SEO Badger

Posted by randfish

I've been running an experiment with some dark-hatted links for several months, consistently hoping Google will catch them and remove their value. So far... Nothing. Well, except top 3 rankings for all the anchor text pointed at those pages. Google's webspam team has all the incentive, brainpower and money in the world, yet their bets seem to be centered firmly on Google+ and the social graph eventually subsuming the "natural" results with those biased to what our friends and connections share/+1. Fine. I get it. Link buying isn't going away, no matter how much we wish it would.

Even if link buying is working in the short-term and webspam's being less aggressive, I still think it's a waste of money for three reasons:

1. Rankings are tactical: Earning your way to the top rankings is awesome, because it brings with it the branding, familiarity, trust, social sharing and dozens of other positive marketing signals that "earned" links carry. Spam and paid links just give you some more traffic (and not even as much as a trusted brand could earn in the same position). Conversion rates are lower than your peers, and the secondary traffic benefits from other sources, word-of-mouth, etc. never come into play.
2. It's Overpriced: My wife's travel site gets offers for several hundred dollars to put in a few links on a single post, and that's not even an efficient market like those created by professional link sellers and link platforms. Playing the link buying game in the big leagues takes thousands to tens of thousands of dollars each month 
3. There's Always Risk: You're already familiar with the horrific pain of Google's Kafka-esque penalties, but maybe you're banking on not getting hit, given their relative ineffectiveness over the past couple years. Problem is, Google+ has created two new kinds of risk for link spammers. The first is that social search results, which have virtually no ties to the link graph, will overwhelm "natural" results and make those purchased links largely useless. The second is that Google+ gains enough momentum and data to leverage for webspam analysis. If you've been pointing lots of links at sites and pages that earn no social traction, get ready to feel some pain. Maybe you're risk-tolerant enough to scoff off both of these, but I don't think Google+ is going anywhere, and I give them even-odds to have a social content/sharing graph big enough to pull off both within 24 months.

"Blah, blah, blah, I've heard your white hat evangelism before, Rand" Yeah, you have. Fair enough. So how about instead of just warning about what not to do, I give you somewhere to spend all those earmarked-for-spam dollars.

Here's some rough calculations on link purchasing in a moderately competitive vertical:

• Ranking goal: single keyword phrase plus some slight modified phrases
• Required: minimum of 50 unique root domains
  • 35 will be one-time payments, but are relatively low quality, $100 is the average price (like I said, low quality)
  • 15 will require ongoing payments to maintain the link, $100/month (on average) will probably do it
• Total cost over 12 months: ($100*35)+($100*12*15) = $21,500

So, for $21,500, you can probably buy your way into the top 3 rankings for a moderately competitive phrase in a vertical like niche travel, low-volume e-commerce products, etc. Many black hats I know would argue they can get it cheaper, and they can, but that's usually because they own networks and properties or have relationships for which they wouldn't pay directly. A marketing guy working in-house at a brand has none of the connections, no networks of spamfarms, nothing except dollars and a business model that can turn $21.5K in spammy links into $100K in CLTV at 50% margins for a net of $28.5K.

Now let's try an alternative: Buying a blog.

Say you're LastWear Clothing (a site one of my favorite Moz engineers, Marty, particularly likes). They could buy some links to key pages (in spite of all the many good reasons not to) and try to get rankings for queries like men's hakama or womens underbust corset. There's a small amount of existing search query demand, and they're one of the only sources on the web selling those precise garments, so there's a good chance that would turn into sales.

But, let's try another thought experiment. I'll head over to Google Reader and run a search for "steampunk" (the aesthetic of LastWear's clothing):

The second site that pops up has a blog with 6,647 subscribers... And it's talking about the fashion of steampunk! I think we're on to something.

The Steampunk Workshop blog has thousands of subscribers, and they're already clear proponents of LastWear (I know, at this point you're thinking I planned all this from the start, but I swear, it just fell into place as I was searching/writing). That Workshop site is also running ads on the sidebar and between posts, which suggests an attempt at monetization. While not every site like this is a potential option, many are likely to be interested in an acquisition.

Here's one way I might structure it:

• Steampunk Workshop moves their blog to LastWear.com/blog
• They continue blogging about all the things they normally would - no editorial interference or direction needed
• LastWear helps with a more professional design, subscription buttons, some marketing polish, etc. to help the blog earn more traffic, visibility and fans
• In exchange for the move, LastWear offers a monthly stipend to the blogger(s) and a lump sum payment at the end of 3 years. After those 3 years, they own the blog and the content therein, and both parties can decide how they'd like to proceed with the relationship.

If LastWear went down this road, I can promise two things; #1) they'll get far greater short and long term ROI than buying links and #2) it will be less expensive in the long run.

To my mind, this is a no-brainer. When you buy a blog or any form of online community, you're not simply acquiring links, you're getting:

• An engine for brand building and indirect customer acquisition
• An ongoing methodology to pull in links, tweets, shares, +1s, likes, etc.
• Brand evangelists who will help expand your reach and credibility
• A PR opportunity like few others, even in fields where PR is hard to come by (acquisitions are talked-about, blogged-about, and make the news, even those of relatively small blogs)
• Content that's already been proven to attract an audience
• All the organic signals that search engines love to see - from links to social to usage to content to branding

I honestly don't understand why this problem exists:

It makes you want to yell, "Why don't you just go get married already?!"

Here's five questions I'd ask brands considering online marketing to answer before choosing link purchasing tactics over a blog investment strategy:

1. Which is more likely to be scalable in the long term?
2. Which is more likely to work across multiple channels (content, social, SEO, referring links, etc)?
3. Which carries a greater risk->reward ratio?
4. Which is more likely to increase conversion rate and customer lifetime value?
5. Which is more likely to earn you accolades from your community and which is more likely to earn you a rankings penalty one morning when you really need to hit your quarterly traffic numbers? 

To be fair, there's plenty of challenges and hoops to jump through in these types of transactions and some won't work out. But, I see a huge disconnect between those who are naturally earning all the signals engines say they want (blogs and online communities) vs. those need them (commercial sites) and no reason the two can't co-mingle. If you're a marketer looking to invest dollars into earning a presence in the search, social and web world, you can either build it yourself or you can buy it. I hope to see lots of dollars flowing to the content pioneers who've already proven themselves effective earners of inbound marketing signals -- the bloggers.

p.s. In the future, I hope to cover this topic in more depth and detail and provide tools and methodologies to structure discovery, transactions, value-creation, etc. but for now, I hope this post offers at least a little inspiration and an alternative use for capitol that can do far more good in the hands of bloggers than fly-by-night spam operations.

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Posted by randfish

Hey gang - short blog post on a topic our product and marketing teams have been noodling around with. As many of you know, we've got our Linkscape index, which is crawled, processed and served out on a monthly basis (there's a new index about every 30 days). We also have a newer datasource, Blogscape, aka Freshscape (which is currently undergoing some repairs in Labs) which crawls a few million "fresh" RSS feeds and indexes full content.

The goal of Linkscape is to present a search-engine size link graph, while the goal with Freshscape is to provide a more realtime, full-content index of links and mentions similar to what Google Alerts does. The problem is... what to call them?

We're currently hard at work on a future iteration of the SEOmoz PRO platform that will include deeper integrations of both Linkscape and Freshscape data (so you can watch and competitively compare your wide link graph metrics as well as these fresher, primarily RSS-based links and brand mentions). As such, we need a way of segmenting these that makes sense to current and future users of PRO, and we'd love your input. The following polls have some of the names we like best right now for classifying Linkscape vs. Freshscape data:

 

If you have other suggestions or ideas, please feel free to include them in the comments. If there's one in particular that receives lots more thumbs up than anything in the poll, we might use your idea in the final version!

Thanks very much for the help - can't wait to show you our new stuff (though it will be more than a few months until this is ready to roll out).

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Posted by randfish

This week we talk about the different roles and responsibilities of a web marketing team. What does it take to have a successful marketing team that will take your brand to the next level? What metrics should your team measure? Your marketing team will go through a few different stages while your company grows and this video walks you through those steps.

Some notes about this video, we shot this a few weeks ago and as with the other video we experienced some quality issues. Please bear with us while we work out the kinks of our new equipment. I also mention that we are looking for another web dev for our marketing team, but I am happy to mention that our new web dev Devin started on Monday! Don't worry we are looking to fill other positions which can be found here.

Video Transcription

Howdy SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're talking about some of the roles and responsibilities of a web marketing team and really how to design a successful web marketing team that can accomplish all of the goals that you've got on the Web.

The place that I like to start is with the metrics you care about. The metrics almost always start with customers or with revenue. Customers or revenue. From customers and revenue you can get down to the metrics that matter, the sources from which those people come externally on your site, the internal sources, the funnel, the marketing funnel itself, how far people make it down the funnel, if you're attracting customers, or the quality of those visitors that you're getting, if we're talking about a site that's driven by ad revenue.

The key metrics usually come from places like visits, visit quality, conversions, brand awareness, competitive intelligence, and the quality of customers being acquired. Those are very, very high level, but they typically filter down into deeper ones. When you look at visits, you might be looking at visit sources. You might be looking at the time that people are spending on the site and the number of pages browsed. You might be looking, when you're looking at conversions, at the quality of those conversions, how many of those people come back, what the customer lifetime value is, what the word-of-mouth spread is, you know, for every one customer, how many new customers do we acquire based on some viral co- efficient, etc., etc. You'll know these for your business, and you'll dig down into them.

These metrics map over to the right sort of team format. The teams that I like to build really come in stages. Those stages are natural evolutions and progressions. If you're extremely early stage, what I really like . . . by super early stage, what I mean is maybe there are three of you, four of you, five of you, up to maybe ten people in a business that's trying to do considerable marketing on the Web. I like having someone with a title at the very junior level. The most junior level I would have is a web marketing manager or a director of marketing or VP of marketing. It's certainly fine to have someone very senior so long as they're willing to get their hands dirty. They're responsible for all of this. They're responsible for where do customers and revenue come from, what are the sources from which we can generate those. I'm going to personally build a funnel, personally build out how we execute on all the sources, focus on the right ones, figure out what the channels are that work, etc.

In a mid-stage I like to extrapolate a little more. Have that VP of marketing who's responsible for the key metrics and for setting the goals and responsibilities and then start to break things out into two worlds. One is the inbound, organic world. This can also be organic or non-paid or free marketing or earned media, whatever you like to call this. Those inbound marketers worry about things like SEO, social, content marketing, blogging, videos, etc., all the things that you do on the Web that earn your customers, that earn visits, rather than buying them or interrupting them.

