NICHEJACKERS.COM

   

                      NEED AN SEO SPECIALIST?

 

          It's a week before Christmas and I've been super busy trying to get my new SEO Membership Site completed by the first of the year, and finish with the last minute shopping before the weekend. I must confess, all my shopping is always last minute. What usually turns out to be the most congested time of the year for me just got worse because I have been non-stop developing content for the new site. I thought I was going to have plenty of time, although when I checked my Nichejackers email the other day I had noticed that 11 people had already tried to join the site,. This brought a new found motivation back that I hadn't felt in a few years.The time I got my first client ranked number 1 in Google!  So I decided to take a short break and blog about what it is I'm exactly doing.

I'm building a three-tier, multilevel SEO Membership site that is going to be unique enough because it doesn't follow any of the usual re-hashed paradigms that most follow. You know most of the developers of these type of sites want to create an automated system with PDF training manuals and some pre- recorded webinars that they incorporate with Aweber or some other form of auto-responeder. Nichejackers.com  is going to break the mold and probably set a new trend because I plan on using Google hangouts like a classroom.  I believe I will be allowed about ten students on the hangout with me and the rest of the members can watch the live stream and communicate with us through the live comments section.

Google Hangouts is really hot right now in the SEO community and internet marketing community because we know how much power these new Hangouts posses in the eyes of their creator, Google. Not to mention the ranking factor for them is through the roof! This means when I do a weekly or monthly hangout discussing a particular topic, that video will rank extremely well for the keywords I choose, allowing me to attract new members rather quickly. I believe that with a more hands on approach to SEO training and guiding people in a more personal way will soon phase out the auto-responder membership site. They will become obsolete in a world that is technologically  moving quickly.

Nichejackers.com is set up for three levels. The Basic level will go over all the on-page SEO material explaining all the significance  and revealing resources online that I use to speed up my on -page process. I have it set up to only take three months maximum to learn. After that the new member will be placed in the Gold Level which costs $67 a month. This is where a lot of members will be at for a while. There is plenty to absorb such as Google Local, building the right kind of relevant back links, picking the right keywords and creating multi-level Pr networks. Once someone becomes a member at the Gold level, I will be giving that person some Bonus software to help them develop the right keywords so that they start on the right path.

The Platinum  Level is for the advanced student who has a complete understanding of the previous levels. Here you will work more directly with me in the classroom on the Google Hangouts. Every month that you are a Platinum member you will receive access and training to the most powerful SEO tools on the planet. Now let's make some money!
  You can email me if you are interested in becoming a new member or if you would like your business to get better rankings in the search engines and start getting more leads!   nichejackers@gmail.com   for Local SEO Clients go to http://bestseospecialist.com
 
  http://rhinoshieldjacksonville.blogspot.com/

Ways to Proactively Welcome Women Into Online Marketing

A lot of my life's work has been focused on increasing the visibility of women and other minorities in male-dominated professional fields. I'm not here to give you an intersectional Feminism 101 lesson or explain to you that institutional sexism is indeed alive and systemically present in online marketing. Instead, in the spirit of the Moz blog, I want to give you tips and tricks to make our corner of the world more welcoming to women. Several of these tips can also easily be adjusted and applied to other groups of marginalized people. Some can really just be applied broadly to life. According to our 2013 industry survey, 28.3% of online marketers are women, and at MozCon 2014, 31% of the audience self-identified as female (up 11% from 2013). We've been here for a while.
If this post gets your bristles up and you're ready to yell at me in the comments, I ask you to  check out the many resources at the bottom to help build the basics to better understanding the "whys" and realizing "yes, this is a thing."

In order to be better marketers and better people, we need to open ourselves up to the experiences of others, particularly to the voices of people whose backgrounds are different than ours. But because of how our cultural biases work, we often must actively and consciously work at creating more welcoming environments. It sucks to think we're any less than awesome, and even when we consider ourselves non-prejudiced, our behavior can still support systems of sexism, racism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, and more.
Let's dive in and shake up the industry!
If we had a nickel for every time the all-female-identified community team was emailed or Facebook messaged as "Dear Sirs" because we work for a SaaS technology company, we'd be rolling in nickels Scrooge McDuck-style.
Nothing can instill imposter syndrome or make someone personally upset like being misgendered. Human culture is so sensitive to displays of gender and identification of gender that a misplaced "sir" or "ma'am" can be incredibly insulting. If the person being misgendered is genderqueer or transgendered, they may be even more sensitive due to the vulnerability of displaying to the world who they are as opposed to who society thinks they should be.
If you're ever communicating with someone whose gender you're unsure of, it's better to ask than to use an errant pronoun. So rip out that "Dear Sir" and replace it instead with "To Whom It May Concern," or better yet, something more specifically personal. Dump the he, she, or s/he and just use an epicene "they." If emailing my team, try "Hi, awesome community team..." You'll probably see better success with your request by not starting out on the wrong foot.
Perhaps one of my top offenses as a professional woman: being labeled as a girl or seeing another woman or group of women labeled as such. The worst is when it's the "men and the girls" or "the guys and the girls." Stop infantilizing women!
Again, this elicits imposter syndrome and also makes women appear inferior, as children have more to learn than adults. So please stop referring to us as girls and conjuring up images of pink, pigtails, and Barbie dolls. We're professionals and grown-ups.

