Understanding our audience, thinking simple, being creative, and telling a story.


Making Memories: Creating Content People Remember- Presented by Casie Gillette

So I want to leave with just this one thing.


I want you to leave this session and I want you to go do something.


I want you to create an image or a video or a GIF or whatever it is, something that you


haven't done before, and share it.


Send it to me.


I'll buy you a beer.


They're free tonight, right?


Is that tomorrow?


I'll buy you a beer tomorrow.


Look, this is cool stuff.


This is where we want to go.


As content marketers, yes, I want you to think back to being a kid, but this is also about


growing up, and these are the things that we can be doing.


20 Attributes that Influence a Link's ValueTemplate - Whiteboard Friday

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


This week we're chatting about the attributes that influence a link's value and which ones


we might still need to care about.


So in old school SEO this was critically important, right?


We had this very manual link building process where we'd go, well, here's a page and do


I want to get a link from that page, I know I'm going to have to put a bunch of outreach


effort in and that could be everything from submit to this page to email or pitch them


or do business development, get a partnership going, maybe some press and PR, maybe I can


submit some guest content, get an embed going, try to get on a different page on this same


site or some new angle, right?


Maybe I can go by the domain of the person they're already linking to and redirect that


to my...


Anyway, very manual link building process which meant every link had to be considered


from a bunch of different attribute-based angles.


And I mean I think that that was a little bit too manual, probably a lot of those things


that we were concerned about back in those days didn't actually make that big of a difference


or if they did it was only for a little bit of time until Google sort of caught up with


their algorithm and got better at it.


And certainly look, because the power of links used to be kind of the whole algorithm and


today it's a much more complex and nuanced picture, this stuff really mattered.


But as we moved into this more link by exposure world where you kind of fire the cannon usually


through social media and all sorts of other broadcast mediums through to your page and


then hope that everybody goes, ooh, ah, I'm going to link to it, yeah, that's great, that's


changed a little bit, right?


You've gotten less concerned with who are these people and do I have to worry about


all the various attributes that they have or not?


Do I have to check all the boxes?


No, not really, right?


That world has gone away in a lot of senses.


However, it is true that today Google and Bing still look at a bunch of different attributes


about a link to determine the relative value that it might have.


And there's kind of, I think there's a bucket of about 20, there's probably plenty more


in the minutia and probably a couple of big ones that I've missed here.


But these 20 are a good representative sample of kind of the things that most people in


the SEO world think about or did think about.


And so what I wanted to do is run through these attributes, talk about how and whether


they were still important in 2015, 2016 and moving forward and how we might measure those


and figure out whether those things are worthy of going out and getting links for it.


Especially as we, some of us, I think some successful SEOs are actually returning to


or never quit the model of having a manual outreach process for link acquisition.


We've seen that some old school SEO folks have been really successful with this and


certainly in our studies with BuzzSumo we saw that a lot of links that are tried to


acquire through social means or through broadcast means don't actually work all that well.


And so as we think about this again, which ones of these do we need to worry about?


Let's go through here.


So anchor text, absolutely still important.


I gave it a three and the reason why I only gave it a three out of five, five being the


most important, zero being not important at all, the reason I only gave it a three is


because in a lot of senses while an anchor text does move the needle further than an


exact match anchor text does more than partial and partial does more than non-match, a link


is still valuable regardless of whether you get the anchor text.


So if the choice is between, well I could get no link at all or I could get a link but


it wouldn't have the anchor text that I want, get the link.


Get the link, right?


Second thing, page rank of the linking source.


Oh, and with anchor text we can measure that.


I mean, obviously you can eyeball it but you can use any of the link based tools OpenSight


Explorer, you can see this in the Moz bar as well, Ahrefs or Majestic for seeing distribution


of anchor text to a given page if that's what you're looking at.


Regarding page rank of the linking source, I gave that actually a very low score because


I think page rank, look Google's page rank in the toolbar obviously dead and been dead


for years now.


You can use Moz rank as a substitute and it's calculated in, well, I would say nearly the


same way as the original page rank patent paper, who knows whether that is how Google


is calculating page rank and I'm sure they have many other link graph based metrics that


they're doing these days.


But page rank of the linking source, not that important for a bunch of reasons including


that if you're getting a link from a page that is not yet published or will be published


soon or has been published in the recent past, it may not have a high Moz rank or high page


rank score and that doesn't matter very much.


I'd much rather that we look at domain authority and importance of the site overall and importance


of other pages on the site, relevance, et cetera.


Speaking of, I put relevance itself at a three.


Look, relevance is important and you have to eyeball it.


There's no tool that tells you exactly how relevant a page or site is going to be to


your precise concept, at least not right now.


But to this degree, I don't think it is critically important that you say, hey, I am writing


about Go For Food and I need to go find websites that are only about food for rodents and marsupials


because any other site is just not going to be very relevant to my site.


That's not true.


Right?


Like you can go get a broad news source.


You could even go get tech industry news, which is completely unrelated.


You could get links from a fashion site or from related sites or from non-related sites


that are in your geographical area and those would still be providing a lot of value.


So relevance is something to think about.


It's certainly a way to find folks who might have an affinity for linking to you, but it


is not a requirement and I would urge you not to cut out people who are irrelevant.


Next one, domain authority.


So domain authority, I'm not talking here about Moz's domain authority, although that's


a reasonably good way to measure it, but rather I'm talking about the concept of domain authority.


How important is this domain from a content and relevance independence perspective just


from the links and how Google considers that site?


This is pretty important.


I think this is the number one way that I would go about from a metrics-driven standpoint


trying to judge whether a link is more valuable than another and whether I should go pursue


it first.


Right?


I have the highest domain authority targets that I can as long as I think they're equally


easy to get and work my way down in terms of authority of the site.


That's just going to be one of the best predictors of how a link will perform for you.


And it's not just from a link perspective like link that will increase my ranking.


It's also link that will be seen by people, be clicked, be engaged upon, have these amplifying


effects.


So lots of good reasons to think about domain authority.


And page, look, you can eyeball it, right?


But that stuff barely matters anymore.


The only reason I'm giving it a two instead of a zero is because if a link is in the footer


of a page or in the sidebar or the advertising section of a page, it's likely to be seen


and potentially classified by Google as being an advertising link.


And if it's not no-followed and it looks like it probably is advertising or sketchy somehow,


that could get you in trouble.


So something to consider, at least a tiny bit.


Internal versus external.


Okay, that one's obvious.


It is important, but we don't need to worry about it really.


Basically an external link, a link from a site that is not your own site, will help


you much more than one that's on your own site.


Quality of the pages, other links.


This is actually pretty high.


You can, unfortunately there's no great way to do this on a page by page basis.


You could look at Moz's spam score on a domain or other metrics like that.


You're going to have to eyeball this one and say, hey, are they linking to really shady


places?


Is this an open free-for-all submission page that anyone can submit to?


If so, maybe I shouldn't go after it.


Maybe it's not all worthwhile.


If, however, the links on the page and on the site generally are well curated, you're


good.


Editorial integrity.


So this is a total judgment call.


And look, we could quibble about which news venues we think, which websites we think have


true editorial integrity.


All I would say is be aware that it's probably in the consideration set of things that Google


will try and look at via machine learning or deep learning by analyzing content and


seeing how people have regarded that content and judged it.


So just know that it's coming.


User engagement.


This one is really important.


I almost want to put this at a five.


It is tough to measure, though.


The reason user engagement matters so much is because if a page is visited a lot and


people engage with that page and they click on those links, Google is seeing that through


things like Chrome and through Android and through all the Wi-Fi services, et cetera,


et cetera, and ISP data if they're buying that.


You can use something like a similar web on the domain to see how relatively engaged with


a particular domain is, or you can use your own web analytics, like Google Analytics or


Omniture or what have you, to say, is this particular link from this page sending me


traffic?


That is a good indication that it's getting engagement and you probably want to go find


links like that, but it's hard to do before you get the link.


However, if you can use your best judgment and figure out whether you think a page is


going to be engaged with or if it is engaged with, for example, if it's ranking well or


if it gets socially shared a lot, those are good signs.


User engagement we've seen to be highly predictive of rankings as well as rank influence.


Follow versus nofollow.


Yes, it still matters.


A nofollow link.


Every test we've run, a nofollow link is not treated like a followed link.


I know they're well correlated, but remember that followed and nofollow links themselves


are well correlated, so that could explain it.


You can use the Moz bar and turn on the highlighting for nofollow links, or you can eyeball it


if you want.


With source depth.


Source depth was something that back in the day when Google's crawlers were not as robust


as they are today, and actually Bing's crawlers are fairly robust today too, you could see


that pages that were basically higher up in a site structure, fewer links away from the


homepage, more likely to get crawled and crawled more frequently looked like they did well,


whereas ones further down not so much.


These days, barely matters.


I wouldn't worry about it.


Google's crawling everything.


They judge all, see all, know all.


Screaming Frog, you could look at this, and I think they will calculate depth away from


a homepage or category page for you.


Text versus image.


Don't care about it, and it's obvious.


Link age and page age, I also don't care about this one.


