SEO Badger

Posted by randfish

Last week, on the very kind invitation of Dmitri Grabov, I gave a presentation in London to the Hacker News monthly meetup group. The event was sponsored and hosted by some friends at Forward, and attended by startup folks from all around the greater London area. Like my presentation in Silicon Valley, the focus was on marketing for startups.

Dmitri & Forward worked together to get the event filmed and posted the video online and thus, I felt it would be great to share here. A couple caveats before watching:

• There's not a lot of advanced, tactically focused content. This talk is geared to startup marketers and founders and probably better for mid-level managers and consulting clients than for "in-the-trenches" SEOs and marketers (who already know all this stuff).
• If you've already seen my presentation from the Silicon Valley HN meetup, this has quite a bit of overlap (go to ~30minutes in to see the unique material).
• I'm sharing this version, despite the crossover with some previous work (something I usually don't do) because I think this may be the best iteration of this particular subject I've done to date, and one of the more efficient (the formal presentation is just under 45 minutes).
• Warning - I do use a bit of bad language. Sorry about that! Sometimes I get excited on stage. :-)

My goal is to help more folks in the startup world become familiar with the practices of inbound marketing - content, SEO, social media, blogs, etc. These are powerful channels, but they often don't get the respect they deserve in these spheres (which both frustrates and surprises me).

Rand Fishkin - Inbound Marketing for Startups: How to Earn Customers Without Paying from HN London on Vimeo.

Hopefully, if you find the video enjoyable and useful, you can spread it to those who need a push to invest in or believe in the great practices inbound marketers undertake.

p.s. I've been on the road for the last two weeks, speaking at events in Madrid, Munich, London, Boston and now San Francisco, but return to Seattle Friday and will hopefully be better about consistent posting and whiteboard Friday appearances thereafter.

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Posted by randfish

It takes a lot of time to put together a marketing plan, a landing page, or even a full web app. Wouldn't it be nice to know if what you are building is going to be successful?

In this week's Whiteboard Friday, we will be covering the tools and tactics that you can use to test your product before it launches. Please leave your own methods and feedback in the comments below!

Video Transcription

Howdy, SEOmoz fans and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're talking about tools and tactics to test your product and marketing before you launch it, before you invest in it.

The reason this is so important is because you're going to take a lot of time and effort to put together a marketing plan, to put together a landing page, to put together a product, to put together an entire website. A lot of the time, before you launch, you get this feeling like, man, is this thing going to really work? I don't know if it's going to take off. I want to be sure.

This is exactly why you need these types of tactics because you're going to build something. You're going to make that investment, but if you can learn a lot about your customers, about the visitors who are coming to you, about your percentage of conversion, about how much people like the product, about what they're going to do, if you can get that critical feedback before you actually launch, you're going to do so much better. This ranges all the way from how you title a blog post to a full launch of a software product or a physical product in the real world or whatever it is that you're marketing and making.

So, number one, this is very, very common, but a lot of people still don't use it, which is before you invest in all of the organic inbound marketing channels, things like SEO and social media and content marketing and doing press outreach and outreach to bloggers, all of this stuff, you can actually buy keywords through PPC just by flipping on an AdWords account, flipping on a Bing account, and then sending traffic from the search results over to your web page.

Now, the thing about this is you need to have a functional page here, but it doesn't have to be complete. What you really want to understand is you want to understand how interested are these visitors in my potential product? This doesn't necessarily require building out the full feature set, building out the full product.

In fact, we can do number two, beta launch pages. So what this is, is essentially saying here is a teaser. In this page, I'm going to put a teaser of the product that I'm going to build, but it's not yet ready. I will build it soon, or I'll have it launched soon. Sign up to get the email invitation and maybe leave us some feedback about the wire frames or the comp screens that we've shown here. Or ask them two or three survey questions on this beta sign-up page. You can embed something from Google. You could embed a Survey Monkey survey. The Google hosted apps has got a survey that you can embed on web pages.

Whatever it is, you can get that feedback by buying traffic to this page or earning it and building out merely a launch page that says, "Yes, I will build this in the future." If you get that feedback that's basically, boy, we got 1,200 visitors to the page and only 6 of them filled out that they wanted the email and the rest bounced. There's something wrong with this. There's something wrong with the product. There's something wrong with how the page is selling the product. People are not excited about it. The people you thought would be most interested in this, the ones who are searching for exactly what you're trying to build, are not interested, and that's a really bad sign. But knowing that before you invest all of that engineering effort and architecting effort and production effort and the launch is so much better than launching blind.

Number three, you can actually do this and apply it, not just to products but to blog posts, to content, to viral content, to an infographic, to a video, to whatever you want by running surveys, simple surveys of your users or your friends or a beta test list or you can use anonymous lists. You could try something like Mechanical Turk or a FIVERR - we'll talk about those in a second - to test that viral content or even to give you preferences of topics and headlines.

So I could run a survey that's headline one and headline two and headline three, and oh look, most of my users said they liked headline two. That's the one I'm going to go with. That's the one that clearly has got the best launch potential, and I can use that survey data to say, "Oh, this is the right thing to do," and therefore increase my chances of having that viral impact.

Number four, the final one here, there are some great tools that you can use to get this testing up front, and this is not just testing necessarily for a headline or for an app, but to test landing pages and their performance, to test a marketing campaign or a message, even to test the usability of websites. I urge you to give these a try, so Feedback Army, this is something that SEOmoz's own Joanna Lord likes a lot, Five Second Test.

