Faster, Fresher, Better: Announcing Link Explorer, Moz's New Link Building Tool

Posted by SarahBird

More link data. Fresher link data. Faster link data.

Today, I’m delighted to share that after eons of hard work, blood, sweat, tears, and love, Moz is taking a major step forward on our commitment to provide the best SEO tools money can buy.

We’ve rebuilt our link technology from the ground up and the data is now broadly available throughout Moz tools. It’s bigger, fresher, and much, much faster than our legacy link tech. And we’re just getting started! The best way to quickly understand the potential power of our revolutionary new link tech is to play with the beta of our Link Explorer.

Introducing Link Explorer, the newest addition to the Moz toolset!

We’ve heard your frustrations with Open Site Explorer and we know that you want more from Moz and your link building tools. OSE has done more than put in its time. Groundbreaking when it launched in 2008, it’s worked long and hard bring link data to the masses. It deserves the honor of a graceful retirement.

OSE represents our past; the new Link Explorer is our fast, innovative, ambitious future.

Here are some of my favorite things about the Link Explorer beta:

• It’s 20x larger and 30x fresher than OSE (RIP)
• Despite its huge index size, the app is lightning fast! I can’t stand waiting so this might be my number-one fav improvement.
• We’re introducing Link Tracking Lists to make managing your link building efforts a breeze. Sometimes the simple things make the biggest difference, like when they started making vans with doors on each side. You’ll never go back.
• Link Explorer includes historic data, a painful gap in OSE. Studying your gained/lost linking domains is fast and easy.
• The new UX surfaces competitive insights much more quickly
• Increases the size and freshness of the index improved the quality of Domain Authority and Spam Score. Voilà.

All this, and we’re only in beta.

Dive into your link data now!

Here’s a deeper dive into my favorites:

#1: The sheer size, quality, and speed of it all

We’re committed to data quality. Here are some ways that shows up in the Moz tools:

• When we collect rankings, we evaluate the natural first page of rankings to ensure that the placement and content of featured snippets and other SERP features are correctly situated (as can happen when ranking are collected in 50- or 100-page batches). This is more expensive, but we think the tradeoff is worth it.
• We were the first to build a hybrid search volume model using clickstream data. We still believe our model is the most accurate.
• Our SERP corpus, which powers Keywords by Site, is completely refreshed every two weeks. We actively update up to 15 million of the keywords each month to remove keywords that are no longer being searched and replace them with trending keywords and terms. This helps keep our keyword data set fresh and relevant.

The new Link Explorer index extends this commitment to data quality. OSE wasn’t cutting it and we’re thrilled to unleash this new tech.

Link Explorer is over 20x larger and 30x fresher than our legacy link index. Bonus points: the underlying technology is very cost-efficient, making it much less expensive for us to scale over time. This frees up resources to focus on feature delivery. BOOM!

One of my top pet peeves is waiting. I feel physical pain while waiting in lines and for apps to load. I can’t stand growing old waiting for a page to load (amirite?).

The new Link Explorer app is delightfully, impossibly fast. It’s like magic. That’s how link research should be. Magical.

#2: Historical data showing discovered and lost linking domains

If you’re a visual person, this report gives you an immediate idea of how your link building efforts are going. A spike you weren't expecting could be a sign of spam network monkey business. Deep-dive effortlessly on the links you lost and gained so you can spend your valuable time doing thoughtful, human outreach.

#3: Link Tracking Lists

Folks, this is a big one. Throw out (at least one of... ha. ha.) those unwieldy spreadsheets and get on board with Link Tracking Lists, because these are the future. Have you been chasing a link from a particular site? Wondering if your outreach emails have borne fruit yet? Want to know if you’ve successfully placed a link, and how you’re linking? Link Tracking Lists cut out a huge time-suck when it comes to checking back on which of your target sites have actually linked back to you.

Why announce the beta today?

We’re sharing this now for a few reasons:

• The new Link Explorer data and app have been available in beta to a limited audience. Even with a quiet, narrow release, the SEO community has been talking about it and asking good questions about our plans. Now that the Link Explorer beta is in broad release throughout all of Moz products and the broader Moz audience can play with it, we’re expecting even more curiosity and excitement.
• If you’re relying on our legacy link technology, this is further notice to shift your applications and reporting to the new-and-improved tech. OSE will be retired soon! We’re making it easier for API customers to get the new data by providing a translation layer for the legacy API.
• We want and need your feedback. We are committed to building the very best link building tool on the planet. You can expect us to invest heavily here. We need your help to guide our efforts and help us make the most impactful tradeoffs. This is your invitation to shape our roadmap.

Today’s release of our new Link Explorer technology is a revolution in Moz tools, not an evolution. We’ve made a major leap forward in our link index technology that delivers a ton of immediate value to Moz customers and the broader Moz Community.

Even though there are impactful improvements around the corner, this ambitious beta stands on its own two feet. OSE wasn’t cutting it and we’re proud of this new, fledgling tech.

What’s on the horizon for Link Explorer?

We’ve got even more features coming in the weeks and months ahead. Please let us know if we’re on the right track.

• Link Building Assistant: a way to quickly identify new link acquisition opportunities
• A more accurate and useful Link Intersect feature
• Link Alerts to notify you when you get a link from a URL you were tracking in a list
• Changes to how we count redirects: Currently we don't count links to a redirect as links to the target of the redirect (that's a lot of redirects), but we have this planned for the future.
• Significantly scaling up our crawling to further improve freshness and size

Go forth, and explore:

Try the new Link Explorer!

Tomorrow Russ Jones will be sharing a post that discusses the importance of quality metrics when it comes to a link index, and don’t miss our pinned Q&A post answering questions about Domain Authority and Page Authority changes or our FAQ in the Help Hub.

We’ll be releasing early and often. Watch this space, and don’t hold back your feedback. Help us shape the future of Links at Moz. We’re listening!

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!

https://ift.tt/2rbZy5t

6 Elements of Running a Successful Instagram Contest

The very thought of running an Instagram contest should lead you directly to the 5 W’s and how.

• Who do you want to target the sweepstakes towards?
• What are you going to giveaway?
• Where will you host the sweepstakes?
• When should you be holding it?
• Why are you hosting a contest?
• How are you going to execute it?

Answering these key questions will automatically begin to shape your Instagram giveaway or any other social sweepstakes for that matter.

WHO

Who do you want entering your giveaway? That will determine the WHAT. What you giveaway will have a direct impact on who enters. Ensure your prize mirrors the entrants you are seeking.

For example, if your product is targeted towards mothers with young children, you are got going to offer a prize that would suit senior citizens or golfers.

https://ift.tt/2JDtaQF

How GDPR Impacts Marketers: What You Need to Know

Are you confused by the European Union (EU) General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)? Wondering how GDPR affects your marketing? In this article, you’ll find a plain-language overview of GDPR, how it could impact your data collection, and what you need to do to make sure you’re compliant before May 25, 2018. What Is GDPR? The

This post How GDPR Impacts Marketers: What You Need to Know first appeared on Social Media Examiner.

https://ift.tt/2FqJge4

GDPR and Social Media Privacy Reform

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, we explore how marketers are preparing for GDPR with Danielle Liss; Facebook ad updates with Amanda Bond; Snapchat, Pinterest,

This post GDPR and Social Media Privacy Reform first appeared on Social Media Examiner.

https://ift.tt/2vTrRLx

Facebook Groups: How to Develop Engaging Communities

Want to create an engaged Facebook group? Are you looking for creative ways to develop a loyal community inside a Facebook group? To explore how to develop an engaged and responsive community with Facebook groups, I interview Caitlin Bacher. More About This Show The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from

This post Facebook Groups: How to Develop Engaging Communities first appeared on Social Media Examiner.

https://ift.tt/2Kjejfx

Content for Answers: The Inverted Pyramid - Whiteboard Friday

Posted by Dr-Pete

If you've been searching for a quick hack to write content for featured snippets, this isn't the article for you. But if you're looking for lasting results and a smart tactic to increase your chances of winning a snippet, you're definitely in the right place.