With both of these, yes, there were tests back in the day that showed that, yeah, look,


an image link passes slightly less value through its anchor text, which is the alt tag, than


a raw text link does.


It's so infinitesimally minute.


If you can get a link, get the link.


If you think the image is going to get more clicks than the text, go for it.


If you think the text will get more links because people recognize it as a link, unlike


the image, go for it.


You can use the Wayback Machine if you want to see how long a page has been around or


how long the link has been on that page, but the whole old crusty links thing doesn't look


like it has good correlation or good connection to rankings today.


In fact, the opposite is true.


We've seen where new pages pop up that have links on them, and those will actually outperform


old crusty links.


Topical authority of a source.


This is basically saying not how authoritative is this website overall from the Domain Authority


perspective, but how authoritative is it in this topical area.


A great way to measure this is to look at either Google.


You can run some searches around a topic, and if you consistently see a site performing


well in the top ten, that might be a signal.


Then you can use SEMrush and see all the things that that site ranks, all the keywords that


site ranks for, and how it performs, and how it's performing over time.


That's a great indication of potential topic authority in Google's eyes, and it is moderately


important.


If you find that great Go for Food website that ranks for all the terms and they link


to your Go for Food site, probably a good thing.


JavaScript.


This is HTML.


Yeah, the only reason I didn't give this a zero is because there are still some forms


of JavaScript rendering and weird stuff that people can do on pages that Google doesn't


crawl as perfectly as they say they crawl it.


You can look at Google's cached snapshot for any given URL to see whether the links are


getting picked up or if it's post-loading JavaScript and they're not crawling it and


indexing it.


Try to go for stuff that isn't too fancy.


I wouldn't urge you to get too complex with your Ajax and all that kind of stuff.


Spam signals.


I gave this one a four.


It is relatively important.


Google will discount or even penalize sites based on lots of spammy links.


I like to try and keep the Moz bar open while I'm surfing and have Spam Score in there and


just have a sense of like, hey, does this domain look sketchy or not?


Or look, you don't even need Spam Score.


You can use your own judgment.


Ninety-nine percent of the time when you look at a site, you get a good sense of like, hmm,


do they look suspicious?


Yeah, maybe they do.


Speed of link acquisition.


If you are doing white hat, you know, non-manipulative, non-spammy linking, you never need to worry


about this.


Speed up, slow down, hey, that's just how it goes.


Fine, don't worry about it.


The only time you ever worry about speed of link acquisition is if you are doing something


sketchy and you think you can maybe do it smarter than Google can catch you doing it,


which good luck.


Majestic is a way to go look at people like that and you can see link growth over time


and see if someone's gotten a bunch of sketchy looking links or a bunch of good looking links,


which could be the case too.


Author authority.


You know, Google has sort of wavered on are they completely deprecating it or is it still


a thing at all?


So maybe it's still a little bit of a thing.


I think where it really becomes valuable for us is not as link builders from an SEO perspective


but as link builders from an authority and influence perspective.


You can get an authoritative author in a space to write about you and link to you.


That's a very good sign.


You can use the quotes that that person has said about you in your marketing.


You can use their endorsement as you pitch people.


It's helpful in all sorts of ways.


You can measure that still via Google Plus or use your own judgment.


Google Plus meaning for whatever Google might be doing with author authority, you could


take a look at that.


First link to target in HTML.


So I don't know if you remember these tests but we used to look at a page and we'd say,


oh, this link, if these two links both point to the same page, it looks like Google will


only consider this first one, right?


The first link is the one that passes anchor text and ranking signals and all that and


they sort of ignore the second one.


Does this matter all that much?


No, it doesn't matter.


The page linked to you twice.


Great.


More of a chance to get more user engagement, more of a chance to get more clicks and more


traffic and more exposure.


The fact that the first link doesn't have your ideal anchor text, that'd be sketchy


to convince me that that is the thing that you should do with your outreach time but


maybe, maybe it is one.


Prior links from this domain.


Again, this is an issue where people said, hey, I'm looking for a lot of domain diversity


and link diversity specifically.


We had an old Whiteboard Friday that this one is now replacing about link diversity.


I think we lost the video in the archive somewhere but link diversity used to matter a tremendous


amount back in the old days of SEO, kind of pre-2010, 2011.


Today link quality matters so much more and link getting a lot of good links from a small


set of high authority domains and high influence domains is probably just as good if not better


than getting a high degree of links from a lot of diverse domains, none of which have


all that much authority.


Plus, when you get linked to by authoritative sites and you're building up credibility in


your field, that tends to trickle down to a lot of other secondary sites in your field.


Not as much of a concern.


Something to think about only because the domain diversity of links is still well correlated


with rankings.


If all the links you get are on the same C block or from the same few set of domains


or subdomains, yeah, it's not going to help your rankings all that much.


All right, everyone.


I hope that this is helpful for you.


I'm sure there's a few factors that you're welcome to jump into and add to this list


and tell me what you think about their varying importance in the comments.


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


Survive the Content Crisis and Drive Results [MozCon 2017] — Tara-Nicholle Nelson

Okay, guys, before I came out here, I talked to Rand about my personal brand, which is


Sexy Black Church Lady.


So when I say, how y'all doing, I'm going to need some, like, real response and some


amens and stuff as we start having this conversation today, okay?


So I'm here to talk to you about a no-big-deal little tiny topic, how to be a happy marketer.


Before I get into the slides, I've had this one sort of overarching career insight about


how to be a happy marketer that I want to share with you, and it's really all about


keeping your career, keeping your work, keeping what we do every day in perspective.


The best way I know how to articulate this is to share with you this really profound


Buddhist adage that I learned back in my agency days, one of my first full-time jobs in marketing.


You guys will definitely want to write this down and imprint it on your heart.


It goes like this.


It's PR, not ER.


It's PR, not ER, right?


We're marketers, but you get the gist.


The idea is that fear and anxiety of our leaders, of the other people around us, about what


we're doing can be very contagious.


But before I started in marketing, I had a super-rich life journey that included things


like I was a teenage mom.


I had my son when I was 17, so I now have a 24-year-old, which is odd because I feel


like he's older than me.


Don't know how that happened.


I was a probation officer.


I was an attorney.


I was a real estate broker at the very, very worst part of the great—other people call


it the great recession.


I call it the not-so-great recession.


So when I—years later, when I was the chief marketer at MyFitnessPal and my team would


start to freak out about whether a thing that we were doing was going to work or not, I


would ask them to come along with me and do some triage, right?


Do we know where all the children are?


Is anyone going to jail?


Is anyone going to lose their house?


If not, we're good.


We can work through everything else because we're marketers and we have to keep what we


do in perspective.


And by that, I don't mean to minimize what we do.


The flip side of that is we live in the best time ever to ever have been marketers.


The energy flows so fast.


The creativity moves so fast.


Technology moves so fast.


You can go from concept to actually immediately directly touching a customer so much more


quickly than has ever been possible before.


And frankly, so much more quickly I saw once I got onto executive teams than any other


function in the company.


You have the ability to have that impact.


So I do talk to a lot of fearful and stressed-out marketers, and one of the pieces of advice


that I give them all the time is if you're fearful and stressed out because you're working


in a fear-based organization, because people do more often make decisions in your company


because they don't—they're afraid of what will happen if they don't do something, then


out of the motivation to create something beautiful or impactful.


Or if you're just working on products that you don't really like that much or you don't


feel like are that impactful or good, don't work on them.


Just don't work on them.


There are many, many companies out there, many leadership teams who are conscious and


consciously trying to create beautiful companies, beautiful cultures for their people, and products


that may or may not be changing the whole world but are creating a positive impact on


the people, the customers you serve.


So go work there.


Now, I could actually drop the mic on that because if you followed all of that advice,


you would probably be a happy marketer.


But I promised I would talk to you a little bit about the transformational consumer and


the content crisis that we're in.


So let's do that.


Here we go.


First, since we're talking about fear and happiness, I want us to have—let's do a


little exercise in group vulnerability.


I want you to each take one minute, pick a person next to you or near you, and each of


you give an answer to this question.


What are you afraid of?


Tell your neighbor one thing you're afraid of.


Go.


Now.


And make sure you switch.


So, here's the deal.


Human beings, baby humans like this guy right here, were born with two fears and two fears


only.


We're born with a fear—does anyone know what they are?


Shout it out if you do.


They're born with a fear of falling and the fear of loud noises.


Those are the only two fears that humans are born with.


So the first takeaway every time I do this exercise is that tonight everybody should


give a ring to their parents and figure out what happened, that you acquired so many other


fears in your lifetime.


But most of my work—in most of my work I talk with CEOs and CMOs and marketing teams,


and based on my extensive research with these audiences, I am petitioning the powers that


be to add one more fear to the list of inborn human fears.


The fear that you'll get no love on Instagram, the fear that no one will follow your Twitter


channel, the fear that no one will download your app and no one will buy what you're selling.


Now generally I think of the fears that I hear the most as bucketed under the fear that


we won't grow, right?


Lack of growth is the biggest fear that I hear from CEOs and CMOs, and it's usually


lack of growth of leads, of customers, and of followers.


