August 6, 2015 by The Traffic Wizard on Business

Why Effective, Modern SEO Requires Technical, Creative, and Strategic Thinking – Whiteboard Friday

There’s no doubt that quite a bit has changed about SEO, and that the field is far more integrated with other aspects of online marketing than it once was. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand pushes back against the idea that effective modern SEO doesn’t require any technical expertise, outlining a fantastic list of technical elements that today’s SEOs need to know about in order to be truly effective.

For reference, here’s a still of this week’s whiteboard. Click on it to open a high resolution image in a new tab!

Video transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I’m going to do something unusual. I don’t usually point out these inconsistencies or sort of take issue with other folks’ content on the web, because I generally find that that’s not all that valuable and useful. But I’m going to make an exception here.

There is an article by Jayson DeMers, who I think might actually be here in Seattle — maybe he and I can hang out at some point — called “Why Modern SEO Requires Almost No Technical Expertise.” It was an article that got a shocking amount of traction and attention. On Facebook, it has thousands of shares. On LinkedIn, it did really well. On Twitter, it got a bunch of attention.

Some folks in the SEO world have already pointed out some issues around this. But because of the increasing popularity of this article, and because I think there’s, like, this hopefulness from worlds outside of kind of the hardcore SEO world that are looking to this piece and going, “Look, this is great. We don’t have to be technical. We don’t have to worry about technical things in order to do SEO.”

Look, I completely get the appeal of that. I did want to point out some of the reasons why this is not so accurate. At the same time, I don’t want to rain on Jayson, because I think that it’s very possible he’s writing an article for Entrepreneur, maybe he has sort of a commitment to them. Maybe he had no idea that this article was going to spark so much attention and investment. He does make some good points. I think it’s just really the title and then some of the messages inside there that I take strong issue with, and so I wanted to bring those up.

First off, some of the good points he did bring up.

One, he wisely says, “You don’t need to know how to code or to write and read algorithms in order to do SEO.” I totally agree with that. If today you’re looking at SEO and you’re thinking, “Well, am I going to get more into this subject? Am I going to try investing in SEO? But I don’t even know HTML and CSS yet.”

Those are good skills to have, and they will help you in SEO, but you don’t need them. Jayson’s totally right. You don’t have to have them, and you can learn and pick up some of these things, and do searches, watch some Whiteboard Fridays, check out some guides, and pick up a lot of that stuff later on as you need it in your career. SEO doesn’t have that hard requirement.

And secondly, he makes an intelligent point that we’ve made many times here at Moz, which is that, broadly speaking, a better user experience is well correlated with better rankings.

You make a great website that delivers great user experience, that provides the answers to searchers’ questions and gives them extraordinarily good content, way better than what’s out there already in the search results, generally speaking you’re going to see happy searchers, and that’s going to lead to higher rankings.

But not entirely. There are a lot of other elements that go in here. So I’ll bring up some frustrating points around the piece as well.

First off, there’s no acknowledgment — and I find this a little disturbing — that the ability to read and write code, or even HTML and CSS, which I think are the basic place to start, is helpful or can take your SEO efforts to the next level. I think both of those things are true.

So being able to look at a web page, view source on it, or pull up Firebug in Firefox or something and diagnose what’s going on and then go, “Oh, that’s why Google is not able to see this content. That’s why we’re not ranking for this keyword or term, or why even when I enter this exact sentence in quotes into Google, which is on our page, this is why it’s not bringing it up. It’s because it’s loading it after the page from a remote file that Google can’t access.” These are technical things, and being able to see how that code is built, how it’s structured, and what’s going on there, very, very helpful.

Some coding knowledge also can take your SEO efforts even further. I mean, so many times, SEOs are stymied by the conversations that we have with our programmers and our developers and the technical staff on our teams. When we can have those conversations intelligently, because at least we understand the principles of how an if-then statement works, or what software engineering best practices are being used, or they can upload something into a GitHub repository, and we can take a look at it there, that kind of stuff is really helpful.

Secondly, I don’t like that the article overly reduces all of this information that we have about what we’ve learned about Google. So he mentions two sources. One is things that Google tells us, and others are SEO experiments. I think both of those are true. Although I’d add that there’s sort of a sixth sense of knowledge that we gain over time from looking at many, many search results and kind of having this feel for why things rank, and what might be wrong with a site, and getting really good at that using tools and data as well. There are people who can look at Open Site Explorer and then go, “Aha, I bet this is going to happen.” They can look, and 90% of the time they’re right.

So he boils this down to, one, write quality content, and two, reduce your bounce rate. Neither of those things are wrong. You should write quality content, although I’d argue there are lots of other forms of quality content that aren’t necessarily written — video, images and graphics, podcasts, lots of other stuff.

And secondly, that just doing those two things is not always enough. So you can see, like many, many folks look and go, “I have quality content. It has a low bounce rate. How come I don’t rank better?” Well, your competitors, they’re also going to have quality content with a low bounce rate. That’s not a very high bar.

Also, frustratingly, this really gets in my craw. I don’t think “write quality content” means anything. You tell me. When you hear that, to me that is a totally non-actionable, non-useful phrase that’s a piece of advice that is so generic as to be discardable. So I really wish that there was more substance behind that.

The article also makes, in my opinion, the totally inaccurate claim that modern SEO really is reduced to “the happier your users are when they visit your site, the higher you’re going to rank.”

Wow. Okay. Again, I think broadly these things are correlated. User happiness and rank is broadly correlated, but it’s not a one to one. This is not like a, “Oh, well, that’s a 1.0 correlation.”

I would guess that the correlation is probably closer to like the page authority range. I bet it’s like 0.35 or something correlation. If you were to actually measure this broadly across the web and say like, “Hey, were you happier with result one, two, three, four, or five,” the ordering would not be perfect at all. It probably wouldn’t even be close.

There’s a ton of reasons why sometimes someone who ranks on Page 2 or Page 3 or doesn’t rank at all for a query is doing a better piece of content than the person who does rank well or ranks on Page 1, Position 1.

Then the article suggests five and sort of a half steps to successful modern SEO, which I think is a really incomplete list. So Jayson gives us;

Good on-site experience
Writing good content
Getting others to acknowledge you as an authority
Rising in social popularity
Earning local relevance
Dealing with modern CMS systems (which he notes most modern CMS systems are SEO-friendly)

The thing is there’s nothing actually wrong with any of these. They’re all, generally speaking, correct, either directly or indirectly related to SEO. The one about local relevance, I have some issue with, because he doesn’t note that there’s a separate algorithm for sort of how local SEO is done and how Google ranks local sites in maps and in their local search results. Also not noted is that rising in social popularity won’t necessarily directly help your SEO, although it can have indirect and positive benefits.

I feel like this list is super incomplete. Okay, I brainstormed just off the top of my head in the 10 minutes before we filmed this video a list. The list was so long that, as you can see, I filled up the whole whiteboard and then didn’t have any more room. I’m not going to bother to erase and go try and be absolutely complete.

But there’s a huge, huge number of things that are important, critically important for technical SEO. If you don’t know how to do these things, you are sunk in many cases. You can’t be an effective SEO analyst, or consultant, or in-house team member, because you simply can’t diagnose the potential problems, rectify those potential problems, identify strategies that your competitors are using, be able to diagnose a traffic gain or loss. You have to have these skills in order to do that.

I’ll run through these quickly, but really the idea is just that this list is so huge and so long that I think it’s very, very, very wrong to say technical SEO is behind us. I almost feel like the opposite is true.

