a problem within our industry.


Here is what Twitter has to say about our digital PR campaigns.


Digital PR is getting ridiculous. The industry itself is becoming attention seeking.


And finally, and probably most prominently for me,


the digital PR community shouldn't feel pressured to post their best work and highlights all of the time.


But you know what? I'm guilty and I'm really guilty, too.


So here I am back in 2017, excited as we're coming to the end of the year, really proud of the team.


I take to Twitter and announce that this year we generated 2400 pieces of coverage for our clients.


Then in 2018, I keep going on this theme and instead of start talking about our clients,


travel supermarkets sharing their coverage and, you know,


the top 15 most populous cities that tourists will be in by 2025.


Then you can really see the sheer impact and how much I was tweeting around,


you know, the successes of our campaigns. And ultimately, this comes down to the fact that I'm super proud of the work we're doing.


And I want to be, you know, lifting the team's confidence up, sharing the wins, sharing the successes as well,


so that we can hopefully inspire others out there who are doing lots of digital PR and link building.


But it didn't stop there. So this time last year, I stood on the MozCon stage.


And that's little old me out there looking like a tiny dot.


And I spoke about the campaigns that had generated the most successful numbers of links that, you know,


our team had gone out and created. We've got this one here, Modern Santa, that got 468 pieces of coverage and 324 linking domains.


A second one I stood on that stage and spoke about was the most popular beaches, according to Instagram.


This one we were nominated for an award or two for as well. And again, this one got 150 pieces of coverage and 66 linking domains.


And finally, and you know, this campaign is super close to my heart, is one that I will always be proud of.


It didn't get the biggest and most viral results in the world.


But the story behind it and the approach that we took generated 68 pieces of coverage and 45 linking domains.


So here is one of those successful campaigns stood alone. You can see here on this graph,


we're mapping coverage against the month. And this was a really, really good month when we launched this.


You know, we got up to 70 pieces of coverage and a really solid amount of links too.


But this is what it's like in context. And you can see that we see that really big spike.


But then after that, the months to follow, they're a little bit more inconsistent.


You can see the highs and lows of link building. And I'm going to be honest and tell you guys that there,


I'm not showing you the full picture when I'm talking about those successes and those successes alone.


I'm not being honest and, you know, talking about the other challenges or the other wins that we potentially have in the months to come.


So my promise to you guys today is that I really do want to show you the full picture.


Now, for me, the full picture covers these three pillars with creative campaigns.


We've got the huge wins that we love talking about. We share them for inspiration.


We have those steady performers in the middle. And that's really the day to day of what we do.


You know, the campaigns that go out there and get 10, 20, 30 links.


And then we have those fails, the ones that crash and burn and the ones that really struggle to get off the ground because of whatever reason.


But this is how we talk about our work. So we place a huge focus on those wins, right?


They're the things that we talk about on social media and LinkedIn and Twitter.


They're the things we write case studies about and we talk about on stage.


But we don't necessarily talk about those steady performers that are actually generating real business results because of the SEO KPIs in place.


And we don't necessarily share those fails, those campaigns that, yes, they're hard, but we can learn from them the most.


This, in reality, is what the day to day looks like, right?


So we have one in four campaigns, maybe a huge win, and one in 10, maybe a huge fail.


But our day to day lives as digital PRs, actually, the steady performers are what we do day in, day out.


The campaigns that go out there and do get those 10, 20 links.


So what's the problem then and why am I showing you this?


Well, ultimately, if we talk about those huge wins all the time, we're giving the impression that we don't have those campaign fails.


And that means we're putting too much pressure on ourselves as digital PRs and newbies within the industry,


people that are junior coming into things and feeling the pressure to get more than 100 links with every campaign.


And because of that, we're starting to normalize the idea that each campaign launch actually does need to go out and get those 100 plus links.


Now, that feeds into really setting unrealistic expectations and KPIs,


and that can lead to really difficult conversations with clients further down the line,


because what you put in front of them and then what you produce versus a sales meeting and a pitch,


to then the reality of what you do could be two very different stories.


But one thing we need to recognize here that if we constantly talk about those huge fails,


those huge wins story all the time, it means that we're making others think that those five, 10 or even 20 links can't be effective.


Now, we know that those steady performers, they can be effective.


And actually, as an industry, we need to talk about them more.


We need to celebrate the impact that they have.


If you're generating those three links that go out and boost that page,


you know, that product page up to position one, celebrate them, learn from them, share those tactics.