There's nothing viral about that, but you're still winning.


Great Expectations: The Truth About Digital PR Campaigns

So I believe as an industry, we can do better.


Now, the first step in doing better is really looking at the habits that our industry has and this rinse and repeat nature.


So why do we focus on the wins?


Let's go back to our first Aeroviral campaign.


And this is the campaign as I started this presentation that really is close to my heart.


It's the first campaign we launched in 2017 as a really small team that actually went off and started to generate links and coverage on its own.


And that really is kind of the key to success, right? When your story that you're sending out starts to get picked up organically.


So we launched this in January. It was a dry January in the UK, a time where most people really aren't supposed to be drinking after quite a heavy Christmas.


But I don't know about you guys. January for me is the time that I'm more than likely to drink because of the doom and gloomy weather pressures that you face as well,


coming back after relatively slow December most often.


So this campaign here got 68 pieces of coverage and 45 linking domains.


So really, it was around the point of this campaign then that we as an agency and as a relatively small team at the time,


we started to really focus on the wins and only the wins.


So guess how many maps we launched that year for one client and one client alone.


We launched 12 campaigns out of a total of 18 campaigns.


12 of them were maps and some of them yes were interactive, others were static.


But you can really see the sheer volume there because we found this recipe for success and we wanted to push it as hard as we could.


Now that is us focusing on those huge wins, right?


That is us realising that we've got something that really works for digital PR and link building,


because we know as an industry it can be risky and results aren't a given.


So we keep pushing it and we keep pushing it because we know that we're going to get something back.


And those maps, they went out, they did their job.


They got links from top tier sites all around the world


and no doubt they had a positive impact on traffic and rankings.


This sounds really familiar though, right? This is something we're really guilty of as an industry.


And so if we take a look and rewind time a little bit,


what do we actually do to get links then?


So in 2009 we focused on guest posts


and that was the tactic we relied on to generate links for our clients and brands we work with.


In 2012 Distilled started to set the precedent for creative


and they were producing high quality static infographics that were going out.


The Instagram one comes to mind for example. In 2014 again pioneered by Distilled,


I would imagine. We were looking at creating lots of interactive infographics.


They could have been interactive maps, for example, indexes, that kind of thing.


In 2017 we saw the trend of Instagram maps emerging.


We alone, obviously you can see we produced the one around the best features.


You could tie this into proposal locations, business locations, anything really relating to that platform,


because the platform was booming and again tying it into maps,


we know it was going to generate links. In 2018 we moved forward into indexes


and that was creating an asset that had multiple data points


so that we could go out to different sectors of the press


and continue to push different stories to generate those all-important links and coverage.


And then in 2019 we saw the rise of the best job ever.


So within the US we saw theme park testers for theme parks in Orlando, Florida.


And over here in the UK we saw Yorkshire pudding testers because we all love a roast on a Sunday.


Then finally in 2020 we're starting to move towards product stunts.


We're seeing new products be created on behalf of brands


and then we're driving links into those product pages.


They're often stumpy and creative and add a new dimension to link building.


So what about next year and beyond then?


What are the trends that we think might start to shine through for digital PR and link building formats?


Well in 2021, I think as a prediction, it's very likely we're going to be moving towards video.


We've seen the emergence of video within our industry kind of dominate over the last couple of years


and I think more and more we're going to see journalists and consumers want this.


So we'll be creating video assets to drive links and coverage.


In 2022 we could look to move towards virtual reality, that's gamification,


starting to use headsets to really immerse our brand audiences in creative campaigns


in order to go out and again get those all-important links.


And in 2023, I think we'll be moving towards more experiential stuff.


So setting up, you know, stunt like rooms and takeovers, for example,


to submerge our brand audiences to really get them feeling emotions that tie in with the brand


and again all comes down to getting that coverage with those followed links.


So that's 10 winning formats in 14 years,


but we were doing more in those 14 years weren't we than just those winning formats.


We were doing different types of link building and experimenting with different formats.


So what about those formats and why didn't we celebrate them?


Why didn't we share them more?


Well because we were focused on celebrating those wins and those recipes for success.


So as an industry we're guilty and we love to rinse and repeat those formats.


And again, I understand why because what we do can be risky,


but unfortunately that doesn't show the full picture.


So again another step in, you know, showing this full picture today


and sharing the truth about digital PR is talking about failure and embracing failure.


So I want to share a couple of failures with you.


And for me, this is really really important, right?


I want to air out some of the challenges and struggles we've had as a team because for me,


one of the biggest steps in sharing and talking about the full picture is to actually address failure.


So hands up, who's had a campaign fail?


Now I know I would have hopefully have been on stage doing this with you,


but this is a safe space.


This is, you know, the Moz fans, you're all a community


and I can put my hand up to this question and say absolutely, I've had a campaign fail.


I'm even going to show you it.


So this is a campaign that we launched in the first three months of me joining Aera back in 2016.


I was working with Mark Johnson who headed up for some time the creative team at Distilled


and again still in my probation, really had something to prove,


especially with Paddy as my boss as well.


And essentially you land on this landing page, you hit that watch it disappear button


and that oil drum that depletes and you can see it compares there to the Empire State building.


Now this shows you just how quickly the US is going to go through their oil reserves


if we don't start to address things like climate change and being more efficient with our energy use.


So when I launched this and I was the lead PR at the time,


I was the one that was hungry to go out and get links and coverage.


I was asked by the Daily Mirror, a leading national publication in the UK,


their science editor at the time, where I'd been for the past four years.


He actually emailed me that back and I got that gut-wrenching stomach drop feeling where I thought,


okay, something's not jelling and it turned out there were some questions over the data.


So it was no surprise when we got zero links,


but actually I'd missed something else


and that wasn't the only hurdle that I had to overcome with this campaign.


Why then? What was that additional thing that I'd missed?


Well, actually we launched our campaign here in early November.


I think it was around the second week and you can see that something huge happens


and that big spike there that I probably should have caught at the time.


Can anyone guess what that was? Trump beat Hillary and won the US presidential election


and I had taken my wonderful campaign that I thought was going to do really well out to US Press in the same week.


There was no surprise there was a bigger story that week


and actually most of the news outlets in the country were covering this.


Most of the news outlets in the UK were also covering this.


It was not wise of me at all to launch a campaign to press during that week of the US presidential election.


I should have caught it. I should have known better.


You know that that falls on me in that instance.


And no doubt you can imagine I kept that one pretty quiet on Twitter.


You didn't see me tweeting about this. Now failures,


they also come in all shapes and sizes


and this is a format that again tying into that map wins there that we were talking about.


That works very well for digital PR and loop building.


You'll notice that some of you in the audience may have even created a similar kind of format here.


But this idea essentially shows the world's top selling car model in every country.


You can see it's very visual, quite busy.


That's kind of the point with these. But one thing that actually is a huge challenge with these is that during the QA process


when our designers and our content strategists are reviewing everything,


you have to, because there's so much text, you have to really have a BDI


and keep your eye on attention to detail because in really busy sections,


just like this one here, you can see we're not just talking about countries,


we've got the brand names there of the cars and also the models.


So there is quite a lot going on. And if you haven't spotted it yet,


I will reveal the big mistake. You can see here rather than say Hong Kong,


we put Hong Kong, huge fail. And what's more,


we actually launched it with that on the map. This had got through our QA process.


This content campaign was live on our client's site.


And we even got a link with that typo in place. Now, luckily,


I had a really understanding client at the time. We kind of went into panic mode the next morning,


was really honest with them, said we needed to fix things quite quickly,


and damage was really limited in that sense. We were able to turn it round.


And eventually this campaign went out and got 80 or so links.


So all was not lost. But again,


that's the kind of thing that you don't see and hear us talking about in the industry.


And I have to admit that Hong Kong will always haunt me.


This is one of the failed stories that we can sit and kind of laugh about now


and have a joke about, but at the time it was absolutely mortifying.


Now there are two campaign failures, right? But as an industry, failures don't stop there.


So again, hands up. Who's had to report on a campaign fail?


I know I definitely have. And you can see this email here that I received at 10 to 9,


first thing on a Monday morning, which is brilliant.


Our client of ours, and actually one of our favourite clients, comes to me and says,


Hi Shannon, how are you? Have you had a good weekend?


I just wanted to get your view on how January unfolded,


as it was below normal standards on a link building front.


Now this hurts, right? The client's got there before I have.


It's 10 to 9 on a Monday morning.


I probably haven't even had enough caffeine yet to deal with this.


But ultimately, you know, we were struggling at this point


and reporting back on this has its challenges on its own.


This is not the kind of email that anybody wants to be receiving.


So who's had to pull their team through a campaign failure?


And again, I can put my hand up to this.


And this is the reality, right, of heading up a team


and having different kind of disciplines within the team as well,


where we all have to muck in and drive forward together.


And you can see this again is a real life Slack message


where I'm saying well done for pushing the team on things today guys.


You know, they've been a bit of a slow start on a campaign.


We repivoted and got it out there.


Our account manager, Livvy, was in a bit of hot water with the client


and again, having to report on things.


And you can see that we all have each other's backs at this point.


And we're literally saying that to each other as well.


So you have to have each other's backs through these failures.


You have to have each other's backs through thick and thin


because we have them, struggles happen with what we do.