We have to be able to understand things like;

Content rendering and indexability
Crawl structure, internal links, JavaScript, Ajax. If something’s post-loading after the page and Google’s not able to index it, or there are links that are accessible via JavaScript or Ajax, maybe Google can’t necessarily see those or isn’t crawling them as effectively, or is crawling them, but isn’t assigning them as much link weight as they might be assigning other stuff, and you’ve made it tough to link to them externally, and so they can’t crawl it.
Disabling crawling and/or indexing of thin or incomplete or non-search-targeted content. We have a bunch of search results pages. Should we use rel=prev/next? Should we robots.txt those out? Should we disallow from crawling with meta robots? Should we rel=canonical them to other pages? Should we exclude them via the protocols inside Google Webmaster Tools, which is now Google Search Console?
Managing redirects, domain migrations, content updates. A new piece of content comes out, replacing an old piece of content, what do we do with that old piece of content? What’s the best practice? It varies by different things. We have a whole Whiteboard Friday about the different things that you could do with that. What about a big redirect or a domain migration? You buy another company and you’re redirecting their site to your site. You have to understand things about subdomain structures versus subfolders, which, again, we’ve done another Whiteboard Friday about that.
Proper error codes, downtime procedures, and not found pages. If your 404 pages turn out to all be 200 pages, well, now you’ve made a big error there, and Google could be crawling tons of 404 pages that they think are real pages, because you’ve made it a status code 200, or you’ve used a 404 code when you should have used a 410, which is a permanently removed, to be able to get it completely out of the indexes, as opposed to having Google revisit it and keep it in the index.

Downtime procedures. So there’s specifically a… I can’t even remember. It’s a 5xx code that you can use. Maybe it was a 503 or something that you can use that’s like, “Revisit later. We’re having some downtime right now.” Google urges you to use that specific code rather than using a 404, which tells them, “This page is now an error.”

Disney had that problem a while ago, if you guys remember, where they 404ed all their pages during an hour of downtime, and then their homepage, when you searched for Disney World, was, like, “Not found.” Oh, jeez, Disney World, not so good.

International and multi-language targeting issues. I won’t go into that. But you have to know the protocols there. Duplicate content, syndication, scrapers. How do we handle all that? Somebody else wants to take our content, put it on their site, what should we do? Someone’s scraping our content. What can we do? We have duplicate content on our own site. What should we do?
Diagnosing traffic drops via analytics and metrics. Being able to look at a rankings report, being able to look at analytics connecting those up and trying to see: Why did we go up or down? Did we have less pages being indexed, more pages being indexed, more pages getting traffic less, more keywords less?
Understanding advanced search parameters. Today, just today, I was checking out the related parameter in Google, which is fascinating for most sites. Well, for Moz, weirdly, related:oursite.com shows nothing. But for virtually every other sit, well, most other sites on the web, it does show some really interesting data, and you can see how Google is connecting up, essentially, intentions and topics from different sites and pages, which can be fascinating, could expose opportunities for links, could expose understanding of how they view your site versus your competition or who they think your competition is.

Then there are tons of parameters, like in URL and in anchor, and da, da, da, da. In anchor doesn’t work anymore, never mind about that one.

I have to go faster, because we’re just going to run out of these. Like, come on. Interpreting and leveraging data in Google Search Console. If you don’t know how to use that, Google could be telling you, you have all sorts of errors, and you don’t know what they are.

Leveraging topic modeling and extraction. Using all these cool tools that are coming out for better keyword research and better on-page targeting. I talked about a couple of those at MozCon, like MonkeyLearn. There’s the new Moz Context API, which will be coming out soon, around that. There’s the Alchemy API, which a lot of folks really like and use.
Identifying and extracting opportunities based on site crawls. You run a Screaming Frog crawl on your site and you’re going, “Oh, here’s all these problems and issues.” If you don’t have these technical skills, you can’t diagnose that. You can’t figure out what’s wrong. You can’t figure out what needs fixing, what needs addressing.
Using rich snippet format to stand out in the SERPs. This is just getting a better click-through rate, which can seriously help your site and obviously your traffic.
Applying Google-supported protocols like rel=canonical, meta description, rel=prev/next, hreflang, robots.txt, meta robots, x robots, NOODP, XML sitemaps, rel=nofollow. The list goes on and on and on. If you’re not technical, you don’t know what those are, you think you just need to write good content and lower your bounce rate, it’s not going to work.
Using APIs from services like AdWords or MozScape, or hrefs from Majestic, or SEM refs from SearchScape or Alchemy API. Those APIs can have powerful things that they can do for your site. There are some powerful problems they could help you solve if you know how to use them. It’s actually not that hard to write something, even inside a Google Doc or Excel, to pull from an API and get some data in there. There’s a bunch of good tutorials out there. Richard Baxter has one, Annie Cushing has one, I think Distilled has some. So really cool stuff there.
Diagnosing page load speed issues, which goes right to what Jayson was talking about. You need that fast-loading page. Well, if you don’t have any technical skills, you can’t figure out why your page might not be loading quickly.
Diagnosing mobile friendliness issues
Advising app developers on the new protocols around App deep linking, so that you can get the content from your mobile apps into the web search results on mobile devices. Awesome. Super powerful. Potentially crazy powerful, as mobile search is becoming bigger than desktop.

Okay, I’m going to take a deep breath and relax. I don’t know Jayson’s intention, and in fact, if he were in this room, he’d be like, “No, I totally agree with all those things. I wrote the article in a rush. I had no idea it was going to be big. I was just trying to make the broader points around you don’t have to be a coder in order to do SEO.” That’s completely fine.

So I’m not going to try and rain criticism down on him. But I think if you’re reading that article, or you’re seeing it in your feed, or your clients are, or your boss is, or other folks are in your world, maybe you can point them to this Whiteboard Friday and let them know, no, that’s not quite right. There’s a ton of technical SEO that is required in 2015 and will be for years to come, I think, that SEOs have to have in order to be effective at their jobs.

All right, everyone. Look forward to some great comments, and we’ll see you again next time for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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August 6, 2015 by The Traffic Wizard on SEO

War And Peace: Bloomberg’s Massive History Of Google’s EU Antitrust Case

If you want a history of Google’s search battles with European antitrust regulators, a new article from Brad Stone (and colleagues) at Bloomberg will more than satisfy you. While there’s very little truly new information, the well-researched (and lengthy) piece is nearly comprehensive and captures all the intrigue as well as the evolving nature of the dispute.

The article is provocatively titled, “Google’s $6 Billion Miscalculation on the EU.” The $6 billion refers to the potential penalties and fines that Google may face in Europe. The “miscalculation” reflects some of Google’s missteps there, chief among which may have been its misplaced reliance on former European Commission competition czar Joaquín Almunia.

Almunia has now been replaced by Danish politician Margrethe Vestager, who is taking a tougher line against the company and is almost certain to seek financial penalties. For example, the article says she is now socializing the idea of fines with Google’s competitors:

Vestager is showing no sign of compromise. While the document containing her charges is secret, Bloomberg has seen a redacted version the competition authority sent to Google competitors. It says the European Commission “intends to set the fine at a level which will be sufficient to ensure deterrence.”

Prior to Vestager’s arrival, at several points over the past two years, it appeared that Google and her predecessor Almunia had struck a formal settlement deal (e.g., “rival links“). While Almunia probably had the authority to push the deal through, he didn’t feel he had the political support and, indeed, greatly underestimated the hostility to settlement with Google.

Almunia also failed to anticipate or gauge the tenacity and resourcefulness of Google’s opponents (both European and US-based) and their drive to derail the settlement agreements. Chief among them was Microsoft. But Redmond is far from alone. Opponent consortiums, such as FairSearch.org, produced several waves of research intended to undermine the settlements by arguing they would have little or no impact on rivals’ traffic or consumer behavior.

These studies were instrumental in weakening Almunia’s hand and resolve, as well as casting doubt on the fairness of the settlement terms from a PR perspective. At the same time, the Bloomberg piece describes how Google had (mis)placed its near total faith in Almunia and his political authority:

At Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., the Almunia settlement with the EU was seen as such a fait accompli that staff assigned to the case started to work on other things.

While the public discussion and debate concerns whether Google abused its “market dominance,” there’s quite a bit more intrigue and subtext — some of which has almost nothing to do with whether Google’s one-boxes or universal search benefit or harm consumers or online competition in Europe (the formal EU Statement of Objections is focused exclusively on comparison shopping).

