going to have an American living in Mexico translating, and then all of that's going


MozCon 2014 - 14 - Zeph Snapp - More than Words: Localizing Your International Content

to come together and it's going to be ugly. But your Spanish is good. You should actually


‑‑ yeah, you're fine. Crowdsourcing is really actually ‑‑ it's


kind of like the new frontier of translation right now. The company that's most known for


it is Duolingo, which I'm sure you guys have heard of as a translation learning app, right,


so you can learn another language. Well, I heard once if you're not paying for


the product, you are the product. And in this case, you are. As soon as you're good enough


to start translating phrases, they're taking your content, compiling it and selling it


to BuzzFeed and CNN. It's really interesting. There's a lot of other companies doing it,


but they're the ones who are doing it the best. I'm just jealous that they thought of


it first. But obviously the holy grail is finding marketers


who are in the region who understand these people, the people who you're trying to target.


And there are good regional agencies. And I'm not just saying that because I am one.


I'm saying that because there's good companies in the Middle East and China and Korea and


Japan that know what they're doing. And so if you work with a company like that,


you're going to get much better results than working with the translation company, you


know, we do 60 languages. Okay. So we have another saying in Mexico,


which is, el diablo sabemas por viejo que por diablo. What it means is the devil knows


more from being old than from being the devil. And I've I'm kind of old. And I've also seen


a lot of translation projects. So I'm going to share a couple of tips that I have for


you about that. The first thing is, always do a test project,


something small. Give them a chance to prove themselves so that you can test the quality


and then have that vetted by somebody else, some kind of third party. Pay them by the


hour or by the project, because if you pay someone by the word, they have no incentive


to do a good job. They're just trying to get it done as quickly as they possibly can.


And also, hire bilinguals when you can, preferably people whose language of origin is your target


language. Like, I learned English and Spanish at the


same time, but my written Spanish is really, really bad. You do not want me translating


your Web site. That's why I have really good people to do that. But if you can find someone


who's bilingual, they're going to understand the source material a whole lot better.


And yeah, so okay. So let's talk a little bit about specific forms of content. I love


this guy. I don't know if you guys know who this is. This is the coach of the Mexican


team. He's nicknamed El Pioho, which means the flea. And we watched all the games in


the office and we were joking that they should have had a coach cam so we could just watch


him the entire game. He's great. Look him up on YouTube. You'll enjoy it.


So anyhow, so when you're looking at blogging, you can translate some of your content. Like


the stuff that's four universal queries that we were talking about earlier, that can be


translated and that can be posted on your blog and it's going to be successful content.


But it has to be based on query intent. One company that we work with is Shopify. And


we've done a lot of this type of work with them. But what we found, too, is that if you're


not addressing a universal query, like we did a guide to drop shipping, which is really


successful in English, the problem is that in Latin America you can't drop ship because


shipping is super expensive and nobody offers it. So we translated that and it bombed. It


was bad. But when we did the guide to 50 ways to get


your first sale, that's something people can relate to. It's about entrepreneurship. It's


a universal query. So you translate that and it's going to work. We also have written specific


content for them about changes to tax laws in certain countries. And that stuff really


works, too, because that's what entrepreneurs want to know about and the Shopify blog is


really for online entrepreneurs. Now, understand that if you are translating


your blog, you're probably not going to get a lot of comments at first, especially in


Latin America. We have a tendency to have the conversations on social media rather than


actually doing it on your blog, at least at first. So make sure that you're there. Make


sure that you're there to nurture that community and be a part of it. And don't just sit there


and wait for them to comment because it's probably not going to happen.


One tactic we really like is like, okay, so in the case that I was talking about where


you have a great video library, what you can do is you can basically what you can do is


you can take the transcript, you translate the transcript, you turn it into subtitles,


you optimize the Spanish language transcript, and you use it as a Spanish language video.


You don't have to dub. You don't have to create something new. It takes maybe half an hour


or 45 minutes, depending on the length of the video, and that stuff will rank. We love


videos in Latin America. All right. So let's talk just for a minute


about content promotion. You're still going to need links. There's less competition, but


you always need people paying attention to your content.


The first and easiest way to get links when you're studying an international project is


link reclamation. You go into your backlink profile for whatever resource you have, and


you identify the links that are in other languages. We've actually built something based on the


alchemy API that does language detection for you. I'm going to share that at the end.


And so you just throw in a hundred URLs. It tells you, okay, of those 120 are in Spanish.


You reach out to them in their language, and then you get those links.


The one thing you want to make sure that you don't do is don't redirect the Web site based


on IP or browser until after you're done with link reclamation, because if a Web master sees


that it just redirects anyways, they're not going to give you the link because they're


going to be like, well, he already did it, so why does it matter?


Another thing for content that we found that's very successful is basically jacking other


people. Like, you find a really good blog or someone who is really good on social media


in your sphere in that language, and you ask them to come post on your blog, and they bring


their audience with them, and if you're lucky, you can keep them.


The thing that we found that's really interesting about, like, outreach, and I've talked to


a couple people about this, it seems like in the U.S., nobody wants to use the contact


forms because they think that it's, like, super spammy or that people aren't going to


like it. But we found that it's 40% more effective than other forms of outreach, and that includes


Facebook and e-mail and even the phone. And the reason for this, at least in my opinion,


and it's probably going to depend on vertical, but it's because if you're a Web site owner


in Latin America, nobody is really paying attention to you.


So if you get a little love through your contact form, they're like, oh, my God, somebody reads


me. This is amazing. And you can make a connection with them.


So we love BuzzStream. We love them. I'm wearing a BuzzStream T-shirt. But their contact finder


doesn't work for Spanish language. So we built one. And it's Nudo.io. It's live right now.


It's ready for you guys to try out. We're beta testing it. It's a prototype, so please


tell us what you see is wrong with it, and we'll work on fixing it.


We've also got reflang validator and generator, which are really awesome but also sort of


obsolete because Google Webmaster Tools announced yesterday that it's now in Google Webmaster


Tools, but still a great tool. The language detector and then the raster contactos, it's


actually in English on the Web site, is the contact finder. So, yeah, go crazy. Have fun.


Remember, though, when you're reaching out, there's a lot less Web sites in other languages.


Like, I remember having a conversation with a prominent link builder, and we were doing


a project together, and I was like, well, you know we're going to run out of site soon.


He was like, run out of site? What the hell is that? I said, the Internet isn't that big.


So make sure that your outreach is personalized. Make sure that you're addressing their needs,


that you're being as nice to them as you possibly can, because if you screw it up, they're going


to remember. So, okay, I'm running really low on time.


This was a tip that I wanted to share. Basically, we use paid Facebook ads to promote content


to journalists. So what you do is you build the resource and then you put it in their


feed based on the country and the vertical. And sometimes they'll read it, they'll click


through it, they'll see it as news, and they'll report it and you'll get links. And we've


gotten big-time links from this. It's really, really easy and very, very cheap.


So I just want to thank you guys. This is amazing.


Muchas gracias a todos. And I really appreciate you guys listening. Thank you.


That was excellent. Thank you so much, Zef. So I have a question about, like, colloquialisms.


So let's say that you sell straws in Latin America. Now, I know that straws can be called


a popote or a pajilla or a pajita or I don't know why they all can't come up with one word


for straws. So how do you deal with that, with colloquialisms across, like, the same


language? Well, okay. So that's a really good question.


It's very difficult. For projects like Shopify, where we're going


based on language rather than based on country, what we try to do is we just universalize


that as much as possible and then are very transparent about where we're from.


And what we found is that if you're making great stuff, people in Latin America are not


going to care. They're going to go, okay, it's not what I wanted them to say, but meh,


it's not the end of the world. Excellent. That sounds good. I wanted to


make sure that you didn't, like, fall off the stage. I was like, move.


I'm actually more likely to jump over the monitors.


The mom in me is like, please don't fall off the stage.


Okay. It looks like we have at least time for one question. So we'll take this question


over here. Great. Thanks for the presentation. I know


this might be different than your world of experience, but my company is looking at doing


our website for the Chinese market in Mandarin. And there's a lot of unique stuff there, yeah,


with firewalls and duplicating video content on the local social video channels. I think


it's Youku or something. And there's just a ton of questions in our process right now.


Do you have any advice or any experience that you'd share for that particular market?


So I have never worked in China, but I do know that Baidu is a giant pain in the ass.


I actually think that that's more of a beer question. If you find me later at the party,


we can have a beer and we can talk about Baidu, but that would take, like, another three hours.


So we'll spend those three hours on that. That's all right.


All right. Thank you so much. So I think we're going to go ahead and wrap that up. And it


sounds like there were other questions, so be sure to find him afterwards.


I run on bourbon. He loves to talk. You can tell.


Let It Go: How to Embrace Automation and Get Way More Done

Hey everybody.


Okay. These sessions are amazing.


They're going by so fast.


I can't wait to watch them again when it's all over.


So we have two types of speakers


that we traditionally invite to MozCon.


We've seen a lot of industry veterans today, but we also


like to invite the best new up and comers,


get some fresh faces in front of the MozCon audience.


Our next speaker, Francine Rodriguez,


is an expert in PPC, pay-per-click.


