Top Ten Ways To Get More Customer Feedback - Whiteboard Friday

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Top Ten Ways To Get More Customer Feedback - Whiteboard Friday Posted: 04 Oct 2012 07:59 PM PDT Posted by JoannaLord Customer feedback is arguably one of the best ways you can grow and expand your products and services. Being able to obtain that feedback and then apply it to your business effectively can mean the difference between a good year and a great year. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Joanna Lord shares some ideas for getting feedback good and bad, and explains how it may be important in ways you just might not know. There also may or may not be a little surprise at the end. :) What's your best tips for getting customer feedback? Share you thoughts in the comments below. Video Transcription "Hey everyone, I'm Joanna Lord, the VP of Growth Marketing over here at SEOmoz, and today we're going to be doing our Whiteboard Friday on Ten Ways to Get More Customer Feedback. I think we all know why it's super important to have a large volume of customer feedback, but today we're going to be talking about some of the more common places that you find it and some of the less common places, so places that maybe you could suggest to teams to go look at so that we're constantly hearing from our customers and we're constantly trying to improve on the experience that we're giving them. Jumping right in, some of the common ways that people go looking for customer feedback, obviously help tickets, right? So any place you have a customer service team or a help team. We do a great job of this at SEOmoz. Our Help Team is always on top of what are our customers feeling? What are they saying? How are they feeling about something being down, or what are they suggesting for us to do? Taking that information and operationalizing it or putting a process behind it so it can be circulated with a grander team is an excellent way to know what your customers are saying and to better serve them. I think a lot of people are on top of this, and if there's ever any room for improvement there, it's definitely the first place to start. It's like your front line with your customers, and you want it to be the most beautiful experience possible. Then the second one is surveys. I think most marketers we think to ourselves we're going to survey every couple of months or maybe we're constantly in a style of surveying and we're using Survey Monkey or we're using KISSinsights. There's a lot of great reasons to give surveys to your customers. I think sometimes marketers do bias towards this idea of like, "I need to know something right now for this one project, so I'm going to go survey them for a limited time." I challenge you to think more of like an ongoing rolling basis. How can you be surveying them for what they'd like to see or what they may not have found on a page? Avinash does a great blog post of this, on the things that you should ask someone in a survey, the top three questions. They tend to be very simple, like: Did you find what you were looking for? If you didn't find what you were looking for, what were you looking for? That sort of surveying is really critical to constantly improving what you put on your pages and what story you're giving your customers. Surveys is really huge. The third one is reviews. If it makes sense for your business, small businesses also, today there's a lot of ways that companies can be reviewed, whether it be an actual customer review on a product or a company. You can also do that on LinkedIn, where people recommend companies, on Facebook where people are giving sort of reviews on how they were treated or what the product looks like. You should be constantly data mining those reviews so that you have the best sense of how people are discussing you and how they're describing you and what they're asking from you for next time that they have an interaction with you. So reviews is a really common one, but one that I think sometimes only a couple of people at the company might look at, and it's a great thing to circulate more company-wide. The fourth one is in person. We try to do this at a lot of our events. You've probably been asked by some of us at some point: How do you feel about SEOmoz, or how do you feel about the product that we put out? It's a great way to get a large volume of data. I think sometimes it can be so qualitative that it's not actionable, and one thing to think about when you're talking about in person is it doesn't always have to be at an event. It can be a phone call. You can put together kind of smaller projects or campaigns around just calling up people and asking them questions kind of out of the blue. It seems somewhat outdated, but it can still be very personable and very authentic and a great way to get a ton of feedback. So thinking about in person, how you can leverage that, is really great. It's an authentic way to build the community and hear exactly what they're saying straight from their mouth. The fifth one is blog posts. I think we all know that, at this point, having a blog post go out that's kind of like, "Hey, we're looking for feedback. We want to hear what you think," is a great way to get a ton of