The article goes into all this in a great deal of depth, but emotional considerations, fear and a kind of “digital nationalism” have mixed with more principled, legal concerns about preserving competition. Some of the issues playing out behind or beneath the public talking points include the following beliefs:

Google stands in for American culture, government and economic interests and must be curtailed accordingly
Google has been and may continue to be used as an instrument of US government surveillance
American internet companies cannot be allowed to disrupt (and potentially destroy) European businesses and industries — even if those are the market effects of competition

The fear of US internet hegemony is explicitly represented in the article by the following quote from former French Economy Minister Arnaud Montebourg:

We don’t want to be a digital colony of the U.S. Internet giants . . . What’s at stake is our sovereignty itself.

That position is exaggerated if not hysterical — though obviously there are many who feel this way, including German publisher Axel Springer. Indeed newspaper publishers in Germany and Spain promoted restrictive copyright laws effectively designed to tax Google. Both have been traffic disasters for their respective proponents.

I’m not trying to argue that Google hasn’t done anything wrong or that there shouldn’t be a hard look at its competitive practices and potential adjustments to maintain competition. What I am saying is that the Google antitrust matter has become conflated with many other issues and a surrogate for a range of other cultural, political and economic matters that are much larger than the particular issues in dispute in the antitrust case.

Google argues and I think believes that it has introduced search innovations that truly improve the user experience. Some of its competitors and those who rely on SEO as their digital lifeblood have seen conspiracies to promote Google’s own products at their expense. The truth, as always, lies somewhere in-between.

One of the interesting anecdotes in the article involves the shopping engine Foundem and the early days of Google’s troubles in Europe:

There was nothing particularly special about Foundem, but in 2006, Google, as it frequently does, updated its search algorithms. Suddenly Foundem was a lot less visible in search results. Shivaun [Raff, co-founder of Foundem], an articulate and tenacious advocate for her tiny site, spent a few years trying to get Google to tell her what had happened and how to get her company out of the algorithmic penalty box. Google, characteristically opaque about its internal workings, didn’t say much.

In 2009 the Raffs filed the first antitrust complaint against Google in Brussels. They also hooked up with Gary Reback. A Silicon Valley lawyer and serial agitator who had represented Netscape against Microsoft in its 1990s antitrust case, Reback helped the Raffs make the rounds in Washington . . .

Google justifies its actions and product innovations as responding to the needs, behaviors and desires of its users. However as it has matured and come under greater market and investor pressure the company has become equally motivated to generate more revenue from advertisers and not all its actions can be said to be in the best interests of users.

By the same token, some — though not all — of the antitrust critics suggest a kind of entitlement mindset. There’s often an implicit argument that Google should do nothing to adversely impact “their traffic.” When it does happen there’s also sometimes an accompanying sense of anger or betrayal, as in the Foundem example.

Yet Google, though extremely powerful, is not the only channel for exposure. Mobile apps and Facebook, for example, have become effective alternatives for many companies and brands. In particular Facebook has become for some (e.g., BuzzFeed) a much more effective promotional tool than Google. Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg is also pitching the company’s marketing solutions to local businesses as the only ones needed to succeed:

One of the business owners I met [in London] was Kelly Wright, a single mom who started selling dresses from her home. She began by shooting videos of her dresses on her mobile phone and promoting them on Facebook for just a few pounds. Using Facebook as her only marketing channel, Kelly grew her business, Krista Lee Fashion, to over £3 million pounds annually and she now has 10 employees.

(emphasis added.)

Google still needs to formally respond to the EU Statement of Objections. However it’s likely now that the company will be fined and forced to make more dramatic changes to its SERP than it would have had the Almunia settlement been finalized. Yet in some sense the search party has already moved on from the desktop and the real action is now in the mobile SERP.

Indeed, Android is the next Google antitrust matter up before the European Commission.

The post War And Peace: Bloomberg’s Massive History Of Google’s EU Antitrust Case appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Source: SEL

August 6, 2015 by The Traffic Wizard on Uncategorized

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August 6, 2015 by The Traffic Wizard on Marketing

How to Earn Links and Gain Credibility with the Three A’s of Legitimacy

The concept of earning links seems to be one of the most difficult subjects for strategists, marketers, and business owners to wrap their heads around.

It’s no wonder, either, since Google and other search engines adjust the criteria for what deems a link to be relevant or qualified at such a rapid pace.

If you quickly review the blogosphere on this subject, it’s easy to become confused. Many sources recommend tactics like press releases and guest posts. Others warn that those forms of content will lead to Google dropping the hammer with a range of severe penalties.

The fact is that earning links is not difficult to do when approached and understood correctly.

Why Links Are “Earned” Today, as Opposed to “Built”

As search engines continue to develop their ability to interpret and understand quality content, their standards for how websites obtain authority continue to rise, as well.

In 2009, strategists could achieve premier rankings by embedding links on just about any website, regardless of the link’s value to users or its relation to the original domain. Now, business owners are tasked with the responsibility for creating relationships with relevant thought influencers that offer high quality content to online consumers.

Examples of link “building” include paying companies or webmasters to post links on their sites and embedding links on free directories that appear spammy.

In contrast, link “earning” involves strategists collaborating over what types of meaningful content they can create to share with other like-minded authorities online.

With Links, Think About How to Gain Credibility in the Real World

The easiest way to understand the concept of earning links is to think about how credibility is formed in offline, real-world settings.

If some unknown name were to run for public office, that person would have zero credibility to use to garner votes from the public.

However, with endorsements from the community’s local politicians and others in positions of higher authority in government, that person would automatically have a level of credibility based on his or her association with those offering words of support.

Well, the exact same mindset is behind the logic of acquiring links today.

When a brand new website is launched, it is not able to convey to search engines that it deserves to be placed on page one of search results without some history of experience to justify that.

However, when the website is able to connect with other popular sites that are seen as thought providers or consumer advocates within their particular space, it can then justify itself as appropriate for online consumers to engage with.

Look at History to Better Understand Today’s Search Demands

The state of the World Wide Web was a bit of a mess back in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s.

Millions of online users were constantly confronted with links that led to:

Pop-up ads
Porn sites
Irrelevant/meaningless content

It makes sense that Google wanted to implement standards that prevented their customers (online users) from being subjected to inappropriate and unpleasant experiences.

Standards That Promote a Quality Online Experience

Google updates and/or adjusts its algorithm over 500 times each year. While the vast majority of all updates are unannounced or unnoticed by the general public, some of them have a profound impact on what people see when they search online.

For example, popular, well-known updates like “Panda,” Penguin,” and “Pigeon” aim to create an online search experience that provides the most gratifying, rewarding results possible. This includes removing the ability to access sites that:

Contain high volumes of duplicate, plagiarized content
Have excessive volumes of irrelevant links that do not allow users to continue their personal search experience in a meaningful, logical way

Understanding the focus behind some of these updates allows strategists to clearly see an online environment that is completely devoted to offering consumers an original, honest experience that aligns directly with each user’s intentions.

The Three A’s Behind How Content Ranks in 2015

Almost everything about Google’s algorithm and the process involved for determining which listings are appropriate for users to engage with is based on a plethora of considerations.

Remember that links serve as a form of validation or credibility, and you can use the same tactics that have always been popular (i.e., press releases, guest posts, infographics, etc.), despite some industry opinions that say otherwise.

When planning out a new link-earning campaign, keep the three A’s in mind at all times in order to evaluate the legitimacy of the prospective link:

Alignment – how well a particular website or form of content aligns with your users’ expectations, intentions, and demands.
Authority – the level of credibility, experience, and intelligence a particular website is deemed to have based on consumer recognition and search engine algorithms.
Authenticity – the extent to which a particular website’s technical and onsite composition are comprised to meet the specific needs of individual online users/consumers. In other words, is the website built to completely align with and resolve consumer demands, or is it built to satisfy theoretical ranking factors?

How The Three A’s Apply in Action

Over the years, inexperienced strategists responsible for fulfilling a particular linking strategy tended to exclusively dedicate their time to the following tactics:

Creating as many directories as possible
Publishing numerous posts across underdeveloped social channels
Distributing press releases across free, online wires
Contributing content to unqualified third-party hosts

Now, the activities on this list are not the issue. The problem lies in how they are executed and the level of meaning/relevancy behind each action and its result.

