Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

So my first scenario is what I'll call keyword stuffing light.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

It's not egregious and it kind of makes sense, but Google might not see it that way.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

So this example, Boba tea, milk tea, Wulong, okay, three products, 27 varieties of Boba,


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

Cupertino, Fremont, Sunnyvale, Bob's Boba.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

All of those things are true in our fictional scenario.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

All of them are useful.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

I'm not really stuffing more than three things of the same type in a row, but a couple of


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

things.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

One, it's too long.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

Google's going to cut that off.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

Two, they don't really separate these things conceptually very well yet.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

They do a little bit.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

And so they might just still see this as a string of keywords.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

And we are seeing things like this getting rewritten.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

Now in the past, they might just take, you know, the first part of this and dot, dot,


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

dot, and cut it off and you'd be okay.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

The challenge now is they could take something in the middle, right?


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

So you could end up with Cupertino, Fremont, Sunnyvale as your display title.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

Probably not, but you don't really have that control.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

And now there are more options from Google standpoint, which in a way means you have


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

less control.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

You know, it's a little more unpredictable what's going to happen.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

So this is a scenario where are you doing anything terribly wrong?


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

No, but shorten this.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

You know, be in control.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

That's going to be a message of all of these.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

Take more control over this process because Google is going to take more liberties and


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

they're going to do more than just truncate.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

So I would suggest focusing on your critical keywords here and not trying to do so much


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

in the title.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

Second example is superlatives.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

You know, going heavy on marketing copy.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

And this doesn't seem that bad, right?


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

The 11 best boba blends for boba lovers.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

Okay, I put best in all caps.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

It's a little much, but this isn't super spammy.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

I'm not loaded with marketing terms, but we are seeing Google do a fair amount of rewrites


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

on this kind of title and even stuff that's not that over the top.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

And I think the argument is that it's kind of empty.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

You know, it doesn't really tell people much.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

And you know, I think you could argue that there are better, more informative titles


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

that might be good for search users and for your engagement.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

Again, the challenge here is Google isn't going to just truncate this.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

They're going to pick something different on your page to replace it with.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

And what's weird right now is the thing on your page they replace it with might be even


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

more superlative, more marketing copy.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

So I'm seeing some weird stuff.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

And okay, maybe if they take that H1 or that header, it's going to be okay.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

But again, you don't control that.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

So be aware of these things and maybe tone the language down a bit and be a little more


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

descriptive.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

You know, there is a happy medium.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

Finally, we have something that isn't keyword stuffing at all.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

It's long and it's text heavy, but this is really just a reflection of the site architecture,


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

right?


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

Going from brand to category to subcategory to product.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

We see this all the time.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

So this example, Bob's Boba drinks menu, Boba tea, Popping Boba, fruit flavored Popping


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

Boba, Mango Popping Boba.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

Okay, I've overdone it a little bit, but this is a perfectly acceptable site architecture


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

if the site was fairly large.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

And it's very common for people and for CMSs to try and reflect that in the title.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

The problem here again is Google isn't just going to truncate this.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

They might pick something like flavored Popping Boba dash Bob's Boba and actually mix and


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

match this in whatever way they want.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

Could be okay, but again, you're not in control of it.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

We used to advise flipping this.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

You know, we used to say, put the most unique part for the page first.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

So Mango Popping Boba, flavored Popping Boba, on and on, Bob's Boba at the end.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

In a simple truncation scenario, that was fine.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

But now that Google is potentially taking something in the middle, I don't think that's


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

going to work so well anymore.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

So I do think you need to tighten this up and control it.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

I know some people are going to argue, well, this is a perfectly valid reflection of our


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

site architecture.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

Yes, it is.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

You're not doing anything wrong.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

But is this really good for users?


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

You know, people on search, they have short attention span.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

You scan, I scan.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

The way we use search and the way we think as SEOs aren't always the same.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

So you're not going to read all this, even if it was displayed.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

And this is not really all useful for the visitor.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

It's perfectly fine in your site architecture to navigate this way and to have that structure.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

That's great.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

But you don't need all of this in your title tag.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

So pick that most unique thing.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

You can put the brand on the end if you want.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

Again, you control that, not Google.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

So three scenarios here.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

keyword stuffing light, going a little too heavy on that marketing copy, and finally


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

trying to stuff your entire site navigation into the title.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

None of these terrible things and you're not a bad person, but you're very likely to get


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

rewritten.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

And the rewrites might be a little more random than you'd like.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

This data just from this past month, about 30% rewrites.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

It hasn't really changed that much since Google did the rollout back in August.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

So be careful, be aware, measure and adjust as you go.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid

Thanks for joining us and we'll see you next time on Whiteboard Friday.


Title Rewrites: 3 Patterns to Avoid


Daily SEO Fix Video #4: Find Backlinks to Competitors’ Broken Pages

Hi there, I'm Erian from the Onboarding team here at Moz, and today I will be showing you


how to find backlinks that will link into your competitor's broken pages using Link


Explorer in Moz Pro.


Let's get into Moz Pro.


First, head to Link Explorer, then insert your competitor's website URL.


It can be a root domain, subdomain, or an exact page URL.


In this case, I will query a root domain.


The tool will then load up your competitor's backlink profile, click on top pages, and


here you will see the pages on your competitor's website that have the highest number of backlinks.


Then click on the status code dropdown and select the 4xx broken option in order to see


the competitor's top pages that are broken.


Now we have a table that shows us the exact page URLs of these broken pages, authority


score, number of linking domains, and status code of that page.


Pages with a status code 404 will be the broken pages that get the page not found there when


opened.


These are the pages you should be looking at.


Next step here is to click on the magnifying glass icon under View Links.


This will show us the inbound links pointing towards your competitor's broken page, along


with other information, like anchor text, authority scores of this backlink providing


website as well as the spam score.


When you click on the arrow under More Info, it will show you the date this backlink was


first seen, as well as the date when it was last.


Always keep in mind that you can export this entire table to a csp file, as well as add


a few URLs to a link tracking list to track when our website links for them.


With the help of Link Explorer, we have figured out which websites are linking to our competitor's


broken pages.


When we are planning a link building campaign, we now have a list of websites that we can


reach out to in order to obtain a backlink from them.


With the 404s and link opportunities that we can see in Link Explorer, focus on creating


content that's relevant to the website you want to earn a backlink from.


From there, you can reach out to that website regarding getting a backlink from them.


Balancing Search Ads - Whiteboard Friday

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


to chat about how to balance your marketing mix. Specifically, I want to talk a little


bit more about search ads and SEO versus kind of content and social. Those traffic channels


that you invest in, either paid or organic, that can drive traffic kind of more at the


top of the funnel or more in the conversion process. But this is actually a complex equation,


and the marketing mix overall is something that a lot of folks struggle with and that


I find a ton of misplaced energy and misplaced dollars happening. So the way to solve for


this in my opinion is we can start with a pretty simple auditing process, right? We


can ask ourselves kind of strategically, where are we facing funnel challenges? And I see


lots of businesses from tiny small startups and small businesses on the web to giant companies


having this issue where they say, we have a problem with the consideration and comparison


phase. We feel really good that people are aware of our brand and they come back for


that first visit, they come back for the return visit, but then they get to the consideration


phase and we feel like we're losing out against our competitors right there before conversion


happens. Well, guess what? If you're spending all your marketing dollars on display or on


offline forms of display marketing, which go to awareness and very little in the consideration


and comparison set where things like search can be great, especially your brand versus


competitors or your competitor versus your own brand or features or what to buy or recommendations


or reviews, right? All those kinds of things, ranking for that stuff, buying those key terms,


having content that serves them, and maybe doing some display advertising to people who've


already been to your website through retargeting that's trying to convince them. Well, all


of those forms of marketing can reach that set. But the problem is you're spending all


your time and energy and people and dollars up in awareness. And I see this across the


board, right? I've seen people spend a ton on first visit and return visit and nothing


on recidivism and retention. I've seen them spend a ton at the point of conversion, but


nothing up here to drive awareness and so they have a great looking funnel for a very


small number of people. And if you know where you have this problem, if you can identify


where your issues lie, then you can invest in the right channels and you can change up


your marketing mix and your people and your time and your dollars accordingly. Also, don't


be too narrow. My view here is a little bit narrow, but you should consider whether channel


channels like community building, email marketing, offline advertising, or in-product, in-app


marketing can actually be part of this mix and how they should be part of this mix. I


don't want you to limit it just to search social content display. There's a lot of opportunity


there. Next, step two, we need to validate that the investments we're making can actually


move the needle in these places. You can invest a lot of time and energy and dollars and people


into one of these channels to try and move the needle on something and get what look


like good results in the channel itself, like, oh, search is driving lots of traffic, or


we have high rankings, or we are spending a lot on this display channel and we're seeing


lots of people visit. But then, when you actually dig in, you see that you're not moving the


needle on what you need to, you're not improving the problem that you have in your funnel.