The other side is performance marketers. These are people who do things like paid acquisition, conversion rate optimization. I like having the person who's responsible for paid acquisition also run the CRO and the marketing funnel. The reason why is because these visitors usually are extremely high ROI and cost less. Hopefully, 60 to 80 percent of your traffic is coming through here.

This is where you're going to get a ton of your direct conversions. These people will be paying some cost to acquire those visitors. So owning the funnel makes a lot of sense for them. That way they can say, "Okay, customer lifetime value is $500. We will pay up to $150 to acquire a customer through these five channels. We'll pay up to $250 to acquire a customer through these channels because we know it's worth more. We're going to keep optimizing the funnel and improving the conversion rate."

Then, naturally, the stuff from organic will flow into those paid channels and into that same funnel. The ROI is usually higher, but the directness and ability to increase that takes longer. It takes more effort and more time, more energy expended. You'll have more things where you throw stuff against the wall to see if it sticks versus paid where, hopefully, you learn that very, very quickly. We bid on this keyword, it didn't work. We put an ad on this site, it didn't work. Fine, we take those down.

In terms of who you should assign to these teams, I would say start with one person responsible for each. This person up here, maybe they move into that VP marketing role. If they don't, maybe they move into one of these roles because they're particularly good at performance or at inbound. Then, the VP of marketing comes in and you hire someone more senior to take over those roles.

Then you could get specialized inside those. If you see that SEO is an amazing channel for us and we have a ton of content and ton of material that needs SEO'ing, we need to bring in a full-time technical and content SEO to worry about those types of things. Outreach is huge for us. We need a full-time link builder. Social is huge for us. We need a full-time community and social manager.

Great, those are fine things, and that leads you naturally into the next stage, the later stage or more mature stage where you usually have . . . I actually like to have at this point something like a CMO, someone who's a chief officer and has a higher purview of roles, of responsibility around that. This also means that people who have progressed in the organization from inbound or from performance channels can move into those VP roles: VP of inbound, VP of performance. Then you can have people under them who are very specialized in each of the requirements of that role. So it could be we have someone who just does PR.

We have someone who just does technical SEO. I cannot recommend this enough, have web developers or software engineers who work on each of these teams because it means that someone who's working on performance marketing doesn't need to wait for engineering to get projects done. They have someone who works on the team full-time. This is absolutely amazing here at SEOmoz. We have Casey Henry who works as a full-time web developer, and we're hiring another developer - if you know any great people, please send them our way - to actually work on our marketing team and worry about the www site and the marketing funnel and all the stuff that exists around the inbound and performance side. Obviously, with time, I'd like to see that become two or three or four people.

These people's roles really depend on the channels that are working for you and the channels into which you want to invest. You might have a full-time person who just does video content. You might have a full-time person who just does blogging and they do very little else. That could be a content marketer. You might have multiple people who are managing your community because you have so many people following you and interacting with you on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, through your own social sources on your site if you have a social platform, a high level of community contributions, user generated content, those types of things.

This segmentation and role specialization is excellent too because people can move up and have opportunities as one of these channels takes off and becomes amazing.

An even later stage might be that we've got SEO as an entire department and it has its own director. Underneath the director are people who are responsible for specific parts. This person is responsible for UGC SEO. This person is responsible for video. This person is responsible for technical SEO. All those kinds of roles can get even more specialized, and you can move into a bigger division.

The nice thing about how this whole platform works is that it can organically grow. It can build off itself, and you develop strengths in all the areas without ignoring any channels. Early on in your stages, these people and then these people are going to be experimenting with all types of different channels. As you get here, you have specialists who can perform in those channels, leaving the CMO, the VP, the director free to explore new channels and find places where they might want additional specialists.

For an in-house team, this is how I personally like to do it. I am, of course, looking forward to your comments, seeing how you guys do this, seeing where I might be right or wrong here And I hope you will join us again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Posted by randfish

For the past decade, most of us in the field of search have relied on Google's AdWords data (either in the public tool, the API or the tools inside AdWords accounts). It's the best source we've got, but many marketers may not realize that sadly, the numbers and queries may not always match up to what's actually happening on Google's search engine. I'll illustrate with an example.

An SEOmoz blog post ranks in the top 2-3 results for many keywords around the phrase "blog traffic." Here's a screenshot of some of those rankings:

I went into our Google Analytics account and pulled the related keywords along with how much traffic they've sent in the past 30 days:

Then I went to Google's AdWords Tool and searched for "blog traffic" to compare the suggestions:

Here I got confused, because many of the terms that we receive traffic for are NOT shown above in the list... Is Google hiding them? Do they not know about them?

To be sure, I typed them into Google's AdWords Tool manually, performing [exact match] searches only:

Holy cow... There they are. So, AdWords does have volume for these, and will display it, but only if you enter them exactly (or rather, "more exactly" - you can find them if you do sets of imprecise, but closer queries, too). I made the chart below to illustrate which terms were available from the broad reserach:

As you can see, there's ~50% of the terms not shown in the suggestion list, which is fairly substantive and could lead to some serious missed targeting opportunities.

THE IMPORTANT LESSON: Running discovery-focused searches in AdWords may not show you all the valuable/high-volume keyword phrases connected to a word/phrase.

There are a few ways to address this challenge:

1. If you have the budget, my top recommendation is to buy a few, very broad keywords in AdWords, send them to a relevant landing page on your site, but realize you probably will lose money on the campaign. The goal isn't conversions, but rather to learn by watching the keyword terms/phrases for which you get impressions. This is also great conversion-testing if you have the budget to invest, but even a week or two of data can be highly valuable for future keyword targeting.
2. When searching in AdWords, start broad, and then enter narrower queries and note the new phrases that come up. Make sure to use exact match, and be diligent in testing variations. Google only lies through omission.
3. The relative numbers of searches aren't perfect (as you can see above), but they are relatively decent. In fact, I'd say they've improved in what they show vs. the actuals you'll see compared to prior years. However, 
4. Use your own analytics as a guide to find new terms/phrases you might be imperfectly targeting. And if you see keyword variations that have a unique or different intent, it might even pay to create a more targeted page for that query, and you often need less work to rank, since Google uses the "indented results" system to drop a second URL from the same domain directly underneath the first one on a given page.

Now I'd love to hear from you - what are your experiences around keyword research in AdWords? Are you seeing the same thing we are? You can share your thoughts in the comments and/or use the poll below (from a new service called Quipol that has some fun twists):

BTW - Given that 30%+ of our referrals from Google searches are keyword (not provided), I'd venture to guess that all of the numbers from our analytics are underreporting by about that same percent. Keep that in mind when comparing the data from AdWords vs. our analytics above.

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Posted by randfish

In this week's Whiteboard Friday, we go underneath the surface and bring to light some hidden factors in online marketing. These often overlooked details can have a huge impact in helping us accomplish our goals as online marketers. Please enjoy and don't forget to leave your comments below.

Please note that we shot this week's Whiteboard Friday on a brand new video camera and we still need to work out a few kinks. I apologize for the slight purple tint on the Whiteboard.

Video Transcription

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I want to talk about the goals that we try to get people to accomplish on the Web, the things that we're trying to accomplish as online marketers, and what we're trying to optimize for, things like: click-through rate from search results; getting people to subscribe to RSS and e-mail; getting them to click links that are posted on social networks; getting them to share things on social networks, on blogs, on websites of all kinds; getting them to convert from browsing to buying; completing a free trial or downloading a white paper and giving you their information; staying a customer of a subscription product. These goals that we have are traditionally done through optimization tactics that we've talked about many, many times here. But there are hidden factors. There are things that hide beneath the surface that impact and affect all of these, all of the success rates and the conversion rates and the goal rates that you have. They can be so subtle sometimes and so hidden beneath the surface that we don't even realize what's going on. That's what I want to talk about today.

So in terms of impacting all of these items, there's traditional stuff that we know, we talk about. So things like, oh, and the click-through rate for the search results, I know that position matters. I know that getting a rich snippet matters. If I can have little stars next to mine; if I can have a picture, a photo, or a video, that usually increases click-through rate. I know that if I'm in special kinds of results, that can either increase or decrease my results. I know if I've got a listing and an indented listing below, that can help me. I know that with subscriptions to RSS and e-mail, I can test different buttons, different versions of the entry form; different calls to action. On links that I click, I can test different titles. All this kind of stuff, there are those traditional testing kinds of things, right?

So in that traditional CRO, that's been covered a ton of times. We don't need to cover this because you often know a lot of the things that are in there. You can find them. They're well-documented. The subtle stuff, the weird stuff is oftentimes around just two questions.

Number one: Does the product or service or thing that you want me to do meet my needs? It could be as simple as: Do I think when I click on this result in the search engine that it will answer the question that I originally asked? But there are so many subtleties that are involved in that, that we never think about, that doing traditional kinds of CRO testing and optimization, we'll never get there.

The second question is: Do I trust and like the brand and/or people behind the brand? This goes to fundamental marketing and branding awareness, and it is so pervasive in all the things that we do, whether it's in web marketing or in offline marketing, and yet oftentimes ignored by marketers like us, who operate in the inbound world of SEO and social media and content marketing and these kinds of things, because we're so analytics driven, that we see a lower click-through rate than we want, a lower conversion rate than we want, a lower subscription rate, a lower sharing rate than we want, and we think, hey, let's test these traditional types of CRO things. Sometimes the problem or the optimization tactics are at a much deeper level.

Let's start with the product/service meeting the needs. There's a bunch of things that go in here. Uptime and reliability is one of the biggest ones. So essentially, if I click a website and it is not speedy, delivering the things that I need, and consistent, I'm going to learn not to trust it, and I'm going to be less likely to click it. This is why you see things like speed being a factor, webpage load speed in Google's rankings, granted a very small factor, but certainly a much bigger factor when you're talking about, "Hey, I'm going to click this, and boy, it's going to take a long time."

I'll give you a good example. I personally think that a lot of the writing at Forbes is pretty darn good. Same with The Wall Street Journal, same with Bloomberg online. But they almost all have interstitial ads and very, very slow page load times. At least in my experience in the past, those websites have done that for me. Almost always have the interstitial, almost always takes a while to load, and then I have to wait through the interstitial. I hate it.

So if I see something else in the search results, a site in social media, I'm going to be less apt to share it. I'm going to be less apt to click on it. I've learned through the conditioning that those brands have given me that the uptime, reliability speed issues are problems.

Same thing with pricing. So I think Radian6 is an absolutely phenomenal product. I've heard great things about it, met the CEO, know some people there. Terrific product. Way too expensive! No way that I can justify affording it. Right now, I'm using Google Alerts and some combination of Google searches that I do every day, some other brand monitoring stuff that SEOmoz is working on in beta, the Blogscape Project, which of course I get kind of alpha access to.