Earn Links Correctly by Thinking of People First, Not Rankings

One sure way to approach links incorrectly is to think about them solely as a means to drive rankings rather than brand awareness or conversions.

When strategists intentionally try to build authority around particular key phrases or sites in order to rank in the first position on Google’s results pages, without consideration for the three A’s, they waste their time publishing content through empty social profiles or setting up directories on sites that no one visits.

Instead, you can maximize the value of your work and the results for your clients by keeping the three A’s in mind at all times when executing the tactics mentioned above.

Let’s go through each one of the link-earning activities now.

Creating Directories

Creating business directories that outline legitimate information attached to a particular brand or service is still an appropriate step to take when it comes to earning links.

However, you need to keep the target audience in mind at all times and think about whether or not the directory you want to create will:

Lead to a new link

Lead to a new link and drive qualified referral traffic

If a directory is going to be published in an environment that has nothing to do with the primary message or service of your brand, then don’t bother.

This could lead to some trouble with Google (possible deindexing) due to the concept of “building links just to build them.”

Instead, identify which specific directory sites your brand’s target audience actually engages, based on information related to the online behavior of your audience.

Popular, credible directory sites such as Yelp and Foursquare create links that derive from authoritative sources and that connect brands with real, qualified consumers.

Publishing Posts on Social Media

The concept of “social SEO” in association with earning links sees social shares derived from actions of individuals. Examples of actions are:

Leaving a comment on a blog post
Sharing an article on Facebook
Retweeting a comment on Twitter
Repinning a photo on Pinterest

This also includes any other manual action by an individual in relation to content.

The ability to earn qualified links through social media is successful only when there is an established audience that is able to react to the content they receive.

The idea of publishing all created forms of content through social media is correct.
However, too often, strategists find themselves publishing materials through underdeveloped profiles that have few or no followers.

What basically happens here is that the strategist announces new information using a megaphone, but no one is in attendance to listen.

If your brand has social profiles with inactive followers or insignificant numbers of followers, allocate time and resources to build up such followers first.

You can and should always publish through Google+ since there are legitimate organic search merits involved, including the immediate indexation of content.

However, other profiles like Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest need to be nurtured before they can serve as credible avenues for acquiring social links.

Distributing Press Releases

Press releases are a bit of a different beast when it comes to earning links.

The best way to approach this tactic is to think about only the end user and the opportunity to connect with new potential customers.

Online wires, whether they require some form of payment or not, should not be seen as a legitimate means of earning links that have value.

Most wires do not allow publishers to embed links in their releases; those that do are typically not high in quality when it comes to user experience, intention, and meaning.

Source

Here are a few best practices to consider for press release distribution:

Create them with substance and provide evidence that supports the value of what is being promoted; i.e., statistics, references, quotes, etc.
Create them only when something is actually newsworthy or relevant to the masses. For most businesses outside the Fortune 1000 status, one press release per quarter is probably appropriate.
Send each release over actual media outlets, whether regional or national. These include newspapers, affiliate TV stations, radio channels, and others. Most local newspapers and TV stations allow users to publish newsworthy events right on their websites.

Contributing Guest Content

Guest posting is a great way to connect brands and businesses with new potential customers who are interested in similar materials or subjects and who have not yet been introduced to a particular supplier.

However, too often strategists and marketers will create content for their clients and publish with hosts that have no set standards dedicated to the quality of submissions they take or that are irrelevant to the client’s primary message.

You can use tools like GroupHigh to identify actual thought consumers and advocates per vertical throughout the world.

Tools like this one offer you the ability to understand more detailed information about potential third-party hosts and their level of authenticity/alignment, including:

Who are the host’s target audience(s)
How often do they publish new forms of content
How many social followers do they have and how actively engaged are they
Domain authority

If such tools aren’t accessible because of budgetary limitations, a simple manual review of the criteria listed above will go a long way toward understanding whether the link(s) and visitors that have the potential to be acquired are qualified and of value.

You Can’t Go Wrong Earning Links Using the Three A’s

Regardless of which tactic you choose to use or implement, remember that everything has to come back to these three questions:

Does this content or website align with the specific intentions, expectations, and motivations of your brand’s target audience?
Is this content or website recognized as a thought leader, or are they appropriate for the category they are competing for?
Is this content or website being built/developed with the intention of satisfying customers, or is there too much focus on onsite optimization?

As long as the answers to these questions always go back to benefiting the end user, your link-earning campaigns will serve as a primary means of driving visibility, connections, and conversions.

About the Author: Jason Corrigan is the Manager of Search Marketing for The American Cancer Society; with experience developing complex, wide-scale search and social strategies for Fortune 1000 brands including: Duracell, Febreze, Swiffer, Oral-B, The Source and others. He is a published author on the concept of “Social SEO” and a frequent contributor to some of the industry’s most popular search journals. Corrigan owns the trademark to “SEO Without Borders” and is currently developing a non-profit organization that will connect victims in third-world countries with qualified donors across the world using digital resources and organic search. You can follow him on Twitter.

Source: KISS

August 5, 2015 by The Traffic Wizard on Business

The 2015 #MozCon Video Bundle Has Arrived!

Posted by EricaMcGillivray

The bird has landed, and by bird, I mean the MozCon 2015 Video Bundle! That’s right, 27 sessions and over 15 hours of knowledge from our top notch speakers right at your fingertips. Watch presentations about SEO, personalization, content strategy, local SEO, Facebook graph search, and more to level up your online marketing expertise.

If these videos were already on your wish list, skip ahead:

If you attended MozCon, the videos are included with your ticket. You should have an email in your inbox (sent to the address you registered for MozCon with) containing your unique URL for a free “purchase.”

MozCon 2015 was fantastic! This year, we opened up the room for a few more attendees and to fit our growing staff, which meant 1,600 people showed up. Each year we work to bring our programming one step further with incredible speakers, diverse topics, and tons of tactics and tips for you.

What did attendees say?

We heard directly from 30% of MozCon attendees. Here’s what they had to say about the content:

What do I get in the bundle?

Our videos feature the presenter and their presentation side-by-side, so there’s no need to flip to another program to view a slide deck. You’ll have easy access to links and reference tools, and the videos even offer closed captioning for your enjoyment and ease of understanding.

For $299, the 2015 MozCon Video Bundle gives you instant access to:

27 videos (over 15 hours) from MozCon 2015
Stream or download the videos to your computer, tablet, phone, phablet, or whatever you’ve got handy
Downloadable slide decks for all presentations

Bonus! A free full session from 2015!

Because some sessions are just too good to hide behind a paywall. Sample what the conference is all about with a full session from Cara Harshman about personalization on the web:

Surprised and excited to see these videos so early? Huge thanks is due to the Moz team for working hard to process, build, program, write, design, and do all the necessaries to make these happen. You’re the best!

Still not convinced you want the videos? Watch the preview for the Sherlock Christmas Special. Want to attend the live show? Buy your early bird ticket for MozCon 2016. We’ve sold out the conference for the last five years running, so grab your ticket now!

Source: moz

August 5, 2015 by The Traffic Wizard on SEO

SearchCap: Google Search Analytics API, Bing Ads App, AdWords Report Editor & Panda

Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the Web.