comments, a ton of great suggestions from people that really want to have a voice, and you want them to come along with the story. You want them to feel part of the story, and I think that can be done really well with leveraging the customer feedback that you might get in a blog post interaction. Whether it's a CEO that puts up a post, or whether it's just from the team, "Hey guys, we're thinking of building this," or, "Hey guys, we're thinking of expanding here," and getting some feedback, I think it's a great way to get some of that. So those are the five most common. I think marketers today, we do have a lot of this in our process. So we're either doing it on some level at any given point, or we're doing it quarterly or semi-annually. That's really great and awesome, and if that's all you can get to, it's still better than nothing. But I really think there are some other, less common ways for customer feedback that if you can start to lace them together you get a much fuller picture of what's going on. So let's talk about some of those, some of the bonus customer feedbacks that we're going for. This one is huge for us, and it was actually somewhat surprising, but Feature Request Forms. Whether you're a SaaS company or even if you just have a "Contact Us With Suggestions" type experience on your website, if you go looking at those regularly and you're pulling out trends and you're starting to see, what do they want from us time and time again or how are they describing us time and time again, it can be really huge. Feature request forms for us here have been this gold mine of data and customer feedback that we weren't really expecting at first. Now we've put it straight through to product, and they're constantly checking this, and it's really great information when you're trying to figure out: What should we build next? What should we do next? What should we invest in next? This is a great place to look. Number seven, the cancellation survey. On the exact flip side, a lot of people tend to ignore that people that leave you for whatever reason, those reasons are really important, and they're super insightful. For us, we've kind of added a layer when you go to cancel, just one quick question that's like, "What's your reason for canceling today?" Some people go with our default options, which tends to be things like maybe a technical problem, or maybe I just don't need this service right now, or the price point is a little high. But we also offer this opportunity to just tell us in your own words why you're leaving, and the Help Team does an amazing job of surfacing, along with our retention marketer, what those trends are. If you start to react to those and you start to really take them to heart as a company, you tend to be far more agile in how you're solving for their problems. It really does help produce churn. It really does help increase positive sentiment. So it's a great place to look when you're starting to ask yourself, "Where could we be doing better?" This one - social platforms - might seem like a little large of an idea, but our Community Team does an amazing job of this, and it's something as simple as going to Facebook and asking, "Hey guys, if you could only describe us in one word, what would it be?" When you have a community, or when you're building a community, or you have customers and they start to respond to that, it is gold because you use those words, and those words resonate better with your potential leads than anything else could. It also really shows the customers that you're really interested in what they have to say, and that how they're describing you is exactly the way that you want to be describing yourself. We also ask them just simple questions like: What's your favorite thing about our service? Or what's the one thing we don't have that you would like? We could do all sorts of internal data mining to try to figure that out, or we could simply go ask on social platforms, whether it be Facebook or Twitter, or even opening up our own Q&A on Quora or something like that. It's a great place to start thinking, "What can we ask them that can really help inform our decisions internally?" This one's really fun for us. It's a new thing we've started in the last six months. It's a customer board. We call it our CAB - Customer Advisory Board - and what we've done is we've collected a group of people randomly to represent many demographics of our customers, and we've put them together and we've engaged in a long-term interaction with them, where we show them new things, and maybe they're on an email conversation with us as we shape new messaging, or we shape new products, or we're just looking for general feedback about acquiring another product or something like that. It's really going to our customers and being like, "You've been with us since the beginning. You know all this just as well as us. What do you think of this?" It is such a great conversation to have. Yes, you have to be aware that it somewhat only represents a small portion, but you can extrapolate a lot of insights from those conversations, because they tend to get very deep. They tend to be very robust, so you can take a lot of adjectives or a lot of sentences and find out great information. So