SEO Ideas on SEO india

5 Of Our Best Infographics From 2014

Wed, 31 Dec 2014 18:25:25 +0000

2014 has definitely been the year of the infographic, we are still finding that creating and promoting them is the very best way to get loads of traffic and high quality editorial links for our customers. Throughout the year we have researched, designed and marketed around 20 infographics in total and the majority of them have done extremely well, got lots of traffic and been featured on some amazing blogs and news websites. Because it is the end of 2014 I have put together this blog post providing some information about what are in my opinion the five best infographics we have done this year including details of the traffic, social votes and links they received. Enjoy the blog post and please let me know which one you think is the best in the comments.

1. The Periodic Table of Fictional Minerals

This is definitely our most successful infographic from 2014 that we made for the sheet metal website called Buy Metal Online. The infographic which displays made up minerals has had about 10,000 visitors so far, has 660 Facebook shares and has been linked to by well over 40 quality blogs and news websites. Two of the top sites that the infographic was published on are the Washington Post and Fast Company.

To view the full size infographic click here

2. Superhero Dating Profiles

We created this fun infographic for the online dating website called FreeDating.co.uk featuring made up online dating profiles for some of our favourite superheroes including Tony Stark, Bruce Wayne, Clark Kent, Peter Parker and James Howlett. The infographic did fairly well on traffic, got over 100 FB likes and tweets and got over 30 blog links. The infographic was displayed on some great blogs like Geeks are Sexy and Holy Kaw.

To view the full infographic click here

3. Iconic Cars from Film and Television

We promoted this Hollywood cars infographic in July of this year for the registration plate website called Simply Show Plates. The infographic is basically original illustrations of some of the coolest cars from movies and TV shows like the Knight Rider car and the Ghostbusters car. The piece has had over 12,000 visitors so far, got over 200 Facebook shares and 30 blog links. The people at infographic site Visual.ly must have liked it as they mentioned it in their newsletter and it also got featured on blogs like Broadsheet.ie and Mighty Mega.

To view the full infographic click here

4. Superhero Skin

We made this good looking superhero skin graphic for the skincare website called Beauty Flash in November and it really took off. The infographic offers information about superheroes with the toughest and most unique skin including a list of strengths and weaknesses for each one. The infographic really excelled in gaining links and was distributed on over 35 quality blogs including nerd blogs like GeekTyrant and movie blogs like /Film.

To view the full infographic click here

5. How to Zombie Proof Your Shed

We launched this zombie-proofing one just before Halloween on the new shed review website called What Shed. The infographic has an awesome header which you can see above and then provides an illustration of a typical shed including information about the changes you would have to do to help make it more Zombie proof, such as digging a trench around it and installing a security camera. The piece got featured on the number 1 infographic blog Cool Infographics and popular movie blog Screenrant.

To view the full infographic click here

Posted in Social Media News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.

The post 5 Of Our Best Infographics From 2014 appeared first on The SEO Company - UK Search Engine Optimisation.

Top 5 Infographic Promotion Guides

Fri, 27 Sep 2013 11:12:57 +0000

Here is a collection of some of the best infographic promotion guides that I have been able to find around the internet. If you are looking for information on how to successfully promote an infographic for your website then you should definitely check these out. Please let me know which is your favourite by leaving a comment or by posting on Facebook or twitter. Enjoy, then go and create great infographics and get lots of traffic and links.

1/ Infographic Promotion – The Ultimate Guide

An in depth guide to infographic promotion from one of the best infographic design agencies in the UK: DesignBySoap Ltd. The article is around 6,000 words long and is broken down into 11 different sections including The Importance of Content, Research and Design, Encourage Sharing and Engagement and more.

2/ The Definitive Guide to Writing and Promoting a Viral Infographic

I found this gem on one of my favourite SEO news blogs Search Engine Journal and it was written by a guy called Jayson DeMers. The 1st part of the article is about why you need a great concept, the 2nd part is about effective design and then finally there is information about marketing.

3/ 7 Awesome Tips for Promoting Your Infographics

This article was written by a good friend of mine called Tom Cumpsty who runs Sensible Internet based in Lancaster. Tom is fairly new to the game but he knows a great deal about design and marketing. The 1st tip: Link Your Sources and Contact Them works really well and is a great way to get links and social love.

4/ 5 Ways to Get Your Infographic to Go Viral

An excellent blog post written by SEO and linkbait legend Mr Neil Patel offering five great tips on how to get your infographic to really take off. My favourite section is the part about manual outreach, you need to send out lots of emails if you want to succeed in this game.

5/ 10 Ways to Promote an Infographic

Finally, this great article was written by social media guru Lilach Bullock who runs a UK based company called Socialable. I like the 1st part about optimising your infographic, if you include a search term you want to rank for in the title it gives you a good chance of getting targeted traffic from the search engines.

Posted in Social Media News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.

The post Top 5 Infographic Promotion Guides appeared first on The SEO Company - UK Search Engine Optimisation.

Sci Fi Infographic Goes Viral

Thu, 04 Jul 2013 15:02:36 +0000

I have just finished off promoting an infographic for Liverpool based Glow New Media about sci fi movies and TV shows that predicted the future and it has done incredibly well, it is probably the most successful infographic we have promoted so far. Now technically the infographic is not that good, there is not that much information and a lot more could have been done but it looked good and featured a lot of good movies that people like. Please take into consideration that this is only Glow’s 2nd attempt at an infographic:

What do you think? Not bad aye? Check out the results it got.

Traffic:

Since I started promotion the infographic has brought a steady flow of extra visitors to the Glow website, here is the number of unique visitors it has received each day since it went online.

25/06/2013 – 149
26/06/2013 – 550
27/06/2013 – 269
28/06/2013 – 372
29/06/2013 – 273
30/06/2013 – 129
01/07/2013 – 311
02/07/2013 – 563
03/07/2013 – 271

Not a massive amount, but I am confident that it will go on pulling in more traffic for some time.

Social:

When I 1st posted a link to it on Reddit some nerd came and wrote a massive paragraph about why it sucked and I didn’t think it was going to do well but it went on to do very well on a lot of social sites.

Reddit – 8 up votes
Stumbleupon – 4 likes
Facebook – 110 shares and 124 likes
Twitter – 66 tweets
Google + – 23 +1s
Visual.ly – 8 likes and 2 comments

All natural people. Facebook has sent the most traffic so far, just over 500 visits.

Links:

Now here is where the infographic really excelled and we all know it’s links that count.

All together I have been able to find 46 decent blogs that have linked through to the Glow New Media site so far thanks to the infographic and I am not including scrapers or anything like that. Here are 10 of the best ranked by the homepage PageRank score of the linking site.

Guy Kawasaki’s Blog – PageRank 7
Buzzfeed – PageRank 7
French Gizmodo – PageRank 6
TrendHunter – PageRank 6
SciFiNow – PageRank 5
TECHi – PageRank 5
BitRebels – PageRank 5
Zimo – PageRank 5
Xataka – PageRank 5
French Vanity Fair – PageRank 0

If you are interested and you want the full list of blogs then send me an email and I will send it to you.

The infographic also got published on the Blockbuster Blog but unfortunately the link is a nofollow – I will have to try and get them to change that.

The original infographic with embed code can be found here.

Posted in Link Building News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.

The post Sci Fi Infographic Goes Viral appeared first on The SEO Company - UK Search Engine Optimisation.

Top 10 Infographic Sites That Don’t Charge

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 19:19:55 +0000

Over the last 10 months or so I have really got into doing infographics for our clients. At the moment they are really popular and generally getting way more links then regular linkbaits.

By practicing I have got pretty good at marketing infographics for our clients and am normally getting very good results.

Submitting to infographic sites is a great way to kick start your infographic marketing campaign and there are plenty of them out there. The thing is that when I have been going through infographic site lists around the web I have had problems. The problems with the infographic sites on the lists are, either a/ the infographic site has been abandoned and not updated in months, or b/ the infographic site is very popular and so overwhelmed with submissions that it could take weeks or even months for your submission to be approved or finally c/ the owner of the infographic site wants cash (and sometimes a ridiculous amount) to review your submission.

Through hard work testing I have figured out which the best free to submit to infographic sites are that will actually approve your submission in a timely manner. Here are the top 10:

1/ visual.ly

Visual.ly is without a doubt the king of infographic sites with a whopping PageRank score of 7/10 and more traffic then any other infographic site. All you have to do is sign up, click on the submit page and then follow instructions. Your infographic will be published straight away with a link or two to your site.

2/ Design You Trust

This design blog and community is an excellent place to submit your infographic with a PageRank score of 6/10 and high levels of traffic. All you have to do is register for the site, login and then create a blog post including your infographic and a link to your site – the post will appear right away.

3/ Visual Loop

This infographic blog powered by Tumblr has a high PR score and publishes new infographics all of the time. The site is operated by a guy called Tiago and he has published every infographic I have ever sent him and got back to me with an email to let me know each time. All you have to do is send him an email to submit.

4/ Business 2 Community

Now this PageRank 5 business community blog isn’t strictly an infographic site but it does accept and publish lots of them as you can see here. Before you are able to submit you have to apply to be come a contributor, but it doesn’t take long, I was accepted within a day or two. You do need to write a 300+ word description to go with your infographic if you want it to be accepted.

5/ Infographic Directory

My own infographic blog that was hosted on a WordPress.com domain until recently. Because the site got quite popular and received almost a quarter of a million visitors in the 1st few months I decided to take it a bit more seriously and purchased Infographic-Directory.com. I try to approve a good few submissions each month.

6/ Love Infographics

This infographics community site is another one that you should submit to with a good PageRank score and traffic. All you have to do is register, sign in and then fill in the form including a link to your site to submit. Your infographic will appear on the homepage right away.

7/ The Infographics

This infographic blog is owned by a friend of mine called Tom from Sensible Internet and it has a high PageRank score of 4/10. All you have to do is fill in the short form on the submit page and Tom will aim to process your submission within a few days.

8/ Video Infographic

This one is run by infographic designer Brian from Nowsourcing and has a PageRank score of 3/10. All you have to do is click on the submit infographic button and fill in the form. Brian is quite choosy and only approves really decent infographics.

9/ Cool Daily Infographics

Another PageRank 3 infographic blog that publishes lots of infographics in a wide range of categories. Click on the submit page and fill in the form to complete your submission. Cool Daily Infographics has featured quite a lot of our work.

10/ Infographic File

This infographic site only has a PageRank score of 2/10 but it is very new so it may well go up in the future. To submit your work register, create a profile and then click on “upload an infographic+”. My submissions have all been approved very quickly.

I hope you find this post useful. Best of luck promoting your infographic.

Posted in Link Building News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.

The post Top 10 Infographic Sites That Don’t Charge appeared first on The SEO Company - UK Search Engine Optimisation.

SEO Site Ranking for Payday Loans on Google

Fri, 08 Jun 2012 13:18:26 +0000

About a week or so ago somebody managed to hack into this website and they were able to claim it in Google webmaster tools. They used the change of address tool to move my rankings to a payday loans website:

http://paydayloans-money.co.uk

And for a couple of days the payday loans site stole some of my rankings. As soon as I realised what had happened I cancelled the change of address, changed all of my passwords and updated my WordPress (my designer suspected that was how they got in).

Yesterday I was checking my stats and I noticed that I was getting hits on the keyword payday loans, I checked Google and saw I was ranking in the 11th position on Google for the term:

Over the past few days I have had 98 visitors from people searching for payday loans.

I was just checking my links with Bing webmaster tools today and I found hidden links pointing to this site. Whoever hacked this site has built hidden links to get it ranking for payday loans such as the one on this site in the code:

http://darcomic.com

So there you have it, make sure your wordpress is up to date and keep an eye out for unusual activity – negative SEO does happen.

Posted in SEO News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.

The post SEO Site Ranking for Payday Loans on Google appeared first on The SEO Company - UK Search Engine Optimisation.

7 Of Our Best Link Baits So Far According To StumbleUpon Hits

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 23:48:12 +0000

Image Source

Here are 7 of the best link baits our team have done so far ranked by the amount of traffic they have received from Stumbleupon, IMO the best social bookmarking site for getting traffic.

According to Google Analytics roughly 65% of the Stumbleupon hits convert into unique page views.

1/ 30 of the World’s Greatest Wedding Cakes

This link bait was published on the FreeDating.co.uk site on the 24th of May this year and is by far the most popular bait we have done so far. It’s basically just a collection of amazing wedding cakes that our linkbait guy was able to find around the web. It did incredible on a bunch of social sites and got linked to by loads of blogs.

Stumbleupon hits: 1.2 million

2/ 5 Creepy Beach Sculptures To Scare Off Sunbathers

This one was published on the Premier Holidays website back in December 2008 and everybody loved it. The post features 5 super creepy beach sculptures from round the World: the pictures are awesome. As soon as Neatorama linked to it the post went viral and attracted lots of links.

Stumbleupon hits: 506K

3/ How Not To Clean A Window

We put this one on the Master Cleaners blog on March the 1st this year and as soon as it got published the post set on fire. The linkbait is a selection of photographs of very brave or stupid people very dangerously cleaning windows. It hit the homepage of Meneame and Yahoo buzz and got plenty of links.

Stumbleupon hits: 477k

4/ 10 Beautifully Intricate Locks

We put this brilliant linkbait on the Locksmiths R Us blog on June the 16th this year and almost all of the people who commented on it really liked it. The blog post shows pictures of 10 old fashioned and beautiful locks and at the bottom there is a video. It got featured on some very popular blogs such as Dark Roasted Blend and Mental Floss.

Stumbleupon hits: 394k

5/ 10 Enchanting Tree Tunnels

I put this bait on a web directory I run called Killer Directory on the 6th of August 2009. It is simply 10 photographs of tree tunnels: streets or paths lined with trees where the branches have arched over to form natural tunnels. The post did really well on reddit and got linked to by quite a few blogs.

Stumbleupon hits: 89k

6/ Infuriating Wheelchair Ramps

This funny linkbait was put online on August the 9th 2010 on the RollaRamp wheelchair ramps blog and people on the social networks adored it. The article shows pictures of poorly designed wheelchair ramps that are difficult for people who are in wheelchairs to use. The bait did well and got lots of links from wheelchair bloggers.

Stumbleupon hits: 48k

7/ The World’s Most Unique Headphones

We did this one for online electronics store Crescent Electronics and it went online on the 6th of June earlier this year. The post shows photographs of the World’s most unique headphones including antler headphones, Star Wars headphones and more. The bait was quite successful and got linked to by some decent gadget blogs.

Stumbleupon hits: 38k

Like what you see? Want to get lots of social traffic and organic links for your site? Contact us today for a free proposal.

Posted in Social Media News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.

The post 7 Of Our Best Link Baits So Far According To StumbleUpon Hits appeared first on The SEO Company - UK Search Engine Optimisation.

Are Stumbleupon and Reddit Beating Digg on Traffic?

Thu, 28 Apr 2011 19:08:50 +0000

Just been having a look at the Alexa rankings of some of the top social news websites and was surprised to see that Stumbleupon and Reddit are both apparently getting more traffic then digg. Have a look at the graph below:

The results are very close so it is hard to tell who is getting the most by looking at the graph, but if you look at the traffic rank for each site you will see that Stumbleupon and Reddit are both supposed to be getting more traffic then digg. Here are the traffic ranks for each site:

Stumbleupon – 117th most popular site on the web.
Reddit – 135th most popular site on the web.
Digg – 138th most popular site on the web.

