Welcome to MozCon 2016!

And they can show us things like where does traffic come from on the web?


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Search just keeps on growing, which is beautiful.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

I don't know if you've been to Silicon Valley lately, but this would surprise a lot of people


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

there who think Facebook is everything, when in fact, you can see social refers 5 and 1


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

half percent of all traffic.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Dark traffic, though, that's still a huge issue.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

And you can see that in referral data.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

38% of my social traffic, this is almost all shares on social, which makes me think when


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

I look at that direct bucket, I think there's probably still a lot of social stuff in there.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Second one.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

If you haven't read the article from Steven Levy about Google's move to machine learning,


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

especially on their engineering teams, I would highly recommend it.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

It's fairly accessible.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

And you're going to hear a lot about machine learning and deep learning here at MozCon


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

as it relates to search.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

And I think for everything Google does for the next many years to come.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Number three.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

God damn it, AdWords.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Right?


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

It just, I can't understand it.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

They're doing this for paying customers, right?


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

It's like, here's a few thousand dollars a month.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Yeah, we're not going to tell you where you should spend that.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Sorry.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

We're just going to assume that you'll keep giving us your 60 billion dollars I think


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

was spent on AdWords last year, but screw you advertisers.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Ten blue links, my god.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

This is data from Dr. Pete who's going to be talking a lot more about this stuff.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

But only 3% of searches have these classic ten blue links anymore.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

That's crazy.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Cert features just dominating.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

That being said, most SEOs, that's concerning.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

40%, well, OK, this highly scientific poll conducted with intense, intense research rigidity


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

and validity, 40% on Twitter by me.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

But 40% saying no.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

All right.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Quality is becoming this site-wide metric.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

I think this is pretty cool because Google's been very page level for a long time when


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

it comes to judging content.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

And now that is changing, especially the last two or three years.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

And we're seeing that really heavily now.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Everett Sizemore wrote this great post covering all these details of how, and lots of case


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

studies too, of how cutting out cruft on websites helped them rank better.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Number six.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

You've probably seen me share this chart before.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

I mean, SEO is just dominant.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Just dominant.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

This isn't the word SEO, right?


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

This is search engine optimization, the category list which includes SEO.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

And man, I mean, compared to content and social, paid, it's just nuts.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

The interest in our field is incredible.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Incredible.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

I think that people are desperate to learn.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

But weirdly enough, job postings show the inverse.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

I think this continues the trend of what we've talked about the last couple of years, where


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

SEO has become a skill.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

It's become a function.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

But it's not as much a job title.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

I'll show you more in a sec on that.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Brain brain, hummingbird, changing how content can rank.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

You guys remember the video game with the Italian plumbers?


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

They're good at this, right?


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Like they know who it is.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

That's impressive.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

You should try and fool them.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Google gets real good.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

And as a result of these, more and more content can rank for a wider and wider variety of


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

queries.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

More so than ever before.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Which is fantastic for content creators, fantastic for SEOs, unless you're the type of SEO who


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

likes to build very thin content targeted at each particular keyword, then it's not


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

so good.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

This is a highly in-demand practice.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

I shared this earlier this year.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

This is the hottest skills of 2015.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

So these are basically the skills that got you, that can get you hired in 2016.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

And this is the highest SEO has ever been.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

SEO and SEM marketing, which is semi-repetitive LinkedIn.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Maybe they don't know what SEM stands for.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

But regardless, that's crazy.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

That is huge demand.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

But like we said, more of a skill than a title.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

You can see on LinkedIn, while the people who list SEO as a skill keeps rising, people


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

who have SEO in their job title has stayed pretty stagnant the last few years.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

That is not a huge surprise to me, but I think it is an interesting observation for us.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

PBC, this is from Merkle, RKG.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

They do some fantastic reports every year.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

And this one showed paid search spend continuing that trend of leveling off.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

And to keep up with this, we see Google doing what Google always does, which is making the


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

ads more and more subtle.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Look at that.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

There's barely a difference between an ad and an organic result.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

And yet, I'm going to show you some incredible data thanks to Russ Jones.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Are you here?


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Russ?


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

I know you're here.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Come on.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

He's tired?


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

No, he was up early.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

OK, I'm here.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

There you go.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Come on up.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

No, that's a.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

So Russ has been working with us at Moz for the last few months, specifically on collecting


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

clickstream level data, which lets us see some awesome, awesome things.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Check this out.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

So this is in 2016, analyzing many millions of search queries through clickstream data,


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

we can see the distribution.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Right?


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Well, that's still a lot of five, six word queries.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

We also have a new version of the search demand curve that I built last night.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Sorry, Erica, for getting you my slides late last night.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

And man, that's crazy.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

So basically, around the top billion keywords, a little after the top billion keywords or


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

few billion keywords, is where you reach half of all search terms.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

And those are things that are only searched for tens or hundreds of times.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

So there really is a huge, long tail still in search.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

The average searcher is performing about three queries per day on a desktop or a laptop.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

And we should have some data on mobile there soon.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Of those, of all those queries by all those people, 1.19% of all searches result in an


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

ad click.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Oh my god.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Google is making 90% of their money from 1% of all the clicks that happen.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Now this is clicks, not searches, because about 51% of all the clicks that happen on,


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

this is Google.com US data, right, but go to the organic non-search results.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

The rest, 49%, are going essentially to Google properties.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Sites pages on Google itself, Google Maps, YouTube, they're clicking on instant answer


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

results, right, that don't take them off the site, all those kinds of things.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

There are lots and lots of no click searches.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

About 40% of all search queries result in no click at all.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Like Google is either answering them or it's an instant answer and the person hasn't finished


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

typing their query or they weren't satisfied with those results and so they're searching


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

for something else.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

But that's pretty substantive.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

That's a lot of capturable value, I think, for SEO folks.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

For weather queries like this one, Russ noted it's about 75%.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Search suggest, I think, might be doing some of this biasing because about 25% of desktop


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

queries are coming through Chrome Instant.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

So essentially they're loading as someone's typing and that's taking some of that traffic


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

up.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

These are the top sites that we saw receiving traffic from Google.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Answers.yahoo still?


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

I'm almost more embarrassed by that than I am by number 18, not going to say it by name.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

So together these 20 sites, this is insane, 22.8% of all clicks on Google that result


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

in a referral go to these 20.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

That is dominance.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Look at this.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

That's the top 100, top 1,000, top 10,000.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

So basically if you're not in the top 10,000 sites, all the rest of the millions, hundreds


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

of millions of websites are getting less than 40% of all the referrals.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

It's crazy.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Facebook, by the way, we looked at Facebook too.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Facebook's distribution even more biased to the top, just FYI.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

And Russ, you're going to write a post about this, right?


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

You're going to have all sorts of crazy, awesome, cool data.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

That's Russ and his lovely wife Morgan, who were very kind and had Geraldine and I over.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

You can say yes now.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Sure.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Okay, great.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Thank you.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

So this data is very cool.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

It lets us do a lot of the awesome things that you see in places like Keyword Explorer,


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

where we can show click-through rate opportunity and volume.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

And we hope to do a lot more.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

The last year at Moz, there were some good things, but we had some really painful stuff


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

happen too.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

And many of you probably know that in August, Moz did its first ever round of layoffs when


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

we closed down Moz content.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

And we're selling off follower wonk right now.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

And that was heartbreaking.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

The good news is there's some phenomenal folks to hire.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

And the ex-Mozers actually came together and built this hire Moz website, where you can


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

go and find folks.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

We kept a Google spreadsheet that folks could add companies and job listings to.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

And there were 135 companies with more than 500 job listings seeking, I think, 55 or 54


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

ex-Mozers.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

So it's very humbling to see, well, how hot the tech space is and the Seattle tech space


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

is in particular, but also how in-demand Moz folks are.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

That was great to see.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

As a result of this, Sarah's approach has been a strategy, much like Google's many years


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

ago, of more wood behind fewer arrows.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

So essentially closing down content, closing down follower wonk so that we can focus on


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Moz local and Moz Pro and get back to our roots in SEO.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

As sad as I am about the folks we had to say goodbye to, I am psyched to work on SEO.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

That's where my passion is.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

That's what I love to do.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

I'm also very excited that I might finally get to shave this ridiculous mustache.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

You see the curl doesn't even, like it can't even do that anymore because it curls in on


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

itself.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

So for those of you who don't know, I started growing my mustache in 2013 and said, hey,


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

when Moz gets back to profitable, I'll shave it off.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

And then I stepped down as CEO and our strategy changed to be a little less focused on profitability


