community platforms that are out there that don't look good. So perhaps looking good isn't


MozCon 2015 - 16 - Reaching Critical Mass: 150 Active Members with Rich Millington

the key to having a successful type of community platform. So maybe the rule is we don't need


a platform that looks good. Maybe we need a community platform that simply shows the


latest activity above the fold on the landing page of that community. And how many of you


are using a Facebook page for your online community? A quick show of hands, please.


I know it's after lunch. Some of you. Please stop doing that. There's nothing else. Just


stop. Please. The problem right now is like having a postman who might say, I'm only going


to deliver the mail that I think your members want to get from you unless you pay me. And


honestly, the only solution at this stage is to pay for the advertising and get the


e-mail addresses of your members. Get your members out of there and somewhere else. Because


it's very difficult to build a community platform on Facebook. And if you are looking for options,


there are other options around there at different levels. So zero to 4K, you have Mighty Bell,


you have vanilla forums, you have telescope, which will give you a community exactly like


product hunt or Reddit or something like that. If you have more money, say the 50 to say


the 5 to 50K level, then it's more about back in the right horse. It's more about making


sure that you have a company that is going to be successful in the long term. So HireLogic


are okay here, the two open source solutions and Mobilize as well. And if you have people


ask me for just one suggestion, I would go with an integration of these two. And if you


have a budget of 50K, if you have lots of money, after you contact us, you should definitely


reach out to maybe Lithium, Jive, Yammer, one of these types of community platforms


that exist. And what you get is not something that is monumentally better than anywhere


else, but you have a company that will just take care of everything. So before we continue,


before you begin doing anything else, you have to make sure you have a platform that


is activity focused. That will show the latest activity above the landing page, above the


fold of that community. You want to make sure that when people visit your platform, the


first thing they see is how crazy active it is. That is the kind of platform that we want


to have. Okay. Next. How do we get members to participate?


Imagine how gut wrenching it is to have a community where you have the platform, you


have the founding members, but people still won't participate. This happens far too often.


And it happens because what we ask members to do is usually entirely the wrong thing.


So too many online communities today for the very first contribution that a member makes


wants a member to introduce themselves. Think about this. Imagine going into a room of people


that you don't know and saying, hello, my name is Richard Millington and I work at this


company and I'm very, very, very excited to be here. That's what we're doing. And imagine


it's not just you. But you can see a whole line of people that have done that before


you and have done that after you as well. How motivating would that be to you? And how


interesting is it to your members? This isn't what we want to be doing.


State number two. The first thing we tell members to do is to complete their profile.


Think about this. You see a community platform that you want to participate in. Actually,


let's do it in real life. You see a bar that you want to join and you try and get in there


and someone goes, stop. What? Profile. Richard Millington, age, location, about me. Who wants


to fill in an about me thing? But this is what we're doing. It's no surprise that most


people just give up and go to Facebook instead. And three, we just dump members into the community.


We just throw them in there and hope that somehow, some way, they find the right place


to participate and they get engaged and everyone is very happy about that.


And this doesn't work well. What you have is a very small window. A 15 minute window.


About the time it takes for the average person to have a shower to hook a member into that


community. To make sure that they're sharing an opinion, an experience, or something that's


specific to them. Something that's going to get them into that notification cycle that


members have. So one way to do that is to use your confirmation email that you send


out much better than we're using it today. If you look at this one here from Dell, Dell


want you to join, participate, catalyze. Have you guys done much catalyzing recently? This


isn't what we want to be doing. If you want to increase the number of newcomers that actually


make a contribution by 15 to 20 percent right now, right now, change this message here.


Say, hi, you're in. I'd love your opinion on this discussion taking place here. And


just update that link every single week. We've done this in lots of communities. You can


do it right now and that would be a 15 to 20 percent boost.


And if you can't do that, you can see what other calls to action you can do. You can


see what other actions you can tell members to take. So one of them, what are your members


thinking? This is a very powerful call to action. Or two, what are members doing? My


favorite type of discussion in any type of professional community is what are you working


on right now? And the reason that is so successful is that if I share what I'm working on and


someone else shares what they're working on, I can be like, you too? No way. You can have


a good collaborative opportunity. You can get people more engaged and participating


simply if they know what each other are working on. Three is what have you recently learned?


Everyone has learned something recently about the topic that you're in and you just need


to give them a place to share it. Or four, what do members need help with? Very often


the biggest challenge isn't getting people to participate. It's not getting replies.


It's simply getting people to ask a question in the first place. So if you cannot convert


more than 50% of your newcomers into regular active members of that community, stop promoting


the community. Instead, focus on converging them. Focus on testing different calls to


action, different appeals until you find out what works best. Because in almost every type


of community, we can do a far, far better job here than what we're doing right now.


Okay. Finally, how to keep members active. According to whatever research you read, between


40 and 90% of members in online communities who make their first ever contribution will


never participate again. Why is that? You don't have that in any other type of social


group. So what is it about online communities where that happens? Well, one is that in an


online community, if you ask a question and you don't get a response, you'll never participate


again. The worst thing that we want is to be ignored. Second, if you ask a question


and you don't get a quick response, you will never participate again. The speed of response


is so important upon whether someone participates again. If you can respond to someone's first


contribution within 15 minutes, they have an 87% chance of participating again. If you


wait three hours, that drops to around 60%. So rapid contributions matter a lot. And third,


imagine if you ask a question and you get the absolute drop dead perfect result that


you ever could, that you could ever could want. Well, then you don't have to go back


and participate again. Think about that. By giving a member the perfect answer to the


question they're asking, why does that member have to participate again? And this happens


very often. But there are ways to hook members into participating over the long term. And


the first one is to show them a visible increase in skill, which means if I have, if I can


see that my level of skill has increased since being a member of that community, then I am


far more likely to continue participating in that community. And the way you can do


that is copy what, say, the weightlifting communities do or the weight loss or the fitness


type of communities do, where you benchmark yourself at the beginning and then you update


that benchmark, whatever that might be. So that might be in a professional community.


What job did you have right at the beginning? And then you can see your career progression


as a result of being in that community. And that's a very powerful reason to keep participating.


Another good idea is to take whatever great advice is being shared in your community and


turn it into a mini course or ebooks or guides, anything that people can see that the skill


of almost everyone in that group is growing as a result of being in that community.


Second is autonomy. So this means the more control, power, and influence we have over


a particular group, the more likely we are going to continue participating in that group.


My first ever job was doing a paper route. So that's like putting newspapers through


doors. You must have a U.S. alternative. And I thought after a couple of months, I'm doing


a damn good job of this. And so I asked my boss, I would like some more money. And he


said, and I remember, well, Rich, I can't give you some more money, but I can give you


more responsibility. I was like, okay. So it gave me two routes to do. By the time I


thought that was amazing, I had more control and more responsibility, it was such a powerful


thing for me. What we want is to design a journey for newcomers once they join that


community to give them increasing levels of control and responsibility and power within


that community. That might mean when someone joins for the very first time and they post


that first question and they get a response, you ask them to document that response for


other people. And if they do that, you might ask them to interview other experts to do


that or resolve that challenge even better. You might designate them as an expert if they


do that. Or at the very high level, they might be able to run groups and columns in different


parts of that community. But the increasing level of control that you give people in that


community, the more I guarantee you, the more they will continue participating. And third,


social relatedness. The more we make friends in that community, the more we continue participating


in that community. Which means the more I recognize the other people and the more I


feel recognized by that group, the more I continue participating within that group.


And that's such a powerful thing. You can have a community manager that welcomes newcomers


and introduces them to other people like themselves. People with the same challenge, people in


the same location. If you can find a way to automate this even better. But if you can


tackle this challenge, if you can make sure that people make genuine friendships as a


result of being in your community, they will keep coming back again and again and again.


And what we want to wrap things up is to design that whole journey through. So what is the


first thing they need? It's an ego hit. Something that sucks them in right at the beginning,


that quick, rapid response. Second, you might introduce them to somebody else. You might


have a skill increase task. Some sort of task is going to increase their skill. You might


give them more responsibility. And you can test this and you can change it and you can


adapt it. You can do whatever you want to do. But this is a process that we need to


get right. This is a process that we can be doing much better right now. And if we want


to have members that are participating not just once, but over the long term, we absolutely


have to be doing a better job of this. Because there's so much potential for improvement


right here. Okay, let's quickly wrap things up. When we think about how communities actually


grow, it's not with a massive launch. It's not with a massive launch. What happens is


they grow really steadily. They begin with the founders of that community. Then you have


the friends of friends that join and participate. Then you have the early majority. It's a good


curve that goes like this. And the biggest mistake that we make is that we begin here.


