advantage is temporary. It is a moving target and that's why it's so difficult for brands to


Competitive Advantage in a Commoditized Industry

achieve and maintain. I'm going to reference the typical product lifecycle here, another NBA


classic, but I'm going to stretch it a bit to fit my point about defending competitive advantage.


Now when a brand new company emerges or they have a new product, service, audience, competitive


advantage, whatever, much of that effort investment is spent on raising awareness and


amassing your first customers. Great. Then you start to build up preference for your brand,


increasing your market share, whether that's establishing that new or taking it away from


other brands. Competition might be lower at this stage. You're getting some scale. You're growing


your audience. Then your steep growth trajectory starts to level off. The competition sees that


you're onto a good thing and they start cutting into your piece of the pie. You might fight it


by adding more features or perhaps you lower your price. And in a typical business, this is the


point where sales may even start to decline and you have choices here, right? You can maintain


your existing service and try to rejuvenate it. You can cut costs to stay competitive, but maybe


that cuts into your profit margin and makes it a little less worthwhile. Or perhaps you decide to


get out of the game entirely because it's not financially attractive anymore. And if you have


an attractive competitive advantage and you're making good money, we know that competitors in


this space are going to adopt that to stay competitive themselves. So those copycats


encroaching on you leads to parity and that competitive advantage diminishes. Or, or you can


find new ways to achieve competitive advantage. You can explore areas of expansion or even


completely reinvent yourself to renew your competitiveness. The cycle starts again and you


can once again become the one that others want to catch up to. Now you can only fight off the


competition for so long doing the same things and fighting isn't always the answer. At some point,


you might need to evolve. And there are a few ways you might do that. You could explore new markets,


are there underserved or untapped audiences you could reach? You can expand new closely related


product lines and services. You could add new features or innovations to your existing product


or service. Similarly, you could also elevate or enhance your current benefits. You could cut costs


to produce or shift or find economies of scale, which drives price down and it makes your parity


product more valuable relative to price. Or you could go through mergers and acquisitions to join


forces or even divest certain pieces of business so you can focus on your new competitive advantage.


Now this is hardly an exhaustive list, just a few thought starters on what evolution might look like


if you're at that stage of your career or if your business is at this point in its natural life


cycle. Now in order to create, keep and defend sustainable competitive advantage, long term,


evolution is necessary. Keep rooting out the opportunity for renewed competitive advantage


and master the art of reinvention. And if you can adapt and transform, you can compete and survive.


Thank you very much. Remember, MozCon.VMLYRConnect to get all your free goodies. These are the two


books that I talked about. And thank you again for me and all of us at VMLYNR, especially in our


MozCon 2014 - 07 - Mike Ramsey - Local Lessons from Small Town USA

I'm so excited to be able to talk to you all today because I get to talk about my favorite


things. One, my hometown, Burley, Idaho, and the other thing, local search. And we get


to combine them together. So here you go. This is Burley, what you've been waiting for


since you bought your ticket to see this. We have mountains, we have snow, we have trees,


we have water, and we have some weeds. And a cross. And we have Happy Island. The reason


that's called Happy Island is because I kissed my crush in high school on that island. Okay?


And you know, I love my hometown, but when I was growing up and when I was in school,


I wanted to move from country roads that look like this to big cities that look like this.


And the fun thing about this deck, I took all these pictures, so I really enjoy photography


as well. So I wanted to move to a city like New York. But then this happened. And this


led to these. You say, oh, but you do not know these. No. I love my kids, okay? And


we started this family in Burley. I'm from Burley, my wife's from Burley. We moved into


there next to my wife's sister. And her mother lives about.6 miles along that trail there.


I found a really cool map pin to represent that place. That trail, I call it the Trail


of Tears. I take it almost daily. And yes, okay. Well, anyway, so this was never going


to happen. Okay? The second we moved into that house, it was just not going to happen


anymore if I valued my happiness. And so now we have Nifty Marketing. This is our office.


We actually have the old bus depot in Burley. And we've been growing. We've been doing really


well. We opened another company, Nifty Law, which is focused on the legal niche. And we've


gone through all these things and we've had all these growing challenges and we've had


all of this wonderful experience in learning local SEO. And I started to realize that a


lot of the things that I was able to do and a lot of the things that I learned were because


of lessons that I had basically acquired over the course of my time in Burley, Idaho. So


I'm going to share those with you today and I hope that they can guide you in your local


search experiences as well. Now, I know you're all interested in local


because if you do any search on any keyword, mobile or desktop, I can almost guarantee


that search is localized now. So if you don't care about local, it's just because you haven't


been paying attention. So we're not even going to try to sell you on it. You just should


be interested. So lesson number one, everyone is related.


Everyone is related in my hometown. I am related to everybody. As a matter of fact, I'm going


to show you my family tree. It's called the Burley, Idaho ecosystem. Now, I don't know


how many of you know this or have seen something similar to this, not quite as good, but we'll


talk about it. So I'm in the middle and you see the Ramses, Handys, Morgans, Lees, Hanson.


Some of these are those who have direct influence on me. These are like my grandparents and


progenity friends, just everybody and their relations to each other and how they're all


related and how they have effect on me. And you have my wife, Hillary. Of course, she


has major effect. She's the closest relationship there.


So come to my surprise when I saw David Mim had ripped off my family tree with the local


search ecosystem by Moz. And he just switched out me for Google Plus local. And then he


has, you know, instead of my relatives, he has the relationships that these different


directories have with each other. And he shows how Google, you know, what information Google


gathers directly. And we'll talk a little bit about that. But first, David, David, David.


So no, it's okay. You won't hear from my lawyers. I'm feeling generous. You just have to give


me your shares of Moz. So the most important thing to understand


from this is that a company's business name, address, and phone number need to be consistent


across the Web, especially on these local search directories. And as Google goes across


the Web and as they have these different relationships, they see these places where you're listed,


and if it's correct, then they basically put that information in your cluster. Okay?


And so here's examples of it not being correct down below there. But what we found in a recent


study, we looked at 100 marks across the U.S. in the personal injury law space, and we found


that the average personal injury lawyer ranking one through three had about 49 what we call


citations, places where their name, address, and phone number appear. And in the 8 to 10


position, there was 54. This was really weird, because forever we've heard people say you


got to go get citations, go get citations, get as many as you can, you know, you need


to have a lot of citations to rank. And, you know, there's Cretan stuff for sure. But this


was interesting. This was interesting to me. But we did another thing with this information.


We looked at info group using Moz local and found that those listed in one through three


had on average only about one little error, some small little error. And those that were


listed in positions 8 through 10 had three errors. So the consistency was really off


on info group. Same on axiom, same on some of these other directories that were very,


very important. And that stood out to me. And it told, you know, we were able to do


that using Moz local. And you can see here in this case, this company had great data


for the most part, but info group was the place that they had the worst information.


And it taught me that you have to fix these big relationships first. Okay?


So let's look at some of those big relationships. You have Google map maker, you have info group


and you have axiom. We're going to look at how you can look at that information real


quickly and then go on from there. So first we're going to use Moz as an example. I typed


in Moz Seattle on express update and it looks like a company, I have no idea who this is,


SEO Moz. Has anybody ever heard of them? Or is it ‑‑ I'm not sure if that was there


or not before. But they have two of those listings there. And so we can see that info


group has that data. And then if you go to map maker and you type in Moz, then there's


two listings that show up. And in map maker, this is a great way to check for duplicate


listings is just go there and search for a brand and you can see what Google basically


has in their index for a specific company. And so here you have listings that have the


exact same information. Okay? And so now that I have totally called out


David and Moz, I'm sure I will never be invited back. So whoever does the local speech next


year has to follow up to make sure that these are fixed. Okay?


So lesson number two, reputation is built in a lifetime and broken in an instant. I


want to talk to you about a company called the weekly mailer. Now, the weekly mailer


is our hometown version of Yelp. People are not fully online so much in Burley. So this


is a print paper that's delivered to every house in the community and consists of anonymous


letters. That's all it is. It's just anonymous letters. Just bashing people. I mean, bashing


prominent people in the community, bashing businesses. If you want the gossip of local


hometown, this is it. I hate them with a fiery passion. I hated them so bad, I spent hundreds


of thousands of dollars creating my own newspaper and just combated them. I told them if you


don't stop, I'm going to start a paper and just take you out of business. Okay?


And it was because the guy who owned this was an elected official at the time as well.


But he taught me this lesson. He taught me that if you mess up once, if you make one


blunder and that goes public, then all of the things that you could do over the course


of your entire life could be ruined as far as your reputation goes. And there's many


people in Burley who's experienced this at his hand and at this paper's hand. Okay?


And I think the same goes in the local search space with reviews. Online reviews make or


break a business. Let's look at some statistics here. 88% of consumers trust online reviews


as much as personal recommendations. This is a study done by Bright Local. And this


number has gone up year after year after year as well. And on this one, 95% of consumers


share bad customer experiences. Okay? And I think there's only one way that businesses


can ever overcome this, and that is to make reviews part of your customer experience.


Okay? And we'll talk a little bit about how to do that. And this is my son Joshua up here.