And sometimes it really hurts, right?


It's painful.


When you believe in a campaign, you're emotionally invested,


you believe you've got something that's going to go out


and deliver on a link building front.


When things don't go to plan and those links don't come in


and you've got a team that you're trying to boost morale on,


you know, it can be really challenging.


And that is the reality, unfortunately, with link building.


That is, you know, the industry that we work with them.


So to continue on this theme of truth then,


what is normal then when it comes to digital PR and link building?


Well, earlier this year Paddy led this survey


and launched a survey questionnaire style research piece out to our industry.


We had more than 300 replies from digital PRs, content marketers,


heads of marketing all around the world.


And we were eventually able to create this asset,


the State of Link Building Report 2020.


And it covers things like the future of link building,


where brands are spending their money, the tactics they're using,


and also the realities, how many links that we're generating.


So there's a couple of data points that I just want to bring to your guys' attention


that almost shows you the reality of link building, right?


And this is a really important question throughout this report.


Have you ever had a campaign that received the following number of links?


And you can see in the top spot there that actually 61% of respondents


that even answered this survey got between one and nine links.


Then in second place, you can see that 55% of respondents


got between 10 and 19 links for their campaigns.


And then in third place, you can see that 46% of respondents


got between 20 and 39 links.


Guys, there's nothing viral about that.


These are all steady performers.


Now, again, in position five, talking about that theme of fails and struggles with what we do,


28% also said that they'd launched a campaign that hadn't got any links.


Now, I'm a little bit suspicious about that.


I know that, for example, we've had more than one that's been a struggle over the last four years.


We've got processes and stuff in place to bounce back.


But I do think more than a third in our industry


and more than a third of campaigns or people out there have experienced zero links.


Now, despite what Twitter shows then, not every campaign is going viral, right?


Those are steady performers that we just talked you through.


And the research here from our state of link building report


shows that actually the majority of campaigns are getting between one and 20 links.


And you know what? That's really good.


Let's celebrate that. Let's learn from that.


Let's look at those campaigns and find out what's working


and take that forward with our strategies as well.


So to give you a bit more insight into normal and what normal is for digital PR campaigns,


I want to talk you through what's normal for error.


So across the 12 month period we launched 138 campaigns.


That received 2,381 followed links and around 5,000 pieces of coverage.


That gives you an average of just 17 links per campaigns.


Now I have to caveat that some of those campaigns in there,


yes, they did go off, do a brilliant job.


They got into, you know, top-tier figures and stuff like that.


But when you're looking at the law of averages, there's nothing again viral about this number.


Actually all of the averages that we've just shown here fall into this study performer category.


And these study performers we know because they're high quality links,


they're relevant to our clients and organically,


they're actually having positive impacts on our clients bottom line


and having real-world impacts on their increases of the traffic and rankings too.


But one thing I have to say here is that actually the link numbers themselves are almost irrelevant


because if they're not having those bigger impacts on SEO KPIs,


you know, from my position, I would rather have 17 high quality links


that are having an impact on those keyword rankings and traffic


and driving the audiences into our client sites


than a hundred spammy links that aren't going to shift the needle at all.


So for us really it is about quality over quantity and it's about consistency over virality.


Because you don't always need loads of links to go out and generate those business results.


And again, I want to talk you through some examples here.


So this is what 47 links across five campaigns with the perfect blend of technical SEO


and research and keyword research can do.


You can see session traffic here for a client of ours doubles year on year


because we have that perfect mix going on.


And what's more the client then provides a testimonial to say that Aera have consistently provided


great guidance on setting targets, communicating their progress and helping us grow as a company.


Now the most important thing to me and Aera at this point will be that last line there.


Those 47 links, that perfect recipe of technical SEO as well,


is adding revenue to the client's bottom line and is inspiring and achieving growth.


So actually those steady performers can make a big difference to the bottom line.


We need to talk about them more, we need to embrace them, we need to celebrate them.


So I want to take you through next around learning from these steady performers


and what we can do in order to take them forward into our wider strategies.


So let's go back to that challenging email that I received on that gloomy Monday morning in February last year.


We actually managed to turn it around today.


And by the end of the year last year in December the same client, the same guy, came back to us and said,


great job guys, you're finishing the year on a real high, keep it going.


Now there's a reason that we were able to finish the year on a real high


and that's because we've got a number of processes in place that help us learn and develop as a team


and help us get things back on track when they might not be going quite to plan.


One of them is the content evaluation matrix.


So where this matrix started then was with Mark Johnson.


So he headed up, as you guys might know, the creative team at Distilled for some time.


And he's recently just launched a new project called Content Hubble.


You should definitely sign up for that because it analyzes some of the most important


and you know, biggest campaigns and shows how agencies out there like Aera, Rise at Seven,


Digital Loft and stuff like that had come up with the ideas.


But essentially we were sitting in a brainstorm


and you can see the squiggles on the side here that are really hard to decipher.


We started to look and pull apart some of these campaigns.


And this is what that matrix looks like in person then.


So we have successful campaigns versus not successful


and that's in terms of a link building front.


And then we have complex versus not complex and that is in terms of a build and creative front.


So design, dev, coding, that kind of thing.


Now what we were doing at the time when we came up with this matrix was kind of really focusing on those wins


and we were looking at that top box there, going back to those campaigns,


trying to work out why they would know why they perform so well,


what the formats were, what the pitch angles were,


how we were speaking to journalists, building relationships from them.


And we were able to spot trends off the back of that


and we could see that, you know, at this point when we were starting to really drill into the data here,


that maps were great for link building.


Here were some of our most successful maps that we've ever launched.


There's 300 links alone between these campaigns here, which is brilliant


and it's something that we're really proud of.


But again, to go back to that rinse and repeat nature that I was telling you about,


we really, really pushed maps and probably a little bit too hard at the time.


One thing we didn't do though was look at this second box here,


the campaigns that weren't so successful, that actually were quite challenging to build


and we didn't go back and learn from our fails.


And this is one of them, so the most lucrative movie quotes of all time.


This was for a voucher code company that we worked with


and essentially we launched a huge internal data pool.


We looked at a number of films. We were able to essentially put a monetary value


to some of the leading movie quotes that are famous all around the world.


So we can see here that Tom Hanks, a hefty amount there, saying his all-important line,


Mama always said life was like a box of chocolates and you never know what you're going to get.


Again, we did this with a number of other quotes.


So you can see here the first rule of Fight Club is you don't talk about Fight Club


and you can see how much the actor earned for saying that quote then.


One thing to note here is that this is quite an experimental format, right?


We probably could have made this quite simple.


We might have been able to put this stuff in a blog post.


We could have done a different visual with it.


But at the time we were trying to push our designs in creative formats.


And a second example then, so here we were working with an online gambling company


and to play on the pun and the theme of odds,


you know, you can get odds against horses at the Grand National,


you can get odds against American footballers and stuff like that with the Super Bowl.


We wanted to look at the odds on life events.


So the likes of getting into college,


if my baby will be healthy and we were able to plot these against,


you know, life and death, politics, curiosities and stuff like that.


And we were sure that this campaign was going to go down really well with top-tier press


and specifically lifestyle press.


Then when you go down into the campaign design a little bit more,


you can see some more of these themes coming through.


So we were able to, you know, talk about living in a simulation


and that tapped into things that Elon Musk was talking about at the time.


We thought this campaign was going to be a huge success


and it was one of the hardest campaigns that we've ever launched


and had to outreach at the time.


But we should have taken a step back at that point.


And what should we have learned from these campaigns then?


Well, actually if we looked at that trend,


we realised that we were complicating things too much.


The ideas themselves were quite original, they were quite inspiring,


but the formats and the design that we choose to illustrate our stories,


actually they could have been potentially quite off-putting.


We could have distilled them in a much more simple way


that let the data and the story sing.


Now not learning from these, it did produce inconsistent digital PR results.


You know, there were fluctuations with the link building results


and ultimately this can put you in tricky situations with clients


and ultimately you can lose them.


You end up having graphs like this,


so you have huge spikes and then you really topple off


because you're not getting things right


and you're not going back to look at why things were challenging


so that you can learn from them.


Whereas if we look at the study performers,


instead they can produce consistent results.


So let's look at the middle of this matrix.


So the trend we found here then was that campaigns with multiple data points


and a river green can work really well for consistent results.


So this is a campaign then that does just that,


it does what it says on the tin.


It was for a travel tech client


and it reveals the world's best cities to stay connected.


So you can see we took a multitude of data points.


We looked at free Wi-Fi hotspots per square kilometer.


We then combined that with airports with free Wi-Fi


and the cost of downloads and stuff like that


and we were able to produce this unique data set


that could provide us with a ranking


to be able to go out to more than one sector of the press.


We could go to Paris and Parisian press and say,


hey, you guys took the crown of the world's best city to stay connected.


We could go to business press and say that,


you know, if you're working and traveling as a business traveler,


these are the best airport cities to stay connected.


And again, it allowed us to take all of these different angles


and generate really solid consistent results.


So that's just the study performer.


I think that campaign alone got, you know, 25 links.


Again, nothing viral about that.


But looking at those study performers in that middle category of the matrix,


it helped us get a 95% increase in organic traffic for this client


and a 63% increase in organic revenue.


