Image personalization, seeing your own face in an email, there's nothing more personal


The Hidden Talents of Email: Creating Customer-Centric Messages Presented by Justine Jordan

than that, which is totally awesome.


That was before I cut all my hair off.


I promise that's me.


Interactivity, we sent an email releasing our new builder product and actually had an


interactive tour of the product in the email.


Now, this is crazy.


It doesn't work everywhere.


It requires a lot of hacks, a lot of technical know-how, but it's one of those things where


if you're able to pull it off and you have the right audience, it can really blow their


minds.


We had people talking about this on Twitter for days.


Or gamification, it's possible with email.


Rather than just telling everyone the name of the city of the last stop on our conference


tour, we asked people to tweet and share the email in order to reveal the third city in


the email itself.


So we said here's how to reveal the surprise city.


We included a share tracker that showed how many people had shared the Twitter, shared


the email on Twitter and Facebook and had forwarded the email.


And then their tweets actually showed up live in the email itself, too.


Pretty cool.


We had, I think, something like 1500 tweets in 24 hours or something about this.


It was just nuts.


At least for our business.


It was a big deal.


So, in closing, if you can combine that subscriber experience with the hierarchy of subscriber


needs and really tailor your emails to the needs of both of those things, uniting your


needs with the customer's needs, you can unlock the hidden talents of email.


Because good emails make people open and good emails make people click, but great emails


make people think, feel, act, share, and deliver really, really awesome experiences.


So you can make email better.


Thanks.


That's all I've got.


Thank you, Justine.


I think you conveniently managed to use up all your time there, didn't you?


I did.


Do we have time for a question?


Up to you.


Someone asked, and I don't know who it was, so I'm not going to out you, they said, my


company's fallen into the trap of offering giveaways to increase open rates.


It's not really working anymore.


They want to transition back to more relevant subject lines, more relevant content.


Any suggestions or recommendations?


I would, again, follow the funnel.


If you're doing a lot of giveaways or a lot of maybe suboptical marketing techniques and


your management is really buying into that because the open rates are higher, it's like


building the list, take that follow the funnel approach.


I can almost guarantee you that the people that are engaging with those are signing up


as a result of those.


You're going to have higher unsubscribe rates and you're going to have higher complaint


rates, which a lot of people don't realize can affect your deliverability down the road.


So email platforms like Gmail are actually looking at that type of engagement in an activity,


and if you have a lot of people marketing as spam or complaining, you can be forbidden


from delivering email in the future.


Okay.


We had a few different technical questions like how do I make my buttons bigger and how


do I do anything for Outlook?


I'm not going to get you to rattle off every technical answer right now.


For people trying to figure this stuff out, looking for resources, what do you recommend?


Where would you point people to to answer all of this?


I'm biased.


Litmus, the company I work for, I think has great resources for this.


Our conference is actually in San Francisco later this week.


I'm headed down there after this.


We have a great blog.


We have a great community.


There's tons and tons of tons of technical resources on both the blog and the community.


Other good resources, campaign monitor.


If you go to that landing page, thelitmus.com slash LP slash MozCon, I have a ton of stuff


on there, a lot to third parties.


MailChimp has a good technical online resource, and there's a bunch of people that are on


Twitter that you should follow, too.


If you tweet at me, I will definitely get you some specific names, though.


Fantastic.


Thank you.


Daily SEO Fix - Keyword Opportunities

Hey there, I'm Emily and I'm from the onboarding team here at Moz.


Daily SEO Fix - Keyword Opportunities

Today we'll be talking about how to find some more keyword opportunities within MozPro.


Daily SEO Fix - Keyword Opportunities

Within MozPro, head to your campaign section and into rankings.


Daily SEO Fix - Keyword Opportunities

And then click here on opportunities.


Daily SEO Fix - Keyword Opportunities

Here you'll find keywords that may be sending traffic to your site and your site is already ranking for,


Daily SEO Fix - Keyword Opportunities

but you're not currently tracking within your campaign.


Daily SEO Fix - Keyword Opportunities

You can click on the track checkbox here to track how well you're performing for these keyword rankings over time.


Daily SEO Fix - Keyword Opportunities

This data is powered by Keyword Explorer.


Daily SEO Fix - Keyword Opportunities

This new keyword ranking data will be available for you after your next weekly campaign update.


Daily SEO Fix - Keyword Opportunities


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Hey everybody.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Okay, time to introduce our next speaker.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So, MozCon Virtual, really cool, best virtual conference out there.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

But we were originally going to have MozCon in person in Seattle.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

There are a few people coming in from different parts of the world


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

that I really wanted to meet.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Our next speaker is one of those people, Izzy Smith.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

I've never met Izzy in real life.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

If you follow her on Twitter, which you should,


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

she has one of the best SEO Twitter games going on, other than me of course.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

But she is great.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

She used to do SEO for six car rental company, and now she works for Wright,


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

the SEO tools company, doing amazing work, showing people different things about Google.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

She's talking about something today that's near and dear to my heart,


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

which is click-through rate.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

I'm not going to get into it.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

I write a lot about this, so I'm excited to watch her presentation.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Let's kick it over to Izzy.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So, hello everyone, and welcome to my talk all about how to be ahead of the CCR curve.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

And good morning MozCon.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

I'm unfortunately very sad that I can't be there in person, but it's a huge honor


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

to be speaking here with and in front of you all today.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

And of course, the pleasure of attending a physical conference is shadowed


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

by many sacrifices we've had to make.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

We've all been through a lot recently, no matter in which situation you've been.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So it's very important to celebrate the little successes.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

And personally, I've been trying my best as much as I can during the situation.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

I'm sure you have too, holding it together for the people around me, my family back home,


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

my colleagues, and my community.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

As well, and in our work life, we've had to rapidly adapt in certain cases.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

I've spoken with good friends who have agencies, good friends who are consultants


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

who lost clients, unfortunately, and even in-houses who have lost their jobs.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So we're really rapidly changing our priorities here in our SEO work.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

For example, at Right, we've been doing a lot of analysis into GSE impression data


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

to uncover which industries are performing well, which are struggling,


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

so that we can feed this information and help our clients out with action plans.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

And yeah, our time spent on SEO tasks is becoming even more precious.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

You've probably noticed this as well.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

We're all scrambling to get the best jobs done with limited time, unfortunately.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

A lot of copy and pasting or a lot of manual tasks.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

We're trying to do our best as we normally can, but with shorter time


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

and with much more stranger circumstances.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Am I right?


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Maybe you agree, I'm sure you will.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

And yeah, we're all striving to spend our time and knowledge in order to achieve


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

fantastic rankings for our clients and for our business via things like relevant content,


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

having great technical prowess, high user experience, and so on.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

But maybe sometimes we're losing sight of one of the most valuable KPIs.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Are we focusing on what this all boils down to?


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Something that's indicative of everything we strive for in SEO,


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

valuable user experiences, meaningful engagements, and so on.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So the humble click, the KPI it all comes down to.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

But of course, not all clicks are equal.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

They're not all created equal.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So the better KPI we need to be aspiring for is the engage click.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

What is a click without the intent to be there, sorry, and to prolong their visit and their custom?