thinking about building a customer advisory board and giving that place a home in your company is really big. It's been super valuable for us, and huge thanks to those on the Customer Advisory Board, in case you're looking. The last one is other teams. This one, again, is something I think marketing can very often become somewhat siloed, or maybe we're just doing our own ways of data mining for customer feedback. But something as simple as setting up a meeting with someone on the Help Team - me grabbing Joel from the Help Team and jumping in a room and saying like, "What are you hearing right now? How are you feeling about it all?" The conversations he's having on the phone are far more insightful than anything I could get from looking at our mass data files, because that is anonymous, and it's somewhat removed from the true problems that tend to be compounding on each other to cause these bigger trends. Asking the other teams, "Hey, you went to a meet-up last week, and you talked to a bunch of Seattle engineers. Did any of them give any interesting feedback on SEOmoz?" It's amazing what comes back. I think that opening those conversations regularly is such a great thing to do for the health of a company and the customer feedback. I think that these ten things are the things that we're trying to really improve on here at SEOmoz and the things that we really want to develop into more of true channels, constant channels of feedback, so that we don't do it once a quarter, or when something goes wrong, let's go see what people are saying, but so that we're constantly getting this influx of information. I did throw up here: Why? What are you going to do with all this? I think it probably warrants its own Whiteboard Friday at some point. But in general, I think you're really trying to look for trends. I think that's pretty obvious, trends and what they're saying. It's a great place to start for a benchmark of sentiment. If we were to really ask all the teams here from what they're hearing from all these different channels, it's almost like an internal net promoter score. You get a real sense of how people are seeing you right now. Planning, there is no better way to plan what you should be doing as a company than to ask your customers what they need and then tracking, right? Because if you don't start all this now, then in three or six months, you're not going to have those three or six months of data to start building on. I think the sooner that you start to really address these and bring them in and start working on them or get a lot of people invested company-wide, I think the better off you'll be. So that's my spiel on customer feedback. I definitely look forward to hearing what other suggestions you have in the comments below. It's been super fun, and I'll see you next time. Have a good day." 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!

The Exact Match Domain Playbook: A Guide and Best Practices for EMDs Posted: 04 Oct 2012 03:32 AM PDT Posted by stuntdubl This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc. Exact match domains have always been the source of a lot of contention among SEOs. For quite some time, EMD’s have offered a competitive advantage for SEO’s who understood how to use them. In the early days of search when relevance algorithms were rather weak, many folks used “double dashed” domains because they were cheap to buy, and easy to rank. $6 to rank for a 3 word phrase. Sold. However, when you see best-online-seo-company.biz in your search result, you start to question the weighting of relevance factors. This is, in large part, how EMD’s got a bad rep to start with. Despite the debate and obvious abuse, EMD’s represent what SEO’s do best – Seize Every Opportunity! I’ve always been a pretty big fan of EMD’s, and I agree with Elliot Silver that  EMD domains can be brands. High value keyword domains have been a commodity since the internet became a commercial marketplace.  Matt Cutts (esteemed Google engineer) has made this comment in the past (about 2 years ago): "We have looked at the rankings and weights that we give to keyword domains and some people have complained that we’re giving a little too much weight for keywords in domains. And so we have been thinking about adjusting that mix a little bit and sort of turning the knob down within the algorithm so that given two different domains, it wouldn’t necessarily help you as much to have a domain with a bunch of keywords in it."     Types of EMD’s I think it’s important firstly to qualify the different types of EMD. The major factors in identifying quality domains, to me, includes: TLD extension (.com/.net/.org/.other) Number of keywords Dashed or non-dashed Domains with “stop words” only qualify as “partial match domains” Let’s start with dashed domains. It has been proven statistically that domains with more than a single dash are very likely to be spam. Multiple dashes in a domain was an early spammer trick because of the low barrier to entry with cost. This rules these out.  Don’t bother with a double dash domain.  