Pricing is wrapped in there by necessity. When you worry, "Hey, wait a minute. I'm attracting all these visitors. They're not converting or they're not taking this action." They may have heard, or they may know, or they may have seen that your pricing simply doesn't match their market, or they have fears around that. That's why I'm such a big fan of transparency here, because I think that you will weed out and save your salespeople time, and save your customer service people time, and save your website bandwidth, if you're transparent about this most of the time.

Features and perceived features. Features is: Do you do the thing that I want you to do? When I'm talking about features, I could mean in software. I could mean in a product, like I'm buying a digital camera, I'm buying a car, I'm buying a whiteboard pen, I'm buying a subscription to a software service. I'm looking purely for information. The features are: Do you do the things that I want you do to? Oftentimes, that comes through brand perception as well.

So I know that a lot of the times when I visit an eHow type of website, that it doesn't have the features that I want, which is a reliable source that I know I can trust. Wikipedia's the same way. I only semi-trust Wikipedia, and I trust it on some topics and not others, and I always want to back it up with something else from some reliable source where I know the person there or I know the brand there, because Wikipedia could be edited by anybody, and I don't necessarily know who's behind it.

So those types of brands, and this is even true sometimes at About.com, where the writers in some categories are phenomenal. Southern food, I think is terrific. Some of the digital marketing ones are good. Some of them are mediocre. It's a trust factor around the features and the perception of features. Perception of features is often very different from actual features.

We find, for example, when we survey customers of SEOmoz that they have no idea that we actually will help track their Facebook pages, Insights data over time, and their Twitter data over time. Many people don't even know that Open Site Explorer and SEOmoz are offered in the same subscription. So this is clearly a problem that we have had on perception of features, not even on actual features.

Presentation. The way and the style in which the features and the information and the pricing and reliability and the uptime, all of that is presented is another big one. The thing about presentation is that it's a layer that impacts everything else, not just up here, but down here as well. It's often done terribly, terribly wrong on the Web.

Because it ties so much to the, "Do I like and trust these people," let's talk about those. This question, when you ask the question, "Do I like and trust the brand, and the people behind the brand," that goes to a bunch of inputs that are very, very far removed, all so far removed from traditional CRO stuff. That's things like design and UX, which we talk about many times here on Whiteboard Friday and on the site. Higher quality, more professional, more consistent with what your audience is looking for, just does a fantastically better job than, "Oh yeah, we bought some stock photography of some people in an office working, and don't they look attractive, don't they have perfect skin? And now, you know, that's our homepage, and then there's Services, and Contact, and About. Great, we have a professional website!" No, you don't. No, no, you don't!

Design UX isn't just about that. There are other inputs like domain name and brand name. One of the biggest reasons that I'm often against exact- match domains is because it is so tremendously hard to build up any sort of branding. If you name industries, you will very, very rarely hear that the generic, exact-match domain for what we call that industry is a market leader, a brand leader, and because of that and also because, to be totally fair, a lot of people in the domaining sphere and the affiliate marketing and SEO sphere noticed the power that these had in Google and abused them tremendously. So now consumers have an association, particularly savvy consumers have an association, a brand association with exact-match domains. That is, "Oh, that's probably a low-quality site. That's probably not the real brand. I don't know if I can trust it if I click on that," versus actual brand names.

I'll give you some very good examples. In the world of office supplies I've heard of Staples, right? I've heard of OfficeMax. I've heard of Office Depot. But if it's OfficeSupplies.net, I'm sure someone owns that domain. It could even be someone awesome. Maybe it's a great site, but if I see it in the search results, I'm going to be mighty suspicious. That suspicion just naturally creeps in. That's why domain name and brand name are so tied together in the perception of trust and can substantially impact things like click-through rate and conversion rate and subscription rate, etc.

Accessibility of contact information. It's funny, I was just on an e-mail thread yesterday night, and some folks in the SEO sphere said, hey, have you ever heard of this particular - it was an enterprise SEO software provider. I went, "No, I haven't heard of them. This is the first time. Let me go check out their site." I see they try and say a few futures, but there's literally nothing, no one mentioned on the site; no people who are using it, no people who are associated with the brand. The contact information is "Fill out a contact form" or "Here's our office." I think it was somewhere in the United States; I can't remember exactly where. But other than a mailing address and a phone number, there was no human being listed, which made me very suspicious, because why would you not show off the team? Like, here's the exec team behind it. Here are our engineers. That kind of transparency is natural in the software world. Something's weird if it doesn't exist there.

Being able to find that information - a phone number, e-mail, contact forms, here's our Twitter and our Facebook, and these kinds of things - you just expect those from web companies. When they don't exist, you become highly suspicious.

The authenticity of the content. One of my favorite examples is there's a brand that's been doing a ton of fantastic infographics. I think it's MBAonline or MBAeducation.com, one of the online education providers with a very generic name. They really do great infographics. They sponsor some awesome stuff. Sometimes they'll get featured on a Mashable or even a TechCrunch, or something like that. Tremendous work, excellent work getting that brand out there.

But I always look at them and think this doesn't have a relationship with what the services that you're trying to sell, which is you're an affiliate for a bunch of online education providers, which can be a little bit of a nasty, sort of spammy, aggressive field. The challenge here is, hey, yes, you've got the infographic, you've got the link. But when you're trying to tie back into consumers and earn their business, those of us who are savvy and sophisticated, we sort of get a funny feeling, like something doesn't match up. The content is not authentic to the brand. Why is it being produced?

I think a great example of this is OkTrends, which is OkCupid's blog. They essentially have dating content that matches up with what people are looking for from their site. So, here's how to optimize your dating profile, and by the way, we're a dating website. Great, makes perfect sense.

Hey, here's an infographic about the rise of Twitter or Twitter click- through rates or something - and by the way, we're an MBA online education provider. Why is that? It seems like it's just for the links and attention and awareness and has nothing to do with the actual brand. Highly suspicious, particularly in spheres that are very aggressive.

Industry reputation, word of mouth. I'll give you another example. So, there was another provider that was mentioned on this string in the SEO enterprise space. No, I'm sorry. It was another enterprise software provider, but not in SEO. There were some comments of, "Oh, hey, should we use this? Should we use this other one?" Someone remarked on an e-mail thread, "You know, the CEO of this particular company has treated women employees very badly."

You would never find that on the Web, right? That's not information that you're going to see. If you start searching for reviews, you won't find it on their website. It's something that's word-of-mouth only, but it's made its way to enough influencers that now that is an influential thing in the perception of, "Do I like the brand and the people?" Very frankly, I trust this source, and I know the source knows the CEO there, and I don't. I'm probably not going to buy from this particular enterprise software provider, even if they meet my needs up here. This is the type of stuff that influences conversion rate, that is so subtle and so hidden, that you're never going to realize it from a traditional CRO-type of perspective. And yet, it pays huge dividends to go and investigate this stuff and understand that perception.

The final one that I'll mention here is familiarity with the brand and social proof of the brand. A great example here, go to SurveyMonkey's website. If you're not logged in, the homepage is a woman from Facebook, her picture, she's a statistical analyst there, and she's giving an endorsement to SurveyMonkey. Now, Facebook is a phenomenal brand; they're very well-known. Their business practices are respected. People know that they're a great data-driven company, and so the fact that they trust SurveyMonkey strongly suggests SurveyMonkey must be a great provider. So, they've created that social proof, and they're using a brand that you're familiar with.

When you combine those things, it's absolutely excellent and incredibly powerful. When I go to websites and I see a lot of social proof from either people that are anonymous or people that provide only their fist name or people that I don't know, it's less powerful. When I have seen a brand, six, seven, eight times on the Web, at a conference, in various types of ways - I've heard from someone over e-mail, I know someone who's used them, I've had an experience with someone from that company - those types of things strongly influence these. Building up all of this builds up your conversion rates and builds up all of these metrics that you think about as an online marketer, and yet, we often have so little control or so little even ability to judge and record these things.

What I want to suggest is that, to those of you who are doing web marketing, when you're thinking about these metrics, remember that these are all inputs. Don't necessarily use them as excuses, but make sure that you're taking some action on them. Make sure that you're finding ways to measure them. Make sure that these aren't the reasons why your rates over here are low, rather than the stuff that you focus on, because it can be incredibly frustrating to find that, hey, the reason that we're not making good sales is because no one is familiar with our brand, and we don't have the right social proof, rather than, oh, it's because I didn't write the title tags correctly, and I don't have a compelling description for the content, and the page isn't optimized well. It doesn't have a good flow and conversion process and funnel. Sometimes these two things are mixed up together, and I worry about those hidden factors.

So, I hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday, and I hope we'll see you again next week. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Posted by randfish

In this week's Whiteboard Friday, we go underneath the surface and bring to light some hidden factors in online marketing. These often overlooked details can have a huge impact in helping us accomplish our goals as online marketers. Please enjoy and don't forget to leave your comments below.

Please note that we shot this week's Whiteboard Friday on a brand new video camera and we still need to work out a few kinks. I apologize for the slight purple tint on the Whiteboard.

Video Transcription

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I want to talk about the goals that we try to get people to accomplish on the Web, the things that we're trying to accomplish as online marketers, and what we're trying to optimize for, things like: click-through rate from search results; getting people to subscribe to RSS and e-mail; getting them to click links that are posted on social networks; getting them to share things on social networks, on blogs, on websites of all kinds; getting them to convert from browsing to buying; completing a free trial or downloading a white paper and giving you their information; staying a customer of a subscription product. These goals that we have are traditionally done through optimization tactics that we've talked about many, many times here. But there are hidden factors. There are things that hide beneath the surface that impact and affect all of these, all of the success rates and the conversion rates and the goal rates that you have. They can be so subtle sometimes and so hidden beneath the surface that we don't even realize what's going on. That's what I want to talk about today.

So in terms of impacting all of these items, there's traditional stuff that we know, we talk about. So things like, oh, and the click-through rate for the search results, I know that position matters. I know that getting a rich snippet matters. If I can have little stars next to mine; if I can have a picture, a photo, or a video, that usually increases click-through rate. I know that if I'm in special kinds of results, that can either increase or decrease my results. I know if I've got a listing and an indented listing below, that can help me. I know that with subscriptions to RSS and e-mail, I can test different buttons, different versions of the entry form; different calls to action. On links that I click, I can test different titles. All this kind of stuff, there are those traditional testing kinds of things, right?

So in that traditional CRO, that's been covered a ton of times. We don't need to cover this because you often know a lot of the things that are in there. You can find them. They're well-documented. The subtle stuff, the weird stuff is oftentimes around just two questions.

Number one: Does the product or service or thing that you want me to do meet my needs? It could be as simple as: Do I think when I click on this result in the search engine that it will answer the question that I originally asked? But there are so many subtleties that are involved in that, that we never think about, that doing traditional kinds of CRO testing and optimization, we'll never get there.