And what they usually do to fight those fears is also growth-related, right?


You solve the fear of growth with growth hacking.


You solve these fears with brand advertising and user acquisition efforts.


Marketers are afraid too.


The ones that I talk to are often afraid of the silly metrics that they're given, metrics


that they know don't actually mean much to the business.


They're fearful that as soon as they put a campaign out, somebody—I call this all the


world's a marketer a little bit.


Everyone who's ever seen a commercial feels like they know how to be a marketer.


So that fear of someone's constantly criticizing the work because it's so public, the fear


that as soon as we get started and get traction, someone's going to come along and move our


target again, having to market products that you're not really that into, and ultimately


the lack of influence in the organization, the lack that people will hear you enough


to give you the resources that you need to do the work that you need to do.


Now I think even these fears almost all track up to and live under the leadership team's


fears of lack of growth of customers, lack of growth of leads, lack of growth of followers.


And I think those are worthy things to want for your company, but I feel like we are all


looking fixated on the wrong thing, right?


When you look beyond the vanity metrics about how many customers we have, how many followers


we have, how many downloads we've gotten, at the metrics that it actually takes for


a company to succeed, you see quickly that we're all afraid of the wrong thing.


As far as I can tell, any company in any industry at any stage will be successful if it engages


to audiences over and over, its customers and its employees.


And the data that I've seen shows that most companies aren't actually doing that great


a job engaging either its customers or their employees.


Now TrackMaven's report says that brand published content is up 35% and customer engagement


with that content is down 17%.


We're publishing more.


People are engaging with it less.


Ad data, there's a really interesting whole new field of eye tracking ad data that shows


that even when you can get customers in front of a screen and play a video ad on that screen,


60% of them avoid the ad by just turning their heads.


Just by turning their heads.


I have almost only worked on apps, so I know a lot of the big brands out there are looking


to solve for some of these problems by creating an app.


But I will tell you from my experience with apps that it's way harder to get people to


engage with an app than it is to get them to engage with a tangible product.


Locallytics says that something like 60% of apps that are downloaded will be used less


than ten times and the vast majority of them are used only the single time they were downloaded.


Just the time they were downloaded.


And the news on employee engagement is not so much better either.


I actually see a lot of parallels between engaging your internal audiences and your


external audiences.


Gartner says like 70% of American employees rank somewhere on this spectrum of disengagement


from kind of like neutral and meh to toxically actively hateful toward their employers and


toward their work.


Now we have a disengagement dilemma when you can't actually even pay people to be engaged.


If we fear anything, it's not the lack of growth of followers and that sort of thing.


We should fear what we fear should be disengagement.


Because disengagement is the number one limiting factor on every business.


If we're fixating on growth and getting people into the top of the funnel without paying


attention to engaging them and stopping churn, we call it churn in the app world, once they're


in, it's like pouring champagne down the bathtub drain.


When you get to a place where the cost to acquire a customer is greater than the lifetime


value of that customer to your business, that is not a sustainable business model.


And the other reason I think that disengagement is the number one limiting factor on businesses


is that you can actually buy growth.


You can growth hack your way and get people into the funnel.


You can brand advertise your way enough.


You can get follow you can buy followers.


You cannot buy engagement.


You have to build it.


And if you do build it, then having an engagement engine, making your marketing, your content


marketing programming serve as an engagement engine for your business takes the limits


off of any business in any vertical.


It positions you as the marketer who does that to be a real hero in your entire company.


Now, engagement means lots of things.


There are lots of metrics around it.


When I say engagement, I generally mean just people care about what you sell.


They buy what you sell.


They read what you publish.


They watch your videos.


They tell other people about it.


An engaged customer is a customer who cares about your product, opens your e-mails, spends


time on your app.


These are the things it takes for a business to survive.


A deeply engaged customer is a love mark.


I'm not sure if you are familiar with the phrase and the framework of love marks.


There is an incredible book written by Kevin Roberts about the love mark phenomenon.


But he just says that a love mark is a brand that has earned its customers loyalty beyond


all reason when you think about what the product actually is.


And he says that it quantifies that love marks are brands that have reached high levels of


love and respect from their customers.


Now, the thing I disagree with him about is he says the way you know if your brand is


a love mark is that if your customers can't get to your product, they protest loudly.


Now I've never worked for a CEO who would let me take the product away from customers


to see if they protest loudly.


But I have spent enough time on executive teams now to know that in C-suite, fatigue,


engagement actually is measurable along all of these lines, return visits, time in store,


time on site, time in app, repeat purchases, all of these things that ultimately lead to


increased customer lifetime value.


Now what do you do?


So we know engagement is important.


What do you do to drive engagement?


Most often the companies that I talk with are looking toward digital things to drive


engagement.


They're looking at digital, they're looking at social, they're looking at big data, they're


looking at demographics.


I argue that this misunderstands the essential nature of the disengagement dilemma.


Digital solutions work for digital problems.


And I'm a digital chick, but I'm going to show you my exhibit A, the lawyer in me couldn't


resist doing that, of why I don't think disengagement is a digital problem.


Normally I require, Ashley, let's try it, guys.


Let's actually read this quote all aloud.


It's going to be music to my ears.


Let's do it now.


Okay.


Advertisements, all of you, are now so numerous that they are very negligently perused and


it is therefore become necessary to gain attention by magnificence of promises and by eloquence,


sometimes sublime and sometimes pathetic.


I think you can tell by that language that this quote was not, like, tweeted last week.


Does anyone want to guess when this quote was written?


Clue.


That's the guy who said it.


In 1759.


This guy was writing about advertising being disengaging in 1759.


So disengagement can't be a digital problem.


Disengagement is a human problem.


Disengagement is a human problem and the solution will also be human.


We will only fix the disengagement dilemma by understanding the undying principles of


human motivation and reorienting our product and our marketing efforts to align with the


reasons why people do what they do and why they want what they want and buy what they


buy.


Now, here's some basic truths about human.


Human beings since time was begun have wanted to be healthier, they've wanted to be wealthier


and they've wanted to be wiser.


It is still to this day one of the most powerful purchasing motivators, the desire people have


to transform their lives in these ways.


The challenge with these things, healthier, wealthier and wiser, as aspirations is that


all of them require behavior change and behavior change is hard.


I won't get into it, but there are a bunch of different brain circuits and structures


that make it really, really hard for people on their own to build good habits and to break


bad habits.


So there is a particular consumer group, I'm not going to go into the framework a ton because


I want to get into the meat of the action items around it, but there is a particular


consumer group who has figured out that there are brands out there that can help them live


healthier, wealthier, wiser lives and they're constantly, eagerly out there engaging with


those brands, they're early adopters, they're highly influential on the buying behavior


of the people around them.


Those people are called the transformational consumer.


That's what the book is about.


In order to engage the hearts and minds of people, you have to be serving their aspirations.


And if you want to be the kind of, oh, one point is, unless you're selling, this is not


just a framework that is helpful for health companies or personal finance companies.


I say that unless you're selling actually like alcohol, tobacco and firearms, like the


federal agency, and there's some arguments about alcohol being a nice stress manager,


but we won't go into that right now, unless you're selling one of those things, you really


can reach and engage customers by helping unlock their desires to live healthier, wealthier,


wiser lives.


I've even had people write me in and say, in your book you said garbage bags weren't


transformational, but my family just read the Marie Kondo book about the life changing


magic of tidying up and we went out and bought a bunch of garbage bags to change our lives.


So you're wrong.


Garbage bags can be transformational too.


If you want to be the kind of marketer that engages customers, that drives business results,


and that as a result develops internal influence and autonomy and sovereignty over your decision


making, if you want to be the kind of marketer that consistently gets the resources you need


to do the programs that you want to do, do these things.


Let's go through them rapid fire.


The first is to rethink what you sell.


You don't sell a product.


You don't sell a software or app or packaged thing or even real estate.


What you sell is a transformation.


You sell a transformation from having the problem that your company exists to solve


to no longer having that problem.


You may sell confidence or being more successful in your customers, being more successful in


their career, being more productive or prosperous.


You may sell well-being in their bodies or their relationships.


You may sell something that helps them be better world citizens or better parents.


But what you sell is easing the frictions that they experience along their journey.


Or you sell more fuel for them to get from one stage of their journey to the next stage,


to get across their path in their journey faster, more joyously, more beautifully even


or more easily than they would have done without your product.


A lot of this idea of rethinking what you sell is sort of my rallying cry to all of


us as marketers to get out of that product first world view that is very, very easy to


get in when you work in a product company because everyone else in the company is very


focused on your product first.


This is about shifting into a problem first world view.


It's about no longer fixating on the things that you sell and instead fixating on what


problems you actually solve for people.


And the problem in the process of rethinking what you sell, you will have to rethink your


customer and who they are.


Your customer is not just your existing customer base, the people who follow you on Twitter


or Facebook, even like target buyers of your product.


Your customer is anyone who is out there dealing with the high level human scale problem that


your company exists to solve.


You have to find what that is.


You have to find that deeper human motivation that your company exists to solve.