Borrowed from journalism, the inverted pyramid method of writing can help you craft intentional, compelling, rich content that will help you rank for multiple queries and win more than one snippet at a time. Learn how in this Whiteboard Friday starring the one and only Dr. Pete!

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

Video Transcription

Hey, Moz fans, Dr. Pete here. I'm the Marketing Scientist at Moz and visiting you from not-so-sunny Chicago in the Seattle office. We've talked a lot in the last couple years in my blog posts and such about featured snippets.

So these are answers that kind of cross with organic. So it's an answer box, but you get the attribution and the link. Britney has done some great Whiteboard Fridays, the last couple, about how you do research for featured snippets and how you look for good questions to answer. But I want to talk about something that we don't cover very much, which is how to write content for answers.

The inverted pyramid style of content writing

It's tough, because I'm a content marketer and I don't like to think that there's a trick to content. I'm afraid to give people the kind of tricks that would have them run off and write lousy, thin content. But there is a technique that works that I think has been very effective for featured snippets for writing for questions and answers. It comes from the world of journalism, which gives me a little more faith in its credibility. So I want to talk to you about that today. That's called the inverted pyramid.

1. Start with the lead

It looks something like this. When you write a story as a journalist, you start with the lead. You lead with the lead. So if we have a story like "Penguins Rob a Bank," which would be a strange story, we want to put that right out front. That's interesting. Penguins rob a bank, that's all you need to know. The thing about it is, and this is true back to print, especially when we had to buy each newspaper. We weren't subscribers. But definitely on the web, you have to get people's attention quickly. You have to draw them in. You have to have that headline.

2. Go into the details

So leading with the lead is all about pulling them in to see if they're interested and grabbing their attention. The inverted pyramid, then you get into the smaller pieces. Then you get to the details. You might talk about how many penguins were there and what bank did they rob and how much money did they take.

3. Move to the context

Then you're going to move to the context. That might be the history of penguin crime in America and penguin ties to the mafia and what does this say about penguin culture and what are we going to do about this. So then it gets into kind of the speculation and the value add that you as an expert might have.

How does this apply to answering questions for SEO?

So how does this apply to answering questions in an SEO context?

Lead with the answer, get into the details and data, then address the sub-questions.

Well, what you can do is lead with the answer. If somebody's asked you a question, you have that snippet, go straight to the summary of the answer. Tell them what they want to know and then get into the details and get into the data. Add those things that give you credibility and that show your expertise. Then you can talk about context.

But I think what's interesting with answers — and I'll talk about this in a minute — is getting into these sub-questions, talking about if you have a very big, broad question, that's going to dive up into a lot of follow-ups. People who are interested are going to want to know about those follow-ups. So go ahead and answer those.

If I win a featured snippet, will people click on my answer? Should I give everything away?

So I think there's a fear we have. What if we answer the question and Google puts it in that box? Here's the question and that's the query. It shows the answer. Are people going to click? What's going to happen? Should we be giving everything away? Yes, I think, and there are a couple reasons.

Questions that can be very easily answered should be avoided

First, I want you to be careful. Britney has gotten into some of this. This is a separate topic on its own. You don't always want to answer questions that can be very easily answered. We've already seen that with the Knowledge Graph. Google says something like time and date or a fact about a person, anything that can come from that Knowledge Graph. "How tall was Abraham Lincoln?" That's answered and done, and they're already replacing those answers.

Answer how-to questions and questions with rich context instead

So you want to answer the kinds of things, the how-to questions and the why questions that have a rich enough context to get people interested. In those cases, I don't think you have to be afraid to give that away, and I'm going to tell you why. This is more of a UX perspective. If somebody asks this question and they see that little teaser of your answer and it's credible, they're going to click through.

"Giving away" the answer builds your credibility and earns more qualified visitors

So here you've got the penguin. He's flushed with cash. He's looking for money to spend. We're not going to worry about the ethics of how he got his money. You don't know. It's okay. Then he's going to click through to your link. You know you have your branding and hopefully it looks professional, Pyramid Inc., and he sees that question again and he sees that answer again.

Giving the searcher a "scent trail" builds trust

If you're afraid that that's repetitive, I think the good thing about that is this gives him what we call a scent trail. He can see that, "You know what? Yes, this is the page I meant to click on. This is relevant. I'm in the right place." Then you get to the details, and then you get to the data and you give this trail of credibility that gives them more to go after and shows your expertise.

People who want an easy answer aren't the kind of visitors that convert

I think the good thing about that is we're so afraid to give something away because then somebody might not click. But the kind of people who just wanted that answer and clicked, they're not the kind of people that are going to convert. They're not qualified leads. So these people that see this and see it as credible and want to go read more, they're the qualified leads. They're the kind of people that are going to give you that money.

So I don't think we should be afraid of this. Don't give away the easy answers. I think if you're in the easy answer business, you're in trouble right now anyway, to be honest. That's a tough topic. But give them something that guides them to the path of your answer and gives them more information.

How does this tactic work in the real world?Thin content isn't credible.

So I'm going to talk about how that looks in a more real context. My fear is this. Don't take this and run off and say write a bunch of pages that are just a question and a paragraph and a ton of thin content and answering hundreds and hundreds of questions. I think that can really look thin to Google. So you don't want pages that are like question, answer, buy my stuff. It doesn't look credible. You're not going to convert. I think those pages are going to look thin to Google, and you're going to end up spinning out many, many hundreds of them. I've seen people do that.

Use the inverted pyramid to build richer content and lead to your CTA

What I'd like to see you do is craft this kind of question page. This is something that takes a fair amount of time and effort. You have that question. You lead with that answer. You're at the top of the pyramid. Get into the details. Get into the things that people who are really interested in this would want to know and let them build up to that. Then get into data. If you have original data, if you have something you can contribute that no one else can, that's great.

Then go ahead and answer those sub-questions, because the people who are really interested in that question will have follow-ups. If you're the person who can answer that follow-up, that makes for a very, very credible piece of content, and not just something that can rank for this snippet, but something that really is useful for anybody who finds it in any way.

So I think this is great content to have. Then if you want some kind of call to action, like a "Learn More," that's contextual, I think this is a page that will attract qualified leads and convert.

Moz's example: What is a Title Tag?

So I want to give you an example. This is something we've used a lot on Moz in the Learning Center. So, obviously, we have the Moz blog, but we also have these permanent pages that answer kind of the big questions that people always have. So we have one on the title tag, obviously a big topic in SEO.