The second question is: Do I trust and like the brand and/or people behind the brand? This goes to fundamental marketing and branding awareness, and it is so pervasive in all the things that we do, whether it's in web marketing or in offline marketing, and yet oftentimes ignored by marketers like us, who operate in the inbound world of SEO and social media and content marketing and these kinds of things, because we're so analytics driven, that we see a lower click-through rate than we want, a lower conversion rate than we want, a lower subscription rate, a lower sharing rate than we want, and we think, hey, let's test these traditional types of CRO things. Sometimes the problem or the optimization tactics are at a much deeper level.

Let's start with the product/service meeting the needs. There's a bunch of things that go in here. Uptime and reliability is one of the biggest ones. So essentially, if I click a website and it is not speedy, delivering the things that I need, and consistent, I'm going to learn not to trust it, and I'm going to be less likely to click it. This is why you see things like speed being a factor, webpage load speed in Google's rankings, granted a very small factor, but certainly a much bigger factor when you're talking about, "Hey, I'm going to click this, and boy, it's going to take a long time."

I'll give you a good example. I personally think that a lot of the writing at Forbes is pretty darn good. Same with The Wall Street Journal, same with Bloomberg online. But they almost all have interstitial ads and very, very slow page load times. At least in my experience in the past, those websites have done that for me. Almost always have the interstitial, almost always takes a while to load, and then I have to wait through the interstitial. I hate it.

So if I see something else in the search results, a site in social media, I'm going to be less apt to share it. I'm going to be less apt to click on it. I've learned through the conditioning that those brands have given me that the uptime, reliability speed issues are problems.

Same thing with pricing. So I think Radian6 is an absolutely phenomenal product. I've heard great things about it, met the CEO, know some people there. Terrific product. Way too expensive! No way that I can justify affording it. Right now, I'm using Google Alerts and some combination of Google searches that I do every day, some other brand monitoring stuff that SEOmoz is working on in beta, the Blogscape Project, which of course I get kind of alpha access to.

Pricing is wrapped in there by necessity. When you worry, "Hey, wait a minute. I'm attracting all these visitors. They're not converting or they're not taking this action." They may have heard, or they may know, or they may have seen that your pricing simply doesn't match their market, or they have fears around that. That's why I'm such a big fan of transparency here, because I think that you will weed out and save your salespeople time, and save your customer service people time, and save your website bandwidth, if you're transparent about this most of the time.

Features and perceived features. Features is: Do you do the thing that I want you to do? When I'm talking about features, I could mean in software. I could mean in a product, like I'm buying a digital camera, I'm buying a car, I'm buying a whiteboard pen, I'm buying a subscription to a software service. I'm looking purely for information. The features are: Do you do the things that I want you do to? Oftentimes, that comes through brand perception as well.

So I know that a lot of the times when I visit an eHow type of website, that it doesn't have the features that I want, which is a reliable source that I know I can trust. Wikipedia's the same way. I only semi-trust Wikipedia, and I trust it on some topics and not others, and I always want to back it up with something else from some reliable source where I know the person there or I know the brand there, because Wikipedia could be edited by anybody, and I don't necessarily know who's behind it.

So those types of brands, and this is even true sometimes at About.com, where the writers in some categories are phenomenal. Southern food, I think is terrific. Some of the digital marketing ones are good. Some of them are mediocre. It's a trust factor around the features and the perception of features. Perception of features is often very different from actual features.

We find, for example, when we survey customers of SEOmoz that they have no idea that we actually will help track their Facebook pages, Insights data over time, and their Twitter data over time. Many people don't even know that Open Site Explorer and SEOmoz are offered in the same subscription. So this is clearly a problem that we have had on perception of features, not even on actual features.

Presentation. The way and the style in which the features and the information and the pricing and reliability and the uptime, all of that is presented is another big one. The thing about presentation is that it's a layer that impacts everything else, not just up here, but down here as well. It's often done terribly, terribly wrong on the Web.

Because it ties so much to the, "Do I like and trust these people," let's talk about those. This question, when you ask the question, "Do I like and trust the brand, and the people behind the brand," that goes to a bunch of inputs that are very, very far removed, all so far removed from traditional CRO stuff. That's things like design and UX, which we talk about many times here on Whiteboard Friday and on the site. Higher quality, more professional, more consistent with what your audience is looking for, just does a fantastically better job than, "Oh yeah, we bought some stock photography of some people in an office working, and don't they look attractive, don't they have perfect skin? And now, you know, that's our homepage, and then there's Services, and Contact, and About. Great, we have a professional website!" No, you don't. No, no, you don't!

Design UX isn't just about that. There are other inputs like domain name and brand name. One of the biggest reasons that I'm often against exact- match domains is because it is so tremendously hard to build up any sort of branding. If you name industries, you will very, very rarely hear that the generic, exact-match domain for what we call that industry is a market leader, a brand leader, and because of that and also because, to be totally fair, a lot of people in the domaining sphere and the affiliate marketing and SEO sphere noticed the power that these had in Google and abused them tremendously. So now consumers have an association, particularly savvy consumers have an association, a brand association with exact-match domains. That is, "Oh, that's probably a low-quality site. That's probably not the real brand. I don't know if I can trust it if I click on that," versus actual brand names.

I'll give you some very good examples. In the world of office supplies I've heard of Staples, right? I've heard of OfficeMax. I've heard of Office Depot. But if it's OfficeSupplies.net, I'm sure someone owns that domain. It could even be someone awesome. Maybe it's a great site, but if I see it in the search results, I'm going to be mighty suspicious. That suspicion just naturally creeps in. That's why domain name and brand name are so tied together in the perception of trust and can substantially impact things like click-through rate and conversion rate and subscription rate, etc.

Accessibility of contact information. It's funny, I was just on an e-mail thread yesterday night, and some folks in the SEO sphere said, hey, have you ever heard of this particular - it was an enterprise SEO software provider. I went, "No, I haven't heard of them. This is the first time. Let me go check out their site." I see they try and say a few futures, but there's literally nothing, no one mentioned on the site; no people who are using it, no people who are associated with the brand. The contact information is "Fill out a contact form" or "Here's our office." I think it was somewhere in the United States; I can't remember exactly where. But other than a mailing address and a phone number, there was no human being listed, which made me very suspicious, because why would you not show off the team? Like, here's the exec team behind it. Here are our engineers. That kind of transparency is natural in the software world. Something's weird if it doesn't exist there.

Being able to find that information - a phone number, e-mail, contact forms, here's our Twitter and our Facebook, and these kinds of things - you just expect those from web companies. When they don't exist, you become highly suspicious.

The authenticity of the content. One of my favorite examples is there's a brand that's been doing a ton of fantastic infographics. I think it's MBAonline or MBAeducation.com, one of the online education providers with a very generic name. They really do great infographics. They sponsor some awesome stuff. Sometimes they'll get featured on a Mashable or even a TechCrunch, or something like that. Tremendous work, excellent work getting that brand out there.

But I always look at them and think this doesn't have a relationship with what the services that you're trying to sell, which is you're an affiliate for a bunch of online education providers, which can be a little bit of a nasty, sort of spammy, aggressive field. The challenge here is, hey, yes, you've got the infographic, you've got the link. But when you're trying to tie back into consumers and earn their business, those of us who are savvy and sophisticated, we sort of get a funny feeling, like something doesn't match up. The content is not authentic to the brand. Why is it being produced?

I think a great example of this is OkTrends, which is OkCupid's blog. They essentially have dating content that matches up with what people are looking for from their site. So, here's how to optimize your dating profile, and by the way, we're a dating website. Great, makes perfect sense.

Hey, here's an infographic about the rise of Twitter or Twitter click- through rates or something - and by the way, we're an MBA online education provider. Why is that? It seems like it's just for the links and attention and awareness and has nothing to do with the actual brand. Highly suspicious, particularly in spheres that are very aggressive.

Industry reputation, word of mouth. I'll give you another example. So, there was another provider that was mentioned on this string in the SEO enterprise space. No, I'm sorry. It was another enterprise software provider, but not in SEO. There were some comments of, "Oh, hey, should we use this? Should we use this other one?" Someone remarked on an e-mail thread, "You know, the CEO of this particular company has treated women employees very badly."

You would never find that on the Web, right? That's not information that you're going to see. If you start searching for reviews, you won't find it on their website. It's something that's word-of-mouth only, but it's made its way to enough influencers that now that is an influential thing in the perception of, "Do I like the brand and the people?" Very frankly, I trust this source, and I know the source knows the CEO there, and I don't. I'm probably not going to buy from this particular enterprise software provider, even if they meet my needs up here. This is the type of stuff that influences conversion rate, that is so subtle and so hidden, that you're never going to realize it from a traditional CRO-type of perspective. And yet, it pays huge dividends to go and investigate this stuff and understand that perception.

The final one that I'll mention here is familiarity with the brand and social proof of the brand. A great example here, go to SurveyMonkey's website. If you're not logged in, the homepage is a woman from Facebook, her picture, she's a statistical analyst there, and she's giving an endorsement to SurveyMonkey. Now, Facebook is a phenomenal brand; they're very well-known. Their business practices are respected. People know that they're a great data-driven company, and so the fact that they trust SurveyMonkey strongly suggests SurveyMonkey must be a great provider. So, they've created that social proof, and they're using a brand that you're familiar with.

When you combine those things, it's absolutely excellent and incredibly powerful. When I go to websites and I see a lot of social proof from either people that are anonymous or people that provide only their fist name or people that I don't know, it's less powerful. When I have seen a brand, six, seven, eight times on the Web, at a conference, in various types of ways - I've heard from someone over e-mail, I know someone who's used them, I've had an experience with someone from that company - those types of things strongly influence these. Building up all of this builds up your conversion rates and builds up all of these metrics that you think about as an online marketer, and yet, we often have so little control or so little even ability to judge and record these things.

What I want to suggest is that, to those of you who are doing web marketing, when you're thinking about these metrics, remember that these are all inputs. Don't necessarily use them as excuses, but make sure that you're taking some action on them. Make sure that you're finding ways to measure them. Make sure that these aren't the reasons why your rates over here are low, rather than the stuff that you focus on, because it can be incredibly frustrating to find that, hey, the reason that we're not making good sales is because no one is familiar with our brand, and we don't have the right social proof, rather than, oh, it's because I didn't write the title tags correctly, and I don't have a compelling description for the content, and the page isn't optimized well. It doesn't have a good flow and conversion process and funnel. Sometimes these two things are mixed up together, and I worry about those hidden factors.