And if you don't do this, he will kick you in the face. Okay? So here's one example of


how this works. You can build a form like this on your Web site that says we really


appreciate your honest feedback. Please fill out this very brief form. Put in your name.


And then just rate your experience on a five question basis, you know, very poor to great.


Okay? If they choose very poor to okay, we send them to this experience. Please let us


know what we can do better. That form goes directly to me. I even go as far as putting


my name and phone number on there and a business's name and phone number that we build this for


in order for them to get this feedback to make their business better and ensure that


customers with, you know, trouble can be taken care of. If they choose good or great, we


send them to this page. Thanks for the great feedback. We love it when our customers review


us online. You know, go read these reviews or leave us a review on Google or because


you can't send people to Yelp to leave reviews. We say or enjoy reading your reviews on Yelp


and then we send them to actual search results instead of the actual listing on Yelp so that


we don't get any trouble there. So this is a great way to just work in a feedback system


into any type of business. I love this approach. All right? And there's a tool if you don't


build this called get five stars built by the infamous Mike Blumenthal and Dom Campbell


that does this very thing. I highly recommend it. And here's an example of what happens


when a company takes this seriously. Rope pest control, pest control, I mean, it's a


hard industry to get reviews on. It's not a very attractive industry. And if you look


on this page, look at the star ratings. Who even has star ratings showing up? Them. And


pretty much them only. And they've done very well with this approach. And another thing


that they do is they respond to every single review that they get. Because it's still very


few. And in looking at these reviews and looking at these responses, not only does it make


them seem more just more approachable and willing to take care of their customers, but


if you have good reviews like this, this is all that shows up when you click on the review


tab on Google and it pushes reviews like this off the page. And it only took two. There's


only two visible reviews on that first pop-up window by doing that.


Lesson three. To have fun, you've got to get creative. There is not much to do with money


in Burley, Idaho. There's not many places to go and play. As a matter of fact, we have


the Burley Cinema, as you can see there with the broken window to the right. And we have


a bowling alley. It's quite an old bowling alley. So growing up, we just had to come


up with our own things for fun. We did things like wakeboarding in canals with very little


clothes on, sometimes none. We did things like a BB gun. Do you guys remember Duck Hunt


on Nintendos? Yeah, great game. We did that with BB guns in real life. And we'd only allow


one pump on the BB gun, but my friends weren't good friends. And they would usually pump


a few more times and you would just run out in a field and then you would get shot. So


it makes you strong, but it's extremely stupid. So the idea with this, though, is that you


can't wait for others to figure out what to do. And I think our industry has a problem.


I think that we wait around a lot to figure out and wait for other people to come up with


creative ideas. But not only that, when it comes to research in our industry, I see a


lot of people that just sit and wait. They don't do their own research. They don't do


their own studies and they take people's word for it. And I just really want to go and publish


a bunch of false information and see how many people implement that. But my challenge to


you is to go out and to do your own studies, do your own tests. And I have some tests that


I want to talk to you about here. So the great thing about Burley is nothing changes in this


market. Hardly any of the listings are claimed. We don't have any local clients. And so we


use Burley as our test grounds because it's a stagnant market. No listings move up or


down. And so you can start playing around with things and you can see what moves needles.


So the review test. There's a great restaurant called Edith's and Hamburger Joint, they're


only open, get their hours. Tuesday through Thursday, 11 to 1. Okay. The owner is great


if he likes you. And if he doesn't know you or you're not from Burley, he probably won't


even serve you. He'll just say believe. And so he had a few negative reviews, but a lot


of our office really likes him. So we went out, we ate there, and then we added ‑‑


this is the screenshot from May 29th in the carousel results. So he's in position nine.


We added seven reviews over a period of a month. Okay. There's some of the reviews between


probably four and five stars. And they were legit. And on June 24th, 2014, by that time,


he had moved from nine to seven. Moved up two positions. Only thing that changed, the


reviews. Interesting. Okay. Driving direction test. There's ‑‑ Mike Blumenthal did


a really good presentation recently at one of our local university advance programs about


driving directions and how these could potentially be a ranking factor. And we wanted to look


into this a little bit. And these are small off‑tests. I mean, these are by no means


conclusive, but I use these to just start to form different hypotheses and then go for


much deeper tests. But driving directions test, King Pope, Phillips and Oaks, hardest


CPA firm name to pronounce ever, they were in position F on May 30th, 2014, and we went


through with mobile phones and clicked on this ‑‑ the driving directions button


on these mobile results and then followed the driving directions to their office over


a period of this month. And what happened was really interesting. By the end of the


month, the child listing for King Pope, Phillips and Oaks that has the same exact address,


same exact phone number had moved up to the position directly underneath that. Almost


like it was a duplicate listing, even though it goes on to have the actual Oaks partner


listing information there. But the driving direction information was the same. And so


I thought this one was quite interesting as well.


Next we had a link test that we did. Kim Hansen Chevrolet, used car dealership in Burley,


we built ten links. We built four exact match links, we built four branded links and we


did two naked URLs. Ten, yeah, okay. And as we did this, and as you can see here, the


positions that they were ranking in, map listing from doing this over the course of a month


moved up three spots, organic moved up five spots, all staying the same. Okay. Interesting.


We did a custom category test. The custom category test went like this. We built a fake


listing. I had to put my black hat on a little bit for this one. I don't recommend doing


fake listings for other than test purposes. But we created one, it was called the Mike


firm, it's law firm. Fake law firm, it's mine, and I built it in Burley. And as you can see,


I put the category personal injury attorney down there. And here we are on Google map


maker, if you go over to map maker, you can actually add custom categories. Now, this


option has been taken away from just the normal ability in Google My Places listings, so you


have to choose a predefined category. On map maker, you can still insert custom words.


So we inserted the keyword injury law and car accident attorney, which are more specific


within that personal injury attorney space. By doing that, you know, we had to wait for


an approval period, and this approval has to be done by somebody in the map maker system.


And so during that time, I also added a picture of me taming a zebra just for good measure


to ensure people knew I was very good at law. And as soon, I mean, like literally the second


this listing was approved, those two categories, the Mike firm moved up on the keyword injury


lawyer, you know, Burley, Idaho, injury lawyer to position D, and on car accident attorney,


which is usually in the personal injury space, these are some of the bread and butter phrases,


moved up to number one instantly. This is a brand new listing just through custom categorization.


Yet again, interesting test. Now, I don't ‑‑ the reason I put shh on this listing here,


these are the type of ones that you don't really want to tweet to, you know, people


from Google too often or else those options disappear. But I did want to share that because


I found that a very interesting one of our experiments. We also did quite a few click


tests. And I wanted to show a couple of those to you today. So we had the phrase Burley


lawyer and you can see there's one ad, three organic results and then a bunch of local


packs. And here's the outcome of that. 17% clicked on local, 64% on organic. And this


is very different than I've seen in other studies. 11% on paid and 92% of the total


clicks were above the fold, which you can see here, the rest were down below. We used


a really great tool, usability hub to run these tests and we had 100 participants on


the experiment and we asked them if you were searching, you know, if you were in need to


find a lawyer in Burley, Idaho and you did this search phrase, which result would you


choose? Okay. We took the same exact search phrase and put it in a mobile version and


did the same study and had very different outcomes. We had a big drop in local. We actually


had a big drop in local because in looking what's truly above the fold here, there was


not local results above the fold and 77% of those clicks were above the fold. 23% went


to paid, much higher. 54% a little drop in organic just on this phrase. Now, this is


very, very different than we saw in a similar study that we did on carousel results. On


this specific carousel results study, we saw 64% that were related to maps or local search


or 62, sorry, 62%. Okay. Now, I don't think that you can look at any of these and say


that this is across the board in any way, but what I do recommend is whatever industry


you're in or whatever market you're in, run your own tests, run your own click tests and


your own quick studies like this to see why people might be clicking on specific things.


One of the things that I thought was very interesting was one of the listings on here,


it was burleylawyer.com, but that burleylawyer.com was the last name. It wasn't even the town.


And that received a large amount of clicks and it made me want to do a lot more tests


on looking at exact match domains in local search to see if they have, if that's, you


know, if that was a cause of maybe getting a little more organic search clicks than I


would have expected compared to localized search clicks. Okay.


Reason number four, traffic is slow, but you have to pay attention. You guys remember Happy


Island? I got to tell you a story. So when I was in high school, this same young woman


was walking on the road on 16th Street. It's this like, you know, old street, no lines


in the road. It's just two lanes. And I was driving along and I saw her. And as any gentleman


would do, I started following her with my eyes a little bit and she made eye contact


and I did a nice little slight nod and I ran into the back of a car.


That pretty much ended our relationship. I did not live that one down. And it taught


me a really valuable lesson that you always have to pay attention not only on the road


but looking at your local search traffic. It's small. Some of you deal with lots and


lots of traffic. And when you look at a small market, it might not be something that you


want to spend too much time segmenting or breaking down or understanding. But for many


of you who target national audiences, if you compiled all the local search traffic that


you could get across many, many markets, this traffic starts getting very, very big very,


very quickly. And so I want to talk about a few things that


I do not see hardly anybody doing, especially bigger brands that they definitely should.


