Rock Your SEO with Structured Social Sharing - #MozCon Presentation |
| Rock Your SEO with Structured Social Sharing - #MozCon Presentation Posted: 18 Sep 2012 07:59 PM PDT Posted by Dana Lookadoo During my MozCon 2012 talk, attendees learned about the Structured Social Sharing Formula (SSSF) - 10 steps to optimize and track social share snippets on Facebook, Google Plus, and Twitter. The formula includes use of microdata and best practices for controlling the snippet that displays on Facebook and Google+ as well as how to automatically tag URLs with campaign variables for analytics. PRO TIP: This structured markup makes a difference for SEO! I'm sharing the process, my MozCon presentation, and a free worksheet with you below. Oh! La! La! You can also view my Whiteboard Friday on SSSF where I give a bird's-eye view of through the process. Why are social snippets important?You put your heart and soul into creating a piece of great content or a killer blog post. It looks good, reads well, is attractive, and maybe even authoritative. You're hoping for links and social engagement. Then you share it online... OUCH! The wrong image displays, or worse, maybe no image displays. Your share doesn't look as good as you hoped and fizzles. If you don't optimize your page with the right code, your dreams of going viral may flop. That killer content most likely won't get as many reshares, likes, or retweets as you thought it would. Example: Great content without structured markup Rand Fishkin put together an absolutely stellar Whiteboard Friday: 8 Rules for Exceptional Slide Presentations The video rocked! He included a SlideShare presentation along with transcripts. There were some fantastic images in the presntation and nice visuals in Rand's video. However, when shared on Facebook and Google+, the share snippet image didn't work in both cases: Facebook grabbed Rand's avatar for the post image correctly, but Google+ found no image on the page large enough to pull. Publishers beware: Most CMS are not set up to allow an editor to control the <head> where the structured markup to control a share snippet needs to be placed. (There are a couple references below for WordPress users.) Amazingly, major news publishers such as the Reuters and the LA Times don't even have it right. Often, a sponsor's ad on the page is the default image that displays. OOPS! Anatomy of a Share SnippetLet's review the elements of a share snippet before we get to the SSSF and steps. Every share snippet contains, at least, the following elements: The code on your page controls how the share snippet displays:
When you don't use microdata to specify what to display for these elements, Facebook and Google+ determine it for you. You can make your social snippets look good and know if your social media engagement is working for you by implementing the steps below! Formula for Optimized Social EngagementHere's the all-in-one Structured Social Sharing Formula to optimize your social engagement: Five of the 10 steps include placing additional <meta> in the <head> of each Web page using Open Graph Protocol (OG). PRO TIP: 10 Steps With Microdata & AnalyticsFour of the five Open Graph tags are required, marked with an asterisk (*) below. Let's break each step down:
The last step after documenting everything in the worksheet is to cut and paste into each social network. OK, we're almost done... Analytics - URL TaggingLet's delve a little into tagging those URLs. As mentioned, you can quickly and automatically create UTM variables to track the effectiveness of each social share, including Twitter. The worksheet does it for you through its automatic URL builder to tag URLs with UTM campaign variables. The required fields and a sample tagged URL are shown below: Why is tagging important? You won’t get full social referral data in Google Analytics when you shared a post without campaign variables.
Tag every URL you share for maximum "data" to know if and how each social media share is sending you traffic. PRO TIP: You can add UTM variables via AddThis and ShareThis. But you cannot vary your campaigns for each post. Do make it easy to share by using these and other sharing plugins, but for your personal/company sharing, tag and share them manually. Your analytics gurus will be happy for the data. Additional Social Sharing Tips & ResourcesBelow are a few more tips to enhance your social sharing (and SEO) experience: 1. Enhanced Google Site Search A worthy by-product of the "Structured Social Sharing Formula" is that it enhances results for Google's Search Appliance for in-site search results. So if your site uses Google's Site Search, you can control and add images to those search results using the same og:image code. The images will be scaled to a smaller size to fit your own personal in-site SERPs. 2. WordPress There are a couple WordPress plug-ins that have received good ratings for accessing the <head> to enable you to insert OG code. Check out the following:
3. Structured Social Sharing - Rock Your SEO with Structured Social Sharing from Yo! Yo! SEO
This is the full presentation as given at MozCon 2012. 4. Best Practices for Structured Social Sharing on WebmasterRadio.FM I joined Ross Dunn and John Carcutt, co-hosts of SEO 101 Podcast, on WebmasterRadio.FM. While Ross and I were in Seattle for MozCon, we joined John to discuss best practices for optimizing social share snippets and how to track efforts. Listen to the podcast.
