like on the Harvard Law Review or something. And we would get these articles. And getting


Size Doesn't Matter: Great Content by Teams of One [MozCon 2017] — Ian Lurie

one big article and working through it was much faster than if the writer sent us one


chunk at a time. Right? Because you just get focused.


So try to piggyback content. If you are creating a bunch of blog posts, put them together into


one big post. Be thematic. And it's possible that one of those folks, the lawyer, the engineer,


the product person, actually wrote out a series of rules. If you ask them for that, they are


going to swoon with joy. They will be so happy and excited that you ask them because no one


ever does. They will be very, very happy. Or start writing down what you hear so you


don't have to keep asking. Keep your own little help desk of all this stuff.


So now you've got your content. Time to relax. This is not a dead badger. This is actually


a resting badger. I checked. There are many pictures of dead badgers by the side of the


road on iStock. I didn't use any of them. It feels like it's time to just stop. But


you're not done. Badgers don't let go of things. They keep working at them. What you want to


do is repurpose the hell out of your content. Repurpose it constantly. Waste nothing.


So just as an example, this is what actually led to this presentation. I did this post.


This was a rant. And I did a slide deck that was eight little things to make your blog


post better. And it got 50,000 views on SlideShare, which it got my attention. And it actually


got some slides clipped, which was exciting too. And I said, OK, there's something here.


Let's keep going with it. I did a blog post. It didn't bomb exactly, but it didn't exactly


light the world on fire either. 1,500 views. OK. Unique views.


Then I took a look at doing a webinar. Did that. I think we had like 1,200 views or something


like that. Again, exciting. Not the most exciting thing I've ever seen. Then I repurposed it


into an e-book, which took a lot of work. But that got us, so far, 350 quality leads,


leads worth reaching out to. This is typical inbound marketing. That worked really well.


So we repurposed it four times. We got 50,000 views on SlideShare. We got 350 leads. If


you ignore everything in between, this was still a success. And I didn't repeat any work.


And if I had been writing a separate e-book on a separate topic, it would have taken much,


much longer. There are other kinds of media too. Right?


There's always other kinds of media. So maybe you want to do video. Maybe you want to do


audio. And this, again, is where you get into kind of this badger mode, because of course,


you're going to hear, no, no, don't have the time. It's too expensive. Forget it. We can't


do this. We've got to get an outside resource, whatever else.


The truth is, you don't have to. There are tools out there, like Soapbox by Wistia, and


I think Phil Cunningham is going to show this to you later on, maybe tomorrow. I'm not sure.


Nottingham. Not Cunningham. Why should I say Phil Cunningham? His name is Phil Nottingham.


Sorry, Phil. You can take a tool like Wistia's Soapbox,


and you can easily do your face as a talking head and your screen right next to each other.


And it's a simple web-based tool. It takes a couple of minutes. It's easy. You don't


need to go and get another team. It will still need to go through legal. It will still need


to go through engineering. It will still need to go through everything else. It's going


to take some time to get your boss to really think about it, but you can do it.


And that's what this really gets down to as I kind of wrap this up. There's always a way


to do this stuff. All right? You're always going to get a little bit less than what you


really want without fail, but there's always a way to get this done. And by the way, I


have very high expectations of marketers. Okay? I look at you all, and I know you can


do this stuff. And I have very high expectations, and I write blog posts about things like all


marketers should be developers, all marketers should know how to edit images, all this kind


of stuff. When I talk about that, I don't necessarily mean you have to be the best developer


ever. You don't have to be Ernest Hemingway. You don't have to be a master with Photoshop.


You just have to be good enough at it to find a way, because badgers find ways to get shit


done. It's how they work. They'll take 30 minutes now to learn the tool that's going


to save them an hour for every single piece of content they ever do again. Right? You're


going to do that. No matter how pressed you feel for time, it's worth doing.


Badgers don't try to alter their environment that often. So you're going to go out, and


you're going to work with, you're going to go into new organizations. And I'm the worst


at this. You suffer from this thing called first professional syndrome, where you walk


into a room, and you feel like you're the first person to have ever known what they're


doing in that room. I have bad news for you, and I fail at this all the time. You have


to understand that there's actually some people before you who have some qualifications. Chances


are. You at least have to start with that understanding.


Understand that going in and immediately throwing things into an uproar may not be the best


way to start. Badgers don't do that. Okay? They tweak things a little bit at a time.


They know the constraints under which they have to work. Right? Unicorns, the unicorn


approach is to immediately go way, way, way outside what's been done before and do radical


stuff, which is awesome. But we don't get to do it that very often. Badgers know their


constraints, and they're always pushing at them a little bit. Right? You're using markdown,


so you don't have to do your H so that someone else doesn't have to do your HTML. You're


producing a few more things than the legal team is used to. You're using a few more images


or a few fewer images, and you're just improving on things a little bit every single time so


that you create lasting change in the environment, which you also adapt to at the same time,


and you never stop. All right? You never stop refining and streamlining and accelerating


and finding ways to do this better. You're always looking at ways to do a little better


at this, and it's kind of a meta content approach. Right? So even as, whether you're a copywriter


or a Photoshop person, a developer, even as you're doing your day-to-day work and you're


head down, you're always finding ways to do a little better at it every time.


And yeah, someday you're going to have that bigger team. And this is a big thing about


this presentation is I talk a lot about this, and it seems like I'm talking about teams


of one. This is designed for very small teams, but a team of 50 can bog down in process and


end up being a victim of its own size, and that's when you have to think like a badger


again, which is what this really all boils down to. I'm actually going to get some of


these made, I think, and put them somewhere. This is what this all boils down to is people


will come to you when you get stuck. If you're trying to create that unicorn piece, and they'll


say, oh, you know, well, don't take it personally. It's just your work.


This is seriously personal shit. If it's not personal, you should not be doing this work.


That doesn't mean you need to be a diva or have a temper tantrum, though. It means you


just constantly chip away and you find ways to do awesome, awesome stuff when the world


around you is kind of resistant to that, and you just keep chipping away until you do that


awesome shit, until your organization is producing that awesome shit. That's what badgers do.


One Way to Make or Break Your Site Migration - Whiteboard Friday

Hey guys, welcome to this week's edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Cameron Jenkins


and I work here at Moz. So what we're going to be talking about today is redirects and


how they're one way that you can make or break your site migration. So site migration can


mean a lot of different things depending on your context. So I just kind of wanted to


go over quickly what I mean before we dive into some tips for avoiding redirection errors.


So when I talk about migration, I'm coming from the experience of these kind of like


primary activities. So one example of a migration I might be referring to is maybe we're taking


on a client and they, you know, previously used a CMS that had a default kind of, you


know, URL formatting and it was like a dated something. So it was like 2018, May and then


the post. And then we want to, we're changing CMSs, we have more flexibility with how our


pages, our URLs are structured so we're kind of going to move it to just slash post or


something like that. So in that way, URLs, a lot of URLs are going to be moving around


because we're changing the way that those URLs are structured. Another instance is that,


you know, sometimes we'll get clients that come to us with kind of dated or like keywordy


URLs and we want to change those to be a lot cleaner, shorten them where possible, just


make them more human readable. So an example of that would be maybe the client used URLs


like best-plumber-dallas and we want to change it to something a little bit cleaner, more


natural and not as keywordy to just slash plumbers or something like that. So that could


be another example of URLs, lots of URLs moving around if we're taking over a whole site and


we're kind of wanting to do away with those. And then another example is if we're doing


a complete content overhaul. So maybe the client comes to us and they say, hey, we've


been, you know, writing content and blogging for a really long time, we're just not seeing


the traffic and the rankings that we want, can you do a, you know, a thorough audit of


all of our content? And usually what we notice is that you have maybe even thousands of pages


but, you know, four of them are ranking. And so there's a lot of just redundant pages,


pages that are thin, would be stronger together, some pages that just don't really serve a


purpose and we want to just let die. So that's another example where we would be merging


URLs, moving pages around, just letting some drop completely. That's another example of,


you know, migrating things around that I'm referring to. So that's what I'm referring


to when it comes to migrations. But before we dive in, I kind of wanted to address the


fact that like don't we know this stuff already? I mean I'm talking to SEOs and we all know


or should know the importance of redirection. I mean if there's not a redirect, there's


no path to follow to tell Google where you've moved your page to. It's frustrating for users


if they click on a link that no longer works, it doesn't take them to the proper destination.


We know it's important, we know what it does. It passes link equity, it makes sure people


aren't frustrated, helps, you know, get the correct page indexed, all of those things.


