Welcome to this week’s edition of the Social Media Marketing Talk Show, a news show for marketers who want to stay on the leading edge of social media. On this week’s Social Media Marketing Talk Show with Michael Stelzner, we explore Twitter expanding to 280 characters with Madalyn Sklar, Vimeo acquiring Livestream with Luria Petrucci,
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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
Posted by KaneJamison
Stuck in a content marketing rut? Relying on your existing newsletter, social followers, or email outreach won't do your launches justice. Boosting your signal with paid social both introduces your brand to new audiences and improves your launch's traffic and results. In today's Whiteboard Friday, we're welcoming back our good friend Kane Jamison to highlight four straightforward, actionable tactics you can start using ASAP.
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Howdy, Moz fans. My name is Kane. I'm the founder of a content marketing agency here in Seattle called Content Harmony, and we do a lot of content marketing projects where we use paid social to launch them and get better traffic and results.
So I spoke about this, this past year at MozCon, and what I want to do today is share some of those tactics with you and help you get started with launching your content with some paid traction and not just relying on your email outreach or maybe your own existing email newsletter and social followers.
Especially for a lot of companies that are just getting started with content marketing, that audience development component is really important. A lot of people just don't have a significant market share of their industry subscribed to their newsletter. So it's great to use paid social in order to reach new people, get them over to your most important content projects, or even just get them over to your week-to-week blog content.
So different things you can do include:
So everybody's instant reaction, of course, is, "I don't have the budget for video." That's okay. You don't need to be a videography expert to create decent social ads. There's a lot of great tools out there.
All of those tools are great ways to create short, 20-second, 60-second types of videos. They let you create captions. So if you're scrolling through a social feed and you see an autoplay video, there's a good chance that the audio on that is turned off, so you can create captions to let people know what the video is about if it's not instantly obvious from the video itself. So that's a great way to get cheaper distribution than you might get from your typical image ad, and it's really going to stick out to users because most other companies aren't spending the time to do that.
Lookalike audiencesWe can upload those into a custom audience in the social network of our choice and then create what's called a lookalike audience. In this case, I'd recommend what's called a "one percent lookalike audience." So if you're targeting people in the US, it means the one percent of people in the US that appear most like your audience. So if your audience is men ages 35 to 45, typically that are interested in a specific topic, the lookalike audience will probably be a lot of other men in a similar age group that like similar topics.
So Facebook is making that choice, which means you may or may not get the perfect audience right from the start. So it's great to test additional filters on top of the default lookalike audience. So, for example, you could target people by household income. You could target people by additional interests that may or may not be obvious from the custom audience, just to make sure you're only reaching the users that are interested in your topic. Whatever it might be, if this is going to end up being three or four million people at one percent of the country, it's probably good to go ahead and filter that down to a smaller audience that's a little bit closer to your exact target that you want to reach. So excellent way to create brand awareness with that target audience.
InfluencersWhen you start running ads to this type of group, you're going to find that it costs a little bit more per click. If you're used to paying $0.50 to $1.00 per click, you might end up paying $1.00 or $2.00 per click to reach this audience. That's okay. There's a lot more embedded value with this audience than the typical user, because they're likely, on average, to have more reach, more followers, more influence.
Test share-focused CTAsIt's worth testing share focus call to actions. What that means is encouraging people to share this with some people they know that might be interested. Post it to their page even is something worth testing. It may or may not work every time, but certainly valuable to test.
FiltersSo the way we recommend reaching most of these users is through something like a job title filter. Somebody says they're a blogger, says they're an editor-in-chief, that's the clearest way to reach them. They may not always have that as their job title, so you could also do employers. That's another good example.
I recommend combining that with broad interests. So if I am targeting journalists because I have a new research piece out, it's great for us to attach interests that are relevant to our space. If we're in health care, we might target people interested in health care and the FDA and other big companies in the space that they'd likely be following for updates. If we're in fashion, we might just be selecting people that are fans of big brands, Nordstrom and others like that. Whatever it is, you can take this audience of a few hundred thousand or whatever it might be down to just a few thousand and really focus on the people that are most likely to be writing about or influential in your space.
Retarget non-subscribers
So what we can do is convert this into more of a social ad unit and just show the same messaging to the people that didn't sign up on the site. Maybe they just hate pop-ups by default. They will never sign up for them. That's okay. They might be more receptive to a lead ad in Facebook that says "subscribe" or "download" instead of something that pops up on their screen.
The other thing we can do is start testing new messages and new content. Maybe this offer wasn't interesting to them because they don't need that guide, but maybe they need your checklist instead, or maybe they'd just like your email drip series that has an educational component to it. So keep testing different types of messaging. Just because this one wasn't valuable doesn't mean your other content isn't interesting to them, and it doesn't mean they're not interested in your email list.
Redo split tests from your siteWe can keep testing messaging. So if we are testing messaging on our site, we might take the top two or three and test that messaging on ads. We might find that different messaging works better on social than it does on pop-ups or banners on the site. So it's worth redoing split tests that seemed conclusive on your site because things might be different on the social media network.
So that's it for today. What I'd love for you guys to do is if you have some great examples of targeting that's worked for you, messaging that's worked for you, or just other paid social tactics that have worked really well for your content marketing campaigns, I'd love to hear examples of that in the comments on the post, and we'd be happy to answer questions you guys have on how to actually get some of this stuff done. Whether it's targeting questions, how to set up lookalike audiences, anything like that, we'd be happy to answer questions there as well.
So that's it for me today. Thanks, Moz fans. We'll see you next time.
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Want your YouTube ads to convert? Looking for effective ways to build remarketing audiences for your ads? To explore tactics for remarketing with YouTube, I interview Brett Curry. More About This Show The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It’s designed to help busy marketers, business owners,
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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
Most brands are quite successful in their country. But when they enter China, they need to understand they are starting from scratch.
You have to build awareness, get the trust of the consumers and create engagement before thinking about selling something.
Where should a new brand start in China?
The business environment in China is strongly dictated by the digital sphere. Having a digital presence is crucial to developing a brand image and the reputation of a company. Chinese consumers love new technology because they use it in their lives on a daily basis.
In the first half of 2017, the Chinese spent 40 billion hours on social platforms. This represents many opportunities for brands to innovate their digital strategies in the Middle Empire.
Enter digital marketing
In the past few years, digital has become THE trend in China.
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Do you save Instagram posts? Looking for a way to organize your saved posts? In this article, you’ll learn how to create private Instagram collections to organize saved posts you want to refer to later. Why Instagram Collections? When you save Instagram posts you want to refer to later on, they’re added to a private
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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
Posted by nickpierno
If you asked me, I’d tell you that proper tracking is the single most important element in your local business digital marketing stack. I’d also tell you that even if you didn’t ask, apparently.
A decent tracking setup allows you to answer the most important questions about your marketing efforts. What’s working and what isn’t?
Many digital marketing strategies today still focus on traffic. Lots of agencies/developers/marketers will slap an Analytics tracking code on your site and call it a day. For most local businesses, though, traffic isn’t all that meaningful of a metric. And in many cases (e.g. Adwords & Facebook), more traffic just means more spending, without any real relationship to results.