You can buy users on FIVERR to perform more complicated tasks. This is $5 a task, but a lot of people will volunteer their time, and you can certainly put up ads saying, "Hey, for five bucks I want you to go run through this whole app and give me all these feedback pieces." For 50 bucks, you can get 10 people giving you serious, intensive feedback. Silverback App. There are a few other ones that will let you do this as well.

Now, the process here is less about which specific tool you use and what you use it for and more the idea. What I want you to take away from this is that you don't have to do the full launch to get feedback and know how things are going to perform. You can do early, up front testing, make something people want, and then see it perform in the wild in a wonderful, wonderful way.

All right, everyone. Thanks for joining me for this edition of Whiteboard Friday. See you again next week.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Posted by randfish

Buenos Dias, marketers!

Today's an exciting day! We're thrilled to announce the launch of the 2012 SEOmoz Industry Survey. It's been 2 long years since our last survey, which had more than 10,000 respondents from around the world and produced some of the most detailed public information ever assembled about the growing fields of SEO, social media, content, and organic/inbound marketing.

This year's survey is projected to take about 20 minutes to complete (I took it twice and the first time took me ~18 minutes), and it's slightly more detailed than 2010's. We know this means a little extra work on your part, but we hope it will be worth it as we make the data available to all. The survey's available now in SurveyMonkey and will run for 5 weeks to collect data (but early participation's greatly appreciated):

The following sections contain the 54 total questions (49 if you're not an agency/consultant):

• Your Work in the Industry
• Questions for Consultants, Freelancers, and Agencies
• Learning and Improving Internet Marketing Skills
• Internet and Inbound Marketing Scope and Process
• Inbound Marketing Tools and Tactics
• SEO Tools and Tactics
• Social Media Tools and Tactics
• Predictions/Opinions for Internet/Inbound Marketing 

As an added incentive for the survey, we are offering the following excellent prizes to some lucky participants: One Grand Prize Winner will get a 16GB Wifi iPad 3. Three First Prize Winners will each get a $75 ThinkGeek gift certificate. Ten Second Prize Winners will each get a $25 gift certificate to the SEOmoz Zazzle Store. To see the full sweepstakes terms and rules, check out our sweepstakes rules page. The winners will be announced by June 4th.

We'd also like to thank our partners who are helping to encourage marketers around the world to participate in the survey, including Outspoken Media, Search Engine Land, Distilled, Hubspot, Search Engine Journal, Techipedia, AimClear, Blueglass, Marketing Pilgrim and Search Engine Watch.

If you're able, a tweet, Google+ share, Facebook share, or blog post of your own would be incredibly appreciated. It's our goal to reach as many professionals as possible and share something truly remarkable from the data.

Thanks for your help and participation!

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Posted by randfish

Google's Search Suggest automatically recommends popular searches as you type your query into the search field. Let's examine how Google determines these results and what factors go into influencing them.

In this week's Whiteboard Friday, Rand suggests how you can use these instant recommendations to leverage your brand, or business. Please leave you comments below with your own suggestions!

As part of the test mentioned in the video, we'd love to have your help running the query "Does Anyone Watch Whiteboard Friday"

We'll watch the results for search suggest/instant and see what happens. Here they are just prior to publication of the blog post:

Video Transcription

Howdy, SEOmoz fans! Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're talking about the very exciting topic of search suggest, also known as Google Instant or Google Suggest. Bing actually does this as well. So do search engines like DuckDuckGo. Even places like Quora and Wikipedia are starting to do this so that as you type a query, so I started typing "Does anyone . . . " and Google has suggested things to me that perhaps I might want to search for. Curious things like, "Does anyone still use MySpace?" Well, maybe I am interested in that. "Does anyone use MySpace anymore?" Well, thank you, Google, that's quite repetitive of you. "Does anyone live in Greenland?" Well, yes, there are at least a few people. "Does anyone use Google+?" Nope, nobody. I'm just kidding. Hopefully, at least all of you watching Whiteboard Friday are using Google+.

These suggestions are interesting from two perspectives. Number one, they're interesting because sometimes negative things can show up in here as you start searching for a business name. Things like scam or fraud or, I don't know, illegal activity or criminal or something like that, bad stuff can come up. Occasionally, SEOs will receive calls from clients or potential clients seeking to have that altered. Or you might be trying to control the reputation for your own business or your own name, making sure that search suggest is controlled so that the queries that show up in here, the phrases that are suggested by Google, are good ones.

The second thing, of course, that is really, really interesting is thinking about this from a branding perspective. So I'll give you an exciting example. For years and years, if you started a search, let's make our own little search box here, if I started a search for SEO, the first thing that would come up, at least in most of the United States, was Seoul. Seoul, Korea, which is the capital there and the most common flight destination. Now, that's interesting, but there were other things that would come up - SEO book, SEO guide. Then as SEOmoz started to become a brand, SEOmoz would become suggested in there, which we thought was tremendously exciting and we really liked that. Then, over time, that actually moved up, and today, at least in most of the United States, although interestingly enough not Seattle because we have a lot of Korean-Americans here in Seattle who fly back and forth to Seoul and I think we have a direct flight as well, so Seattle has a lot of searches for Seoul compared to most of the rest of the country. SEOmoz is now the number one suggested result under SEO, which resulted when that shift happened. You could actually see the search traffic, if this was the line in our analytics for how much traffic we were getting for our branded keyword, that actually shot up within a couple days of that becoming the number one term. It went from, if I remember correctly, this was about a year and a half, two years go, it went from number three to number one, which is super cool. Really, really interesting stuff. This search suggest is influenceable, and it is something that over time through branding you can change the words and phrases that show up here.

