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Why We Can't Just Be SEOs Anymore - Whiteboard Friday |
Why We Can't Just Be SEOs Anymore - Whiteboard Friday Posted: 02 May 2013 02:13 PM PDT Posted by randfish There's a movement happening in our industry, and many folks are changing their practices and titles from "SEO" to "online marketing, inbound marketing, and/or earned media marketing." Where did this shift originate from, and where is it taking our industry as a whole? Is it enough to just be an SEO in today's game, or are we missing the bigger picture? In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand shares his take on the shift from "SEO" to "inbound marketing" and what the future holds for our industry at large. Have something to add? Leave your thoughts and experiences in the comments below! For your viewing pleasure, here's a still image of the whiteboard used in this week's video:
Video Transcription
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A New Version of GetListed.org Posted: 02 May 2013 02:02 AM PDT Posted by David Mihm Today, I am excited to announce the release of a new version of GetListed.org. While no new functionality is included in this update, the team and I hope it provides a dramatically improved user experience on several fronts. The best way to get a sense of what's changed is to run a business search for yourself, but I'll run through a few brief highlights here. Faster business lookups
GetListed is now waaayyyy faster (that's the technical term used by our engineers) than it used to be. Previously, lookups averaged around 20 seconds. We've cut the average response time in half to about 10 seconds, and we'll be working to make it even faster as we analyze usage of the app and further optimize our response times. We hope this increased speed provides a big value-add for those of you who use GetListed in your on-the-spot client meetings. More consistent results
Previously, GetListed's Listing Snapshot displayed a composite listing based on the data points returned by several search engines in our list. This led to unnecessary confusion among business owners, and made it difficult for some of our agency users to identify which search engines were returning incorrect information about clients' listings. It also made tracking Listing Score progress over time more difficult, since this score was dependent on the order of results returned by our search engine partners, and this order sometimes varied week-to-week and month-to-month. The new version of the site asks users to establish their canonical NAP (Name, Address, Phone number) information prior to running a full query for a given business, so that the new Snapshot page and Listing Score are no longer based on "best guess" composite listings. Please note: this update means you may see changes in your listing scores, including for those businesses saved to your Dashboard. We suggest re-establishing these scores by running your listings through the new site. When you do, you'll have a fixed data point against which you can measure your progress over time. Cleaner Listing Snapshot interface
When we started GetListed back in January 2009, only four search engines were displayed on the snapshot page. As our app grew in popularity and we established new relationships with data providers and other search engines, that list grew ever-longer and the formerly-simple interface grew clunky and overwhelming. The goal of the site (to get business owners to update erroneous information and add missing information) became muddied. We hope the new interface makes these calls-to-action much clearer--to create listings on search engines where they don't exist, and to update information that doesn't match reality. The new app consolidates the old Snapshot, Accuracy, and Details pages, bringing accuracy front-and-center, and makes it easy to see listing details inline without jumping from page-to-page. Cleaner Dashboard interface
The new Dashboard removes the clutter of favicon-style search engine logos (another problem created by our gradual expansion to include more listing providers over the last four years). The new Dashboard provides a quick way to assess listing scores at a glance, and easy access to the details page for your listings from clickable business titles. U.S. version onlyOver the past couple of months, we've noticed GetListed UK and GetListed CA returning an unacceptably high number of errors on business queries. As part of this release, we've decided to temporarily suspend these versions in order to focus on the backend and interface for our U.S. audience, which accounted for 98% of all queries run in April. After we've had a chance to analyze our domestic audience usage on this new system, we plan to re-release UK- and CA-specific versions (along with more international sites) later in the year. Looking aheadWell, that takes care of most of the major changes for this release. Feedback, as always, is welcome. We've even added a handy-dandy tab where you can submit feedback directly within the app; you can also feel free to email me at davidm@seomoz.org. I hope I've laid out a compelling case above for the rationale behind this release from a user's perspective. From a development perspective, the goal of this iteration of GetListed was to create a foundation for more frequent feature releases and better integration with SEOmoz tools moving forward. It paves the way for a number of new features we will be rolling out over the course of the summer and fall, which all of us on the GetListed team are even more excited about. Looking forward to sharing those with you soon! 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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The typical industrial-era organization is like a battleship. Hundreds or thousands of people onboard, and most of them are essential--but most of them aren't actually directly responsible for the work that we hired the battleship to do. Without the fuel people, the navigation team, the folks in the med corps and on and on, it doesn't work.