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Also known as the long click, something we should be aspiring to.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Not only does it result in more value for your business, but it's the type of qualitative feedback


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

that you can directly provide to search engines to prove that you deserve to be ranking well


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

or higher than before.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So an excerpt from Steve Levy's book puts it best.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

To paraphrase Tolstoy, happy users were the same.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

The best sign of their happiness was the long click.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Now, this is a pattern widely analyzed by SEOs and data scientists, computer scientists alike.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So I'd like to reference it quite a lot.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

And also in this talk, I mention it quite often.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Modifying search result ranking based on implicit user feedback.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Let me read you some boring slides.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Don't worry, there'll be memes and funny stuff later.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

But it's important to get this context across.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So user reactions to particular search results or search result lists may be gauged.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So that results on which users often click will receive a higher ranking.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

There are also short clicks.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

A short click can be considered indicative of a poor page and thus given a low weight.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

A medium click and so on can be considered indicative of a potentially good page or an


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

okay page and given a slightly higher weight like 0.5.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

And a long click can be seen as a great page and given a much higher weight.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Finally, there is the last click when the user doesn't return to the main page, to the


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

main SERP.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

And this can be considered as likely indicative of a good, okay page and given a fairly high


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

weight, for example, 0.9.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Of course, it depends.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Like everything in SEO, a short click can be indicative of quality also if someone is


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

directly looking for a quick piece of information.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

But remember, Google is smart enough to answer those queries themselves.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Queries that would result in a positive short click, positive to you and your brand, will


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

simply all be satisfied by Google anyway.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

If not now, it will be later.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So all that aside, where do we start with analyzing and improving the quality and quantity


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

of our engaged clicks?


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Those positive long clicks.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

For that, we need to measure our organic clicks and the patterns effectively, effectively,


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

effectively and get to work rapidly.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

And we need for that the best tool in our inventory.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Of course, I'm talking about the wonderful Google search console, which is home to the


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

most powerful data set that us as SEOs or as webmasters, business owners, it's the most


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

powerful data set we have.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

But it's all too often that the interface highly limits our potential of slicing and


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

dicing the data to our needs, of drilling down, of filtering, of seeing capabilities


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

and the full picture past that 1000 rows of initial information.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So using the Google search console manually for that search performance won't really help


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

you get the full extent out of it.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So I can only recommend to build a more actionable performance dashboard, pulling that data via


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

the GSC API.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

For example, a later solace, the wonderful later has a great template if you're struggling


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

to get started.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Of course, I'm personally using right search access.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

The most easiest and efficient way to analyze all of that GSC data.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

But the point is, we need to turn all of that wonderful data into a masterpiece.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

And yeah, myself and my colleagues, Alex and Marcus, the technical SEO team right at the


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

best job in the world because we have 33 terabytes of GSC search performance data to sift through,


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

to analyze, to find those patterns, to detect what is going on.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

It's like a veritable treasure trove of SEO nerdy data.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

I love it.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

And that's around 5000 connected accounts, which is pretty exciting.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

And this usually makes me think I am a data scientist, but I'm not.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Maybe you want either, you're probably not.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

But luckily I have those in house and that doesn't even matter anyway.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

You don't need to be, that's okay.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So whether you beautify your precious data using Google Data Studio with help from a


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

later's wonderful template, maybe you have your own in house built solutions or also


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Hannah Rampton, she's fantastic.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Very recently ramped up her GSC connector in Google Sheets.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Please check out that template as well.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

I forgot to link it.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Damn it.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Oh, there's a link.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Yeah.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Or if you have tons and tons and tons of data with limited time, limited time, a tool like


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Search Success.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

But however you use it, just use it.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

It doesn't really matter what tool you're using, how you pull in that data, as long


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

as you're using that real GSC data for analyzing your long clicks and your impressions.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Because as powerful as they may be, rank trackers won't always cut it due to the fact that you're


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

just looking at a ranking position snapshot.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Only in the search console you can really see what happened, can investigate.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

It's your data.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

You already have access to it.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

It's free data.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Why wouldn't you use it?


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

And it's reliable data.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

It's purely from Google itself.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

The beast that we are targeting, that we're working for.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

We're not working for them directly, of course, but you know what I mean?


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So use it, but use it wisely.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

I can't stress that enough.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

With great data comes great responsibilities.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

You have to know what you're looking for.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Don't get lost down these tracks of average positions, misleading click-through rates,


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

or high impressions that give you false hope.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Remember, yeah, I can't stress that enough, that our time is more precious than ever.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So we have to use it as smartly as we can.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So today I'm going to be showing you some crucial patterns to look out for in your search


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

performance data that you can find with your own GSC accounts, for your own business, for


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

your own clients, to be really aware of what is going on there, how you can detect things


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

like your meaningful long clicks and keep uplifting them for even more growth.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

I'm using real life GSC data.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

I've got some really nice juicy examples for you.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Of course, in many places it's anonymized to protect the clients that I work with.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So that you yourself can strive to be ahead of that CTR curve, to keep driving in those


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

engaged clicks, and to be proving to Google that you deserve to be ranking well.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So CTR, are you ready?


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

With my talks, you can always expect cheesy puns and bad SEO memes.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So you better be.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Number one, let's get right to it.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Performance-based core update impacts.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

I added this first as it's been something that myself and my colleagues have been recently


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

working on, assisting our wonderful clients on uncovering where and how they were hit


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

by Google's May core update.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Of course, industry experts like the fantastic Dr. Pete have been working hard on analyzing


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

bulk data.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

But as he mentions quite often in this article, no one metric can ever tell the whole story.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So you need to sift through your own search performance data, truly analyze what is going


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

on there, and try to get as close to the reason as possible.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So in my analyses of the recent core update and of the previous ones, my impact reasoning


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

fell into three specific buckets.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So relevancy.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Google has found your domain to be ranking for irrelevant queries that you were unable


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

to satisfy, and thus you lost those rankings.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

I don't know, I see that as a bad thing.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

I see it as Google properly ranking for my website for keywords that it deserves to bring


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

traffic for.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

It's a slight adjustment.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

It could be EAT.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

We hear that very often.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Expertise, authoritateness, and trust.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

It's not always the sole reason for core update impacts.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

But in some cases, you could have been seen by Google as having a low EAT scoring within


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

your industry.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Google has demoted your website to improve the quality and reliability of their results


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

as they do on a very ongoing basis.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Or it could be underperformance.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Google might have tested your page for a specific keyword rankings that did not perform as well


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

as expected.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

This could be a huge shift in where Google demotes you and they see that this is a sign


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

that your results are irrelevant, low quality, or maybe just in need of some sub sprucing.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

I love that word.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Sprucing.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Or it could be something else completely like a reversal of a previous core update or something


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

else.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

It could be factors from all of them.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

It's usually quite hard to see.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So let's take this health magazine as an example.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Around June 2019, that core update, or was it May?


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

May, yeah.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

They saw a drop of 60% clicks.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So a huge dramatic loss there.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So one month before the update, non-branded click-through rate was performing incredibly


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

well.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So just in that row there, you can see some really juicy click-through rates for high


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

impression keywords.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

The core update recognized low EAT signals for such a high your money or your life required


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

industry and kicked them down.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

There were things like no expert authors, no real authorship at all.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So they were linking to generic journalist pages that had nothing to do with medicine


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

and they were themselves giving advice on very serious matters.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So really not proving their expertise.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

This is a kind of normal example of EAT.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

I'm not going to be talking about that so much today, but I created a template to guide


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

you into the right direction of improving your EAT, depending on specific verticals


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

that you may or may not work in.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Check it out.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

I hope you like it.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

I love a good Trello board.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

But today I want to point out something that we can analyze better with our GSE data.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So underperformance factors getting us down.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

This can happen maybe gradually over time or in one fell swoop of a core update.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

There we go.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So this is what a pretty typical core update looks like.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

You can see clearly the drop in impressions and clicks as well as the number of ranking


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

keywords.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

It is especially this drop in the number of ranking keywords, which is important because


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

around Christmas, you can observe a similar drop in impressions and clicks, but here the


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

number of keywords stay the same and even slightly increased like it did.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So people were still searching for the same keywords just in lower volumes.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Let's take a look at some individual keywords.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So I've gathered around three or four of their focus keywords that they really try and optimize


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

for.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So these are directly being impacted by the core update.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

We can see that very clearly, the position tanks and with the impressions.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

You can also see for the same keyword how the site got tested within the top 10 for


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

about 10 weeks.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

But during that time, the website didn't get a lot of clicks for this very lucrative click