I am not surprised that Stumbleupon has come out on top, our linkbait articles always seem to get lots of traffic from the social bookmarking site, one of them that we did a few years ago has had almost half a million visitors from it and another that we did just a couple of months ago has already had 274K.

Up until a few months ago digg was way ahead of both of them in the Alexa rankings, I think the drop in traffic could be something to do with the site re-design that they did last August.

Posted in Social Media News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.

The post Are Stumbleupon and Reddit Beating Digg on Traffic? appeared first on The SEO Company - UK Search Engine Optimisation.

BT Now Offering SEO & PPC Services

Mon, 04 Jan 2010 14:32:23 +0000

I have just been checking out rankings and stuff this morning after a nice long Christmas break and I saw a Google ad for BT SearchSmart: PPC & SEO.

I checked it out and it is the real British Telecom offering SEO and PPC services, you can check the website out here.

BT are probably the biggest company ever to start selling SEO and PPC services.

Their SEO packages include most of the things you would expect to get with a basic SEO pack, with the option 1 for £74.99 per month + a £100 setup fee you get:

Keyword selection
Comprehensive website audit
Recommendations document
In depth telephone consultation
Unlimited email access to online marketing specialists
Google Site Map production and provision for upload
Monthly SEO reports position reporting
Best practice SEO documentation & guides

The only thing that’s missing is link building, however links are mentioned in their option 2 package which costs £349.99 per month + £100 setup:

All the features of Option 1 plus:
Unlimited 0800 phone-based support
Link building via 3 bespoke articles (monthly)
Directory submissions to up to 50 targeted directories
Enhanced reporting
Enhanced reporting of keywords & competitor link analysis

That doesn’t sound too bad, it could go either way I guess depending on the quality of the articles they are creating and the quality of the web directories and article directories they are submitting to. For a similar price we will include submissions to all of the best paid directories such as BOTW and Yahoo etc. If they are just submitting to the free ones then there is less chance of your links getting approved and sticking around.

Thoughts?

Posted in SEO News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.

The post BT Now Offering SEO & PPC Services appeared first on The SEO Company - UK Search Engine Optimisation.

Strange Titles on Google

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 12:13:54 +0000

Image: Google search for social media traffic

Last week I was reading an article at Search Engine Roundtable about Google pulling website titles from Google maps and according to a comment on the post Googler, John Mueller has said this:

“We may choose to replace titles which are repeated on a number of pages or which otherwise appear to be suboptimal”

So is this the reason why I am seeing the phrase Social Media Traffic – at the start of my page title tag when I search Google for that particular phrase? I am not too sure.

My actual meta page title tag for the page coming up is this:

“Just How Much Traffic Can You Get From Social Media Websites?”

Google are currently showing this:

“Social Media Traffic – Just How Much Traffic Can You Get From Social Media Websites?

You check the Google cache for the page here and there is no mention of the extra phrase at the start of the page title tag.

Pretty strange right? My thoughts are, if it gets me a higher CTR then I am all for it.

Posted in Search Engine News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.

The post Strange Titles on Google appeared first on The SEO Company - UK Search Engine Optimisation.

3 Reasons Why Digital Point’s PageRank Got Penalised

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 03:13:33 +0000

I have just been looking at what keywords people have been typing in to find this blog and someone searched for:

“digital point forum pr has been reduced”

So I’m guessing this searcher is curious to know why Digital Point Solutions and Digital Point Forums have both had their PageRank scores dramatically reduced:

www.digitalpoint.com is down from a PR 7/10 to a PR 4/10
forums.digitalpoint.com is down from a PR 6/10 to a PR 4/10

Here are 3 good reasons why Google might have spanked their PageRank scores.

1. The buying and selling of signature links amongst its users – Buying and selling links that pass PageRank is against the guidelines, this alone could warrant a PR penalty.

2. The link sales forum – Plenty of guideline breaking links get sold in that forum every day, again this could warrant a penalty.

3. DP COOP – The Digital Point Coop link exchange network is still active and spamming Google’s search results to this day.

And that’s just for starters, I’m sure if I looked into it further I could find a few more.

Posted in Search Engine News By David Eaves a UK search engine optimisation specialist.

The post 3 Reasons Why Digital Point’s PageRank Got Penalised appeared first on The SEO Company - UK Search Engine Optimisation.

Why Meaning Will Ultimately Determine Your Brand's Content Marketing Success

ronell-smith — Wed, 30 Sep 2015 00:15:00 +0000

Posted by ronell-smith

In 2009 Fletcher Cleaves was a top high school football prospect ready for the next level, eager to do in college what he'd done in high school: rack up yards as a running back. But before Cleaves could realize his dream of playing at the next level, a texting, distracted driver plowed into the car he was driving, forever changing his life's trajectory.

Today, Cleaves, paralyzed from the chest down as a result of the accident, serves as a tragic reminder of something as seemingly harmless as texting and driving can alter lives. It's impossible to watch the video below and not immediately realize three important facts:

Texting and driving is a big deal.
This young man was unfairly robbed of his future.
This big brand nailed the messaging.

Telecommunications brands (and airline companies) enjoy some of the worst customer service ratings on the planet. And to make matters worse, their core messaging via print, radio and online ads is equally atrocious, doing very little to make would-be customers give them a second look.

However, with the latest iteration of the "It Can Wait" campaign, which is rich with stories and features stunning video recreation, AT&T did something all brands looking to make a mark in content marketing should copy: They delivered content with meaning.

The end of utility

We live in a world rich in information and teeming with data. The ability to analyze the results of our content marketing efforts, even in real-time, is as astonishing as it is mesmerizing and revealing. Our teams can know, before a word is written, a design delivered or a report is generated what the results should be based on the assigned key performance indicators (KPIs). The automation present in online marketing can make it feel as though the world we inhabit is more fantasy than reality, as if the press of a button will always lead to the results we expect.

Yet we still struggle with how to create content that commands attention, that nudges prospects to take immediate action, that leads to the vast majority of our customers moving from brand loyalists to brand ambassadors and advocates.

Why is this?

I propose that we've misread the tea leaves.

In the last three years, marketers (even this one) have sung from the rooftops that your content must be useful and relevant, have immediacy, and deliver impact. And if you followed this advice, you likely found a modicum of success, if only for a short time.

How could we expect any different when the customers we're all clamoring for are being bombarded with thousands of messages every day? When that happens, even the most resonant voices get drowned out. And for those of us who've thrown our hats into the usefulness and relevance ring, we've largely committed ourselves to a life of struggle that's tough to recover from.

This line of thinking occurred to me in July of 2014, as I finished Jay Baer's book Youtility during the plane ride home from MozCon 2014. I agree with and applaud Baer for bringing to light the novel term, which he defines as "Marketing that's wanted by customers. Youtility is massively useful information, provided for free, that creates long-term trust and kinship between your company and your customers."

But I'm afraid this ship has largely sailed. Not because usefulness is any less importance, but because the threshold was so low that every brand and their sister jumped online via websites, social media, forums, message boards and everywhere else with information that temporarily sated prospects' appetites but did little to create a lasting impression.

If your desire is to create a brand whose content is sought-after and, indeed, clamored for, you must bake meaning into your content.

Without meaning, your brand's content is adrift

Like many of you, most of my early content-creation efforts were centered around pleasing Google, whereby my inspiration was for thinking in terms of queries:

1: Informational: Where prospects are likely to look for information

2: Navigational: What prospects are likely to be looking for on those sites

3: Transactional: What prospects are ready/likely to buy

The result of this thinking (outlined in the graphic below) was the myriad 350-word posts that now clog the web.

There's a better way.

It's time your content led with meaning, and that process begins with a revamping of the thought process surrounding content ideation and content creation. Why is that important?

We cannot win otherwise, says Bill Sebald, founder of Greenlane SEO, a Pennsylvania-based SEO firm.

"Think about it," he says. "Many brands are still writing low-quality articles that deliver little value and have zero impact to their customers or prospects. That's bad enough, but when you consider the prevalence of these thin content pieces, is there any wonder how the Panda Update evokes fear in these same brands? Being useful is great. It can and does work fine, for a while. But what you want as a brand is lasting impact, people seeking you out, top-of-mind awareness. As it regards content marketing, that only happens when your brand is known for delivering content with meaning, which sticks in the gut of the folks who read it."

(image source)

In All Your Content Doesn’t Matter Without Meaning, Sebald shared five easy-to-follow questions he thinks brands should ask themselves as they work to create content with meaning:

Did I say anything new?
Did I say something that will get someone’s attention?
Is the content part of a strategy?
Am I really an expert in this topic?
Did my copy focus on relationships Google knows about?

Any brand committed to asking themselves at least three of those questions before any content is created is swimming in the deep end of the pool, having moved away from the pack and on the way to delivering meaningful content.

After reading Sebald's post, I dug into my notes to discern what I think it takes to win the race for content marketings next frontier.

If your brand is looking to separate from the back, I'd like to share three ideas I've seen work well for brands of all sizes, even in boring verticals, such as HVAC and plumbing.

1. Be where your prospects are, at the time they need your information, with a message so good they cannot ignore you.

As a lifelong angler, I'm keen to compare marketing to bass fishing, whereby bait and location are pretty much all that matters. Or so I thought, until one day I got my hands on an underwater camera and could see fish swimming all around my lure, which they ignored.

(image source)

That's when I realized bait and location are only as good as timing.

No matter how great the quality of my tackle or how well-placed was my lure, the fish must be ready to bite for me to find success.

How your brand can put this thinking to work: Personalize your company's blog by adding bi-weekly or monthly interviews with people who've used your services/products, and who can share information that's hyper-relevant to issues prospects are likely dealing with at the time.

For example, in the month of October a pool company might highlight a customer who maintains their own pool but who hires a pool company for winterization help. Or, in the same month, an accountant might share a video blog of a couple who owns a small business and does a great job of staying on top of expenses.

You might notice that I never said the person spotlighted mentions the brand or even uses them for service. That's immaterial. What's key is (a) the person shares a compelling story that's (b) delivered on your blog and (c) is information they can use right away for where they are in the decision-making process. (It's important that the content not appear salesy because too often the prospects who're most likely to need your services aren't even looking for those services. They're simply suckers for a good story.)

2. Make them feel confident about what the brand stands for, not simply the purchase they might someday make.

One of my favorite words from college is ubiquity. Get to know this word if your brand is to produce meaningful content. Your brand should show up in all the places and for all the things prospects would expect to find you ranking for, conversing about and, more important, being shared by others for.

To instill your content with meaning, it must show up in places and for things prospects likely would expect t find it showing up for. This isn't simply about ubiquity. It shows empathy.

A brand that does this better than most is Seattle-based REI. It's amazing the range of terms they rank highly for. If they sell it, there's a great chance REI shows up somewhere in or near the top of the SERPs for the category.

For example, I simply typed "snow goggles" into the search box, and voila, look who shows up. Also, look who they show up above. Better yet, imagine all of the large eyewear brands they're outcompeting for this position.

By clicking on the query, you immediately see why they're at the top of the SERPS: The content is rich in visuals and answers every question a prospect would ever have surrounding snow goggles.

I discovered the strength of REI's content ideation and creation efforts in 2013, while completing a content strategy roadmap for one of the largest two-way radio manufacturers in the world.

Despite the brand's heft, REI was always ahead of them in the SERPs, with social shares, in online conversations, etc.

When I visited with Jonathon Colman, formerly the in-house SEO for REI, at Facebook headquarters in

San Francisco, I understood why REI had content ubiquity: "From the start, they did something right that continues to [work in their favor]," says Colman, who works for Facebook in the areas of product user experience and content strategy. "They simply focused on creating and sharing the best content for their users, not on marketing."

Those words resonated with me, as they should with you.

How your brand can put this thinking to work

Stop thinking like a marketer and start thinking like a customer. I've written before about keeping and sharing a document that lists the questions and comments prospects and customers share during calls, on social media and via any any other platforms used to capture customer sentiment.

This document could form the basis for content that's written and shared by your marketing team. However, your brand must go farther to deliver meaning through it's content.

An approach I've recommended to clients and seen good success with works as follows:

Focus on creating one big piece of content per month: This pulls your team away from thinking about creating content for content's sake. It also ensures that the team is able to marshal its resources to research, design, and create content with meaning. The goal with each big content piece is to answer every reasonable question and/or objection a prospect might have before doing business with you. For example, an SEO agency might, in month one, create a big content piece titled "How Small Companies Can Win With Personalized Content," detailing in depth how becoming a popular local expert can earn the brand links, gain press attention and increase overall business. In month two, the same agency might go all-in on a post titled "How Your Mom and Pop Shop Can Beat the Big Guys," whereby they outline an actionable plan for how to smartly use their blog, one social media platform and a small PPC budget to generate awareness, site visits, links and earned media. Prospects are likely to see the agency as the one to help get them over the hump.
Ignore the competition: Instead of checking the SERPs to see what's ranking highest for content in your vertical on the topic you wish to create, look at the content that's being shared outside your area by brands that have no relation to your vertical. You cannot win long-term by copying a strategy that your competition is better equipped to deploy, so don't emulate them. Look at what non-competing brands are doing to deliver meaningful content. It could be a TV show, even, which you study for how characters are developed. Think of the regional car dealerships who grew to be household names in the late '90s by delivering sitcom-style commercials and ads based off popular TV shows that meant something to the audience. Your brand can find similar inspiration by looking outside your area.
Make consistency a mainstay: REI wins at content marketing in large part because the brand is consistent. No matter where you find their content, it's thorough and deserving of its place in the pantheon of content marketers. Don't simply pour your heart into the big content piece, then allow everything else to fall by the wayside. Your brand must imbue every area, all departments and any content shared with meaning. This effort takes shape as the development, design and product teams placing users in the driver's seat early on in the process; the marketing team only sharing information that, first and foremost, addresses the needs of the audience; the customer service team creating customer happiness, not quashing complaints; and sales team members frequently checking on prospects, even when no sale is imminent.

The goal here is to, as the saying goes, be so good they cannot ignore you.

3. Help your customers become the best versions of themselves

It's likely you've seen the graphic below online before, maybe even on the Buffer Blog, which is where I found it. The image expertly sums up where I think the brands who ultimately win at content marketing will have to go: Turning away from their own interests and keying in on how the brand can better enable the customer to (a) better do what they endeavor to do and (b) become a version of themselves they never imagined possible.

(image source)

Sound far-fetched? Imagine the car commercials showing an average Joe who is all of a sudden a handsome hero admired by beautiful passersby because of his new wheels.

Your brand can become the means-something-to-prospects darling of its industry, too, with the adoption of three simple steps applied with conviction:

Personalization — Develop people (at least one, but a few would be even better) in your company who can become the public face of the brand, who make it easier for prospects to form a connection with the company and more likely that content is shared and amplified more frequently as their popularity increases.
Become a helper, not a hero — Stop thinking that your content or your product or your service needs to be life-changing to get the attention of prospects. They desire to be the heroes and sheroes of their own journey; they simply need an assist from you to create a lasting bond they won't soon forget about.
Make users' stories a core of your marketing efforts — Let's get this straight: No one gives a damn about your story. Your brand's story only becomes relevant when prospects have been made to feel important, special by you then desire to explore further the meaning behind the brands. How do you accomplish that task? By integrating the stories of customers into your marketing efforts.

