And I'm recording this right now at, I think it's about 9.30 Eastern Time, and it was either


#WhiteboardFriday: Matter. How SEOs Can Help... Now

this or Netflix.


We have the opportunity to make a really big difference.


So whether that's helping a local business create an e-commerce version, or helping them


with shipping, or even more often than not, helping nonprofits collect donations online,


there are just tons of opportunities for you and your organization to get involved and


help make a difference for the companies that aren't already online.


Now I know you could think about this from the other direction, which is to say my business


and my clients are online, and now is our chance to win, because our competitors just


weren't prepared.


This is one of those times where I think you've got to question whether or not you really


want to bring that karma upon you.


Now's the opportunity to matter.


And the last thing I would recommend is to let your employees, your benefactors, and


your deeds speak for themselves.


You don't need to go out touting left and right all of the things that you're doing.


Certainly you should advertise the offers that you're giving so that you actually extend


the reach.


Certainly you should advertise the fact that you're looking for nonprofit organizations


to help out online.


And while you should do that, the question you should ask yourself before you put out


any kind of information about what you've done, about how you've helped, is whether


or not the time you're spending putting together that information and the dollars that you're


spending, putting out that information, is worth the cost of the good that you could


have done with that time and money doing something else.


I want to end on a positive note.


These are difficult times.


But if there's one thing that I've seen, I've seen time and time again, is that people in


our industry care, and they're trying to make a difference.


These are just some of the ideas that I came up with.


And I'm betting in the Moz audience and across the Twitter sphere and Reddit and all social


media, that there are people who have other excellent ideas.


I want you to fill, just fill the comments with those types of ideas.


And we'll do our best to promote them.


Thank you again for spending another Whiteboard Friday with me.


God bless.


Be healthy.


And I'll see you soon again.


Ruth Burr Reedy - Relative or Absolute URLs? - Whiteboard Friday

Howdy Moz fans, my name is Ruth Burr-Reedy.


You may recognize me from such projects as when I used to be the head of SEO at Moz.


I'm now the senior SEO manager at Big Wing Interactive in Oklahoma City, and today we're


going to talk about relative versus absolute URLs and why they are important.


So at any given time, your website can have several different configurations that might


be causing duplicate content issues.


You could have just standard HTTP, HTTP, www.example.com.


That's a pretty standard format for a website.


But the main sources that we see of domain-level duplicate content are when the non-www.example.com


does not redirect to the www or vice versa, and when the HTTPS versions of your URLs are


not forced to resolve to HTTP versions or, again, vice versa.


What this can mean is if all of these scenarios are true, if all four of these URLs resolve


without being forced to resolve to a canonical version, you can, in essence, have four versions


of your website out on the internet.


And this may or may not be a problem.


I mean, it's not ideal for a couple of reasons.


Number one, duplicate content is a problem because some people think that duplicate content


is going to give you a penalty, and duplicate content is not going to get your website penalized


in the same way that you might see a spammy link penalty from Penguin.


It's just going to...


There's no actual penalty involved.


You won't be punished for having duplicate content.


The problem with duplicate content is that you're basically relying on Google to figure


out what the real version of your website is.


So Google isn't going to rank the same URL from all four versions of your website.


They're going to try to figure out which URL is the real URL and just rank that one.


The problem with that is you're basically leaving that decision up to Google when it's


something that you could take control of for yourself.


There are a couple of other reasons that we'll go into a little bit later for why duplicate


content can be a problem.


But in short, duplicate content is no good.


However, just having these URLs not resolved to each other may or may not be a huge problem.


When it really becomes a serious issue is when that problem is combined with injudicious


use of relative URLs in internal links.


Let's talk a little bit about the difference between a relative URL and an absolute URL


when it comes to internal linking.


With an absolute URL, you are putting the entire web address of the page that you are


linking to in the link.


So you're putting your full domain, everything in the link, including slash page.


That's an absolute URL.


However, when coding a website, it's a fairly common web development practice to instead


code internal links with what's called a relative URL.


A relative URL is just slash page.


And basically what that does is it relies on your browser to understand, OK, this link


is pointing to a page that's on the same domain that we're already on.


I'm just going to assume that that is the case and go there.


And there are a couple of really good reasons to code relative URLs.


One is that it is much easier and faster to code.


So when you are a web developer and you're building a site and there are thousands of


pages, coding relative versus absolute URLs is a way to be more efficient.


So you'll see it happen a lot.


Another reason why you might see relative versus absolute URLs is some content management


systems, and SharePoint is a great example of this, have a staging environment that's


on its own domain.


So instead of being example.com, it'll be examplestaging.com.


And the entire website will basically be replicated on that staging domain.


Having relative versus absolute URLs means that the same website can exist on staging


and on production or the live accessible version of your website without having to go back


in and recode all of those URLs.


So again, it's more efficient for your web development team, and those are really perfectly


valid reasons to do those things.


So don't yell at your web dev team if they've coded relative URLs, because from their perspective,


it is a better solution.


Relative URLs will also cause your page to load slightly faster.


However, in my experience, the SEO benefits of having absolute versus relative URLs in


your website far outweigh the teeny tiny bit longer that it will take the page to load.


It's very negligible, and if you have a really, really long page load time, there is going


to be a whole boatload of things that you can change that will make a bigger difference


than coding your URLs as relative versus absolute.


So page load time, in my opinion, not a concern here.


However, it is something that your web dev team may bring up with you when you try to


address with them the fact that from an SEO perspective, coding your website with relative


versus absolute URLs, especially in the nav, is not a good solution.


And there are a few reasons why.


One is that if you have all of your internal links as relative URLs, it'd be very, very,


very easy for a scraper to simply scrape your whole website and put it up on a new domain,


and the whole website would just work.


And that sucks for you and is great for that scraper.


But unless you are out there doing public services for scrapers for some reason, that's


probably not something that you want happening with your beautiful, hardworking, handcrafted


site.


So that's one reason there is a scraper risk.


But the other reason why it's very important to have absolute versus relative URLs is that


it really mitigates the duplicate content risk that can be presented when you don't


have all of these versions of your website resolving to one version.


So Google could potentially enter your site on any one of these four pages, which they're


the same page to you.


They are four different pages to Google.


They're the same domain to you.


They are four different domains to Google.


But they could enter your site.


And if all of your URLs are relative, they can then crawl and index your entire domain


using whatever format these are.


Whereas if you have absolute links coded, even if Google enters your site on www., and


that resolves, once they crawl to another page that you've got coded without the www.,


all of that other internal link juice and all of the other pages on your website, Google's


not going to assume that those live at the www.version.


That really cuts down on different versions of each page of your website.


If you have relative URLs throughout, you basically have four different websites if


you haven't fixed this problem.


And again, this is not always a huge issue, right?


Duplicate content, it's not ideal.


However, Google has gotten pretty good at figuring out what the real version of your


website is.


You do want to think about internal linking when you're thinking about this.


If you have basically four different versions of any URL that anybody could just copy and


paste when they want to link to you or when they want to share something that you've built,


you're diluting your internal links by four, which is not great.


You basically would have to build four times as many links in order to get the same authority.


So that's one reason.


The other reason why it's pretty important not to do is because of crawl budget.


I'm going to walk over here and I'm going to point at it like this instead.


Crawl budget.


So when we talk about crawl budget, basically what that is is every time Google crawls your


website, there is a finite depth that they will go.


There's a finite number of URLs that they will crawl and then they decide, okay, I'm


done.


And that's based on a few different things.


However, site authority is one of them, your actual page rank, not toolbar page rank, but


how good Google actually thinks your website is, is a big part of that.


But also how complex your site is, how often it's updated, things like that are also going


to contribute to how often and how deep Google is going to crawl your site.


It's important to remember when we think about crawl budget that for Google, crawl budget


costs actual dollars.


One of Google's biggest expenditures as a company is the money and the bandwidth it


takes to crawl and index the web.


All of that energy that's going into crawling and indexing the web that lives on servers,


that bandwidth comes from servers.


And that means that using bandwidth costs Google actual real dollars.


So Google is incentivized to crawl as efficiently as possible because when they crawl inefficiently,


it costs them money.


So if your site is not efficient to crawl, Google is going to save itself some money


by crawling it less frequently and crawling to a fewer number of pages per crawl.


And that can mean that if you have a site that's updated frequently, your site may not


be updating in the index as frequently as you're updating it.


It may also mean that Google, while it's crawling and indexing, may be crawling and indexing


a version of your website that isn't the version that you really want it to crawl and index.


So having four different versions of your website, all of which are completely crawlable


to the last page because you've got relative URLs and you haven't fixed this duplicate


content problem, means that Google has to spend four times as much money in order to


really crawl and understand your website.


And over time, they're going to do that less and less frequently, especially if you don't


have a really high authority website.


If you're a small website, if you're just starting out, if you've only got a medium


number of inbound links, over time you're going to see your crawl rate and frequency


impacted.


And that's bad.


We don't want that.


We want Google to come back all the time, see all our pages, they're beautiful, put


them up in the index, rank them well.


That's what we want.


So that's what we should do.


So there are a couple of ways to fix your relative versus absolute URLs problem.