I want to give a personal thanks to the SEOmoz team who put together such a fantastic event! Thank you for allowing 4 community speakers take 10-15 minutes on stage. To the readers, please do share how you are controlling your social shares and any additional tips. I look forward to your ideas! Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read! |
| Content Marketing - Think Campaigns Not Just Links, Your Guide to TOFU Posted: 18 Sep 2012 02:32 AM PDT Posted by searchbrat This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc. Content Marketing is without doubt the most popular member of buzzword bingo at the moment. With updates like Panda and Penguin (easily track all this with SEOMoz's Algorithm Tracker) and the devaluation of low quality links, the role of content in SEO has never been greater. Many of the large SEO agencies are doubling down on their efforts to sell themselves as content strategists, not just SEO consultants, and where the big agencies go, usually everyone else follows. With the next Google Penguin update (dependent on when this post is published, it may have already been released) touted to be "jarring and jolting" for a lot of webmasters, we can expect content marketing's shine to get even greater. Changing from "build" to "attract"From an SEO viewpoint, the interest in great content is to attract links, where as a lot of what Google is looking to eliminate are examples of where content is used to build links: articles, spun articles spammed across thousands of directories, blog posts spun across networks, networks that dragged in content form places like Youtube, Yahoo Answers and article directories to create mashup posts, blog comments, spun blog comments using scrapebox so you can hit thousands of sites at a time, web2.0 link wheels made from spun content, reclaiming tumblr blogs with PR and adding posts with links to your site, buying up dropped domains and using archive.org to re-add the previous content so you can link to your site, finding squidoo len's to comment on, the list could go on and on and on. It's a lot easier to build links with subpar content, as you don't expect anyone to read it. What's being sold as "Content Marketing" - is truly great content that people want to share and link to = hey presto ... you're #Number1inGoogleB*tches. The problem with a lot of SEO's evolution into "Content Marketing" is they are really just thinking about links/shares - it's a blackbox approach, with content going in and links and social shares coming out: There is more to Content than LinksThe reality is true content marketing isn't just about links and shares. In the words of copyblogger: "Content Marketing means creating and sharing valuable free content to attract and convert prospects into customers, and customers into repeat buyers. The type of content you share is closely related to what you sell; in other words, you’re educating people so that they know, like, and trust you enough to do business with you.” CopyBlogger Content Marketing is so much more than getting links. It's the glue that holds your funnel together. It's the reason a prospect visits your site, it's the reason they choose to move further down the purchase path, buy a product and return to your site time and again. Real content marketing is complex; it's not just building a great infographic and notifying some bloggers about it. If you are purchasing a "Content Marketing" strategy from an SEO agency where the sole objective is to acquire links - you are going to waste money in the long run. Sure links can be a metric, but real content marketing is expensive, as a link building strategy - it's very difficult to make a decent return on. If you are investing in content marketing, why not put together campaigns that drive goals across your funnel and have links and shares as a metric, but not the sole objective. Let's start with TOFU (Top of Funnel) content marketing campaigns .... Top of Funnel - Joining the DotsYour approach to content marketing will differ slightly dependent on where the campaign resides within the funnel. For example, the following is a snapshot of what may be involved in a TOFU (Top of Funnel) campaign. # ObjectiveAnything successful in life starts with a clear and concise objective/goal. For example, a goal could be structured as: Core Objective: Our content campaign is aimed at people who love to camp and are looking for the latest pair of hiking boots from brand X. We want to attract X amount of new visits, rank for keyword “X” on first page of Google, attract 15 links from PR2+ sites and drive X% of these new visits into our product page (which converts at X%) - of course that X% can be improved upon by MOFU (Mid of Funnel Campaigns) via A/B Testing etc Secondary Goal: We want X amount of these new visits to turn into Facebook Fans and X to turn into new Twitter Followers The more specific you can be about the goal of your content campaign the better. When asked to explain what you are doing to a VP of marketing, having a well-structured campaign mapped against core business goals will get you a far bigger budget than "I'm trying to get links". Your Twitter Highlight: Your Content Marketing Strategy Should be aligned to Business Goals I have purposely left out revenue in the above goal as I am splitting campaigns into Top of Funnel and Mid of Funnel to show the importance of content throughout the purchase path. If you're running a content campaign across the funnel - you should have revenue as a metric. You will need to quantify your own metrics to establish the ROI on your campaign e.g. how do you value Cost Per Link. 1. Persona Development Persona development is a crucial part of any successful content marketing strategy. There are a number of ways to develop personas:
