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For Writers Only: Secrets to Improving Engagement on Your Content Using Word Pictures (and I Don't Mean Wordle) - Moz Blog

For Writers Only: Secrets to Improving Engagement on Your Content Using Word Pictures (and I Don't Mean Wordle) - Moz Blog
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For Writers Only: Secrets to Improving Engagement on Your Content Using Word Pictures (and I Don't Mean Wordle)

Posted on: Tuesday 27 January 2015 — 01:16

Posted by Isla_McKetta

"Picture it."

If you're of a certain generation, those two words can only conjure images of tiny, white-haired Sophia from the Golden Girls about to tell one of her engaging (if somewhat long and irrelevant) stories as she holds her elderly roommates hostage in the kitchen or living room of their pastel-hued Miami home.

Even if you have no idea what I'm talking about, those words should become your writing mantra, because what readers do with your words is take all those letters and turn them into mind pictures. And as the writer, you have control over what those pictures look like and how long your readers mull them over.

According to Reading in the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene, reading involves a rich back and forth between the language areas and visual areas of our brains. Although the full extent of that connectivity is not yet known, it's easy to imagine that the more sensory (interesting) information we can include in our writing, the more fully we can engage our readers.

So if you're a writer or content marketer you should be harnessing the illustrative power of words to occupy your readers' minds and keep them interested until they're ready to convert. Here's how to make your words work for you.

Kill clichés

I could have titled this piece "Painting a Picture with Words" but you've heard it. Over and over and over. And I'm going to propose that every time you use a cliché, a puppy dies. 

While that's a bit extreme (at least I hope so because that's a lot of dead puppies and Rocky's having second thoughts about his choice of parents), I hope it will remind you to read over what you've written and see where your attention starts to wander (wandering attention=cliché=one more tragic, senseless death) you get bored. Chances are it's right in the middle of a tired bit of language that used to be a wonderful word picture but has been used and abused to the point that we readers can't even summon the image anymore.

Make up metaphors (and similes)

Did you know that most clichés used to be metaphors? And that we overused them because metaphors are possibly the most powerful tool we have at our disposal for creating word pictures (and, thus, engaging content)? You do now.

By making unexpected comparisons, metaphors and similes force words to perform like a stage mom on a reality show. These comparisons shake our brains awake and force us to pay attention. So apply a whip to your language. Make it dance like a ballerina in a little pink tutu. Give our brains something interesting to sink our teeth into (poor Rocky!), gnaw on, and share with out friends.

Engage the senses

If the goal of all this attention to language is to turn reading into a full brain experience, why not make it a little easier by including sensory information in whatever you're writing? Here are a few examples:

  • These tickets are selling so fast we can smell the burning rubber.
  • Next to a crumbling cement pillar, our interview subject sits typing on his pristine MacBook Air.
  • In a sea of (yelp!) never ending horde of black and gray umbrellas, this red cowboy hat will show the world you own your look.
  • Black hat tactics left your SERPs stinking as bad as a garbage strike in late August? Let us help you clear the air by cleaning up those results.

See how those images and experiences continue to unfold and develop in your mind? You have the power to affect your readers the same way—to create an image so powerful it stays with them throughout their busy days. One note of caution, though, sensory information is so strong that you want to be careful when creating potentially negative associations (like that garbage strike stench in the final example).

Leverage superlatives (wisely) and ditch hyperbole

SUPERLATIVES ARE THE MOST EFFECTIVEST TOOL YOU CAN USE EVER (until you wear your reader out or lose their trust). Superlatives (think "best," "worst," "hairiest" – any form of the adjective or adverb that is the most exaggerated form of the word) are one of the main problems with clickbait headlines (the other being the failure to deliver on those huge promises).

Speaking of exaggeration, be careful with it in all of its forms. You don't actually have to stop using it, but think of your reader's credence in your copy as a grasshopper handed over by a child. They think it's super special and they want you to as well. If you mistreat that grasshopper by piling exaggerated fact after exaggerated fact on top of it, the grasshopper will be crushed and your reader will not easily forgive you.

So how do you stand out in a crowded field of over-used superlatives and hyperbolic claims? Find the places your products honestly excel and tout those. At Moz we don't have the largest link index in the world. Instead, we have a really high quality link index. I could have obfuscated there and said we have "the best" link index, but by being specific about what we're actually awesome at, we end up attracting customers who want better results instead of more results (and they're happier for it).

Unearth the mystery

One of the keys to piquing your audience's interest is to tap into (poor puppy!) create or find the mystery in what you're writing. I'm not saying your product description will suddenly feature PIs in fedoras (I can dream, though), but figure out what's intriguing or new about what you're talking about. Here are some examples:

  • Remember when shortcuts meant a few extra minutes to yourself after school? How will you spend the 15-30 minutes our email management system will save you? We won't tell…
  • You don't need to understand how this toilet saves water while flushing so quietly it won't wake the baby, just enjoy a restful night's sleep (and lower water bills)
  • Check out this interactive to see what makes our work boots more comfortable than all the rest.

Secrets, surprises, and inside information make readers hunger for more knowledge. Use that power to get your audience excited about the story you're about to tell them.

Don't forget the words around your imagery

Notice how some of these suggestions aren't about the word picture itself, they're about the frame around the picture? I firmly believe that a reader comes to a post with a certain amount of energy. You can waste that energy by soothing them to sleep with boring imagery and clichés, while they try to find something to be interested in. Or you can give them energy by giving them word pictures they can get excited about.

So picture it. You've captured your reader's attention with imagery so engaging they'll remember you after they put down their phone, read their social streams (again), and check their email. They'll come back to your site to read your content again or to share that story they just can't shake.

Good writing isn't easy or fast, but it's worth the time and effort.

Let me help you make word pictures

Editing writing to make it better is actually one of my great pleasures in life, so I'm going to make you an offer here. Leave a sentence or two in the comments that you're having trouble activating, and I'll see what I can do to offer you some suggestions. Pick a cliché you can't get out of your head or a metaphor that needs a little refresh. Give me a little context for the best possible results.

I'll do my best to help the first 50 questions or so (I have to stop somewhere or I'll never write the next blog post in this series), so ask away. I promise no puppies will get hurt in the process. In fact, Rocky's quite happy to be the poster boy for this post—it's the first time we've let him have beach day, ferry day, and all the other spoilings all at once.


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Get to Know the Moz Community Managers

Posted on: Monday 26 January 2015 — 01:15

Posted by jennita

At this very moment a spammy comment is being written on the Moz Blog, a tweet is being sent to @Moz, and someone is signing up for the next Mozinar. You'll probably never see any of these happen, and may not realize that just like Newton's third law states, "For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction." As each one of these actions occurs, a Moz Community Manager is jumping into a reaction: The spammer is banned, the tweet is answered, and the Mozinar is being prepared.


Charlene, Megan, and Erica showing how much fun Community Managers have :)

Today is Community Manager Appreciation Day, or #CMAD as it's come to be known. It's a day to thank the amazing community managers out there who keep all things moving no matter what the day or time. At Moz, we're lucky to have an exceptional team of folks that manages everything from social media posts to handling spammers. It's not always a pretty job, but it's one they take to heart, and have come to live and breathe the role.

Did you know the @Moz Twitter account is handled by 7 different people?
I dare you to try to figure out who's tweeting when.

It's my great honor to introduce and thank each of our community managers, as well as several folks who contribute greatly to the team. They make sure our site isn't overrun with spam, your questions get answered in Q&A, your tweets see replies, and that you have help writing a great post for YouMoz.

Before I dive in, I'd like to give a shout out to all of our Associates, especially Gianluca and Miriam, who help the Community team in a myriad of ways every single day. In order to be fair, I'll introduce each person in terms of how long they've been working on community-related tasks here at Moz.

Keri Morgret - Community Manager

Keri started out as an Associate in early 2011, where she initially focused on YouMoz. She had been quite active in the greater SEO community, and her knowledge and experience was top-notch. Top that with a need for perfect grammar (she once refused to read a self-published book because of bad grammar), and she took YouMoz to great heights.

Over time, she took over Q&A, and eventually came to manage just about everything happening on the site each day. Keri moved to Seattle, and became a full-time Mozzer in May 2012. Here's a high-level peek at all the areas Keri currently handles:

  • Managing YouMoz
  • Managing Q&A
  • User moderation
  • Coordination with Help Team

As someone we often call our "super sleuth," Keri likes to know everything that's happening on the site at all times. My appreciation for her goes well beyond her keeping tabs on the community for us. She cares for Moz and our entire community to her core. She lives and breathes TAGFEE, and holds all of us at Moz to the highest standards, constantly reminding us to focus on our community.

This year in particular was a special one for Keri, as she welcomed her daughter Eloise to the world. I'll throw in a big thank you to Eloise as well, who has brought so much love and happiness to Keri and her husband. :)

2014 Stat: The team banned 1,235 accounts for comment spam.

Erica McGillivray - Sr. Community Manager

Between the time Erica accepted the role of "Community Attache" in October 2011, and the time she actually started just a few weeks later, her job had completely changed. Lucky for us, her background is diverse: Not only has she been an SEO in a previous life, but she's managed email campaigns, writes killer copy, and was once the President of  GeekGirlCon. She accepted the changed role, and focused on marketing communications for a while. However, it didn't take too long for her to find her true calling back on the community team!

Erica quickly proved her prowess at managing speakers and events, and took over our bi-weekly webinars (a.k.a. Mozinars), as well as speaker coordination for our annual conference, MozCon. Plus, with her knowledge of SEO and social, she took over the management of our social media channels, and helped Keri with on-site work as needed.

Today, as our Senior Community Manager, she's in charge of the following areas:

  • Speaker management & promotion for MozCon, LocalUp Advanced, and Mozinars
  • Event project management (ensuring pages are created for events, videos are ready to sell, etc.)
  • Handling of escalated social or on-site issues
  • Community strategy
  • Team management backup

This year, I'm extremely thankful for Erica stepping in and helping with bigger strategy items, and being my backup! Ok, that really just means she ends up going to a lot more meetings, but still, it's been great. :)

2014 Stat: 8,945 people watched our webinars live.

Christy Correll - Q&A Associate

Christy and I worked together many years ago in Denver (in what feels like a completely different life). When we realized that Q&A was getting more active in early 2012, and we needed an additional set of eyes in there, I knew just who to turn to. Christy was running her own online marketing agency, so I knew she had the background and ability, and I was pleased to find out she had the time as well!

What began as a possible 10 hours/week job has grown into at least a half-time gig. We count on Christy's insights and smarts in Q&A every single day. She and Keri use a spreadsheet with all of our staff and Associates expertise to know who best to assign things to. She's also been helping out more and more with the editing of YouMoz blog posts.

Christy, thank you for your continued excellence in making Q&A an amazing place to give and get answers to all kind of online marketing questions.

2014 Stat: 8,165 questions were asked in Q&A with 31,218 replies.

Megan Singley - Social Community Manager

Megan had been working on the Help team for almost two years, when we stole her over to the community team in January of 2013 (yes, that means she just hit her 4-year mark!). She was more knowledgeable about our tools and how to help our customers than any of the rest of us were. Her love has always been in social, and she initially worked with Erica on managing our social accounts. It didn't take long, though, for her to take over social management, and she is currently the go-to person for all things social media. At this very moment we have some fascinating social tests happening on Twitter thanks to her work. (Now, if only I could get her to write a blog post about the tests!)