So, I hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday, and I hope we'll see you again next week. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Posted by randfish

Having content that goes viral can seem like the luck of the draw, but there are a number of steps you can take to improve your odds. In this week's Whiteboard Friday, we will show you a few things you can do to increase your chances of having that well crafted content spread through the internet like a wildfire. Thanks for watching and don't forget to leave your comments below.

Video Transcription

Howdy SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're talking about how to give your content a better chance of going viral, and from virality, what I really mean here is not just getting links, which are obviously very helpful from an SEO perspective, but getting social shares, getting mentions on other blogs, getting talked about, getting emailed around. The virality of content determines how successful that content is going to be in the broader Web, in the scheme of all things that are inbound, not just SEO, not just social, not just community stuff, but overall. There are a few things that you can do that will significantly help your efforts to earn that content virality. So let's talk about a few of them.

Number one, the right format or the right UI or UX, user experience. What I'm talking about here is a lot of people think that they can take the same way that they produce content normally, keep on doing that, and sometimes that works, especially if you have a very, very clean site, maybe it's in a blog format and it's got nice width. It's not too hampered by advertising and surrounded by that kind of stuff. But oftentimes you will see that content can perform better when it's in a separate type of format. So let's say you've got a traditional page layout that has content section here but a big header up here and a top ad and a bottom ad and a bunch of sidebar stuff. And maybe you think, "You know what? I'm actually going to clean that up to something that has branding but minimal branding, got a great headline, got the content right in there, and that's the focus of the page." So the users who come to it can easily, above the fold, find the content that they're looking for, that there's compelling visuals.

These visuals are particularly important because both Google+ and Facebook, if you do any sharing on either of those platforms, remember that they'll automatically insert an image from the post, and oftentimes the user can select which image. If you've got a couple compelling images that look great when scaled down, that look great when you're going to share them on Facebook or on Google+ or that somebody else who is going to copy those images and put them on their site, oh man, much, much more successful.

Even if you have literally just a piece of writing, if you can have some sort of a visual element that is compelling, that's interesting, that draws in the reader, that's relevant, you're going to do much, much better. Flickr Creative Commons is great for this. Drawing your own stuff is great for this. Charts and graphs are great for this. Even licensing out someone to do a tiny amount of work for a few hundred dollars around building a visual for you, taking some of the data or some of the insight that you've learned that you're putting into that content can be really helpful to help it go more viral.

Then doing things like, you know, you've got to have the design look and feel professional. It has to be modern and updated. Clean is very, very good for getting that sharing principle. You can see this happen all the time with content that's shared on major media websites, where it's the print friendly version that gets emailed around, that makes its way around Twitter and around Google+ and Facebook and goes on LinkedIn. It's almost always the one that people will link to in a Reddit or a Hacker News or on Stumble Upon. Print friendly versions, just make that the default for content that you want to have virality.

Then finally I'd also be looking at the title friendliness itself, and the URL actually matters a lot now too. So if you've got a pre-existing CMS, when you go to bit.ly or you to goo.gl or whatever your URL shortener is, you might want to try something like this, getting the customized one. So for example, you'll see that when I have content that I like to share a lot, I might say for example, "Oh, let's make this content say inbound startups, and that'll be my slide share presentation." So now you don't have to remember some long URL. It's just bit.ly/inboundstartups, and that will take you right to my presentation here, that URL functions. Customizing this portion of the shared URL can be very helpful if you can't control it. If you can though, go with something easy, simple, short, not too many parameters in there. This will also help you. I might even, for some things, recommend dropping the slash articles or the slash blog and going just with /catchy-subject, whatever that subject line is. You 're going to shrink down the title so that it's easily understandable so if somebody ever sees that URL or hovers on it, they think, "Oh, that sounds interesting. I should click that link. That might be cool."

Number two, great, fantastic way to make sure that your content is going to at least perform decently on the Web is to get buy-in from your influencers, the influencers in a community, before, not after, not during, but before you ever publish it. So I'll give you a great example. I got an email last Friday from a guy in the search world and he said, "Hey Rand, my company, we produce this big report. We've got this cool infographic, lots of interesting data about stuff that's happening in the world. Would you take a look at this? Tell me what you think. Do you think your community would like it?" And I wrote back and said, "Yeah, I really love this. I think it's excellent. I don't even have any changes. I think this is going to do great, and I'd be happy to share it." This person didn't specifically ask me for a share and I think that's why. What they asked me for was feedback.

That feedback, coming from people who have a powerful forum, 6,000 RSS readers, 500 people following them on Google+, you can find these people. You probably already know about them in your niche or your sphere, who they are, the key bloggers, the key Twitter accounts, the key Google+ accounts, the key people on LinkedIn, the people who run popular websites, the influencers. Then you can essentially draw them back to whatever it is that's your content in here, and they will be much more likely to share if you ping them about it beforehand. They'll also give you feedback like, "I don't really think this is going to play well," or "If you did this, it'd be very interesting, but I don't see what you've done as particularly unique or valuable. I probably wouldn't share it." Or no response at all. If you get lots of those, you know that you're not hitting it out of the park with this content. You're going to have to do something else, try something else. That's great to know before you hit that publish button.

There's a bunch of things you can get from them. So if you're thinking, boy, I just can't get these people to share what I'm producing. I don't know what I can do, get them involved in the actual content itself. So rather than you writing an opinion blog post saying I like this particular thing and that particular thing, you can instead go and gather. Hey, can I solicit your review and opinion on a subject, and then I'm going to gather that from several experts and publish that. I'm going to run a survey of you and 20 other people who are influencers in the field about particular things, about some data from your sites, your projects, your experiences, your businesses, whatever it is, or your opinions on this matter. I'm going to interview you or do some lessons learned stuff. I shared a great link last week that was a bunch of video interviews of entrepreneurs, and this type of stuff performs tremendously well because all of those people who are involved in the project, from an interviewee perspective, they are all going to share it after it's produced because you write back to them and you say, "Hey, the interview is now live. The data is now live. The review is now live."

You can request input from their communities. For example, when SEOmoz does the SEO Industry Survey every two years, we always ask, hey, would you share this with your community so that we can get the input of people who read Search Engine Land or Search Engine Watch or SEO Book or Search Engine Journal, a variety of these places. HubSpot, etc.

If you can't directly reach out, you can always mention these people. So if you, for example, gather things that they've tweeted, said on their own blogs, you're getting quotes from them, you're getting data they've shared, you're using numbers from them, anything like that, you can say, "Oh, by the way, we mentioned you or we're going to be mentioning you in an upcoming piece, would you like to take a look at it and review and let us know if it's appropriate or okay, if this is accurate?" That process of interacting in an authentic way, both to confirm that you do have accurate data and that you're doing the right thing with them, gives them a buy-in to, "Oh, I'm going to go check out this article. Huh, this is interesting. Yeah, this looks great, thanks very much." Or, "Oh I have this little bit of feedback for you." Then when you publish, you can say, "Hey, we hit publish. It's now live. Thanks again for reviewing. If you would share with your community, that'd be great. Here's the shortened link or here's a tweet you could retweet." This kind of stuff works phenomenally well. This process of getting that early buy-in ahead of time is so powerful, and it just makes sure that the content does much better than it normally would.

The third and final thing that I'm going to mention here - topic, timing, and seeding. So this is essentially the process of figuring out what works best in your community, and that's from a topical perspective. Copyblogger has a lot of good posts about how to write a compelling headline and what's going to be popular right now. But I would think about it this way. If it's being mentioned in the news, so for example if I go to, let's say this is Google Insights or Google Trends or the news timeline, and I see mentions it is at the steady state point but has a spike here, this is where I want to be writing about that topic. Or maybe right after, when there's usually that second bump of people having a discussion about it. If you can, you might even want to catch it here, before it goes hot, and then you'll have a chance to appear in things like Google News and you'll have a chance to be mentioned in all the articles that talk about that subject thereafter. This is great for anytime you have a timely or trending type of topic.

You also want to, in addition to all these influencers you talk to, there are likely a few people, these are your buddies, your friends, people you connect with on a regular basis, you're emailing with them, you follow each other on Twitter. Do them a favor. Start sharing some of their content. When they tweet things, retweet them. Build up those relationships. Almost all of you probably have a few of those already. Leverage those. Email them in person and say, "Kenny, I know you've got a small Twitter account. It'd be awesome if you could share this. If you ever need the same favor from me, just ask." Almost always, especially if those are close relationships, personal relationships, you've hung out in a bar before, you've bought each other dinner, you know each other well, you're going to get that. I think that's a great way to leverage the real world social network for online social networks. Obviously, you have to be careful not to abuse this. You want to be sharing stuff that these people would ordinarily want to share and be interested in.

Then finally timing stuff. I can tell you for B2B content, Saturday and Sunday are just straight out. However, the reverse is true for Facebook, where the most sharing and the most time spent on Facebook happens on the weekends. Now, not surprisingly, that's not B2B Facebooking. That's personal Facebooking. So it better be the kind of stuff that's going to play well with your mom and your grandma and your brother and that kind of stuff. B2B, Tuesday through Thursday. Don't do Monday. Don't do Friday. With the exception of, it appears that some of the best content or most successful tweeting happens on Friday morning, sort of Thursday night going into Friday morning. That's when people seem to be tweeting and retweeting a lot of stuff. This is from some research from Dan Zarrella over at HubSpot. You can look into that. The timing of social media, I believe, is his presentation.

So don't necessarily take my word for it. Test, test, test. If you're sharing content and producing content on a regular basis, you will figure out the right times to share, who you can start seeding things with, who's reliable and helps you get that content out there, what topics work well, what sorts of headlines work well for your audience. It's going to be different for everyone. So don't just trust these. But do test and observe and watch your click through rates, using something like a bit.ly, watching your analytics, seeing what works when you share things and how long it takes for them to go and what sources indicate. Sometimes you're going to share with this one guy and he's going to populate it to tons of places. One of my favorite features for this is Google+'s ripples, where you can actually see, it's almost like this. It'll actually show you a timeline of this person shared and then these 13 other people shared and 1 of them produced 10 more shares. That stuff is very powerful, and you can observe it on the regular Web, on the rest of the Web, across platforms if you're carefully watching analytics or your bit.ly click throughs.

So hopefully, using this methodology, you can produce some content that has higher chances, better odds of going viral. I wish you luck. I hope to see lots of great stuff out there on the Web. Take care. We'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Posted by randfish

Earlier tonight, I sent out the following tweet:

Have any questions about search, social, content, conversion or analytics you want answered? I'm taking requests for the Moz blog tonight :)

— Rand Fishkin (@randfish) January 24, 2012

I was clearly under-prepared for the amazing responses. In order to tackle such a magnitude of great questions, I'm giving myself some rules for replies.

