The Zand Hotel is a giant sand castle in the Netherlands constructed by event organizers for Global PowWow. The hotel took four weeks to build and has 60 rooms that are open for business.
The Rock is one of the most popular actors in the world right now but he couldn't have done it without his cousin Tanoai Reed. Tanoai works as a double for The Rock in his feature films. Do you see the resemblance?
The Moz Blog is built to help you all become better marketers. We couldn't possibly succeed in that goal if we didn't have a good sense for who you are and what you'd like to (and need to) see, so we did what anyone would do to get that sense: ask.
This summer, we released a survey to ask you all about yourselves, your work, and your thoughts about the Moz Blog. This is the second time we've done this in the last several years, which makes these results all the more exciting—now we have trending data.
The results from the survey are below, with a list of key takeaways at the end of the post (feel free to scroll for the tl;dr). We've included stats, where available, from the 2013 survey as well, giving the data a historical benchmark.
We'll use what we learned to keep making the Moz Blog more relevant, more actionable, and more valuable for you all, and we'd like to extend our sincerest thanks to the more than 750 of you who responded.
Let's get down to it!
What is your job title?
Back in 2013, as as we expanded our products to emphasize areas of marketing outside of just SEO, we all thought our community would expand along with them. When we released this survey in December of that year, more than six months after rebranding from SEOmoz and a few months after we rolled out our new suite of software, still very little had changed.
Now, nearly two years later, after countless blog posts about content marketing, local search marketing, social media, branding, and more, we're only just beginning to see a shift.
I'm normally not a huge fan of word clouds, but they're fairly effective in illustrating things like this. Here's a cloud made from all of your job titles in this year's survey:
And here's the cloud from the 2013 survey, nearly two years ago:
It's remarkable how similar the two are, but we can begin to see the change.
Our audience is clearly predominantly marketing managers with a heavy emphasis on SEO. The word SEO is smaller in this year's cloud, though, and "digital" and "content" are larger. It definitely looks as though we're seeing more content marketers among our audience, and the numbers back that up.
In a numerical breakdown of the words we see most often (and the total number of responses in each survey was nearly identical), "seo" drops from 233 to 194, and "content" jumps from 34 to 51. Here are the rest of the most common words seen, along with the number of times they occurred in each year's survey:
Word
2015 survey
2013 survey
seo
194
233
marketing
235
169
manager
137
154
specialist
84
55
director
61
52
analyst
38
44
online
35
43
consultant
24
42
strategist
44
37
content
51
34
ceo
15
31
search
21
30
marketer
19
26
owner
20
24
social
15
9
chief
3
3
What percentage of your day-to-day work involves SEO?
The idea that our audience is finally broadening is supported by another statistic: the amount of SEO that our readers do in their day-to-day work. Whereas the 2013 survey skewed a bit more toward the high end of the scale, there's a significant spike in responses between 0-10% this year. The median value reported dropped from 60% to 50%.
On a scale of 1-5, how advanced would you say your knowledge of SEO is?
The plot thickens, though, when we turn to actual SEO ability. We asked everyone to self-report their knowledge of SEO, on a scale from 1 ("I'm a beginner") to 5 ("I'm an industry expert"), and the similarity to the 2013 survey is staggering:
There are fewer people reporting themselves as industry experts, but not many. So, people have the same skill level, but SEO is less a part of their day-to-day work. To me, that implies their skill sets are growing, and the industry is simply demanding a broader gamut of work from them. They're becoming more and more T-shaped.
Do you work in-house, or at an agency/consultancy?
One note before we dive into this one: There should have been an additional option on the survey for independent freelancers. Without that option, we assume (since those folks do some of their own work and some work for clients) that most of them fell into the "both" category below, but we can't really be sure.
With that grain of salt in mind, there are clearly more in-house marketers than agency/consulting marketers in our audience:
At the same time, nearly half of our readers have some work for external clients. It's good to know that the set of skills unique to that type of work are relevant on our blog.
What are some of the biggest challenges you face in your work today?