She's also the one who can always put a smile on someone's face if they're having a grumpy day. (She once sent a guy cookies because he tweeted @Moz saying the latest Whiteboard Friday had made him hungry for cookies.) And with this kind of work, you run into some grumpy folks now and then (usually me). ;)

Megan is focused on these areas:

  • Daily social management (everyone helps with this, but she does the scheduling and is the resource for escalation)
  • Social testing
  • Product feedback liaison
  • Weekly metrics
  • Community Chronicle (a monthly email about community metrics)
  • Community College (internal training on all things community)

Right? That's a lot! Megan has stepped out of her comfort zone, and helped us to create some great internal processes, and keeps us all on track on social (a place where I usually get in trouble!). I'm grateful to her for taking on this new role and striving to make our social marketing the absolute best in the industry.

2014 Stat: The team sent a whopping 9.6k tweets from the @Moz account.

Melissa Fach - Social Associate

Melissa began as an Associate in 2013, to help us manage the growing YouMoz queue. As a well-known SEO and previous editor at Search Engine Journal, YouMoz made perfect sense for her. During MozCon that year, we asked her to help us manage social while we were busy with the conference, and we quickly realized that social was her true calling for Moz.

With our growing international community, we had been looking for someone to manage all our social channels during our off-hours. Melissa to the rescue! Not only did she already know the industry, and had been a part of the Moz community for years, but lucky for us she lives in Florida, three hours ahead of the Mozplex.

I'm not exactly sure what we'd do without Melissa these days. Her role of managing all the social things during the wee hours of the morning is essential to Moz. She alerts us if there are multiple tweets about a tool not working, or if a certain post is doing exceptionally well (or exceptionally poorly, for that matter). She's the eyes and ears of Moz while those of us here in Seattle are still fast asleep. (Unless we're talking about Keri being up with her newborn at 3 a.m.)

Melissa has the difficult job of working from her home in Florida, yet staying on top of everything that's happening throughout the day at Moz. She does this well, so that each morning she knows how to respond to questions on Twitter, and knows when there's something going on. A huge thank you to her for always making us look so darn good!

2014 Stat: We saw a 43% YOY loss in Facebook traffic.

Trevor Klein - Content Strategist

Trevor is the lucky guy who gets to edit posts for the Moz Blog. Yep, he edited this one too, and when he gets to this part he's going to feel really weird for a few seconds. :) [Editor's note: It's true.] Trevor is a part of the Content Team here at Moz, but because content and community are so closely tied, his job often crosses roles.

Trevor started managing the blog in May 2013. He's upped the ante on our blog content, and quickly realized that content doesn't end upon publishing a post. We get tons of comments and thumbs on posts, and he helps Keri and the rest of the team to moderate all the things. He'll email a member who's posted too many spammy links in their otherwise well written comments, or reply to a comment reminding a member to stay TAGFEE in their responses.

Personally, I'm grateful to have someone on the team who cares so deeply about Moz and the community that he's willing to stand up for his beliefs, and for the community. (Even if he is standing up to or disagreeing with me. ;)) [Editor's sarcastic note: That never happens. Ever.]

2014 Stat: Moz staff edited 622 blog comments for spammy links, TAGFEE wording, etc.

Charlene Inoncillo - Community Brand Manager

Although Charlene started back in September 2011, and had been handling all our event details for a while, it wasn't until 2014 that she became an official part of the Community team. She initially started as the Marketing Admin, and swiftly worked herself into a full-time events manager. Over time this role has changed as she's increased her skillset, and has continued to break her own goals.

Charlene works closely with Erica on all of our events, plus she's in charge of any sponsorships or speaking engagements we have throughout the year. Here's the high-level list of Charlene's roles:

  • Event logistics & promotion for MozCon, LocalUp Advanced, and MozPlex events
  • Conference sponsorships & promotions
  • Swag Management
  • Social branding
  • Brand monitoring

With her addition, we've completely upped our game when it comes to branding. Charlene works with our design team to create beautiful swag, have a perfect brand experience at MozCon, and essentially make us look good, consistently. It also helps that she's the most organized person I know, and always considers even the tiniest of details. (Which is really great for someone like me who dislikes dealing with details.)

What am I most thankful of Charlene for this year? It's the little things, actually. She ensured that every blog post, webinar, event, product launch, etc. has branded images that we share on social, and in blog posts. These things make a huge impact!

2014 Stat: We sent 573 "Happy" packages and ordered 37,364 swag items.

Danie Launders - Marketing Specialist

While Danie isn't officially on the Community team, we pretend as if she is. We started stealing her time early in 2014, and just keep pulling her in farther (shh, don't tell Annette, our CMO). Danie's ability to jump into any project and willingness to learn all the things have had a great impact on the community team this past year. She's an absolute natural with the Moz "voice" and manages our social channels several times per week (in 4-hour shifts).

She's crazy-organized, so it makes sense that she helps Charlene with all the events, sponsorship, and swag tasks. This year, I'm thankful for every single thing Danie does. Whether making sure our Associates get paid, sending swag to an active member, or just replying to a Facebook message, she does it with grace.
 

2014 Stat: 9k+ tweets were sent using the #MozCon hashtag.

Ronell Smith - YouMoz Associate

Ronell may be our newest member of the team, but his impact has been swift and grand. While Keri was on maternity leave, we needed someone to help manage YouMoz posts. It had to be someone who knows the online marketing industry well, plus has great editing skills, AND is a great writer. When Keri went on leave a bit sooner than expected, we had to throw Ronell into the YouMoz fire without a ton of training.

If you've submitted a YouMoz post recently, and have worked with Ronell, you know what I mean when I say he's kicked royal butt for us. He cares deeply about ensuring that posts are of the highest quality, and he works with authors (I've seen email threads between him and an author that were 65+ emails deep!) to help improve their writing. This is why even after Keri returned from leave, we asked him to continue making YouMoz awesome.

My thank-you to Ronell is for helping us to not only improve our process, but to up our YouMoz game. Heck, the entire community thanks you.

2014 Stat: Only 3.7% of all YouMoz posts submitted were published.

Now it's your turn.

Impressive group of folks, right? Please help me in thanking them for all their amazing work every day for Moz. Also, I bet after reading about them you may even have a few questions of your own. Well, lucky you! Each one of them is on stand-by today to answer any questions you have about their roles at Moz or how we manage all things community.

Go ahead… ask us anything! (about our jobs)


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Know What Your Audience Wants Before Investing in Content Creation and Marketing - Whiteboard Friday

Posted on: Friday 23 January 2015 — 01:16

Posted by randfish

Content marketing is an iterative process: We learn and improve by analyzing the success of the things we produce. That doesn't mean, though, that we shouldn't set ourselves up for that success in the first place, and the best way to do that is by knowing what our audiences want before we actually go through the effort to create it. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand (along with his stick-figure friends Rainy Bill and Hailstorm Hal) explains how we can stack our own decks in our favor with that knowledge.

Know What Your Audience Wants - Whiteboard Friday_1

For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!

Know What Your Audience Wants Before You Invest in Content Creation and Marketing - Whiteboard

Video transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. It's 2015. It's going to be a year where, again, many, many marketers engage in a ton of content investments and content marketing for a wide variety of purposes from SEO to driving traffic to growing their email newsletters and lists to earning links and attention and growing their social channels. Unfortunately, there's a content marketing problem that we see over and over and over again, and that is that folks are making investments in content without knowing whether their audience is going to know and love and appreciate what they're doing beforehand.

That kind of sucks because it adds a lot of risk to a process that is already risk intensive. You're going to put a lot of work into the content that you're creating. Well, hopefully you are. If you're not, I don't know how well it's going to do. All of that work can be for naught.

Let me show you two examples. Over here I have Rainy Bill from WhatTheWeather.com, and here's Hailstorm Hal from KingOfClimate.com. We'll start with Rainy Bill's story.

So Rainy Bill, he's thinking to himself, "You know, I want to invest in some content marketing for WhatTheWeather.com." He has an idea. He's like, "You know, maybe I could make a chart of the T-shirts that meteorologists wear by season. I'll look at all the TV meteorologists, all the Internet meteorologists, and I'll look at the T-shirts that they wear. They all wear T-shirts, and I'll make a big chart of them."

You might think this is a ridiculous idea. I have seen worse. But Rainy Bill is thinking to himself, "Well, if I do this, it's kind of ego bait. I get all the meteorologists involved. I'll feature all their T-shirts, and, of course, all of them will see it and they'll all link to me, talk about me, share it on their social media channels, email their friends with it. Oh check it out. Put it on their Facebook."

He makes it. He's got this beautiful chart showing different kinds of T-shirts that meteorologists are wearing over the seasons, and Bill's just as happy as a clam. He can't believe how beautiful that is until he tries to launch and promote it. Then it's just sadness. He's just crying tears.

What happened here is that no one actually cared what Bill had to say. No one cared about T-shirt patterns that are worn by meteorologists, and Bill didn't actually realize this until he had already made the investment and started trying to do the promotion.

This might be a slightly ridiculous example, but I can't tell you how many times I've seen exactly this story play out by marketer after marketer of content investments. They put something together that they hope will achieve their goal of reaching a new audience, of getting promoted, but it falls flat mostly because they had the idea before they talked to anyone else. Before they realized whether anyone else was interested, they went and built it.

That's actually kind of a terrible idea. Unless you have your finger on the pulse of an industry, a field so incredibly well that you don't need that process, I'm going to say that is the 1% of the 1% who can do this without going out and first talking to their audience and understanding.

Hailstorm Hal, from KingOfClimate, instead of having a great idea for a piece of content, Hailstorm Hal is going to start with the idea from which all content marketing springs, which is, "I want to make something people will really want and something they'll really love." Okay. They want it, and they're going to love it when they see it and when they get it.

So Hailstorm Hal is going to go out and say, "Well, what are the weather watchers talking about? People who are active in this community, in this industry, the people who do the sharing and the amplification, who influence what the rest of us see, what are they talking about?"

So he goes onto this weather forum and hears someone complaining, "The weather in Cincinnati is totally unpredictable." The reply, "Yeah, but it's way more predictable than Seattle is." "Nuh-uh, you liar." From this, eureka, Hailstorm Hal has a great idea. "Wait a minute. What if I were to actually go and take all of this online commentary and turn it into something useful where these two commenters could prove to each other who's correct and people would know for certain how much . . ."

It's not just helpful to them. This is helpful to a huge, broad swath of society. How accurate are your meteorologists, on average, city by city? I don't actually know, but I would be fascinated to know whether when I go to San Diego -- I was there for the holidays to see my wife's family -- maybe the weather reports in San Diego are much more or much less accurate than what I'm used to here at home in Seattle.

So Hal's going to put together this great map that's got an illustration of different regions of the United States, and you can see that in the Midwest actually weather is more predictable than it is on the coast or less predictable than it is on the coast. That's awesome. That's terrific. This is going to work far, far better than anything that Hal could have come up with on his own without first understanding the industry.

Now the process and tips that I'm going to recommend here are not exhaustive. There are a lot more things in this. But if you follow these five, at least, I think you're going to do much better with your content investment.

First off, even before you do this process, get to know the industry, the niche, or the community that you're operating in. If Hal didn't know where to find weather watchers, he might just search weather forum, click on the first link in Google, and be at some place that doesn't really have a very serious investment from the community of people he's trying to reach. Without understanding all of the sites and pages, without understanding who are the big influencers in the community on social media, without understanding what are the popular websites, what gets a lot of interaction and engagement and doesn't, that's going to be really tough for him to figure out.

So that's why I would say you need to go out and learn about your industry before you make something for it. Incidentally, this is why it's really tough to do this as a consultant and why if you are paying consultants to go and do this, you're going to actually be paying quite a bit of money for this research time. This is going to be dozens of hours of research to understand the niche before you can effectively create content for it. That's something where it isn't just an on demand kind of thing.

