You're competing with businesses that focus on just one of these while you're also running


I Wanna Be Rich: Making Your Consultancy Profitable

consultancy.


Your goal should be a diverse set of payers, not a diverse set of industries or technologies


or strategies.


You wouldn't open up a fruit stand on the side.


So why would you open up a software company on the side?


Unless you can get some sort of external investment.


Now here's the real trick.


Here's the real reality.


And the last thing I want to talk about.


Most companies never attempt to change.


Of all the things that we've talked about that have been beneficial, most of the time


companies have never tried new tech, never tried remote, never added jobs, never cut


jobs, never replaced leaders, never changed pricing, never specialized, never added new


things, never cut old things, and never automated.


Most of the time people just keep doing the same thing.


And if you experiment only when you have to, you're going to fail.


But if you experiment now when you can, and don't wait until you must, chances are you're


going to grow and improve and succeed and beat out your competitors.


And that's going to give you the type of healthy business that's going to help your customers


and your families and employees for the long run.


Daily SEO Fix Video: Identify Your True Competitors

Hi there, my name is Hannah and I'm going to show you how you can identify your competitors


using Woz's brand new True Competitor tool.


It can be really hard to figure out who your competitors are, let's say if you're a new


business or just somebody who hasn't really thought that much about it before, but that's


where True Competitor can help.


Firstly, if you'd like to learn more about this tool, you'll notice that there's a more


info button here and you can click it.


It's going to give you an overview of the competitive research suite of tools as a whole,


including some videos and some guides.


The first thing you're going to see when you want to go look for your True Competitors


is that you're going to be able to enter a website.


I've been looking at shoes lately, so I'm going to pick Steve Madden.


You can also select your domain type, whether it be domain or subdomain.


Personally, I'm going to stick with domain for this example.


And finally, you just need to choose the country of your preferred market, then hit find competitors.


So the first thing you're going to see is your website and your domain authority.


The DA is a Moz metric that is used to predict how likely it is that a website will rank.


It's calculated by evaluating multiple factors, including linking your domains and the total


number of links into a single DA score.


Domain authority scores range from one to 100, with higher scores corresponding to a


greater likelihood of ranking.


So from there, we'll scroll down and you'll see that Moz will generate a list of up to


25 competitors, listing them for most competitive to least competitive.


You'll see the list of competitors on this left hand side, and we can also see several metrics.


We can see the DA for each competitor, as well as two new metrics, overlap and rivalry.


The overlap metric refers to the percentage of keywords that we analyze that you share


with a given competitor.


The rivalry metric is on a scale of one to 100 and combines your DA, your competitor's


DA, keyword overlap, keyword volume, and your rankings to identify your biggest rivals.


You can filter this list by each of the metrics that we see here at the top to analyze further.


You can also export this file to a CSV that you can view outside of Moz Pro.


I hope this video was helpful in you finding out for once and for all who your true competitors are.


Should SEOs & Content Marketers Play to the Social Networks' "Stay-On-Our-Site" Algorithms? - WBF

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


This week we're chatting about whether SEOs and content marketers, for that matter, should


play to what the social networks are developing in their visibility and engagement algorithms,


or whether we should say, no, you know what, forget about what you guys are doing.


We're going to try and do things on social networks that benefit us.


I'll show you what I'm talking about.


If you're using Facebook and you're posting content to it, Facebook generally tends to


frown upon and lower the average visibility and ability of content to reach its audience


on Facebook if it includes an external link.


On average, posts that include an external link will fare more poorly in Facebook's newsfeed


algorithm than on-site content, exclusively content that lives on Facebook.


So a video that, for example, if you see this video promoted on Facebook.com slash Moz or


Facebook.com slash Rand Fishkin, it will do more poorly than if Moz and I had promoted


a Facebook native video of Whiteboard Friday.


But we don't want that.


We want people to come visit our site and subscribe to Whiteboard Friday here and not


stay on Facebook where we only reach one out of every 50 or 100 people who might subscribe


to our page.


So it's clearly in our interest to do this, but Facebook wants to keep you on Facebook's


website because then they can do the most advertising and targeting to you and get the


most time on site from you, and that's their business, right?


Same thing's true of Twitter.


So it tends to be the case that links off Twitter fare more poorly.


Now I am not 100 percent sure in Twitter's case whether this is algorithmic or user-driven.


I suspect it's a little of both, right, that Twitter will promote or make most visible


to you when you log into Twitter the posts that have been made or the tweets that have


been made that are self-contained, right?


They live entirely on Twitter.


They might contain a bunch of different stuff, right, a poll or images or be a thread, but


links off Twitter will be dampened.


Same thing's true on Instagram.


Well, on Instagram, they're kind of the worst.


They don't allow links at all.


The only thing you can do is a link in profile, and more engaging content on Instagram as


of just a couple weeks ago, more engaging content equals higher placement in the feed.


In fact, Instagram has now just come out and said that they will show you content posts


from people you are not following but that they think will be engaging to you, which


gives influential Instagram accounts that gets lots of engagement an additional benefit


but kind of hurts everyone else that you're normally following on the network.


LinkedIn.


LinkedIn's algorithm includes extra visibility in the feed for self-contained post content,


which is why you see a lot of these posts of, you know, oh, here's all the crazy amounts


of work I did and what my experience was like building this or doing that.


If it's a self-contained sort of blog post-style content in LinkedIn that does not link out


it will do much better than posts that contain an external link, which LinkedIn sort of dampens


in their visibility algorithm for their feed.


So all of these sites have these components of their algorithm that basically reward you


if you are willing to play to their algos, meaning you keep all of the content on their


sites and platform, right?


Their stuff, not yours.


You essentially play to what they're trying to achieve, which is more time on site for


them, more engagement for them, less people going away to other places.


You refuse, you don't link out, right?


So no external linking to other places.


And you maintain sort of what I call a high signal-to-noise ratio so that rather than


sharing all the things you might want to share you only share posts that you can count on


having relatively high engagement.


And that track record is something that sticks with you on most of these networks, right?


So for Facebook, for example, if I have posts that do well, many in a row, I will get more


visibility for my next one.


And if my last couple of posts have performed poorly on Facebook, my next one will be dampened,


right?


So you sort of get a string or get on a roll with these networks.


Same thing's true on Twitter, by the way.


Or you say, you know, forget you to the algorithms and serve your own site instead, which means


you use the networks to tease content, right?


Like here's this exciting, interesting thing.


You want the whole story or you want to watch the full video or you want to see all the


graphs and charts or whatever it is, you need to come to our website where we host the full


content.


You link externally so that you're driving traffic back to the properties that you own


and control.


And you have to be willing to promote some potentially promotional content in order to


earn value from these social networks, even if that means slightly lower engagement or


less of that get-on-a-roll reputation.


And the recommendation that I have for SEOs and content marketers is I think we need to


balance this, but if I had to, I would tilt it in favor of your site.


Social networks – I know it doesn't seem this way, but social networks come and go


in popularity and they change the way that they work, right?


So investing very heavily in Facebook six or seven years ago might have made a ton of


sense for a business.


Today a lot of those investments have been shown to have very little impact because instead


of reaching 20 or 30 out of 100 of your followers, you're reaching one or two, right?


So you've lost an order of magnitude of reach on there.


Same thing has been true generally on Twitter, generally on LinkedIn, on Instagram.


So I really urge you to tilt slightly to your own site.