So we know this stuff. But if you're like me, you've also been in those situations where


you have to spend entire days fixing 404s to kind of correct traffic loss or whatever


after a migration or, you know, you're fixing 301s that were maybe done but they were sent


to all kinds of weird funky places. So mistakes still happen even though we know the importance


of redirects. So I want to talk about why really quickly. So unclear ownership is something


that can happen especially if you're on like a scrappier team, smaller team, maybe you


don't handle these things very often enough to have a defined process for this. I've been


in situations where, you know, I assumed the tech was going to do it and the tech assumed


that the project assistant was going to do it. We're all kind of pointing fingers at


each other with no clear ownership and then, you know, the ball gets dropped because no


one really knows whose responsibility it is. So just make sure that you designate someone


to do it and that they know and you know that that person is going to be handling it. Another


thing is deadlines. So internal and external deadlines can affect this. So one example


that I encountered pretty often is a client would say, hey, we really need this project


done buying next Monday because we're launching another initiative. We're doing a TV commercial


and our domain is going to be listed on that TV commercial. So I'd really like this stuff


wrapped up when those commercials go live. So those kind of external deadlines can affect


how quickly we have to work. So a lot of times it just gets left by the wayside because it's


not a very visible thing. If you don't know the importance of redirects, you might handle


things like, you know, content and making sure the buttons all work and the template


looks nice and things like that, the visible things where people assume that redirects,


oh, that's just a back end thing. We can take care of it later. Unfortunately, redirects


usually fall into that category if they don't really know, the person doing it doesn't really


know the importance of it. Another thing with deadlines is internal deadlines. Sometimes


maybe you might have a deadline for a quarterly game, quarterly game or monthly game. We have


to have all of our projects done by this date. Same thing with the deadlines. Redirects are


usually unfortunately something that tends to miss the cutoff for those types of things.


And then another situation that can cause site migration errors and 404s after moving


around is non-SEOs handling this. Now you don't have to be a really experienced SEO,


I don't think, usually to handle these types of things. It depends on your CMS and how


complicated is the way that you're implementing your redirects. But sometimes if it's easy,


if your CMS makes redirection easy, it can be treated as like a data entry type of job


and it can be delegated to someone who maybe doesn't know the importance of doing all of


them or formatting them properly or directing them to the places that they're supposed to


go. So those are all situations that I've encountered issues with. So now that we kind


of know what I'm talking about with migrations and why they kind of sometimes still happen,


I'm going to launch into some rules that will hopefully help prevent this site migration


errors because of failed redirects. So number one, always create one-to-one redirects. This


is super important. What I've seen sometimes is, oh man, it can save me tons of time if


I just use a wildcard and redirect all of these pages to the homepage or to the blog


homepage or something like that. But what that tells Google is that, you know, page


A has moved to page B, whereas that's not the case. They're not moving all of these


pages to the homepage. They haven't actually moved there. So it's an irrelevant redirect


and Google has even said, I think, that they treat those essentially as a soft 404. They


don't even count. So make sure you don't do that. Make sure you're always linking URL


to its new location, one-to-one, every single time for every URL that's moving. Two, watch


out for chains. So I think Google says something oddly specific like, you know, watch out for


redirect change three, no more than five or something. Just try to limit it as much as


possible. By chains, I mean you have URL A and then you redirect it to B and then later


you decide to move it to a third location. So instead of doing this and going through


a middleman, A to B to C, shorten it if you can. Go straight from the source to the destination,


A to C. Three, watch out for loops. Similarly, what can happen is you redirect, you know,


position A to URL B to another version C and then back to A. And what happens is it's chasing


its tail. It will never resolve. So you're redirecting it in a loop. So watch out for


things like that. One way to check those things, I think, is a nifty tool. Screaming Frog has


a redirect chains report. So you can see if you're kind of encountering any of those issues


after you've implemented your redirects. Number four, 404 strategically. The presence


of 404s on your site alone is not, that is not going to hurt your site's rankings. It


is letting pages die that were ranking and bringing your site traffic that is going to


cause issues. Obviously, if a page is 404ing, eventually Google's going to take that out


of the index if you don't redirect it to its new location. And if that page was ranking


really well, if it was bringing your site traffic, you're going to lose the benefits


of it. If it had links to it, you're going to lose the benefits of that backlink if it


dies. So if you're going to 404, just do it strategically. You can let pages die. Like


in these situations, maybe you're just outright deleting a page and it has no new location,


nothing relevant to redirect it to. That's okay. Just know that you're going to lose


any of the benefits that URL was bringing your site. Number five, prioritize SEO valuable


URLs. And I kind of do that because I prefer, obviously, redirect everything that you're


moving, everything that's legitimately moving. But because of situations like deadlines and


things like that, when we're down to the wire, I think it's really important to at least


have started out with your most important URLs. So those are URLs that are ranking really


well, giving you a lot of good traffic, URLs that you've earned links to. So those are


really SEO valuable URLs. If you have a deadline and you don't get to finish all of your redirects


before this project goes live, at least you have those most critical, most important URLs


handled first. Again, obviously it's not ideal, I don't think in my mind to save any until


after the launch. Obviously, I think it's best to have them all set up by the time it


goes live. But if that's not the case and you're getting rushed and you have to launch,


at least you will have handled the most important URLs for SEO value. And number six, just to


end it off, test. I think it's super important just to monitor these things because you could


think that you have set these all up right, but maybe there were some formatting errors


or maybe you mistakenly redirected something to the wrong place. It is super important


just to test. So what you can do, you could do a site colon domain.com and just start


clicking on all the results that come up and see if any are redirecting to the wrong place.


Maybe they're 404-ing, just checking all of those old indexed URLs to make sure that they're


going to their proper new destination. I think Moz's SiteCrawl is another huge benefit here


for testing purposes. What it does if you have a domain set up or a URL set up in a


campaign in Moz Pro, it checks this every week and you can force another run if you


want it to, but it'll scan your site for errors like this, 404 is namely. So if there's any


issues like that, 500, 400 type errors, SiteCrawl will catch it and notify you. If you're not


managing the domain that you're working on in a campaign in Moz Pro, there's on-demand


curl too, so you can run that on any domain that you're working on to test for things


like that. There are plenty of other ways you can test and find errors, but the most


important thing to remember is just to do it, just to test and make sure that even once


you've implemented these things that you're checking and making sure that there's no issues


after launch. I would check right after launch and then a couple days later and then just


kind of taper off just until you're absolutely positive that everything has gone smoothly.


So those are my tips, those are my rules for how to implement redirects properly, why you


need to, when you need to, and the risks that can happen with that. So if you have any tips


of your own that you'd like to share, pop them in the comments, share it with all of


us in the SEO community. That's it for this week's Whiteboard Friday. Come back again


Actually Accurate Analytics - Whiteboard Friday

Hi, MOS fans. I'm Ruth Barridi and I am the Vice President of Strategy at UpBuild. We're


a technical marketing agency specializing in technical SEO and advanced web analytics.


And one of the things I wanted to talk about today, Whiteboard Friday, is about analytics.


So when I talk to SEOs about analytics and kind of ask them, when it comes to analytics,


what do you do? What do you do first when you're taking on a new client? What do you


do? SEOs are often really eager to tell me, I dive into the data, here's what I look like,


here are the views that I set up, here's how I, you know, filter things, here's where I


go to gain insights. But what I often don't hear people talk about that I think is a super


important first step with a new client or a new analytics account or really any time


if you haven't done it, is making sure your analytics data is accurate and consistent.


Taking the time to do some basic analytics housekeeping is going to serve you so far


into the future and even beyond your time at that given client or company, the people


who come after you will be so, so, so thankful that you did these things. So today we're


going to talk about actually accurate analytics. So the first question that you should ask


yourself is, is your analytics code on every page? Is it? Are you sure? There are a lot


of different things that can contribute to your analytics code not actually being on


every single page of your website. One of them is if portions of your site have a different


CMS from the main CMS that's driving your site. We see this a lot with things like subdomains,


with things like forums. A really common culprit is if you're using a tool like Marketo or


HubSpot or Unbounce to build landing pages, it's really easy to forget to put analytics


on those pages. And over time, those pages are out there in the world, maybe it's just


one or two pages. You're not seeing them in analytics at all, which means you're probably


not thinking about them, especially if they're old, but that doesn't mean that they don't


still exist and that they aren't still getting views and visits. So, okay, how do we know


about these pages? Well, before you do anything, it's important to remember that because of


the existence of orphan pages, you can't only rely on a tool like Screaming Frog or DeepCrawl


to do a crawl of your site and make sure that code is on every page because if the crawler


can't reach the page and your code's not on the page, it's kind of in an unseeable, shrouded


in mystery area and we don't want that. The best way, the most sure way to make sure that


you are finding every page is to go to your dev team, to go to your developers and ask


them to give you an export of every single URL in your database. If you're using WordPress,


there's actually a really simple tool you can use. It's called Export All URLs in the


grand tradition of very specifically named WordPress tools, but depending on your CMS


and how your site is set up, this is something that you can almost certainly do. I need a


list of every single URL on the website, every single URL in our database. Your dev team


can almost certainly do this. When you get this, what you can do, if you could, if you


wanted, simply load that list of URLs. You'd want to filter out things like images and


make sure you're just looking at the HTML documents. Once you had that, you could load


that whole thing into Screaming Frog as a list. That would take a while. What you could


do instead, if you wanted, is run a Screaming Frog crawl and then dedupe that, dedupe it


with Screaming Frog. So now you've got a list of your orphan pages and then you've got a


list of all of the pages that Screaming Frog can find. So now we have a list of every single


page on the website. And we can use either a combination of crawler and list or just


list depending on how you want to do it to run the following custom search. So in Screaming


Frog, what you can do is if you go to configuration and then you go to custom search, it will


pop up a custom search field. What this will allow you to do is while the crawler is crawling,


it will search for a given piece of information on a page and then fill that in a custom field


within the crawler so that you can then go back and look at all of the pages that have


this piece of information. What I like to do when I'm looking for analytics information


is set up two filters actually. One for all of the pages that contain my UI identifier


and one for all of the pages that don't contain it. Because if I just have a list of all of


the pages that contain it, I still don't know which pages don't contain it. So you can do


this with your unique Google Analytics Identifier. If you're deploying Google Analytics through


Google Tag Manager, instead you would look for your GTM number, your GTIM ID. So it just


depends how you've implemented analytics. You're going to be looking for one of those


two numbers. And almost every website I've worked on has at least a few pages that don't


have analytics on them. What you'll sometimes also find is that there are pages that have


the code or that should have the code on them but that still aren't being picked up. And


so if you start seeing these errors as you're crawling, you can use a tool like Tag Assistant


to go in and see, okay, why isn't this actually sending information back to Google Analytics?