From Search Engine Land:

Study: Non-Mobile-Friendly Sites Disappearing From Top Google Results
Remarkably there are many brands and companies that still don’t have mobile-friendly sites. According to a new study from Moovweb there are clear visibility and ranking consequences, in addition to usability consequences. April 21 was the formal date when Google’s Mobile-Friendly Algorithm kicked in. Since then Moovweb has tracked “1,000 important e-commerce keywords in a […]
The Mobile Opportunity for Local and Multi-Location Businesses- August 11 Webcast
Stop struggling with desktop optimization—the real action now and in future is in mobile.
AdWords Drag-And-Drop Report Editor Officially Rolling Out
Make pivot tables and charts on the fly. Full rollout is expected to take months.
35 Ways To Make Your Site Search Friendly Before You Hire An SEO
Columnist Stoney deGeyter reviews some of the elements of website design and development that make it easier to perform search engine optimization later on.
Google Panda 4.2 FAQs: We Interviewed Google On The Latest Panda Update
There are many questions about the latest Google Panda update, Panda 4.2. Here are some answers for you from our talk with Google.
The Minimum Quality Score That Can Save You Money In AdWords
How does your Quality Score affect your cost per click in AdWords? To find out, columnist Frederick Vallaeys explores the relationship between Quality Score and first page bid estimates.
Bing Ads iOS App Gets An Update, Goes Global & Android App Is On The Way
Latest iOS app is now available globally with more features. Team is looking for Android app pilot testers.
Google Business Views To Change To Street View Trusted
Google will be dropping many of the street view panoramas (photo spheres) in the upcoming weeks but promises other ways to discover these images.
Confirmed: Google’s New Search Analytics Search Console API Now Available
As expected, Google has officially launched the Search Console Search Analytics API. You can now get your keyword data through this new API.
When Was The First Traffic Light Installed? Google Logo Marks Electric Traffic Signal’s 101st Anniversary
Now that it’s in the car business, Google is celebrating the first electric light installed in Cleveland, Ohio, with a Doodle designed by Nate Swinehart.
Microsoft Makes It Harder To Break Up With Bing In Windows 10, Critics Cry Foul
Windows 10 (so far) is a hit for Microsoft. It has been well reviewed, it’s free, and it already has millions of downloads. It also makes IE successor Edge the browser default and makes it harder to switch away from Bing as your default search engine. There are roughly 1.5 billion Windows PC users around […]
Google To Launch New Search Console API As Early As Tomorrow
Google is expected to announce a new API for the Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools) tomorrow morning.

Recent Headlines From Marketing Land, Our Sister Site Dedicated To Internet Marketing:

Search News From Around The Web:

Industry

Yelp’s Consumer Protection Initiative: ProPublica Partnership Brings Medical Info to Yelp, Yelp Official Blog
Zillow beats expectations with $171M revenue in Q2 as Trulia acquisition starts to pay off, GeekWire

Local & Maps

Google Testing Local Pack Without Google+ Links, Search Engine Roundtable

Link Building

Link Miner: On Page Link Analyzer, Majestic Blog

SEO

Google search ranking factors 2015 revealed in latest study, vertical-leap.uk
Google Tip: Don’t NoIndex Your Site When You Are On Vacation, Search Engine Roundtable
The Step-by-Step Guide to Fixing Any Google Penalty , quicksprout.com

SEM / Paid Search

7 Questions You Should Ask When Creating PPC Reports, PPC Hero
An easier way to create Display campaigns, Inside AdWords
The Differences Between Text Ads, PLAs & Display Ads, digitalthirdcoast.net

Search Marketing

How to Move Your Site to SSL, Search Engine People

The post SearchCap: Google Search Analytics API, Bing Ads App, AdWords Report Editor & Panda appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Source: SEL

August 5, 2015 by The Traffic Wizard on Marketing

5 Blog Topics to Stop Rehashing Immediately

You work hard to create blog content that people actually want to read. You know it’s an important part of your content marketing efforts that will bring in new customers over time.

But there are a few topics that online readers have seen time and time again—and at this point, they’re just becoming noise.

An Algoso survey found that 88% of people read blogs because they want analysis and opinions, while 74% wanted information on trends within a sector or to learn from others’ experiences.

Source

In order to satisfy those readers’ driving desires, you need to write blog content that says something new, interesting, and insightful—not regurgitates what everyone else has already said.

Here are 5 topics that have been overdone (and that you should steer clear from.)

1. The 10 Best X

With more than 4.9 billion search results for this phrase, it’s safe to say that we’ve all seen our fair share of top 10 lists.

For example: The 10 Best Ways to Get More Followers on Twitter or The 10 Best Ways to Grow Your Email List

The trouble with these posts is that they strive for quantity—not quality—by providing only surface level information rather than taking a deep dive into one particular point.

When we look at a top 10 blog post, we don’t learn much beyond what they are. There’s often no how that explains what makes them qualified to be on this top 10 list or that walks you through how you could emulate what made it so successful.

Plus, research shows that the average content length for a top-ranking site in Google has at least 2,000 words. Therefore, it’s clear that Google defines higher quality content as posts that go into greater detail.

Unfortunately, the average top 10 post falls far short of that minimum. Bottom line: There’s not a lot you can teach in that few words.

Try this instead: Rather than throwing together a quick top 10 post, pick the best example on the list and pick apart what makes it work so well. Create a piece of content like ‘The One Best X to do X’ that teaches the reader something valuable using this singular example—and leave the rest of the top 10 list behind.

2. How X is Like X

Another overdone blog topic is the comparison post that finds some creative similarity between two concepts and trys to spin it into something interesting. There are 1 billion search results for this blog topic—so comparison posts have had a good run.

For example: How Your Business is Like a Computer Processor or How Your Marketing Funnel is Like Baking a Cake

It sounds like a good idea, but is there real substance for the reader that can come from such a far-fetched comparison? Is it going to teach them something they didn’t already know?

Posts that try to use comparisons to teach a concept often miss the mark because the writer is so focused on staying on track with the theme. The content becomes idea-centric rather than based in research, and while it might make for a clever headline, the content itself comes out weak.

The other obstacle that arises from posts that pivot on similarities between concepts or products is that they lack those essential personal opinions and experiences that offer unique insight—which the Algoso survey showed was a top motivator for blog readers.

Try this instead: Comparisons can be powerful when used to demonstrate a finding that others can implement, too. Try something like ‘What We Can Learn from Testing A Against B’ that shows how a test proved that one method was more effective than another.

ContentVerve uses this to effectively showcase results of A/B testing and compares two versions side by side to illustrate the positive impact.

Source

3. News Round-Ups

There are more than 350M search results for news round-ups, but how many of them offer something new to the conversation?

When it comes to these news round-up posts, they often just repeat information that’s already been shared elsewhere and leave out personal insight.

For example: Healthcare News Round-Up for August 2015 or Marketing News Round-Up: The Things You Missed

For the reader, there’s simply not much value. Number one: They may have already read the news elsewhere, so when they encounter it on your blog with no accompanying input, it feels disappointing. When someone visits your blog, they want to hear from you—not from someone else.

Number two: News round-ups also frequently include quote-heavy content that really tells the reader, “Hey, I didn’t have the story, but someone else did.” Is that a message you want to send to your readers?

Try this instead: Rather than just repackaging existing information, try a topic like ‘Highlights of X and What You Can Learn From It.’ This way, you’re still sharing the important information, but you’re doing the legwork for the reader and telling them what they need to read between the lines. Or, share what you know from your past experiences—and weigh in with some fresh perspective.

4. Why X is Cliché/Wrong/Bad

Lots of bloggers and content marketers like to take to the pulpit and express their opinions on business issues, launching lofty statements like, “X is wrong and here’s why.”

For example: Why Blogging is Bad for Your Business or Why Client Thank You Notes are Cliché

Don’t believe me? Check the 1B search results that come up for that title.

Opinion and persuasion are definitely key elements to a great blog post. However, when writers make these bold claims, they often forget to back them up with research, case studies, or experience. They’re purely opinion-based—and there’s where things get tricky.

Commentary that’s not backed in tangible proof can read as trivial for the audience, and can put you in a position to play defense with people who disagree. What might sound like an emotionally charged blog post that you’re really passionate about could actually do harm for your personal brand if you don’t have the ethos and logos to accompany your claims.

Additionally, these posts often lack a strong CTA for the reader. If blogging is part of your content marketing strategy and you throw in an opinion piece that’s missing a strong, relevant CTA, you can cause serious damage to your sales funnel.

Try this instead: Make bold claims by showcasing interesting case studies you conducted that include screenshots, testing methods, and real numbers that prove your point. Think more along the lines of ‘How We Tested (strategy) to Discover You Should Use A Over B’.