What you really need your tracking setup to tell you is how many leads (AKA conversions) you’re getting, and from where. It also needs to do so quickly and easily, without you having to log into multiple accounts to piece everything together.
If you’re spending money or energy on SEO, Adwords, Facebook, or any other kind of digital traffic stream and you’re not measuring how many leads you get from each source, stop what you’re doing right now and make setting up a solid tracking plan your next priority.
This guide is intended to fill you in on all the basic elements you’ll need to assemble a simple, yet flexible and robust tracking setup.
Google AnalyticsGoogle Analytics is at the center of virtually every good web tracking setup. There are other supplemental ways to collect web analytics (like Heap, Hotjar, Facebook Pixels, etc), but Google Analytics is the free, powerful, and omnipresent tool that virtually every website should use. It will be the foundation of our approach in this guide.
Analytics setup tipsAnalytics is super easy to set up. Create (or sign into) a Google account, add your Account and Property (website), and install the tracking code in your website’s template.
Whatever happens, don’t let your agency or developer set up your Analytics property on their own Account. Agencies and developers: STOP DOING THIS! Create a separate Google/Gmail account and let this be the "owner" of a new Analytics Account, then share permission with the agency/developer’s account, the client’s personal Google account, and so on.
The “All Website Data” view will be created by default for a new property. If you’re going to add filters or make any other advanced changes, be sure to create and use a separate View, keeping the default view clean and pure.
Also be sure to set the appropriate currency and time zone in the “View Settings.” If you ever use Adwords, using the wrong currency setting will result in a major disagreement between Adwords and Analytics.
GoalsOnce your basic Analytics setup is in place, you should add some goals. This is where the magic happens. Ideally, every business objective your website can achieve should be represented as a goal conversion. Conversions can come in many forms, but here are some of the most common ones:
How you slice up your goals will vary with your needs, but I generally try to group similar “types” of conversions into a single goal. If I have several different contact forms on a site (like a quick contact form in the sidebar, and a heftier one on the contact page), I might group those as a single goal. You can always dig deeper to see the specific breakdown, but it’s nice to keep goals as neat and tidy as possible.
To create a goal in Analytics:
Don’t worry though, you can still get these conversions tracked in Analytics if you want to (I could make an argument either for or against). Simply create a single “offline” tracking number in your call tracking platform, and use that number as the destination for the Google forwarding number.
This also helps counteract one of the oddities of Google’s call forwarding system. Google will actually only start showing the forwarding number on desktop ads after they have received a certain (seemingly arbitrary) minimum number of clicks per week. As a result, some calls are tracked and some aren’t — especially on smaller campaigns. With this little trick, Analytics will show all the calls originating from your ads — not just ones that take place once you’ve paid Google enough each week.
Adwords might give you a hard time for using a number in your call extensions that isn’t on your website. If you encounter issues with getting your number verified for use as a call extension, just make sure you have linked your Search Console to your Adwords account (as indicated above).
Now you’ve got Analytics and Adwords all synced up, and your tracking regimen is looking pretty gnarly! There are a few other cool tools you can use to take full advantage of your sweet setup.
Google Tag ManagerIf you’re finding yourself putting a lot of code snippets on your site (web chat, Analytics, call tracking, Adwords, Facebook Pixels, etc), Google Tag Manager is a fantastic tool for managing them all from one spot. You can also do all sorts of advanced slicing and dicing.
GTM is basically a container that you put all your snippets in, and then you put a single GTM snippet on your site. Once installed, you never need to go back to your site’s code to make changes to your snippets. You can manage them all from the GTM interface in a user-friendly, version-controlled environment.
Don’t bother if you just need Analytics on your site (and are using the CallRail plugin). But for more robust needs, it’s well worth considering for its sheer power and simplicity.
Here’s a great primer on making use of Google Tag Manager.
UTM tracking URLs & Google Campaign URL BuilderOnce you’ve got conversion data occupying all your waking thoughts, you might want to take things a step further. Perhaps you want to track traffic and leads that come from an offline advertisement, a business card, an email signature, etc. You can build tracking URLs that include UTM parameters (campaign, source, and medium), so that when visitors come to your site from a certain place, you can tell where that place was!
Once you know how to build these URLs, you don’t really need a tool, but Google’s Campaign URL Builder makes quick enough work of it that it’s bound to earn a spot in your browser’s bookmarks bar.
Pro tip: Use a tracking URL on your Google My Business listing to help distinguish traffic/conversions coming in from your listing vs traffic coming in from the organic search results. I’d recommend using:
Source: google
Medium: organic
Campaign name: gmb-listing (or something)
This way your GMB traffic still shows up in Analytics as normal organic traffic, but you can drill down to the gmb-listing campaign to see its specific performance.
Bonus pro tip: Use a vanity domain or a short URL on print materials or offline ads, and point it to a tracking URL to measure their performance in Analytics.
Rank trackingWhaaat? Rank tracking is a dirty word to conversion tracking purists, isn’t it?
Nah. It’s true that rank tracking is a poor primary metric for your digital marketing efforts, but it can be very helpful as a supplemental metric and for helping to diagnose changes in traffic, as Darren Shaw explored here.
For local businesses, we think our Local Rank Tracker is a pretty darn good tool for the job.
I don’t consider this a necessary step, because you’re probably not pointing your paid clicks to your GMB listing. However, combined with a tracking URL pointing to your website, you can now fully measure the performance of Google My Business for your business!
Disclaimer: I believe that this method is totally safe, and I’m using it myself in several instances, but I can’t say with absolute certainty that it won’t impact your rankings. Whitespark is currently testing this out on a larger scale, and we’ll share our findings once they’re assembled!
Taking it all inSo now you’ve assembled a lean, mean tracking machine. You’re already feeling 10 years younger, and everyone pays attention when you enter the room. But what can you do with all this power?
Here are a few ways I like to soak up this beautiful data.
Pop into AnalyticsSince we’ve centralized all our tracking in Analytics, we can answer pretty much any performance questions we have within a few simple clicks.
There are a billion and seven ways to look at your Analytics data, but I do most of my ogling from Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels. Here you get a great overview of your traffic and conversions sliced up by channels (Organic Search, Paid Search, Direct, Referral, etc). You can obviously adjust date ranges, compare to past date ranges, and view conversion metrics individually or as a whole. For me, this is Analytics home base.
Google’s Dashboards inside Analytics provide a great way to put the most important metrics together on a single screen. They’re easy to use, but I’ve always found them a bit limiting. Fortunately for data junkies, Google has recently released its next generation data visualization product...
Google Data StudioThis is pretty awesome. It’s very flexible, powerful, and user-friendly. I’d recommend skipping the Analytics Dashboards and going straight to Data Studio.
It will allow to you to beautifully dashboard-ify your data from Analytics, Adwords, Youtube, DoubleClick, and even custom databases or spreadsheets. All the data is “live” and dynamic. Users can even change data sources and date ranges on the fly! Bosses love it, clients love it, and marketers love it… provided everything is..