Often just as a tip, the origin story is often your founder's original reason for founding


the company is often a clue as to what that deeper motivation is.


I'm going to give you a couple of examples here on how to define the PDC is a term I


use in the book.


It's personal disruption conundrum.


But the problem, the high level human scale problem that you exist to solve.


I used to run consumer content marketing and PR at Trulia.com.


It was a real estate search engine.


We never talked about ourselves as a real estate search engine.


We always talked about what we were doing, the reason we existed as being to help people


make as wise a possible decision as they could on the biggest transaction they would ever


make in their lives.


Right?


At Slack is another good example.


Slack is a tool you could call like a group chat software.


But that's not what they talk about.


They talk about their reason for existing as making workplaces more collaborative, helping


people be more productive at work, and helping companies tap into the like just untapped


hidden value in all the documents that exist that no one knows about in the company.


At MyFitnessPal, we were calorie counting at Essence.


But we didn't talk about that.


We saw ourselves as like really kind of Avengers, an Avengers superhero team out there battling


the status quo injustice that we saw, which is that it's so much easier to live an unhealthy


life in this world than a healthy one.


We did not like that, and we were on a mission to solve for that and to remove every kind


of friction that we could possibly see from our customers' journey to living a healthier


life.


How many people here are familiar with the hero's journey or have used it in their work?


Yes.


Okay.


So there's one way in which I really strongly encourage you to start rethinking your customers,


and it requires that you know a little bit about the hero's journey.


So the hero's journey is an age-old human story arc.


It's just sort of a narrative, think of it as like a fill in the blank almost kind of


story.


But it's much more than that.


The hero's journey has been found in every one of the most engaging stories that human


beings have ever told themselves across all time, across all cultures seriously.


The hero's journey, it always involves a hero.


It always involves that hero being called to an adventure, so they have to leave home


and go out into an unknown world where they have battles and they have quests.


They're aided by mentors and guides and sometimes tools.


They ultimately have one big battle.


They are victorious.


And then they return home.


And when they return home, they come home with the spoils of the quest, but they also


come home changed, as changed people having been through this battle.


Now a lot of marketing, there has been a lot of writing and marketing about using the hero's


journey because the story type is so incredibly engaging to the human brain.


The hero's journey is a story of Luke Skywalker, of Jesus Christ, of Wonder Woman, literally


that arc is just an arc that your brain sees and goes, hey, that's just like a really good


movie or a really good story.


So many, many people have said all marketing should tell stories built on the hero's journey


with the brand and the role of the hero.


I argue that we should be creating this story arc through our content marketing, but that


your customer should be in the position of the hero, right?


Then your job is to understand what their journey is, to understand what their quest


is, to understand what the battles are that they fight along the way of solving the problem


that you exist to solve.


And your job is to position your brand, whether it's your company's spokespeople or content


marketing or your actual product, your brand becomes their aid, their guide, their mentor


and their tool.


Now in order to do all of that stuff, in order to understand their journey, you actually


have to do, I call it follow my number one rule of customer research, which is do customer


research.


It actually means like talking to customers, but remember the way I've defined them, not


just people who already use what you use, get out in the world and talk to all of the


people, not all of the people, talk to representatives of the people who are trying to solve the


problem that your company exists to solve.


Your whole company is now tasked with becoming an expert on their journey.


And when I talk about doing customer journey mapping, which this is a very, very redacted


version of the real customer journey map I built at MyFitnessPal, I am not talking about


mapping your customer's life cycle within your brand or your own channels.


That is an important and worthy thing to do.


That's just not this.


What I'm talking about is mapping out their real world journey, their real world experience


of going from having the problem that you exist to solve to no longer having that problem.


And I'll share with you a few of the elements that you need to make sure you capture as


you sort of document that journey.


And there's actually like not really a shortcut to doing it.


You can kind of do it online sometimes with like online communities, online listening,


reading all the Reddit channels that are relevant to your subject matter.


But you do have to actually immerse yourself in this information and spot patterns to create


this kind of customer journey map.


So what you are looking for are you're looking to identify the universal stages that people


experience as they go from having the problem to no longer having the problem.


You're looking to inventory and identify the things that get them stuck, like resistance


points, what are their pain points, their quit points, their failure points, where do


they, you know, fail and go move backwards.


You also are looking for the things that get them unstuck.


What are the progress triggers that help people go from one stage of the journey to the next.


You'll want to inventory what Google calls their micro moments, right?


Where are the places along their path that they're looking to know something or go somewhere


or do something or buy something?


Who are they asking those questions of?


It may not be online.


That was something we kept finding over and over again.


It was often them asking about workouts information from the friend that they knew who had used


My Fitness Pal to lose 20 pounds, right?


Or asking their doctor or asking, you know, other real life people.


You actually want to capture both the online and the offline behavior.


And you want to capture their natural language patterns.


You need to know, I am stunned and amazed on a pretty constant basis at the big gap


between the way companies talk about the problem that they exist to solve and the way their


customers talk about the problems that they're trying to solve with that product.


My favorite example of this is that when we first started out at My Fitness Pal, we were


publishing some content for beginner workouts.


It was like beginner workouts for people who had knee injuries, which we knew was a common


thing in people who were new to working out.


After we started talking to people, I mean, and we did an ethnography at it, we I think


we ended up going to 12 different cities, talked to people in every city.


We didn't just talk to them.


We actually went into their homes, into their kitchens, into their pantries, went to the


drive through with them.


We went to the gym with them.


And I took executives from different functions to every one of those interviews.


We heard people say over and over again the phrase bad knees.


No one ever said knee injuries.


People said bad knees.


So we ended up shifting the way we published that content.


It was the same content.


We just changed, optimized our headlines for their natural language and people dramatically,


dramatically engaged with it more.


Let's see.


All right.


Now the next step is to rethink your marketing.


And it does take a little bit of courage and badassery to do this.


Rethink your marketing from in a couple of ways.


First is we all want to tell big beautiful stories about our brands.


I would encourage you to make the shift of thinking of the content that you publish as


needing to be high value content that fuels your customer's journey, your customer's progress


along that journey.


This content should not all be about you.


It should be for them.


The second big shift in marketing that I encourage companies to make is from growth, from marketing


focusing just on growth to focusing on engagement.


Marketing is an incredible engagement and retention lever.


And I have found I'll talk to you a little bit about it in the next couple of slides.


I have found a lot of resources opened up in my company once I proved that marketing


was actually able to drive retention and ongoing engagement of customers, not just growth.


The way that this works is you use the customer journey information from your journey map


and the micro moments information to drive your content strategy.


The journey tells you what problems that they're having that you can solve with content.


So this is like about a shift from content is not any longer just about you.


It's problem solving content for their journey.


And the journey stages and the micro moments are the information you need to understand


what problems they have that you can solve with content.


Select just choose some of the friction, some of the quick points, some of the progress


triggers and you can use them to build your core messages or message pillars that span


your entire content strategy.


Micro moments tell you a little more specifically what content will resonate with which people


at which stage in the journey and specifically where they will be at the different stages


of their journey, sometimes online, sometimes off.


The natural language stuff does what I just said, which is that it just when you have


your topics and titles and headlines and subject lines phrased in people's own natural language,


it's an immediate engagement trigger.


It clicks open their mental frames for like, oh, I care about bad news because I say that


out of my mouth all the time that I have bad news.


And the last step here is to turn your insight into influence.


Now you guys know who this is.


This is Drew Carey, the comedian.


Drew Carey has an amazing quote that I use in the book that goes something like this.


Oh, you hate your job?


There's a support group for that.


It's called the bar and we meet there after work.


Work doesn't have to be like that and you can take the customer insights that we're


talking about developing for your marketing strategy and use them to gain internal influence


in your company and make your life better.


I'll be quick here, but the first thing that you have to do is to use you guys are the


best storytellers in the company, right?


Use your storytelling superpowers to make the business case for the resources you need


to do the work that you know you need to do.


The point of influence that you have within your company is at the place where the transformation


that programs you want to do, the content, the problem solving content programs that


you want to build, they drive transformation for both your customers and for your company.


That is your point of influence.


So after you get the customer insights that you need to build that sort of a program and


before you start making the shift into actually doing the program, do not skip the step of


internal PR.


Do not skip that step.


Tell the story upwards.


Tell it as high up as you can get in the company of the customer transformation you believe


that your new marketing shift will carry out and of the business results that you believe


that marketing shift will carry out.


And before you go big and, you know, put your whole budget on something, do a bunch of proof


of concept tests.


I am a huge fan of proof of concept tests.


Before I will do a video campaign, before I will implement a new software to do something,


I'll run a subject line in the e-mail newsletter and prove that people are interested in that


content.


It's just like lean marketing methodology.


If you know lean startup methodology, start with a minimum viable product, get customer


feedback to it and use that as a data point to optimize and iterate your programming.


We should be doing the same thing in marketing with our content.


In fact, when I first came to MyFitnessPal, they had 45 million customers and no e-mail


system.


To send an e-mail, we actually had to I had to have a designer hand HTML code the e-mail,


I had to give that to an engineer who had to build it into the app, and we had to release


an app store update to send any e-mail to customers.