Then from there you want to use the discussion forums, Q&A sites, social media, and blog comments to find topics and discussions that inspire questions, curiosity, and need. Some of that is going to be very blatant. Some of it is going to be much more latent, and you're going to be drawing from both of those. Your job is to have insight and empathy, and that's what a great marketer should be able to do when they're researching these communities.

Number three, you want to validate that if you created something, (a) it would be unique, no one else has made it before, and (b) others would actually share it. You can do this very directly by reaching out and talking to people.

So Hal can go and say, "Hey, who's this commenter right here? Let's have a quick conversation. Would you like this?" If the answer is, "Yeah, not only would I like that, I would help share that. I would spread that. I would love to know the answer to this question." Or no reply, or "Sounds interesting, let me know when you get it up." There's going to be a different variation.

You can go and use Twitter, Google+, and email to reach out directly to these people. Most of the time, if you're finding commentary on these forums and in these places, there will be a way to reach them. I also have two tools I'm going to recommend, both for email. One is Conspire and the other is VoilaNorbert. VoilaNorbert.com is an email finding tool. I think it's the best one out there right now, and Conspire is a great tool for seeing who you're connected to that's connected to people you might want to reach. When you're trying to reach someone, those can be very helpful.

Number four, it tends to be the case that visual and/or interactive content is going to perform a lot better than text. So if Hal's list had simply been a list of data -- here are all the major U.S. regions and here's how predictable and unpredictable their weather is -- well, that might work okay. But this map, this visual is probably going to sail around the weather world much faster, much better, be picked up by news sources, be written about, be embedded in social media graphics, all that kind of stuff, far better than a mere chart would be.

Number five, remember that as you're doing the creation, you need to align the audience goals with your business goals. So if KingOfClimate's goal is to get people signing up for a weather tracking service on an email list, well great, you should have this and then say, "We can send you variability reports. We can tell you if things are getting more or less accurate," and have an email call to action to get people to sign up to the newsletter. But you want to tie those business goals together.

The one thing I'd be careful of and this is a mistake that many, many folks who invest in content marketing make is that a lot of those benefits are going to be indirect and long term, meaning if the goal is that KingOfClimate.com is trying to sell professional meteorologists on a software subscription service, well, you know what? You're probably not going to sell a whole lot with this. But you are going to get a lot more professional meteorologists who remember the name, KingOfClimate, and that brand memory is going to influence future purchase decisions, likely nudging conversation rates up a little bit.

It's probably going to help with links. Links will lead to rankings. Rankings will lead to being higher up in search engines when professional meteorologists search for precisely, "I'm looking for weather tracking software or weather notification software." So these kings of things are long term and indirect. You have to make sure you're tying together all of the benefits of content marketing with your business goals that you might achieve.

I hope to see some phenomenal content here in 2015. I'm sure you guys are already working on some great stuff. Applying this can mean that you don't have to be psychic. You just have to put in a little bit of elbow grease, and you can make things that will perform far better for your customers, for your community, and for your business.

All right, everyone. Look forward to the discussion, and we will see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com


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5 Years of SEO Changes and Better Goal-Setting - Videos from MozTalk 2

Posted on: Thursday 22 January 2015 — 01:14

Posted by CharleneKate

Have you ever noticed how Rand is often speaking at conferences all around the world? Well, we realized that those of us here in Seattle rarely get to see them. So we started MozTalks, a free event here at the MozPlex.

It normally runs 2-3 hours with multiple speakers, one of whom is Rand. The event is hosted at the Moz HQ and offers time for mingling, appetizers, refreshments and of course, swag. The series is still evolving as we continue to test out new ideas (maybe taking the show on the road), so be on the lookout for any updates.

The world of marketing and SEO continues to change, but are you changing with it? Staying on the cutting edge should always be a priority, especially since early adoption has proven more beneficial than ever. Sticking with what works isn't enough anymore, and marketing isn't just about analyzing our successes and failures or understanding our returns and losses. It's about what we do next.

In the presentations below, Rand and Dr. Pete will dive deep into where metrics serve us best, as well as what really works to drive traffic and what's better left behind.

Rand: What Changed? A Brief Look at How SEO has Evolved over the Last 5 Years

2014-11-18 - MozTalk - Rand - What Changed?

Dr. Pete: From Lag to Lead: Actionable Analytics

2014-11-18 - MozTalk - Dr. Pete - From Lag to Lead

Top takeaways

We asked both presenters for a few of their top takeaways from their talks, and they've got some gems. Here's what they had to say:

From Rand

  • Keyword matching has become intent matching, which doesn't mean we should avoid using keywords, but it does mean we need to change the way we determine which pages to build, which to canonicalize, and how to structure our sites and content.
  • The job title "SEO" may be limiting the influence we have, and we may need broader authority to impact SEO in the modern era. The onus is on marketers to make teams, clients, and execs aware of these new requirements, so they understand what we need to do in order to grow search traffic.
  • Webspam has gone from Google's problem to our problem. The onus is on marketers to stay wary and up-to-date with how Google is seeing their links and their site.

From Dr. Pete

  • As content marketers, we can't afford to see only the forest or the trees. We have to understand a wide variety of metrics, and combine them in new and insightful ways.
  • We have to stop looking backward using lag goals like "Get 100,000 Likes in Q4." They aren't actionable, and succeed or fail, we have no way to repeat success. We have to focus on objectives that drive specific, measurable actions.

Missed the previous talk?

The first MozTalk featured Rand and his wife Geraldine, known in the blogosphere as The Everywhereist. Rand covered what bloggers need to know about SEO, and Geraldine talked about how to make your blog audience fall in love with you. Check them both out here:

Need-to-Know SEO and Making Your Blog Audience Fall in Love - Videos from MozTalk 1

Join us for the next one

Our next free MozTalk is set for  Thursday, April 2nd, and we're still finalizing plans. We'll be sure to post the videos on this blog for those of you who can't make it, but if you're in town, keep your eyes open for more details. We hope to see you there!


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Everything You Need To Know About Sponsored Content

Posted on: Tuesday 20 January 2015 — 23:28

Posted by ChadPollitt

Media-Buyers-Guide-Sponsored-Content-1-2

Many of the traditional channels for online content discovery are thoroughly understood and their adoption rates are high. 

The readily accepted channels—from SEO and PPC, to email and social media broadcasting—can deliver the best content to the right people at the right time.

Today, however, the Internet is experiencing a deluge of content, and many channels for content discovery are bloated. Estimates say that  more than 2.73 million blog posts are written and published daily. Many industries are experiencing a content surplus, making it even more challenging for marketers to get their content seen.

Social media networks like Facebook and Twitter are adjusting their algorithms to ensure the least amount of organic visibility for brands, too. Traditional paid media, such as banner advertising, is becoming less effective year-over-year because banner blindness runs rampant. According to Solve Media, you're more likely to survive a plane crash than click on a banner ad.

That sounds farfetched until you look at the results from the Nielsen Norman Groups 2007 eyetracking study (shown below).

reading-patterns-blogs.jpg

Red areas indicate where users looked the most; yellow areas indicate fewer views; areas colored blue depict the least-viewed portions of the page; gray areas didn't attract any views/actions; and the green boxes are used to highlight advertisements.

As a result, new techniques, tactics and tools are cropping up and being used by marketers of all stripes to maximize the visibility of their content. There's now an entire content promotion ecosystem. From influencer marketing to native advertising, brands are experimenting in new ways.

Many brands are sponsoring articles on blogs or other online publications with large preexisting audiences. An interesting stat we just included in our own " Content Promotion Manifesto" is that brands spent, on average, 6.7 percent of their content marketing budgets on sponsored content in 2013. It's trending upwards, too. From the The New York Times to Forbes' Brand Voice, there's no shortage of famous examples.

While advertorials have been around for decades, this top-of-the-funnel sponsored article channel is relatively new for many content marketers. Over the last year, we have received many questions from clients about sponsored content—questions about pricing, scale, value and strategy. We struggled to answer most of them; there wasn't anywhere to get answers.

Because of this, we decided to reach out to 550 online publications to gather as much information about their sponsored content programs as possible. We wanted to find out the following:

  • An agreed upon definition for sponsored articles
  • The current state of sponsored articles as a channel
  • Examples of sponsored articles
  • Sponsored article pricing and value
  • A media buying strategy for sponsored articles
  • Tools and platforms for sponsored articles

We quickly learned that sponsored content on blogs and other online publications, when viewed as a marketing channel, is very immature. Pricing doesn't have much rhyme or reason, either. However, after collecting and interpreting data on 550 online properties, and dissecting countless native advertising studies, we hope to shine a light on a little known content marketing channel.

The results of the study are outlined below. 

Note: The complete Media Buyers Guide to Sponsored Content study is available for download here.

Defining Sponsored Articles

With content marketing adoption rates so high, many brands are looking to native advertising to promote their content. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) defines native advertising as "paid ads that are so cohesive with the page content, assimilated into the design, and consistent with the platform behavior that the viewer simply feels that they belong." According to the IAB, native advertising contains six different types of ad units: in-feed, promoted listings, in-ad with native element, paid search, recommendation widgets, and custom.

Sponsored articles fall into the in-feed subgroup. However, so does promoted content on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Bcause they appear within the normal content feed of the publisher, it doesn't matter if the publisher is Facebook or BuzzFeed. 

In other words, sponsored articles amount to advertising on a media outlet in the form of editorial content that looks like it's supposed to be there. Brands value this because association with a publication and exposure to its audience can drive awareness, traffic, conversions, and leads.

The Current State of Sponsored Articles

We uncovered lots of fascinating information about sponsored articles while conducting our research. They are actually an evolved version of what many marketers call advertorials, which have been around for decades. The biggest difference between the two is where the content resides in the customer buying journey. Advertorials are middle to bottom-of-the-funnel content.

An example of a magazine advertorial

On the other hand, sponsored articles strictly reside at the top of the funnel. Their purpose is to be helpful, entertaining, or both. Top-of-the-funnel content doesn't appear to be salesy and brand-centric to the reader. It's the rise of content marketing that helped move advertorials up the funnel. This helps brands become not just purveyors of goods and services, but a producer of ideas and a distributor of knowledge.

Controversy

Sponsored articles have received pushback from some publishers, brands, and consumers—and even government regulators who are concerned because the articles resemble editorial content. This can damage the editorial integrity of a publication, as well as a brand's image.

Both publishers and marketers have a vested interest in not appearing to mislead consumers. Native advertising in general is misunderstood by many consumers and marketers. (That's partly why we conducted this study.) 

In the video below, John Oliver does a good job of articulating many consumers' concerns regarding sponsored articles.

Copyblogger's 2014 State of Native Advertising Report surveyed over 2,000 marketers and discovered that 73 percent were either completely unfamiliar with or hardly familiar with native advertising.

Native-Survey-Results.jpg

Thirty-eight percent of the marketers could identify forms of native advertising from a checklist, and only three percent claimed to be very knowledgeable.

Earlier this year, Contently surveyed 542 U.S. Internet users to determine what they thought about sponsored articles. Only 48 percent of the respondents believed sponsored content that was labeled as such was paid for by an advertiser that had influenced the content produced. The rest thought the label meant something else.

Sponsored-Content-Survey-Results.jpg

Just over 66 percent of the respondents reported they are not likely to click on an article sponsored by a brand and 33 percent said they're just as likely to click on a sponsored article as they are to click on (unsponsored) editorial content.