As it was in 2013, this is my favorite question we asked. It was open-ended, and thus was such an easy question for respondents to skip (not many people usually want to type their own answers in a survey), but 621 people responded out of just over 750 total times the survey was taken. There were some easily visible recurring answers, and the top 20 are as follows:
Challenge
# of Mentions
Constant changes in the industry/technology
73
Lack of knowledge and unrealistic expectations of colleagues/clients/bosses
65
Convincing clients of value of the work
60
Lack of time
53
Content creation/curation
35
Link building
33
Team/resource constraints
33
Analytics
30
Proving ROI
28
Overwhelmed by too much content, too many tools
26
Budget constraints
23
Finding and promoting to the right audience
22
Communication/trust issues, politics
18
Rankings
17
CRO
14
Juggling different kinds of work/clients
14
Diversifying skill sets and proritizing channels
14
Complexity of work
14
Integration of siloed marketing teams
12
Reporting
12
Of note, half as many people noted content marketing as a great challenge this year as noted it in 2013. If that's any indication, we're getting better at it, or at least are better able to wrap our heads around it than we were before.
Above all, though, the top issues are largely the same: The industry is constantly changing, and it's incredibly difficult to find time to stay abreast of those changes. There's too much shoddy content to sift through (likely thanks to the rise of content marketing), and clients and bosses still largely don't understand the value in our work, as it's quite difficult to prove the ROI of what we do.
How often do you read posts on the Moz Blog?
We asked readers how often they read the Moz Blog (which has a new post published nearly every weekday), and there's definitely a difference from 2013:
In all likelihood, this is largely due to the broader gamut of topics we include in our editorial calendar these days. We now have content marketers in our audience who aren't always interested in advanced SEO, and technical SEO veterans who aren't interested in brand strategy. For that reason, more people are reading regularly, but fewer are reading every day. This also likely has something to do with the lack of time we noticed in the question above.
On which type(s) of devices do you prefer to read blog posts?
This was surprising in 2013, but the numbers were even more extreme this time around:
A whopping 71% of blog readers prefer to read posts on a desktop or laptop machine, up from 68% a couple of years ago. Just about all the numbers are the same here; it seems as if a group of folks who switched between laptops and tablets decided they'd rather stick to full machines.
Of note here is a theory we had last year that Moz Blog readers decided they preferred desktops because our blog wasn't mobile-friendly. We had, in effect, trained them to prefer reading on full screens, because it was just plain difficult to read on mobile devices. By the time this year's survey was sent out, though, the blog had been mobile-friendly for more than two months. There's always the chance that habits take more than two months to break, but if you ask me, that's evidence that our readers really do prefer to read posts on a laptop or desktop.
What percentage of the posts on the Moz Blog would you say are relevant to you and your work?
While there's not much change from the 2013 numbers, we're still quite happy to see that the majority of readers say that the majority of posts are relevant to their work. There's a slightly greater concentration of posts in the 11-40% range than there was before, which we can expect to go along with a broadening of post topics. Interesting to also see an increase in responses in the 91-100% range—I'd guess an increase in marketing generalists, and fewer folks with narrower sets of skills, leads to that change. (I'd love to hear any other theories in the comments!)
Do you feel the Moz Blog posts are generally too basic, too advanced, or about right?
One thing we regularly wonder is whether the posts we're publishing are too basic to actually be valuable, or if they sail right over the heads of our readers. As it turns out, it's pretty well balanced:
The inner circle in the donut chart above is data from 2013. The numbers from this year (the outer circle) are nearly identical, moving a few (statistically insignificant) responses from "Too basic" to "Just right."
We also asked readers who didn't say posts were "just right" to quantify the extreme to which they thought the posts were either too basic or too advanced:
This is interesting—people who see posts as too advanced feel more strongly about that response than the people who see posts as too basic. That implies we have some true beginners among our readers who would benefit from coverage of the basics in easy-to-digest formats.
In general, what do you think about the length of Moz Blog posts?
This is a question we didn't ask last time. We wanted to get a sense for whether readers had any strong feelings about the length of posts. Our suspicion was pretty well confirmed:
More than 1/5 of responses indicated our posts are too long, a much greater percentage than we'd like to see. This is really good feedback; we do tend to err on the comprehensive side, but could certainly put more effort into removing extraneous text from posts.
What, if anything, would you like to see different about the Moz Blog?