Number one is you have to fix on the server side what is happening with your website.


You have to make sure that you are forcing all of these different versions of your domain


to resolve to one version of your domain.


And for me, I'm pretty agnostic as to which version you pick.


You should probably already have a pretty good idea of which version of your website


is the real version, whether that's www, non-www, HTTPS, or HTTP.


From my view, what's most important is that all four of these versions resolve to one


version.


From an SEO standpoint, there is evidence to suggest, and Google has certainly said,


that HTTPS is a little bit better than HTTP.


And from a URL length perspective, I like to not have the www dot in there because it


doesn't really do anything.


It just makes your URLs four characters longer.


So if you don't know which one to pick, I would pick this one, HTTPS, no Ws.


But whichever one you pick, what's really most important is that all of them resolve


to one version.


You can do that on the server side.


And that's usually pretty easy for your dev team to fix once you tell them that it needs


to happen.


Great.


So you fixed it on your server side.


Now you need to fix your internal links.


And you need to recode them from being relative to being absolute.


This is something that your dev team is not going to want to do because it is time consuming


and, from a web dev perspective, not that important.


However, you should use resources like this Whiteboard Friday to explain to them that


from an SEO perspective, both from the scraper risk and from a duplicate content standpoint,


having those absolute URLs is a high priority and something that should get done.


So you'll need to fix those, especially in your navigational elements.


But once you've got your nav fixed, also do pull out your database or run a screaming


frog crawl or however you want to discover internal links that aren't part of your nav.


And make sure you're updating those to be absolute as well.


And then you do some education with everybody who touches your website saying, hey, when


you link internally, make sure you're using the absolute URL and make sure it's in our


preferred format because that's really going to give you the most bang for your buck per


internal link.


So do some education, fix your internal links.


Sometimes your dev team is going to say, no, we can't do that.


We're not going to recode the whole nav.


It's not a good use of our time.


And sometimes they are right.


The dev team has more important things to do.


That's OK.


If you can't get your internal links fixed or if they're not going to get fixed any time


in the near future, a stopgap or a Band-Aid that you can kind of put on this problem is


to canonicalize all of your pages.


So as you're changing your server to force all of these different versions of your domain


to resolve to one, at the same time, you should be implementing the canonical tag on all of


the pages of your website to self-canonize.


So on every page, you have a canonical tag saying, this page right here that we're already


on is the canonical version of this page.


Or if there's another page that's the canonical version, then obviously you point to that


instead.


But having each page self-canonicalized will mitigate both the risk of duplicate content


internally and some of the risk posed by scrapers.


Because when they scrape, if they're scraping your website and slapping it up somewhere


else, those canonical tags will often stay in place.


And that lets Google know this is not the real version of the website.


So in conclusion, relative links, not as good.


Absolute links, those are the way to go.


Make sure that you're fixing these very common domain-level duplicate content problems.


And if your dev team tries to tell you that they don't want to do this, just tell them


Ruth sent you.


MozCon 2015 - 01 - Welcome to MozCon with Rand Fishkin

Howdy gang. I apologize. I miraculously, out of the last 364 days, only lost my voice once


today. So you get a very, I don't know, Batman-esque, it's gonna be Dark Knight in the Forest. First


up, welcome to Moscon. Thank you so much for joining us. You guys are awesome. You are


my colleagues, my friends, my family. It's amazing to be part of this community. And


Moz has been a special place for a long time, but my first duty has never been to the company


itself. It's been to this community. Because without all of you, there would be no Moz,


no 160 people working at our office in Seattle and in Portland. None of the great tools and


resources we've been able to build. And so I'm deeply grateful, and all of us at Moz


are deeply grateful for your support. Now, let's go ahead and get started. I saw something


interesting the other day. It was a book, a little red book that's given out to every


new Facebook employee. And you can't get it unless you work at Facebook. So the only way


to see this book is to actually be hired. But there's some interesting quotes that have


leaked out of there. Things that don't stay relevant don't even get the luxury of leaving


ruins. Facebook, and Facebook is not alone, but Facebook has an interesting philosophy


and it's espoused in this book. They say, if we don't create the thing that kills Facebook,


someone else will. Facebook's not the only one who believes this. This is true at Google


as well. That's why Larry Page, for many Google employees, is such a frustrating CEO. Because


if you bring him something that delivers incremental improvement, he tells you to take a hike.


Because they're not looking for incremental improvement, they want 10x. Google wants to


disrupt Google. Facebook wants to disrupt Facebook. One of my favorite recent examples.


I don't actually think this is going to work, by the way. But Contributor is Google saying,


we are willing to take a bet, to take the chance that maybe the ad-sponsored model of


the internet is all wrong and provide this service, Google Contributor, that essentially


disintermediates advertising from how websites make revenue. Facebook's willing to admit


defeat, just like Google is, on its own products. I think Google Wave, and it might be the case


that Google Plus goes this direction too, willing to admit defeat and pay billions of


dollars for tiny teams that have built successful social products. If you look on your mobile


device, you will see something that's costing Google millions of dollars a day in advertising.


Millions of dollars a day. Do you know how much these keywords go for? What's this one?


Car insurance? Credit cards? Are you kidding me? And as I type it in, if I click on creditcards.com


or bofa.com, Google just sends me directly to that website. They don't charge them any


money. They never even got to display an ad. That's crazy. At 99% of companies, this would


get you thrown out. That's quite literally insane. But Google's willing to do it because


Building a Discoverability Powerhouse - Presented by Heather Physioc

Good morning.


So Heather Fisioch, Group Director of Discoverability at VML Y&R, and today we're going to talk


about how to build a discoverability powerhouse.


So since the last time I saw you guys, we have gone through a few changes.


We've gone through mergers with several other companies in our WPP network, most notably


Rockfish who came to us with some awesome e-comm capabilities, Sudler for Health, and


Y&R who are some of the industry leaders in building brands.


So effectively overnight, our agency doubled in size from 3,000 people to 7,000 people


in over 90 countries around the world.


No big deal.


So with those mergers came tons of new capabilities and clients that we can do great work for.


And so my new role is Group Director of Discoverability, which includes organic search, paid search,


and performance content.


And we're 26 people in six offices across North America.


So today I want to talk candidly with you about how we brought those teams together


and some of the hard knocks and learnings that we got along the way.


So as a search industry, we talk a pretty good game about collaboration.


We walk into these new business pitches and make these grand claims about how integrated


we are and how we sit right next to the people we're going to be doing the work with.


And then we make these recommendations and we make the argument that they're better because


they're somehow holistic.


Kumbaya, cue dorky stock photo, right?


Like who even does this?


So the moment we leave that room, we get sucked back into our individual silos buried under


the day-to-day tasks and we're focusing exclusively on our own expertise.


We go back to writing PPC and SEO scopes separately, often neglecting the content resources that


we need in order to make those channels successful.


We go back to presenting recommendations that haven't been peer reviewed and don't have


the buy-in of our colleagues.


We go back to complaining that no one ever brings us in and not bringing each other in.


Now I've talked in the past at MozCon about why it is so hard for search teams to get


the content resources that they need to be successful.


And last year, I talked about how to break down barriers between channels and align so


you can actually get your clients to implement your recommendations.


And so now that's all coming to a head for our team.


When these mergers happened, we saw an opportunity.


We saw an opportunity to solve the chronic content challenges that our clients face through


performance content.


And we saw an opportunity to collaborate with our paid search friends like we should have


been doing all along.


So we raised our hands to merge into one group.


So this is what our team looks like now.


And this is going to look different in every organization.


There is no one magical way to shape a search team.


There are pros and cons to every single arrangement.


You may not be on the same team or even on the same company.


But these principles for collaborating with search apply no matter whether you are in-house,


agency or who you're trying to integrate with search.


So now we have three teams under this one umbrella.


And they've all been reasonably smart and successful independently.


So why should we move away from these separate work streams into one cohesive unified group?


And equally important, how?


So I want to introduce to you this concept of interdisciplinarity.


It is when two or more schools of thought combine and cross traditional boundaries to


solve new challenges as new problems emerge.


And it benefits from modifying and integrating their previously individual approaches into


one new approach.


And it helps you solve for problems like chronic siloing or extreme specialization.


And in the rapidly evolving and increasingly commoditized world of search, we need to be


thinking about this.


You see it in the sciences and technology.


You see it in neuroscience, biochemistry, cybernetics.


There are multiple fields that come together to create something entirely new.


Now I'm not saying that discoverability is like life-saving rocket surgery or whatever.


But there is new ground to be forged in search.


And there is a difference between complementarity and interdisciplinarity.


Anyone can go online and learn SEO.


Anyone can learn PPC.


And I'd argue that there are a lot of paid and organic teams that sit next to each other


and do complementary strategies.


But very few are doing what I would call interdisciplinary, where you are joining forces to offer new


and evolved capabilities in search.


True interdisciplinarity is when the sum of the whole is greater than its parts.


It is when you are bringing different specialties together to create completely custom solutions


for a client.


And it's situational.


You bring the relevant experts with the relevant expertise together to share their unique knowledge


and experiences to create a cohesive end-to-end solution that is bespoke for the need.