So that's the best way to make sure that you have code on every single page. The other


thing you want to take a look at is whether or not your analytics code is in the head


of every page and as close to the top of the head as possible. Now I know some of you are


thinking like, yeah, that's Analytics Implementation 101. But when you're implementing analytics,


especially if you're doing so via a plugin or via GTM, and of course if you're doing


it via GTM, the implementation rules for that are a little bit different. But it's really


easy for over time, especially if your site is old, other things to get added to the head


by other people who aren't you and to push that code down. Now that's not necessarily


the end of the world and if it's going to be very difficult or time consuming or expensive


to fix, you may decide it's not worth your time if everything seems like it's firing


correctly. But the farther down that code gets pushed, the higher the likelihood that


something's going to go wrong, that something's going to fire before the tracker, that the


tracker is not going to pick up, that something's going to fire that's going to prevent the


tracker from firing. It could be a lot of different things and that's why the best practice


is to have it as high up in the head as possible. Again, whether or not you want to fix that


is up to you. Once you've gotten your code firing correctly on every single page of your


website, I like to go into Google Analytics and change a few basic settings. The first


one is the site speed sample rate. So this is when you're running site speed reports


in Google Analytics. Typically they're not giving you site timings or page timings for


the site as a whole because that's a lot of data. It's more data than GA really wants


to store, especially in the free version of the tool. So instead they use a sample, a


sample set of pages to give you page timings. I think typically it's around 1%. That can


be a very, very small sample if you don't have a lot of traffic. It can become so small


that the sample size is skewed, it's not relevant. So I usually like to bump up that sample size


to more like 10%. Don't do 100%, that's more data than you need. But bump it up to a number


that's high enough that you're going to get relevant data. The other thing that I like


to take a look at when I first get my hands on a GA account is the session and campaign


timeout. So session timeout is basically how long somebody would have to stay on your website


before their first session is over and now they've begun a new session if they come back


and do something on your site where now they're not being registered as part of their original


visit. And historically, GA automatically determines session timeout at 30 minutes.


But this is a world where people have a million tabs open. I bet you right now are watching


this video in one of a million tabs. And the longer you have a tab open, the more likely


it is that your session will time out. So I like to increase that timeout to at least


60 minutes. The other thing that Google automatically does is set a campaign timeout. So if you're


using UTM parameters to do campaign tracking, Google will automatically set that campaign


timeout at six months. So six months after somebody first clicks that UTM parameter,


if they come back, they're no longer considered part of that same campaign. They're now a


new fresh user. And your customer life cycle might not be six months. If you're like a


B2B or a SaaS company, sometimes your customer life cycle can be two years. Sometimes if


you're like an e-comm company, six months is a really long time and you only need 30


days. Whatever your actual customer life cycle is, you can set your campaign timeout to reflect


that. I know very few people who are actually going to make that window shorter, but you


can certainly make that longer to reflect the actual life cycle of your customers. And


then the third thing that I like to do when I go into a Google Analytics account is annotate


what I can. And I know a lot of SEOs, when you first get into a GA account, you're like,


well, no one's been annotating. Ho-hum. I guess going forward, as of today, we're going to


annotate changes going forward. And that's great. You should definitely be annotating


changes. However, you can also take a look at overall traffic trends and do what you


can to ask your coworkers or your client or whatever your relationship is to this account,


what happened here? Do you remember what happened here? Can I get a timeline of major events


in the company, major product releases, press releases, coverage in the press, things that


might have driven traffic or seen a spike in traffic, product launches? And you can


annotate those things historically, going back in time. Just because you weren't there


doesn't mean it didn't happen. All right. So our data is complete. It's being collected


the way that we want to, and we're tracking what's happening. Cool. Now let's talk about


account setup. I have found that many, many people do not take the time to be intentional


and deliberate when it comes to how they set up their Google Analytics account. It's something


that just kind of happens organically over time. A lot of people are constrained by defaults.


They don't really get what they're doing. And what we can do, even if this is not a


brand new GA account, is try to impose some structure, order, and consistency, and especially


some clarity, not only for ourselves as marketers, but for anybody else who might be using this


GA account, either now or in the future. So starting out with just your basic GA structure,


you start with your account. Your account name is usually just your company name. It


doesn't totally matter what your account name is. However, if you're working with a vendor,


I know they'd prefer that it be your company name as opposed to something random that only


makes sense to you internally, because that's going to make it easier for them. But if you


don't care about that, you could conceivably name your account whatever you want. Most


of the time it is your company name. Then you've got your property. You might have various


properties. A good rule of thumb is that you should have one property per website or per


group of sites with the same experience. So if you have one experience that goes on and


off of a subdomain, maybe you have mysite.com, and then you also have store.mysite.com. But


as far as the user experience is concerned, it's one website. That could be one property.


That's kind of where you want to delineate properties is based on site experiences. And


then drilling down to views, you can have as many views as you want. When it comes to


naming views, the convention that I like to use is to have the site or section name that


you're tracking in that specific view, and then information about how that view is set


up and how it's intending to be used. Don't assume that you're going to remember what


you were doing last year, a year from now. Write it down. Make it clear. Make it easy


for people who aren't you to use. And you can have as many views as you want. You can


set up views for very small sections of your site, for very specific and weird filters.


If there's some customizations you want to do, you can set up as many views as you need


to use. But I think there are three views that you should make sure you have. The first


is a raw data view. This is a view with no filters on it at all. If you don't already


have one of these, then all of your data in the past is suspect. Having a view that is


completely raw and unfiltered means if you do something to mess up the filtering on all


your other views, you at least have one source of total raw data. I know this is not new


information for SEOs when it comes to GA account setup, but so many people don't do it. And


I know this because I go into your accounts and I see that you don't have it. If you don't


have it, set it up right now. Pause this video. Go set it up right now. And then come back


and watch the rest because it's going to be good. I like to name, in addition to naming


it raw data unfiltered, I like to also add something like don't touch or, you know, for


historical purposes only if you're not into the whole brevity thing. Something that makes


it really clear that not only is this the raw data, but also no one should touch it.


This is not the data we're using. This is not the data we're making decisions by. This


is just our backup. This is our backup data. Don't touch it. Then you're going to want


to have your primary view. So whatever, however many views you as a marketer set up, there


are going to be other people in your organization who just kind of want the data. So pick a


view that's your primary filtered view. And you're going to have a lot of your basic filters


on this. Things like filtering out your internal IP range, filtering out known bots. You might


set up some filtering to capture the full host name if you're tracking between subdomains.


Things like that. But it's your primary view with basic filtering. You're going to want


to name that something like use this one. Sometimes if there's like one person and they


won't stop touching your raw data, you can even say like Nicole, use this one. Whatever


you need to label it so that even if you got sick and were in the hospital and unreachable,


you won the lottery, you're on an island, no one can reach you. People can still say


which of these 17 views that they're set up should I use? Oh, perhaps it's the one called


use this one. It's a clue. And then I like to always have at least one view that is a


test view. That's usually unfiltered in its base state, but it's where I might test out


filters or custom dimensions or other things. And I'm not ready to roll out to the primary


view. You may have additional views on top of those, but those are the three that in


my opinion you absolutely need to have. What you should not have is a view called all website


data. All website data is what Google will automatically call a view when you're first


setting up GA. And a lot of times people don't change that as they're setting up their analytics.


And the problem with that is that all website data means different things to different people.