Let's talk about the signals that Google is using inside of search suggest. So, first off, query volume. If lots and lots of people start searching for "Does anyone else watch Whiteboard Friday," how about we all search for that. Wouldn't that be cool? Should we do a test? Let's do a test! Oh, that's a great idea! All right. So try searching "Does anyone watch Whiteboard Friday?" I tell you what. I will Tweet some links and share some stuff on Google+, and we'll see if we can't get some people searching for this particular phrase and we'll track how many. I'll use a bitly link and share it. In fact, I'll put the bitly link in this Whiteboard Friday so that we can actually test this. What you'll see, what you'll probably see, is with a few hindered to a couple thousand searches from across the US, about 50% of SEOmoz's traffic is here inside the US, folks who watch Whiteboard Friday, and the other 50% is from other countries all around the world, which is awesome. What you'll see is that may start to show up inside of these results over time. Now this is happening because query volume is something that the engines look at and they see, hey, people are searching for this. Let's start to suggest it.

Now, be very careful, because Google did, in fact, have even a particular relationship with Amazon's Mechanical Turk a few years ago. There was a representative at Mechanical Turk who was contacted by Google and Google said, basically, hey we want to know if anyone's asking for search suggest influencing, that kind of thing. Google has gotten a lot more sophisticated about this, so you can bet that today they're probably using things like unique verifiable accounts, independent users. You know, if I go and search from my computer 100 times, that's probably not going to make a big difference, but if 500 people all around the Seattle area all start searching, you can bet that "Does anyone watch Whiteboard Friday?" will probably show up pretty highly in these results at least in this geographic area.

Which gets to the second point, the second input, and that is the geography of the searchers themselves. Now interestingly we actually ran a test here at SEOmoz a while back, where I had about 1000 people around the world search for a phrase, and that was "travel blog" and then the word that my wife's blog actually "Everywhereist." I wanted to see if search suggest actually had an influence on ranking position. So, essentially, does putting the brand name here, will that bump up the rankings of a site? It did not appear to, at least in this example. But what it did do is show me that very quickly this would pop into search suggest, and it popped into geographic areas where I had lots of followers or friends who searched for that, which is really, really interesting. It suggests strongly that the geography is influential but that you don't necessarily need that many users searching for a particular phrase in order to get it included in here.

Now, obviously, there is black and gray hat things you could do with this. Don't do that. Don't try it. You're going to get in trouble. Google obviously does some scrubbing of these results anyway, so it is going to get caught very quickly. But if you can naturally do it, through branding, through product naming, through social sharing, through content marketing, through all sorts of forms of inbound marketing, then this is something you can change.

Finally, and interestingly, the keyword a phrase mentions, and what I mean by mentions is actually mentions on the Web. So particularly in news and fresh content seeing the word, right, seeing the word "travel blog Everywhereist" appear or seeing the word "Does anyone watch Whiteboard Friday?" appear, so this video for example, as this blog post goes out and the phrase "Does anyone watch Whiteboard Friday?" appear across the Web as RSS feeders pick it up and people start searching for it and all those kinds of things. That will influence the search suggest as well.

I am betting that Google does something where they verify both geographically and through unique users, and they look for keyword phrases and mentions. So if something is being searched for, but no one is talking about it on the Web, that might be a little odd. But if something is in the news, especially in news headlines, and it's popular, it's in lots of sources, and it's getting search volume, then it's probably going to make its way into search suggest.

Hopefully this Whiteboard Friday has helped you to understand how Google is doing this stuff, and I look forward to seeing you again next week. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Posted by randfish

The web marketing community, and specifically many folks in the search field have recently been engaging in lots of conversations about the industry's nomenclature. I think these discussions are excellent to have and I'm glad we're openly communicating with one another on the topic. If there's to be a shift or a progression in how online marketers focused on non-paid channels describe themselves and their work, I believe rigorous debate is a great starting point. And, as part of that belief, I want to share my views on the topic.

Considering taking the leap and having my official title changed to Inbound vs. SEO

— Justin Briggs (@justinrbriggs) February 23, 2012

I've been in SEO a long time; at the end of this year, it will have been a decade since I joined my first SEO forum and attempted to learn how to capture the magical, free traffic that engines like MSN, Yahoo! and the emerging Google could send. In 2005, after experiencing the remarkable, positive impact SEO could have, I went from a practitioner to an evangelist. I loved SEO and I still love it. I love the complexities of search technology, the overwhelmingly vast sea of technical tactics, the individual stories, the packed conference-hall bars, the dark stories of spam and the illuminating tales of white hat triumphs. But, most of all, I love the people. I have met most of my best friends, hundreds of people I wish I saw more of and literally thousands of awesome individuals all around the world thanks to this field.

To say I'm a raving, fanatical, lunatic SEO evangelist is putting it mildly.