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

and a little more focused on a long, long mustache.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

But I love being profitable.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

I'm very, very much looking forward to that.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

We've made some great progress in some of our software.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Moz local has radically improved its distribution listings process.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Moz local customers have closed like 200,000 duplicates now, which is great.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

We launched local insights, which lets you see traffic and rankings and reviews right


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

inside local.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

And Moz Pro's had a bunch of big ones too.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

So an upgraded Moz bar, I know some folks are having trouble with the Moz bar.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

There's a fix coming out very soon.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Keyword Explorer, which is kind of my favorite thing right now, if you couldn't tell from


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

all this stuff that I constantly talk about.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Dozens of pro campaigns improvements that we've made and you can check those out.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

We're now tracking lots of SERP features right in there against you and your competition.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

We have this more accurate keyword volume data, at least in the US.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

I know UK and globally we are still catching up there, but that is coming.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

And as of last week, we've got that volume data in Pro as well.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

The related topics launched this year.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

So did date ranges.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Finally, date ranges.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

It seems like you should have had that a while ago.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

But we have it now.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

So yes, I feel good about that.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

And just a lot more and a lot more stable releases at Moz than ever before.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

And I credit that to a lot of our software engineers, many of whom are here with us at


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

MozCon.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

But we still got a ways to go.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

I have this chart.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Adam actually maintains this kind of showing like, here's all the things we need to be


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

great at, and here's where we are today.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

And there's some where we are just not there at all, and some where we're doing all right.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

I have confidence we will get there.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Well, as always, we have an incredible, incredible lineup of speakers, phenomenal folks, a wide


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

breadth as well as some very, very deep work on and topics all around SEO and search, of


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

course.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

You can ask questions to us via this app, the MozCon app, which this year, my understanding


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

is it actually works, which is kind of nice.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

That's a new benefit.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

So this is in the iPhone app store and in Google Play.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

You can download it and then you can see that submission process for Q&A.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Whoever's on stage, that's who you'll be able to ask questions to.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Pretty easy stuff.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

There's also going to be closed captions this year, live transcription and closed captions


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

on the screen Monday night, tonight.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

We have the MozCrawl.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Our partners, MozCon partners, are sponsoring a very cool watering hole in town.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Most of them I think are on Capitol Hill, which is just up the hill from here.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Tuesday night, tomorrow Geraldine, my wife, will be hosting MozCon Ignite, where you will


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

see five-minute talks on nothing to do with search.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

You can leave your notebook at home.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

It's really fun.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

If you didn't go last year, you should check it out this year.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

They're phenomenally interesting talks, although it is going to be tough to beat Ian Lurie's


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

chasing a raccoon out of his kitchen story.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

That was top-notch.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Wednesday night, of course, the bash at the garage, where I hope to meet this fellow and


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

compare mustaches.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

And we've got some great swag this year, including the Lego Roger.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Jean Luca, just for you, buddy.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

I got your back.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Actually, I didn't make that, but you know.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

There's also, as you might have guessed from the intro, there is a video game, a MozCon


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

video game that some of our designers and developers worked on.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

For fun, it is at Moz.com slash Roger hyphen patrol.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

And you are welcome to play.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

I think they might have used my voice for some of the characters or some of the announcements


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

in the game.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

I haven't even gotten to play it yet, but looking forward to that.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Outside these doors, you will find the Moz Hub.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

We would love to have you join us, help make your SEO life better.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Christine from our design UX team is going to be there, along with some other Mozers.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

We would love to talk to you about all things SEO and software and data and what you'd like


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

to see.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

You can also demo some of our partners' killer tools and software.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

We do a special thing here at MozCon where all of our partners or sponsors are invite


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

only.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

So we essentially said, oh, similar web, unbounce, stat, buffer, bloodstream.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

We love you folks.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

We use you.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

We cite you all the time.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Would you like to come to MozCon and show off all the cool stuff that we love you for


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

to the thousands of people who are here?


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

And they said yes.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

That was very kind.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

So we've got some great folks out there.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

We love taking photos.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

I love taking photos.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Please, photos totally welcome at all times.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

This is the opposite of the art museum.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

We love tweets.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

You can use the hashtag MozCon.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

We love the fist bump.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

I especially love the fist bump, mostly because I love data.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

And all the data says that if you fist bump instead of handshake, we can prevent literally,


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

just us, can prevent millions of dollars in communicable disease transfer.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

So fist bump me, please.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Fist bump each other.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Fist bump everyone.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

It's just great.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

It feels good.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

It looks cooler.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

It'd be awesome.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

And of course, we would love your feedback about MozCon or anything Moz-related.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

I'm wearing a feminist t-shirt, but all the other Mozers are wearing blue staff t-shirts.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

And if you see them, you can talk to them.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

You're also welcome to email us or tweet at us and talk to us outside.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

And we would love to hear from you.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Get ready, folks.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

It is going to be an amazing MozCon.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

And we're going to kick it off with our emcee for today, Distilled's Rob Ousby.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!

Rob, come on out.


Welcome to MozCon 2016!


#WhiteboardFriday: Generating Local Content

Hey folks, this is Russ Jones here with Moz again to talk to you about important search


engine optimization issues.


Today I'm going to talk about one of my favorite techniques, something that I invented several


years ago for a particular client and has just become more and more and more important


over the years.


And I call this using natural language generation to create hyper-local content.


Now I know that there's a bunch of long words in there.


Some of you are familiar with them, some of you are not.


So let me just kind of give you the scenario, which is probably one you've been familiar


with at some point or another.


Imagine you have a new client and that client has something like 18,000 locations across


the United States.


And then you're told by Google you need to make unique content.


Now of course it doesn't have to be 18,000.


Even 100 locations can be difficult, not just to create unique content, but to create uniquely


valuable content that has some sort of relevance to that particular location.


So what I want to do today is talk through one particular methodology that uses natural


language generation in order to create these types of pages at scale.


Now there might be a couple of questions that we need to just go ahead and get off of our


plates at the beginning.


So first, just what is natural language generation?


Well natural language generation was actually originated for the purpose of generating weather


warnings.


You've actually probably seen this 100,000 times.


Whenever there's like a thunderstorm or say high wind warning or something, you've seen


on the bottom of a television if you're older like me, or you've gotten one on your cell


phone and it says the National Weather Service has issued some sort of warning about some


sort of weather alert that's dangerous and you need to take cover.


Well the language that you see there is generated by a machine.


It takes into account all of the data that they've arrived at regarding the weather and


then they put it into sentences that humans automatically understand.


It's sort of like Mad Libs, but a lot more technical in the sense that what comes out


of it instead of being funny or silly is actually really useful information.


And that's our goal here.


We want to use natural language generation to produce local pages for our business that


has information that is very useful.


Now the question we almost always get, or I at least almost get, is this black hat?


One of the things that we're not supposed to do is just auto-generate content.


And so I'm going to take a moment towards the end to discuss exactly how we differentiate


this type of content creation from just the standard Mad Libs style plugging in different


city words into content generation and what we're doing here.


Because what we're doing here is providing uniquely valuable content to our customers


and because of that it passes the test of being quality content.


So let's do this.


Let's talk about probably what I believe to be the easiest methodology and I call this


the Google Trends method.


So let's step back for a second and talk about this business that has 18,000 locations.


What do we know about this business?


Well, businesses have a couple of things that are in common regardless of what industry


they're in.


They either have like products or services.


And those products and services might have styles or flavors or toppings or just all


sorts of things that you can compare about the different items and services that they


offer.


And therein lies our opportunity to produce unique content across almost any region in


the United States.


And the tool we're going to use to accomplish that is Google Trends.


So the first step that you're going to do is you're going to take this client and in


this case I'm going to just say it's a pizza chain, for example.


And we're going to identify the items that we might want to compare.


In this case I would probably choose toppings, for example.


So we would be interested in pepperoni and sausage and anchovies and, God forbid, pineapple,


just all sorts of different types of toppings that might differ from region to region, from


city to city, and from location to location in terms of demand.


And so then what we'll do is we'll go straight to Google Trends.


And the best part about Google Trends is that they're not just providing information at


a national level.


You can narrow down to city level, state level, or even in some cases to zip code level.


And because of this it allows us to collect hyper-local information about this particular


category of services or products.


So for example, this is actually a comparison of the demand for pepperoni versus mushroom


versus sausage toppings in Seattle right now.


So most pizza, when people are Googling for pizza, would be searching for pepperoni.


So what you would do is you would take all of the different locations and you would collect


this type of information about it.