She's working for WordStream.


She is an awesome speaker and an all-around great human being.


That's why we invited her here today from MozCon.


And she's going to be talking about automation,


something that we can all have more of in our life


and learn how to do better.


So let's welcome Francine Rodriguez.


Hi everyone.


This is Francine Rodriguez.


I'm a manager of customer success at WordStream.


And today I'm here to talk to you about how to let it go,


how to embrace automation and get way more done


in your paid search campaigns.


Now, right now, life is tough


and definitely we all need a break.


So if today you just learn one thing to help you out,


I've done my job.


Now, it's no secret 2020 has been a really tough year.


For me, it started with being in a 6.4 earthquake


in my home of Puerto Rico.


And I thought that that was the biggest challenge I was going


to face this year.


Clearly, I was incredibly wrong.


Now, the world is a really overwhelming place right now.


And a lot of things have been changing.


History books are literally being written


around all around us.


So when it comes to digital marketing and our jobs,


I don't know about you.


I feel really overwhelmed and burned out.


It is time to let some things go.


And at this point, it's not just something


that would be really, really nice.


It feels more like a necessity.


And that's totally okay.


Look, managing change is not easy.


This is how I see my team and my family right now.


And I'm sure that's the same for all of you.


And as our support systems change, it's time for us


to find some things where we can effectively let go


without sacrificing quality.


So this is where my idea came from, you know,


let the robot uprising begin.


I'm so ready to let the machine take over.


They don't get tired.


They never sleep.


They know all the secrets that will never do.


So why not let them be in charge?


And I know that a lot of people have heard about, you know,


horror stories with automation in the past.


But here today, I'm going to present


to you all the places where safely in PPC, you can let go


and let the automation take over.


So the first thing and the most important thing with Google Ads


that it all begins with an auction.


So if it begins with an auction, that's how we get our foot


in the door, we need to figure out a way


to do this a lot smarter.


And I don't know if you guys have noticed this,


but out of all the bidding strategies available


in paid search, I definitely see the scales tipping towards one


side more than the other.


Now, automated has been a really big deal and a really big push.


All the new bidding strategies always end


up to be more automated.


But manual bidding still holds like a big part of a lot


of PPCers hearts, and it's considered the golden standard.


And that's really interesting, because when you look


at the full spectrum, there's a lot of things


that automated brings to the table,


but manual still considers to be the top dog.


So let's kind of break this down to understand why are we


so attached to this?


Well, the first thing with manual CPC that we all love


and we can't ignore is that you get to control everything.


Now, that is some awesome marketing superpower.


We didn't get into this role and into this industry


if we don't love to control data.


Obviously, that sounds amazing.


And the next thing is that in terms of commitment effort,


it's a lot of commitment effort.


You know, I'm single in my 30s in a pandemic stuck inside.


Commitment sounds really good right now.


But I think this is that other type of commitment,


the one where you have to hunker down over data


and spend hours looking at information.


Maybe that's not sounding so good right now.


And the last thing is, you know, how do we describe the people


who love manual CPC?


They're the sophisticated advertiser who doesn't want


to be described as top of their field, super knowledgeable


and totally sophisticated.


Obviously, this is why manual CPC is such an important part


and such a beloved bidding strategy.


The reality of manual CPC is this.


You know, it's a lot of data that you have to comb through


and you have to go keyword and bid and line by line looking


at all the information and you have to go one by one


by one by one.


And this is a task that you have to do all the time.


It is never ending.


What you already just did, you have to check it again the next


week and the week after that.


It is time consuming.


It is a lot.


And in terms of tools that you have available for you,


what do you have?


Well, you have things like the keyword bid simulator.


This tool, what it does, it provides you with, hey,


this is where you are right now and here's some suggestions


and some forecasting of what you could do if you want


to change or improve.


In this customer's case, they were bidding $12


and getting about 13 clicks a day.


Google went ahead and suggested, hey, change it to 85.


You're going to get a whopping two more clicks.


You know, you guys, that doesn't sound so great and so awesome.


And when you think about it, this is a 24-hour-a-day cycle,


seven days a week.


You're not only fighting against all the paid search engines


but your competitors as well.


You know, this is beginning to be a hard pass for me


and I'm going to start looking at some other options.


So come along with me and go take one big task off


that to-do list because we don't have to be doing manual anymore.


And if you don't want to believe me, that's totally fine.


How about you believe Google?


Because right on the tool, they give you a warning saying, hey,


if you are on manual bidding, you may see lower performance.


On top of that, you could also be running out of budget faster


and you could be losing impression share faster as well.


So the negatives are starting to pile up and it's not just in the product


and in the settings where you set these up.


In the opportunities tab, all of the suggestions for this customer as well were, hey,


move to the different automated options.


There's so much you could be saving and doing there.


So the question begs, you know, which automated strategy is best?


That's really difficult to answer because that really depends on your goals


and where you are right now with your campaigns.


So I'm going to give you guys a really quick high-level crash course on each one


so you can understand their benefits and how they work.


First, you have maximize clicks.


And for me, that's like shooting a campaign out of a cannon.


It's great for brand new campaigns, for people who can't get conversion tracking,


or for people who are really struggling to jumpstart those campaigns.


What's really good about this feature is that it also has a safety net that's called bid-capping.


And that way, you can make sure that your budget just doesn't run wild.


So definitely a great strategy to start off with.


Next up, you have things like target impression share.


This is location, location, location.


I consider it like a step up.


What's great about this one is that you get to decide, you know,


I want to know which piece of the SERP I'm going to be showing up in.


And I'm going to decide that this is how I'm going to be spending my budget.


It also provides a safety net with a bid cap.


But this is really pay-to-play.


You do need to have a little bit of a larger budget to make sure that you are appearing


in the impression share in the location spot that you want to be.


Then you have maximize conversions.


I consider this one to be like the shiniest strategy


and the one that has really big promises.


With maximize conversions, it's basically telling you, hey, within the budget


that you give me, I'm going to get you as many conversions as possible.


Obvious to state, but we should say it anyways,


you do need to have accurate conversion tracking data to have this one.


And while you can start it off any campaign with this sort of strategy, even new ones,


I always recommend making sure that you've done your stretches and you've done your workout a


little bit before starting off.


I usually tend to change to this strategy when you have about 15 to 30 conversions


in that campaign that you want to try it out in.


I wouldn't recommend it right off the start


because it doesn't have any historical data to really, you know, go with.


Then next up, you have target CPA.


I consider this to be the glow up and one of those end strategies that you want to get to someday.


This is great for the sophisticated marketer that has really accurate historical data


that has a ton of conversions in their campaigns.


What's great about this is that you get to set, this is how I want,


how much I want to pay for my acquisitions.


But you need to have realistic goals.


Like we all want a penny CPA or a dollar CPA, but that's just not the reality.


So if you go way far off your goal, you're not going to be successful with this one.


And then finally, we have target ROAS.


This is my angle strategy for my e-commerce folks.


Same sort of thing as target CPA, a lot of historical data is important.


You need to have accurate conversion value and conversions in the account.


But once you get to the strategy, it really does perform awesome.


And this is a really great strategy.


If you are struggling, you can start it off at 100%, which basically tells Google, hey,


break even for me on my return on investment.


And then from there, you can build up.


All right.


So next up is ad copy.


This is the only part of all the work that we do in Google that the customer gets to see.


So we do need to spend a lot of time here.


And finding a way to save time can be a little bit difficult, especially right now.


We need to be over communicating to our customers and not just in paid ads.


On our websites, blogs, social media, emails, we need to be telling the customer


so much information so that they know what is our plan right now.


If we're lost, so is the customer.


They need to know, you know, have you changed to a virtual conference


or are you offering virtual services?


Is it contactless delivery or contactless pickup?


Should I make a reservation or can I just walk in?


This is all the information that the customer needs to know so that they can figure out, hey,


can I do business with you right now?


And as the world change, your plan is going to be changed.


The fastest way to communicate right now with your customers is using your ad copy.


So which tool can you use right now?


Then I highly recommend responsive search ads.


Responsive search ads are a type of ad that you can find in Google where you provide, you know,


15 different headlines, four different descriptions in one sitting.


And then the tool is going to use machine learning technology to provide the best combination


of the ad to the right customer in the right moment.


What's really cool about this is that you're going to get immediate data.


And you don't have to invest in A-B testing because the tool already does it for you.


And what you want to know is, hey, what are the pieces of ad copy


that are people really responding to right now?


And you can inform the rest of your digital marketing strategy


on the information you get from these sorts of ads.


And I almost forgot the most important part.


If you give Google the biggest amount of headlines and descriptions,


all those ad copy pieces, you can get up to 43,680 different possible variations of ads.


Imagine trying to do that right now.


That will be an impossible task.


But sitting down, what, 20 minutes to create a couple different lines


of ad copy is going to generate these results for you.


And I know there are a lot of folks who just can't let go.


I have information for you as well.


There's a tool in there called pinning.


And so if you have a piece of ad copy that's super important to you,


you can use that little pushpin icon to tell Google,


I want this piece to be in this position always.


Obviously, this is going to cut down on the amount of variations that you get,


but you still get the control that you want.