Again, the perfect mix of digital PR link building,


technical SEOs producing solid consistent results


that are impacting this brand's bottom line.


So when it comes to the content success matrix,


then you should be reviewing your work every quarter


to find these trends and implement them.


I've given you a template here.


I'll be sharing my deck and no doubt Moz will as well


that you can download, you can mess around with it,


you can plot all of your campaigns against every quarter


and start to draw out these trends and insights


so that you can take it forward into your future link building strategies.


So in summary, I just want to circle everything background


and say that today in sharing the full picture with you guys,


digital PR can be really hard and we focus so much on the wins,


but we're doing so much more.


You are going to experience a campaign fail,


maybe two, maybe three.


It's going to happen.


It's in the nature of what we do.


It's important to keep consistency and quality in mind over virality.


Again, going back to that point, huge campaigns that fly are great,


but you need those links to be high quality.


They need to be relevant.


And in my opinion, I would rather have 20 solid high quality


relevant links than a hundred that aren't going to shift the needle


when it comes to traffic and rankings.


We are the consistent guys here.


So step one in doing all of that really is taking the viral pressure


off yourself and start talking more about those steady performers


and sharing those fails so that you can learn.


Step two is to realise that those steady performers


can consistently impact weighty SEO KPIs like traffic,


rankings and ultimately revenue.


And finally, step three then is to use that success matrix


to review campaigns, catch those trends early,


jump on the recipes for success with those wins,


look at those steady performers to see what the steady beat is


for consistency and learn from those fails.


Today, I really hope I've showed you the full picture.


What Deep Learning and Machine Learning Mean For the Future of SEO - Whiteboard Friday

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


This week we're going to take a peek into Google's future and look at what it could


mean as Google advances their machine learning and deep learning capabilities.


I know these sound like big fancy important words.


They're not actually that tough of topics to understand.


In fact, they're simplistic enough that even a lot of technology firms like Moz does some


level of machine learning.


We don't do anything with deep learning and a lot of neural networks.


We might be going that direction.


But I found an article that was published in January absolutely fascinating and I think


really worth reading.


And I wanted to extract some of the contents here for Whiteboard Friday because I do think


this is tactically and strategically important to understand for SEOs and really important


for us to understand so that we can explain to our bosses, our teams, our clients how


SEO works and will work in the future.


So the article is called Google Search Will Be Your Next Brain.


It's by Steven Levy.


It's over on Medium.


I do encourage you to read it.


It's a relatively lengthy read but just a fascinating one if you're interested in search.


And it starts with a profile of Jeff Hinton who was a professor in Canada and worked on


neural networks for a long time and then came over to Google, is now a distinguished engineer


there.


And as the article says, a quote from the article, he is versed in the black art of


organizing several layers of artificial neurons so that the entire system, the system of neurons,


could be trained or even train itself to divine coherence from random inputs.


This sounds complex but basically what we're saying is we're trying to get machines to


come up with outcomes on their own rather than us having to tell them all the inputs


to consider and how to process those incomes and the outcome to spit out.


So this is essentially machine learning which is like Google's used this, for example, to


figure out when you give it a bunch of photos and it can say, oh, this is a landscape photo.


Oh, this is an outdoor photo.


Oh, this is a photo of a person.


Have you ever had that creepy experience where you upload a photo to Facebook or to Google


Plus and they say, is this your friend so-and-so?


And you're like, that's a terrible shot of my friend.


You can barely see most of his face and he's wearing glasses which he usually never wears.


How in the world could Google Plus or could Facebook figure out that this was this person?


And that's what they use these neural networks, these deep learning, machine learning processes


for.


So I'll give you a simple example.


Here at Moz we do machine learning very simplistically for page authority and domain authority.


So we take all the inputs, number of links, number of linking root domains, every single


metric that you could get from Moz on the page level, on the subdomain level, on the


root domain level, all these metrics.


And then we combine them together and we say, hey, machine, we want you to build us the


algorithm that best correlates with how Google ranks pages.


And here's a bunch of pages that Google has ranked.


I think we use a base set of 10,000 and we do it about quarterly or every six months.


Feed that back into the system and the system pumps out the little algorithm that says,


here you go, this will give you the best correlating metric with how Google ranks pages.


And that's how you get page authority, domain authority.


Cool, really useful, helpful for us to say like, okay, this page is probably considered


a little more important than this page by Google and this one a lot more important.


Very cool.


But it's not a particularly advanced system, right?


The more advanced system is to have these kind of neural nets in layers, right?


So you have a set of networks and these neural networks, by the way, they're designed to


replicate nodes in the human brain, which is, in my opinion, a little creepy, but don't


worry, the article does talk about it.


There's like a board of scientists who make sure that Terminator 2 doesn't happen, or


Terminator 1 for that matter.


Apparently no one's stopping Terminator 4 from happening, I don't know.


That's the new one that's coming out.


So one layer of the neural net will identify features, right?


Another layer of the neural net might classify the types of features that are coming in.


Imagine this for search results, right?


So search results are coming in and Google's looking at the features of all the websites


and web pages, your websites and pages, to try and consider like, what are the elements


I could pull out from there?


Well there's the link data about it and there's things that happen on the page and there's


user interactions and all sorts of stuff.


And then we're going to classify types of pages, types of searches, and then we're going


to extract the features or metrics that predict the desired result, that a user gets a search


result they really like.


And we have an algorithm that can consistently produce those.


And then neural networks are hopefully designed, right?


That's what Jeff Hinton's been working on, is hopefully designed to train themselves


to get better.


So it's not like, you know, with PA and DA, it's our data scientist, right, Matt Peters,


and his team looking at it and going, I bet we could make this better by doing this.


And this is standing back and, you know, the guys at Google just going, all right machine,


you learn.


And they figure it out.


That's kind of creepy, right?


In the original system, you needed those people, right?


These individuals here to feed the inputs, to say like, this is what you can consider


system and the features that we want you to extract from it.


And in unsupervised learning, which is kind of this next step, unsupervised learning,


the system figures it out, right?


So this takes us to some interesting places.


Imagine the Google algorithm circa 2005, right?


And you had basically a bunch of things in here.


Maybe you have anchor text and you'd have page rank and you'd have some measure of authority


on a domain level.


And maybe there's people who are tossing new stuff in there like, hey, algorithm, let's


consider the location of the searcher.


Hey, algorithm, let's consider some user and usage data, right?


And they're tossing new things into the bucket that the algorithm might consider and then


they're measuring it, seeing if it improves.


But you get to, you know, the algorithm today and gosh, there's going to be a lot of things


in there that are driven by machine learning, if not deep learning yet, machine learning.


So you know, there's derivatives of all of these metrics.


There's conglomerations of them.


There's extracted pieces like, hey, we only want to look and measure anchor text on these


types of results when we also see that the anchor text matches up to the search queries


that have previously been performed by people who also search for this.


Wait, what?


What does that even mean?


But that's what the algorithm is designed to do, right?


The machine learning system figures out things that humans would never extract, metrics that


we would never even create from the inputs that they can see.


And then over time, the idea is that in the future, even the inputs aren't given by human


beings, right?


The machine is getting to figure this stuff out itself.


That's weird.


That means that if you were to ask a Google engineer in a world where deep learning controls


the ranking algorithm, if you were to ask the people who designed the ranking system,


hey, does it matter if I get more links?


They might be like, well, maybe.


But they don't know, right?


Because they don't know what's in this algorithm.


Only the machine knows.


And the machine can't even really explain it.


You could go take a snapshot and look at it, but A, it's constantly evolving, and B, a


lot of these metrics are going to be weird conglomerations and derivatives of a bunch


of metrics mashed together and torn apart and considered only when certain criteria


are fulfilled.


Yikes.


So what does that mean for SEOs?


What do we have to care about from all of this system, from all of these systems and


this evolution and this move towards deep learning?


Which by the way, that's what Jeff Dean, who is one of Google's, I think he's a senior


fellow over at Google, right?


He's the dude that everyone mocks for being the world's smartest computer scientist over


there.


And Jeff Dean has basically said, hey, we want to put this into search.


It's not there yet, but we want to take these models, these things that Hinton has built,


and we want to put them into search.


And that, for SEOs in the future, is going to mean much less distinct universal ranking


inputs, ranking factors.


We won't really have ranking factors in the way that we know them today, right?


It won't be like, well, they have more anchor text, and so they rank higher.


That might be something we'd still look at, and we'd say, hey, they have this anchor text.


Maybe that's correlated with what the machine is finding, the system is finding to be useful,


and that's still something I want to care about to a certain extent.


But we're going to have to consider those things a lot more seriously.


We're going to have to take another look at them and decide and determine whether the


things that we thought were ranking factors still are when the neural network system takes


over, right?


It also is going to mean something that I think many, many SEOs have been predicting


for a long time and have been working towards, which is more success for websites that satisfy


searchers, right?


If the output is successful searches, right, and that's what the system is looking for,


and that's what it's trying to correlate all its metrics to, if you produce something that


means more successful searches for Google searchers when they get to your site and you


ranking in the top means Google searchers are happier, well, you know what?


The algorithm will catch up to you.


That's kind of a nice thing.