So you would know that, for example, here there's probably about two and a half times


more interest in pepperoni than there is in sausage pizza.


Well that's not going to be the same in every city and in every state.


In fact, if you choose a lot of different toppings you'll find all sorts of things,


not just the comparison of how much people order them or want them, but perhaps how things


have changed over time.


For example, perhaps pepperoni has become less popular and if you were to look in certain


cities that probably is the case as vegetarian and veganism has increased.


Well the cool thing about natural language generation is that we can automatically extract


out those kinds of unique relationships and then use that as data to inform the content


that we end up putting on the pages on our site.


So for example, let's say we took Seattle.


The system would automatically be able to identify these different types of relationships.


Let's say we know that pepperoni is the most popular and it might also be able to identify


that let's say anchovies have gone out of fashion on pizzas, almost nobody wants them


anymore, something of that sort.


But what's happening is we're slowly but surely coming up with these trends and data points


that are interesting and useful for people who are about to order pizza.


For example, if you're going to throw a party for 50 people and you don't know what they


want, you can either do what everybody does pretty much, which is let's say one-third


pepperoni, one-third plain, and one-third veggie, which is kind of the standard if you're


like throwing a birthday party or something.


But if you landed on the Pizza Hut page or the Domino's page and it told you that in


the city where you live, people actually really like this particular topping, then you might


actually make a better decision about what you're going to order.


So we're actually providing useful information.


So this is where we're talking about generating the text from the trends and the data that


we've grabbed from all of the locales.


Now the first step, of course, is just looking at local trends.


But local trends aren't the only place we can look.


We can go beyond that.


For example, we can compare to other locations.


So it might be just as interesting that in Seattle people really like mushroom as a topping


or something of that sort.


But it would also be really interesting to see if the toppings that are preferred, for


example, in Chicago where Chicago style pizza rolls versus New York is different.


That would be something that would be interesting and could be automatically drawn out by natural


language generation.


And then finally, another thing that people tend to miss in trying to implement this solution


is they think that they have to compare everything at once.


That's not the way you would do it.


What you would do is you would choose the most interesting insights in each situation.


Now we could get technical about how that might be accomplished.


For example, we might say, okay, we can look at trends.


Well, if all of the trends are flat, then we're probably not going to choose that information.


But we see that the relationship between one topping and another topping in the city is


exceptionally different compared to other cities.


Well, that might be what gets selected.


Now here's where the question comes in about white hat versus black hat.


So we've got this local page and now we've generated all of this textual content about


what people want on a pizza in that particularly town or city.


And we need to make sure that this content is actually quality.


And that's where the final step comes in, which is just human review.


In my opinion, auto-generated content, as long as it is useful and valuable and has


gone through the hands of a human editor who has identified that that's true, is every


bit as good as if that human editor had just looked up that same data point and wrote the


same sentences.


And so I think in this case, especially when we're talking about providing data to such


a diverse set of locales across the country, that it makes sense to take advantage of technology


in a way that allows us to generate content and also allows us to serve the user the best


possible and the most relevant content that we can.


So I hope that you will take this, spend some time looking up natural language generation,


and ultimately be able to build much better local pages than you ever have before.


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

Hello, I'm Tom Capper from Moz and today I want to talk about how I'm going to use chat


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

GPT and NLP, natural language processing apps in general in my day to day SEO tasks.


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

This has been a big topic recently, I've seen a lot of people tweeting about this, some


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

people are saying SEO is dead, this is the beginning of the end as always.


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

I think that's maybe a bit too dramatic but there are some big ways that this can be useful


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

and that this will affect SEOs in their industry I think.


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

The first question I want to ask is can we use this instead of Google?


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

Are people going to start using NLP powered assistance instead of search engines in a


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

big way?


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

So I asked, just being meta here, I asked chat GPT to ask a song about Google search


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

results being ruined by an influx of AI content.


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

This is obviously something that Google themselves is really concerned about right?


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

They talked about it with the helpful content update.


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

Now I think this is, the fact that we can be concerned about AI content ruining search


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

results suggests there might be some problem with an AI powered search engine.


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

Now AI powered is maybe the wrong term because obviously Google themselves are to some degree


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

AI powered but I mean pure AI written results.


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

So for example I stole this from a tweet and I've credited the account below but if you


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

ask it what is the fastest marine mammal?


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

The fastest marine mammal is the peregrine falcon.


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

That is not a mammal.


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

And then it mentions the sailfish which is not a mammal and marlin which is not a mammal.


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

This is a particularly bad result whereas if I Google this, great, that is an example


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

of a fast mammal.


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

We're at least on the right track.


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

Similarly if I'm looking for a specific web page, I've searched Atlantic article about


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

the declining quality of search results and even though clearly if you look at the other


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

information that it services, clearly this has consumed some kind of selection of web


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

pages.


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

It's refusing to acknowledge that here whereas obviously if I Google that, very easy, I can


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

find what I'm looking for straight away.


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

So yeah maybe I'm not going to just replace Google with chatgpt just yet.


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

What about writing copy though?


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

What about, you know, I'm fed up of having to manually write blog posts about content


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

that I want to rank for or that I think my audience want to hear about so I'm just going


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

to outsource it to a robot.


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

Well here's an example.


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

Write a blog post about the future of NLP in SEO.


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

Now at first glance this looks okay but actually when you look a little bit closer it's a bluff.


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

It's vapid.


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

It doesn't really use any concrete examples.


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

It doesn't really read the room.


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

It doesn't talk about sort of how our industry might be affected more broadly.


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

It just uses some quick tactical examples.


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

It's not the worst article you could find.


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

I'm sure if you asked, you know, you pulled a teenager off the street who knew nothing


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

about this and asked them to write about it they'd probably produce something worse than


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

this but on the other hand if you saw an article on the Moz blog or another industry credible


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

source you'd expect something better than this.


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

So yeah I don't I don't think that we're going to be using chat GPT as a as our copywriter


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

right away but there may be some nuance which I'll get to in just a bit.


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

What about writing descriptions though?


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

I thought this was pretty good.


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

Write a meta description for my Moz blog post about SEO predictions in 2023.


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

Now I could do a lot better with the query here.


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

I could talk I could tell it what my post is going to be about for starters so that


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

it can write a more specific description.


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

This is already quite good.


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

It's the right length for a meta description.


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

It covers the bases.


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

It's inviting people to click.


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

It makes the post sound exciting.


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

This is this pretty good.


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

You'd obviously want a human to review these for the factual issues we talked about before


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

but I think a human plus the AI is going to be more effective here than just the human


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

or at least more efficient time efficient.


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

So that's a potential use case.


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

What about ideating copies?


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

So I said that the pure chat GPT written blog post wasn't great.


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

But one thing I could do is get it to give me a list of subtopics or subheadings that


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

I might want to include in my own post.


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

So here although it is not the best blog post in the world it has covered some topics that


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

I might not have thought about.


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

So I might want to include those in my own post.


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

So instead of asking it write a blog post about the future of NLP and SEO I could say


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

write a bullet point list of ways NLP might affect SEO and then I could steal some of


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

those if I hadn't thought of them myself as potential topics that my own ideation had


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

missed.


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

Similarly you could use that as a copywriter's brief or something like that again in addition


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

to human participation.


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

My favorite use case so far though is coding.


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

So personally I'm not a developer by trade but I do often like many SEOs I have to interact


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

with SQL with JavaScript with Excel these kinds of thing and that often results in a


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

lot of googling from first principles for someone less experienced in those areas and


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

even experienced coders often find themselves falling back to Stack Overflow and this kind


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

of thing.


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

So here's an example write an SQL query that extracts all the rows from table 2 where column


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

A also exists as a row in table 1.


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

So that's quite a complex you know I've not I've not really made an effort to make that


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

query very easy to understand but the result is actually pretty good.


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

It's a it's a working piece of SQL with an explanation below.


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

This is much quicker than me figuring this out from first principles and I can take that


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

myself and work it into something good.


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

So again this is AI plus human rather than just AI or just human being the most effective.


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

I could get a lot of value out of this and I definitely will.


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

I think in future rather than starting by going to Stack Overflow or googling something


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

that where I hope to see a Stack Overflow result I think I would start just by asking


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

here and then work from that.


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

That's all.


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

So that's how I think I'm going to be using ChatGBT in my day to day SEO tasks.


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

I'd love to hear what you've got planned.


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper

Let me know.