Now with using RSAs, we at WordStream have seen our customers get a click uplift from 5


to up to 15% when they have one RSA or responsive search ad per ad group.


And remember, this is about letting go.


So we don't want to go too crazy.


The maximum amount you want to do is three per ad group, no more than that.


And yes, there is an equivalent for display ads.


It's called responsive display ads.


This is really great for those people who don't have a graphic designer at hand


and have an entry to barrier to go into these types of advertisements.


And as I said, I have also tools for people who are just not quite ready to let go.


Here you have WordStream's free Smart Ad Creator tool.


What this tool does is you can add in a URL or different images, and it will create


in a few minutes a custom group of ads for you in all the main sizes that you need.


So feel free to check it out, wordstream.com slash smart ads creator.


Next up, we have smart shopping campaigns.


You know, right now during quarantine, I'm sure that you've been through this.


I've been shopping a lot online, and I probably shopped and bought some things


that maybe didn't make quite sense.


You know, my worst quarantine purchase has been a giant bag of marshmallows that come


in Lucky Charms, but just the marshmallows.


I don't think I needed that, but it made me feel happy, and I treated myself.


And I know a lot of you are also treating yourself.


So this is a super important strategy for us to be thinking about.


What are we going to do about all these people shopping online?


And you don't have to believe me once again.


Here we have Shopify CTO, where they shared that during COVID-19,


their shopping platform saw Black Friday levels of traffic every single day.


That is a lot.


E-commerce really has become the king right now, so important.


So what tools are there available to help us break into these campaigns and save time?


You got your smart shopping campaigns.


So with this campaign type, the Smart Shopping Ads campaign, you can create one campaign


and automatically get ads in search, display, YouTube, and Gmail.


It is awesome.


To set it up, it's super duper simple.


You only need to have three requirements,


the first one being e-commerce conversion value tracking, the second being remarketing,


because it also automatically does that for you.


And you just need 100 minimum active users.


And the third is having an active Google Merchant Center fee.


So great new shoppers.


This campaign strategy is awesome.


It typically performs really, really well.


And you can set up a target ROAS bidding strategy with them.


You can also subdivide your products so you can have a lot of organization.


And you can and should exclude those products that are not performing well


or that you just don't want to advertise for.


There is a downside to this.


You unfortunately cannot add any negative keywords, and you cannot see the search query.


So it is truly running on its own.


And if you change your budget a lot, it can reset that learning period.


So with Smart Shopping campaigns, you want to set it up, and really,


you kind of want to let it go.


You don't want to tweak too much in there, both positive and negative.


I certainly recommend this for people who are having a really tough time


with shopping campaigns right now, or that you're in a really competitive industry.


Or you have a really large inventory that changes all the time.


These campaigns were built exactly to help you.


But there are some things you definitely should stay away from.


First of all, if you have products that are advertising in Smart Campaign


and in regular standard campaigns, don't do that.


First of all, you're overworking yourself.


And long story short, those Smart Shopping campaigns kind of always win over regular ones


when you have the same products in both.


So you definitely want to separate those out.


And my last piece of advice, if it's not baroque, don't fix it.


We definitely don't want to be tweaking too much with our Smart campaigns.


As I said, the good thing about it is you let it go.


But you shouldn't be changing too much.


So if things are working, just let it be.


All right?


And I know that paying for ads can be really, really difficult for some folks.


So I wanted to make sure you guys know this.


In April 2020, Google recently announced that anyone who had a Google Merchant Center feed


could advertise for free on the Shopping tab of Google SERP.


So definitely take advantage of this.


All you have to do is just set up your account.


You are automatically entered to win free ads.


Next up, we have our keywords.


This is a place where SEO and PPC meet.


But this is one of also the places that we can save a lot of time.


So using this, the oldest infographic in the industry,


I want to talk a little bit about keyword match types.


And the first thing I'll say is I'm going to make a slightly controversial statement.


So please hold on to your pajama bottoms that you're probably wearing right now.


And do not panic buy toilet paper.


There will be no need.


We'll get through this.


I believe that match types are dead.


And I'm so sorry to be breaking this news right now for everyone.


The match types that we used to know, they had very specific rules.


They had, they were different from each other.


They served a place in context of time.


Now, Google has been making a lot of changes to our match types.


And the lines have completely blurred.


So I'm going to give you an example of what I mean.


In this picture here, I know it's a lot.


You're going to see the search report for just one keyword.


That keyword was vacation packages Yellowstone on modified broad.


Now, there were 42 queries attached to this keyword.


But only three of the 42 followed the rule of modified broad, which is the most simple one


of all, anything with a plus sign, that word has to appear in the search query.


Again, three out of 42 follow the rules.


That's a big change.


So kind of what's going on?


Why are we making all these changes?


I'm going to introduce to you what the new match types are.


They basically have the same name.


And they're a little bit confusing because they're not following any of the rules.


Right now, you can add in function words, which are things like in and the.


The words can be totally reordered, which breaks some of the major rules of some


of our match types, and words can be paraphrased.


Or we can add things that, hey, have the same intent, or things that were implied


to be in the word, and one of my favorites, close variants.


It can be plural.


It can be singular.


It can be any sort of misspelling of that keyword.


You know, kind of what's going on?


This is really breaking all the rules of what these match types used to be.


Well, the match types were doing, I think, too good of a job


of restricting themselves and putting them in a box.


And what Google realized is by letting the rules kind of flow,


customers could get 3% more click-through rate with addition and traffic.


And at WarStream, we did a little bit of an experiment.


We looked at exact match keywords across tons of accounts.


And what we noticed is, okay, we want to know how these new rules impact the existing keywords


that we have.


We found that 18% of the exact match keywords across our accounts would be considered


duplicates now, meaning that almost 20% of our keywords we didn't need to have,


and we were spending time adding them in when we were going to get those clicks anyways.


And the other fact that we found is that 41% of exact match keyword spend was impacted


on terms that today Google would consider duplicates.


So again, we were doing a ton of work for stuff that we're going to get anyways.


So I know we all know this, but Google handles 3.5 billion searches a day.


Fifteen percent of those searches have never been seen before.


And then when we think about Microsoft ads,


20% of those searches have never been seen before.


What it all comes down to is that if you go super restrictive,


we were missing out on those new trends.


So that's kind of where we're at now.


We're making sure that we're getting as many clicks as possible.


But I've kind of left you guys out with one big question.


So what match type do we pick?


I don't know.


You know, this is the funny part.


I created a really heated debate in the office trying to answer this question.


Most of us, I would say over 80% of us at the company decided


between modified broad and phrase match, those are the ones that we're going to.


But 100% of us decided that the main thing that you need to take out of today is


that using all four is not necessary anymore.


You really can only stick to one and do a really great job with it.


So match type strategy is something that we need to get away from our lives forever.


And with match type strategy, we also have to say a farewell and thank you for your service


to some different types of strategies also attached to match types.


So single keyword ad groups, also known as skags.


You were really great when manual CPC was keen


and when match types did what they said they did.


But in this point of time, you really make no sense.


You actually give us more work when match types are doing whatever they want anyway.


So we were going to get all those clicks anyways.


And also campaign structured by match types.


I'll admit you were never my favorite.


And I'm really happy to see you go because you made me duplicate all my work.


So goodbye to you forever as well, my friend.


Ride into the sunset.


But without match types, what I think we do need to concentrate is that the future is audiences.


I think that campaigns, let's compare them to a burger.


You know, the campaign is going to be the buns.


They're going to hold it together.


They're going to make sure that we're not going to get away from our settings.


And the keywords are going to be that juicy meaty patty.


They're going to help us make sure that it's giving meat to the account.


But the audiences are going to be the condiment.


Those are things like remarketing, demographics, in-market audiences, affinity audience.


Those are the things that are going to help us get to the next step and give us some better control.


So before we were really obsessed with kind of the order of the words that people were typing in in the SERP.


And the lesson here is we don't need to be obsessed with what word they put for a second or in between.


What we need to be concentrating is how they are searching online, what they're searching online,


how are they a consumer.


And that's where audiences are going to come in.


By marrying keywords and audiences instead of marrying keywords and match types,


we're going to have a better combination to get a juicier burger for our campaigns.


And if there is someone who can teach us how to let it go, it is the artist formerly known as Bing, our friends, Microsoft Ads.


They have the ultimate tool for letting go and that is their import tool.


And yeah, I know this is not new or revolutionary, but this tool is awesome.


It helps you import quickly all their campaigns from Google and you can actually schedule imports weekly or daily whenever you want.


So we need to be taking advantage of this to make sure that we are not duplicating our work and saving a ton of time.


But what's really important about Microsoft Ads is actually this.


When WordStream was looking at how our ad traffic was impacted by COVID-19, in the month of March, we noticed that Google took a big hit.


Our traffic changed about 20% less.


But when we looked at Bing, surprising, only 5%.


They're not bad during the worst time of our industry.


And then when we looked at the data again in April, Google search kind of had recovered, which is nice to see.


But Bing was almost, again, at the same level.


They were very agnostic to change.


So if you want to let go, make sure you're investing in a safe network that's not going to have these big swings, Bing is the place.