But we had 45 million customers, so it was going to cost a lot to build an e-mail and


create an e-mail infrastructure.


So before I even bothered making the argument for doing it, I did that hard work of sending


four or five weeks' worth of e-mails with that laborious process, but then I had the


data points I needed to make the projections for what this program would look like if we


scaled it.


And we did scale it, and we ended up starting a blog that went from zero to 10 million readers


a month in I think the first nine months we had it.


But I also would encourage I encourage all marketers to get a little more CEO-ish about


the way that you treat metrics.


Don't just accept the metrics that you're given, especially if you don't agree with


them.


Push back.


And if you know what the metrics are that your CEO and your CMO are talking about all


the time, when you push back and you say this is what I think we should be doing, phrase


the projected impact of the programs you want to do in those metrics terms, not just in


the ones that you're doing.


Okay.


Number two is to reposition content as rapid prototyping.


I think a lot of C suites are surprised at how much it actually costs to build a real


great content programming.


And so one thing that I have been successful doing is repositioning content is not just


for content.


Content is also an incredibly powerful way of rapidly prototyping product features, especially


in a digital product.


You can use a customer's responsiveness to a subject matter or to a headline as sort


of a divining rod to help your higher your executive team figure out what product features


they'll be responsive to.


As an example, so at MyFitnessPal when we started publishing cooking and recipe content,


we had this incredible responsiveness from customers, and it sort of laid the groundwork


for us to end up building a bunch of features into the app that supported recipe logging


and supported cooking.


What was fun about that was it kind of was like a full circle feedback loop because then


we as a marketing team had the ability to market new product features that we knew would


be successful because we knew people wanted them because they had already been responsive


to that content.


The third point here is to reposition marketing as retention, and we've talked about that


a little bit, but I've just seen time and time again where marketers get a goal, hit


the goal and break their necks to hit the goal, but the goal doesn't actually convert


into revenue, it doesn't actually convert into retention, it doesn't actually change


any of the big things that the C-suite was concerned about, so then everybody's still


kind of unhappy even though you did all of that work to hit the goal.


I see this happening a lot because I feel that we're not as aggressively pushing back


and arguing for what the right metrics should be at the time when the goals are set in the


first place.


So this is a lot about learning to speak up and learning to push back.


It requires you to cultivate some emotional groundedness and security and voice.


It requires a little bit of a commitment to live in integrity, to not be saying one thing


while you're feeling another thing and doing another thing.


I talk to all sorts of marketing teams and hear them being like, gosh, we've got these


goals, they don't make sense, they come back to each other, they come back to me as a consultant


and talk about how crazy these goals are and why it won't work or why it's not going to


do it.


And my question is always right, well, did you say that?


Did you say that at the beginning of the year?


And the answer is often no, and the answer is often no because of fear.


And I actually had someone say to me recently, Tara, if I pushed back on the goals I was


given on the objectives I was given, at my company that would be a CLEM.


And I said, I don't know what a CLEM is.


And they said it stands for Career Limiting Move, CLM, to which I said, if you speaking


back and saying these objectives that I have will not actually drive this overarching business


and I know what will or hear some ideas about what will and that's going to limit your career


at a place, you should probably not be at that place.


You should probably not be at that place.


So this is some about metrics and being strategic and some about just being willing to speak


up.


When I first came into the scene at MyFitnessPal, my brief as a consultant was just to answer


the question, hey, we've got 45 million users and no marketing team, should we even have


a marketing team?


And my answer was, yes, you need a marketing team.


But maybe not a traditional marketing team.


Maybe it's not a team that's going to be super fixated on growth and brand marketing and


those things.


Instead, I pushed back that our metrics should be not just a growth metric, it should be


a new user growth metric, it should be a growth of engaged users metric.


And that ultimately was where we went.


We did some things to grow new users, but that wasn't our primary focus and a lot of


that was because people just didn't know and were looking for some guidance.


So in the end, I think in the first 18 months I was there with our content program and the


customer research that we did, we grew engagement on the app about 22% on a weekly basis and


25% on a monthly basis, all out of marketing.


That's totally separate and aside from any of the work that the product team or the international


team or any other teams did.


And that positioned our marketing team to be one of few teams among my friends that


were CMOs at the time at tech companies.


We didn't feel like stepchildren at all, even though it was an engineering-based company.


People valued our input.


We were called into every product feature road mapping conversation.


I think that was largely because we were working we had positioned engagement and retention


as a core function of marketing, not just growth.


And finally, you know, create a team of change agents throughout your company.


Make sure every function is involved.


Make sure people at every level are involved and make sure they're all understanding, participating


in and working against the same customer journey map.


I see companies want to companies get very excited about customer research projects and


ethnographies and personas and content strategies and then nobody sees them again after they're


delivered.


What we're talking about here is a whole company shift to a problem perspective.


That kind of shift requires strategy.


It requires resources.


Tips that I would give from my experience doing this pretty successfully would be if


you can, do whatever you can to get people as high up on the hierarchy in your company


in an actual customer interview as possible.


I mean, I think actually every company that we've worked with in my consulting firm since


I've left, we've had the CEO actually come into at least one customer interview.


We have people from every single kind of team.


We have people from HR and People Ops come to individual customer interviews because


those people are going to need to be your squad of change agents that represent the


customer and their journey and that problem first shift that you're trying to make in


the little sort of, you know, everyday meetings and side conversations where decisions are


actually made.


That is about it for me.


These are all the things that I do and where you can find me.


Oh, I will say that last bit on influence and creating influence in your organization,


there's a whole chapter in my book that's just about the organizational piece of becoming


an influencer.


I am happy to email that chapter to you if you email me at Tara at transformationalconsumer.com.


And these are the things I do, including a 30-day writing challenge that is entirely


designed to respond to the marketers in my world who were struggling to have voice and


influence.


It's a free experience and it changes people's lives and careers.


So that's where to find me.


And that's it.


Thank you.


Featured Snippets: Essentials to Know & How to Target- Presented by Britney Muller

All right. How many of you know who Princess Kay of the Milky Way is? There's got to be


some of you. Yeah, you know, Minnesota. Okay. So this might be the most underrated princess


of our time. This is a title given to a young woman in the state of Minnesota every year.


And more importantly, she gets her likeness carved into a 90-pound block of butter. How


amazing is that? I was talking to my brother about this last night. I was like, isn't that


weird that we just thought that was normal? He's like, yeah, I guess. That was just the


normal thing. We thought that happened everywhere. But if you were to ask this question into


Google, they beautifully explain it in a featured snippet. They even have a butter image right


there for you. And Google is getting so much better at answering these long tail queries.


We know that this has been going on and it's continuing to evolve in this space. These


are not to be confused with what Greg Gifford found, the answer box. How many ships are


in the U.S. Navy? At least 13. Right? There's at least 13. Great. But these don't mention


a website. It doesn't pull content from a website. It's using other sources. And there's


different types. Most of you are aware there's paragraph featured snippets. There's lists.


These are in bullets and in numbers. We see tables. The videos are interesting because


it pulls from the specific part of the video that it thinks will answer your query. And


most recently we've seen accordion featured snippets. These are in mobile and they act


a little bit like the people also ask boxes. It provides a featured snippet and then it


has different content underneath it to continue explaining things. And it expands with a different


source typically. And stat just started tracking these. So pretty cool. But these things change.


We've heard about this all week. This stuff comes and goes and new things pop up. In fact,


in creating this deck, I came across one of these. Is that a paragraph or a list? I have


no idea. We've never seen that. But this is sort of part of the process and something


we have to embrace as an industry. And if there's two things you take away from my talk


today, first and foremost I hope it's this. You absolutely must be testing. You have to


be testing in your space and with your websites. It's the only way for you to level up and


know how to really get these featured snippets. The second is you're going to see some things


that I've experimented with. And I don't want you to get the idea that I'm encouraging anyone


to create content for search engines. By all means you should be creating content for people.


And before we dive into the data, I want to give a big thanks to Eric and Shatish who


have helped put this data together. Eric from stat did all of this research. And a lot of


you this might look familiar. This is a refresh of stat's featured snippet research. And so


he did all the analysis and was just amazing throughout this whole process. And Shatish


helped me dive into some featured snippet images which have never been looked at before.


So what we're going to look at are never seen before facts about featured snippets. And


I'm so excited. But I didn't want this to be a tour of facts. So while this first part


is going to be all about those facts, we really will dive into how do we what do we do with


that information? How can we make that work for your website? What kind of tests can be


done? So to start, we did this research on the refresh of all of those same keywords


that the research had been done previously. So it's about a million high priced cost per


click keywords. And we focused on the mobile browser and at a very, very specific location.


So as you learned earlier this week from Rob Bucci, national SERPs don't really exist.