One is tracking local pack traffic. So we've been running some tests and have seen some


pretty cool results. We use the Google URL builder and this works for pack results. This


used to be done but when blended results came out in search which was the combined organic


and local search listing, it stopped working so it kind of phased out. But now that we're


back to traditional seven pack or three pack results, we see this working a lot more.


So you go to the Google URL builder, you build a URL, you put local, let me go back to that,


you put local in the campaign medium or seven pack or three pack or whatever type of modifier


you would like to have show up in your analytics platform. And it doesn't show up when you


look at the actual URL in the seven pack but as you roll over that URL, you can see that


the UTM code there is showing up. Okay? The tracking URL.


And we're able to take this and segment the traffic to find exactly how it's performing


through the rest of the conversion process this way and be able to segment that where


normally you would just be looking at combined sometimes organic and local traffic without


being able to make a distinction there. So a very interesting thing to do. Now, this


works great if you have seven pack. If you have carousel, it doesn't work. And the reason


why, on a carousel result, when you click on a map listing, it redirects or reroutes


the search to be the brand name followed by the city with a comma and then the state identifier.


Okay? And so what I would recommend in that case,


and then as you look below, you see that it's the organic listing instead of the actual


URL that you've stuck into your Google My Business Center.


So in this case, on Rov Pass controls, it doesn't work, but you could take for anything


that hasn't been filtered out that's non-provided, you could take all of the keyword traffic


you get from, you know, brand name, city, and then comma followed by the state identifier


and segment that traffic and be able to find similar data for carousel results.


Okay. Call tracking and local. There's tons of debate on this. There's call tracking companies


that say, hey, put call tracking numbers everywhere, it will not hurt you, you have a lot of local


search experts that have varying opinions on it. I will set it straight as far as what


I would say the average local search person should be talking to you about and telling


you. And that's this. If you use an image on your website with a call tracking phone


number, great. Great. For local search, that's perfect. As a matter of fact, super awesome.


Happy monkey here. You get the happy monkey award.


And a great company that does this is CallRail. Now, CallRail has dynamic number insertion,


so you could actually assign a number for very many things. You could do organic, you


could have one that rotates out for local specifically, you could do one for specific


keywords for different campaigns, whatever you'd like to do. But they take it a step


further and they actually allow you to do dynamic image insertion as well, so you can


actually rotate these images dynamically of the phone number. So I really appreciate these


guys because they, out of all the companies they've seen to care the most about local


search and keeping things consistent. If you put it on any directories, okay, especially


the ones that are directly related to Google, info group, you know, the feed of map maker,


if you try to put tracking numbers on your Google Plus listing, if you tried to do any


of these different things, no bueno. And if you do that, Joshua will kick you in the face.


So the important thing to understand here, you have to keep that NAP information consistent


anywhere that Google can index that information. If you want the benefits of having clustered


information about your business that can grow your location prominence in their algorithm


for higher rankings. Now, if you don't care about rankings, by all means, put as many


call tracking numbers as you want in as many places as you want.


Okay? Next lesson. Lesson five. Be a big fish in whatever pond you're in. This is my grandpa.


This is Christmas. And no, he's not throwing a gang sign and he's not about to bust a cap.


He was asking for scissors to open the Christmas package. Just like this. Come on, guys. I


saw, you know. Get your minds out of the ghetto. No.


He ran a local business for over 50 years. And he passed away about four or five years


ago. And I was raised by my grandparents and my mom. And I really looked up to him. As


you can see, his hat there, Ramsey heating and electric. I have that hat hanging in my


office and I have it there to remind me of the type of business person he was. He was


loved in his community. He gave away hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars worth


of free air conditioning equipment and electrical things. He worked very heavily for the boy


scouts through most of his life. He just did a lot of service in our community and he was


very, very well respected. And I asked him, you know, I was like, you always talk about,


you know, trying to be a big fish in the pond that you're in, but how do you do that? And


he told me something I've never forgot. He said this. It's not about business. It's about


community. Okay? And this is the message that's largely missing from many small businesses'


conversations. They want business because they want to make money. But they don't get


business because of that. And I look at my grandfather and many people would use him


and use his services simply because they knew Bob Ramsey, they knew he was honest, they


knew that he wouldn't swindle them and that he would do everything that he could for them


or that he had already done something for somebody that they knew. And that carried


on. And he was a big fish. And I see big fishes in big markets. I see big fishes in small


markets, but they all have the same thing in common. They serve. Okay? And here's an


example of that. This is Storybrook Park. This is a park that was built in Burley, Idaho,


and it's just really fantastic. And the way that this was built is the community came


together, they got the wood, they got the plans, and the local businesses just basically


took off a few days of work and they built the park. They, you know, my grandpa had about


20 of his employees that he had there. Other businesses had more. Some donated, not hundreds,


but they donated tens of thousands of dollars for the equipment that it would take to do


a really big park, and this is just a very small section of this. But that's the type


of thing that happens in Burley, Idaho. You know? They don't get marketing, but they get


community. And I love it because of that. And here's another example. Just the other


day, I was in Dairy Queen. That's our hangout spot is Dairy Queen. And that's like our gourmet


food as well, sorry to say. You can't beat, though. You really can't beat some of those


treats, man, as you can tell. But First Federal, as I went through the drive-through, somebody


in front of me paid for my meal. And when I got up there, they just handed me this card.


It's as simple as that. And it didn't say, come bank with us. It didn't say, hey, my


name's this. Call me for anything. There's no number. It just said compliments of First


Federal and pay it forward. And in my community, there's a responsibility to pay it forward.


When people serve you, you go out and serve others. And this is how businesses can build


brands. I think that if you can find ways and creative things like this to serve instead


of just to market to, then you will find that you can become a big fish in whatever pond


you're in. And most importantly, you cannot fake caring about local people. Thank you.


Thanks, man.


Nice work. I feel good about life right now. That's awesome. You went over a lot of technical


stuff, and that is jam-packed with technical tips. You emphasized the importance of local


citation cleanup, consistency, things like that. It seemed to be one of your more overriding


points. About a year ago, I had a local client, and I attempted to do a citation cleanup,


and I got in over my head. I ended up hiring somebody that we know. For people faced with


that, what's a good way to get started?


Number one, and this isn't a plug that they've paid me to do, though I will take donations


afterwards.


I did not plant this question.


Go to moz.com. And if you put in your business information, you can see how you're listed.


The number one step is just finding out what's online about your business. And by doing that,


you can see if there's inconsistencies, as I showed in that screen shot, with your business


name, address, phone number, websites, some information there. And I suspect that there


will be updates to that tool to give you even more information over time.


I'm kind of embarrassed because I didn't know you were going to plug that, but it is free,


by the way. Let's take a—go ahead.


Hey, Mike. Wow, that's hot. I'll step back. That was a really awesome presentation. We


work for a company that has—another company that essentially has a distributor setup.


So, we've got something—oh, I guess I wasn't speaking too loud. So, we have something like


250 distributors for one of the companies that we own. And so, they essentially—distributors


resell the products of our company. And so, we attempted to do a bulk upload of 250 local


distributors, and it got rejected. They said we weren't eligible for the bulk upload.


And seemingly because they were seeing the distributors as not part of our business.


And so, we're in the point where we're debating about going back to Google and saying, hey,


but they are part of our business. They're our representatives. Any advice you can give


on that? I don't know if you will be able to use the


bulk upload unless they carry the same brand name and their URLs and email—and your email


address would match up with that URL that each of those locations has. And it's something


we've talked to them a lot about because I think it would be great as a company, like


if you could become a white listed company to just upload random companies, you know,


with different names and different information as long as it was trusted. But for now, it


seems like the only companies that can use the bulk upload are branches of the same company


compared to maybe a distributor where each company has its own brand and its own management


and is handled differently. Great. Thank you.


Hey, I know a lot of people have questions for Mike, but we've got to keep it on schedule.


Will you be able to stick around for a couple hours and have people find you?


Definitely. Yeah, because you're a nice guy. All right.


Human 👉 Machine 👉 Human: Understanding Human-Readable Quality Signals - Presented by Ruth Burr

And today what I want to talk about is the discourse.


The discourse in SEO fandom is really heating up right now, y'all.


And what I'm seeing people talking about a lot tends to converge on two main axes of


conversation.


The first is the classic topic that SEOs love to fight about, should we be chasing the algorithm?


That is, is it worth our time to take a look at what Google is doing when they post updates


to the algorithm and try to reverse engineer that?


Or should we be spending that same time just connecting with our users and focusing on


them?


The other thing that people are talking about a lot lately and being mean to each other


about, by the way, is Google's quality rater guidelines.


For those of you who don't know, these are the set of guidelines that Google provides


to the people who, in essence, beta test the algorithm.


Google representatives of Google have said that these are worthwhile for webmasters to


pay attention to as well.


A lot of SEOs think that that's smoke and mirrors on Google's part.


There's a lot of conversation.


And there are a lot of smart people who I respect a ton on both sides of these conversations


saying really smart things.


If you see your words up here, I promise I'm not trying to call you out.


I'm just saying, people are talking about this a lot.


And I don't find it particularly interesting to listen to.


I get it.