If during COVID-19 they were pretty normal in their traffic, I'm pretty sure they can survive anything.


And one thing I definitely want to point out in this graph, I don't know if you noticed, but shopping before had negative 15.


And the month later, they were up 40%.


So do not sleep on shopping.


As I said, super important.


And I can't leave you without a little bit of a bonus.


It's Google Ad Scripts.


These provide a way for you to programmatically control your Google Ads using simple JavaScript to automate common procedures that you would do in Google.


So this is basically like a cheat code for marketers.


And I'll say this, I will never claim to be a scripts specialist, but that search guy Nils definitely is.


In his blog, which I have linked to here, and you can find him on Twitter as well,


he has a running list of 250 different Google Ad Scripts for anything and everything.


So if you need more ideas on how to automate your account, go right there.


You're going to have 250 plus ones.


So you guys, we've done it.


We've learned all the places that we can automate and let it go.


So what are we going to do with all this free time?


Initially, I was going to invite you all to come with me to tour the top of the world.


But right now, I've had a lot of quarantine snacks making this presentation, like way too many.


So I'm going to go take a walk and maybe do some crunches with my cat over here.


So muchos, muchas, gracias, milescon.


I really appreciate your time.


Stay resilient, keep moving forward, and please let some things go.


And I'm happy now to answer any questions.


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Running Your Own SEO Tests: Why It Matters & How to Do It Right- Presented by Rob Ousbey

Thank you. Thank you Moscon. Oh, it's good to be back here. I know you arrived on Monday,


you logged into the app, and you saw that this session on Wednesday was still TBD. So


you're excited to know now that it's me. They decided. I'm going to be talking about the


next evolution of SEO. I am Rob Wiesbe. This is me. This is the only slide where you need


to write anything down. If you write down my Twitter handle, I'll be sharing all the


slides there later on and you'll have all the links that I talk about. I also put up


my profile here so that you notice that I am within spitting distance of 5,000 followers.


Wouldn't it be lovely to cross that threshold before I get off stage? Make some noise if


you're 35 or older. Not bad. Make some noise if you're under 35. I remember that youthful


exuberance. Okay, kids. I've got some good news and bad news for you. The bad news is


that soon enough all of this happens without that face app. The good news is that you are


still young enough to be disruptive in any team, in any organization, in any industry.


And that's because when you go into a company and you ask, why do we do this thing or why


do we do it this way, you do not put up with the answer, because that's the way we've always


done it. You look at folks who say, I've been in this industry for 10 or 15 or 20 years


and you roll your eyes because you know that what we mean is I learned to do all this shit


10 years ago and I haven't really evolved my thinking since then. But we need to. Because


as we get older, everything changes. And SEO is no different. 15 years ago we were putting


up blog posts about the top ranking factors for SEO. They broke down basically into is


the page relevant and is the page authoritative. SEO back in those days was a bunch of Google


engineers in a room tweaking the algorithm. In fact, it was this bunch of engineers in


this conference room deciding what levers to pull and what knobs to turn to improve


the Google algorithm. So they did that work and we ran a bunch of correlation studies


and Rand would do a whiteboard Friday and we would all update our processes to reflect


that. So what were Google doing when they were trying to iterate on their algorithm?


Well, it was all in furtherance of their goal to be a portal to the Internet. Google wanted


to be the first place you went to bounce off and explore the rest of the Web. And if you


clicked on a search result and had a good Internet experience, that reflected well on


Google. If you clicked off and had a bad Internet experience, it reflected poorly on Google.


And a bad Internet experience was much easier to define. If you clicked off on a page and


the site was super slow, that was a bad experience. If you clicked onto a page and it downloaded


a virus onto your machine, that was a bad Internet experience. If you clicked onto a


page and a sneaky redirect took you off to a porn website, that was maybe not what you


were looking for right then. But all of these things could be measured directly. Google


could look at a site and say, is it slow? Does it have malware on it? Does it have sneaky


redirects? What they really wanted to do was to measure our satisfaction with the search


results. And so for a while they did that directly. They just asked us, hey, you happy


with this list? But two things changed that let them do a better job than that. The first


is that Google ended up with more data than any company should ever possibly have. I don't


know how much of this data they've ever really been using, but when we think about it, they're


not just a search engine, they were the world's most popular web browser. The world's most


popular mobile operating system. The world's least popular social network. They were also


an Internet provider. They were a cell phone provider, DNS, a whole bunch of other data.


But then the other thing that happened is they became more comfortable with, as Wired


Magazine put it, becoming a machine learning first company. This let them process all of


that clickstream data, all of those user metrics that they were collecting. And so now this


lets them actually look at the satisfaction we have with search results. If I search for


a term, click on the first result, and as someone mentioned earlier, I land on a page


and there's no products in stock or there's nothing on the Best Buy category search page,


then I'm gonna click back and click on something else instead. If I'm on my phone and I click


on a result and it's a terrible mobile experience, I'll click back and choose something else.


We call this pogo sticking, and Google can now recognize it, see that I have dissatisfaction,


probably see on aggregate, we all have dissatisfaction with the result, and they're gonna rank that


page lower if it's even gonna deserve to stay on the front page at all. So our thesis over


the last few years has been that user metrics are more important than links or more traditional


ranking factors. And I've got some data that Distilled's collected that I want to share


with you and some quotes and some anecdotes that prove some of this. Typically, we go


to Google and we make a search term and then we get some results. We have page one of results,


we have page two of results, and I've heard there's also a page three, four, and five


of results as well, but I've never met anyone who's ever been there. Most of the clicks


are on the first page of results. This is where they have loads of user metrics, loads


of user data. There's a lot less data on page two and beyond. And this makes sense when


we see the correlations that we've been studying over the last couple of years at Distilled


with links. On page two and beyond, there's still pretty modest correlation between links


and rankings. When you get onto the bottom of the first page, the correlation is a lot


weaker. And by the time we're looking at the top five results, there's barely any correlation


left between links and rankings. Now, I'm not saying that links are dead. What's actually


happening is that you need enough links to be in the consideration set for front page


rankings, but at that point, a bunch of other factors take over. But we are also saying


that links are dying a little bit, and this correlation on the front page is getting weaker


and weaker every year between links and rankings. We see a similar thing when we look at the


keyword curve from head terms to long tail. Head terms, those terms where lots of people


are searching for them, lots of clicks, there's a lot of user metric data to be looked at


there. The long tail of terms, the billions of terms that maybe only a few people ever


search for, there's no real data for Google to get their teeth into there. And so what


we see is that long tail terms tend to be more link-based rankings. In the head, it's


a lot more about user engagement metrics, brand strength. We've even seen that brand


strength is better correlated with rankings than link metrics when you get into the competitive


head terms. So over the last two or three years, we've seen study after study. WordStream


showed that if you have a higher than expected click-through rate for your ranking position,


you end up with better rankings. Brian Dean, Backlinko, showed that higher bounce rates,


like that pogo sticking, people clicking back to the search results, gives you a lower set


of rankings. Even search metrics found that time on site was more highly correlated with


rankings than any on-page content factor. And then we look at what Google has said publicly.


They invited CNBC into their office while they were having a meeting about a new set


of search experiences that they were testing out. And one of the things that Google explicitly


said they were measuring was how many people clicked on one of these new types of results


and then hit back. They were also looking at how long it took people to interact with


the SERPs. Google seemed to be optimizing for time to interaction. But we all browse


the web quite a lot. So we all have our own anecdotal evidence of things we've seen as


well. And I've blurred some logos here to protect the guilty. I was looking for some


movie trivia and I landed on this website and I had to take a screenshot of it because


I could not believe how many ads and pop-ups and overlays they'd managed to put in the


way of the content I was looking for. If our thesis is correct, a site like this should


now be losing search visibility. And week on week on month on year, that's exactly what


is happening to them. A couple of weeks ago, I clicked on a result from a B2B marketplace


for a very specific niche. And there were two things on that page. One was this beautiful


image of a sculpture in the mountains. The other was a form asking me for six pieces


of personal information before I could see the content. I did not fill in the form. I


hit the back button because I knew there were nine other results on the results page that


I could click on instead. If our thesis is correct, when this site starts putting up


this form, we should see search visibility dropping regardless of how many links they


get. And this top graph is their links going up and up. And this bottom graph is exactly


what happened to them when they put that form in the way. And then you go onto a big site


like Forbes.com. And I'm not going to begrudge the fact that they have some advertising in


the right hand nav there. You know, publishers need to make money. What I was surprised by


was I came for the article, but there's this unrelated video documentary that I didn't


ask for in the sidebar. Sure, Forbes, whatever, do your thing. Just while I was rolling my


eyes at that, another version of the ad slides into view just in case I missed the first


one. And then the video documentary that I didn't want in the first place has a preroll


ad that starts playing before it. And then it was a weird time to suggest that maybe


I want to subscribe to the site. While I'm looking at all this, then the video documentary


that I didn't want in the first place starts autoplaying, so I scroll down, just trying


to read the article. And then they take the video documentary that I didn't want in


the first place and pin it into the corner. And then give me a whole bunch more display


ads just in case. At this point, I'm thinking people must be seeing this experience and


hitting the back button to get away from Forbes. In fact, I would suspect that people are just


avoiding clicking on Forbes in the search results when they see it there in the first


place. But this is a strong site, a well-known publisher. They earn 700 new linking root


domains every single day. If our theory was right, they'd still be losing search visibility.