For some people, all website data means the raw data. For some people, all website data


means this is the use this one view. It's unclear. If I get into a GA account and I


see that there is a view named all website data, I know that this company has not thought


about how they're setting up views and how they're communicating that internally. Likely


there's going to be some filtering on stuff that shouldn't have been filtered, some historical


mishmash. It's a sign that you haven't taken the time to do it right. In my opinion, a


good SEO should never have a view called all website data. All right, great. So we've got


our view set up. Everything's configured the way that we want it. How that's configured


may be up to you, but we've got these basic tenets in place. Let's talk about goals. Goals


are really interesting and it's, I don't love this about Google Analytics, but goals are


forever. Once you set a goal in GA, information that is tracked to that number, that goal


number within that goal set, will always be tracked back to that. What that means is that


say you have a goal that's blue widget sales and you're tracking blue widget sales. Over


time you discontinue the blue widget and now you're only tracking red widget sales. So


you rename the blue widget sales widget to now it's called red widget sales. The problem


is renaming the goal doesn't change the goal itself. All of that historical blue widget


data will still be associated with that goal and unless you're annotating carefully, you


may not have a good idea of when this goal switch to be tracking from tracking one thing


to be tracking another thing. This is a huge problem when it comes to data governance and


making decisions based on historical data. The other problem is you have a limited number


of goals. So you need to be really thoughtful about how you set up your goals because they're


forever. A basic rule is that you should set goals based on what makes you money. You might


have a lot of micro conversions. You might have things like newsletter sign ups or white


paper downloads or things like that. If those things don't make you money, you might want


to track those as events instead. More on that in a minute. Whatever you're tracking


as a goal should be related to how you make money. If you're a lead gen biz, things like


white paper downloads may still be valuable enough that you want to track them as a goal.


It just depends on your business. Think about goals as money. What's the site here to do?


When you think about goals, again, remember that they're forever and you don't get that


many of them. So anytime you can group goals efficiently, take some time to think about


how you're going to do that. If you have three different forms and they're all going to be


scheduling a demo in some way or another but they're different forms, is there a way that


you can have one goal that's schedule a demo and then differentiate between which form


it was in another way? Say you have an event category that's schedule a demo and then you


use the label to differentiate between the forms. It's one goal that you can then drill


down. A classic mistake that I see with people setting up goals is they have the same goal


in different places on the website and they're tracking that differently. When I say, hey,


this is the same goal and you're tracking it in three different places, they often say,


oh, well, that's because we want to be able to drill that down into that data. Great.


You can do that in Google Analytics. You can do that via Google Analytics reporting. You


can look at what URLs and what psych sections people completed a given goal on. You don't


have to build that into the goal. So try to group as efficiently as possible and think


long term. If at any time you're setting up a goal that you know is someday going to be


part of a group of goals, try to set it up in such a way that you can add to that and


then drill down into the individual reports rather than setting up new goals because those


20 slots go quick. The other thing you're going to want to do with goals and with everything,


this is clearly the thesis of my presentation, is name them clearly. Name them things where


it would be impossible not to understand exactly what it is. Don't name your goal, download.


Don't name your goal, thank you page. Name your goal something specific enough that people


can look at it at a glance, even people who don't work there right now, people in the


future, the future people, can look at your goals and know exactly what they were. But


again, name them not so specifically that you can't then encompass that goal wherever


it exists on the site. So, download might be too broad, blue widget white paper download


might be too specific, white paper download might be a good middle ground there. Whatever


it is for you, think about how you're going to name it in such a way that it will make


sense to somebody else, even if you don't work there anymore and they can't ask you.


Now from talking about goals, it kind of segues naturally into talking about events, event


tracking. Event tracking is one of the best things about Google Analytics now. It used


to be that to track an event you had to add code directly to a page or directly to a link


and that was hard to do at scale and difficult to get implemented alongside conflicting dev


possibilities. But now with Google Tag Manager you can track as many events as you want whenever


you want to do them and you can set them up all by yourself, which means that now you


as the marketer, as the analytics person becomes the person who is in charge of Google Analytics


events and you should take that seriously because the other side of that coin is that


it's very possible to get event creep or now you're tracking way too many events and you're


tracking them inefficiently and inconsistently in ways that make it difficult to extract


insights from them on a macro level. So with events, think about what you want and why.


Anytime somebody is like, I want to track this, ask them, okay, what are we going to


do with that information? If they're like, I don't know, I just want to know it, that


might not be a good case to make to track an event. Understand what you're going to


do with the data. Resist the urge to track just for tracking sake. Resist data for data's


sake. I know it's hard because data is cool, but try your best. As you take over, now that


you are the person in charge of events, which you are, you're taking this on, this is yours


now, develop naming conventions for your events and then become the absolute arbiter of those


conventions. Do not let anybody name anything unless it adheres to your conventions. Now


how you name things is up to you. Some suggestions for category, I like that to be the site section


that something's in or maybe the item type. So maybe it's product pages, maybe it's forms,


maybe it's videos. Whatever, however you are going to group these events on a macro level,


that should be your category. The action is, you know, the action. So that's, you know,


click, submit, play, whatever it is the action is doing. And then the label is where I like


to get unique and make sure that I'm drilling down to just this one thing. So maybe that's


where I'll have the actual CTA of the button or which form it was that people filled out


or, you know, what product it was that they purchased. Again, think about information


that you can get from other reports. So for example, you don't need to capture the URL


that the event was recorded on as part of the label because you can actually go in and


look at all of your events by URL and see where that happened without having to capture


it in that way. The important thing is that you have rules. That those rules are something


that you could communicate to other people and that they would then be able to name their


own categories, actions, and labels in ways that were consistent with yours. Over time,


as you do this and as you rename old events, you're going to have a more and more usable


body of data. You're going to be increasingly comparing apples to apples. You're not going


to have some things where click is the action and some things where click is the label or


things that should be in one category that are in two or three categories. Over time,


you're going to have a much more usable and controllable body of event data. And then


you need to be ruthless about consistency with usage of these naming conventions. There


will be no just setting up an event real quick. Or in fact, there will be just setting up


an event real quick, but it will be using these rules that you have very thoroughly


outlined, communicated to everybody, and that you're then checking up to make sure everything's


still tracking the same way. A big thing to watch for when you're being ruthless about


consistency is capitalization. Capitalization in category, action, and label in event tracking


will come back as two different things. Capital C and lowercase c category are two different


things. So make sure as you're creating new events that you have some kind of standardization.


Maybe it's the first letter is always capitalized. Maybe it's nothing is ever capitalized. It


doesn't matter what it is as long as it's all the same. And then think about the future.


Think about the day when you win the lottery and you move to a beautiful island in the


middle of the sea and you turn off your phone and you never think about Google Analytics


again and you're lying in the sand and no one who works with you now can reach you.


If you never came back to work again, could the people who work there continue the tracking


work that you've worked so hard to set up? If not, work harder to make sure that's the


case. Create documentation. Communicate your rules. Get everybody on the same page. Doing


so will make this whole organization's data collection better, more actionable, more usable


for years to come. And if you do come back to work tomorrow, if in fact you work here


for the next 10 years, you've just set yourself up for success for the next decade. Congratulations.


So these are the things that I like to do when I first get into a GA account. Obviously


there are a lot of other things that you can do in GA. That's why we all love GA so much.


But to break it down and give you all some homework that you can do right now tonight,


go in and check for orphan pages when it comes to analytics. Those might be different or


they might be the same as orphan pages in the traditional sense. Make sure your code


is on every page. Rename all your confusing stuff and remove the views that you're not


using. Turn off the goals that you're not using. Make sure everything is as up to date


as possible. Guard your raw data. Don't let anybody touch that raw data. Rename it do


not touch and then don't touch it. Enforce your naming conventions. Create them. Enforce


them. Protect them. They're yours now. You are the police. You are the police of naming


conventions. Annotate as much as you can. Both, I mean, going forward you're going to


annotate all the time because you can because you're there. You can still go back in time


and annotate. One thing that I didn't really talk about today but you should also do when


it comes to the general health of your analytics is go in and check who has user permissions


to all of your different analytics accounts. Remove old users. Take a look at that once


a quarter. Just it's good governance to do. And then you're going to update your sampling


and your timeouts. You can do all of these things and check back in on them regularly.


You're going to have a healthy, robust, and extremely usable analytics ecosystem. Let


me know what your favorite things to do in analytics are. Let me know how you're tracking


events in GTM. I want to hear all about everything you all are doing in analytics so come holler


How Google AdWords (PPC) Does and Doesn't Affect Organic Results - Whiteboard Friday

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


This week we're chatting about AdWords and how PPC paid search results can potentially


impact organic results.


Now let's be really clear.


As a rule, paid does not directly affect organic rankings.


So many of you have probably seen the conspiracy theories out there of, oh, we started spending


a lot on Google AdWords and then our organic results went up, or hey, we're spending a


lot with Google but are competitors spending even more?


That must be why they're ranking better in the organic results.


And none of that is true.


So there's a bunch of protections in place that, you know, they have a real wall at Google


between the paid side and the organic side.


And the organic folks, the engineers, the product managers, the program managers, all


the people who work on those organic ranking results in the search quality team, they absolutely


will not let paid directly impact how they rank or whether they rank a site or page in


the organic results.


But there are a lot of indirect things that Google doesn't control entirely that cause


paid and organic to have an intersection.


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


So first off, searchers who see an ad, and we've seen studies on this including a notable


one from Google years ago, who see an ad may be more likely to click on an organic listing


or they may be more likely if they see a high ranking organic listing for the same ad to


click that ad.