It does mean a lot less info from Google about how they rank results.


So today, you might hear from someone at Google, well, page speed is a very small ranking factor.


In the future, they might be, well, page speed is, like all ranking factors, totally unknown


to us, right?


Because the machine might say, well, yeah, page speed as a distinct metric, right, one


that a Google engineer could actually look at, looks very small.


But derivatives of things that are connected to page speed may be huge inputs, right?


Maybe page speed is something that, across all of these, is very well connected with


happier searchers and successful search results.


Weird things that we never thought of before might be connected with them, right, as the


machine learning system tries to build all those correlations.


And that means potentially many more inputs into the ranking algorithm, things that we


would never consider today, things we might consider wholly illogical, like what servers


do you run on?


Well, that seems ridiculous.


Why would Google ever grade you on that?


And if human beings are putting factors into the algo, they never would.


But the neural network doesn't care, right?


It's a honey badger.


It doesn't care what inputs it collects.


It only cares about successful searches.


And so if it turns out that Ubuntu is poorly correlated with successful search results,


too bad, right?


So this world is not here yet today, but certainly there are elements of it, right?


Google's talked about how Panda and Penguin are based off of machine learning systems


like this.


And I think given what Jeff Hinton and Jeff Dean are working on at Google, it sounds like


this will be making its way more seriously into search, and therefore it's something


that we're going to really have to consider as search marketers.


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


Friday.


I'd Rather Be Thanked Than Ranked [MozCon 2017] — Wil Reynolds

So, I'm obviously super excited to be here today, but before I get started, I would like


to give back to Ran what he's given to me.


This man has held my son on flights when I was working on slide decks.


He's such a good man, and wherever you go from here, Ran, I follow you wherever you


go, dude.


You have made me build a better company.


You have.


There are women at SEER that have spoken on this stage because you've made that something


that mattered to me when I didn't know it mattered to me.


There are mothers' rooms for our new moms when they come back to SEER after maternity


leave who have rooms where they can have private space that's built for them when they come


back and when they're pumping.


I'm a guy.


I'm going to show you some pictures of some man boobs later, but I don't pump.


I never had that understanding, and the minute you did that during the swap, it just made


me better.


It made me better.


Whatever you do, from here going forward, I hope it's freaking huge.


You know why?


Because my company's better because I know you.


Screw what you've done for SEO.


That's just the tip of the iceberg.


There are 140 people at SEER who are better off with me in that company because I've learned


things from you that have made me a better me.


When a man is willing to hold your crying son so you can finish a slide deck, I can


at least drop a tear for that motherfucker.


All right.


That's over with.


I'm an emotional guy.


But speaking of emotions, I look at our role in SEARCH, and I'm starting to realize that


it's better to be thanked than ranked.


I'm going to share with you something that's a massive failure that I made, and it all


came to me on a trip to Scotland with Wren and Geraldine.


Cute picture, right?


I took this myself.


Check out my Dempel game, right?


But Geraldine said this, and I was like, ooh, I'm using that, and I'm going to open MozCon


with you because she said, how about we did this?


I was like, you're fucking right.


How about we become the content that we wish we found instead of the content that we're


sometimes producing?


So I'm going to share with you three things that I've seen that have made me make pretty


strong pivots in my company, and I hope that I show you a reality that makes you maybe


want to consider making some of these pivots too because I think it's dangerous.


So the first thing I'm going to show you is a time when I ranked high for my own site.


So I've spent three years trying to rank for words like SEO company, an SEO agency, an


SEO consultant, and I stood on stage at MozCon 2011 and was like, psh, got it.


Top three globally for all these words.


You should listen to me because I've outranked all of you.


I didn't get a freaking dime from ranking for those words.


You know how painful it is to work on something for three years and believe that once I rank


for the word SEO company, woo hoo, leads and sales like crazy.


Wrong.


The money actually never came.


I never closed a deal from ranking well on search engines for the word SEO company or


SEO consultant, even though I was in the top three globally for it.


Ooh, that hurts.


Here's the reason why, because I stayed in a silo and looked at my SEO tools, and I didn't


actually talk to real people who might actually search for this word.


If you look at the business census, you would know that in the United States, for every


140 small businesses, there is one mid-market or large business.


Of that 140, 78% are not employers.


They don't employ anyone, which is fine.


That's just not typically our demographic of clients that we typically target.


Fifty-two percent are home-based.


We have a couple of clients who are distributed companies, but not home-based businesses.


What's interesting is all the searches were being done on SEO company because whether


you have a huge business or a small business, you probably want to show up on Google for


something.


Think about what's happening there.


I'm over-waiting, and most of the people searching for this word aren't my target.


How would I know that?


I probably should have taken some time to talk to some people who might search for it,


and I wouldn't have wasted three years of my life going after a keyword that when I


finally got it, did nothing for my business.


What happens when you get to our site and you see all these logos and you're a small


business?


You're like, not for me.


I don't want to work with companies like that.


So Google around 2012 after me working and having all these high rankings knocked SEER


out of the top results for the word SEO company, SEO agency.


When I saw that, I went, whoa, there is a new reality.


What did they do?


But my revenue never went down.


Let's think about that, all of us who are chasing the holy grail of rankings.


My rankings tanked, and my business did that.


Ooh, how does that happen?


Maybe we're all at the wrong freaking conference.


Now, you're at the right conference.


Let me introduce you to Helen Fang.


Helen's been working with SEER on various projects at various companies for eight years.


See, Helen brings us with her.


And when we make mistakes, she kicks us in the butt and helps us to get better, right?


We're not perfect.


But she knows that we'll keep getting better, so she keeps bringing us along with her.


And then when people ask her, who would you use for SEO, which is much better than Googling


it, she makes referrals.


And over eight years of working together, I probably owe Helen five million bucks, which


is five million more dollars than ranking for the word SEO company ever did.


Ranking for SEO company actually lost me money.


You know why?


Because my BD team was trying to talk to every single person and help them out that called


us even though we could never work with them.


So they went, can you hire some more BD people?


Hire more people in BD.


We need a bigger BD team.


Well, for what?


So we can all just say, no, thank you, let me refer you, no, thank you, let me refer


you, no, thank you, let me refer you?


It actually almost cost me money, which is crazy.


And the reason why this should be concerning to all of you is because the speed by which


Google can get smart is insane.


In 24 hours, Google's AI changed Google Translate in a way that improved it so much that it


was better than anything they had done in 10 years.


Let me show you.


There's an article about this.


It's really long, nobody here is going to read it, so I'm just going to give you the


cliff notes.


So we're going to talk about Hemingway.


Snows of Kilimanjaro.


Researcher had been dropping in the first paragraph of this short story into Google


Translate for years.


Every day puts it in, puts it in.


The left-hand side, I'm going to read the bottom one, no one has explained what the


leopard was seeking at that altitude.


That is Hemingway.


Now, let's read what Google Translate had to say.


Whether the leopard had what the demand at that altitude, there is that nobody explained.


Ooh, Google Translate.


Ugh.


Can't complain about it because it's free, so it's better than nothing.


In 24 hours of enabling AI into Google Translate, look at how much better the second sentence


got, or the last sentence got.


24 hours.


What is your 24-hour moment?


What is the thing you're doing right now that if Google got better in 24 hours and smacked


you in the face tomorrow with a new set of results that you would be losing business


on because you're not the right answer?


That's how quickly the machines can learn and improve.


Are you going to bet against them or are you going in the direction that Google's ultimately


going?


You have to remember that there's so much more to people than the words they type into


search engines.


When I type in SEO company, there was a lot more to people than what they typed in, right?


I'm a small business.


Well, I never asked them that, so I wasted three years trying to beat people out for


that keyword.


Now with machine learning and all that great stuff at Google, they show local results.


They show local results when you search for SEO company.


They didn't do that in 2012, so my dumb ass spent three years going after that keyword.


Today you all know, don't do it.


What does the world look like when Google starts understanding how we feel about the


results that we found?


How does the world look when Google understands that behavior?


Feels like this when you find great content, doesn't it?


Oh, I found the thing that actually solves my problem.


So that was the first thing that I saw and I went, okay.


The second thing that I saw that I cannot disclose with a whole lot of detail and I


apologize, it's not really my style, but the company I will be talking about could own


me in two seconds if I mention their name.


So let's just say this.


They basically built the industry.


They built the industry.


They're the first people to come out with this word that everybody uses.


It searched for hundreds of thousands of times a month and they were ranked number 20 for


it and they were pissed.


Ten times the brand, ten times the history, ten times the content, ten times the links.


Ranked 20.


Hired one search agency, fired.


Hired second search agency, fired.


And then we showed up like, oh God, next.


And then we fought them for eight months and we said, look at what Google's showing.


Google has learned something about the right answer for this query and it's not selling


people on what you do.


It's educating them.


We believe that Google is artificially suppressing your rankings algorithmically because the


user signals are showing them that you are the wrong answer.


There is no amount of links you can build or no amount of content you can produce that's


going to overcome the fact that you're a disappointment.


I'm going to skip through that.


So speaking of disappointing things, I search for my name all the time and when I search


for my name, I end up seeing models show up one day in the suggested results.


What the freak?


Look at me.


I'm a search guy and search guys ain't models.