So you might ask, I've got a retargeting ad or a whole set of retargeting ads. Are we


effectively improving conversion rate or are we just bringing people back to the site?


And which was our goal? Were we doing retargeting to earn return visits or are we doing retargeting


so that we can increase conversion or so we can improve consideration and comparison against


the competition? Is this piece of content or our content strategy overall or the tactic


of producing a daily blog post or a monthly report or a white paper every quarter, is


that reaching a broad enough audience? Is it targeting enough of our visitors and their


influencers? Is it driving return visits? Is it driving conversion? Is it getting us


a lead that we can then follow up with? What's happening there?


And you can ask that question in SEO and in PBC as well, right? Does ranking for this


keyword bring in the right qualified potential traffic? Does it bring us enough? Are we ranking


for a keyword where, you know what, it sounds like a great keyword and it would convert


great but we're not getting enough people because Google has a knowledge graph and an


instant answer up top and so the keyword opportunity score is way down low in the toilet and it's


just not going to drive any traffic, right? And so maybe we need to expand that keyword


set. Maybe we're doing great with SEO but we need to do more of it for different keywords.


If you are doing this auditing process and you identify whether the tactics are actually


moving the needle in the places you think they are, you can now move on to we know our


funnel problem, where they exist, where they don't. We know which tactics work and don't


and now we can say, you know what, let me look at my marketing mix, right? Let me look


at my resource allocation and say, oh, maybe I'm putting 20% of my budget to display and


18% to paid search and maybe I'm putting 15% to offline and I'm putting 12% to social and


8% to content and whatever the numbers may be. Is that the right mix? Does that effectively


sound like it's doing the right things over here or should I be changing this up? Should


I say, huh, you know what, we saw that we have a bunch of opportunity in SEO or we have


a bunch of opportunity in content. We have a lot of time and energy and people being


spent in display. Could we put that on autopilot for a little bit? Let our display run for


a quarter, maybe do a weekly or monthly check-in from one person but ask those people to go


concentrate on content and then have our SEOs help them become sophisticated and savvy with


how to promote that content? Maybe, maybe you can. The questions I like to ask in the


resource allocation phase are, are any of these already purely on autopilot? Are they


just sort of running and they haven't been audited? Because that can speak to why the


tactic isn't working or why it's not targeting the right phase of the funnel. How many people


and dollars, sorry, how many people and hours, not just dollars, are going to each? Because


a lot of folks, when they look at their marketing budget from a CFO level or a chief marketing


officer, they'll look purely at the numbers, not at the people. That can be very dangerous


too, because if you say, hey, we've got a bunch of our budget allocated to display,


we have almost no budget allocated to SEO but that's intentional because SEO is a free


channel. Pull out your hair. That's crazy. The only dollars that we have assigned to


it are our SEO consultants rather than people and hours and time and energy, which is what


you need to be successful with an inbound marketing flywheel like the content search


social email community system. Are any of these maxing out? If you're seeing that you're


putting more dollars, more time against them but you're getting lower and lower ROI over


time, that could be a sign that you're maxed out in that channel and you either need to


get more creative on how you're reaching more people or you might think about switching


some of that expenditure of time and people and dollars.


Then finally, do any of these have tracking or data issues? I find that in a huge number


of organizations, the reason they're not solving the funnel challenges that they want to and


pursuing poor tactics and not investing in channels like search and social and content


is because they have no good way to measure it. The first step might be admitting, you


know what? We're bad at measuring the ROI of content and so that's the first thing we


have to do. We have to be able to say, did someone come to visit us for the first time


from a piece of content? What happened in the 90-day window or 120-day window, whatever,


the cookie lasts, however long we can make the cookie last? Did we see that person come


back again and go to consideration and comparison phase or go to conversion or become more of


a recidivist for our product or a highly retentive customer who's subscribing to us? If the answer


to those things is yes, then you know what? Data is the place to invest. When you do that,


then you're able to effectively allocate your marketing channels.


Hopefully this will kick off an exercise, an audit for many of you and I'd love to hear


from you in the comments with your shares about places you have reallocated dollars,


places you've seen present lots of opportunity or present poor opportunity. Then I'd love


How to Optimize Existing Content for Featured Snippets — Whiteboard Friday

Hi, my name is Crystal Carter.


Welcome to my Whiteboard Friday.


I am the head of SEO communications at Wix and today I'm going to talk to you about featured


snippets.


Specifically, I'm going to talk to you about how you can get featured snippets for existing


content.


Now before I get into that, I'd like to talk to you about why we should be thinking about


featured snippets for existing content and that's because featured snippets show up in


lots of different parts of the SERP so they give you lots of good value for organic reach.


You're not sure what a featured snippet is.


If you Google something like what is a featured snippet, you actually get a featured snippet


and it's a sort of extract of text from a website and underneath of it, it will say


that it's a featured snippet and that's how you know it's a featured snippet.


Now, the content from a featured snippet can show in lots of different parts of search


when you're online so it will show in the featured snippet and it might include an image,


it might include a paragraph, it might include some other elements which I'll go into a little


bit later but it also might show in a featured snippet dropdown.


So featured snippets are constantly changing all the time.


They're adding new features and trialing new features but one of the features that we've


seen, for instance, if you look up what is a featured snippet, I've seen it before where


it has the main paragraph which says what a featured snippet is and then it'll break


it down further so how to get a featured snippet, how to optimize for that sort of thing so


it'll break it down into different sections and under each section, there's more content


which if you click on it, leads you to another featured snippet.


There's also the people also ask section of Google so under people also ask, there might


be more questions about a given topic particularly if you're searching for a head term like say,


I don't know, shoes, there might be sort of what shoes should I buy or where can I get


shoes or is a stand-alone shoe.


That sort of thing might show up and people also ask.


Those often contain featured snippets as well.


You might also get a featured snippet when you make a voice query.


You might also get a featured snippet when you search on Google Lens.


You might also get the content from a featured snippet within the from sources across the


web accordions which show up for certain topic queries so for instance, if you were to query


something like seven wonders of the world, you might get something that says from sources


around the web and has sort of the pyramid at Giza and then if you click on that, there'll


be lots of little bits of content and those will often be pulled from featured snippets.


You may also see a featured snippet under a knowledge panel dropdown so for instance,


if you were to look up again something like the pyramid at Giza, it might have a section


about different parts of that particular query and those will include different dropdowns


and under those dropdowns, you will often see featured snippet content and of course,


the knowledge panel will very often pull content from featured snippets.


So with all of that opportunity to gain organic reach and to gain organic visibility, it's


really worth optimizing content for featured snippets.


Now if you have content that you think has the potential to get a featured snippet, i.e.


that it appeals to some good, juicy, long tail keywords and that it's of high quality,


you may very well think, oh, this particular search result that this page is ranking for


has a featured snippet.


Maybe I could get it.


If you're not sure where to start about how to get on that featured snippet, then here's


a few tips that tend to work.


So this is a little bit of a decision tree and I'm just going to talk you through a little


bit of it.


So first thing you should think about is your formatting.


So headers.


This is not, this isn't rocket science.


This is classic SEO tooling.


So your headers, your H1s, your H2s, your H3s, are they relevant?


Are they present?


Are they breaking down the content in lots of good ways?


If they are not, then you should update that.


If they are, if you do have headers, H1s, H2s, then make sure that they've got relevant


terminology in them.


We can think keywords, but also you can think more naturally, like natural language processing


is becoming a lot more intuitive within Google and they're able to understand lots of nuances


of language.


So make sure that you're including something that's relevant, that continues to tell the


story of whatever the topic is that you're covering.


And another thing that you can think about, and this also helps you with people also ask,


is whether or not you can phrase the headers as questions.


So for instance, if you were to think about the pyramids, for instance, you might say,


you might say, can I, you know, what, when is a good time to go to visit the pyramids?


For instance, that might be something that you, that you might want to include.


If you can write it as a question, sometimes that can help with, with queries, like for


instance, within the voice search and also with people also ask.


And once you've done all of that, you want to go to the next thing.


So if you go to headers and you say, yes, we've done all of this, then we look at facts


and data sets.