For example, let's say I'm running Seattle Whale Tours and I search for whale watching,


right, while I'm in town.


I see an ad for Seattle Whale Tours and then I see an organic result.


It could be the case, let's say that my normal click through rate if there was only the ad


was one and my normal click through rate if I only saw the organic listing was one.


Let's imagine this equation one plus one is actually going to equal something like 2.2,


right?


It's going to be a little bit higher because seeing these two together biases you, biases


searchers to generally be more likely to click these than they otherwise would independent


of one another.


And this is why many people will bid on their brand ads.


Now you might say, gosh, that's a really expensive way to go for, you know,.2 or even lower


in some cases.


And I agree with you, I don't always endorse and I know many SEOs and paid search folks


who don't always endorse bidding on branded terms, but it can work.


All right, B, searchers who've been previously exposed to a particular brand through paid


search may be more likely in the future to click and engage on the organic content.


And remember, a higher click through rate, a higher engagement rate can lead to a higher


ranking.


So if you see that, you know, many people have searched in the past, they've clicked


on a paid ad and then later in the organic results they see that same brand ranking,


they might be more likely and more inclined to click it, more inclined to engage with


it, more inclined actually to convert on that page, right, to click that buy button generally


because the association, the brand association is stronger.


If it's the first time you've ever heard of a new brand, new company, new website, you're


less likely to click, less likely to engage, less likely to buy, which is why some paid


exposure prior to organic exposure can be good even for the organic exposure.


C, paid results do strongly impact organic click through rate, especially in certain


queries.


So across the board, right, what we've seen is that, you know, paid searches on average


and all of Google gets between two and three percent of all clicks of all searches result


in a paid click.


And organic, it's something between about 47 and 57 percent of all searches result in


an organic click.


But remember there's many searches where there's no paid clicks and there are many searches


where paid gets a ton of traffic.


If you haven't seen it yet, there was a blog post from Moz last week from the folks at


Wayfair and they talked about, you know, how incredibly their SERP click through rates


have changed because of the appearance of ads.


So for example, I searched for dining room table lighting and you can see, you can see


on your mobile or on desktop how Google has these, you know, rich image ads and you can


sort of select different ones.


I want to see all lighting, I want to see black lighting, I want to see chrome lighting.


And then there's ads below that, right, the normal paid text ads.


And then way, way down here there's the organic results.


So this is probably taking up between 25 and 50 percent of all the clicks to this page


are going to the paid search results, biasing the click through rate massively, which means


if you bid in certain cases, you may find that you will actually change the click through


rate curve for the entire SERP and change that click through rate opportunity, right,


for the keyword.


So paid ad clicks may lead to other things, right?


If someone clicks on a paid ad, they might get to that site and then they might decide


to link to it, to mention that brand somewhere else, to provide media coverage or social


media coverage, to do sharing of some kind.


And all of those things can, some of them directly, some of them indirectly, boost rankings,


right?


And so it is often the case that when you grow the engagement, the traffic of a website


overall, especially if that website is providing a compelling experience that someone might


want to write about, share, cover, amplify in some way, that can boost the rankings.


And we do see this sometimes, especially for queries that have a strong overlap in terms


of their content value and usefulness and they're not just purely commercial in intent.


Last one, and this is a little subtler and more difficult to understand, but basically


by bidding on paid search results, you can change, you sort of change the market, right?


You affect the market for how people think about content creation there, for how they


think about monetization, for how they think about the value of those queries.


So a few years ago, there was no one bidding on and no one interested in the market around


insurance discounts as they relate to fitness levels.


And then a bunch of companies, insurance companies and fitness tracking companies and all these


other folks started getting into this world and then they started bidding on it and they


created sort of a value chain and a monetization method.


And then you saw more competition, you saw more brands entering this space, you saw more


affiliates entering.


And so the organic SERPs themselves became more competitive with the entry of paid, right?


And this happens very often in markets that were under or unmonetized and then become


more monetized through paid advertising, through products, through offerings.


So be careful sometimes when you start bidding in a space that previously no one was bidding


in, no one was buying paid ads in, you can invite a lot of new and interesting competition


into the search results that can change the whole dynamic of how the search query space


works in your sector.


All right, everyone.


Hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday.


Look forward to your thoughts in the comments and we'll see you again next week for another


edition.


How to Create an SEO audit for your startup - Whiteboard Friday

Hi everyone down at StartCon.


Thank you so much for having me.


My name is Ran Fishkin.


I'm the co-founder of Moz, and today I'm going to be talking to all of you and to Whiteboard


Friday fans everywhere about how to kickstart an SEO audit for your startup.


So what I've done here is I've taken our classic SEO pyramid, sort of, you know, you've got


to start with a strong base and work your way up.


Well, I flipped it because in an audit scenario, we're actually going to start from the bottom


and work our way to the top.


So I've inverted our pyramid.


We're going to start with crawling and accessibility, and we're going to work all the way up to


conversion.


Now, SEO in a startup setting can be challenging.


I'm going to assume that your startup has already launched your website or your web


content, your application, and that now you've just realized, wait, maybe we should do some


of that SEO stuff.


And yes, you should.


Let me make three big reasons, three big cases why you should.


First off, search traffic is among the most, the highest percentage of all referral traffic


on the web.


That is, social traffic sends approximately 5% to 6% of all the web's referral traffic.


Search engines send about 28% or 29% of all the web's referring traffic.


This is data according to SimilarWeb, who has a large clickstream panel that they look


at.


Second thing, search traffic, organic search traffic, is more than 90% of all the clicks


that go to search results.


So 90% of the clicks are going to organic, 10%, or actually less than 10%, are going


to the paid results.


Companies around the world are spending $40, $50, $60 billion a year or more on Google's


paid search results alone.


That organic stuff is a competitive advantage because it means low cost of customer acquisition,


it tends to mean higher retention, it tends to mean higher conversion rates.


Very, very attractive traffic.


And the third reason is, searches are a specific request from a user that says, I want this


thing and I want it right now.


That's some of the most powerful traffic you can possibly be in front of on the web.


And as a result, the startups that can get their product, their service, their company,


their brand in front of those searchers can have an outsized impact.


Now we need to kick off this audit.


So let's start with crawling, indexing, and website structure.


What I've essentially done here is taken sort of the top three things to be thinking about


for each of these and detailed them for you.


So when it comes to crawling and web structure, we want everything on one sub and root domain.


I can't tell you how many times I've seen startups use blog.startup.com or use startupblog.com


or they blog only on medium.com instead of blogging on their own site and using medium


as an additional network to amplify that content.


Or they put everything on their app and their app is one page and so Google can't index


anything except that one page.


Generally, all of these are terrible ideas.


If you can, keep everything in subfolders of, or if you call them subdirectories of


your website.


Don't separate out your content onto multiple sites and don't build anything on somebody


else's site unless you're also using it on your site and just referring back.


You want to use medium?


Great.


You want to use Facebook?


You want to use LinkedIn publishing?


Fantastic.


Always have the, here's the link to the original and point it to your website.


Second, it is free.


You can sign up for Google Search Console.


That will help you identify a lot of crawl errors and issues.


If you work with a professional SEO, chances are they're going to use a tool like onpage.org


or Screaming Frog or Moz's Crawl.


Those are all good too.


They can provide a little bit more extra detail.


One of the things that you will want to do when you're looking at your site is eliminate


duplicates, search URLs, meaning pages on your site that are essentially just search


results.


Google does not like your search results in their search results, and thin pages, pages


that have very little content.


You might think, oh, but they target some extra keywords for me.


Yeah, but Google considers your site as a whole.


If you have thousands of pages with very thin content, they're going to rank your other


content lower.


That is not a good thing.


You do not want that.


Next up, keyword research and targeting.


I'm going to ask that what you do is try and make a big, broad list.


You could do this in Excel.


You could do it in a Google spreadsheet.


You could do it in a tool like Keyword Explorer.


I want you to use a bunch of different sources.


I want you to look at keywords that your competitors are ranking for.


You can find that from lots of different tools.


You could use something like a keyword explorer.


You could use SEMrush.


You could use KeyCompete.


You could use SpyFu.


There's lots and lots of tools that allow you to do this.


I want you to also use the related and suggested search terms that come up when you search


for the key terms and phrases you're already targeting in Google.


I want you to use semantically connected terms and terms that are in the format of questions.


A lot of folks like Answer the Public.


Moz also has the filter in Keyword Explorer for queries that are in the form of questions.


These will give you a big, big broad list.


From there, you're going to need some metrics.


You want volume.


You can get that from Google's AdWords keyword tool.


You will have to either start an account and pay some money for some paid search ads, otherwise


Google only shows you these terrible things, or you're going to have to use a third party


tool like a SEMrush or a Keyword Explorer.


You want difficulty, so you want to know how hard it will be to rank.


That is not the same as the competition score that you get from AdWords.


Competition in AdWords is just the competition in the paid search results.


Not the same thing as how difficult it will be to rank in the organic search results.


You want to know click-through rate opportunity.


There's lots of ads above the fold.