Own channels are your website, your email, where you have the email addresses of the


people there.


I would rather have an email or a loyal visitor or an RSS subscriber than I would 100 times


as many Twitter followers because the engagement that you can get and the value that you can


get as a business, as an organization is just much higher.


Just don't ignore how these algorithms work, right?


If you can, I would urge you to sometimes get on those roles so that you can grow your


awareness and reach by playing to these algorithms.


So essentially while I'm urging you to tilt slightly this way, I'm also suggesting that


occasionally you should use what you know about how these algorithms work in order to


grow and accelerate your growth of followers and reach on these networks so that you can


then get more benefit of driving those people back to your site.


You've got to play both sides, I think, today in order to have success with the social network's


current reach and visibility algorithms.


All right, everyone, look forward to your comments.


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


How to Rank in 2018: The SEO Checklist - Whiteboard Friday

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to a special New Year's edition of Whiteboard Friday.


This week we're going to run through how to rank in 2018 in a brief checklist format.


So I know that many of you sometimes wonder, gosh, it feels overwhelming to try and explain


to someone outside the SEO profession how to get a webpage ranked.


Well, you know what?


Let's explore that a little bit this week on Whiteboard Friday.


I sent out a tweet asking folks, send me a brief checklist in 280 characters or less,


and I got back some amazing responses and I've credited some folks here when they've


contributed.


But it is not, there's a ton of detail to ranking in the SEO world, to try and rank


in Google's results.


But when we pull out, when we go broad, I think that just a few items, right, in fact,


just the nine we've got here can basically take you through the majority of what's required


to rank in the year ahead.


So let's dive into that.


Start with a crawlable, accessible URL whose content Google can easily crawl and parse,


right?


So we want Google bots, spiders to be able to come to this page to understand the content


that's on there in a text-readable format to understand images and visuals or video or


embeds or anything else that you've got on the page in a way that they are going to be


able to put into their web index.


That is crucial.


Without it, none of the rest of this stuff even matters.


Second, keyword research.


We need to know and to uncover the words and phrases that searchers are actually using


to solve or to get answers to the problem that they are having in your world, right?


And those should be problems that your organization, your website is actually working to solve,


that your content will help them to solve.


What you want here is a primary keyword and hopefully a set of related secondary keywords


that share the searcher's intent, right?


So the intent behind all of these terms and phrases should be the same so that the same


content can serve it.


When you do that, we now have a primary and a secondary set of keywords that we can target


in our optimization efforts.


Next, I want you to do some SERP investigation, meaning perform the search query in Google,


see what comes back to you, right?


And then figure out from there what Google believes to be relevant to the keywords searches,


right?


What does Google think is the content that will answer this searcher's query?


You're trying to figure out intent, the type of content that's required, and whatever missing


pieces might be there.


If you can find holes where, hey, no one's serving this, but I know that people want


the answer to it, you might be able to fill that gap and take over that ranking position.


Thanks to Gaetano, at Gaetano underscore NYC, for the great suggestion on this one.


Next up, have the most credible, amplifiable person or team available create content that's


going to serve the searcher's goal and solve their task better than anyone else on page


one.


So this is sort of, there's three elements here.


First, we want an actually credible, worthy of amplification person or persons to create


the content.


Why is that?


Because if we do that, we make amplification, we make link building, we make social sharing


way more likely to happen.


And our content becomes more credible, both in the eyes of searchers and visitors, as


well as in Google's eyes, too.


So to the degree that that is possible, I would certainly urge you to do it.


Next, we're trying to serve the searcher's goal and solve their task.


And we want to do that better than anyone else does it on page one.


Because if we don't, even if we've optimized a lot of these other things, over time Google


will realize, you know what, searchers are frustrated with your result compared to other


results.


And they're going to rank those other people higher.


Huge credit to Dan Kern at Kern Media on Twitter for the suggestion, great suggestion on this


one.


Next up, craft a compelling title, meta description.


Yes, Google still does use the meta description quite frequently.


I know it seems like sometimes they don't.


But in fact, there's a high percent of the time when the actual meta description from


the page is used.


There's an even higher percentage where the title is used.


And the URL, while Google sometimes truncates those, also used in the snippet, as well as


other elements.


We'll talk about schema and other kinds of markup later on.


But the snippet is something that is crucial to your SEO efforts because that determines


how it displays in the search result.


And how Google displays your result determines whether people want to click on your listing


or someone else's.


The snippet is your opportunity to say, come click me instead of those other guys.


And if you can optimize this, both from a keyword perspective, using the words and phrases


that people want, as well as from a relevancy and a pure drawing the click perspective,


you can really win.


Next up, intelligently employ those primary, secondary, and related keywords.


Related keywords meaning those that are semantically connected that Google is going to view as


critical to proving to them that your content is relevant to the searcher's query in the


page's text content.


Why am I saying text content here?


Because if you put it purely in visuals or in video or some other embeddable format that


Google can't necessarily easily parse out, they might not count it.


They might not treat it as that's actually content on the page.


And you need to prove to Google that you have the relevant keywords on the page.


All right.


Next up, where relevant and possible, use rich snippets and schema markup to enhance


the potential visibility that you're going to get.


This is not possible for everyone, but in some cases, right, in the case that you're


getting into Google News or in the case that you're in the recipe world and you can get


visuals and images or in the case where you have a featured snippet opportunity and you


can get the visual for that featured snippet along with that credit or in the case where


you can get rich snippets around travel or around flights, other verticals that schema


is supporting right now.


Well, that's great.


You should take advantage of those opportunities.


Next up, optimize the page to load fast, as fast as possible, and look great.


I mean look great from a visual UI perspective and look great from a user experience perspective,


right?


You should be able to see someone go all the way through and accomplish their task in an


easy, fulfilling way on every device, at every speed, and make it secure too, right?


Security critically important.


HTTPS is not the only thing, but it is a big part of what Google cares about right now,


and HTTPS was a big focus in 2016 and 17.


It'll certainly continue to be a focus for Google in 2018.


Next up, definitely not least, you need to have a great answer to the question, who will


help amplify this and why?


When you have that great answer, I mean a specific list of people in publications who


are going to help you amplify it, you got to execute.


Execute to earn solid links and mentions and word of mouth across the web and across social


media so that your content can be seen by Google's crawlers and by human beings, by


people as highly relevant and high quality.


You do all this stuff, you're going to rank very well in 2018.


Look forward to your comments, your additions, your contributions, and feel free to look


through the tweet thread as well.


Thanks to all of you who contributed via Twitter and to all of you who followed us here at


Moz and Whiteboard Friday in 2017.


We hope you have a great year ahead.


Thanks for watching.


5 Simple Tips for SEO + Email Marketing Flywheels — Whiteboard Friday

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


I'm Cyrus Shepard, I hope you're enjoying this video no matter which day of the week


you're watching it on.


Today I want to talk about SEO and email marketing.


Specifically, five simple tips for SEO and email marketing flywheels.


So when I talk about SEO and email marketing flywheels, what do we mean by flywheel?


Well that's where we're using the power of SEO to grow our email marketing list and conversely


using our email marketing list to grow our SEO for more website traffic.


And there are actual ways you can do that and doing it over and over and over again


so that each becomes bigger and more powerful the more you do it.


So it's more like a flywheel.


It's really hard to get started but as you get going it gets easier and easier and easier


and everything grows a little bit more effective.