And we shouldn't rely on them. They're not as accurate as a very specific location. So


that's what we looked at. And what we found was almost 24% of all search result pages


have a featured snippet. And that these are on the rise. These are going up and to the


right. They're up about over 160% since 2016. We also know that paragraphs and lists are


by far the most common. By far. And just to touch briefly on people also ask boxes, we


see them on 93.8% of featured snippet SERPs. It's crazy. These two are best friends. Almost


any time you see that featured snippet box, this will follow. Right? Interesting. On the


flip side, featured snippets are only on around 34% of people also ask box SERPs. What does


that mean? There's way more people also ask boxes. We saw around 65% of all search result


pages had a PAA box. And Dr. Pete talked about this yesterday. Right? These are going up


and to the right way faster than featured snippets. It's fascinating. Really, really


interesting space to keep an eye on. Something that surprised us was that half


of all the featured snippet results were part of a carousel. And what I mean by carousel


is this. We've all seen these. You do a search. And they're sort of refinement queries. They


help disambiguate what it was that you were searching for. And what's cool is that it


populates a different featured snippet. Many times from a completely different website.


And so, if you think about that for a second, if you're trying really hard to compete for


a super popular search term, like I think I was searching what's the best beer in the


world and you can't rank for it, if you go niche, if you do something like ale and really


dig into that, you could potentially have real estate on the search result. It's a really


interesting space to keep an eye on. We discovered that recipe SERPs don't get


featured snippets for some reason. But we do see them testing these cards, which are


interesting. They continue to expand into the hundreds. I was seeing most of them around


maybe 105. And then they ask you, they sort of suggest you to send it to your Google Home


for voice. And so, that would walk you through the recipe or if you had a voice display,


it might show it. Super interesting. Something that we knew previously and that


we can confirm today is that the higher you rank in search, the better your odds are in


having that featured snippet box. Now, I know this graph looks a little crazy. These are


the different types of featured snippets and where they rank in search results. Really


interesting. These are some of the start word triggers


at the top. So, you can quickly notice that how, as the start word, will oftentimes trigger


a list. And the rest of the words oftentimes trigger paragraphs, but how is pretty strong


for that video and the list. Now, there's a lot of data coming at you. You guys can


get all of these slides. Don't feel like you have to take notes. Paragraph triggers, these


are some of the most commonly included words within the paragraph featured snippets that


we discovered. And it makes sense, right? Does, much, between, list triggers, best,


types, brands. It totally makes sense, especially with these tables. Rates, sizes, prices, those


might be things that you would rather see in a table. And now, some of the research


that I had to do was looking at those images, right? I've always been curious about that


and I know many of you have and there's not really been any research around them, right?


What are the common sizes? Where do they rank in search results? Where is Google pulling


these images from? And that was the first thing I asked Satish to look at. And we figured


out that around 15% of all image URLs aren't in the organic results that we have access


to, meaning they likely aren't on page one or page two. It's wild, right? Google's pulling


these images from completely other sources and you see that drop in that number one position.


Does anyone want to guess why? Our thoughts are that that is because that's the featured


snippet URL, right? And then it's pulling from the rest of the SERPs as it goes. Pretty


interesting. And one other thing I would like to note is that we discovered that the most


frequently displayed size of those images was 120 pixels by 90 pixels. However, I want


you to take this with a grain of salt. This is what they're displaying. This isn't necessarily


the size of the images that are being pulled. They're often stretching and changing the


image to fit that size, but you should probably keep that ratio in mind, right? It's good


to have in your back pocket. But this is why you must be testing stuff. And this is where


we get into how can we use this information? What can you take away from this today? So


we're going to divide it up into a couple different sections. First, we're going to


address the most popular question about featured snippets. Who's winning in this space? And


then we're going to break some things and I'm going to give you some actions to take.


And big shout out to the community and honestly all of you for being here and for asking good


questions and for fueling this sort of research. We couldn't do this sort of stuff without


you and we really take your emails, your messages, your questions and thoughts into consideration.


So please continue to stay active. It's been a huge driving force and so much fun to incorporate.


All right, so we've heard about this all week. Do featured snippets drive traffic? It's the


number one thing that people love to talk about featured snippets. And I'm very excited


to address this and hopefully put a close on this question for now. We see lots of conflicting


stories. Some people say Google in particular says that they do drive traffic. Other sources


say they don't. And so in addressing this question, I thought, okay, how can I come


up with a solid answer for all of you? And the way that I went about it was grabbing


Google Search Console data. So I pulled a ton of Google Search Console data and thank


you if you sent any in and I looked at the keywords, the ranking position and the click


through rate. Keep that in mind. And as I'm looking at all of that, I split the data in


half and I bucketed the keywords that show a featured snippet and the keywords that don't.


And right away I started to see a problem. And that was that the average ranking position


for these two buckets was wildly off and the median, right? They weren't the same, meaning


that that would obviously impact the click through rate across these buckets. So what


I did was I basically cherry picked deleting different keywords in each buckets until the


averages and the median position ranking was about the same. So then we could really kind


of look at what was the click through rate on featured snippet keywords and non. And


when I explained this to Eric, who did a lot of this research, he was very quick to point


out that this was just gross. Those gross way to analyze this data. It's not statistically


significant, but it was really all I had to go off of. And I think it's worth including


here just because we did see about a 40% difference, right? So on average, around 40% less clicks


would go to the keywords with no featured snippets. However, there are so many other


variables here. There are so many other variables and I want you to be super, super skeptical


any time you see a featured snippet traffic research study or paper or white paper I call


bullshit. There is no way to really identify if you're getting traffic from a featured


snippet or not. There's just no way. We can't see that in Google analytics. Click through


a rate providers, clickstream providers have trouble identifying that as well. It's next


to impossible to identify. And I feel like the only people that truly know that answer


is Google. And let's ask ourselves something. Who do we think gets the most clicks on the


search result page? It has a featured snippet and historically we know people click most


frequently at the top. Where do we think most people are clicking? I would assume that it


would be the featured snippet box, right? Perhaps it's a bit less and I totally have


empathy for those that have concern over people staying on the surf. I get that. I totally


get that. But I think we have to address this question of why traffic, right? Why are we


so concerned about traffic? Why not branding? Why not messaging? Why not share a voice?


And quite frankly, who is going to go to their boss and say, oh, you know those keywords


we had for SEO strategy? We're not going to do, you know, this, this bucket of them because


they have featured snippets. You're not going to do that, right? Those are likely important


keywords that you need to include in your plan. And we have to embrace this. Featured


snippets aren't going anywhere. They're just not. And I think it's time that we kind of


learned to navigate the waters a bit better. So my whole stance on this is that it doesn't


matter if they get more traffic. They're present in some SERPs and they're present in non-present


in others, right? That's just the world we live in and it's going to continue to change.


Shifting gears, who's winning in the featured snippet space? This was pretty interesting.


So we looked at the top 100 domains that rank for featured snippets and I identify the top


10 here. I was pretty, I was pretty curious to see YouTube at the top. That was interesting.


Wikipedia makes sense, right? They format, they format all of their stuff so well that


they're just spoon feeding entities and nouns and you name it to Google. And when I broke


these out across the hundred websites by type, something was just quickly very clear. Informational


sites dominate featured snippets. Absolutely dominate. And when you break that out by the


specific type of informational sites, it's financial informational sites, it's educational


sites, really, really interesting stuff. But I think there's things that we can learn here.


Something that stuck out for me in this list was socialworkguide.org. They have a DA of


35, a modest DA of 35 and they are ranking number fifth overall. They only have 260 pages


and if you look at any social work featured snippets, they completely dominate. Even in


this one that has carousel items, right? You click on California, they have it. Texas,


they have it. And when you go to their site, it just makes sense. They have all the information


you could possibly need to know in making a decision like this. They have graduation


rates, they have the different programs, they have contact information and reviews. It's


really comprehensive good stuff. Now, what, again, how can we sort of work on applying


all of this information? What do we do with it? So I thought it would be really fun to


break stuff. So my motto has always been you aren't trying hard enough unless you're breaking


stuff. I really believe in that. I think there is a lot we can learn from failing an SEO


and as an industry and it gives you confidence to have a better grasp of what's going on


in this featured snippet space. So this was a featured snippet I discovered that Moz had


for Reddit advertising costs, which I thought was a pretty random one that we had. And the


first thing I noticed was that cost period was the first thing, right? Kind of strange.


And when I went to the page, I saw that that was marked up in an H4 tag. And I thought,


do headers matter in featured snippets? What kind of impact would this have if I just removed


it? And Google removed it. So that was interesting. You also noticed that the image disappeared.


And you'll see the images kind of fluctuate quite a bit on these. So how often do we hear


SEOs say make your content longer to entice the click? We always hear this. If you're


in a featured snippet box and it's a list, make your list more than seven items long


because we want to go after this more items, read more. That's what we want to target because


we believe it's going to increase click through rates. And it does make sense to some degree,


correct? So I was experimenting with this and I thought, okay, what if I make this longer


to get a read more? And so I extend the sentence and Google just replaced it with something


else. It's like, oh, okay. Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. So I go back to the drawing board.


