What are the questions that need to be answered first before they're ready to have those next questions answered?


How to Write Customer-driven Copy That Converts [MozCon 2017] — Joel Klettke

So as a rough flow, if your lead doesn't leave your hero section understanding why they should care about what you're offering them, what it actually is, and if it's for them, you lose.


You've already taken steps backwards. Then once you've gotten that buy-in from there, you've answered those questions, now you have the ability to get into how their life will improve or how it works or why they should trust you.


And finally, once you've answered all those questions, now you can show them, okay, here's what happens next.


Now, I'm not presenting this like, hey, calls to action in the hero are bad. That's not the case.


But what I want you to think about is are we answering the questions people need to have answered before they're willing to do something?


And if there's a marketer in this room that really gets that, it's Will Reynolds, and I'm so excited that you guys get to watch him tomorrow morning.


Even if you drink too much, please, please, please show up because that talk is going to give so much context to all of this.


So how do we get answers to those questions? How do we make it all meaningful?


Well, here we have a problem too, especially if you're an SEO, because in SEO and especially other marketing disciplines, we tend to look at our leads as these outlines, these things that we've drawn and we try to shove real people into them.


So they're the people we wish our customers were.


But for copy, it's not useful really to know that, oh, they're a 40-year-old marketing director who makes 60 grand a year and it's a single mom who drives a minivan and looked for a recipe for cherry pie.


None of that is helpful in tapping into motivation.


And motivation is what we really need to understand if we want to write copy that converts.


The why behind all of those queries, the because that's not usually attached.


So someone might search for gym gear.


But why do they want that gym gear?


Maybe it's because their old gym gear was uncomfortable and they're trying to get back in shape.


We don't get to see that because if we stop at the search query, if we never talk to these people.


So there's four things that we need to understand if we're going to get to the heart of motivation.


We need to understand our customers' pain points.


We need to understand their anxieties.


We need to understand the priorities because not all anxieties and pain points are created equal.


And then we need to understand the outcomes they're coming to us for.


So you might read that list and go, great, we know those things. I'm going to hop right in.


But there's a problem with that.


And I want to illustrate it this way. Let's play a simple game.


I want you to watch and tell me the difference between the copy on the left and the copy on the right.


So on the left we have sales made simple.


And on the right we have you hate guesswork and busywork, so we made sales less work.


What about this?


The terrible time tracking payroll software.


Sexy stuff, right?


Or the time tracking tool that pays for itself.


Breakthrough native reporting limitations.


Now, I was on this project and even I don't know what that means.


It's like it was tossed out of an angry jargon robot.


And then on the right we've got get the reports your CRM can't give you without the headaches it does.


And I think if we're honest, most of us would agree that the copy on the left is more generic, cliched.


It doesn't really pack an emotional punch.


It's boring.


And the copy on the right is more specific, interesting, human.


Well, I mentioned there was a problem earlier and this is it.


All of the copy on the left was written by marketers and copywriters from real projects.


And all of the copy on the right is almost verbatim pulled from customers.


So am I out of a job?


The problem is that you are not your customer.


So stop trying to think for them.


And start talking to them.


So real quick, I'm going to cover three different tactics, three different tools to gather the information you need.


I'm going to show you how to organize it to make it useful.


And then I'm going to tell you what to look for and wrap it all up with a case study that makes it all real.


So three different ways that we can talk to our customers.


The first is customer interviews.


And I love this because this is the deepest dive you can possibly take of any channel.


Because you're face to face or on the phone and you have the ability to ask why.


Why is the single most important question you can ask when trying to gather customer insights.


Then email surveys.


And I love email surveys because you can collect mass feedback at scale.


It's less personal than an interview so you need to choose your questions carefully.


But you can quantify qualitative things.


Especially good for priorities.


For example, what feature is most important to your leads?


When they're evaluating you, what almost kept them from buying?


What comes up over and over again?


It's much easier to recognize patterns with mass feedback at scale.


And finally, reviews and testimonials.


And I love them because they're free and you don't need a whole lot of them to start gathering some really interesting information.


But that's not good enough.


How do we know what questions to ask and when?


I just told you, yeah, go do an email survey.


You could go blast out a terrible email survey, learn nothing and then come back next year and say, what you told me was totally useless.


So, there's a structure.


What we want to get to when we're talking about motivation is people's experience.


Not their opinion.


We're not looking for opinions.


We're looking for experiences.


That means getting people to tell us their story.


And the way that we do that is by asking questions in a logical format.


What was going on before they came to us?


What was their experience like working with our product or service?


And then what happened after?


We need to get them to share the narrative of their decision.


So, I'm going to share eight questions that across thousands of survey respondents and hundreds of interviews have proven to be really effective at capturing the information that we need.


And the wording here is really important.


So, first, for capturing pain points.


What was going on in your business or in your life that sent you looking for a solution?


So, instead of someone saying, oh, we needed a new time tracking software.


Now they're telling you about the problems that they have that sent them looking for something like you.


What else did you try and what didn't you love about it?


Most marketers stop at what else did you try and they get this list of competitors like, great, we know who we're up against.


Well, while you're talking to them, ask them what they didn't love about it.


What's your pain point that you can solve better than your competitor can?


For anxieties, what almost kept you from buying from us?


What almost stopped you from making the decision to work with us?


Or if you want to flip this to a positive, which tends to get really great responses as well, what made you confident enough to give us a try?


What was it about us that made you go, hmm, you know what, I think these people can be trusted.


That is a powerful insight to have when you're structuring your copy.


When we're talking about priorities, what made Blank the best solution for you?


So again, what was it about us that made us better than the competition?


What priority did we meet that other competitors just couldn't?


And then when evaluating Blank, whether it's industry or solution or whatever, what was most important to you?


Especially powerful when used in surveys to gather hierarchies of priorities.


What can you do now or do better than you could before?


Please, never ask your customer, what have your results been? Because they won't know.


They won't know what to tell you. They'll be grasping at straws.


Ask them what they can do now or do better than they could before.


And if you want even better insights, follow this question up with, and what has that meant for you?


What has that meant for other departments?


And finally, give me an example of when Blank, your product or service, made a difference for you.


Again, get them telling a story that brings context to all those features and benefits that make your product matter.


So you can go out and you can ask these questions, but the problem is you're only going to be as good as your analysis.


So really quickly, there's a downloadable template that you can use when gathering this information to make it meaningful.


And there's a link there that you can go download this and a whole schwack of other resources that I'm going to talk about.


But the gist of this slide is copy and paste the quote, classify it as whether it's a benefit, a pain point, an anxiety,


so that you can group them later. If there's themes that emerge, you want to classify those there so all the quotes come up together.


If it's tied to a feature, mention that. Take notes on why you like that quote, because I promise some of them you will forget why you pulled that in the first place.


And then the single most important column next to the quote itself, where you found it, so that you can go back and get context on it later.


Because when you're doing this over 100 different things, it's really easy to lose quotes.


So what are we actually looking for in these responses? The first thing is frequently used words.


What words do your customers say over and over and over again, talking about themselves, talking about you, their problems or benefits?


Because if they use those words, you probably should too.


Look for recurring themes. These are real responses to a survey we did for Inside Squared.


So because of Inside Squared, we've been able to close higher value deals on a faster timeline than before.


KPIs used to be a time consuming part of my workflow. It saves me time every morning. We saw time coming up again and again and again as a theme, and we could work with that.


Look for things that are well said. So instead of saying we can analyze data better, we can twist, turn and dig into every aspect of the sales process.


And instead of, oh, the learning curve is short. Yeah, that's not bad, but you could literally turn your sales intelligence on tomorrow.


You'll know these because when you read them, they hit you in the gut. It feels different when you read this kind of response.


And lastly, look for quotes that are insightful, that reveal that hidden because that I mentioned earlier.


It has very detailed reporting, somewhat useful. Why does that matter?


Because before everyone thought over what the true booking number was, but now it's a given.


This is a problem we didn't even know customers had, internal conflicts over numbers.


And now that we know they have it, we can talk about how we solve it. And none of the competitors are talking about that.


So I want to wrap this up by showing you a case study of how we brought this all together in real life.


So I was brought into work on the HubSpot.com CRM page as a small project with Matt Barbee.


And we took this exact process. So if we first we conducted an email survey of existing clients, getting them to classify who they are, how they use the software, what was most important to them.


Then we mined reviews and testimonials out in the wild. And one of the most important things I can tell you here is don't just mine your own testimonials.


Go read your competitors bad reviews. Because not only is it great whiskey reading, it's fantastic for figuring out what you can solve that people are frustrated with about your competitor.


And put that front and center and say, hey, we do this better.


Then we reviewed interview transcripts. So the HubSpot team had already talked to a pile of customers. We poured over those to see how people talked about their problem and solution over and over.


And finally, check out your chat logs. If you're not running live chat on your site, commit to running it for just one week.


Give it resources for just one week because it's an anxieties gold mine.


No other channel is going to tell you the problems your leads don't think are being solved on your landing pages or website quite like a chat log.


Because the questions that come up over and over again aren't being answered in your copy. So answer them in your copy.


So there's a few things we learned. The first thing was that customers cared about different things than we do.