But over the past 3 years, I've been gradually coming around to the viewpoint that in spite of my personal adoration for all things organic search, the outside world of marketing departments, startups, small-medium businesses and individual consumers doesn't see it that way. Last night, a startup friend of mine was over, reviewing a slide deck I'm building for another round of fundraising pain, when he received a spam email trying to buy some links on his site.

"Ha. You SEO guys never quit do you?"

Then today, in an interview with a candidate, I asked her about her background in SEO and she replied, "I told my husband about SEOmoz and he said 'SEO company? Watch out, those guys are spammy and untrustworthy." We talked through it, of course, but if you're in the field, you surely encounter this feedback daily, too.

There's the problem. No matter how many cities I fly to, or times I evangelize the great things SEO can do, no matter how many blog posts or retweets or guest articles, it will always carry with it the taint of manipulation and inauthenticity. Even from those who know better. Even from those who've invested in SEO. And always, always from the mainstream and tech media.

So what's to be done? Should we give up using the acronym? Perhaps shift to something like "get found online," "search engine visibility" or "content optimization?"

In my opinion, those aren't real options. SEO is an established practice and it's an established, descriptive term. For millions of people around the world, it carries the accurate meaning - the practice of improving a brand's visibility in and traffic from search engines. That meaning may be negatively tarnished by frustrating and inaccurate brand sentiments, but even if we could shift to a new phrase, this new moniker would undoubtedly attract the same sorts of bad actors who cloud SEO's perception today.

For better or worse, SEO is here to stay.

But I'm not blind to the emerging reality: a shift in terminology is accompanying the growth in responsibilities of professional SEOs. I did some simplistic LinkedIn research recently that's illustrated below:

That figure above shows overlap between these various fields and skillsets, and it's my opinion that we're going to see considerably more overlap between them in the years to come. To be an effective social media marketer, you must understand content, analytics and SEO. To be a great SEO, you need social media, content marketing, analytics and CRO skills. The "specialist/generalist marketers" - those who excel at a particular facet but have competence in all of them - are best poised to win in the upcoming decade of marketing.

We need a way to describe this combination - it's simply too cumbersome and not descriptive enough to say one's job is: "Content creation, combined with investments in both the technical and outreach-based tactics in channels such as organic search, social networks, blogs and other websites, measured through analytics and tuned with conversion rate optimization." That's a mouthful, but it's getting to be a more and more common mouthful, because this process needs to be explained!

Some say "SEO" already encompasses these:

@randfish I still believe SEO encompasses all those things. If not, then Internet Marketing. Remember when that used to sound cutting edge?

— AJ Kohn (@ajkohn) March 9, 2012

This is hard, because in many ways, I agree. If you're a modern SEO and you don't also embrace content creation, social media marketing, link outreach for brand and direct traffic value (beyond their algorithmic contributions), PR, CRO and analytics, you're probably not achieving all that you could by combining these practices (at least a little). And yet, there's no way to explain to the outside world (even those in web marketing but not directly tied to SEO) that "search engine optimization" also includes "social media" or "conversion rate optimization" or "public relations" or "content marketing." SEO necessarily equates to search engine-based stuff. Social media and other practices may have direct and indirect positive influences, but to an outsider, SEO will never mean all of these things, and saying you do "SEO" will never carry the meaning of that bolded sentence above.

Hence, we need a term/phrase that accurately describes this combination (but is not "Internet Marketing" since that phrase encompasses vastly more than what we're trying to get across, paid channels in particular).

I've been a personal fan of the concept behind Inbound Marketing for a long time - that we should earn our customers' attention rather than interrupting them by buying it. I gave a talk about inbound for startups last December in Silicon Valley:

If you skip to 7:05 or so in the video, you can see the start of my talk, one of the better ones I've given in the past year.

I recognize that not everyone in the marketing and search field feels as positive as I do toward the phrase "inbound marketing." But, I am seeing nearly everyone adopt the principles behind it, which include:

• Combining the practices of content creation and conversion optimization to earn visitors' trust and their business
• Jointly leveraging the channels of search, social, blogs, PR, referring links, email and word-of-mouth to promote this content
• Using sophisticated analytics practices like first-touch and multi-touch attribution to better understand the true value of your content and your visitor sources

I asked on Twitter last week about alternatives to "inbound marketing" that still mean the same thing - narrow enough to exclusively focus on free channels of web-based customer acquisition (which terms like "Internet marketing" or "digital marketing" wouldn't), yet broad enough to include the items mentioned above. Two other suggestions seemed widely-adopted enough to consider: "earned media" and "organic marketing." I ran a comparison of these across several services:

That chart above compares keyword searches on LinkedIn, SimplyHired, Google News, Google's AdWords Tool (for exact matches) and Topsy's Analytics. To be fair, all of these trail behind the individual tactics like "SEO," "social media," or "blogging," (as I noted above, they're not meant to replace those terms, but rather to explain the marketing practice that combines them). Inbound is clearly many steps ahead of the other two, though "earned media" has a lot of traction in the c-suites of large enterprises and publishers.

Even if inbound marketing isn't the term that wins the lexicon battle, I believe the principles behind it are sound. They work. And they earn outsized returns to investments in most paid marketing channels or myopically singular investments on search, social or content alone. That's a message I've been working to refine and spread for some time now.