How your brand can put this thinking to work

The importance of using an engaging personality to deliver meaning for your content cannot be overstated. In fact, it's likely the shortest path to winning attention and garnering success.

I'll use Canadian personal trainer Dean Somerset as an example. I discovered Somerset a few years ago when he dropped a few helpful knowledge bombs in the comments of a fitness blog I was reading. I then found a link to his blog, which I have now become a religious follower of. Over the years, we've traded numerous emails, interacted myriad times via Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, and I've even hired him for training assessments.

Why?

Aside from being brilliant, he's a goofball who takes his work, not himself, too seriously.

(image source)

But most important, the core of every post he creates or video he shares or every Facebook Q&A he offers is helping others become better at physical health and physical fitness than they ever imagined they could.

The result is that, in a relatively short time span, Somerset has become one of the top young minds in the fitness industry, in no small part because he creates heroes with nearly every piece of content he shares. (If you doubt me, watch the video below.)

Don't think for a second that your brand can't do the same:

Look for members on your team who have personality and who are uniquely qualified to create content (e.g., video, text, SlideShare, etc.) on topics readers care about. Empower them to share, converse and engage around this content, whether locally (e.g., Meetups) nationally (e.g., conferences) or online (e.g., blogs, social media, etc.).
The script these experts must work from, for everything they share, should begin with the question, "How can this [blog, video, etc.] help at least one person do something better tomorrow that they cannot yet do today?" Answer this question, and you won't simply create meaning for your content, you'll create meaning, relevance and top-of-mind awareness for the brand as well.

It's hard for a brand to escape being successful if this mindset is ever-present.

The last area we'll look at is storytelling, which is very popular in content marketing. And almost no one gets it right.

Yes, people do love stories. They eat them up, especially compelling, heart-wrenching stories or, even better, tales of tremendous uplift.

However, people are not interested in your brand's story — at least not yet.

The only story brands should be telling are those of their users. The brands who have realized this are leaving the brand storytellers in the dust, while turning up the dial on meaning and significance to the audience.

A great example is Patagonia and their Worn Wear video series. Instead of creating ads showcasing the durability of their products, they filmed actual customers who've been using the same Patagonia products for years and who wouldn't trade the brand's products for those of any other company.

These are rabid fans, loyal to the nth degree.

Don't drink the brand storytelling Kool-Aid. Tell the stories of your users.

Identify a handful of ardent fans of your product or service, then reach out to them via phone to ask if they'd mind being part of a short-video series you're doing to showcase people and brands doing great things. (I mentioned a similar approach earlier, which is ideal for the smallest companies. I think this effort plays into a much broader strategy for larger brands.)

Depending on your budget and their location, you could either have a small camera crew visit their office or walk them through how to shoot what you need on their mobile devices. You could also provide them with a script.

Here's the kicker: During the video, they are not allowed to talk about your brand, product or service in any way shape or form.

The goal is to get video of them going about their day, at home and at work, as they share what makes them tick, what's important to them, who they are and why they do what they do.

This is their story, remember? And as such, your brand is a bit player, not a/the star. Also, the lack of a mention washes away any suspicion viewers might have of your brand's motives. Most important, however, you get a real, authentic success story on your website and domain, so the implication is that your brand was a helper in this heroic journey.

If this post accomplishes anything, my wish is that it makes clear how necessary and how realistic it is for your brand to create meaningful content.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

Million Dollar Content - An Analysis of the Web's Most Valuable Organic Content

rjonesx. — Tue, 29 Sep 2015 00:16:00 +0000

Posted by rjonesx.

As much as we like to debate content vs. links, sometimes great content just seems to dominate. I don't mean to say that great content doesn't get great links, or that the purposes of creating great content is not to get links, but simply that some content on the web seems to shine through the SERPs.

Content might not be king, but it has lot of sway in Google's kingdom.

After sifting through tons of SERP data to find million dollar answer boxes (answer box results that rank at the top for keywords driving millions of dollars in traffic), I decided to dig deep to find content just like it across the web. But I wanted to do something different, something harder. I wanted to find content that didn't have huge Domain Authority. Sure, it is easy for the Wikipedia's and YouTubes of this world to rank for huge keywords, but what about the little guy? Are there any pieces of content out there bringing in millions of dollars of traffic coming from domains with Domain Authority around 50 or lower? And if so, what sets this content apart from the rest? Let's find out!

First, I needed a little help in deconstructing exactly what makes this great content tick. I enlisted the SEO greats - Garrett French of CitationLabs who essentially wrote the book on linkable content, and Mark Traphagen, Internet social guru extraordinaire from Stone Temple.

So let's begin.

Finding great content

I didn't want to start with any assumptions. I didn't want to assume that great content was pretty, or thorough, or authoritative. I wanted to judge content by its results, not its features. I set 3 distinct qualifications:

The content URL couldn't be a home page.
The domain couldn't have a Moz Domain Authority above 55.
The content URL had to earn more than $1,000,000 a year in traffic based on a recent click through model, traffic volume, and estimated CPC of the keywords for which it ranks.

With those parameters set, I went digging. With SERPScape and the MozScape API, we quickly uncovered dozens of contenders out of just a sampling of the data set. So, what did we discover? What patterns did we find across the board? What set this content apart?

Feature #1: On-point

One of the most obvious trends was simply how perfectly and thoroughly the top content answered the users queries. It wasn't that the content was necessarily long (although in many cases it was). However, the content was highly relevant, regardless of its length. Take for example this "bed sizes" web page on SleepTrain.com.

Most webmasters would be content with just throwing up a quick intro paragraph and dimensions, but the SleepTrain site provides it several different ways...

An overlay comparison image with Dimensions
A textual table listing of sizes
Several separate images showing people placement on the different mattresses
A textual analysis of common bed sizes describing who would and would not fit by their height.

Now, I know what you are thinking. This isn't all that great!, but everything must be seen in context. Look at the next several listings. Wikipedia is a nightmare of text, BetterSleep is just text, bedding experts is a little better, but doesn't have the first overlay chart, SleepCountry only has the overlay chart... No other page in the top 10 answers all of a user's questions as thoroughly but succinctly as the SleepTrain site.

But don't take my word for it, we saw this over and over again in the data. We know that good, thorough content can rank well, and we saw just that. The average topical relevancy scores of our Million Dollar Content pieces were significantly better time and time again than the average competition in the SERPs.

In fact, some pages had scores that were truly mind blowing. One particular page on resume templates hit 99.96% relevancy! To get that level of precision, not only do you need to be highly thorough, you also have to be highly restrictive to prevent the addition of content that isn't relevant. That means no filler. Subsequently, this one particular page ranked for over 2,000 related keywords!

Feature #2: Bold

Conventional wisdom rarely helps you win in a competitive atmosphere. If you do what everyone else thinks should be done, you are predictable, and predictable is beatable.

For a few years now, one of the items on my regular audit list has been page speed. We know that TTFB (time-to-first-bite) correlates with search rankings, that fast download speeds correlate with increased conversions and better user engagement, and we even have an official announcement from Google that page speed matters for rankings.

Well, StyleGlam gives Google a giant middle finger when it comes to page speed. The page is bold, image-laden, and is even filled with ads.

The page clocks in at a turtle's pace of 24.9 seconds to load and an elephant's weight at 7.49MB in size! But maybe that is the point.

The game of SEO is all about compromises. When you make a page load quickly, you often have to compromise on images, text, and thoroughness. When you make a page informative, you might have to compromise on conversion rates. In this case, the webmasters came up with a completely different balance. They chose not to compromise on thoroughness, information content, conversion points (look at the ads!) and instead let page speed die a horrendous death. But the trade-off worked!

StyleGlam wasn't the only site we saw throw page speed to the wind in order to go big. Sites in the resume space, calendar, degree and health care spaces often took refuge in being big before being quick.

But we also saw the opposite true. Paired-back resources that answer one question very quickly, very easily, very simply can also win. What seems to never make its way to the top though is conventional content on a conventional sites. If you aren't a big brand, you better be different, be better, be bold.

Feature #3: Fresh

Can content survive in high spam, high value keyword niches? You bet it can. I was shocked when I came upon this one, as it was just a well managed blog post that was now several years old. It was surrounded by the latest entrants into a niche that was notoriously getting shut down and cleaned out: free streaming movies.

So how does a simple blog post on the best free movie sites manage to bring in $1,000,000+ in traffic not just this year, or last year, or the year before but for years and years on end?

Well, one thing we noticed about it and many others was content freshness. I can't tell you how many times a client has been scared to update their content that already ranks. "But what if I break it? What if I lose rankings?"

Not updating your content IS breaking it.

The truth is that if you are not updating your content regularly, Google will have to assume that your content is losing its reliability. So why not? Over time, you will build up a great backlink profile by sheer longevity, while at the same time keeping content as fresh as new competitors entering the space.

The author here found a great opportunity. People wanted to find these sites, they kept disappearing, and someone needed to keep an up-to-date record of the best ones. Now, the webmaster didn't create it once and leave it, or update it annually. They updated it regularly. The net result?

This piece of content has enjoyed long-term, million-dollar rankings while competitors have come and gone. They have ranked for thousands of keywords for several years by simply creating great content and keeping it fresh.

Linkable million-dollar pages

I am now going to turn this study over to Garrett French. Garrett is the founder and chief link strategist of Citation Labs, a link-building agency and campaign incubator. He's developed multiple link-building tools, including the Link Prospector and the Broken Link Finder. He also co-wrote The Ultimate Guide to Link Building with Link Moses himself, Eric Ward. Garrett and his team lead monthly webinars on enterprise content strategy and promotion from the Citation Labs Blog.

Only 34% of the content studied has at least 1 link in OSE. That's right - there are tons of pages getting $1,000,000+ worth of organic search traffic yearly that have few if any external links. A lack of links does not necessarily demonstrate a lack of linkability, but I will say that overall these pages don't seem "designed" for linkability.

Before we get to individual examples of linkability though (they do exist in this set!) I'd like to outline some basics on how we evaluated these pages.

At Citation Labs, we divide linkers into "curators" who collect URLs for a single existing resource page and "editors" who publish new topic pages. Tactically speaking, the curators support broken link building and "link request" efforts, while editors support PR and guest posting campaigns.

We believe that it's primarily the linkers themselves who define a document's linkability - both by their decision or not to link and how many potential linkers there happen to be.

URLs Linkable to Curators

Linkable Document - Timberline Knolls

Drug addiction, a subcategory of mental health, is one of the single most linkable topics we've encountered in our work thus far. This URL provides clear and comprehensive information for concerned loved-ones of a potential heroin user. These concerned loved-ones are a "linker-valued audience."

To get a quick read on how many curators might be out there for this topic, search for this query heroin inurl:links.html. We use the inurl:links.html portion of the query to get a sense of volume. There's a ton out there for this document which makes it not only linkable but worthy of further promotion on its own.

Curators are - relatively speaking - quite rare. The existence of curators seems to be topically-driven and are especially prevalent across health and education.

Linkable Document - Wixon Jewelers

I would examine the potential for a broken link building campaign in the "birthstones" area for this URL. In addition, it appears (based on this query: birthstones inurl:links.html) that there are enough potential opportunities to support a request campaign as well.

Birthstones probably won't get curators linking quite like addiction will. That said, they remain embedded in our collective psyche and if a related URL happens to be dead this could be a great candidate for a linkable page.

URLs linkable to editors

Linkable Document - SMU Mustangs

I'm not a sportser, but this URL stood out in our analysis because it had 60+ root linking domains. This seems to be a hub for SMU's football team, complete with a calendar. Bloggers, sports journalists, opponents, local events websites, all of these folks should be interested in linking to and supporting this team. Businesses could consider starting a competitive football team to replicate this effort ;)

But seriously, one takeaway, especially for local, is supporting the beloved local sports teams and events.

Linkable Document - The Best Schools

At first pass, my strategy would be to promote via PR, ideally in conjunction with the ranked schools to help them get the most out of their top ranking. Secondly, I'd run a low-scale branded guest posting effort. Guest posting topics could cover "following dreams," "seizing the day," "increasing your income," "going back to school as a parent", etc. If you repackage the data for a linker-valued audience (Best Online Colleges for Seniors) you could potentially build out a link request campaign too.

Linkable Document - Top 10 Home Remedies

The title - "How to Get Rid of Pimples Fast" - makes this one a tough pitch to skin health curators. That said, I think it could be a fantastic citation opportunity in a guest posting campaign. Target blogs that are more lifestyle oriented - makeup blogs perhaps, dating advice blogs etc - and build out titles that are not necessarily directly related to pimples or blemishes themselves.

Here are a couple more in that same vein - they could work well as supporting citations in a guest posting effort:

StayGlam: Nail Designs for Short Nails

Hair Style On Point: Top 10 Short Men's Hairstyles in 2015

Most editors would not think twice about allowing those links to live so long as they fit topically and have potential appeal to the reading audience.

Linkability takeaways

The majority of these million dollar pages are not purely linkable, but many could support link building campaigns. Pay close attention to the link profile of the entire domain for link building campaign guidance - the ranking pages may not be there based on their individual link earnings.

Shareable million-dollar pages

So how do these million dollar content pieces actually perform in the very different context of social media? We'll let the venerable Mark Traphagen, Senior Director of Online Marketing at Stone Temple Consulting and give us some insights on how this high performing content makes out in the world of social media. Mark is a world traveler, speaker, consultant and is actually a Klout Top 10 Expert for SEO & Content Marketing, meaning he actually does know how to make this social stuff work.

Just as Garrett revealed above that million dollar content does not necessarily have to have a lot of external links (or even any at all), so I found that there is little-to-no correlation between the number of social shares and whether or not content will win Russ's million dollar prize.

45% of our sample group had no social shares at all (according to Buzzsumo) and 66% had fewer than 300 shares.

Of course, just like having a lot of good links "sure can't hurt," having a lot of social shares certainly increases the chances that your content will do well organically. In fact, the page with the highest number of social shares in the sample group (it had over 1 million) also has the lowest domain authority of the group (21). Moreover, 60% of the pages with 1000 or more social shares have a DA of 40 or less.

Now I'm not suggesting that this proves that the million dollar status of those pages was driven directly by their social popularity. In fact, I consider it unlikely that social popularity is a direct ranking factor at the present time. However, it is likely that wide exposure via social media increases the chances of activity that very likely does factor into Google's ranking algorithm.

Before I take a deeper look at the most-shared content, I have to share two interesting tidbits from my examination of the pages Russ sampled for this study:

Facebook is as killer for this type of content as most people think it is. For those pages with at least 100 social shares, a whopping 92% had the vast majority of those shares occur via Facebook. For most of those, almost all the social sharing happened on Facebook.
None of the pages that had zero social shares had visible social sharing buttons. To be fair, several of them were simply landing pages linking to other content, and thus not really shareable. But most of the rest have characteristics that typically make content more attractive to shares, yet they provided no easy opportunity for visitors to take that action.