The features and benefits that the internal team thought were the most important weren't exactly the ones that the customer talked about the most or even said were most important to them.


And that was interesting. And then the serum was heavily marketed on the word free. And yes, that's a huge selling point.


But free wasn't even the biggest part of the equation when we talked to customers. There were other more compelling reasons they signed on.


And then we learned that some tasks were common to all segments. Some outcomes every segment wanted to have.


Everyone in every group mentioned these as things they wanted to achieve. But some benefits were unique to decision makers.


And if you're going to only write a page for one person, write it for the person who can actually buy from you instead of all the people who might go, oh, this is interesting.


So here's what we did. We changed the messaging to mirror the priorities and pain points of the audience we talked to.


Instead of pushing on the word free, we changed it to an outcome that came up over and over again.


Close more deals with less work. And that came literally verbatim from feedback from a customer.


Then we moved from features to benefits. So on the old site we talked a lot about customizing views, dealing task boards, being in sync with the platform.


We changed that to talk about here's why you're going to love the HubSpot CRM. You can learn it in minutes, not months.


And you can automate the boring stuff. And you can track every interaction you have with the customer.


And yep, that stuff's all directly stolen from customers too.


Then we restructured the landing pages based on customer priorities. The things that they told us were most important to them got talked about first.


Instead of the things that internal teams or that the copywriters thought, we should really push this, it's important.


We let customers define that. We let the customer drive.


And then we used those customer outcomes that we learned to write better crossheads to make it more enticing to pick this up and work with it.


So hey, you can see your entire pipeline at a glance. You can customize deal stages to your sales process.


Well as a result we saw a 20% increase in signups to the CRM, which is no small number when you're dealing with that volume of traffic.


And Matt Barbee, who's a real person and is here and speaks later this week, can verify that if you go and ask him.


So that got us buy-in internally to do a larger project.


When HubSpot was redesigning the site, we used the same copy framework to overhaul the copy.


And in working in tandem with their design and their new signup flow, we doubled HubSpot's site-wide conversion rate.


We doubled their inbound call volume. We saw a 35% increase in demo requests and 27% more product signups.


And if you take nothing else away from this session today, take this slide away.


This is the power of shutting up and listening to your customers and then taking the words that they're saying and putting them into your own copy.


Dark Helmet's Guide to Local Domination with @Google Posts and Q&A - Presented by Greg Gifford

So, for those of you that have seen me speak before, you know this isn't really a good title slide, so let's get to this one.


We're doing Dark Helmet's Guide to Local Domination with Google Posts and questions and answers.


I talk really fucking fast. Here's where I had this whole plan to lament and be like,


oh, I've got 87 slides to do in 15 minutes, but then fuck me, Areach came in and was like, boom, 180, fuck you.


But anyway, I go really fast, it's gonna be tough to take notes, so the slides are up at that link right there,


so you don't have to worry about taking notes, you can pay attention and enjoy the ride.


And just like my friend, Rowdy Rowdy Piper, Rowdy Rowdy Piper said,


I have come here to chew bubble gum and kick ass, and I'm all out of bubble gum.


So I speak at conferences all over the world, I'm gonna hit like seven or eight different countries this year,


I see a lot of really bad presenters, and so there's always a podium, and the bad presenters,


they stand right up front behind the podium with their back to the crowd, and they just read their slides.


And it's super boring. And even worse, the background of the slide is just white, and it's black text in Arial font,


and tons and tons and tons of bullet points, and because of that, I firmly believe that bullet points kill kittens,


so we're gonna be completely kitten safe just for Rob.


And you notice the dark helmet thing, at least the older people, I'm sure a lot of you younger ones don't even know the movie,


I was a film major in college, I love movies, I have a full sleeve of movie portrait tattoos, my whole right leg is Goonies,


every time I present, I like to combine my love of movies with my love of SEO.


So there's always a theme. Today's theme is sci-fi movies.


We have 62 references to sci-fi movies in the deck today.


Part of my thing is I usually go back and do one movie for every year in the last 50 years within that theme,


but today we're going back 50 years, because we have to have every Planet of the Apes movie in there.


So if you haven't seen the movie, there is attribution over to the side, so not only will you learn some cool shit about local SEO,


you'll have some cool movies to watch afterwards.


So are we all ready? Everybody's pumped.


So, how many of you are here today because you need a hand with local SEO?


Google My Business is a really tough puzzle to crack, and unfortunately, when it comes to Google My Business,


you can't just float along, because if you're not really going to put in the effort and you're going to float along,


then you're going to blend into the background.


And if your business is blending into the background, you're going to be virtually invisible to your potential customers,


and that's a bad thing.


Now I know there's a lot of confusing stuff out there because there have been so many changes with Google My Business over the last year,


so I don't want you guys to lose your head.


That's all the laugh I get? Come on, that's Boba Fett getting his head chopped off.


That's funny stuff, guys.


So there's a lot of misinformation about these new features in Google My Business.


So today I'm going to help you dig through the giant pile of shit that you're reading online about all this stuff,


so that you'll know what really works.


I'm going to show you the code behind the Google My Business matrix so that you know the things that you can do to stand out and attract more customers.


Now we've heard a lot about local SEO already today.


One of the things that hasn't, or throughout the whole week,


one of the things we haven't really talked too much about is the Local Search Ranking Factor Study that Darren runs,


and it's always published on Moz, where the top 35 to 40 worldwide experts do this study to figure out what the local search ranking factors are each year.


I like to call it the LSRF or Le Surf.


So let's look at this year's numbers.


That big blue chunk, the biggest piece of the pie, Google My Business.


In fact, the biggest change from last year to this year was Google My Business got 32% bigger.


It's more important.


Here's the thing that's really crazy.


Google My Business is your new homepage.


You've got to get this through your head if you're working with any business that has a local business presence.


You're showing up in a particular geographic area and the Google My Business profile shows up for you.


This is the new first impression you're making with customers.


All the people that needed to get your phone number before, they're not going to your site.


It's right there.


All the people that wanted to get your directions, they can get it right here.


They don't have to go to your site to get your address.


They want to check out pictures, they can get it right here on your profile.


They want to see reviews, it's all right here.


This is zero click search in action.


They're not going to your site anymore.


Also, yes, this is Biscuit Bitch here.


It is the best place in the entire world to eat breakfast.


If you haven't gone, go before you leave town.


Now you have to make the best first impression if you want to win those customers.


If you're not making a great first impression, you're going to blend into the background and nobody's going to find you and nobody's going to come do business with you.


The best thing to do is use the new features that have come out in the last year that no one else is using so that you'll stand out.


One of the things they talked about in the local search ranking factors or the LASERF was asking the experts,


hey, what are you guys going to spend more time on this year?


What's more important to you and your clients and what are you seeing that gets a lot more results?


What are you going to focus on more this year?


The number two answer was Google Posts.


Google Posts are awesome.


For those of you that don't know what they are, they show up on mobile in your blended results and on desktop, they show up at the bottom of your knowledge panel.


It's a little thumbnail image and a little bit of text and when you click on that image, boom, it pops up the big image and the full text.


So this is something that you can get to engage with customers before they even get to your website.


So you can get conversions without people going to your site.


I'm telling you right now, this will give you conversions on zero-click search.


This shit's awesome, guys. You got to use it.


Plus, your competitors aren't using it.


So you could do something, you know, if it's a local business, people are looking at your competitors as well and you're going to stand out because you're doing cool stuff that they're not doing.


Now, Posts got moved to the bottom.


They used to show up at the top right under your address and phone number.


They moved to the bottom and everybody was like, ah, fuck it, I'm not going to use it anymore.


Nobody's going to see it.


But they're still getting clicks.


They're still getting conversions.


They're still getting views.


You've got to do it.


And it's not that hard to do a post.


Let's say it takes 10 minutes to do a post and you do one a week.


That's 40 minutes a month that you're spending where you're going to get conversions out of it.


And isn't that why we're here?


We're all here to figure out how to get more conversions for either our business or the clients that we work with.


Now, Posts will stay live for seven days.


Once you put the post in, it's going to show up in your panel for seven days.


And then it disappears.


Unless you use one of the templates that has a date range for the post.


But the date range isn't always a good idea.


I'm going to show you why in just a second.


Now, most of the stuff that you're going to read online or videos that you're going to watch online about these posts, completely inaccurate.


It's utter bullshit.


So, for example, this is what your typical post on Google Posts is going to be.


A giant pile of shit.


It's not going to help you.


So I'm going to help you guys today.


You guys want some help today?


All right.


So most posts about Posts will tell you the Post images...


Somebody should be ringing a little bell every time I say Post.


Everything says the image should be 750 by 750.


But that was when they first rolled out and they were a square image.


So all the posts that say 750 by 750...


What it should really be is 1200 by 900.


So write that down if you're writing notes.


But you shouldn't be writing notes because you should be enjoying the show.


Also, you'll hear, hey, the images get cropped vertically on the center.


It's actually slightly higher than center, which is really frustrating.


And it's not even consistent.


Check this out.


This is the same exact JPEG image loaded into two different posts.


And look at how vertically they're completely different.