Many of you reading this blog likely know that I started a personal project with my friend Dharmesh (from Onstartups & Hubspot) called Inbound.org. It's a site that seeks to highlight some of the best content around the marketing world. Along with that, I'm putting more effort into broadening my expertise in fields like content marketing, social media, CRO and PR, and when I talk about it publicly, I call it inbound marketing. Many other organizations, from software firms like Wordstream and Optify to agencies like TrustE, Weidert, Kuno Creative and Volinsky to blogs like Distilled, Kiss Metrics and Search Engine Land are using this language, too.

I wouldn't say the terminology has overwhelming adoption, nor that it's necessarily won the market, but I would argue that the concept and principles are unstoppable and need a name. I don't think explaining that SEO means a bunch of other non-search-engine-related marketing practices is viable, nor do I think it's practical to explain the full concept every time you want to refer to it. SEO, in my opinion, isn't going anywhere, but it has tactical allies today that didn't exist 5 years ago, and I hope that some terminology encompassing these techniques takes root.

TL;DR - SEO is great as is. It doesn't need a new name. The combination of all free/earned/organic/inbound tactics needs a name of some kind. "Internet Marketing" is too broad. "SEO" far too narrow. I like "inbound marketing" for now.

As always, I'm looking forward to your thoughts on the trends of marketers focused on inbound/organic/free channels and the emerging use of "inbound marketing," itself. I'll do my best to contribute to the discussion in the comments, too :-)

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Posted by randfish

In this week's Whiteboard Friday, we will be talking about visualizing and measuring your marketing funnel. All too often basic web analytics can mislead marketers which can lead to investing in the wrong channels. Understanding what content drives people to your site and when will allow you to make much more informed decisions on where to invest your money.

Thanks for joining us and don't forget to leave your comments below. Enjoy!

The SEOmoz Inbound Marketing Funnel

Video Transcription

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're talking about the inbound marketing funnel. Specifically, we're talking about why basic web analytics can often fail and mislead marketers in to investing in a lot of the wrong channels. What I have done today is try to illustrate that visually with this beautiful funnel. I know, I know, it looks a little complex. You're going to go, "Boy, that is really colorful and you must have taken a long time to draw those lines." I did.

But think about things this way. Let's imagine the flow of visitors to your website. What happens is there are some visitors who are coming to you for the first time. Never seen your site before, you're sort of capturing them early in the stage. Maybe they know very little about you. Maybe they've heard something about you through word of mouth. Maybe they saw someone tweet a link. Maybe they found you through a search. Maybe they found you through just typing in your web address directly or through an email someone sent them. Whatever the case might be, you can track all of those. You know where they come from. I've simplified this. Obviously, there are more channels and you could break these up into direct, search, social, RSS, your blog, and referring links. Referring links from sort of the blogosphere, the news world, forums, links on other corporate sites, whatever it is. There could be advertising things in here too, but I am going to ignore paid for the moment.

What's interesting is when you think about this, think about the people who come to you for the first time and how you capture them. Those channels might be entirely different from the people who way down here at the bottom of this funnel completed a transaction that was worth money. So these are people who made me directly dollars or Euros or whatever . . . Euros. Is that the Euros symbol? I don't know. Let's do the yen symbol. I know that one better. Made you cold hard cash. Excellent. Great.

But what happens? Marketers almost always, and particularly the higher up you go in a marketing organization, they look at what sent traffic here and that's where they assign the budget. Right? Because they're tracking actions down here and they go, "Oh, well, fantastic. You know, these people down here, look at this. Social in green sent no completed transactions, screw social. Stop wasting your time on Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn and Google+. Those are a waste of time, because look, they didn't send us any transactions." Oh yeah? How did all these people know to subscribe to your RSS feed? How did they know to come from referring links? How did they know to type in your web address directly? How did they know to search for you? Particularly if this is branded and unbranded search, if I break that our right here, I bet this is going to be 90%+ branded search, meaning people who searched for your brand name or items related to your brand name, not unbranded terms that they've never heard of before and aren't familiar with. Because of this, you attribute revenue and people and time to places that they shouldn't go, and this is a very, very dangerous thing.

So let's walk through the funnel. I think that everyone who has Google Analytics or something more advanced installed can build this out. In fact, I built this for SEOmoz's own website recently. I'll give Kenny a screenshot to put in the Whiteboard Friday of that specific image that I built. It's not very advanced, but it can give you a sense of what ours sort of looks like. So, you can take a count of the first-time visitors. So, it's like, oh, I've got a million first time visitors in the last 60 days, and maybe I have 750,000 returning visitors in the last 60 days. How many people made 4+ visits in the last 60 days? Well, that's interesting. You can segment. You can create a segment that's says, "Hey, only show me people who have visited 4 or more times in the last 60 days, and now show me the channels that they came through. Show me the referring sources of those individuals." Wow. Now I can start to see a pattern emerging. I can see, oh look at this. This was actually true for SEOmoz. RSS very little at first time, bigger at referring, and then a nice segment, a really nice segment, right down to completed transaction where people don't really come through RSS very much when they complete a transaction.

You can do this. Let's say there's 300,000 who came in the last 60 days 4 or more times, and maybe there's 100,000 who came 10+ times. Wow. These people are really interesting. Particularly these people are really interesting because they must really like what you have. They must like your content or your blog or something that you do on your site, some sort of tool, some sort of function that you provide to them. Yet, there's going to be a very different look at who sent these visitors, right, which of these sources sent these visitors versus which sent the people who made a conversion action, something like signed up for an email account, or signed up with their email address, or subscribed to your newsletter, or filled out a survey, or filled out a request for a white paper that gave you a lead versus actually completed a transaction, like went back to the site and signed up for the paid service or bought the product, or did whatever it is that makes you money. Knowing these source differences and building out this funnel, visualizing this funnel and being able to see these means that you will be able to do a bunch of things right.