If there's a knowledge graph, if there's an answer box up top there, that's going to drive


clicks away from the organic results.


You need to know that before you choose to target a keyword.


Finally, you're going to use these metrics, and you're going to prioritize by the importance


to you, to your company.


You're going to prioritize by the ease, the difficulty, and by the traffic, which is some


function of the click-through rate opportunity and the volume in order to choose right keywords


for you.


You're going to prioritize that big list that you've got, and then you're going to start


targeting.


We are going to create content that targets those searchers and serves them well.


Why do I say delight searchers here in this third section?


Well, because content that merely serves your purposes, that ranks, and maybe gets one or


two percent of people to convert on your site, give you their email address or sign up for


whatever it is you have to sign up for, a free trial or a subscription to your software,


that's fine, but you're probably going to be outranked by someone who does a fantastic


job of serving searchers before putting their own interests into the mix.


If you put your interests ahead of searchers' interests, over time, someone else is going


to take that traffic away from you, and Google is going to rank them first.


Don't just serve your own interests, your own funnel, satisfy those searchers.


You can use low engagement metrics to identify poorly performing URLs.


If you filter in your Google Analytics, your Omniture, whatever you've got by pages that


receive traffic from Google referrals, and then you look at bounce rate, you look at


time on site, you look at pages per visit, and you see pages that are very low on those


metrics, well, that is going to tell you, you are not doing a great job of serving those


searchers.


Google will probably, over time, push you down, push your competitors up.


That's a bad thing.


We want content that is doing a great job of delighting searchers.


It has to serve both their implicit and explicit query.


The explicit part of the query, that's usually obvious.


The implicit part can be, what do they really want to do after that, once they have that


answer?


Next, we're going to take that content and we are going to optimize it for search engines


and searchers.


That means using keywords intelligently and doing some smart on-page optimization.


Now, classic SEO kinds of things, some of them no longer apply.


The meta keywords tag, for example, that's gone.


We don't need to do the same sort of, every little variation of a keyword demands a different


page that we used to do in the past.


Things like keyword use in the title, the URL, the meta description, the headline, and


inside the content, they all still matter.


What we should be doing nowadays, though, is taking all the keywords that share the


same searcher intent, where the searcher is trying to essentially accomplish the same


thing.


Let's say I'm a mobile phone directory and I have a bunch of reviews of mobile phone


devices, best mobile phones, best cell phones, best smart phones, best smart phones 2016,


guess what?


They all share the same searcher intent.


I should have one page targeting all those keywords, not a separate one for each one.


So all the keywords that share the same intent get one URL.


Next up, snippet, my markup, and my schema optimization.


This is essentially where I'm trying to stand out from the pack in Google search results.


If you've performed a search in the last five years, you know that it doesn't just look


like 10 blue links anymore.


There are a lot more rich options for how your snippet, the search engine result position


that you appear in, can look to searchers, and that can drive a lot more traffic.


Check out schema.org and check out the types of results in your specific field or industry


or that go with your content that could be met by schema that Google supports right now.


You should be taking a look in your keyword research at the types of results that already


appear in your search engine result pages.


So if you check out your keywords, you know you're using a tool like Keyword Explorer,


you can see here's a distribution of search results that contain images, ones that contain


news results, ones that contain recipe rich snippets, ones that contain video, whatever


it is, right?


And then you can choose to do those.


Next, 15%, just about 15% of all search queries in Google today have an answer box of some


kind.


An answer box meaning that featured snippet up at what we call result number zero, up


before the top 10, usually right after the ads, and that can drive a tremendous amount


more traffic.


If you have answer box opportunities, you can take those from your competitors or you


can have your snippet appear in there.


There's a great presentation from Dr. Pete that you can check out on Moz or Whiteboard


Friday on that same topic as well.


Next, we want to think about non-Google sources of traffic or non-google.com web search sources


of traffic.


For example, YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, ahead of even


Baidu, ahead of Bing, ahead of Yahoo.


And if you are doing video content, you should be thinking about YouTube.


Even if you're not doing video content, you should be checking YouTube search volume to


see if lots of people are searching on YouTube for answers to the questions that your business


could answer with video.


You also want to consider alternative search formats like images, news, and apps in lots


of spaces.


For example, in home decor and home repair, image search is very, very popular.


Obviously, in spheres like politics and technology, news is very popular.


For lots of kinds of queries, apps are very popular, particularly those ones that happen


on mobile and have a clear app use or need around them.


If you are in the local space, you're going to want to check out Google Maps, which can


send a tremendous amount of traffic through there.


You can use a tool like a Moz Local or Yext for that.


You can check out if you're in e-commerce and you're selling a physical product, there


might be engines like Amazon or Etsy where you could and should be putting your product.


Next up, links and amplification.


Yes, links still matter.


Yes, they are still critical for rankings and you will need a lot of links from good


places that are editorially pointing to your content, to your website in order to rank


well.


You also want to earn other forms of amplification that will then lead to links.


Social sharing is one of the big ones.


Word of mouth is obviously a big one.


Lots of forms of advertising can eventually lead to links through awareness and those


sorts of things.


Before you ever create content, my suggestion is you should ask the question, who will help


amplify this and why?


If you don't have a great answer to that question, and I mean a specific list of people or a


specific list of outlets, you shouldn't hit publish.


Go and do that work first and every piece of content that you create will have more


success, in terms of amplification and reach and link potential and the potential to earn


an audience.


Why are you creating content if no one's going to see it?


This isn't a forest.


You don't need those trees falling.


Second one, you want to choose a link flywheel, a flywheel that's going to earn you links


over time.


There's a few different structures.


News and press tends to be a good structure that earn links over time in a flywheel sort


of format.


Content marketing tends to be one.


Partnerships tend to be one.


Embedded content tends to be one.


These flywheels tend to encounter friction.


That's where you use these smart hacks, like submissions to certain kinds of directories


that are editorial and high quality or outreach on a one-to-one basis.


You don't want to be doing these one-to-one kinds of hacky link building unless it's in


the service of a flywheel that's going to move faster over time and grow your link profile


while you're asleep.


Finally, last but not least, your conversion and funnel optimization.


You've done all this stuff to serve searchers well, to earn their trust and their traffic.


Now we have to realize two things.


One, conversion takes time and it takes a lot of visits.


In fact, WordStream, Larry Kim did some great research showing that over time on a second


or third or fourth visit, conversion rates move up by hundreds of percents versus that


first visit.


Don't expect that you are going to rank for a keyword, drive someone to your site for


the first time, and convert them instantly.


That rarely happens, sometimes, but rarely.


What's generally going to happen is that you're going to earn that click first and then over


time you're going to earn them back again, maybe through social channels, maybe through


amplification, through word of mouth, through type-in traffic, through a branded search,


through another completely unrelated search.


Then eventually they'll find their way back to you and on the third or fourth or fifth


visit they will convert.


We have to be thinking about how can I delight people, how can I brand them, and then eventually


I want to draw them back to my website and close the deal through my funnel.


That's what conversion optimization is when it works in the organic world.


We're through this very, very basic audit process.


A few frequently asked questions that I always get from startups.


Should I get a consultant in an agency or should I do it in-house?


If you know that SEO is going to be a long-term competitive advantage that you continue to


invest in and it's going to be something you need to do for the life of your company, you


should go in-house as soon as possible.


If, however, it's more like a nice-to-have and it's a helpful marketing channel but it's


not a core competency and you're not going to build the company's marketing strategy


around it, consultant or agency can work just fine.


There are some great ones, by the way.


C versus SEO.


Paid search is easy to invest in.


It is high cost but it's fast to get started.


For this reason, it's incredibly competitive and it tends to be the case that people are


bidding at or very close to their maximum ROI to spend ratio, meaning that there's not


usually, unless you have an incredible business model that's way better than all your competitors,


there's not usually a lot of competitive advantages to be earned in return on investment or in


cost of customer acquisition to lifetime value ratio in PPC.


SEO, on the other hand, takes a long time.


It's a lot of investment.


This is often a six-month or a year process before you start earning big returns and therefore


very few people invest in it strategically and it is a much bigger competitive advantage.


C. I get this from a lot of folks, especially in the technical world.


Can't Google just figure this all out?


No, they absolutely cannot.


If you ignore these things and choose not to invest strategically and specifically in


SEO, Google will not just figure it out.


That has never happened to anyone who's made SEO a true competitive advantage in their


startup, in their company's marketing channels.


It's just not how it works.


D. Does social media impact SEO?


The answer is yes but indirectly.


When you do good things on social, they can lead to good links, they can lead to good


engagement on your site, which is certainly a positive signal for Google, and they can


lead to word of mouth, which can result in branded searches and more clickstream traffic


to your site and all these sorts of things that Google can see.


But if you think that buying a bunch of likes or a bunch of tweets on Fiverr is going to


help your page rank higher, you're in for, well, $5 a pane.


Fiverr's quite cheap.


All right, everyone.


Thank you so much for having me at StartCon.


Thanks for watching me on Whiteboard Friday and I hope to see you around Moz and maybe


down in Australia sometime in the near future.