It's really frustrating when you've got some element in your image like text.


Or if you're a car dealer and you want that shiny new F-150 and then all of a sudden half of it gets cropped off.


It's super frustrating.


To make things even worse, the image size of the thumbnail is different on desktop than what it is on mobile.


So again, same image loaded in and you can see on desktop the image is higher.


It's got a taller number of pixels than the mobile version.


So that's really frustrating too.


So I made something awesome for all of you here.


You can go to that bit.ly link right there.


It is case sensitive.


So if you are writing notes, you've got to make sure you write it in lowercase.


It's a Photoshop guide.


And it has a grid in it.


It looks just like this.


So anything within the white grid, you're guaranteed will not get cropped off.


Anything in that little kind of bluish green area underneath may show up.


And anything in the green won't be visible in the crop.


Now once you click on that thumbnail and the full image pops up, you still see the full image.


So you can still use those areas.


Just understand that in the thumbnail version, only the stuff within the grid is what's going to be visible.


So one more time in case you need that link, it's that.


bit.ly slash post dash image dash guide.


So you can also upload videos.


They changed the rules last fall.


So instead of putting an image in, you can put in a video.


And the video file size limit is 100 meg or 30 seconds, which, hey, just happens to be about the size of most commercials.


So if you've got commercials, go throw them in.


They're super awesome.


It shows as a thumbnail.


And then when you click it, it auto plays the video.


Now when we're talking about what shows up down in the text version of the thumbnail, most of the things that you're going to read are going to say that, hey,


you get 100 characters or about 16 words.


You guys think that's right?


No.


So really it depends on which post template you're using because they're different.


And it also depends on whether or not you include a call to action button.


But hey, what are we?


We're marketers, right?


We want to get conversions.


If you don't have a call to action, you're not going to get any fucking conversions.


So why are you doing it?


So you've got to use a call to action button.


But that's going to remove the bottom line of text so you get less visible text when you have that button.


So you need to understand the differences between the different types of posts so that you can optimize what you're doing and get the best chances of getting click throughs.


So think of it like AdWords copy or display ads.


You've got to be visually eye catching and compelling with whatever's left after including that button.


So typically you want to use the what's new post.


That's just text only.


So you're going to get once you remove that final line for the call to action, you get three lines of text to write something compelling.


Now you also have the event post where you're going to have the title on its own line, which can be nice, and then a date range.


Now this post will stay live for the entire date range.


But notice once you add the button in, you only get one single line for your description.


So it's tough to be compelling.


Then you've got offer posts, which a lot of people love because holy shit, you get a cool little price tag emoji.


That's going to make people want to click. Yay.


But no, because you only get one line of description again once everything is there.


And then you've got product posts where you can share your products where it's got the product name and the price range.


But once you have the button, only one single line of text.


So it's still really tough to optimize anything.


Make sure when you're doing posts that you're sharing promotional posts.


Because it needs to be an offer.


Don't share social fluff.


Remember, this is your first impression with customers.


They haven't been to your site yet.


They don't care about all your bullshit social stuff or your blog posts.


This is where you need to attract customers with an awesome offer that helps you stand out from your competitors.


You also need to be absolutely sure you're putting UTM tracking on the links in your CTAs.


Because big surprise, Google Analytics is broken.


And all of these clicks or the vast majority of these clicks will be attributed as direct traffic.


Even though these are coming from organic search.


Plus you're going to want to put in the campaign variables so you can track which offers are working better.


So that you can replicate them in the future.


Moving on to the other new feature that is super awesome and also kind of super scary.


Questions and answers.


You should always in every case be paying attention to questions and answers every single day.


It's a new feature that shows up directly under your name and address and phone number.


That's a community discussion feature.


Anyone can ask your business a question.


And anyone can answer that question.


I didn't hear anybody go, ooh, but that should scare the shit out of you.


Because anybody in the community can answer a question about your business if you're not paying attention and answering first.


This is what it looks like.


It's just below all of that top line information that says questions and answers.


You click the questions and you can start reading everything.


If a question gets three upvotes, three thumbs up on a question.


Instead of showing the, hey, click here to see questions and answers.


It shows natively in the GMB panel like this for the gum wall.


Where somebody says, hey, I'm from California.


I want to chew gum and put it on the wall.


And somebody's like, yeah, you can chew gum and do it from no matter where you come from.


Now it's kind of funny.


But that's the thing that you've got to pay attention to is what questions are getting upvoted.


So you know what's showing to the public.


The answers also work with an upvote system.


You can get multiple answers to a question.


And the answer that gets the most upvotes is the one that shows as the primary answer.


When you're answering as the business owner, you should never include a URL or a phone number.


Because if you do, that answer will get filtered out and not show to the public.


Even though when you're logged in, you'll see that answer there.


So be careful with that.


The really cool thing is you can ask your own questions of your business.


Load your own questions in and remember, this is your new home page.


Google my business.


People aren't going to your website anymore.


Load a pre-site FAQ page.


Take all of those frequently asked questions, throw them up and answer them.


And you're making a better first impression.


And we did a study and several people have done studies.


It turns out most of these questions are either people putting reviews in the wrong spot


or they are straight up leads and sales opportunities.


So we did a study of 640 car dealerships and looked at all the questions that were asked


in the last quarter of last year.


We bucketed all of those answers and it broke out into a system like this.


Now we colored all of those orange here to make it easy for you because holy shit,


40% of that 643 questions were straight up leads for the dealership.


And of that 40%, only two of those questions were answered by the dealership.


That's super scary.


That's thousands and hundreds of thousands of dollars that got missed out on.


And I'm almost out of time, but you guys want to see some fun examples


slash scary examples of this stuff?


Yes, no, if not, like I can just go.


Yes, okay.


So fun examples.


We see shit like this all the time.


This guy, hey, do you have a phone number?


Hey, Jack hole, you click the button to ask a question that's literally an inch


from the clickable phone number on the page.


Dude, but every time we see that, it's hey, I need your phone number.


They're not going to see your phone number above.


They're not going to click it.


They're not going to click the button to go to your website and get the phone number off


your website because they think this is a messaging system that you're paying attention to.


So you've got to pay attention to stuff like this or we'll see somebody that's not even


a question.


Your website sucks.


Got answers.


Yeah, I'm not a fan of it either.


And we laugh, but that probably shows that this business needs to do a little bit of


work on their website, right?


Now here's a fun one.


I did this one at a presentation for car dealers at Google headquarters in Austin, and I always


like to pull local examples like I did with the biscuit bitch in Gum Wall.


So I pulled this one, not knowing this guy was going to be in the room.


So the question is, does this dealership have a body shop?


And the guy says, don't go here.


Look at the reviews.


I had a horrible experience.


They lie to you and everybody else.


But notice there's six more answers.


If you look at the other answers, the dealership answered.


And when the business owner answers, it says owner in parentheses.


Much better answer.


So when I finished, the guy came up and was like, holy shit, man, I'm that guy.


What do I do?


And I said, oh, it's easy.


We grabbed three people sitting in the front row, had them log into Google, go to his question


and upvote his question and boom, immediately his answer shows us the primary answer to


that question.


And then this was a fun one.


This was for Search Love Boston last year.


I looked up the hotel and how are the room numbers ordered?


This jackass says alphabetically.


Look at that asshole too.


He's a total smug son of a bitch that's really proud of that answer.


You know, like, okay.


And we laugh, but for the hotel, they should be paying attention to this because this is


not the kind of thing that they want to be the first impression.


This is my favorite one ever.


This is the London Eye on the Thames River, the big Ferris wheel.


And the question is, do you have to wear a helmet?


And the answer, for those of you in the back that can't read, no, you don't have to, but


you can if you wish.


I believe Viking helmets are a popular choice.


Which again, we all laugh at, but for the Coca-Cola branded London Eye, that's probably


not the thing that they want to show as a first impression.


And this question got upvoted, so it's just natively in their panel.


So what you need to do is make all of yours look like this.


You're loading in your own questions and you're loading in your own answers.


So you've got that pre-site FAQ page.


So ask and answer your own questions.


Upvote your answers and control the conversation.


Rock that new homepage that you've got on Google My Business so you can make the best


first impression.


Now I know I had to go really fast.


I'm sorry about that.


I hope I didn't explode anyone's brains.


Now there's a couple people laughing because they've seen this movie.


For those of you that are younger and haven't seen Scanners, this is what happens next.


So anyway, the truth is out there about the new features in Google My Business.


I have now given you guys the key to success so you'll all be able to break out and do


better marketing.


Get it?


Break out.


And now your businesses will live long and prosper.


Thank you.


That's it.


Visual Search Optimization — Whiteboard Friday

Music


Howdy, MOS fans, and welcome to My Whiteboard Friday on visual search.


Today I'm going to talk about the different optimizations that you can make for visual search


and the different kinds of results that you might see for visual search content.


So what happens with visual search is that you would do some optimizations on your website,


then the user would do a visual search, and then they might get a different kind of result.


So the kinds of optimizations that you should consider for visual search,


which is searches that are made via Google Lens or Pinterest Lens or via Bing's image search tools,


would include image SEO around making sure that you've got images that are performing well for image SEO


with good file formats, titles, alt text, alt tags, schema, all of that sort of thing.