5. The Year in Review

999M ‘year in review’ posts exist already.

For example: The Year in Review: Looking Back at My Business in 2015 or Recap: The Year in Review and What I Accomplished

[Insert: GoogleResults.png]

Do we need another? Probably not. Here’s why:

Reflection posts that simply recap the past 365 days don’t typically offer the reader any new insight and instead just recycle ideas, lessons, and events you’ve already talked about.

More importantly, though, think about what motivates your audience to visit your blog in the first place. They might like your writing style and online persona, but really, they want to learn something they can use for themselves.

If you’re just looking back on what you accomplished this year and not showcasing an in-depth lesson you took away from it—you’re probably just rambling.

Try this instead: It’s okay to share what you learned over the past year, but remember to focus in on one key theme. A topic like ‘The Most Important X I Learned in (year) That Helped My Business’ gives the reader serious value—you’re squeezing the best lesson you learned over a the course of a whole year and handing it to them with a pretty bow.

Conclusion

With millions of pieces of content that already exist on the Internet, the blog posts you write need to stand out, provide value, and be backed in research—not pure opinion.

Gary Vaynerchuk said that when it comes to what you’re producing on the Internet, “Someone is always watching.” Readers can see when you’re not giving a solid effort to your blogs and each time you deliver less-than insightful blog posts, you chip away at the trust and authority you’ve earned with your audience.

Stop rehashing these overdone blog topics and start being a unique voice in the noisy world of content.

About the Author: Kaleigh Moore is a social media consultant and copywriter who helps SaaS companies craft intelligent content with a charming human element. Visit her website or follow her on Twitter.

Source: KISS

August 4, 2015 by The Traffic Wizard on Business

A Practical Guide to Content and Its Metrics

Posted by gfiorelli1

A small disclaimer:

Before you start reading, I want to say that I am not an analytics expert per se, but a strategic SEO and digital marketing consultant. On the other hand, in my daily work of auditing and designing holistic digital marketing strategies, I deal a lot with Analytics in order to understand my clients’ gaps and opportunities.

For that reason, what you are going to read isn’t an “ultimate guide,” but instead my personal and practical guide to content and its metrics, filled with links to useful resources that helped me solving the big contents’ metric mystery. I happily expect to see your ideas in the comments.

The difference between content and formats

One of the hardest things to measure is content effectiveness, mostly because there exists great confusion about its changing nature and purpose. One common problem is thinking of “content” and “formats” as synonyms, which leads to frustration and, with the wrong scaling processes present, may also lead to Google disasters.

What is the difference between content and formats?

Content is any message a brand/person delivers to an audience;
Formats are the specific ways a brand/person can deliver that message (e.g. data visualizations, written content, images/photos, video, etc.).

Just to be clear: We engage and eventually share the ideas and emotions that content represents, not its formats. Formats are just the clothing we choose for our content, and keeping the fashion metaphor, some ways of dressing are better than others for making a message more explicit.

Strategy, as in everything in marketing, also plays a very important role when it comes to content.

It is during the strategic phase that we attempt to understand (both thanks to our own site analysis and competitive analysis of others’ sites) if our content is responding to our audience’s interests and needs, and also to understand what metrics we must choose in order to assess its success or failure.

Paraphrasing an old Pirelli commercial tagline: Content without strategy is nothing.

Strategy: Starting with why/how/what

When we are building a content strategy, we should ask ourselves (and our clients and CMOs) these classic questions:

Why does the brand exist?
How does the brand solidify its “why?”
What specific tactics will the brand use for successfully developing the “how?”

Only when we have those answers can we understand the goals of our content, what metrics to consider, and how to calculate them.

Let use an example every Mozzer can understand.

Why does Moz exist?

The answer is in its tagline:

Inbound marketing is complicated. Moz’s software makes it easy.

How does Moz solidify its “why?”

Moz produces a series of tools, which help marketers in auditing, monitoring and taking insightful decisions about their web marketing projects.
Moreover, Moz creates and publishes content, which aims to educate marketers to do their jobs better.

If you notice, we can already pick out a couple of generic goals here:

Leads > subscriptions;
Awareness (that may ultimately drive leads).

What specific tactics does Moz use for successfully achieving its main goals?

Considering the nature of the two main goals we clarified above, we can find content tactics covering all the areas of the so-called content matrix.

Some classic content matrix models are the ones developed by Distilled (in the image above) and Smart Insights and First 10, but it is a good idea to develop your own based on the insights you may have about your specific industry niche.

The things Moz does are many, so I am presenting an incomplete list here.

In the “Purchase” side and with conversion and persuasion as end goals:

Home page and “Products” section of Moz.com (we can define them as “organic landing pages”);
Content about tools
- Free tools;
- Pro tools (which are substantially free for a 30-day trial period).
CPC landing pages;
Price page with testimonials;
“About” section;
Events sponsorship.

In the “Awareness” side and with educational and entertainment (or pure engagement) purposes:

The blogs (both the main blog and UGC);
The “Learn and Connect” section, which includes the Q&A;
Guides;
Games (The SEO Expert Quiz can surely be considered a game);
Webinars;
Social media publishing;
Email marketing
Live events (MozCon and LocalUp, but also the events where Moz Staff is present with one or more speakers).

Once we have the content inventory of our web site, we can relatively easily identify the specific goals for the different pieces of content, and of the single type of content we own and will create.

I will usually not consider content like tools, sponsorship, or live events, because even though content surely plays a role in their goals’ achievement, there are also other factors like user satisfaction and serendipity involved which are not directly related to content itself or cannot be easily measured.

Measuring landing/conversion pages’ content

This may be the easier kind of content to measure, because it is deeply related to the more general measures of leads and conversions, and it is also strongly related to everything CRO.

We can measure the effectiveness of our landing/conversion pages’ content easily with Google Analytics, especially if we remember to implement content grouping (here’s the official Google guide) and follow the suggestions Jeff Sauer offered in this post on Moz.

We can find another great resource and practical suggestions in this older (but still valid) post by Justin Cutroni: How to Use Google Analytics Content Grouping: 4 Business Examples. The example Justin offers about Patagonia.com is particularly interesting, because it is explicitly about product pages.

On the other hand, we should always remember that the default conversion rate metric should not be taken as the only metric to incorporate into decision-making; the same is true when it comes to content performance and optimization. In fact, as Dan Barker said once, the better we segment our analysis the better we can understand the performance of our money pages, give a better meaning to the conversion rate value and, therefore, correct and improve our sales and leads.

Good examples of segmentation are:

Conversions per returning visitor vs new visitor;
Conversions per type of visitor based on demographic data;
Conversions per channel/device.

These segmented metrics are fundamental for developing A/B tests with our content.

Here are some examples of A/B tests for landing/conversion pages’ content:

Title tags and meta description A/B tests (yes, title tags and meta descriptions are content too, and they have a fundamental role in CTR and “first impressions”);
Prominent presence of testimonials vs. a more discreet one;
Tone of voice used in the product description (copywriting experiment);
Product slideshow vs. video.

Here are a few additional sources about CRO and content, surely better than me for inspiring you in this specific field:

Measuring on-site “editorial” content

Here is where things start getting a little more complicated.

Blog posts, guides, white papers, and similar content usually do not have a conversion/lead nature, at leastnot directly. Usually their goals are more intangible ones, such as creating awareness, likability, trust, and authority.

In other cases, then, this kind of content also serves the objective of creating and maintaining an active community, as it does in the case of Moz. I tend to consider this a subset, though, because in many niches creating a community is not a top priority. Or, even if it is, it does not offer a reliable flux of “signals” so as to appropriately measure the effectiveness of our content because of pure lack of statistical evidence.

A good starting place is measuring the so-called consumption metrics.

Again, the ideal is to implement content grouping in Google Analytics (see the video above), because that way we can segment every different kind of editorial content.