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

worthy keyword.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So just 273 clicks out of 125,000 searches.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So it got pushed onto page two again.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Exact same behavior with another affected keyword, a great focus keyword of theirs,


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

but you tanked in impressions and position.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

And another pretty juicy one, which failed to entice users to click through to the website.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So a CTR of 0.1%, all which were adamantly clear signs to big G, big G, big Google, that


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

they were not worthy.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

They were not a correct fit.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

And so, yeah.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So pattern number two is knowing when you've lost and when your hard, precious time is


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

spent elsewhere.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

In other words, identifying irrelevant rankings and inhospitable search.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

I call it inhospitable because it's very hard to survive on those search engine result pages


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

as an organic page.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So some examples from our own domain now.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So we have the right Wiki, which is like a lexicon of many specific online marketing


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

terms.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So a clear navigational query Bing, as you can see, it's quite funny.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

A lot of people search for Bing on Google.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

You can clearly see the top 10 tests always with a nice corresponding uplift in impressions.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

That's quite a big increase there.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

But of course, we didn't get that many clicks through.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

We have a very low, very close to 0% click through rate.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So we can't establish ourselves properly in the top 10.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

And therefore, we're now on page five, which is well deserved.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

There's no need to take action here.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

This is really just optimizing for third party visibility metrics, for ranking for those


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

lucrative impression terms.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

And next up, a really typical definition intent keyword SERP.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

We're looking probably to understand what SERP stands for, search engine result page.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

It's difficult to get any meaningful traffic or meaningful amount of traffic via this keyword


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

beyond that feature snippet that is there.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So first, we got qualified for the test on page two after applying some on-page optimizations,


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

getting those classic ranking factors in place.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Then we were tested on the top 10 for a couple of months.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

And the length of these tests depend on the number of searches because Google will likely


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

need to ensure statistical relevance.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

It's hard to talk.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

But yet again, in this case, we can't entice users to click through to our website because


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

that intent is simply not there.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So we got pushed down to page three.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

We're going for good here.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

But since the keyword isn't really that juicy for us as a wiki page, we don't need to


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

act.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So what did we do about it?


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Nothing, nothing.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

The underperforming CTR was only proof that our wiki pages are simply not a purely a wholly


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

relevant result for those pure answer intent or branded navigational queries like Bing,


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

for example.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So using our precious time, we focus our attention elsewhere on results that we have the power


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

to influence and that will hopefully have a higher click event.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Intent, intent, which takes me to my next example.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

For example, yeah.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

And what I like to do also before I go into the next example is cluster those in hospitable


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

SERPs.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

For example, if it's like pure entity keywords named entities, I group them in one segment


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

and I filter that out of my general reporting, general analysis and uplift.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Yeah.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Growth analysis, discovery, sorry.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So yeah, when I include this segment here, that's over half of all my impressions, but


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

less than 1% of clicks.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So I don't want to get blindsided by those queries.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So next point, leverage SERP features to your advantage in order to drive even more clicks


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

to your website.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So a keyword that we actually acted upon, seeing as the research intent was there, research


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

is kind of like more informational intent, but there will be some kind of necessity to


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

click through to your website to understand more.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

It's a nice example.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

It's about meta keywords.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So people, yes, are still searching for meta keywords, which is quite interesting.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

And you can clearly see when we were first tested in the top 10, right around that stage


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

there.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So the average CTR during this test was not high enough.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So we bounced back down to page three.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Bye bye.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

But what we did was we applied again some on-page optimizations.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

We clawed our way back up to the top 10.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Yeah.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Again, it's very clear to see that there.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

But this time we had identified a new opportunity.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

We took action and optimized the snippet as well as the direct answer for the most dominating


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

phrase, what are meta keywords?


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Using that to, using the URL analysis to uncover the most lucrative keywords it was ranking


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

for.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

And then leading to a significant rise, you see there, yep, of the CTR and even claiming


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

the featured snippet.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

This is a really nice feature snippet that we won there with the images as well.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So it was also caused by our amazing Wiki because building a collective resource assists


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

with your large scale feature snippet earning because Google can see that you're a collective


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

powerhouse of this knowledge.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

You're an expert on that subject.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So yeah, very powerful.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

I have spoken quite a lot about feature snippets and this was a photo I really like because


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

it's quite meme worthy on how you can win feature snippets.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So becoming a well-structured, engaging and satisfying resource with relevant authority


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

and high accessibility.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

But 2020 was a bad year for feature snippets.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So I kind of stopped, but 2020 was a bad year for a lot of things.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

And that's mainly because of the de-duplication of feature snippets gate, as I like to call


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

it where, actually I think it was Dr. Pete who first noticed that if a feature snippet


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

was present on the SERP, then its standard result was taken away.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

And I find it quite funny that Danny said this declutches the results and help helps


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

users locate relevant information more easily, which is very cheeky because we have very


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

ad heavy SERPs that completely blend in with organic results.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

What?


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Okay.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Anyway, so from position zero to position one, that's an example of how it looked in


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

December before the de-duplication and then January afterwards.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So we were ranking on position zero and one, and now only with that position one feature


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

snippet.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

And after that, a lot of SEOs were like, well, now I'm not doing it.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

And I did an analysis.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

I want to see how our feature snippets were performing.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

And it turns out our high position CTR for feature snippets is actually slightly lower


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

than the standard results.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So the feature snippets weren't performing as well.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

But to be fair, many of our feature snippets are for high informational intent queries.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

And most of them weren't standing out very well on desktop because there were no images.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Something that we're working on incorporating, so all those helpful diagrams to increase


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

clickworthiness.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So I did another analysis with a client's website that had a lot of transactional intent


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

feature snippets, and they had a much better CTR with their feature snippet than without


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

the high ranking result, the standard result.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

And here's another example of why it's so important to claim feature snippets when the


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

query offers one.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So this page is always on position number one, but it's a big impact if that page is


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

getting the feature snippet or just the result beneath it.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

That is a 20% CTR versus a 2% CTR difference.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

I know what I want.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So is it still worth it?


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Yes, yes, it is.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

And even if there is a purely answer intent query, there are some amazing benefits.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So our ranking competitors showing that brand and trust value that Google has in you that


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

is hopefully going to uplift conversions down the line and show you as an expert in the


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

subject.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Also helpful for conversational search, for voice search, but bear in mind that there


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

could be some drawbacks as well, such as on-set satisfaction, reducing your click-through


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

rate.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Sometimes Google misinterprets a query and provides the wrong result.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

And sometimes people think that feature snippets look like ads, so they don't click on them.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

And as well as feature snippets, there are tons of SERP features we can take advantage


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

of for our organic results to drive more traffic.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So Moz Pro helps you really detect those SERP features such as local packs if you're a brick


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

and mortar business, having review snippets, related questions, and site links.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

And there are also SERP features that may not always drive clicks, but definitely assist


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

you with brand awareness and being present in entity search results.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

And there are some risks of using structured data, which usually powers SERP features like


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

this knowledge panel results here of when MozCon is.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

But if you're not providing, if you're not feeding Google with that structured data,


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

you risk being included in those knowledge card results that display that direct data.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

And there are some other advantages.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

You want to be represented in those features rather than excluded.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

You want to be in control of those facts rather than providing people with misinformation.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

And if Google is taking their own answers, that can happen.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

And also, on SERP satisfaction of those direct answer intent queries is likely more useful


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

than someone visiting your website and quickly going back to the search results.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So my fourth point is knowing when Google is testing you in the top 10 and exceed those


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

expectations.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Sometimes Google is promoting you to page one to receive that user feedback and evaluate


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

position.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Then they can understand if you're the best page for the job.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So another great example of web architecture, this one is from our website.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

We identified via topic analysis and started to really work on it.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

And we got bumped up to the top 10 after some hiding and some on-page optimization and then


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

moved up to eight to four.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

We got tested again quite successfully.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

And at this stage, it's getting to more be like, who is the reigning queen?