Here's what this page looks like. So we go right to the question: What is a title tag? We give the answer: A title tag is an HTML element that does this and this and is useful for SEO, etc. Right there in the paragraph. That's in the featured snippet. That's okay. If that's all someone wants to know and they see that Moz answered that, great, no problem.

But naturally, the people who ask that question, they really want to know: What does this do? What's it good for? How does it help my SEO? How do I write one? So we dug in and we ended up combining three or four pieces of content into one large piece of content, and we get into some pretty rich things. So we have a preview tool that's been popular. We give a code sample. We show how it might look in HTML. It gives it kind of a visual richness. Then we start to get into these sub-questions. Why are title tags important? How do I write a good title tag?

One page can gain the ability to rank for hundreds of questions and phrases

What's interesting, because I think sometimes people want to split up all the questions because they're afraid that they have to have one question per page, what's interesting is that I think looked the other day, this was ranking in our 40 million keyword set for over 200 phrases, over 200 questions. So it's ranking for things like "what is a title tag," but it's also ranking for things like "how do I write a good title tag." So you don't have to be afraid of that. If this is a rich, solid piece of content that people are going to, you're going to rank for these sub-questions, in many cases, and you're going to get featured snippets for those as well.

Then, when people have gotten through all of this, we can give them something like, "Hey, Moz has some of these tools. You can help write richer title tags. We can check your title tags. Why don't you try a free 30-day trial?" Obviously, we're experimenting with that, and you don't want to push too hard, but this becomes a very rich piece of content. We can answer multiple questions, and you actually have multiple opportunities to get featured snippets.

So I think this inverted pyramid technique is legitimate. I think it can help you write good content that's a win-win. It's good for SEO. It's good for your visitors, and it will hopefully help you land some featured snippets.

So I'd love to hear about what kind of questions you're writing content for, how you can break that up, how you can answer that, and I'd love to discuss that with you. So we'll see you in the comments. Thank you.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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!

https://ift.tt/2HV6XQV

Win a Ticket + Lodging to MozCon 2018!

Posted by ErinMcCaul

Have you been wanting to come to MozCon but just can’t swing the budget? Want to take a selfie with Roger, meet like-minded friends at our afterparties, and learn from leading industry experts? I’m thrilled to announce that you can do it all by winning a free ticket to join us at MozCon this July!

I’m one of the behind-the-scenes house elves who helps make MozCon happen, and I’m here to tell you everything you need to know about entering to win!

To enter, just submit a unique piece of content telling us why we should send you to MozCon by Sunday May 6th at 5pm PDT. Make sure your entry is both original and creative — the Moz staff will review all submissions and vote on the winner! If you’re chosen, we’ll pick up the tab for your registration and accommodations at the Grand Hyatt. You’ll also have a reserved VIP seat in our front-row, and an invite to mix and mingle at our pre-event MozCon speakers’ dinner!

Without further ado, here’s the scoop:

Step 1: Create!

Create a unique, compelling piece of content telling us why you want to come to MozCon. Past ideas have included:

• Drawings
• Videos (must be one minute or less)
• Blog posts
• Original songs
• Books
• Slide decks
• Anything else you can cook up!

Don’t feel limited by these examples. Is this the year we’ll see a Lego Roger stop-motion film, a MozCon-inspired show tune, or Roger-themed sugar cookies? The sky's the limit, my friends! (But think hard about trying your hand at those cookies.)

Step 2: Submit!

Once you’re ready to throw your hat in the game, tweet us a link @Moz and use the hashtag #MozConVIP by Sunday May 6th at 5pm PDT. Make sure to follow the instructions, and include your name and email address somewhere easily visible within your content. To keep things fair, there will be no exceptions to the rules. We need to be able to contact you if you’re our lucky winner!

Let’s recap:

• The submission deadline is Sunday May 6th at 5pm PDT.
• Mozzers will vote on all the entries based on the creativity and uniqueness of the content
• We’ll announce the winning entry from @Moz via Twitter on Friday, May 11. You must be able to attend MozCon, July 9–11 2018, in Seattle. Prizes are non-transferable.
• All submissions must adhere to the MozCon Code of Conduct
• Content is void where prohibited by law.
• The value of the prize will be reported for tax purposes as required by law; the winner will receive an IRS form 1099 at the end of the calendar year and a copy of such form will be filed with the IRS. The winner is solely responsible for reporting and paying any and all applicable taxes related to the prizes and paying any expenses associated with any prize which are not specifically provided for in the official rules.

Our lucky winner will receive:

• A free ticket to MozCon 2018, including optional VIP front-row seating and an invitation to our speakers’ dinner (valued at $1,500+)
• Accommodations with a suite upgrade at the Grand Hyatt from July 8–12, 2018 (valued at $1,300+)

Alright, that’s wrap. I can’t wait to see what you folks come up with! Happy creating!

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!

https://ift.tt/2Fij7hB

How to Protect Your Business From a Social Phishing Scam

Are you ready to respond if someone pretends to be you on social media? Wondering how to protect your customers and brand from a social phishing attack? From erroneous links to outright brand impersonation, social phishing is becoming more frequent. In this article, you’ll discover four ways to protect your business from social phishing scams.

This post How to Protect Your Business From a Social Phishing Scam first appeared on Social Media Examiner.

https://ift.tt/2I1Kpf8

When Your Great Customer Experience Drives Your Employees Crazy

Hick’s Law states that the more choices we face, the harder it is for us to make a selection. Perhaps best explained in the terrific book The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz, Hick’s Law is why you stand slack-jawed when trying to make a cereal selection at Kroger: too. many. kinds. of. cereal.

Increasingly, we try to shortcut our decision-making by relying upon aggregate opinions of other people who have already experienced the thing we seek. Psychologically, this is what powers ratings and reviews sites like Yelp, TripAdvisor, ApartmentRatings.com, RealSelf.com (plastic surgery reviews), and the hundreds of other sites that collect opinions and present them with one- to five-star scores.

The companion trend giving rise to these sites is our relative distrust of messaging from companies and organizations and our comparative embrace of the feelings of our fellow humans. Oft-cited research from BrightLocal says that more than 80 percent of people believe at least some online reviews as much as they trust recommendations from friends and family members. Companies, on the other hand, are trusted about half the time.

I suspect our reliance on ratings and reviews will continue to escalate. After all, who has time to figure out the best whatever in your area? Just compare their average ratings, and make a decision that way.

A fascinating sidebar of the rise of ratings and reviews, however, is the application of similar data collection to employers. Glassdoor.com and Indeed.com are the leaders in the fast-growth category of employer reviews. Both firms use these ratings as a robust content marketing initiative that spurs awareness and interest in their recruitment and job placement services.

Both sites are red hot. Website traffic places Glassdoor as the 202nd busiest site in the USA and Indeed at number 27, according to SimilarWeb data.

Further, more and more companies (including consulting clients of ours here at Convince & Convert) are increasingly interested in how they are portrayed on these sites. Why? The current labor market is almost historically tight, with job seekers holding the cards in ways they have not for many years. If you’re looking for a job in retail, or hospitality, or insurance, or healthcare, or homebuilding, or anything else, and you have multiple options, why would you NOT compare your potential employers on sites like these to see what current/former employees have to say about the policies, culture, and environment?

Thus, sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor provide a snapshot of how well companies are meeting customer expectations, while sites like Glassdoor and Indeed offer a similar glimpse into alignment with employee expectations.