But it's repeatable.


And it's refinable as similar needs arise in the future.


So this concept of interdisciplinarity has been a driving force that has led the way


for our team to join forces.


Everything we do is focused on leveling up since we merged.


And so now we are helping clients to do this too in complex organizations.


So we have all new offerings, not just in how we deliver SEO and PPC, but we have this


new consulting service where we help companies evolve how they are thinking about search.


So today let's talk about some of the obstacles we encounter, some of the wins you stand to


gain, and how you can apply this in your company too.


But let's start with the road bumps.


The first one is just moving from saying we collaborate to actually doing it.


And we have been saying it for so long that it is easy for us to say, I don't see how


it could be any better.


So we have to make a case to our teams about the benefits of working with the different


teams together.


And we have to agree on the importance of actually getting into a room together and


doing actual work together and getting case studies that prove the value of that work


together.


It is a massive cultural shift to move from being these individual star athletes on three


different teams to one giant all-star world champion team.


And it does not happen overnight.


And counterintuitively, the larger your team is, the harder it is to collaborate, especially


when your team does different things.


So we couldn't become a behemoth so big that we lose our ability to move quickly.


Now when we originally brought performance content into our group, we kind of tried to


force them to adapt to all of our ways of doing things.


And we quickly learned that it didn't quite fit, and it kind of made us too big to move


the whole unit forward together.


So I had to step back.


We renamed the entire group to Discoverability as an umbrella, but we started to encourage


the individual teams underneath to maintain their identity and autonomy.


We had to empower them to make decisions that they knew were right for their team and their


clients as long as it didn't run counter to the spirit of what the group was trying to


do.


The lesson here was don't force it.


Integrate where it makes sense.


Group identity is important, but it doesn't negate the need for team autonomy.


And interdisciplinary teams fail without enough autonomy.


At first we tried to force everyone to kind of collaborate on everything all the time,


but that design by committee approach led to frustrated people and work that was more


deluded than it should have been.


Now we felt it was important to keep the connective tissue that allowed us to bond and grow as


a group, but we had to allow the slicing and dicing of smaller teams to serve whatever


need arises.


And so that helped solve the problem of becoming too big to stay nimble.


Now while it was never us versus them between our teams, when you're joining forces like


this, there are bound to be conflicts.


And a lot of times you see this take the form of perceived competition for diminishing budgets


or experts vying for the final word on a solution or a way forward.


And when you've got three teams of equally smart people in different areas, there's bound


to be some negotiating of roles.


Maybe even some turf defending.


But now we're all sharing the same turf.


It takes extra effort to give the benefit of the doubt, to assume good intent, and to


get on the same page.


It is an exercise in humility to give everyone's expertise equal weight.


We had to retrain ourselves to actively seek the perspective of other people instead of


it being an accidental afterthought, which as SEOs we all hate.


We had to relearn how to choose our battles, to know when to stand up and fight for the


recommendations that matter, but also when to take a back seat because someone else's


recommendation is stronger.


We had to create a culture where all of us win when one of us wins.


Now merging processes was probably one of the biggest challenges we faced.


Each team had its own perfectly good way of doing things before we joined forces.


So when that's going well, people can be resistant to change or slow to adapt.


So you're going to run into conflicting expertise and opinions.


We learned that trying to overhaul everything at once was a mistake.


It's like trying to boil the ocean.


We had to start making 1% changes one at a time.


It's important that we take the time to understand each other's processes fully before we just


go in and start ripping out of parts because there's a reason they are the way they are.


And the last big obstacle we encountered was change fatigue.


This is real.


By the last merger, I literally had someone on my team saying I cannot change my email


address one more time.


They are burned out.


They are sick of constant change.


It feels like there's no light at the end of the tunnel.


But we really try to build a culture of ongoing testing, learning, and optimization where


minor change is always expected as a tool for growth.


And so change becomes less of a risk.


We also learn to make change incrementally and at these points of natural intersection


or moments of friction so that it actually feels like relief to make change.


One example that I think every SEO can relate to is when keyword research and basic optimization


is an afterthought.


It happens after the content is published if it happens at all.


You don't even know if you're creating the right content.


Well, one simple change, creating a content brief that has the keywords and the questions


the content should answer up front before the writer gets started makes both the SEO


and the writer's jobs easier.


And that small win builds momentum endurance for more change.


So if it's that hard, why do it?


Well, here are some of the wins we stand to gain.


One of the most obvious things of Joining Forces is the ability to cross-sell and upsell


each other's work.


We learned early on that our team's growth didn't come primarily from the new business


pitches, bringing in all new clients.


It came from expanding our relationships with existing clients inside the agency.


And that knowledge helped us to integrate our offerings better than ever before.


So instead of four people advocating for one team, eight people advocating for another


team, I've got 26 people advocating for a whole practice and each of the three teams


underneath it.


We're constantly brainstorming how SEO can bring in performance content and how paid


search can bring in organic search.


And now, about a year and a half into this, about 85% of our clients are using at least


two of our teams.


And we're actually collaborating.


Whereas a year ago, that was maybe a quarter of our clients, and there was little to no


collaboration between the teams.


One area that we are frequently able to cross-sell is when our clients run into content production


challenges.


Like I talked about in 2017, this is a chronic issue that our clients face.


But now, we have this ability to lift and shift SEO budget to our content resources


so we can demonstrate our writing chops and prove the impact it can have on search results.


We do this often with our clients, allowing them to use our SEO budget to pilot content


capabilities.


And another way we're cross-selling is organic search and paid search are actually talking


to clients about whole SERPs now.


So instead of PPC in one conversation, SEO in another conversation, we're talking to


clients about dominating whole SERPs and how the two channels play off of one another to


capture as much of that visible real estate as possible.


It reduces the likelihood that one or the other team will get line itemized out of important


projects.


Our unified approach is also allowing us to speed up and scale at new levels because we're


better able to distribute the labor across the team.


Three ways we're doing that.


One, we have trained up our performance content team to be able to write title tags and meta


description tags and we've trained them to write PPC ad copy.


So now, we can shift up resources as needed as demand changes.


Another example, our paid search and organic search teams are doing competitive analysis


and keyword research together, which reduces duplication of efforts.


And finally, we're dividing and conquering our organic search strategy playbooks across


the team.


We often have four people working on a playbook for one client because we can cover more ground


more quickly.


And we're sharing our learnings with each other and peer reviewing each other's work


from different perspectives.


So it speeds up the delivery of our product by weeks and it simply delivers a better product.


Knowledge sharing has become second nature on our team.


We're finding opportunities that we never would have seen before alone.


It's a lot like what Shannon was talking about yesterday with the content newsroom where


you've got PR and social and search sitting in the same room at the same time.


This is exactly that concept.


And one example where we're doing that is we've got e-commerce that we're doing on a


big consumer sweets brand.


So we're able to optimize content across both retailers and their own properties.


We are coordinating our e-commerce and non-e-commerce keyword research so we can achieve maximum


visibility across retailers and search engines alike.


We are using keyword research and questions in those keywords to fuel our product detail


page content to overcome shopper objectives and convert more.


And we're doing this all with less work, minimal cannibalization, oh and it's winning awards.


We have created a culture of vulnerability and sharing where no one feels the pressure


to know everything and we're unafraid to ask for help.


We have created a crowdsource culture where we pool our knowledge to solve problems and


answer questions faster and rather than fighting the battles alone from only one perspective.


We've created an innovation culture where we're constantly finding points of friction


and frustration and then working together to clear the way to speed up and scale.


And our new holistic approach helps to minimalize competition and cannibalization because we


have stopped worrying about who's budget and who's targets and we started focusing on what's


best for the client so we can steer the resources to where the greatest impact will be felt.


So we have a big e-client and the truth is they have given us individual objectives by


team and that seriously runs the risk of making it every team for themselves.


But at the end of the day, the agency is held to a single double digit millions of dollars


of growth number year over year.


And the client does not care which channel or channels delivers that growth as long as


we deliver.


And that team had an interesting finding recently, right?


So our SEO and PPC expert discovered that when paid search was paused on a particularly


high value, high visibility set of keywords, organic search traffic spiked more than paid


search declined.


So together they were able to bring a recommendation forward to the client.


Three action items.


One, they decided to shift PPC budget to keywords that were ranking on page two organically.


It's been more there than on page one keywords.


They decided to downbid on non-branded keywords that saw the biggest increase in organic search


when paid search was turned off.


And they decided to test shifting some of that paid search from keywords that were ranking


in positions one through three to instead focus on keywords that were ranking four through


ten.


Pretty simple.


And I'm thankful, expressly said, thank you for your holistic recommendation.


Because recommendations have more weight and more credibility together when they are vetted


from multiple experts.


We have to be talking about joint opportunities.


We have to be discussing how our channels perform together or separately.


We need to be balancing our paid search and our organic search recommendations because


a more thoughtful approach is more easily defensible to a client.


When we can demonstrate more bang for their buck, it's easier for them to invest.


And when a recommendation is good for multiple channels, that's a no brainer.


And we're developing new capabilities at the intersections between our practices.


Sometimes it's two teams, sometimes it's all three.


When we see an opportunity, we build and launch new unified services.