Also, you're going to think about the kinds of entities which are within your photos.


So visual search recognition software and tools, they can understand lots of different kinds of entities.


There are a few that they prioritize in particular, though, and they include logos, landmarks, text, and entities,


which I've called Bing's in this particular instance, just as a shorthand,


but entities are essentially things that are found within the Knowledge Graph.


And then the other one you want to think about is your composition.


So the composition that you have for your image will affect what Google understands the image to be about.


So, for instance, the way that different elements are positioned within an image


can affect how Google understands the image.


So I did an article for Moz at the beginning of the year where I compared a teapot,


and there was a teapot where the handle was here and the spout was here,


and they understood that to be a teapot.


And then when they turned it this way, they understood it to be a kettle,


and those are two different things.


So the way that you think about the composition for your image can affect it.


So make sure that you have clean and clear images,


and that also that you're thinking about your images being similar to user-generated content,


particularly if you're in a B2C business,


and also that you understand the primary focus.


So, for instance, if you had a photo of a bicycle


and you were trying to emphasize the bicycle part of the image,


if you had somebody who was sitting on the bicycle or standing next to the bicycle


and they were taking up most of the image,


Google would think that that picture was more about that person than it was about the bicycle.


So think about where the primary focus is in your image in order to optimize for visual search.


You also want to think about contrast, just making sure that it's very clear


what the focus of the image is,


and so that you've got whatever is the focus of your image very clear and easy to decipher,


not too busy if you need it to be about a single thing.


So these different elements are things that you should consider


when you're optimizing your images for visual search, particularly for Google Lens.


And as you go, as users carry out a visual search,


so, for instance, if you use Google Lens and you take a picture of a butterfly


or a caterpillar or a flower or a chocolate doughnut,


you're going to get lots of different types of results.


So, first of all, you may very well get an image pack result,


and this will include some of the information that we were talking about before.


So the difference between visual search and image search SEO is that in an image search SEO,


like when you go to the image tab within Google, you can enter the word chocolate doughnut.


But let's say you didn't know what a chocolate doughnut was,


or let's say it was a different language and you didn't know the local word for a chocolate doughnut,


then what would happen is that the user would make the search of the chocolate doughnut,


and Google would use its tools like Vision AI, for instance,


to understand that that's a chocolate doughnut,


and then they would look through their images to understand which ones had text cues


that were talking about chocolate doughnuts and that sort of thing.


So that would have returned potentially some image pack information,


and also in the chocolate doughnut example in particular,


it might return something like multi-search.


So, for instance, you would do a modification, like you might say,


oh, a doughnut like this, but with sprinkles maybe, for instance.


You might also get a result that's around Google Shopping, for instance.


The other one you want to think about is the kinds of results you might get for different search features.


So local pack is something that might come up.


Also knowledge panels.


So particularly with the entities, the entities may very well be attached to a specific knowledge panel.


So, for instance, logos for businesses or landmarks will have a knowledge panel,


and also certain things, like if you were to think about something like Lego,


that may very well have a knowledge panel as well,


and landmarks, again, will also could very well be showing in a Google map.


So think about the kinds of SERP features that you might show there,


and that means that you could also, while you're optimizing this,


as part of your optimization for visual search,


you might think about the optimizations that you make for these types of SERP results as well.


Finally, the other kinds of search, or the other kinds of results that Google might give to someone


when they make a visual search is a visual match.


So visual matches are images that look really similar to the picture that the person took,


and these will sometimes return image packs, sometimes return local packets,


and they'll sometimes just return a general SERP result,


like including a feature snippet that might have an image in it.


You might also see something for a Google business profile.


So if there is something that's local that has that,


then they may very well get a Google business profile visual match,


and also just general web content that might come through there.


So there's lots of different opportunities to return a visual match,


but this one is particularly good when you're thinking about the composition of your images.


So if you have a lot of footfall, if you have a lot of interaction with customers


where they are reviewing your content, where they are visiting your establishment,


and they're creating a lot of user-generated content,


then think about how you can create images and add images to your website


that satisfy the visual match queries that users might be making.


And I think there's some great opportunities across visual search.


In the next few years, Google's been investing in this quite a lot,


and I think that this is an opportunity for businesses of all sizes,


Remarketing to people that have already visited - Whiteboard Friday

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're chatting


about remarketing, remarketing to people who've already visited your website and then left


or already interacted with your niche, your service, your community, and then gone off


somewhere else. This is actually pretty interesting. So a lot of times when we talk about the organic


marketing funnel, right, someone performs a search, they follow you on a social network


or they see a tweet from you, Facebook update, and they come to your website, well, you know,


we focus a lot on trying to convert that person either to a customer or convert them to signing


up for an email newsletter, subscribing to something, following you on a social network,


right, becoming a part of your community. But there's actually a lot of data suggesting


that the vast, the overwhelming majority of people who visit your website, I'll use Fitbit


as an example here. Brad, one of Moz's investors and also Fitbit's investor, sent me a Fitbit


recently, which is very nice. What am I at today? Let's see, 5,696 steps. So a lot of


people, right, who visit Fitbit's website, I don't actually know this for sure, but probably


about a tenth of a percent of them are converting to a sale or actually buying one of these


things and then 99.9% are going somewhere else. So the idea here is what can we do to


capture this audience again, to get in front of them? We know that at some point they were


interested in our product or our service. We want to get in front of them again. Retargeting


is something we've covered a little bit, but there's actually a bunch of new options that


have surfaced from the advertising and web marketing world that we should probably be


aware of. So a few of these include things like classic retargeting, aka we follow them


around the web like a lost puppy dog, the ads that you see on the side of everything


after you looked at that one pair of Zappos shoes that one time and now you just can't


seem to get them out of your head or your browser. So maybe someone's visiting the next


web, and if page X over here on Fitbit's website was visiting the last one, two, 30, 60 days,


we want to show this particular ad with a bid price of XYZ. This is kind of cool. I


think where retargeting has really become more sophisticated is in some of the options.


So we can filter and configure and modify this and model it in such a way that we can


say if you visited this page but not these other pages, or if you visited these three


pages in a row, we want to show you this. If you interacted on our site in this particular


way, we can now do things with apps. So if we know that someone has interacted with an


app, we can start to do retargeting and remarketing personalized to them. Moz has used a service


called AdRoll in the past. There's a number of them out there. Obviously, Google has a


pretty powerful display network around this too. Another thing that, well, has been around


for a couple of years but that we haven't talked about too much on Whiteboard Friday


here is RLSA. That's Remarketed Lists for Search Ads. So this means if we know that


Sonya visited the, I think it's Tory Burch, who's a fashion designer who designs a special


kind of Fitbit, visited the Tory Burch page on Fitbit, and then we know that she searched


for bracelets or watches. Even though bracelets and watches are something we would never ever


want to bid on as Fitbit because that's really not, we're not in the fashion category, but


if we know that Sonya has previously visited a page on Fitbit or any page on Fitbit's website


potentially, well, now that she's doing these fashion-related searches, we might say, you


know what, let's show our Tory Burch ad specifically for that product, which is a fashion product,


in the search result in the ads there. That's pretty cool. We can customize this in a ton


of ways. You can imagine a bunch of different uses based on what people visited and then


what they searched for. Of course, you can bid a lot higher for those types of ads because


you know the prior behavior, and you can also expect a much higher click-through rate and


probably a much higher conversion rate from those ads because that person has already


visited your website and is familiar with your product, your brand. If you have an email


address or a social ID or an app ID, even a phone number actually, you can use Facebook


and Twitter's custom audiences, which are pretty cool to do targeting specifically to


people on Facebook or on Twitter whose email address you've uploaded. So if a lot of people


have signed up for your email newsletter or have started your product purchase process,


maybe they went to Fitbit, they entered their email address to sign up, and then they never


completed a purchase, we can get back in front of them using Facebook or Twitter custom audiences,


using AdWords, actually as of, well, two days prior to us filming this, but probably a few


days before, maybe a week or two before this Whiteboard Friday comes out, Facebook just


introduced something called Customer Match, sorry, Google just introduced something called


Customer Match in AdWords where you can upload an email list and then get it in front of


those emails specifically when they're performing searches or across their display ad network.


You can do those via places like Retargetr and AdRoll and Google. Those are sort of the


CRM retargeting models and services, so that's pretty cool. And if we have social IDs, for


example, if you Facebook connected to Fitbit or if you connected via Twitter, I think you


can also use Facebook's connection on Instagram for Instagram ads now if you're part of Instagram's


ad program, and so a bunch of options there as well. A few best practices before we finish


here. First off, whenever you're doing any type of remarketing or retargeting through


any of these types of services, make sure that you have smart burn pixels and burn pages,


meaning if someone finishes the checkout at Fitbit, don't show them the ad anymore. You


don't want to keep marketing to someone who's already completed that conversion process.