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Is this site even a top position one contender?


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

And it turns out, even after a couple of days later, we were so great that we won also a


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

feature snippet.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

It took us around three months to get from not ranking at all, from identifying that


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

keyword and then becoming the feature snippet.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

But of course, it's not just about the CTR.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

The page also needs to fulfill that intent of the searcher.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Oh yeah, I had to show you the feature snippet because it has those panel links underneath


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

it.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

It's really sexy there.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

And it brings engaged clicks, which seems to do quite well.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

It has a very good average on time of five and a half minutes on the page, which takes


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

me gorgeously full circle back to the beginning, to the long click.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Or the last click, search intent successfully is fulfilled.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

That could be a little bonus on top.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

And it's not about whole pages.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

It's about the different kinds of information that they hold.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So in this case, you can see the page is ranking for over 1,500 different keywords.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Yeah, quite a lot.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

And Google is tweaking the keyword rankings continuously.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So when I compare these two specific keywords, the same page is ranking for, you can see


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

how that one keyword with a very good CTR rose up to be the number one result, while


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

another keyword ranking got demoted because of the poor CTR.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

And some of you might see all this information and start wondering how you can manipulate


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

it and cheat the system, but don't because it won't work.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

I keep seeing businesses like this who guarantee clicks through a ranking factor, a direct


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

ranking factor, and they will employ real humans to click through to your website, which


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

is, you know, that's why we can't have nice things.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

And they based all of this on Rand's study, his experiment back in 2014, the very famous


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

one where he asked the audience to click on position number seven.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

And after a few hours, it got back to it got up to number one.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

But after some time, it reverted back.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Going back to that patent again, there are safeguards against spammers users who generate


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

fraudulent kick clicks in an attempt to boost certain search results can be taken to ensure


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

that the user selection data is meaningful, even when very little data is available for


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

a given query.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

And now they go on to explain and I'm running out of time.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So I'll wrap it up a little bit.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

They can describe how a user should behave over time.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So long story short, they can be aware of when this is being manipulated.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

We even tested it ourselves with one of Marcus's websites.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So this keyword in German, sorry, is job advertisements.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

And beginning there was a normal CTR for the position.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So 2%, then for position nine, it hit 37%.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Position 10, it hit 57%.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

And remember, this is job offers.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So really lucrative high volume keyword.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

And then Google was like, nah, this is going wrong and kicked us down to position 77.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So okay, party people, sorry, I'm a bit over time.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Let's wrap it up.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

For crucial search performance analysis that you own use that GSE data.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

When it comes to your own site's well being, utilize it as best as you can to give that


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

definitive support to your hypotheses, to your understandings, and so on.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

But turn it into a masterpiece.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Use it wisely.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Remember, your time is precious.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So utilize segments.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So for example, I like to use informational intent keyword segments using questions.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

And also keep filtering down to find those underperforming keywords that need some love


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

and attention.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Here's an example I can skip through.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Be aware of when Google is testing you in the top 10 and act accordingly.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

So you can do things like setting up alerts that can trigger every time a focus keyword


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

falls above onto page one or it's dropping and how you can act accordingly.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Keep standing out as well in those spaces.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Aim for those engaged long clicks.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Strive for positive last clicks doing all in your power to satisfy those users creating


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

those enticing features.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

And keep combining those skills with fabulous experience user experiences that will result


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

in really positive uplifts with your brand association around your product.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Keep proving your worth in the SERPs.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Stay strong everyone.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

I miss you all.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Sending my love from Munich.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Thank you.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Thank you so much for listening and keep in touch.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

I'm Izzy Smith.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve

Thank you, Mascon.


How to Be Ahead of The (CTR) Curve


Estimating Search Opportunity — Whiteboard Friday

Good evening, good afternoon and good morning wherever you happen to be in the world. My


name is Robin Lord, I work for a digital marketing agency called Aera here in the UK and I'm


going to be talking to you about estimating opportunities with different searches. Now,


it's really important that we're able to estimate opportunity because it gives us a way to talk


about how valuable our projects are to other people and it helps us to figure out where


we should be focusing our energies, right? So, being able to know how much opportunity


we might get in different places is pretty crucial. So, we're going to start with the


most basic way of approaching that and then we're going to work our way up to a slightly


more complex, slightly more nuanced approach. But to begin with, the kind of things that


we have when we start to estimate opportunity with different searches are usually the number


of keywords that we want to target. So, for example, here's one setting up a business


and the search volume that we have for those keywords. So, here in this case, setting up


a business we think is searched about 6,500 times a month. So, 6,500 times a month someone


is searching for setting up a business. Now, we're not going to assume that every single


one of those is going to come straight to our website, right? We're not assuming that


we could get 6,500 clicks straight to our website. We get an idea that probably most


people are going to click position one, but some people are going to click position two


and some people are going to click position three and position four and so on and so on.


So, even if we were in the best possible position, we can't be everywhere. So, we can't just


assume we're going to get that 6,500 clicks through to our website. And the way that we


start to handle that is by using something called a click-through rate curve, which if


you haven't encountered it before, looks roughly like this and you can probably see why it's


called a click-through rate curve. Here we've got the curve, we've got all of our positions


one through ten here at the bottom and the side is how likely we think someone is to


click through to our site. So, the easiest way to kind of visualize it is in a graph,


but what we usually have is in a table so that we can use something like a VLOOKUP.


If we are saying position one, then we know that our click-through rate for that is probably


going to be about 35%. So, we use that to estimate what we could get out of this search


for position one. Likewise, if we're looking at like position eight, we might say, click-through


rate for that is more like 5%. So, if we're in position eight, that's kind of what we


assume we're going to be able to get out of it. And we use that in a formula kind of like


this one. So, we say the search volume, so how many times something's being searched


here at the top, multiplied by the click-through rate is how many clicks we expect to get.


So, in this case, 6,500 is our search volume, 35% for position one gets us about 2.3 thousand


clicks a month or 27,000 clicks a year. You can see here, I've hidden up here, you can


kind of mark it here at this line just to visualize for you. That's kind of what we're


doing here. We're assuming position one will get us this kind of click-through rate, then


that would result in about 27,000 clicks a year for this search term. Now, we could stop


there, and some people would stop there in terms of, okay, well, I'm going to assume


I could get position one for every keyword, and I'm just going to multiply it out to make


sure that I'm not making wild predictions about how much traffic I might be able to


get, but that's the way I'm going to leave it. And that can give you a slightly more


accurate estimate, but it's not factoring in times when we might already be ranking


a bit for a keyword, right? So, say, for example, we are already ranking position eight for


this specific search. Now, we can see here, position eight is already getting some clicks.


So, if we move up to position one, sure, we're going to get more than we're currently getting,


but we're not going to get 27,000 clicks more than we're currently getting. We're going


to get a bit more than we're currently getting, but we need to factor that in because there


could be other searches, for example, that have smaller search volume, but we're not


ranking at all. So, the opportunity for us is bigger because really what we want to focus


on is how much more could we get than we're currently getting at the moment. So, how could


we handle that? Well, fortunately, the matter around that is actually fairly simple. It's


exactly the same sum as we've done here. We just need to look at position eight, figure


out what our click-through rate is for position eight, and then do that same sum to figure


out how much we could get. Now, in this case, five percent gives us 325 clicks a month,


about 4,000 clicks a year. So, we're getting 4,000 clicks a year at the moment. We could


get 27,000 clicks a year, so we just subtract what we're currently getting and we say, okay,


we've got an opportunity here of about 23,000 clicks a year. So, that's starting to get


us a bit more of a nuanced idea of what our opportunity is in different places because


we're not going to keep pouring energy into something we're currently doing kind of well


for, and we can start to focus on the areas where there's kind of untapped growth there.


How about we push things a little bit further still? So, we've got this understanding of


how much we could get if we got to position one. Say for this search, position one is


a government website, and position two is Amazon, and position three is Google. Now,


Google, once it has a government website, once it decides a government website is quite


relevant, doesn't really like to replace that because they tend to be very trustworthy.