There is also contradictory evidence surrounding the overall effectiveness of sponsored articles. Research from Chartbeat shows that only 24 percent of visitors scroll past the fold when visiting a sponsored article—compared with 71 percent for editorial content.

However, The New York Times claims readers spend the same amount of time on sponsored articles as traditional news stories. This is backed up by a study from Sharethrough and IPG Media Labs. They found that consumers actually look at sponsored articles more than typical editorial articles (26 percent vs. 24 percent) and spend a similar amount of time on each (1 minute vs. 1.2 minutes).

Time-Spent-Viewing-Sponsored-Content.jpg

Not all publishers offer sponsored article opportunities to marketers. During our research, some respondents told us that protecting editorial integrity and preserving audience trust were a higher priorities. On the other hand, many big name publishers like Forbes, The New York Times, Business Insider, The Atlantic, Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal have all embraced sponsored articles as a revenue source.

BuzzFeed's entire business model is built around what it calls sponsored "listicles," a.k.a. sponsored articles. While some publishers are averse to adopting this native form of advertising, it doesn't seem to be causing any damage to the publishers who are using native ads.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) hasn't quite figured out how to regulate native advertising. The FTC has delayed handing down regulations around disclosure requirements, language and graphic separation. Until that happens, the display of native advertising will remain at the discretion of publishers.

With that said, the IAB has set native advertising guidelines for its members. The IAB reports that clarity and prominence of paid native ad unit disclosure are vital, regardless of native advertising type. 

Their two criteria are straightforward:

  • Use language that conveys the advertising has been paid for, thus making it an advertising unit, even if that unit does not contain traditional promotional advertising messages.
  • Be large and visible enough for a consumer to notice it in the context of a given page and/or relative to the device the ad is being viewed on.

In the case of sponsored articles, a reasonable consumer should be able to distinguish between editorial content from the publisher and paid advertising.

Growth

A 2013 survey conducted by Hexagram and Spada revealed that 62 percent of publishers had embraced sponsored articles, with another 16 percent planning to go this route by the end of 2014. Comparable research from eMarketer showed that only 10 percent of digital publishers didn't have and weren't considering native advertising on their sites.

Publishers-Embrace-Sponsored-Articles.jp

The 2014 Native Advertising Roundup revealed that 73 percent of media buyers use native advertising, and 93 percent expect to spend the same or more in the future. Native advertising spending in the U.S. is expected to increase from $1.3 billion in 2013 to $9.4 billion in 2018. A full 40 percent of publishers expect native advertising to drive a quarter or more of their digital revenue this year.

Native-Ad-Spending.jpg

Native advertising, when compared to traditional display ads, have been found to be more effective. 25 percent more consumers looked at sponsored articles than display ad units. Native ads produced an 18 percent lift in purchase intent and a nine percent lift for brand affinity responses. BIA/Kelsey released a study which shows brands are planning on spending more on native advertising, and publishers stand to benefit as long as they can preserve the trust and interest of their audience.

Native-vs-Social-Display.jpg

Examples of Sponsored Articles

Since look, feel, design, language and requirements of sponsored content are left up to the discretion of publishers, the presentation of sponsored content on different sites varies widely. Some publications provide brands with what can be described as a virtual microsite within the site itself. Others are more streamlined, using an article that appears as a piece of featured content but is labeled as sponsored.

Sponsored Article Pricing

There are no real standards for pricing in the digital world with regard to sponsored content. This makes budgeting for the channel very tough to do. It also makes long-term strategic execution at scale and across multiple publications a near impossibility.

While the value of sponsoring content is clearly understood by many brands, how to execute it and who to talk to in order to get it done is generally unclear. The study set out to add rhyme and reason to this burgeoning channel by exploring costs and comparing them across a broad spectrum of online publications and blogs.

This is valuable information for marketers and media buyers wishing to negotiate with online publications. It can even be used by publications that have not yet offered sponsored content opportunities to establish fair pricing.

Since publishers completely control their own pricing and standards, they maintain their own criteria for validating costs associated with sponsored articles. In today's analytics-driven marketing culture, where channels are often compared and returns are measured, sponsoring content across several different publications can't be so easily consolidated  into a single "sponsored content" channel since each one has a unique value proposition.

This study is the industry's first attempt to scientifically justify, quantify, and predict current going-rate prices of sponsored articles using explicit data points that can be measured for each online publication. Our goal was to create the first-ever quantitatively supported pricing standard for sponsored articles.

We hope our research puts an end to these challenges and empowers marketers with the ability to budget, negotiate, and ultimately scale the deployment of sponsored articles within their channel mix.

Research

In total, the research for this study was conducted over a five-month period of time earlier this year. It included manual outreach via email and phone to over 1,000 media outlets and blogs. The outreach resulted in responses from 550 publishers that sold sponsored article units.

The study took an unbiased approach to data inclusion and included a representative sample set. It collected data on globally-recognized publications, one-person blogs, and everything in between. 

Publications were classified using the following criteria:

  • Content is created by more than five writers/contributors/columnists, and:
  • The website already utilizes traditional display advertising (e.g., banner ads)

Everything that didn't meet the above criteria was classified as a blog.

Each price collected in the study was the minimum charge for getting a sponsored article published, regardless of other pricing factors. A total of 17 factors were cited as justification for pricing schemes from the 550 publishers.

  1. Word count: The number of words in a sponsored article
  2. User time on page: The amount of time a typical reader spends on a web page
  3. Links: Specifications regarding whether or not links would be provided, and if so, how many, where and whether or not they would be "nofollow" links
  4. Lead capture: For publishers that provide links to gated assets, many charge on a per-lead basis
  5. Impressions (CPM): Cost per thousand impressions based on historic data
  6. Time and effort required from publication's editorial staff
  7. Monthly website traffic
  8. PageRank: Often used by publishers to justify relative pricing when they run more than one media outlet
  9. Domain Authority: Often used for publishers to justify relative pricing when they own more than one publication
  10. Page-level engagement: A metric that is measured by how far readers scroll down the page and the amount of time spent on a given article
  11. Social media promotion: Often an optional add-on that would increase price (may come as part of a package deal)
  12. Email promotion: Often an optional add-on that would increase price (may come as part of a package deal)
  13. Display advertising: Often an optional add-on that would increase price (may come as part of a package deal)
  14. Number of articles: How many sponsored articles you are buying at a time
  15. Visibility time: The amount of time an article stays live on the site
  16. Verticals: For large publications that cover many verticals or subject areas, some verticals are more expensive than others
  17. Pay-per-click: Another engagement-level metric that is measured by the number of click-throughs to an intended landing page

In order to do a quantitative analysis, explicit data was collected from all of the publications to calculate predictor variables. Those variables included:

  • Domain Authority: A ranking score from Moz, on a 100-point scale, that uses more than 40 signals to calculate how well a website will perform in the search engine results pages (SERPs). The higher the score, the more authoritative the website is viewed as being. 
  • Page Authority: Another ranking score from Moz, on a 100-point scale, that calculates how well a given webpage is likely to rank in the SERPs. In the case of this study, the publication's home pages were used.
  • PageRank: A ranking metric from Google that calculates the relevance of a webpage. This score analyzes the number of incoming links and the quality of the referring webpages to generate a measurement between 0 (low relevance) and 10 (high relevance).
  • AlexaRank: A ranking score from Alexa.com that is based on traffic data from users over a rolling three-month period. A site's ranking is based on a combined measure of unique visitors and page views. The site with the greatest combination of these is ranked No. 1, and higher number rankings correlate with lower traffic data.
  • Facebook Following: The number of fans (or "likes") a publication's Facebook page has.
  • Twitter Following: The number of followers a publication's or a blogger's Twitter account has. For publications with multiple accounts and/or contributing authors, only the account with the largest following was used.
  • Pinterest Following: The number of followers a publication's or a blogger's Pinterest account has.

Assumptions

It is assumed that the data set in this study is a representative sample of the entire ecosystem of blogs and other online publications because the results closely mirror Moz's distribution of Page Authority that analyzed more than 10,000 SERPs and 200,000 unique pages. This regression model had a mean (average) Page Authority of 40.8 and standard deviation of 15.1. The distribution can be seen below.

Moz-Distribution.jpg

The regression model in this study had a mean of 47.1 and a standard deviation of 15.5. The sample set of blogs and publications had a slightly higher Page Authority than the Moz study. This was expected because the study only measured root domains and not long-tail pages within those domains.

Publisher-Distribution.jpg

Aside from that slight disparity, the distribution curves are nearly identical. For those readers who are number junkies, the descriptive statistics of the Page Authority data in the study are below.

Publication-Stats.jpg

Limitations

Variations in sponsored content offerings – The study established the pricing baseline based on the cost of one sponsored article. Since some publications only offered long-term commitments to marketers that could include other benefits (banners, email, social promotion, etc.), some publications' unit pricing could be inflated. As a result, the regression model may not be an accurate price predictor in all scenarios.

Social account data – Not all online publications have accounts on Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. In these cases, the number zero was used to quantify followers. Also, for publications with multiple accounts on the same network, the study measured the account with the most followers.

Alexa Rank Inaccuracies – Alexa admits publicly that there are limits to making judgments from its data. Sites with relatively low traffic may not be accurately measured by Alexa.

Analysis

The graph below seeks to show the exact methodology we used to conduct the sponsored content pricing study. It's purpose is to give readers confidence in our pricing models so they feel comfortable in adapting the formulas.

When all prices are graphed, bloat appears on each end of the pricing spectrum. In order to reconcile the dense areas, the study broke down the pricing data and regression models for blogs and publications separately.

Price-Distribution-All-Data.jpg

Blog Pricing Analysis

The graph below represents the distribution of prices for all 474 blogs in the study.

Pricing-Distribution-Blogs.jpg

Because of the wide range and low frequency of prices recorded in the "more" area, we decided to label these data points as outliers. By removing the outliers (approximately 3.8 percent of the sample) from the analysis, the variance decreased by 87 percent, making for a more accurate predictive model. All descriptive statistics for the blog data sample before and after removing the outliers were laid out in the study.

With the remaining 456 cases, a multi-variable regression test for price against all of the predictor variables was run, after which the insignificant variables were removed to formulate the pricing regression model for blogs, as shown below.

Blog-Price-Regression-Significant-Variab

The end result confidently determined the fair market price formula for a sponsored article on a blog:

Sponsored-Article-Price-Formula-Blog.jpg

Publication Pricing Analysis

The graph below represents the distribution of pricing for all 76 publications recorded in the study.

Price-Distribution-All-Publications.jpg

The outliers were kept in this regression model because of the range in quality and size of online publications is large. The descriptive statistics are available in the actual study.

Following the same methods as the blog analysis, the study ran a multi-variable regression test to construct a predictive model for publication pricing. After removing the insignificant variables the output looks like this:

Publication-Price-Regresion-Significant-

The end result confidently determines the fair market price formula for a sponsored article on a publication:

Publication-Pricing-Formula.jpg

What All This Math Really Boils Down To

With the formulas below, marketers now have a way to assign value when purchasing or negotiating for sponsored articles on blogs or publications. 

Prior to this study marketers had no way of knowing if they were getting a fair deal or not using this emerging channel.

  • Blog Price Formula = -60.5 + 5.97(DA) + 0.978(thousand Fb fans) + 15.1(PR) – 0.000007(AR)
  • Publication Price Formua = -37000 + 314(DA) + 20.9(thousand Fb fans) + 5152(PR) – 46.6(thousand Pinterest followers)

That said, media buyers should also note that many top-tier publications package their sponsored content offering in different ways. Keep this in mind when using the formulas above. Below are examples of some variation in sponsored article packages.