Like our digital shelf optimization service for e-commerce sites.


Enhanced landing page development where we use our SEO keyword research and knowledge


about optimizing landing pages to better optimize the performance content on a landing page


to then increase the efficacy of our paid search work and drive down costs while driving


up quality score.


That's a pretty good selling point.


We have a joint approach to voice search now.


This kind of thinking helps our clients and our colleagues better understand our work.


We are constantly increasing the value that we add for our clients and it makes our offerings


repeatable and we continue to refine them together.


Our unified approach is leading to competitive advantage that we didn't enjoy before.


Because we are willing to put in the legwork that our competitors can't, won't, or don't.


We are better able to answer any ask or need that arises than we've ever been before.


We've got unique points of distinction and capabilities that others just don't have.


We've become increasingly indispensable to our clients because they can't imagine going


back to the world of silos before.


True interdisciplinarity is hard to accomplish and that is why it is hard for competitors


to replicate.


And finally, we have taken more hardware home than ever before.


We're winning things like most bang for your buck and consistent achiever and just recently


we took home the International Drum Award for Organic Team of the Year.


But we couldn't have done that without our paid search and our performance content teams


leveling up our work.


They just don't have a category for that yet.


So how do we do it and how can you do it too?


So we looked beyond industries like search and marketing to figure out how to get this


right.


We looked at academia, we looked at the sciences, we looked at social work.


So these tips apply no matter whether you're agency or in-house, whether you're search


or something else.


Building the world's most connected brands starts with connected teams.


This is our mantra.


Our mantra has guided everything we've done since integrating as a group.


So what will your mantra be?


Give your teams a guiding light that will define every step that they take to integrate


with others.


Now when it comes to announcing the change, you need to do it quickly.


Rip the band-aid off.


Make it really clear what it is you're doing and why.


Make the case for the benefits of integrating but be honest with your teams about the challenges


that you are going to face.


Prepare them for it.


Get people involved in the mission as soon as possible.


Set the expectation that we sink or we swim together because the most successful people


in the face of change are not the ones who continuously obstruct the inevitable.


It is the people who roll up their sleeves and look for ways to help.


So model the behavior you want to see.


And once you've announced the change, you need to immediately take action to actually


activate that change.


Get people in the room and face to face as soon as possible.


Start dialogues around a common mission and vision.


Start brainstorming ideas together on how you're going to move forward together.


And once established, once you have a new team or a new capability or whatever it is


you're merging, reintroduce it to the organization.


Put faces to names.


Talk about the new capabilities and how people can engage with your work.


We, when we found out about the performance content, by the way I've got a sample agenda,


when we brought the performance content team in, we scheduled something called the Rockfish


Sessions.


So we flew everybody out to Kansas City and the sessions were infused with introductions


and icebreakers and get to know yous.


We had overarching sessions about what's it going to be like to work at VML Y&R.


What is the vision for our department as a whole?


And then we talked about our search and content capabilities.


We shared our strongest case studies.


Talked about our frequent deliverables and processes on each team.


But we also wanted to get to know each other beyond the work.


So we had plenty of team building activities and of course went out to dinner and drinks


together.


So I shared a sample agenda link, or at my link, moscon.vmlyrconnect.com where I've got


a bunch of other goodies from today's talk.


So you want to announce and immerse quickly, but you actually want to slow down to speed


up on the actual change.


So again, we don't want to boil the ocean.


We learned that we need to make 1% changes one at a time.


And so we actually developed small cross team committees to push forward each change.


There were training initiatives, there were emerging deliverable initiatives, but it helped


to consider all of the angles for making that change and get buy in across the different


groups.


And we had to charge everyone with making it successful.


We also had to adopt the attitude that no process is precious.


Of course we were all committed to establishing clear processes that include all the key stakeholders.


And the stakeholders get to say where they're relevant in those processes.


So we brought those voices to the table, we collaborated in building and refining those


workflows, but I think this part is important.


We consider them living processes.


So we created a living wiki.


So my team uses Confluence for our shared wikis where we document all of our processes


and workflows and we reference them often as we're doing the work.


And we update them and we reorganize them regularly.


Everybody on the team has full access and full trust to refine these processes however


they see fit for the group.


And we check in regularly to review those processes and we ditch what isn't serving


us.


So in the immersion and beyond, we are constantly hosting cross training in each other's skills.


The purpose here is not to necessarily be able to do each other's jobs, but rather to


be able to speak about them, advocate for them, and cross sell them.


We've done so many workshops and hands on trainings.


We've even tried our hands at swapping jobs.


So we had a bunch of SEOs writing performance content for product detail pages, myself included.


But that exercise created this new sense of empathy for one another and what they need


to do a good job.


It created these mental checkpoints of am I including the right people here?


Is the work I'm doing going to impact someone else?


It created this sense of trust where we know that if any of us can't be there, anyone else


on the team can speak for all of us anytime.


And we make these things habits by course correcting promptly when they forget, but


also rewarding and validating when they get it right.


We need to make it a habit.


Another thing we took on was in our first year, we set out to productize 10 of our offerings.


So that included enhancing our recurring SEO and performance content deliverables by cross


pollinating our new skills.


But also developing all new joint offerings that did not exist before.


And again, we appointed cross team committees to define the value of those offerings, clearly


articulate the inputs, the outputs, the cost, the timing, the process, and so on into an


easy to sell package.


It's stuff like search driven content insights to support our big burst campaigns with supplemental


digital content or stuff like this.


Our e-commerce approach to discoverability.


Now when a client or your boss asks you for a solution to their problem for something


like e-commerce, they do not expect one third of a solution.


So now our joint cohesive end to end offering is able to solve the problem of e-commerce


and we are selling them one thing, not three things a la carte.


This should go without saying, but it apparently bears repeating.


We should be making recommendations and reporting together.


If I see one more disjointed set of reporting slides that are smashed together at the last


minute and thrown over the fence right before it gets to the client, I'm gonna puke.


They're meaningless.


It's no wonder clients don't read our reports.


When we are doing cross channel reporting, we should actually be collecting our data


and actually sitting in a room together and analyzing that information together to find


the larger story that it tells that our client should care about.


They have to make marketing decisions based on this information, so help them prioritize


what matters together.


And we should be evaluating opportunities together.


This is simple, but it's so rarely done.


We should be collecting insights to solve a certain challenge from all these different


sources, present our findings to each other, decide together on the biggest opportunity,


and then put together a joint roadmap to solve that problem.


That B2B client I mentioned earlier, they have thousands of locations.


They're a big national brand, but they are competing on a hyper local level.


It's like death by a thousand paper cuts up against these mom and pop shops.


And the client's been trying to solve this problem and get hyper local data for years,


and she struggled with it.


So she came to us, and she asked for a local strategy.


Now mind you, she didn't ask for a local SEO strategy.


She didn't ask for a local PPC strategy.


She asked for a local strategy.


And when you go to the individual teams, there's some like head scratching and a little skepticism


that we can deliver it.


Kind of sat on it, sat on it.


Then we got all the teams together in a room for a summit, and the client was there.


We had paid search, organic search, analytics, paid media.


We were all in a room, and suddenly, bouncing ideas off of each other, we cracked the code.


We've got the client saying, I'm gonna pull inventory and sales data, and paid media's


gonna pull demographic and psychographic data, and organic search is like, I'm gonna pull


local keyword search data, and paid search is like, I'm gonna get click data in the local


market.


So now our analytics experts are gonna put all of this data into Tableau, do one badass


data visualization that we can slice and dice and make decisions that affect every channel


we're running for this brand going forward.


That's a big deal.


So it's easy to get stuck in the status quo.


We go back to retiring to our individual corners.


I know you're probably like, cool, a meeting, but hear me out.


So monthly account strategy sessions.


At minimum, this is a time to share what's going on with one another.


But this session is bigger than a to-do list.


We should be discussing and strategizing together how the brand is performing, problems that


we are solving, opportunities that we see, risks or threats to the business, joint efforts


and tests that we should be running together.


This simple meetup can benefit any group that you are trying to integrate with.


You can establish recurring monthly roundtables with any department or global region.


Imagine having search meet up with sales to talk about their problems and how search can


solve them.


Or you meet up with the Europe region so you can deep dive and brainstorm opportunities


relevant to their market.


And after a few months, these meetings are more than just meetings.


It becomes a way of life.


And I've included a discussion guide that will help you get the most out of these meetings.


We had to change our model to a networked team.


We have central sources of truth, but the operations and the execution are decentralized.


An ideal network team, according to Forrester, can spin up smaller task force around specific


objectives.


Their low hierarchy, they're transparent, they're open.


They calibrate to each other quickly.


They build trust rapidly so not everyone has to be involved in every single decision.


Now we have common standards and we have common best practices, but the networked team delivers


however they need to.


It's a balance between an empowered local team and central control.


So any given process, the same process could come to life in dozens of different ways depending


on the brand, the objective, the category, whatever.


So one example that we have is that e-commerce workflow that I showed you before.


It's a pretty solid repeatable workflow, right?


But the way we sell CPG products on third party e-commerce retailers is completely different


from how we approach a fashion retail brand on a direct to consumer e-commerce site.