1. If I don't have a good answer, I won't tackle the question. For example, Nathaniel Deal asked a good one on .NET viewstates impacting SEO, and while I'd love to reply, I don't know enough about them to provide solid suggestions.
2. No answer can be longer than two paragraphs (plus maybe an explanatory image/graphic).
3. Everyone who asked a great question gets their tweet embedded in this post (using Twitter's nice, new embed functionality), which also gives a spiffy followed link to their tweet.
4. Where possible, I'll provide links to content for more detail so those who are particularly interested can follow up.

Let's get started!

@randfish What single site on the web would you most want to see the analytics for?

— AlexConde (@AlexConde) January 24, 2012

Tough decision. It would probably be between YouTube and eHow, mostly for the putting-to-rest-conspiracy-theories value. But that's with my blogger/search news hat on. If I think more strategically and web-wide, I'd say Amazon's analytics would be fascinating to open-source ala Wikileaks. I suspect folks around the world could study the last decade of data and discover remarkable traits and trends about what we care about, buy and sell as a society.

@randfish not a lot of coverage on enterprise b2b content out there. What differences in strategy should these companies use?

— Jack Jones (@Mafuba) January 24, 2012

I think there's some pretty good stuff out there about Enterprise SEO (though, in all fairness, Moz hasn't been doing a great job on that topic lately - I'll try to fix that). Some recommendations:

• The columns at SELand on Enterprise SEO are often good (Ian Lurie's latest in particular)
• Tom Critchlow gave a solid delivery at Mozcation Peru on this topic, and his slide deck is on Slideshare.
• Speaking of Slideshare, Bill Hunt, who's a brilliant enterprise-level marketing tactician, also has a good deck there.
• A pair of good pieces from Aimclear and Raven covered enterprise sessions at conferences.

In terms of my personal recommendations - the key is to think at scale. Oftentimes, the "little stuff," like fixing title tags, getting URLs right, making it easier to use the CMS so more people at the company blog, etc. can have huge impacts at big organizations but would do little for SMBs. There's also larger strategies like content licensing and adding specific inbound marketing roles to a team. E.g. for a five-person team, you could have a content strategist, a full-time writer, an SEO/analytics data junky, a marketing-focused graphic designer and a marketing-specific developer. That combination can often do AMAZING things, even in very large organizations.

@randfish Booh, the Filthy Linking Rich are getting some link Juice..? bit.ly/22IyMo

— Dennis Goedegebuure (@TheNextCorner) January 24, 2012

I suppose linking to Twitter is giving a link-rich site more juice, but I'd worry about saying I'll link to everyone's individual domains, as that could create some more manipulative/non-authentic questions, especially considering the sphere we're in :-)

Oh, and BTW, if you haven't read the article Dennis links to in his tweet (from the brilliant Mike Grehan), I'd check it out. I wrote about it again a couple years ago, because it's a concept that every marketer should know and embrace.

@randfish conversion: how many people really click on related posts lists at the end of a post?

— Brankica U (@BrankicaU) January 24, 2012

It totally depends on how it's implemented and what you put there. I've seen/heard of CTRs on "related" as high as 10% of visits (usually on hyper-targeted blogs that include images/graphics in the related section) and under 0.1%. My advice is to test the formats you think will work best against one another, using some A/B testing software like Google Website Optimizer or Unbounce. Given the task you're aiming for has relatively higher conversions than a traditional purchase funnel, you can likely see results fairly quickly.

@randfish Do you think Google is using or will use 'author trust' as a highly relevant ranking factor?

— David Cohen (@explorionary) January 24, 2012

Right now, I'd say it's a strong factor for earning those amazing rel=author style rich snippets in the SERPs (as seen below):

In the future, I think it will depend on the degree to which the data format is embraced and used across the web, and whether they see a strong correlation with increased searcher happiness/relevancy when they test implementations. If you've not yet read the interview with a Google Search Quality Rater, check it out. To my mind, that clearly illustrates the process by which Google's Search Quality team determines whether an algorithmic shift is positive (and worth releasing) or negative (and thus, shut down).

@randfish been thinking of doing a crowdsourced post about the state of affiliate marketing this year (with GSPYW, Panda, social signals)...

— Jason Acidre (@jasonacidre) January 24, 2012

I think it's a great topic. Sadly, for a lot of affiliate marketers, I think Google's intent is to put them out of business, or at least make things much tougher for them in search/SEO. If I were doing any form of affiliate stuff, I'd be thinking extremely hard about how to build a unique value proposition, a recognizable, memorable, beloved brand and earn enough press and awareness, particularly in the tech community, so as to limit the potential damage of future Google updates targeted as eliminating these types of operators. I'd also try to diversify my traffic to get no more than 40% of visits from search (which likely means investing in a lot of content marketing, social media, blogs, etc).

@randfish What kind of difference should I expect in conversions if I require a credit card for a free trial, vs open registration?

— Adrian Pike (@adrianpike) January 24, 2012

We actually studied this one at Moz! Our findings, from talking to a bunch of folks in the sphere, were that the numbers come out very similarly either way. If you take a credit card upfront, you have a higher barrier to entry and fewer free trials, but a higher post-trial conversion rate. If you don't require a credit card, trials go up, but conversions at the end of the period go down to approximately the same.

We based our decision on the fact that there are substantive costs associated with crawling a site, fetching data, etc. in our web app and tools (including social data, which we pay for based on usage). Thus, fewer trials with a higher conversion rate would give the business better overall margins.

@randfish Could you write up a post about the science of sharing? I.e. best practices to get your readers to share your content?

— Jon Cooper (@PointBlankSEO) January 24, 2012

I'm going to defer to the expert on this one and point over to these 10 excellent posts by Dan Zarrella. In fact, just go read all his stuff. Here's his posts on Hubspot and his Slideshare decks.

If you want even more, I did a Whiteboard+ video that went up just today on the topic of sharing across multiple platforms.

@randfish While SEO Moz lays out some fantastic best practices, can you think of any sites succeeding by doing the exact opposite?

— AlexConde (@AlexConde) January 24, 2012

Many of the daily deals and subscription commerce sites actually do very little inbound marketing. Here's a cool infographic from the folks at Kiss Metrics showing off the impressive growth many of them have experienced:

Some of this is based on the product alone, some is the virality of the concept, some is highly successful advertising and a few, to be fair, do a good job with inbound channels like content, search and social. Other great examples are Craigslist and Reddit. There's lots of ways to skin the web traffic cat, and while I'm biased to organic/free sources, I'm also keenly aware that it's not the only route.

@randfish love to know more about canonical issues with site redesigns. When to use them or do I 301 bunch of weird urls?

— Ken Savage (@kensavage) January 24, 2012

If possible, most SEOs generally like to use 301 rewrite rules. They scale nicely - even if you have 500,000 pages of product URLs that all need to change, a single 301 rule through .htaccess can often address the problem - and they're still a best practice. I'd lean more towards canonical when you have a specific reason to want to keep the page accessible to users in multiple formats, e.g. print/mobile-friendly versions of articles or the same product with different image views.

@randfish What I mean is the best ways to implement sharing (i.e. social buttons) in your content to increase social traction.

— Jon Cooper (@PointBlankSEO) January 24, 2012

Oh... Interesting. I think this would be worthy of some testing and research, but one cool data point I'd check out comes from the OKTrends blog. You might remember that they used to have multiple sharing buttons that dropped-down from the top of the page using CSS once you reached the bottom of an article. After testing, my understanding is that they found having a single Facebook like button (as per the image below) worked best.

Perhaps less is more when it comes to sharing. I know that personally, I'm often overwhelmed by, for example, what Mashable or Huffington Post do with share buttons. Though, I do like having at least Twitter, Facebook and Google+.

@randfish Google is pushing G+, Search Plus your world in it's SERP! What's the future of #SEO? Or do we just need to push content on G+?

— Aakar Anil (@aakarpost) January 24, 2012

I think they'll only get more aggressive with pushing Google+ into the SERPs and into non-traditional results areas as with what we see below:

I did a video about this last week, and I'd also recommend AJ Kohn's sublime SEO Guide to Google+ for more depth.

@randfish when doing outreach, what's the best way to improve response/overall content conversion rates?

— Xiaohan Zhang (@xiaohanzhang14) January 24, 2012

My top 5 things to get improved conversions through outreach are:

1. Have a pre-existing relationship w/ those you contact
2. Be a recognizable, trusted brand (or have an association that they'll know and trust)
3. Make requests that benefit both parties (e.g. it's easy to get me to share great marketing content, because I know that if I do, I'll earn more followers/blog readers/circles/fans/etc)
4. Make your content source (blog/website/infographic) as beautifully-designed, clean and ad-free as possible
5. Be incredibly relevant - reference things that show you know the person you've reached out to, point to content that's recent, useful, interesting and "up their alley," and be authentic in your request (i.e. explain how/why your request and content are relevant if it's not truly obvious)

Mike King also offered some great suggestions in his blog post on the topic here.

@randfish Hi :) With HTML 5 and long 1 page websites. What are the recommendations for Hx tags and for "inner" linking ?

— Khalil Maaouni (@kmaaouni) January 24, 2012

I like internal anchor links a lot, and I don't just use them for long pages, but also to split up pages in a long document (e.g. our Search Ranking Factors). For those long one-pagers, do be aware that Google may rank specific portions from those internal anchors separately (which can be a good thing), and that you can also get the mini-sitelinks like these:

You don't need to do anything fancy - clean, classic internal anchors and substantive content + good external links usually does the job.

@randfish For @seomoz blog - These Google shenanigans, how much will it affect their activity? Will Bing/Yahoo see an increase overtime?

— Bill Springer (@billyspringer) January 24, 2012

Probably not. I'd say that for logged-in users of Google accounts, Gmail and Google+, Google already has those users "in their pocket" as searchers and it will be very tough to go over to Bing. Core relevancy, particularly in the long tail, is still a weak spot for Bing, and Google's still relatively religious in their testing around user experience and click activity. If they see any hint of a real hit to usage, they'll tune things up very quickly. My guess is that the SPYW rollout wouldn't have even happened unless they saw some good data suggesting it would improve the metrics they care about.

@randfish Do you see Pinterest ever playing a big role in the social marketing other than "putting the button on my site"?

— Colby Almond (@colbyalmond) January 24, 2012

I think long-term, Pinterest may be more than it is today. Twitter started out as a place to tell people what you were eating. Facebook was just a place college students went to hook up. I'd guess Pinterest has a real shot at disrupting e-commerce and online shopping from a social perspective.

@randfish What are the best options to integrate a mobile-optimized site with an existing desktop one?

— Ryan Ricketts (@RickettsFish) January 24, 2012

My favorite is simply to have a mobile stylesheet. The content stays the same. The URLs stay the same. The social sharing and SEO isn't affected. It just makes it easier to read on tiny devices.