You all know what's happening? 35% decline year on year for Forbes. Yeah. It's no cliche


to say that SEO is changing. I feel like, thanks, Dr. Pete, again, for this data. I


feel like we can see the moment when volatility increased, when Google said, we have new data,


we can do this a different way. So Google has changed, things are different, but our


processes don't look so different. I'm gonna tell the kids how all of this process used


to work. We'd go around the web and we would read a bunch of SEO articles, things that


had worked for someone else and that we should do as well. And then we'd go to a more reputable


blog and we'd read a whole bunch of Moz posts as well. Maybe we'd go to the Google Webmaster


Central blog and we would see what Google lined to us about in our ranking signals.


And then we'd come to a conference and there'd be some bland white guy in a plaid shirt on


stage telling you about what had worked for him and his clients over and over again. Don't


fashion shame me. I found a thing that works, I'm just gonna stick with it at this point.


The point is, we just came up with a whole bunch of ideas and then best case scenario,


we got all of them implemented. And then we sat back and traffic went up. And now your


boss loves you and knows you're a great SEO and your client thinks you're a great SEO


and your mom and dad, bless them, they don't really understand what it is you do every


day but they know you're a great SEO as well and you're super happy. And you think, all


right, so in this case we had like 14% traffic increase, we had a bunch of changes we made,


maybe each of them contributed a couple of percent of that increase. And then some doubt


creeps in and you say, what if only a couple of them actually helped and I wasted time


on a whole bunch of things that we did as well. And then the existential dread creeps


in and you say, shit, what if a couple of them were actually detrimental to the site


and these two were pulling their weight so much that it masked the effect of the whole


thing. And then you realize if that had been the case, we could have saved ourselves a


bunch of effort, not done a bunch of this work and had more search traffic at the end


of the process. The future SEO process needs to let us isolate every change we make to


the site to see what the impact of every change is. And then we can decide, do we want it


on the site or do we not? That sounds simple but then we think, what does it mean to test


a change? Well, here's a way you could do it. You could say, previously my site had


500,000 visits a month and then I had a smart idea that we implemented and now we have 600,000


visits a month. That's got to be good, right? Well, that, my friends, is spurious thinking.


Because you might be in a very seasonal industry. If I sell propane and propane accessories,


I'm going to have more search traffic in July than I did in June. If I sell digital cameras,


it's a declining industry and I'm going to have less and less search volume every month.


Or maybe you launch a test, you change something on your SEO and then Google says, ah, fuck


that industry, we're just going to own everything above the fold. You're going to lose a bunch


of search traffic. What you really need to do is compare two parallel universes, a universe


where you made the change against a universe where you did absolutely nothing. For those


of you who were over 35, our metaphor here would be sliding doors. What if Gwyneth Paltrow


made this SEO change versus what if she chose not to? For those of you who don't get the


reference, our metaphor instead would be the edge of tomorrow. What if Tom Cruise had the


chance to do this again and again? But here's how we create our own parallel universe for


SEO. We take a site. Let's say this is my site. I have a whole section about animals.


Also, don't at me and say that unicorns aren't real. If they were a mythical creature, why


would Scotland have been allowed to choose them as their national beast? I have a website


all about animals and this is my design. I've got a heading, I've got some intro, I've got


an image and I say, I've got a better idea. I think I've got a new format that will rank


better. I think I'm going to have a heading, then a video and then a structured list of


data. So what we do is we take our site and we don't apply this change to the site. We


keep half of it, the red pages here, as a control group. Cats and dogs don't see any


changes. The other half of the site gets the changes. And now what we have is a control


group, a parallel universe which will do whatever happens with your seasonality and the overall


trends in your industry and then you've got a set of pages that we can compare against.


We have to do some whole bunch of clever math that I'm just absolutely going to skip over


here. What really happens is we're going to choose two buckets of pages that have roughly


the same amount of traffic. Before we roll out the change, we're going to measure the


search traffic to both of them. We're going to see what kind of search traffic we get


and then one day we're going to implement the change. Half the site has now changed.


This is now our new variant group. And then we wait. We wait for Google to crawl the pages,


to index the new content and that might take a couple of days or a couple of weeks and


then we see if traffic diverges. Remember, we're not looking to see if the variant group


traffic itself goes up or down. We're looking to see if there's a gap between our control


group and the variant group. In this case, there is a gap and it's a good one. The variant


group's up so now we do get to pop some champagne. Now we're actually happy. There's three things


that might happen when we run a test like this. We might have a positive test. Traffic


to the variant group was above the control. In that case, we say this is a good SEO change.


We're going to roll it out to the site. We might have a negative test. Traffic might


go down to the variant group and we say whoops, let's turn that off and try to forget we ever


suggested it. You might have a null test where the two lines continue to stay together. Null


tests, by the way, can be incredibly useful. You might run a test on something that wasn't


for SEO benefit but you wanted to see if it had an SEO impact. And so you run the test,


you say this had no impact on SEO and then you get to roll it out, safe in the knowledge


that you're not going to cause any problems. So this is the process. Split the pages into


two groups, create a predictive model. This is the part I skipped over. I'll have links


in the deck to tell you how to do it. Then we apply changes to half the site and then


we see what happened. We were doing a bunch of this at Distilled and it was showing great


promise which is why we built our tool Distilled ODN, the optimization delivery network to


just do it for people. And I'm not mentioning this because I want you all to go to DistilledODN.com


and sign up for a demo. Though that would be great, right? Wouldn't that be fun? I'm


mentioning it because I want to share a bunch of examples of tests we've run over the last


couple of years. I wish I could say that there's a bunch of other tools you can use that do


this but we're basically the only one in the market at the moment. But a bunch of people


are doing it in house for themselves as well. So people like Etsy and Pinterest have built


their own testing platforms into their CMS. This is totally a thing you can look at doing.


So what have we learned? I said I'm going to share a bunch of stories about tests we've


run and things we've learned. Most of our clients are under NDA so I don't want to just


put up their screenshots directly. So I'm going to pretend all of these came from Best


Buy. So when I'm doing screenshots I'm just going to use Best Buy again. I didn't collaborate


with Luke on this. This was just accidental. But I want to be real clear. Best Buy is not


a client so don't tweet like, oh Rob ran this test for Best Buy. I'm just using them for


screenshot examples. Though if there is anyone from Best Buy here, call me. We'll talk about


it. All right. One of the first things we tried doing was testing traditional SEO best


practices. We've seen blog posts from decades ago about what the perfectly optimized page


would have on it. One of those things is image alt tags. That's a pretty traditional best


practice SEO recommendation. So we took a site that had no alt tags on their product


page images and we said what happens if we add the product name and description to the


big product image. So we have our control group. Half the site still had no alt text


on those images. The other half the site, our varying group, now we had the product


name as the image alt text. Then we waited to see what would happen. Have in your mind


how much you think helped. We all know that alt text is the thing to do, right? There


was no change in traffic. Now what I'm not saying here is that alt text is no longer


a ranking factor or useful for SEO. What I'm saying is it didn't help on this site. My


theory, my hypothesis here is that Google understood the relevancy of this page well


enough already. It knew what the page was about. They're like bro, you've got this keyword


in your URL, in your title, in your body copy, it's everywhere. Adding it to the alt text


on these images doesn't help us better understand the page. But what we learned from this is


that best practices are not so clear cut. And you might be wasting your time if you


go to your boss or to your client and say hey, I've got some real basic SEO best practice


that you have to implement before we do anything else. Because you might be disappointed to


find that it doesn't actually help you out a great deal. We decided to revisit a bunch


of other old SEO practices. Back in the days of Panda, we worried that category pages were


too thin. And so we spent a bunch of time and effort writing category page content.


We put a couple of paragraphs at the bottom of every category page about that topic. It


was hard to pretend that we were doing this for users. This was pretty clearly just for


search engines and I shit you not. I went to take these screenshots from Best Buy. I


looked at the code for their category page content and it's in a div that's literally


called text block SEO. Not even trying to hide it. We wondered what would happen on


a client site if we took all of that content away. How much is actually helping? Let's


run the test. So the control group still had category page content. The variant group,


we removed it. There was no change in traffic. It seemed like this category page content


was just not helping anymore. At this point, we'd launched ODN and we now had a bunch of


clients so we went to test this on some other websites. Tested on a second website and removing


the content gave us a 3% increase in traffic. Tested on a third website, saw a 4% decrease


in traffic. So we learned that there is no change that it consistently has the same effect


across a bunch of websites. The only thing that will work for your website is the thing


that will work for your website. At this point, I was super convinced like testing is something


we have to do on all sorts of sites for all sorts of changes. One of the next tests I


was excited about was structured markup. We had some other category pages on a client


site that I was worried maybe there's not enough for Google to actually get their teeth


into here. So we took the category page and we added structured data. Beforehand, there


was nothing on the page. Afterwards, we marked up details about the page, a whole bunch of


entities on there and everything else. So the control group, no structured data. Variant


group had a bunch of structured data. Have in your mind again, do we think structured


data helped? An 11% uplift in traffic to those category pages. This additional traffic to


the category pages alone drove $1.9 million in additional revenue in the first year. Thank


you, structured data. You've just paid for our engagement many times over and you've


given us the credibility to do whatever we want to do on the client's website at the


rest of this point. We were excited about this, so we took another client website, added


structured data to their category page and this time, it was an 11% increase again. At


this point, I'm like holy shit, we found the one weird trick to increase category page


content by 11%. This is amazing. So we tried it on a third website and there was no change


in traffic. Tried it on a fourth website, no change in traffic. And then we tried on


a fifth website, yeah, no change in traffic. We learned, wait, we've already done this.