Likewise, you probably want to have a burn after a certain number of days, so if you


can see that after eight days or 12 days or 15 days, you just are getting very low clickthrough,


very low conversion, you know what? Maybe it's time to give up on the ad. You also want


to be smart about limiting the exposure and or changing the message. So if someone has


seen your ad four, five, six times as they're browsing across the web, maybe you want to


say, hey, let's either give them a new message or wait for them to visit again before we


keep trying to advertise. Otherwise, we could be burning dollars and bids that could be


better spent on other customers or other marketing channels. We want to customize based on behavior,


so I think one of the big advancements here is that remarketing, when it initially came


out, used to be pretty dumb and pretty basic. It was, did they visit your site? Then you


can show them this one ad. Now people have gotten way more sophisticated, and ad networks


have gotten way more sophisticated, so we can say, hey, they performed this action.


We only want to be in this network. We only want to do this if they've done this specific


group of things in a row or completed these processes. That can really improve your clickthrough


rates, improve your conversion rates, improve your targeting. Don't ever assign 100 percent


credit to any one of these. Remember that whatever initially brought them to the website


should receive at least as much, if not more credit and investment than whatever brought


them back to purchase. This is a way of recapturing folks, not an initial way. So if you're assigning


100 percent credit, what happens is that you'll stop investing at the top of the funnel, and


soon you'll just be remarketing to the same smaller shrinking group of users over time,


visitors over time. That can get really dangerous.


Number five, don't limit ads to sales focus only. If you know that you can convert from


other sources, from content, from multiple visits, from someone signing up for an email


newsletter, from someone attending an event, from participation on your platform or in


your community in a certain way, you don't need to only market the product that you are


selling. I think this is something where folks have gotten very narrow, but you can see some


innovative companies doing some really smart stuff in retargeting, remarketing, looking


earlier in their funnel and saying, hey, we know that 30 percent of people who do this


activity will eventually become a customer of ours, so let's also remarket this activity


and we can bid a third of the price of whatever we know the conversion leads to directly.


Number four, you can also try remarketing for really creative stuff. I've seen it for


job ads, which I think is brilliant. If someone visits your jobs page and you're having trouble


hiring, hey, follow them around the web like a lost puppy dog. Get in front of them on


their social networks. If they have been to an event of yours, you have their email address,


you can now market through here.


Campaigns to influencers, I've seen some really creative content marketers who said, hey,


you know what, we know that here's a list of journalists and bloggers that we've reached


out to. We can take that email list and upload it. You need a minimum of 1,000 email addresses


for both Facebook, I think for all three, Facebook, Twitter, and Google for the CRM


style stuff, so make sure that you have that many emails before you try and upload.


If you do, you can get in front of those influencers with content and if that's leading to links


and press coverage and stories and the bid prices are low, which they often will be,


you may have some big advantages there.


Hopefully I will see some very creative ads from all of you following me around the web


and I look forward to the discussion in the comments. We'll see you again next week for


An Introduction to Accessibility and SEO [Series Part 1] — Whiteboard Friday

Hey Moz fans, welcome to the latest edition of Whiteboard Friday.


I'm Cooper Holmayer.


Today we're going to be talking about SEO and accessibility, the idea of optimizing


not just for some of our audience, but all of our audience.


I've been doing SEO since 2016 and I started out working on small businesses, local mom


and pop shops, and then I found the allure of ecommerce SEO and I've been doing that


ever since.


Today I work on an in-house team doing technical SEO for a large outdoor ecommerce retailer.


Now if you're anything like me, you know that SEO is a little bit more than just code


on the page and copy that's crafted to meet searchers intent.


You're working, whether you're a seasoned SEO pro or you're looking for the latest tips


as that mom and pop shop or you're maybe starting out in an SEO role for the first time, you


understand that we have to take our content that we're producing and we have to in some


way make sure that it shows up in search engines.


So you know for me as a technical SEO maybe I'm thinking about things like my H1 tag or


my paragraph tag or my title tag for this example page here for Mossville Dog Rescue.


Now most of the time I would say my job revolves around the idea of making sure that what I'm


doing, the stuff I'm producing, what I'm designing for can be seen, digested, consumed, and then


essentially regurgitated by our friend the bot.


But have you stopped to think about maybe there's a larger audience out there, maybe


it's more than just my bots and you're thinking that way you're moving towards the right direction,


you're moving towards a more inclusive approach, you're thinking about more than just a search


engine but also the users, the people that are consuming that content, engaging with


it and maybe even engaging with your business.


If you think about only optimizing for bots, you're thinking about something kind of like


someone sitting in a spotlight on a stage.


You can see that person front and center but you maybe can't see the surrounding cast because


they're out there in the darkness.


What we want to do is we want to think about a larger group of people.


We want to take that spotlight away and give everyone a chance to shine, everyone a chance


to consume, engage with, and be delighted by the content that you're producing.


So as you're thinking about search engine optimization, as you're thinking about building


a new product, service, experience, think about not just can a search engine bot see


that, we know that's important as an SEO, but also think about can other people interact


with, engage with, or be compelled by this content.


If the answer is no, you have some issues.


But I can give you a few tips on how to solve those issues.


When you're making some content, whether it's marketing material both digitally on a website


or offline in some sort of print material, ask yourself these four things.


Is my content perceivable?


Is it able to be seen or understood or does it exist for my user?


Is it operable?


Can they do something with it?


Is it understandable?


Am I writing at the right reading level?


Am I explaining this in a way that's going to be consumable by a large audience and maybe


not just someone but somebody with a PhD?


And is that content robust?


Is what I'm building available in a multiple different formats, fonts, sizes, etc., so


that regardless of who my user is, they're going to be able to understand what I've given


them?


These are the four principles of web accessibility.


These are the guidelines that the web consortium has given us and you can apply them every


time that you're building something new or even retrofitting something old.


For example, let's say you have this playbill or you have maybe a menu for a restaurant.


If I don't offer that menu or that playbill in both a digital and a print format, I end


up in a situation where someone who needs braille, needs a screen reader, needs some


sort of assistive technology in order to understand and consume that content is going to be kind


of left out in the dark.


They're not going to be able to do those things.


In the example of a menu, for example, I can't order from a restaurant if I don't know what


they offer for me to order.


So it's important that we make sure that our content, the things we're producing, the marketing


materials that we're developing are perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust.


But okay, I'm only talking about maybe one example of disability.


When I say disability, what does that mean to you?


You might think of an elderly family member who needs a cane to walk.


You might think of your friend who has a hard time reading large words or gets anxious when


there's a math test coming up in class.


If that's the case, you'd be talking about only two types of disability, maybe body structure,


shape and size disabilities for someone who's walking with a cane or cognitive disabilities


or even learning disabilities that your friend might be experiencing.


There are a bunch of different other types of disabilities that even I didn't know about


until I learned about it.


Those might include blindness, low vision, deaf blindness, color blindness.


I'm the first to admit here that this white board being in blue and red and green and


black may not be the most accessible for someone with color blindness.


That's why it's important that we have closed captioning and a transcript below this video.


These all make this content more accessible.


Auditory, cognitive, anxiety, mood, seizure.


You can see that this list is long and it's not exhaustive.


There are a ton of different types of disability and many of them aren't even perceivable by


you or I.


People may be suffering from disability and dealing with this in their life that you might


not know.


It's important to recognize that we need to start optimizing content not just for bots


but for people as well.


We need to make sure that people are able to actually consume and engage with our content.


How does this relate to your world as an SEO?


Well there's a lot of similarities between accessibility work and SEO work and I want


to break that down into some myths and legends.


Number one, commonly people will say accessibility only impacts a small group of people.


We're looking at this through a lens of able-bodied individuals who we think, okay they can see


my content if I write it on the page but the reality is one in five people in the United


States are dealing with a disability.


That's a lot of people, that's almost 60 million people.


So it's not a small problem if you ask me.


For SEO, if I do something for SEO, if I write a title tag, if I write a meta description,


if I craft my H1 in a certain way, I may not only be helping someone who, I guess I might


not only be helping a bot but I'm also helping probably other channels of marketing as well.


I'm going to help that email campaign have a better title.


I'm going to have that pay-per-click ad that's going to have a better page to go to.


So small impact is really a myth.


Accessibility and SEO both fall into that bucket where they impact a lot more people


than I think we commonly realize.


Number two, it's a short-term problem.


For accessibility, the ability to be able to order from a menu or read this playbill


is more than a short-term problem.


It's going to happen every time I go to that business or this restaurant.


So it's important that we keep our accessibility work ongoing and continue to improve and evolve


our practices.


We know that for SEO, it's a zero-sum game too.


We know that the world is always changing.


Search algorithms are changing.


User intent and behavior is changing.


And so it's important that we stay on top of our SEO work and make sure that our business


understands that SEO work if you're working in an enterprise situation so that way we're


not falling behind our competitors and we're not disadvantaging people that we may not realize


we're disadvantaging.


Number three, we should do it at the end.


I hear this a lot when we're talking about SEO, but for accessibility especially too.


Hey, I have this website.


Maybe we should do an audit.


Then we can do some work to remediate this problem so that the website becomes accessible.


It's always faster, cheaper, and easier to make a website accessible from the get-go


than do it retroactively and do this kind of retrofitting.


For SEO, we know that it's way easier and also a lot more effective if we build content


for users with SEO insights to inform what they're looking for, what questions we need


to answer.