And when I say facts and data sets, I don't mean like massive, huge data sets and like


17 spreadsheets with lots of tabs and V lookups and all that stuff.


I mean lists.


For instance, if you were to say, should I wear samples or should I wear sneakers?


Let's say you, that would, that would be something that you can compare and you can say, well,


is the weather like this or is this like that?


Or is that like that?


Those, that's a set of information that you could put on a table for instance, or if you


were to say what different types of, what different types of shoes are there?


Sandals, heels, trainers, whichever, then that's, that's also a type of data set.


So if you have data, if you have a list within your content, then you might want to think


about, about whether or not you, you could, you could include more lists or more in your


content and that might be something you want to think about.


And if you are doing that, then you want to think about including that, including HTML


lists.


So not just listed in the, in the paragraph, but also listed out specifically within lists.


Now these can be as ordered lists or as unordered lists.


So an unordered list within HTML is a, it has an HTML tag of UL and then you would,


you would be able to, to make that as bullet points.


If you're able to, if you're able to put in an ordered list, one, two, three, four, like


top 10 tips for XYZ, then you would be able to put that, put that in as an ordered list.


And that's something that you could put in your HTML.


What happens with Google with their featured snippets is sometimes they pull out the list


and they will put that onto the featured snippet there.


So if you have it in your, in your content, then you're more likely to show for featured


snippets.


Another thing you can think about is tables.


So I mentioned some of the tables.


Google sometimes within their featured snippets will show the tables in the SERP.


So if you have content that could be put into a table, it's worth thinking about that as


well.


So when you're thinking about your data sets and when you're thinking about the data and


the information that you have in your content, think about if there's a way that you can


make it more snackable with lists, ordered lists.


Think about if there's a way that you can make it more snackable with tables.


If you haven't done that yet, then you should update your content so that it includes that.


And if you have done that, then you can move on to the next step.


So the next step is to think about relevant pictures.


Does it contain relevant pictures?


And this can be, this can be an illustration or this can be photos of whatever it is you're


talking about.


Sometimes when I speak to people about this, they say, oh, well, you know, we're, we're


in a vertical that doesn't have a lot of photos.


That's fine.


That's okay.


You can make infographics as well.


You can make, you can make diagrams as well, and those can help you for featured snippets.


They can also help you with lots of other parts of the SERP.


One of the features that shows up very regularly within featured snippets is an image carousel.


And sometimes Google will mix and match the content within them.


So they'll, so for a featured snippet, you might see a paragraph from one, one website


and an image from another one.


If you have, so even if you have the featured snippet, you might not have all of the elements


of the featured snippet.


Now, if you do have an image on your featured snippet, then you're more likely to show for


both the paragraph and the image.


So if you don't have images on your content, you should add them.


If you don't, if you're not able to take a photo, then you should create a diagram that,


that is relevant to your content.


And the other one you want to think about is making sure that any images that you have


on your content include relevant attributes like your alt ties, your title names, your


file names, your file formats for your, for your, for your images so that they can, so


that they can be indexed and crawled correctly.


And also you want to think about entities that relevant that the, any images on your


website and contain relevant entities, which can also help you with visual search.


Shout out to my last whiteboard Friday on that.


And if you've done all of that, then you want to think about making sure that you have schema


markup on your, on your images, because that will also give you another element.


Now, just, just a slight sidebar.


Schema markup is not a part of the criteria for, for a featured snippets.


You do not need to have schema markup on your website to get a featured snippet.


However, anecdotally, a lot of websites which have schema markup tend to perform well for


featured snippets.


So what, what the schema does is it helps Google to understand your image better, which


makes it more likely for it to show an image search.


It makes it more likely to show in a featured snippet.


So if you don't have these things in place, then you should add those to your content


as well.


And if you do, then I would say that it's worth, it's worth making sure that, that you


are keeping an eye on your featured snippets and keeping an eye on your content to see


if there's any of these things that can be optimized as you go along.


And once you've done that, it's worth, it's worth checking where your content is being


distributed, whether, whether you're showing for a featured snippet, whether you're showing


for people also ask, whether there's other parts of the, of the SERP that you might be


featured on so that you can potentially build on that with, with either additional content


or with enriching this content further.


And those are my, my recommendations for how to optimize existing content for featured


#WhiteboardFriday: Marketing in Times of Uncertainty

Howdy folks, I'm Ran Fishkin, the founder of Moz and co-founder of SparkToro. And I'm


here today with a very special edition of Whiteboard Friday. I think that now is the


right time to talk about marketing in uncertain epochs like the one we're living through.


We obviously have a global crisis. It's very serious, but most of you who watch Whiteboard


Friday know that here at Moz, right, they're trying to help. They want to help people through


this crisis. And that means doing marketing. I don't think that now is the right time for


us to stop our marketing activities. In fact, I think it's time to probably crunch down


and do some hard work. So let's talk about what's going on and then I'll give some tactics


that I hope will be helpful to you and your teams, your clients, your bosses, everyone


in your organizations as we're going through this together. First off, we are in this cycle


of trying to prevent massive amounts of death, which is absolutely the right thing to do.


But because of that, I think a lot of us in the business world and the marketing world


are experiencing pain, particularly in certain industries. Some industries obviously demand


is spiking, it's skyrocketing for coronavirus related reasons. And in other cases, demand


is down. That's because we sort of have this inability to go out. We can't go to bars and


restaurants and movies and bowling alleys and go do all the things we would normally


do. And so we don't need fancy clothes to go do it in. We don't need haircuts is probably


the last Whiteboard Friday I'm going to want to record before needing a cut. And all of


that spending, that consumer spending affects business to business spending as well. It


leads to cost cutting by businesses because they know there's not as much demand. It leads


to lower investment and oftentimes layoffs as we saw in the United States where nearly


10 million workers are out of work according to the latest stats from the federal government.


And that builds this environment of fear. None of us have faced anything like this.


This is much bigger and worse, at least this spike of it is, than the great recession of


2008. And of course, all of these things contribute to lower spending across the board. However,


however, what's interesting about this moment in time is that it is a compressed moment,


right? It's not a long-term fear of what will happen. I think there's fears about whether


the recession will take a long time to recover from, but we know that eventually in sometime


between three and 18 months from now, spending will resume and there will be this new normal.


I think of now as a time when marketing needs to change its tone and attitude, businesses


need to change their tone and attitude and in three ways. And that's what I want to talk


through. First off, as you are looking to save money, and if you're an agency, if you're


a consultant, your clients are almost certainly saying, hey, where can we pull back and still


get returns on investment? And I think one of the important points is not to cut with


a chainsaw, right? Not to take a big whack to, oh, let's just look at all of our Google


and Facebook ad spending and cut it out entirely. Or let's look at all of our content marketing


investments and drop them completely. That's probably not the right way to go. Instead,


we should be looking to cut with a scalpel. And that means examining each channel and


the individual contributors inside channels as individuals and looking at whether they


are ROI positive. I would urge against looking at a, say, one week, two week, three week


trend, the last three weeks spending is very frozen. And I believe that it will open up


more again. I think most economists agree. You can see that's why the public stock markets


have not crashed nearly as hard. We've had some bouncing around. And I think that's because


people know that we will get to this point where people are ordering online. They are


using businesses online. They are getting deliveries. They are doing activities through


the internet over the course of however long they're quarantined or there's fear about


going out. And then it will return to a new normal. And so because of that, you should


probably be looking something like six to 12 weeks in the past and trying to sort out,


okay, where are the trends? Where are their lifelines and opportunities and points of


light? And let's look at those ROI positive channels and not cut them too soon. Likewise,


you can look inside a channel. If you haven't seen it already, I highly recommend Sierra


Interactive's guide to cutting with a scalpel. I think they call it not a sledgehammer. And


they look at how you can analyze your Google Ads accounts to find keywords that are probably


still sending you valuable traffic that you should not pull back on. I would also caution,


I have talked to a bunch of folks recently who've seen Facebook and Instagram and Twitter


and YouTube and Google Ad inventory at historically low prices. So if you have ROI positive channels


right now or your clients do, now is an awesome time to potentially be putting some dollars


into that. Second thing, I would invest now for the second and third waves. I think that's


a really smart way to go. You can look at Harvard Business Review and Bloomberg and


a bunch of folks have written about investing during times of recession, times of fear and


seeing how, right, basically when we go through wave one, which I think will be still another


two to six weeks, right, of sort of nothing but viral news and, sorry, virus related news,


nothing but COVID-19 and get to a point where we're transitioning to this life online. It's


becoming our new everyday. And then getting to a post-crisis new normal, you know, after


we have robust testing and quarantining has hopefully worked out well, the hospital systems


aren't overwhelmed and maybe a vaccine is near development or done. When those things


start to come, we will want to have now messaging and content and keyword demand serving, right,


and ads and webinars, anything that is in our marketing inventory that can be helpful


to people, not just during this time, but over the course of these, because if we make


these investments now, we will be better set up than our competitors who are pulling back


to execute on this. And that is what that research shows, right, that essentially folks


who invest in marketing, in sales during a recession tend to outperform and more quickly


outperform their competition as markets resume. You don't even have to wait for them to get


good just as they start to pick up again. Third thing, possibly most important right


now is I think to read the room. People are paying attention online like never before.