They tend to have pretty good information. Also, it doesn't really like to replace Amazon,


by and large, because Amazon tends to be a great result for a whole bunch of different


things, and particularly doesn't like to replace itself. So, if we're starting to think about


what we could get for this keyword, and we're assuming we could get position one, this 35


percent click-through rate, we might look at some of these results and think, well,


actually, I don't think I can get up here. I think we should probably be looking a little


bit further down. So, maybe we look at something like position


four. Say position four is a page about how to start a business. Position five is Wikipedia,


and position six is someone offering to sell a service so that you can buy a business set


up, and seven is 50 percent off business set up. So, again, offering to sell, but they've


got that cheeky 50 percent discount that you can benefit from.


So, if we look at all of this, we might start to think, okay, well, I don't think I can


reach position one, probably not position two, probably not position three, and actually,


I think I probably don't want to assume I can replace Wikipedia here either in position


five. So, the best position that I'm looking at


here is actually position four. So, I should go back to some of my click-through rate estimates.


I should estimate based on position four rather than position one and then use that to get


an idea of the total opportunity we could get for this keyword.


Now, you could be wondering how you might do this. Actually, there's a bunch of tools


that will give you the full top 20 export for a whole list of keywords. The first time


I did this, I used the stat top 20 export. I just exported everything and I dumped it


into a Google Sheet. So, I ended up with all of my keywords and all of the top 20 results


row after row after row after row along my sheet.


Then I used a formula, pretty simple formula, to just find any websites that we thought


we wouldn't be able to beat. And I used that to mark those rows anytime we thought we would


be able to beat. And then I just deleted those rows. So, I ended up with each of my keywords.


I only had the ranking positions that we thought we were actually able to achieve. So, in this


case, four, six, seven, and eight, which we are currently. And then I just found the highest


position that we could get in that list for each keyword. And I used that with my click-through


rate curve to try and estimate how much traffic we might be able to get. So, this all really


boiled down to like if formulas and VLOOKUPs. So, it's very accessible for anyone who wants


to get involved in this kind of thing. Now, we could leave it there. That would give us


a pretty solid understanding of where we might be able to get. And it's far more nuanced


than the picture that we might get at first blush. If you want to get a bit more fancy


with it, there's other information that you could pull in to your analysis. So, say, for example,


you're able to put in the titles of all of the pages that are currently ranking. Say, in position


four, it's how to start a business. And position six, it's buy a business setup. And position seven,


it's 50% off business setup. Again, if we look at these, we could use some fairly simple formulas,


even just in Google Sheets, to try to categorize these into different intents. So, how to is fairly


clearly an informational search, an informational result rather. So, we're not trying to categorize


the search, we're trying to categorize the individual results. Buy is a fairly clear purchase


search and 50% off, again, suggests that it's trying to sell us something. So, if we start to


look at these results, we can filter them down even more if we want to. So, say, for example,


we're working on a site and we know it has to be a product page. If we're going to target this term,


we have to use a product page. Well, we could do that same filtering process, except this time


we're marking anything where the title is something like how to or top tips or instructions


how to or anything that seems like a blog post and we remove them as well. So, we say, actually,


we couldn't get this either. This is the highest we could get with this product page. If we do that


across all of our keywords, we know that we have to use product pages and we're saying, okay, for


this, we're position six. Well, say, position six actually has a pretty low search click-through


rate. If we're looking at position six for this keyword, we're already at position eight. So,


maybe the opportunity that we've got for this keyword is actually pretty small and we decide


that we want to focus on other things. So, that's another quick way to filter all of our different


opportunities by just removing the kind of results that we wouldn't want to compete with.


Alternatively, if we don't already have an idea that it's got to be a product page, we could go


through all of our searches and say, we know that it's going to be position four is the best place


that we could get. We can use that same category. We can use that same categorization formula to say,


well, position four looks like it's informational. So, as we're identifying our opportunities,


we can quite quickly say, when we go to do a content brief for this, for example, this needs


to be a blog post. It shouldn't be an update to a product page. Now, the aim for any of this isn't


to make people's decisions for them. We're never going to just send this sheet, for example, off


to someone and not have an SEO professional look at it. But it means that instead of spending lots


of time having to reverse engineer, having to think really hard about all these different things


and pull information into one place, we have a starting point for people to go from. So, when we


have someone who's an expert at SEO looking at this, they've got all of the information in front


of them to begin with. That's actually the approach that we tend to take in general in Aera. So,


when we do this kind of work, we actually tend to use a Python script and that script pulls in all


of the top 20 results. It also categorizes those search results, the individual results, rather


than the search term itself, based on whether they seem informational or transactional. And it finds


that opportunity, it finds that highest place that we could currently get and subtracts where we're


ranking at the moment. And that means that we end up with a sheet where we can order things quite


nicely based on highest opportunity to lowest opportunity and categorize them based on what


kind of results they are. We also pull in some other things like authority, which is one thing


that you could also use to filter down your results if you're starting to dig into this.


And we also use the search results to see how similar different searches are as a way of clustering


them. So, those are some other things that you can dig into once you get familiar with these kind of


concepts and really start to accelerate. Now, you don't have to go that far. You can do any step


along this route and get a little closer to a nuanced understanding of what this search result


could get you. And that's going to be a really positive advancement because the more that we can


bring in this nuance, the more quickly we're able to identify these different things. All of these


are decisions that you're going to be making anyway. You're already a smart SEO professional.


You're already going to know all this information. It's about speeding up your path to that answer.


Anyway, thanks very much for listening to me. I really enjoyed chatting this through with you.


MozCon 2014 - 20 - Phil Nottingham - YouTube Optimization

So YouTube optimization.


Probably some of you in the room know a bit about it.


The most important thing is to upload


your video in high definition.


So YouTube will preference HD content.


You then need to optimize your title tags, descriptions,


and categories for relevant keywords.


Make sure you're getting the keywords in there.


You then need to upload a closed caption file.


And you can include keywords in there as well.


It acts like page copy for the video.


And then lastly, you need to get as many people


to watch, share, and link to the video as possible.


And that's YouTube optimization.


Woo!


The problem is it just sounds a little bit like SEO from 2008.


2008, the year of pounding techno.


Howdy, SEOmoz fans.


Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday.


So in this particular Whiteboard Friday video,


Rand talks about the SEO pyramid,


which is accessible quality content, keyword research


and targeting, link building, and social.


And that is SEO.


Done.


Great.


In fairness to Rand, he's ahead of his time here.


And this is still true today.


You still need all this stuff.


But if we're honest, it's about the tip of the iceberg.


That's like 10% of the real what SEO looks like.


I mean, over the past couple of days,


we've had so many presentations that


have spanned this enormous breadth.


And the prevailing narrative for YouTube optimization


and YouTube SEO really looks like SEO from 2008.


So today, I want to take a step a bit deeper into this


and talk about YouTube, the most important search engine


that you have not yet optimized for.


So search engine.


Is YouTube a search engine?


It's often touted as the second biggest search engine


in the world after Google.


Let's consider Google as like a supermarket.


Google is a place where you can go.


You can buy lots of different products.


It's got everything there.


You can browse.


You can explore.


You can go find things to buy.


This is probably Bing.


It's a bit of a mess.


It's quite hard to find anything.


Sorry, any Microsoft employees who


happen to be in the building.


Under this analogy, YouTube is like a library.


It's a place where people go to find content for information


or entertainment.


And it's also a community platform.


It's a place designed for conversation and collaboration.


So YouTube is, in a sense, a social network


as much as it is a search engine.


It has its own unique identity.


And people don't normally go to the library with purchase


intent unless they have to pay their fines.


And the same is true for YouTube.


YouTube is great for increasing brand awareness.


It's great for building conversations around your brand.