@randfish in PPC setups, before people ever get the chance to see your content, what are some of the best ways to increase CTR / conversions

— Bryan Pellegrino (@PrimordialAA) January 24, 2012

Help me Joanna Lord! You're my only hope. Seriously, we should get her to write a blog post about this. I bet it would be amazing :-)

@randfish any opinion on which SEO plugin for wordpress is "best"? (IF there is good content and if not)

— Aly & John (@hopandjaunt) January 24, 2012

I'm a longtime fan of Yoast's Wordpress plugins. They're powerful, flexible and nearly easy enough for beginners (at least, with a little light reading). He also keeps them updated regularly and allows for some of the cool, new functionality like rel=author (to be fair, you can do this without the plugin, too).

@randfish Twitter vs. Facebook. Which link raises a page one result faster? (My tests say Facebook every time) wondering what you see.

— Amanda MacArthur (@amaaanda) January 24, 2012

My understanding, which comes straight from Google is that neither influences search rankings directly (at least, not anymore - Twitter did from 2009-2011). However, they both spread content to users who search, click, like, link, +1 and perform all other manners of activity, some of which may indeed be directly influencing the rankings.

In terms of which one's more powerful, I'd say it's about your network and your users. For example, on Moz, we have far more success spreading content using Twitter than Facebook. And for me personally, the same is true. For others, though, Facebook may be much more influential. You have to know your network and your audience.

@randfish I once heard that Google takes the length of a domain registration into account as one of their ranking/authority factors. True?

— Lennart(@LennartDam) January 24, 2012

I've heard the same thing, and I believe it's based on a webspam-related patent Google filed many years ago. Bill Slawski recently re-visited the patent and his coverage is worth a read. Personally, I'd guess that if it's a signal, it's a very small one, and potentially limited to use only for network spam detection. That said, I'd still register domains for multiple years, because it sucks royally when you forget to renew them :-)

@randfish in the music lyrics industry, what's the best competitive advantage a site can get - considering all "content" is the same

— Jonathan Dingman (@Dingman) January 24, 2012

Check out the brilliant work of Rap Genius. In my opinion, they set the gold standard for adding value in an industry/niche where few thought that could be done.

@randfish Which books taught you the most about the Web?

— Ryan Ricketts (@RickettsFish) January 24, 2012

I've got a list for you right here! Some of them are just enjoyable works of fiction, but the rest should be up your alley.

@randfish Is there such a thing as a scalable link building strategy?

— ROImedia (@ROImedia_LLC) January 24, 2012

Definitely. UGC is scalable. Content licensing is scalable. Embedded content is highly scalable. Data APIs are scalable. Even media coverage can be scalable. Heck, if you're really good at it, blogging can even be scalable. A good post on the topic comes from Distilled.

@randfish Hi Randfish, I would like to know how to leverage on Twitter / Facebook to increase the Klout rank

— Writing-Unleashed (@17OnlineIncome) January 24, 2012

Hmm... I don't think I'd worry much about Klout's ranking. It's a lot like toolbar PageRank in that there's not much point in attempting to inflate it. I'd concentrate more on social metrics like these.

That said, I've heard that if you have lots and lots of @ reply conversations (particularly with a diverse set of folks), it can bring up your Klout score quite a bit.

@randfish hey...if multiple accounts on FB and G+ link to a website (not to the FB page of the brand)..wud that improve the rankings?

— Srikanth Ch (@srikanthch10) January 24, 2012

Potentially yes, though probably not by a huge amount unless they're accompanied by all the other nice signals that a group of social influencers often bestow on a site they all share (e.g. SEOmoz has quite a few powerful Twitter/Facebook/G+ accounts linking to it, though the benefits are probably more second-order impact than direct).

@randfish- with radically differing serps by region is it neccessary to measure campaign performance on rankings anymore.

— rbnfsh (@rbnfsh) January 24, 2012

I don't think I'd go that far. Rather, I'd say it's important to measure rankings for specific engines in specific regions, e.g. Google.co.uk AND Google.ca AND Google.com (US).

@randfish as a small biz online, what should you focus on the most? Blog, newsletter, landing pages, social, other?

— Robert Rolfe (@rrolfe) January 24, 2012

Unfortunately, the best advice I can give is the hardest to implement: You have to test. If you try a channel honestly and with authentic effort for 3-4 weeks, then compare against other things you're doing, you'll have real data about the value of that source for your brand. If not, you'll probably miss some.

That said, if you do nothing else, have a blog you update religiously every week (or every day if possible), occasionally targeting keyword phrases for SEO, and get accounts on Facebook/Twitter/Google+ where you share your posts. It doesn't work for everyone, but it's a content+social strategy that often yields consistent rewards.

@randfish How would you quantify, in $, the value of a single link with the purpose of comparing net roi of competing linkbuilding efforts

— Dylan Whitman (@DylanWhitman) January 24, 2012

You ask for the impossible, sir.

Links can almost never be measured in dollar value, unless it's an affiliate link with a tracking code and you know every visitor that came and their behavior over the next 3 months (and even then, you're probably missing some of the value). Rather than trying to come up with an arbitrary formula, I'd think holistically about the value of links - they send traffic, they help with branding and awareness, they likely provide some SEO benefits (if they're from good sources) and they build relationships with the linking site. Hard to measure is a good thing - it means the competition probably underinvests :-)

@randfish A question: What has the most value, a "mention" of a URL or a no-followed link?

— Mikael Rieck (@mikaelrieck) January 24, 2012

I would LOVE to run some tests on that :-) If anyone does it, we'd be thrilled to publish your findings here on the Moz blog.

My total guess is that nofollow links probably do, but it's very hard to say and could even be on a case-by-case, e.g. link mentions on Wikipedia might be worth more than nofollow links on a random blog (but can't say for certain).

@randfish Many software co's leverage post-blog CTAs in the form of whitepapers, free trials, & the like. Why does SEOMoz choose not to?

— Ross Hudgens (@RossHudgens) January 24, 2012

We sorta do... This is what you'll see if you're logged-out of your account:

Being honest, there's a natural tension inside SEOmoz about not pushing our products too hard in our community. It's part of our commitment to TAGFEE (specifically Authenticity). We believe there's a ton of value in building up trust and a relationship with our members prior to asking them to buy our stuff. So far, that's worked out well :-)

@randfish As search engines become more intelligent with their search results do you think SEO will be as effective as it is today?

— Mac Segura-Cook (@MacSegura) January 24, 2012

Engines have gotten tremendously more intelligent over the last decade, but I've only ever seen the effectiveness and value of SEO go up. Granted, it's become more complex and nuanced, but that's actually made it a more worthwhile investment, IMO.

@randfish We have a ton of user-generated content, and as such, lots of inbound links. How can we leverage that info for greater exposure?

— Greg Childs (@NICOclub) January 24, 2012

Target good keywords! And encourage folks who contribute UGC to do likewise (and to link to their profiles and their content in scalable ways, such as badges or direct-embedding, like I did with your tweet above). You can also try taking older, out-of-date content and redirecting it to more relevant, high quality, updated pages, thus consolidating some of the spread-out link juice and providing better value to visitors.

@randfish What factors does Google use to define what an ad is? How does it know it's paid and how many is too many? [Above the fold]

— Nathaniel W Deal (@NathanielDeal) January 24, 2012

Ads on the web follow extremely similar patterns such as tracking URLs and IDs, sizing formats, delivery through CDNs, etc. I'd guess that Google likely has a machine-learning based algo that has human editors tweaking it semi-regularly when any new ad network gets to scale.

What's the best competitive benchmark for social ROI? RT @randfish: Have any questions... you want answered? I'm taking requests tonight :)

— Bryant Tutterow (@BTutterow) January 24, 2012

There's only a few metrics you can really get publicly for the Twitter/Facebook/Google+/etc. accounts of your competition. Check out this post to see more.

@randfish When on-page has been done all wrong for large WP Blog what path do u take? Fix 200 posts, go hard creating new ones done right?

— Sha Menz (@ShahMenz) January 24, 2012

Depends. If the content was targeting good keywords and is high-value/useful then just clean up the on-page, perhaps update the content a touch and then re-share (particularly the good stuff) on social networks/featuring on the homepage, linking to it in new posts, etc. If, however, there's a lot of old junk in the blog, I'd worry less about reviving it and more about upgrading quality, SEO-targeting and share-worthiness moving forward.

- @randfish Do search engines read URLs as separate words? Are dashes in URLs SEO friendlier? www. ThisURL .com vs www. This-URL . com ?

— Sarah V. (@nettyboops) January 24, 2012

99% of the time, they do. But be careful if you make up words. For example, SEOmoz itself may not get the benefit of having "SEO" in the domain name, because "moz" isn't a word. Likewise, something like "Everywhereist" might not rank for "Everywhere" because the engines interpret "ist" as part of the word, not a separate one. However, if you have a domain like "greetingcards.com" that will certainly be seen as the words "greeting" and "cards."

@randfish is it possible to cost effectively outsource article creation (non-spun, non-spam) for non-tech businesses (eg. restaurants/vets)

— Iain Dooley (@iaindooley) January 24, 2012

It is, but there's a bunch of pitfalls and shortcuts that lead many down the wrong path. My best advice is to outsource to those who are already blogging/content-creating passionately and authentically. For example, if you're a travel site seeking content, don't hire folks who've never written about travel before (or who do it through a content agency for $5 an article). Go find 50 travel writers on the web who aren't monetizing their sites well. Reach out individually and offer them $50-$100 per post. You'll get a lot of takers and way more value - because those bloggers will (oftentimes) SHARE the content they write for you, bringing far more value than just the words alone.

@randfish How should one go about forecasting weekly organic search results to show ROI in order to obtain dev resources and budget?

— Jonathon Colman (@jcolman) January 24, 2012

This deserves its own post, Jon. Excellent question though - I will try to tackle in some future content (maybe a WB Friday or a blog post).

@randfish do paid website directory listingsoffer any SEO benefit anymore?

— AlexConde (@AlexConde) January 24, 2012

Sadly, the answer is sometimes, but usually not permanently and on rare occasion, it can get you a penalty. I'd use extreme caution here (which means, I'd never do it personally, but some folks with higher risk tolerance do and get rankings from it).

@randfish As SERPs become more personal & harder to influence en masse, what metrics will become more important for measuring SEO success?

— Mollie Vandor (@mollierosev) January 24, 2012

Visits from search, # of keywords sending traffic, performance of keywords, # of pages receiving search traffic, rankings for key terms using non-personalized search (even if many are logged-in, the "natural" results still usually hold some sway in what gets shown, especially on Page 1).