SEO Recap: ChatGPT — Tom Capper


How to Use STAT to Find SEO Opportunities at Scale — Whiteboard Friday

Hi everybody, welcome. My name is Cyrus. Today the thing I want to talk about is how to use


STAT to find SEO opportunities at scale. I mean massive scale. Now a lot of you have


probably heard of STAT, you may know that it has an excellent reputation, but it's possible


you haven't actually used it or have a very good understanding of what it actually does.


So that's what I'm going to try to cover today and explain how powerful it is at discovering


SEO opportunities in ways that can inform content strategy, competitive analysis, and


a lot more. So STAT, the full name of STAT is actually STAT Search Analytics. On the


surface what a lot of people understand is that it is a rank tracker, tracking thousands


of keywords at a time anywhere across the globe. But underneath the hood it's actually


a lot more than a rank tracker. It's a rank tracker, it's a competitive landscape tool,


it's SERP analysis and intent and it allows you to do some pretty incredible things once


you dig into the data. So let me dig into a little bit about how it actually works.


So like a lot of keyword rank trackers, you start with keywords. But one of the differences


is all the different attributes that you can assign to each of your keywords. So first


is very familiar, the market or the search engine. So you want Canadian English results


or Canadian French results. Any market in the world that's available, it's pretty much


available for you to use in STAT. The second is location, which is a slightly different


concept so you can define zip codes, cities, be as specific as you want. This is very important


for multiple location businesses or if you're running an advertising campaign in a certain


part of the country and you want to track very specific results. But you can define


location very specifically for each of your keywords. Third is device, mobile or desktop,


especially important with mobile first indexing and increasing mobile results. But also tags,


smart tags. And this is where the true power of STAT comes in. The ways that you can use


smart tagging. So you can tag your keywords in multiple ways, assigning multiple tags


to slice them and dice them any way you want. So different ways that you can tag keywords


in STAT is anything that's important to your business. For example, you can create keyword


groups based on what's important to you. At Moz, we tag keywords with SEO in it or anything


that's important to your business that you want to create a keyword cohort out of. Or


location like we were talking about if you're running an advertising campaign in Indiana


and you want to tag certain keywords that you're targeting there, something like that.


Or all your Kansas City keywords or your London or Berlin keywords. Product categories. So


if you sell multiple categories, you sell TVs, books, dresses, anything you want, you


might want to tag all those into a particular keyword category. Or attributes such as 55


inch television versus a 48 inch television when you want to get very, very specific across


your product line. And also your brand. At Moz, we track everything with the word Moz


in it or Nike or Apple or whatever your brand is or if you have multiple brands. Basically,


anything that's important to your business, any KPI that you measure, anything that's


relevant to your marketing department or finance or anything else like that, you can tag. And


that's where the true power comes in. Because once you tag, you've created a keyword cohort


or a group. And then you can see your share of voice across that entire market using just


that group. So if you want to track yourself against a very specific set of keywords, you


can see your share of voice. Share of voice meaning how much visibility you have in Google


search results. And stat will show you your exact competitors and how you rank among those.


And generally you want to see yourself going up and to the right. But if you're not, you


can see exactly who's beating you and where their movement is and how you're doing for


that specific keyword group, which is incredibly valuable when you're working on a particular


set of keywords or a campaign. But my favorite part, and this is where the true power comes


in because it can inform your content strategy, and this is where the SEO opportunities are


actually at, is the analysis of SERP features and intent. Because what stat will do is out


of the thousands of keywords that you put into it, it will analyze the entire SERP of


each of those and it will collect all the SERP features that it finds and tell you exactly


what you own and don't own and where your opportunities are. So let's give an example


that's a little more concrete. So let's say you track a bunch of keywords within a particular


cohort and you see that most of the results have a featured snippet. And stat will show


you exactly what you own and what you don't own. Now what's cool about this is you can


click into what you don't own and you can see the exact featured snippets that your


competitors own that you can actually create some content strategy around and try and go


steal those. A different way is images or news. So let's say that you notice that you're


selling TVs or something like that and almost all the SERPs have images and you don't own


any of them. So something like that can inform your content strategy where you go to your


team and you say, hey folks, we need to create more images or we need better structured data


to get Google to show the images because this is the intent for this type of keyword and


we're simply not owning it in this way. Same thing with news. If you notice a lot of news


results and you're not a news organization but you're competing for these keywords, that


can inform your content strategy and maybe you need to go after those news keywords or


try something else. Video is another one. More and more SERPs have video results with


video carousel and things like that and you can see exactly what you own and what you


don't own and a lot of times you're going to find that certain domains are beating you


on those videos and that may inform, especially for the high volume keywords that you want


to go after, you may want to be creating more video content for that. But it all depends


on the SERP and you're going to find different feature sets and different combinations for


every keyword cohort that you do. So what's important to you and what's important to track


is going to show up differently every time but it's going to show you exactly where the


opportunities are. FAQs are another thing. Rich snippets, sort of results. You may find


that your competitors are all using FAQ markup. You're not using any. That could inform your


SEO strategy and you might start incorporating more FAQs because Google is obviously rewarding


those in the SERPs and your competitors are getting those and not you. Other things, virtually


any SERP feature that's trackable, you can find local results, Twitter boxes. You may


find that for certain queries, Google is surfacing Twitter results and maybe that means you need


to be on Twitter more than you actually are right now and see who's ranking for those


results instead of something that you're doing on site. And maybe you need to do more YouTube.


It's not all necessarily on your site but this will tell you where you need to invest


those opportunities. Review stars, podcasts, more. All of this will tell you what's important


and where the opportunities are and where you're winning and losing and the exact keywords


that you can go after if you want to win and the exact feature sets where your competitors


are getting traffic and you aren't. So I use Stat. I love it every week. It's a great tool.


Redefining Technical SEO - Presented by Paul Shapiro

Thanks, Brittany.


There they are, my little boy and my little girl.


They're burgeoning technical SEOs.


By the way, I want to thank my wife, who's an incredible woman for enabling me to be


here today.


They're only eight weeks old.


Shout out to my wife.


Let's take a trip back to the early days when you were learning SEO, learning our craft.


Grab your Ninja Turtles lunchbox.


Think back to those days.


What were you taught?


If you were like me, you were given this picture painted for you of SEO, this Venn diagram


consisting of three pillars, relevance, authority and trust, and website infrastructure and


search engine accessibility, which in turn equated to three primary practices of SEO,


time strategy, digital PR and link building, and quote unquote technical SEO.


Now the problem with the things we were taught in grade school and in life in general is


sometimes they're oversimplifications, they're embellishments, they're collective truths


that are in reality collective falsehoods.


This is not uncommon.


Just to give an example of one of the things that is incorrect that we were taught in grade


school, there's a story of Isaac Newton sitting under an apple tree when an apple falls from


a branch above, blinks him on the head, and eureka, he came up with the theory of gravity.


That never happened.


He was sitting in an orchard, which I believe was on his family's estate.


He was a wealthy man and he was watching the apples fall and inventing calculus and so


forth.


He did in that environment come up with the theory of gravity, but there was no eureka


moment with this apple falling on his head.


We're taught this rule of English, I before E except after C, which is generally true,


except there's something like 193 somewhat exceptions to the rule.


The story of Benjamin Franklin flying a kite with a key attached to it, discovering electricity.


Electricity was known for so many years prior to this.


This experiment was actually designed to prove that lightning was in fact electrical in nature,


has nothing to do with the discovery of electricity, but it's a good story and we tell it.


I also recall this anecdote of a friend from college who was studying electrical engineering.


I don't know how many people are familiar with principles of electricity and electrical


design, but there's this equation Ohm's law, I equals VR, and it's this sort of steadfast


truth and he was telling me that for all intents and purposes, this is true.


Until things get really complicated, there's this concept of this infinite grid of resistors


in which this equation, which is more or less a law, completely falls apart.


Anyway, I'm going on.


SEO is no different.


It's complex and it's wrought with oversimplifications.


So take a step back.


I want to look at technical SEO and how we think about it.


In my opinion, why it's a misguided definition.


This is the traditional picture of technical SEO.


It has everything to do with crawling and indexing and as a result, we're able to rank


our pages.


In modern days, with the prevalence of JavaScript, JavaScript frameworks, they add in this extra


layer of rendering.


This is, again, the traditional viewpoint of what technical SEO is.


Don't get me wrong, this is hugely, hugely important and I love everything about working


on these sort of problems related to this.


You have an e-commerce website.


If you cannot crawl those pages and they don't get indexed, you're missing out on an incredible


source of revenue.


And websites can get quite complex.


And expertise in how it all works is necessary.


It's becoming more necessary as we evolve as practitioners, as websites evolve, as the


web evolves.


But you can have the most technically sound website and have no traffic.