And it's great for also solving problems


that your customers may have and they go to find answers for.


It's not so hot for sending traffic to your site


or driving direct sales.


But that's OK.


So I think there's broadly three different goals


that you might have when you're creating video content,


either brand awareness, so getting people


to know about you, consideration and advocacy,


getting people to know a bit more about what you're about.


But potentially they're halfway through the conversion funnel.


They may be considering a purchase.


And then conversion, so actually turning people


from potential customer into getting money in the bank.


Under this framework, YouTube sits about here.


It's mostly a brand awareness play.


The main value you're going to get from YouTube


is brand awareness and to some extent


igniting those conversations around your product,


around your industry that are going to eventually lead


to people becoming advocates.


You need to think of your channels like a soccer team


or a football team.


I call it football, obviously.


I don't know why you guys call it bananas or something.


And you can't be thinking about building a team of attackers.


Each player has their own individual value


to the overall good of the team.


And that's how you get the most goals in the net.


So Tim Howard is not judged on his goal scoring ability.


He may score one occasionally.


Watch this.


Ready?


All the way.


Wait.


But that's not what makes him good.


He's a great player because he can save anything.


That is his value as a player.


And we need to be thinking about our channels,


our marketing channels in the same way.


And YouTube is primarily a place for brand.


So how do people find YouTube videos?


Well, there's basically two ways.


Number one, they can go and look for them.


So they can go and search on Google


or they can search on YouTube.


And you can optimize this with SEO from 2008.


We can all do this.


But the more complicated and actually more nuanced


and important way that people find YouTube videos


is through having them suggested.


So they might see the recommended links


in the YouTube sidebar or in the icons that pop up


after you finish watching a video.


They might get them through subscription notifications,


which come through email.


And when you go to YouTube, you might


see this stuff recommended.


You also get YouTube videos through social channels,


through LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Google+.


It's integrated throughout all platforms.


And really, you have to optimize for this


by optimizing for engagement.


And engagement will beget engagement.


So the more engagement you're getting on your content,


the more people who are sharing your content,


watching your content, it's going


to increase the visibility across those platforms


and get more people to watch it.


And if you get this stuff right, you


can do like Old Spice, who are often touted as a company that


have got YouTube right and for good reason.


You can get all the SEO side wrong, actually,


because their title is Jim and their description is


great hair, don't care.


And yet within a week, they're able to drive 26,000 views


because they have got the rest of it right.


And under this world, really, subscriptions


are the holy grail of core YouTube optimization.


If you can get subscriptions, people


are going to have their content recommended


throughout the platform when they search online.


It's like when people encircle you on Google+,


and they start to search that way.


It's the personalization, and it is rife with YouTube.


And it's been there for a while.


And yet often as SEOs, we've forgotten that really, this


is the critical thing.


But there's a problem, because the way most people approach


YouTube marketing is as such.


They think, right, I need to come up with a great idea


for a video to promote my business.


They then pay a creative agency to make this video.


They then upload the video to YouTube,


pave some seeding in advertising,


and judge success based on the number of views.


But this never works, because a good idea for a video


is not necessarily a good idea for YouTube.


The two are not interchangeable.


They are not the same thing.


YouTube is its own discrete, unique platform


and requires a unique approach.


And so I want to show you an example of a video


that I think is a good video, but didn't work for YouTube.


And I could have picked hundreds of examples,


but I wanted to show you one of my own failures


and to show you a video that we made at Distilled.


So this video is going to be, it was originally


made exactly like these Wistia videos we've been playing


to be played at a conference.


It was for Brighton SEO in the UK


to promote our training platform.


I'm here to introduce you to Distilled U, our online SEO


training platform.


If this were a real advert, it would


use my voice as Distilled with 80 hours of HD video,


interactive modules, explosions, bacon, alien, Cri-Lo, bacon.


Really, it's just something we built to help train our team.


We're still releasing new modules into it.


But you can try it out for free if you like.


Can I go now?


OK.


It's frivolous.


It's stupid.


It was fun.


It did quite well at the conference.


We got a few sign ups.


People liked it.


There was a few laughs.


But then we wanted to maximize the benefit from this video.


So we put it on YouTube.


And over a year, it accrued a total of less than 1,000 views,


five thumbs up.


Did nothing.


It had no value for us.


And actually, what we found is it


was cannibalizing our performance in organic search.


So YouTube is a very strong domain.


And YouTube videos will typically rank very well.


But the problem is when you search for Distilled U videos,


what you've got was this here.


You've got YouTube ranking above our own site


when really we wanted to drive people


to our own site for this particular term.


So it was a problem.


And it was an all-around failure.


And the reason is because nobody cared


about the content on YouTube.


Why would you care about that?


It's an ad.


It's just something that we've made for promotion.


And the critical thing is not to treat YouTube


like a content repository.


Just because you have a video doesn't mean


it's going to work on YouTube.


I deal with this kind of perspective all the time.


When people think content first, they think,


ah, we've got content we have.


Great, we've invested in videos.


And now we want to maximize the benefit.


We know that YouTube is the place


where people go to find video content online.


So we want to make sure we have a presence there.


We want to make sure all our videos are findable there.


It just doesn't work.


You have to think audience first.


Does your audience want to watch your videos on YouTube?


What are your audience looking for?


Is it the kind of content you're creating?


It's not content that's king.


You can have great content.


It's context.


And YouTube requires a specific context.


You have to understand what your audience is looking for


and serve that requirement, serve that need,


rather than just hoping that the fact that you've


created a great video is going to work for them.


So instead of thinking always be closing,


you should be thinking ABV.


Matt Brown, I'm not talking about alcohol by volume.


Always be valuable.


It's about serving the intent and the requirements


of your users.


And you need a coherent channel strategy for this.


The best channels on YouTube are lean and mean,


which means that you need to make sure you're only having


content on there that is valuable for your audience,


and rather than just flooding things,


flooding the channel with lots of different pieces of content.


Because the more your channel is lean


and the more the best content is driven to the top,


the more that specific content is


going to be recommended when users are browsing one video


or browsing another one.


So what you have to do is go into your YouTube Analytics.


It's going to work.


I'd recommend going to YouTube Analytics


and then go to the Audience Retention report.


And what you'll notice if you scroll down


is that there is a series of videos ranked


by the average time watched and the estimated minutes watched.


So the average percentage viewed here


is the most important thing.


And what you want to do is make sure


the content that has very low engagement.


So here we have one that has 28% average percentage viewed.


That's a clear indication that the content is not


as successful or as interesting to my audience


as the other content there.


And what we should do is then go make that content unlisted,


which is basically like putting a no index tag on your videos.


You can still retain the view count.


The content is still there.


But it's not going to flood the search


and have that issue of being recommended


above content that's actually performing better.


I would then also recommend going to the Traffic Sources


report.


There's a very nice way where you can actually


determine whether or not your specific videos are


valuable for YouTube.


So if you get into Traffic Sources and you scroll down,


you'll be able to see all the different ways in which people


have found your YouTube videos.


And if people are typically coming from Google search,


from embedded players on other websites,


and from external websites, then this is a clear indication


actually YouTube itself as a platform


is not providing value for you.


So you should probably host your videos on something


like Wistia where you can retain control.


What you want to see is lots of views


coming from YouTube suggested videos, YouTube search,


and the YouTube channel page.


That is when you know that YouTube is of a specific value


to you for your video content.


I want to talk about MVC, which is


something we've recently been implementing at Distilled.


It stands for Minimum Viable Conversion.


And it means the next action that you expect somebody


to do once they've explored and engaged


with a specific piece of content.


Obviously, somebody isn't going to watch a YouTube video


and then immediately become a customer.


In a bunch of instances, there's a many-step process.


And for YouTube, the MVCs are normally as follows.


Either visit another website, share the video,


subscribe to the channel, or watch another video.


And of these, the MVCs should normally


be watch another video.


You want to encourage consumption.