And if you're doing web marketing, they're paying attention to your work, to our work.


That means we need to be more empathetic than we have been historically, right? They are,


our audiences are not thinking about the same things they were weeks ago. They're, they're


in a very new mindset, right? It doesn't matter if they're business to business or business


to consumer, you are dealing with everyone on the planet basically obsessed with the


conditions that we're all in right now. That means assuming that everyone is thinking about


this. I really think the best type of content you create, the best type of marketing you


can create right now across any channel, any platform is stuff that helps first, right?


Helps other people. It could be in big ways. It could be in small ways. The Getty Museum,


I don't know if you saw Avinash Kaushik's great post about it, but the Getty Museum


did this fun thing where they took pictures from their museum, right? Famous paintings


and they put them online and said, hey, go around your home and try and recreate these


and we'll post them. Is it, is it helping, you know, healthcare workers get masks? No,


but is it helping people at home with their kids, with their families, with their loved


ones, have a little fun, take their mind off the crisis, engage with art in a way that


maybe they can't because they can't go to the museums right now? Yeah, that's awesome.


That's fine. It's okay to help in little ways too, but help first. I also think it's okay


to talk about content or subjects that are not necessarily related to the virus. Look,


web marketing right now is not directly related to the coronavirus. It's not even directly


related to some of the follow on effects of that, but I'm hoping that it's helpful, right?


And I'm hoping that we can talk about it in empathetic and thoughtful ways. We just have


to have to read the room, right? It is okay to recognize that this crisis is affecting


your customers and to talk about things that aren't directly related but are still useful


to them. And if you can, I would try not to ignore this, right? Not to create things that


are completely unrelated that feel like, gosh, this could have been launched at any time


in the last six months. Sort of feels tone deaf. I think everything that we do is viewed


through the lens of what's happening right now. And certainly I have that experience


as I go through online content. Do not dismiss the scenario. I think that history will reflect


very poorly. History is moving so fast right now that it is already reflecting poorly on


people who are doing this. Don't exploit the crisis in a shameless way. I've seen a few


marketing companies and agencies, I won't point them out because I don't think shaming


is the right thing to do right now. But show how you're helping. Don't exploit by saying


it's coronavirus times, we have a sale. Say, oh, we are offering a discount on our products


because we know that money is tight right now. And we are helping this crisis by donating


10% of whatever or we are helping by offering you something that you can do at home with


your family or something that will help you with remote work or something that will help


you through whatever you're going through, whatever your customers are going through.


Keep your tone and tactics the same right now. Oh, I think that's kind of madness as


well. So I would urge you as you're creating all this potentially good stuff, new stuff,


right stuff that plans for the future and that speaks to right now, go ahead and audit


your marketing. Look at the email newsletters you're sending out. Look at the sequential


emails that are in your onboarding cycles. Look at the overlay messaging. Look at your


homepage. Look at your about page. Make sure that you're speaking either not ignoring the


crisis or speaking effectively to it. I don't think every page on a website needs to change


right now. I don't think every marketing message has to change. But I think that in many cases


it's the right thing to do to conduct an audit and to make sure that you are not being insensitive


or perceived as insensitive. All right, everyone. I hope that you are staying safe, that you're


staying at home, that you're washing your hands. And I promise you together, we're going


Daily SEO Fix Video: Site Audit Reporting

Hi there, I'm Emily from the learning team. In this daily SEO Fix video, I'll show you


how to use custom reports to monitor your site and keep an ongoing record of your site


audit. Let's jump in. Within the custom reports section of MozPro, you have three options


for creating your site audit report. The first would be to create it from scratch. Alternatively,


if you have a medium level subscription or high, you can use one of the two templates.


MozPro offers a full site audit report and a quick site audit report, depending on your


needs. In this example, we're going to use the full site audit option. After selecting


the template, I'll be asked to select whether I want to produce a monthly or weekly report


followed by a request to enter in the title and description of my report. From here, I'll


then be taken to the design report step setup, where I can see that information regarding


how many pages crawled, the total number of issues, and a preview of those issues are


included. This report type also includes information about linking domains I've gained or lost


recently as well as a breakdown of status codes for the pages crawled. This is a very


thorough report that provides a great overview of the health of my website. However, I want


to take this one step further. Moz recently added the performance metrics tool to SiteCrawl,


which provides information regarding how pages on my site are measuring up when it comes


to Core Web Vitals. And if you're not familiar with Core Web Vitals, we have quite a few


excellent blog posts available that talk about what they are and why they are important.


With the addition of this tool, I can bulk analyze pages to see an overall performance


metrics score for my pages on desktop and mobile. And now I can also add those to my


site audit report. To do so, I'm going to head back to the add modules step by clicking


on the breadcrumb here at the top. I can then head to SiteCrawl and then performance metrics.


And from here, I can filter and select which modules I'd like to add in order to keep an


eye on how my site is performing, as well as how changes I'm making to my site are impacting


my Core Web Vitals measurements. With the bulk analysis options and the custom report


addition, this new feature makes it easier than ever to keep your team and key stakeholders


Technical Tips: How to Identify Critical Crawler Issues

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


you to today's edition of Technical Tips.


So I'd like to walk through what to do in site crawl when you're dealing with thousands


of crawl errors or thousands of crawl warnings, and especially where maybe some of them are


things you'd like to ignore, but you're really not sure what's important and what isn't.


And for some sites, it might not be thousands, it might be tens or hundreds of thousands.


So how do you possibly go through that kind of list and not have to do it all by hand?


So I'm going to walk you through a process that I hope you can make use of.


So obviously this is a complicated topic and there are a lot of ways to go about this,


but I want to walk you through one method of dealing with thousands of errors.


I'm going to start with the Moz Pro Site Crawl tool, and we're going to go to Crawl


or Warnings.


Now warnings are things where it's not something like a 500 where we know it's a problem.


We want you to be aware of something you might not have intended to do, but the trick is


we don't know what you intended to do.


And we can let you do things like ignore them, but you might not want to ignore an entire


category or ignore them one by one.


And here's a great example.


On moz.com, we have 34,000 metano index tags.


And in this case, I know we intended to do some of them, but I'm a little worried about


those other ones.


So we can scroll down and take a look.


And I probably don't want to go through 34,272 errors by hand.


I think you can agree with that.


So we're going to export this, which is great.


And we get something like this in Excel.


You can clean it up a little bit, obviously, but again, it's still a ton of data.


There's a lot here that's useful, but it's too much to go through by hand.


So I'm going to take this URL column.


And for these kinds of warnings, we just need to know what page it's on.


We need to know what page the no index is sitting on.


And I'm going to copy that over into Google Docs.


And here's what I'm going to look for.


Something like moz.com community users and that new number after that, that's one specific


page within a very large folder.


So what about that folder itself?


Could I kind of drill down to that?


Well, I'm going to create a little formula.


And here's a tip.


If you're ever going to create a complicated formula in Google Docs or Excel, just break


it up into columns.


Don't try and be fancy and do it in one giant thing.


You're going to end up with like 15 close parentheses and no idea what went wrong.


So I'm going to break it up.


We're going to use the find command in Google Docs.


And basically what we're saying is give me that first slash in the URL after the double


slash.


So I basically looked and said, you know, that's around position nine.


So give me the first slash after position nine.


In this case, it's 16.


Now give me the next slash after that.


This is all this formula is doing.


It's saying skip to one after this 16 and give me the next one.


And then take the text between those two things.


And in this case, it's slash community.


So in this way, I've been able to just strip out that first level folder and I could get


more fancy and kind of do the second and third level or whatever I wanted.


But I just want to show you the basics here.


All right.


So now we've got a column with all these first level folder values.


What I'm going to do is I'm going to take that whole column.


I'm going to go up to data and I'm going to create a pivot table.


We've never done pivots before.


Don't worry about it.