The shareability winners

Let's examine the factors that most likely made the three most-shared pages in our sample set so shareable.

80 Nail Designs for Short Nails - 1 million shares

This stayglam.com page is almost embarrassingly easy to analyze, as Buzzsumo shows that all but about 800 of its 1 million+ shares came from Pinterest.

If there ever were a textbook example of "made for Pinterest," it's this page. The entirety of the content is 80 dazzling images of colorful and exotic nail designs, such as the following:

The images are fashion-centered, brightly-colored, and oriented toward a female audience, the perfect trifecta of Pinterest shareability.

Here's the kicker: those 1 million Pinterest shares happened in spite of the fact that the stayglam.com page has no social share buttons! This serves as clear proof that if your content is amazingly shareable, and in particular well-adapted for a particular social network, visitors will share it even if it isn't easy to do so.

It's probable, though, that the vast majority of those 1 million shares weren't made directly from the content page. The most likely scenario is that a few influential Pinterest users did the initial sharing, and then thousands upon thousands of other Pinterest users repined those shares.

How to Get Rid of Pimples Fast- 73,300 shares

People love to share "how to" content that they think will be helpful to their social connections. Why? Social psychology tells us that the feeling of being helpful to others conveys as much benefit to the giver as to the receivers, and often more.

A HubSpot study found that content with the word "how" in the title is among the most shared on Twitter.

Furthermore, this content piece speaks directly to a very common (and embarrassing) problem with quick, easy fixes, exactly what people in such a situation seek. The page also has several easy-to-understand infographics, which undoubtedly make it even more appealing to share. The Open Graph image tag is properly set so that the most appealing of those images appears in shares on networks like Facebook and Google+.

Finally, this piece of content, like the previous, exemplifies that highly-shareable content will be shared, even if the site itself does not make sharing easy. In this case, the page does have share buttons for Twitter and Facebook, but they are at the bottom of the page, and below ads and other navigation. Nevertheless, once the content found its way to Facebook (where almost all of its shares occurred), it took off.

Positive & Inspirational Life Quotes- 15,800 shares

Frankly, this page has very little going for it other than the one thing that probably earned it 6.3K shares on Facebook and another 1000 on Twitter. It is well-optimized for a very popular sharing category on both those networks: quotations.

According to a New York Times commissioned study, people share content to satisfy any of four psychological needs. Those needs are:

Entertainment
Self-definition
Relationship building
Self-fulfillment

Inspirational quotes fulfill at least 1, 2, and 4 of the above, and probably help contribute to #3. They are entertaining in that they fit the kind of light, easily-digested, feel good moments that many people turn to Facebook and Twitter for. Quotations also help us define ourselves to our tribe. They are a quick "tag" to aspirations that are likely shared by others in our social circles. Finally, quotes provide self-fulfillment, as sharing them makes us feel like we have contributed something positive to the world (and with very little effort!).

Out of our sample group, this was the only content that had a volume of Twitter shares worth mentioning. Most likely that was because a number of the quotations used a "click to tweet" feature, where a Twitter user can, with one click, share the quote to her Twitter stream. Even though the previous two examples show that highly-sharable content can get shared even without the site providing an easy way to do so, making that content one-click sharable can boost the share volume even higher.

Shareability takeaways

Social shares are not necessary to achieving million dollar content status in search. However, in some cases having them may improve your content's chances in that regard.
Content that meets the criteria of being highly shareable sometimes needs little or no boost from the publishing site itself, as long as enough visitors take the initiative to share it themselves. A recent Buzzsumo study published here on the Moz Blog found that "surprising, unexpected and entertaining images, quizzes and videos have the potential to go viral with high shares." However, the study showed that those content types typically earn few links, even if they are highly shared. This confirms Garrett's findings above.
While making content easy to share (by providing easy-to-find share buttons, for example), while not necessary, can boost the number of overall shares, and/or get the content shared to other networks where an influencer hasn't done the work already.
Despite all the negative press about how much Facebook has reduced the ability for brand content to get organic reach, it remains by far the most "viral-ready" social network. If your content can get a good toehold there by being shared by some influencers, Facebook can still provide organic reach magic. Of course, paid boosting of content can vastly accelerate the chances of that happening, and this study did not examine whether any of the content was supported with paid social advertising.

Overall takeaways

So what are the takeaways? What makes something million-dollar content? I think there are a few standouts...

Go big and bold. You have to stand out from the crowd, and if you can't do that with your domain authority, you have to do it with your content.
Stay relevant, both in freshness and thoroughness. Know what your user wants and deliver it.
Some sites just get lucky, but other sites make their luck. There were certainly a number of pages that still seemed to rank inexplicably, with average content, few social shares, and even fewer links. Don't bank on that. Do the leg work and you too can create million dollar content.

Scraping and Cleaning Your Data with Google Sheets: A Closer Look

Jeremy_Gottlieb — Mon, 28 Sep 2015 00:17:00 +0000

Posted by Jeremy_Gottlieb

Have you ever wanted to automate pulling data from a web page—such as building a Twitter audience—and wanted a way to magically make all of the Twitter handles from the web page appear in your Google Sheet, but didn’t know how? If learning Python isn’t your cup of tea, using a few formulas in Google Sheets will allow you to easily and quickly scrape data from a URL that, were you to do so manually, could take hours.

For Windows users, Niels Bosma’s amazing SEO plug-in for Excel is an option that could also be used for this purpose, but if you analyze data on a Mac, this tutorial on formulas in Google Sheets will help make your life much easier, as the plug-in doesn’t work on Macs.

Within Google Sheets, there are 3 formulas that I like to use in order to save myself huge amounts of time and headspace. These are:

IMPORTXML
QUERY
REGEXEXTRACT

With just these 3 formulas, you should be able to scrape and clean the data you need for whatever purpose you may come across—whether that be curating Twitter audiences, analyzing links, or anything else that you can think of. The beauty of these formulas is in their versatility, so the use cases for them are practically infinite. By understanding the concept behind this, the variables can be substituted depending on the individual use case. However, the essential process for scraping, cleaning and presenting data will remain the same.

It should be noted that scraping has limitations, and some sites (like Google) don’t really want anyone scraping their content. The purpose of this post is purely to help you smart Moz readers pull and sort data even faster and more easily than you would’ve thought possible.

Let’s find some funny people on Twitter we should follow (or target. Does it really matter?). Googling around the subject of funny people on Twitter, I find myself landing on the following page:

Bingo. Straight copying and pasting into a Google Doc would be a disaster; there’s simply way too much other content on the page. This is where IMPORTXML comes in.

The first step is to open up a Google Sheet and input the desired URL into a cell. It could be any cell, but in the example below, I placed the URL into cell A1.

Just before we begin with the scraping, we need to figure out exactly what data we plan on scraping. In this case, it happens to be Twitter handles, so this is how we’re going to do it.

First, right click on our target (the Twitter handle) and click “Inspect Element.”

Once in “Inspect Element,” we want to figure out where on the page our target lives.

Because we want the Twitter handle and not the URL, we’re going to focus on the element/modifier/identifier “target” rather than “href” within the <a></a> tags. We also happen to notice that the <a></a> tags are “children” of the <h3></h3> tags. What these values mean is a topic for another post, but what we need to keep in mind is that for this particular URL, this is where our desired information lives that we need to extract. It will almost certainly live in a different area with different modifiers on any other given URL; this is just the information that’s unique to the site we're on.

Let’s get to the scary stuff (maybe?): how to write the formula.

I put the formula in cell A3, where I have the red arrow. As can be seen in the highlighted rectangle, I wrote =IMPORTXML(A1, “//h3//a[@target=’_blank’]”), which yielded a wonderful, organized list of all the top Twitter handles to follow from the page. Voila. Cool, right?

Something to remember when doing this is that the values have been created via a formula, so trying to copy and paste them regularly can get messy; you’ll need to copy and paste as values.

Now, let’s break down the madness.

Like any other function in Sheets, you’ll need to begin with an equal sign, so we start with =IMPORTXML. Next, we find the cell with our targeted URL (in this case, cell A1) and then add a comma. Double quotation marks are always required to begin the query, followed by two forward slashes (“//"). Next, you select the element you want to scrape (in this case, the h3 tag). We don’t want all of the information in the h3 elements, just a particular part of the <a></a> tags—specifically, the “target” part where we find the Twitter handles. To capture this part, we add //a[@target=’_blank’], which specifies only the target=’_blank” part of the <a></a> tag. Putting it all together, the formula =IMPORTXML(A1, “//h3//a[@target=’_blank’]”) can be translated as “From the URL within cell A1, select the data with an <h3> tag that is also within an <a> tag and also part of the target attribute.”

In this particular case, the Twitter handles were the only element that could be scraped based on our formula and how it was originally written within the HTML, but sometimes that’s not the case. What if we were looking for travel bloggers and came across a site like the one seen below, where our desired Twitter handles are within a text paragraph?

Taking a look at the Inspect Element button, we see the following information:

In the top rectangle is the div and the class we need, and in the second rectangle is the other half of the information we require: the <p> tag. The <p> tag is used in html to specify where a given paragraph is. The Twitter handles we’re looking for are located within a text paragraph, so we’ll need to select the <p> tag as the element to scrape.

Once again, we input the URL into a cell (any empty cell works) and write out the new formula =IMPORTXML(A1, “//div[@class=’span8 column_container’]//p”). Instead of selecting all of the h3 elements like in the preceding example, this time we’re finding all of the <p> tags within the div elements that have a class of “span8 column_container”. The reason we’re looking for <p> tags within div elements that have a class of “span8 column_container” is because there are other <p> tags on the page that contain information we likely won’t need. All of the Twitter handles are contained with <p> tags within that specifically-classed div, so by selecting it, we’ll have selected the most appropriate data.

However, the results of this are not perfect and look like this:

The results are less than ideal, but manageable nonetheless - we ultimately just want Twitter handles, but are provided with a whole bunch of other text. Highlighted in the green rectangle is a result closer to what I want, but not in the column I need (there’s also another one down the page out of the view of the screenshot, but most are where I need them). To make sure we get all the data in the appropriate format, we can copy and paste values for everything within columns A–C, which will remove the values populated by formulas and replace them with hard values that can be manipulated. Once that is done, we can cut and paste the outlying values (one in column B and one in column C) into their corresponding cells in column A.

All of our data is now in column A; however, some of the cells include information that does not contain a Twitter handle. We’re going to fix this by running the =QUERY function and separating the cells that contain “@” from the ones that do not. In a separate cell (I used cell C4), we’re going to input =query(A4:A36, or “Select A where A contains ‘@’”) and hit enter. BOOM. From here on, we’ll have only cells that contain Twitter handles, a huge improvement over having a mixed bag of results that contain both cells with and without Twitter handles. To explain, our formula can be translated as “From within the array A4:A36, select the cell in column A when that cell contains '@'.” It’s pretty self-explanatory, but is nonetheless a fantastic formula that is incredibly powerful. The image below shows what this looks like:

Keep in mind that the results we just pulled are going to contain excess information within the cells that we’ll need to remove. To do this, we’ll need to run the =REGEXEXTRACT formula, which will pretty much eliminate any need you have for the =RIGHT, =LEFT, =MID, =FIND, and =LEN formulas, or any mixture of those. While useful, these functions can get a bit complicated and need to work in unison in order to produce the same results as =REGEXEXTRACT. A more detailed explanation of these formulas with visuals can be found here.

We’ll run the formula on the results produced from running the =QUERY formula. Using =REGEXEXTRACT, we’ll select the top cell in the queries column (in this case, C4) and then select everything after it beginning with “@”, the start of what we’re looking for. Our desired formula will look like =REGEXEXTRACT(C4, “\@.*”). The backslash signifies to escape the following character, and the .* means select everything after. Thus, the formula can be translated as “For cell C4, extract all of the content beginning at the “@”.

To get all of the other values, all we need to do is click and grab the bottom right corner of cell E4 and drag it down until the end of our array at cell C28. Dragging down the corner of E4 will apply the formula within it to the cells included within the drag. We want to include up to E28 because the corresponding cell C28 is the last cell in the array we are applying the formula to. Doing this will provide the results shown below:

Though a nice and clean output, the data in column E is created by formula and cannot be easily manipulated. We’ll need to do copy and paste values within this column to have everything we need and be able to manipulate the data.

If you’d like to play around with the Google Sheet and make your own copy, you can find the original here.

Hopefully this helps provide some direction and insight into how you can easily scrape and clean data from web pages. If you're interested in learning more, here's a list of great resources:

Want more use cases, tips, and things to watch out for when scraping? I interviewed the following experts for their insights into the world of web scraping:

Dave Sottimano, VP Strategy, Define Media Group, Inc.
Chad Gingrich, Senior SEO Manager, Seer Interactive
Dan Butler, Head of SEO, Builtvisible
Tom Critchlow, tomcritchlow.com
Ian Lurie, CEO and Founder, Portent, Inc.
Mike King, Founder, iPullRank

Question 1: Describe a time when automated scraping "saved your life."

“During the time when hreflang was first released, there were a lot of implementation & configuration issues. While isolated testing was very informative, it was the automated scraping of SERPs that helped me realize the impact of certain international configurations and make important decisions for clients.” – Dave Sottimano

“We wanted a way to visualize forum data to see what types of questions their clients' audiences were talking about most frequently to be able to create a content strategy out of that data. We scraped Reddit and various forums, grabbing data like post titles, views, number of replies, and even the post content. We were able to aggregate all that data to put together a really interesting look at the most popular questions and visualize keywords within the post title and comments that might be a prime target for content. Another way we use scraping often at Seer is for keyword research. Being able to look at much larger seed keyword sets provides a huge advantage and time savings. Additionally, being able to easily pull search results to inform your keyword research is important and couldn't be done without scraping.” – Chad Gingrich

“I’d say scraping saves my life on a regular basis, but one scenario that stands out in particular was when a client requested Schema.org mark-up for each of its 60 hotels in 6 different languages. Straightforward request, or so I thought—turns out they had very limited development resource to implement themselves, and an aged CMS that didn’t offer the capabilities of simply downloading a database so that mark up could be appended. Firing up ImportXML in Google Sheets, I could scrape anything (titles, source images, descriptions, addresses, geo-coordinates, etc.), and combined with a series of concatenates was able to compile the data so all that was needed was to upload the code to the corresponding page.” – Dan Butler

“I’ve lost count of the times when ad-hoc scraping has saved my bacon. There were low-stress times when fetching a bunch of pages and pulling their meta descriptions into Excel was useful, but my favorite example in recent times was with a client of mine who was in talks with Facebook to be included in F8. We were crunching data to get into the keynote speech and needed to analyze some social media data for URLs at reasonable scale (a few thousand URLs). It’s the kind of data that existed somewhere in the client’s system as an SQL query, but we didn’t have time to get the dev team to get us the data. It was very liberating to spend 20 minutes fetching and analyzing the data ourselves to get a fast turnaround for Facebook.” – Tom Critchlow

“We discovered a client simultaneously pointed all of their home page links at a staging subdomain, and that they'd added a meta robots noindex/nofollow to their home page about one hour after they did it. We saw the crawl result and thought, "Huh, that can't be right." We assumed our crawler was broken. Nope. That's about the best timing we could've hoped for. But it saved the client from a major gaffe that could've cost them tens of thousands of dollars. Another time we had to do a massive content migration from a client that had a static site. The client was actually starting to cut and paste thousands of pages. We scraped them all into a database, parsed them and automated the whole process.“ – Ian Lurie

“Generally, I hate any task where I have to copy and paste, because any time you're doing that, a computer could be doing it for you. The moment that stands out the most to me is when I first started at Razorfish and they gave me the task of segmenting 3 million links from a Majestic export. I wrote a PHP script that collected 30 data points per link. This was before any of the tools like CognitiveSEO or even LinkDetective existed. Pretty safe to say that saved me from wanting to throw my computer off the top of the building.“ – Mike King

Question 2: What are your preferred tools/methods for doing it?