#WhiteboardFriday: The Theory Behind Ranking Factors

Music


Hi folks, welcome back to another Whiteboard Friday.


Today we're going to be talking about ranking factors and the theory behind them.


And hopefully get past some of these, let's say controversies that have come up over the years


when we've really just been talking past one another.


You see, ranking factors have been with us since pretty much day one of search engine optimization.


We have been trying as SEOs to identify exactly what influences the algorithm.


Well, that's what we're going to go over today, but we're going to try and tease out some better definitions and vocabulary


so that we're not talking past one another and we're not constantly beating each other over the heads about


correlation not causation or some other kind of nuance that really doesn't matter.


So, let's begin at the beginning with direct ranking factors.


This is the most narrow kind of understanding of ranking factors.


It's not to say that it's wrong, it's just, it's pretty restrictive.


And a direct ranking factor would be something that Google measures and directly influences the performance of the search result.


So, a classic example would actually be your robots.txt file.


If you make a change to your robots.txt file and let's say you disallow Google,


you will have a direct impact on your performance in Google, namely your site's going to disappear.


The same is true for the most part with relevancy.


Now, we might not know exactly what it is that Google is using to measure relevancy,


but we do know that if you improve the relevancy of your content, you're more likely to rank higher.


So, these are what we would call direct ranking factors.


But there's obviously a lot more to it than that.


Google has added more and more features to their search engine.


They have changed the way that their algorithms work.


They've added more and more machine learning.


So, I've done my best to try and tease out some new vocabulary that we might be able to use to describe the different types of ranking factors


that we often discuss in our various communities or online.


Now, obviously if there's direct ranking factors, it seems like there should be indirect ranking factors.


And these are just once removed ranking factors or interventions that you could take that don't directly influence the algorithm,


but they do influence some of the direct ranking factors which influence the algorithm.


I think a classic example of this is hosting.


Let's say you have a site that's starting to become more popular,


and it's time to move off of that dollar a month cPanel hosting that you signed up for when you first started your blog.


Well, you might choose to move to, let's say, a dedicated host that has a lot more RAM and CPU and can handle more threads.


So, everything's moving faster, time to first byte is faster.


Well, Google doesn't have an algorithm that's going out and digging into your server and identifying exactly how many CPU cores there are.


But there are a number of direct ranking factors, those that are related perhaps to user experience or perhaps to page speed


that might be influenced by your hosting environment.


And subsequently, we have good reason to believe that improving your hosting environment could have a positive influence on your search rankings.


But it wouldn't be a direct influence, it would be indirect.


The same would be true with social media.


While we're pretty sure that Google isn't just going out and saying, okay, whoever's the most popular on Twitter is going to rank,


there is good reason to believe that investing your time, your money, and your energy in promoting your content on social media can actually influence your search results.


A perfect example of this would be promoting an article on Facebook, which later gets picked up by some online publication and then links back to your site.


So, while the social media activity itself did not directly influence your search results,


it did influence the links and those links influenced your search results.


So, we can call these indirect ranking factors.


And I want, for politeness sake, please, when someone talks about social media as a ranking factor,


just don't immediately assume that they mean that it is a direct ranking factor.


They very well may mean that it is indirect, and you can ask them to clarify.


Well, what do you mean? Do you think Google measures social media activity,


or are you saying that doing a better job on social is likely to influence search results in some way or another?


So, this is part of the process of teasing out the differences between ranking factors.


It gives us the ability to communicate about them in a way in which we're not, let's say, confusing what we mean by the words.


Now, the third type is probably the one that's going to be most controversial, and I'm actually okay with that.


I would love to talk in either the comments or on Twitter about exactly what I mean by emergent ranking factors.


And I think it's important that we get this one clear in some way, shape, or form because I think it's going to be more and more and more important


as machine learning itself becomes more and more and more important as a part of Google's algorithm.


Many, many years ago, search engine optimizers like myself noticed that web pages on domains that had strong link authority


seemed to do well in organic search results, even when the page itself wasn't particularly good,


didn't have particularly good external links or any at all, and even didn't have particularly good internal links.


That is to say, it was a nearly orphaned page.


And so SEO started to wonder whether or not there was some sort of domain level attribute that Google was using as a ranking factor.


Well, we can't know that. We can't, well, we can ask Google, but we can only hope that they'll tell us.


So at Moz, what we decided to do was try and identify a series of domain level link metrics that actually predict the likelihood that a page will perform well in the search results.


And we call this an emergent ranking factor, at least I call it an emergent ranking factor,


because it is obviously the case that Google does not have a specific domain authority-like feature inside their algorithm.


But on the contrary, they also do have a lot of data about links pointing to different pages on that same domain.


And what I believe is going on is what I would call an emergent ranking factor, which is where the, let's say, the influence of several different metrics,


none of which have a particularly intended purpose of creating something, end up being easy to measure and to talk about as an emergent ranking factor rather than as part of all of its constituent elements.


Now, that was kind of a mouthful, so let me give you an example.


When you're making a sauce, if you're cooking, one of the most common parts of that would be the production of a roux.


A roux would be a mix normally of equal weights of flour and fat, and you would use this to thicken the sauce.


Now, I could write an entire recipe book about sauces and never use the word roux.


Just don't use it.


And describe the process of producing roux a hundred times, but never actually use the word roux, because roux describes this intermediate state.


But it becomes very, very useful as a chef to be able to just say to another chef or sous chef or a cook in their cookbook to say,


produce a roux out of, and then whatever it is, the particular fat that you're using, whether it's butter or oil or something of that sort.


So, the analogy here is that there isn't really a thing called a roux that's inside the sauce.


What's in the sauce is the fat in the flour, but at the same time, it's really convenient to refer to it as a roux.


In fact, we can use the word roux to know a lot about a particular dish without ever talking about the actual ingredients of flour and of fat.


For example, we can be pretty confident that if a roux is called for a particular dish, that dish is likely not bacon.


It's not a sauce.


So, I guess what I'm trying to get at here is that a lot of what we're talking about with ranking factors is using language that is convenient and valuable for certain purposes.


Like, DA is valuable for helping predict search results, but it doesn't actually have to be a part of the algorithm in order to do that.


In fact, I think there's a really interesting example that's going on right now.


We're about to see a shift from the categories, which are Core Web Vitals.


Google has been pushing page speed for quite some time and has provided us several iterations of different types of metrics for determining how fast a page loads.


However, what appears to be the case is that Google has decided not to promote individual particular steps that a website could take in order to speed up,


but instead want you to maximize or minimize a particular emergent value that comes from the amalgamation of all of those steps.


So, we know that the three different types of Core Web Vitals are first input delay, largest contentful paint, and cumulative layout shift.


So, let's talk about the third one.


If you've ever been on your cell phone and you've noticed that the text loads before certain other aspects, and you start reading it and you try to scroll down,


and as soon as you put your finger there, an ad pops up because the ad took longer to load, and it's just jostling the page.


Well, that's layout shift, and Google has learned that users just don't like it.


And so, even though they don't know all of the individual factors underneath that are responsible for cumulative layout shift,


they know that there's this measurement that explains all of it, that is great shorthand and a really effective way of determining whether or not a user is going to enjoy their experience on that page.


So, this would be an emergent ranking factor.


Now, what's interesting is that Google has now decided that this emergent ranking factor is going to become a direct ranking factor in 2021.


They're going to move these descriptive factors that are amalgamations of lots of little things and make them directly influence the search results.


So, we can see how these different types of ranking factors can move back and forth from categories.


And back to the question of domain authority.


Now, Google has made it clear they don't use Moz's domain authority, of course they don't, and they do not have a domain authority like metric.


However, there's nothing to say that at some point they could not build exactly that.


Some sort of domain level link based metric which is used to inform how to rank certain pages.


So, an emergent ranking factor isn't stuck in that category.


It can change.


Well, that's enough about emergent ranking factors.


Hopefully, we can talk more about that in the comments.


The next step I wanted to run through is what I would call a validating ranking factor.


And this is another one that's been pretty controversial which is the quality rating guidelines list of things that matter.


And probably the one that gets the most talked about is EAT, expertise, authority, and trustworthiness.


Well, Google has made it clear that not only do they not measure EAT, or at least as best as I've understood, they don't have metrics that are specifically targeted at EAT.


Not only do they not do that, they also, when they collect the data from quality raters on whether or not the SERPs they're looking at meet these qualifications,


they don't train their algorithm against the label data that comes back from their quality raters.


Which, to me, is surprising. It seems to me like if you had a lot of label data about quality, expertise, authoritativeness, you might want to train against that.


But maybe Google found out that it wasn't very productive.


Nevertheless, we know that Google cares about EAT.


And we also have anecdotal evidence, that is to say webmasters have noticed over time, especially in your money or your life types of industries,


that expertise and authority does appear to matter in some way, shape, or form.


So, I like to call these validating ranking factors because Google uses them to validate the quality of the SERPs and the sites that are ranking.


But don't actually use them in any kind of direct or indirect way to influence the search results.


Now, I've got an interesting one here, which is what I would call user engagement.