So, I have some action items that I want you to take away from this inbound marketing funnel visualization.

Number one, please, if you can do nothing else, at least set up first touch attribution. So you may not be able to get the concrete segment that has made at least one visit from this source before converting somewhere in their funnel, because a lot of those people who convert down here are going to be in the 10+ or 4+ visit segment, and they're going to have come to you multiple times, and usually you're only doing last touch attribution, meaning you only see the source that sent them the last time. There are some more advanced analytics like Mixpanel or KISSmetrics that can help you see deeper into that multitouch funnel, but at least you can set up first touch attribution tracking in Google Analytics. There is a good blog post on how to do that Will Critchlow from Distilled wrote. We'll link you over to that.

Second step, segment the content that is driving people, so not just the visit sources, but the content that's driving people early on in your funnel and later in your funnel. Understanding that dichotomy will give you a sense of, hey, we can't just give up on the content that's bringing people in here or the content that's bringing people in the 4+, 10+, made a converting action. We need to focus on both of those, and here's how we should be distributing our time. Let's not spend, you know, be careful not to over assign value with resources of any kind, with dollars, with people, with time, to channels that are just getting you into the bottom of the funnel. It's really, really dangerous. It can mean that what happens over time is you increase conversion rate here, yeah, and things are going well, but as this dries up, your competitors are taking this traffic. They are getting it one way or another. Or you're not executing on it, which means no one is happy and finding what they need on the Web from you or whatever it is that you provide.

Finally, the other thing is track those actions that are likely to lead to transactions. So, if you know that a high percentage of people in a certain bucket, in a number of visits bucket, in a number of visits to specific content bucket, in a conversion-like action, say they did this thing like sign up for an email newsletter, track the percent and the number that are flowing down to actual dollar value transactions. If you do that, you'll have a great sense of where you can invest sort of in the middle of the funnel that will help to drive that action further down.

This is a complex fascinating process, and I know it's not easy to implement. But for those of you who do, the returns can be phenomenal.

Thanks very much, and I hope I'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

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Posted by randfish

Guest blogging can be a great way to help build up your brand, earn recognition, and even get some great links back to your site. When guest blogging it's important to study your audience so that you can produce the best content possible. Exceptional content is often heavily shared and that has huge potential value for your site. In this week's Whiteboard Friday, we'll be covering a few guest blogging strategies that you can start using today.

Please leave your comments below and maybe even share some of your own guest blogging strategies with us.

Video Transcription

Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're talking about guest blogging strategies. Guest blogging and guest authorship across websites other than your own is a fantastic strategy to build your brand, get in front of new people, earn some links back to your site, and earn the recognition from other communities that can lead to all sorts of good marketing opportunities in the future. But guest posting and guest blogging can also get really run down, spammy, manipulative, low quality, and junky. What I want to do today is talk about some strategies that will help you keep it high quality, help return exceptional value from those guest posts, and make sure that when you're contributing content you're not losing all of the value that you might get from putting it on your own site, or at least you're gaining enough in return to make that transaction worthwhile.

So let's take a look at some of these. I want to walk through a step-by- step format here. The first step, of course, in any sort of guest authoring, guest posting situation is trying to find good targets. A few tools that I do recommend, obviously, there are some things you can do around Google searches, searching for blogs in your niche. You probably already know of some. But you can also use some more advanced searches. I like using things like "guest author in URL blog" or "guest post" or "guest contributor," variations on these phrases. "Guest posting guidelines" or "guest authoring guidelines" or "guest blog guidelines," using these types of queries inside of Google, inside of Bing can reveal a lot of different things. You probably want to add in something about your topic, some keyword that is related to you, something broad. So if you are, for example, in the world of, I don't know, contact lenses and eyeglasses, you might write about something like glasses or eyewear or ocular health or any of those types of things to try and find people in that world.

I also highly recommend using a metric that's unique from the metrics that we typically talk about here at Moz. So certainly things like Domain Authority from Open Site Explorer and Page Authority, MozRank, those are all very good, very helpful. But you can go to google.com/reader and use their search function to actually search for blogs by name or by topic area, and you will find blogs with their subscriber count, the number of people who subscribe to them in Google Reader. What this number tells you is sort of how well read and how distributed is that blog. If you see something with maybe a dozen, a couple dozen readers, I'd be a little wary. I don't know how big or valuable that blog audience is going to be, and remember it's a lot of time if you are writing a high quality article, versus something that has hundreds or thousands, hopefully thousands, of subscribers. That has tremendous, tremendous value. This is also a good research tool in general.

Then I also like using some of the blog directories if you are struggling to find topic areas, you're just not finding them using your keywords. Go dig in to some of these structured and organized hierarchies. BlogHer is an excellent directory list of blogs, primarily run by woman but also sort of around female-centric topic, woman-centric topics. My Blog Guest, another great community for finding things. Technorati and Alltop, two more that you could add to that list. I would also be seeking in the things that you are looking for, in the metrics and sort of things that you are looking for, try to find, if you can, blogs that get scraped. I know this is an odd one, but blogs that get scraped, it tends to be an indication that that blog is important and well-known and that other people are taking and using their content, some of them for legitimate purposes, some of them for less legitimate purposes. But the value comes particularly when you have a link from one of these sites that gets scraped and republished all over the Web, that you get links from a lot more domains than just the one domain where you're writing.