But we really learned it this time. But the actual takeaway from this is that every now


and again, you have to rechallenge your beliefs because what if the first test or the first


three tests we'd done for this kind of structured data had had no impact? We would have missed


the opportunity to see what happens on those two sites where it really, really paid off.


Even if a test hasn't brought big results for you in the past, you need to look at a


site and say this time I have a hypothesis for why it's going to help and then you can


run the test. We've also learned a lot about the practicalities of SEO from doing these


tests over the years. We had a site where car reviews, this is a demo, but the title


was something like Outback Review. And we thought there's a bunch more information on


that page, so why don't we reveal some of it in the title tag. We'll mention that it's


the review and the safety information. We ran the test and saw a 10% decrease in traffic.


All right. We ran a lot of title tag and meta description tests. Turned out more than half


of them decreased traffic to the site. Couple of things going on there. One, it's really


hard to write great title tags. But the other thing is that because we have this testing


platform, we were way more bullish in the tests we would run. We would run tests knowing


that yeah, if it decreases, we'll just turn it off. We could do tests that had a much


bigger risk reward spread. If it's bad, we turn it off. And if it's good, it's going


to be really good. So those 6% were fantastic uplifts. Across all these tests we ran for


titles and metas, we found that typically we were seeing traffic swings of about 10%,


and that was remarkably consistent across size of site, across industry. We also found


that when we changed title and meta descriptions at scale in a testing method like this, that


with only a couple of days we could see the results turning up in search. It was indexed


and put into the search results this quickly. And then immediately we'd start getting more


or less search traffic. This speed means that we can be pretty agile. What if you ran a


title tag test every two weeks? That would mean that between now and next year's MozCon,


you have 26 chances to iterate and improve on the title tags. When was the last time


you did a wholesale title tag rewrite for your website? What if you could iterate? Do


you think you could get a better title tag if you had 26 bytes at the cherry? I'm pretty


sure you could. But there was one thing still worrying me about all these tests. What if


we have a test that is detrimental to traffic, and then we turn it off, and things don't


go back to where they were beforehand? Well, we had a client who was an online-only e-comm


retailer. They were selling fashion so their title tags were all like, buy dresses online,


buy hats online, buy belts online. And we thought, I bet the users know that this website


is online, and I wonder if Google can figure it out as well. So we deleted the word online


from all of their title tags. Then we sat back, looked at traffic, waited to see what


happened to the rankings. Ooh, I think this was the rankings for buy dresses online. Yeah,


it plummeted. After seven days, we said, all right, this isn't coming back. So we added


the word online back to all the title tags, and rankings went back up. When we do testing


in this rigorous process, we can click undo, we can revert the changes we've made, and


the effects of it revert as well. Now, if what you're doing is blindly just implementing


changes to the site and then waiting weeks or months to find that it's been detrimental,


and then you try and revert it, who knows what's gonna happen. It might not be so easy


to turn it off and get back the results you previously had. We've learned a bunch of other


stuff about Google as well through this process. We have a site where, without JavaScript,


with JavaScript, you know, the site rendered properly, without JavaScript, you couldn't


see the page content. We were a bit worried about this, like, sure, we all browse with


JavaScript on our desktop, on mobile devices, but do we think Google can read the page properly


with no JavaScript? And you say, hey, Google, are you, you know, able to cope if we don't


have JavaScript on the site? And they say, super easy, barely an inconvenience. We've


been rendering JavaScript for years. And we say, yeah, sure, we're gonna test it. So we


had a test where, with JavaScript enabled or disabled, you would still be able to see


the site. So for our control group for this site, we still needed JS on half the site.


For the variant group, content was loaded more accessibly directly into HTML. This should


be easier to crawl. Do you wanna know what happened? Traffic went up by 6%. Now, sure,


the JavaScript might have been particularly funky on this website, but this was a great


increase. And I'm not saying you shouldn't take Google at their word and believe everything


they say, but I've got one other test I wanna tell you about here, if you'd like promise


not to tell everybody about it. We were interested in the fresh content impact on rankings and


SEO. Here's an article by Cyrus, writing about fresh content. You can tell it's fresh, or


you certainly could in June 2016, because it had a date in the corner. And when you


search for this page, it had the date in the search results as well. Where does that date


come from? Well, you can do it via your JSON-LD, or you can do it directly on the page in markup


like this, date modified. This is when we last updated the page. We wanted to test fresh


content, and the easiest way to do that was probably just gonna be to change the date


modified date. And we thought, we wanna see a result. So we're gonna go real aggressive.


We're gonna say that this article was updated today. So our control group for this test


had a whole site where half the pages, we had honest date modified dates. For the other


half of the site, we said that the article was updated today. This test took like two


minutes to implement in ODN. That was a lot easier than rewriting content for half the


site every single day. We sat back and wondered if we would actually see any impact from this.


We had an 8% increase in traffic. Oh, shit! We're lying to Google, we're lying to users,


and we're being rewarded for it. So after our heart rate went down, we turned the test


off. I wouldn't recommend it. This is what we learned from this test. There's nothing


to learn. Don't take anything away from this. This was like super black hat by accident.


I'm pretty sure if Google found you doing this, they would penalize you pretty quickly.


So all these tests, lots to learn, and a lot of traffic that we've earned for our clients


because of it. So here's how you can get started. Well, the first thing to do is go and read


more about this process on Will's post. This is the founder of Distilled, a couple of years


back on the Moz blog. He goes through the process and how all of this works. And then


you can read this post on Distilled. We actually have a free tool that uses causal impact,


a math library that Google developed, and I love the fact that we're using Google's


math against them in this case. But this is a free tool that helps you do some of this,


the math part of this methodology. To make all this work, you're gonna need an interdisciplinary


team. An analytics person is gonna help you segment the traffic and find two buckets of


pages that are gonna work for this. Then you have a backend person who makes sure that


some pages serve up one template and the other variant group serves up the other template.


You're gonna have an SEO person, maybe one of you, dreaming up a whole bunch of things


that you want to test. And then a front-end person who's gonna implement those tests in


a new page template. And then finally, a statistician who is going to either use our tool or do


some other math to find whether there was an impact from every one of these tests. Or


come over to Distilled ODN, take a look at us and see if we can just take all of this


off your plate. We've built an interdisciplinary team to make it easier for you. So let's do


this. My hope is that in a couple of years' time, we'll come back to MozCon or we'll read


Moz blog posts and it won't be a bunch of people standing here saying, here's what I've


done, it worked for me, you should go and do it as well. Instead, we'll be collaboratively


saying, here's a whole bunch of ideas that you could test, here's a whole bunch of things


that might work for you. I'm hoping that you as SEOs go into your organizations and instead


of having this long list of things that you're trying to fight for dev resources, fight for


time to get implemented on the site, instead you test all these things, you put a big X


through all the ones that haven't worked, and for the ones that do work, you have numbers


against how impactful they were. And then you go to your boss or you go to leadership


and you say, hey, if we implement these two things, we'll have 25% more search traffic.


Plus, how long do you want to leave money on the table before we can get it done? As


Google changes and as the speed of Google's iterations increase, split testing for SEO


is becoming more and more necessary. This is an established thing that people are already


doing. Your competitors might be quietly doing it behind the scenes already. And when you


put data against things, split testing makes you a more credible marketer. This is already


accessible. You can do it yourself and there are ways to get started with this right now.


Thank you for letting me share my passion about this with you. I've been Rob Ousby.


Local Projects to Boost Your Company and Career Presented by Mike Ramsey

Well, I want to talk with you about personal brands.


And to start out, just a few examples of some personal brands.


It's very common for people to use living organisms to represent themselves and their


brand.


Here's a great example.


LeBron James, the king, who got a tattoo of a lion on his arm and then he's had a logo


that had a lion in there and recently switched to an LJ crown.


We have Shark Tank.


And these people, you know, they're fierce, they're willing to take a bite out of you


for roughly about 35% IRR return.


One of my other favorites, The Rock, and he literally has arms that are like bigger than


my head and it's almost like they have two arms.


He like surgically put two arms in one arm because they're just so big.


And before you say that a rock is not a living organism, I looked it up on Wikipedia.


Live rock.


And since Google trusts Wikipedia and everything that comes out of it, I figure I can as well.


But this isn't something new.


This isn't something that has just been going on recently.


People have been using living organisms to represent their personal branding for a very,


very long time, thousands of years.