So if you're an experienced SEO email marketer this video may not be for you but if you primarily


do SEO and you're looking for ways to improve your email marketing or you're primarily an


email marketer and you're looking for ways to grow your SEO, these are the tips for you.


So let's talk about our goals.


What are we trying to accomplish with this email SEO marketing flywheel?


First of all, it's simply more visitors.


More visitors to your website content because more visitors usually leads to more links,


sharing, things like that.


And the links and sharing can be positive SEO signals to Google which actually lead


to higher rankings.


So if we can get more people to our content, through our email, the downstream effect of


that could be higher rankings and more traffic naturally generated through Google search


results.


But also we want bigger and more powerful email marketing lists because your marketing


list is one of your best marketing channels especially if you segment users which we're


going to talk about in just a little bit.


And ultimately we want more conversions and sales.


Whatever your marketing and business goals are, that's what we want to achieve with this


flywheel effect.


So let's talk about the specifics.


How are we going to get into it?


First of all, we want to get more signups from our content, from our website material.


And so we want to incentivize signups.


Now the important thing to realize is you don't have to incentivize signups just through


SEO.


You can do it through any marketing traffic channel.


That's direct traffic, social media traffic, referral traffic.


Any way that people are visiting your content, you want to target those to incentivize for


signups to your email marketing list.


So one of the ways I like to do this through SEO is through what a lot of people call content


powerups.


That's where you're incentivizing signups by offering bonus or exclusive content in


exchange for people to sign up for your list.


For example, this is five simple tips for SEO and email marketing.


What if at the end of this post I would offer five additional bonus tips in exchange for


signing up for exclusive content?


The idea is that you want to offer something that they can't find on the website and that


could be a tool, some additional content, downloads, any sort of free bonus, a coupon,


whatever you can think of, something exclusive to incentivize those signups from your content.


Second tip, we don't want to dump everything onto the same large email list.


We want to make sure that we're segmenting those signups by topic and interest.


Unless your site is very narrowly focused, you generally want to segment your list among


different topics.


For example, here at Moz, we cover SEO, but we cover many, many different types of SEO


based on user interest.


So there's local SEO, there's technical SEO, there's copywriting, there's link building,


all these niche interests that we want to segment users by.


So there's a couple different ways to segment.


One is self-segmentation where people can check a box and say, I'm interested in this


and this and this.


But a little bit easier is automatic segmentation based on the type of content that people are


visiting.


So on your technical SEO pages, if that's what you were doing, you would put people


onto a technical SEO signup list and make it clear that they're receiving technical


SEO tips.


Always make it clear what they're receiving.


But this segmentation is going to come in useful in just a little bit.


So the third thing, third tip, and this is where we're getting into the meat of it, is


content promotion.


This is where we're using our email list to send traffic back to our website.


And this is when people think about SEO and email marketing flywheels, this is what they


typically think about.


They think about the content promotion aspect.


Now the important thing is we're not trying to promote all of our content.


No, we want to promote our best content because your website, your visitors are coming, they're


doing a Google search, they're not necessarily aware of what your best content is and that's


why you want to deliver your best content.


And importantly, you want to personalize it with the segmentation.


You're not promoting all your content to all your customers, to all your visitors, you're


personalizing it based on their interest because you already segmented them out based on the


type of content that they consumed.


So if we're sending out a technical SEO newsletter, we're sending the best of our technical SEO


content to those people who have already indicated an interest in technical SEO.


And one of the most important things to remember, you don't have to just promote your new content.


It's okay to promote the best of your old content as well because again, your users


aren't aware of what that is.


So oftentimes in an introductory email, maybe the first email they receive in a series,


you can promote and highlight old posts or even do it in a series.


This is our best content over the last five years.


Make sure you don't miss this.


And that old content, if it's truly the best, will oftentimes outperform your newer content.


So that's how you can personalize and segment and send out your best content to get more


promotion, more eyeballs on your best SEO content and hopefully more links, sharing


and all that to keep the flywheel going.


So not only did we incentivize signups, now that we're in the email part and sending emails


out, we want to incentivize sharing.


And that's my fourth tip, incentivize sharing because we don't only want people to visit


and read the content, we're hopefully that they'll share it with their audience as well.


One of the ways I like to do that is to segment my best shares.


Now what do I mean by this?


I'm not only segmenting by interest, but I'm segmenting by influence.


So I might put together a list of influencers or people I know, you know, in my particular


industry that have signed up, maybe I've targeted them.


And I offer, just like I offered people exclusive content to sign up for the email list, I'm


offering my sharers exclusive content before I share it with the rest of the world.


So I might email my sharing segment and say, hey, we just published a post.


We haven't told anybody, we're going to announce it on social tomorrow, but I wanted to let


you know about it ahead of time if you want to share with your followers.


Because we made it exclusive, we haven't shared it with our followers, it gives our influencers


something to share and makes them feel special in sharing out with their own audience.


And there's different strategies that you can use to do that, but it is often an effective


tactic to segment your best shares.


It's a little advanced, but that can incentivize sharing and hopefully help out your SEO.


Finally when we talk about SEO, we talk about keyword research.


And keyword research is one of those SEO areas that work really well in incorporating into


email.


Now here at Moz we have a tool called Keyword Explorer, there are other tools out there,


but millions of keyword suggestions.


And traditionally in SEO, use keyword research to determine your content, targeting keywords


that your audience is interested in.


And we have lots of guides here at Moz on how to do that, how to target content around


keywords.


But you can also use that keyword research in your emails.


One of the most important places to use them is your email subject line.


If you know the interest that your audience is interested in through your segmentation,


you can start to understand the keywords that drove them to their content.


And use those same keywords in your email subject lines can improve your open rates.


But that's not the only place.


One of my favorite places to use keywords is in the signup CTA.


So when you have a signup form on your website, you can use a generic signup form like, hey,


signup for our newsletter.


Okay, that's not very effective.


But if you use the keyword, the targeted keywords, signup for our technical SEO tips, or our


local SEO, or our best dog food recipes.


The keywords that people use to find your website are going to be the best keywords


to incorporate into your CTAs to get them to sign up, use keywords in your email subject


lines to get them back to your content, and so on and so forth.


And it's another part of the effective flywheel.


So finally, bonus tip, I want to make sure that you don't forget, turn your best emails


into content.


Your content doesn't have to live exclusively in separated channels.


If you're writing killer emails to your audience that get a lot of engagement, super high open


rates, those are emails that you can turn into content for your website.


Or if you have a popular newsletter, you can simply archive all your emails into HTML so


people can search.


You may not want to do that for certain reasons if the quality isn't very good.


But if the emails are actually good, go ahead and turn them in the content because that's


going to help your SEO as well.


All right, I hope you enjoyed these tips.


If you have any questions about email or SEO, please reach out to the team here at Moz.


We're here to help.


Hope you enjoyed it everybody, and please share this video.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Hey everybody, Cyrus Shepard here.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

I want to introduce our next speaker because she is one of my favorite people in the SEO


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

industry and also one of the most brilliant, Alexis Sanders.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

You may have heard of Alexis if you've ever played an online SEO game.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

She has two brilliant games that she's developed, Technical SEO Expert and Technical SEO Guru.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

So that's technicalseo.expert and technicalseo.guru.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Check them out, they're a lot of fun.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

So even though Alexis is a brilliant technical SEO, she's going to talk today about something


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

we don't always consider when speaking about technical SEO, which is the audience and how


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

important finding that audience is to your SEO propositions.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

So we're going to kick it over to Alexis.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

I know you're going to enjoy this session.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Howdy, MozCon.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Customers are at the center of quality content, user experience and digital marketing.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And have you ever thought to yourself, how do I learn about my customers with the resources


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

that are already currently available at my company?