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Does anyone else sometimes feel like their content just fails? Every so often I get into this funk and nothing I write seems to have any oomph. The topics are stale, or I am just not feeling it? Sure, research shows that it is what is popular in the public consciousness at the time. But trends and I don’t always mix and when that happens you can really see it in what I produce.
That is why this little trick really saved my bacon. After years of struggling with this particular issue, I realized I was missing the obvious: my customers were the ones I should be listening to. I had been hearing about – and sometimes writing about – the importance of answering customer questions for ages, yet I was failing to take that advice.
Once I made the shift it was like a whole new world opened up for me.
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Are you creating YouTube videos? Wondering how to analyze the impact of your video content? In this article, you’ll discover how to measure the performance of YouTube videos. #1: Assess Video Watch Behavior YouTube provides powerful analytics data that lets you evaluate how your videos are performing and how you might improve your content in
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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
Customer service is having a moment.
Now that more and more interactions between customers and companies are taking place in public—via social media, review sites, and beyond—the stakes are higher. Attention and budgets are growing.
But still, even with renewed focus, the overwhelming majority of customer service resources are reactive. “How can we best interact with customers who are seeking help, or who have complained?” This is the mantra.
It’s not a bad idea. Certainly, with customer service becoming a spectator sport, handing customer questions and complaints better and faster will have a material impact on your business. I wrote a whole book about it.
However, the best way to build your business with customer experience isn’t to get better at reactive service, but instead to pay more attention to PROACTIVE customer service.
Proactive Customer Service, FTWIsn’t the best complaint the one that never has to be delivered? Team members in almost every business already know what customers are likely to complain about. This is because, despite a few outliers, most complaints clump over time into a few, specific types that reoccur over and over again.
If I asked you to stop reading right now and write down the five complaints you hear most often from customers, almost all of you could accomplish the task within 90 seconds. It. Is. Obvious.
Yet, even though we know what customers struggle with, we don’t put much time or effort into getting out in front of it. It’s misplaced, and you can fix it—typically, with information.
Proactive Customer Service on My SinkToday, I’m in Palms Springs, California delivering two talks on customer service to franchisees of Anytime Fitness. Proactive customer service is critical for the continued success or the company. Nearly every franchisee has the same customer satisfaction issues. They must communicate better with members to alleviate any understanding gaps, thereby solving problems before the customer needs to complain.
Ironically, as I was getting dressed for my presentation, I found a terrific example of proactive customer service in action, right in my hotel room.
On my sink was this sign, helpfully placed by the Renaissance Hotel:
Brilliant! Because indeed, the water out of my bathroom faucet was cloudy—like a mixture of water and milk, actually. That was a little disconcerting, frankly, until I read the sign informing me that this was a natural, regional occurrence and the water was pure and full of “minerals required for healthy growth and development.”
One, simple sign turned my faucet water from a shortcoming to an elixir.
I’m not sure how long the signs have been in place. I’m going to try to meet with the manager and find out, and I’ll update the post if I get an answer. But I can only imagine how many calls to the front desk were being placed before the signs appeared.
This is a big hotel. If only 20 percent of guests inquired about the water, you’d have dozens of calls every day with which to contend. Now, because of proactive customer service, they have just a few, if any. Very smart.
Proactive Customer Service MattersWade Lombard owns a moving company in Texas called Square Cow Movers. It’s a good business—better than most moving companies.
He dug deeper. He printed out the reviews. He printed out the emails. He transcribed complaint phone calls. He combined all the data, and realized that practically zero complaints were about moving. They were about related issues like show up times, parking, packing, and so forth.
This was a puzzle to Wade because he had thought Square Cow was pretty great at proactive customer service. When customers pay a deposit and hold a date, they are sent a welcome kit with an explanation of the process. And then, Wade’s team sends a reminder email seven days in advance of the move, with more helpful tips. Finally, the night before, a voicemail arrives to confirm the details.
But despite all of this, customers were complaining that they just DIDN’T KNOW what to expect. The company thought customers were adequately informed, but the customers thought they were under-informed—so much so that it created complaints.
And then Wade realized a key fact: By definition, all of his customers are in the process of moving. When you move, you become a crazy person. It’s stressful. You’re not at your best. Wade recognized that even though the company was sending information, it wasn’t sinking in for customers. So, they doubled everything. Two welcome kits. Two “here’s what to expect” emails. Two reminders in the last days. And guess what happened? All the complaints faded away.
As Wade told me once, no customer has ever said, “Please stop informing me so much.”
There’s no such thing as too much information. It’s true if you run a moving company. Or own a fitness gym. Or just have cloudy water.
If you want to put more time and money into your customer service, I’m with you 110 percent. But don’t neglect proactive customer service. The results can transform your business.
http://ift.tt/2xwLOHPAscend2, which offers research-based marketing services, and Vidyard, a video marketing platform, recently released a survey of content marketers to find out how the best of the best run their content marketing campaigns.
Over half of the respondents worked at companies with over 500 employees. 40 percent had 50 to 500 employees, and eight percent had fewer than 50. More than half dealt primarily with business-to-business (B2B) channels, about a quarter worked mostly with business-to-consumer (B2C) channels, and 20 percent worked with both equally.
35 percent of respondents ranked their content marketing and distribution strategy as very successful compared to their competitors. 46 percent described their strategies as somewhat successful, and 19 percent ranked them as unsuccessful.
“I was a little surprised to read the results of the survey,” says Jacqueline Gay, Digital Marketing & Communications Manager for international company Quincy Compressor. “Historically, industrial companies seem to struggle to create content, yet we’ve been able to generate a bunch of creative content ideas for our marketing campaigns taking a more aggressive approach to connect with our audiences.”
It’s true—Quincy Compressor has created some genuinely shareable (if not downright surprising) infographics, and its blog seems to have no shortage of recently published posts.
“We know as well as any company that content marketing isn’t the easiest thing to jump right into,” says Gay, “but if we can do it, surely other industries can find success with it, too.”
Ascend2 and Vidyard’s survey just might shed some additional insights into exactly what challenges other industries and companies are perceiving. We’ve highlighted some of the most notable below.
Strategic ObjectivesHalf of the best-in-class respondents said that increasing sales revenue was the most important objective of their strategy. This was followed by improving search rankings with 42 percent and increasing brand awareness with 41 percent.
When it comes to for-profit businesses, the other responses in the survey are likely, for the most part, sub-goals on the way toward the ultimate goal of increasing sales revenue.
Types of ContentWhen asked to rank the most effective types of content marketing, 63 percent said video and motion graphics. Other studies have found that to be true. Visual content tends to perform exceptionally well on social media.
The rest of the top spots went to, in this order, research reports, webinars/webcasts, social media content, infographics, website articles, blogs, and case studies/white papers. The last option received only nine percent, while the others got higher scores.
MetricsYou can’t tell how successful a campaign was unless you have something you can use to measure it. 64 percent of respondents said that brand awareness was the most useful metric. Lead generation and nurturing and customer engagement were other popular selections. Brand awareness is also difficult to measure, but various analytic tools can help with that.