So we can shift and adjust the team to have a different makeup or tweak the approach however


they need to.


Managing and direct and prompt feedback has been huge to this integration.


Now I almost said, you need to empower your teams to give feedback.


And I was like, no, that language is not strong enough.


You need to expect your teams to speak up and bring ideas.


Now that means giving feedback to each other.


It means giving feedback to you.


It means peer reviewing each other's work and recommendations.


And it means constantly scrutinizing your shared processes and ways of doing things.


It makes the work stronger.


It decreases the margin for error, increases the quality of your recommendations.


It makes your people stronger because a culture of feedback makes feedback less personal and


makes it about the quality of the work.


And don't just tell them to do it.


Teach them how to give feedback constructively and with empathy and then model the behavior


and hold them to account when they don't live it.


Marketing successes has been a huge game changer for our integration.


You should be constantly watching for the wins or the warnings to create internal case


studies.


And you need to look for meaningful impacts that you have made and make sure your team,


your bosses, your clients, and your colleagues are hearing those stories to increase their


understanding of, engagement with, and buy in for your offerings.


One way that we do this is through our all discoverability group quarterly meetings.


So the first meeting of the year we presented a joint case study from one of our e-commerce


teams.


They did some really awesome work this year.


So they shared their strategy and tactics with us.


But I think the most important thing they brought to that meeting was tips and learnings


that they got as they learned to work together.


They shared that with the whole team.


And up next for our next quarterly meeting, we're going to talk through one of our organic


search playbooks where we originally started with this client and they specifically asked


for organic search.


And when we did our immersion workshop, we realized they had a greater need to figure


out how to break up the log jams to creating content.


And they needed to learn how to integrate with their internal paid search team.


So we're going to talk through that next quarter.


And finally, sit together whenever possible.


Who you sit with matters.


The ability to strike up a conversation about something that you're working on or just turn


your chair around and ask a question matters.


Now I recognize that rearranging the floor plan is not in the cards for everyone.


If this doesn't make sense because you're in a different company or in a different city,


you can still find ways to have real human contact.


Whether it is video chat or traveling for in-person meetings or desk bombs or picking


up your computer and going and working in another part of the office with your colleagues


or live chatting, phone calls instead of another bloody email.


Whatever it takes to be present.


So what have we learned?


The competitive advantage is real.


To quote my colleague Britt who is here in the room with us today, as individual teams


we are experts.


As an integrated practice we are a powerhouse.


Much like Google and Apple integrate with our lives at ever expanding touch points to


keep us engaged in their ecosystems, when we sell whole end to end services that have


greater impact together than separately, it makes us more indispensable to our clients


who cannot imagine going back to the disjointed world of before.


Doing our individual jobs, SEO or PPC is relatively easy.


But doing them together and doing them well is hard.


And getting that right helps you stand out from the competition.


The cultural shift is worth it.


Major cultural shift from a house of brands to a branded house is an iterative process


with a lot of work and a lot of growing pains up front but it is worth it.


And it doesn't have to mean merging teams.


It can mean creating a competency circle around a certain offering or type of work or client


that transcends the org chart.


And as time goes on, you start to create new things, the team matures and the lines between


them begin to blur.


And when your new culture is established you need to hire people with the traits to sustain


it.


Things like communication, collaboration, being a team player, accountability, transparency,


and if it were easy, everyone would do it.


There will be bumps along the way.


It can be frustrating and time consuming up front but you have to create that culture


of openness and vulnerability and feedback.


You have to create the expectation of iteration, evolution and change.


You have the fortitude to get through these changes together and remember that competitive


advantage happens when you're willing to put in the work that your competitors can't, won't,


or don't because if it were easy, everyone would do it.


What Does an SEO Do In Their Day-to-Day Work? - Whiteboard Friday

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


This week I want to tackle a question I get sometimes about the day-to-day activities


of an SEO and what should you do after you've completed that first site audit, sort of fixed


the problems.


What does the day-to-day work look like?


And so a lot of SEOs, especially those coming from consulting backgrounds or who join companies


as in-house SEOs who've had kind of this big project-based SEO work to do, find themselves


struggling after that's done.


Typically that process is pretty straightforward.


You kind of do an audit.


You look at all the things on the site.


You figure out what's wrong, what's missing, where are opportunities that we could execute


on.


Maybe you do some competitive analysis, some market analysis.


You identify those fixes.


You work with teams to make those changes, validate the results have been completed,


and then you're sort of in this, well, do I go back and audit again and try and iterate


and improve again?


And that doesn't feel quite right.


But it also doesn't necessarily feel quite right to go to the very, very old school SEO


model of like, all right, we've got these keywords we're trying to rank for.


Let's optimize our content, get some links, check our rankings for them, and then try


and rinse and repeat and keep improving.


This model's pretty broken, I'd say, and just not reflective of the reality of opportunities


that are in SEO or the reality of the tactics that work today.


So the way that I like to think about this is the audit, the SEO audit, an SEO-focused


audit which is trying to say what traffic could we get, what's missing, what's broken


and wrong, only works at the low level in the very tactical trenches of a marketing


process or a business process.


What you really need to do is you want to be more incrementally based, but you need


to be informed by and you need to be evolving your tactics and your work based on what does


the business need right now.


And so this process is about saying what are the top level company and marketing goals


overall?


What are we doing in the company?


What are we trying to accomplish this year, this quarter, the next three-year plan?


What are we trying to achieve?


And then figure out areas where SEO can best contribute to that work.


And then from there you're creating tactical lists of projects that maybe are going to


positively move the needle, the right needles, the ones that you've identified, and then


you're going to evaluate and prioritize which ones you want to implement first and second


and third in what order and test implement those.


So hey, we figured out that we think that a new blog section for this particular piece


of content or we think that getting some user-generated content, building up some community around


this section would be terrific.


Or we think outreach to these kinds of publications or building up our social stats in these worlds


will expose us to the right people who can earn us the amplification we'll need to rank


better, et cetera, et cetera.


So this is a fine process and you're going to want to do this, I would say, at least


annually and maybe even think about it quarterly.


And then from there you're going to take, all of this work is essentially centered on


a customer profile universe.


A universe of people, I've got my person X, Y, and Z here, but your customer universe


may involve many different personas.


It may involve just one type of person you're targeting that you're always trying to reach


over and over again, but it probably involves also the people who influence that direct


subsection of your market.


And from there you can take the, hey, you know what, person Z is really interested in


and consumes and searches for these types of content topics and these kinds of keywords.


So we're going to start by taking keyword set A or content set A and figure out our


keyword list and our content list.


We're going to create, launch, and promote work that supports that.


Could be content pieces, could be video, could be some combination of those things in social


media, all forms of content.


It could be tools, whatever you want, an application.


We're going to launch that, promote it, and then work on some amplification.


And then we're going to measure and learn, which is a critical part of that process.


I want to not only see what are my results, but what can I learn from what we just did


and hopefully I'll get better and better at iterating on this process.


And this process will work iteratively, kind of similar to our broken process over here


or to our site audit process there.


It'll work iteratively and then every now and then you should pop back up and go, hey,


you know what, I feel like we've exhausted the easiest 80% of value that we're going


to get from 20% of the work on keyword set A. Let's move on and go visit keyword set


B now and then let's go visit content set C.


And occasionally you're even going to want to move one step up and say, hey, you know


what, maybe our personas or our market is changing a little bit.


We want to try targeting some new customers.


We're going to look at these folks over here or this guy over here and see if we can reach


them and their influencers with new kinds of content and topics and keywords and that


sort of thing.


If your site is rocking and rolling, if you've completed your audit, things are just smooth


sailing, then this kind of a process is going to work much better so long as it's tied to


real business objectives.


Because then when you achieve results here, you can point back to, hey, remember I told


you these are the areas SEO can contribute to our overall goals and now I can connect


these up directly.


The metrics that I get from all this SEO stuff can tie directly to those areas, can tie directly


to the business goals and everyone from the CEO on down is going to love what you're doing


for the company.


All right, everyone, I hope you'll join me again next week for another edition of Whiteboard


Friday.


Full Funnel Testing: SEO & CRO Together - Whiteboard Friday

Hi everyone, welcome to another Whiteboard Friday.


My name is Will Critchlow, one of the founders at Distilled.


And if you've been following what I've been writing and talking about around the web recently,


today's topic may not surprise you that much.


I'm going to be talking about another kind of SEO testing.


For at Distilled, we've been investing pretty heavily in building out our capability to


do SEO tests and in particular built our optimization delivery network, which has let us do a new


kind of SEO testing that hasn't been previously available to most of our clients.


And recently we've been working on a new enhancement to this, which is full funnel testing.


And that's what I want to talk about today.


So full funnel testing is testing all the way through the funnel from acquisition at


the SEO end to conversion.


So it's SEO testing plus CRO testing together.


I'm going to write a little bit more about some of the motivation for this, but in a


nutshell it essentially boils down to the fact that it is perfectly possible, in fact


we've seen in the wild, cases of tests that win in SEO terms and lose in CRO terms or


vice versa.


In other words, tests that maybe you make a change and it converts better, but you lose


organic search traffic.