For instance, Jesus Christ, also known as the lamb of God, holy, pure, sacrificial,


and can't forget counterpart, Lucifer, serpent, sneaky, you know, deadly.


And so this isn't new.


The symbology has been used to represent people and the things that they care about or the


things that they do for as long as we can remember.


And we even do it with those that we love.


So next I've got to show you a wonderful picture here.


I was waiting to hear it.


It was like, aww.


Aww.


Okay.


This is my daughter, Liza.


My, we have three and another one on the way.


And so Liza, love her.


She's super spunky.


And she's got the nickname Liza bear.


And the reason why is because bears are cute and cuddly, but when they are angry or when


they're hangry, it's like they will just rain down on you with the fire of a thousand suns.


And so Liza, interesting enough, she goes to time out often for different things.


And it became such a joke in our family that I started taking pictures when she would go


into time out.


And we call it the Time Out Chronicles.


And here's one of these pictures.


So you can see.


And now Liza, I just want to talk about this.


So I'm really strict when it comes to time out.


When one of my kids is in time out, they have to sit in the chair and they can't move or


we're like adding time onto the clock.


It's like if they get out of the chair and so it's always like she's trying to like scoot


the chair without getting out of it or trying to climb around.


So this was her attempt.


She was just done at this point.


She just laid back, but she couldn't get out of the chair.


So but, you know, she got that brand bear from her father.


But I have a question for you.


What is your personal brand?


What living organism represents you?


Is it a lion?


A tiger?


A bear?


Oh, my.


I've thought a lot about this for myself.


And it's taken me a long time to figure out what mine was.


But it's something that it's something that I think can be a big part of you the way that


tag fee potentially is for moss.


And that's this.


It looks like the E came off a little bit, but it's the bristlecone pine.


Now, why the bristlecone pine?


This isn't the tallest tree.


It's definitely not the best looking tree.


Don't even produce no fruit.


But there's some characteristics about the bristlecone pine that I've really, really,


really came to respect.


First, it survives where nothing else can, in the most rugged terrain imaginable.


I mean, it's a rock.


It's a tree growing in the middle of a rock.


Okay?


Nothing else grows where bristlecone pines can grow.


Next, you have thick bark.


It's impenetrable from disease, from insects, these different things.


And it's just growing that thicker and thicker and thicker and just stronger bark all the


time.


Another really interesting thing about the bristlecone pine, it's the oldest living tree


on earth.


The oldest one is known as Methuselah.


And this tree is like 5,000 years old.


Imagine that being alive for 5,000 years.


Do you know how many dogs have potentially peed on that tree in 5,000 years?


I mean, it's just unfathomable to imagine how long that's been alive.


But the thing about this tree in particular that I just absolutely love is this.


It never stops growing.


All right?


So now it's time for a story.


I started my company in a pretty rough situation.


I had just graduated college.


My wife was pregnant with our first child, a young boy.


And I had a good job.


I had a pretty good job.


It was in door-to-door sales, so it wasn't that great of a job.


And I was doing door-to-door sales for a few summers through high school.


And then I was going to be moving up within this company.


And it was really sweet.


I could live where I wanted.


I would just have to do a little bit of travel for work.


But what happened was I decided to quit.


And not only did I decide to quit, I decided to start a search marketing company without


ever working at one before.


And I decided on that pretty much that same day that I quit and had the search marketing


company, we had made all these plans and had worked with a contractor.


And we're starting to build a house in Burley, Idaho.


Okay?


Burley, Idaho.


We have 10,000 people.


There's more cows in my town than there are people by, like, a substantial amount.


And so a weird place to do this from.


But we did it.


And when I started, I was cold calling people across Idaho trying to find work.


And it was just dismal.


Like, I couldn't get anything going.


And we were in, you know, it was a tough situation to start from.


But though it was hard, I mean, it was like literally when we talk about the bristlecone


pine and the growing on rocks, it was like trying to make a rain forest in Mars.


I mean, that's how I felt.


But over time, I realized something.


I just had to keep growing.


And I had to grow in my knowledge.


I didn't know much.


And so I started doing all of these different studies.


And I started publishing everything I could find.


And I started researching everything I could find.


And I started reading all of the top experts.


And I started trying to be like them in the way that they would write.


And I tried to learn the way that they would research and the things that they would research.


And I started to publish and people started to notice.


And that led to one thing, which led to another thing, which led to another thing.


And then you end up on a stage like this.


You know?


Where was this what I studied in college?


No.


Not much.


Just a little bit.


I had a class that piqued my interest where I literally started a website selling Idaho


potatoes online.


I know that that's ridiculous, but that's what happened.


So anyhow, the interesting thing is in my hometown where it shouldn't have worked, it


did.


But other people that were like me, you know, these bristle cones, came out of the woodworks.


And over time, you know, we've been able to establish a good company in this super small


town that makes no sense.


It's agriculture and a tech company on Main Street, you know?


That's basically what it is.


And so I'm going to talk to you about a few of these stories here.


And I want to start out with one person that we have named Amador.


Okay?


Now Amador comes from a family of ten siblings.


And he moved back to Burley.


He went to school close by there.


And he moved back to basically be around his family.


I mean, that's a big responsibility.


Ten siblings.


And he wanted to be around.


He was the oldest of the siblings.


So he's living there.


What opportunity is there for him?


So anyhow, he ends up at Nifty.


And this guy's a bristle cone.


All right?


And so I know what you're thinking, though, as you're looking at this.


What is that in the background?


It's the leg lamp from Christmas Story.


Okay?


So anyways, Amador.


Back to Amador.


He comes into my office and he's like, hi, Mike.


And I'm like, hi, Amador.


And he's like, how are you?


And I say, I'm doing really good.


And then he says, I got something I want to show you.


And so then he says, I've done some research and I want to talk to you about this research.


And then he spits off these numbers.


And I got to read it because I can't even do it.


He's like, we sent 7,189 outreach emails to 2,661 unique email addresses at 1,969 unique


colleges and universities.


We got 582 responses of which 155 said yes, but we ended up with 549 live links.


This is an 8.1 response rate and a 7.64 success rate.


Okay.


I got through it.


And I said, wow.


And this is what he was doing with scholarship link building research.


He took all of the emails that we sent out over a three-year period and that's the data


that he got out of them.


And I said, hey, that's really cool.


That's good to know.


We've never really looked at that before.


And then he said, but that's not what I want to talk to you about.


Because as I'm sure some of you in the link building space know, scholarships have been


one of these things that's kind of highly debated as, oh, is this a dying tactic?


Is Google going to do something about it?


I mean, just what's the case?


And so he showed me this.


He said, no responses have been increasing over the years.


We've gone from 5% in 2014 to 34% in 2015 and in 2016 it's not over but about 40%.


This is showing you the increase in no responses.


And those no responses, why are they that way?


And so he looked at every single email that we got back across our company and found out


why was it?


It was too many requests.


So congratulations, SEO people.


We have absolutely destroyed funding kids through university.


So there's just so many companies offering scholarships now and these universities used


to be so good about accepting them all but now they're like, oh, there's just too many


of you asking.


We don't have enough space or we don't have enough time to manage this.


And we thought it was interesting.


But then he said, hey, I've got some more things to show you.


We also looked at the authority of these links that we've gotten over this time because it's


a substantial amount of links.


And it was about 40 average domain authority for high school websites and about a 72 average


domain authority for the university websites that we're pulling the links from.


And then he said, and the anchor text was also interesting.


So he looked at all of this.


And it was manual.


There wasn't a really good way to gather this out of everybody's emails that had been doing


outreach and different things.


But he looked at the URLs and found that 38% were naked URLs.


And interesting enough, the next highest was the actual scholarship name.


And so then he said, hey, if we're going to keep doing some of these, if some of our clients


want to do a scholarship program for brand and link and everything else, we've really


got to start thinking about the name of that scholarship.


But more than that, we need to look at who we're sending it to.


And he said, we've tried to send it to personal email addresses at these places.


We've tried to send to more of like a generic.


And we found that the generic is much more effective.


And as a matter of fact, especially for re-upping or reaching out to the same school for a different


scholarship, if we have a generic one, 88% versus the personal side.


But the most important thing, and something that I think a lot of people have been asking


about scholarship link building, at least lately, and especially in the world that I


deal in, we do a lot in local search.


And not just local search, we do a lot with law firms in local search.


We have a separate brand called Nifty Law.


And so a ton of this comes out of there because legal link building is a difficult space to


be in.


But, you know, lawyers have a lot of money.


And it's also fairly prestigious for lawyers to offer scholarships.


So it's kind of a good marriage.


So anyhow, we looked at the impacts of rankings across some of our recent ones.


And we tie scholarships a lot to like accordions on home pages and different things.


So this represents where the scholarship was found.


But we looked and we found that the rankings before and after the scholarship in cases


where potentially that was the main thing that was going on.


And in almost every single case, we saw fairly significant increases of rankings, not just


on scholarship-related words, but on whatever were associated with that page.


And in conjunction with that, here's the organic traffic.


And that was a massive increase.


Now of course, organic traffic, you can see that after the scholarship it tapered off,


but nowhere near from where we started.


Now, how much of that is because people are starting to search for a brand and potentially


pushing up other signals from these things?