SEOs are busy.


This is a room of extremely busy people.


And that means that our time is at a premium.


When you see somebody giving SEO advice that you think is wrong or a waste of time or not


where people should be focusing their efforts, that can hurt, right?


It's frustrating to see busy people being given advice that wastes their time.


I get that.


And people who are in the don't chase the algorithm camp tend to focus on real company


stuff.


Real company stuff is a concept that Will Reynolds introduced at MozCon 2012, seven


years ago, for those of you who would like to join me in feeling old.


And it's the idea that instead of focusing on things like making tweaks to our title


tags and anchor text and things like that, we should be focused on marketing.


We should be focused on stuff that real companies do, on building a great product and finding


our audience and connecting with them where they live.


And I don't disagree with any of that.


Real company stuff, SEO is a marketing channel.


We should be focusing on marketing.


I don't disagree.


But it's also entirely possible to do real company great, beautiful, big marketing in


ways that don't create SEO success.


We've all been there.


And real company stuff is not an excuse not to learn SEO fundamentals, not to focus on


technical SEO.


If we only focus on the user and don't think about the algorithm or Google at all, we are


leaving opportunity on the table and we're not doing our jobs.


It's both, right?


It has to be both in order to succeed.


So my personal framework for approaching changes in our industry, how I decide where to spend


my time is to view what we do.


We are humans, right?


Everyone in this room is human, right?


And we are marketing to humans, right?


Human people are the people who give us money in exchange for goods and services.


We're humans marketing to humans and we are doing so with a machine as the intermediary.


It goes from humans through the machine and back to humans.


People in the real company stuff camp often talk about just create good content.


Who here has been told just to create good content?


Uh-huh, yeah, yeah.


How do you know what good content is, though?


How do you know what people want you can give them to them?


You figure out what information people need to complete their task and you provide it.


How do you get that information?


Well if you have a ton of money, you can do user testing and focus groups and bring your


users all in together and ask them.


It's very expensive.


It's very time consuming.


The data is often not a representative sample.


And if you work in an agency, you may not have access to your clients' clients at all.


Well you know who has more information about how people use search to find information


than anyone?


Google.


Ran just talked about this.


Google also has more information than anyone about how people talk about things, entities,


topics, how those things are related using written language.


They spend a lot of time and a lot of effort and a lot of money trying to figure this out.


At the end of the day, Google wants humans to find what they're looking for on Google


because that's how Google makes money.


It's not altruistic.


That's how they make money.


This means that Google spends a lot of time trying to build machines that understand and


can mimic the way a person might search for information.


So great.


What do we mean when we talk about Google?


Who is Google?


Well, Google is two things.


Google is a lot more than two things.


But for the purposes of this conversation, Google is two things.


Google is a company.


Google has humans that work there.


Danny Sullivan and John Miller and Gary Elish and everybody else, the thousands and thousands


of people that work at Google.


There are humans who are making decisions and communicating those decisions about the


company.


But when we talk about Google, we're often talking about the algorithm, the machine.


And when I say the algorithm, it's a lot of different algorithms running consecutively


and concurrently and on top of each other.


And which one runs depends on the query.


It's a series of algorithms.


For the purposes of our conversation today, I'm going to alternately refer to as a machine


or a robot.


But it is Google the machine.


At its very, very, very simplest, an algorithm takes in information, inputs, does something


to them, processes them, and produces some kind of output that's like a very, very, very,


very simplified version of what an algorithm does.


As SEOs, we tend to focus on algorithmic inputs.


Because that's what we can control.


Things like keywords.


Things like links.


Things like metadata.


These are algorithmic inputs.


They're what some people call ranking factors.


They're the inputs to the algorithm that help Google decide what to output.


And that output is the search engine results page.


And often we tend to stop there.


We tend to look at the SERP and say, did I or did I not successfully optimize these inputs


for the desired output?


That's not how Google thinks about the algorithm.


Google the company is focused on results.


Again, they want people to find what they're looking for when they search because that's


how Google makes money.


And the SERP is only a means to that end.


And we've seen over and over and over again Google is willing to completely blow up the


SERP if it means that they can make more money and if more people can find what they're looking


for on Google using Google.


So we should be looking at outputs.


Not as ends in and of themselves.


But as information about how to achieve those results.


Because I also want people to find what they're looking for and I want them to find it on


my client's sites and give them money so that they can give me money.


This is a job.


We do this for work.


It's fun.


But they pay us.


One way to understand Google is to try to understand what the human readable quality


signals that Google using its huge, huge body of user data has deduced are important to


people when they search on a given topic.


And then from there to try to reverse engineer machine readable equivalents or proxies of


these signals.


So it's not just the algorithm.


It's not just humans.


You focus on both.


The question that I ask myself with every SEO task is how can I demonstrate quality


in ways that are both human and machine readable?


This is important because humans and robots don't think about things the same way.


Which is great because the human brain is very inefficient.


It's beautiful and it's amazing and we can process a lot of information.


But like the 12 people who thought they were listening to everything I said until just


now and they realized they were actually thinking about something else, the human brain can


be very inefficient.


Robots are never going to process information the same way humans do.


And that's okay.


So when you think about looking at a web page, a human might ask what is this page about?


And you just read it and then you know what it's about.


You've read things, right?


With a robot, what is this page about is one of the easiest things they can tell.


This is when we get into our very old school on page SEO signals.


Things like keywords, things like topic modeling, things like TFIDF, which is a very simple


old school machine learning way of trying to understand the topic of a page.


I'm not going to talk a ton about that because I think most people in this room have some


understanding of it.


If you do want to learn more about on page SEO, Brittany had a great whiteboard Friday


about it earlier this year that I suggest you check out.


What I think is a more interesting question, both as an SEO and in trying to understand


Google, is this a good page about this topic?


Now, we've all encountered a web page where we go and we read it and we're like this doesn't


help me.


It's vague.


It's broad.


It's a sales pitch in disguise.


It doesn't have the information I need.


I hate it.


How do machines discover the same thing?


How can they tell if something is good?


They look at link signals.


More on that later.


But increasingly, Google is investing in things like natural language processing and neural


mapping.


They're trying to get more and more sophisticated about understanding what topics should be


covered on a good page on a subject and how closely related to that good page any given


piece of content is.


So the example that Danny gave on Twitter was the soap opera effect.


If you don't know what the soap opera effect is, you can't Google it.


But you still might be experiencing it.


So you might search something like why does my TV look strange?


Using things like neural matching and natural language processing, Google can start to understand


that when somebody searches why does my TV look strange, one possible answer is that


it's the soap opera effect.


I really enjoy trying to think about ways that a machine can find and parse information


in content.


Both because it's important to understand whether or not Google is picking up what you're


putting down, but also because humans are actually terrible at writing content that's


about what they actually think it's about.


You see this a lot in the B2B world where you encounter this page that just has this


wall of text and jargon and it's meaningless and you don't understand it at all.


So this is a page from a very large software company that has a CRM solution.


It ranks on page two for customer relationship management.


And the only reason it ranks on page two is because they have a lot of authority.


I find that optimizing for machine readability, because even though they're getting more sophisticated


about it all the time, Google's still not quite as good as a person at figuring out


whether or not a page is a good page about this topic.


But optimizing for machine readability and optimizing for human readability actually


have a lot in common.


If you've ever been completely humbled by the readability score in Yoast, like no one


knows what you're talking about, you esoteric weirdo, break it down.


Optimizing for human readability and machine readability can be the same.


Machine readable content is clear.


It's concise.


It puts answers next to question.


It doesn't ramble on for 500 words before it gets to the recipe.


It avoids jargon and it covers enough of the related topics to give you a full picture


of that topic.


Does that sound like good writing?


Yes, it does.


It's human readable.


And it's also machine readable.


This is the kind of thing that we can do and optimize for both humans and machines at the


same time.


Google actually now has a natural language API.


Not as sophisticated as what they're using for their own stuff.


But you can take a look at it and you can paste in a block of text and it will extract


what entities it can find from the text.


And then it will assign each one a salient score between 0 and 1.


So 0.9 is great.


0.01 is not at all relevant.


So what that score is is how relevant is this entity to the piece of content as a whole.


In other words, can this API understand what this content is about?


So I pasted the text from this CRM page into this API.


And look.


It can tell that this is a page about a customer relationship management tool.


Kind of.


It can tell that this is the top entity on the page.


But even that is still only given a salience of.16.


Which means we're pretty sure this is what this page is about.


But we're not that sure.


Which is probably why it ranks 19th.


This is the kind of thing that you can look at and make sure that you're actually writing


about what you think you're writing about.


That you're not writing a post on social media for the holidays where you talk about the


holidays for one paragraph and then your tool for seven paragraphs and you never mention


the holidays again.


Why, yes, that is an example from real life.


If you want to learn more about on page SEO for natural language processing, Justin Briggs


has an amazing resource on it.


Get better at reducing the semantic distance between the related entities that you're talking


about in your content.


And you'll also be writing better content.


All right.


Next question.


Someone might ask themselves, can this site be trusted?


Ran just talked about that a lot.


One of the ways that the machine can tell whether or not a site can be trusted is they


look at things like link signals.