What we see is lots of organizations that have, that perhaps see other communities that


get a lot of press attention, that have a lot of members and think, if we're going to


be successful, we need a lot of press attention and a lot of members. And they forget that


you have to have a small group before you can have a big group. Please don't begin at


this level. It's very risky. It's very expensive. And it doesn't succeed. What you want to do


is to begin with that founder. Who is the person that's going to be creating that community?


How much credibility do they actually have? And if you do that, you have a 94% success


rate. If you do that, it is not very expensive. If you do that, there are safeguards in place


that stop you from wasting a lot of money before that community fails. So to quickly


wrap things up, first you need a founder with credibility in that field. Second, you need


a concept that pops. Third, you need an activity focused community platform. And fourth, you


need to make sure that oh, whoops. And fourth, you need to be prompting newcomers to make


a specific post. And finally, give members increasing level of skill, power, and make


sure they're making friends in your online community. Because we have so short time to


do the work that we're going to do. And it's the most incredible feeling in the world when


you're able to take a group of people and connect them together around your organization.


MozCon, it's always amazing to speak to you. Thank you so much.


Thank you, Rich. Okay. When you were tweeting, when you were up here, people were tweeting


all kinds of questions about platforms. So we're going to do a quick speed round. You


mentioned Facebook. Don't do Facebook. Very quickly, what are your thoughts on the following


platforms? LinkedIn.


LinkedIn can work for some professional communities, but recently I haven't seen that many that


are doing well.


Meetup.


Meetup is good. Meetup works very well for communities that like to meet up in person.


It seems to be a company that's going well. Yeah, that's a good one.


I'll group these together if I can. Slack and HipChat.


Slack is very interesting. It seems to be growing fast. I like Slack. Yammer should


be very scared at the moment. The other one, I haven't had much experience with, HipChat.


Rand had an interesting question. What would you advise Twitter, I mean Reddit, do with


your recent community kerfuffle. Would you have any advice to them on that?


You know, we've read it. It's one of those really unfortunate things. And I think everyone


has a different opinion on it. My opinion is that it's a bad idea to have only one person


responsible for that community. I mean, you need to have more than one person responsible.


But I also think when someone does stand up and does try to tackle the abuse that's happening


in that site, we need to support them. Everyone in that organization should have been supporting


her, not being strangely quiet. But I think right now it's a little late for them to be


doing that. I think the key thing is just to make sure that they have more than one


person responsible, that the lines of communication are pretty clear. Also, there are times where


you just have to take a stand. You have to take a stand saying we are not going to tolerate


this in our community any longer. And there's going to be people that don't like that. But


I think that's just what happens in communities sometimes. Thanks, Jen.


Well said. For people who saw you last year, you touched on this a little bit last year,


but a lot of people in the audience are wondering about how to sell community, how to sell investment.


I'm wondering, Linda was asking about organic visits or new customers. For those people


who are interested in learning more about the ROI of community, where can they get started?


If you go to fee4b.com slash ROIP PDF, I think the ROI is in capital letters. If not, I'll


just tweet it out right after this. Sounds good. Excellent. Thank you, Rich


Millington. Thank you so much.


Daily SEO Fix: Analyze Crawl Depth of Important Pages

Hi there, my name is Eli and I am one of the customer support engineers here at Moz.


In this video, I will be showing you how to analyse crawl depth of important pages within


your site.


Site architecture best practices say that it should take no more than 3 or 4 clicks


to get from your homepage to any other important page on your site.


Keeping a relatively flat or shallow architecture on your site helps users get to where they


want to go more quickly and most importantly it saves them valuable crawl budget.


The crawl depth metric within SiteCrawl indicates how deeply the Moz spiders had to crawl in


order to find a given page.


In SiteCrawl, click all crawled pages and you can then filter the full list by status


code so that you are only seeing pages that return a 2xx status code.


You can sort this list of URLs by crawl depth, from high to low.


You may want to investigate any page with a crawl depth greater than 4 or you can set


your own baseline depending on the size and complexity of your website.


You can also sort this list by page authority so that you can see how many hops or clicks


it takes to get from your homepage to your other most authoritative pages.


Wherever you see high numbers, consider adjusting your internal linking strategy to make it


easier for users and search engines to reach those high value pages without doing too much


digging.


Thanks for joining me today for this daily fix.


If you are new to Moz, you can sign up for a 30 day free trial.


And if you wanted to dive into the rest of our features, you can book a fantastic one-on-one


How to Build a Killer Content → Keyword Map for SEO - Whiteboard Friday

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


This week we're going to chat about building a killer content to keyword map.


Now this is something that pretty much every SEO does when they do an audit of a site,


whether that's in-house or as a contractor or an agency, consultant.


What we're trying to get here is a picture of here are all the keywords that we're trying


to target, here's all the content that we have and maybe we have keywords for all of


that content, maybe some of that content doesn't have a keyword, those kinds of things.


And we're trying to map these together so that we know what needs optimization, what


new content needs to be built, what keywords need to be targeted to fit with which content,


all of these types of things.


This is how we identify the priorities and work that an SEO should be doing as they're


attacking a new site, attacking a new campaign.


So what I've done here is build out a big one but actually this is not as fully featured


as you might imagine some content to keyword maps can be.


I've seen them with double the number of columns of these and I'm sure plenty of you who are


watching are saying, oh man, Rand, I have even more in my map.


Usually this is done in Excel or it's done in Google Spreadsheets and either one can


work fine.


Unfortunately, there's no great software to do this right now.


You could use a tool like Moz or a tool if you're on the enterprise side like SearchMetrics


or Conductor to get a lot of this data.


You might pull the data from tons of different places, a screaming frog here, a stat over


there, whatever it is, onpage.org.


But what you're trying to build here is essentially all my keywords mapped to all my URLs and


sometimes you might have, in fact, you should find, if you're doing a comprehensive job,


you should find places where you don't have a URL for some keywords because some keywords


haven't been targeted yet but you still want to rank for them.


And you should probably have some URLs for which you have no keyword.


Essentially you haven't intentionally targeted a keyword with that page yet and this might


actually help you prioritize and try and do some of that.


Then you have things like how much volume does this get, how much search volume.


You're going to try and estimate or use a tool to give you a grade around the title,


the content, maybe the URL itself, load speed, engagement.


Engagement could be browse rate or time on site or pages per visit or some combination


of all of those things.


You might be looking at internal and external links to the page, internal links to say how


well linked to is it internally, do I have opportunity there, external to say am I ranking


or not ranking because I don't have external links pointing here.


I might look at something like a page authority to try and roll those up.


Google desktop and Google mobile rankings and the organic visits that that page has


received from search engines.


Now there are a lot more columns that you might consider adding.


You could add things like anchor text if you want to analyze your internal and external


anchor text.


You might look at Google search console click through rates for some of the keywords here


and add that data in.


We all know Google search console, not phenomenal data, but sometimes can be useful.


You might have more keyword driven metrics if you're trying to prioritize a big keyword


research function like the things in keyword explorer, keyword difficulty, click through


rate opportunity, important score, your custom important score, your potential so that you


might order these differently based on those kinds of things.


Then you might even have something like a page level conversion rate.


How much does this contribute to content that converts on my site?


How well does it convert directly?


Those types of things.


Now you've got this big content to keyword map.


Grand, why am I building this?


Well, look, this map lets you do a bunch of incredibly important critical things like


identify keywords that have no content mapped to them.


Essentially that's saying, hey, I better build some content if I want to target this keyword.


That's work that you need to do.


Identify on-page opportunities to improve.


So you might look at the content or title grade for something.


You might go match that up to rankings and you might go, wait a minute, I'm ranking number


ten.


My content grade is only 40 out of 100.


Damn, I could improve that real fast.


I can make that page a lot better by investing in some on-page optimization.


Or for example, you might say, huh, I'm doing pretty well on a bunch of these metrics, but


boy, that page load speed is really bad.


And look, I can see that in the desktop versus mobile ranking.


I'm ranking a lot better on desktop than I am on mobile.


Maybe that load speed is one of the reasons why.


I could look at something like other on-page improvements like, ooh, man, that low engagement,


I bet that low engagement is dragging down my potential for rankings.


So all right, those two.


Identify content without intentional keyword targeting.


So I might find in here that I have something like, you know, slash flowers, which offers


all of my different flower options here, but I have not intentionally chosen what I'm targeting.


Am I selling flowers for delivery?


Should I be targeting that?


Am I selling flowers for greenhouses or for planning in your backyard?


What is my keyword here?


Oh, shoot, I have not built one in yet.


And oftentimes when you're auditing a site, you will find tons of URLs that are intentionally


targeting no specific keyword but should be.


And all you need to do is some optimization work to help those URLs target the keywords


that they should.


Next, you're going to identify link building needs, right?


So I might look in here and I might say, huh, my external links, ooh, that's pretty bad.