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And that's what we're going to be getting into today.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

If you are interested in a copy of this presentation before we get started, it's available at this


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

bit.ly link, Seeking Science, because we'll be going into the science of seeking your


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

customers today.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

As I mentioned, we're going to be going into the what, why, when, where and how of finding


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

your specific audience.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

So getting started with the what.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Finding an audience is both an art and a science.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

We have both the intuition as well as the data that goes behind it.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

It's about getting to know people and quality data, but it's also about quantitative data


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

as well.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

It is both micro and macro in that we're looking at large audiences, but we're also looking


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

at individuals as well.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

It is multifaceted because the people that we're looking at are not just one dimensional.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

They have lives, they have depth to them, and that makes finding an audience multidimensional.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And it's something that's constantly evolving.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

As people evolve, products also evolve and their audience evolve with them.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

So as a product gets more mature in the cycle, we're going to see shifts in the audience.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And that's something that is going to constantly change.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And finally, it relates, it's something that can relate to everyone in your company and


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

something that everyone is interested in.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

The user is generally considered the North Star for many products, for brands, for the


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

media, for IT, as well as ultimately executives.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

So something that everyone really cares about.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And it really comes down to understanding these questions.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Who are they?


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Why do they buy?


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

What do they ultimately need in the product or service that you're offering?


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

What type of search queries do they use and how are they getting to you?


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

What is that journey?


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

What does that look like?


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And what matters to them as people?


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And so that comes down to a few different key questions to answer.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

So there's first off in terms of categories, there's key information, there's things that


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

are core to their personality, there's product information, as well as their relationship


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

with technology.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

So in terms of key information, that often looks like things like demographics.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

So what is their age?


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

What is their gender, their income, their location, their number of children?


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And that type of information is very general and can be really relevant to who buys your


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

product because if you're a local business, then your location is something that's really


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

important to find your customers.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Another top question that you can ask in terms of key information is what are the top five


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

adjectives that describe your audience in particular?


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Personal core relates to instead of looking at it from who's the person on the outside,


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

looking at the question from who's the person on the inside.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

So what do they want in life?


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

What are some of their key motivators?


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

What do they value and see as a self-concept?


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

What general attitudes do they have?


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Like, for instance, I like to learn a lot.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

That's a general attitude that some people have and some people do not.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And what are their cited interests?


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

What are things that they've noted that they are interested in outside of your product


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

and service?


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

It's just all about getting to know them as a full person.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Product related, so this gets into the nitty gritty of the information that you're going


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

to want to look for.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And at the core of this is how do you win over this group?


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

What do they really want from that product?


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

What do they look for in the product?


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And one easy question to ask in terms of your top competition is I am most likely to buy


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

my product or service from X, Y, or Z.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And finally, for the last core question, it's what is their relationship with technology?


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

What is their relationship with the web, with your website?


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

What is their annual spend on that product or service?


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Where are they engaging online already?


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And how do we find them and engage with them on digital forums that are meaningful to them?


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And really, the whole point of finding user data and analyzing it and finding insights


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

from it is because it changes the conversation.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Really if you have no data, you have no context and you going into that conversation blind


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

can be much more challenging, which affects many different streams of digital marketing.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Context helps us to ask the right questions, to target what drives decisions, to identify


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

where to find online and offline, and determine how to ultimately engage.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

It also helps us connect in a meaningful capacity, identify what actually matters to people,


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

and understand ultimately their values and the ultimate goal is to create better experiences


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

overall.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

So when would you do this type of analysis?


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

When would you go out and seek information specifically about your users?


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And really, audience profiling and finding data extends the entire journey of a product


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

from its initial development to its introduction to the market, its growth, maturity, and decline.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Because our audience at each stage is going to be very, very different.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And it expands across, of course, branding as well as media strategy.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

So every channel within media cares about this and it's something that expands and is


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

really relevant at any point in time.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

It also affects deliverables across different EAUs.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

So here's just like a sample visual of a very small sample of deliverables that use user


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

information and audience profiling to inform that particular deliverable.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And you can see just in this very small micro example that your user information affects


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

your content channel, your information architecture, user experience, your design, as well as all


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

of your analytics deliverables.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And as well as many, many others as well, which makes it something that's very relevant


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

and useful.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

So getting into the meat of today's presentation, where?


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

So where do we actually ultimately find this data?


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And generally comes from one of two places.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

There's really three out there, but for the most part, most times it's related to first


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

party or third party data.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

So the third one is second party data.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

First party data, of course, is your own data that you collect and assimilate.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Third party data is data that you get from someone else.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And second party data is kind of that weird ground where maybe you have a partnership


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

with someone and it's kind of an in-between mix of your data and their data and cross-sharing.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

But that's more of a rare opportunity, although it can be a very fruitful one.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

So getting into today, we're going to start with first party data.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

There are many different places that you can collect first party data.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

The first and probably generally the most accessible one is web performance analytics.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

So it's something like Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics, your organic search performance,


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

which is also free, through Google Search Console, the Big Webmaster tools.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

You also have ranking data tools so you can find out what information people are getting


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

to your site from organic.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

There's surveying tools that you can use that can be free, like Google surveys and SurveyMonkey.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And finally, if you're lucky enough to have a CRM team, which we'll get into a little


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

bit later in terms of third party data, some of the cool things about CRM.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

These are really generally the types of tools.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And as you can see, they range from free to very, very expensive.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

So a lot of the times finding user information and user data is about identifying what's


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

available to you and what's most cost effective and time effective.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And here's some resources.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

So I wanted to go into some of the different things, different reports that I really like


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

about within a few of these tools so that if you're looking for user information, you


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

can more easily access that.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

So the first is GA, mostly because it's very accessible to most brands and most small businesses.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

There's a report in GA called audience and interests.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And if you look in there, there's really two groups that you're mainly primarily looking


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

at the in market and the affinity.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

The in market is going to relate to your users interest in relation to your current product.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

So a lot of times this is going to end up being a little bit more relevant, whereas


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

affinity is more about people's general interests and hobby.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And that can be interesting because it can tell you maybe a little bit more about like


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

the cited interests of people and things that they're doing in their free time outside of


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

your product.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

But generally the market to me, that seems like it's a little bit more useful generally.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Other stuff that just kind of didn't fit in other places.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

If you really want to get into the weeds, GA has a user explorer report that you can


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

go into.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

You can filter by organic search.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

You can also filter by conversions and you can go in and see the different steps that


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

a user and I guess it's kind of like a user's ID, a user's ID and that particular journey


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

that has been tagged by GA.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

So you can literally follow them through a journey.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Now this is of course very in the weeds, but if you're trying to get very specific or maybe


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

you're trying to look to do some illustrative user journey mappings, this can be really,


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

really useful.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Okay.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

The last thing about GA that I think is pretty cool is you can actually ask questions in


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

the search bar.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

I'm sure a lot of the audience has already explored this, but there's a bunch of different


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

basic questions that you can ask relating to content and Google actually breaks these


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

out in their documentation by understanding trends, content analysis and understanding


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

user behavior.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And a lot of times the user behavior relates to user engagement metrics like time on site


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

and bounce rate.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

But having these questions allows you to just ask in the search bar questions like what


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

are my top landing pages and terms and sessions?