Because consumption leads to that brand reinforcement


that's going to become the value that you're


going to get from your channel.


It's also going to lead to the optimization that


means the content is spread and visible for more people


when they're searching around and browsing.


And to do this, you need a channel unique value


proposition.


And so I'm going to give you a framework, a very, very


simple, very sticky, very memorable framework


that you can use to determine what your channel is


going to be.


And this is called Home and Hero.


And it means you're going to create


two different kinds of content for your channel.


Home, which is going to be the mainstay of your content.


80% of your content will be home content.


20% will be hero.


So what does this mean?


Home content is basically scalable, easy to produce,


evergreen, often informational.


And it drives consistent, unremarkable engagement.


This is the kind of content that you're


going to create to try and get subscribers, the kind of content


that people are going to come back for repeatedly


because it's valuable.


So examples like Moz, White Ball Friday, or REI,


who have a series of videos that give you tips


on how to set up a bicycle, or unpack a backpack,


or put up a tent.


Or similarly, from Home Depot, who


are giving tips about what you can use their products for.


Or Nivea for Men, who are doing a bunch of life hacks.


So how to get rid of smelly sneakers,


and how to chill a beer if you don't


have a refrigerator handy.


Informational content that's valuable to your audience.


But it doesn't have to be sensible.


Will it blend?


Of course, I'm sure many of you have seen this from BlendTech,


where they put consumer electronics in a blender


and show the power of their stuff.


It's funny, it's frivolous, it's easy,


you come back to watch more.


So that's home content.


And then hero content, which is the big investment, heavily


promoted pieces, the viral videos.


And the real focus of this is promoting that core brand


message.


The value you get from these videos


is in terms of building that brand.


These are the pieces that when people see,


they're going to have that reinforcement,


and it's going to drive the knowledge of your business.


So the focus here is driving that extreme temporal engagement.


So examples of this would be Dollar Shave Club,


would be Dove Real Beauty Sketches, et cetera.


With all these videos, success is not about great production.


Never has been.


It's about a great story.


And I'm going to give you a quick example of a video that


has extremely low production values,


but the story is fantastic.


JINGLE BELLS


I'll let you guys go and search and see how that one ends.


So gut reactions for videos are formed in three seconds


or less.


And this is incredibly important for YouTube


because of this thing.


How many of you, when you're going to watch a YouTube video


and a pre-rollout that comes up, your eyes focus immediately


there, and you just wait for the five seconds to click Skip?


Yeah, most of us.


I think it's about 56% of people basically skip all ads.


I think the main reason for this is that actually the ads


are typically irrelevant and not targeted all that well.


If you get a really good ad, you will stop and watch it.


How many people have seen this piece,


Epic Splits from Volvo trucks?


Worth looking at.


Fantastic piece of marketing.


I want to give you a little story, an anecdote


to prove the point here, which comes from my colleague Rob


Ousby, who is the VP in Seattle here


and runs our Seattle office.


He's also the world's least photogenic man.


If any of you see him later on, I


would recommend trying to get a selfie with him.


Anyone who can get a good selfie with Rob


that makes him look good, I will give you a free link.


And Rob said this.


Apparently my son insisted on watching this ad consecutively


10 times yesterday.


He hates pre-roll advertising, interrupting his videos,


but loved this piece of creative marketing.


Conclusion, the attitudes of a one-year-old


are a good proxy for the average internet user.


So your brand is not what you sell.


It's how you sell it.


And you need to sell it with style and passion.


We're entering the Mad Men era of the internet.


When TV advertising first came into play in the 40s,


the majority of ads that first came out were direct response.


It was buy this, buy this, buy this.


And it was only really in the 60s in the Mad Men era


where the focus of advertising was about brand.


It was about story.


And we're about to hit this phase in the internet.


If you look back historically, most advertising


was quite direct response focused.


But now that isn't good enough, because in order


to get content out there, it needs


to be shared, to get past filter bubbles that


need to be actively watched and shared.


And this is incredibly true on YouTube.


Otherwise, your content just gets buried.


And what works on TV may not work on YouTube.


The two are not the same format.


A bunch of advertising agencies that I've seen essentially


come up with an idea for a TV ad and then just think


of YouTube as an afterthought and seed some there too.


Doesn't work.


You need to think specifically about the channel.


So I'm going to give you an example of two


videos from the same company.


And you'll see why one of them does much better


than the other one on YouTube.


SHE'S GONNA LET IT GO


We speak body talk, next level body rock.


I'ma take it up a notch, kinda like a sink attack.


If you're coming up, take the elevator,


top floor my skyscraper.


Keep you looking down, happy background.


But the rocks in the glass cools down, make it last.


It be hot like a desert, yo.


She be walking like an animal.


Shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, shake.


Can you give it a let it go?


OK.


It's an OK TV ad.


How about this one?


Sorry, can I ask a stupid question?


Sorry, do you have a minute?


Sorry.


Hey, there he is.


High five, squeeze in here.


Did I?


I go first.


No, it's just, I was gonna say it.


I have a question.


Why don't we go back to the original thing that we did?


Morning.


You got a minute?


Sorry, not sorry.


Not sorry.


We share because we care.


We don't typically share videos or content or anything


because we like the product or we like the company


or whatever.


It's about us.


We share to say something about who we are


and our experience in the world.


And it's about spreading our own personal message,


our own personal brand to the people that we know.


And strong emotions triumph.


If you can elicit a strong emotion from your video content,


whatever that emotion may be, be it negative, be it positive,


that's when you're going to get stuff that's really, really


shareable.


It can't be bland.


And so I want to show you an example of a piece of content


that we've done that we've launched actually just


this week at Distilled.


We're about to push it on YouTube.


That basically was something that I've


tried to create to learn from the mistakes we made


previously, where we've just created content that was OK


but wasn't relevant for YouTube.


And I've tried to do something that will get engagement


within the first five seconds, so it'll pass through the ad


block, that it will be shareable,


and that it will elicit a strong emotion.


And I'd like to show it to you.


My first time, it was pretty awkward.


I didn't know whether to look into his eyes


or at the guy standing next to him.


I got really, really hot, but not in a good way.


My first time was at a festival.


In the park.


Sorry.


At a gallery opening.


In a storeroom.


A little bit cramped.


What was the question?


He brought lots of equipment with him.


You know what?


I was fantastic.


OK.


No, I wasn't.


My mouth got really dry.


I didn't help.


We spent a lot of time deciding where to put the camera.


I brought my friend along to help


hold the equipment in place, which she didn't like.


But it made perfect sense to me.


Not going to lie.


I was kind of glad when it was done.


I find practice really helps.


On reflection, it probably would have


been better without all the people watching,


particularly my mom.


I actually haven't done it before.


Yes, seriously.


This is my first time.


All right.


Tim, I appreciate you using the camera.


I told you you were supposed to just


look at the camera.


Just go way louder than you did.


It's an interesting rehearsal.


And, yeah, it's a glass of wine.


You're going to have to get something else to do.


You just have to take it seriously.


Thank you.


So the MVC, the minimum viable conversion for that video,


is not become a distilled client, obviously.


Our conversion funnel is long.


It takes a very long period of time.


The focus is to get them to consume more of our content.


So what happens when you finish watching the videos,


you click on the link.


You're taken to this landing page


where you can sign up for a webinar.


And you need to think about what that next action is going


to be for the pieces you're creating.


So where can you come up with great ideas for YouTube videos?


Well, I recommend a strategy of complete total immersion.


So you need to find out what your audience care about.


And there's a few little hacks and tools


that will allow you to do this.


So firstly, YouTube Trends allows


you to segment by demographic and see


what different people are watching, what they're sharing,


what they're engaging with, which


can be really useful to get a flavor for what's going on


at a specific period of time.


Google Trends also does a similar thing


in that you can segment by YouTube search


and then discover the kind of things


that people are searching for.


