Central Perk: SEO and Community: Like Peanut Butter & Jelly

joi, 6 iunie 2013

SEO and Community: Like Peanut Butter & Jelly

Posted: 05 Jun 2013 05:54 PM PDT

More and more businesses and organizations of all sizes are realizing the importance of building an online community. I'm curious though, have you considered integrating SEO into your Community management, or even making sure you're considering Community in your SEO tasks?

Now, usually when you think about SEO, youâ€™re thinking about Google searches, building links, creating good content, getting your content shared, keyword research, crawlers, bots, indexation, and so on. You probably have thought about the conversion funnel and getting people to buy your product or sign up for your newsletter. But have you ever thought about how using your SEO can help you actually build a community?

When it comes to community, you think customer service, blogging, user-generated content, forum threads, interacting on social media, industry events, and casual meetups. Essentially it's all about the people, right?

But I want to talk about these two areas can work together nicely. Not only is it important to build a community because they will help you with your SEO, but you want to use your SEO to help find the community as well!

Hello Relationship Building

Combining your SEO and Community efforts means youâ€™re building relationships with people, not just ranking higher. Youâ€™re investing in your future by ensuring that you have those brand advocates, link builders, content sharers, etc. for years to come. Since it's the people who promote you because they trust and like you and/or your service, they're the ones to focus on.

Not only will building a community help your SEO, but you'll find the opposite true as well. Think about it, your future community members are the ones searching for you. How often have you searched for a brand name, rather than going directly to their website? In a previous job, we did usability studies and asked people to walk through various scenarios. At the end of each one, we asked them to go back to the home page. More than half of the users typed in the brand name in Google to get back to the home page, rather than clicking the logo. INSANE right? But it happens.

Also, when you do your SEO right, you'll attract the people who fit right into the community. For example, doing a search for "geeky family..." quickly brings up thinkgeek.com. That's the *exact* type of person they're looking for, and exactly what I'd like to see. :)

Who do you think is going to link to you? Yep, that would be your community. Theyâ€™re the â€œlinkeratiâ€, those folks who have blogs, own companies, and they tweet, pin and circle.

Mmm hmmm. Links, shares, tweets, likes, etc.

Use Your Community to Improve Your SEO

Ok, youâ€™re going to tell me â€œYeah, itâ€™s called Link Building, Jen.â€ And youâ€™re right! But the part thatâ€™s different is that youâ€™re going to focus on building a relationship with people. The content you create will be what your community cares about and really wants to link to. That means youâ€™re probably going to have talk less about yourself.

One important piece in this is making sure you have someone in charge of the community. You probably already have someone focused on SEO, but what about your community? Kate Morris wrote a great post earlier this year titled, Your Best Link Building Tool in 2013: Community Manager. Itâ€™s so true! Get someone to care about your SEO, Social, Community, and Content together (just one person, or a team!), and youâ€™re going to find that whole link building things gets a bit easier.

Following are some tactics to build a relationship with your community and get some great links from them at the same time:

Make it super easy to share.

This sounds pretty straightforward right? I mean, youâ€™d never actually put up great content then make it difficult for people to share, right? Sadly, this happens more often than Iâ€™d like to think. It often occurs when you have different people working on various aspects of a site. For example, Iâ€™ve seen times when the Social person assumes the Developer obviously knows to do this, and the SEO thinks the Social person will make sure itâ€™s done, and so on.

Or sometimes your CEO wants the only CTA on the page to be a subscribe to the blog via email button. ehem.

Not only do you want it to be easy, but also you want to focus on sites that your community cares most about. I know I want a big easy button to push, donâ€™t make me think.

Focus your content on what your community cares about.

Itâ€™s cool and all to put together an amazing piece of content, but if *your* community, the people who care about your brand, isnâ€™t interested in it, then youâ€™re not getting the full potential from that content.

Take Mint.com for example. They have online software to help you do your finances... boooooring. But their blog is extremely useful because they talk about what their community/users care about. They don't *just* focus on themselves all the time.

This also isn't something that's *only* on your site. You want to to this with your social content as well. One of the best examples of this, is the way ThinkGeek plays to their community of geeks. :) *giggle*

There are various ways to do find out what your people care about, and one of the easiest ways is to simply ask. Set up a quick and easy form and ask people to tell you what they want to read about. We did this back on the blog several years ago and it shaped the content we wrote for the next year and a half (at least).