If you try to optimize something after the fact, a lot of times I think you'll find that


the content that you're producing feels like it's SEO driven.


It's not going to feel like it's for a customer because it wasn't.


You're coming in after the fact.


Number four, it costs too much money.


You know what costs a lot of money?


Lawsuits.


If you don't work on accessibility first and foremost in the beginning of the process and


in an ongoing fashion, you'll find I think that accessibility lawsuits can cost your


business a lot more and they can be detrimental, but so can SEO and penalties.


If you take a shortcut, if you don't take the time to think about what your user needs,


how this is going to be received by a search engine as well as customers in general, I


think you'll find that those penalties are going to hurt a lot more than doing it right


the first time and doing it in an ongoing fashion.


Number five, it's distracting.


For accessibility, in a lot of cases, the things that we're going to be implementing


aren't going to be visible to your average user.


They're going to be visible to assistive technology and the screen readers and the things that


people with disabilities might be using to interact with the same content that someone


else is.


But in most cases, it's better to be correct and there and visible in terms of what a screen


reader can see than be impossible to use altogether.


For SEO, we know that bad and unethical SEO is obvious.


We've seen keyword stuffing.


We've seen a bunch of links on a page that don't belong or don't really provide value


to my customer.


That is more distracting, I think, than doing the work to make it right.


Okay, so there's some similarities between accessibility and SEO.


In most cases, there is a very large impact if you do it right.


It's not a short-term problem.


It's ongoing.


We shouldn't do it at the end.


We should be doing it at the beginning.


It really doesn't cost that much money if you do it right compared to if you do it wrong


and get it wrong.


And then number five is in most cases, the best work goes unnoticed because it's organic,


it's ethical, it's honest.


So what's the impact of doing accessibility work?


And also, I guess, doing SEO work that aligns with accessibility practices.


Number one, it helps people with disabilities first and foremost.


It makes the impossible possible.


Number two, it helps businesses, right?


You as a business owner or as someone who's optimizing a website for a business or even


maybe someone who is just trying to get into SEO and learn more, it's going to help your


public perception.


If you make a website that's accessible, it's going to be obvious and people are going to


thank you for that.


They're going to say, oh, this company cares about all people and a diverse group of abilities.


It's going to be a more durable experience for your customers.


When you start to think about things like text alternatives and captioning and transcripts


and you kind of build this practice up over time and you really build this habit of doing


accessible work and inclusive work, you're going to find that your website is more durable.


It's less likely to be hit by these algorithm changes and things like that where people


have taken the short-term approach.


I know you're going to love this.


It's going to help your SEO.


It's going to give you a bigger audience.


You've now taken your spotlight focus on just your bots and you've expanded it to see the


entire stage in front of you.


So a bigger audience is going to be in front of you as well for a business and that means


more money, more people, and honestly, a lot less problems.


And I think we all know this one, but lawsuits.


If you do this, if you start implementing accessibility work, you start thinking about


accessibility first and foremost as you're developing things, you're going to have a


lot less lawsuits.


People aren't going to complain.


They aren't going to be upset by your lack of accessibility because you won't have any.


It will be accessible and inclusive for all people.


And then number three, doing accessibility work, thinking about accessibility, thinking


about whether my website, whether my marketing material is going to be able to be consumed


and enjoyed by people is going to help those family and friends who are working with people


with disabilities.


It's going to make things possible for people with disabilities.


It's going to make their lives more independent and therefore release a little bit of that


burden on family and friends.


And it's also going to allow you as a practitioner, as an SEO or maybe another discipline to have


a chance to interact with people with more diverse perspectives, learn more, get a richer,


more intimate experience with these different users and craft a better overall experience.


So as you can see, accessibility and SEO are very similar and it's important to recognize


that we need to kind of shift our mindset from thinking about just optimized for bots.


How can I get Google to see this?


How can I get other search engines to see this?


And think about people first and use the rich insights that we get from search engine optimization


and the tools they give us for free to make a big impact on people and everyday life.


Okay, so now what do I do with this information is the question you might have.


Well, you can learn and test.


So you can learn a little bit more about accessibility by checking out Global Accessibility Awareness


Day.


You can join a meetup.


There's tons of people out there who are as passionate as I am about accessibility who


can show you the way and give you tips and tricks on how to think about this.


And you can subscribe to a newsletter.


I've included a Bitly link here, bit.ly slash wbf for Whiteboard Fridays hyphen week.


You can sign up for a weekly newsletter from Accessibility Weekly and get more tips and


tricks and really cool stories about how people are doing this and implementing this work


on their own business.


And then you can also subscribe, sorry, you can also test your actual pages.


Once you kind of get this awareness and start understanding how accessibility fits into


your workflow, you can use either Wave or Axe.


I've included the Bitly links here and down below.


And you can look at those tools as just another thing you can do to make sure that the things


you're producing are visible, they're accessible, they're able to be accessed by assistive technology.


Thanks for spending some time with me today and talking about SEO and accessibility.


I really hope that this changes your perspective and gives you a broader idea of how you can


impact people's daily lives with the SEO and the accessibility work you're doing for your


own business.


Thanks.


Using the Cross Domain Rel=Canonical to Maximize the SEO Value of X Posted Content -WBF

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


This week we're going to chat about the cross-domain rel canonical tag.


So we've talked about rel canonical a little bit and how it can be used to take care of


duplicate content issues, point Google to the right pages from potentially other pages


that share similar or exactly the same content.


But cross-domain rel canonical is a unique and uniquely powerful tool that is designed


to basically say, you know what, Google, there is the same content on multiple different


domains.


So in this simplistic example, myfriendsite.com slash green hyphen turtles contains this content


that I said, sure, it's totally fine for you, my friend, to republish, but I know I don't


want SEO issues.


I know I don't want duplicate content.


I know I don't want a problem where my friend site ends up outranking me because maybe they


have better links or other ranking signals.


And I know that I would like any ranking credit, right, any link or authority signals that


they accrue to actually come to my website.


And there's a way that you can do this.


Google introduced it back in 2009.


It is the cross-domain rel canonical.


So essentially, in the header tag of the page, I can add this link rel equals canonical href,


it's a link tag, so there's an href to the place where I want the link or the canonical,


in this case, to point to, and then close the tag.


And Google will transfer over, this is an estimate, right, but roughly in the SEO world


we think it's pretty similar to what you get in a 301 redirect.


So something above 90 percent of the link authority and ranking signals will transfer


from friendsite.com to mysite.com.


And so my green turtles page is going to be the one that Google will be more likely to


rank.


As this one accrues any links or other ranking signals, that authority, those links, should


transfer over to my page.


And that's an ideal situation for a bunch of different things.


I'll talk about those in a sec.


Multiple domains and pages are totally cool to point to any URL.


So I can do this for friendsite.com.


I can also do this for, you know, turtledudes.com and leatherbackfriends.net and cts.com and


natureislit.com.


All of them can contain this cross-domain rel canonical pointing back to the site or


the page that I want it to go to.


And this is a great way to potentially license content out there, give people republishing


permissions without losing any of the SEO value.


A few things need to match or generally should match.


The page content really does need to match.


And that includes things like text, images, if you've embedded videos, whatever you've


got on there.


The headline ideally should match.


It's a little less crucial than the page content, but probably you want that headline to match.


And if you have links inside the content, those should also match.


This is a good way to make sure, right, you check one, two, three.


This is a good way to make sure that Google will count that rel canonical correctly.


Things that don't need to match, the URL, no, it's fine if the URLs are different, right.


In this case, I've got natureislit.com slash turtles slash p question mark id equals 679.


That's okay.


It doesn't need to be, you know, green hyphen turtles.


I can have a different URL structure on my site than they've got on theirs.


Google's just fine with that.


The title of the piece, many times the cross-domain rel canonical is used with different page


titles.


So if, for example, cts.com wants to publish the piece with a different title, that's okay.


I still generally recommend that the headlines stay the same, but title, okay to have different


The navigation and the site branding.


So all the things around the content, right.


If we've got, you know, I've got my page here and I have like, you know, nav elements over


here, nav elements down here, maybe a footer down here, right, a nice little logo up in


the top left.


That's fine if those are totally different from the ones that are on these other pages,


cross-domain colonically.


That stuff does not need to match.


We're really talking about the content inside the page that Google looks for.


Some great ways to use the cross-domain rel canonical.


First off, if you run multiple domains for whatever reason, right, let's say you've got


a set of domains and you would like the benefit of being able to publish a single piece of


content for whatever reason across multiples of these domains that you own, but you know


you don't want to deal with a duplicate content issue and you know you'd prefer for one of


these domains to be the one receiving the ranking signals, cross-domain rel canonical


is your friend.


You can tell Google that site A and site C should not get credit for this content, but


site B should get all the credit.


The issue here is don't try and do this across multiple domains.


So don't say, oh, site A, why don't you rel canonical to B and site C, why don't you rel


canonical to D and I'll try and get two things ranked in the top.


Don't do that.


Make sure all of them point to one.


That is the best way to make sure that Google respects the cross-domain rel canonical properly.


Second, let's say a publication reaches out to you.