The report also compared the most useful metrics to the most important objectives, as identified by the survey’s respondents. Objectives are much more useful when they can be effectively measured. The survey found that the most important objectives and the most useful ones didn’t always align.
64% of marketers say that brand awareness is the most useful marketing metric.
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Resources Used
The study indicated that outsourcing your content marketing distribution leads to more success. This may be because outside marketing companies have more specialized skills and more access to marketing-related resources.
94 percent of best-in-class respondents outsourced at least part of their content marketing. 53 percent outsourced all of it, 41 percent used a combination of outsourcing and in-house resources, and only six percent used only in-house resources.
Paid DistributionMore than three-quarters of the top content marketers said paid distribution channels are becoming significantly more effective. 19 percent reported that their effectiveness was increasing marginally, while just four percent said it was decreasing either marginally or significantly.
Of those paid channels, search engine rankings took the top spot with 69 percent, followed by online banner ads and promoted posts or tweets. The survey also asked about print and offline promotions, which seven percent of best-in-class marketers said was the most effective channel.
Sales CycleThe type of sales cycle your business typically encounters is important for choosing the right content marketing strategy. Most of the marketers surveyed (71 percent) said they deal mostly with complex cycles, which are longer and have many influencers. Twenty percent work mostly with direct sales, while nine percent encounter both types equally.
This survey tells us that most content marketers value increased sales the most but find brand awareness to be the most useful metric. They often use video and motion graphics to reach their goals and believe paid channels are becoming more effective. Most companies didn’t do their content marketing themselves, though—outsourcing was overwhelmingly popular.
Perhaps businesses will find the results of this survey useful, and maybe the next time a survey like this is conducted, more of them will be able to describe their strategies as “very successful.”
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http://ift.tt/2yrGUIMPosted by Everett
Google still ranks webpages based on the content, code, and links they find with a desktop crawler. They’re working to update this old-school approach in favor of what their mobile crawlers find instead. Although the rollout will probably happen in phases over time, I’m calling the day this change goes live worldwide “D-day” in the post below. Mobilegeddon was already taken.
You don’t want to be in a situation on D-day where your mobile site has broken meta tags, unoptimized titles and headers, missing content, or is serving the wrong HTTP status code. This post will help you prepare so you can sleep well between now then.
What is a mobile parity audit?When two or more versions of a website are available on the same URL, a "parity audit" will crawl each version, compare the differences, and look for errors.
When do you need one?You should do a parity audit if content is added, removed, hidden, or changed between devices without sending the user to a new URL.
This type of analysis is also useful for mobile sites on a separate URL, but that's another post.
What will it tell you? How will it help?Is the mobile version of the website "optimized" and crawlable? Are all of the header response codes and tags set up properly, and in the same way, on both versions? Is important textual content missing from, or hidden, on the mobile version?
Why parity audits could save your buttThe last thing you want to do is scramble to diagnose a major traffic drop on D-day when things go mobile-first. Even if you don’t change anything now, cataloging the differences between site versions will help diagnose issues if/when the time comes.
It may also help you improve rankings right now.
I know an excellent team of SEOs for a major brand who, for severals months, had missed the fact that the entire mobile site (millions of pages) had title tags that all read the same: "BrandName - Mobile Site." They found this error and contacted us to take a more complete look at the differences between the two sites. Here are some other things we found:
It sounds complicated, but really it boils down to a few simple steps:
Screaming Frog provides the option to crawl the site as the Googlebot Mobile user-agent with a smartphone device. You may or may not need to render JavaScript.
You can run two crawls (mobile and desktop) with DeepCrawl as well. However, reports like "Mobile Word Count Mismatch" do not currently work on dynamic sites, even after two crawls.
The hack to get at the data you want is the same as with Screaming Frog: namely, running two crawls, exporting two reports, and using Vlookups in Excel to compare the columns side-by-side with URL being the unique identifier.
Here's a simplified example using an export from DeepCrawl:
As you can see in the screenshot above, blog category pages, like /category/cro/, are bigly different between devices types, not just in how they appear, but also in what code and content gets delivered and rendered as source code. The bigliest difference is that post teasers disappear on mobile, which accounts for the word count disparity.
Word count is only one data point. You would want to look at many different things, discussed below, when performing a mobile/desktop parity audit.
For now, there does NOT appear to be an SEO tool on the market that crawls a dynamic site as both a desktop and mobile crawler, and then generates helpful reports about the differences between them.
But there's hope!Our industry toolmakers are hot on the trail, and at this point I'd expect features to release in time for D-day.
Deep CrawlWe are working on Changed Metrics reports, which will automatically show you pages where the titles and descriptions have changed between crawls. This would serve to identify differences on dynamic sites when the user agent is changed. But for now, this can be done manually by downloading and merging the data from the two crawls and calculating the differences.Moz Pro
Dr. Pete says they've talked about comparing desktop and mobile rankings to look for warning signs so Moz could alert customers of any potential issues. This would be a very helpful feature to augment the other analysis of on-page differences.
SitebulbWhen you select "mobile-friendly," Sitebulb is already crawling the whole site first, then choosing a sample of (up to) 100 pages, and then recrawling these with the JavaScript rendering crawler. This is what produces their "mobile-friendly" report.
They're thinking about doing the same to run these parity audit reports (mobile/desktop difference checker), which would be a big step forward for us SEOs. Because most of these disparity issues happen at the template/page type level, taking URLs from different crawl depths and sections of the site should allow this tool to alert SEOs of potential mismatches between content and page elements on those two versions of the single URL.
Screaming FrogAside from the oversensitive hash values, SF has no major advantage over DeepCrawl at the moment. In fact, DeepCrawl has some mobile difference finding features that, if they were to work on dynamic sites, would be leaps and bounds ahead of SF.
That said, the process shared below uses Screaming Frog because it's what I'm most familiar with.
Customizing the diff findersOne of my SEO heroes, David Sottimano, whipped out a customization of John Resig's Javascript Diff Algorithm to help automate some of the hard work involved in these desktop/mobile parity audits.
http://ift.tt/2xCAzgbPosted by rachelgooodmanmoore
CHAPTER 1: A New HopeA long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, marketers who wanted to learn about SEO were forced to mine deep into the caverns of Google search engine result pages to find the answers to even the most simple SEO questions.
Then, out of darkness came a new hope (with a mouthful of a name):
...the Learn SEO and Search Marketing hub!
The SEO and Search Marketing hub housed resources like the Beginner’s Guide to SEO and articles about popular SEO topics like meta descriptions, title tags, and robots.txt. Its purpose was to serve as a one-stop-shop for visitors looking to learn what SEO was all about and how to use it on their own sites.
The Learn SEO and Search marketing hub would go on to serve as a guiding light for searchers and site visitors looking to learn the ropes of SEO for many years to come.