Feedback on the SEOmoz Blog: What Can We Do For You?

There are also quite a few great tools out there that help you curate content and find out what the people in your community talk about.

Additional Reading:

Webinar with Gianluca Fiorelli â€" Social Content Curation: Why, How, and What

Give them data, or something else they want.

Again, this is one of those that seems like simple common sense. But we all seem to mess it up. Whether youâ€™re a job board, a dating site, a webinar provider, an online store, or even a news site, you have data. You have information about the people who use your site, what they do on your site and how they use it. This information is extremely interesting and can make for great content.

OKCupid blog - OKTrends

OkCupid did a great thing with their blog, they took the data gathered from use of their site, to create amazing content that get shared like crazy. Why do these posts get shared so much? They're relatable and they use real data from real people. They're not giving out names or private information, but they are using their data in super unique ways.

What information do you have that you can turn into interesting content?

Make it easily embeddable

Please, for the love of all things grumpy cat, make it easy to re-use the amazing content you create. When your community loves something that youâ€™ve created, theyâ€™ll want to re-use it. Then make sure the embed code, has not only a link, but also the embed code.

Simply Hired

Slideshare does an excellent job of this. Theyâ€™ve essentially made it so that their community is building links to them every day, over and over. When you embed a Slideshare presentation, it adds a link and an easy way to embed the presentation yourself. Brilliant!

Using Social Analytics For Testing from Jennifer Lopez

This is a presention I gave last month at Interactivity Digital in Florida. Right after I finished the presentation, I uploaded it to Slideshare. It's a really great way to get reach a new audience and they do a great job of getting users to create links back t their site. :)

Make sure theyâ€™re sharing the way you want them to

Have you ever found a website or page that you were so excited about that you couldn't wait to tell all your friends about it? But when you share it on Facebook, the page doesn't look quite right. This happened to me when I found out about the Nutella Truck. All the excitement of thinking that a Nutella truck would come through Seattle got me all giddy. This is the page I wanted to share:

However, when I tried to share it on Facebook, this is what actually showed up:

Yikes! When you look at the code on the page, they did have a title tag. But they were missing a meta description and the image on the page was a CSS background image. The only text on the page that Facebook could find was the "No Purchase Necessary" mumbo jumbo which made for a bad sharing experience. The only good that came from this experience was that I now have a great example of what not to do. :D

Open Graph tags

Make sure your open graph tags are set up correctly. Dana Lookadoo wrote a great post that walks you through the importance of the open graph tags and how to set it all up. Essentially having these tags set up will ensure that when your content is shared on Facebook and Google+ the way you want it to show up.

Facebook Debugger

Did you know, that the first time a link is shared on Facebook, it gets cached. Usually this makes perfect sense, but there are times when the first share of a page changes. Take for example, the open graph code we originally had on moz.com. It was all about the upcoming launch and talked about "Top Secret Project." Obviously, on launch day, we changed all the information, but Facebook still had the old open graph information. So when people started sharing the new site, it still looked like this:

But no problem, we ran on over to the Facebook Debugger: https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug, input the page, and it recached the page. After doing this, Keri then shared the page on her feed to make sure it looked right. Voila!

By running the page through the Facebook debugger, we recached the page which pulled in all the new information. So from that point forward, all new shares were correct!

Twitter Cards
Setting up Twitter Cards is a really great way to get a rich snippet of your content directly into the Twitter feed. So rather than having to click on the link to see what it's all about, you get a nice preview. Here's a good example of a post from yesterday at Search Engine Land:

Last year, AJ Kohn wrote a great post about how to implement Twitter cards. I definitely recommend checking out his post on how to set it all up on your site.

Make your community do the work. [UGC baby!]

This sounds a little harsh, but I mean it in the nicest way possible. Your community members will write content in the form of blog posts, comments, reviews, etc. if you give them an easy way to do it. Here at Moz, we have YouMoz and Q&A that serve has the big areas for us where you, the user, are creating the content.

Another example I like to show off is ModCloth. What I like most, is the way they have their reviews set up. Not only do you add your commentary, but you also add your height, waist, bra, and hip sizes. Plus, buyers can add the size they bought and show pictures of themselves in the clothing! This is a really great way to show off the product and build up your community content at the same time.