@randfish How about the parallel between search and usability and how the new generation of mobile users are influencing this

— Jack Plouse (@jplouse) January 24, 2012

I'm not sure that mobile has added a ton here (though having content that's easy to consume + share on mobile devices is certainly a win, don't get me wrong). However, usability/UX has always been critical to SEO - it increases the likelihood your content will be seen, shared, liked, linked-to and all the other signals engines measure. Given how aggressive Google's been about user-experience style algo updates of late, I'd say a great UX is more important than ever, and it's something I'd nail even before worrying about broader marketing efforts.

@randfish Would love to have data on the impact of images to link to as we market @Shutterstock.

— David Fraga (@davidfraga) January 24, 2012

Links from images definitely appear to have an impact, and the alt attribute seems to act like anchor text. However, we did run some tests about 18 months ago showing that image links seemed to have less of a rankings influence than straight text links, so if possible, I might try to get the attribution to images in a caption below the image rather than just having the image itself click-able.

---

Thanks to everyone who sent questions! This has been tons of fun, though a lot of work.

I'm sure many of the comments will have more detail and probably some even better responses than those I gave above. That's the great part about this community - it scales. Someday soon, I suspect I'll be more of a question-asker than an answerer here, and that will be a wonderful day.

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!

Continue Reading

Posted by randfish

What happens when you have a page that ranks very well, but it isn't the page that pulls in the sales that you need? Often times the page that does convert very well is "boring" and subsequently ranks poorly.

In this weeks Whiteboard Friday, we are going to go over some strategies you can use to get those classically "boring" pages to rank well. Don't forget to leave your comments below. Enjoy!

Video Transcription

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're talking about a particularly vexing problem that plagues many folks in the inbound marketing industry, and that is the challenge of having a different sort of content that you want to rank to help you earn sales, to help you sell your product or your service, your idea, versus the content you create that performs well in the link and social sharing graph of the web, the one that everyone's tweeting about, the one that everyone's putting on Facebook and Google+, the one that everyone's linking to. This is a big frustration because the problem becomes that you don't really want to see this, especially those of you who are very conversion focused don't want to see this, where you Google some particular keyword and then maybe some other guy's ranking number one and you're ranking number two, but you're ranking number two with some link-worthy content, maybe something from your blog, a cool infographic you did, a nifty tool you built, something that you thought would perform well on the web of ideas and the content web, but is not pulling in the sales that you want.

If you've got a page like this that the issue can be, yeah, it's awesome charts and it's graphs and cool images and information and maybe some great opinions, some video, whatever it is, but it's not getting people to take the next step that you want them to which is buy. "I want to collect your e- mail address. I want to get some information from you. I want you to fill out this form. I want to get in touch with you so my salespeople can get in touch. I want to have you click 'buy' right here and go through a shopping cart process," whatever that is, it tends to be on a very different page, a boring, classically boring, not necessarily boring, but a classically boring product or sales-focused page, and oftentimes, that's ranking way down here, number 27.

So, there's a number of strategies that you can use to work around this. I think that this challenge is actually one of the things that draws people away from inbound marketing and makes them focus on sometimes black hat activities or purely paid search activities. Remember with paid search I can go, "Well, you know what? I can just put this in an ad up here and, yeah, the click-through rate isn't going to be nearly as good. I'm not going to capture as many of those leads, but it's fine. I'll get some of them, and that will be a way that I can earn those visits." But what you really want to do is have the ability to rank number one, number two with your boring product or sales page. There's a bunch of ways to do this.

Number one, one of my favorites, it is the simplest one - combine and conquer. This doesn't always work, but there are many times when I've seen folks who, for one reason or another, they have this great page with all this information that people link to and people like and people have checked out and shared, and they have this other page that's boring, but they never think to combine these into one and it's very possible. So, what you can do is take the, whatever it is, the technical specifications of the product, the idea you're trying to present, the sales stuff of it and mix it together with stuff that you know has performed well, the opinion part, the content piece. This doesn't always work, but it can work very well, and one of the things that you can do is if you find content that works tremendously well to attract links and shares and those kinds of things and then you have this boring page, you can put them together and then redirect, 301 redirect one of these to the other one, whichever the new canonical version is or rel=canonical it over, assuming the content's going to be the same, and you can earn that same position, essentially killing this one that's ranking 27th, x'ing this guy out and putting him up here. Then this page, which has the e-mail capture, the lead capture form, the "buy this product" whatever it is, can start to get that traffic, earn that traffic. Granted, this doesn't always work and that's why there's a bunch of other strategies.

One of the ones that we use all the time here at SEOmoz is to leverage the authority that you earn by producing great content to get links to the sales page. What do I mean here? What I'm saying is, what happens if you put out one of these is that this page gets links and interesting stuff and that's great. But if you write a blog that every week has great content that people in your industry care about, eventually, you will find that other great things happen. People will start asking, "Can I translate your content?" When they ask for translation privileges, you say, "Sure. We ask that you provide these links, including the links that we've got on this page, which by the way, link over to this one." So that gives you some nice links right there. People will ask you to guest blog for them. They'll ask you to contribute to questions, to surveys, to industry conferences and events, all sorts of things. Your bio, your profile will fly around the web.

When that stuff happens, you have the opportunity to embed that link that points back to the content that you want to rank, and very often you'll get a chance to capture the indented double listing. Many of you have probably seen this in the Google search results, but when there's a second listing from the same domain, it goes in here if it's on the same page. So, for example, you could be ranking number 10, and you will automatically be popped into a sub-spot number 3, which can be great for traffic, particularly because this can help to get the right intents to the right places, right? If this guy over here says, "Hmm? I'm not sure which one I want to go to." He's even got some little thought bubbles there. He's not sure which of these he's trying to get to. Well, he can take a look at both of them and go, "Oh, yeah, you know what? I've read this piece from them. That's not what I'm interested in. I'm actually interested in the product." Now that's going to be a very high value click, high likelihood of transaction person.

Number three, a lot of the time, if you can't truly combine these, or you feel like it's disingenuous or it doesn't work well or it would be not really the same content to put these two together, you can still have a sales message in here. All sorts of great content on the web has advertising embedded in it. When you advertise for your own stuff, this works even better. You can see this on the SEOmoz blog, where we'll sort of ask, "Hey, have you taken a free trial yet? Do you want to sign up for a comment?" Then you'll put in your e-mail address and you'll say is it okay if we e-mail you, and we'll shoot you an e-mail in your first week of free membership and say, "Hey, do you want to give Pro a try?" So we're sort of capturing you, and that sales message that can pop over on this type of content, that could be something that comes up after the page has loaded. It could be embedded right in there. You can test all sorts of different formats. It could be on the sidebar. It could be at the bottom of the page. It could be only when they try and take action on the page. Whatever it is that you think works best, that's a great way to send the relevant portions of this traffic over to these sales pages and potentially capture those leads as well.

Then the last one I'll mention here, number four, is using content marketing, in general, all forms of content marketing, which would include things like SEO and social media and however your content is being distributed, to earn the permission to do marketing and get that follow-up. And what I mean in here is, if people start subscribing to your blog, if people are following you on Twitter, if people are connecting with your Facebook fan page, they're liking your stuff, they're encircling you on Google+, this essentially says, "Hey, I am open to being part of your community and part of your world. I'm interested in what you're doing," and now you have a relationship and that relationship allows for this kind of permission marketing, which means you can say, "Hey, would you like to subscribe to this e-mail newsletter? Could we contact you about our products? Would you like to watch this webinar about some of the things that we're doing? Does this particular individual product, which is timed with a season or an event match up for you?" Those are things that all sorts of folks do. You can see great examples of this all over the search world where industry blogs that are connected with events like an SMX or a SES or a Pubcon will essentially say to people who are in those communities, "Hey, now it's time for this event. Would you like to follow up?"

You can see this inside the SEOmoz community where we essentially gather a lot of people who subscribe to things like the Moz Top 10, and then there will be one marketing or sales-focused message and link somewhere in the Top 10, usually in paragraphs below, those kinds of things.

These tactics, these strategies, these ways of mixing the two of these are incredibly powerful because what it lets you do is to say, "Hey, inbound marketing and content marketing can be forms of sales," and that's an incredible power to have because the ability of these to attract a huge audience versus these, which tend to have a much tinier and more focused audience, is really impressive, and, over time, this audience actually grows as a part of this. So if you're attracting all these people, yeah, it could only be that a tiny dot starts out as a relevant part of who's going to buy, but over time, it grows and grows and grows. It's a great thing.

All right, everyone, I hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday. I hope you'll try some of these strategies, and I hope we'll see you again next week. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Posted by randfish

If you've visited the Internet today, you know that SOPA and PIPA are being protested by companies like Google, Craigslist, Reddit and thousands of others. To them, we at Moz (and all of us in the web marketing world) say, "Thank You." It's not often that the web's interests align so clearly with the principles of economic and political freedom, and we appreciate those who are recognizing it today, along with those who'll continue the fight in the future.

If you're unfamilar with SOPA, please take a few minutes to watch this video:

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

 

We'd also strongly recommend that everyone concerned about this take heed of Joe Brockmeier's wise words on the topic (via RWW):

I'm glad that all of these organizations are taking a stand. But invoking what some call the "nuclear option" is only going to be so effective. Even if SOPA/PIPA are stopped this year, they'll be back under new names next year. The entertainment industry can afford to keep at it, knowing that the public's attention span is extremely short. The lobbyists who work on things like SOPA are paid to press these things through Congress. They can focus on them year after year, while the voting public has to make a conscious effort to keep tabs on their representatives.

Informing people about SOPA and asking that they call their representatives is all well and good, but it doesn't go nearly far enough.

What the SOPA protesters should say is that even if SOPA goes down in flames, it's not over. It's never over. Further, the public can not rely on mainstream media to warn them of this sort of legislation. This is doubly true when the legislation is supported by the same organizations that own the media.

Sure, call your representative and senators today. Protest SOPA and PIPA. But beyond that, keep paying attention to what your elected officials are doing. Spend a little more time paying attention to your government, even if it means spending a little less time on entertainment activities.  

Today's events are a great step in helping to raise public awareness, but there is real danger in the long term, and advocates must take action more than just today. That said, I've personally signed the petition at American Censorship, and if your beliefs align, I'd encourage you to consider it.

SOPA + PIPA are real threats to Internet freedom, commerce, content and the marketing profession not just in the US, but worldwide (another troubling and terrifying issue that Moz isn't really the place to discuss). We support all those helping to keep the web the amazing place it's become and will put our names, our votes and our dollars to use stopping those who'd legislate against web freedom to help the wallets of self-interested non-innovators.

p.s. SEOmoz had originally planned to make some changes to our site today in support of the SOPA/PIPA blackout protest, but we've been having some release management challenges - for that we apologize. Please don't construe this as a lack of support.

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