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

So you can get a little bit more, a better understanding of your content analysis, which


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

is pretty, pretty cool.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

All right.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Of course, GSC, we all know it.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

We all love it.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Yeah.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

There's a lot of stories to tell and a lot of stories to tell in click behavior.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

What are people clicking onto your site?


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Categorization is obviously a very easy mechanism to identify patterns.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

There's a bunch of different ways to do this that a lot of people have been over.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

I have some links in this presentation on ideas for how to do it efficiently in Google


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Sheets, Jupyter Notebooks.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

There's a CoLab as well.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

You can also do it using machine learning.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

There's been a lot of great suggestions by like Brittany Miller and everyone on how to


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

sort keywords by using machine learning and Batista as well.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

So definitely check out some of the stuff that they have.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

But you can also do it manually.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

But there's a lot of stories to tell about what users are doing and how they're interacting


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

with your site.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Surveys.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Surveys can be a lot of times the only way to get very specific information that you


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

want from a specific subset of people.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Many times in third party data structures, when they're asking questions on psychographic,


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

they're doing it through a survey, but to a larger audience and with professionals that


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

of course have written surveys for leaders.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Now surveys for you can be a great way to get quick information, to get qualitative


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

information, to make sure that you are getting exactly what you need.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And I've included some tips here.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

The primary ones are to make sure you test the survey, to stay consistent as much as


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

possible, to use plain, clear lingo, to reference an expert style, keep it short, keep it punchy,


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

and as much as possible, avoid leading questions.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And if you have someone who's an expert in the field, definitely have them read it over


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

and check because there's always some weird insights with surveys where it's like, okay,


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

well, I didn't expect that, but it's cool.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

All right, another thing that you can do if you're really close to some of your top customers


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

and top fans, and you want to get an understanding of their general interests, you can ask them


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

questions, of course, but you can also ask them what their discover interests are in


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Google.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

So anybody can access their discover interest on Google by going through the mobile experience,


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

clicking on the three little dots and checking out to see what your interests are.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And if you're close enough with your users and can ask them, it may be a good area to


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

explore commonalities.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And if you can get a bunch of different users to agree to do this and to help you out, you


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

can then take the free, take that, copy all that information down and count frequencies


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

and see if anything interesting appears.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

So it can be kind of cool.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

All right, so third party tools.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

There are a lot of different third party tools and a lot of different types of third party


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

tools.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

First, of course, there is keyword search data.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Many people in here are already familiar with that.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

I only have a short, short tidbit on that.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Social data, audience tools, publicly available data sets like the census or really anything


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

like research, which is pretty cool.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Research publications, social listening, competitive tools, as well as CRM, which kind of makes


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

finding third party data this endless stream of information.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

All right, going into the specifics here, search data.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

So as many of you know, and this is my only slide on search data here because I want to


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

keep it short because a lot of MOSCON attendees are experts, I'm categorizing that data by


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

intent by SERP features.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

So SERP intent proxy basically by brand and by different questions can be really useful


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

to extrapolating information about how people are clicking through to the site, as well


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

as using location data where available.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Sometimes I found in the past, I guess this is a more of a competitive type thing, but


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

that certain brands were performing better because they were concentrating in specific


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

markets more, which is just kind of interesting to see when you layer in location onto different


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

competitive data.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Yeah, provide some additional context, Google Find My Audience has a free audience tool


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

that's available.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

So if your audience aligns really well with the audiences that Google has outlined, you


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

can use these tools and basically go through and input general information.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

It's very, very high level, but at the same time, you can get these nice PDFs back and


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

you can go through and maybe get some additional insights or places to start more research.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

A little bit more useful is Facebook Audience Insights.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

There are two forms of Facebook Audience Insights, two flavors, if you will.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

The first one is using your own Facebook profile, basically, or Facebook company information,


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

which you can then load into the tool and look at that specific information.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

So it's really like looking at your own data on Facebook Audience Insights.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

The second is using Facebook's audiences overall.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

They're basically their base audiences, and you can identify different themes and different


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

targets and topics and pull out different demographics from that.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

So that can be another way to get more general, a general foothold into what you are interested


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

in.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

So for example, if you know that you need to do research into cloud software, you can


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

see what does the cloud software audience on Facebook look like?


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

What are some of their job titles?


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

What are some of their top categories and favorite things on Facebook?


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

What location are they primarily in and what device usages do they have?


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

So it's a great way, if you are unfamiliar or maybe don't have a super high budget, can


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

go through and pick out the information and identify some things about user audiences


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

that Facebook has.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Or of course, if you have your Facebook audience data, you can use that too.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

So you can get insights about an audience that way, which is pretty cool.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Of course, I would be a failure to not mention SparkToro, of course, which I'm sure many


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

of you guys have already seen.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

So I just had some quick little things that I really loved about SparkToro here.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And I think it's really useful if you're approaching audience insights from a content or influencer


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

perspective, which of course was their target.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

It allows you to break data down in a variety of ways.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

It is pretty straightforward overview of the social accounts and the top accounts that


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

are out there.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

So if you're looking for the high influencers in the field, you'll be able to find those.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

It shows a lot of online consumption data as well as top active networks.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

So where is your audience actually engaging online, which of course is a question.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

If you're doing work primarily on your website and everyone else is on Reddit, then they're


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

not going to find you.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

But yeah, it also includes some useful social listening tidbits, which can be really fun.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And if you've loved keyword research, then you probably also really like this part as


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

well because it just kind of tries to create a broader person, which is super interesting.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Okay.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Next, one of the things, I'm not sure how many other people in the industry do this,


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

but I love looking at research publications.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Some of my favorite include Pew Research for just general information.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

They have a lot of really good stuff.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

If you have a health client, the CDC has a lot of really great stuff.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

The US Census is great.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

There's also a plethora of other data sets that are published by companies like PWC as


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

well as researchers.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And this can be a great place to find general high level audience information that allows


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

you to make assumptions about things, things that are going on in the world.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

I also highly suggest the Mary Meeker report every year, the Internet Trends report.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

It's very, very good.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And it kind of shows the idea of how do you take all this high level data, compile it


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

into something that's useful and pick out the trends that are going to affect businesses.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

I think she does a really good job of that.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

But that's the idea here is basically there's endless rooms of research out there that you


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

can use and you can tap into to help understand what's going on in terms of your audience.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

All right.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

The last section I have here is a little bit expanded and of course, CRM fits into both


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

the first party and third party data world.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

But I wanted to talk a little bit more about that because I think that CRM isn't something


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

that typically people talk about in SEO.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And I thought I think it's something that's super fascinating.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And a lot of times teams already have a CRM team that's built in in another part of the


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

organization.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And it's a matter of knowing what to ask with data to ask them for.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

So one of the things that's really interesting about CRM is generally media of teams think


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

of CRM as something that's more useful on digital for targeted campaigns.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And in truth, it kind of is in that what you're looking for with targeted campaigns is less


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

discerning than what you're looking for if you're looking for a general audience like


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

content.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Now, there are really two primary metrics that you're going to see in CRM data.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

The first is frequency.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

So the number of percent of respondents who met a specific criteria and the index, which


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

is the comparison to the base audience.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

So regardless of whether you're doing work for content or targeted campaigns, you always


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

want to have high index because that's what makes your audience unique.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

For example, if you are in Canada and you're Disney or something like that, they may over