Or the other way around, you know, it ranks better, but it converts less well.


And if you're only testing one, which is common, I mean most organizations are only testing


the conversion rate side of things, it's perfectly possible to have a winning test, roll it out


and do worse.


So let's step back a little bit, a little bit of a primer.


Conversion rate optimization testing works in an A-B split kind of way.


You can test on a single page if you want to, or a site section.


And the way it works is you split your audience.


So your audience is split, some of your audience get one version of the page, and the rest


of the audience get a different version.


And then you can compare the conversion rate among the group who got the control and the


group who got the variant.


That's fairly straightforward.


And like I said, it can happen on a single page or across an entire site.


SEO testing, a little bit newer.


The way this works is you can't split the audience because we care very much about the


search engine spiders in this case.


And for the purposes of this consideration, there's essentially only one Googlebot.


And so you couldn't put Google in class A or class B here and expect to get anything


meaningful.


And so the SEO test is we actually split the pages.


And to do this, you need a substantial site section.


So imagine, for example, an e-commerce website, thousands of products.


You might have a hypothesis of something that will help those product pages perform better.


You take your hypothesis, you only apply it to some of the pages.


And you leave some of the pages unchanged as a control.


And then crucially, search engines and users see the same experience.


There's no cloaking going on.


There's nothing, there's no duplication of content.


You simply change some pages and not change others.


And then you apply advanced mathematical statistical analysis, try and figure out, do these pages


get statistically more organic search traffic than we think they would have done if we hadn't


made this change?


So that's how an SEO test works.


Now as I said, the problem that we are trying to tackle here is it's really plausible that


despite Google's best intentions to do what's right for users, it's perfectly plausible


that you could have a test that ranks better but converts less well or vice versa.


And we've seen this with, for example, removing content from a page.


Sometimes having a cleaner, simpler page can convert better.


But maybe that was where the keywords were.


And maybe that was helping the page rank.


So we're trying to avoid those kind of situations.


And that's where full funnel testing comes in.


And so I want to just run through how you run a full funnel test.


What you do is you first of all set it up in the same way as an SEO test.


Because we're essentially starting with SEO at the top of the funnel.


And so it sets up exactly the same way.


Some pages are unchanged.


Some pages get the hypothesis applied to them.


And as far as Google is concerned, that's the end of the story.


Because on any individual request to these pages, that's what we serve back.


But the critically important thing here is I've got my little character.


This is a human browser.


Performs a search.


What do badgers eat?


One of our silly examples that we came up with in one of our demo sites


lands on this page here.


What we do is we then set a cookie.


And this is a cookie.


This user then, as they navigate around the site,


no matter where they go within this site section,


they get the same treatment, either the control or the variant.


They get the same treatment across the entire site section.


And this is more like the conversion rate test here.


So what I didn't show in this diagram is if you


were running this test across the site section,


you would cookie this user and make sure


that they always saw the same treatment, no matter where


they navigated around the site.


And so because Googlebot is making stateless requests, in other words,


just independent one-off requests for each of these pages with no cookie


set, Google sees the split.


Users get whatever their first page impression looks like.


They then get that treatment applied across the entire site section.


And so what we can do then is we can evaluate independently.


We can evaluate the performance in search,


evaluate that on entrances.


So do we get significantly more entrances


than we would have expected to the variant pages


than we would have expected if we hadn't applied our hypothesis to them?


That tells us the uplift from an SEO perspective.


So maybe we say, OK, this is plus 11% in organic traffic.


Well, great.


So in a vacuum, all else being equal, we'd love to roll out this test.


But before we do that, what we can do now is


we can evaluate the conversion rate.


And we do that based on user metrics.


So these users are cookied.


We can also set an analytics tag on them and say, OK,


wherever they navigate around, how many of them end up converting?


And then we can evaluate the conversion rate


based on whether they saw treatment A or treatment B.


And because we're looking at conversion rate,


the audience size doesn't exactly have to be the same.


And so the statistical analysis can take care of that fact.


And we can evaluate the conversion rate on a user-centric basis.


So then we maybe see that it's minus 5% in conversion rate.


And we then need to evaluate, is this something we should roll out?


So step one is, do we just roll it out?


If we need both, then the answer is yes, probably.


If they're in different directions, then there's a couple of things we can do.


Firstly, we can evaluate the relative performance in different directions,


taking care that conversion rate applies generally across all channels.


And so a relatively small drop in conversion rate


can be a really big deal compared to even an uplift in organic traffic,


because the conversion rate is applied to all channels,


not just your organic traffic channels.


But suppose that it's a small net positive or a small net negative.


What we can then do is we can say, we might get to the point


that it's a net positive and roll it out.


Either way, we might then say, what can we take from this?


What can we actually learn?


So back to our example of the content, we might say,


users like this cleaner version of the page with apparently less content


on it, the search engines are clearly relying on that content


to understand what this page is about.


How do we get the best of both worlds?


Well, that might be a question of a redesign, right?


Moving the layout of the page around a little bit,


keeping the content on there, but maybe not


putting it front and center to the user as they land right at the beginning.


We can test those different things, run sequential tests,


try and take the best of the SEO test and the best of the CRO test


and get it working together.


And crucially, avoid those situations where


you think you've got to win, because your conversion rate is up,


but you're actually about to crater your organic search performance.


And we think this is going to just be the more data-driven we get,


the more accountable our SEO testing makes us,


the more important it's going to be to join these dots


and make sure that we're getting true uplifts on a net basis


when we combine them.


So I hope that's been useful to some of you.


Thank you for joining me on this week's Whiteboard Friday.


I'm Will Cripps, though, from Distilled.


Uplevel Your A/B Testing Skills Presented by Cara Harshman

Good morning, MozCon.


Wow.


Yay.


I am so elated to be here for my second year for the beginning of a really, really truly


magical and inspiring three days of content, of learning, of connection, especially coming


off of this past three months.


This summer for me was evolutionary, not just because I left my job at Optimizely, pursuing


my next career move, pretty exciting times, but because I think everyone was chasing the


idea of evolution.


And by that, I mean everyone was playing Pokemon.


Anywhere you looked, people were just engrossed in their phones.


Like walking, walking, crossing the street.


You just couldn't even escape Pokemon.


I had this crazy experience when I was in New York.


For about a week, I was just hanging out with friends.


I was doing some touristy things in Central Park, and I stumbled across a humongous Pokemon


gym, a Pokemon gym, where everyone plays and battles each other, and I think I was probably


the only person out of this crowd of over a thousand people not playing Pokemon.


I'm serious.


It was so crazy to me that I had to do my first Facebook live video feed, and so I did


that, and it got a lot of traction.


It's really fun if you've ever done it.


I don't know if you have, but it's fun.


And I made a video, and I'm going to show it to you right now.


Let's take a look.


So I'm standing right near the Fifth Avenue 57th Street entrance to Central Park in New


York City, and every single person around me is playing Pokemon right now.


I'm probably the only person here not playing Pokemon.


I'm just like, hey, this is not a Pokemon game.


I want Pokemon right here.


Just right outside the hot dog stand.


Just casual Pokemon players everywhere.


What is going on here?


It was so crazy, right?


I mean, just like coming into a group of thousands of people all together.


It's really actually pretty beautiful.


So quick poll, just got to ask, you know, how many people have played Pokemon or are


still playing Pokemon?


Yeah, wow.


It's dark, but I can see your hands.


Amazing.


Even though there's been a precipitous nose dive in the amount of players, you were all


part of the 45 million people who were logging into Pokemon all the time, playing for at


least 30 minutes a day.


More than any other app.


At its peak, July 11th, 2016, people were just on Pokemon all day.


So I really wish that I had the foresight to call my talk evolve your A B testing skills


because up level this didn't really seem to fit after this summer, so I'm here by changing


the name of my talk to evolve your A B testing skills from up level.


Not just because of the nature of this word, I really like it, but it has a really solid


visualization component.


I can just imagine a bunch of marketers sitting and watching a whiteboard Friday with Rand


Fishkin being like, oh, my God, evolution, long tail SEO, I'm learning so much, yes,


yes.


So I'm naming Poke marketers with an extra E. Genius, right?


So if someone can make a visualization of this, that would be really awesome for the


actual marketer.


I had to find these on YouTube.


So I didn't actually pitch a talk on how to evolve your Pokemon, sorry for all of you,


have to go to another conference for that, but I'm here to talk about a much more important


skill for all of us, which is evolving your A B testing skills.


Because A B testing is so fundamental to the way that we do our work from asking questions,


questioning the status quo, not just accepting what's given to us, but trying to make the


best decisions that we can.


And that's why I'm going to talk about evolving your A B testing skills today.


And a lot of you say that conversion optimization and A B testing is a huge priority.


In fact, 70% of marketers said that conversion optimization is more of a priority in 2016


than it was in 2015.


This is from a survey that conversion XL did on the state of conversion optimization.


So that's great news.


The more decent than great, but 56% of teams will allocate more budget to conversion optimization


in 2016.


4% will devote less.


Don't know what's happening there, but hopefully we can move all up together.


But the sad thing is, and the reality that's with any marketing skill, is that there's


still a lot of challenges to overcome.