Blogs that rarely have guest content. So, a lot of blogs out there are kind of in a little bit of this kind of spammy world of just, oh, yeah, yeah, I take guest posts from everywhere, we post guest posts around, and we're more like a low quality content link directory. If you find blogs that, hey, you know, four or five days out of the week the primary writers are writing there and then maybe one guest post a week. Great. Those are excellent targets typically speaking from a quality standpoint.

Then finally, non-blog news and content sites that have guest authorship opportunities. I know this sounds a little odd, but the idea here is that you can contribute just like you could to newspapers or to traditional print publications, editorial content, or guest content, and those types of ways. When that gets published, it is often a very, very unique place and an audience that your competitors are going to have a very tough time reaching.

Step two, let's go in to this building relationship. I despise this idea that, "Oh, you know, hey, Rand, I wrote this post about metadata for SEO. Please publish it on SEOmoz." Who are you? Do we know each other? This is a very odd transaction. Right? No one comes up to me in the street and is like, "Hey, hey Rand, wear this T-shirt. I want you to wear this T-shirt. It's got my brand on it." This is my bad Jersey. Sorry about that everyone. All right. I was born in New Jersey, so, you know, I have an excuse. But you need that relationship before you're going to do this kind of outreach and ask these questions

So what I recommend is using the social networks, right, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+. Do you like my Twitter bird here? He doesn't really have wings. Does he look better? Better or worse? A little worse. Eh, he's Christmassy though. What I highly recommend is four weeks, a minimum of four weeks of interaction and engagement with your target for outreach, with your target that you're trying to reach out to for your guest posting, before you send them the request. Let them know that you're a real person, that you know who they are, that you've researched them, that you've been in touch. After spending time interacting and engaging over social media, on their blog itself, I recommend at least two or more unique mediums, meaning maybe Twitter and Facebook, maybe Twitter and Google+, maybe Twitter and their blog, and do leave some comments on their blog so that they get to know you. They're approving those comments. They're seeing you in there. You have a presence in their community. Other people who are reading their site are knowing who you are. And do try to help them with something. Over these four weeks of engagement they will probably tweet something, say something, blog about something, have some kind of request, or you can figure it out yourself from looking at their About page and reading more about them that, oh you know what, this person, they are very, very curious about this particular topic or they are traveling here and they want some tips. Whatever it is, reach out and try and help in some way. If that is your first point of contact, the relationship is going to be much better than if the first thing you ask for is a favor - "Hey will you post my guest post?".

Step three, you want to optimize your content, the content you're going to be writing, for their audience. So you want to be looking at their readers and asking questions like, "Well, what do the readers like?" You can see what people have guest posted previously, if there have been some. You can see what the authors are writing about. You kind of get this sense of, oh, wow, you know, this community is really focused on these topics and they seem to lean in these directions sort of emotionally and psychologically and politically and from a technical standpoint and here's what they understand and don't understand and here's how in-depth they like their material. Fantastic. Great. You know more about them. You're going to be able to write far more effective content that's (a) more likely to get published and (b) more likely to be shared by that audience.

Remember, you don't just want a post to go up and provide you with a link. You're looking for that content to spread far and wide. You want lots of people sharing it, lots of people following your Twitter account after you've shared it with people. You want people visiting your site, finding more content like that, and then subscribing to your blog and RSS feed, following your brand on Facebook and all these other social networks. You want to get those people into the top of your marketing funnel so that they are comfortable and familiar with you and they trust you and like you. The way to do that is to study the audience where you're going to be participating. So, what earns comments, shares, and likes? If you use the Open Site Explorer top pages tool for this, you can actually go to a blog and then see, hey, what's been the most successful content and you can see all the social share numbers and all that kind of stuff and the links too. You can also ask yourself, "What kinds of questions does this community have?" If it is a highly participatory community, you'll often see that engagement. You can start to follow people who are deep in that community and see, oh, yeah, they're constantly asking these kinds of questions. I can answer that content.

Finally, step four, I want to try to help you with some specific tactics that are going to earn outsize returns from your guest content. So, one of the first ones, one of the ones that I highly, highly recommend is you're usually getting a link, but that link is often in the form of a bio and people, if you submit a guest post and it has a lot of anchor text links pointing to your content, no one is going to approve it. People are going to think you're spammy. Even if the content is great, they're going to assume you're just there for the SEO, and they don't want any part of it. But you can get great links back to your site and a lot of visits to your site if you have embeddable content. So things like images and graphics or videos or interactive tools, interactive content that you're referencing back on your site that for obvious reasons can't live in the post itself. Right. Now, you might have a small version of an infographic or a small version of a photo, but then you would link off to the larger version of that photo or the larger version of that graphic, which would live on your site. That's a great thing to do too because it means that the hosting is offloaded from the guest blog publisher who might not have the world's most robust hosting, and if they are getting tons and tons of bandwidth requests, it's not exactly ideal.

I also recommend a few other ones. If you can, if you have a few blogs that you know, hey, this audience is phenomenal, ask if you can do a series. Say, "Hey, I have a three or four part series on this specific topic." It's very, very wide, it's broad. Great. Write three or four guest posts and that will get you more and more familiarity with that audience, earn you better branding, earn you more links, all those good things.