And my rankings kind of reflect that.


I need to do some link building.


That page is not going to rank.


Even though it's doing all right on on-page, it's not going to rank without this.


This whole exercise is designed to help you prioritize and focus your work so that you


can do the most important things after you do this audit and you can really move the


needle with your SEO.


If you have great ideas or you've done great things inside your content keyword maps, I


would love to see them.


Please leave them in the comments.


Feel free to link to things.


Show off your maps if you feel like uploading them.


I'd love to see the columns and the ways that you use this map.


And hopefully in the future, maybe I can convince the Moz Pro software guys to build this for


you.


All right, everyone, take care.


How Google May Be analyzing and Evaluating your Content - Whiteboard Friday

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


This week we're going to chat about how Google might be analyzing and evaluating all the


quality and value and ranking signals, rank worthiness, of your content.


So Google was kind enough to confirm something that as SEOs we've probably known for a very


long time, which is that the two factors most commonly found ranking web pages from Google


are indeed content signals and link signals, which that's not a big surprise to anybody.


But in light of that, we talk a lot about links.


Links obviously have a tremendous amount of importance.


Content does too, but it's gotten massively more sophisticated.


And so I thought we'd dive into some of the ways that Google can analyze on-page content


signals that may not just be the simplistic ones we're used to from the past.


So first off, number one here.


If I search for something like best granola brands, what I find is this page ranking first.


It's from this supermarket.


Granted, your mileage may vary, right?


You might get a different search result given your geo or that kind of thing.


And the page is called the world's 10 healthiest granolas.


Now Google's looking at a bunch of things here, but one of the things that they are


obviously looking at and still looking at, very much so, is things like keyword matches.


And not just raw, pure matches, although that's important too, but synonyms, word uses, intent


matching.


Essentially, Google's trying to parse out, all right, when someone searches for best


granola brands, they could mean the best meaning, the most flavorful.


They might mean the ones that are most popular.


They might mean the ones that are healthiest or maybe some combination of all these qualities.


And in this case, they've taken healthiest, right?


Healthiest was in fact a bunch of the top 10 results.


So I think Google is actually saying, hey, maybe in the world of granola, best and healthiest


have some synonymity, right?


Have some overlap, some confluence.


Perhaps a lot of people who are searching for best are searching for healthiest in the


world of granola, that is.


And so they put that there.


When you're thinking about evaluating your content, we've done this for years and years


in the SEO world, but we should be thinking about how do my keywords match up, particularly


my title and my headline and the first bits of my content.


Okay, number two, topic associations, related term and phrase matches, co-occurrence, keyword


co-occurrence.


It is the case that if Google sees that a lot of the time when words like best granola


brands or granola brands or best granola appear on the web, they also see words and phrases


like healthy.


They also see words like nutritious.


They see words like fat and sugars.


They see calories.


If they're seeing these words frequently associated with this other topic, they're going to essentially


reward content that uses those terms and phrases intelligently, and they might actually penalize


pages that don't have them.


Google might, for example, say, gosh, it's very odd to have a page about granola that


nowhere on the page mentions nuts, because we frequently see nuts and granolas mentioned


together.


And so that is a peculiar one to us.


Or it could be the case that when they see granola brands, they almost always see a comparison


of things like calories and fat and sodium and sugar, and so when they see a page that


doesn't have those elements, that's also peculiar to them.


You'll remember a few weeks ago on Whiteboard Friday, I talked about related topics and


terms and how you can actually use those and how there's a few tools to go out and do that,


things like the related topics tool inside Moz Analytics now.


All right.


So we know that Google does those types of evaluations.


We also know that Google can do things around basically the broad page, not an individual


word or phrase, but content length, comprehensiveness, reading level, sentence and paragraph format,


all those kinds of things.


If they see that, gosh, it's the case that when people are searching for best granola


brands, they don't really want a long read type of article like you'd find in a magazine


or a long form newspaper or a long form article.


They're really looking for that kind of broken up like here's the top five or here's the


top ten, and they frequently feature an image and then some analysis.


Great.


That's the format that people are looking for when they want those best of types of


lists.


That's the type of thing that we're going to put in the search results.


And if you follow a different sort of format, it may be more difficult for you to prove


to Google, hey, we belong in these types of search rankings, search listings as well.


That's also true for reading level.


It could be the case that if your audience is searching for highly scientific terms or


very niche specific terms, maybe there's a lot of words and phrases in there that are


more complex.


And likewise, you have a term or phrase that's targeting much more of a layman audience or


an amateur audience.


Well, maybe you have much less sophisticated word usage and phrasing and sentence structure,


and that's the right way to play it.


So again, you've got to play to your audience and what Google thinks your audience is.


A good way to do this, just like related topics, you've got to analyze what's in the top ten,


top twenty results.


Number four.


I went back and forth, and so I have to keep sliding around here.


Number four, brand name, site name.


I know you're like, wait, what?


That's content?


Yeah, yeah.


But these things, brands and site names, can build up associations, topical associations,


about whether they have authority in their space or not on a particular subject.


And that could apply not just as a brand as a whole or a site as a whole, but actually


from a site section or subfolder, even subdomain, or a tag, right?


A section, like a subsection of tags that a blog or an article site may have a bunch


of a news site.


That could play into it as well.


And so as Google notices these things, they say, hmm, eat this supermarkets is often associated


with things where they have a lot of information about granola in particular, or about healthy


foods of which granola is a subcategory.


And in fact, this is in their weight loss category, which is, in Google's opinion perhaps,


a very popular category, a very authoritative one, especially when it comes to the topic


of granola or granola brands, right?


So as they connect up, make these semantic associations between words and phrases, between


topics between websites, they can then sort of say, you know what?


We think this site or this particular subfolder of this site or this tag or subdomain of this


site belongs here more than another site might.


So yes, it could be the case that Wikipedia is a more authoritative overall place, but


when it comes to the topic of best granola or healthy granola, you know what?


We're going to put eat this supermarkets near the top.


Number five, visuals and non-text content.


I could mean, you know, you could talk about video or audio or interactive elements or


tools, calculators, all that type of stuff.


Google can look at those features and start to associate them with something.


If you search for, for example, mortgage rates or calculate my loan or population density


by state, Google may be looking for those interactive tools or elements.


Likewise, if you're searching for the name of a song, Google might say, hey, you know


what?


We should look for pages that contain video or audio.


If you're looking for a particular topic that Google is associated with, podcasts, they


may try and pull back audio content.


So all of those kinds of things can also play a role in how your content is evaluated.


Number six, this one is unusual, but Google has talked about it actually publicly last


year.


They did a whole piece with NPR around how they may look for truthfulness, accuracy,


and validity of information in content.


In order to do that, they have a subset of sites that they know and trust, that they


pull data from, and they establish these knowledge components like, yes, we know that climate


change is real and that it's manmade.


We want to make sure that when people are searching for things like, is climate change


real or are humans the cause of climate change, we want to make sure that we actually return


accurate results, not necessarily the most popular results.


You can imagine there are people who don't believe in the science of it, and therefore


they influence the search results by linking to different things, that sort of stuff.


So that bubbles to the top.


Maybe it's very hot right now.


It's election season in the United States, for those of you who have been in a cave on


Mars with your fingers in your ears.


I don't blame you.


That could be the case where Google has actually said with certain types of queries – I don't


know that best granola brands would fall under this, but they call them YMYL or your money


or your life types of queries.


This is things like filing for your taxes or knowing how much exercise to get or checking


in on a medical condition and researching those types of things.


In those cases, Google has said we need very accurate information.


We need it to be verifiable.


And so they may look at the content and say, gosh, this is probably not the case, like


I said, with granola, but 18Rabbits granola, we have looked in our database of content


and nobody else says that it has 280 calories.


At least none of the sites that we trust say that it has 280 calories per serving.


Therefore we're going to stop trusting this particular resource and push it down in the


rankings and push up something else that matches against the knowledge that we think we have


from the trusted sites.


This could be very important if you're trying to rank for these YMYL types of queries.


Who knows?


In the future it could extend to other types of things, maybe even the world of granola


calorie counting.


Last one we'll talk about today – this is certainly not completely comprehensive,


but we'll talk about it today – is phrase and sentence structure evaluation.


So Google has talked about this very publicly with regards to RankBrain recently, where


they talk about RankBrain interpreting a query, essentially saying, hey, best granola brands


we know from that that you're looking for particular types of information.


You probably want a listing of multiple granola brands, not just one.


You're probably looking for some sort of evaluation criteria.


We know that you are looking for brand names of granola, not particular recipes of granola.


So they do query interpretation, and they're very intelligent about being able to parse


that.


They're also very intelligent about being able to parse out sentence meanings.


So in this case, for example, let's say I did a search for sugar-free, best sugar-free


granola brands.