It is very common to see domain names that include a single hyphen, but when two, three, or more hyphens are present, this is often an indication that these domain names are associated with companies that are attempting to trick search engines into ranking their web pages more highly. From this amazing patent post by Bill Slawski regarding EMD's and detecting commercial queries. Even though there is plenty of evidence that a single dash domain can rank just fine, I would avoid this technique as well. Many of the single dash EMD’s that rank are old existing domains. It is my opinion that a single dash EMD still really provides very little advantage over a non-keyword domain with all things considered. Skip the dashed domains as well. The next question is how many keywords in a URL is too many. I would answer 2-3 for a .net/.org and 3-4 for a .com. BestBusinessCreditCards.com may be long, but I think it is still effective and too the point. Four words is pushing it, but I think you can still make a valid argument for a 4 word .com domain in certain spaces where most all the domains are taken, and there are some very niche commercial products worth targeting specifically. While .net/.org domains are still very credible, there are more of them available, so I think you have to reduce by a word. 4 words max for .com, 3 words max for .net/.org.  3 word .com or 2 word .net/.org is the best idea. .net/.org keyword domains have proven to be very effective as a tool for bootstrapping a website. I think this is valid strategy. Instead of flickr.com, start with onlinephotos.net or even onlinephotogallery.org. I understand the value of a brand, but I think there’s also value in embracing “bootstrapper traffic.” There's definitely a lot of value to a startup in some highly relevant long tail traffic from your targeted keyword phrase set.  .net/.org domains are generally priced at about 10% of the value of a .com domain. This can be of great value in competitive verticals where most of the domains have been registered for many years.  Find the BEST two-word .net/.org within your category, and buy it in the aftermarket if it is available. For buying your EMD - see the advice below. This can be great for your mainsite, microsite, or just to keep your competitor from getting it. At worst, think of it as a defensive strategy for your most important phrases. Just don’t think you’re going to dominate the SERPS spending less than three or four times what you paid for the domain in the first place. A crappy microsite  that costs half of what you paid for the domain will get you a one way ticket to Nowhereville these days. Stop words in keyword domains Domains that include stopwords don’t truly qualify as an EMD, but can be mildly effective. It probably wouldn’t be my first choice, but if you can get theDetroitRoofer.com for $6, it will probably be a decent bet you’ll have some decent signals at your advantage in ranking for your targeted term for the relatively reasonable future. There is the potential for some brand confusion here though if someone owns detroitroofer.com The most significant benefit of an exact match domain is that it makes it much more easy to develop targeted keyword anchor text from authority sites. Anchor text as an SEO tool is in decline, but it has always been a very significant factor, and will likely remain this way to some extent. It’s much easier to get someone to link to your site with the domain name, than it is to tell them “link to me with these keywords." This is probably the major competitive advantage over non-EMD domains.  Offsite optimization is more than just links these days with the increasing importance of social mentions. Smart money speculation says it will be easier to get keyword rich social mentions for an EMD than for other types of domains as well. So with all the talk of EMD’s, what the people really want to know is: what should we do? For those of you in this camp, let me offer you my best practices with keyword domain names. Unfortunately, I can make no guarantees to the amount of time these will hold true in the ever shifting tides of SEO change, but this is where I think we're at as of the time of posting: EMD and domain best practices Always be willing to spend 10-15% of your overall budget on the BEST domain name you can get. It will make a big difference in both the short and long run. Dive into the aftermarket, and send some emails. Skip the second level TLD’s - .mobi / .travel / .info isn’t worth it. No more than one dash in your domain (better to just skip dash domains altogether) 3-4 words max for .com EMD’s 2-3 words max for .net/.org EMD’s Best to build a Brand site on a keyword domain so you get both brand mentions and generic intent keywords (see Toys.com owned by ToysRus.com and associates) Geo-local EMD’s are great to own, and offer lower barriers to entry You're going to have to focus some efforts on "de-optimization" As the proud owner of MiamiFishing.com (no, I’m not a retired fisherman, but thanks for asking) and other exact match domains, I can say that there are both pros and cons to EMD's. I saw a few sites of my own pay the price for “over optimization” during Penguin. It's hard to always know how aggressive to be, and how far G is going to turn the "filter knobs," In a time where disavowing, delinking, and de-optimization seem to be the valid strategies, it's safe to say you should probably take a more conservative approach to your organic ranking strategy. SEO factors aside, there's something valuable about having your domain name "say on the box" exactly what you do when you put it on a hat, t-shirt, or sign. There's a lot of implied credibility in a .com EMD (and even to some extent .net and .org). After years of being an SEO, it’s sometimes difficult to maintain a TAGFEE mentality and put my own site up on the chopping block for public criticism, but it’s a site I’m also very proud of, and I think really stands up to the other websites in the vertical in delivering value to our users. Please be gentle.  