“Depends on the scale and the type of job. For quick stuff, it's usually Google docs (ImportXML, or I'll write a custom function), and on scale I really like Scraping Hub. As SEO tasks move closer towards data analysis (science), I think I'll be much more likely to rely on web import modules provided by big data analytics platforms such as RapidMiner or Knime for any scraping.” – Dave Sottimano

“Starting out, Outwit is a great tool. It's essentially a browser that lets you build scrapers easily by using the source code. ...I've started using Ruby to have more control and scalability. I chose Ruby because of the front end/backend components, but Python is also a great choice and is definitely a standard for scraping (Google uses it). I think it's inevitable that you learn to code when you're interested in scraping because you're almost always going to need something you can't readily get from simple tools. Other tools I like are the scraper Chrome plugin for quick one page scrapes, Scrapebox, RegExr, & Text2re for building and testing regex. And of course, SEO Tools for Excel.” – Chad Gingrich

“I love tools like Screaming Frog and URL Profiler, but find that having the power of a simple spreadsheet behind the approach offers a little more flexibility by saving time being able to manage the output, perform a series of concatenated lookups, and turn it into a dynamic report for ongoing maintenance. Google Sheets also has the ability for you to create custom scripts, so you can connect to multiple APIs or even scrape & convert JSON output. Hey, it’s free as well!” – Dan Butler

“Google Docs is by far the most versatile, powerful and fast method for doing this, in my personal experience. I started with ImportXML and cut my teeth using that before graduating to Google Scripts and more powerful, robust, and cron-driven uses. Occasionally, I’ve used Python to build my own scrapers, but this has so far never really proven to be an effective use of my time—though it has been fun.” – Tom Critchlow

“We have our own toolset in-house. It's built on Python and Cython, and has a very powerful regex engine, so we can extract pretty much anything we want. We also write custom tools when we need them to do something really unique, like analyze image types/compression. For really, really big sites—millions of pages—we may use DeepCrawl. But our in-house toolset does the trick 99% of the time and gives us a lot of flexibility.” – Ian Lurie

“While I know there a number of WYSIWYG tools for it at this point, I still I prefer writing a script. That way I get exactly what I want and it's in the precise format that I'm looking for.” – Mike King

Question 3: What are common pitfalls with web scraping to watch out for?

“Bad data. This ranges from hidden characters and encoding issues to bad HTML, and sometimes you're just being fed crap by some clever system admin. As a general rule, I'd far rather pay for an API than scrape.” – Dave Sottimano

“Just because you can scrape something doesn't mean you should, and sometimes too much data just confuses the end goal. I like to outline what I'm going to scrape and why I need it/what I'll do with that data before scraping one piece of data. Use brain power up front, let the scraping automate the rest for you, and you'll come out the other side in a much better place.” – Chad Gingrich

“If you’re setting up dynamic reports or building your own tools, make sure you have something like Change Detection running so you can be alerted when X% of the target HTML has changed, which could invalidate your Xpath. On the flipside, it’s crazy how common parsing private API credentials/authentication is via public HTTP get requests or over XHR—seriously, sites need to start locking this stuff down if they don’t want it accessible in the public domain.” – Dan Butler

“The most common pitfall with computers is that they only do what you tell them—this sounds obvious, but it’s a good reminder that when you get frustrated, you usually only have yourself to blame. Oh—and don’t forget to check your recurring tasks every once in a while.” – Tom Critchlow

“It’s important to slow your crawls down. I'm not even talking about Google scraping. I'm talking about crawling other folks' web sites. I'm continuously amazed at just how poorly optimized most site technology stacks really are. If you start hitting one page a second, you may actually slow or crash a site for a multi-million-dollar business. We once killed a client's site with a one-page-per-second crawl—they were a Fortune 1000 company. It's ridiculous, but it happens more often than you might think. Also, if you don't design your crawler to detect and avoid spider traps, you could end up crawling 250,000 pages of utter duplicate crap. That's a waste of server resources. Once you find an infinitely-expanding URL or other problem, have your crawler move on.” – Ian Lurie

“The biggest pitfall I run into these days is that a lot of sites are rendering their content with JavaScript and a standard text-based crawler doesn't always cut it. More often than not, I'm scraping with a headless browser. My favorite abstraction of PhantomJS is NightmareJS because it's quick and easy, so I use that. The other thing is that sometimes people's code is so bad that there's no structure, so you end up grabbing everything and needing to sort through it.” – Mike King

Do you have any interesting use-cases or experiences with data scraping? Sound off in the comments!

How to Hack the Amplification Process - Whiteboard Friday

randfish — Fri, 25 Sep 2015 00:15:00 +0000

Posted by randfish

Last month, Rand made a surprise virtual appearance at Full Stack Marketing, part of the Turing Festival in Edinburgh, Scotland. He presented a special edition Whiteboard Friday to the audience, and the folks at Stipso who hosted the festival were kind enough to let us share it with you, as well.

Amplifying content to the right audiences is tricky business. It's easy to hope people will find you organically—particularly if you have really great tools to share—but most of the time, it just doesn't work out that way. In today's special-edition Whiteboard Friday, Rand takes an in-depth look at how marketers should be finding the right audiences for their content and tools, effectively hacking the amplification process.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video transcription

Let's talk about how to hack the amplification process. I see a lot of companies, small and medium businesses, startups that are seeking high growth, even enterprises that are launching products, launching services, and they have this problem. They announce to the world like, "Hey, we've just launched." But there's nobody listening.

Because of that, you get these giant crickets -- giant crickets because my stick figure's leg is about the same size as them - just going, "Chirp, chirp, chirp, chirp." Nobody is listening.

The problem right here...

is that you might have an amazing product, but when you combine that with a small megaphone that doesn't reach your audience, you get abysmal adoption.

Solution A:

Look, I see a lot of folks, particularly in the startup, high growth, tech industries thinking like, "Oh, you know what the solution to that is? We need to make the product better." There's this mindset mentality that great products will spread virally, and marketing is just for bad products or poor products.

That's a little crazy in my view. But the process that they therefore use is, "Well, let's go add some features. We'll improve the UI/UX, and we'll push our customers to virally spread for us."

I won't argue that this doesn't work sometimes. I think people point to cases like Google and Slack more recently. They sometimes point to Dropbox. Although, all of those companies, I would argue, had some marketing elements in them that were not just add features and improve UX and make customers do it. But still, I think that mentality, if it works for you, great. But if it's not working, I'd suggest you try something else.

Solution B:

Another methodology that some folks try is this Solution B I've got here. You might say, "Hey, here's Cindy. She loves our product. Great. Let's go sell more Cindys on our product." So that process is very sales driven and sales focused. It's identify your customer target, find their contact information, and do outreach, whatever outreach might mean. It could mean phone calls. It could mean in-person visits. It usually means email, and LinkedIn is often big for that.

This process can work, and I think if you are a sales heavy, sales focused organization and you have a lot of experience in that area, great, go try it out. If that's how you want to build your business, terrific.

But I would say that too few folks give this a try. This is an area, this organic amplification that we're trying to hack here with this Whiteboard Friday today, this is really powerful and has high potential, but it's a longer, more indirect process. We need to be aware of that when we're going in, or we can have that slow timed ROI and get cut off by our executive teams, our investors, and our CEO.

Solution C:

So the way that Solution C works is, basically, we identify the folks who are in our audience. They're potential target customers and people who influence potential target customers. We try and figure out what they consume, what they care about, and then we try and get mentioned, included, visible in the places that they already go to organically.

What's great about this is it doesn't cost money. It costs elbow grease. It takes time investment. It takes sweat equity. It doesn't take direct dollars. Although, you could argue that advertising could go into here and could be a way to scale with dollars or, in your case, pounds.

When we go through this amplification process, what we need to do is identify who our audience are, their influencers, the media and publications, and all the things that they might consume. What will resonate with them? What kinds of messages, content, and branding will resonate? Then we need to test, measure, learn, and improve.

I've got some hacks for you. Probably some of you have been through parts of this process or you're doing it in your day jobs right now. So I have some clever little hacks that I want to share.

Who?

When you're doing this "who," trying to figure out like, "Who is my audience? How do I reach them," well, start with some of these. Try some in-person interviews. Look at surveys. By the way, you can survey your audience, but there's actually now a process whereby you can identify custom audiences using Google's audience surveys or SurveyMonkey's audience features. That will actually let you target folks, specifically across the world, through ad platforms that make you take a survey before you can see content. That can be a very powerful and interesting way to get data.

We've used that at Moz ourselves. I did a survey last year, with the help of Mike King from iPullRank, and we got fascinating data about the SEO market from that.

You can also use Facebook ads and Facebook's audience network to reach potential customers. You can use Google AdWords campaigns. These are usable in two ways. You can use them to identify people who might be in your audience and then market to them directly using advertising. Or you can also use them to reach your audience and then give them a survey so that you can learn more about them and who they are and what they need, what they listen and pay attention to, all that kind of stuff.

Influencers

There are some really great tools here. Followerwonk is one that is run by Moz. There's actually a great tool that I think is a very impressive competitor to Followerwonk called Klear. It used to be called Twtrland, but they've moved to Klear now. I think that's an impressive tool. I'd urge you to give that a try. It will help you identify influencers, specifically on Twitter. Klear has some Facebook stuff too.

Fanpage Karma, another great tool for finding influencers and influential pages on Facebook specifically and then trying to figure out what other pages people who follow a given page might follow.

Klout and Kred lists, those provide lists of influencers in specific industries and verticals and niches that you can then go identify and do outreach to them.

I actually find that very few people use this, but powerful is going and looking at conferences and event lists and checking out all the speakers. If you see that someone is speaking at an event that you know your audience attends, that's a great influencer target and potentially someone that you might have missed in these other analyses.

Media and publications

Basically, "What is my audience consuming? If I can figure that out, I can get in front of them with those publications." I think using Google search is a great starting point.

One advanced search query that very few folks use is the "related query." So I can type in "related:website.com" and I can see what Google thinks are other sites about that topic or visited by the same people. Pretty cool, actually. You can use this on both domains and pages. So if you see a resource or an article that's on a journalistic site, on The New York Times, The Guardian, The Observer, or The Independent, you can type "related" that URL and see other articles or other publications that write about those same things. Potentially great for journalist outreach and those kinds of things.

SimilarWeb does something really cool with related sites. I can take a site and kind of hack that process of finding other sites that are visited by that same target audience.

Compass is a tool that I haven't personally used, but several folks have been recommending to me recently. It's sort of like SEMrush in that it gives you data, but about ads rather than about keywords. So SEMrush is great for keywords. Compass, give that a try for the ad side. They'll sort of show you, "Where are my competitors advertising? What ads are they running? What's resonating?" That kind of stuff.

Then Feedly, as well as Twitter and Facebook fan counts. Feedly will give the you the count of the subscribers for any given blog or RSS feed, so you can get a sense of how popular a given publication might be. Then, of course, you can use Twitter and Facebook statistics for those pages, for that account to figure out how popular those folks are as well.

I'm also a big fan of SimilarWeb for that, for figuring out how a popular a given website is. Please, do not use Alexa, Compete, Quantcast, Hitwise, Nielsen. The data is not good. You'd be better off flipping a coin. No offense, they're just not good.

What's going to resonate?

So this is us trying to figure out what type of content that if we could get in front of folks on our own site, on other people's sites, what kinds of messages, what would work to reach them?

Look, no doubt about it, search is still very powerful. If we know the search terms that people in our audience are looking for and we can rank for those or we can advertise for those, just a direct way to acquire competent, high conversion likely customers.

AdWords is kind of the default, but you can also check out SEMrush and SimilarWeb. SimilarWeb will give you the terms and phrases that are sending traffic to any given website. If you find a competitors' site, you can plug them in. SEMrush, same story and they'll also give you a bunch of other keyword options.

Then, I love BuzzSumo. I think everyone in the content marketing world loves BuzzSumo. That will show you content that has performed well around a particular keyword.

You can also check out Open Site Explorer or Ahrefs or Majestic for the top pages to see what are the top performing pages on a given domain.

Finally, trial and error. A lot of stuff, when it comes to content, is going to be you putting things out there, those things failing to resonate, and you learning what your audience does and doesn't like. There's no substitute for it. You can learn everything you want from all of these hacks and tools, you're still going to have to try and have some failure rate. If you're unwilling to fail, this is not the path for you.

In order to do this effectively, we need to...

Test, measure, learn, and improve.

So hopefully, we're getting better and better over time. To do that, we need four kinds of analytics.

We want web analytics, like Google Analytics or Omniture, if you're using that. Product analytics, something like a Mixpanel or a KISSmetrics.

We need some finance analytics, especially if you have a software as a service type product or an ongoing subscription product. My recommendation would be to use Stripe and then something like ProfitWell or Baremetrics on top of Stripe to be able to see all of the data about who's performing well, what your customer lifetime value is, where you acquired those people, from which channels, etc.

Finally, some search, social, kind of inbound marketing analytics. Moz is fairly good for that. Searchmetrics is another really good choice. We really like TrueSocialMetrics here for the social aspect of getting analytics.

So now you have these hacks. Now you know this process, and I think you can effectively hack the amplification process. I'm very excited to see what you all do, and I hope to be joining you again, next year, at the Turing Festival.

Thanks so much. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Announcing the 2015 Local Search Ranking Factors Results

David-Mihm — Thu, 24 Sep 2015 00:16:00 +0000

Posted by David-Mihm

As we head into the thick of fall conference season, I'm happy to announce that the results of the 2015 Local Search Ranking Factors Survey are in.

Click here for the full results

At the very least, I hope they help kickstart your Birds of a Feather roundtable conversations. (Or if you have a local search addiction as debilitating as mine, perhaps even an after-party conversation over over a pint!)

My high-level takeaways

Google's local search algorithm seems to be maturing

Overall, we've seen a continuation of the gradual trend towards Google rewarding quality on all fronts—from citations to links to reviews. And as more companies have implemented the table stakes of site architecture, keyword- and location-relevant title tags, and claiming their Google My Business pages, quality and authority become the differentiators in competitive markets.

The influence of Google+ on local results is on its way out (if it even existed in the first place)

With the removal of links to Google+ pages from Maps and even from the primary SERP, the always-awkward integration between Plus and Local has now been completely severed.

At this point, I view Google My Business essentially as a UI for structured data* and a conduit to AdWords. While Google's original "business builder" vision may still come to fruition, it clearly won't be under the social umbrella of Google+.

*as well as photos--increasingly important for conversion in a Knowledge Card-heavy future.