Now Google might in the past have said, oh, you know what?


This resource contains the word sugar.


It has a bunch of mentions of sugar, and it has a few mentions of sugar-free types of


granola, and so therefore we're going to rank it, as opposed to saying, wait a minute.


I think they're looking specifically for a list of granola brands with no sugar in them


at all, and therefore we need a different resource for this.


A Google representative used the example of how to complete Super Mario Brothers without


a cheat code or something like that, or without skipping a level, that kind of thing.


These types of query interpretations on the search side and then on the content side can


both be happening in Google's evaluation of content.


Like I said, this is not everything that Google looks at, but these are a bunch of more advanced


types of ways that Google can be analyzing content than what we might ordinarily think


of.


If we're looking at content that we've produced and we say, gosh, it's got a lot of links,


it's doing good keyword targeting, but it doesn't seem to rank.


What am I missing?


You probably could think about adding these content evaluation factors that Google is


almost certainly looking at, as well as others, to your list of things to try and determine


why you might not be ranking how you could rank better.


All right, everyone.


I hope you've enjoyed this, and we'll see you again next week for another edition of


Whiteboard Friday.


The 3 Easiest Link Building Tactics Any Website Can Use to Acquire Their First 50 Links - WBF

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


This week we're going to chat about how to get those first few links that every website


needs to be able to compete.


And many folks I know, when you get started with link building, it can seem daunting and


overwhelming.


So let me walk you through what is essentially a half a day of work, maybe three or four


hours of work to try these three tactics that will almost certainly get your business or


your organization the first handful, let's say 50 links that you need to start being


able to compete.


Content can take you a long way, keywords can take you a long way, engagement and interaction


take you a long way, but you got to have a base of links.


So let's get started here.


First one is basically looking for links that will help, that come from your own name, your


brand name, your domain name potentially, and the names of the founders or people who


run your company.


And essentially what you're doing is you're going to search Google for the names in quotes.


So if it was me and Moz, right, you'd be searching for Rand Fishkin or Moz.com in quotes, not


the domain name in the URL field, right, but in the Google search bar I'd be searching


for Moz.com in quotes or Moz plus SEO.


Moz also has other meanings including the singer Morrissey, which makes for confusing


types of things.


If you have that, you'll need to use your brand name plus some sort of signifier or


identifier.


It's very rare that Morrissey gets mentioned along with search engine optimization.


It's very often that Moz gets mentioned along with SEO and so I can combine those to search


room.


So any of these searches will result in a big list of tons of Google results and then


I'm going to manually check the top, let's say 50 to 100 results and I'm trying to confirm


three things.


One, that they link to the right place and if they don't, right, if there are mentions


of Rand Fishkin that don't link to Moz, we should fix that, right, we're going to contact


those people.


If you can control the anchor text and where the link location points, you can update it.


For example, I can go to my LinkedIn.


My LinkedIn has a link to Moz.


I can update that, right, if I were at a different company or if Moz's domain name changed, for


example, when it did change from SEO Moz to just Moz.


And if it's missing or wrong, I find the right people, I email them and I fix it and as a


result, I should have something like this.


Every single mention in Google has a link on the page to my website and I can get that


from brand name, from domain name and from founders and executives.


That's a lot of great links.


Second, sites that list your competition.


So this is essentially saying we're going to identify your top five or ten most visible


on the web competitors and this is a process that you can go through on your own to identify,


well, these are the five or ten that we see on the web very frequently for searches that


we wish we competed for or we see them mentioned in the press a ton, whatever it is.


Step two, you're going to search Google not for each one individually but rather for combinations,


usually two, three or four of them all together.


For example, if I were making a new whiteboard pen company, I would look for the existing


ones like Pilot and Expo and Quartet and PandaBoard.


I might search for Pilot and PandaBoard first, then I might search for Pilot and Expo, then


I might search for PandaBoard and Quartet, right?


And all these various combinations of these different ones, right?


And then I would, step three, visit any sites that show up in the Google search results


that list multiple competitors in any sort of format that's like a directory structure


or a comparison of multiple ones or a list format, right?


And then in each of those cases, I would submit or I would try and contact or get in touch


with whoever runs that list and say, hey, my company, my organization also belongs on


here because like these other ones you've listed, we do the same thing, right?


So if it's here's whiteboard pen brands, Expo, PandaBoard, Quartet and your site, which should


now link to yoursite.com.


This is a little more challenging.


You won't have as high a hit rate as you will with your own brand names.


But again, great way to expand your link portfolio.


You can usually almost always get, you know, 20, 30 different sites that are listing people


in your field and get on those lists.


Third one, similar to our second one, this is sites that list people or organizations


in a particular field, a particular region with particular attributes or some combination


of those three, right?


So they're saying here are, you know, European based whiteboard pen manufacturers or European


based manufacturers who were founded by women, right?


And so you can say, aha, that's a unique attribute, that's a geography and that's my field.


I'm in manufacturing, I'm a whiteboard pens, you know, we were our co-founder was a woman


and we are in Europe.


So therefore we count in all three of those, we should be on that list.


And you're looking for lists like these, which might not list your competitors, but are high


quality opportunities to get good links.


So first thing you need to do is list your organization's areas of operation, right?


So that would be like we are in technology or we're in manufacturing or software or services


or we're a utility or we're finance tech or whatever we are, right?


And you can start from macro and go down to micro at each of those levels.


Then you're going to list your geography in the same format from macro to micro.


You want to go, you know, as broad as continent, for example, Europe, right?


Down to country, region, county, city, even neighborhood.


There are websites that lists, you know, oh, well, these are startups that are based in,


you know, Ballard, Seattle, Washington in the United States, in North America.


So you go, okay, I can fit in there.


And then you want to list your unique attributes.


Were you founded by someone whose attributes are different than normal, right?


So Moz was obviously my co-founder was my mom, Jillian, right?


So Moz is a co-founded by a woman company.


Are you eco-friendly, right?


Maybe you buy carbon credits to offset, or maybe you have a very eco-friendly energy


policy, or you have committed to donating to charity like Salesforce has, or you have


an all remote team, or maybe you're very GLBTQIA friendly, or you have a very generous family


leave policy.


Whatever interesting attributes there are about you, you can list those and then you


can combine them and search.


In step two, search Google for lists of businesses or websites or organizations that have some


of these attributes in your region or with your focus.


For example, Washington State venture backed companies, right?


Moz is a venture backed company, so I could potentially get on that list.


Or the EU based manufacturing companies started by women, and I could get on that list with


my whiteboard pen company base there.


And you can find lots and lots of these if you sort of take from your list, start searching


Google and discover those results, and you'll use the same process you did here.


You know what the great thing about all three of these is?


No tools required.


You don't have to pay for a single tool, you don't have to worry about domain authority,


you don't have to worry about any sort of link qualification process or paying for something


expensive.


You can do this manually by yourself with Google as your only tool, and that will get


you some of those first early links.


If you've got additional suggestions, please leave them down in the comments.


Look forward to chatting with you there.


Daily SEO Fix: Prioritize Crawl Issues

Hey everyone, my name is Zach Hendricks and I'm on the account manager team here at Moz.


Daily SEO Fix: Prioritize Crawl Issues

I'm here today to walk you through our daily SEO fix for prioritizing website crawl issues.


Daily SEO Fix: Prioritize Crawl Issues

You may already be aware of certain crawl issues within your site, redirect chains,


Daily SEO Fix: Prioritize Crawl Issues

duplicate content, missing tags, anything our site crawl can detect.


Daily SEO Fix: Prioritize Crawl Issues

But how do you know which pages to prioritize when you're ready to begin fixing these issues?


Daily SEO Fix: Prioritize Crawl Issues

Let me show you how to do this in Moz Pro.


Daily SEO Fix: Prioritize Crawl Issues

Within a Moz Pro campaign, you can use the filters in SiteCrawl and an exported CSV to


Daily SEO Fix: Prioritize Crawl Issues

prioritize page issues in a few different ways.


Daily SEO Fix: Prioritize Crawl Issues

In the All Crawled Pages section, you can see a full list of URLs that Rogerbot, the


Daily SEO Fix: Prioritize Crawl Issues

Moz crawler for Moz Pro, was able to find and crawl on your site.


Daily SEO Fix: Prioritize Crawl Issues

Then you can filter the list so that you're only seeing pages where we've detected crawl


Daily SEO Fix: Prioritize Crawl Issues

issues by clicking on the Has Issues box just above the full list.


Daily SEO Fix: Prioritize Crawl Issues

After that, you can click Export to CSV and let the download start while we begin sorting


Daily SEO Fix: Prioritize Crawl Issues

within the tool itself.