It is a long-held maxim that companies that deliver a good customer experience typically also provide a good employee experience. This correlation is not an accident, as it often speaks to underlying culture and values. In fact, many researchers believe that one begets the other; treating your employees well naturally manifests in improved customer experiences. Just to cherry-pick some examples, leaders in customer experience like Southwest, Ritz-Carlton, and USAA are generally known to be good places to work.

But sometimes, what customers want and what employees prefer veer in opposite directions, like magnets with opposing polarity, or the Gallagher brothers at a family gathering.

Customer versus Employee Experience at Olive Garden

A new research project from Brain+Trust Insights demonstrates how this can happen, this time at Olive Garden Restaurants. Brain+Trust Insights is a new consultancy that uses big data and machine learning to uncover interesting and applicable truths about brands and behaviors. The firm is led by my brilliant friend Christopher S. Penn, who is unquestionably the most interesting person I know.

For this project, Chris and his team digitally ingested (using IBM Watson Analytics) 2,547 Glassdoor reviews of Olive Garden, the prominent, 844-location Italian food restaurant chain owned by the Darden Restaurants group.

Across all reviews, the company has an average score of 3.5 out of 5, as of April 2018. 64 percent of workers would recommend the company to a friend, and 76 percent approve of the company CEO. These numbers are pretty solid for a national restaurant chain.

In comparison, Outback Steakhouse and The Cheesecake Factory average 3.6, and Chili’s maintains a 3.4 rating.

Despite these generally positive marks, Olive Garden should seek to improve the experience and attitude of its employees, for three reasons:

1. Happier employees provide better service, improving customer retention and profit.
2. Employee churn is a colossal expense for all restaurants, costing millions of dollars in training costs for a chain as large as Olive Garden and reducing the on-floor experience and expertise of the staff due to turnover.
3. In a tight labor market, remaining fully staffed may be easier if Olive Garden could meaningfully creep ahead of competitors in average Glassdoor score.

It’s worth it to move from relative contentment to genuine happiness within the employee ranks at Olive Garden. And the analysis by Brain+Trust Insights shows that this is actually occurring already. Negative comments and low review scores among employees have dipped consistently since 2014. But more can and should be done. How?

The Curse of Free Breadsticks

Change the free breadsticks policy.

You may know that a signature Olive Garden experience is breadsticks delivered to your table once you’re seated. And one of the most popular menu items is the $11.99 unlimited soup, salad, and breadsticks combination.

Restaurant patrons love the breadsticks. Many employees loathe it, and the data shows this to be true, as many team members leaving Glassdoor reviews specifically mention that the breadsticks, in particular, set them up to fail because they are either constantly having to re-fill the breadsticks basket, or because the breadsticks are decidedly less tasty when they sit for a few minutes.

Specific comments include, “You are nothing but a breadsticks slave,” and, “Unlimited salad and breadsticks sucks.”

Operationally, Olive Garden has to balance the rampant, almost cultish popularity of the soup/salad/breadsticks combination—which spurs nearly 80 percent of all social chatter about the brand, according to Penn—and the companion fact that the very thing customers love is also driving dissatisfaction among team members.

This is a classic game theory quandary. What does it require to recruit new customers consistently if you do NOT have the breadsticks offer, and how does that compare with the costs and impacts of a partially dissatisfied workforce?

There are two lessons here. First, in our heightened zeal to provide better customer experiences (usually a good thing), we may trigger unintended consequences. And second, the application of machine learning to peer into previously opaque data sets and derive insights is useful and interesting in many contexts.

I guess there’s no such thing as a free lunch, even if it’s just breadsticks.

Download the entire report from Brain+Trust Insights here.

https://ift.tt/2HsH4o5

How To Use Instagram Stories to Drive Web Leads

Many businesses want to drive leads to their websites. If this is you, Instagram Stories is a strategy to consider.

Instagram Stories allows users to post photos and videos that vanish after 24 hours. Introduced in 2016 to rival the Snapchat app where content disappears after 24 hours.

The Stories appear in a bar at the top of your feed, and all Instagram accounts are allowed to share their stories. When there is something new to see, your followers will see a colorful ring around your profile photo.

To view the new story, users tap on your profile photo The story appears full-screen, displaying all the content you’ve posted within the last 24 hours. The posts appear in chronological order with most recent posts shown at the top.

Why Use Instagram Stories to Generate Leads?

A large number of businesses are already using the feature for marketing purposes.

https://ift.tt/2KeLYHa

4 Tools to Help Rank Your YouTube Videos

Are your YouTube videos ranking in YouTube search? Looking for tools to optimize your titles, keywords, and tags? In this article, you’ll discover a four-step process to reveal high-performing keywords for your YouTube content. #1: Gauge Topic Interest with Google Trends Before you create a YouTube video, the first step is to find a topic

This post 4 Tools to Help Rank Your YouTube Videos first appeared on Social Media Examiner.

https://ift.tt/2qZn4ST

How We Got a 32% Organic Traffic Boost from 4 On-Page SEO Changes [Case Study]

Posted by WallStreetOasis.com

My name is Patrick Curtis, and I'm the founder and CEO of Wall Street Oasis, an online community focused on careers in finance founded in 2006 with over 2 million visits per month.

User-generated content and long-tail organic traffic is what has built our business and community over the last 12+ years. But what happens if you wake up one day and realize that your growth has suddenly stopped? This is what happened to us back in November 2012.

In this case study, I’ll highlight two of our main SEO problems as a large forum with over 200,000 URLs, then describe two solutions that finally helped us regain our growth trajectory — almost five years later.

Two main problems1. Algorithm change impactsEver since November 2012, Google’s algo changes have seemed to hurt many online forums like ours. Even though our traffic didn’t decline, our growth dropped to the single-digit percentages. No matter what we tried, we couldn’t break through our “plateau of pain” (I call it that because it was a painful ~5 years trying).

2. Quality of user-generated content

Related to the first problem, 99% of our content is user-generated (UGC) which means the quality is mixed (to put it kindly). Like most forum-based sites, some of our members create incredible pieces of content, but a meaningful percentage of our content is also admittedly thin and/or low-quality.

How could we deal with over 200,000 pieces of content efficiently and try to optimize them without going bankrupt? How could we “clean the cruft” when there was just so much of it?

Fighting back: Two solutions (and one statistical analysis to show how it worked)1. "Merge and Purge" project

Our goal was to consolidate weaker “children” URLs into stronger “master” URLs to utilize some of the valuable content Google was ignoring and to make the user experience better.

For example, instead of having ~20 discussions on a specific topic (each with an average of around two to three comments) across twelve years, we would consolidate many of those discussions into the strongest two or three URLs (each with around 20–30 comments), leading to a much better user experience with less need to search and jump around the site.

Changes included taking the original post and comments from a “child” URL and merging them into the “master” URL, unpublishing the child URL, removing the child from sitemap, and adding a 301 redirect to the master.

Below is an example of how it looked when we merged a child into our popular Why Investment Banking discussion. We highlighted the original child post as a Related Topic with a blue border and included the original post date to help avoid confusion:

This was a massive project that involved some complex Excel sorting, but after 18 months and about $50,000 invested (27,418 children merged into 8,515 masters to date), the user experience, site architecture, and organization is much better.