CHAPTER 2: The Learning Hub Strikes BackSince its inception in 2010, this hub happily served hundreds of thousands of Internet folk looking to learn the ropes of SEO and search marketing. But time took its toll on the hub. As marketing and search engine optimization grew increasingly complex, the Learning Hub lapsed into disrepair. While new content was periodically added, that content was hard to find and often intermingled with older, out-of-date resources. The Learning Hub became less of a hub and more of a list of resources… some of which were also lists of resources.
Offshoots like the Local Learning Center and Content Marketing Learning Center sprung up in an effort to tame the overgrown learning hub, but ‘twas all for naught: By autumn of 2016, Moz’s learning hub sites were a confusing nest of hard-to-navigate articles, guides, and 404s. Some articles were written for SEO experts and explained concepts in extensive, technical detail, while others were written for an audience with less extensive SEO knowledge. It was impossible to know which type of article you found yourself in before you wound up confused or discouraged.
What had once been a useful resource for marketers of all backgrounds was languishing in its age.
CHAPTER 3: The Return of the Learning CenterThe vision behind the SEO and Search Marketing Hub had always been to educate SEOs and search marketers on the skills they needed to be successful in their jobs. While the site section continued to serve that purpose, somewhere along the along the way we started getting diminishing returns.
Our mission, then, was clear: Re-invent Moz’s learning resources with a new structure, new website, and new content.
As we set off on this mission, one thing was clear: The new Learning Center should serve as a home base for marketers and SEOs of all skill levels to learn what’s needed to excel in their work: from the fundamentals to expert-level content, from time-tested tenets of SEO success to cutting-edge tactics and tricks. If we weren’t able to accomplish this, our mission would all be for naught.
We also believed that a new Learning Center should make it easy for visitors of all skill levels and learning styles to find value: from those folks who want to read an article then dive into their work; to those who want to browse through libraries of focused SEO videos; to folks who want to learn from the experts in hands-on webinars.
So, that’s exactly what we built.
May we introduce to you the (drumroll, please) brand new, totally rebuilt SEO Learning Center!
Unlike the “list of lists” in the old Learn SEO and Search Marketing hub, the new Learning Center organizes content by topic.
Each topic has its own “topic hub.” There are eleven of these and they cover:
Each of the eleven topic hubs host a slew of hand-picked articles, videos, blog posts, webinars, Q&A posts, templates, and training classes designed to help you dive deeper into your chosen SEO topic.
All eleven of the hubs contain a “fundamentals” menu to help you wrap your brain around a topic, as well as a content feed with hundreds of resources to help you go even further. These feed resources are filterable by topic (for instance, content that’s about both ranking & visibility AND local SEO), SEO skill level (from beginner to advanced), and format.
Use the Learning Center’s filters to zero in on exactly the content you’re looking for.
And, if you’re brand new to a topic or not sure where to start, you can always find a link to the Beginner’s Guide to SEO right at the top of each page.
But we can only explain so much in words — check it out for yourself:
Visit the new SEO Learning Center!
CHAPTER 4: The Content AwakensOne of the main motivations behind rebuilding the Learning Center website was to make it easier for folks to find and move through a slew of educational content, be that a native Learning Center article, a blog post, a webinar, or otherwise. But it doesn’t do any good to make content easier to find if that content is totally out-of-date and unhelpful.
In addition to our mission to build a new Learning Center, we’ve also been quietly updating our existing articles to include the latest best practices, tactics, strategies, and resources. As part of this rewrite, we’ve also made an effort to keep each article as focused as possible around specifically one topic — a complete explanation of everything someone newer to the world of SEO needs to know about the given topic. What did that process look like in action? Check it out:
As of now we’ve updated 50+ articles, with more on the way!
Going forward, we’ll continue to iterate on the search experience within the new Learning Center. For example, while we always have our site search bar available, a Learning Center-specific search function would make finding articles even easier — and that’s just one of our plans for the future. Bigger projects include a complete update of the Beginner’s Guide to SEO (keep an eye on the blog for more news there, too), as well as our other introductory guides.
Help us, Moz-i Wan Community, you’re our only hopeWe’ve already telekinetically moved mountains with this project, but the Learning Center is your resource — we’d love to hear what you’d like to see next, or if there’s anything really important you think we’ve missed. Head over, check it out, and tell us what you think in the comments!
Explore the new SEO Learning Center!
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http://ift.tt/2xsGmWpAscend2, which offers research-based marketing services, and Vidyard, a video marketing platform, recently released a survey of content marketers to find out how the best of the best run their content marketing campaigns.
Over half of the respondents worked at companies with over 500 employees. 40 percent had 50 to 500 employees, and eight percent had fewer than 50. More than half dealt primarily with business-to-business (B2B) channels, about a quarter worked mostly with business-to-consumer (B2C) channels, and 20 percent worked with both equally.
35 percent of respondents ranked their content marketing and distribution strategy as very successful compared to their competitors. 46 percent described their strategies as somewhat successful, and 19 percent ranked them as unsuccessful.
“I was a little surprised to read the results of the survey,” says Jacqueline Gay, Digital Marketing & Communications Manager for international company Quincy Compressor. “Historically, industrial companies seem to struggle to create content, yet we’ve been able to generate a bunch of creative content ideas for our marketing campaigns taking a more aggressive approach to connect with our audiences.”
It’s true—Quincy Compressor has created some genuinely shareable (if not downright surprising) infographics, and its blog seems to have no shortage of recently published posts.
“We know as well as any company that content marketing isn’t the easiest thing to jump right into,” says Gay, “but if we can do it, surely other industries can find success with it, too.”
Ascend2 and Vidyard’s survey just might shed some additional insights into exactly what challenges other industries and companies are perceiving. We’ve highlighted some of the most notable below.
Strategic ObjectivesHalf of the best-in-class respondents said that increasing sales revenue was the most important objective of their strategy. This was followed by improving search rankings with 42 percent and increasing brand awareness with 41 percent.
When it comes to for-profit businesses, the other responses in the survey are likely, for the most part, sub-goals on the way toward the ultimate goal of increasing sales revenue.
Types of ContentWhen asked to rank the most effective types of content marketing, 63 percent said video and motion graphics. Other studies have found that to be true. Visual content tends to perform exceptionally well on social media.
The rest of the top spots went to, in this order, research reports, webinars/webcasts, social media content, infographics, website articles, blogs, and case studies/white papers. The last option received only nine percent, while the others got higher scores.
MetricsYou can’t tell how successful a campaign was unless you have something you can use to measure it. 64 percent of respondents said that brand awareness was the most useful metric. Lead generation and nurturing and customer engagement were other popular selections. Brand awareness is also difficult to measure, but various analytic tools can help with that.
The report also compared the most useful metrics to the most important objectives, as identified by the survey’s respondents. Objectives are much more useful when they can be effectively measured. The survey found that the most important objectives and the most useful ones didn’t always align.
64% of marketers say that brand awareness is the most useful marketing metric.
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Resources Used
The study indicated that outsourcing your content marketing distribution leads to more success. This may be because outside marketing companies have more specialized skills and more access to marketing-related resources.
94 percent of best-in-class respondents outsourced at least part of their content marketing. 53 percent outsourced all of it, 41 percent used a combination of outsourcing and in-house resources, and only six percent used only in-house resources.