Something that’s really important to keep in mind is your content campaign may touch multiple personas. For example, in the objectives mapped out above, the persona we are targeting for new visits isn’t necessary the same persona who is going to link to you. Unlike online marketing, where most people have blogs, it’s highly likely in other industries the people who you can get links from and potential customers are not the same person. Your Twitter Highlight: If Links are your core goal; you need to target the personas who actually have the power to link to you. 2. Strategy Once you have personas in place, you can build out your content campaign framework. This should be broken into what I call The VP Strategy and The Actual Strategy. But What's my VP Strategy? This is for that moment in a meeting when you are asked, "Hey what are you spending my 100k on?" They don’t need your life story, just an overview that makes sense. We are building an interactive map of the globe where users can click around and learn about the best camping destinations in the world + what camp gear they should bring for each hike. We are doing 10 posts on our own blog to promote it. We are doing an outreach program with 20 experts on outdoor pursuits; these experts helped us develop the content for the map. We are doing PR with 10 online camping magazines about our Facebook competition where you can win a holiday to one of the destinations on the map. The clues to this are being given away on our Twitter feed; you have to follow to get them, as they are time sensitive We are also running paid campaign via remarketing, content network and third-party placements to support our initial launch The above may not be great, but you get the point :) The Actual Strategy is your project plan. I usually start everything with a flow diagram (creately is awesome for this) – I am a visual thinker so this helps a lot - how you plan content could be totally different. But you need to plan .... : Your Twitter Highlight: Divide your content campaign into a VP Strategy and Actual Strategy 3. Resources Most content campaigns will fail because they have no clear objective and they haven’t considered what resources they require (often not having the correct resources to implement the campaign). You need to define:
For our campaign we probably need:
Resources should be part of your project plan doc. Your Twitter Highlight: Your Content Marketing will #fail if you don't have the right resources 4. Content Types What content types will you be using in your campaign:
Your Twitter Highlight: Map out every asset your content campaign will include over the whole lifecycle of the project 5. Mediums What mediums are going to be used to promote your content? For our example we are going to use:
Your Twitter Highlight: Even the most remarkable Content will #fail without a solid promotion plan 6. Metrics Doing content for "Brand Awareness" or "Thought Leadership" is easy, as most companies do not put anything measurable against these goals. Putting metrics against what you are doing and reporting to senior execs is a lot more difficult. You will get asked what did I get in return for my spend? Having an answer to this will put on you a par with every other exec (mostly in Sales), who can easily answer that question. a. Goals Defining goals for content marketing campaigns is not easy, just as defining goals for whitehat link building campaigns is near impossible (unless you are just doing guest posting). How do you put a number against how many links a piece of content will deliver naturally? But it's critical you have specific goals for any campaign you put live. These will be defined in your objectives:
Most TOFU (Top of Funnel) campaigns core goal is not Sales(B2C)/Qualified Leads(B2B), but thinking in terms of Macro and Micro conversions will help put dollar/euro values against each goal. For example, you can get the number of sales generated by your product page (either when it's the landing page or when it's some part of the journey), using this you can put a dollar/euro metric against each visit generated to that product page as part of this campaign. It's then up to your MOFU campaign to split test the hell out of the page and turn these into sales. b. ROI ROI isn't going to be a straightforward calculation. How valuable is each new visit? (Google Analytics Mutli Funnels help a lot). How valuable is your improved visibility on Google? How valuable are visits to your product page? How valuable are your Facebook Fans/Twitter followers? In most cases, it might not be possible to answer all these questions, but if you want executive buy in for large content campaigns - have some type of ROI forecast you can give them. c. Links/Shares Yes, links and shares are good metrics to have. Trying to put a monetary value against these are a lot more difficult. You are better of measuring what links and shares should bring e.g. new visits from both google and social media. Your Twitter Highlight: Content Marketing Campaign without metrics is like p*ssing in the dark. Spraying everywhere and just maybe hitting the target So you are now thinking Top of Funnel Content Marketing Campaigns !! and well on the way to being a ...... #TOFUContentMarketingNinjaBut what about the Mid of Funnel (MOFU) Campaigns ... that's going to need a whole other post !! Hope you can hold on for part two !! Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read! |
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