Pricing-on-large-publications.jpg

Networks and Tools for Sponsored Articles

While conducting research, several tools and networks kept coming up. Some networks set up for the sole purpose of connecting marketers with publishers for sponsored content. Even HubSpot has built an informal ad hoc network for its partner agencies to connect with its publishing customers. Content measurement tools, including Nudge, which was built to measure sponsored content, are starting to crop up, too. 

A few other networks and tools worth noting:

  • Adproval: A media outlet marketplace for connecting publishers and advertisers
  • BlogHer: A blog and social media influencer community focused on social media coverage of women
  • Blogsvertise: A blog marketplace for connecting publishers and advertisers
  • Buysellads: A media outlet marketplace for connecting publishers and advertisers
  • Cision: The brand's Content Marketing Database includes a searchable database of over 2,000 sponsored opportunities with thousands of U.S. publications
  • GroupHigh: Blogger outreach marketing software that helps companies find bloggers, in addition to managing and tracking relationships, and measuring results
  • Izea: A sponsorship marketplace that connects social media influencers with brands
  • Markerly: A brand amplification platform that connects brands with bloggers
  • Sway Group: Connects brands and agencies with the largest network of female bloggers on the Web
  • The Syndicate: A brand storytelling partner and blog sponsorship network.

With the growth of online content showing no signs of slowing, the use of sponsored content as a marketing channel will undoubtedly continue to grow as well. Besides, it's a proven revenue stream for publishers who have often struggled to make money on the Internet.

However, as the popularity of sponsored content grows, so does the likelihood of it being regulated by governments. Until then, consider this post your definitive guide to sponsored content. The study can be downloaded here.


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Why SEOs Need to Care About Correlation as Much (or More) than Causation

Posted on: Tuesday 20 January 2015 — 01:18

Posted by randfish

correlation does not equal causation

Today I'm going to make a crazy claim—that in modern SEO, there are times, situations, and types of analyses where correlation is actually MORE interesting and useful than causality. I know that sounds insane, but stick with me until the end and at least give the argument a chance. And for those of you who like visuals, our friend AJ Ghergich and his intrepid team of designers created some nifty graphics to accompany the piece.

Once upon a time, SEO professionals had a reasonable sense of many (or perhaps even most) of the inputs into the search engine's ranking systems. We leveraged our knowledge of how Google interpreted various modifications to keywords, links, content, and technical aspects to hammer on the signals that produced results.

But today, there can be little argument—Google's ranking algorithm has become so incredibly complex, nuanced, powerful, and full-featured, that modern SEOs have all but given up on hammering away at individual signals. Instead, we're becoming more complete marketers, with greater influence on all of the elements of our organizations' online presence.

Web marketers operate in a world where Google:

  • Uses machine learning to identify editorial endorsements vs. spam (e.g. Penguin)
  • Measures and rewards engagement (e.g. pogo-sticking)
  • Rewards signals that correlate with brands (and attempts to remove/punish non-brand entities)
  • Applies thousands of immensely powerful and surprisingly accurate ways to analyze content (e.g. Hummingbird)
  • Punishes sites that produce mediocre content (intentionally or accidentally) even if the site has good content, too (e.g. Panda)
  • Rapidly recognizes and accounts for patterns of queries and clicks as rank boosting signals (e.g. this recent test)
  • Makes 600+ algorithmic updates each year, the vast majority of which are neither announced nor known by the marketing/SEO community

how Google works

Given this frenetic ecosystem, the best path forward isn't to exclusively build to the signals that are recognized and accepted as having a direct impact on rankings (keyword-matching, links, etc). Those who've previously pursued such a strategy have mostly failed to deliver on long-term results. Many have found their sites in serious trouble due to penalization, more future-focused competitors, and/or a devaluing of their tactics.

Instead, successful marketers have been engaging in the tactics that Google's own algorithms are chasing—popularity, relevance, trust, and a great overall experience for visitors. Very frequently, that means looking at correlation rather than causation.

[Via Moz's 2013 Ranking Factors - the new 2015 version is coming this summer!]

We'll engage in a thought experiment to help highlight the issue:

Let's say you discover, as a signal of quality, Google directly measures the time a given searcher spends on a page visited from the SERPs. Sites with pages searchers spend more time on get a rankings boost, while those with quick abandonment find their pages falling in the rankings. You decide to press your advantage with this knowledge by using some clever hacks to keep visitors on your page longer and to make clicking the back button more difficult. Sure, it may suck for some visitors, but those are the ones you would have lost anyway (and they would have hurt your rankings!), so you figure they're not worth worrying about. You've identified a metric that directly impacts Google's algorithm, and you're going to make the most of it.

Meanwhile, your competitor (who has no idea about the algorithmic impact of this factor) has been working on a new design that makes their website content easier, faster, and more pleasurable to consume. When the new design launches, they initially see a fall in rankings, and don't understand why. But you're pretty sure you know what's happened. Google's use of the time-on-site metric is hurting them because visitors are now getting the information they want from your competitor's new design faster than before, and thus, they're leaving more quickly, hurting the site's rankings. You cackle with delight as your fortune swells.

But what happens long term? Google's quality testers see diminished happiness among searchers. They rework their algorithms to reward sites that successfully deliver great experiences more quickly. At the same time, competitors gain more links, amplification, social sharing, and word of mouth because real users are deriving more positive experiences from their site than yours. You found an algorithmic loophole and exploited it briefly, but by playing the "where's Google weak?" game rather than the "where's Google going?" game, you've ultimately lost.

Over the last decade, in case after case of marketers optimizing for the causal elements of Google's algorithm, this pattern of short-term gain leading to long-term loss continually occurs. That's why, today, I suggest marketers think about what correlates with rankings as much as what actually causes them.

If many high-ranking sites in your field are offering mobile apps for Android and iOS, you may be tempted to think there's no point to considering an app-strategy just for SEO because, obviously, having an app doesn't make Google rank your site any higher. But what if those mobile apps are leading to more press coverage for those competitors, and more links to their site, and more direct visits to their webpages from those apps, and more search queries that include their brand names, and a hundred other things that Google maybe IS counting directly in their algorithm?

And, if many high ranking sites in your field engage in TV ads, you may be tempted to think that it's useless to investigate TV as a channel because there's no way Google would reward advertising as a signal for SEO. But what if those TV ads drive searches and clicks, which could lead directly to rankings? What if those TV ads create brand-biasing behaviors through psychological nudges that lead to greater recognition and a higher likelihood of searchers click on, link to, share, talk about, write about, buy from, etc. your TV-advertising competitor?

Thousands of hard-to-identify, individual signals, mashed together through machine learning, are most likely directly responsible for your competitor's website outranking yours on a particular search query. But even if you had a list of the potential inputs and the mathematical formulas Google's process considers most valuable for that query's ranking evaluation, you'd be little closer to competently beating them. You may feel smugly satisfied that your own SEO knowledge exceeded that of your competitor, or of their SEO consultants, but smug satisfaction does not raise rankings. In fact, I think some of the SEO field's historic obsession with knowing precisely how Google works and which signals matter is, at times, costing us a broader, deeper understanding of big-picture marketing*.

Time and again, I've seen SEO professionals whom I admire, respect, and find to be brilliant analysts of Google's algorithms lose out to less-hyper-SEO-aware marketers who combine that big picture knowledge with more-basic/fundamental SEO tactics. While I certainly wouldn't advise anyone to learn less about their field nor give up their investigation of Google's inner workings, I am and will continue to strongly advise marketers of all specialties to think about all the elements that might have a second-order or purely correlated effect on Google's rankings, rather than just concentrate on what we know to be directly causal.

-----------------

* No one's guiltier than I am of obsessing over discovering and sharing Google's operations. And I'll probably keep being that way because that's how obsession works. But, I'm trying to recognize that this obsession isn't necessarily connected to being the most successful marketer or SEO I can be.


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Technical Site Audit Checklist: 2015 Edition

Posted on: Monday 19 January 2015 — 01:13

Posted by GeoffKenyon

Back in 2011, I wrote a technical site audit checklist, and while it was thorough, there have been a lot of additions to what is encompassed in a site audit. I have gone through and updated that old checklist for 2015. Some of the biggest changes were the addition of sections for mobile, international, and site speed.

This checklist should help you put together a thorough site audit and determine what is holding back the organic performance of your site. At the end of your audit, don't write a document that says what's wrong with the website. Instead, create a document that says what needs to be done. Then explain why these actions need to be taken and why they are important. What I've found to really helpful is to provide a prioritized list along with your document of all the actions that you would like them to implement. This list can be handed off to a dev or content team to be implemented easily. These teams can refer to your more thorough document as needed.


Quick overview

Check BoxCheck indexed pages  
  • Do a site: search.
  • How many pages are returned? (This can be way off so don't put too much stock in this).
  • Is the homepage showing up as the first result? 
  • If the homepage isn't showing up as the first result, there could be issues, like a penalty or poor site architecture/internal linking, affecting the site. This may be less of a concern as Google's John Mueller recently said that your homepage doesn't need to be listed first.

Check BoxReview the number of organic landing pages in Google Analytics

  • Does this match with the number of results in a site: search?
  • This is often the best view of how many pages are in a search engine's index that search engines find valuable.

Check BoxSearch for the brand and branded terms

  • Is the homepage showing up at the top, or are correct pages showing up?
  • If the proper pages aren't showing up as the first result, there could be issues, like a penalty, in play.
Check BoxCheck Google's cache for key pages
  • Is the content showing up?
  • Are navigation links present?
  • Are there links that aren't visible on the site?
PRO Tip:
Don't forget to check the text-only version of the cached page. Here is a bookmarklet to help you do that.

Check BoxDo a mobile search for your brand and key landing pages

  • Does your listing have the "mobile friendly" label?
  • Are your landing pages mobile friendly?
  • If the answer is no to either of these, it may be costing you organic visits.

On-page optimization

Check BoxTitle tags are optimized
  • Title tags should be optimized and unique.
  • Your brand name should be included in your title tag to improve click-through rates.
  • Title tags are about 55-60 characters (512 pixels) to be fully displayed. You can test here or review title pixel widths in Screaming Frog.
Check BoxImportant pages have click-through rate optimized titles and meta descriptions
  • This will help improve your organic traffic independent of your rankings.
  • You can use SERP Turkey for this.
Check Box
Check for pages missing page titles and meta descriptions
  
Check BoxThe on-page content includes the primary keyword phrase multiple times as well as variations and alternate keyword phrases
  
Check BoxThere is a significant amount of optimized, unique content on key pages
 
Check BoxThe primary keyword phrase is contained in the H1 tag
  
Check Box
Images' file names and alt text are optimized to include the primary keyword phrase associated with the page.
 
Check BoxURLs are descriptive and optimized
  • While it is beneficial to include your keyword phrase in URLs, changing your URLs can negatively impact traffic when you do a 301. As such, I typically recommend optimizing URLs when the current ones are really bad or when you don't have to change URLs with existing external links.
Check BoxClean URLs
  • No excessive parameters or session IDs.
  • URLs exposed to search engines should be static.
Check BoxShort URLs
  • 115 characters or shorter – this character limit isn't set in stone, but shorter URLs are better for usability.