Initial analysis suggests that the percentage gain from merging weak children URLs into stronger masters has given us a boost of ~10–15% in organic search traffic.

2. The Content Optimization Team

The goal of this initiative was to take the top landing pages that already existed on Wall Street Oasis and make sure that they were both higher quality and optimized for SEO. What does that mean, exactly, and how did we execute it?

We needed a dedicated team that had some baseline industry knowledge. To that end, we formed a team of five interns from the community, due to the fact that they were familiar with the common topics.

We looked at the top ~200 URLs over the previous 90 days (by organic landing page traffic) and listed them out in a spreadsheet:

We held five main hypotheses of what we believed would boost organic traffic before we started this project:

1. Longer content with subtitles: Increasing the length of the content and adding relevant H2 and H3 subtitles to give the reader more detailed and useful information in an organized fashion.
2. Changing the H1 so that it matched more high-volume keywords using Moz’s Keyword Explorer.
3. Changing the URL so that it also was a better match to high-volume and relevant keywords.
4. Adding a relevant image or graphic to help break up large “walls of text” and enrich the content.
5. Adding a relevant video similar to the graphic, but also to help increase time on page and enrich the content around the topic.

We tracked all five of these changes across all 200 URLs (see image above). After a statistical analysis, we learned that four of them helped our organic search traffic and one actually hurt.

Summary of results from our statistical analysis

• Increasing the length of the articles and adding relevant subtitles (H2s, H3s, and H4s) to help organize the content gives an average boost to organic traffic of 14%
• Improving the title or H1 of the URLs yields a 9% increase on average
• Changing the URL decreased traffic on average by 38% (this was a smaller sample size — we stopped doing this early on for obvious reasons)
• Including a relevant video increases the organic traffic by 4% on average, while putting an image up increases it by 5% on average.

Overall, the boost to organic traffic — should we continue to make these four changes (and avoid changing the URL) — is 32% on average.

Key takeaway:

Over half of that gain (~18%) comes from changes that require a minimal investment of time. For teams trying to optimize on-page SEO across a large number of pages, we recommend focusing on the top landing pages first and easy wins before deciding if further investment is warranted.

We hope this case study of our on-page SEO efforts was interesting, and I’m happy to answer any questions you have in the !

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!

https://ift.tt/2qW745c

How to Easily Find and Connect with Influencers on Twitter

Have you ever heard the expression that sometimes one plus one equals three? It’s bad math but a great concept that can help you grow your business or personal brand fast.

When you combine your efforts with someone else in your niche – not a competitor but someone with a similar audience as yours – you can see that bad math boost your bottom line. The idea is to pool your resources and promote each other so you both win.

The key is finding the right people to connect with and how to form a strategic partnership.

In this post, we’ll discuss exactly how to find the right influencers for a mutually beneficial relationship and exactly how to connect with them for the best results.

Ready? Let’s get to it!

Identify the Type or Influencer You’re Looking For

First, nail down exactly the type of influencer it’s best for you to connect with at this stage in your business.

https://ift.tt/2vGDrJY

8 Takeaways and Predictions from the Latest Email Marketing Research

We have two recently released, well-authored research reports on email marketing that provide some very different—not contradictory, but different—assessments of email marketing as it stands today and where we’re headed. In this article, we’ll give you a concise look at each and the most relevant takeaways from each report, as they pertain to you and your business. Presumptuous of us? Nah. We know how marketers—and their extended teams—tend to think about such things.

You can access the full reports from the Litmus 2018 State of Email and the Campaign Monitor 2018 Email Predictions.

What makes this mash-up so interesting is that one is based on a great deal of quantifiable backward-looking data, and the other is based on predictions from a number of experts in the field. Does the analytical data support the forward-looking recommendations? Read on.

We’re big fans of Litmus and the services they provide, yet we’re not a shill for their services or offerings. They just provide really good and essential services to email marketers. So, it will not come as a surprise their report is chock full of solid insights, technological changes across the entire email client spectrum, marketing trends, and (understandably) a regular cadence of CTAs to learn more and engage with their brand. We’ve got four major takeaways for you on this report.

1. The 3 Audiences in Your Organization Who Need to See This Report

Those audiences are:

• Developers: The people who are hand-coding or tweaking in-platform templates with stuff like this: @media screen and (max-device-width: 320px) and (max-device-height: 568px) { /* Insert styles here */ } Scary! That is apparently important when viewing an email on an iPhone 8 in zoom mode.
• Marketing Managers, Strategists, CMOs: Anyone responsible for email results.
• Your In-House Council, Attorney, and CEO: Anyone who doesn’t want a massive fine or legal entanglement over your use of private data.

We did not include analysts in there because they’re usually too busy looking at their own collected data. The point is, this research report is broad enough that it spans multiple types of stakeholders who touch email marketing.

Action Item: Highlight the essential parts of this report and share them with your colleagues on a need-to-know basis, especially the developers. Your analyst could completely misinterpret your subject-line test results based on the unknown number of recipients who couldn’t view the email correctly on a particular email client on a particular mobile device. Yes, it is that granular.

And if it hasn’t hit the inbox of C-level execs yet, the GDPR rules and consequences are real. At the time of this writing, in fact, it’s all over the news. Be sure your organization has it all together on the new data and privacy rules (see Takeaway #4 below).

2. It’s About Subscriber Engagement, Not List Size

If anyone within eyesight of this is still being graded on list size, stop it. Stop it now. A massive surge in list growth is not a key metric if those subscribers are not engaging, interacting, replying, sharing, or purchasing. It’s a false metric—one that will absolutely skew your email marketing metrics.

Purge non-engagers, put them on a re-engagement campaign, implement ongoing automated list hygiene methods, and be aggressive in cutting the dead wood. If the boss doesn’t get it, forward this article, along with our contact info.

List size is a false metric—one that will absolutely skew your email marketing metrics.
Click To Tweet
Top Reasons Consumers Unsubscribe

The following graphic shows the percentage of consumers (out of 1,212 respondents) who have unsubscribed from a brand’s promotional emails for the designated reasons.

Those first two reasons should come as no surprise. The third most common reason, “Brand’s emails or website don’t display or work well on subscriber’s smartphone,” is scary because that aspect of accessibility is largely under our control! (See Takeaway #3 below.)

Most interesting to us, however, is that fourth reason. 38 to 51 percent of subscribers unsubscribe due to a bad customer experience. If this is the case in your organization, it’s time to address and achieve best-in-class customer service, because that is also under our control.

Action Item: If you’re stuck in an environment in which list growth is a key metric, and your paycheck depends on it, you have three options:

1. Leave.
2. Teach the C-suite that list growth is significantly less important than engagement.
3. Hope for regime change, and hope you aren’t part of that change. (If yes, see #1.)

3. Email Marketing Is Way More Technical Now

How up-to-speed is your email/web developer? What’s the latest device’s screen size? How about its retina pixel count? How do you optimize for that? Should one optimize for that?

Here’s a quick test. Can your email/web developer tell you about at least four Samsung (not Android) mobile device rendering quirks that absolutely affect readability? (Pause for effect.)

(Still pausing.)

Knowledge like this plays a crucial role in generating engagement. Responsibility for that knowledge comes down to the person(s) dropping bits and pieces of code into your emails prior to sending. To be clear, we’re not shills for Litmus. But we do encourage you to adopt a tool like theirs to ensure your brilliantly crafted, written, and designed emails can actually be experienced as intended, on a plethora of ever-changing operating systems and devices.