We also asked an open-ended question about whatever you all would like to see different about the Moz Blog. Reading through the responses was one of the most heartening things I've done in my time as the manager of the Moz Blog—a heartfelt thank-you to everyone who offered words of encouragement and ideas for how we can make this blog even better.
Here were some of the most common themes:
Request
# of responses
More step-by-step / how-to guides
37
More WBF / video-based content
27
More case studies
22
Too wordy/verbose; more to-the-point
18
Shorter posts
18
More posts
11
More Rand, Dr. Pete, Cyrus
11
More international content & translations
11
More accessible for beginners
9
More explicit takeaways for each post
8
More interactive elements
8
Better categorization / IA
7
More technical posts
7
More posts from respected influencers
6
More news / timely analysis
6
This was a telling question when we read through the responses in 2013, and not a lot has changed:
Which of the following topics would you like to learn more about?
Search engine trends, Mobile SEO, and CRO are all new categories we added this year. Other than that, the top three remain the same—advanced SEO, content marketing, and data analysis. Social media was bumped down a few spots, and branding was bumped down a few more spots. Design/UX was bumped up significantly, and one of the biggest gainers was basic SEO—something that, until recent years, we didn't see a lot of demand for on our blog.
More than anything, it's pretty clear that SEO and content marketing are still the hottest topics, and there's far more demand for advanced SEO than there is for basic SEO. That said, we're definitely seeing demand for a wide spectrum.
Which of the following types of posts would you most like to see on the Moz Blog?
We added a few options to this question this year to try and get a better sense for your preferences. Two of the strongest categories weren't chosen quite as often, causing a general flattening of the graph, but it's still quite easy to get a feel for what you all like to see by checking out the results:
A word we often use to describe great posts is "actionable." If readers can finish the post and immediately have a new tool or tactic at their disposal that they're excited to use, we've done our jobs well. It's easy to see that reflected in the above results. Making people think is good. Getting them to put their own work in new contexts is great. But the posts that really win are those that show instead of telling, offering readers a quick lesson that helps immediately improve their work.
Now we go to work.
This is a wealth of data that can help us continue to improve the Moz Blog, and the next step is to put it all into action. Here's a good start:
Primary takeaways
The greatest challenges faced by our audience haven't changed much in two years. Keeping up with a constantly changing industry. Convincing other people (clients, bosses, etc.) that channels like SEO and content marketing -- while long-term investments with fuzzy ROI -- are worthwhile investments. You all are constantly battling to have work in the first place, let alone actually get that work done, and there isn't enough time to get all that done. Our job now is to take those challenges (and the rest that you all named above) and find industry experts who can help you through them.
The traditional blog format, where all posts are published to a single channel to the same audience, is no longer cutting it. Our range of topics is broad enough and our audience diverse enough that we need to find better ways to deliver our content to readers, helping them filter out what they don't need and more quickly hone in on what they do.
The vast (vast) majority of our readers still prefer to read blog posts on desktops and laptops, so while we're happy the Moz Blog is finally responsive, we won't shy away from developing features because they primarily benefit desktop/laptop users.
We have a growing contingent of beginners in our audience. While the majority of readers are more experienced and advanced, we should focus on making all of our posts as accessible as possible, reducing unnecessary jargon and linking to additional resources. Nobody should feel like a post goes straight over their heads, or like they're not experienced enough to glean value from it.
Two full years after the rebrand from SEOmoz, our audience is shifting ever so slightly toward a broader skill set than its SEO roots. It is continuing to become more T-shaped, as even the experts among us are finding less of their day-to-day work to do with SEO. Our posts (while never forgetting those roots) should continue to reflect that diversification.
Through their self-identification as agency employees or consultants as well as their predominant challenge in convincing clients their work is worth time and money, it's clear that agency professionals with client-based work make up a large portion of our audience. We haven't posted much to specifically help this group, and will likely make more of an effort along those lines.
There is a general call for shorter posts, but it's not simply shorter: It's more concise. More compendious. We'll work on continuing to hone our editorial rigor to ensure we're cutting verbose language and off-topic rambling. We certainly don't want to make you all read things you don't need to.