That's because at the end of the day, if you do not have content, you do not have the right


content, you're not going to get that traffic.


You could have all the technical SEO you want, the traditional definition of technical SEO


and not have any sales.


I mean, this is the technical SEO talk, right?


I'm talking about technical SEO.


Why am I saying content is in some ways more important?


I'm going to drill this home a little bit more.


Furthermore, there's some easy ways to get technical SEO right.


You have a WordPress website, you install the Yoast plugin.


Most of the way there, right?


And again, I'm committing my own sin of over-simplifying things, but reality is you're going to do


kind of fine if you have great content in a WordPress installation.


My website doesn't use WordPress, right?


Well, you know what?


A lot of the market does.


60% of the CMS market is WordPress.


33% of all websites run on WordPress.


33% of all websites have good enough technical SEO.


So again, most modern CMSs do a lot of the heavy lifting for technical SEO.


The barrier to getting technical SEO good enough is in some ways much lower than getting


content right.


It's no wonder you start to see articles like this pop up.


I don't know if anyone remembers this.


This was I think a few years ago now.


Clayburn Griffin wrote this article on search engine land, title, The Role of Technical


SEO Should Play.


It's Makeup.


And the underlying idea is not entirely wrong, but it was of course a very poorly worded


offensive analogy that was a bit inflammatory.


But point being, technical SEO is very important.


And there's a lot more to technical SEO than the technical SEO that this article is talking


about.


And there's more to the definition than the one you've been taught in SEO grade school.


So without further ado, let's redefine technical SEO.


Brittany mentioned my conference, which is coming back for its third year.


It's a conference dedicated entirely to technical SEO.


Our first year we had Russ Jones who presented yesterday an amazing presentation.


I had him come and give a talk on the state of technical SEO.


And in that presentation, we actually, I think we collaborated a bit on coming to the final


definition.


And what he came up with was this definition right here.


He said, any sufficiently technical action undertaken with the intent to improve search


results.


Now if that's the definition of technical SEO, that certainly broadens things.


It's not necessarily just about crawling and indexing.


I want to take this a step further, dive a little bit deeper because I believe this deserves


a little bit more exploration.


I posit that there are actually four types of technical SEO.


First one, checklist technical SEO.


Then there's general technical SEO, blurred responsibility technical SEO, and advanced


applied technical SEO.


Starting with checklist technical SEO.


Checklist technical SEO is things that could be distilled down into sort of a checklist


process or framework.


You can sort of posit a few questions one at a time.


Consider yes or no, check the box.


It's frankly automatable.


Does this page have a canonical tag?


Yes, that's great.


Is that canonical tag crawlable, correctly formatted?


Awesome.


Is that canonical tag directed to the desired URL?


Great.


And so on and so forth.


And there's a lot of tools that will help you handle a lot of this.


You can use a crawler like Bonafide or Screaming Frog and you'll get a lot of the way there.


You can use a, I know, I haven't even seen this before.


I know Annie Cushing has a technical audit you can purchase that is essentially this.


You ask one question at a time and answer those questions for a client and you're doing


technical SEO.


Using checklist technical SEO.


And essentially it's just a lower skilled version of that crawling and indexing thing


that we were discussing earlier, that definition.


And I don't mean to diminish it either because it's hugely important.


You do these things and if your website is all have any issues, you're gonna see a lift.


But AI's coming, the robots are coming.


These things are definitely subject to automation.


And if you rely entirely on this, you're in trouble.


And furthermore, it's not quite equipped for the more complex situations.


Which brings us to the second type of technical SEO, general technical SEO.


So general technical SEO is conceptually very similar to checklist technical SEO.


It's things that concern itself with crawling and indexing except the scenarios in which


you need to apply logic and your skill set are more complex.


It's the higher skilled version of checklist technical SEO.


And these are things like maybe finding and correcting obscure crawler trap created by


a bug in your CMS, designing a maximally crawlable taxonomy inside architecture, internal linking


analysis, working on your server side rendering design, and so forth.


More difficult to automate, a little bit more in the weeds.


Blurred responsibility technical SEO.


Welcome to SEO folks, blurred responsibility.


Oftentimes in SEO, there are jobs and tasks and things that we recommend that aren't necessarily


SEO tasks, right?


We're talking about things like page speed, web performance optimization.


You could easily pass that off to a front end web developer or a UX guy.


But oftentimes it falls to the SEO.


It's kind of technical too.


Internal site search.


I don't know if anyone's designed an internal site search engine, but this in itself is


a huge task, a huge body of knowledge.


People engineer these things.


Structured data.


There's another whole world of technical SEO that's not necessarily meant to be done by


SEOs.


Advanced analytics implementation.


The list goes on.


Which brings me to the last one, and this is where we're really going to focus most


of the talk, is advanced applied technical SEO.


These are things that are not necessarily anything to do with crawling and indexing.


These involve applying a technical skill set to SEO problems across the board.


Quickly rattle off a few examples.


Testing for SEO purposes.


Anytime there's an adoption of a new technology, having someone there that is well equipped


to deal with that, understands how a crawler works, understands how it might work with


that new technology, how to actually design this for your client in an optimal manner.


The application of data science for SEO.


Using technology like natural language processing, machine learning, and applying that to search.


Automation.


This is the application of technical items to your SEO.


When you posit technical SEO in this way, it starts to seem that almost SEO becomes


a cornerstone.


It's foundational.


All SEO can in fact be technical SEO.


Now that we have our definition, you're nice and excited.


You understand this new definition of technical SEO.


I want to give some more practical examples.


I've listed these all on my blog.


You can look at them all in one place at searchwilderness.com slash moshcons hyphen 2019.


They're there for your enjoyment.


Link development.


Is that technical SEO?


Link building?


I think traditionally not, but it can be.


This is a Python script.


Essentially what this does is it looks for expired domains.


You can do something like go to a niche community forum.


Really into board games, one of the niche community forums for board games is boardgamegeek.com.


I can look at a particular game on board game geek, crawl that with screaming frog, export


the out links, use the script.


The script doesn't solve automatically once you have the screaming frog output.


It distills those links to just the domain name.


Uses the Moz Linkscape API to extract the page authority and domain authority for each


one of those domains.


Checks whether the HTTP status code is a 404.


Checks a whois API to see if that domain name is registered.


And outputs the answer to you.


There's a million ways you can use this.


One of the ways I'd recommend is to find those domains that were high page authority.


They were high page authority for a reason.


There's probably very excellent content on those.


You can look at what questions were they answering, what sort of content were they producing.


How to replicate the intent there.


And then conduct outreach.


But getting to those content ideas was a technical process.


And again, I ran this, found cardboardcrusader.com was expired.


Some dude selling it for 1800 bucks.


I'm not paying 1800 bucks.


But I looked at the content.


I put it in the wayback machine.


I'm starting to build out a content strategy.


Technical SEO.


On page SEO.


Not traditionally technical SEO.


That's writing.


Here's another Python script.


And by the way, if you guys are not familiar with Python, you do need to download the Python


scripting language.


You can get that on Python.org.


If you're on Windows, I kind of recommend using the Anacondas distribution.


Just Google Python Anacondas.


And you'll have to install the relevant libraries.


Back to this example.


This is using the Google natural language API to extract entities to enhance your content.


So you need to, in the Google developer console, you need to enable the natural language processing


API.


It's free up to a certain number of queries.


I forget how many exactly.


And then it's like a nominal charge after that.


You can input SERP data.


For the purpose of this script, we're just using a CSV.


So it's like I imported like the first three pages of results.


I would recommend actually using this with a rank tracking API.


If you use stat, you can use the stat API.


Whatever you like.


You download all the pages that are ranking.


So those top 30 results, download all the content of those pages.


Reduce that content to just the text.


So get rid of all the code.


Remove all the boilerplate content.


So no navigation menus, no footer.


Just the real content that matters.


And then you simply put this into the Google natural language API.


And it's going to extract entities as Google determines the entities to exist.


Then we can count the frequency of those entities across all the various documents.


We'll pull out that salient score.


And we can aggregate those metrics.


And we'll, end of the day, we'll get a list of keywords.


I think this term was Martin guitars.


And we can sort of use that to optimize content for Martin guitars.


To make sure that we have an optimal breadth of coverage.


That we've improved the relevance for that underlying topic or term.


Technical SEO.


On page SEO is technical SEO.


Content ideation.


My God, I love applying content ideation in technical SEO.


Big Redditor.


I think Reddit's an invaluable source of information for content ideation.


Ross did a fantastic talk where he discussed some of this.