And the reason why I've put it here is because this still remains to be a fairly controversial ranking factor.


We're not quite sure exactly how Google uses it, although we do get some hints every now and then, like Core Web Vitals.


If that data is collected from actual user behavior in Chrome, then we've got an idea of exactly how user engagement could have an indirect impact on the algorithm


because user engagement measures the Core Web Vitals, which coming in 2021 are going to directly influence the search results.


So, validating is this fourth category of ranking factors.


And the last, the one that I think is the most controversial is correlates.


We get into this argument every time, correlation does not equal causation.


And it seems to me to be the statement that the person who only knows one thing about statistics knows,


and so they always say it whenever anything ever comes up about correlation.


And yes, correlation does not imply causation.


But that doesn't mean it isn't very, very useful.


So, let's talk about social metrics.


This is one of the classic ones.


Several times we've run various studies of ranking factors and discovered a direct relationship, a strong relationship between things like Facebook likes or Google pluses and rankings.


All right.


Now, pretty much everyone immediately understood that the reason why a site would have more plus ones in Google Plus, would have more likes in Facebook, would be because they rank.


That is to say, it's not Google going out and depending on Facebook's API to determine how they're going to rank their search engine or rank their sites in their search engine.


On the contrary, performing well in their search engine drives traffic and that traffic then tends to like the page.


So, I understand the frustration there when customers start asking, well, these two things correlate, why aren't you getting me more likes?


I get that.


But it doesn't mean that it isn't useful in other ways.


So, I'll give you a good example.


If you were ranking well for a keyword, but yet your social media metrics are poorer than your competitors, well, it means that there's something going on in that situation that is making your users engage better with your competitor sites than your own.


And that's important to know.


It might not change your rankings, but it might change your conversion rate.


It might increase the likelihood that you get found on social media.


And even more so, it could actually influence your search results because when you recognize the reason why you're not getting any likes to your page is because you have broken code, so the Facebook button isn't working.


And then you add it and you start getting shared and more and more people are engaging with and linking to your content, well, then we start having that indirect effect on your rankings.


So, yeah, correlation isn't the same as causation, but there's a lot of value there.


And there's a new area that I think is going to be really, really important for this.


And this is going to be natural language processing metrics.


These are various different technologies that are on the cutting edge.


Well, some are older, some are newer, but that allow us to kind of predict how good content is.


Now, chances are we are not going to guess the exact way that Google is measuring content quality.


It's just, I mean, unless a leaked document or something shows up, we're probably not going to get that lucky.


But that doesn't mean we can't be really productive if we have a number of correlates and those correlates can then be used to guide us.


So, I drew a little map here to kind of serve as an example, but imagine that it's the evening and you're camping and you decide to go on a quick hike.


And you take with you, let's say, a flag or a series of flags and you mark the trail as you go so that when it gets later,


you can flick on your flashlight and just follow the flags, picking them up to lead you back to camp.


But it gets super dark and then you realize you left your flashlight back at camp.


What are you going to do? Well, we need to find a way to guide ourselves back to camp.


Now, obviously, the flags would have been the best situation, but there are lots of things that are not the camp itself and are not the path itself,


but would still be really helpful in getting us back to camp.


So, for example, let's say that you had just put out the fire after you left camp.


Well, the smell of the smoke is a great way for you to find your way back to the camp, but the smoke isn't the camp.


It didn't cause the camp, it didn't build the camp. It's not the path. It didn't create the path.


In fact, the trail of smoke itself is probably quite off the path, but once you do find where it crosses you, you can follow that scent.


Well, in that case, it's really valuable, even though it just mildly correlates with exactly where you need to get.


Well, the same thing is true when we're talking about something like NLP metrics or social media metrics.


While they might not matter in terms of influencing the search results directly, they can guide your way.


They can help you make better decisions.


The thing you want to stay away from is manipulating these types of metrics for their own sake,


because we know that correlates are the furthest away from direct ranking factors,


at least when we know that the correlate itself is not a direct ranking factor.


All right, I know that's a lot to stomach, a lot to take in, so hopefully we have some material for us to discuss below in the comments,


and I look forward to talking with you more.


Mission SEO Impossible - Whiteboard Friday

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


This week we're chatting about one of the toughest things that a lot of SEOs face, which


is trying to rank for these specific types of queries that have a plural comparative


intent behind them.


So I'll give you a bunch of examples just to set the stage for this.


Let's say I'm a hotel operator in Edinburgh and I run one individual hotel, maybe a boutique


hotel, and I want to rank for best hotels in Edinburgh.


But that is nearly impossible because if you look at the front page of results, all the


folks there are comparative types of sites, right?


They're media properties, they're hotel comparison shopping sites, so it's TripAdvisor and Telegraph


and US News and World's Reports, and This is Edinburgh, which is a media magazine there.


If I want to rank for compare headphones and I am the makers of one particular type of


headphones, it's incredibly difficult to outrank a PC magazine, Forbes, headphonescompared.com,


CNET, Revue.


This is an incredible challenge, right?


Best Broadway shows.


How am I going to – if I'm operating a new Broadway show and I want to come up for this,


which would be really meaningful for my Broadway show, which by the way, most of them lose


money, it's an incredibly tough business, NYC Theatre, Time Out, Broadway.com, how do


I get in there?


Or let's say I'm in the software field, right?


I'm full contact and I want to rank for full contact versus Clearbit.


This is the case.


There are lots of comparative types of searches like this.


If you search for your brand name or your product's brand name and versus, you'll almost


certainly come up with a bunch of suggestions.


Well, it turns out full contact, neither full contact nor Clearbit rank for this type of


query, right?


So it's a long-bound.org and StackShare and Quora and Analyzeu for Android word games.


If I've come out with a new word game, it could be huge for me to rank for this term,


but you know what?


It's going to be Android Central and Google Play, Tom's Guide, Android Headlines, right?


If I have a new TV comedy, well, it would be fantastic because a lot of people are searching


for TV comedies or TV comedies on Netflix or what have you, right?


And if I was Netflix or if I were some of these folks, I would love to come up here,


but instead it's Uproxx and Ranker and IMDb.


It's comparative media sites almost always.


So what do we do, right?


The first step is we have to identify the problem.


What is fundamentally going on?


Why is it that these types of sites consistently outperform?


This is not universal, but it's close enough, especially on competitive head terms like


some of these, where it gets close to impossible or feels that way.


First off, it's really tough to rank without using the right words and phrases.


And if you are a boutique hotel in Edinburgh, you might not be very comfortable using words


like Hilton or Marriott or some of these other words that are branded terms that are owned


by your competition.


There could be legal issues around that, but it might also just be a brand guidelines type


of thing.


So that's one part of the hard problem.


Second, it's really hard to rank without serving the searcher's true intent.


And in these cases, the searcher's intent is I want to compare multiples of these things.


So if you have an individual hotel website or an individual headphone website, an individual


Android word game, that's not actually answering the searcher's intent.


It used to be easier back before RankBrain and before Google got really smart with Hummingbird


around their query intent understanding, but these days, very, very challenging.


So that's the second one.


And the third challenge, it's really hard to get links.


Hard to get links when you're purely promotional or self-interested, right?


You're just one brand trying to outrank these folks because these types of pieces of content


seem sort of less selfish, right?


The comparisons feel less self-interested and therefore it's easier for them to get


organic links.


So tough challenge here, three big issues that we have to address.


And there actually are some solutions.


There are some ways that some very creative and clever folks have worked around this in


the past and you can use them as well.


First one, you can try separating your media or your blog or editorial content.


By separate, I mean one of two ways.


Either you could go a wholly separate domain.


That's pretty tough.


You won't inherit the domain authority, right?


It'll probably be a new domain, so that will be a challenge.


Or you simply separate it editorially such that it's segmented from the promotional content.


Moz actually does this and as a result, we rank for a lot of these types of queries.


We even rank for a lot of SEO software types of queries that are clearly comparative because


we have that editorial independence in our editorial content.


So this is one way you can go about doing that.


Second, you could try a guest posting strategy or guest contribution.


So if you can go out to the websites that are already listed here or ones like them,


those independent editorial media-driven properties and say, hey, I will contribute to this as


an independent author or writer.


Yes, I work for this brand, but I think when you see my content, you will see that I've


done my research and I am not biased.


And if you can prove that to the editors at these publications, you can often prove that


to the audience as well, and then you can earn these types of rankings.


You can actually see an example of this.


I think it was – yes, I think the Forbes contributor here, I suspect they worked either


with or for or at least in conjunction with a brand because it seemed like they had a


preference behind them and the author had a connection there.


Third one, you can commission independent research.


This is something that a lot of big companies will do.


They'll go out and they'll say, hey, you're an independent research firm that's well-trusted.


Will you do some research in our particular space?


And then hopefully something that the press will pick up, and it's these press websites


that you're actually hoping are going to earn the rankings over here.


I will say, while most of the folks doing this right now are very large companies with


big research budgets and big advertising and promotional budgets, you don't have to be.


You can go and contract a single expert in the field, someone that you trust to do a


great job, and you can say, hey, you already contribute to CNET.