So all of a sudden, people started looking for something different when they searched


for my name and when they clicked on the image results that Google started showing, this


is what they got.


That look like a model's body to you?


So think about it.


If you were looking for Will Reynolds' model and you saw this guy with these freaking awesome


man boobs, would you be like, yes, you have solved my problem or are you like, oh my God,


we'll change the slide.


I'm sick of seeing you with no shirt on.


I'm still here.


See, the thing is that I was a massive disappointment to most people searching for that word.


So what that meant is Google started seeing that disappointment and when they saw that


disappointment, they said, well, ooh, why is it that people are more satisfied when


they search for Will Reynolds' model and then click on images of this little skinny white


dude?


See, the computers were telling them this is a better result.


So then Google said why should we make people have to modify their search three and four


and five times when we actually can run machine learning on this and see where they ultimately


end up where they have the best experience.


So today if you search for me, you will find that about half of the results are him because


he's a better answer and I expect to lose traffic from image search because of this


and that's okay because none of you have ever decided to work with Cyr because of my lovely


naked body.


If you did, that's weird.


I'm married.


So when the computers learn what disappointment is looking like and Google can find that out


and in 24 hours, what are you currently doing that's risk, that's open for that risk?


Overall, you know what, the web is a disappointing place.


I recently was doing some research for a client, searched for this word.


The number one result said, well, the cost for this can be between $1,000 and $5,000


a month.


All right.


If you lived in Philadelphia in my zip code and you had $5,000 a month to drop on a place


to live, you could get a four bedroom in this building with a two story gym overlooking


the freaking bridge with a slide that drops you in front of your freaking fireplace for


five grand.


If you live in the same zip code and you have $1,000, you get two brick walls and a bad


freaking closet door.


That's all you get.


So when a piece of content says, even though it ranks number one, you could be between


$5,000 and $1,000?


That's not helpful.


That is not helpful.


So maybe a better piece of content would ask, how much are you looking to spend?


And then based on that, I might actually give you different recommendations.


What about location?


Five grand gets you that baller place in Philly.


Five grand gets you this in New York.


So that content isn't helping anybody.


And I believe that content that does not guide the user to their ultimate destination is


highly disruptable.


And I want to build as much of that content as possible.


Let me show you more disappointment across the web.


I was looking for Looker.


I was looking for their pricing.


I clicked on their paid search ad.


If you can find pricing here, I'll give you $500.


Didn't think so.


They pay to disappoint me.


I clicked on the next result from Insight Squared.


How about you give me pricing?


Nah, we're going to tell you that they have graphs and charts.


Nah, really?


Paid for that disappointment.


The third result, so this time I read the description and I go, OK, pricing, great.


It's given me all the stuff that I think that I need.


Pricing, pricing, pricing.


Pricing, pricing.


Fucking A. No pricing.


People are paying to not give me what I'm asking for.


That's disappointment.


But if you're willing to pay for it, Google will let you do that all day because that's


how they build self-driving cars is on bad PPC marketers' money.


And then they retarget the heck out of me, reminding me of my disappointment.


Hey, remember we didn't give you that pricing?


Still here trying to get you in the funnel.


And then they set up ToutApp and then they scale talking to me like they actually care.


And then I go out and I start talking about Tableau and I get engagement and I'm an influencer,


remember?


And they never, ever responded.


They could have just said good luck and given me a thumbs up.


No, we didn't do that.


We spent all our time in ToutApp trying to figure out how to scale 1,000 messages to


actually sound like we give a fuck when we don't.


This is the problem with scale in business is very often it leads us to starting with


scale and then we automate acting like we actually give a fuck about these people when


we don't.


And we feel it.


And this is why the web is a disappointing place.


Hopefully, this is the room that's going to start fixing it because I need some brave


marketers in here.


What's interesting, though, is when you're not willing to pay for it, Google makes you


earn it by actually answering the freaking question.


So then I looked at the Montclair SaaS 250 list and I looked at the and we did some analysis


on this list of the top 250 SaaS companies.


Only 23% had pricing pages, disruptable.


52%, over half of them, ranked a demo or contact page when I searched for their brand in the


word pricing.


Disappointing.


27% of them showed answer boxes.


So 27% of these 250 companies when I searched for their brand and the word pricing, answer


boxes showed up.


One answer to that query.


The sad part is over 83% of those one box answers were not the companies themselves.


Let me show you what this actually looks like.


I wanted to know what Namely costs.


I was doing some research in HR.


Notice the top answer?


Somebody else.


The top four results aren't even the brand.


Google is not going to let you rank when you consistently disappoint people and as the


machines get more data, they're going to get smarter at knowing that you should not rank


unless you change the way that you serve up your content to help people.


Interesting example here, HubSpot.


HubSpot ranks for the word best CRM software.


What I've seen about best queries is people type in best because they want guidance, not


because they want companies typically.


So how did HubSpot rank?


Because HubSpot built a page that compared them to their competitors.


You know why we all love HubSpot and why HubSpot builds so much trust with us?


Because they rated themselves second.


How many of you work in a company right now where if you actually thought you were the


second best answer to that customer, you're willing to freaking say it on your own website?


We go, oh, HubSpot's so great, how are we ever going to beat them?


You're never going to beat HubSpot because they're willing to do stuff like this while


you're begging to do anything even close to this.


And this is why HubSpot owns most marketers in the room like I own you, I own you, I own


you, I own you, I see you, I own you too.


HubSpot walks by marketers and are like, I own all of you because I've got the balls


to actually try to answer my customer's question.


I don't know where my brave marketers are in the house today, but man, we need a couple


of you to help me and other folks try to lead the way on like how can we get better at helping


our clients to see the reality that I'm showing you today.


This is all, this is irrefutable.


This is stuff I'm just seeing, right?


So when you think of disruptive change, it's never hidden from us.


You have seen these things in front of you.


The problem is we as people don't want to handle the conflict.


We don't want to handle the reality that that provokes.


When you go, well, what does that mean if all my content is crap and not solving people's


problems?


Let me just put my head in the sand.


By the time the company finds out, I'll be at a new job and then the new SEO can deal


with all the crap that I've left behind.


So what are we to do?


Simple.


Start by listening, watching, and learning from your customers.


So what we do at Sia, we're starting to do, have very few clients letting us do it, but


man, this is the bet that I'm making on the future.


We watch people go through search results when we ask them, hey, I want to see you solve


this problem starting at Google.


How would you do it?


And then they start going through results and they click on things and we ask them questions


and we understand their why.


You might say, well, we do surveys.


Surveys aren't good enough.


I'm going to tell you why.


The woman who did this set of click, did this click behavior, when you listen to her, the


first thing she said is, when I'm comparing apps, I want recent information.


I heard that out of her mouth.


So if you asked her in a survey, do you want recent information, she'd say yes.


That's my number one thing.


But then I watched her skip over all the stuff that was more recent to click on something


that was in position number five.


And I'm going, why did you just skip over all the recent stuff when you told me you


wanted recent content?


She didn't even see the dates.


We do because we're marketing people who spend all day on Google.


She looks where she clicks.


And when you look at the title tag, 2016 is in there.


Where's the year and all the other ones.


So she skipped them.


Watching people go through the search results makes you a better marketer instantaneously.


I don't have time to talk about this.


Google Clay Christensen in selling milkshakes.


You'll hear all about it, but I want to make sure I've got time.


I took up some of my time to shout out Rand and become a blubbery mess.


But what he found out, Clay Christensen found out, is that most milkshakes are bought between


8 and 8.30 in the morning.


And when McDonald's was asking people, well, how can we sell you more milkshakes?


They adjusted pricing.


They asked them, hey, do you want more thickness?


Do you want different flavors?


And people answered those questions.


And McDonald's ran out and did those things and got no sales.


The team that Clay Christensen worked with at McDonald's allowed them to observe behavior.


And what they observed is that most people that bought milkshakes did them at 8 to 8.30


in the morning.


Why?


Because you wanted something to drink on your car ride that lasted the entire commute.


Almost everybody who bought a milkshake at 8 to 8.30 in the morning was driving.


What was the job that a milkshake was there to do?


To take up your commute, which meant that milkshakes at McDonald's didn't compete with


milkshakes at Burger King.


It competed with donuts.


It competed with bagels.


Really interesting.


It's a four-minute video.


Whoever is running the Twitter handle for Sia, tweet that out.


It's awesome.


Watch it later.


Or if you're bored, watch it now.


Personas.


I got personas, Will, so I'm people-focused.


Anybody here ever hang out with Sample Sally?


Hey, Sample Sally, how you doing, girl?


Yeah, ooh, girl, we had a good time at the club last night, Sample Sally.


Anybody here skew female?


What the fuck?


So the problem with personas is they're not people.


I've never heard Sample Sally say, hey, I'm having a really hard time finding Namely's


pricing.


Here's a video that I'm going to show you guys of what it sounds like when we're going


through search results with people.


It's a little low, so I hope we can turn it up a little bit.


She skipped over the first four results and the rich snippet, clicked on PC mag.


Just because I like how it...


Listen.


I like how it lays out your comparisons.


It's easy to read at a glance, and then if I want to know more, I can go to do research.


This is what we're missing.


She goes, I like it for these reasons.


Now, think about it.