Daily SEO Fix: Prioritize Crawl Issues

You can sort these pages by the number of issues it has, which will help you prioritize


Daily SEO Fix: Prioritize Crawl Issues

the URLs that need the most attention first.


Daily SEO Fix: Prioritize Crawl Issues

Or you can sort by page authority, which will help you prioritize the URLs with the highest


Daily SEO Fix: Prioritize Crawl Issues

likelihood of ranking according to Moz.


Daily SEO Fix: Prioritize Crawl Issues

After your CSV download is complete, you can sort the sheet by link count to prioritize


Daily SEO Fix: Prioritize Crawl Issues

the URLs with the most external links pointing to them.


Daily SEO Fix: Prioritize Crawl Issues

Within the sheet, you can also cross-reference those highly linked pages with the pages you


Daily SEO Fix: Prioritize Crawl Issues

already know have a high number of issues and or a high page authority.


Daily SEO Fix: Prioritize Crawl Issues

When you know which URLs you'd like to prioritize, jump back into Moz Pro, click on the magnifying


Daily SEO Fix: Prioritize Crawl Issues

glass under the Analyze column in SiteCrawl to investigate the issues that exist on those


Daily SEO Fix: Prioritize Crawl Issues

pages and find out more information about how to fix them.


Daily SEO Fix: Prioritize Crawl Issues

That's where your real work begins.


Daily SEO Fix: Prioritize Crawl Issues

And then finally, once you've handled the issues for a particular URL, you can come


Daily SEO Fix: Prioritize Crawl Issues

back into Moz Pro, mark it as fixed, or you can choose to ignore or dismiss the issue.


Daily SEO Fix: Prioritize Crawl Issues

So thank you for joining me today for this SEO Daily Fix.


Daily SEO Fix: Prioritize Crawl Issues

If you're new to Moz, you can sign up for a 30-day free trial.


Daily SEO Fix: Prioritize Crawl Issues

If you want to explore more about what Moz Pro has to offer, you can also book a one-on-one


Daily SEO Fix: Prioritize Crawl Issues

walkthrough with someone on our onboarding team.


Daily SEO Fix: Prioritize Crawl Issues


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

Happy Friday, Moz fans, and today's topic is Cruel Budget.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

I think it's worth saying right off the bat that this is somewhat of a more advanced topic


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

or one that applies primarily to larger websites.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

I think even if that's not you, there is still a lot you can learn from this in terms of


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

SEO theory that comes about when you're looking at some of the tactics you might employ or


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

some of the diagnostics you might employ for a cruel budget.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

But in Google's own documentation, they suggest that you should care about cruel budget if


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

you have more than a million pages or more than 10,000 pages that are updated on a daily


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

basis.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

I think those are obviously kind of hard or arbitrary thresholds.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

I would say that if you have issues with your site getting indexed, pages deep on your site


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

just not getting into the index that you want to, or if you have issues with pages not getting


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

indexed quickly enough, then in either of those cases, cruel budget is an issue that


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

you should care about.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

So what actually is cruel budget?


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

Cruel budget refers to the amount of time that Google is willing to spend crawling a


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

given site.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

Now, they have, although it seems like Google is sort of all powerful, they have finite


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

resources and the web is vast.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

So they have to prioritize somehow and allocate a certain amount of time or resource to crawl


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

a given website.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

Now, they prioritize based on, or so they say, they prioritize based on the popularity


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

of sites with their users and based on the freshness of content because Googlebot sort


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

has a thirst for new, never before seen URLs.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

We're not really going to talk in this video about how to increase your cruel budget.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

We're going to focus on how to make the best use of the cruel budget you have, which is


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

generally an easier lever to pull in any case.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

So how do issues with cruel budget actually come about?


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

Now, I think the main sort of issues on sites that can lead to cruel budget problems are


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

firstly facets.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

So you can imagine on an e-comm site, imagine we've got a laptops page, we might be able


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

to filter that by size, a 15 inch screen and 16 gigabytes of RAM.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

And there might be a lot of different permutations there that could lead to a very large number


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

of URLs when actually we've only got one page or one category as we think about it, the


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

laptops page.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

And similarly, those could then be reordered to create other URLs that do the exact same


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

thing, but have to be separately crawled.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

Similarly they might be sorted differently, there might be pagination and so on and so


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

forth.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

So you could have one category page generating a vast number of URLs.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

A few other things that often come about are search results pages from internal site search


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

can often, especially if they're paginated, they can have a lot of different URLs generated.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

And listings pages.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

If you allow users to upload their own listings or content, then that can over time build


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

up to be an enormous number of URLs.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

If you think about a job board or something like eBay, it probably has a huge number of


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

pages.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

So what are some of the tools that you can use to address these issues and to get the


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

most out of your core budget?


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

So as a baseline, if we think about how a normal URL behaves with Googlebot, we say,


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

yes, it can be crawled, yes, it can be indexed, and yes, it passes page rank.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

So a URL like these, if I link to these somewhere on my site, and then Google follows that link,


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

it index these pages, these probably still have the top nav and the site wide navigation


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

on them.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

So the link activity that's passed through to these pages will be sort of recycled around.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

There'll be some losses through to dilution when we're linking through so many different


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

pages and so many different filters.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

But ultimately, we are recycling this, there's no sort of black hole loss of leaky page rank.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

Now at the opposite extreme, the most extreme sort of solution to crawl budget that you


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

can employ is the robots.txt file.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

So if you block a page in robots.txt, then it can't be crawled.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

So great, problem solved.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

Well, no, because there are some compromises here.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

Technically pages blocked in robots.txt can be indexed.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

You sometimes see page showing up in the SERPs with this meta description cannot be shown


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

because the page is blocked in robots.txt or this kind of message.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

So technically they can be indexed, but functionally they're not going to run for anything or at


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

least something competitive.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

So yeah, well sort of technically.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

Crucially they do not pass page rank.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

So we've created, we're still passing page rank through when we link into a page like


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

this, but if it's then blocked in robots.txt, the page rank goes no further.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

So we've created a leak, a black hole.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

So this is quite a heavy handed solution, although it is easy to implement.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

Link level nofollow.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

So by this I mean if we took our links on the main laptop's category page that were


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

pointing to these facets and we put a nofollow attribute internally on those links, that


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

would have some advantages and disadvantages.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

I think a better use case for this would actually be more on the listings case.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

So imagine if we run a used car website where we have millions of different used car individual


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

sort of product listings.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

Now we don't really want Google to be wasting its time on these individual listings, depending


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

on the scale of our site perhaps, but occasionally a celebrity might upload their car or something


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

like that or a very rare car might be uploaded and that will start to get media links.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

So we don't want to block that page in robots.txt because that's external links that we would


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

be squandering in that case.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

So what we might do is on our internal links to that page, we might internally nofollow


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

the link.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

So that would mean that it can be crawled but only if Google finds it in some other


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

way, so through an external link or something like that.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

So we sort of have a halfway house here.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

Now technically nofollow these days is a hint.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

In my experience Google will not crawl pages that are only linked to, through an internal


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

nofollow.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

If it finds the page in some other way obviously it will still crawl it.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

But generally speaking this can be effective as a way of restricting crawl budget, or I


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

should say more efficiently using crawl budget.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

The page can still be indexed, that's what we were trying to achieve in that example,


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

right?


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

And it can still pass page rank, that's the other thing we were trying to achieve.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

Although you are still losing some page rank through this nofollowed link, that still counts


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

as a link, so you are losing some page rank that would otherwise have been piped into


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

a followed link.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

Noindex nofollow, so this is obviously a very common solution for pages like these on ecomm


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

sites.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

Now in this case the page can be crawled, but once Google gets to that page it will


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

discover it's noindex and it will crawl it much, much less over time because there's


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

sort of less point in crawling a noindex page.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

So again we have sort of a halfway house here.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

Obviously it can't be indexed, it's noindex.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

And it doesn't pass page rank outwards.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

Page rank is still passed into this page because it's got a nofollow in the head section, it


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

doesn't pass page rank outwards.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

This isn't a great solution and we've got some compromises that we've had to achieve


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

here to economize on crawl budget.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

So a lot of people used to think, oh well the solution to that would be to use a noindexfollow


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

as a sort of best of both.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

So we put a noindexfollow tag in the head section of one of these pages and oh yeah


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

everyone's a winner because we still get the same sort of crawling benefit, we're still


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

not indexing this sort of near duplicate page which we don't want to index, but the page


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

rank solution is fixed, right?


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

Well a few years ago Google came out and said, oh well we didn't realize this ourselves,


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

but actually as we crawl this page less and less over time we will stop seeing the link


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

and then it kind of won't count.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

So they sort of implied that this no longer worked as a way of still passing page rank


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

and eventually it would come to be treated as noindex, nofollow.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

So again we have a sort of slightly compromised solution there.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

Now the true best of all worlds might then be canonical, right?