With that concision in mind, we'll address the clear demand for more case studies and more actionable how-tos and step-by-step guides.
All of that, combined with your stated preferences for topics and styles, gives us a great place to start making improvements.
Thanks again to everyone who sent us their thoughts; we couldn't do what we do without you. =)
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The most important part of a race car is the tires. Good tires will always beat bad ones.
The most important part of a cup of coffee is the beans. The grinder, the machine, the barista pale in comparison to the quality of what you start with.
And the most important parts of an organization are the people you begin with. Not the systems or the policies or even the real estate. Great people make everything easier.
And yet...
And yet we spend money on 4 wheel drive instead of snow tires.
And yet we upgrade our coffee maker instead of buying from a local roaster (or roasting our own).
And mostly, we run classified ads to find the cheapest common denominator employee and spend all our time building systems to protect our customers from people who don't care...
Syriza party leader Alexis Tsipras who resigned in the wake of his cave-in to the troika is back in office following Sunday's snap elections.
The election was supposed to be extremely close, but it wasn't.
Greek polls are notoriously unreliable. Tsipras won his first election by a huge vote even though polls were close. On Sunday the result was the same.
Pollsters had New Democracy running neck-and-neck but in a low turnout Syriza received 35.5 per cent of the vote to 28 percent for New Democracy.
Greek election rules give a huge block of parliament to the plurality vote, so in parliament the score is 145-75 out of a total of 300.
145 is short of a majority, but close enough so Tsipras can form a coalition with the Independent Greeks party (Anel), just as Syriza did after the last election.
Syria Wins Again
145 + 10 = 5 seat majority.
Whether the coalition proves stable is anyone's guess.
The Financial Times provided the above chart (purple highlights mine) and this commentary.
Alexis Tsipras's radical left Syriza party secured a clear victory in Sunday's Greek general election, suggesting his gamble on snap elections after striking a deal on a new €86bn bailout had paid off.
With 90 per cent of the votes counted, Syriza was on 35.5 per cent of the vote, giving it 145 seats in the 300 member parliament, well ahead of centre-right New Democracy on 28 per cent and 75 seats.
Mr Tsipras's win cements his place as the pre-eminent figure in Europe's far-left anti-austerity movement and is likely to galvanise sympathisers including Spain's Podemos and Jeremy Corbyn, the hard-left leader of Britain's Labour party.
Mr Tsipras insisted Syriza would govern for a full four-year term, even though his revived coalition with the small nationalist Independent Greeks party (Anel), announced on Sunday night, looks far from stable with only a six-seat majority in parliament.
But he warned there would be no easy exit from the country's six-year recession. His first task as re-elected prime minister will be to implement more tough austerity measures demanded by creditors in return for a new €86bn rescue package.
Early results put turnout at only 55 per cent, suggesting many young leftwing voters angered by Mr Tsipras's decision to capitulate to Greece's creditors and accept more harsh austerity measures in return for a new bailout had declined to take part, as experts had predicted.
Radical Left?
The above comments by the Financial Times in regards to Tsipras being the "pre-eminent figure in Europe's far-left anti-austerity movement" should have every one laughing or gagging. Take your pick.
Tsipras first ran on a radical left platform, but this time his platform was virtually indistinguishable from that of "center right" New Democracy.
I have no sympathy for radical leftists (or leftists of any kind actually, but I also have no sympathy for blatant liars and hypocrites.
Rule Number One
The number one rule for politicians is "Say or even do anything necessary to stay in office".
With that comment, I congratulate Tsipras for pulling it off, while noting that his problems have really just begun. Good luck with that five-seat majority Alexis, you will need it.
In an effort to convince the market that rate hikes are coming, an amusing parade of Fed parrots squawked in full force over the weekend, within an hour or so of each other.
"The case for policy normalization is quite strong, since Committee objectives have essentially been met," Bullard said in slides prepared for a speech in Nashville, Tennessee. "I argued against the decision at the FOMC meeting."
Bullard is not a voting member of the policy-setting Federal Open Market Committee in 2015, but will vote in 2016.
"Such exceptionally low real interest rates are unlikely to be appropriate for an economy with persistently strong consumption growth and tightening labor markets," Lacker said in a statement.