The battleship can go far, with impact, and change the course of history. While it has exactly one captain, it's the synchronized work of more than a million people (when you think about all the machinists and support folks back home) and it works. It does what we ask it to do.
One more thing about the people on the battleship: just about everyone has a punchlist, an itemized inventory of what they need to get done. And many of them are rewarded for doing that set of tasks more efficiently, more elegantly and with better quality than expected. Great people means the system works even better, but it's designed to survive with people who are merely good at what they do.
The typical professional services company, on the other hand, is a lot like a blueberry pancake. While there's an essential support team, the firm is all about blueberries working in parallel. Each blueberry can work independently, and sometimes they even work on projects that might have conflicting outcomes or views of the world. I don't care how many people report to you. I care about how connected and how brave you are.
As the firm gets bigger, it doesn't get thicker. You don't make a better pancake by making a thicker one. You make a better pancake by hiring ever better blueberries.
And, as you've guessed, most of the blueberries don't know exactly what they'll be doing in six weeks, and most don't work from a manual about the industry's best practices on how to do what they do. It's hard to measure blueberries, but a talented and motivated one can also change the world.
Apple is now a battleship. Most of the tens of thousands of people who work there have a line job, selling, building, fixing or interacting. Only a few are dreaming up something that you can't even imagine.
Your favorite record label, though, ought to be a blueberry pancake. Each musical group is mostly alone, figuring out something that just might work. The goal isn't to lock and repeat and scale. It's to go wide and stay interesting. Great record labels have both better blueberries and the support staff to launch them into the world.
I remember the day we transformed Yoyodyne from a pancake to a battleship. We hired 17 salespeople in 24 hours (increasing the size of the company by 25%) and for the first time, I didn't know every employee well. People had their orders, and we were ready to scale.
If you want to make your battleship work better, be really clear about defining the mission, the tactics, the chain of command and most of all, precisely what you measure from each person on the team.
Your pancake, on the other hand, gives up swing weight and firepower and instead gets flexibility and the possiblity of non-fatal failure (and game-changing magic).
Both work. The problem kicks in when a successful pancake thinks its future is in the battleship business. Or when battleships are asked to dance.
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Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis |
Australia Manufacturing Collapses as Commodity Supercycle Stalls; Labor and Unions Wrecked Australia Posted: 02 May 2013 02:26 PM PDT Australia fundamentals deteriorate rapidly as evidenced by a collapse in the PMI Manufacturing Index in April. Key FindingsAustralia PMI at a Glance
Macro Alert From Steen Jakobsen Via email, Steen Jakobsen at Saxo Bank sent these comments ... Macro Alert: Australia is seeing significant slow-down.Massive Imbalances Please note the massive imbalances in the PMI report. Input prices have been expanding for 131 straight months. Wages have been expanding for 48 months. Selling prices have been contracting for 25 months. New orders and exports tell the story. Wages are too high. Margin pressures mount. Employment must drop and it did. The employment index was down a monstrous 9.4 points. Labor and Unions Wrecked Australia The labor party and unions wrecked Australia. This was invisible for years because a housing boom and China-fueled commodity boom masked the untenable nature of wage and property bubble growth. Now, it's payback time. On September 14, prime minister Julia Gillard, leader of the Australian Labor Party will be thrown out of office in a landslide. Unfortunately, it will take years for Australia to recover from the damage caused by Labor. Addendum - Comments from Steve Keen Steve Keen blames both parties. Via email, Keen says "The damage began under Labor with Hawke and Keating, was turbocharged by the Liberals under Howard, and simply maintained by Rudd/Gillard Labor. And unions have lost significant power all the way through--they've been bystanders, not active participants. It's instead been a series of distortions caused