Use your SEO to build your Community

â€œBut this is what already I do!â€ you say. And itâ€™s partially true, youâ€™re working on getting your site/pages ranking for certain keywords. But are you thinking about how they will become longtime community members and brand advocates because of it? I want to walk you through a couple scenarios.

Letâ€™s say that I was looking for more information about young people who get cancer and how they are coping with it. I might do a search something like this:

Which would lead me to a site called StupidCancer.org, which just happens to be a community for young people living with and recovering from cancer and treatments. Because theyâ€™ve done a good job of targeting their site to the correct group of people, I easily found their site.

Letâ€™s try another scenario, where I would take my search further than just getting to the site. In this scenario, Iâ€™m looking for something to do with my daughter this weekend, so I start to do a search.

Obviously redtri.com is doing a great job ranking for the terms Iâ€™m looking for, as they show up for both the #1 and #2 spots. Once I get to the site, I realize that they have weekly calendars with really great stuff for kids! From there I check out both their Twitter and Facebook pages and determine that Facebook is the right one for me and I â€œlikeâ€ them.

I start getting updates about new kids plays in town and fun things to do over the weekend. So what do I do, I share them! I click on them! I take my daughter to do fun things!

Because of that very first search, I now visit the site pretty much every week. I rely on them to tell me whatâ€™s going on in the city for kids. And I recommend the site, over and over again.

These are only two scenarios of using SEO to build your community, but there are tons more. Iâ€™d like to challenge you to work with your other team members, the person who manages social, the dev who works on the blog, the SEO, etc. to see how you can work together. What can you do to make sure you're making the best peanut butter and jelly sandwich out there?

[ok, did I just take that PB & J think too far?]

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Followerwonk Partners with Buffer To Optimize Tweet Scheduling

Posted: 05 Jun 2013 01:08 AM PDT

Posted by @petebray

Today, we're happy to announce a partnership between Followerwonk and Buffer to help you optimize your tweeting. We're really excited to be teaming up with such a great product and company, and the combination of our apps really does advance the cause of our customers.

Before I dig into specifics of that relationship, I want to lay some groundwork to explain why we formed this partnership.

It all comes down to this little pearl:

Tweets are delicate

Tweets have a half-life of a mere 18 minutes. Poof! and their utility to reach new customers, drive traffic, and extend your reach is pretty much gone.

But it gets worse for our little tweets.

First, most of us have a heck of a job consistently coming up with good content to tweet day after day. It's kinda like going to the gym: we start out strong, but most of us quickly fade to where we spend the entire time in the sauna.

Second, even if we do come up with lots of good content, we risk undermining our own performance.

I want to talk with you about ways to squeeze the most out of the content we do come up with. How can we maximally schedule our tweets to perform?

Cultivate your current audience

Given the gossamer-like nature of tweets, a simple first step is to schedule most of your tweets when your followers are most active.

This is where our relationship with Buffer helps.

First, go to Followerwonk and complete an Analysis of your followers. Once you're finished, we'll present a chart of their most active hours. (Mouse over each hour to view your local time.)

By itself, this insight is extraordinarily useful. There is significant variation from one person to the next in terms of when their followers are most active, and we can now take advantage of this data with the Buffer button integrated into Followerwonk.

When you click this new button, it will create a schedule on Buffer with as many times as you specify (you can specify from 1 to 99 times, currently). And when you do, you'll find a new schedule on Buffer like this:

(Of course, if you don't yet have a free account on Buffer, definitely grab one.)

We use a weighted, random distribution to divvy up the times you specify. This means that we don't ignore off-hours; we just assign times to them less frequently. Fine-tune the schedule we create for you in Buffer.

Also, make sure you install the Buffer Chrome extension. Once you do, you'll be presented with a Buffer alternative when you tweet on Twitter.

With this, you can take a moment before each tweet and consider: is this one of the top hours for my audience? If not, hit the Buffer button and rest assured the tweet will be queued up to go out at a more optimal time.

Aim for your future audience

Your tweets should not be solely determined by your current followers. A couple of reasons why:

You may have a lot of spam followers or who people who aren't important to your business.
Since they are already followers, you've already "converted" them. Part of your goal on Twitter should be to find new potential converts.
There's potentially a lot of "low hanging fruit" in other hours that you might not typically reach.