And I find link signals fascinating because this is an area where the machine has been


trying to mimic humans for years.


How do humans figure out using social information, we don't already know, how would you figure


out whether or not a person or a piece of content was trustworthy?


You might ask around.


If you ask around, lots of people say it's good.


That's better than if one person says it's good.


If all those people are connected, you might trust that less than if a bunch of discrete


random strangers say it.


And if somebody who has expertise on that subject says it's good, you're going to count


that more than if some rando says it.


That's link signals.


Those are the kinds of link signals that we look at.


It's been years and years since sheer link volume was going to do anything for you.


Think about how you as a person might figure out whether or not a piece of content or a


website was trustworthy and see that on the web in machine readable ways.


Cyrus just wrote a really great post about this that I had to redo my slide to fit in


here because it was so good.


That has a bunch of great graphics on how search engines value links.


So check that out.


And then lastly, a person might ask is this site pleasant to use because even if it has


what I need, if I hate your website, I'm not coming back.


This is where we get into modern web page optimization metrics.


Things like page speed, things like crawlability, things like information architecture, engagement


metrics, things like that.


What I love about web performance optimization is that at this point, the signals for the


machine and the human are the same signals.


This is the whole reason Lighthouse was released, right?


Because for a human, your experience of a page doesn't begin once the page is fully


loaded.


It begins as soon as you start trying to load the page.


Which is why we now look at metrics like time interactive and first meaningful paint.


What is it like for a human to load this web page?


You can optimize these machine readable proxies and create a better experience for humans


at the same time.


Now Lighthouse reports are difficult to run at any kind of scale.


Real smart guy wrote a blog post and a tool about this.


So if you want to run Lighthouse reports for multiple pages at once, we've got a tool.


He's updating the tool sometime in the next few weeks.


So keep an eye out.


But it is possible to do.


All right.


So now we're all on the same page about what we as SEOs are trying to do.


Let's go back to those two topics of conversation that SEOs won't stop fighting about.


The quality guidelines are written by humans for humans.


They have nothing to do with the algorithm.


They are written by humans at Google for humans testing Google so that those humans can look


at the signals that are being sent by the algorithm and see if they're satisfactory.


They don't give insight into the algorithm, but they do give insight into what Google


wants the search to be, and I think they're useful through that lens.


It's important to remember that quality reader data is probably being used in two different


ways.


It's definitely being used, as I said before, to essentially beta test the algorithm.


When people search, do they find what they want?


How do we know?


Is this working?


Or is bad stuff coming up?


But the other way that Google is almost certainly using this data is as a training set for machine


learning.


So every time a page gets rated high quality, needs fully met by a quality rater, it's extremely


likely that Google is adding that to a training set for machine learning so that it can find


similar pages.


So in that sense, creating high quality, needs fully met pages is, again, important for the


machine and important for humans.


And Google's pretty upfront about how the quality guidelines are not about how Google


is now.


It's not about the search engine today.


And that's really important to keep in mind because it means that some things that you


might try to optimize might not be effective yet.


The guidelines don't tell you how it's ranking results.


The guidelines tell you what the algorithm should be doing.


They're where they're going.


This is great because the future exists and we all want to be there.


The big topic that's come out of the quality rater guidelines recently is expertise, authority


and trust.


EAT.


This is a new concept introduced in I think the second or third now most recent version


of quality rater guidelines.


It's all about some of that stuff that Rand was talking about earlier.


Can this information be trusted?


Is it misleading?


Is it harmful?


And as soon as it came out, we had a whole flurry of conversation and topics and content


created in our industry about EAT.


Is it important?


Should you be focusing on it?


Does it have anything to do with rankings at all?


And one question that I see Danny and Gary and John being asked a lot online that they


seem pretty irritated by and I get why is is EAT a ranking factor?


No.


EAT is not a ranking factor for the same reason that brand is not a ranking factor.


Any brand marketer will tell you brand isn't one thing.


Expertise, authoritativeness and trust are not individual things.


You can't be like how expert is this content?


Seven.


Excellent.


I have no follow up questions.


That's not how anybody finds information.


So EAT is not a ranking factor because EAT is made up of dozens and maybe even hundreds


of different signals.


Some of which may or may not be at any given time algorithmic inputs which is what people


mean when they say ranking factors.


I don't care.


That's boring.


Stop asking about it.


Sorry, you guys are great.


But can we stop talking about this, please?


EAT has nothing to do with ranking factors because EAT is a system written by humans


for humans.


It is meant to be human readable.


The signals that are outlined in the quality reader guidelines are human readable.


It is a human readable way of answering the question of does this person, does this website


know what they're talking about?


That doesn't mean in fact quite the opposite.


It doesn't mean that Google isn't trying to answer these questions in the same way.


It just means that we as humans aren't going to approach this in exactly the same manner.


So again, we've got human readable signals but that doesn't mean that Google isn't looking


at their machine readable equivalent.


In that sense, yes, again, EAT like brand, very important, made up of dozens and maybe


even hundreds of signals that you should be paying attention to and trying to optimize.


I'm not going to go into how because Marie is going to talk about this tomorrow afternoon


and she's super smart and you should all listen to her.


The question I ask myself when I read the quality guidelines is which of these signals


is machine readable?


That's really interesting.


Just go through the quality guidelines and read them and look at what of these things


are things a machine could easily find.


For example, under the EAT section, the quality guidelines talk about how content should be


produced by people, medical content should be produced by people with appropriate medical


expertise or accreditation.


I know how I, a person, would figure out whether or not somebody was trustworthy.


I wouldn't do it on their website.


I would research it on the web.


I know how I would do that.


How might Google do the same thing?


Where might they look for that information?


In places that I can put it.


It's time to get experts to create your expert content.


It's time I mean I know there are a lot of people who are beautiful content creators


in this room, but when it's something that requires subject matter expertise, it's time


to pony up and pay them.


Expert content costs more.


There along the way, a lot of companies appear to have decided that content should be cheap,


which sucks.


I feel you on that.


It's time for people to start paying more to have content created by people who know


what they're talking about.


Once you have those subject matter experts creating content for you, you can promote


them online the same way you would any other brand asset.


A lot of the other stuff in the EAT stuff is already very easily machine readable.


All of this stuff that I've highlighted here is stuff a machine can find on the page without


trying.


So are you putting it on the page or what?


The other question that's important to ask is how might a machine find the same information


in another way?


I know Cyrus Shepard is an SEO expert because I've known him for years.


He was my boss for like a minute.


And every time I talk to him, I'm like, wow, this guy is smart.


But Google doesn't know Cyrus.


It can't because it's a machine.


Machines don't know people.


So where online might Google find that same information that I know just from talking


to him?


Once you've thought about that, the next question to ask is which of these signals can we boost?


What can we make easier for a machine to find and read?


Did you know that the quality reader guidelines contain step by step instructions for a simple


link reputation audit?


Just check it out.


Section 2.6.4.


It tells you exactly how to check the online reputation of any website.


Is Google looking for this information the same way?


Probably not.


But I don't care because I'm a person.


I can use this.


I can find where online people are saying things about me.


And I can work to optimize those signals.


And then Google can find them.


And then the last question to ask to keep yourself in context as you're reading these


guidelines is which of these signals is easiest to game or fake and therefore less valuable?


Because some marketers are terrible, ruin everything, try to game the system.


So the challenge for search engines becomes creating a sophisticated set of inputs to


separate the wheat from the chaff.


This is why things like anchor text are now really only important in conjunction with


a lot of other quality signals because it's too easy to game.


So take a look at the quality reader guidelines.


Ask yourself what of this information that is written by humans for humans could be found


by a machine in another way.


If you don't feel like reading them, I suggest following Jen Slag on Twitter because she


already does an amazing thorough takedown every time they update the results.


Okay.


So that's the quality reader guidelines.


Now the $64 million question.


Should SEOs chase the algorithm?


Chase the algorithm too hard.


The algorithm is going to end up chasing you.


If you are looking at algorithmic updates in order to find insight on algorithmic inputs,


you are focusing on the wrong information.


You will always be behind the eight ball because you will always be optimizing to what Google


just did instead of what Google is going for.


We should be instead examining for outcomes.


How can we demonstrate quality in ways that machines and humans can understand?


You can't be solely reactive to algorithmic changes.


You will lose your mind.


But when they happen, it's worth trying to understand not the what of what happened,


but the why it happened.


Ask yourself what can this tell me about changes in my target market?


With that in mind, here are some things that I like to look at in the wake of an algorithmic


update.


First of all, Google updates the algorithm every day, multiple times a day.


A lot of times it's stuff we don't even notice.


It's small, it's behind the scenes.


Maybe it only affects one very niche industry, which is fine, unless it's your industry and


now suddenly you've got a zero click result like Rand was just talking about where before


you were getting in a bunch of traffic, then it matters a lot.


It doesn't really matter if it was a core update or if it just affected your industry.


You're going to care.


So the first question then becomes how, if at all, did this impact the sites that I work


on?


You can see here, UpBuild has a brand new client.


You can tell they're brand new because we haven't even named their analytic stuff the


things that we like to name it.


They were hit by the June update because they're a medical adjacent site.