I switch it back and it was back. And if you're wondering how I'm doing all this, I literally


just have another window open with Google search console and I'm requesting it to be


indexed. And it happens very quickly and I can see the results almost immediately on


my phone for most of these. So it was back. What if we do a barely longer version? What


if we just add the word unfortunately? Right? What would they do? Gone. Placed us with these


guys. Okay, now I'm just getting desperate. What if I just add another period and make


it look like it's trailing off? Right? Maybe some people will click more. There's something


more there. Gone. The moral of the story is that if you want 271 character featured snippet


that you own longer for something like that, Google might potentially show 115 character


one instead. It's wild. We hear these norms about featured snippets all the time and we


rarely challenge them. And so what I want all of you to think about today is how can


you start challenging this stuff more and how can you experiment more with this in your


space? And seeing that this was such a touchy featured snippet that we would lose so quickly,


I thought what did the other industry advertising costs featured snippets look like? How can


I make this stay a little bit better? And something that became quickly apparent and


that was across the board if you do YouTube advertising costs and LinkedIn advertising


costs, they have that as the heading of the featured snippet. I guess if we want to call


it like that. So I thought, okay, well, what if I add that to the page so I add Reddit


advertising costs because it looks like Google wants that and it's back. Right? And it has


that included but they paired it back to 158 characters for the description. Interesting.


Right? Super interesting stuff. This is why you have to be testing. You absolutely must


be testing your space. Let's do another one. This one, Dr. Pete, I'm so sorry if you're


in here. You wrote this post a while back and I discovered that it ranks for a featured


snippet. How much money does Google make? And something that I was thinking about and


looking at this is it's marked up in a paragraph obviously. Right? And it's a paragraph on


the page. We always say you should format your content in the way that the featured


snippet is formatted. But have we ever tried to change the formatting? Have we ever tried


to take a paragraph and make it into a list? So I decided to give this a shot. I changed


the paragraph to bullets. And interestingly, it shortened the featured snippet and Google


just took the first bullet and the last bullet. I thought, okay, that was interesting. What


if I add a table? What would they do? And it was just gone. Right? Just gone. I thought,


oh, but we're supposed to keep updated content. Maybe Google wants to serve really nice, updated,


relevant content about revenue or something. I add that. Still gone. So I restore the original


markup. She's back. Look at her. And then I think, okay, what if I update the content


within the paragraph? What if I keep it the way that they want it and I just update the


content? It's so gone, you guys. You can't find this Moz result on the first 10 pages


of this search. And I was like, oh, shit, like what did I do? Oh, I'm in trouble. And


I have this hunch that it was because I kept requesting them to index the same page with


these little tweaks. And perhaps, you know, I was stupid and on the same IP address, right,


and doing these searches and they might have had something, you know, trigger that. But


it's a completely different search result page now. Really interesting. Really interesting


stuff. Let's do another one. So I thought this could be a very valuable featured snippet


for Moz. How to find back links. Right? And Brian Childs wrote this really great article


all about it. And I thought, well, what if I just format it in the way that I think Google


wants it and see if they take it? Right? And sure enough, we got it. And those were literally


all the changes I made. There was text in between the steps. But I just made it more


concise and more descriptive. And apparently it's still there today. One more. If you were


here a few years ago, you might have seen my talk where I accidentally had a typo in


a meta description and I lost the featured snippet. And I was thinking in doing some


of these, I thought, how important are typos? Right? How does that work? Especially for


a primary keyword like let's just use Facebook. Let's just botch that word in this post and


see what happens to that featured snippet. So this is the content that Google is directly


pulling for that featured snippet. We'll go back here. How to boost your Facebook group.


And they took the typos. These are things I can't explain. Right? And I don't know if


this would necessarily happen in other spaces. Very likely not. Right? This is why you've


got to test some of this stuff out. And I was thinking maybe we could test something


today. So I saw some stuff on Twitter about Forbes, which made me laugh and feel I felt


seen. But Forbes ranks for 10X content. And they're literally just stealing Rand Fishkin's


writing and his term and all that good stuff. And I was thinking, Moz deserves to rank for


that or SparkToro. Right? Like why is Forbes in that featured snippet? So I was thinking,


and hopefully we don't, I would suggest we don't tweet about this maybe. Maybe keep this


under the radar. I hope someone wasn't super fast and already did that. But if we could


do a search and click on Moz, could we get it to swap out? I have no idea. But I know


that it's interesting to test this space and to start to really rock the boat a little


bit in figuring out how we can make more opportunities for our clients and for these websites. So


if you could, if you can't do it right now, I suggest doing it later when you're out maybe


at your hotel or out at the garage party, which is going to be so much fun. Go ahead


and click on Moz. Let's see if we can get this to flip. I have no idea. I'll buy everyone


a beer if it flips. I'm just kidding. Now I'm nervous. I'm just kidding. Okay. Seven


actions for you to take. How can you walk away, go home and use this information? First


and foremost, you have to know what keywords provide featured snippets that you rank on


page one for. That is your sandbox. It's beautiful. That is where all your opportunities lie.


And there's a really easy way to do this in Keyword Explorer. You type in your site and


you filter by ranking one through 10. And then you put that into a list and you can


select featured snippets and you see all of the opportunities available. You can also


filter from there by monthly volume, difficulty, click through rate. There's obviously all


sorts of things you can do with this data. Number two, know the searcher's intent. This


is so, so important and I love that this has been talked about lately. If you write a really


groundbreaking article on how to tool leather, it likely won't rank, right? Because it's


so visual. People need to see images. They need to see this performed. You have to know


the type of intent and the type of content a user is looking for. Provide succinct answers.


We saw this earlier with this other website that kept beating us out of the Reddit advertising


costs. The more succinct and the better summarized, the better. And I think this also has something


to do with voice. Have you ever asked Google Home a question and it just felt like it was


so long and it probably wasn't all that long, but the shorter, the better, right? Really


interesting. And something that you can do right away is also just add summaries to popular


blog posts. Add too long, didn't read to them, right? Summarize the popular content you already


have. Healthline does this so well with this weight loss article. It's super long, comprehensive,


got all this stuff. And at the bottom, they have a summary of all that information. And


it ranks for tons of featured snippets. It does incredibly well and I think there's a


lot we can learn from formatting pages like that. In doing the MozCon rehearsal, Joy Hawkins


gave me such a beautiful tip that she has allowed me to share here. And I love the story


as well. There was some kind of no name SEO on a forum and she or he was talking about


how they have successfully been able to grab all these featured snippets. And they were


saying how most of it was crafted around two words. And that was here's how. So they would


create this content and then they would include here's how. And they would have information


summarized. Brilliant. I haven't tested this. I think it's fun to share and to see if this


works, if this catches any for you. And I really appreciate Joy for sharing that. Number


five, identify commonly asked questions. We know that questions trigger featured snippets.


And if they don't, they could in the future. So one way I like to find questions is in


keyword explorer. I know there's tons of tools out there. But we have a our questions filter.


And some of you might be looking at this and thinking, okay, that's cool. But where to


buy beer near me and where can I buy beer near me is pretty similar. Right. And isn't


that the most annoying part of keyword research is having like so many iterations of the same


thing. That's why we have this filter to group keywords by low, medium and high lexical similarity.


I don't know what I would do without this filter. I really, really love this part of


the tool because it just makes my job a lot faster. Source questions from PA boxes, like


Dr. Pete said, go check out what he's working on and find opportunities there. I think that's


super smart way to go about it. And one little hack that I've used for years is to interview


the experts. Right. They know the answers to the most popular questions better than


anyone. And you can do what Ross Simmons was talking about. Remix that stuff. Right. Turn


it into an image with the information. Turn it into a slide share. You can do all sorts


of things with that content once you have it. And to have it in a rich form to start


with is so, so powerful. Number six, this is interesting. No. Okay. So this has been


talked about a ton this week, but I don't feel like it's really resonated because I


feel like for the most part, when you hear the word API, we get a little shell shock,


right? We're like, well, maybe I'm not technical enough. Maybe I don't have the chops to use


it. Did you guys know that you can Google, Google NLP API and the front end is available


for free. You can literally copy and paste text into Google's own natural language processing


and get that information back out. You can see what they recognize as entities. You can


see the sentiment, the syntax, and perhaps most importantly, the categories and the salience


or confidence score that they apply to them. I highly suggest if you are trying to compete


for a featured snippet and perhaps you're bouncing back and forth like I was doing earlier,


take your content and put it in here and see how it's categorizing it and then do it for


your competitor. Oftentimes you will see the site that's a little bit lower have multiple


diluted categories. It's fascinating and a great easy way to analyze your content and


it's free. It's available and you don't have to write a line of code. It's all online.


Number seven is to monitor these featured snippets. We have to keep track of these.


They're continuing to change. How do we do that? There's a number of tools but Stat is


one of my favorites. That's because you can click on all of the featured snippets that


you currently own and add a dynamic tag. This will follow those snippets as they fluctuate.