Behavioral signals are increasing in importance

Experts judged behavioral and/or mobile signals to make up 9.5% of the algorithm across pack and localized organic results. Granted, that number is not strikingly high, but it's up 38% compared with last year's 6.9%. Research from Darren Shaw and others in the past year has borne out this factor empirically at least in certain markets.

In localized organic results, clickthrough rate was judged the #4 overall factor, and in competitive markets, it moved up 8 spots from 2014, cracking the top ten factors for the first time. A number of experts noted additional behavioral factors beyond clickthrough rate may be playing a role, including post-click time spent on-site or pogosticking.

Citations are still crucial—but your focus should be on quality and consistency

Oddly, citations went from 15.5% to 13.6% as a general ranking factor, but specifically, citation quality and consistency remain top-five factors for both pack results and in competitive markets.

Reading between the lines, it's the quantity of horizontal citations on traditional directories that is becoming less important. Algorithmically, this makes sense, as many of these sites have been hit by successive Panda releases for thin content. The authority passed by mentions on these sites has clearly declined.

Are links the new links?

Overall, links were up 9% as a general factor compared to last year, and a number of experts noted an increased focus on quality links since the rollout of the Local Stack / Snack Pack. Diversity of inbound links as a ranking factor in pack results moved up 22 spots from last year, and even in competitive markets, it rose 10 spots to #14. And in localized organic results, locally-relevant links, location keywords in anchor text, and product/service keywords in anchor text all moved up at least 10 spots in 2015.

Pigeon's shift to the user as centroid has "stuck"

The decline of proximity to centroid as a ranking factor, particularly in competitive markets, now seems just about complete. As Google has gotten better at location detection--on both desktop and mobile results--this rather arbitrary factor has been almost completely discarded. We saw this trend start in earnest with the release of Pigeon last summer, and since the snack pack / local stack rollout, proximity to centroid is the factor that experts think took the biggest hit.

On the other hand, proximity to searcher moved up four spots in the pack-specific rankings, and 10 spots in competitive markets. Clearly, the location of a business matters immensely, but only relative to where people are physically conducting their searches.

Wrapping Up

This is always the case, but this year in particular there are so many pearls of wisdom from the survey's participants that I hope you spend some serious time diving into the comments section of the results. These little nuggets are every bit as interesting as the numbers, if not more so. I truly appreciate the contributions from all participants this year, and look forward to reading comments from our great community members below!

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Want to see the rest?

Take a look at the full results

Interested in Local Search Marketing? Don’t miss MozCon Local 2016, February 18-19, here in Seattle, WA. Check out some of the speakers and register today! Read more about MozCon Local and Register!

Let Me Work, Please: A Case for Fewer & More Productive Meetings

MTurek — Wed, 23 Sep 2015 00:15:00 +0000

Posted by MTurek

If you feel like your workweek is structured around meetings—like all you're doing is preparing for and attending meetings, talking about and reporting on your work rather than sitting and doing it—then you've reached a point of frustration where you need to regain control of your time.

There are two sides to meetings: not attending them if they're unnecessary, and when running a meeting, ensuring that it's purposeful, on-point, and driving a specific outcome. If the meeting lacks purpose and has no desired outcome, what's the point?

Today's workplace

The current workplace is operated on a model that doesn't promote productivity. Many offices are built around the "open office" concept, which serves as an ideal delivery system for distraction. This open-plan environment may promote camaraderie, but constant noise damages attention spans and workplace productivity. Even the most sophisticated noise-canceling headphones cannot defend workers from inevitable but unpredictable waves of interruption: ringing phones, loud chatter, shouting across the office, and more. People go to work every day, but much of the real work happens before or after business hours, on the weekends, at home, in airplanes, in coffee shops—virtually everywhere except the office.

If we want to start being productive at work, the model needs to change. This requires removing distractions and creating longer and longer periods of uninterrupted time devoted to work. Feeling frustrated because of how little you actually get done is a sign you're feeling resistance against the model in which you must operate.

Creative people require unstructured time to "get into the zone." As a knowledge worker, whether you're a programmer or a digital analyst, being unable to complete your work creates internal friction and frustration. According to an Atlassian study, employees are attending up to 62 meetings per month, half of which are considered a waste of time. In a 20-day work month, that averages to 3.1 meetings per day. Now, imagine that these meetings are spread out across the day. That’s a recipe for frustration: a stop-start workday in which you never have the opportunity to take the time to focus on complex work.

To preserve both your sanity and your productivity, you must reclaim your workday.

21 daily habits to master for increased productivity, from Too Busy to Do Good Work.

Finding work/meeting balance

Meetings should be like salt—a spice sprinkled carefully to enhance a dish, not poured recklessly over every forkful. Too much salt destroys a dish. Too many meetings destroy morale and motivation.

– Jason Fried, Basecamp

1. Block out 2–4 hours every day in your calendar for uninterrupted work.

If you're an early riser and your most productive time is in the morning, you have a better chance of setting up several hours of uninterrupted work time during the day. Create blocks of time in your calendar dedicated to your work, and indicate in the title that this time is blocked off for specific, focused tasks. Indicate which project you'll be working on and request that no meetings are booked in that time.

2. Review your existing meeting invitations.

Review your calendar at the start of each week, ensuring that you understand the purpose and desired outcome of every meeting you're invited to. If there's any doubt in your mind as to the purpose of a meeting, speak to the organizer and determine whether your attendance is required.

3. Ensure that every meeting you attend has a clear purpose.

If there's no agenda for a meeting to which you've been invited, request it. Every single meeting should have a clear, unique agenda that's outlined at least 24 hours beforehand.

4. How many meetings actually take an hour?

The reality is that there are few meetings that require a full hour to complete. The challenge is that, if the meeting is set to last an hour, the meeting will likely be stretched out to accommodate that timeframe. Start by scheduling your own meetings for 30 or 45 minutes. For meetings that routinely end early, reach out to the organizer and request that the meeting invite be shortened to reflect the actual time required.

5. No-meeting weekday.

This one’s ambitious, but if companies like Asana, with over 100 employees, can successfully manage their workweek with a “No Meeting Day,” then surely your company can, too. This is a decision that must be supported by senior management and implemented by the entire organization. If you are in a position where you can make a recommendation for such a policy, begin by having conversations with the right people.

If you’re not fortunate enough to work at an organization that implements this type of policy, begin by blocking out a no-meeting day in your own calendar, encouraging team members to book meetings with you another day. Your example may inspire others to implement their own no-meeting days, organically spreading this idea across the organization.

21 daily habits to master for increased productivity, from Too Busy to Do Good Work.

Productive meetings: The rule, not the exception

If 20% of an average day is spent on meetings, expressed as a year, that means a meeting you start on New Year’s Day would let out around the middle of March.

– Merlin Mann, 43 Folders

Meetings can be an incredibly effective way for people to share and exchange information, get feedback, plan, collaborate, brainstorm, and make important decisions. To ensure that meetings are adding value to your work rather than detracting from it, hold yourself and others accountable to a higher standard.

1. Avoid over-inviting.

Consider the purpose of the meeting and determine who is actually required to attend. Meetings require employees to drop whatever they're doing and switch tasks. In a service-based business model, time is one of the company’s most valuable assets. If you're pulling five people into one meeting, that meeting costs five billable hours. Let’s assume that a billable hour is conservatively worth $200. How confidently can you say that your last meeting, where you may have pulled in 5 senior team members, was worth $1,000?

2. Ban cellphones.

When attendees are checking their phones, they aren't focusing on the meeting. If distraction is a problem in your meetings, address it by removing that distraction.

3. Write actionable agendas.

Your agenda should be written with action words, not nouns. Each item should address the desired outcome using an action, with the responsible individual indicated. For example, “Agree on ad copy testing plan next steps – Max” is more descriptive and actionable than “Ad copy testing plan.”

4. Send agendas 24 hours in advance.

Ensure that the agenda is updated and sent to attendees 24 hours in advance so that they're able to review it, contribute to it, and prepare for the meeting.

5. Begin on time.

Make sure to start and end every meeting on time.

6. Prepare for meetings.

Simply attending a meeting isn't enough. For a meeting to be productive, you need to prepare for the meeting, understand what your role is at that meeting, and be prepared to contribute to its desired outcome.

Meetings are one of the biggest disruptors of at-work productivity and have come to dominate the workday, when in reality creative work should be the core focus of every day. Our most productive work is done without distraction; wasting workday time means we're working more outside of business hours in order to get things done. Build some quiet time into your day and be vigilant about ensuring that you have at least 2–4 hours dedicated to focused tasks. When you do attend or run your own meetings, ensure that you put in as much effort into making those meetings effective.

Take back your workday and use the skills that you’re paid for to work on constructive, creative projects. If you’re looking for some additional steps to improve your focus and productivity while on the job, download the PDF of my slide deck Too Busy to Do Good Work from MozCon 2015.

Google Glossary: Revenge of Mega-SERP

Dr-Pete — Tue, 22 Sep 2015 00:14:00 +0000

Posted by Dr-Pete

The Google landscape is constantly changing. Two years ago, I created the Mega-SERP, and within days it was already outdated. This time, we've set out to create a more permanent glossary of Google features – a reference that we'll update as the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) change.

If your focus is on organic SEO, why should you care about the wider world of Google features? Put simply, because rich SERP features are no longer the exception to the rule. Across 10,000 keywords tracked daily by the MozCast project, this is what we saw as of September 1, 2015:

Of course, this is just one data set, but even with a healthy margin of error, the story is clear – Google SERPs are dynamic and feature-rich. In our data set, 97% of keywords show at least one rich or paid feature. Only 3% of these SERPs are still pristine, organic wilderness. Times have changed.

This glossary is organized by the sections in the graph above and is an attempt to cover major SERP features currently seen on Google. To make it easy to come back and see what you're interested in (or check out new features), here are a few jump-links to the sections:

New & In Testing
Organic & Enhancements
Vertical Results
The Knowledge Graph
Local Results
Ads & Shopping

This list won't cover every variation (there are dozens, possibly hundreds, of variations of Knowledge Panels, for example), but our goal is to cover every significant feature. We're also working to find common naming conventions between the SEO industry and Google. If you think something is missing or incorrect, please leave a comment.

Each feature in this glossary is paired with a thumbnail image, which shows the approximate location that feature occupies on a hypothetical SERP. The light-gray boxes show generic SERP elements, and the dark-gray box shows the location of the feature. In this instance, the feature appears in the left-hand column, mixed with organic results.

New & In Testing

Let's start with what's new and currently in testing. We'll update this section regularly as Google introduces new features, so we're going to keep it at the top of the post. As these features roll out and accumulate some history, we'll move them to other sections.

"Claim this business" in Local Panel (Sep 2015)

Google seems to be testing functions to "Claim this business" and "Suggest an edit" directly in the Local Knowledge Panel. Previously, these features existed much deeper in Google's local SEO functionality.

Search: "mustangs unlimited" (Manchester, CT)

"I'm Feeling Curious" Card (Sep 2015)

Type "I'm feeling curious" into Google, and you'll get a card-like feature with a random trivia question. Like Featured Snippets, these factoids come from indexed pages and include attribution.

Search: "i'm feeling curious"

Popular Times (Sep 2015)

Some local Knowledge Panels are beginning to show a graph of "Popular Times" (by day of the week), to help visitors sort out when best to visit a location, especially popular destinations.

Search: "art institute of chicago"

Book an Appointment (Aug 2015)

In partnership with Demandforce (an Intuit company), Google launched the ability for local businesses to book appointments from the Knowledge Panel. Searchers are given a dropdown list of appointment types, which takes them directly to the Demandforce website.

Search: "bjs auto repair" (Chicago)

Twitter Results (Aug 2015)

Google recently made a new agreement with Twitter and has started displaying tweets directly in SERPs, mixed in with organic results. Unlike Google+ results, Twitter results do not seem to require or be affected by personalization.

Search: "rick bayless"

Home Services Ads (Aug 2015)

Google has announced their entry into the home services market, and they've started testing a pilot program in a couple of niches in the San Francisco area. The AdWords team has confirmed that this result is part of that test. We have no timeline on when and how this program might expand.

Search: "plumbers"

Organic & Enhancements

It all started with 10 blue links, so that's where we'll start the rest of this glossary. This section will also include "enhancements" - add-ons to organic links that enhance them but aren't technically stand-alone SERP features.

Simple Organic Results

They're the things we spend all of our time chasing. A simple organic result, if such a thing even exists these days, has a linked title (in blue), a destination URL (in green), and a "snippet" of descriptive text.

Search: "tacos are the best"

Only 13 reasons?! Step it up, BuzzFeed!

Organic w/ Date Add-on

Sometimes, Google will algorithmically add information to a snippet. One of the most common examples is a date-stamp added to news and blog results. These add-ons appear at the beginning of the snippet.

Search: "are tacos healthy"

Organic w/ Virtual Path

Google will occasionally replace a page's URL with a breadcrumb-style path. These URL rewrites are common on mobile SERPs and will likely become more common on desktop. These virtual paths replace the destination URL.

Search: "walking taco news"

Organic w/ Long Snippet

Most descriptive snippets are limited to about two lines (conventional SEO wisdom is to keep them below 155 characters). Recently, though, longer snippets have appeared, often paired with Featured Snippets.

Search: "how much is a taco bell"

Organic w/ Brand Dropdown

Brands and other known entities may get an additional linked reference to their name. Clicking on it reveals a dropdown with general information about the entity.

Search: "taco bell menu"

Organic w/ Mini Sitelinks

For internal links or on-page anchors, Google will occasionally display mini-sitelinks directly to those pages/anchors. These sitelinks occupy a single row below the result snippet.

Search: "how many tacos are there"

Organic w/ Full Sitelinks

Dominant entities in the #1 position may be rewarded with a set of full sitelinks. A #1 result can have anywhere from 1-6 full sitelinks, and each row of sitelinks displaces one organic result. So, a #1 result with 5-6 full site links (3 rows) removes 3 organic positions from page 1.

Search: "taco johns"

Organic w/ Mega-Sitelinks

When someone searches for an exact domain (suggesting clear brand intent), Google may display an expanded pack of up to 10 sitelinks. The full pack of sitelinks occupies 5 organic positions, dominating the SERP.

Search: "tacobell.com"

Organic w/ Internal Search

Searches with clear brand intent may display a search box that allows you to search the Google index for a single website (the equivalent of a "site:" search). This option only seems to be available in the #1 organic position and is usually accompanied by Full Sitelinks.

Search: "food network"

Organic w/ Review Stars

Review stars and rating data are sometimes displayed for products, recipes, and other relevant items. Review/rating data is shown between the destination URL and snippet.

Search: "best taco holders"

Organic w/ Video Thumbnail

Video results (especially YouTube) may display a thumbnail of that video. Video results used to be a true vertical but are now more of an organic enhancement.

Search: "taco of destiny"

I have absolutely no idea what's going on in this video.

Organic w/ Recipe Thumbnail

Recipes are eligible for a specialized square thumbnail. This type of thumbnail was also used for results with authorship, but that display format has been discontinued.

Search: "brisket taco monkey" (yeah, you heard me)

There is a recipe site called "in sock monkey slippers", and so every result title is in the form of "Some food - in sock monkey slippers". This is an act of pure genius.