If you started asking people that, might you be able to build the content that not only


ranked well but also solved their problem better, which would protect you from the 24-hour


bug coming of Google throwing machine learning on your keyword, and then you not ranking


because you're not solving people's problem.


Have to listen to people.


Here's another one that I want to show you of another user looking to go through a moving


process.


I don't like that.


What the four?


Is it video?


I know we need time for a four-minute video.


You see her frustration?


You hear that?


I don't have time for a four-minute video.


She's frustrated.


When you're frustrated, what do you do?


You hit the back button.


You do that enough and do another search, I've already shown you the reality that Google


will start to suppress your rankings in certain verticals.


It's just a matter of them getting enough data to feel confident to knock you out of


the top results.


I think this is a competitive advantage.


Let me give you an example of how much of a competitive advantage it is.


So we work with a client who is in the space where people buy rent to own electronics.


You look at this.


You go, okay.


Google tools we use.


Look for seasonality and blah, blah, blah.


When we talk to people, we found out two things.


A woman who went through a divorce recently was like, my husband managed all of my bills,


so therefore I never built my credit, so I'm using this rent to own company to establish


my credit.


Instantaneous empathy.


When my team is doing optimization or keyword strategy or content strategy, they remember


her voice.


They remember her pain and her why, and now they have a mission to go help solve that.


It's not sample Sally that I can just put away in my drawer.


When you hear someone's pain, you never forget it.


Every time you see that keyword, my team sees the why, because we've asked them why.


The grandmother who said to us, I'm on a fixed income.


I only get a certain amount of money every month, so I need to spread those payments


out over time so I can have an iPad for my grandson.


Oh, wow.


I would have never come up with that.


Sorry, Maz.


The tools are awesome.


But they don't tell me that this is a grandmother who's looking for installment payments for


her grandson's Christmas gift.


And it's not really their job to show me that.


It's our job as marketers to get to know people.


All right.


I'm going to keep skipping through.


So you look at this beautiful deck.


We have a decking client.


And we're trying to figure out what makes people buy composite decking.


Splinters!


Splinters are why people buy composite decks.


Most tools that you use, if you typed in composite decking, are never going to tell you.


Related searches are splinters.


But when we talk to actual people, almost all of them, seven out of ten, were like,


I got a damn splinter.


And that's what made me be like, I need a new deck.


And we're like, okay, so then what's our client's role for this query that none of regular marketers


would ever go after?


This is the zero moment of truth.


Oh, I'm walking across, getting ready to pick up my son.


Oh, God damn splinter.


Oh, my God, how do I get this splinter out of my foot?


Hey, are you looking for a new deck?


Maybe a little bit aggressive.


But you search for that query.


I know a little bit more about what you're likely to search for two or three weeks from


now, unless you're just one of those sadomasochistic people that like getting freaking splinters


in your foot.


So we're ignoring the people that are searching.


It's so simple, but so few of us are doing it.


Talking to the actual people.


You have to get good at asking questions, questions like these.


When you're watching somebody go through a set of search results, why did you click on


this?


Why didn't you?


What could make this better?


You start actually getting, it'd be like being able to log in to a heat mapping tool for


your competitors.


Because you watch people search, land on your competitor's site, and tell you everything


they don't like about their content or everything they love about their content, which gives


you a much stronger roadmap on how to actually solve people's problems.


I'm a big believer in guidance over content.


You ever had your dog run through your screen and break it?


The minute your dog does that, right, are you like, man, I really want some content


today.


I hope I got some content marketing done well.


You're like, I got to fix my screen door, man.


My dog just busted through.


Anybody ever go to like Home Depot or Lowe's or wherever you go to try to figure out what


screen to buy?


It is a nightmare trying to figure that out.


And the reason why we were able to find that out is because our team members actually got


the permission from our client to go to Home Depot and look at their product on the shelves


and to ask associates what kind of things do people ask?


And the associates are telling you all those things that people get confused by when they're


picking up the boxes and trying to read them.


And they're going, well, what about this?


And do I have a that?


And do I have a this?


So what we built for that client is this, a guide.


Where are you going to use the screen?


Oh, I needed to know that.


Do you have pets?


Why, yes, I do.


Is visibility important to you?


Do you need protection from the sun?


Nah.


And then it says, great, here you go.


This is the path that so many people have to do eight or 12 different queries to ultimately


find the right answer.


Guidance is what people want.


And I want to say thank you to Christian Williams sitting right up here.


It's a company that just does wire mesh in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.


This isn't Nike.


But they enable us, and they allowed me to show this, so I want to shout him out for


thanking him for letting me show you some of the work that we're doing.


Great clients enable great agencies.


You need people who are like, yes, we want to actually solve people's problems versus


just keep getting them in the funnel, Will.


Who cares?


Get them in the funnel.


I hate viral stuff.


I'm sorry.


Some people might not like me for it, but I don't need to make new friends, so I don't


really care very much.


I don't like spiky shit.


Oh, we did this thing and whoop, and then wham, nothing.


It's like doing drugs.


Oh, my God, it's amazing.


Oh, man, I need another hit.


That content for that, how to pick the right wire, I think that as a chance to solve that


problem for years because it is something that guides people to the right answer.


I don't need to write a funny, let me just go to whatever the site is and make some really


cool videos of dogs running through freaking the wire in the mesh.


Stop it.


You look at that, you laugh, you're like, whatever.


I don't want to be in that business.


I want to be in the business that when I go to bed at night and put my head on the pillow,


I feel that we have worked so hard to try to help somebody who was lost find an answer


to their freaking problem.


Dogs have been running through screens for years, way before BuzzFeed came out.


Fuck getting links for this.


I want to help people that are sitting in Home Depot, like, what do I do next?


That's what gives me satisfaction in my job.


I don't care if it gets one link or not.


There's no excuses for this, people.


You got Facebook, you got some friends, they will answer your questions.


How did I find out about the splinters?


Rob Boetje, he's speaking next.


Shauna Huber.


Anybody here know Shawn?


Great Seattle SEO, works at Alaska.


He's not able to make it.


You can ask people and they're willing to sit on the phone with you and help you do


better.


All right.


So now I've got to get you through some of the cool stuff I've been working on to do


some of this at scale.


I want you to start looking at the bottom of the search results through a different


lens of intent.


Use your brain.


When I looked at the bottom of that search result, best brands basics, this is what people


were looking for.


That should influence the content that you build.


I'm going to skip through this because I want to make sure I get to this stuff.


The first tool I love to use is Stat because they're the only tool that I know that lets


me kick out all the people also asks and all the related searches at scale.


So I can put in 10,000 words and get all the people also asks for them.


I can get all the related searches for them.


I'm going to show you two things that I'm doing.


One of them is I'm just pivoting on which sites are showing up the most for all these


queries that I care about as a one box answer.


Those are the trusted sites.


Those are the sites that your customer will end up on at some point in their journey.


So until you can make that content yourself, go out to the AdWords planner, display planner,


find out what sites are in the GDN, buy those ads, get in those websites newsletters, maybe


swap pixels with them, do native because you know that those are the one box answers which


means people are going to be clicking on them when they're searching for the words that


you care about and you can't produce all this content overnight.


So go to the places where they're naturally going to already be.


Another thing that I love to do, taking paid search query reports.


So if you're in this room and if I were to ask you if you could get a search query report


out of your AdWords and you can't do it in less than five minutes because you don't know


how to do it, you need to change the way you do your job and I'm going to show you why.


We go, oh, well Google no longer gives us not provided.


Screw that.


It's called a search query report in Excel.


Go get your keywords back instead of bitching about it.


So if you take a search query report with conversions in it, now we can talk money instead


of other BS metrics like traffic and links.


Get the things that are making people money out of the search query report and then just


do a word cloud.


This is an actual client who runs an app.


Biggest word, best.


What is that?


Guidance.


Hey client, you're actually getting conversions off of the word best.


Are we landing people on something that gives them guidance?


Not really.


Okay.


Well what that means is we're going to have to pay for that keyword forever because we're


not building the content that HubSpot did to make sure that we can rank for best queries.


But then when I show them how much money they're spending on it and how much money they're


making on it in paid, they go, maybe we can build that content because you're making a


case that I can take to my CEO.


You take to the CEO, hey we're going to build this thing, it's going to give us a lot of


links.


They're going, what does that do for me?


I don't report up to the board on that.


Ram, do you report to the board on links?


Of course he does.


You know, don't you hate using your friends for examples and they don't freaking go along


with the thing that you told them to go along with?


Let's go back.


People's why is all over your search query report.


This is a photo editing app.


Let me show you that by just word clouding it what I saw.


See the word skinny?


Huh, why are people searching for the word skinny when they're looking for photo editing


apps?


See the word wrinkle and airbrushing and slimming and eyes and tan and whiten?


That's your why.


Is my meta description saying, girl you're going to look skinnier after you use this


app?


Or is it saying, photo editing app for all your photo editing needs, we're the best?


People's why is buried in search query reports.


If you don't go looking for it, you're missing out on their why.


The problem with best is I don't trust the business to ever tell me who's the best.


I trust the business to say, we're the best.


You ain't DJ Khaled, you're not the freaking best.


Sorry, I don't know if DJ Khaled references go over well in Seattle.