Challenges with knowledge, with resources, with knowing what to test, like, what the


hell do I do out there?


So today I'm going to take us on an evolutionary journey, just like we're evolving our Pokemon,


getting all the stardust and the candies.


I'm going to take us on an evolutionary journey of taking your A B testing ideas, your execution,


and your team to a state of hypotheses, automation, and advocacy.


So you're not just shooting shit on the wall and seeing what happens.


You're doing formal hypothesis formation.


You're not just making it happen.


You're automating the plan so you can plug and play all your ideas.


You need to focus on more of the substance and less on the process.


And then going from the team of people who work with you to the advocates who promote


your work.


And the optimal outcome of this evolution is a learn rate of 100%.


Because in order to the thing about A B testing is it's not just about winning, it's about


losing, too.


We want to lose.


That means it's not working.


Any statistically significant outcome is positive.


And then I want to help you grow your business.


Because the fact is that A B testing helps you make more money.


So let's make more money for all of you.


Third, delighted customers.


The better your user experiences, the happier your customers are, the better your product


is, the more they want to buy from you and work with you.


And then fourth, stronger internal decisions for your company and a more open, transparent


culture.


That's one of the most understated but really important facets of the value of A B testing


is just questioning everything.


So to kick us all off and make sure we're on the same page and understand what A B testing


is all about, I want to share an example from a two-time Moz Connor, a previous coworker


of mine at Optimizely and a good friend named Kyle Rush.


This is Kyle.


Kyle is so smiley.


And he is currently working with a very interesting person, Hillary Clinton.


He is on her campaign right now testing everything he possibly can on her website.


Because much like every other candidate in this 2016 election, A B testing has been the


name of the game.


They are not leaving any choice for to-gut decisions.


They're data-driven to the max.


So one of the things that they're obviously focused on is getting more donations.


They want more money coming into their website.


So Kyle and Hillary, well, really Kyle, not really, probably, not Hills, they decided


to test something on reducing the friction that it would take to make a donation.


And much as you can guess, credit card details are a pain in the ass.


Having to go get your credit card every time and remember the numbers and put them in.


So Kyle wanted to automate this process of making it as easy as possible for people to


submit a payment with their credit card details saved.


So he made a strong hypothesis that if we make it as easy as possible to save your credit


card info, then more people will donate because we've removed the friction of payment.


So let's see what he did.


This is the original flow of the process of what happens right after you make a donation


for any donation, any donor, any time, to save your credit card details.


This is the original.


It's like save your credit card payment info.


We'll give you a free sticker.


I blew that box up, actually.


It was really small.


So it was really not noticeable.


And then if you click that button, it would take you to this log-in screen where you would


have to enter the same email address that you just used to make the donation.


And then if you didn't even have that, you would have to register and make an account.


Friction full process.


So he decided to try this.


A variation flow where they used some logic to determine whether or not the email address


that you used to make the donation had an account associated with it.


So it's pretty subtle.


It's harder to show than explain with many A-B tests.


That's the beauty of them.


So subtle.


But what they did was they understood, okay, this person has an email address.


Now we'll just take you straight to save your payment details.


And if you're not logged in already, then we'll just have your email right there and


you can log in quickly.


Simple.


Pretty obvious, right?


Well, it made huge returns for them.


They saw a 239% increase in people who saved their payment details from this test.


The original conversion rate was 9%.


The variation was 31%.


This is I talked to Kyle, I was Facebook messaging him, Kyle, I'm going to mention you on Moscon,


is that cool?


He said absolutely, do it.


So he said this is the biggest lift he's ever seen in all of his testing.


Really remarkable.


And the other results prove it.


This is the opt in rate chart of people who saved their payment details.


And you can see January 1st, it just took precipitous hike.


Amazing.


So this really segues nicely.


It's the first evolutionary process that we're going to go through.


Going from ideas, just let's test this, let's add that, let's move this here, let's remove


all this stuff and change it up to a very rooted statement of reason.


If we do this, if we move this, if we make this easier, then this will happen.


This metric will move because of this reason that we've researched, we've found it's a


foundational thing that we know to be true.


And like this evolutionary theme, we need to go on a journey, it's not just a straight


line.


So we need to find our proverbial candy and our stardust to evolve as POCA marketers that


we are into this new state of status quo of evolution and hypothesis generation.


So my talk today is going to walk us on this path of evolution from ideas to hypotheses,


from execution to automation, and from team to advocates.


We're ready to go hunting.


Pokemon.


Not Pokemon, no more Pokemon.


Ready to go hunting.


Yay.


Okay.


So on the journey from ideas to hypotheses, the things that we need to find are the analytics


and the voice of the customer.


Because I hate to break it to you, but great A-B test hypotheses are born out of reason


and data, not whiteboard sessions.


Maybe there's a whiteboard session in gathering the reason and data, but just no.


No.


No whiteboards.


First thing we need is analytics.


Analytics is a quantitative or qualitative information about your website or app.


You're all at MozCon, you know this stuff, you probably are a GA wizard by now, but I


want to walk you through five of the top reports that I think you can go find immediately to


go find some really interesting fodder to test.


So top analytic sources.


The first one is a funnel report in Google Analytics.


You can most of you probably have a funnel, if it's sign in, purchase, check out, request


a quote, something like that, you can run this report in Google Analytics and see where


people are falling off in your funnel.


Wherever the most severe falloff is, just go focus on that page and then probably run


a heat map on it.


This is the second analytics report that I think is really useful because it's just a


qualitative kind of picture of really pretty colors, seeing where people are clicking or


scrolling or looking more focused on your website.


And I think you should run these on really high intent pages, pages that are very close


to a conversion event.


Number three, form error submission reports.


This is like second nature because if people can't submit a form, there's a problem there.


Go fix that.


Fourth, exit or bounce rate report.


So places where people are leaving your site.


I found this really helpful when I was managing the blog at Optimize.ly because there's so


much content there, but people exit on a good, like, concentration of pages.


So if you go find those pages, then you can hypothesize something to keep them engaged,


keep them going a level deeper into your site instead of bouncing off.


And fifth, high traffic, low conversion landing pages.


So this is an overlapping quality of pages that have really high traffic but super low


conversion rate.


Those are number one.


Go find those and try to just look at the data, get around your team and brainstorm


some ideas on what you could possibly do to make these pages have a higher conversion.


So that's analytics.


Next is the voice of the customer.


This is on our journey to hypothesis.


So the voice of the customer gets at the empathy-based analysis of what your customer needs as a


human.


Because we're all humans, we're all just on our way, trying to get through the day, trying


to make the best of the suffering and living that we can.


So we got to get on the same level as our customers because it's really easy since you


know your product so well, you're in it all the time, you just know your website back


and forth, it's easy to put yourself in this ivory tower and make things way more complicated


than they need to be.


So getting to the voice of the customer is a very humbling, gratifying experience.


And you'll get to make new friends and talk to people.


So some listening channels that I can suggest for you.


Our first, your customer success team.


I think it's not every company has one, but people who are talking to your customers,


dealing with the problems, dealing with the challenges, but they're learning so much about


your experience that you're delivering.


So make sure you have a tight feedback loop with them.


Try to set up a meeting, make friends, take those people out to coffee, get to know them.


Second is recording user testing sessions.


You can do this easily online, usertesting.com, or you can just put up an ad on Craigslist


and get some people to come into your office and record their screen and see what they're


doing.


This is really helpful to see where people are getting into mess-ups or hiccups with


your website.


Give them an action, tell them something to do, and watch how they do it or don't do it.


Next, coffee shops.


I mean, no better place.


A lot of people are usually working on their laptops at these coffee shops.


Just go interrupt them in between lattes and see if you can ask them a few questions.


They might be really amenable to your request.


Fourth on-page surveys.


I really like Hotjar and Qualaroo to do these.


Just putting up something right there.


The conversion rate isn't always super high, but it's just a nice fallback.


You can always be collecting data.


Better to have it there than to not have it there.


Five email surveys.


Email is still king, as we'll learn today at MozCon.


Lots of people talk about email.


And you can send out some A-B test your survey emails for sure and see what people are reacting


to.


It's a really good way to get a ton of blast.


Blast it out.


And then along with this voice of the customer and listening channels is the voice of the


human, the voice of who we are, our psychological triggers, what makes us tick.


And a lot of people have talked about these principles, and I have a few to show you.


One is the lift model by Wider Funnel.


They do a really cool job of distilling value proposition with urgency and clarity.


These things that you can use to vet the experience on your website.


Second, the conversion equation from Ollie Gardner.


I don't know if anyone was at CTA conference this year, but he blew my mind.


He was wearing a kilt.


He drew this whole piece of toilet paper across the floor.


Outlining the conversion equation.


So good.


Really highly recommend this for your websites and apps.


And then psychology.


Obviously.


There's so many psychological principles.


I can't go into them all here.


Design principles.


Contrast.


Color blocking.


Fonts.


People looking at a button.


Those kind of psychological things are really helpful for rooting your hypotheses.


Finding that rationale.


And last, neuromarketing.


This guy Robert Tildani with his six principles of scarcity and clarity and all those.