Organic w/ Knowledge Snippets

Knowledge Snippets are factoids from the Knowledge Graph that complement an organic result. The snippets appear in a list-like format below the search snippet.

Search: "when was the taco invented"

Special thanks to Patrick Bos for finding me a taco-related Knowledge Snippet.

Organic w/ Forum Results

Discussion forum results sometimes show a special snippet with links to related results. These appear as individual rows below the snippet, and may show additional data.

Search: "in-depth taco discussion"

Organic w/ Event Results

Similarly, pages about events may show rich snippets that link to specific dates and locations. These appear as individual rows below the snippet, and may show additional data.

Search: "taco events"

Vertical Results

Verticals results are blocks of specialized results that are triggered for searches with specific types of intent and use ranking rules beyond the core organic algorithm. Each block of vertical results takes the place of one organic result (as of this writing).

Image Results

Image results are displayed as a horizontal row of image links, which click through to a Google Images search. Image results may appear in any organic position.

Search: "show me the tacos"

Image Mega-block

For searches that are clearly image related (containing keywords like "pictures" or "photos"), Google may display a large block of images that takes up three organic positions.

Search: "best taco pics"

News Results

Time-sensitive and newsworthy topics may generate a block of results from Google News. Since the "In the news" update in late 2014, a wider variety of sites are eligible to rank in the news block.

Search: "taco news"

In-depth Articles

For broad or ambiguous terms, Google may return a block of "in-depth" articles, which are almost indistinguishable from organic results. They follow somewhat different ranking rules than core organic, and are dominated by large publishers. Each block of three occupies only one organic position.

Search: "tacos"

Google+ Results

In personalized search, Google may return matching posts from your Google+ circles. Like other verticals these results are intermixed with organic results, but they don't occupy an organic position.

Search: "talking tacos"

The Knowledge Graph

The "Knowledge Graph" covers a lot of ground, from semantic data from human-edited sources (such as WikiData) to semantic data extracted from the Google index to private data partnerships. We'll use the term "Knowledge Graph" loosely for the purposes of this glossary.

Knowledge Panels (Person)

The most familiar incarnation of the Knowledge Graph is the Knowledge Panel, a rich entity that appears in the right-hand column of Google desktop searches. This is a pretty typical example, containing images, a descriptive snippet, relevant factoids, and related searches.

Search: "glen bell"

Knowledge Panels (Celebrity)

Actors/actresses, musicians, and other celebrities may have very rich Knowledge Panels, including information about music and movies, social profiles, and more. This has nothing to do with tacos – I just love Justin Timberlake.

Search: "justin timberlake"

Knowledge Panels (Brand)

Brands may also qualify for Knowledge Panels. Big brands may list detailed information (like the one below), but even smaller brands and local businesses that Google recognizes as entities can qualify for a Knowledge Panel.

Search: "chipotle"

Knowledge Panels (Nutrition)

Food items may show a specialized Knowledge Panel with nutrition facts. Google is constantly adding specialized Knowledge Panels and will likely continue. Sometimes, though, ignorance is bliss – just enjoy your taco in peace.

Search: "tacos"

Disambiguation Boxes

When a search is ambiguous, and Google doesn't have additional data (like search history), they may display a disambiguation box. The example below is a rich one, covering astronomy, mythology, and science-fiction television.

Search: "andromeda"

Medical Knowledge Panels

Early in 2015, Google launched a first of its kind – original content in the Knowledge Panel. Medical Knowledge Panels are curated by Google along with third-party professionals, and even contain original illustrations.

Search: "irritable bowel syndrome"

Knowledge Cards

Knowledge Cards (AKA "Answer Boxes", "Direct Answers") return semantic data directly from the Knowledge Graph. These answers are usually factual, such as a date, relationship, measurement, or some verifiable piece of information.

Search: "where is my taco"

Knowledge Cards w/ Reminder

Knowledge Cards are driven by mobile search, and tie neatly into newer formats, such as Google Now. This is an example of a date-based answer that allows a logged-in searcher to submit information directly to Google Now.

Search: "when is national taco day"

Definition Cards

Queries liked "definition of[word]" and "origin of [word]" may show a special definition card, that includes definitions, origin information, usage trends, and pronunciation. Some less common words may show this card even without "definition" in the search.

Search: "definition of taco"

Rich Knowledge Cards

Some Knowledge Cards return rich, structured information, including images. The example below shows Dr. Seuss' birthday, but also includes a picture, a list of birthdays of other childrens' authors, and a header that restates the question.

Search: "dr. seuss birthday"

Knowledge Cards w/ Graph

Knowledge Cards may return even more specialized and structured data, such as a graph. The example below shows the population of Mexico City over time. This graph also includes source attribution.

Search: "population of mexico city

Conversion Cards

There are some unique features that look like Knowledge Cards. One example is conversion calculators. The taco one below is just for fun, but Google also allows many types of unit and currency conversions.

Search: "how many calories in a taco"

Calculator Cards

Google also includes a fully-featured scientific calculator, that can be triggered by simple formulas, such as "7 X 6" or "sqrt(1764)". The example below is a Google Easter Egg. Some formulas, such as "sin x" will launch a graph card instead.

Search: "answer to life the universe and everything"

Mortgage Calculators

Google is beginning to invest in more specialized calculators, such as this mortgage calculator, which triggers for a wide range of competitive queries. Expect to see more niche calculators and tools in the near future.

Search: "mortgage calculator"

Google Now Cards

Some personalized data, especially data from Gmail, can be pulled directly into Google-Now-style Knowledge Cards. This includes upcoming flight information, frequent flyer numbers, hotel bookings, and product purchases.

Search: "my flights"

Live Results (Sports)

"Live Results" are a special type of card driven by private partnerships in select verticals. Many of these contain very rich data. There are multiple examples in both professional and college sports, including the box score card below.

Search: "cubs score"

Live Results (Weather)

Another common Live Result is regional weather forecasts. This is another very rich feature that includes current conditions, a short-term forecast, a long-term forecast, and even some interactive features in the UI.

Search: "seattle weather"

Live Results (Stock Quote)

Financial information for many ticker symbols is also available via live results. Nearly real-time results (including after-hours trades) are available from major financial news sources, along with graphs over multiple time windows.

Search: "yum stock quote"

Mega-Video Cards

Googles "Mega-Video" format promotes a single video to a prominent card-like result, with a very large thumbnail and song/artist data. Mega-Videos are dominated by YouTube and the Vevo music video network.

Search: "never gonna give you up"

Lyrics Cards (from Google Play)

In the first half of 2015, Google started to display song lyrics directly in a card-like format. Lyrics are taken directly from Google Play and link to Google Play for more information and the option to purchase the song.

Search: "never gonna give you up lyrics"

Menu Results

Restaurant menus for specific locations may be shown in a specialized, card-like format. These generally list the name of the restaurant, the address, and tabbed categories that allow you to scroll through a text-based menu.

Search: "el pollo loco menu" (Seattle)

Featured Snippets

When Google wants to answer a question that isn't in the core Knowledge Graph, they may attempt to find that answer in the index. This creates a special class of organic result with information extracted from the target page.

Search: "who invented tacos"

Featured Snippets w/ Tables

As Featured Snippets expand, they are also becoming more richly formatted, including images, lists, and tables. The example below shows a Featured Snippet made up of tabular data.

Search: "how much is a taco"

Knowledge Carousels

Some niche searches may bring up a carousel with a black background that extends across both columns. This carousel may also have unique search filters related to the search. The image below is truncated for a close-up view.

Search: "best movies of 1984"

Rich Lists

Another carousel format presents lists in a table across both columns. This format seems to be expanding, and can include songs, travel destinations, nutrition information, and other list-style data.

Search: "songs by taco"

Local Results

Local SEO has changed dramatically in the past couple of years, and local features are evolving rapidly. Especially if you have a brick-and-mortar business, it's important to be very familiar with Google's local space.

Local Packs

In mid-2015, Google phased out the familiar 2-7 result local pack (that blended with organic results), and rolled out a new 2-3 result entity that's more closely aligned with Google Maps.

Search: "gastroenterologists" (Seattle)

Local A/B/C Packs

In some cases, Google may display a variant local pack with A/B/C labels and map pins. This sometimes occurs when all of the locations in a pack are related to the same entity (such as a restaurant chain).

Search: "taco bell" (Seattle)

Local "Snack" Packs

Before re-launching local packs, Google rolled out the "snack pack", a specialized local 3-pack with search filters, and no direct website link. These packs are still being used in some niches, including general restaurant searches.

Search: "mexican food" (Seattle)

Authoritative One-boxes

If Google finds a single, authoritative location for a search, they may return a "one-box". This is a single local result represented by a map pin and address/phone, integrated into an organic result.

Search: "topolobampo" (Chicago)

Local Knowledge Panels

Often tied with Authoritative One-boxes, Local Knowledge Panels display rich information about a local business, including address, phone, hours, reviews, and, most recently, a graph of when you should expect a crowd.

Search: "frontera grill" (Chicago)

Ads & Shopping

Google's financial empire is built on pay-per-click (PPC) ads, but in recent years the simple Google ad block has transformed into a rich advertising ecosystem. Here are a few of the more prominent types of paid results.

AdWords Ads (Top/Bottom)

Traditional AdWords ads come in many flavors now, but the most common type appears at the top and/or bottom of the left-hand column, above and below organic results. Each ad has a colored [Ad] label next to it.

Search: "tequila gift baskets"

AdWords Ads w/ Extensions

Traditional ads can have many different extensions and enhancements, just like organic results. The example below has review stars, Google+ follower count, and mini-sitelinks. Ads may also qualify for full sitelinks.

Search: "chichen itza tours"

AdWords Ads (Right Column)

Ads in the right-hand column are a bit smaller, horizontally, and may appear in packs with up to eight total ads. The [Ads] label only appears once in the right-hand column, above the first ad.

Search: "destination weddings"

Paid Shopping (Left Column)

Paid Shopping results or Product Listing Ads (PLAs) sell products directly with rich information, such as images and pricing. Paid Shopping results in the left column usually appear as a horizontal row of products.

Search: "taco shells"

Paid Shopping (Right Column)

Shopping results in the right-hand column are very similar, but they may take up multiple rows. Google has experimented with larger Paid Shopping results, but most current results are either one or two rows of products.

Search: "buy tortillas"

Paid Shopping w/ Rows (Right)

For a smaller product count, paid shopping in the right-hand column may also be displayed as one product per row. The functionality is similar, but this allows for additional space and a line of ad copy.

Search: "pace picante"

Paid Product Panels

Unique product models may trigger a specialized entity that looks like a Knowledge Panel but is actually a sponsored result. The example below is from a smartphone search, which shows retailers and the option to filter by carrier.

Search: "iphone 6"

Movies w/ Watch Now Ads

Knowledge Panels for movies that are available to watch online may display "Watch now" ads to services such as Google Play, Amazon, etc. These are currently labeled with the AdWords [Ads] marker.

Search: "cloudy with a chance of meatballs 2"

Music w/ Listen Now Ads

Similarly, Knowledge Panels for musical artists and album titles may give you paid listings to listen to songs online. Recently, some books have added "Read now" ads as well. Expect this type of paid feature to expand.

Search: "futuresex"

Hotels w/ Book a Room Ads

Some Local Knowledge Panels for hotels allow you to check availability dates and link directly to booking services. Google is actively expanding both organic and paid hotel elements, including amenities data.

Search: "hotel monaco" (Seattle)

Paid Flight Results

Flight searches can trigger a number of paid features. The example below is a card-like format that allows you to check and book flights directly via the Google Flights engine.

Search: "flight from chicago to seattle"

Acknowledgements

Cataloging and naming the Google feature ecosystem is not something I could ever do alone. Many features were spotted and named long before I re-entered the industry, most notably by the tireless work of Danny Sullivan and Barry Schwartz. I'd also like to thank Jennifer Slegg for her great work over the past year identifying and tracking down names for new features. Thanks also to Gary Illyes at Google, for being willing to talk openly with us about new features and naming conventions. Special thanks to the local SEO community for their ongoing generosity and geekery, and my sincere apologies for ever creating the name "snack pack". Finally, thanks to Kevin on our design team for being willing to listen to instructions like "Think glossary + Godzilla + tacos!" without murdering me.

A Picture of You: Results of the 2015 Moz Blog Reader Survey

Trevor-Klein — Mon, 21 Sep 2015 00:15:00 +0000

Posted by Trevor-Klein

The Moz Blog is built to help you all become better marketers. We couldn't possibly succeed in that goal if we didn't have a good sense for who you are and what you'd like to (and need to) see, so we did what anyone would do to get that sense: ask.

This summer, we released a survey to ask you all about yourselves, your work, and your thoughts about the Moz Blog. This is the second time we've done this in the last several years, which makes these results all the more exciting—now we have trending data.

The results from the survey are below, with a list of key takeaways at the end of the post (feel free to scroll for the tl;dr). We've included stats, where available, from the 2013 survey as well, giving the data a historical benchmark.

We'll use what we learned to keep making the Moz Blog more relevant, more actionable, and more valuable for you all, and we'd like to extend our sincerest thanks to the more than 750 of you who responded.

Let's get down to it!

What is your job title?

Back in 2013, as as we expanded our products to emphasize areas of marketing outside of just SEO, we all thought our community would expand along with them. When we released this survey in December of that year, more than six months after rebranding from SEOmoz and a few months after we rolled out our new suite of software, still very little had changed.

Now, nearly two years later, after countless blog posts about content marketing, local search marketing, social media, branding, and more, we're only just beginning to see a shift.

I'm normally not a huge fan of word clouds, but they're fairly effective in illustrating things like this. Here's a cloud made from all of your job titles in this year's survey:

And here's the cloud from the 2013 survey, nearly two years ago:

It's remarkable how similar the two are, but we can begin to see the change.

Our audience is clearly predominantly marketing managers with a heavy emphasis on SEO. The word SEO is smaller in this year's cloud, though, and "digital" and "content" are larger. It definitely looks as though we're seeing more content marketers among our audience, and the numbers back that up.

In a numerical breakdown of the words we see most often (and the total number of responses in each survey was nearly identical), "seo" drops from 233 to 194, and "content" jumps from 34 to 51. Here are the rest of the most common words seen, along with the number of times they occurred in each year's survey:

Word	2015 survey	2013 survey
seo	194	233
marketing	235	169
manager	137	154
specialist	84	55
director	61	52
analyst	38	44
online	35	43
consultant	24	42
strategist	44	37
content	51	34
ceo	15	31
search	21	30
marketer	19	26
owner	20	24
social	15	9
chief	3	3

What percentage of your day-to-day work involves SEO?

The idea that our audience is finally broadening is supported by another statistic: the amount of SEO that our readers do in their day-to-day work. Whereas the 2013 survey skewed a bit more toward the high end of the scale, there's a significant spike in responses between 0-10% this year. The median value reported dropped from 60% to 50%.

On a scale of 1-5, how advanced would you say your knowledge of SEO is?