You can use this script to help out with some of that.


So you go into the script, you log in with your Reddit credentials.


You specify an output.


You can choose either to isolate it to specific subreddits,


specific communities, or you can look at the entirety of Reddit.


You put in one term or series of terms.


I like to put in things like how to, or how can I, where can I,


things that are questions that people wanted answered on Reddit.


Or you can just put in whatever the topic is that you're looking to cover.


And you're just gonna get a long list of threads on Reddit.


Sorted by upvotes, sorted by comments, and


you can start to analyze that afterwards.


Look at an actual application.


I run a board game blog now, but I used to run a horror movie blog.


And when I was looking to develop content originally for


my horror movie blog, I used this tool.


And this is sort of an interesting, I think this is an interesting concept.


So horror movies, horror movie fans are a unique breed.


They're hardcore enthusiasts and


what they like isn't what the general populace necessarily likes.


So if you look at search volume,


that's a metric that reflects what the general populace likes.


So this was, I was deciding which horror movie director to write about.


So this is just sorted by horror movie director.


And if you look at this, one of the main directors, horror movie directors I


should have written about was Alfred Hitchcock, popular director.


Let's look at metrics from Reddit.


So this is sorted by upvotes and comments.


Alfred Hitchcock's nowhere to be found.


It's because within my own niche community,


Alfred Hitchcock wasn't the guy to write about.


They don't care about Alfred Hitchcock.


Honestly, you're better striking a balance between search volume and


interest from Reddit.


George Romero's the way to go.


It's technical SEO.


Do another example, just because content ideation's fun.


YouTube, tons of text content hidden behind videos.


So this tool, which again, it's a Python script you can use freely.


You input a whole YouTube playlist.


I do an example in a minute where I put in all of MozCon 2016.


There's a free playlist of all the videos from MozCon 2016.


It downloads every auto-generated transcription in English.


Does some basic frequency analysis on that text.


And we get some interesting insights.


MozCon 2016 was the year of content and friends.


Technical SEO.


Automation.


Automation's great.


Some real advantages to automating things.


Clearly it frees up time that you can spend on strategy and


other things that you can't automate as easily.


Also helps with data consistency.


If you're doing a redundant task over and over, it's subject to error.


But if you have the robot do it in a very strict way, computer,


a program, you're gonna get more consistency out of that task.


Here's an automation example.


So Wayback Machine, love Wayback Machine.


They have a series of APIs.


One of them will list every single URL for a domain name.


So you put in the domain name into the Wayback Machine.


It will spit out a list of historic URLs that ever existed,


that it ever was able to find on the Wayback Machine.


It will extract the text, it will get rid of the crufts,


it will get rid of the navigation, just the main text.


And then you can compare the old content to the existing content


using text analysis.


So essentially, what you get is a process of automating 301 redirect mapping.


So this example, I literally searched law firm redesign to see


someone who messed it up.


Not surprising, within the first ten results, there was a lot of errors.


So I hope no one works for this law firm.


Cuz, or if you do, come see me.


So essentially, you get a list of old URLs mapped to a list of new URLs and


a similarity score.


You assume that the highest scoring URL is likely the correct fit.


It's technical SEO.


Writing meta descriptions, it's tedious.


Sometimes you can't write a meta description for


every page on an e-commerce website with 10 million URLs.


What do you do?


I don't suggest completely automating it, although there are some people in


this industry that are definitely working on this problem and doing a great job.


So you input a list of URLs into a text file.


You specify an output.


You run it through various text summarization algorithms.


So you're getting actually a summary rather than a true meta description.


And you're using that summary as a proxy for a meta description.


You're summarizing what that page is about,


rather than leading it to Google to figure that out.


Outrova puts it to a CSV.


And then you do some manual work.


So this is sort of like a semi-automated approach.


You just sort of scan and see which would be the best algorithm for


this one, cuz sometimes they produce really junk results.


Sometimes one's better than the other in a certain instance.


And at least you have a starting place.


You're not writing a meta description completely from scratch.


And you put this into a tool like my pixel width checker,


which is really great for bulk writing of titles and meta descriptions.


And you do a lot of that work for you.


It's technical SEO.


Keyword research.


So technical.


Big fan of audience-based research when you're doing keyword research.


Otherwise, a pretty manual process.


So to really understand your audience and write content for


that audience and make sure it's a good fit for that audience.


I work for a big agency.


We have pretty expensive tools.


One of them is Hitwise AudienceView.


Pretty cool tool.


It has all sorts of audience data associated with keywords and websites.


And you can sort of do these across big keyword profiles.


But it's really hard to do them one at a time.


And I think that's really important when you're doing keyword research.


So essentially, this does some sort of browser simulation.


The script's really janky, but it does the job.


And it pulls out all sorts of psychographic and demographic data for


each and every one of those keywords.


So you can make sure that when you write content,


it aligns properly to that audience.


It's technical SEO.


Reporting automation dashboards.


If there's one thing you're gonna automate,


I recommend working towards automated reporting.


It is such a time suck.


And of course, you're gonna have to sit with a client and go through it a bit.


But at least you're not putting together a giant Excel dashboard for


them to have to go through.


And in order to do this,


one of the things you need to do is sort of create a data warehouse.


So you need to start pulling in analytics data, search console data,


anything that may be relevant.


This could all be done through API.


In this instance, this is using search console.


It dumps it all to a SQL database.


And then that can be imported into a dashboarding software like Tableau,


Data Studio, Power BI, whatever you like to use.


And then you make pretty charts.


It's technical SEO.


Last example.


And my previous examples were heavy coding examples.


And I don't want people to think that this is restricted to people that code.


There's a lot of ways where that technical acumen


can be applied in other ways.


Testing is one of them, hugely important to the industry today.


There's a use of machine learning algorithms.


Its queries are varying wildly, ranking is much harder to predict.


So testing's essential.


So again, far too often SEOs rely on the status quo,


best practices that end up being wrong.


I've seen some of the biggest lists from conducting tests.


And experimentation, opposed to, like say split testing,


can really help us understand how the search engines work.


How can you help do this?


You can work with engineers, product managers to write testing specs,


adhering to these scientific method.


You can measure the before and after in an attempt to isolate anomalies.


That's more on the measurement side of things.


This is a split testing example.


We have a control group where everything stays the same.


And then a series of variants, in which case we alter a little aspect of it.


Etsy wrote a great article about how to do this conceptually using


causal impact librarian R.


This is using a Python port, a very, very simple implementation.


But it essentially tries to isolate data anomalies, things like seasonality


that might affect a test like this and be able to determine causality.


The other type of testing I mentioned is sort of experiments.


This was an example of a similar test I ran for one of my clients that was


trying to understand how their navigation would function.


So instead of forcing them to do a live test on their website,


we recreated the key aspects of what they were trying to do on a separate


domain name and observed how Google responded to it.


It's technical SEO.


And I've mentioned this already.


So coding, a lot of these examples relied on coding.


And it's not the only way to contribute to technical SEO.


But it is important, and I recommend that people learn the fundamentals


of coding, it's gonna help you in other ways.


Even if you're not designing data programs or anything,


you'll be able to work better with developers in the future,


speaking their language.


And you'll be better at solving crawling and indexing problems, to be honest.


And furthermore, it's my twins again.


Children are learning how to code in grade school.


It's becoming a part of basic literacy.


And eventually, these children are gonna enter the workforce and


they're gonna be gunning for your jobs.


So not to paint such a grim picture, but I recommend learning.


These are examples of general technical SEO that would make use of coding.


Okay, I'm way over time.


This might be sort of a daunting thing to learn about coding,


which is why I recommend investing in technical SEOs,


rather than technical SEO itself.


They are the glue that holds this together, and often talent is your bottleneck.


But fear not, if you don't know how to code,


I don't want you to stress, I wanna tell you how to think about this.


Should you hire engineers, data scientists, analysts?


Can your existing SEO staff learn these things?


How to think about hiring technical SEOs.


You wanna think about hiring people that are adept at utilizing their technical


aptitude and skills to aid, improve, and enhance both technical and


non-technical SEO tasks.


This is really like a mode of thinking, more than anything.


I would look for skills similar to those of what I consider good engineers.


People that aren't purely about the code,


people that have a strong ability to problem solve, think critically.


The ability to take a complex subject and


communicate that well to others who may not understand it, a creative mind.


And if you need to start from square one and learn how to code,


maybe you have a little bit of experience in the past coding, and


it was like a visual basic or a less common programming language today.


Don't worry about it.


It doesn't matter which programming language you use.


It's the logic, the underlying logic.