People want reviews and Google gets that which is why Google suppresses rankings.


You search for photo editing app.


Notice that Google's not willing to actually, through that bar at the top, most people don't


click on them.


We've actually talked to people and watched them go through the results.


They usually skip over them.


Even on the mobile, especially on the mobile where it shows apps that you can just click


and install right from the app store, people don't click on those.


Notice that Google ranks nothing but best, best, best, best, best, but people don't have


to write the word best.


When I see best showing up in my search query report that much, I go, ooh, a lot of people


at some point are searching for best.


That gives me part of their intent.


With that intent, I go, oh crap, these are the sites that I might need to advertise on


or partner with until I can build the content to outrank them all.


Another thing I love to do for my e-comm SEOs.


This has been fun.


So pay attention.


I'm using this tool FeedCheck, which is in the slides.


It's not great, but it does the job on things on Amazon that have low numbers of reviews.


And I exported all the reviews for this company, Liza, in the mattress space, and I took all


of their one and two star reviews, and I put them in the word cloud and saw the word firm.


But the problem with the word firm is I have no context on that word.


Is it too firm or not firm enough?


You don't know that with the word cloud.


So what do you do?


You use an engram analyzer.


Thank you, Ethan.


You were on vacation, but wherever you are, Ethan, in Paris, thank you for showing this


to me because now I'm a little bit better of a marketer.


So I dropped in all the low reviews, clicked on trigrams or bigrams that show a certain


amount of times, and then it starts to give me this.


So now I'm starting to understand what makes, when people review you lowly for your product,


what kind of words are they using the most?


And then I did this little sneaky thing called use log likelihood.


I have no idea what that means.


None.


But let me show you what it did for me.


Salvation Army?


Hmm.


Why is the Salvation Army showing up in all these bad, only four bad reviews, but when


it does, it's like a really bad review.


All right.


Let's read this out loud.


To return this product is a nightmare.


They don't take it back.


Instead, they want you to donate to a charity like Salvation Army.


This person down here goes, you can schedule every day and take off of work, and they just


never come.


So if I'm competing with this company and people are searching for my brand name versus


their brand name, can you imagine the ad I'm going to put up?


Make sure you check the return policy.


Hope you live near a Salvation Army, question mark.


You're like, what is that?


Scraping reviews.


Do better marketing.


Hit people's why.


You can also take the five star reviews and be a little more positive because I'm a devilish


kind of guy.


You can be more positive and look at things like this.


So now you can look at your meta descriptions.


And you know what?


I'm sitting here telling you today, I've already presented it to the death, so I'm not presenting


it today.


I have gotten as high as a 307% increase on my click through rate without my rankings


ever going up for a piece of content by just altering the title and description to sound


more like what people actually want.


Three times the traffic, no increase in rankings, people.


It is possible.


But you have to understand people's why.


That was an anomaly.


But that is the highest improvement I've seen to date at SEER when we've tested that.


307% increase to a page.


Because now I'm going to talk about how you feel in the morning.


Right?


Oh, I wasn't talking about that before.


Before I was like, our mattress is great.


I'm going to talk about how you feel.


Or your relationship with your husband.


And wife is a little bit lower, right?


So I can see maybe there's a little bit of a skew here more towards women buying or maybe


women are more likely to review than men.


How it compares to memory foam.


Do you see how I'm taking all the five star reviews and saying this is what people love


about us.


And then you go through all your meta descriptions and start running small little tests.


And I'm able to get more clicks from the same ranking by talking to people about how they'll


feel in the morning or the fact that their wife is going to or their husband is going


to roll over and be like, oh, my God, sweetie, I just had the best night of sleep ever.


That's what we want.


And the other thing I found by extracting out a stat, search, related searches.


People search differently by region.


A lot of people are like, yeah, I know that.


All right, slow down.


So we looked at senior living facilities in California.


And you see three things that I've highlighted.


Atria, Cypress, and Oakmont.


Those were the brands that Google saw as highly related to the phrase assisted living facility.


In that zip code.


So my client says to me, these are my competitors in this zip code.


I go, okay.


But when Google, we looked at all these different keywords that you want to rank for generically,


in that zip code, Google showed me slightly different competitor names showing up.


Might we want to look at both of these?


Because a lot of people searching for that, Google is saying they're likely to search


for those brands.


This also shows you where you're not in the brand consideration set.


Oh, okay.


Maybe we have to do some more offline?


Maybe.


Let's try it in that city and see if we can get our name to show up there more as a related


search, which is a signal to Google that we're more correlated with the word that we ultimately


want to rank for.


Make sense?


Good.


All right.


Is Kate Morris here?


I saw you sitting in the front yesterday.


Kate, I'm not sure if you're still here.


Kate, where you at?


There you are.


You're from Austin, right?


Hook them horns, you're from Boston.


Hook them horns or whatever you guys do down there.


So I don't know shit about Austin, right?


Nothing.


I know nothing.


But great keyword research can help you to minimize your bias.


So when I took my client who's in Austin and I dropped in these words in an Austin zip


code and I looked at the related searches, two things showed up I want to share with


you.


North and south.


I'm like, why are the words north and south showing up so much in related searches?


Kate, I guess that north and south Austin are pretty far apart.


Yes.


Do you see how I don't know squat about Austin, but by doing keyword research and looking


at the related searches, I knew what she knows because she lives there?


That's what great keyword research is about.


And by looking at all the words that matter to them by zip code, I could start to tell


what mattered most to those people individually.


Now if my client is in south Austin, maybe I go adjust your bids for the people searching


for this in south Austin, but the people in north Austin, adjust those down a little bit


because I don't think you're actually going to have a chance to convert those people.


And I can do this at scale because stat is amazing.


The other thing is Medicaid.


When I get to learn the client's business, they go Medicaid people aren't really good


for us.


We don't get a good conversion rate.


And I go, well Google says for some reason in Austin I'm getting a lot more Medicaid


searches along with this core keyword.


Maybe we should test something there to try to either find a way to better convert those


people or to not bid as much for those people because there's a little bit of a difference


in how they search than the other zip code I showed which doesn't show anything related


to Medicaid.


Once you get a high ranking, the job almost just starts in my opinion.


So we have a client that we're working with, Laura Kane.


Thank you Laura.


Thanks for getting this for me for my slides.


We actually stopped.


So the client already had all these great rankings for this keyword.


We didn't do squat to really help them to rank better.


But then we said, okay, well you already ranked for this keyword.


That's great.


You're number two for this word.


But then we said, well that's even more important for us to talk to people about because you


already have valuable real estate that's driving you a ton of traffic.


Let's actually interview people and ask them what they would do to improve this content.


See the other thing that Perrin was talking about the other day about building your brand


and what it allows you to do, when people like your brand, they're willing to get on


the phone with you and tell you how to improve your content.


So they said, yeah, we'll jump on the phone.


Time and time again they said, hey, if you improved this and this and this and that and


all of a sudden our trajectory of traffic started increasing like crazy.


I've already checked the conversions.


They follow the exact same trajectory.


Actually a slightly higher trajectory because we incorporated things into the content that


people told me, oh, I wish it had this because I always go to this other site to solve this


problem.


We go, well, if we added this here, you wouldn't need to go there.


They're like, absolutely, because I really like this one better.


This is where I go to first.


Thank you.


You can improve conversion rates as well when you talk to customers.


That's also the holy grail.


So not only do you do all your cool SEO crap and all your content stuff to get more rankings


and more traffic, you then kick that SOB up even faster because you're also working on


how to get more people to convert.


So now you're saying, client, I don't just want you to invest in me talking to people


so I can get you more traffic.


If I hear how your content is and isn't solving problems, I can protect that ranking for the


long haul so the machine learning someday doesn't kick you out.


First of all, the other thing you can do is you can actually get them more conversions


from the work they're putting in.


Satisfied searchers leave a very, very, very strong fingerprint and Google is learning


that fingerprint better than ever.


Let me show you an example of what we're doing at Sear.


So we rank for some SEM rush keywords and it's a long ass guide.


So you're going to have to wait.


There I am.


That's the right Will Reynolds right there.


Maybe I should take my shirt off in the next one.


Feeling this content?


We are currently testing how much stronger can we build trust in Google's eyes by helping


the user.


What we looked at was the related searches for SEM rush guide keywords.


A lot of people that are searching for SEM rush and SEM rush guide are comparing them


to Moz.


So we said, okay, why don't we find the best SEM rush to Moz comparison on the web and


we're linking off of our own site.


See, when I ask you to be brave, I'm asking you that if you're truly going to be on this


journey with me, you have to be willing to link somebody to another site that answers


the question better than you do if you're truly about solving their problem.


And if you work somewhere with you, I'm not going to do that.


Why am I going to send people off to my competitor's site?


Well, because they answer the question better than you.


Make the content or help the customer.


Are you willing to do that?


I don't have enough data on this just yet.


It's so statistically insignificant, it's ridiculous.


So once I get more data, I will share this with everybody in some kind of a blog post.


But two of the three links here go to other websites.


I can also track how people react to those if they come back to my site.


Was it truly a good answer?


I'm going to start to figure out what kind of signals might I be sending to Google.


All right, I'm going to show you a few other things that are possible when you think of


guidance over guides.