They're like, wow, hey, we really like this piece.


My wife Geraldine wrote a piece about Mario Batali's sexual harassment apology letter


and the cinnamon rolls recipe that he strangely included in this apology and she baked those


right and then wrote about it.


It went quite viral, got a lot of shares from a ton of powerful and well-networked people


and then a bunch of publications, The Guardian reached out, an Australian newspaper reached


out and they said, hey, we would like to republish your piece.


And Geraldine talked to her agent and they set up a price or whatever.


One of the ways that you can do this and benefit from it, not just from getting a link from


The Guardian or some other newspaper, but is to say, hey, I will be happy to be included


here.


You don't even have to give me, necessarily, if you don't want to, right, author credits,


or link credit, but I do want that sweet, sweet rel canonical, right?


And this is a great way to get, to maximize the SEO benefit of being posted on someone


else's site because you're not just receiving a single link, you're receiving credit from


all the links that that piece might generate.


Oops, I did that backwards.


You want it to come from their site to your site.


This is how you know Whiteboard Friday is done in one take.


Next, right?


So let's say I am in the opposite situation.


I'm the publisher.


I see a piece of content that I love and I want to get that piece, right?


So I might say, wow, that piece of content is terrific.


It didn't do as well as I thought it would do.


I bet if we put it on our site and broadcast it with our audience, it would do incredibly


well.


Let's reach out to the author of the piece and see if we can purchase or rent for a time


period, right, say two years, right?


For the next two years, we want to put the cross-domain rel canonical on your site and


point it back to us and we want to host that content.


After two years, you can have it back.


You can own it again.


Without forcing them to remove the content from their site, so saying, you publisher,


you author can keep it on your site, we don't mind, we'd just like this tag applied and


we'd like to be able to have republishing permissions on our website, now you can get


the SEO benefits of that piece of content and they can, in exchange, get some money.


So your site sending them some dollars, their site sending you the rel canonical and the


ranking authority and the link equity and all those beautiful things.


Number four, Medium.


Medium is a great place to publish content.


It has a wide network, people who really care about consuming content.


Medium is a great distribution network with one challenge.


If you post on Medium, people worry that they can't post the same thing on their own site


because you'll be competing with medium.com.


It's a very powerful domain.


It tends to rank really well.


So duplicate content is an issue and potentially losing the rankings and the traffic that you


would get from search and losing that to Medium is no fun.


But Medium has a beautiful thing.


The cross-domain rel canonical is built in to their import tool.


So if you go to medium.com slash p slash import and you are logged into your Medium account,


you can enter in their URL field the content that you've published on your own site.


Medium will republish it on your account and they will include the cross-domain rel canonical


back to you.


Now you can start thinking of Medium as essentially a distribution network without the penalties


or problems of duplicate content issues.


Really, really awesome tool.


Really awesome that Medium is offering this.


I hope it sticks around.


All right, everyone.


I think you're going to have some excellent additional ideas for the cross-domain rel


canonical and how you have used it.


We would love you to share those in the comments below and we'll see you again next week for


another edition of Whiteboard Friday.


Daily SEO Fix: Report Branding Labeling Your Report

Hi there, I'm Emily from the learning team. In this video, I'll be showing you how you


can add your own logo to a custom report in Moz Pro. Let's jump into the tool.


Designing a branded report allows you to create an SEO report that can be instantly associated


with your brand. It also looks nicer. To do this in Moz Pro, head to custom reports and


click on create a custom report. We can add our logo in the report details stage. So I


just click on a random report and create. We can see here in report details. If you


want to add a logo, then upload your logo here. Remember the image you choose must stay


within the requirements. A max width of 750 pixels, a max height of 300 pixels, a resolution


of 300 dpi and it must be in a JPEG, GIF or PNG format. If you already have a logo set,


you'll be asked whether you want to change your current logo. Choose the image you want


to upload and then tick the box here to add your custom logo to the top of your report.


If we go to preview and download, we can have a look at what our new branded report will


look like. I hope this video has been helpful. Do you remember if you want to talk to someone


and go through the tool, you can book a one on one walkthrough with one of our onboarding


How to Prioritize SEO Tasks - Whiteboard Friday

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


This week we're chatting about how to prioritize SEO tasks and specifically get the biggest


bang for the buck that we possibly can.


So I know that all of you have to deal with this, whether you are a consultant or at an


agency and you're working with a client and you're trying to prioritize their SEO tasks


in an audit or a set of recommendations that you've got, or you're working on an ongoing


basis in-house or as a consultant and you're trying to tell a team or a boss or manager,


hey, these are all the SEO things that we could potentially do.


Which ones should we do first?


Which ones are going to get in this sprint, this quarter, this cycle, whatever the cadence


is that you're using?


I wanted to give you some great ways that we here at Moz have done this and some of


the things that I've seen from both very small companies, startups, all the way up to large


enterprises.


And look, the list of SEO tasks can be fairly enormous, right?


So it could be all sorts of things, rewrite our titles and descriptions, add rich, diverse


categories, create new user profile pages, hey, we want to rewrite the remaining dynamic


URLs that we haven't taken care of yet, or add some of the recommended internal links


to the blog posts, or do outreach to some influencers that we know in this new space


we're getting into.


You might have a huge list of these things that are potential SEO items.


I actually urge you to make this list internally for yourself, either as a consulting team


or an in-house team, as big as you possibly can.


I think it's great to involve decision makers in this process, right?


So you reach out to a manager or the rest of your team or your client, whoever it is,


and get all of their ideas as well, because you don't want to walk into these prioritization


meetings and then have them go, great, those are your priorities, but what about all these


things that are my ideas?


You want to capture as many of these as you can, and then you go through a validation


process.


And that's really the focus of today.


So the prioritization questions that I think all of us need to be asking ourselves before


we decide which order tasks will go in and which ones we're going to focus on are, what


company goals does this task serve or map to?


So typically, and I, you know, look, if your company or the organization you're working


with doesn't actually have big initiatives for the year or the quarter, that's a whole


other matter.


I would recommend that you make sure your organization gets on top of that or that you


as a consultant, if you are a consultant, get a list of what those big goals are.


And that could be, those big things might be, hey, we're trying to increase revenue


from this particular product line, or we're trying to drive more qualified users to sign


up for this feature, or we're trying to grow traffic to this specific section, right?


Kind of big company goals.


It might even be weird things like we're trying, or, you know, non-marketing things, not weird,


but non-marketing things like we're trying to recruit this quarter.


It's really important for us to focus on recruitment.


And so you might have an SEO task that maps to how do we get more people who are job seekers


to our jobs pages, or how do we get our jobs listings more prominent in search results


for relevant keywords, that kind of thing.


So they can map to all sorts of goals across a company.


And then once we have those, we want to ask for an estimated range, and this is very important,


a range of value that the task will provide over the next x period of time.


So I like doing this in terms of several time periods.


I don't like to say, hey, we're only going to estimate what the six-month value is.


I like to say, hey, what's an estimated 30, 60, 90, and one-year value?


You don't have to be that specific.


You could say, hey, we're only going to do this for a month and then for the next year.


And then for each of those time periods right here, you'd go, here's our low estimate, our


mid estimate, and our high estimate of how this is going to impact traffic or conversion


rate or whatever the goal is that you're mapping to up here.


Next, we want to ask which teams or people are needed to accomplish this work, and what


is their estimate of time needed?


Important, what is their estimate?


Not what's your estimate, right?


I as an SEO think that it's very, very simple to make small changes to CMS to allow me to


edit a rel canonical tag.


My web dev team tells me differently, right?


And I want their opinion.


That's what I want to represent in any sort of planning process.


If you're working outside a company as a consultant or at an agency, you need to go validate with


their web dev team, with their engineering team, what's it going to take to make these


changes?


If you're a contractor and they work with a web dev contractor, you need to talk to


that contractor about what it's going to take.


You never want to present estimates that haven't been validated by the right team.


So I might, for example, say there's a big SEO change that we want to make here at Moz.


I might need some help from UX folks, some help from content, some help from the SEO


themselves and one dev for two weeks, right?


So all of these different things, I want to represent those completely in the planning


process.


And finally, last question I'll ask in this prioritization is how are we going to capture


the right metrics around this, measure it, see that it's working, and identify potential


problems early on?


One of the things that happens with SEO is sometimes something goes wrong either in the


planning phase or the implementation or the launch itself or something unexpected happens,


right?


We update the user profiles to be way more SEO friendly and realize that, oh, we, in


the new profile pages, we no longer link to this very important piece of internal content


that users had uploaded or had created, and so now we've lost a bunch of internal links


to that and our indexation is dropping out and so your profile pages may be doing great,


but that user-generated content is shrinking fast and so we need to correct that immediately.


We have to be on the watch for those and that requires validation of design, some form of


test if you can, sometimes it's not needed but many times it is, some launch metrics


so you can watch and see how it's doing, and then ongoing metrics to tell you was that


a good change and did it map well to what we predicted it was going to do.


Just a few rules now that we've been through this process, some general wisdom around here.


I mean, I think this is true in all aspects of professional life, but under-promise and


over-deliver, especially on speed to execute.