Paid DistributionMore than three-quarters of the top content marketers said paid distribution channels are becoming significantly more effective. 19 percent reported that their effectiveness was increasing marginally, while just four percent said it was decreasing either marginally or significantly.
Of those paid channels, search engine rankings took the top spot with 69 percent, followed by online banner ads and promoted posts or tweets. The survey also asked about print and offline promotions, which seven percent of best-in-class marketers said was the most effective channel.
Sales CycleThe type of sales cycle your business typically encounters is important for choosing the right content marketing strategy. Most of the marketers surveyed (71 percent) said they deal mostly with complex cycles, which are longer and have many influencers. Twenty percent work mostly with direct sales, while nine percent encounter both types equally.
This survey tells us that most content marketers value increased sales the most but find brand awareness to be the most useful metric. They often use video and motion graphics to reach their goals and believe paid channels are becoming more effective. Most companies didn’t do their content marketing themselves, though—outsourcing was overwhelmingly popular.
Perhaps businesses will find the results of this survey useful, and maybe the next time a survey like this is conducted, more of them will be able to describe their strategies as “very successful.”
Get a weekly dose of the trends and insights you need to keep you ON top, from Jay Baer at Convince & Convert. Sign up for the Convince & Convert ON email newsletter.
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As more brands use infographics for their marketing, patterns regarding style, promotion strategies, and content emerge.
Observing these trends can help you keep up and maintain the relevance of your brand. But if you really want to gain a significant edge over the competition, you’ll need to look ahead using the information readily available today.
In this post, we’ll discuss the current trends that could shape the infographic design industry in 2018.
1. Large Headlines
The first thing you’ll notice with the majority of infographics designed today, particularly those with a long format, is the use of large headlines.
This is probably one of the trends that will stick around for a long time. After all, the headline is in charge of getting the audience’s attention and giving them the right expectations with regard to what the content is about.
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Want to create a Facebook presence that’s separate from your personal profile? Have you considered creating a public figure Facebook page? In this article, you’ll discover why you should consider a Facebook public figure page and how to set one up. Why a Public Figure Facebook Page? Your personal brand is your most valuable asset.
This post How to Create a Facebook Public Figure Page and Why You Should first appeared on .
- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
What is a boosted post? Why should we pay for our fans to see our posts?
There seems to be a wishy-washy view from the experts as to whether boosted posts work or if you should stay away from them.
In my own experience, boosted posts are a quick and easy way to get the audience to take an action. The key is having a call to action to make the boosted post effective. Some of my clients absolutely dislike boosted posts. Because as the post gains momentum the comments can be negative or attract trolls. Let’s look at boosted posts and why we need to pay so our fans can see the boosted posts. From this article, you should be able to make an informed decision for your business.
Let’s start with what is a boosted post
A boosted post is a post you’ve uploaded to your Facebook fan page.
http://ift.tt/2wRUp3iScroll through your Facebook feed, and for every link to a long-form article, you will have to pass a healthy handful of viral videos. Are they industry specific? Hardly. Politics, entertainment, entrepreneurship advice, you name it, the verdict is clear: The preferred form is video.
Are they industry specific? Hardly. Politics, entertainment, entrepreneurship advice, you name it, the verdict is clear: The preferred form is video.
Politics, entertainment, entrepreneurship advice, you name it, the verdict is clear: The preferred form is video.
According to a report by Cisco, total internet video traffic (business and consumer, combined) will be 79 percent of all Internet traffic by 2020, up from 63 percent in 2015. But the data points to a larger issue, and one that is scaring one of the longest standing crafts of all time: writing.
However, videos are only part of the equation. The larger shift that is happening is away from reading and more toward visual storytelling, which includes images. Content with images gets 94 percent more views than content without, cited another study. And according to a Citrix report, nearly two-thirds of the posts on social media are visual content.
The Role of the Writer Has ChangedHere’s what’s fascinating: Despite the data telling us that images and video are a consistently rising trend, this is not to say that writing, in itself, is dying—in fact, far from it.
One could say that writing is simply becoming more visual. Those images that get shared so often on social media? One of the most popular image types is quote graphics: images with text layered on top. Or the videos that fill your Facebook news feed? They are paired with banner text acting as headlines, piquing the curiosity of potential viewers.
So even though data shows the human brain processes images at lightning speed—13 milliseconds—and that videos are processed by the brain 60,000 times faster than text, this ignores the simple fact that potent messaging is what draws someone in to begin with.
Sure, reading long-form content requires a longer attention span and deeper cognitive efforts, but the act of reading will never disappear, since words are what give us direction. They tell us what we’re about to watch before we watch it. Therefore, the role of the writer isn’t vanishing. It’s evolving. High-performing images and videos are demanding that writing, if anything, challenge itself to be more condensed. Snappier headlines. Quick, meaningful quotes.
The visual age is forcing writers to get to the point.
So, how can writers stay relevant? And more importantly, what does a successful writing style look like in today’s digital world?
The role of the writer isn't vanishing. It's evolving.
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1. Know the Rules of Your Medium
Marketers especially, listen up: Since written and visual storytelling has become so intertwined, you have to think of them as two halves to the same coin. The question is not which one to choose, but rather the density of the blend. For example, combining an emotional photo with a powerful quote to create an image graphic is a great mixture for a platform like Instagram. It is not, however, a great fit for a platform like Facebook, since Facebook’s algorithm does not favor posts with more than 20 percent text. It’s a simple example, but a crucial one.
Written and visual elements work together to tell lasting stories. For marketers, then, the question becomes how to properly utilize both based on the medium of choice—and what the users on those platforms are most comfortable engaging with.
In addition, there are plenty of cases when writing absolutely trumps visual storytelling. Some would argue that reading a column or blog is easier than listening to a heavily detailed podcast— learning through reading versus listening.
If you want people to think and learn something particular, consider writing. If you want people to feel, lead with the visual: video or imagery.
2. Let Design Accentuate, or Even Guide, Your WritingIf you look around, writing is everywhere. There truly is no shortage of words. From infographics to websites, landing pages to Facebook ads, the written word is alive and well. It just tends to get overshadowed by trends that hail the power of visual storytelling.
A key part of making your writing stand out, then, is to frame it in the right context. This is where learning to work with designers can be tremendously helpful. By understanding how a designer approaches a piece of content, you too can learn how to shape your writing to fit within those constraints without losing any of its meaning or depth.
The real benefit here, however, is that a single sentence framed by the right design can hold so much more weight in the visual age than an entire essay lost amongst a sea of other copy. Learning to write with the awareness of the context created by design will not only help your writing stand out; it will allow you to reach and impact many more people whose eyes are on the lookout for something visual.
3. Visual Stories Are Still StoriesAlong with the changing responsibilities of the modern-day writer comes the acceptance that, sometimes, what you’ve written can be more powerfully told through a video, for example.
Thinking like a screenwriter or a playwright gives you a significant advantage in the digital age. If you can be the writer behind meaningful videos and construct a story worth watching, your value will not be forgotten. In fact, the next time you see a video on the internet, take note of whether or not subtitles are included. Chances are, they’re there.