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

Because the canonical tag, it's still going to get crawled a bit less over time, the canonical


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

ized version, great.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

And it's still not going to be indexed, the canonicalized version, great.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

And it still passes page rank.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

So that seems great, that seems perfect in a lot of cases.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

But this only works if the pages are near enough duplicates that Google is willing to


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

consider them a duplicate and respect the canonical.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

If they're not willing to consider them a duplicate then you might have to go back to


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

using a noindex.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

Or if you think actually there's no reason for this URL to even exist.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

I don't know how this ROM order combination came about but it seems pretty pointless.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

I'm not going to link to it anymore.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

But in case some people still find the URL somehow we could use a 301, right, as a sort


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

of economy that is going to perform pretty well eventually for, I'd say, even better


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

than canonical and noindex for saving crawl budget because Google doesn't even have to


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

look at the page.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

On the rare occasion it does check it because it just follows a 301.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

It's going to solve our indexing issue and it's going to pass page rank.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

But obviously the tradeoff here is users also can't access this URL so we have to be okay


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

with that.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

So rounding all this up, how would we actually employ these tactics?


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

What are the activities that I would recommend if you want to have a crawl budget project?


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

One of the less intuitive ones is speed.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

Like I said earlier, Google is sort of allocating an amount of time or amount of resource to


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

crawl a given site.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

So if your site is very fast, if you have low server response times, if you have lightweight


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

HTML, they will simply get through more pages in the same amount of time.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

So this counterintuitively is a great way to approach this.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

Log analysis, this is more traditional.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

Often it's quite unintuitive which pages on your site or which parameters are actually


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

sapping all of your crawl budget.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

Log analysis on larger sites often yields surprising results.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

So that's something you might have to consider.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

And then actually employing some of these tools.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

So yeah, redundant URLs that we don't think users even need to look at, we can 301.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

Variants that users do need to look at.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

We could look at a canonical or a noindex tag.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

But we also might want to avoid linking to them in the first place so that we're not


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

sort of losing some degree of page rank into those canonicalized or noindex variants through


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

dilution or through a dead end.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

Robots.txt and nofollow, as I sort of implied as I was going through it, these are tactics


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

that you would want to use very sparingly because they do create these page rank dead ends.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

And then lastly, a sort of recent or more interesting tip that I got a while back from


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

an Oli HG Mason blog post, which I'll probably link to below.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

It turns out that if you have a sitemap on your site that you only use for fresh or recent


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

URLs, recently changed URLs, then because Googlebot has such a thirst, like I said,


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

for fresh content, they will start crawling this sitemap very often.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

So you can sort of use this tactic to direct crawl budget towards the new URLs, which sort


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

of everyone wins, right?


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

Googlebot only wants to see the fresh URLs.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

You perhaps only want Googlebot to see the fresh URLs.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

So if you have a sitemap that only serves that purpose, then everyone wins.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

And that can be quite a nice sort of easy tip to implement.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

So that's all.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

I hope you found that useful.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday

If not, feel free to let me know your tips or challenges on Twitter.


Crawl Budget — Whiteboard Friday


Pop Ups, Overlays, Modals - Whiteboard Friday

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


This week we're chatting about pop-ups, overlays, modals, interstitials, and all things like


them.


They have specific kinds of interactions with SEO.


In addition to Google having some guidelines around them, they also can change how people


interact with your website, and that can adversely or positively affect you accomplishing your


goals, SEO and otherwise.


Let's walk through what these elements, these design and UX elements do, how they work,


and best practices for how we should be thinking about them and how they might interfere with


our SEO efforts.


So first up, let's talk specifically about what each element is.


A pop-up, now, okay, there's a few kinds.


There's pop-ups that happen in new windows.


New window pop-ups are basically new window, no good.


Google hates those.


They are fundamentally against them.


Many browsers will stop them automatically.


Chrome does.


Firefox does.


In fact, users despise these as well.


There are still some spammy and sketchy sites out there that use them, but generally speaking,


bad news.


When we're talking about a pop-up that happens in the same browser window, essentially it's


just a visual element, that's often also referred to as an overlay.


So we're going to call it, for the purposes of this Wipeout Friday, we'll call that an


overlay.


An overlay is basically like this, where you have the page's content and there's some smaller


element, a piece, a box, a window, a visual of some kind that comes up and that essentially


says, maybe it says, sign up for my email newsletter, and then there's a place to enter


your email, or get my book now, and you click that and get the book.


Those types of overlays are pretty common on the web and they do not create quite the


same problems that pop-ups do, at least from Google's perspective.


However, we'll talk about those later, there are some issues around them, especially with


mobile.


Modals tend to be windows of interaction, tend to be more elements of use.


So light boxes for images is a very popular modal.


A modal is something where you are doing work inside that new box rather than in the content


that's underneath it.


So a sign-in form that overlays, that pops up over the rest of the content, but that


doesn't allow you to engage with this content underneath it, that would be considered a


modal.


Generally, most of the time, these aren't a problem unless they are something like spam


or advertising or something that's taking you out of the user experience.


And then finally, interstitials are essentially, and many of these can also be called interstitial


experiences, but a classic interstitial is something like what Forbes.com does, right?


When you visit Forbes, an article for the first time, you get this, welcome, our sponsor


of the day is, you know, Brondo, Brondo, it has what plants need.


And then you can continue after a certain number of seconds.


These really piss people off, myself included.


I really hate the interstitial experience.


I understand that it's an advertising thing, but yeah, Google hates them too.


Not quite enough to kick Forbes out of their SERPs entirely yet, but you know, fingers


crossed it'll happen sometime soon.


They've certainly removed plenty of other folks who have gone with invasive or overly


heavy interstitials over the years and made those pretty tough.


Okay, so what are the factors that matter for SEO?


Well, it turns out timing is a big one.


So when the element appears matters.


Basically, if the element shows up initially upon page load, they will consider it differently


than if it shows up after a few minutes.


So for example, if you have a, you know, sign up now overlay that pops up the second you


visit the page, that's going to be treated differently than something that happens when


you're 80 percent or you've just finished scrolling through an entire blog post.


That will get treated very differently or may have no effect actually on how Google


treats the SEO, and then it really comes down to how users do.


And then how long does it last as well?


So interstitials, especially those advertising interstitials, there's some issues governing


that with people like Forbes.


There's also some issues around an overlay that can't be closed and how long a window


can pop up, especially if it shows advertising and those types of things.


Generally speaking, obviously, shorter is better.


But you can get into trouble even with very short ones.


Interaction, can that element easily be closed, right?


And does it interfere with the content or readability?


So Google's new mobile guidelines, I think as of just a few months ago, now state that


an overlay or a modal or something interferes with a visitor's ability to read the actual


content on the page.


Google may penalize those or remove their mobile-friendly tags and remove any mobile-friendly


benefit.


That's obviously quite concerning for SEO.


And then content.


So there's an exception or an exclusion to a lot of Google's rules around this, which


is if you have an element that is essentially asking for the user's age or asking for some


form of legal consent or giving a warning about cookies, which is very popular in the


EU, of course, and the UK because of the legal requirements around saying, hey, this website


uses cookies and you have to agree to it, those kinds of things, that actually gets


around Google's issues.


So Google will not give you a hard time if you have an overlay, interstitial or a modal


that says, are you of legal drinking age in your country?


Enter your birth date to continue.


They will not necessarily penalize those types of things.


Advertising, on the other hand, advertising could get you into more trouble, as we've


discussed.


If it's a call to action for the website itself, again, that can be considered, that could


go either way.


And if it's part of the user experience, generally you are just fine there, meaning something


like a modal where you get to a website and then you say, hey, I want to leave a comment


and so there's a modal that makes you log in, right, that type of a modal.


Or you click on an image and it shows you a larger version of that image in a modal.


Again, no problem, that's part of the user experience.


Conditions matter as well.


So if it is triggered from SERP visits versus not, meaning that if you have an exclusionary


protocol in your interstitial, your overlay, your modal that says, hey, if someone's visiting


from Google, don't show this to them, or someone's visiting from Bing, someone's visiting from


DuckDuckGo, don't show this to them, that can change how the search engines perceive


it as well.


It's also the case that this can change if you only showed a cookied or logged in or


logged out types of users.


Now, logged out types of users means that everyone from a search engine could or will


get it.


So for logged in users, for example, you can imagine that if you visit a page on a social


media site and there's a modal that includes or an overlay that includes some notification


around activity that you've already been performing on the site, now that becomes more a part


of the user experience, that's not necessarily going to harm you.


Where it can hurt is the other way around where you get visitors from search engines,


they are logged out and you require them to log in before seeing the content.


Quora had a big issue with this for a long time, and they seem to have mostly resolved


that through a variety of measures, and they're fairly sophisticated about it.