So when you estimate all these things, make sure to leave yourself a nice buffer, healthy


buffer, and potential value, right?


So I like to be very conservative around how I think these types of things can move the


needle on the metrics.


Leave teams and people room in their sprints or whatever the cadence is to do their daily


and ongoing and maintenance types of work.


You can't go, well, there's four weeks in this time period for this sprint and so we're


going to have the dev do this thing that takes two weeks and that thing that takes two weeks.


Well, guess what?


They have to do other work as well, right?


You're not the only team asking for things from them.


They have their daily work that they've got to do.


They have maintenance work.


They have regular things that crop up that go wrong.


They have email that needs to be answered.


So you've got to make sure that those are accounted for.


I mentioned this before, never, ever, ever estimate on behalf of other people.


It's not just that you might be wrong about it.


That's actually only a small portion of the problem.


The big part of the problem with estimating on behalf of others is then when they see


it or when they're asked to confirm it by a team, a manager, a client, whomever, they


will inevitably get upset that you've estimated on their behalf and assumed that work will


take a certain amount of time.


You might have been way overestimating and so you feel like, hey man, I left you tons


of time.


What are you worried about?


The frustrating part is not being looped in early.


I think people just as a general rule, human beings like to know that they are part of


a process for the work that they have to do and not being told, okay, this is the work


we're assigning you.


You had no input into it.


I promise you too, if you have these conversations early, the work will get done faster and better


than if you left those people out of those conversations.


Don't present every option in planning.


I know there's a huge list of things here.


What I don't want you to do is go into a planning process or a client meeting or something like


that, sit down and have that full list and go, all right, here's everything we evaluated.


We'd evaluated 50 different things you could do for SEO.


I don't know.


Bring them the top five.


Even just the top three or so.


You want to have just the best ones.


You should have the full list available somewhere.


If they call up like, hey, did you think about doing this?


Did you think about doing that?


You can say, yeah, we did.


We've done the diligence on it.


This is the list of the best things that we've got and here's our recommended prioritization.


Then that might change around as people have different opinions about value and which goals


are more important, that time period, et cetera.


If possible, two of the earliest investments I recommend are A, automated, easy to access


metrics, so building up a culture of metrics and a way to get those metrics easily so that


every time you launch something new, it doesn't take you an inordinate amount of time to go


get the metrics and every week or month or quarter, however your reporting cycle goes,


it doesn't take you tons and tons of time to collect and report on those metrics.


Integrated metrics, especially for SEO, but all kinds of metrics, hugely valuable.


Second, CMS upgrades, things that make it such that your content team, your SEO team


can go make changes on the fly without having to involve developers, engineers, UX folks,


all that kind of stuff.


If you make it very easy for a content management system to enable editable titles and descriptions,


make URLs easily rewritable, make things redirectable simply, allow for rel canonical or other types


of header changes, enable you to put schema markup into stuff, all those kinds of things,


if that is right in the CMS and you can get that done early, then a ton of the things


over here go from needing lots and lots of people involved to just the SEO or the SEO


and the content person involved, and that's really, really nice too.


All right, everyone.


I look forward to hearing your thoughts and comments on prioritization methods, and we'll


see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.


MozCon 2015 - 27 - On site SEO in 2015 with Rand Fishkin

I love SEO.


I love the idea that there's an algorithm that is not transparent, that Google hides


information from us, information that would make us more successful, that in my opinion


would make the web a better place if it were transparent and open.


I realize that's my opinion and not their opinion.


Doesn't mean it's any less true to me.


And so I love the job that I have and that I sometimes get to do of making Google more


transparent.


That's what I want to do.


And that's what I get to do today.


So you can find these slides at bit.ly on site SEO 2015.


So I want to urge you not to have to take mad, crazy notes and look up URLs on the fly


because you can get them all, click them all there.


I will ask you to do one thing at the end of the presentation, but you can't use your


laptop for it.


At least you can't use any device connected to the Wi-Fi.


You remember this little trick?


Got another fun one for you.


All right.


How Many Words Is a Question Worth? - Presented by Dr. Pete Meyers

I want to talk today about questions and what we can do with them and how we need to think


about questions differently from how we think about keywords today.


I want to start by answering a question you may have, which is why is Dr. Pete carrying


a wand today?


I was with my family at Universal Orlando recently, and we were at the two Harry Potter


parks, and we're big fans.


My dad, their grandpa's a big fan.


We took our kids to Ollivanders, and they got the wands.


If you don't know, they have the interactive exhibits, so you can do things, and you cast


the spells, and water comes out, and you spray people, and lights turn on.


I told my wife, I'm like, okay, we have to go back, because I have to get my own.


I got home and realized I had spent $165 on wands and $87 on butter beer.


I'm like, I'm damn well going to get some value out of this.


I put that on Twitter, and people are like, you have to bring it.


It escalated, and now my entire deck is Harry Potter themed.


If you're into that, great.


If you're not, you can just pretend I'm conducting Invisible Orchestra.


If you'd like to just think I've lost my grip on reality completely, that's cool, too.


That's probably not far from the truth.


So a quick history.


I want to take you through some of the features of Knowledge Graph a little bit.


This is something I've talked about quite a bit over the years.


The original Knowledge Graph, some folks are talking about today.


Basically a collection of entities and relationships, a collection of facts that's human curated.


And so if you ask Google something like when was Harry Potter 1 published, it can go into


this collection of facts, pull something back, and say June 26, 1997.


And this is great and useful and interesting, except that what Google quickly found out


that we've known since the directory days and the dawn of search is that human curated


content can never keep up with the nearly infinite questions that we can ask.


And so Google realized that they would have to dip into the index and start to extract


answers from our content.


They would have to use the entirety of their data to actually answer the kinds of questions


we might ask, because we're really asked more esoteric things, like what are all the positions


in Quidditch?


And Google can come back and say, hey, we found a site that has that.


They extract the answer.


We know this is called a featured snippet.


Brittany's going to talk about this more tomorrow.


And we can ask really weird stuff, like do ghosts show up on the Marauder's Map?


And the answer is yes, and people and animals and not bugs.


So if you needed to know that, you're good to go now.


Is Hogwarts a real school?


I hope that you don't have to answer that.


But there's such a wide range of what we could potentially ask that can never be covered


by human curated content that's often subjective.


And so Google launched this sort of second knowledge graph.


They don't call it that.


But Google started to index our content in a different way to understand questions and


understand answers.


And we also got this, the people also ask box.


Sometimes we call it related questions.


That sort of asks follow-up questions about the query.


And so you can see a question like how much would it cost to go to Hogwarts?


Apparently, Hogwarts has free tuition, so that's nice.


If you get the letter, don't worry about paying for it.


And this gives us something that looks like a featured snippet.


And we kind of obsess about this.


And I don't want to talk today about how to rank in this box, how to be in a PAA.


I don't think that's actually very valuable.


By the time somebody opens these and clicks on them, the CTR is pretty low.


We've seen that in our studies.


It looks a bit like a featured snippet.


But this is something very different, very interesting.


I want to tell you why.


Most SERP features, if you think of traditional verticals like news or video, they have a


very clear intent, right?


We know the kind of searches that are going to tend to trigger video.


We know what is newsworthy, what has a QDF component.


Something like featured snippets, very closely tied to informational content.


Light links in the number one position, very closely tied to branded navigational content.


But PAA's are different.


The first thing I want to tell you is that a lot of featured snippets run, not featured


snippets, SERP features run anywhere from a few percent of SERPs we track up to maybe


20, 30 percent.


This is data from Moscow.


This is 10,000 queries.


They run a little bit more head competitive queries than long tail.


So we sometimes have higher estimates of SERP features.


Last June, a year ago, PAA's were appearing on 30 percent of all of our SERPs.


This June, they were appearing on almost 90 percent.


They've almost tripled.


They cross, they were 87 percent when I made this slide.


I think they're 86 now, so not a big change.


They cross all verticals.


They cross all intents.


They're appearing on queries where they really don't make that much sense.


They're not informational queries.


And what I believe Google is doing is using this process of follow-up questions to understand


our intent, to see what we click on, to refine that, and to feed the machine, and to feed


their machine learning processes.


And so this is not a typical SERP feature that Google is looking for us to go and click


on and have a journey through.


They're actually trying to mine that data.


And I believe that this is intended as a data mining device.


And so how can we exploit that?


And if this is appearing so often, we know Google is trying to use this, what can we


do with this?


I also want to show you that it appears in places that just don't make all that sense.


So this is a query for my t-shirt.


What would Hermione do?


She would probably save your sorry ass is what she would do, because that's her job.


And you can see that Google considers this to be a commercial SERP.


So we got shopping up at the top.


I'll actually use my wand now and then.


And then we've got images down below.


And they're actually, this isn't something that was said or done in the book.


So they just view this as, hey, we're trying to sell you the shirt.


And then we have the PAs underneath that.


This doesn't serve a lot of purpose on this SERP.


So Google is doing something different with that.


And so a few months back, about a year ago, I guess I started thinking, well, how can


I take advantage of this?


How can we use this data?


It turns out in our keyword explorer data set, we track now I think 160 million keywords,


80 million English.