I care about that.


I don't care if you guys care about it or not.


That's my job.


So if you have a site that was hit, the next question is was it page specific or was it


site wide?


If you got hit in a way that, what is it, Mercola.com got hit where you're just gone,


you're out of the results, chances are it's either that you have been providing something


of low quality that Google is actively trying to filter out or you've been doing something


that was working really well that Google has decided is too gameable a signal and doesn't


work.


Sometimes when this happens, you know what you did.


So fix it.


You can also check things like Twitter, SEO Twitter, forums, groups, like ask other SEOs,


what did other sites that were impacted see.


But a lot of times you just lost some really great rankings on some very important high


traffic topics.


You didn't lose those rankings.


Somebody else got them.


You got beat.


So what does the SERP say?


Who's ranking now?


What does that mean for you?


It's not always possible to get traffic back that you've lost.


Sometimes that traffic is gone.


Breathe.


It's okay.


You can get other traffic instead, but that traffic is gone.


Sometimes it's not that you've been penalized or that something you were doing stopped working.


Sometimes it's just that over time what people want when they search in a topic changes and


you no longer have what Google using this huge amount of user data has determined people


want.


John Mueller just said the same thing in a webmaster hangout almost exactly a month ago.


Search evolves.


The SERP evolves with it.


So understanding the end goal, again, the why, not the what, can give you insight into


changes in your target market.


What do these changes say about what my customers are looking for?


What do they want that I don't have?


And how can I provide these things for my users in a way that Google can see and understand?


Again, this is very difficult to do at scale.


I know Content Harmony has a tool in beta right now that analyzes SERPs for search intent.


Roy Truesdale also wrote a great post on search engine journal a few months ago about scraping


the SERPs to optimize for search intent.


Google doesn't like it when you scrape the SERPs, but whatever.


The other thing to keep in mind is that if an update has happened within your niche that


is meant to fix a flaw, that is meant to improve results quality, it will almost certainly


not be the last time this update is made.


Google will continue iterating until it fixes the problem.


Think about Panda.


Panda didn't just happen one time.


It happened and it kept happening and it kept happening until finally they were able to


build it in and now it just is part of the algorithm.


This is the kind of thing that you need to think about.


If you had a healthcare focused site that in March was not impacted by the core update,


it would be the height of hubris to assume that you are safe forever.


If an update hits your industry, hits your niche, hits your market, assume that it will


happen again and again and start ramping up your quality signals because a lot of people


who didn't get hit in March got hit in June and I bet they wish that they hadn't just


sat on their laurels.


So when you're asking does Google look at whatever thing as a ranking factor, as an


algorithmic input, I mean, you can get so minute, you can get so far down the rabbit


hole or you can think about, okay, if it is a machine readable proxy to a human readable


quality signal, they're probably at least trying to look at it and since it's also a


human readable quality signal, you might as well optimize for it.


If it's very easy to do, it's very easy for you to do, it's probably easy for everybody


else to do, too, which means it's easy to game.


That might mean that either they've decided it's not a valuable signal or they're still


working on how to interpret it in such a way that it's less gameable.


And when you're asking about things like organic click through rate, dwell time, engagement


metrics, we talk about this stuff a lot.


By my model, I would say Google has almost certainly at least tried to look at this stuff


because it makes sense.


It's machine readable, it's a human quality signal, there's no reason for them not to.


I don't know this, I just assume it.


But you should want that stuff anyway.


So why not optimize for it?


Worst case scenario, you've made a better website that humans really like.


I don't see the downside.


So yeah, final thought.


Optimizing for the robot, too reactive.


Optimizing just for the human, inefficient.


You have to look at both, you have to look at what people want and how Google can figure


that out and create that together in order to stay ahead of changes in the algorithm.


And there are people in this room who are like, yeah, I know all this.


I know all this.


This is not helpful for me.


If you know all this, what are you doing about it?


I have homework.


Yes, I know it's the morning on day one.


Go back and reread the quality guidelines.


Highlight the parts you find interesting.


What if these signals are machine readable?


Can you optimize them?


Ask yourself, be honest.


Ask yourself what is your site currently benefiting from that Google is likely to either be trying


to discount or filter out?


Write better content.


And what better, I don't mean longer.


I mean clearer, simpler, more machine readable content.


Think about the entities that you are talking about in your content and try to improve the


semantic relationships between them.


One way to do that is to improve topics using Google's NLP API.


They have a version you can use for free which I used for this presentation.


It's actually fairly reasonably priced for an API if you want to try to build a tool


with it.


And examine the SERP to the degree that you can in your content areas and in your target


markets to better not just understand but meet search intent.


Create expert content and then promote your experts online.


Your experts are now part of your brand.


You know who does a great job of that?


Moz.


You guys heard of Dr. Pete?


Yeah, me too.


He's great.


And you go back into section two of the QR guidelines and conduct a simple reputation


audit.


I do this once a quarter.


It's a really easy way to get out of things like domain authority and things like equity


passing and non equity passing and these like solely input focused views.


What's actually on the Internet about your company that somebody can find and how can


you make that better?


And then please, if you have one takeaway from my talk today, stop fighting about this


stuff online.


It's so boring.


Just do your jobs.


That's it.


That's my talk.


If you want to get my slides, they're right here.


Upbuild is also hiring for a senior marketing strategist.


The whole team is here.


If you see one of these awesome nerds around, say hi.


5 Tactics to Earn Links Without Having to Directly Ask - Whiteboard Friday

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


This week, I'm going to help you avoid having to directly ask for links.


Some people in the SEO world, some link builders are extremely effective.


If you go to the Russ Jones School of Link Outreach, you need to make a big list of people


to contact, get in front of those folks, outreach them, and have these low success rates.


But for some of us, myself included, I just absolutely hate begging people for links.


So even though I often produce content that I want people to link to, it's the outreach


process that stops me from having success.


But there are ways around this.


There are ways to earn links, even from very specific sources, without needing to directly


say, hey, will you please link to this?


And I'll try and illustrate that.


So the problem is, I think that most of the web at this point is sort of burned out on


this conversation of, hey, I have this great resource, or hey, you linked to this thing


which is currently broken, and so maybe you'd like to, or hey, I noticed that you frequently


mention or link to blah, blah, blah.


Well, I have a blah, blah, blah like blah, blah, blah.


And folks, I think, are just like, oh my God, I hate these SEOs.


Like, I'm so done with this.


Most of these folks, the journalists, the bloggers, the content creators of all kinds,


start to detest the link requests, even when they're useful, even when they help.


Your success rates, I mean, great success rates, the world's best link builders, link


outreach specialists.


When I talk to agencies, they say our absolute best folks ever hover in the 5 to 10% success


range.


So that means you're basically like, nope, nope, nuh-uh, uh-uh, no way, sorry, uh-uh,


yeah, no, uh, no.


And then maybe you'll get one, okay, fine, I'll actually link to you.


This can be a really demoralizing practice, and it also hurts your brand every time you


outreach to someone and have no success, right?


They're basically associating you with, and in fact, there are many people in the SEO


world who my only association with them is, gosh, they've asked me for a lot of links


over the years.


And it kind of sucks the souls from people who hate doing it.


Now granted, there are some people who like doing it, but you have two options.


Number one, you can optimize the outreach, right, to try and get a higher success rate


to do less damage to your brand when you do this, to make this less of a soul-sucking


process.


And we have some Whiteboard Fridays on exactly that topic and some great blog posts on that


too.


But there are ways to build links without it, and today I'm going to cover four and


a half of them.


The fifth one is barely a tactic.


All right.


The sixth one is the tactic I'm going to use very conversational naming conventions for


these, the I made this thing you will probably use.


So this is in effect saying not, hey, I made this thing, will you link to it?


But rather, I made this thing and I have a good, I can have some confidence that you


and people like you, others like you, will probably want to link to it because it fulfills


a specific need.


So there's some existing content that you find on the web.


You locate the author of that content or the publisher of that content, and you form a


connection usually through social, through email, or through direct comment on that content.


And you have a piece of additional resource of some kind that is likely to be included


either in that particular element or in a future element.


This works very well with bloggers.


It works well with journalists.


It works well with folks who cover data and studies.


It works well with folks who are including visuals or tools in their content.


And as a result, it tends to work well if you can optimize for one of those types of


things like data or visuals or ego bait or supporting evidence works really well.


If you have someone who's trying to make an argument with their content and you have evidence


that can help support that argument, it will very often be the case that even just a comment


can get you included into the primary post because that person wants to show off what


you've got.


It tends not to work very well with commercial content.


So that is a drawback to this tactic.


Second tactic, the you list things like X, I have or I am an X.


So this is rather than saying I would like a link, right?


It's a very indirect or a relatively indirect ploy for the same thing, you find resources


that list Xs and there's usually either an author or some process for submission, but


you don't have to beg for links.


You can instead just say, I fit your criteria.


So this could be, hey, are there websites in the educational world that are ADA compliant


and accessible for folks?


And you might say, well, guess what?


I am a that.


Therefore, all of these places that list resources like that that are ADA compliant will fit


in here.


Or for example, we're doing design awards for pure CSS design and it turns out you have


a beautifully designed site or page that is pure CSS and so maybe you can fit into that


particular criteria.