It's pretty transferable.


But if you need to pick a language today,


there's sort of like two paths you can pick.


There's the data analysis path, which I recommend Python.


A lot of data numbers, libraries that are very helpful.


If you're going down the web development path, JavaScript's the way to go.


It's a very robust language, applicable in many ways.


And there's a lot of resources to learn how to use them.


I recommend having a practical goal to work towards,


although there's sort of a divergent pedagogy for this.


Some people think you should learn all the underlying theory first.


I've always been a fan of jumping into the ocean,


just having a job in mind that I wanna solve and trying to do it.


Leverage online tutorials, MOOCs, Code Academy.


Don't be afraid to look at examples,


steal little snippets from GitHub and Stack Overflow.


And you don't have to do everything yourself.


If you have the resources, if you have an engineering team, and


you understand that logic behind what you're actually trying to accomplish,


look for help.


So, to go back to our original discussion on the pillars of technical SEO,


I insinuated that content might be even more important than technical SEO.


Is it?


Notice when I say technical SEO is more important than content or


link buildings, really, it's all a part of this one crazy Venn diagram.


So the Venn diagram can look a little bit different.


You can put technical SEO as a circle that encompasses both of those.


Technical SEO could be at the center of all of it.


You can elevate your work that is otherwise creative,


your content strategy, the work you're already doing.


You can elevate the work your link builders are doing, the content development.


Start thinking about technical SEO a little differently.


Let technical SEO be your glue.


They help.


Let technical SEOs be your glue.


They help everyone.


Thank you.


Reimagining Customer Retention and Evangelism Presented by Kristen Craft

I want to start by taking everyone back to 1989.


This is me in 1989.


I have some really large front teeth, some really 80s hair going on.


I'm really into turtlenecks for some reason.


And as a kid, back in the 80s, probably like many of you as children, I spent a ton of


time in the car with my parents, going to the grocery store, running random errands.


And I particularly loved being in the car with my dad.


Not only did his car have this really warm, rich smell of leather, but also he had something


in the car that I thought was the coolest thing ever.


He had this big honking car phone.


Now for anyone who is too young to know what this is, this was a car phone, not a mobile


phone, and it was massive.


It was sort of fixed to the center console.


And at the time, it was just mind blowing that you could use a phone in the car.


So I thought this was really cool.


And not infrequently, I would be in the car with my dad, and he'd get a phone call.


And he'd pick it up, and we'd just be chatting very casually with the person.


He'd ask about their kids, and he'd remember them by name.


Or he'd know where that person had recently been on vacation and ask about that.


Now, years later, I learned that, you know, all of these calls really were not friend


calls despite what I thought, but that he was talking to clients.


This totally blew my mind for a couple of reasons.


One, my dad was a salesman.


He sold office furniture.


And I just didn't understand why a salesperson would be wasting his time having these phone


calls with existing customers.


After all, shouldn't he be out there trying to sell new customers?


But then also, why was he talking to them in this really casual way?


Shouldn't he be more professional about it?


Well, my dad's philosophy was always that it's far better and more valuable to keep


an existing customer than it is to try to go out and win a new one.


So why am I telling you all this?


Well, I think that this kind of real relationship building, the kind of relationship building


that my dad did, is something that we see so infrequently these days.


And I get it.


It's hard to scale that kind of thing.


You can't get on the phone and remember the kids' names of your 20,000 customers.


And we try.


We use things like marketing automation to try to personalize and try to scale that.


But we know what that is.


It's not really the same thing.


And yet we want the same thing now that my dad wanted back in 1989.


We all want lifelong customers.


We want people who feel that connection with our companies.


So people churn.


And why do they churn?


We're working so hard to keep these lifelong customers.


We're working hard to build great products, to build great websites.


And people still leave.


Why are they leaving?


Well, I would argue that it's because we're using short-term tactics.


And short-term tactics lead to short-term relationships.


You can change the dials a little bit on price, on various things, and hope that that's going


to keep someone around.


But that is short-term thinking.


So what can we do if we actually want to keep those lifelong customers?


I tend to believe that there are three primary ways that we can differentiate ourselves.


We can differentiate on price, on product, or on experience.


Let's talk about some of these.


Price, I think that is the worst one to try to differentiate on.


It's a race to the bottom, first of all.


And you actually have no control over this.


The second you drop your price, someone can come out and undercut you.


Additionally, people don't actually care.


I mean, you have to have a competitive price, but the vast majority of people are willing


to pay more for an excellent experience.


So I don't think it's price.


How about product?


This is one that, you know, I think we all imagine that we need to have the best feature


set out there, the most differentiated feature set out there.


But again, it's not under your control.


You can build the best thing in the world, but it's only a matter of time before someone


notices what you're doing and they turn around and replicate that exact same feature.


And again, it's not what customers want.


That's because of something called Hick's law, which says that the amount of time it


takes to make a decision or take an action increases exponentially with the number of


choices.


And as those number of choices go up, the experience you're having from it goes down.


So people are actually oftentimes having worse experiences as we bolt on feature after feature


trying to remain in parity with our competitors.


So it's not necessarily product that's our differentiator.


Where does that leave us?


I think it leaves us with experience.


Experience is the ultimate differentiator.


This is an area where nobody can come in and replicate what it feels like to work with


you.


To know what it feels like to call up someone on your customer service team and talk with


them.


No one can steal this from you.


And I think it's just worth saying that, you know, yes, you have to have a competitive


price and you have to have an excellent product.


Those things are table stakes, but they're not reliable as differentiators.


So one of the things you might be thinking is, okay, great, but how do I actually do


this?


Well, let's take a look at where we're heading.


I'm going to talk about how to leverage familiarity to build that experience, how to make sure


you're not trying to be all things to all people, and how to prioritize the personal


over the professional.


So I'm going to start with a question, which is, how do you get a second grader to like


you?


There's a psychologist by the name of Robert Zajunck who did a really interesting study


with this.


What Zajunck did is he went into a couple second grade classrooms.


And in one classroom, he sent a woman for about five minutes a day over the course of


a week.


The woman didn't say anything, she didn't do anything, she didn't so much as smile at


the kids.


The teacher didn't introduce her.


She just sat there, at the end of that time, she marched out.


In the second classroom, the woman never came into the room.


Now at the end of the week, Zajunck showed all of these second graders a stack of photographs


of people's faces.


And he asked the students to rate how much they liked the person.


Among the second graders who never saw the woman, they pegged her sort of middle of the


road, fours, fives, sixes.


What's really weird is that among the second graders who saw her there in their classroom,


they rated her eights, nines, tens, for no good reason at all.


Well, there actually is a good reason, and it comes down to a human behavior, a human


tendency, which is called the familiarity principle, also worked on and studied by Zajunck.


And the familiarity principle says that we are all hardwired to prefer the things that


we see more often.


So how can we actually leverage this?


How can we take advantage of this human tendency?


There's a company that does this really, really well.


They're called Bamboo HR, and they make HR software.


This woman you see here, her name is Sarah.


She does sales at Bamboo HR.


And like many salespeople, she spends a ton of time on the phone calling people and trying


to get people to call her back.


Wasn't working that well for her, so she decided to make this video voicemail.


Hi, I'm Sarah from Bamboo HR, I love to use voicemail as well, but I know that sometimes


email is easier.


I'd love to chat with you about our free HR technology webinar.


You can go ahead and email me back or give me a call at 801-889-1269.


I spoke with Sarah, and she told me that after they launched this video and she started using


this, she was selling more than two times what she was previously.


So Bamboo HR went and scaled this across their entire sales team.


And this is powerful stuff.


People felt familiar.


They felt like they had that familiarity with Sarah.


They preferred her.


They felt empathy with her.


Familiarity breeds love.


And I want to pause for a minute just to make a side note.


So I don't know, maybe some of you know this phrase.


I think about this a lot.


To the person with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.


I am that person with a hammer, and my hammer is video.


I work at Wistia, we do video hosting, video analytics, so I see video opportunities everywhere.


That said, there are many great ways to build an excellent differentiated experience that


go beyond video, and I recognize that completely.


I just happen to believe that video is one of the best ways of doing that.


So how can we take advantage of this familiarity principle?


Very tactically, what can we do differently on our websites with our clients for our own


companies?


Well, first of all, put real people on camera.


It kills me when I see people using stock photography or worse, hiring actors to come


in to be in images or worse videos on your own website.


I can feel a little intimidating at first, but that's how you build an authentic experience


is by being honest in that way.