When a viewer watches a video with subtitles, they are not only feeling the visual but reading the story as well—and the better the story, the more engaged they will be. Since so many people watch videos on their mobile phones, especially when they’re out and about (and may not have access to headphones), subtitles allow them to follow along. If you can write a narrative worth reading, imagine how much more engaged people will be with a coinciding video guiding them through.
The craft of writing is not dying. It is simply evolving as consumer behavior changes.
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Do you want to learn more about your competitors’ social media activity? Looking for tools to help? Competitive research tools let you see at a glance how your social media marketing compares to similar businesses. In this article, you’ll discover four tools for researching your competition on popular social media platforms. #1: Benchmark YouTube Channels
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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
Welcome to this week’s edition of the Social Media Marketing Talk Show, a news show for marketers who want to stay on the leading edge of social media. On this week’s Social Media Marketing Talk Show with Michael Stelzner, we explore Facebook ad updates with Amanda Bond, Instagram updates with Jeff Sieh, YouTube fan sponsors
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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
Posted by randfish
What do the age of your site, your headline H1/H2 preference, bounce rate, and shared hosting all have in common? You might've gotten a hint from the title: not a single one of them directly affects your Google rankings. In this rather comforting Whiteboard Friday, Rand lists out ten factors commonly thought to influence your rankings that Google simply doesn't care about.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!
Video TranscriptionHowdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about things that do not affect your Google rankings.
So it turns out lots of people have this idea that anything and everything that you do with your website or on the web could have an impact. Well, some things have an indirect impact and maybe even a few of these do. I'll talk through those. But tons and tons of things that you do don't directly affect your Google rankings. So I'll try and walk through some of these that I've heard or seen questions about, especially in the recent past.
First one, longstanding debate: the age of your website. Does Google care if you registered your site in 1998 or 2008 or 2016? No, they don't care at all. They only care the degree to which your content actually helps people and that you have links and authority signals and those kinds of things. Granted, it is true there's correlation going in this direction. If you started a site in 1998 and it's still going strong today, chances are good that you've built up lots of links and authority and equity and all these kinds of signals that Google does care about.
But maybe you've just had a very successful first two years, and you only registered your site in 2015, and you've built up all those same signals. Google is actually probably going to reward that site even more, because it's built up the same authority and influence in a very small period of time versus a much longer one.
So people worry that, "Oh, wait a minute. Can't Google sort of monitor what's going on with my Google Analytics account and see all my data there and AdSense? What if they can look inside Gmail or Google Docs?"
Google, first off, the engineers who work on these products and the engineers who work on search, most of them would quit right that day if they discovered that Google was peering into your Gmail account to discover that you had been buying shady links or that you didn't look as authoritative as you really were on the web or these kinds of things. So don't fear the use of these or the decision not to use them will hurt or harm your rankings in Google web search in any way. It won't.
So you have a Facebook counter on there, and it shows that you have 17,000 shares on that page. Wow, that's a lot of shares. Does Google care? No, they don't care at all. In fact, they're not even looking at that or using it. But what if it turns out that many of those people who shared it on Facebook also did other activities that resulted in lots of browser activity and search activity, click-through activity, increased branding, lower pogo-sticking rates, brand preference for you in the search results, and links? Well, Google does care about a lot of those things. So indirectly, this can have an impact. Directly, no. Should you buy 10,000 Facebook shares? No, you should not.
4. What about raw bounce rate or time on site?Well, this is sort of an interesting one. Let's say you have a time on site of two minutes, and you look at your industry averages, your benchmarks, maybe via Google Analytics if you've opted in to sharing there, and you see that your industry benchmarks are actually lower than average. Is that going to hurt you in Google web search? Not necessarily. It could be the case that those visitors are coming from elsewhere. It could be the case that you are actually serving up a faster-loading site and you're getting people to the information that they need more quickly, and so their time on site is slightly lower or maybe even their bounce rate is higher.
But so long as pogo-sticking type of activity, people bouncing back to the search results and choosing a different result because you didn't actually answer their query, so long as that remains fine, you're not in trouble here. So raw bounce rate, raw time on site, I wouldn't worry too much about that.
Are you using certain JavaScript libraries like Node or React, one is Facebook, one is Google. If you use Facebook's, does Google give you a hard time about it? No. Facebook might, due to patent issues, but anyway we won't worry about that. .NET or what if you're coding up things in raw HTML still? Just fine. It doesn't matter. If Google can crawl each of these URLs and see the unique content on there and the content that Google sees and the content visitors see is the same, they don't care what's being used under the hood to deliver that to the browser.
Sometimes you get that knowledge panel, and it shows around the web and some information sometimes from Wikipedia. What about site links, where you search for your brand name and you get branded site links? The first few sets of results are all from your own website, and they're sort of indented. Does that impact your rankings? No, it does not. It doesn't impact your rankings for any other search query anyway.
It could be that showing up here and it probably is that showing up here means you're going to get a lot more of these clicks, a higher share of those clicks, and it's a good thing. But does this impact your rankings for some other totally unbranded query to your site? No, it doesn't at all. I wouldn't stress too much. Over time, sites tend to build up site links and knowledge panels as their brands become bigger and as they become better known and as they get more coverage around the web and online and offline. So this is not something to stress about.
Well, directly, this is not going to affect you unless it hurts load speed or up time. If it doesn't hurt either of those things and they're just as good as they were before or as they would be if you were paying more or using solo hosting, you're just fine. Don't worry about it.
So when Google crawls a site, when they come to a site, if you don't have a robots.txt file, or you have a robots.txt file but it doesn't include any exclusions, any disallows, or they reach a page and it has no meta robots tag, they're just going to assume that they get to crawl everything and that they should follow all the links.
Using things like the meta robots "index, follow" or using, on an individual link, a rel=follow inside the href tag, or in your robots.txt file specifying that Google can crawl everything, doesn't boost anything. They just assume all those things by default. Using them in these places, saying yes, you can do the default thing, doesn't give you any special benefit. It doesn't hurt you, but it gives you no benefit. Google just doesn't care.
So the page title element sits in the header of a document, and it could be something like your brand name and then a separator and some words and phrases after it, or the other way around, words and phrases, separator, the brand name. Does it matter if that separator is the pipe bar or a hyphen or a colon or any other special character that you would like to use? No, Google does not care. You don't need to worry about it. This is a personal preference issue.
Now, maybe you've found that one of these characters has a slightly better click-through rate and preference than another one. If you've found that, great. We have not seen one broadly on the web. Some people will say they particularly like the pipe over the hyphen. I don't think it matters too much. I think it's up to you.
Well, I've heard this said: If you put your headline inside an H2 rather than an H1, Google will consider it a little less important. No, that is definitely not true. In fact, I'm not even sure the degree to which Google cares at all whether you use H1s or H2s or H3s, or whether they just look at the content and they say, "Well, this one is big and at the top and bold. That must be the headline, and that's how we're going to treat it. This one is lower down and smaller. We're going to say that's probably a sub-header."