I do believe the Moz has great tenants, but it can be very frightening to put your site up in the crosshairs for people to take aim and fire at, especially when you haven't accomplished everything you'd like to do with it sometimes. Being optimized or optimal means getting the most you can from the resources at your disposal, and sometimes this isn't always enough to create the perfect website (I have others that aren't nearly as pretty). EMD’s do have their advantages, but they have some disadvantages as well. Pros of an EMD Great for a startup to gather some relevant longtail traffic Easier to get targeted anchor text Easier to get social mentions with keywords Can dominate a single niche (IE: “Category Killer”) Good for targeting variations in the long tail keyword phrase set Brand mentions and keyword mentions become one in the same They can be very effective for generic commercial intent queries They can be very effective in local search Great way to build startup “bootstrapper” traction Can be an effective strategy with a well built microsite to target a single niche. Some businesses have very limited keyword sets – this is a decent approach in these areas. Cons of an EMD Limits future brand expansion Can create “brand confusion” You don’t get the same “credit” for brand mentions. Your brand can come off as “generic” It can be harder to claim social media profiles It can be more difficult to associate mentions with your brand Hatorade on your site quality if you outrank competitors More chance of “over-optimization” (seriously, does anyone else hate this phrase as much as I do?) There are a limited amount of them They can be very expensive The effectiveness of the advantages are slowly being neutralized EMD's and Brand Confusion One of the main problems facing EMD's is the brand confusion that can come with a keyword domain. It’s HARD to own a very sought after generic commercial intent keyword. Google really doesn't want someone to own a keyword, and for good reason. Keywords are the new brand. Someone in every vertical is trying to own their generic commercial keywords. Think about the big brands Staples and Office Max; do they really DESERVE to rank better than a well built OfficeChairs.com or OfficeFurnitureOnline.com ? Generic commercial intent keywords are hard to come by; there’s really not a ton of them around, and they are VERY sought after when you start looking at the search demand curve. It doesn't make sense to for a SE to allow only one advertiser own the keyword when several can compete to drive prices to a point of maximum profit for G and diminishing returns for advertisers. There will always be competition to be the brand associated with the generic commercial intent keyword. Logic follows that value in the associated domains should stay pretty strong as well.   This is probably beyond the scope of this post, so I may leave this discussion of "branding" keyword domains for another day, but it is at the crux of the EMD debate. I’ll leave the solutions to the commenters ;). We all know that G is expecting much more out of a website to allow it to remain on their first page these days. Think there’s a lot of keywords with generic commercial intent? Consider the main ones in each of these categories where G makes the majority of their ad revenues.  The list might not be as long as you think. I'm willing to bet most consultants and agencies here in the Moz community have at least a client or two in each of these major verticals. So what was the “solution” to the EMD relevance “problem?” Google engineers have always attempted to “level the playing field” for webmasters. They do a great job in many cases, and provide lots of fantastic tools these days with Google Webmaster Tools. Unfortunately, I don’t really think EMD’s are inherently a bad thing. They were just too large of a competitive advantage for some competitive niches where it was difficult to get targeted keyword anchor text. It's still going to remain difficult to get targeted anchor text in these niches (though it's now much less valuable to do so). EMD’s became a goldrush landgrab for optimizers and domainers when they saw the advantages they provide, and the tactics got used and abused and started to create some relevance problems. As with all landgrabs, people got greedy. Speculators starting creating sites that gave EMD’s a pretty bad rap.Competitors start reporting these websites go Google as S.P.A.M (sites positioned above mine), and users start to complain that the SERPs suck. Speculators started putting up 1 page garbage microsites and ranking for large 2 and 3 word phrases with 3 crappy directory links and a page of outsourced content. The EMD's started to look like those old double dashed sites, even though the barriers to entry for top search rankings were a bit higher. Those barriers continue to get raised. You can’t cry about your rankings when you didn’t deserve them in the first place, and honestly you never deserve rankings. You earn rankings, and often lose them. It’s part of the love, joy, and pain that is SEO.  