This is a $200,000 house in Philadelphia.


This is a $1.2 million house in that zip code in Philadelphia with its really nice kitchen


and all that lovely crap.


This is a Range Rover going through mud because this is what you do in a Range Rover.


You drive out in the nature and you go through big mud piles and the mirrors on your Range


Rover actually tell you how deep the water is that you're going through.


Why does Range Rover advertise this way when the average person is just at Whole Foods


putting groceries in the back of their freaking Range Rover?


Because they understand people.


I want to feel like my car can go through three feet of water but oh, my Jimmy Choo's


are going to get wet.


Nobody that owns a Range Rover does the crap that they actually put in their ads.


I think it's absolutely hilarious.


But it shows us the life we want to be, not the life we actually freaking live.


Sorry for those of you that own Range Rovers but you know you go to freaking Whole Foods


and load it up in the back.


When's the last time you took it through three feet of water?


Never.


When you decide to build guides or things that help people solve problems, I want to


show you how you can connect SEO and PPC.


So Google organically is always going to, not always, but more than likely is going


to rank the helpful shit.


Or they're trying to rank the helpful shit.


So let's say that you have an office space calculator.


I'm moving into a new office in San Diego.


I end up on sites like these.


Well, because I'm trying to figure out how much space do I need.


God knows, anybody who's ever had to make a space decision for a company, it's a pain


in the ass and it's super risky because you're trying to project your growth and if we don't


hit it, we have all this extra space, it's a very stressful time.


So when a company shows up to give me guidance and I can put in how many different things


that I want, there's something that you can do where you can negative out audiences who


are searching for office keywords later because, oh, you know what, you only have one executive


office.


If I know my customer well, I know a lot of them have five or more.


So when I build a tool like this, I can negative out all the people searching for office keywords.


I can use keywords who don't fit my target demographic, but then I can juice my bids


up for people who put in larger numbers.


It's a great way to take organic content that truly helps users and you want it to be interactive


so you can trigger events out of all the different things they're clicking on out of GA.


If somebody puts in 20 executive offices, they are a whale.


I want to put them in a different audience.


I want to market to them differently.


I might want to have somebody jump on the phone with them really quickly.


If you've invested in building amazing content already, now is the time for you to invest


in ways to make it more guidance driven so you can aggregate all those little things


about your customer.


Oh, and then you can create lookalike audiences off of the people who constantly look like


that so you can make your marketing better and make those organic assets help you in


saving money on paid.


Another example, this company, this website, this client of ours, they have a dropdown


here.


This is are you affiliated with the military?


They have coded that dropdown to basically create two different events.


If you say you are affiliated with the military, instead of me doing dumb retargeting, I'm


now able to do smarter retargeting with ads that are more military based and speak to


how the military buyer might be interested in online education, which is very different.


Those ads can say, hey, continue your journey while you're deployed.


You would never say that to the average user, but if you already have a form and you can


put event triggers on these and put people in separate audiences, your remarketing can


become much smarter.


And then we do what we all do, which is, oh, my God, they're talking to me.


They understand me.


All right.


This is freaking dope.


I didn't even know people in my company were doing this until they showed it to me.


They're like, we didn't realize it was a big deal.


I'm like, uh, yeah, it is.


I did not know this.


In GA, you can build a custom dimension that is a secondary dimension.


This is for a client of ours.


So what we basically, their name's not here, good.


So they have a commercial side of their business and a residential side of their business.


The problem is a lot of their keywords are broad.


So we don't know who's who.


But what we've done is we've created a cookie that adds a factor of one to your score in


this custom secondary dimension.


So what happens is people who are residential look totally different than commercial users.


They never really visit the same pages.


So when you have disambiguation with the query where you're not sure who that person is,


you can actually score every other page that they visit, put it into a custom cookie, and


then you can target people based on, okay, if somebody's residential and they've hit


the residential pages or the pages I see high value more than three times and their score


is over a five, I'm adjusting all my bids up by 20% for the next two weeks because I


know that they're more likely to convert then.


This is why you've got to take your current, all this hustle, all this building 10X content,


you start putting event triggers on all this stuff, you will save your company so much


money in wasted PPC spend unless you really just enjoy giving it to Google so they can


buy their employees free lunches.


I love Google, but you know.


I don't want to give you guys any more free lunches.


Cut out the dumb retargeting.


When you build amazing content, you have a chance to then use all those different things


to remarket to people differently throughout their journey.


Just be a little bit smart about it.


All the things you can do that I've talked about, this is how you start to make the case


for doing great organic content that truly solves people's problems.


I think we can all agree to this.


Google is not getting any dumber.


I just showed you that in 24 hours the machines did a better job than like 50 people working


on something for 10 years.


24 hours.


What is your 24 hour moment?


Where Google makes a change and all of a sudden you're like, oh, snap, where are all my rankings


and are you going to start trying to do this stuff when all your rankings are gone, when


you're under pressure?


I hope you're ready for this.


I'm seeing it coming in drips and drabs and as the machines get more data, they get smarter


about what recommendations to make.


I think when I look out at all of you, I think that we've got a chance as a group to say


that we're not just, I don't even know what the word I want to use.


I don't want to call myself an SEO anymore.


I feel more like a concierge for the web.


When you are lost as a customer looking for anything, we're going to be the people to


guide you to the best answer on the web, whether it's on my site or not.


I know that's very altruistic, so of course we have to be a little bit marketery about


it and then we'll retarget the shit out of you smartly.


Thank you so much.


Thank you, Rand.


This has been an amazing six-year run for me up here.


Thank you so much and thank you for your time.


I appreciate it.


How to Make Newsworthy Content: Part 2 — Amanda Milligan

Hi everyone, welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Amanda Milligan


and I am back with a part two for how to make newsworthy content. So when I made part one,


I was working at Fractal and I talked about three things. Let's see if I remember them.


It was data, emotion, and impact as three elements you need to be considering when creating


newsworthy content. Those are still important, if you haven't seen that Whiteboard Friday,


check it out after this one. Doesn't need to be in any particular order. Now I work at Stacker.


Stacker.com is a publication but it's also a newswire. So like the AP for breaking news or


Reuters for financial news, Stacker is a newswire for data journalism. So I work on the brand side


though where we partner with brands, they underwrite content, and we syndicate it to


our newswire. I've been talking to the team since I'm still relatively new and they told


me that these are three additional things that they consider when they are creating content for


their publishing partners. So it was fascinating to get their take on this, I'm really excited


to share this with you. So let's just dive in. Three things to consider. The first is if the


content is serviceable. Basically all that means is how can it help the reader? So as marketers


we're actually already pretty good at this, right? This is like that how-to content of the world,


just with more of a news spin. So it's not going to be your standard blog post, it's going to be


more along the lines of how do you take something practical that's happening to people that's also


newsworthy, which we can get into exactly what that means. This will overlap with a lot of these


other different qualities. So if it's serviceable and it's also adding context to a greater story,


if it's serviceable and also based on new data, or it's based on an emotional component, or it


impacts a lot of people, those things all help it be newsworthy. The second is contextualized. This


is something that SAC really excels at and I find fascinating. So we can't break news as marketers,


that's on our job. We're not in the business of doing really quick reporting off the backs of


you know big events, right? That's just not what we're doing. So contextualizing is taking a look


at what's trending, what people are talking about, what's happening, and thinking about the other


angles, the other perspectives that tell more comprehensive stories to that. This has worked


really well. I think it's something that all brands should be considering when they're following,


like if you have those websites or blogs that you follow in your niche, thinking about what those


kind of like top news stories are and how you can add to the conversation. Finally, localized. So


this one's near and dear to my heart because I actually have a journalism degree even though I


never became a reporter and I learned localization in college. I took a class called reporting that


was extremely difficult. It was the weed up class for the journalism degree and the first time I got


an A and I got my article run in the college newspaper was from localization. There was a


national story about how doodling can help improve your concentration which I thought was interesting


and kind of contrary to what you normally think, I called up local experts like people at the


university neuroscientists and I said, hey, I just saw this report come out, do you agree with it?


And they were thrilled to talk to me about it. They told me all about how they absolutely believe


that that's true, that they doodle when they are listening to presentations. Anyway, it's not that


the data was any different or anything, it's that it was localized. It was that it mattered to the


people who were reading it because it was being corroborated by people in their own community.


So localization can be a huge asset if you're a brand that has a brick and mortar or not,


if you specialize in certain areas, if your customers live in certain areas, localizing


content can really speak to them in a way that the national content might not. Okay, so I just


ran through those things. So let's do a little exercise. This is a statistic I saw recently. The


median home price for an existing home in August of 2021 increased by 15% compared to 2020. Okay,


so this was from the National Association of Realtors. It's a statistic I saw and the exercise


I want to do is let's try to come up with angles, not even necessarily the ones that you're going


to run with, but the story, but to brainstorm in that direction. Okay, so serviceable. How do you


take a statistic like this and consider the serviceable angles? So I have written, where are


the most affordable places to live? Okay, so we're finding that home prices are going up. It's a


practical, helpful thing to know where it can actually be affordable to move. If people were


thinking about moving, they're like, I don't know if it makes sense to do that. At least now they


can have their options, right? And then going a little deeper or even just like a different way