It's really just a way of taking a lot of data and grouping it.


In this case, we're only using one column.


So we're just going to group it by the values in that column.


The way we do that, we create a new table.


We're going to add the rows in folder.


And we're going to tell it to use the values in count A. So count A just counts up anything,


whether it's text or a number.


We might want to do the sum or there's a bunch of different functions we can use, but we


just want to rock out.


Now what you're going to see here is we have over 34,000 errors just in the community folder.


And I'm aware of those from previous work.


So there's really only about 15 other ones left to look through that might be interesting.


So let's take a look at help.


Here's something where we might not want to block that page.


And I want to take a look.


So I'm going to go back to mouse pro and then filter by URL.


I'm going to type in slash help.


Give me a second here.


And I can immediately see these two pages.


In this case, we could debate whether we want these to show or not, but this way we can


really take a ton of data.


In this case, we have 34,000 entries and I've been able to drill down to just 15 that might


be worth checking by hand and finding out whether there's a real problem or not.


So I hope that gives you a good starting point.


You can take these same formulas and dive into second and third order folders and really


slice and dice the data in a lot of different ways.


So thanks for joining me today for technical tips from us.


And I hope to see you next time.


MozCon 2015 - 25 - The Psychology of Social Media with Courtney Seiter

Hey, y'all.


Oh, my gosh, I'm so excited to be on this stage.


I'm so grateful for this opportunity to tell you guys some stories about social media.


So we're going to start with this guy.


His name is Ramit.


He's a developer.


He likes to use Instagram to post photos like these of him doing cool stuff in cool places.


And he doesn't pay a whole lot of attention to what his friends are posting.


He doesn't spend a lot of time liking or commenting on his friends' photos.


And about a year ago, he noticed that this was starting to create a rift in some of his relationships.


So he solved it the way that maybe most of us would like to do if we had the development skills to do so.


He created a script.


He wrote a program that would like every photo that passed through his Instagram feed, every single one.


And he ran it for a couple of days, and he started to discover some really interesting real-world responses.


He grew his followers by about 30 or so a day.


He got invited to more parties.


He got stopped on the street by people who recognized him from Instagram.


And he said his friends started begging him to post more content.


He said it's almost like they were frustrated, like they were longing for something to like in return.


These likes and posts and comments that we share on social media, they feel so inconsequential sometimes.


But they mean something.


They tap into the heart of what makes us human, our anxieties, our desires, our fears, our joys.


And as a result, social media is changing our brains and our relationships in ways that we never really thought were possible.


What could we do if we knew more about the psychological basis of why we go online, what we want out of those relationships,


what we want to get from our social media experiences?


Could we make them better?


Could we create stronger relationships with our customers and our fans?


Could we do it in a way that feels ethical and responsible and good?


That's what I wanted to find out and research.


So the first things we need to know are about the chemicals in our brain that are active when we're in a social media space.


Even if you don't work in social media as your main job, you might find yourself getting sort of sucked in there from time to time.


And there are two main chemicals that are causing this to happen, dopamine and oxytocin.


We used to think dopamine was a pleasure chemical in the brain, mostly because of experiments that scientists have done with rats, right?


They put this little thing on the rat's head, put it in a little box and give it a lever to push that would produce a dopamine jolt in the rat's brain.


So the scientists would watch as the rats would push the lever 700 times an hour.


They would push it to the point of starvation.


They didn't want to do anything but push this lever.


So we thought for sure, dopamine must feel really good to our brains.


It must feel really pleasurable.


But the more we learn about dopamine, it's not about pleasure at all.


It's about desire. It's about seeking, wanting, searching.


And it's really hard to satiate that feeling on social media.


We get stimulated through dopamine by the exact conditions of social media.


Little pieces of information that don't really fully satisfy.


Visual cues, sound cues like the little ticker in your Facebook feed if you have a new notification.


And as a result, studies have shown that tweeting is harder for us to resist than cigarettes and alcohol.


That's the power of dopamine.


Then there's oxytocin.


Oxytocin is sometimes called the cuddle chemical.


It's what's produced when we kiss or hug someone or when we tweet.


Ten minutes of Twitter time, replies, talking with friends, can spike your oxytocin levels by 13%.


That's the equivalent of a groom at his wedding.


And all the good feelings that come with oxytocin, feelings of love, feelings of trust, empathy, lowered stress levels,


they come with it on social media too.


Meaning that social media users are among the most trusting on all the internet.


Facebook users are 43% more likely than regular internet users to feel that people can be trusted.


So we've got oxytocin giving us these great, warm, fuzzy feelings.


We've got dopamine causing us to seek those feelings, just keep going with it.


So we enter what's called like a social media loop.


We find ourselves refreshing.


We're always going back. We're looking for more content.


We're looking for more conversations to be in.


This is a very familiar feeling for me.


So I wanted to dig in a little bit to what we are actually doing when we're having these social media activities.


When we like a post, what does it mean?


When we share something of someone's, what are we trying to get out of that interaction?


So let's take a look.


Why we post.


It's probably not too surprising to hear that humans really like to talk about ourselves.


When we are in a face-to-face conversation, about 30 to 40% of our time is spent talking about ourselves.


Online, that number jumps to 80%.


80% of all social media communication is us talking about ourselves, our experiences.


So why does that happen online?


It's because of a concept called self-presentation.


It should be pretty familiar.


When we talk with someone in person, we know the rules.


We know the etiquette conventions.


We have to give them time to talk.


We have to read their facial expressions, create that empathy.


And it's pretty neurologically exhausting to do that, to have that face-to-face conversation.


Online, we don't have that problem.


We're able to take our time.


We can construct. We can refine.


We can make our image exactly what we want the world to see.


And that feeling is so powerful that just going to your Facebook profile page and looking at it has been shown to raise your self-esteem.


So we love talking about ourselves.


It's the main thing we feel comfortable doing on social media.


Now, historically, it's been a little tough for marketers to figure out how that works with what we want to do, which is reach people.


So one interesting campaign this year was Dove's Speak Beautiful campaign they did with Twitter.


And what they did here was find people who were tweeting things about their self-image, in this case, negative self-image things, like, I look fat today or something like that.


So they would find these tweets and they would reply to them with a positive message in this Speak Beautiful hashtag.


This campaign made a lot of waves.


And I think one of the big reasons is that it reaches people where they are on social media.


It finds people doing the thing they already are comfortable doing, love doing, talking about themselves, and it involves them in the conversation, which is sort of like a bigger level conversation.


It's not trying to sell something. It's sort of a values-driven idea.


Another element of self-presentation that's really interesting for marketers might be that it's about stuff.


We use stuff to find our tribe.


We use stuff to say, this is who I am.


Who are you in comparison to that?


So clothes, games, music, the logo on your laptop or your phone right now.


This is a very powerful driver.


So much so that when I knew I was coming to MozCon, I decided I wanted a carry-on backpack.


For some reason it seemed really important to me.


And I've got one and I really like it.


But I put the whole thing online because it's like the best possible self-presentation in the world.


I literally sat on my couch and got to feel like I was a minimalist world traveler.


Power of self-presentation.


And as a result, we can have really close relationships with brands because of the way we identify with them.


This really neat study had people look at photos of their partners and their friends.


And they compared it to the response when they looked at logos of brands that they loved.


And what they found is that a response doesn't get quite to the level of a partner when we look at a brand we love.


But it does approach that of a friend.


So we can feel that strongly about a brand.


We can have that level of affinity.


So what this tells me is to really be thinking about what I can do with my brand that will feel aspirational.


You know, it wasn't that long ago that marketing was about imitation.


Wanting to drive and drink and wear what a celebrity told us was a good thing to drive and drink and wear.


Now we want something a little bit more.


We want to be part of a community.


We want to have a role to play.


We want to feel something bigger when we have these relationships.


So that means if you're a maker, if you can identify with Lego, you can be part of their community.


You can build your own tool, gather support from their community, see your Lego idea become a reality.


If you identify with Coke's values of positivity, you can tweet using the Make It Happy hashtag.


You can be part of that values-driven messaging.


You can feel like you have a role to play in something larger, which is kind of what we all want.


So if we love talking about ourselves so much, what would cause us to share something of someone else's?


Again, it goes back to that self-presentation.


68% of us say we share something in order to help people understand who we are, what we're about.


But an even larger portion of us share in order to strengthen relationships.


We see something and we say, I wonder what he'll think about that, or she's going to have an interesting take on this article.


We feel that urge to pass it along.


And in my mind, this means content that's destined for social media sharing doesn't really need to be designed for a general audience or even a large audience.