How much is potentially unrelated to just that aspect of the scholarship league?


I think there's some things that are hard to tell, but it was really interesting.


And so anyhow, he's in my office.


He hands us this research.


And we just made it available to everybody.


And it was like a 40-page document that he handed me with just tons of different points.


I've just done some of the highlights.


So you can look at that here at bit.ly and then scholarship study.


But more so than this, what happened was from this project, we sat down.


And as I talked to Amador, I said, how great would it be for everybody to do something


like this in our organization, to just do it, even though it's hard, even though he


didn't have much to work with.


It was on his own time.


He had to deal with all the client work.


I mean, really, he was in a tough spot trying to grow and learn personally.


And so we launched something in our company called the Bristlecone Pine Project.


And basically, here's what it was.


Everybody in the company had to come up with something that they were passionate about


and do a project around it and try to improve personally and try to improve our company.


So the rest of this is just going through some of these projects.


Next up, Ryan.


Came into my office one day when I had a newspaper and an SEO company.


And we weren't hiring or anything, but he was just a hustler, just really motivated.


Came and dropped off his resume, said, give me a call when you're ready type thing.


Didn't have any experience in the field, but has just learned a ton.


And so Ryan did a study across local content.


And it's a huge study.


I have a link to it at the end, and you can look that up.


But I'm just showing you a couple things.


So one of the things he did that was interesting was he tried to take some of these sub pages


on law firm websites and tie them into an overall page.


So for instance, car accident, premise liability, motorcycle accident, lawyer, and tie them


all into the personal injury page instead of having all of these separate pages trying


to build this content story around all of those things in one page that became pretty


heavy on content.


It was 2,333 words.


And what happened?


Quite a few of the keywords stayed the same.


None dropped on this specific page.


But on a couple different terms, we had massive increases that moved up into some top positions


on some very hard terms.


And that was a fun study.


And he has tons.


There's probably about 15 different studies he did across local content plays to just


see what would happen as he did different tests.


But then he took Rand's study on 10x content, and he took Rand's 10 points that are basically


the top 10 things that something has to have to be 10x content.


And then he looked at the top 50 markets in America across four different practice areas


in the legal space and just rated companies' content to see what would come up.


And we found that about only 28% had from two of the points in Rand's study, so we call


it like 2x content because they covered two of those 10 points to 10.


And we didn't even find any company that had 10x content, not a single one.


And then he looked at ranking terms associated with those websites and associated with the


page that was ranked from 2 to 10x content.


And you can see in the bottom here across both sides, 2x content had a ton of long tail


that was terms that were associated with it.


There was no 8x content, no 10x content.


But the interesting thing to me was how head term rankings started going up as companies


had more and more points or were that much better and better and better and better than


the next piece of content.


That's what it took to start getting across some of these head terms and potentially track


those links.


You can see the whole study at this link just launched today on our site.


Next we have Chelsea.


And Chelsea's a designer at Nifty.


And she took a study that we did across local landing pages, similar data set, 50 top markets


in America, and looked at four different practice areas.


So roughly about 200 different search results in legal, which is fairly substantial across


the legal industry in America at least, and created what it took to have like the best


landing page.


So right here you can see some of the things that were found.


So we had things like 86% of the pages that were ranking in the top position in maps,


the top position were home pages compared to sub pages.


Makes sense.


We had things like 62% or 62 average domain authority across those websites.


And then I'll just let this roll.


As you can see this, and I'll have a link to this as well, but you can see some of the


different data points that we found.


Some of the things I thought were interesting, 75 average Google desktop speed score.


We had 10%, only 10% of the forms, which I was surprised it was this much, had like a


hard capacha to read, capacha.


And there's a lot of different data points on here that we found.


But overall, one of the interesting ones was that the average page length was about that


200 and, or sorry, the average amount of links was 2,033, which spoke to a lot of spam in


the legal space, unfortunately.


But anyhow, this data was really interesting.


These were things that we were talking about as we were starting to look at websites.


And so you can find that as well, bit.ly, local-landing.


We did a lot around link building because it's always a question, especially in local.


It's hard.


You know, link building's always going to be hard, but it's been so important, and I


think we have a long time of importance left.


So another one that we were testing out was internship link building.


And this is Jost, Ryan Jost, and really great guy.


And he looked at a client site that had an internship offering page and said, you know


what?


I bet there's a lot of sites and universities that would be interested in linking to this.


And so we reached out to some of these universities.


He spent three hours doing it, had a 75% success rate, ended up with seven links from really


high domain authority websites, you know, super positive.


So we were like, hey, could we do this?


These were all local universities.


Could we take a local internship opportunity and scale that, you know, and basically go


out and like a scholarship thing the same way and start asking people in all of these


different places.


You know, there could be people in other schools that want to move here.


So let's see what we can do.


So he goes out and he does it.


He spends several hours.


And you know, on this one in particular, and we did quite a few, had 5% confirmed approval


rate on, you know, getting accepted onto these sites or people talking, you know, or saying


that they would post a scholarship or internship.


And then he ended up with 30 applications for this company, which is great.


You know, the reason why we did it, what was it, you know, I hate to say it, but how many


links?


Drum roll, please.


You don't really have to drum roll.


Zero.


Wah wah.


And largely speaking, outside of the area really close by, people were putting them


on like scholarship database that was internal.


Like we just didn't get anything indexed.


But was it still good, especially for a few links?


Three hours for seven quality, really quality links in local is very good.


All right.


So yet again, another really fun study that he did.


And not all the studies were something that really came out with these awesome, awesome


results that we wanted, but we learned a lot from them.


Next.


Devon.


Now, Devon is from a town close to Burley.


We have more cows than people in Burley.


Well, he's from Decklow.


And Decklow has more flies on a single cow than they have people in a town.


Okay.


And Devon did a competitive link building worksheet that he built out.


Now, you know, Moz has a great competitive link tool that basically you can put in competitors


and then you can put in your domain name and it will show you the links your competitors


have that you don't.


But we don't I love Moz and I'm really excited to see how the focus is coming back to SEO


and that I think we're going to see some awesome things, especially with Open Site Explorer


in the future.


I don't know, but I just imagine.


And you know, we use a lot of different sets when we look at it.


We use OSE, we use Ahrefs, sometimes SEO profiler, cognitive, majestic, we use Google search


console link data.


And so this is all the places that we're pulling links from.


And so what we wanted was to be able to take all of these different links, put them into


a sheet and come up with a really big competitive list for about five competitors.


So he built an Excel sheet where we could plug in these five competitors, you know,


get their backlinks, copy and paste the links that we got into a form into, you know, the


rows.


And then using a really good plug-in that is called the Remove Duplicates plug-in, we


could gather all of the duplicates out from these websites and, you know, following this


process ultimately make a really good solid list of the top competitor links that our


client or whoever we were working on did not have.


And from that, we ended up getting, you know, two hours, 30 shared, like truly good, you


know, shared link opportunities, reached out to ten of those that were, you know, exceptional,


ended up with four really good links.


And in local yet again for two hours, that's really solid.


And he walks you through the process of exactly how to do that at this post here and makes


the sheet usable for you that you can download or make for yourself.


Now Devon was also a very key person in creating a list of local link building ideas and tactics


that we did for MozCon Local a little earlier in this year.


And I think that that's another important one that if you're doing any type of link


building, and I think whether, you know, Rand did a whiteboard Friday about this, you know,


whether you are in local or you're a national company, local links can be very, very good


for you.


And so there's some great ideas in here.


The caps matter on the Ls and the B. So, yeah, yet again, good studies.


Now next we have Cameron.


And Cameron works across a couple of my different companies.


And in this case, Cameron spent a couple years learning to speak Spanish and doing some mission


area work.


And so we used him to do a lot of Spanish research.


And what he did was he went and he looked at the top hundred U.S. markets in legal and


tried to determine what was working for Spanish in the United States, Spanish websites in


the United States for law firms.


And wanted to understand what the site structures were that were, you know, ranking the best,


et cetera.


And so he gathered this data.


And here's what we found.


We found that folders, you know, like a subfolder of a site, not a subdomain, not a separate


website, but a folder on the website was best.


There was more of them and they ranked higher than any other form of data or of style of


linking, as you can see here.


And beyond this, another really, really interesting point was that those sites that marked up


in schema in Spanish really outperformed everything else, but it was very, very uncommon to find


that.


There was for every 16 English sites that were marked up in Spanish, or in English,


only one of which were marked up in Spanish as they did that.


And so yet again, these are some really key things that have changed and just helped us


grow and helped their understanding grow of a specific space.


Sticking with schema, we had Jonathan.


And Jonathan did a schema study across reviews.


And I'll show you what I mean by that.


So as you can see, these are review snippets showing up on organic listings.


And it was showing either an aggregate of stars for multiple reviews or marked up a


single review.


And so we looked across similar data set across these top, you know, 50 markets in America


and found across 3,700 SERP results or actual listings, we found 2.7 had rich snippets.


Okay.


Now we've seen as we've done some other studies that these get higher click-through rates.


And we also see that a lot of people spam it.


But we found some other interesting things too.


It was always a subpage.


It was always on a subpage that these would show up.


It wouldn't work on your home page.