But you can see that Facebook still struggles with this because a lot of their content,


they demand that you log in before you can ever view or access it, and that does keep


some of their results out of Google, or certainly ranking lower.


And then finally, the engagement impact, I think this is what Google is ultimately trying


to measure and what they're trying to essentially say, hey, this is why we have these issues


around this, which is if you are hurting the click-through rate or you're hurting pogo


sticking, meaning that more people are clicking onto your website from Google and then immediately


clicking the back button when one of these things appears, that is a sign to Google that


you have provided a poor user experience, that people are not willing to jump through


whatever hoop you've created for them to get access to your content, and that suggests


they don't want to get there.


So this is sort of the ultimate thing that you should be measuring.


Some of these can still hurt you even if these are okay, but this is the big one.


So some best practices around using all these types of elements on your website.


I would strongly urge you to avoid elements that are significantly harming UX.


If you're willing to take a small sacrifice in user experience in exchange for a great


deal of value because you capture people's email addresses or you get more engagement


of other different kinds, okay, but this would be something I'd watch.


There are three or four metrics that I'd urge you to check out to compare whether this is


doing the right thing, and those are bounce rate, browse rate, return visitor rates, meaning


the percentage of people who come back to your site again and again, and time on site


after the element appears.


So those four will help tell you whether you are truly interfering badly with user experience.


On mobile, ensure that your crucial content is not covered up, right, that the reading


experience, the browsing experience isn't covered up by one of these elements.


Please, whatever you do, make those elements easy and obvious to dismiss.


This is part of Google's guidelines around it, but it's also best practice, and it will


certainly help your user experience metrics.


Only choose to keep one of these elements if you are finding that the sacrifice, and


there's almost always a sacrifice cost, right, like you will hurt bounce rate or browse rate


or return visitor rate or time on site, you will hurt it.


The question is, is it a slight enough hurt in exchange for enough gain, right, and that's


that trade-off that you need to decide whether it's worth it.


I think if you are hurting visitor interaction by a few seconds on average per visit, but


you are getting 5% of your visitors to give you an email address, that's probably worth


it.


If it's more like 30 seconds and 1%, maybe not as good, right?


Consider removing the elements from triggering if the visit comes from search engines.


So if you're finding that this works fine and great, but you're having issues around


search guidelines, you could consider potentially just removing the element from any visit that


comes directly from a search engine and instead placing that in the content itself or letting


it happen on a second page load, assuming that your browse rate is decently high.


That's a fine way to go as well.


If you're trying to get the most effective value out of these types of elements, it tends


to be the case that the less common and less well used the visual element is, the more


interaction and engagement it's going to get.


But that can also have the other side of that coin, right, is that it can create a more


frustrating experience.


So if people are not familiar with the overlay or modal or interstitial visual layout design


that you've chosen, they may engage more with it, right?


They might not dismiss it out of hand because they're not used to it yet, but they can


also get more frustrated by it.


So again, return to looking at those metrics.


With that in mind, hopefully you will effectively and not too harmfully to your SEO be able


to use these pop-ups, overlays, interstitials, modals, and all other forms of elements that


interfere with user experience.


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


How to Build a Global Brand Without a Global Budget

There are very few truly brilliant people whose hearts are just as big as their brains.


Phil Nottingham is one of those people.


You can count on just about any of Phil's friends and total strangers to have an inspiring


story about how Phil has generously helped them in big and meaningful ways.


He does this quietly and without any expected return.


But these stories are truly echoed all around the world.


I have heard Phil stories that he's helped people in Bali, all over the UK, and over


in Prague.


So talk about building a global brand without a global budget.


Phil has done that 10 times over.


So please join me in welcoming the one, the only video and brand marketing strategist,


Phil Nottingham.


At every conference I go to, the story is always the same.


The funnel is broken.


This idea that we can market to people, to consumers or businesses by trying to drive


them through a linear journey, which ends up in purchase, just doesn't really work anymore.


Because things like GDPR means that all tracking is double opt in and we can't necessarily


keep hold of all people and measure exactly what their interactions are.


With DarkSocial, a lot of conversations are happening on places like WhatsApp and Messenger


where we can't see the conversations that consumers are having with one another.


And the dominance of Facebook and Google controlling ever more of the digital ecosystem means that


unless we're paying money to Google and Facebook, we often can't reach our particular customers


to communicate with them themselves.


So this idea of the funnel is increasingly causing us a lot of problems.


And the answer to this is often cited that we need to market for preference rather than


conversion.


So in a world where we can't think about driving people through a conversion funnel, we need


to start to build up that reputation that makes consumers want to go to us directly.


In other words, we need to build a brand.


And every conference is now, you know what, the way to really future-proof your marketing,


the way to really stand out for the long term is to build a brand.


But I've always sat there, I'm sure many of you have, and thought, okay, how?


How do I, as somebody working for maybe a small or a medium business, without the resources


of the Nikes and the Adidas and the people who can do these huge, great big Super Bowl


ad type campaigns, how can I actually build a brand in a similar way?


And it's a hard question, but I'm here today because I think I've worked it out and I want


to share the answer with you.


For the last few years, I've been working with a company called Wistia, and we're a


video hosting company in the software B2B space.


And I've also worked with a bunch of other companies to sort of help them work out how


to use their marketing to better build a brand.


And I'm going to show you some of my findings.


So first of all, what have we been doing wrong?


And I think the way in which we currently try to build a brand is causing the problems.


So what we currently do is as follows.


We'll start by trying to make sure that we create a great customer experience.


So we will invest in amazing support, sales, make a beautiful, easy to use website, and


hope that this helps us stand out.


And this is great, but the problem is that a good website is now a commodity that everybody


can have.


And good sales and good support teams are sort of table stakes for just competing these


days rather than a way of really making yourself stand out.


So you really can't differentiate with customer experience.


Okay, well, when we've done that, most of us then say, we've built this really great


website.


We've done all our kind of core technical SEO.


We've really got to the stage where we can now start to build our reputation, our brand.


So then we start to go towards things like blogging.


We'll start to write loads and loads of posts.


We'll start to create more and more content, hiring writers and doing that kind of stuff.


And again, this can work and it can be really helpful, but it's increasingly less effective


with 600 million blogs out there.


It's very, very hard to stand out.


And also, walls of text don't necessarily help you convey personality, particularly


wealth.


One of the key ingredients of brand is of course, personality.


It may help you as a writer stand out as an individual to explain your thinking, but it


doesn't necessarily help you as a brand craft your identity.


So next we think about maybe we need to start doing PR.


That's the way we're going to really help build a brand and stand out through that.


So we will probably engage an agency and we'll do big campaigns and we'll try and come up


with a social change or we'll try and tag ourselves onto an existing happening in the


world and try and make our story front and center through the conversations consumers


are having.


But again, the problem with this is that it can work, but it's extremely high risk and


very unreliable.


The majority of PR campaigns do not lead to an amazing way of building a brand.


That happens very, very rarely.


So to treat this as a strategy, your strategy being we are going to be the 0.01% that do


it is not necessarily very reliable or effective.


So then what we tend to do once we've maybe done a bit of PR is then think, well, let's


try and build up our reputation on social media.


Social media is obviously where a lot of conversations are happening.


It's where brands can be built.


It's where we can start to converse with people.


So we will create short, snackable videos usually, do some images, do fun things that


help us be part of the conversation on social media.


And this, again, can work slightly, but has some problems because social media doesn't


necessarily help people with the brand.


And just because something does very well on social media doesn't necessarily mean that


it's helping you drive that central preference and consumer relation with your particular


brand.


If we think about the way social media is measured, often it's with these three categories.


We have things like applause, which basically means the number of people clicking like or


favoriting a tweet.


We have conversation, the number of people commenting or replying to a post.


And then amplification, the number of people sharing it themselves.


And we'll often measure this in aggregated metrics that are then used relatively.


So we'll try and measure over time our like rate and our comments and our shares as amplification


rate, applause rate, conversation rate.


And we'll download these kind of reports often from social media measurement tools.


And we'll then try and track this over time to see if we're doing any better.


But of course, the problem is that we'll end up working with a media agency and getting


a report that says something quite impressive, like, we did this campaign and we saw a 35%


increase in brand amplification.


Sounds great.


The problem is what this actually often means in reality is that this campaign just had


a few more shares than it did last year.


And so these relative measurements trying to be constantly relevant on social media


is not necessarily helping us.


And it's not necessarily a good benchmark in any meaningful sense of our brand.


Additionally, actually going viral on social media doesn't necessarily help people on the


brand at all.


This was a video that we launched at Wistia a couple of years ago.


And this particular video did really, really well.


It got the 100,000 shares and lots and lots of people were liking it.