It can be extremely, extremely specific.


If you've got a laptop open and the Wi-Fi's working, you can Google BuzzFeed in the name of your college or your home state.


You'll probably find an article like this one, sort of a super specific article that you would not think would be something that would be hugely shared,


and yet it's one of their top posts at BuzzFeed.


And I think it's because when you feel something strongly, when you feel the resonance with this article, it's going to be really hard for you not to share it.


If you've got an association with Minnesota, it's going to tie into your self-identity.


If you know someone from there, you're going to want to share it with them.


You want to strengthen that relationship through the sharing of that content.


Another big reason is social currency.


Our stock goes up when we share something really great.


People learn to turn to us as someone who has good taste and shareable content.


So what does social currency mean exactly?


It's kind of hard to define.


I think Mashable does a great job here.


They've got, you may have seen this velocity graph that travels with all of their stories,


and it's just a little graph that says, where is this article in the process of being shared?


Am I early? Do I get to cash in on the wave here?


Or is this article played out?


If I share it, am I not going to get much of a response because everyone's already seen it?


So we can look at it at a glance and see what sort of social currency will arise from sharing this type of content.


Now, if we wanted to create content with social currency, it seems like the main thing to focus on is something that's a little bit novel,


a little bit off-kilter, something that knocks us off balance, makes us think again about something.


The dress we heard about this morning is a great example of that.


We, on the Buffer blog, had an author who unearthed a really interesting research paper for us from the 1970s.


It's by a guy named Murray Davis, and he attempts to create a unified theory of what makes something interesting.


What he came up with is, anything interesting attacks the taken-for-granted worldview of the audience.


It's like the dress did. We thought we knew blue from white. We didn't. We freaked out. We couldn't understand it.


Everyone shared it. It was huge. It attacked what we took for granted.


I find that sometimes, if you're blogging, if you're doing content, things that attack the taken-for-granted there can be a little bit personal, a little bit vulnerable.


Challenges, failures, unpopular opinions, anything that sort of knocks us off our usual axis and gets us thinking in a new way.


Those tend to have a lot of social currency.


On to likes and favorites. The lightest-weight signal of all.


Yet, we spend so much time liking and favoriting.


Forty-four percent of us go to Facebook once a day to like something.


Twenty-nine percent of us, I include myself among this, are liking things several times a day.


Why would we spend that time? What do we get out of it?


I think it's the same reason that Ramit created his Instagram like bot.


It's relationship maintenance. It's a nod that says, I see you. I note what you're doing. You're on my radar. We're still close. We're still friends.


And when we do that, we create a reciprocity effect.


It's very hard for us as humans to think someone has done us a favor and we haven't returned it.


Have those uneven scales doesn't feel good to us at all.


A BYU sociologist who was studying reciprocity sent 600 Christmas cards to total strangers one year.


He didn't know one of them. He got 200 Christmas cards in return.


It's very, very hard for us to let that go when we feel that kindness needs to be repaid.


So, yeah, that's a neat position for marketers to be in.


If people are wanting to like more of your content, maybe they want to share and maybe they want to sign up for an email list.


There's a lot we can do with reciprocity.


Commenting. Super interesting research here. I was really, really shocked by this.


I counted myself among the people who think that building a conversation with a fan or customer is really important to create that sort of long-term advocacy,


that affinity that's going to last a lifetime of a relationship.


So I was really surprised to find out that consumers don't feel that way at all.


A study of 7,000 consumers showed that only 23% of them believe they have a relationship with a brand at all.


And of those who do, only 13% say that it's because of frequent interactions.


It's just not the way that they build a relationship.


They were far more likely to say that shared values were the way that they saw themselves creating a relationship with a brand.


64% of them said shared values were the way that they created that relationship.


So that's not to say that comments aren't important.


They can be incredibly so through a concept called shared reality.


Shared reality basically says we don't experience any event, any piece of content in a vacuum.


We always want to know what other people are thinking of it.


It helps us identify our own feelings. It helps us put things in context.


85% of us say we read comments and we share comments in order to process information, to make sense of what we're reading, to understand it.


And that means comments are really powerful. They have the ability to change minds.


And the research really bears this out.


A study on news site comments showed that you could just come onto a website and attack the author of an article.


You could say, this guy has no idea what he's talking about. He's a liar.


And that no factual basis for the comment at all has the ability to start swaying readers.


It has the ability to change their opinion on a topic.


Now on the other hand, polite negative reviews, it has been shown, change the way we think about a company.


We find them to be more honest, more trustworthy when we see polite negative reviews.


People were willing to pay $41 more for a watch when they saw polite negative reviews than when they were removed.


So what we find here is that comments about you anywhere online, your property or not, your authorship or not, they're all a reflection of you.


They're all a reflection of our brand. It's not logical. It's not fair.


But it's just the way our brains work.


So even if customers don't find that the best way to create a relationship with us is through these conversations, it's really important because of the shared reality we're all experiencing.


So anytime we see this information, these comments, they become part of the context we use to make sense of our relationship with a brand.


Okay, so that's the basis of the likes and posts.


I wanted to dive into just a few really interesting social media phenomenon that I think are really fun and promising for marketers.


Selfies. So great.


There are 300 million, I think almost 300 million, I checked this morning, we weren't quite there,


but we saw photos on Instagram that were tagged with the selfie tag.


We love taking photos of ourselves.


And historically, in the past, if you were wealthy enough to be able to have your portrait taken or have your photo taken, it was about power.


It was about controlling who sees your image, what it looks like.


So there's a little bit of that I think that remains with selfies.


They're also about figuring out who we are.


There's a concept called the looking glass self that says we can't ever really get a full picture of our own identity.


We really need to see ourselves reflected in others.


We need those extra pieces to understand the full context of who we are.


We need that feedback.


So selfies are a way of kind of exploring that, creating that atmosphere where we can get that feedback.


Also, we just really like faces.


Humans are wired to respond to faces.


On the social media profile like Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn, the avatar, the headshot is going to be the first place the eye is drawn to generally.


And on Instagram, photos with faces are 38% more likely to get likes, 32% more likely to get comments.


We really, really resonate with faces.


Some of you UX people might know that faces guide our gaze online.


We look where they look, so it's a great way to point people to important information.


And even more interesting, faces create empathy, a ton of empathy.


A really neat study slipped patients' headshots into doctors' files and watched to see what would happen as a result.


The doctors reported they felt more deeply for the patients.


They started giving them better treatment just as a result of seeing their faces.


So this is a huge element of empathy for us.


We connect with faces super deeply.


So we love taking photos of ourselves.


We're looking at photos of other people's faces, and that means there's a ton of opportunity for brands here.


If you've got a physical location, it's great to create a selfie station.


You can pull in some props. You can give people a hashtag to use.


There's still maybe a little bit of vanity, a little bit of embarrassment around taking a selfie in some places.


So if we can push through that, encourage people to have a little bit of fun with it, great things can result.


That's great content you can use anywhere.


Online, you can have a lot of fun with it too.


I saw that Wistia and Unbounce are doing the Cool Selfie with a Stranger campaign this week.


That's like a perfect example of using these selfies.


These photos are from Museum Selfie Day, where once a year everyone's encouraged to go out to a cultural institution or a museum, take their photo.


It's a great way to spread awareness about a cause. You can have a photo contest. It's a lot of fun.


And you can use them to humanize your brand. This empathy that they create really can't be overstated.


As soon as I read that research about empathy, I started thinking about all the places we could put faces on our website.


So in our emails, Tamara, who did a talk yesterday about lifecycle email marketing, was kind enough to mention Buffer in a few slides.


And she's right. We put faces everywhere. We've got them in our invoice email, in our welcome email.


We've started experimenting with animated GIFs in our social media reports.


So if you have a really good week in social media, you might get an animated GIF of one of our teammates doing a happy dance for you.


It's just a way to have fun, to remind people that when you're dealing with a brand, you're dealing with humans.


Emoji. Any emoji users out there? Any emoji addicts? Yeah, it's fun.


So when we talk with each other face to face, we do something that we might not even recognize.


We mimic each other's facial expressions. You smile, I smile. It's called social contagion.


And it's a really big way to build social connectedness. Online, we really didn't have a way to do this until emoji.


Now, 74 percent of us in the U.S. use emoji emoticons or stickers regularly.


And six billion emoji are flying around the globe every single day.


And what this has done is create a new brain pattern within us.


When our brains see, for example, a smiley face emoji, they react the same way as if we were looking at a human face.