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

index on French speakers in Quebec.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And that's what makes them in Quebec unique, which is what you're ultimately looking for.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

The difference really between targeted campaigns and general content and publishing type initiatives


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

is that when you're looking for content, you don't really want to have a low frequency.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

You really want to have high frequency that you look for.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And that's because you don't want to just target those niche populations that maybe


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

you over index on.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

You want to target the majority of people and you want to target what makes them unique.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

So yeah.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

OK.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And the other thing that I wanted to introduce is this idea that there is a hierarchy of


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

data and that a lot of times what we do in SEO sits somewhere in the middle of the bottom


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

to the bottom of the hierarchy.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And that's, in my opinion, OK, because we really don't generally do one to one personal


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

targeting, but it's something that can be done.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

So panel data at the bottom is things like surveys, personas, sample customer data, segment


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

level analysis, audiences.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And that's kind of a lot of the comfort area for SEO.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

I think ultimately, probably in the future, as websites evolve, maybe, I don't know, five,


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

10 years or something like that.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

We'll get into something that can address more personal level computer experiences for


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

non logged in users or non authenticated users.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

As of now, I think a lot of that split is between new users and existing users.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

If you're, for instance, cookie is one of those.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

There's cookies, which basically is what that is.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

So if you're cookie does an existing user, then you may get an existing user experience.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And if you're not cookie as an existing user, maybe you'll get a new user.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Or maybe if you, for instance, cleared your cookies or something, you'll get the user


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

experience.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

But there is this hierarchy that at the top of it sits personal level data.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And it's not really, you know, Ted to Bob or something like that or specific people.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And it's more about your IDs that they assign you on one, which is a very, I guess, interesting


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

concept to that.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

It's not personally identifiable information if you're it's not you kind of interesting.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And this data expands very far.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

There are many companies out there and pretty much, I guess, every company that you could


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

name probably collects data about you.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And all this interconnects and you can associate all that data back with your ID if you're


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

lucky enough.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And there's something that comes into CRM, which is called the closed loop.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And what that means and what that's what they really strive to do to get personal one to


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

one data.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And what that means is that if on platform one, we have cute bow tie guy, and on platform


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

three, you have cute bow tie guy, and you know that both of those are the same and the


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

same for platform two and platform four.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

You know that each of these are the same.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

But for whatever reason, we find out that platform one guy is also the same as platform


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

four guy.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

We can actually close this loop and determine that this person is the same person that we're


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

all talking about, even though we don't know this person's name, we don't know any of their


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

personal information.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Obviously, we know that when we're talking about him on platform one, we're also talking


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

about him on platform two as well as platform four.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And that's what closing the loop is.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Now you can't always have a perfect data set and any database cleanser will tell you that.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

But there's just something known as match rate, which is basically like how many ideas


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

were we able to match and determine that we have data on this person and that matches.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

That's pretty much how that number calculates out.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And at Merkle, we have an internal system called M1, which is something that mostly


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

our media teams use to for remarketing purposes and to get more specific data on audiences


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

and they have their own thing going on.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

But if our client has purchased it, it's something that we can also use for SEO.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And I just wanted to share with you some of the things that I thought were interesting


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

here.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

So, and the importance, of course, of having an analyst.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

So data, of course, is not just, you know, as I mentioned before, a science.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

It's also ended up in art and there's a lot of intuition that goes behind it.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

So I just want to share with you some examples from that particular system.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

So all right.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Minute Maid, according to data, 35 to 49 year olds crush Minute Maid.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And as you can see here, the gray, of course, is the base audience.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

The blue is, of course, the index.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

So we're looking for how much the data overlaps here in this visual.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

So you can see for the 35 to 49 year olds, the data just explodes.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

People who are 35 to 49 love Minute Maid.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And of course, you look at like their net worth and like, well, these people are worth


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

150,000 to $375,000.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Like what is in that choose?


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Pretty cool.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

But, you know, if you're, of course, an analyst and digging through the data, you may also


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

discover, okay, well, maybe it's not that these guys love Minute Maid.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Maybe they're not super pumped about getting some OJ in the morning, but more about, you


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

know, the fact that they all have children.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

So it's kind of one of the more fun things when people have kids, it kind of messes up


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

the data set, but it skews it in a way that makes it kind of interesting.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

You know, data looking at this type of stuff, and theorem data can also make you introspective


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

in such that things like why do 76 year olds index so low on eating and going out to Chipotle?


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Even more interesting, why is it that people don't get Chipotle as much when there's a


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

grandparents in the house?


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

I don't know.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Maybe make that a 2020 initiative, get your grandparent to a Chipotle.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Anyways, okay.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

So diving into a little bit of the how, how do we format this data?


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

How do we compile it?


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Generally, this ends up being a lot of information.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

So you have to have a way of processing it and thinking about it.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And how do we present this so that we can develop something that we can simulate to


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

send out to the rest of the teams?


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

My suggestion is two things.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

The first, brain writing.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

The second being mini charrettes.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

So brain writing is exactly like brainstorming, but instead of having everybody get in the


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

same room together and talk out ideas initially, you have people go and write their thoughts


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

out and process the information.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And oftentimes, what that allows people to do is come back to their roots, to idea before


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

talking and process information.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

It also allows for if you have a few extroverted voices or people that are of influence that


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

are more extroverted and more authoritative, it allows people who are maybe more introverted


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

or take a little bit more time to process to think about their thoughts, go through


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

and process them and have them all written out and prepared ahead of time.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

So you can have a productive meeting.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Where the charrette comes in is basically a mini meeting where everybody comes together


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

and talks about their ideas and you compile it into something that's useful and kind of


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

pulls out the top insights from all different angles here.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And of course, I included some screenshots down here for you guys to see some examples


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

where we used Microsoft Whiteboard.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And you can see in the brain writing side on the blue side is one person.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

The red overlay is another, the yellow overlay is another.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And you can see these can get kind of exciting and it's kind of has like a dynamic feel to


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

it.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

So if you're pulling data from a bunch of different parts and a bunch of different tools


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

and each person is doing different tool, you can compile it that way as well.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

How do you present this information?


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

So I have three different ideas of how I personally think are different ways to present this information.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

But I mean, really, it's endless.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Like there's many different things you could use data for and really doesn't necessarily


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

need to be something that's presented.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

It could be bullets in an email.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

But here are some ideas.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

So the first is an illustrative user journey for content.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And what that looks like is basically picking out either an audience or a specific user,


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

identifying different stages along their journey.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And of course, you would fill in all these little boxes here.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Identifying and aligning what Web site touch points exist.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And then finally, identifying the primary focal point of the user.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Are they looking for something like convenience at this stage?


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Are they looking for information, trying to figure out what is the one specific user audience?


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And sometimes this can help because instead of trying to think of it as this big problem,


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

you can reduce it into a problem that's more accessible and more relatable.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And then later you can take it and expand this out to be something a little bit bigger.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

But it's something that can, as I mentioned, reduce the problem, which is key in solving


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

complex issues.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

The next is I wanted to introduce before I got started into the audience journeys and


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

briefs, the means and model.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And there's a ton of different psychological models that you can use.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

The means and model is just one.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

But what it relates to is this idea that there are product attributes and product benefits


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

that are things that are on the surface that people see and that are tangible.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

But then underlying our feelings and a sense of self that come with every single thing


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

that we as human beings do, we seek to align.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And a simple sentence to kind of describe how this goes is, what are the tangible benefits


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

of the product that lead to functional benefits for the person?