Content

Check BoxHomepage content is optimized
  • Does the homepage have at least one paragraph?
  • There has to be enough content on the page to give search engines an understanding of what a page is about. Based on my experience, I typically recommend at least 150 words.
Check BoxLanding pages are optimized
  • Do these pages have at least a few paragraphs of content? Is it enough to give search engines an understanding of what the page is about?
  • Is it template text or is it completely unique?
Check BoxSite contains real and substantial content
  • Is there real content on the site or is the "content" simply a list of links?
Check BoxProper keyword targeting
  • Does the intent behind the keyword match the intent of the landing page?
  • Are there pages targeting head terms, mid-tail, and long-tail keywords?
Check BoxKeyword cannibalization
  • Do a site: search in Google for important keyword phrases.
  • Check for duplicate content/page titles using the Moz Pro Crawl Test.
Check BoxContent to help users convert exists and is easily accessible to users
  • In addition to search engine driven content, there should be content to help educate users about the product or service.
Check BoxContent formatting
  • Is the content formatted well and easy to read quickly?
  • Are H tags used?
  • Are images used?
  • Is the text broken down into easy to read paragraphs?
Check BoxGood headlines on blog posts
  • Good headlines go a long way. Make sure the headlines are well written and draw users in.
Check BoxAmount of content versus ads
  • Since the implementation of Panda, the amount of ad-space on a page has become important to evaluate.
  • Make sure there is significant unique content above the fold.
  • If you have more ads than unique content, you are probably going to have a problem.

Duplicate content

Check BoxThere should be one URL for each piece of content
  • Do URLs include parameters or tracking code? This will result in multiple URLs for a piece of content.
  • Does the same content reside on completely different URLs? This is often due to products/content being replicated across different categories.
Pro Tip:
Exclude common parameters, such as those used to designate tracking code, in Google Webmaster Tools. Read more at Search Engine Land.
Check BoxDo a search to check for duplicate content
  • Take a content snippet, put it in quotes and search for it.
  • Does the content show up elsewhere on the domain?
  • Has it been scraped? If the content has been scraped, you should file a content removal request with Google.
Check BoxSub-domain duplicate content
  • Does the same content exist on different sub-domains?
Check BoxCheck for a secure version of the site
  • Does the content exist on a secure version of the site?
Check BoxCheck other sites owned by the company
  • Is the content replicated on other domains owned by the company?
Check BoxCheck for "print" pages
  • If there are "printer friendly" versions of pages, they may be causing duplicate content.

Accessibility & Indexation

Check BoxCheck the robots.txt
  • Has the entire site, or important content been blocked? Is link equity being orphaned due to pages being blocked via the robots.txt?
Check BoxTurn off JavaScript, cookies, and CSS Check BoxNow change your user agent to Googlebot
PRO Tip:
Use SEO Browser to do a quick spot check.

Check BoxCheck the SEOmoz PRO Campaign

  • Check for 4xx errors and 5xx errors.

Check BoxXML sitemaps are listed in the robots.txt file

Check BoxXML sitemaps are submitted to Google/Bing Webmaster Tools

Check BoxCheck pages for meta robots noindex tag

  • Are pages accidentally being tagged with the meta robots noindex command
  • Are there pages that should have the noindex command applied
  • You can check the site quickly via a crawl tool such as Moz or Screaming Frog

Check BoxDo goal pages have the noindex command applied?

  • This is important to prevent direct organic visits from showing up as goals in analytics

Site architecture and internal linking

Check BoxNumber of links on a page
Check BoxVertical linking structures are in place
  • Homepage links to category pages.
  • Category pages link to sub-category and product pages as appropriate.
  • Product pages link to relevant category pages.
Check BoxHorizontal linking structures are in place
  • Category pages link to other relevant category pages.
  • Product pages link to other relevant product pages.
Check BoxLinks are in content
  • Does not utilize massive blocks of links stuck in the content to do internal linking.
Check BoxFooter links
  • Does not use a block of footer links instead of proper navigation.
  • Does not link to landing pages with optimized anchors.
Check BoxGood internal anchor text
 
Check BoxCheck for broken links
  • Link Checker and Xenu are good tools for this.

Technical issues

Check BoxProper use of 301s
  • Are 301s being used for all redirects?
  • If the root is being directed to a landing page, are they using a 301 instead of a 302?
  • Use Live HTTP Headers Firefox plugin to check 301s.
Check Box"Bad" redirects are avoided
  • These include 302s, 307s, meta refresh, and JavaScript redirects as they pass little to no value.
  • These redirects can easily be identified with a tool like Screaming Frog.
Check BoxRedirects point directly to the final URL and do not leverage redirect chains
  • Redirect chains significantly diminish the amount of link equity associated with the final URL.
  • Google has said that they will stop following a redirect chain after several redirects.
Check BoxUse of JavaScript
  • Is content being served in JavaScript?
  • Are links being served in JavaScript? Is this to do PR sculpting or is it accidental?
Check BoxUse of iFrames
  • Is content being pulled in via iFrames?
Check BoxUse of Flash
  • Is the entire site done in Flash, or is Flash used sparingly in a way that doesn't hinder crawling?
Check BoxCheck for errors in Google Webmaster Tools
  • Google WMT will give you a good list of technical problems that they are encountering on your site (such as: 4xx and 5xx errors, inaccessible pages in the XML sitemap, and soft 404s)
Check BoxXML Sitemaps  
  • Are XML sitemaps in place?
  • Are XML sitemaps covering for poor site architecture?
  • Are XML sitemaps structured to show indexation problems?
  • Do the sitemaps follow proper XML protocols
Check BoxCanonical version of the site established through 301s
 
Check BoxCanonical version of site is specified in Google Webmaster Tools
 
Check BoxRel canonical link tag is properly implemented across the site
Check BoxUses absolute URLs instead of relative URLs
  • This can cause a lot of problems if you have a root domain with secure sections.

Site speed

Check Box

Review page load time for key pages 

Check BoxMake sure compression is enabled
Check Box

Enable caching

Check Box
Optimize your images for the web
Check Box

Minify your CSS/JS/HTML

Check BoxUse a good, fast host
  • Consider using a CDN for your images.

Check Box

Optimize your images for the web

Mobile

Check BoxReview the mobile experience
  • Is there a mobile site set up?
  • If there is, is it a mobile site, responsive design, or dynamic serving?
Check Box

Make sure analytics are set up if separate mobile content exists

Check Box

If dynamic serving is being used, make sure the Vary HTTP header is being used

Check BoxReview how the mobile experience matches up with the intent of mobile visitors
  • Do your mobile visitors have a different intent than desktop based visitors?
Check BoxEnsure faulty mobile redirects do not exist
  • If your site redirects mobile visitors away from their intended URL (typically to the homepage), you're likely going to run into issues impacting your mobile organic performance.
Check BoxEnsure that the relationship between the mobile site and desktop site is established with proper markup
  • If a mobile site (m.) exists, does the desktop equivalent URL point to the mobile version with rel="alternate"?
  • Does the mobile version canonical to the desktop version?
  • Official documentation.

International

Check BoxReview international versions indicated in the URL
  • ex: site.com/uk/ or uk.site.com
Check BoxEnable country based targeting in webmaster tools
  • If the site is targeted to one specific country, is this specified in webmaster tools? 
  • If the site has international sections, are they targeted in webmaster tools?
Check BoxImplement hreflang / rel alternate if relevant
Check BoxIf there are multiple versions of a site in the same language (such as /us/ and /uk/, both in English), update the copy been updated so that they are both unique
 
Check BoxMake sure the currency reflects the country targeted
 
Check BoxEnsure the URL structure is in the native language 
  • Try to avoid having all URLs in the default language

Analytics

Check BoxAnalytics tracking code is on every page
  • You can check this using the "custom" filter in a Screaming Frog Crawl or by looking for self referrals.
  • Are there pages that should be blocked?
Check BoxThere is only one instance of a GA property on a page
  • Having the same Google Analytics property will create problems with pageview-related metrics such as inflating page views and pages per visit and reducing the bounce rate.
  • It is OK to have multiple GA properties listed, this won't cause a problem.
Check BoxAnalytics is properly tracking and capturing internal searches
 
Check BoxDemographics tracking is set up

Check BoxAdwords and Adsense are properly linked if you are using these platforms
Check BoxInternal IP addresses are excluded
Check BoxUTM Campaign Parameters are used for other marketing efforts
Check BoxMeta refresh and JavaScript redirects are avoided
  • These can artificially lower bounce rates.
Check BoxEvent tracking is set up for key user interactions

This audit covers the main technical elements of a site and should help you uncover any issues that are holding a site back. As with any project, the deliverable is critical. I've found focusing on the solution and impact (business case) is the best approach for site audit reports. While it is important to outline the problems, too much detail here can take away from the recommendations. If you're looking for more resources on site audits, I recommend the following:

Helpful tools for doing a site audit:

Annie Cushing's Site Audit
Web Developer Toolbar
User Agent Add-on
Firebug
Link Checker
SEObook Toolbar
MozBar (Moz's SEO toolbar)
Xenu
Screaming Frog
Your own scraper
Inflow's technical mobile best practices


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Hacking Keyword Targeting by Serving Interest-Based Searches - Whiteboard Friday

Posted on: Friday 16 January 2015 — 01:17

Posted by randfish

Depending on your industry, the more obvious and conversion-focused keywords you might target could be few and far between. With Google continuing to evolve, though, there's a whole host of other areas you might look: interest-based keywords. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand shows you how to find them.

For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard!

Hacking Keyword Targeting whiteboard

Video transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're chatting about keyword targeting and specifically some of the challenges that happen when your keyword targeting list is rather small or hyper competitive and you need to broaden out. One of the great ways you can do that is actually by hacking the interests of the people who are performing those searches, or might perform those searches in the future, or might never perform those searches, but are actually interested in the product or service that you have to offer.

Classic, traditional keyword research is all about focusing on the product or service's purchase intent. Meaning, here's let's say Charles over here. Charles needs to better track his fitness. He knows that what he'd like to able to do is get some tools to track his fitness. Maybe he's looking at a Fitbit or something like that.

When we, doing marketing to Charles, have a fitness tracking product or a piece of software or a piece of hardware to offer him, we're thinking about terms like fitness tracking software, track weight loss, workout measurement, and monitor workout progress, very direct, very obvious kinds of search terms that are clearly going to lead Charles from his intent right over to our website.

This is perfect keyword targeting keyword research if you're doing paid search, because with paid search you need a return on that investment right away. You don't want to be bidding on keywords, generally speaking, that are not going to directly bring you sign-ups, conversions, potential costumers.

This is not so true, however, when it comes to SEO. A lot of times when folks look at their SEO campaigns, they go, "Man, the list of keywords that I could target that really say expressly I want a fitness tracking piece of software or a fitness tracking piece of hardware is not that long. Therefore, what else should I create? What other terms could I potentially go after?" That's where you want to do a little bit more of what social display and retargeting does, which is to think about reaching people based on their interests, their attributes, and the actions that they've taken.

If you go to Facebook and you do some ad targeting there, it's not based on, hey, Charles expressly did a search for fitness tracking software. But you can go and find all the people who've labeled fitness as an interest of theirs. You can then further refine by demographics and psychographics, job, location, income, and all these other attributes.

This is what you can do in, for example, Google's Display Planner as well. You can look at I want all the people who've read articles on MensHealth.com. Or you can get even more specific with some kinds of advertising and say, "I only want to advertise in front of people who looked at articles specifically on cross training, because we happen to know that maybe that's that best target group for us."

This is a very cool process too. But in SEO we can actually merge these two things. We can put them together, and a lot of smart SEOs do this. They combine these two practices in their keyword research and targeting. They find people who like fitness, and then they talk to them. They ask them questions. This can be implicit, explicit. This can be through surveys. This can be through interviews. You kind of sit down, and you're like, "Okay, that's really awesome. Can you tell me more about what inspired your love for fitness? Tell me about the content that you looked at prior to this. Tell me about books that you read, people that influenced you, all those kinds of things."