For instance, if we have a blog, not only we can create a group for it, but we can also create

As many groups as there are categories and tags on our blog;
groups by average length of the posts;
groups per the kind of prominent formats used (video posts like Moz’s Whiteboard Fridays, infographics, long-form, etc.).

This are just three examples; think about your own measuring needs and the nature of your content, and you will come out with other ideas for content groupings.

The following are basic metrics that you’ll need to consider when measuring your editorial content:

Pageviews / Unique Pageviews
Pages / Session
Time on Page

The ideal is to analyze these metrics at least with these secondary levels:

Medium / Sources, so you can understand what channel contributed the most to your content visibility. Remember, though, that dark search/social is a reality that can screw up your metrics (check out Marshall Simmonds’ deck from MozCon 2015);
User Type, so to see what percent of the Pageviews is due to returning visitors (a good indicator of the level of trust and authority our content has) and new ones (which indicates the ability our content has to attract new potentially long-lasting readers);
Mobile, which is useful in understanding the environments in which our users mostly interact with our content, and how we have to optimize its experience depending on the device used, hence helping making our content more memorable.

You surely can have fun also analyzing your content’s performance by segmenting them per demographic indicators. For instance, it may be interesting to see what affinity categories of your readers there are, depending on the categorization used in your blog and that you have replicated in your content grouping. This, in fact, can help us in better understanding the personas composing our audience, and so refining the targeting of our content.

As you can see, I did not mention bounce rate as a metric to consider, and there is a reason for that: Bounce rate is tricky, and its misinterpretation can lead to bad decisions.

Instead of bounce rate, when it comes to editorial content (and blog posts in particular), I prefer to consider scroll completion, a metric we can retrieve using Tag Manager (see this post by Optimize Smart).

Finally, especially if you also grouped content for outstanding format used (video, embedded SlideShare, etc.), you will need to retrieve users’ interactions through Tag Manager. However, if you really want to dig into the analysis of how that content is consumed by users, you will need to export your Analytics data and then combine it with data from external sources, like YouTube Analytics, SlideShare Analytics, etc.

The more we share, the more we have. This is also true in Marketing.

Consumption metrics, though, are not enough in order to understand the performance of your content, especially if you strongly rely on a community and one of the content objectives is creating and growing a community around your brand.

I am talking of the so-called sharing metrics:

Social shares (Likes, Tweets, Pins, etc.);
Inbound links;
Un-linked mentions
Email forwarding.

All this can be tracked and measured (e.g.: social shares, mentions on web sites or on social).

I usually add comments into these Metrics, because of the social nature comments have. Again, thanks to Tag Manager, you can easily tag when someone clicks on the “add comment” button.

A final metric we should always consider is the page value. As Google itself explains in that Help Page:

Page value is a measure of influence. It’s a single number that can help you better understand which pages on your site drive conversions and revenue. Pages with a high Page Value are more influential than pages with a low Page Value [Page Value is also shown for groups of content].

The combined analysis of consumption and social metrics can offer us a very granular understanding of how our content is performing, therefore how to optimize our strategy and/or how to start conducting A/B tests.

On the other hand, such a granular vision is not the ideal for reporting, especially if we have to report to a board of directors and not to our in-house or in-agency counterpart.

In that case being able to resume all these metrics (or the most relevant ones) in just one metric is very useful.

How to do it? My suggestion is to follow (and adapt to your own needs) the methodology used by the Moz editorial team and described in this post by Trevor Klein.

What about the ROI of editorial content? Don’t give up; I’ll talk about it below.

Measuring the ROI of content marketing and content-based link building campaigns

Theoretically measuring the ROI of something is relatively easy:

(Return – Investment) / Investment = ROI.

However the difficulty is not in that formula itself, but in the values used in that formula.

How to calculate the investment value?

Usually we have a given budget assigned for our content marketing and/or content-based campaigns. If that is the case, perfect! We have a figure to use for the investment value.

A complete different situation is when we must present a budget proposal and/or assign part of the budget to each campaign in a balanced and considered way.

In this post by Caroline Gilbert for Siege Media you can find great suggestions about how to calculate a content marketing budget, but I would like to present mine, too, which is based on competitive analysis.

Here’s what I do:

Identify the distinct competitors which created content related to what we will target with our campaign. I rely on both SERP analysis (i.e.: using the Keyword Difficulty Tool by Moz) and information we can retrieve with a “keyword search” on Buzzsumo.
Retrieve all meaningful content metrics:
- Links (another reason why I use the Keyword Difficulty Tool);
- Social shares per kind of social network (these are available from BuzzSumo). Remember that some of these social shares can be tallied by sponsored content (check this Social Media Explorer post about how to do Facebook competitive analysis).
- Estimated traffic to the content’s URL (data retrieved via SimilarWeb).
Assign a monetary value to the metrics retrieved.
Calculate the competitors’ potential investment value.
Calculate the median investment value of all the competitors.
Consider the delta between what the client/company invested in content marketing (or link building, if it is moving from classic old link building to modern link earning) before, as well as the median investment value of the competitors.
Calculate and propose the content marketing / content-based campaign’s value in a range which goes from “minimum viable budget” to “ideal.”

Reality teaches us that the proposed investment is not the same than the real investment, but at least we then have some data for proposing it and not just a gut feeling. However, we must be prepared to work with budgets that are more on the “minimum viable” side than on the ideal one.

How to calculate revenue?

You can find a good number of ROI calculators, but I particularly like the Fractl one, because it is very easy to understand and use.

Their general philosophy is to calculate ROI in terms of how much traffic, links, and social shares the content itself has generated organically, hence how much it helped saving in paid promotion.

If you look at it, it reminds the methodology I described above (points 1 to 7).

However, when it comes to social shares, you should avoid the classic mistake of considering only the social shares directly generated by the page your content has been published.

For instance, let’s take the Idioms of the World campaigns Verve Search did for HotelClub.com and which won the European Search Awards.

If we we look only at its own social share metrics, we will have just a partial picture:

Instead, if we see what are the social shares metrics of the pages that linked and talked about it, we will have the complete picture.

We can use (again) BuzzSumo for retrieving this data (also using its Content Analysis feature), or using URL Profiler.

As you can imagine, you can calculate the ROI of your editorial content using the same methodology.

Obviously the Fractl ROI calculator is far from being perfect, as it does not consider the offline repercussion a content campaign may have (the Idioms of the World campaign was organically published in a outstanding placement on The Guardian’s paper version, for instance), but it is a solid base for crafting your own ROI calculation.

Conclusions

So, we have arrived at the end of this personal guide about content and its metrics.

Remember these important things:

Don’t be data driven, be data informed;
Think strategically, act tactically;
Content’s metrics vary depending on the goals of content itself.

Source: moz

August 4, 2015 by The Traffic Wizard on SEO

Google To Launch New Search Console API As Early As Tomorrow

Search Engine Land has learned that Google is expected to launch a brand new Google Search Console, formerly Google Webmaster Tools, API. This has actually been expected for some time, but our sources say it was suppose to go live today but the launch date was pushed to tomorrow morning instead.

Google has been pulling away features from the old API for some time. John Mueller at Google hinted to that a new API was coming several times and that day is coming really soon now. John also was asking webmasters for feedback on what they’d like to see in the API. Plus Google asked for beta testers for the API back in March.

What We Know About the Search Console API Announcement

We know that Google plans on officially announcing the new API tomorrow. When Google announces the API, anyone can begin using it, you won’t need to be “whitelisted” to gain access to it. The old CSV download method of pulling data from the Google Search Console will still exist for some time and be supported for some time.

Google also has a private forum where beta testers are sharing feedback with Google on this API and that forum will remain open for the next “few months” according to our source.

Our source also tells us the features and options within the API by far exceeds the feature set within the old API.

So keep an eye on the Google Webmaster Blog and the Google Developer center for updates.

The post Google To Launch New Search Console API As Early As Tomorrow appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Source: SEL

August 4, 2015 by The Traffic Wizard on Marketing

Search Engine Ranking is Not The Point – Check These Progress Signals Instead

We all want to show up higher in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page). That’s the name of the game. Most clients will see a rise in ranking and love you for it. However, have you really completed your job as a web marketer by improving your client’s key terms positions?