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Basically what are they getting out of it on the surface, which affect how that user


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

customer feels and reflects on their personal values.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And that's something that I think fits really well into briefs, because you can basically


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

identify those underlying components that go into each person.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

But that, of course, requires a lot of data, a lot of analysis, a lot of chunking, a lot


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

of different ideas coming into the room.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

So yeah, this is one example of what an audience brief may look like.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Of course, there's a lot of flexibility there.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And finally, there's this idea of mapping user training.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

For content, I think there are a few different rows of information that are really important.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

So making sure that you identify what is the primary goal of the user at that particular


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

stage, the types of content that they would need, the common traits, I think is something


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

that's very useful.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Content location, you can keep it or leave it.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

The next stage is also really important.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

How are we pushing them down the particular funnel?


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And of course, starting with the different columns, acceptance, I'm sorry, awareness,


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

acceptance, consideration, decision, make sense.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Sometimes you need to expand and contract that model depending on the different audience.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And you can see here, we modified it a little bit.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And journey mapping is something that can also expand to all channels.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

It's not something that necessarily is just about content.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

It also can be about every single channel and every single touch point and how all those


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

points engage.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And here's just one small screenshot example of what that looks like at a larger strategic


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

level.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

So our TLDR for today, our summary is that, in my opinion, for doing user research, use


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

what data you have available.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And there is data available to you out there.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Communicate to others on teams to get a fuller picture of what's going on with users because


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

other teams may have different data than you and you can use that.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

The third is that user research is something that's constantly evolving and something that


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

you can consistently do, but is something that makes more sense to do at specific intervals


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

that make sense for you and is efficient for your team and something that you need to almost


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

constantly be doing as you go and constantly learning, which is exciting.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And finally, that personal one-to-one campaigns are our thing.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And to close out today, I just want to mention this kind of closing thought that it's about


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

constant change and that is the new norm.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

It's not about guessing right and having a project and going back to some normal.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

It's about learning fast and trying different things.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

I have a few special thanks to Abby, Chris, Max, Kaitlin, and Adam.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Thank you so much.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

And it's been an honor to spend miles coming with all of you.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Miles come virtual.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Yay.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer

Thanks everyone.


The Science of Seeking Your Customer


Daily SEO Fix: How Do I Set Up a Custom Report?

Hi, I'm Kerry from the Onboarding team and I'm going to show you how to set up a custom


report.


Custom reports allows you to show your colleagues and your clients what you're working on within


MozPro.


There are a variety of reports that you can create so let's get started.


In your MozPro account, choose the campaign that you want to create the report for.


So I'm going to choose it for this campaign here and I'm going to scroll down and click


on custom reports.


Here I'm going to click on create or schedule a PDF report.


You can create a report from scratch here or if you're on the medium plan or higher


you can choose to use any templates that are shown here.


If you click on the template it will show you what the report includes and you can click


preview report to download a PDF.


For the purpose of the demonstration I'm going to use the competitive analysis overview


I'm going to scroll down and click on create report.


From here you have the option to select whether you'd like it monthly or weekly.


You can name your report and add a description in this section here.


If you have a medium subscription or higher you'll be able to add your brand logo to the


report.


In this section you'll be able to see the modules that have been added.


If you've chosen a template the add module section will be skipped and you'll have to


go straight to design report.


If you create from scratch it will bring you through and you'll be able to add whatever


modules you would like to your custom report.


In this design report section you can customize the layout of your modules as well as including


important notes and you'll be able to choose the coloring as well as changing their markdown


and highlighting important modules with colored borders.


And once you've made the changes that you want you can click on next and it will bring


you to the preview and download section where you'll be able to get a preview of your custom


report and download it as a PDF if you'd like.


And if we continue to the next section you'll be able to schedule and share your report.


You can schedule your report to run automatically on a weekly or monthly basis.


Default recipient will be the admin on file.


You can change this and send the report to anyone you would like.


And finally describe the content of your report with this custom subject and message.


Thanks for watching.


Ranking Multiple Domains to Own More SERP Real Estate - Whiteboard Friday

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


This week we're going to chat about ranking multiple domains so you can own a bunch of


the SERP real estate and whether you should do that and how you should do that, some ways


to do that.


I'll show you an example because I think that'll help kick us off.


So you are almost certainly familiar, if you've played around in the world of real estate


SERPs with Zillow and Trulia.


So Zillow started up here in Seattle.


They bought Trulia a couple of years ago and have been doing pretty amazingly well.


In fact, I was speaking at a real estate conference in New York recently and, my God, I did an


example where I was searching for tons of cities plus homes for sale or plus real estate


or houses and Zillow and Trulia, along with a couple others, are in the top five for every


single city I checked, no matter how big or small.


So very, very impressive SEO.


One of the things that a lot of SEOs have seen, not just with Zillow and Trulia but


with a few others like them, is that, man, they own multiple listings in the SERPs and


so they kind of dominate the real estate here and get even more clicks as an entity, a combined


entity, than they would if Zillow had, for example, when they bought Trulia, redirected


Trulia.com to Zillow.


On Whiteboard Friday, Annette Maz and a lot of people in the SEO world often recommend


that when you buy another domain or when you're combining entities that you do actually 301


redirect because it can help bring up the rankings here.


And the reason Zillow did not do that, and I think wisely so, is that they already dominated


these SERPs so well that they figured, you know, pushing Trulia's rankings into their


own and combining the two entities would, yes, probably move them from number two and


three to number one in some places, but they already own number one in a ton of these.


Trulia was almost always one or two or three.


Why not own all of that, right?


Why not own 66% of the top three consistently rather than number one a little more frequently?


And I think that was probably the right move for them.


As a result, many SEOs ask themselves, should I do something similar?


Should I buy other domains or should I start other domains?


Should I run multiple sites and try and rank for, you know, many different keyword phrases


or a few keywords that I care very, very deeply about?


And the answer is, well, before you do that, before you make any call, ask yourself these


four questions.


The answers to them will help you determine whether you should follow in these footsteps.


So first off, do you need to dominate multiple results for a keyword or a small set of keywords


more than you need to improve global rankings?


Global rankings, I mean, like, all the keywords that your site could rank for potentially


or that you do rank for now or could help you to rank a larger set of keywords that


send visits and traffic, right?


And if you – you kind of have to weigh these two things.


It's either do I want, you know, two out of the three top results to be mine for this


one keyword or do I want, you know, these ten keywords that I'm ranking for to broadly


move up in rankings generally?


A lot of the time this will, you know, bias you to go, wait a minute, no, the opportunity


is not in these, you know, few keywords where I could dominate multiple positions, it's


in moving up the global rankings and making my ability to rank for any set of keywords


greater.


Even at Moz today, Moz does very well in the rankings for a lot of terms around SEO, but


if we were, for example, let's say we were purchased by Search Engine Land or we bought


Search Engine Land, right?


If those two entities were combined, and granted, you know, we do rank for many, many similar


keywords but we would probably not keep them separate.


We would probably combine them because the opportunity is still greater in combination


than it is in dominating, you know, multiple results the way Zillow and Trulia are.


This is a pretty rare circumstance.


Okay, second, are you going to cannibalize link equity opportunities with multiple sites


and do you have the ability to get enough equity and authority signals to rank both


domains, or all three, or all four, or whatever it is?