When you are guest posting, you often have a target list of many, many folks. You're going, "Oh well, I'm going after this guy. Then I want to go after these three guys over here, these three other blogs." Oh yeah? Well, when you write for this guy, freaking link to these guys. What does that do? That says to these people, "Oh, wow, this is cool. I got a link from this other post. Oh, interesting, it's a guest author. He must follow me, he must like me." Fantastic. Now you're relationship building in the future. They're going to get the trackback and the ping for this. You'll have done them a favor by giving them a nice link to some of their content you recognized. You're building that relationship. Fantastic. Do that. When you are writing for one, link to the others.

Bio links. Bio links are tough, but you can actually, if you are clever and smart about how you interact with these, you can get the anchor text to overlap well with your branding. So, for example, I use this example a lot. Whenever I have my bio go on other people's sites, I like to link to my wife's travel blog. Now, obviously people would get very suspicious if I said travel blog, and Geraldine, my wife, of course, refuses to do any SEO herself. So, yeah, anyway, whole other story, we could do a Whiteboard Friday about that. So what I like to do, is I like to say, "Rand's wife, Geraldine, chronicles their adventures in her Serendipitous travel blog," and that is the link that I use. So it is sort of a, "Oh, you know, this is a clever combination." It does get the words travel blog in there, which I hope some day she might rank for. I think she has a great travel blog, so I hope that she does. The idea here is that you take your brand, right, so if you have your eyeglasses site, you might say, "Well, Kenny's nascent eyewear site is doing quite well in this particular vertical." Whatever it is, you want to try and craft that in a clever way so that you include some anchor text, include some branding.

Finally, last thing here. When a lot of people write guest posts, they do one of two things, and I think both are kind of dumb. Number one is they don't do any SEO. They're not actually targeting keywords. They think to themselves, "Well, I want to target keyword phrases and rank for stuff on my site, not on someone else's." That's weird. The second thing they do is they try and target their primary keyword phrases on somebody else's site, which, of course, is also a little bit strange. I understand these are two dichotomous opinions here. But what I highly recommend is target those secondary or tertiary keyword phrases, the ones that you wouldn't go after because they're not super high volume. Maybe they're secondary or tertiary in your list of important keywords to go after. But you do want to try and own those search results, and one of the ways to do it is with a guest blog post. So doing a little bit of that keyword research upfront, figuring out the terms and phrases that you really want to rank for, targeting those on your site, the ones that are of secondary importance and maybe thinking about those as great guest posting opportunities, because, remember, guest posts, especially on powerful blogs, they're going to earn lots of links, they have high potential to rank, and of course, if they do that and they earn lots of nice link juice, the links pointing back to you are going to be authoritative and helpful for your own SEO.

All right everyone. I hope to see lots of phenomenal guest posts from you all over the Web. Great content only. I don't want to see any more of this mishmash SEO spammy crap. I hope you'll 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

After some wrestling with Amazon's EC2 and the tragic loss of many hard disks therein, we've finally finished processing and have released the latest Linkscape update (previously scheduled for Feb. 14). This new index is, once again, quite large in comparison to our prior indices, and contains a mix of crawl data going back to the end of last year. In fact, this is technically our largest index ever!

Here are the latest stats:

• 65,997,728,692 (66 billion) URLs
• 601,062,802 (601 million) Subdomains
• 140,281,592 (140 million) Root Domains
• 739,867,470,316 (740 billion) Links
• Followed vs. Nofollowed
  • 2.21% of all links found were nofollowed
  • 57.91% of nofollowed links are internal
  • 42.09% are external
• Rel Canonical - 11.11% of all pages now employ a rel=canonical tag
• The average page in this index has 71.88 links on it
  • 60.98 internal links on average
  • 10.90 external links on average  

We also ran our correlation metrics against a large set of Google search results and saw very similar data to last round. Here are the latest numbers using mean Spearman correlation coefficients (on a scale of 0 to 1, higher is better):

• Domain Authority: 0.26
• Page Authority: 0.37
• MozRank of a URL: 0.19
• # of Linking Root Domains to a URL: 0.26

Our evaluation process also check the comprehensiveness of our crawl data against a large set of Google results, and in this index, we've got link data on 82.09% of SERPs. This is slightly down from last month's 82.37%, which we suspect is a result of the late release. Crawl data ages with the web, and new URLs make their way into the SERPs, too. To help visualize our crawl, here's a histogram of when the URLs in this index were seen by Linkscape:

We always "replace" any older URLs with newer content if we recrawl or see new links to a page, so while there may be some "old, crusty" stuff from December, the vast majority of this index was crawled in mid-to-late January.

In the next few weeks, we're working on a new, experimental index that may be massively larger (2-3X) this one, and closer to what's in Google's main index at scale. This is very exciting for us and we hope, for all of you who use Open Site Explorer, the Mozbar, the Linkscape API and tools from our partners like Hubspot, Conductor, Brightedge and our newest API partner, Ginza Metrics (check out some cool stuff they're doing with Moz data here and in the screenshot below).

Ginza Metrics' New Backlink Analysis Tool

If you're interested in chatting about using Moz data in products, drop Andrew Dumont a line and he'll be happy to help. And, as always, feedback on this latest index, our tools or metrics are greatly appreciated.

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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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