Or websites that load under a second even on a super slow collection and they list those


and you have one of those, right?


There's a process and you can get inclusion.


Third one, the let me help you with that.


This can be very broad, but basically if you can identify sources and start to follow those


sources wherever they publish and however they publish, whether that's social or via


content or broadcast or other ways, if you find those publications, those authors expressing


a need or an interest or that they are in the process of completing something, by offering


to assist, you will almost always get a link for your credit.


And so this is a way where you're simply monitoring these folks that you would like to get links


from, waiting for them to express some sort of need, fulfilling that need, and then reaping


the benefit through that link.


Tactic number four, the I'd be happy to provide an endorsement.


This is sort of a modified version of I made this thing you'll probably like, but instead


of saying here's the thing that you will probably like and maybe include, you're saying I notice


that you have a product, a piece of content, a tool, a new piece of hardware or some physical


product, whatever it is, and I like it and I use it and I happen to fit into the correct


demographic that you are trying to reach.


Therefore, I am happy to contribute an endorsement or a testimonial and oftentimes, almost always,


whenever there's a testimonial, you will get a link back to your source, right, because


they'll want to say, well, Rand Fishkin for Moz says X and Y and Z, and there's the link


to either my page or to Moz's page.


Tactic number five is the one you're probably most familiar with, and it was probably the


first one that came to mind when you thought about the how do I get links without asking


for them, and that is through guest contributions, so guest blogging and guest editorials and


authorship of all kinds.


There's a few Whiteboard Fridays on that, so I won't dive deep in here, but I hope you


can leverage some or all of these tactics because if you hate link building the outreach


way, these all have more work that goes into them but far, far better results than this


five to 10 percent is the top.


Five to 10 percent is probably the bottom range for each of these, and you can get 50,


75 percent on some of these tactics, get a lot of great links from great sources.


It just requires some elbow grease.


All right, everyone.


Thanks for watching.


We'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.


The Truth About Mobile-first Indexing [MozCon 2017] — Cindy Krum

Are you excited to be here today?


Sorry, that was probably way loud.


I'm sorry.


I am excited as well.


So Brittany didn't mention it, so I'm going to take it on me to mention it that you might


notice my shirt.


This is actually literal.


Today you have a full lineup of awesome female tech speakers.


So I just want to take a second to have a round of applause for that.


Because it was an accident.


They didn't plan it.


It didn't happen on purpose.


It was an accident and that makes me so happy.


So today I'm going to be telling you the truth about mobile first indexing.


And mobile first indexing is something that Google announced in 2016.


And so it should be launching in 2018.


Probably we hope so.


It's been delayed a couple times.


And we've heard mixed messages from Googlers about what's going on.


We heard from Gary that it's launching in 2018.


But two weeks ago we heard from John Mueller that some sites that are ready are already


getting introduced or added to the mobile first index.


And they didn't specify which sites or how or where or when or anything like that.


So launching soon, you need to be ready for it even if we don't know exactly when it's


going to launch.


It was preannounced.


That means it's a big deal.


So since it was preannounced and we've had a while to talk about it, a lot of SEOs have


been speculating what it's going to be about.


And unfortunately, what I'm seeing in those speculations is a lot about mobile friendliness.


And that's confusing to me because that already happened.


Mobile friendliness was like last year, the year before a little bit.


Mobile friendliness is great.


But it's not mobile first indexing.


If they tell you that that's what it's about, that's fake news.


That's not true.


This is nicer fake news than you see elsewhere with the pug.


That's not my dog yet, though.


Someone else's dog.


So mobile first design and mobile first indexing are two different concepts.


And I don't want you to get them confused or you'll miss a really, really important


part of what you can expect in this update.


So there are three words in this name of the update.


Mobile first indexing.


So I suggest we do like Rand and break it down.


Is Rand here?


Do the Rand dance.


All right.


What is mobile?


Mobile means a lot of different things.


And if you listen to Google, mobile means just about anything that's not a desktop or


laptop computer.


People are saying mobile to mean anything like even fridges, which are definitely not


portable, right?


They're kind of taking the word out of its original context.


But I want you to believe or I want you to at least consider that the mobile first indexing


update might not be using the word mobile in the way that you're expecting.


I think mobile first indexing is using the word mobile to describe the content rather


than the device that's going to be presented on.


Google wants your content to be portable.


Let's replace it with portable.


Okay?


So portable instead of mobile first.


What does that mean?


It's a sequence or a prioritization.


It's not an exclusionary thing.


It's not to say that desktop content won't be there or won't have a place, right?


That still exists.


That's still important.


Google made a lot of money there.


Indexing.


This is really important.


What is an index?


Index is a word that's existed long before search engines came around to try and organize


all the information in the world.


Indexes are just ways of organizing big sets of similar kind of data so that it can be


easily queried to find something.


For instance, a yellow pages is an index of businesses in alphabetical order by name.


A white pages is an index of businesses in alphabetical order by the type of business


they are.


At the library, the Dewey Decimal system is an index of books that they have available


in their library and only in their library, right?


And no one knows how to use that index anymore.


But I want you to understand that indexing and ranking are two different things.


And when we talk about indexing in this context, there are three parts, three things historically


that a search engine does, right?


We know this.


Crawling, indexing, and ranking.


Indexing is the middle piece.


If you're not in the index, you're never going to rank.


You can't get there.


The index is the list of possible correct answers for a query.


So that's important.


And it's also an indication that this may be a structural change to how Google works.


It's not turning up the dial or turning down the dial on a certain ranking factor.


It's how it's organized.


That's structural.


That's cool.


That's different.


We haven't seen that since caffeine, really, if you're old enough to remember caffeine.


Is anyone old enough to remember caffeine?


Woo!


Yeah!


Great.


OK.


So let's put it all together.


Portable prioritized ordering of information for easy query.


Mobile first indexing.


Portable prioritized organization of information for easy query.


Awesome.


This could fundamentally change your understanding of what people or what Google really means


when they say mobile first indexing.


So I want you to take that.


And now I want you to think about it with this model in mind.


You may have seen me talk before, or Emily, my colleague, this is the S curve of technology,


the technology S curve.


And what it describes is the normal pattern that new technologies go through as they get


adopted.


So we start with the slow new innovation.


And then it starts to catch on.


There are some improvements.


It's looking better.


It's working better.


And then once everyone has one or it's old news, it kind of flattens back out again.


So it makes this S shape.


And this is what most of us, the average person out there participates right along this line.


But the average isn't the only.


And there's always other stuff happening.


So we have smaller component improvements that make up the larger system improvements


that enable the adoption and encourage the adoption and the growth.


But we have incumbent technology too.


And in the background, new adopters, earlier innovative adopters are checking out new stuff


in the background so that sometimes it feels like technology sneaks up on us.


And we're like, whoa, all of a sudden I had all these CDs and now everyone's using MP3s.


I had all these DVDs and now they're useless because everyone's in the cloud.


I have a media server.


All of a sudden you're like, wait, I spent all this money on all that crap.


And what do I do with it now?


And it's because in the background that kind of innovation was happening.


And so this is a diagram or a timeline of Google's innovation and some of the things


that were like component improvements or seemed like they were component improvements in regular


search that we deal with day to day.


But we're actually probably more likely part of this new technology improvement.


So the beginning of voice search and then the addition of semantic understanding to


voice search with Hummingbird.


And then RankBrain.


I didn't make this graph, but someone else is on the same page as me because they see


these things as a larger story that go together.


Because Hummingbird is using semantic understanding with AI, with machine learning to make voice


search a continuous loop of feeding back query and response, query and response so that the


machine learning can learn more and adapt and give you the closer, more correct answer


as you go to drill down.


So what you also have to understand is that the voice first device footprint has grown


exponentially.


So this is on like it's right now going into that steep curve.


Because all of a sudden in 2017, we have loads of devices that don't have what?


Screens.


They don't have screens and if they don't have screens, they probably don't have browsers


or keyboards.


So people are interacting with technology that's on the internet with only their voice.


And this is taking off.


Here's something you probably don't know.


Chatbots moment for moment are actually growing faster than apps ever did.


Native apps grew really fast, right?


Who doesn't use at least one native app every day?


Probably three or four.


Probably Facebook, Slack, Uber.


You forget they're even native apps, right?


Because they're so fundamental to your life.


Those grew fast.


But chatbots are growing faster if you line it up at the same start point.


Chatbots are fundamental and important for mobile first indexing because they get into


the AI feedback loop.


And Perna did a great job of talking about how important chatbots are going to be.


It's not just with Bing, right?


Chatbots sound to me originally they sounded hokey and dumb.


But when you understand exactly how they work, you get the feeling of how powerful they're


going to be for our industry.


Now the other thing that kind of happened that no one really thought was that cool except


for me was Chromecast.


Chromecast is a game changer too because it allows things that don't have screens send


information to things that do.


So again, we're enabling the voice first, no screen, internet connected devices to have


a screen if they should need one whenever they want but not have to carry it around


all the time.


And it's making our phones more of like a portable information system and then the big


screens are just dummy docs that you can send information from a lot of different devices.