by a neoliberal philosophy that is shared by both parties." Hmm. Parties talk differently but act the same. Where have we seen that before? In the US, it's on war, bailouts, and spending that always goes up. Romneycare and Obamacare were the same. For political purposes people pretend differences exist when they don't, except on some social issues. Mike "Mish" Shedlock http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com Mike "Mish" Shedlock is a registered investment advisor representative for SitkaPacific Capital Management. Sitka Pacific is an asset management firm whose goal is strong performance and low volatility, regardless of market direction. Visit http://www.sitkapacific.com/account_management.html to learn more about wealth management and capital preservation strategies of Sitka Pacific. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Global Manufacturing Stagnates; Global Recession Will Follow Posted: 02 May 2013 10:49 AM PDT The JPMorgan Global Manufacturing PMI shows Global manufacturing growth slows to near-stagnation. At 50.5 in April, the JPMorgan Global Manufacturing PMI™ – a composite index* produced by JPMorgan and Markit in association with ISM and IFPSM – signalled expansion for the fourth straight month. The rate of expansion decelerated slightly during April, meaning that growth so far in 2013 has remained, at best, only marginal.Global PMI April vs. March Every facet of global manufacturing is slowing and global growth will follow. A global recession is certainly baked in the cake, if indeed a recession is not already in progress. Mike "Mish" Shedlock http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com Mike "Mish" Shedlock is a registered investment advisor representative for SitkaPacific Capital Management. Sitka Pacific is an asset management firm whose goal is strong performance and low volatility, regardless of market direction. Visit http://www.sitkapacific.com/account_management.html to learn more about wealth management and capital preservation strategies of Sitka Pacific. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Posted: 02 May 2013 09:09 AM PDT As expected the ECB, cut its lending rate 25 basis points to 0.50%. Yesterday, I suggested the ECB may try a "shock and awe" move. They did, just not the move anyone expected. Instead, Mario Draghi said the ECB was Prepared to "Cope With Consequences of Negative Deposit Rates". Shock and Awe Bloomberg reports The euro fell for the first time in five days against the dollar after European Central Bank President Mario Draghi said policy makers may take the unprecedented step of charging banks to hold excess reserves.For an analysis of what this means, with a tip of the hat to Steen Jakobsen at Saxo Bank for the link, let's flashback to a decision to cut the deposit rate to zero in July of 2012. Dancing in the Dark Experiment The Financial Times says ECB Dances in the Dark It's clear the ECB has gone into experimental mode.Death of Banking FT Alphaville makes the case Negative rates as a precursor to the death of banking. What we believe is that rather than stimulating the lending market — and the economy along with it — such a rate policy could have a disastrous impact on collateral markets and money market funds, not to mention the net interest income of lending institutions. All of which could unleash a protracted deflationary spiral.FT Alphaville cites Morgan Stanley Research as follows: Our rates team expects short end German yields to follow financing rates into negative territory and some investors to extend along duration and credit curves to achieve positive yields to maturity.Deposit Rate of Zero Did Not Work It's clear that cutting the deposit rate to zero did not work. So why will cutting them to less than zero work? A negative deposit rate will not stimulate lending because it does not fix any structural problems, it does not fix any liquidity issues, and it makes solvency problems worse by turning guaranteed arbitrage gains into guaranteed losses on excess reserves. Should this actually succeed in stimulating lending, expect it to also succeed at stimulating losses on that lending. Mike "Mish" Shedlock http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com Mike "Mish" Shedlock is a registered investment advisor representative for SitkaPacific Capital Management. Sitka Pacific is an asset management firm whose goal is strong performance and low volatility, regardless of market direction. Visit http://www.sitkapacific.com/account_management.html to learn more about wealth management and capital preservation strategies of Sitka Pacific. |
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