You're trying to gather that information, those subjects of interest. Not just fitness, but other things that they touch on. Content that they may have found or liked before learning that they wanted to track their fitness progress. Websites that they frequently visit. People and brands or accounts that they follow on social media. Who are their influencers?

We learn all this, and now we have kind of this topic set for pre-interest keyword research. Pre-interest, meaning, before the party is actually interested in the product or service or solution that we provide, what are they interested in? We can do keyword research and targeting based on those things.

What's awesome about this is it's like potentially much lower competition, earlier brand exposure, which means that all of our others efforts that are targeting them further down the funnel are likely to be more effective because they've already been exposed to our brand. They know us. Hopefully, they like us already.

This is huge for content marketing. Very rich content opportunities. Usually, content marketing opportunities and content creation opportunities that aren't just purely self-promotional either. You go and create content about this and you're a fitness tracking company, well, that's pretty typical. That's to be expected. It's going to be self-promotional whether it's explicitly promotional or not.

But this type of content is very different. This type of content is all about promoting a movement or promoting information about a topic that you know potentially your subjects will have interest in, in the future, and because of that it's much easier to promote and share without being perceived as prideful and self-promotional, which tamps down a lot of the sharing that you could get.

Instead of things like fitness tracking software, I'm going to get running trails, comparison of cross trainer sneakers, strength training exercises, healthy meals for muscle growth. Awesome.

This is really cool. This process is what you want to use in that keyword research and brainstorming. Start before you get bogged down into, hey, these are the only terms and phrases that we can target because these are the only things that express intent.

Sometimes this might cross over into PPC. Most of the time this is really useful for SEO and content creation.

All right, everyone, I look forward to seeing some tools, tactics, and tips from all of you in the comments. We'll catch you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com


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E-Commerce KPI Study: There's (Finally) a Benchmark for That

Posted on: Thursday 15 January 2015 — 01:16

Posted by ProfAlfonso

Being a digital marketer, I spend my day knee-deep in data. The time I don't spend analysing it, I spend explaining its significance to a client or junior colleague or arguing its significance with a client or senior colleague.

But after many debates over the importance of bounce rate, time on site, mobile conversion rate and the colour grey for buttons (our designer partook in that last one), we're never much closer to an agreement on significance.

Our industry is swimming in data (thanks Google Analytics), but at times we're drowning in it.

Numbers without context mean nothing. Data in the hands of even the savviest marketer is useless without a context to evaluate its performance against competitors or the industry at large.

Which is why we need benchmarks. Through benchmarking, marketers can contextualise data to identify under-performing elements and amplify what is over-performing. They can focus on the KPIs that are important, and recognise whether they are achievable.

Benchmarks also give context to those who aren't familiar with data. One pain point that digital marketers face globally is communicating their performance upwards. There are very few 'digital natives' sitting in company boardrooms these days but plenty of executives who know their numbers inside out.

Industry benchmark data arms us with perspective and framework when we need to communicate upwards. It ensures we get pats on the back when deserved and additional budget released when required.

Google Analytics Benchmarking Reports

Google, you might argue, have already solved these problems.

The upgrade and roll-out of Google Analytics Benchmarking Reports has been met with plenty of excitement for these reasons. With its large data set and nifty options to chop up the data by geography and website size, for a minute it certainly seemed like the benchmarking of our dreams. And while we recognise its usefulness to benchmark against real-time data (comparing a surge of traffic from a particular location for example, or seasonal demands), it still left us short of the hard data insights we were looking for.

We wanted reliable KPI data that went beyond user behaviour. We wanted average conversion rates and average transaction values as well as 'softer' engagement metrics such as bounce rate and time on site.

Most importantly, we wanted to know which engagement metrics actually correlated with the conversion rate, so we could narrow our field of analysis and efforts in pursuit of a healthier bottom line.

Which is why we went out and got our own and generated this e-commerce KPI report.

Data and methodology

We analysed the 56 million visits and approximately $252 million (€214 million) in revenue that flowed through 30 participating websites between August 1, 2013 and July 30, 2014. The websites were in the retail and travel sectors and included both online-only and those with a physical store as well as an e-commerce site.

We averaged stats on a per-website basis, so that websites with high levels of traffic didn't skew the stats. We had more retail participants than travel participants so the average e-commerce figures are not the midpoint between travel and retail but the average figure across all study participants. Revenue is attributed on a last-click basis.

Results

Here is a highlight of some of our most relevant and interesting findings. For all the data and results, download the full report on WolfgangDigital.com.

Average KPIs: Bounce rate, time on site, and conversion rate

First, we calculated some averages across engagement KPIs and commercial KPIs. If you are an e-commerce website in the travel or retail business, you can use these numbers to evaluate how your website is performing when set against a broad swath of your industry peers.

Well, remember the conversion measured here is a sale. If your conversion rate is lower than the study average don't fire your CMO straight away; check if your average transaction value (ATV) is higher. If they balance each other out you are all good – if they don't, it's time to start digging deeper. Does the 1.4% conversion rate give you a smug tingly feeling or a stab of panic?

We often break down conversion rate into two parts: website-to-basket and basket-to-checkout. Industry norms tell us expect about 5% CR on website-to-basket and 30% on basket-to-checkout. Check which one of these conversion rates is most out of kilter on your site, then focus your attention there. This exercise will often give greater visibility on where the hole in your bucket is, Dear Liza.

Another factor in this analysis is that online-only retailers tend to enjoy higher conversion rates as the consumer must transact via the website. If you have an offline presence, a lower conversion rate comes with the physical territory as your site visitors may convert in store.

KPIs by device: Mobile under scrutiny

Next, we segmented the data by device: desktop, tablet and mobile.

We found that although mobile and tablet together accounted for nearly half of website traffic (43%), they contributed to just over a quarter of revenue (26%).

Mobile alone accounted for 26% of traffic but only 10% of revenue. This suggests that while mobile is a favoured device for browsing and researching, it's the desktop where users are more likely to whip out the credit card.

When we looked at conversion rates by device, this confirmed it.

What data matters: The correlations

We wanted to know which engagement figures had an influence (if any) on commercial ones.

Then we'd know which behavioural metrics were worth trying to improve to lift conversion rate, and which metrics we could finally label insignificant.

We did this by calculating correlations. A correlation ranges from 0 to 1, so 0 indicates on no correlation at all, while 1 signifies a clear correlation. A negative correlation indicates that as one variable increases the other decreases.

Time on site (0.34) and pages viewed (0.35) both had positive correlations with conversion rate, so our advice is to look at how to improve these metrics for your site to benefit from a higher conversion rate.

We delved into the device data and found mobile was the only device with positive traffic (0.29) and revenue (0.45) correlations to overall conversion rate. In fact, that 0.45 correlation rate between mobile revenue % and conversion rate was actually the strongest correlation rate across all factors we measured.

We infer that while the mobile conversion rate is depressingly low, a mobile user is still somebody with purchase intent who is likely to convert later on another device. The lesson we took from this is to make sure your website is mobile-optimised, particularly for ease of research and browsing content.

Finally, the time came to talk about bounce rate. Our Excel wizard had converted the data to an 'un-bounce rate' (1 minus the bounce rate) for consistency with positive time on site and pages viewed metrics. We gathered round the spreadsheet.

He revealed there is actually a negative correlation (-0.12) between un-bounce rate and conversion rate. This correlation signals that it couldn't be less influential on conversion rate, so for those unable to sleep at night for bounce anxiety, we're delighted to let you sleep easy.

Increasing your conversion rate may not be as complex a task as it seems.

Our KPI study shows that if you can increase pages viewed and time on site it will push up your conversion rate (content marketing for conversion optimisation anybody?).

We've also proved that mobile matters. Don't be discouraged if your mobile conversion rate pales against desktop's performance; keep driving mobile traffic and revenue (however minor) and you'll see the difference in your bottom line.

Read the full results broken down by industry level by downloading from the Wolfgang Digital e-commerce KPI Study.


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Seth's Blog : Your mood vs. your reality

Your mood vs. your reality

Who is happy?

Are rock stars, billionaires or recently-funded entrepreneurs happier? What about teenagers with clear skin?

Either what happens changes our mood... or our mood changes the way we narrate what happens.

This goes beyond happiness economics and the understanding that a certain baseline of health and success is needed for many people to be happy.

The question worth pondering is: are you seeking out the imperfect to justify your habit of being unhappy? Does something have to happen in the outside world for you to be happy inside?

Or, to put it differently, Is there a narrative of your reality that supports your mood?

Marketers spend billions of dollars trying to create a connection between what we see in the mirror and our happiness, implying that others are judging us in a way that ought to make us unhappy.

And industrialists have built an economic system in which compliance to a boss's instructions is seen as the only way to avoid the unhappiness that comes from being penalized at work. And so fear becomes a dominant paradigm of our profession.

Those things are unlikely to change any time soon, but the way we process them can change today. Our narrative, the laundry list we tick off, the things we highlight for ourselves and others... our narrative is completely up to us.

The simple shortcut: the way we respond to the things that we can't change can instantly transform our lives. "That's interesting," is a thousand times more productive than, "that's terrible." Even more powerful is our ability to stop experiencing failure before it even happens, because, of course, it usually doesn't.

Happiness, for most of us, is a choice. Reality is not. It seems, though, that choosing to be happy ends up changing the reality that we keep track of.

       

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luni, 26 ianuarie 2015

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis


Self-Driving "Fully Automated" Vehicles on German Autobahn; Supply Chain Math; Uber and Kahn Academy

Posted: 26 Jan 2015 07:32 PM PST

Don't worry taxi drivers, this is only a test: Self-driving cars to hit German Autobahn.
A section of the A9 Autobahn in Bavaria will be converted into a test route for self-driving cars, Transport Minister Alexander Dobrindt said on Monday.

"We will set up a test stretch on the A9 Autobahn" Dobrindt told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in an interview, adding that the first steps towards the "Digital Testing Ground Autobahn" project would be taken this year.

Under Dobrindt's plan, the upgraded road will offer infrastructure allowing the cars to communicate with the road and with other vehicles around them.

"Cars with assisted driving and later fully-automated cars will be able to drive there", Dobrindt said.

"The German car industry will also be able to be world leaders in digital cars".

He added that "German manufacturers won't rely on Google" - the current leader in the field – to produce their own self-driving vehicles.
Cars, Trucks, Taxis

People will not give up their cars. But who needs truck drivers? And who needs taxi drivers?

I suspect trucking will be the first industry to go mostly driverless.

The Last Mile

Many claim trucks cannot load or unload themselves. Others argue trucks cannot maneuver around cities. Let's assume those objections are true whether they are or not.

Here's the simple solution as I have proposed before: Nothing stops a trucking company from having distribution facilities right off an interstate near major cities where local drivers deliver the goods the last mile.

Why can't all but the last few miles be driverless even if a skilled driver is needed some step of the way for safety reasons?

Supply Chain Math

SupplyChain247 reports Fuel Dip "Savings" Offset By Surge in Costs for Drivers, Equipment, and Healthcare.
Shippers negotiating with carriers over 2015 freight rates ought not be swayed by the dramatic lowering of diesel fuel costs into believing their carriers' overall cost of doing business are lessening. In fact, they are rising.

A new report by the American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI), an arm of the American Trucking Associations, confirms what most trucking executives have been saying publicly for years: trucking costs are rising, with some components increasingly sharply.

"The cost of finding, recruiting, training and keeping drivers is steadily rising," Shevell says. "Equipment costs are through the roof. A new Class 8 truck costs about $135,000. Tires, insurance, terminal costs have all risen substantially. Plus, we're hit with rising health care costs for our people."