More often than most people think, a rise in ranking does not improve the bottom line. In fact, some clients will report that despite a rise in ranking, an improvement in calls/sales have yet to come.

The truth is that improving ranking does not necessarily improve sales.

Of course we want to improve our ranking, and in order to do this, we take a look at keywords, and their ranking data. However, while there is no question about the value of checking a set of keywords against the SERP and finding out their positioning, this information is simply over rated… and I’ll explain why.

Knowing the rankings for a set of keywords doesn’t really give you an idea of performance, it’s just a number. Not once, but many times I have witnessed keywords with high commerciality and decent search volume entering the performance zone (position 1-5), with little to no improvement. For the experienced readers, this is probably starting to sound familiar.

Improvement can be defined as: ranking increase, additional traffic, more conversions, better CTR, impressions, etc. However, some improvements are only stepping stones to end goals.

We should treat some improvements as signals indicating that we are on the right track, and others as actual success metrics – working towards reaching our goals. With this in mind, I am going to discuss discovering a website’s high ranking keywords and their signals, and more importantly, understanding how to utilize them for perusing success metrics (conversions goals).

Differentiating Signals vs. Success Metrics

Let’s pause for a second…. I know some of you might think that conversions on a website are affected from a range of metrics that sometimes SEO experts have no control of (no budget to improve code/design, bad sales copy, wrong call to action, bad offer all together, etc). So how can goal completions be an indication? To start, you are right! However, even though you still might not be able to reach the full potential of a website due to barriers, you should be able to see some incline with your success metrics, and that’s enough to prove that what you are doing is working. Getting more or less results is probably out of your hands if you don’t have access/resources to improve on-page conversion metrics as part of what you do.

Okay, now going back to signal/success metrics. Here are the metrics I review when promoting a business. I use Ignitur to automate the process, but you can do this on excel as well. Signals are just direction pointers, and the success metrics are what I’m really aiming for:

Signal – Impressions
Signal – CTR
Signal – Traffic
Signal – Ranking
Success metric – Goal completion

You should know that you might not find all of this data unless you have a PPC campaign in place, which if that isn’t the case, you will need to mine this information somewhere else. My method has helped me rely less on scraped keyword ranking data and more on what’s important to improve my client’s bottom line using Google Webmaster Tools (WMT).

Instead of checking the positioning of a set of keywords I/the client came up with, I compare them to the search terms list in Google Webmaster Tools to see what I’m already ranking for.

Example

Keyword: [Target Keyword]

I’m already ranking for:

Best [Target Keyword] in Phoenix AZ
Where to find [Target Keyword] in Phoenix
Buy [Target Keyword] near 85028
[Target Keyword] that sell also Ocean Breeze Orchids
Pictures of [Target Keyword]
[Target Keyword] (exact match)

You get the idea, right? I compare the core key terms I want to rank for as Phrase Match with what Google indicates I’m already ranking for. Aha moment! You now have a list of terms that your website is showing up for in the SERP that you most likely didn’t know about. You can do the same thing for each core keyword on your list, until you have a long list of keyword versions (and some exact match) of your core ones.

How To Do This Screening in Webmaster Tools?

Download the list of queries from Google Webmaster Tools.

Select ‘Search Traffic’ -> ‘Search Analytics’ -> click ‘Download’ on the bottom. Don’t forget to check all metric options available:

Note: this table provides 1000 records. Unless you are an eCommerce store with many products, that should be more than enough. However, and for probably a limited time (until Google takes this option out), Google gives the option to see up to 10,000 search queries if you just click the link ‘Go back to the old search queries report’.

Next…

Open the excel file and click CTRL F. Input your core keyword, click ‘replace’ -> click ‘options’ -> click ‘format’ -> click ‘fill’ -> choose the color green -> Click ‘ok’ and click ‘Replace All’. Now, all key terms containing your core keyword will be highlighted. Repeat for all keywords. (This works with excel on a PC, not a Mac)

What Do You Do With These Keywords?

The information you just downloaded and sorted has all the signals we talked about above:

Signal – Impressions
Signal – CTR
Signal – Traffic
Signal – Ranking

I will talk about the success metric in a little bit…

Actions You Should Take:

High ranking + Low CTR/Clicks – Improve meta description
High ranking + Low Impressions – Improve page relevancy
High CTR + Low Clicks/ Impressions – Make sure your keyword is in the title
High Impressions + Low Clicks – Improve page engagement and all relevancy metrics

Any combination of Low + Low means that the work needed is beyond a few tweaks.

When you are done with all content updates, wait for the next few crawls, review and adjust. You now probably see why just checking ranking for a list of keywords might feel like a half-way job. There was no direction on which actions to take and why. Right now you have your signal metrics to give you a clear direction.

Another immediate action you can take to improve your organic presence is using the metrics and actions above. Use the option in WMT to see ‘Pages’ in search metrics:

The results will display a table of URLs. Simply try to improve anything ranking on pages 2 to 5 (will show in the table positions 10.1 to 50 in the SERP. These pages have more chances of improving with a few minor tweaks, as opposed to pages 5 and down which indicate that relevancy level need more than a few content changes to bring them up in ranking.

Why Do I Need to Wait For a Few Crawls?

If you are working on inner pages, you want to make sure you give Google enough time to update its index. Alternatively, you can use the option in WMT ‘Fetch as Google’ in order to expedite this process.

Let’s Go Even Further and Separate Between Brand and Non-Brand Keywords

Simply continue working on the same excel file, but do your searches and sort by company name/ business owner name and color the cells in a different color. In the example below, the non-brand keywords are highlighted in green, and the brand keywords are highlighted in red.

Do I Still Need To Do Keyword Research?

Of course you do! Remember in the movie Stargate when the lab guy explains that for space travel you need six points to define the destination and another one to define the point of origin? (By the way, this is Hollywood misinterpretation – you only need three to define the destination and one for the origin…just like GPS).

Following this example, the core keywords you come up with after your keyword research are your coordinates to the destination. Your origin is the current status of those keywords – the signals I talked about earlier. Without one or the other, there really can’t prove any progress. Sadly, it is common to only check ranking on core keywords without really knowing the other important metrics needed to start moving the spaceship to its destination.

Do I Still Need to Check Ranking?

Not really, however, I found it very difficult to let others see it through this perspective, so in some cases, I still provide this data alongside all the goodies above. It simply keeps everybody happy.

What About the Success Metric?

Success metrics are merely Conversion Goals. This is a whole different topic, but I will still cover some of the essentials. You can bring the horse to the river, but you cannot force it to drink! As an SEO specialist, I feel responsible to bring relevant traffic to my client’s website, as well as conversions, but I cannot force a purchase.

Example #1:
I define a user conversion when a subscriber signed up for his 30-day software trial. It is not my responsibility to convert them from free subscribers to paying clients.

Example #2:
I define a user conversion on a hotel’s website when someone clicked ‘Book Now’. It is not my responsibility to convert them from prospects to vacationers (maybe the offer is bad…).

Example #3:
I define a user conversion when a user fills out a form or calls the company. It is not my responsibility to actually sell their services over the phone.

You are probably asking ‘what about eCommerce websites where conversions are actual sales?’ Excellent point! Well, it really is not different from the examples above. If the client decides to sell car parts 25% above suggested drop-shipping retail value instead of 15%, he will probably have less sales, but if you bring him relevant traffic, you will still be able to show him some improvement. However, it would be smart to define conversion goals from the start that are not actual website sales, where you have less control of. Here are a few ideas:

Increase email subscribers
Download discount coupon
Product searches on the website
Create an account
Calls (you can use a call tracking number)

To Sum It Up

Use Google WMT search metrics data to improve your SEO results. WMT provides 90 days of data. You can align your testing and tweaking strategy, and make adjustments every quarter according to the trends.

About the Author: Asher Elran is a practical software engineer and a marketing specialist. He is the CEO at Dynamic Search and founder of Web Ethics.

Source: KISS