And it was a sort of video about this Snapchat hot dog filter.


So it was kind of relevant and speaking to the community and the audience about the things


that they cared about.


Did it do anything for our traffic or our brand search or our otherwise reputation?


The performance was only visible on Facebook and Twitter where it did well.


And everywhere else, it just didn't seem to translate into any meaningful value.


And this is the sad truth.


Social media marketing can be valuable, but it's not necessarily a great or primary avenue


for brand building.


And going viral does not necessarily help build a brand.


So once we've done some social media, so we've got all these covered, what we'll then try


and do is, of course, invest in the big kahuna in some advertising.


And we'll try and invest in great creative that pushes out our message to tell key stories.


But again, there's major problems with treating digital advertising as the main way in which


you're going to build a brand.


If we think about the way in which things work, this is what a view of a video looks


like on YouTube.


Here it comes and it's gone.


And we are spending a fortune buying loads and loads of these and hoping that this will


help stand out.


Or hoping that maybe, again, we are that 001% that create an ad that people actually stop


and watch, that they actually stop and really engage with.


But basing strategy on being the 0.01% is not great odds.


On Facebook, again, we get the same.


Here's a view on Facebook.


Here comes the ad and it's gone.


Facebook's primarily mobile.


People are just watching on the phones.


They're scrolling through.


The average view is not more than a few seconds long.


So we're trying to build a brand basically through lots of these, through lots of just


200 response codes.


Just a browser loaded a video and it played it and that was that.


And of course, this is not necessarily that good or effective.


If we think of what a brand is, a brand is the way a company, organization or individual


is perceived by those who experience it.


And if you are just perceiving a few seconds of something over and over again, if you're


just perceiving a brief interaction over and over again, these quick touch points, lots


and lots of subliminal messaging, it's not really going to work.


This idea that we can build a brand through the impressions on an ad is a very outdated


one.


It was in the 60s when this was possibly likely that just because people were not seeing ads


all the time, the fact that you were standing out on Madison Avenue with your billboards


meant that a few more people might be able to relate to your business more than others.


But in a world where we're just bombarded with ads all the time, simply having digital


advertising does not make you stand out or help you make you build a brand.


No one has proved this.


There's no evidence.


It's just anecdotes and occasional instances where we are relying on an old and outdated


model of doing things because we don't feel like we have any alternatives.


The problem is that the number of impressions is not the number of people impressed.


We seem to be stuck in this Romeo and Juliet narrative where we imagine the consumers there


on the balcony saying, oh, brand, oh, brand, wherefore art thou brand?


And we're just out there as brands just say, yes, pick me, pick me, pick me.


We're trying to build love at first sight all the time with advertising.


Of course, this just doesn't work.


So digital advertising itself can be a very useful marketing tactic, which we'll get onto,


but it doesn't necessarily help make people like you.


It doesn't necessarily help in and of itself with building a brand.


It can do.


There's many counterexamples, but they are the few, not many.


The many, it's just wasted spend.


And in fact, you can see this if you go in to have a look at your particular analytics


on Facebook or YouTube, you'll see that if you really drill down into the data, Facebook


can't lie to you.


Your headline metrics will be something like this.


You'll see that the performance of a post that you did, a promoted post, huge numbers


of minutes to use, lots and lots of views, all this good stuff.


And then when you actually drill into it, you'll see that the vast majority of those


views are just dropping off in seconds.


It's just super, super quick and it's gone.


Because people are scrolling through, they're not watching the whole thing.


But Facebook have set their limits such that a three second view is really not very much.


And a 10 second view is actually anything that's between the three and the 10 and we're


just going to slightly hedge it.


So it looks more valuable than it is.


If you strip out all of these numbers that are just people who are clearly just scrolling


past on their phone, you'll see that in reality, you have far fewer views and a much less time


watch.


So you need to be very skeptical of these metrics.


You're asking the same people that we're giving the money to, to tell us how well it's performing.


So we're stuck in this kind of 50 billion collective delusion where we'll say, let's


give your Facebook money.


They're going to distribute our content for us.


We'll then ask them what they got for the money.


They tell us that it did so, so well.


Loads of loads of people watched it, but we should all spend a bit more money.


And then we believe them.


And we're just caught in this lovely cycle of doom where we just give all this money


to these huge corporations and don't actually necessarily get any value back.


And there's two concepts with Brand Build.


And we seem to be overly focused on the first, which is brand awareness.


So the two concepts are brand awareness and brand affinity.


So first of all, they know you.


And secondly, they like you.


And our current outdated model seems to be predicated on the idea of if we can just get


people to know us, if we can get people to see enough of us, then they'll also start


to like us.


But actually, in the modern world, I think we don't have to take this approach at all.


We can cut out this notion of brand awareness.


We can stop worrying about this idea of trying to get people to see us all the time and just


go straight for the thing that we really care about, brand affinity.


And this requires a new approach to content marketing.


So Receive Wisdom has always been that shorter videos are better for marketing.


People have short attention spans.


If you can get everything into a very short period of time, it's going to provide more


value and you'll have fewer people dropping off.


But I'm not so sure if that's true anymore.


Here is a video that we made for Wistia in 2017.


We decided, per the explanation that I gave earlier, we had got to that stage where we


were doing well on social media.


And we just decided, actually, here, what we need to do is to invest in some advertising


to grow our brand.


The metrics kind of flattened out, we knew that we needed to do something.


So we injected loads of money into a big ad campaign trying to compete with the big players.


And we spent about $2 million on different ads, a bunch of TVs and billboards, digital


stuff, of course, Facebook and YouTube, lots of it.


And we got about 43 million impressions on this particular campaign, which was around


putting faces on different everyday items and trying to be about expressing your company


more personally through video, to advertise our video hosting software.


And it completely failed.


And it just did nothing.


For the overall results that we got from this, the traffic was, we got a bit more traffic


from the campaign.


And that bit more traffic was about as much as if we posted a new particularly good blog


post.


So we spent $2 million on really what could have just been a better blog post.


Kind of sucked.


And so we were chatting with Adam Lisagor about this, who is the founder of a company


called Sandwich Video based down in LA.


This was back in 2017.


So we're saying, this kind of didn't work, you've made loads and loads of really good


ads for particular software companies.


Is there a way we could partner up and maybe explore doing something more creative?


And a few beers later, Chris Savage, the CEO of Wistia and Adam kind of got chatting and


came up with the idea of we could do three different ads, one for $1,000, one for $10,000,


one for $100,000 for the same product, and see kind of how that played out, see which


particular ads perform better, see what the creative process changed when you were having


these really restrictive budgets.


So we made these three ads.


This was one made with an iPhone and $1,000 for the total budget for the ad.


And then we also did one where we spent $10,000 on production.


And this was with a Canon C300 camera, sort of a more of a mid-range video.


And then lastly, a proper high-end commercial ad for $100,000 using a proper cinema camera


and Arri Amira.


So we kind of explored doing these three different levels, super bootstraps, kind of mid-range


and high-end to look at the difference in how it worked.


And the results were actually like this.


So the $1,000 video kind of in terms of the metrics we were measuring, which was cost


per install of our application, that was the main metric for success.


We saw that the best performing video was actually the 10K.


But there wasn't a lot in it overall.


Cost per install was much better.


But for the $100,000 and the $10,000, they were pretty equal.


And the cost per engaged view, somebody watching at least 25% of the video, was pretty similar


for all of them.


So fairly cheap.


So we then off the back of this thought, well, we've just created these ads.


And this was really helpful.


Why don't we document the process?


So concurrently with building the ads, we also created a documentary, basically, about


this whole process.


And this kind of just happened organically.


And we decided to then publish this as a long-form, big creative piece that really explored the


whole process of that more creative and strategic process we've just gone through to make these


three ads.


So we made a long-form movie, basically.


It's a 90-minute documentary.


And we launched this on our website.


It's called 1-7-100.


And we put it all up there.


And we had a goal for this particular campaign.


We thought, you know what?


This has been a big investment for us.


The whole creative team have just basically gone and spent several months building a long-form


piece of content.


If we can get 100,000 engaged views, that would be a really good return.


So we put this out.


And we were really hoping for something good.


And this is what we got.


We got 100,000 engaged views.


Sorry.


We were aiming for 100,000 engaged views, but we actually only got 31,000 engaged views,


which was less than we were hoping for.


So there was obvious disappointment.


But we then thought, well, hold on.


Actually, this campaign, not by the standards that we set, but it seems to have been a success.


We ended up winning a Webby Award for it.


We got lots and lots more customers coming in saying they loved it.


And people...


Our acquisition rate was up.


And also, our brand search was up significantly.


It was up about 11% just off the back of this one particular campaign.


So we knew that actually something had really worked.


It's just that the metrics we were using weren't indicating that success.