And that's super cool.


That's disruptive.


Google knows it, right?


Because right now you can search for things and within two clicks be casting it.


So this one you search for a video, you click on it, it takes you to YouTube and you're


clicking to cast it.


There is no reason at all that that cast button couldn't appear next to the season episode


number directly in the search result.


And I think it will soon.


Right?


So casting in this case is taking a search query or a search landing SEO traffic almost


away, right?


You're just playing the video but you're not landing on an actual web page to do it.


You're doing it in this case from YouTube in the future potentially directly from the


search result page.


And right now you can't send directly from the search result page unless you're cooking


cupcakes and then you can.


This is my Google Home.


So it's not casting it to a TV, it's casting a recipe directly from a search result to


my Google Home so that my Google Home will tell me the recipe as I cook so that I don't


have to use grubby fingers on a device.


That's pretty awesome.


That's a game changer.


That makes life easier to do.


And the other thing to know is you can see how important Google thinks this technology


is because they're building it directly into their phone operating systems at the basic


level so that these technologies can be set up when you're setting up your new phone and


you never have to think about it again.


And the phone becomes the nexus of all your information and you can cast things from one


device to another without even thinking about it.


And it's not just Chromecast, Google Home as well, throughout your whole house, right?


This is the beginning of the connected home.


Here's the problem.


If you've been dealing with Google in your life for long enough, you know that they're


kind of quirky and they don't always talk to one another within the different teams.


And so they get confused about launch dates for things like mobile first indexing, but


they also get confused about who's the lead technology, who's the lead group on a particular


innovation.


And so I say who's on first here because every team at Google seems to be claiming this new


incumbent or this new innovative technology that we're talking about with mobile first


indexing.


So there's the mobile team, the mobile Chrome, they're saying it's mobile first.


But if you paid any attention to Google I.O. this year, their annual conference, huge talk


about offline first.


This is especially important for the next billion users.


AI first, learning rank brain, learning algorithms, stuff like that, artificial intelligence,


Google now team cares about that, and then voice search, so the connected devices care


about that.


Here's the thing.


They're all, if you read documentation, they're all like it's a mobile first world, it's an


AI first world.


It's all of these things, we just don't have a name for it yet.


They're all pushing you to put all of your information up in the cloud as a company and


as an individual so that they can access it and represent it in a great way on a bunch


of different devices regardless of whether or not there's a screen.


So how are they doing that?


The main thing is they're trying to leverage the power of big data and semantics to make


the web a better place, right?


And so if you put all of your content in a really clean, easy, accessible format in the


cloud, then it can be sent to all these different places and it can be updated from a server


and then correct on all different devices without much effort, right?


If the canonical lives in the cloud and not on a device or not within a specific presentation


scenario, then you have the same data on all devices.


You're logged in, you've got a shopping cart that follows you along on any device, that's


fantastic, but it's also for the user a really great, predictable experience where there's


less room for problems, right?


It's predictability and whether you admit it or not, we're human, we like predictability,


we like to know what experience we're going to get when we go get something.


It's like Starbucks or anything like that.


It may not be the best, but you know what you're going to get and that's what Google's


going for here because we're all human.


So to achieve this in the most efficient way, we have to change the way we do things.


And so we have to really start thinking about separating our content from our design further.


So CSS helped people, helped webmasters separate content from design, but then webmasters got


really interested in creating design for specific devices.


And then we kind of went towards responsive, but the content and the design and the presentation


layer were completely enmeshed so that it made crawling for Google even harder and finding


the content, isolating the content and deduping the content from all of its different device


iterations became really hard.


And so we have to let marketers do the marketing, let content creators do the content creation


and let the developers just program, just touch the code and not have to rely on each


other so much to create the experience that we want.


And if you look at what Google's been focusing on recently, what they've been pushing to


us, they all are instances of separate content from design or very cleanly extractable content


from design, AMP, PWAs, APIs, data sets, all of these things we'll talk about in more detail,


but those are things that really, really separate the content from the presentation layer and


the design.


And this is important because Google believes that its job is to crawl or to index the world's


information but crawling has lost its appeal because so much information is being created


every day and Google didn't just say they wanted to index the world's web pages, they


said they wanted to index and rank and show the world's information and there's a lot


of information out there that they can't capture because it's just being created so quickly


on the fly every day.


90% of the world's information was created in the past two years and the rate of information


creation is growing exponentially as we all get more and more connected devices.


My Fitbit knows what I did today and it's got its set of information.


My Nest knows what temperature to set it to next week.


All of these things have their own information that they're generating and Google wants to


help us with that too.


So crawling has become inefficient.


There are more efficient ways for a search engine to get information.


When they crawl, they have to crawl through years and years of legacy code and things


that have been commented out and stuff that you just left in there because it kind of


works sometimes on some devices.


That's not efficient and it's getting worse as there's more stuff that they're supposed


to crawl.


So the most efficient ways Google can access your content are things that we're not talking


about in this industry too much yet.


They can get it directly from hosting it.


They can get it from you guys sending feeds like XML feeds to them.


They can lift it out of JSON-LD files.


They can get it through engaging with your plug-ins or your progressive web apps.


And they can get it through APIs.


And in those scenarios, the content is easier to extract than to try and pull it out of


HTML.


So the idea here is I think to some degree you can expect the bots, the crawlers, to


be out of a job at some point in the future or at least a different job, a pivot, because


they might be there to verify things, but discovery just isn't scalable anymore.


And so this is why it's also important is we put the voice search with stuff like RankBrain


and artificial intelligence and we can have a conversation to get the most recent information


without having to do another crawl, without having a bot to have to visit your site.


If you're sending a feed or if you're hosting the content with Google, they can know instantly


when it's updated.


You're not on any kind of a crawl delay.


And this is replacement technology.


This is important.


I can't say it enough.


So here's my speculation.


And I've been saying this for about six months, but I've been saying it a little bit differently.


I think mobile first indexing is really about cloud first indexing.


No URL required.


If you're an SEO, that might have just really hurt or broken your brain, caused a little


angst, right?


As SEOs, we've always said a URL for every piece of unique content, one to one, right?


Now we're saying maybe not.


Who cares about URLs?


They're ugly.


We have to migrate them all the time.


Accident prone, as we heard from Dick's Sporting Goods.


URLs cause problems, actually.


They have parameters.


Why URLs?


We have this pile of new devices coming out from Google and everyone else that doesn't


include a screen.


And without a screen, it doesn't have a browser.


So without a browser, who cares about URLs?


Who cares?


We have devices with teeny tiny screens that Google created, but they don't really have


browsers, right?


So there are more and more things out there in the wild that are showing up and getting


linked together and presented kind of quietly by Google in the search results without URLs.


And Google's actively trying to link those things together, even if they don't have URLs.


So we can cast things.


We can send things to cardboard.


But we can also send things that don't have URLs to other people as a text message.


Does everyone see on the right side of the slide the triangle shape?


That's a share icon.


What it means is that Google has created a dynamic link for this content, that this content


doesn't this knowledge graph of Florence and the Machine doesn't have a URL.


It's just knowledge graph.


It just shows up in a SERP.


But if you want to share that knowledge graph result, here's a Google-generated URL that


will work for you to share it.


So they're generating, like, bit.ly style shortener URLs to share content if you need


to.


If you don't, no problem.


Just consume it in the search result.


But during these interactions, when you're in a knowledge graph, so here's my example.


I search for drumming song.


It gives me information.


It gives me a video of that song.


But then I can click around and see all the other songs that Florence and the Machine


has come out with.


And so on the right is the songs, and I can click on any of those and play the video or


listen to the song.


Notice it didn't update the query.


It's just letting me drill down.


It's giving me a new experience without new URLs, without new queries.


It's trying to understand in an AI kind of way when I search for this, what am I going


to want next?


Other songs.


That makes sense.


So let's look at other examples of this.


If you've tried searching Google Now for a restaurant, you get this Yelp-like experience.


Explore my area.


It's hooked into the GPS.


You can it's trying to replace Yelp.


That's kind of cool.


All of those things, no URL.


The videos that show up in SERPs, they may have a URL in YouTube, but you don't have


to have the URL to play the video.


TV shows.


This is again in Google Now.


You can go through a list of related TV shows, tell them which one you like.


This page I cannot share with you because it doesn't have a URL.


It's all coming from the Knowledge Graph.


Books.


Again, the shareable link.


I can link you with a dynamic link, but all of that content just as hosted by Google lives


in their cloud doesn't have its own URL, at least that they're trying to send you to.


It's not a crawled SERP.


It's a submitted SERP.


Just lives in Google.


And sounds.


So we have a fun demo here.


I'm going to ask everyone to pull out their phone and do a search for a cow sound.


If you've seen me talk, we may have done this before, but it's fun.


I'll do it too.


And turn up your volume if you have your phone on mute.


Now click the cow sound.


Who knew you could do that?


Right?


What's interesting about that is you can search for it from your desktop or your phone and


it works.


This is a thing that shows up in a search result that you can interact with that has


no URL.


There's no website with a button where you can click it.


It's just in the SERP.


It's got this visual representation, but actually it doesn't have to because that query works


with Google Assistant or Google Home too.