Our mood changes. Our expression might change.


And this is not something we were born with. This is something that our brains have created in the past couple of years as a response to emoji and emoticon.


Fascinating.


And it's changing our speech a little bit, too. Instagram, where about half of all posts and comments include at least one emoji, has found that as emoji become more prominent, slang has fallen.


So words like fleek and bay and lol and stuff like that, they're being replaced with the emoji that sort of signifies that same thing.


They're changing our language pattern.


And all this is important because emoji are often a sign of social media power and influence. A study of 31 million tweets found that emoji were one of the common elements of social media power users, influencers.


Another study had people chat online with different types of experts.


And they found that the people who are rated the highest in both competence and friendliness were the ones who were using emoji.


They really connect with us.


So if you want to become emoji fluent, I know I do, Instagram is a great place to go.


They basically have an interactive encyclopedia of emoji in that you can search an emoji just like a hashtag.


You can see exactly who's using them, what they're using to signify. These are some of the top emoji as of May, I believe.


If you want to dive in really deep, you can check out genius.com, the annotation site. They've got an entry like this for every single emoji.


So you can learn a lot there.


Emoji are great for email as well. This is data from MailChimp with the top 15 emojis by subject line appearance.


And they really stand out in a crowded email inbox. They pack a lot of emotion into that email subject line.


And finally, there are some folks who are doing it in a really big way with branded emojis.


These are Ikeas up here with the little Swedish meatballs in the corner.


So Coca-Cola has done this, Ikea, Burger King, Comedy Central.


And what's really interesting here is that if we really tap into that self-identity, that self-expression, people don't see this as advertising.


They see it as part of their self-expression, which is really powerful.


Finally, there's nostalgia. Social media moves so fast. Digital marketing moves so fast.


Sometimes we want to slow it down. Sometimes we want to go back to a simpler time that may or may not have actually existed.


But we still feel it.


Because nostalgia is a universal feeling. Most of us feel it about once a week, maybe more often than that.


And when we do, it feels good. It's tinged with a little bit of melancholy, but it hearkens back to that feeling of being loved, being trusted, being protected.


And that feeling changes how we feel about money.


People who are asked to recall a nostalgic event are more likely to give money to a cause, and they're more likely to pay more for a product.


Now, on social media, nostalgia can be really hard to come by. The Twitter fire hose moves so fast.


The Facebook algorithm switches things around, so you post something, you may never see it again.


As soon as your content becomes an hour old, it falls off the cliff.


Jonathan Wegner, who said this, created the app called Timehop.


It's going to pull those images, those memories back into your life, give you that nostalgic feeling.


Facebook this spring followed suit. They have On This Day Now, which is a similar app.


It's going to take those nostalgic memories from years ago, it's going to put them back into your feed so you can have that great feeling of nostalgia.


Instagram, on the other hand, there we create nostalgia from the moment we take a photo.


We're able to give it that old timey look, the sepia or the black and white, some of those old film stock feelings.


And when we do this, we speed up the process of nostalgia, and it creates this craving for more and more of it that brands are really tapping into.


Miller Lite produced their throwback packaging last year. Raised sales for the first time in seven years.


Mad Libs, anybody play Mad Libs when they were little on car trips?


So now it's this retro app. It's had 5.5 million downloads. Huge.


And everyone's favorite Trapper Keeper maker, Lisa Frank, has teamed up with Urban Outfitters, and they're selling rare vintage notepads from the 80s and 90s.


The 90s are nostalgic now. Which is sort of scary, but also sort of great, because you don't have to have hundreds of years of brand history in order to tap into nostalgia.


All you have to do is figure out that time period that your audience is going to have those warm and fuzzy feelings for, and tap into that.


Weave it through your writing, weave it through your campaigns, use those hashtags, throwback Thursday and flashback Friday, to have a little fun with it.


So, I'm wrapping it up here, but I would not be very honest with you if I came on here, talked about the psychology of social media, and I didn't mention the negative side.


I didn't talk about the research that says social media is making us more lonely, more isolated, more depressed.


And the research bears that out. It's true. With the caveat that social media is just a medium. It doesn't do anything.


All it does is tap into our existing human tendencies, and sometimes that can be enough.


For example, social comparison. It's very common, it's very natural for us to compare ourselves against others, our friends, people who are our same age, figure out sort of our self worth, how we're doing in life.


A little bit of it makes total sense. A lot of it can be really damaging to your self esteem and self worth.


And you guessed it, we're doing a lot of it on social media. You go on Facebook, the algorithm is going to prioritize those really important events.


They don't want you to miss a friend's wedding or new baby or new job announcement.


So, we're going to see those kind of items again and again in the feed.


And it kind of gives us this feeling that we're comparing our regular day against someone else's best day all the time.


And this doesn't just happen on Facebook. Psychologists are really interested in Instagram envy. This feeling of like you've got that one friend who's like always on vacation, it seems like on Instagram.


Like you just see nonstop beautiful vacation photos while you're doing your work or something else that's sort of mundane and boring.


And Pinterest. A study of 7,000 mothers in the US found that 42% of them say they have Pinterest stress, you guys. Pinterest stress.


They don't feel crafty or creative enough when they see what's on Pinterest. And I totally relate to this. I've had some Pinterest fails.


A study by the Girl Scouts said that 74% of girls think that their peers use social media to make themselves look cooler than they are.


So, this is going all the way to the kids as well.


It can be really hard for us to realize that other people are doing just what we're doing, using social media as a highlight reel.


We tend to attribute other people's success to their personalities while we don't do that to ourselves.


So, it's giving us this weighted feeling that can be really hard to lift out of.


This photo of these twinkling holiday lights.


They're the last photo that 19-year-old college student Madison Holleran posted to her Instagram feed before she killed herself an hour later.


Her friends had no idea she was depressed. They saw what she posted online, thought she was fine, they thought she was happy.


She and her best friend scrolled through Instagram. They would look at photos of girls they knew, girls they wanted to know.


And they would say, this is what college is supposed to be like. This is what we want our life to be like.


Our brains betray us sometimes. They make us feel like everyone else has it easy. We're the only ones having a hard time.


Social media can make it worse.


But social media can also be a great well of empathy. If you've ever shared something about a loss or a challenge on social media,


you may have been surprised by that great flood of love and support that comes back to you, often from people that you wouldn't have expected it from.


Social media time is correlated with virtual empathy. So, spending time there allows us to create that connection with people.


That can actually translate into real world empathy that can be used to connect with people.


Have you ever wondered why animals go so viral? We always want to share animal stories.


GQ did. They interviewed some of the people at BuzzFeed who work on their animals content.


And they said, why do we share dogs and cats? Why is this the internet's number one favorite thing?


And the BuzzFeed editor said they had a theory. He said, the content that we share about animals is often not about animals at all.


It's about humans. It's about humans fostering, rescuing, protecting, caring, doing the right thing.


Our empathy for animals, they said, it's us at our best.


Social media can gnaw at our insecurities, can suck us in. But I think at its core, it's about the good.


It's about finding it in ourselves, recognizing it in others, sharing it, being part of it, passing it along.


Brands can be a big part of this, a big positive element here.


If they're willing to be vulnerable along with us, to be human with all the messiness, craziness that comes with that.


Social media is at its best when we remember it's about humans. Thank you.


Applause


Some people are asking, should brands also spend 80% of their time talking about themselves on social media?


That's a great question. I don't even know that regular humans should spend 80% of their time talking about themselves.


That seems pretty high to me from a standpoint of being a well-rounded person with friends and a lot of things going on.


I think my answer to that would be probably no, especially if you can tap into that impulse that people want to talk about themselves.


It's that Dale Carnegie thing, let people talk about themselves. That's the sweetest sound that they'll ever hear.


It's scary for brands to share content from other sites, but you're saying that's totally okay.


Yes, I am.


That also gets into a question a lot of people have about frequency.


Buffer, you guys post huge numbers on social shares on your post, and part of that has to be frequency.


Talk a little bit about that process. How do you pull those huge social sharing numbers?


That's a good question. Frequency is a big part of it.


Some of the research that I wasn't able to fit in here talked about why we follow people on Twitter, why we follow people somewhere.


One of the things that really turns people off is what they call in scientific studies burstiness.


This idea of we only hear from you once a day from 5 to 5.30 when you're on Twitter, and the rest of the time we never ever hear from you.


We talk a lot about consistency at Buffer, this ability to be on the same schedule.


People can know that you're going to be on throughout the day. They can talk with you.


That content is always coming at a regular frequency, and we find that really helps a lot to build an audience.