He was the lone dissenter among the 10 Fed officials who voted at the meeting. Lacker said the Fed's target should rise by a quarter point.
Lacker has a history of dissent in Fed policy meetings. In 2012, he voted against eight straight policy decisions by the central bank. At the time he was urging the Fed to wind down asset purchases that were aimed at stimulating the economy.
An interest rate hike will likely be appropriate this year given the U.S. Federal Reserve's decision last week to stand pat was a "close call," a top Fed policymaker said on Saturday.
John Williams, a centrist and president of the San Francisco Fed, said the arguments for and against beginning to tighten U.S. monetary policy are about balanced now that the economy is on solid footing, giving him confidence in continued economic and labor market growth.
Balancing Act
If the arguments for and against the hike are "balanced" and the case for a hike "quite strong" then why was the vote 9-1?
By the way, wasn't the case even stronger a year ago? If not, why?
The answer to that is the Fed had a script that said "hike in 2015".
These economic illiterates not only ignore obvious asset bubbles, they actually believe a quarter of a point hike can sink the real economy. They also did not want to surprise the market with early hikes.
Why All the Squawking?
The Fed parrots are out in force, loudly squawking the same tune, because Yellen really wants to hike, provided of course the market goes along. Lately however, the market has had other ideas.
The market did not go along with a hike in September so that forced Yellen to come up with a basket of excuses for not hiking. In response, the market has moved the hike odds to 2016, but the parrots don't like that.
Neil Bouhan at BMO Capital Markets expected the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates this week. Now he's questioning all his views on the central bank.
He's not the only one. Strategists and traders across Wall Street are re-examining their approach to predicting the Fed's moves after officials kept their target near zero Thursday and released an unexpectedly dovish policy statement. Fed Chair Janet Yellen cited a range of concerns -- from slowing growth in China to global market volatility -- to explain the decision to hold the benchmark overnight rate at historic lows.
The tone of her comments in a press conference after the announcement surprised the bond market, fueling the biggest rally in two-year Treasuries since March 2009, when the Fed said it was expanding its bond-buying program. It also left many prognosticators struggling to pinpoint how to trade in the lead-up to the next policy meeting less than six weeks away.
"There is really no way to look at this market if you can't handicap Fed policy, and they've made that much more difficult," said Bouhan, a Chicago-based strategist at BMO. He doesn't expect the central bank will raise interest rates until 2016.
Lesson Learned
"What we learned from yesterday is that Treasuries are a buy either way," Guy Haselmann, head of capital market strategy with Scotiabank, wrote in a note to clients Friday.
John Briggs, head of strategy for the Americas at RBS Securities Inc., echoed the plea for more clarity. He compiled a list of 10 broad economic concerns that Yellen cited in the press conference, including energy prices, U.S. financial conditions and weaknesses in emerging markets.
"It's not common for the Fed to name all these things," he said from the firm's Stamford, Connecticut, office. "Where do they rank? Now we don't even know what to look at to determine whether they will raise rates or not."
The parrots are not happy with this shift in opinion, so they are squawking. They should have tried squawking at the meeting or before the meeting instead of now.
As a result, anyone with any bit of common sense wonders if the Fed will hike at all.
I concluded "By December, the economic data is likely to be weakening so much, that the Fed may not hike until the next recession is over."
Some simple arithmetic will show you how much time you're spending on finding the path:
[The amount of time it took you to do it last time] minus [the amount of time it will take you next time]
If you come up with something close to zero, then you're running the path, doing it consistently and spending almost no time at all finding a path. You've already found one.
On the other hand, if the first time it took you to write that novel was 8 years, and retyping it would take five days, you're spending virtually all of your time finding out where you're going, not actually typing. Which is why writing novels is more difficult than commuting to work.
A few things to consider as you develop your skills as a pathfinder:
If the value you create is in finding the path, are you being patient and generous with yourself as you hack your way through the weeds? You're not a typist, you're an explorer.
Are others significantly more efficient and productive at finding paths in your industry? If so, it probably pays to learn what they've figured out.
If you're not spending much time at all on pathfinding, what would happen if you did?
Lots of people run paths. Very few have the guts to find a new one.
Postări