And you can see these temporal spikes.


Additionally, if you use Google Trends in this way,


at the bottom you'll get related searches.


And basically, you'll be given some keyword ideas


that you can then go and use to determine the kind of content


you might be creating.


And if you have an existing channel,


I'd recommend everybody signs up for a tool called Tubular.


I've been playing with it for the last couple of months.


And I think it's fantastic.


It's free, but you need to have 5,000 subscribers in order


to actually get the tool.


And basically, what it does is it's a YouTube Analytics


platform that provides a load more data than you're actually


going to get from the standard YouTube Analytics, which,


actually, isn't all that good.


So one thing you can see is actually the different videos


that people who watch your content watch on other channels.


So you can get a flavor for the kind of stuff


that actually your core demographic and your audience


are interested in.


You can also look at the channels


that they've been engaging with.


So for us, Google Webmaster Help is unsurprisingly


one of those core channels.


And you can then go to these videos


and scroll down and see who has commented on them.


And there's a rather questionable figure here.


What I recommend doing is going to Google Plus,


encircling these people, and seeing what other content


they've shared, because these people are clearly


influencers in your core space.


Because YouTube comments are now actually fully integrated


with Google Plus, and the two are completely related.


One of the crowning achievements of humanity last year


was that we somehow managed to make YouTube comments worse


by integrating them with Google Plus.


From here, you can then think laterally about your brand.


So for your home content, for the core base of your channel,


for the Whiteboard Friday kind of stuff you might be doing,


think what can you talk about with authority.


What is the unique knowledge that you


hold in your business?


And then for the hero content, you


need to define that brand message.


So work out what separates you from the pack.


And there's a few little hacks into this as well.


So I've taken this from actually our head


of creative at Distilled, Mark Johnston, who just recommends,


and I think it's a fantastic and simple idea that you can all


do, Google the following things.


Google all those, and you will get an immense amount of insight


about how actually people feel about your brand,


how they feel about your competitors,


how they feel about your industry as a whole.


And take this information and try


to work out what your particular product USP is


and the angle that you might be able to take creatively.


So content marketing.


It's not about the product, right?


It's about story.


It's about the user.


Except, of course, when it is about the product.


So if you are Gibson, yes, you can succeed on YouTube just


by having pictures and images and videos of people


playing your guitars.


Because your guitars are great, people like them,


they're a desirable product.


In fact, if you have an even more desirable product,


you don't even need to show the product at all.


MUSIC PLAYING


In fact, if you're Aston Martin, you


can get away with just showing your logo


and having the Inception soundtrack behind it.


I'm sold at that point, frankly.


So what do we need?


But most of us aren't in that lucky position, right?


Unless you have a product offering


that's incredibly desirable, you have


to assume brand agnosticism on YouTube.


You have to realize that the people who


are searching through YouTube or browsing videos probably


don't know who you are.


You have to assume that.


So you have to understand what the kind of thing


you're going to be creating, what you're going to talk about


that's going to really appeal to these people,


rather than just focusing on marketing to individuals who


probably are a bit further down in the conversion funnel


and understand more about you.


If you're creating content for your community,


if you're creating content to nurture people on your site,


it should look very different to the kind of content


you're doing on YouTube, because the context is different.


So content that's relevant to your audience


is far more important than having content


that's relevant to your product.


You have to make sure that it's exciting


and people are interested in it, instead of just trying


to shoehorn a specific brand message in.


And you'll work with a lot of companies


if you do this stuff where they try and do that.


But my personal view is actually,


if your client and company don't understand


the value of communicating to your audience honestly


and solving problems for them, like the stuff Kerry


was talking about yesterday, I would just walk away.


So can you predict whether or not a video will be shareable?


Yes, you can.


I'm going to talk quite a bit about a company called


Unruly Media.


You guys need to get with what they're doing,


because they're one of the biggest players


in the social video advertising space.


And they're doing some really, really cool stuff that's


going to be incredibly important.


And we all need to be aware of their tools and their product


offerings.


And one of the things they offer is called Unruly Share Rank.


And what Unruly Share Rank is is basically


user testing that will allow you to predict how shareable


your video is going to be and how likely it


will be to succeed on YouTube and generally socially.


And from here, you can then craft your advertising strategy


to help with that.


It's quite expensive.


It's going to be about $17,000 to get this done.


So it's not for small companies typically.


But what you can do is kind of replicate that thought process.


It's actually based on a book called Viral Marketing


and Science of Sharing by Karen Nelson Fields.


And I would recommend everybody buys this and reads it,


because it will give you an indication of the kind


of questions you can ask to determine whether or not


people are likely to share your video based on the emotions


it's going to elicit of people.


So technical optimization for YouTube.


You can optimize for visibility across the platform


actually by optimizing for attention.


It's very like SEO in the sense that now doing


great things for the user typically


means you're doing great things for the search engine.


It's absolutely the same on YouTube.


I'm actually going to steal a framework here


from our friends at Wistia.


And they recently released this post,


which I think is absolutely fantastic and a great way


to analyze how you should look at these audience retention


graphs.


And the way it works is there's three parts to a video.


There's the nose, the first five second.


There's the body, the mainstay of the video.


And then there's the tail, the last final part


of the video, the call to action.


And what you can do is you can go into your YouTube analytics,


pick a specific video, go to the relative audience retention


report.


And what this will do is show you


how your video is performing compared


to all the other content on YouTube across the board.


So what we can see here is that actually


at the start of this video with my colleagues Dave and Tom,


it's quite good.


People are immediately keying in.


They're interested.


We have an above average engagement at this point.


So the nose is good.


The body looks pretty strong as well.


However, if we go towards the tail,


that is actually a bit weak.


So what we would then think about doing


is potentially re-editing this video,


maybe chopping off the last bit or adding a clearer call


to action so we don't lose that drop off.


Because retention is the main thing


that's going to actually increase the ranking


of your video in the presence.


And you can see in these reports,


you can split it by traffic source.


So you're actually able to see the way in which different


users are behaving on these videos.


So here we can see the organic views are actually


having a greater level of engagement


at the start compared to the page views.


But it's all dropping off towards the end.


So clicks for YouTube are far more important than keywords.


The more clicks you're going to get,


the more traffic you're going to send to your videos,


the better it's going to rank.


Keywords are not so important in this sense.


So to steal Dr. Pete's example, somehow, magically,


because it has this BuzzFeed style clickbaity headline,


this video has managed to accrue 888,000 views.


And it is literally a three hour video of butter melting.


So I'm not saying that you should replicate BuzzFeed


articles for your titles.


But you need to think about clicks.


And what you can actually do is test this and measure it


using YouTube Analytics.


So test adjustments in the titles and the thumbnails.


And then if you go to the traffic sources


reports in your YouTube Analytics,


then click on YouTube suggested videos,


you'll see this kind of graph.


And what this indicates is the amount of people


who are actually clicking on your video


when they see it in the sidebar or in the boxes that


come up at the end of a video when you finish watching.


And this will indicate to you whether or not it's clickable,


it's sticky, and people are interested.


So you can basically run CRO tests like that.


I'd recommend having multiple channels for multiple


audiences.


If you're working in a company that works internationally,


you're probably going to be talking


to different people in different languages.


It's absolutely fine to have multiple channels.


That's completely appropriate.


I would have as few channels as you can, so keep it lean,


keep it mean, keep it tight.


But still have as many as you require


for your specific audiences.


On the other hand, playlists I would recommend


using absolutely liberally.


Playlists are fantastic because they


can rank in organic search, they can rank in YouTube,


they can be recommended in the sidebar.


So it's basically a way of just slicing and dicing


your content in a different way to increase visibility


across the platform.


And so I would think about using as many playlists


as you particularly think are relevant for your audience


and go nuts with that.


YouTube annotations are also an important part of the mix.


So annotations are basically these JavaScript overlays


that you see.


And you can click on them, and it


will take you to another video.