We started sharing more on Moz.


Megan Singley over there started tweeting a lot more, and we found a huge increase in readership because of that.


For every one person that said, hey, you guys are posting too much, we found 500 people who said, wow, I've never seen this before.


Yeah, it's this thing where if you've been on Twitter a long time, you might remember a time when you could read your entire Twitter timeline for you.


I remember when I could scroll through the whole thing and be like, I'm done. I read Twitter.


But now that's the craziest thing to be able to do. No one is on Twitter that much, and if you're following any number of people, that's an impossible experience.


So our appetite for that content is pretty much always going to be there.


And not a plug, but Buffer is really good for scheduling that stuff.


Thanks. I'm tweeting right now, supplementary resources, while I'm on stage.


Okay, Rand asks, how do I stop social comparison mentality? Because that's a huge issue for a lot of people.


Reading Tech Mem everyday is like a psych nightmare for founders.


Reading what everyday?


Tech Mem.


Oh, okay. Yeah, man, I don't know. That's such a good one.


It feels like a little bit of it is fine, and a lot of the studies I saw said you can really lessen the effects of it if you're not a lurker.


If you participate in the communities, if you sort of have that back and forth mentality with people,


it seems like that social comparison that brings you down tends to happen the most when you are a silent participant and not being part of the conversation.


So maybe that's one way to work on that.


Alright. Courtney Sider, thank you very much.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

Hey everybody, I'm back.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

Cyrus here.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

How many people work for an agency?


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

Okay, yeah, I can see all your hands.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

Thank you.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

So our next speaker spent 10 years running one of the most well recognized and respected


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

agencies here in the States, Distilled, Mr. Rob Ouseby.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

After 10 years of running that agency, he joined Moz as VP of Product and now he's helping


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

Moz build the SEO tools of the future.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

Today he's going to talk about something that's kind of intimidating to some people, including


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

myself, which is scraping.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

Scraping for SEO.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

I'm really curious to hear, look at his presentation and I'm excited to watch.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

So let's kick it over to Rob.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

Hi everyone, I'm Rob Ouseby.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

I'm the VP Product at Moz.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

Now I joined Moz at the end of last year, having spent almost 12 years working as an


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

SEO consultant.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

I mention this because today I'm not going to be promoting Moz's tools and I'm not going


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

to be showing off a bunch of Moz features.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

In fact, I'm not even going to be talking about big strategic topics.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

Instead, I'm going to share a single technique with you.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

A technique that has so many uses and applications that I've pulled it out of my toolkit again


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

and again over the last decade.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

And it's been so useful that I thought it was high time that I shared it with you as


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

well.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

Some of you will see immediate applications for this and it'll be a game changer for the


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

work you're doing.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

But my hope for everyone else is that I can show you how powerful and flexible this can


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

be and it will stick in your mind for long enough that when the day comes you need it,


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

you'll remember that it's in your toolkit, revisit this presentation and you'll get as


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

much value from it as I have.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

I'm going to cram a lot into the next 30 minutes, which is why I'm going to make sure that these


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

slides are available to you immediately afterwards.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

Or since you're all going to get copies of the videos as well, then I'd encourage you


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

to go and watch again.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

In particular, pause the video to step slowly through the code samples that I'm going to


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

share.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

During the live presentation, I'm going to live tweet some links to extra content you'll


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

hopefully find useful.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

My Twitter handle is right there, at Rob Usby, and it'll be in the corner of every slide


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

as well.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

If you're not watching this live, then follow the link later in the presentation and I'll


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

have all of these resources wrapped up into one place for you.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

This technique was on my mind because a colleague asked me the other day about g2.com.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

In case you're not familiar with g2, it's a fantastic site with real customer reviews


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

about thousands of software products, and it's absolutely one of the places you go when


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

you're thinking about making an investment in software for your business.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

They have a review score for each product, and this person had asked me, for a list of


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

products that I want to compare, how can I easily see the scores for each of them side


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

by side?


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

And the obvious answer is, search for each product, click to the products page, and write


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

down the score.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

But I know we can do better than that.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

So once again, I busted out my scraping technique, got the job done, and then realized that I


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

should share how to do this with all of you.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

Which means that today, I'm going to show you how to use it to achieve three different


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

things.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

I'm going to scrape this publisher site, g2, I'm going to build a new tiny but powerful


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

SEO tool, and I'm going to blend together a bunch of SEO data.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

Now fair warning, this requires writing a bit of code.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

So if you're not already super confident with JavaScript, there are three paths you can


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

take.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

You can absolutely use the code that I've created, and hopefully you'll find some of


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

that useful on its own.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

I'll share a link in a little bit for you to do all of this without writing a single


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

line.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

Or you can find someone that's already comfortable writing code, share this presentation with


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

them, and explain what the two of you want to achieve together.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

Or the option that I would recommend is learn a little bit of JavaScript.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

Don't worry, that's not as tough as it sounds.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

I'm about to share a link to a fantastic set of resources for learning JavaScript fundamentals


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

that Madison Kanner put together.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

And while I'll be talking about JavaScript today, I'll also be using a lot of jQuery,


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

which is one of these clever little libraries that does a bunch of useful things.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

And most useful for us is the fact that it basically has a bunch of pre-written functions


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

to make our lives easier.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

I'm also going to be sharing some bonus content, which is Rob's six tips for becoming an effective


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

JavaScript hacker.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

Which includes my sixth tip, that if it works, it works.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

We're writing code to help you get your job done as efficiently as possible.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

It doesn't need to look beautiful or be perfectly optimized.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

We're just trying to make things that work.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

Links to all of these are available right now on my Twitter feed or in the link bundle


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

that I'll share later.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

Okay.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

So to explain how I want to scrape websites differently, let's have a look at how we usually


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

do it.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

In an internet full of websites.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

And here's the one that we want to scrape.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

So we might have our laptop sat on our desk at home and you can scrape from there.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

Requesting all the pages and all the content you need.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

This is how a crawler like Screaming Frog works.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

You run it from your own machine.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

In fact, it's not too different to how a browser like Chrome works.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

They're both just software on your desktop requesting pages.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

Sometimes we'll crawl not from our desktop, but from a server somewhere in the cloud.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

Remember, of course, that the cloud isn't anything special.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

It's just other people's computers sat somewhere else doing the same work for you.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

So when you use Moz Pro to crawl your site, you're really just running software on our


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

machines.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

Or when you use Stat for ramp tracking.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

Again, you're just using our machines to scrape Google's search result pages.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

But if we're trying to extract data from a site, particularly at scale, we do run into


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

a couple of problems.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

One might be authentication.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

Lots of SaaS tools, for instance, will let you log in to look at your data, but you can't


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

export it and they don't have an API to access it programmatically.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

You can only get that data if you're a human visiting the website via a browser.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

Secondly, there's the issue of rate limiting or being banned from scraping.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

Google is a classic example of this.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

If you run a bot to scrape Google, they'll pretty quickly pick up on this and block you


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

with captures or flag your IP address so that you can't visit any longer.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

So how can we do all this differently?


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

Well, in contrast to using other software or servers, I think of this technique as having


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

sites scrape themselves.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

The requests we're going to make the data on the site won't be coming from anywhere


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

but code running on that site.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

So we're going to trick the site into thinking that it has new JavaScript embedded and running


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

on it that it asked to be there.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

And we're going to do all of this from Chrome on your desktop.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

This means that authentication won't be a problem.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

You're already logged into a site.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

And it means that while rate limiting will still be a concern, it's much easier to avoid


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

because your browser has all the hallmarks of being a real browser run by a real user


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

on a real computer.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

I'll reference an old SEO quote here, which is that I'm not doing anything black hat.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

I'm just using computers to help me do the things that I would have been doing anyway


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

but much, much faster.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

And it starts with the premise that you want to be able to insert your code into any browser.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

Any website.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

I'll show you three ways that can happen.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

One simple option to execute JavaScript as if it's on the site is to use the console.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

You're almost certainly familiar with Chrome DevTools already.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

Hit F12 and there it is.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

It lets you inspect all the elements on the page, lets you look at all the network requests


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

a page is making, and it has this console tab where you can interact with the page's


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

JavaScript.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

Just to prove that, here's an example of colorofchange.org.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

Now this website already has jQuery installed.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

So down here in the console, I've written a line of JavaScript to find out about the


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

heading of the page.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

I've used jQuery's amazingly simple way of selecting elements.


A Novel Approach to Scraping Websites

In this case, I put the dollar sign and then in parentheses, I put H1 and that selected