The ATRI study, "Analysis of the Operational Costs of Trucking," has been tracking truckers' costs annually since 2008. It is derived directly from carriers' financial and operational data and provides a vital benchmarking tool for both carriers and shippers.

It found the average marginal cost per mile was $1.68 per mile in 2013. That was a 3 percent increase over the previous year. That compared with $1.45 per mile in 2009, the start of the recession for the trucking industry.

The single biggest cost driver was drivers, according to ATRI. Average driver wage per mile was 44 cents in 2013, up from 42 cents the previous year. The average truck driver benefit cost rose a penny to 13 cents per mile, according to the study.

That was largely caused by driver pay and benefit increases necessary to attract and retain drivers in the current tight labor market for truck drivers, the study concluded.
All Commercial Driving Will Soon Be Local

Supply chain reported a shortage of 30,000 drivers.

In a few years, I suggest there is going to be little need for long-haul drivers at all. Nearly all commercial driving will be local.

What About Uber?

The taxi driving company Uber has been banned in many place. I started accumulating all sorts of links many months ago. I collected well over 20. Here are a few of them.


In spite of the fact Uber is banned nearly everywhere, the company survives!

Why?

Because Uber is what the masses want.

Rise of the Disruption Economy

Here's a dated article (from October 2012), but it's also timeless in its message: Rise of the Disruption Economy.
By now, we've gotten pretty used to the disruption that the rise of the social web has created in the media industry, where it has upended traditional business models and allowed creators of content to connect directly with their audience. But that same wave of socially-driven disruption is now moving through the rest of the economy too.

Entrenched industries and regulators are fighting hard.

Coursera, which offers online-education courses, was recently hit with a regulatory freeze in Minnesota, because the rules for education-related businesses in that state require that they jump through a series of hoops, including filing for registration (and paying fees). The state later modified its views on the service after an uproar about these restrictions, but it is unlikely to be the only roadblock the company runs into as it tries to expand.

Airbnb is in a similar position to the hotel industry: the application of social features — which allow owners of apartments, houses, trailers and even treehouses to easily find and connect with potential short-term renters — has changed the balance of power to the point where someone with a spare room has the ability to create a peer-powered business with virtually no overhead. That's clearly a threat to the hotel business, which is using whatever political and regulatory connections it can to put limits on the company, even as its grows larger:

Uber, the car-scheduling service, has been another prominent participant in this back-and-forth struggle with regulations and an entrenched industry — virtually everywhere the company has set up shop, from San Francisco to New York, it has run into a regulatory morass that is designed to protect the existing taxi and livery industry as much as it is intended to protect consumers.

The service has had problems in San Francisco as well, and is likely to run into similar issues anywhere there is an entrenched taxi industry that is trying to protect its historic market power and profit margins. In New York, for example, taxi "medallions" — which allow an owner to operate a cab business there — sell for $1 million each. That kind of industry isn't going to appreciate a disruptor like Uber, and in New York in particular the taxi business is a big political player.
Kahn Academy

Disruptors are universally despised by bureaucrats and existing businesses.

Sal Kahn at the Kahn Academy is another one of those disruptors. Public union educators do not like his model of free education.

Click on the preceding link to check out free math classes for any grade you want from "early math" to 3rd grade through 8th grade.

Geometry, trig, calculus, differential equations? Yep, you bet. Science has 41 study topics. The list  goes on and on.

Sal Kahn at TED



Please play at least the first couple minutes of the above video. Here's a link if it does not play: Sal Kahn at TED.

Progress Cannot Be Stopped

No doubt the Fed (central bankers) are deeply disturbed by all of this price-deflationary progress, as are bureaucrats in general.

  • Union teachers do not want to see online courses take hold or get accredited.
  • Taxi drivers fight Uber.
  • New York City wants to keep selling taxi medallions for $1,000,000.
  • Hotels fight Airbnb.

It's the biggest protection racket in the world. But progress cannot be stopped.

Taxi Drivers? Who Need Em?

Interestingly, I think even Uber's model will soon give way for the simple reason all commercial drivers will quickly be obsolete.

Uber's model, if it survives, may look something like this.

  • Customer pages a cab on his cell phone.
  • Cab locates customer via cell phone GPS.
  • Customer receives a code back and approximate wait time.
  • Cell phone sends signal to open door when cab arrives.

For hot locations such as airports where cabs are already waiting, a cab pulls up and the cab door opens right up with simple tap of a button. A conductor may be needed to oversee things.

Commercial Drivers? Why?

Communication dispatch with driverless vehicles will eventually handle most needs.

The above may take a few years longer than trucks, just as fiber or wireless to homes (the last mile) was once the telecommunication problem.

The Key

Disruptive technology is advancing so fast, that bureaucrats cannot keep up with it! And that's a good thing. The bad thing is they try.

Additional Reading on Driverless Vehicles


Additional Reading on Free Education


Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

Encircled

Posted: 26 Jan 2015 05:03 PM PST

Here's a new map of major military operations in Ukraine.

I say "new" but the caption indicates it is a day old. An estimated 7,000 to 8,000 Ukrainian troops are about to be encircled.

Major Military Operations - January 25



Colonel Cassad posted this interesting video of rebel positions over time



link if video does not play: DNR Advance Over Time

DNR stands for "Donetsk People's Republic". Each encirclement (cauldron) has eventually been obliterated.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

US Corporations Take Huge Losses on Venezuelan Currency

Posted: 26 Jan 2015 12:04 PM PST

When black markets in currencies develop, you can be 100% sure the official exchange rate is overinflated.

In Venezuela, the fixed rate of exchange is 6.3 bolivars to the dollar, the floating rate of exchange is 50 bolivars to the dollar, and the black market rate is 184 bolivars to the dollar. The latter is what the currency is really worth at the moment.

From 6.3 to 184 is a loss of 96.6%

Even at the floating rate of 50 bolivars to the dollar, Venezuela's currency woes an increasing threat to U.S. corporate profits.

  • Ford Motor Co on Friday said it was taking a pre-tax charge of $800 million for its Venezuela business. It blamed Venezuelan exchange control regulations that have restricted the ability of its operations in the country to pay dividends and obligations in U.S. dollars. Ford also said that it was unable to maintain normal production in Venezuela with the availability of vehicle parts constrained.
  •  
  • On Friday, diaper and tissue maker Kimberly-Clark Corp said it took a fourth-quarter charge of $462 million for its Venezuelan business.
  • At the end of the third quarter, for example, American Airlines Group Inc, had $721 million held in the Venezuelan currency, at a weighted average exchange rate of 6.41 bolivars to the dollar. Theoretically, if the airline tried to repatriate all of that money into dollars at the current black market rate of 184 bolivars per U.S. dollar as quoted by the website dolartoday.com, it would only receive about $25 million.
  •  
  • Overall, foreign companies have an estimated $16 billion in outstanding dividends listed on their balance sheets that they have not been able to return to headquarters, according to Caracas-based research firm Ecoanalitica.
  •  

Dolar Today Quote

Here's the quote from Dolar Today.



Clorox did the smart thing and exited Venezuela entirely. I can see why Ford would not want to abandon its plant (but it's likely to be nationalized anyway).

Why American Airlines and Kimberly-Clark stick around is a mystery.

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com

Dutch Central Bank President Cites "Financial Bubbles", Voices Strong Opposition to QE in TV Interview; Death by 1,000 Pin Pricks

Posted: 26 Jan 2015 10:17 AM PST

Mario Draghi has strong opposition to his QE program from two sources: German central bank president Jens Weidmann and Dutch central Bank president Klaas Knot.

In a television interview on Sunday, Dutch Central Bank Head Says He Doesn't Support ECB Bond Purchases.

Mr. Knot, who sits on the ECB's Governing Council, said in an interview on Dutch television that he wasn't convinced of the "necessity and effectiveness" of the program, known as quantitative easing. "Even if you believe it worked [in the U.S.], you cannot project its alleged success onto the eurozone," he said on the talk show "Buitenhof."

Email from Bruno de Haas

I got the above story from Bruno de Haas, head of policy & research at a medium-sized Dutch pension fund and author of a book arguing that the Netherlands should leave the euro.

De Hass Writes ...
Hi Mish,

This Sunday morning the president of the Dutch central bank, Klaas Knot, was interviewed on Dutch television. In my view he made some remarkable comments on the main topic, namely the ECB's decision to embark on QE.

Knot was very candid. He explained that he had not supported the decision because he thinks it is neither necessary nor effective. He doesn't think it is necessary because there is no deflation in the eurozone once you strip out the effects of the lower oil price.

With regard to effectiveness, he doesn't expect that buying sovereign bonds from banks will increase credit by banks. He does expect that "using the printing press" (a phrase he literally used) will result in higher stock prices and more expensive real estate, further inflating what he called a "bubble on financial markets".

According to Knot asset prices already are far detached from the real economy, and although this situation may last a while, there will be a moment when the two will converge again.

In contrast to the US, where a wealth effect could be expected from inflating asset prices, Knot doesn't find a positive wealth effect likely in the eurozone. The main reason is that most people have their assets in pension funds and insurers, and their solvency ratio decline because the negative impact of a lower interest rate on the mark-to-market value of their liabilities overshadows any gains in the solvency ratio from higher asset prices. This is indeed the case in the Netherlands where the two largest pension funds will have a funding gap at the end of January because of the low yield curve.

The only way that QE might support growth in the eurozone, Knot said, is through a devaluation of the euro, but he expects that to be a temporary effect. With respect to the position of Bundesbank-president Weidman he made it clear that they were in agreement on this. However, not all northern eurozone central bank president had voted against QE, Knot said. The Finnish president voted in favour.

I hope you find this of interest.

Bruno de Haas
Death by 1,000 Pin Pricks

I could not find much in English by de Haas. However, I did find a translation of a news article about him worthy of note.

Please consider "The Euro is Death by a Thousand Pinpricks"
Economist Bruno Haas pulls no punches in a Dutch financial newspaper article. According to Haas, the euro is a speeding train that runs straight into the abyss.

Haas knows whereof he speaks. He was involved in the drafting of the Maastricht Treaty and the department that oversees financial stability for the Dutch Ministry of Finance.

According to Haas, the EU's desperate attempts to pump more money into the rescue of the euro will fail. Moreover, these attempts will be at the expense of both the southern and northern European countries.

Naive Dream

The idea of ​​one large currency union among diverse economies, according to De Haas is an increasingly a naive dream. To break out of the downward spiral in the eurozone, De Haas believes the project needs to be shut down.

"Continuation of the euro project is costing us billions. It's death at the hands of a thousand pinpricks," said the economist.
Rational Arguments

Add Dutch central Bank president Klaas Knot to the list of those saying the right things for the right reasons.

Prince Michael: Prince Michael of Liechtenstein Warns "QE a Sign of Helplessness, Will Not Reach Economy"; Prince Michael vs. Martin Wolf

Mervyn King: More QE will not help the world.

Steen Jakobsen: "Lower Interest Rates May Reduce Consumption". Michael Pettis at China Financial Markets and Lacy Hunt at Hoisington Management both agreed.

Grand Experiment Failure

I wrote about Steen's theory in Grand Experiment Failure; Bankers Prefer Bubbles; Europe is not USA; Final Epitaph, a rebuttal to Bloomberg author Barry Ritholtz, also in favor of massive QE.

Note that the rationale of Dutch central Bank president Klaas Knot is nearly the same as that of Steen Jakobsen and Michael Pettis.

The only thing QE can possibly do is create bigger bubbles. When they crash, what then?

Mike "Mish" Shedlock
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com