As John Andrews says in “You’re Free to Go Home”  "That’s alot like SEO. You win, you get traffic. You don’t win, you don’t get traffic. It doesn’t matter how you play." The real issue with EMDs The main issue originally posed by suffering relevance was not EMD’s, but the amount of influence that keyword anchor text wielded over the search relevance algorithm. EMD’s just benefitted disproportionately from advantages with targeted anchor text. Anchor text carried too much influence without that added benefit. It’s a whole lot easier to get a link that says “Real Estate” when you’re RealEstate.com than it is to get one when you’re  Zillow.com. The same can be said right down to Buy-my-crappy-spyware-cleaner-software.com. It was much more important to fix the overall issues associated with the anchor text relevancy problems, than it was to fix the EMD “problem,” and that’s why we saw the anchor text issues being remedied first with Panda and Penguin (which fixed a slew of other issues as well), before directly fixing EMD issues. There is a lot of potential collateral damage that can occur when making the decision of if a keyword domain has enough "brand signals" or "quality factors" to be near the top of the search results for a phrase, so I imagine it's a pretty difficult search relevance area to tackle. The simple fact is many EMD's ARE good valuable sites that deliver a quality experience to their end users. Can you really take a way all their advantage that they were wise enough to gain from paying top dollar for a great domain? As with most important signals, optimizers found a way to take full advantage of benefits that inbound keyword anchor text provided. As with the rest of the history of SEO, we’ve seen a major shift in the importance of anchor text that has sent a lot of SEO’s reeling. If you didn’t see the writing on the wall, you either didn’t pay attention, or didn’t care. Either way, SEO’s who ignored the impending anchor text over-optimization warning bells are now paying the price, and trying to fix mistakes. Panda and Penguin cured most of the major EMD relevance issues by forcing EMD websites to earn their rankings through achieving acceptable engagement metrics. Think of Panda as a beast that eats sites who don’t give their users what they want. If you don’t hold up the the “relative engagement metrics” within your SERPs, your site gets eaten. If I were to play “if I were a search relevance engineer” (one of my favorite games), I think would just set the barriers to entry higher for EMD’s to rank in the short and medium tail keyphrases. I would also validate with user metrics the fact that they deserve to be there. Long ago (in 2005), Google introduced the “sandbox” (or trustbox) The “trustbox” made new websites “guilty until proven innocent” with regards to their page authority unless they demonstrated sufficient signals to be let into the index.  The principles and ideas associated with the trustbox are still very much in effect today. Value to your users creates trust and credibility verifying engagement metrics like high time on site, multiple page views, low bounce rate, repeat visits, and new websites are let into the index more quickly, but the barriers to entry for commercial intent high dollar short and medium tale queries are much higher. Essentially, your user engagement metrics must validate your rankings.  Yes, that was an “Eminememe”, and as Eminem says: “you get one shot, never miss your chance to blow.” When you get your “audition phase” in the top of the search results, your site needs to perform well against other sites in that keyphrase set. Make sure you pass your “audition” instead of puking on your visitors sweater and telling them it’s value. Positive engagement metrics during your audition phase is equivalent to the importance of quality score in you PPC campaigns; it can really have an effect on the outcome of your webpage's success. Positive engagement metrics High time on site Multiple page view Repeat visits Low bounce Rates Not every industry requires 10 minute time on site, and 50% repeat visitors, but some do. These metrics reflect brands and brand signals, which is what G has repeatedly mentioned as their priority for providing quality and relevant sites to users in the search results.    