Action Item: Continual training. Continual validation testing. It has to be part of the SOP for every email prior to scheduling. Invest time and money in your email developers, and provide them ongoing training.

4. The Rules of Compliance Have Changed

Data security, privacy, and transparency have become flashpoints for consumers, businesses, and governments thanks to both high-profile breaches and strict new laws that affect marketers worldwide. This goes beyond GDPR to include changes related to Canada’s Anti-Spam Law (CASL), the FTC review of the 14-year-old CAN-SPAM laws, Net Neutrality, and salient examples of data breaches.

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Highlights

• GDPR will affect every company that uses personal data from EU citizens. If you collect email addresses from and send email to subscribers in the EU, you must comply with GDPR no matter where you’re based.
• GDPR has stricter regulations around consent and the use of personal data. It also carries higher-than-ever penalties for businesses that don’t play by the rules. Non-compliance can lead to fines of up to €20 million or four percent of a brand’s total global revenue—whichever is higher.
• Marketers who want to send email to EU citizens must review their email processes. Two options are creating separate sign-up processes for EU and non-EU subscribers and changing all opt-in practices to comply with GDPR.

Action Item: If you haven’t done so already, it’s time for your own internal data, privacy policies, and practices audit. Make any policy updates, and take any corrective action right away. (There’s sure to be some.)

There is a lot more covered in the report. It’s pretty granular and becomes more role-specific, so this is a good one to share with your extended team, especially the developers and implementers of your email assets. The assertions and recommendations in the report are based on data collected across their entire community of customers and practitioners.

Looking Forward

Both the Litmus and CampaignMonitor reports contain forward-looking predictions based on a combination of survey data and expert opinions. We’ve reviewed them using our own highly polished, critical prism and summarized the four most important ones below.

Which of These Will Be Big Email Design Trends In 2018?

Top Email Design Trends to Embrace. Source: Litmus poll of 524 visitors to its blog between Nov. 15 and Dec. 4,2017

Our take on it: As you can see from the survey responses above, we can no longer just talk at our subscribers. Interactivity has become the number one area of focus because it fosters engagement. These kinds of features allow subscribers to interact with an email directly in their inbox—opening a dropdown menu, revealing hidden images or text, or adding an item promoted in the email to a cart and then clicking directly to the checkout page.

Google is already folding interactivity into its platforms. Gmail has announced they will add support for dynamic content and interactive email through Google’s AMP technology. Although the move will have its own limitations and challenges, it’s a very strong sign that interactive email is going mainstream.

Further, we have to talk with our subscribers, using personalized, relevant, concise, and humanized stories and conversations. If your existing email content inventory or content plans aren’t addressing this, it’s time to make some changes.

Expert Prediction 1: A New Type of Combined Email Marketing Automation Is Rising

Expect the lines between marketing automation, email marketing, and CRM to blur as email and automation companies continue to expand their features. A new midfield of marketing technology players will emerge. This is great for marketers. It lowers the barrier to get more advanced functionality and start implementing smarter marketing.

Our take on it: Agreed. However, adoption and implementation of these new capabilities will not come without some effort, pain, and expense. You’ll likely need to make a continual investment (or perhaps a complete change) in your technology stack, content assets, CRM data profiles, training, and analytics. Be realistic and intentional as to how your teams will navigate this changing landscape, and get senior management on board too.

Expert Prediction 2: Marketers Will Covet Predictive Marketing Metrics

Right now, marketers are campaign-oriented. We focus on measuring the success of campaigns above measuring the customer lifetime value (CLV). But not for long. Soon, we’ll vastly improve upon predictive marketing metrics, such as CLV calculation. Machine learning and AI will predict individual and group customer lifetime value (called “predictive CLV”). Goodbye, historical CLV! Hello, predictive CLV.

Our take on it: Yes, it’s time to take the long view. This will be particularly hard for short-sighted and even sales-oriented businesses that tend to live month-to-month, without regard to the long game. Commissioned salespeople are not likely to embrace the notion of a customer’s lifetime value when their monthly sales quota is the only KPI they are concerned with. Yet most CEOs understand the idea of increasing shareholder value, and adopting a CLV approach dovetails nicely with that and, possibly, their stock options. Historical, CLV hasn’t been easy for a majority of companies. Predictive CLV might not be either. But it’s worth investigating, and once the case can be made, capitalize on it. Machine learning and AI are the keys here.

Expert Prediction 3:  The Race to One-to-One Personalization Is On

The ability to craft individualized experiences at scale has given email marketing huge leads when it comes to personalization. But so far, email personalization has been typically based on past events like user-created profiles and preferences, purchases, and life stage events. Consumer expectations are rapidly changing. They expect everything to work like Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlist or Netflix’s Recommendation pages.

Our take on it: Spot on. All those other forward-thinking, bleeding-edge companies have reset customer expectations in every industry. And there is no going back. Yesterday’s good-enough, relevant email is no longer good enough. Personalization models and strategies now have to take into account real-time content consumption, infer customer intent, and deliver the next, most relevant content, CTA, assistance, or advice before the prospect (or existing customer) even knows what they need next. Customer journey mapping to stage-specific content inventory, overlaid with behavioral profiling, has to come together to meet the ever-increasing expectations of the prospect/customer. Those who get this right (and faster than their competition) will benefit because they will set the bar.

Expert Prediction 4: Investment Will Shift from Low-Value Emails to High-Value Emails

Investing the vast majority of our time in the production of mass emails that account for roughly 95 percent of our email volume but generate less than half of our email revenue doesn’t make sense. Instead, we’ll begin investing more time in the automated emails that account for five percent of our volume but most of our revenue.

Our take on it: That’s a fact. We’re spending a disproportionate amount of time and effort on emails that yield low per-unit results. But we’ve done it for two decades because it was really easy and cheap. It’s the 80/20 rule, or some variant of it. By shifting resources (time, effort, creativity) to the most valued subscribers, at scale, we expect to see better per-unit results. Each organization’s email models will need to adapt this concept differently, of course. However, we all still want some greater level of engagement (and maybe revenue). Shifting our focus and resources to those who are predisposed to engage, or purchase, makes perfect sense.

So, What Next?

Email marketing is not static and certainly not dead. In fact, it’s a more vibrant channel than ever. New research says we’re all about to boost our marketing budgets. We recommend you boost your resource allocations—budgets, personnel, training, technology, analytics—in this channel, which is far less likely to be disrupted (e.g., by a Facebook algorithm change) and continually evolves to provide a better, more tailored customer experience for all.

At Convince & Convert Consulting, we combine the latest research data with our marketing expertise to help our clients take advantage of the emerging opportunities in digital marketing. If you have questions, thoughts, or counterpoints, let us know. We’d love to hear from you.

https://ift.tt/2vGjPFT

How to Customize Your Instagram Story Highlights Cover

Do you use Instagram story highlights? Wondering how to make them more recognizable to your followers? In this article, you’ll discover how to change your Instagram story highlights cover from the default view to a branded cover image. Why Brand Your Instagram Highlight Covers? The Instagram Highlights feature lets you group and save important, educational,

This post How to Customize Your Instagram Story Highlights Cover first appeared on Social Media Examiner.

https://ift.tt/2JlCHvv

The SEO Quick Fix: Competitor Keywords, Redirect Chains, and Duplicate Content, Oh My!

