Central Perk: Need Help with PRO? Introducing the Help Hub!

marți, 14 august 2012

Need Help with PRO? Introducing the Help Hub!

Posted: 13 Aug 2012 07:53 PM PDT

At SEOmoz, we know that learning complex software applications can be time consuming and challenging, kind of like playing chess with a Wookie. Having well-written and comprehensive onboarding materials can help to decrease the learning curve, thus preventing droid dismemberment. Excellent documentation, videos, and "getting started" guides are a key differentiator between software that is successful and software that slowly fizzles away.

We've gone to great lengths to bring knowledge to the SEO and inbound communities with our daily blog articles and handy Beginner's Guide to SEO. However, getting up to speed with our PRO application has been a challenge for all of us.

We're happy to announce that the previous PRO challenge ends today. Introducing: the new SEOmoz Help Hub!

This project has been at the forefront of our Help Team for the past six months. You may have seen me around the blog before; I'm Kenny, and I designed the look and feel of our new Help home base. The walkthroughs, videos, and screenshots are by my fellow helpster, Nick Sayers, our Communications Chief. Together with the rest of the Help Team, we'll be working to bring you the most high-quality self-help customer service experience on the web.

What are you waiting for? Check it out now!

SEOmoz Help Hub Homepage

Over the past few months, we have been fine-tuning our Getting Started Guides, honing our video editing skills, and taking feedback from our new users. Previously we used our customer support software's forums for all of our documentation needs. Sure, these forums were better than having nothing at all, but they didn't allow for many of the features needed to make our help resources useful for new customers.

Largely, our old forums lacked the functionality we needed as they existed off of the www.seomoz.org domain. This opened the door for odd issues with cross authentication between the forums on SEOmoz and other stunted processes. We wanted a system that was unique to SEOmoz so customers could easy navigate to a central location to learn about our tools. With the launch of our new Help Hub, customers can become zen-level power users in a single afternoon. SEOmoz PRO levitation initiated!

Learning new software through wordy guides and a plethora of screenshots is a good start, but we wanted to shoot for the stars. The new Help Hub hosts a series of finely-tuned video screencasts, which can put the learning process into hyperdrive. Videos are the best way for the community to see where and how to do something on PRO with ease, which is our ultimate goal. In summation, the process should be as quick and painless as a Michael Bay film. Now that we've launched, we'll continue to gather awesome video analytics to see how people are engaged in our content and make improvements to make them even more engaging!

SEOmoz Help Hub Video Screenshot

At SEOmoz, we use Wistia to host our diverse catalogue of videos. Why? Because Wistia is amazing. Their software allows us to see just what sections of our videos are skipped, replayed, and scrobbled back and forth. This information allows us to cut out any fluff and isolate potentially confusing aspects of our videos and even deeper issues with our software itself. Wistia documents user information to help us create video content that you, our awesome community members, really want.

SEOmoz Help Hub Wistia Engagement Metrics

To better measure engagement and success, we are also going to ask for customer feedback. At the end of each article in our Help Hub, you will find a "Was this document helpful?" section. All responses are logged and reviewed so that we can better improve our help documentation over time. Feedback is crucial to this process as we want to know what customers are missing in our learning materials, and also what aspects of our product are the hardest to learn. The most common questions that are submitted to our help team will be identified and added to the documentation, or used to refine current copy to make an article clearer.

SEOmoz Help Hub Feedback Yes or No

SEOmoz Help Hub Feedback Submit

We've dedicated a trove of resources to guarantee that our new Help Hub is improved on a regular basis. As mentioned above, Nick will be managing the Help Hub and making sure the content is fresh, consumable, and accurate. He will also be blogging about our new venture into customer education as it evolves, so be on the lookout for his stellar posts!

In sum, if you are just getting started with SEOmoz PRO and want to get up to speed quickly, or if you're long-time member and haven't explored some of the new features, don't forget to check out our Help Hub and get schooled. Let us know what you like and what you want to see improved in the comments below. This is your Help Hub, after all!

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400% Higher Throughput Mozscape API Now in Beta, And Seeking Testers

Posted: 13 Aug 2012 03:12 AM PDT

Posted by randfish

If you've used or considered using the Mozscape API to retrieve link metrics data, we've got something unique to share - a brand new beta of a much faster, more robust API. This beta version currently has just a few testers (and we're seeking more), but thus far, we're seeing remarkable results.

Carin, who manages the big data team here at Moz, helped share the story with me last week:

The current API is not able to support everyone's use case! Some people need to make a lot of calls in a really short period of time - our API currently can't support more than 10 requests/second (even for paid users). Others have a large list of URLs they want to update metrics on every new index release - our current API doesn't support batching very well and will timeout with batch sizes larger than 50 URLs.
The beta version has made some serious performance improvements with single URL throughput and can handle 200 requests / second - the beta API is seeing a 400% throughput improvement, although response times will still be the same
To address batching users we've developed a new batching model - online batching (available in the beta API) and offline batching (coming soon to the beta API)
- Online batching: the maximum amount of results we can process in a POST without a timeout from S3. This has been improved from 50 URLs to 500 URLs in one batch request
- Offline batching (still in development): for batch sizes larger than 500 URLs, offline batching will process through the entire list (probably up to a certain limit not yet decided) and return a downloadable CSV link to S3 where all the data will be available. Since this is still in development, it is not clear the SLA on offline batching, but this feature will be also be available for beta testing as soon as it is feature complete!

Mozscape's API is pretty big today - we served 154,352,249 (154 million) requests in the first 10 days of August and returned 1,186,736,774 (1.2 billion) rows of link metrics data.

You can still sign up free or try our paid API, but if you have serious demand for high-volume or large batches of link data, we'd love to have you in the beta for the new API. Just contact Andrew Dumont - andrew@seomoz.org - and he'll get you set up!