What are the solutions to my exact match problem? It’s obviously a bit troubling times for EMD owners. No one likes to be at the center of an SEO witch hunt. It’s all fine and good to do spam reports, until it hits your site, or targets your niche or competitive advantage. One of the best competitive advantages has always been the ability to stay under the radar and keep your mouth shut (though I sometimes fail to fail at what I preach). The solutions are the same as to many of the problems with Panda and Penguin. It’s a tough time to be a site owner, and admit that you were “over-optimized” and start back peddling a bit, but it’s G’s world – we just play in it. How many times has Google said it? Focus on the user. You may have always scoffed at doing “what’s good for the user,” but with engagement metrics that suggestion has turned into a requirement. We'll continue to focus on both how to make our websites better for users and Google with more actionable execution taking advantage of how user's interact with our sites via search engines.  There’s still plenty of advantages to EMD’s, and we should continue to see instances of their success, but it’s hard to build a generic commercial intent keyword brand. You gotta have the chops to back it up! We all know ranking for generic commercial intent phrases is valuable, or we wouldn’t be targeting them.  In order to stand up to the scrutiny, you’re going to have choose your favorite EMD’s, and let those other pipe-dream microsites die their slow painful death. It’s important to know when to pull the plug on a losing web property. Any good web entrepreneur has plenty of failures on their resume. A few things to consider for solving problems with EMD sites: Disavow all public knowledge of SEO De-optimize De-link Prioritize your SEO efforts – you can’t win the battle on all fronts anymore Focus on quality of quantity (with site indexation) Redesign and Rebrand (maybe it’s time to get a mascot for your .org) Innovate ways to improve user engagement metrics Develop a social presence and improve your social mentions Diversify your backlink profile Diversify your anchor text Okay – I’m (kind of) kidding on rule #1 - #3 You know who hates on good EMD's most? The people who don't own them. You know why? Because they've always carried an advantage with them. While this advantage is diminishing, there is still a tactical advantage in spending some money up front for a great exact match domain name that describes exactly what you do and acknowledges the generic commercial intent of your visitor.  EMD's will always receive lots of hatorade because the majority of people don't own them. Toolman at webmasterworld said it best: S.P.A.M = Sites Positioned Above Mine. There’s plenty of SEO’s who could make Silky Johnson look like Tony Robbins. Don't participate in the hate, and don't feed the trolls. Very few people are going to come out of the woodwork, and “extol the virtues” of an exact match domain, and put their website under the ever scrutinous eyes of search engineers, and a community that often prefers to focus on failure instead of offering opinion for improvement. As usual, I enjoy being the exception to the rule, and figured I’d pitch in my two cents.  How to find and buy an EMD (and avoid being a hater) Type in whois.sc/yourkeyword.com/.net./org (this will redirect you to domaintools whois search for the targeted phrase) Identify if the domain is owned by a domainer or owner and do some further research If there is no established website - Write an email and ask if the domain is for sale. If you get a response – offer approximately 40% of the asking price, or propose one high enough to not offend the seller. Meet in the middle if .com is worth it.  if .net/.org offer 2-10% of your .com price If there is an established site, check the other metrics, and be prepared to pay much more. After EMD “death” be prepared to pay more for domains in the aftermarket after their “rebirth” For more on domaining, check out the domainer myths. Take my opinion on EMD’s with a grain of salt. No, I didn't test my theories like Pete. This is just my experience. I have bought a fair share of them thinking they were a great buy for future projects, or just to invest in and sell in the aftermarket at a later date. We’ve been warned of the “death of EMD’s” for a long time. I just hope EMD's continue to suffer the same type of death that SEO constantly battles with: one that is curable with creativity, innovation, and execution. Resources: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/googles-emd-algo-update-early-data http://www.seomoz.org/blog/are-exact-match-domains-in-decline http://www.seobook.com/exact-match-domains http://www.seobook.com/should-you-buy-exact-match-domain-name http://www.seobook.com/category-killer-domain-names http://www.seobook.com/googles-matt-cutts-talks-down-keyword-domain-names http://www.standingdog.com/blog/why-exact-match-domain-names-are-good-or-bad-for-seo/ http://www.seobythesea.com/2011/10/googles-exact-match-domain-name-patent-detecting-commercial-queries/ http://www.winningtheweb.com/value-exact-match-domain.php http://www.elliotsblog.com/exact-match-domains-can-be-brands-2692 http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4480480.htm http://upmarketdns.com/highest-sales/ http://www.dnjournal.com/domainsales.htm http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/post-penguin-emd.html http://www.hmtweb.com/marketing-blog/google-over-optimization-penalty-exact-match-domains/ http://www.standingdog.com/blog/why-exact-match-domain-names-are-good-or-bad-for-seo/ http://www.webmasterworld.com/domain_names/3019742.htm 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. 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