Second, to get very, very tactical for a second, if you are going to put people on camera,


don't distract folks with shadows and sort of dark under-eye circles and shadows under


people's chin as you get from fluorescent lighting overhead.


You can make people look at their most empathetic, enthusiastic, passionate selves if you're


flooding your subject's face with light.


And last, do take the time to actually script a video.


And I know what people think oftentimes, won't it sound scripted if I do that?


Well, not if you're doing it right.


There are ways that you can do it that doesn't make it sound scripted.


But it's far better to actually script it than to have something that's unscripted and


then be peppered with ums and ahs.


Pretty distracting.


All right.


So familiarity.


I want to take us next to a book that I read last year and loved and keep thinking about.


This book is called data clism.


It was written by Christian Rudder, one of the co-founders and chief data scientist at


OKCupid.


So Rudder has the most interesting job in the world because he has access to all of


this cool data about how we behave, what we look for in a partner, what we like, what


we dislike.


In this book, data clism exposes a lot of what he has learned over the years.


Now there's so many great things and data points and anecdotes in this book, but there


are two in particular I want to share.


One of which probably will not surprise any of you and the other one, at least for me,


knocked my socks off.


So the first point that Rudder shares is that more attractiveness leads to more messages.


So if you are Brad Pitt or whoever is popular these days, you're going to get more messages


asking you on dates and asking you to connect.


Now here's where things get really weird.


Let's say you have two people.


Both of them are like a five out of ten on the attractiveness scale.


And one of them is universally regarded to be a five.


Everybody considers that person to be a five.


The other person also has an average score of five, but that average is made up of a


lot of ones and a lot of tens.


Maybe there's something unique about them, something a little exotic.


Perhaps a large mustache or a mohawk, let's say.


Where this gets really interesting with that second person, the person who is very polarizing,


who gets a lot of ones and a lot of tens, is that polarizing person will get on average


70% more messages than the person who is universally regarded as a five.


70% more.


That is a really, really big change.


So what's the lesson here?


Perhaps it is that if turtlenecks are your thing, you do you.


There are people out there who might love turtlenecks.


In all seriousness, I think the bottom line here is that you should embrace those things


that are unique and maybe polarizing about them, about you.


There's a company that has leveraged this well.


Their name is ThoughtWorks.


And they have this associate consultant program.


They hire a lot of people into this program, so they're constantly trying to recruit and


hire folks.


And one of the pain points that they experienced is that they had a lot of applicants and a


lot of people who are interested in joining who are terrible fits for this job.


So they made this video to tell people a bit more about what it was like to work at ThoughtWorks.


Now full disclosure or I guess just to note, they don't put real people on camera, so I'm


hoping that the next iteration of this has this.


But I do think that they embraced this idea really well.


So here's what I think is cool about this video.


They are telling it like it is.


They say we travel all over the country and often the world.


To some people who, you know, have a certain kind of lifestyle and love travel, that's


really appealing.


They're like, I want to travel all over the world.


For other people who have two little kids at home like myself, even though I love travel,


that sounds really hard and like it just might not be a good fit.


Turns out they were able to save themselves thousands of dollars per recruit with this


video because they go, they subsequently go into even more detail about what it's like


to have this job and what it feels like to be a part of this program.


What I take away from this in general is that we shouldn't try to be all things to all people.


Okay, again, let's break this down.


What does this actually mean?


How can we take action on this?


Well, first of all, as Joanna talked about earlier today, we need to use precise language.


This makes a difference.


If you are traveling all over the world, say that.


Don't just say people travel all the time.


Second, don't hide your idiosyncrasies.


It can be so tempting to think, you know, I'll just have this okay cupid photo from


this angle rather than that angle to hide this thing.


But don't.


Oftentimes, those idiosyncrasies are the exact things that are going to make some people


so passionate about the experience of working with you.


All right.


Last, I want to take us to the Azores, which is a little chain of islands right in the


middle of the Atlantic Ocean.


It's part of Portugal.


And the two people you're seeing here, Remi and Joao, are dear friends of mine who used


to live in Boston.


Now, Remi and Joao lived in Boston, had, you know, regular jobs, but their lifelong dream


was to move to the Azores and open a bed and breakfast there.


And at some point, they just realized life is short.


If this is our dream, we should just do it.


So I have so much admiration for this.


They quit their jobs, they moved to the Azores, they bought property, and they opened a bed


and breakfast.


During their first year, they invited a lot of guests to come and essentially be beta


testers of their new bed and breakfast and give them feedback.


And towards the end of their first season, they reached out to all of these people who


had come and stayed with them during that beta season asking for help.


They wanted these people to leave them reviews on TripAdvisor, on Yelp.


They wanted those people to come back.


They wanted those people to spread the word and tell their friends.


And when they reached out with this request, they shared this video.


Hello.


Hey, hello.


Thank you guys so much for being some of our very first guests.


Thanks to you, we learned the ropes and you got us on the map.


And I'm going to be honest with you guys, I really can't do video.


So get your ass back here and come visit us.


Happy 2016.


Woo-hoo!


I love this video so much.


It's not professionally done.


It was shot on an iPhone.


It was edited in iMovie.


But there is something that they are doing exceptionally well.


They are prioritizing the personal over the professional.


And that makes a huge difference.


There's a feeling of empathy that's created there.


It's tapping back into the experience that those people had when staying with Remi and


Joao.


Again, let's get really specific.


What does this mean?


What can we actually do differently if we are prioritizing the personal over the professional?


Well, first off, show personal appreciation.


I don't know about you, but it kills me when I get an email from Bank of America thanking


me for something that's this long, drawn out email.


That is not adding to my day, Bank of America.


If anything, you are stealing 10 seconds of my time with your BS, really dry, impersonal


email.


If you're going to say thank you, make it count.


Do it personally, just as Mike was just talking about.


Second, heightened emotion with music.


Music is really, really powerful.


And in this case, for example, that Azorian music brings people back to the experience


that they had when they were staying in the Azores.


Perhaps it makes people reminisce about the Azorian food that Joao is cooking for people


there in their kitchen.


Last, leave room for humor.


You know, Joao makes that dorky little dad joke in that video.


And I love that so much, because that is who he is.


And that's part of the experience that he gave people when they were staying with them.


He's the kind of guy who just loves standing around cooking and cracking jokes with people


and giving people that authentic experience of what he is truly like.


Don't shy away from that.


Leave room for that humor.


Okay, I want to take us now to the holy grail of customer attention.


Which is evangelism.


This is where you are not only keeping a customer for life, but you are actually enlisting their


help to go out and spread the word about your company.


They're doing your selling for you.


There's an organization that leverages evangelists particularly well in an interesting way.


This is called Steve and Kate's Camp.


And they run a series of camps all around the country.


And their whole philosophy is that they encourage kids to do their own thing, to chart their


own course.


Now in the middle of the summer, they make this video and they send it out.


Let's take a look.


This is the only camp I've been to where you can just be free and be yourself.


This camp is all about decision.


You get to choose where you want to go, what you can do, who to be with, which is unique


to this camp and it's very fun.


Steve and Kate pretty much has everything.


You make stuff, you get to sing, you get to dance.


You don't have to bring your own lunch.


They give you very healthy snacks.


They don't really like say, okay, you have to do this.


They don't tell you what to do and they don't have to tell you mean stuff about your mistakes.


Because you're learning what you did wrong and you're learning how you can fix it.


Because there are millions of studios that you can do it in.


It's important that the kids get to be free and play all day.


It's like a free roaming camp.


You get used to making your own decisions.


Mostly you're just kind of your own boss.


Don't you want to go to that camp?


I totally want to go to that camp.


So Steve and Kate's camp, they are Wistia customers and they do a lot with video.


So I was poking around and I took a look at the analytics for this video.


There are two things that jumped out at me here.


The first is the play count.


They had over 14,000 plays on a video that was launched really recently.


That's a lot of plays.


Second, they have a ton of rewatches.


So just to orient you for a second on this engagement graph, the blue line there shows the percentage of people that are still engaging or watching the video over the course of time.


Whereas the orange line that's overlaid above shows you the number of rewatches that are going on at any point in the video.


And normally those two lines are really close together.


But in this case, as you can see, they're decently far apart.


And they're getting about 2,000 rewatches throughout the course of this video.


So I spoke on the phone with the director of marketing from Steve and Kate's camp.


I was like, what is going on with this video?


Why are so many people watching it?


And who's rewatching this video again and again?


Here's what he shared.


He mentioned that they send this video out in the middle of the summer.


Oftentimes the kids are still at camp.


Can you imagine what that feels like for the parent?


You're missing your kid so much.