From there you can set up an alert to notify you anytime you gain or lose even just one


featured snippet. Makes it super, super easy. After all of this, you're still like, okay,


these are great. I'm going to try to do some of these but what if I get in one of those


situations where I still just don't know how to rank for a featured snippet. I have no


idea what I'm doing. I can't get this. I have one final tip which I find really interesting


and that is if all else fails, leverage ranking third party sites. This is so key and I think


this can help a lot of people in this room. I was doing a search for who's the best soccer


player and obviously I want to click on in the world because that seems like the most


comprehensive thing and I see this LinkedIn featured snippet. I go and two things stand


out right away. Two things. This person's only written seven articles and this article


is from 2016. This must be so good, you guys. This must be the best content on soccer players


of all time. This is very exciting. Can't wait. So, scroll down and I'm reading and


I see this source link at the bottom of the first soccer player. And I go to the biography


and it's verbatim what's on that LinkedIn post. Verbatim. I continue down the page and


I find other Wikipedia, all of this is copy and pasted. All of it. I was shocked. And


this is for a pretty competitive, highly searched term, right? I'm not suggesting you copy and


paste on third party sites, but leverage them, right? If you see Quora ranking for a particular


keyword that you're trying to gain visibility with, play around with Quora, play around


with Slideshare. Don't be afraid to leverage these other sites. It's really, I think it's


really fun stuff. So, the main takeaways that I hope you get from this talk is to win through


testing. You have to apply and play around with this stuff in your space. Write quality


content for people, right? Not search engines. Find those featured snippet keywords that


you already rank on page one for. That's where all of your opportunities are. Explore how


they're formatted. Learn from not just informational sites, but also from any sites that currently


have a featured snippet in a space that you desire. And make sure you're summarizing that


content and don't be afraid to go niche. So, super fun. I really hope this inspires some


of you to go forth and break stuff. I will be around afterwards and yeah, it'll be fun.


How to Build a Facebook Funnel That Converts - Whiteboard Friday

Hello, Moz fans.


My name is Ryan Stewart.


I own digital consultancy agency, Webrest, and I am ecstatic to be doing this week's


version of Whiteboard Friday.


Now, as a marketing consultant, I get the pleasure to talk to fellow marketers and business


owners all the time, and one of the first questions I ask them is what they're doing


on Facebook, because I firmly believe there is no better way to spend your money online


right now.


Nine times out of ten, what they tell me is they say, hey, look at Ryan.


We spent some money.


We got some fans.


We got some video views.


We got a lot of clicks, but ultimately that return on investment wasn't quite there, so


we stopped.


I'm going to show you a framework today that's going to help you get more return on investment


from your Facebook ad spend, and before I get into that framework, there's a couple


of key things that I want to just check off right off the bat that might help you.


These are key mistakes that I see people making all the time, and number one is the misuse


of Facebook technology.


What that means is not having the Pixel installed, not using custom conversions, not using a


tag management solution to help you out, and not really understanding and using custom


audiences the right way, because those are ultimately what make remarketing and really


what make this whole funnel thing really drive through.


We need to understand and use custom audiences the right way, and I'm going to talk about


that in here.


Another thing, and I kind of call this the SEO mentality, we think that just because


somebody is interested or searching for red shoes, it means they want to buy it.


It's not the case, especially on Facebook.


There's a completely different mentality on Facebook, and we need to understand that.


There's a lot of studies that show that we need between six to nine brand touch points


before somebody is an interested sales prospect or lead, and we need to build that value,


that relationship, and really build that purchase intent.


We do that through content, which I'm going to talk about in depth over here as well.


And finally is the lack of trust in Facebook.


Again, the SEO mentality that we're constantly working against Google, Facebook is a complete


opposite.


They have done an amazing job optimizing their platform.


All you have to do is tell it what you want it to do, and it will go out and it will find


the right audiences.


Just have faith in the process.


Trust that Facebook will get it done for you, and then you can focus on what really matters.


This is the framework that I have drawn up over here.


It looks like your traditional marketing funnel has got your awareness, interest, consideration,


and purchase, but what's in it is specific to this process and Facebook ads in particular.


Now I'm going to start actually not at the top.


I'm going to run you through the whole thing, but I'm going to start here with interest,


because this is where most people start.


They build a landing page, a squeeze page that says, hey, opt in for our free ebook,


and they just start promoting it.


They push it to fans.


They push it to audiences that they think are interested in it.


Unless you're a huge brand that has all of these touch points and awareness taken care


of, it's very tough, because people don't know who you are, and they're not just going


to start giving you information and start buying just because you put up a nice landing


page.


What we need to do is build content on top of that, and that's what I have right here.


You can see I've got different types of content that you can use, videos, blog posts, webinars,


ebooks.


Whatever it is, it doesn't really matter.


Create something that you're comfortable with, but what you need to focus on is really two


things.


Number one is making sure that it's on your website, because then we can retarget people


and get them down that funnel.


Number two is creating and building value for the people that you're targeting.


Again, if you're Moz and you sell a bunch of different products, you've got your local


solutions, you've got your keyword research, you've got link building solutions, we don't


want to just create one piece of content.


We want to create specific pieces of content that are engaging to those little sub-niches


of the audience and relevant to the product.


That's key, because it allows us to expand and scale this out.


Now once you've got that content built, what I like to start doing is promoting it to what


I call warm audience.


These are people that are already aware.


These are your Facebook fans, your website retargeting list, your customer list, all


of these people.


You start by promoting the content to them, and you start analyzing the data and see what's


performing best.


Understand the audience segments that are driving the most engagement, driving the most


purchases right off the bat, because what we can do is create lookalike audiences based


on these, and we can pivot into promoting this to cold audiences.


Again, this is really where you can start to scale, because this is only going to take


you so far.


Unless you're a massive brand, it's not going to take you very far.


This is really mostly for data analysis and getting some initial people into the funnel.


This up here, the cold audience, is where you really start to make your money.


So again, lookalike audiences are a tremendous thing.


You need to trust in Facebook that what you tell it to do, that's going to go out and


find the right people.


But there's other stuff you can do as well.


Again, because we're not taking a landing page, we can actually go out and do some form


of outreach to get more eyeballs on the page.


We can go to Facebook groups.


We can go to other Facebook pages.


We can say, hey, I've got this really great guide, 19 things to do to build links for


local SEO, and we can start to do some exchanges.


All we need to do is start getting people to hear, to getting people to this content,


because once they're on this content, they're in our funnel.


So let me show you how this works.


This is where the Facebook ads really start to pick up and retargeting really starts to


come into play.


So what we want to do is we want to set parameters that tell Facebook, hey, anytime somebody's


been to this blog post but hasn't been to our landing page, show them this ad.


I love to use video in this case again because video is a great way to build a brand, to


hack those touch points, to get your face out there and to start getting some recognition.


I like to use a video that says, hey, thank you for checking out our blog post, our webinar.


Really appreciate it.


But we left some things out, and those things are included on this page.


And that's how you can start to introduce your offer and get people to your landing


page, your squeeze page, or your product page.


We're not done there because there's some other things that we can do on Facebook to


start really building this thing up and driving a lot more conversions.


Once we get people to the landing page, not everyone's going to convert.


So what we can do is we can set up another remarketing ad that says, hey, Facebook, anytime


that somebody's been to our landing page but hasn't been to the next page, which is our


trial page, our thank you page, whatever that may be, we want to run this ad.


And again, I like to use video again.


And we can say, hey, thank you for checking out our landing page, but you didn't opt in.


Did you know that we have a free trial?


Did you know that we offer a discount?


Did you know we have a free eBook?


Whatever it is that you're offering to get people to opt in, run that.


And what happens is then you get people in your email sequence, your traditional marketing


sequence, you run that on the side, but again, we're not done.


Because we found these people on Facebook, they're still on Facebook.


There's still more that we can do.


If you've got a free trial that you're giving away, free consultation, whatever it is, a


discount for your product, we want to tell people about it.


We want to make sure that they're taking advantage of it.


Because again, you know, once you get somebody on email, you might have a 20% open rate.


You're cutting off 80% of people.


But we know they're on Facebook.


So what we can do is run another remarketing ad that says, hey, Facebook, anytime that


somebody's been to our free trial page but hasn't actually purchased, let's drive people


to use it.


You can say, hey, start talking about the benefits of your product.


Start showing testimonials from people.


Whatever it is that you can drive people to use your product and really build trust in


your product, you want to take advantage of that.


And finally, we're still not done.


Because we still haven't asked for that hard sell.


And this is where we use our final ad that says, hey, Facebook, anytime that somebody


has used our trial but hasn't been to our ultimate checkout page, we want to run this


final ad.


And what I did, I have a course that I use that I sold using Facebook ads.


And what I did, I ran a video, a very personalized video ad that said, hey, thank you for checking


out my content.


Thank you for attending my webinar.


Thank you for checking out the free trial.


Look it, there's something that's holding you up from purchasing.


I am willing to jump on a call with you and answer any questions that you may have.


Obviously, that's not going to apply to every business.


But figure out a final piece of value that you can add to those people to really drive


them to purchase and ask for that hard sell.


So again, this is kind of a quickly overview of this process.


But the key point here is that this part from down here is automated.


All you have to focus on now is building more content and building more traffic to that


content.


Because once you get traffic to these content, and you know tons of ways to do that, you


can even rank it in organic search and get people in your funnel that way.


All you have to do is focus on getting people in here.


And this whole funnel is automated.


And it's a beautiful thing.


And when you do this, it takes patience.


You're not going to get as many email conversions up front.


But it works.