The plot thickens, though, when we turn to actual SEO ability. We asked everyone to self-report their knowledge of SEO, on a scale from 1 ("I'm a beginner") to 5 ("I'm an industry expert"), and the similarity to the 2013 survey is staggering:

There are fewer people reporting themselves as industry experts, but not many. So, people have the same skill level, but SEO is less a part of their day-to-day work. To me, that implies their skill sets are growing, and the industry is simply demanding a broader gamut of work from them. They're becoming more and more T-shaped.

Do you work in-house, or at an agency/consultancy?

One note before we dive into this one: There should have been an additional option on the survey for independent freelancers. Without that option, we assume (since those folks do some of their own work and some work for clients) that most of them fell into the "both" category below, but we can't really be sure.

With that grain of salt in mind, there are clearly more in-house marketers than agency/consulting marketers in our audience:

At the same time, nearly half of our readers have some work for external clients. It's good to know that the set of skills unique to that type of work are relevant on our blog.

What are some of the biggest challenges you face in your work today?

As it was in 2013, this is my favorite question we asked. It was open-ended, and thus was such an easy question for respondents to skip (not many people usually want to type their own answers in a survey), but 621 people responded out of just over 750 total times the survey was taken. There were some easily visible recurring answers, and the top 20 are as follows:

Challenge	# of Mentions
Constant changes in the industry/technology	73
Lack of knowledge and unrealistic expectations of colleagues/clients/bosses	65
Convincing clients of value of the work	60
Lack of time	53
Content creation/curation	35
Link building	33
Team/resource constraints	33
Analytics	30
Proving ROI	28
Overwhelmed by too much content, too many tools	26
Budget constraints	23
Finding and promoting to the right audience	22
Communication/trust issues, politics	18
Rankings	17
CRO	14
Juggling different kinds of work/clients	14
Diversifying skill sets and proritizing channels	14
Complexity of work	14
Integration of siloed marketing teams	12
Reporting	12

Of note, half as many people noted content marketing as a great challenge this year as noted it in 2013. If that's any indication, we're getting better at it, or at least are better able to wrap our heads around it than we were before.

Above all, though, the top issues are largely the same: The industry is constantly changing, and it's incredibly difficult to find time to stay abreast of those changes. There's too much shoddy content to sift through (likely thanks to the rise of content marketing), and clients and bosses still largely don't understand the value in our work, as it's quite difficult to prove the ROI of what we do.

How often do you read posts on the Moz Blog?

We asked readers how often they read the Moz Blog (which has a new post published nearly every weekday), and there's definitely a difference from 2013:

In all likelihood, this is largely due to the broader gamut of topics we include in our editorial calendar these days. We now have content marketers in our audience who aren't always interested in advanced SEO, and technical SEO veterans who aren't interested in brand strategy. For that reason, more people are reading regularly, but fewer are reading every day. This also likely has something to do with the lack of time we noticed in the question above.

On which type(s) of devices do you prefer to read blog posts?

This was surprising in 2013, but the numbers were even more extreme this time around:

A whopping 71% of blog readers prefer to read posts on a desktop or laptop machine, up from 68% a couple of years ago. Just about all the numbers are the same here; it seems as if a group of folks who switched between laptops and tablets decided they'd rather stick to full machines.

Of note here is a theory we had last year that Moz Blog readers decided they preferred desktops because our blog wasn't mobile-friendly. We had, in effect, trained them to prefer reading on full screens, because it was just plain difficult to read on mobile devices. By the time this year's survey was sent out, though, the blog had been mobile-friendly for more than two months. There's always the chance that habits take more than two months to break, but if you ask me, that's evidence that our readers really do prefer to read posts on a laptop or desktop.

What percentage of the posts on the Moz Blog would you say are relevant to you and your work?

While there's not much change from the 2013 numbers, we're still quite happy to see that the majority of readers say that the majority of posts are relevant to their work. There's a slightly greater concentration of posts in the 11-40% range than there was before, which we can expect to go along with a broadening of post topics. Interesting to also see an increase in responses in the 91-100% range—I'd guess an increase in marketing generalists, and fewer folks with narrower sets of skills, leads to that change. (I'd love to hear any other theories in the comments!)

Do you feel the Moz Blog posts are generally too basic, too advanced, or about right?

One thing we regularly wonder is whether the posts we're publishing are too basic to actually be valuable, or if they sail right over the heads of our readers. As it turns out, it's pretty well balanced:

The inner circle in the donut chart above is data from 2013. The numbers from this year (the outer circle) are nearly identical, moving a few (statistically insignificant) responses from "Too basic" to "Just right."

We also asked readers who didn't say posts were "just right" to quantify the extreme to which they thought the posts were either too basic or too advanced:

This is interesting—people who see posts as too advanced feel more strongly about that response than the people who see posts as too basic. That implies we have some true beginners among our readers who would benefit from coverage of the basics in easy-to-digest formats.

In general, what do you think about the length of Moz Blog posts?

This is a question we didn't ask last time. We wanted to get a sense for whether readers had any strong feelings about the length of posts. Our suspicion was pretty well confirmed:

More than 1/5 of responses indicated our posts are too long, a much greater percentage than we'd like to see. This is really good feedback; we do tend to err on the comprehensive side, but could certainly put more effort into removing extraneous text from posts.

What, if anything, would you like to see different about the Moz Blog?

We also asked an open-ended question about whatever you all would like to see different about the Moz Blog. Reading through the responses was one of the most heartening things I've done in my time as the manager of the Moz Blog—a heartfelt thank-you to everyone who offered words of encouragement and ideas for how we can make this blog even better.

Here were some of the most common themes:

Request	# of responses
More step-by-step / how-to guides	37
More WBF / video-based content	27
More case studies	22
Too wordy/verbose; more to-the-point	18
Shorter posts	18
More posts	11
More Rand, Dr. Pete, Cyrus	11
More international content & translations	11
More accessible for beginners	9
More explicit takeaways for each post	8
More interactive elements	8
Better categorization / IA	7
More technical posts	7
More posts from respected influencers	6
More news / timely analysis	6

This was a telling question when we read through the responses in 2013, and not a lot has changed:

Which of the following topics would you like to learn more about?

Search engine trends, Mobile SEO, and CRO are all new categories we added this year. Other than that, the top three remain the same—advanced SEO, content marketing, and data analysis. Social media was bumped down a few spots, and branding was bumped down a few more spots. Design/UX was bumped up significantly, and one of the biggest gainers was basic SEO—something that, until recent years, we didn't see a lot of demand for on our blog.

More than anything, it's pretty clear that SEO and content marketing are still the hottest topics, and there's far more demand for advanced SEO than there is for basic SEO. That said, we're definitely seeing demand for a wide spectrum.

Which of the following types of posts would you most like to see on the Moz Blog?

We added a few options to this question this year to try and get a better sense for your preferences. Two of the strongest categories weren't chosen quite as often, causing a general flattening of the graph, but it's still quite easy to get a feel for what you all like to see by checking out the results:

A word we often use to describe great posts is "actionable." If readers can finish the post and immediately have a new tool or tactic at their disposal that they're excited to use, we've done our jobs well. It's easy to see that reflected in the above results. Making people think is good. Getting them to put their own work in new contexts is great. But the posts that really win are those that show instead of telling, offering readers a quick lesson that helps immediately improve their work.

Now we go to work.

This is a wealth of data that can help us continue to improve the Moz Blog, and the next step is to put it all into action. Here's a good start:

Primary takeaways

The greatest challenges faced by our audience haven't changed much in two years. Keeping up with a constantly changing industry. Convincing other people (clients, bosses, etc.) that channels like SEO and content marketing -- while long-term investments with fuzzy ROI -- are worthwhile investments. You all are constantly battling to have work in the first place, let alone actually get that work done, and there isn't enough time to get all that done. Our job now is to take those challenges (and the rest that you all named above) and find industry experts who can help you through them.
The traditional blog format, where all posts are published to a single channel to the same audience, is no longer cutting it. Our range of topics is broad enough and our audience diverse enough that we need to find better ways to deliver our content to readers, helping them filter out what they don't need and more quickly hone in on what they do.
The vast (vast) majority of our readers still prefer to read blog posts on desktops and laptops, so while we're happy the Moz Blog is finally responsive, we won't shy away from developing features because they primarily benefit desktop/laptop users.
We have a growing contingent of beginners in our audience. While the majority of readers are more experienced and advanced, we should focus on making all of our posts as accessible as possible, reducing unnecessary jargon and linking to additional resources. Nobody should feel like a post goes straight over their heads, or like they're not experienced enough to glean value from it.
Two full years after the rebrand from SEOmoz, our audience is shifting ever so slightly toward a broader skill set than its SEO roots. It is continuing to become more T-shaped, as even the experts among us are finding less of their day-to-day work to do with SEO. Our posts (while never forgetting those roots) should continue to reflect that diversification.
Through their self-identification as agency employees or consultants as well as their predominant challenge in convincing clients their work is worth time and money, it's clear that agency professionals with client-based work make up a large portion of our audience. We haven't posted much to specifically help this group, and will likely make more of an effort along those lines.
There is a general call for shorter posts, but it's not simply shorter: It's more concise. More compendious. We'll work on continuing to hone our editorial rigor to ensure we're cutting verbose language and off-topic rambling. We certainly don't want to make you all read things you don't need to.
With that concision in mind, we'll address the clear demand for more case studies and more actionable how-tos and step-by-step guides.

All of that, combined with your stated preferences for topics and styles, gives us a great place to start making improvements.

Thanks again to everyone who sent us their thoughts; we couldn't do what we do without you. =)

Remembering Dana Lookadoo

jennita — Fri, 18 Sep 2015 08:40:00 +0000

Posted by jennita

Today we mourn the loss of our dear friend, long-time community member, and constant shining star in the industry, Dana Lookadoo.

She passed away early Monday morning after struggling with pain and other issues she endured resulting from her bicycle accident in 2013. Her husband Ed posted about her passing in a private Facebook group many folks were a part of. They will be setting up an education fund that we'll post more about when we have all the details.

Earlier this year we wrote more about the accident, and more importantly about how much Dana has given to this community. From her comments on the blog, to running webinars, and speaking at MozCon, she's been an active, welcoming member for as long as I can remember.

In early 2009, I was the newest member of the SEOmoz SEO Consulting team (yea, we had that back in the day). Let's just say I was slightly scared to death because I was a big nobody, and everyone else on my team was a "somebody" in the SEO industry. What I found, though, was a community of folks who welcomed me, and who made me feel right at home.

During my first SEOmoz Training Seminar (now known as MozCon) that year, Dana Lookadoo made a point to find me and welcome me personally to Moz. She asked if she could get a picture of the two of us. I thought she had to be crazy to want a picture with me. Some nobody. But that's who Dana was. She would go out of her way to make you feel comfortable, to introduce you to other folks, and she always had that big warm smile.

From that point on, Dana and I became industry friends and would run into each other at conferences all over the country. She would inevitably take lots of photos and introduce me to people I was too shy to talk to (yes, I can be shy).

One time at SMX West 2010, I had decided I was going to make a video asking people industry-related questions to see if they knew the answers. But I was having a hard time asking people. I mentioned this to Dana. Of course, she had no problem talking to folks, so she began helping me, introducing me to people, getting the conversation started. She was so dang good at it, so I simply let her roll with it. What came out of it was a silly, somewhat awkward (and a bit horrifying to see the old me), wonderful video.

"Man on Street" - A Who's Who in Search Marketing
Posted by Moz on Wednesday, March 10, 2010

I'll never forget telling her in 2010 that I had just found out I had colon cancer and that I'd be having surgery in a week. She was concerned and worried, but all her thoughts were about how to ensure my recovery went well. We talked about changing diet habits, then went on and on about how to be healthy.

Then in 2011, after I'd been going through chemo treatments for almost eight months, one morning I couldn't get out of bed. I had pushed myself too hard, fallen into a deep depression and my body had given up on me. Dana often called me, and although I didn't actually want to talk to anyone, I would answer, and then just cry. She'd just listen to me cry and tell me how much I was loved. She was concerned and went through the trouble of finding me a well regarded naturopath, made me an appointment and offered to pay for the services! I will never forget her love and her generosity during that horrible time.

After her accident, I went to visit her at her home. I remember feeling so happy to be able to return the love and friendship she had given me during my time of need. Dana will forever be a shining star; she will live on in our hearts and memories.

Dana was always full of love and light. She cared deeply about helping others and connecting people. We all have a story about Dana. I'd love to hear yours.

SEO Ideas on SEO india

5 Of Our Best Infographics From 2014

Top 5 Infographic Promotion Guides

Sci Fi Infographic Goes Viral

Traffic:

Social:

Links:

Top 10 Infographic Sites That Don’t Charge

SEO Site Ranking for Payday Loans on Google

7 Of Our Best Link Baits So Far According To StumbleUpon Hits

Are Stumbleupon and Reddit Beating Digg on Traffic?

BT Now Offering SEO & PPC Services

Strange Titles on Google

3 Reasons Why Digital Point’s PageRank Got Penalised

Why Meaning Will Ultimately Determine Your Brand's Content Marketing Success

The end of utility

Without meaning, your brand's content is adrift

1. Be where your prospects are, at the time they need your information, with a message so good they cannot ignore you.

2. Make them feel confident about what the brand stands for, not simply the purchase they might someday make.

How your brand can put this thinking to work

3. Help your customers become the best versions of themselves

How your brand can put this thinking to work

Million Dollar Content - An Analysis of the Web's Most Valuable Organic Content

Finding great content

Feature #1: On-point

Feature #2: Bold

Feature #3: Fresh

Linkable million-dollar pages

URLs Linkable to Curators

URLs linkable to editors

Linkability takeaways

Shareable million-dollar pages

The shareability winners

Shareability takeaways

Overall takeaways

Scraping and Cleaning Your Data with Google Sheets: A Closer Look

Question 1: Describe a time when automated scraping "saved your life."

Question 2: What are your preferred tools/methods for doing it?

Question 3: What are common pitfalls with web scraping to watch out for?

How to Hack the Amplification Process - Whiteboard Friday

Video transcription

The problem right here...

Solution A:

Solution B:

Solution C:

Who?

Influencers

Media and publications

What's going to resonate?

Test, measure, learn, and improve.

Announcing the 2015 Local Search Ranking Factors Results

My high-level takeaways

Google's local search algorithm seems to be maturing

The influence of Google+ on local results is on its way out (if it even existed in the first place)

Behavioral signals are increasing in importance

Citations are still crucial—but your focus should be on quality and consistency

Are links the new links?

Pigeon's shift to the user as centroid has "stuck"

Wrapping Up

Let Me Work, Please: A Case for Fewer & More Productive Meetings

Today's workplace

Finding work/meeting balance

1. Block out 2–4 hours every day in your calendar for uninterrupted work.

2. Review your existing meeting invitations.

3. Ensure that every meeting you attend has a clear purpose.

4. How many meetings actually take an hour?

5. No-meeting weekday.

Productive meetings: The rule, not the exception

1. Avoid over-inviting.

2. Ban cellphones.

3. Write actionable agendas.

4. Send agendas 24 hours in advance.

5. Begin on time.

6. Prepare for meetings.

Google Glossary: Revenge of Mega-SERP

Table of Contents

New & In Testing

"Claim this business" in Local Panel (Sep 2015)

"I'm Feeling Curious" Card (Sep 2015)

Popular Times (Sep 2015)