A challenge that many SEOs encounter is that building links and building up the authority


to rank is actually the toughest part of the SEO equation, right?


The keyword targeting and ranking multiple domains, that's nice to have, but first you


got to build up a site that's got enough link equity and if it is challenging to earn links,


maybe the answer is, hey, we should combine all our efforts, we should work on all our


efforts.


Remember, even though Zillow owns Trulia, Trulia and Zillow are one entity, the links


between them don't help the other one rank very much.


It was already the case before Zillow bought them that Trulia and Zillow independently


ranked, right?


And the two sites offer different experiences and some different listings and, right, all


that kind of stuff.


So there are reasons why Google keeps them separately and why Zillow and Trulia keep


them separately, but that's going to be really tough.


If you're a smaller business or a smaller website starting out, you're trying to decide


where should you put your link equity efforts, might lean a little more this way.


Number three, should you use your own domain if you decide that you need to have multiple


domains ranking for a single keyword?


A good example of this case scenario is reputation management for your own brand name or for,


you know, maybe someone who works at your company, some particular product that you


make, whatever it is, or you're very, very focused and you know, hey, this one keyword


matters more than everything else that we do.


Okay, now the question would be should you use your own domain or a new domain that you


buy and register and start building up, should you buy an existing domain, something that


already ranks, or should you do barnacle SEO, right?


So you know, MySite2, that would be basically you're registering a new domain, you're building


it up from scratch, you're growing that brand, you're trying to build all the signals that


you'll need.


You could buy a competitor that's already ranking in the search results, that already


has equity and the ranking ability, or you could say, hey, we see that this Quora question's


doing really well, can we answer that question tremendously well?


Or we see that Medium can perform tremendously well here.


You know what?


We can write great posts on Medium.


We see that LinkedIn does really well in this sector.


Great, we can do some publishing on LinkedIn, or there's a list of companies on this page.


We can make sure that we're the number one listed company on that page.


Okay, right?


That kind of barnacle SEO, we did a whiteboard Friday about that a few months ago, and you


can check that out too.


And number four, last but not least, will your multi-site domain strategy cost you time


and money that would be better spent on boosting your primary site's marketing efforts?


Right?


So it is the case that you're going to sacrifice something if you're putting effort into a


different website versus putting all your marketing eggs and efforts into one domain.


Now one reason that people certainly do this is because they're trying riskier tactics


with a second site.


Another reason is because they've already dominated the rankings as much as they want,


or because they're trying to build up multiple properties so that they can sell one off,


and they're very, very good at link building this space already and growing equity and


those sorts of things.


But the other question you have to ask is, will this cause brand dilution, right?


Or is it going to sacrifice potential brand equity?


One of the things that we've observed in the SEO world is that rankings alone do not make


for revenue.


It is absolutely the case that people are choosing which domains to click on and which


domains to buy from and convert on based on the brand and their brand familiarity.


When you're building up a second site, you've got to be building up a second brand, so that's


an additional cost and effort.


Now I don't want to rain on the entire parade here.


Like we've said in a few of these, there are reasons why you might want to consider multiple


domains, reasons why a multi-domain strategy can be effective for some folks.


It's just that I think it might be a little less often and should be undertaken with more


care and attention to detail and to all these questions than what some folks might be doing


when they buy a bunch of domains and hope that they can just dominate the top ten right


out of the gate.


All right, everyone, look forward to your thoughts on multi-domain strategies, and we'll


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


MozCon 2015 - 15 - Drive More Conversions with Lifecycle Email Campaigns with Tamara Gielen

Email marketing, that's a little bit of a change from what you've been hearing so far.


I personally started doing email marketing back in 2001.


I'm that old.


My first email campaign I sent out when I was working for Cognos, which is a B2B company.


They did business analytics software and we were going to do email marketing because it


was cheaper.


We were going to be sending out emails to people to invite them to demo sessions where


our sales people could then try to sell to them.


Email marketing was cheaper to send out.


We had a bunch of email addresses.


Our sales people had done a really good job of getting email addresses of lots and lots


of people, put them in our CRM system, and I would create a really beautiful HTML template,


put it in Internet Explorer and do an Outlook, something like send page by email, and then


I would send it out in Outlook with 500 names in BCC.


Back in 2001, you could still get away with that.


But not for long because probably a couple of months later, one of our sales guys came


up to me and he said, Tamara, what have you done?


I'm like, I didn't do anything.


What did I do?


Well, we can't send any emails anymore to any of our clients.


I can't get through to them anymore.


So basically what happened is, and not any of our clients, it was one big client that


they couldn't reach out to anymore via email because they had blocked us.


All the emails that came through from Cognos at that specific company, they were all blocked


because we were sending out emails with way too many names in BCC, and that for me was


a start.


That for me was when I started learning about how to do email marketing properly.


We got ourselves a real ESP to send out the emails instead of sending them out through


Outlook.


Basically, everything I know about email marketing, I've learned myself through trial and error.


That's probably why I guess I may be qualified to give you guys this presentation.


So what I'm going to do is I'm going to just quickly set the stage a little bit.


I'm going to talk about lifecycle email marketing.


I'm going to give you lots and lots of examples.


I'm going to try and talk through how you do this successfully.


I only have like half an hour, so I can't go really, really into that, but I'll try.


And English is not my native language.


I do my best to not make any mistakes, but bear with me there.


So 2015, back in 2001 when I was sending out emails, people were not receiving too many


emails yet.


That has changed.


Today in 2015, we all get a lot of emails, a lot of emails.


And you have to somehow try and stand out.


We have a lot, as consumers, we have a lot of choice.


I ride a motorcycle and I'm prepping it to take it out on the racetrack and I need new,


how do you call these things, clutch and brake levers I guess.


So I was looking around, asked my dealer and my dealer said, well, if you buy them from


us, they cost, I don't know, 300 euros, so $350, something like that.


So a friend of mine said, why don't you look on eBay?


And I started looking on the internet.


Amazon even sells them.


So instead of buying them from my dealer who is like located two cities away from me, I


might end up buying them in the States or in Hong Kong.


I can buy wherever I want.


And as a consumer, I like to be in control.


I like to own that experience.


I like to decide where I'm going to buy, who I'm going to buy from.


I like to decide in the context of email marketing which emails I will open, which ones I won't.


And I like, or I want, basically, I want companies to make it easy for me.


I want you guys to deliver an experience that I don't need to think about it.


I can just come in and do whatever it is that I want to do.


And more importantly, people only care about themselves.


I care about what's in it for me.


When you send me an email, it better have value for me.


I don't care about your new offices, seriously, unless you are a retail store that's located


somewhere and I used to, you know, every week come and shop at your store and now you're


moving to another place, then I may be interested in that.


But otherwise, I couldn't care less.


Now a study from the Associated Press back in 2013 found that the average attention span


on the Internet is about eight seconds.


You can grab my attention for eight seconds and then I'm gone.


If you think about how much time you spend opening emails or how much time you take to


decide whether you're going to open or delete an email, you're not going to take eight seconds


to make that decision.


That is a second that happens like this.


And think about when you're looking at your mailbox, think about what is the criterion


that you choose to decide whether you're going to open or delete that email.


Is that the sender name or is that the subject line?


If you think about it, it's most likely going to be the sender name because based on the


experience that you've had with a certain sender, you will either open or delete those


emails immediately without even looking at the subject line.


Yes, your subject line is important, but only if you are a sender that is still like, you