Posted by ErinMcCaul

I have a eight-month-old baby. As a mom my time is at a premium, and I’ve come to appreciate functionalities I didn’t know existed in things I already pay for. My HBONow subscription has Game of Thrones AND Sesame Street? Fantastic! Overnight diapers can save me a trip to the tiny airplane bathroom on a quick flight? Sweet! Oxiclean keeps my towels fluffy and vanquishes baby poop stains? Flip my pancakes!

Moz Pro isn’t just a tool for link building, or keyword research, or on-page SEO, or crawling your site. It does all those things and a little bit more, simplifying your SEO work and saving time. And if you’ve run into an SEO task you’re not sure how to tackle, it’s possible that a tool you need is right here just waiting to be found! It’s in this spirit that we’ve revived our SEO Quick Fix videos. These 2–3 minute Mozzer-led tutorials are meant to help you get the most out of our tools, and offer simple solutions to common SEO problems.

Take Moz Pro for a spin!

Today we’ll focus on a few Keyword Explorer and Site Crawl tips. I hope these knowledge nuggets bring you the joy I experienced the moment I realized my son doesn’t care whether I read him The Name of the Wind or Goodnight Moon.

Let’s dive in!

Fix #1 - Keyword Explorer: Finding keyword suggestions that are questions

Search queries all have intent (“when to give my baby water” was a hot Google search at my house recently). Here’s the good news: Research shows that if you’re already ranking in the top ten positions, providing the best answers to specific questions can earn you a coveted Featured Snippet!

In this video, April from our Customer Success Team will show you how to pull a list of keyword phrases that cover the who, what, where, when, why, and how of all the related topics for keywords you’re already ranking for. Here’s the rub. Different questions call for different Featured Snippet formats. For example, “how” and “have” questions tend to result in list-based snippets, while “which” questions often result in tables. When you’re crafting your content, be mindful of the type of question you’re targeting and format accordingly.

Looking for more resources? Once you’ve got your list, check out AJ Ghergich’s article on the Moz Blog for some in-depth insight on formatting and optimizing your snippets. High five!

Fix #2 - Site Crawl: Optimize the content on your site

Sometimes if I find a really good pair of pants, I buy two (I mean, it’s really hard to find good pants). In this case duplicates are good, but the rules of pants don’t always apply to content. Chiaryn is here to teach you how to use Site Crawl to identify duplicate content and titles, and uncover opportunities to help customers and bots find more relevant content on your site.

When reviewing your duplicate content, keep a few things in mind:

• Does this page provide value to visitors?
• Title tags are meant to give searchers a taste of what your content is about, and meant to help bots understand and categorize your content. You want your title tags to be relevant and unique to your content.
• If pages with different content have the same title tag, re-write your tags to make them more relevant to your page content. Use our Title Tag Preview tool to help out.
• Thin content isn’t always a bad thing, but it’s still a good opportunity to make sure your page is performing as expected — and update it as necessary with meaningful content.
• Check out Jo Cameron’s post about How to Turn Low-Value Content Into Neatly Organized Opportunities for more snazzy tips on duplicate content and Site Crawl!

Fix #3 - Keyword Explorer: Identify your competitors’ top keywords

Cozily nestled under a few clicks, Keyword Explorer holds the keys to a competitive research sweet spot. By isolating the ranking keywords you have in common with your competitors, you can pinpoint their weak spots and discover keywords that are low-hanging fruit — phrases you have the content and authority to rank for that, with a little attention, could do even better. In this video, Janisha shows you how targeting a competitor’s low-ranking keywords can earn you a top spot in the SERPS.

Check out all that overlapped opportunity!

For a few more tips along this line, check out Hayley Sherman’s post, How to Use Keyword Explorer to Identify Competitive Keyword Opportunities.

Fix #4 - Site Crawl: Identify and fix redirect chains

Redirects are a handy way to get a visitor from a page they try to land on, to the page you want them to land on. Redirect chains, however, are redirects gone wrong. They look something like this: URL A redirects to URL B, URL B redirects to URL C… and so on and so forth.

These redirect chains can negatively impact your rankings, slow your site load times, and make it hard for crawlers to properly index your site.

Meghan from our Help team is here to show you how to find redirect chains, understand where they currently exist, and help you cut a few of those pesky middle redirects.

Looking for a few other redirect resources? I’ve got you covered:

• Moz's Learning Center: Redirection
• 301 Redirects – How to Redirect Your Website
• Search Console Help: Change page URLs with 301 redirects

Alright friends, that’s a wrap! Like the end of The Last Jedi, you might not be ready for this post to be over. Fear not! Our blog editor liked my jokes so much that she's promised to harp on me to write more blog posts. So, I need your help! Find yourself facing an SEO snafu that doesn’t seem to have a straightforward fix? Let me know in the comments. I might know a Moz tool that can help, and you might inspire another Quick Fix post!

Get a free month of Moz Pro

If you’re still interested in checking out more solutions, here’s a list of some of my favorite resources:

• The SEO Learning Center: If you need a refresher on SEO basics or need to do a gut-check, the Learning Center has your back.
• Moz SEO Training: Whether you need to master your next skill or get your team ramped up on the basics, live training courses can help.
• Our Next Level blog series, focused on helping you solve SEO problems with Moz Pro. We cover lots of topics:
  • How to Target Multiple Keywords with One Page
  • I've Optimized My Site, But I'm Still Not Ranking—Help!
  • Geomodified Searches, Localized Results, and How to Track the Right Keywords and Locations for Your Business
  • Diving for Pearls: A Guide to Long-Tail Keywords
  • Presenting Your Findings: How to Create Relevant and Engaging SEO Reports

Stay cool!

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!

https://ift.tt/2HpUVvx

How to Transform a Dry Blog Post into a Compelling Infographic

Infographics are a key component of any content marketing strategy.

They’re the ultimate accompaniment to any piece of long-form content, like a blog post or news article, because they’re like visual candy–bite-sized and easily digestible.

While most content marketers I speak to these days recognize the value of infographics in digital marketing, most don’t have the time (or the budget) to get them professionally designed. And when they try to make them themselves, they have no idea where to start.

So today I’d like to give you the low-down on the two key steps for creating a successful infographic from a blog post:

1. Summarizing a blog post for an infographic
2. Transforming a summary into an infographic

To make sure you have all the tools you need to create your own infographic, I’ll walk you through a case study–together we’ll turn a real-life long-form article into an irresistible infographic.

https://ift.tt/2qOQ0hu

12 Overlooked Facebook Features That Help Marketers

Do you need to streamline your Facebook marketing activities? Have you explored all of the functions Facebook has for marketers? In this article, you’ll discover 12 overlooked Facebook features that help you better manage your content and communities. #1: Customize Your News Feed The Facebook algorithm and the posts that get shown in the news

This post 12 Overlooked Facebook Features That Help Marketers first appeared on Social Media Examiner.

https://ift.tt/2qS36tr

ROPO: 2018's Most Important Multichannel Digital Marketing Report

Posted by RobBeirne

Digital marketers have always had one drum they loudly beat in front of traditional advertising channels: "We can measure what we do better than you." Now, we weren't embellishing the truth or anything — we can measure digital advertising performance at a much more granular level than we can traditional advertising. But it's not perfect. Multichannel digital marketing teams always have one niggling thought that keeps them awake at night: online activity is driving in-store sales and we can't claim any credit for it.