These are all very helpful to root more of your rationale.


And I know that's a lot of information.


So I just wrote a blog post and posted it on my personal website, KaraHarshman.me, that


goes into some articles where you can find more info on all of this stuff.


So highly recommend you check it out if you're interested.


Okay.


So this is taking us on our evolution to Hypothesis.


Now I want to highlight this with a story of a really solid Hypothesis from a company


called Movement Watches.


I'm shameless plug, I'm wearing one.


I love Movement for men and women.


Really cool watch.


Check it out.


So Movement had a new product they wanted to add to their product catalog.


They had these removable straps that you could buy and change it out to change the style


of your watch.


Because for watches and many other high fashion jewelry, you're not buying a lot of it.


You're buying it once a year maybe.


And so they wanted to get another idea to get more revenue in the mix.


So they decided to test how they were going to incorporate the promotion of these straps


on their website.


And they took a cue from in-store psychology.


They asked how is it in the buying process in a physical store that you would get exposed


to these new straps?


So they made this Hypothesis.


If we add the new products upsell on the product detail page, they picked this page specifically


because they thought, okay, you're looking at the watch, you're really thinking about


how it would look on you, you're scrolling through photos.


If we highlight the straps here, then sales will increase or conversions because this


placement mimics in-store buying experience.


Pretty interesting Hypothesis here.


Offline online, I like it.


So here's one of the variations that they designed.


The ABC.


They decided to change the placement from right below the add to cart, from no promotion


of it whatsoever to way below the add to cart to right below the add to cart.


They tested this on desktop and mobile.


Mobile was more important because more of their conversions come from mobile.


And they found great results.


They had a 5.5 increase in conversions with testing that strap right under the call to


action button.


And on desktop, it was a little bit different, actually.


It wasn't right below.


It was twofold below.


So a great example of a test idea that spawned from psychological principles.


An in-store experience.


Your real life experience.


Now, one way to really get all these things going and really promote what you're doing


in your company is host a testing hackathon.


I've seen this work, and no, it's not coming together with tinkering and building cool


things for your art installations in your office or hacking your product.


It's taking a different stance on hacking but coming up with ideas together.


And one example of this is Hotwire, the big travel company, global travel company, that


was a customer when I worked as a customer, went at Optimizely.


I don't work there anymore, though.


They did a global hackathon where they flew all these people out from all over the world


to their global HQ in Mexico and had a two-day hackathon just spawning test ideas and just


evolving all the things.


So if you want to host an A-B test hackathon, which I highly recommend, it's really fun,


here's four things to do.


Give people access to the data.


The data that you're using to make these decisions.


Give it to them beforehand so they can peruse it, call it, get used to it.


And invite cross-functional teams to collaborate.


Sometimes the best ideas come from your sales team or your HR people.


And then give prizes.


You want to incentivize people to care about this.


So make it fun.


And then follow up.


Give them the due diligence that you did something with their test idea and that you really care


about their input.


So even though it seems silly, test hackathons permeate this culture of data-driven thinking


and get people to know more about what you're doing.


And to help you do this, I have a download for you.


It's a little poster you can customize and put around your office for testing hackathons.


And we created it when I was at Optimizely.


It's part of this testing toolkit.


A slew of resources to help you get up and running with testing and do all the evolutionary


things that I'm talking about here.


Beautiful.


So that's taking us from ideas to hypotheses.


We're finding the analytics and we're tapping into the voice of the customer and really


getting on their level.


Next I want to talk about going from execution to automation.


From get-shit-done to let's make a plan so we can scale.


This is not the most fun one because people don't like all these ions, eons, words, but


I'm going to throw more at you.


I'm sorry.


Execution.


To get there, to move away from execution to automation, we need to work on prioritization


framework and standardization.


I realize it's all ions.


Cool.


Because sometimes when you're really working on scaling up, you need to take your get-shit-done


hat off.


You must take it off and think about the long term, the long view of how you're going to


make this work and become an integral part of your process.


So if you want to buy that hat, by the way, you can buy it at tea shop for ease.


I don't know if you would.


I don't want to wear that hat, but it exists for purchase.


So the first step on this path is the prioritization.


And prioritization, what I mean by this is an emotion-free system to decide what you're


testing.


Keyword emotion-free.


There's a lot of reasons to bring touchy-feeliness into marketing, to bring creative, and I love


it, just, you know, coming together and really getting creative and tapping into the voice


of the customer, of course, but don't bring your emotions to an A-B test.


Instead, make a pie chart or a Gantt chart.


So here's one of the main ways that people think about prioritization on this axis of


ease and impact.


Ease on the X-axis, impact on the Y-axis, if it's easier and it's really impactful,


then do it in that light green quadrant.


Make it happen.


Make that test run.


But if it's really easy and less impactful, do it if you can.


Make time.


If it's really impactful but very difficult to technically implement, then really validate


that hypothesis.


Make sure that you are knowing why you're investing so much time and energy into building


it.


Because A-B tests do take time to build.


It's kind of like sussing out an idea that needs some engineering work.


So do the due diligence there.


And then obviously if it's low impact, not easy to build, don't do it.


Just deprioritize it, bottom of that prioritization queue.


The second way to do this is a prioritization scorecard.


This is like the 201 version, the ease impact is 101 version of prioritization.


So this prioritization scorecard says that you have a bunch of criteria, like what page


it's on, the audience you're identifying the success metric in that dark purple column,


and then you assign points to that idea.


So it's a rule and point-based system where every hypothesis has its own score.


Okay.


Some people use this.


It's hot wire.


I keep using them, but they're just a really great example of a big testing culture.


They use this.


So they say give it a point if it's crucial, if it's part of a funnel page, really important


to be testing those.


If it's targeting 100% of visitors, give another point.


If it's only targeting a secondary goal, not one of our primary goals, then it gets no


points.


So they rank all their hypotheses after a hackathon, for example, and then they put


them in this chart and the ones with the highest points go to the top, the ones with the lowest


points go to the bottom of the prioritization queue.


And this lets Pauline, one of the PMs at hot wire, really great person, she lets her say


if you come to me with an idea and it's not live in two weeks, it's not because it's a


bad idea, it's because I have better things to test.


She doesn't even say I'm so sorry, thank you so much for your input, I'm really glad.


No, this is black and white.


This is why I'm not testing this at this moment.


Great.


So that those frameworks are really nice in spreadsheets, and in the testing toolkit,


again, I have some prioritization spreadsheets you can download for Excel, for Google docs,


for anything that you use.


Sweet.


Now standardization.


This means coming together to identify a broadly agreed upon set of priorities, metrics and


definitions that will help you scale.


So you don't have to reinvent the wheel every single time you want to run an A B test.


You can work on the substance of what you're trying to do and not on the process, like,


well, when are we going to stop this test, what are we measuring, all those questions.


So there's three things that I think you should focus on prioritizing, and that's, one, your


main success metrics, two, your stopping criteria for your tests, and three, the important audiences


that you're trying to target.


Let's break these down.


So one, your success metrics.


Get on the same page with everyone in the company about what are the metrics and actions


that you're trying to move.


That's the conversion, an action, someone doing something that you want them to do.


So this can be defined by filtering, whittling down from your company goals, from going from


company to team to testing to your test hypothesis.


Again, more ideas on this in my blog post and more things to find.


Now standardize your stopping criteria.


How long will we let this test run before we stop it?


And a lot of people think, oh, we'll just let it run until it reaches statistical significance,


but that could be a really long time.


So you don't want to get to a point where you have hundreds or tens of tests running


at the same time that are moving really slowly.


You want to be testing the things that really make a difference.


So for this, a lot of companies or testing tools have a robust statistical engine that's


powering the decisions that you're making, and you can trust them.


But sometimes you want to have a second pair of eyes, which is why a testing calculator


comes into handy.


So you can define the minimum detectable effect that you want to see between the variation


and the control for it to be called conclusive.


Other factors here are time, amount of days.


Do you want your test to run for a weekend and a week?


Because the type of traffic you're going to get from the weekend warriors is different


from the work people.


So think about those things when you're defining your criteria.


Next, which unique traffic segments deserve more attention?


This is where we're defining our audiences.


And if you hear last year, I talked a lot about audience definition with my talk about


personalization.


So the audience is someone who deserves a unique experience.


They are important enough to your bottom line, to your customer base, that they need some


unique content to treat them differently because maybe they're indecisive or they're a ton


of them, so you have more content to share directly with them.


So these are some ideas of this pie chart.


It means there's no numbers related to it, but it's just a nice way to break down your


audiences of mobile visitors or returning visitors or referral or new or people from


Google.


So think about what audiences that you have that you can do some interesting posttest


segmentation on to understand how they performed in that test group and who you can make experience


for deliberately, more moving into the personalization.


A really interesting example of this comes from Brooks Running, a brick and mortar and


online retailer that sells running shoes.


And they've done a pretty cool thing with standardization.


They were noticing after looking at all their data that one group of people, they could


really easily detect if they were going to return a shoe.


They knew without a doubt that people who added two or more shoes in their cart within


a half width or half size were definitely going to return one because they were indecisive.


They didn't know what shoe size they were.


So they bought two.