Whether you use an H5 or an H2 or an H3, that is your CSS on your site and up to you and your designers. It is still best practices in HTML to make sure that the headline, the biggest one is the H1. I would do that for design purposes and for having nice clean HTML and CSS, but I wouldn't stress about it from Google's perspective. If your designers tell you, "Hey, we can't get that headline in H1. We've got to use the H2 because of how our style sheets are formatted." Fine. No big deal. Don't stress.
Normally on Whiteboard Friday, we would end right here. But today, I'd like to ask. These 10 are only the tip of the iceberg. So if you have others that you've seen people say, "Oh, wait a minute, is this a Google ranking factor?" and you think to yourself, "Ah, jeez, no, that's not a ranking factor," go ahead and leave them in the comments. We'd love to see them there and chat through and list all the different non-Google ranking factors.
Thanks, everyone. See you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
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Want to create an intensely loyal fan base for your product? Wondering how a product evangelist can help? To explore how product evangelism supports the sales process, I interview Guy Kawasaki. More About This Show The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It’s designed to help busy
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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
Posted by BritneyMuller
“Where should a company start [with SEO]?” asked an attendee after my AMA Conference talk.
As my mind spun into a million different directions and I struggled to form complete sentences, I asked for a more specific website example. A healthy discussion ensued after more direction was provided, but these “Where do I start?” questions occur all the time in digital marketing.
SEOs especially are in a constant state of overwhelmed-ness (is that a word?), but no one likes to talk about this. It’s not comfortable to discuss the thousands of errors that came back after a recent site crawl. It’s not fun to discuss the drop in organic traffic that you can’t explain. It’s not possible to stay on top of every single news update, international change, case study, tool, etc. It’s exhausting and without a strategic plan of attack, you’ll find yourself in the weeds.
I’ve performed strategic SEO now for both clients and in-house marketing teams, and the following five methods have played a critical role in keeping my head above water.
First, I had to source this question on Twitter:
How do you prioritize SEO fixes?
— Britney Muller (@BritneyMuller) September 15, 2017
Here was some of the best feedback from true industry leaders:
Murat made a solid distinction between working with an SMBs versus a large companies:
This is sad, but so true (thanks, Jeff!):
To help you get started, I put together an SEO prioritization worksheet in Google Sheets. Make yourself a copy (File > Make a copy) and go wild!:
Free SEO prioritization workflow sheet
TLDR;What is the end goal? You can have multiple goals (both macro and micro), but establishing a specific primary end goal is critical.
The only way to agree upon an end goal is to have a strong understanding of your client’s business. I’ve always relied on these new client questions to help me wrap my head around a new client’s business.
[Please leave a comment if you have other favorite client questions!]
This not only helps you become way more strategic in your efforts, but also shows that you care.
Fun fact: I used to use an alias to sign up for my client’s medical consultations online to see what the process was like. What automated emails did they send after someone made an appointment? What are people required to bring into a consult? What is a consult like? How does a consult make someone feel?
Clients were always disappointed when I arrived for the in-person consult, but happy that my team and I were doing our research!
Goal setting tips: MeasurableSeems obvious, but it’s essential to stay on track and set benchmarks along the way.
Be specificDon’t let vague marketing jargon find its way into your goals. Be specific.
Share your goalsA study performed by Psychology professor Dr. Gail Matthews found that writing down and sharing your goals boosts your chances of achieving them.
Have a stretch goal"Under-promise and over-deliver" is a great rule of thumb for clients, but setting private stretch goals (nearly impossible to achieve) can actually help you achieve more. Research found that when people set specific, challenging goals it led to higher performance 90% of the time.
#2 Identify important pages for conversionsThere are a couple ways you can do this in Google Analytics.
Behavior Flow is a nice visualization for common page paths which deserve your attention, but it doesn’t display specific conversion paths very well.
It’s interesting to click on page destination goals to get a better idea of where people come into that page from and where they abandon it to:
Reverse Goal Paths are a great way to discover which page funnels are the most successful for conversions and which could use a little more love:
If you want to know which pages have the most last-touch assists, create a Custom Report > Flat Table > Dimension: Goal Previous Step - 1 > Metric: Goal Completions > Save
Then you’ll see the raw data for your top last-touch pages:
Side note: If the Marketing Services page is driving the second most assists, it’s a great idea to see where else on the site you can naturally weave in Marketing Services Page CTAs.
The idea here is to simply get an idea of which page funnels are working, which are not, and take these pages into high consideration when prioritizing SEO opportunities.
If you really want to become a conversion funnel ninja, check out this awesome Google Analytics Conversion Funnel Survival Guide by Kissmetrics.
#3 Crawl your site for issuesWhile many of us audit parts of a website by hand, we nearly all rely on a site crawl tool (or two) to uncover sneaky technical issues.
Some of my favorites:
I really like Moz Pro, DeepCrawl, and Raven for their automated re-crawling. I’m alerted anytime new issues arise (and they always do). Just last week, I got a Moz Pro email about these new pages that are now redirecting to a 4XX because we moved some Learning Center pages around and missed a few redirects (whoops!):
An initial website crawl can be incredibly overwhelming and stressful. I get anxiety just thinking about a recent Moz site crawl: 54,995 pages with meta noindex, 60,995 pages without valid canonical, 41,234 without an <h1>... you get the idea. Ermahgerd!! Where do you start?!
This is where a time management grid comes in handy.
#4 Employ Covey's time management gridTime management and prioritization is hard, and many of us fall into "Urgent" traps.
Putting out small, urgent SEO fires might feel effective in the short term, but you’ll often fall into productivity-killing rabbit holes. Don’t neglect the non-urgent important items!
Prioritize and set time aside for those non-urgent yet important tasks, like writing short, helpful, unique, click-enticing title tags for all primary pages.
Here’s an example of some SEO issues that fall into each of the above 4 categories:
To help prioritize Not Urgent/Important issues for maximum effectiveness here at Moz, I’m scheduling time to address high-volume crawl errors.
Moz.com’s largest issues (highlighted by Moz Pro) are meta noindex. However, most of these are intentional.
You also want to consider prioritizing any issues on the primary page flows that we discovered earlier. You can also sort issues by shallow crawl depth (fewer clicks from homepage, which are often primary pages to focus on):
Consistently reporting your efforts on increasing your client’s bottom line is critical for client longevity.
Develop a custom SEO reporting system that’s aligned with your client’s KPIs for every stage of your campaign. A great place to start is with a basic Google Analytics Custom Report that you can customize further for your client:
While traffic, search visibility, engagement, conversions, etc. get all of the reporting love, don’t forget about the not-so-tangible metrics. Are customers less frustrated navigating the new website? How does the new site navigation make a user feel? This type of monitoring and reporting can also be done through kickass tools like Lucky Orange or Mechanical Turk.
Lastly, reporting is really about communication and understanding people. Most of you have probably had a client who prefers a simple summary paragraph of your report, and that’s ok too.
Hopefully these tips can help you work smarter, not harder.
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