Offline sales are happening. Sure enough, we're seeing online shopping become more and more popular, but even so, you’ll never see 100% of your sales being made online if you're a multichannel retailer. Whether it’s a dress that needs to be tried on or a TV you want to measure up before you buy, in-store purchases are going nowhere. But it's more important than ever to make sure you don't underestimate the impact your online advertising has on offline sales.

ROPO: Research Online Purchase Offline has plagued multichannel retailers for years. This is when awareness and hot leads are generated online, but the customers convert in-store.

There is one other problem hampering many multichannel businesses: viewing their online store as "just another store" and, in many cases, the store managers themselves considering the website to be a competitor.

In this article, I'll show you how we've improvised to create a ROPO report for DID Electrical, an Irish electrical and home appliance multichannel retailer, to provide greater insight into their customers' multichannel journey and how this affected their business.

What is ROPO reporting?

Offline conversions are a massive blind spot for digital marketers. It's the same as someone else taking credit for your work: your online ads are definitely influencing shoppers who complete their purchase offline, but we can't prove it. Or at least we couldn't prove it — until now.

ROPO reporting (Research Online Purchase Offline) allows multichannel retailers to see what volume of in-store sales have been influenced by online ads. Facebook has trail-blazed in this area of reporting, leaving Google in their wake and scrambling to keep up. I know this well, because I work on Wolfgang's PPC team and gaze enviously at the ROPO reporting abilities of our social team. Working with DID, we created a robust way to measure the offline value of both PPC and SEO activity online.

To create a ROPO report, multichannel retailers must have a digital touch point in-store. This isn't as complicated as it sounds and can be something like an e-receipt or warranty system where you email customers. This gives you the customer data that you'll need to match offline conversions with your online advertising activity.

As I mentioned earlier, Facebook makes this nice and simple. You take the data gathered in-store, upload it to Facebook, and they will match as many people as possible. Our social team is generally seeing a 50% match rate between the data gathered in-store and Facebook users who've seen our ads. You can watch two of my colleagues, Alan and Roisin, discussing social ROPO reporting in an episode of our new video series, Wolfgang Bites:

Clearly, ROPO reporting is potentially very powerful for social media marketers, but Google doesn't yet provide a way for me to simply upload offline conversion data and match it against people who've seen my ads (though they have said that this is coming for Google AdWords). Wouldn't this be a really boring article for people working in SEO and PPC if I just ended things there?

Google ROPO reporting

DID Electrical were a perfect business to develop a ROPO report for. Founded back in 1968 (happy 50th birthday guys!), a year before tech was advanced enough to put man on the moon, DID strives to "understand the needs of each and every one of their customers." DID have an innovative approach to multichannel retail, which is great for ROPO reporting because they're already offering e-receipts to customers purchasing goods for over €100. Better still, the email delivering the e-receipts also has a link to a dedicated competition. This sits on a hidden landing page, so the only visitors to this page are customers receiving e-receipts.

They were nearly set for ROPO reporting, but there was just one extra step needed. In Google Analytics, we set the unique competition landing page URL as a goal, allowing us to reverse-engineer customer journeys and uncover the extent of Google PPC and SEO's influence over in-store sales. Before I unveil the results, a few caveats.

The ROPO under-report

Despite our best efforts to track offline conversions, I can't say ROPO reporting reflects 100% of all in-store sales influenced by digital ads. In the past, we've been open about the difficulties in tracking both offline conversions and cross-device conversions. For example, when running a social ROPO report, customers might give a different email in-store from the one attached to their Facebook account. For an SEO or PPC ROPO report, the customer might click a search ad on a work computer but the open their e-receipt on their smartphone. Unfortunately, due to the nature of the beast, ROPO reporting just isn't 100% accurate, but it does give an incredible indication of online's influence over offline sales.

I expect to see improved reporting coming down the line from Google, and they're definitely working on a ROPO reporting solution like Facebook's upload system. While our approach to ROPO reporting does shine a light on the offline conversion blind spot, it's entirely likely that digital advertising's influence goes far beyond these (still mightily impressive) results.

It’s also important to note that this method isn’t intended to give an exact figure for every ROPO sale, but instead gives us an excellent idea of the proportion of offline sales impacted by our online activities. By applying these proportions to overall business figures, we can work out a robust estimate for metrics like offline ROI.

Results from ROPO reporting

I'm going to divide the results of this ROPO reporting innovation into three sections:

1. PPC Results
2. SEO Results
3. Business Results

1. PPC results of ROPO reporting

First of all, we found 47% of offline customers had visited the DID Electrical website prior to visiting the store and making a purchase. Alone, this was an incredible insight into consumer behavior to be able to offer the team at DID. We went even further and determined that 1 in 8 measurable offline sales were influenced by an AdWords click.

2. SEO results of ROPO reporting

This method of ROPO reporting also means we can check the value of an organic click-through using the same reverse-engineering we used for PPC clicks. Based on the same data set, we discovered 1 in 5 purchases made in-store were made by customers who visited the DID site through an organic click prior to visiting the store.

3. Business results of ROPO reporting

ROPO reporting proved to be a great solution to DID's needs in providing clarity around the position of their website in the multichannel experience. With at least 47% of offline shoppers visiting the site before purchasing, 1 in 8 of them being influenced by AdWords and 1 in 5 by SEO, DID could now show the impact online was having over in-store sales. Internally, the website was no longer being viewed as just another store — now it's viewed as the hub linking everything together for an improved customer experience.

Following the deeper understanding into multichannel retail offered by ROPO reporting, DID was also able to augment their budget allocations between digital and traditional channels more efficiently. These insights have enabled them to justify moving more of their marketing budget online. Digital will make up 50% more of their overall marketing budget in 2018!

Getting started with ROPO reporting

If you're a digital marketer within a multichannel retailer and you want to get started with ROPO reporting, the key factor is your in-store digital touchpoint. This is the bridge between your online advertising and offline conversion data. If you're not offering e-receipts already, now is the time to start considering them as they played a critical role in DID’s ROPO strategy.

ROPO Cheat Guide (or quick reference)

If you're a multichannel retailer and this all sounds tantalizing, here’s the customer journey which ROPO measures:

1. Customer researches online using your website
2. Customer makes purchase in your brick-and-mortar store
3. Customer agrees to receive an e-receipt or warranty delivered to their email address
4. Customer clicks a competition link in the communication they receive
5. This action is captured in your Google Analytics as a custom goal completion
6. You can now calculate ROAS (Return On Advertising Spending)

The two critical steps here are the digital touchpoint in your physical stores and the incentive for the customer’s post-conversion communication click. Once you have this touchpoint and interaction, measuring Facebook's social ROPO is a simple file upload and using what I’ve shown you above, you’ll be able to measure the ROPO impact of PPC and SEO too.

If you do have any questions, pop them into the comments below. I have some questions too and it would be great to hear what you all think:

• If you're a multichannel retailer, are you in a position to start ROPO reporting?
• Does your company view your website as a hub for all stores or just another store (or even a competitor to the physical stores)?
• Have you seen a shift in marketing spend towards digital?

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!

https://ift.tt/2F6dtPr