This is where the Followerwonk integration with Buffer really excites me! You can now create schedules based not just on the most active hours of your followers, but of any other person's followers.

I'll explain how to do this in a moment. But first, I want to address what is central to this approach: whether or not tweets can reach out beyond your current followers.

Yes, tweets can extend out of your network

I analyzed 4,757 active Twitter accounts pulled from a sub-set of Followerwonk users. (This isn't a random sample, but it's far easier for us to analyze these users, as we track all of their data internally.)

Here's the breakdown of their activity:

Note the last one.

A huge number of users are retweeting content from those they don't follow. That's really revealing, as many folks assume that engagement is limited to your existing social network. But it's not. And it's this sort of boundary-breaking activity that's golden.

I then took those approximately 5,000 users and crawled 610,779 of their tweets and retweets. Of those items, here's the breakdown:

I love retweets. (In fact, we based an entire influence metric around them.) And here we see that they're an important component of most users' activities! They're almost as important as @mentions, in fact.

Let's zoom in further and look just at retweets.

Here, we see that roughly 27% of retweeted tweets are of users the retweeter doesn't follow. That's big! And it means that there's serious penetration of content into new networks.

Without doing an actual survey, it's impossible to say exactly how users get their content retweeted by non-followers. But I have a few ideas.

Notice that retweets of non-followers have a larger number of @mentions. This is useful! It suggests that, in part, this breakout strategy is due to @mentioning others (and the recipient retweeting them).

If we consider retweets as a proxy for readership, we see that tweets can and do frequently extend beyond one's current followers. This ability for a tweet to transcend a social network is likely due to any number of factors, including the "discovery" tab on Twitter, retweets of third parties, search, @engagement or #hashtag components of the tweet, and so on.

I draw out this point to highlight that you shouldn't feel restricted to just tweet when your followers are online. Certainly, that's an important consideration for any basic Twitter strategy, but keep in mind that your tweeting during certain hours has assembled an audience whose activity probably closely matches your current schedule. Time to break that mold?

The benefits of off-hour targeting

At any given time on Twitter, here's what your potential audience probably looks like:

Here's the thing: your current followers are likely a large percent of those "attentive and eager" readers who you've captured during your active hours. And while you certainly need to continue to cultivate that crowd, it's perhaps less easy for you to find new prospects. You've already gotten a lot of the "low hanging fruit."

But just think: there are active and eager fans in other hours, and they've probably never seen a single tweet from you. With the right content, you can probably do a terrific job at reaching them.

Let's discuss how.

First, find a competitor or affinity brand on the other side of the world. Do an analysis and notice the active hours for her followers. Quite different than yours, eh?

Look at the full report to better understand the characteristics of their followers. The word clouds might reveal biographic details that might be of use. Look, too, at her most influential followers. These folks can help you spread your message.

Now think about content. Since few of your current followers are online during this user's followers' most active hours, you can think of a content strategy designed exclusively to this audience of far-flung prospects:

Tweet in a different language
Include responsible and constructive @mentions as in-roads into this audience
Use our comparison reports to find relationship overlaps between you and this competitor; DM or otherwise engage with shared followers who are in the off-hour timezone
Target content to the audience (for example, if you're and SEO targeting France, you might focus on Francophone search engines)

Once you've tailored the content, queue them up in Buffer with a schedule based on the analysis of this far-off competitor.

Smart scheduling = lots of opportunities

Unlike Google+ and other social networks, you can't separately target people on Twitter. Theoretically, all your tweets reach all your followers.

But, of course, they really don't.

As I've highlighted above, you can use schedules as a basic means to separately target different swaths of your current and future audience. For most people, off-hour targeting affords a unique means to reach new territory.

But it's not always of course: if you're a local business, it probably won't work well to be targeting folks in France! However, we think that there are a lot of other creative ways you can utilize analyses of competitors, suppliers, and local experts to fine-tune a scheduling and content strategy.

We're extremely excited about our new relationship with Buffer. There are lots of ingenious ways to combine activity analysis like these and targeting scheduling.

We look forward to extending this partnership with great new things in the future!

(And so I don't have to go all off-hours, why not follow me on Twitter right now?)

joi, 6 iunie 2013

SEO and Community: Like Peanut Butter & Jelly

SEO and Community: Like Peanut Butter & Jelly

Hello Relationship Building