The tweet above was sent out by a company I've worked with and expected more from. The webinar was with two women I've also worked with and are some of the sharpest, smartest minds out there in our industry. They were talking about online marketing, and it was completely inappropriate for the company hosting the webinar to refer to them as "girls." (Neither of these women worked or have worked for said company in the past.)
And before anyone mentions the phenomena of the term "geek girls," let me take a moment to address it. I know there are many organizations that are working hard to bring the achievements of women in all forms of geekdom, including tech, and inviting more women to join that call themselves "geek girls" or have some variation in their name. This is fine. This is their group's choice for self-identification, branding, and rolls-off-the-tongue alliteration. However, you would never say "All the girls going to Geek Girl dinners..." They're adult women.
Unfortunately, because women are too often seen as objects instead of people, those objects are given value judgements on their appearances. Women shouldn't be treated like you're picking out the best sofa for your living room. It doesn't matter how cute you may think a woman in the industry is, she likely doesn't want to hear it or doesn't care.
Constantly judging women based on our appearances damages self-esteem. It entrenches stereotypes about beauty having been a woman's most important asset since she was a little girl. It also puts women who don't fit up to traditional Western beauty standards—maybe they're plus-sized, women of color, genderqueer, etc.—at a disadvantage to gaining the professional attention of anyone. Think twice before commenting to a woman how beautiful she is. Or, conversely, how unattractive. (Same goes for men, by the way.)
At the end of the day, what matters most is brainpower, so let's actually act like it.

When I think of highly successful women, who are constantly judged on their attractiveness, Hillary Clinton's a powerful example. Do we pay the same attention to current US Secretary of State John Kerry's pantsuits?
For more things not to say to women in a professional setting, I highly suggest reading Ruth Burr's Things You Think Aren’t Sexist, But Really Are.
Particularly on social media that's public and open like Twitter. With networks like Facebook, many women I know actually don't "friend" people they have met face-to-face or actually consider friends for safety reasons. Sadly, on networks such as Twitter and even the female-dominated Pinterest, men are followed at higher rates than women.
In a perfect world, content on social networks would be shared based entirely on merit. We'd only share the funniest tweet, the cutest cat photo, the most insightful post on Google Analytics, or the best hack we learned today. The best people and brands would have millions of followers. We'd have no internal biases.
But the truth is that as the world gets smaller, in that we're more connected, and as technology serves "smarter" content, we're only going to see people more like ourselves. Eli Pariser called this the "filter bubble." And while he particularly noted the consequences of this in politics and being attuned to world events, this also applies to the experiences of people who are not like you demographically.
For example, over the Memorial Day weekend this past May, Google released a Penguin update. My Twitter stream was full of Penguin talk by male-identified SEOs. What were the women talking about that weekend? #yesallwomen. I couldn't help but wonder if male SEOs, who followed other SEOs primarily, which is a male-dominated industry, even saw the hashtag actively in their streams? Did they know how big the #yesallwomen hashtag was until they saw news stories? I hope for the best, but realistically think about the bubble.

"The internet is showing us what it thinks we want to see, but not necessarily what we need to see." — Eli Pariser

So how do we see the world we need to see? How do we work to essentially outsmart these built-in features? On Twitter, it's actually pretty easy to find and follow people who aren't like you.
Twitter's own analytics and our own Followerwonk will break down the gender of who follows you and whom you follow. Here are some breakdowns of my own Twitter account and those of my fellow Twitter-loving Mozzers, including the genders of the people we follow:

Here's Twitter's own analytics on the gender breakdown of who follows me (which I think speaks volumes about our industry as "SEO" is the top interest of people following me):

It's worth noting that Twitter has categorized every account as either male or female. This is problematic because some accounts are companies, not people, and it discounts people who do not identify with either gender or are somewhere in the middle. Twitter's using a mix of self-reported demographics (what Followerwonk picked up), name categorization of gender, and natural language processing to look for gender signifiers. My recommendation for Twitter: join Facebook in giving people more gender options and toss those companies out.
Recently, our own Rand Fishkin took a close examination of his followers and those he followed back, in a concerted effort to follow more women on Twitter. Rand was pretty shocked to learn how many more male followers he had than female, and he was perhaps more shocked about my followers, given that my Twitter bio identifies me as a feminist and I tweet more about social justice than online marketing.

In addition to following more women, look at the gender balance of people you retweet and whose voices you're helping amplify. Twee-Q analyzes your last 100 tweets and shows the gender balance who you've been retweeting. Entrepreneur Anil Dash talked about how he spent a year only retweeting women. Even if you don't follow Dash's footsteps, it's pretty eye opening to see just who you're retweeting.

I swear I did not stage this equal RTing result. Usually, I skew toward more women than men.
As a community manager, I'm a little obsessed with keeping the virtual living room free of hatred, especially on sites directly owned by a brand. I love, for example, that the comments on the Moz Blog are actually valuable to read, unlike almost every other site out there.
It's hard to backpedal and bring order to your community; we all watched YouTube integrate G+ and Huffington Post hire an army of comment moderators. But most of us aren't managing a community with millions of incoming comments and forum posts. Community guidelines or a code of conduct give you more room to be explicit about expectations for behavior on your properties.
For example, Moz works in the SEO space. So while it's not very TAGFEE to put a spammy link in a comment, it saves argument time that it's actually outlined in our community etiquette. While not directly tied to stopping discrimination, you can easily see how parallels in explicitly outlining what kinds of speech your brand won't tolerate. "Be excellent to each other" can just bring on too many arguments from the person you're moderating.
The allowance of hate-fueled user-generated content sends a signal loud and clear to women, minorities, and allies just what your brand is about, and this feeling is only amplified when we all meet face-to-face.
This year at MozCon, we implemented a Code of Conduct. For those that don't know, in the events space, there's been an increasing awareness of harassment at conferences. One way organizers are combating it and making attendees safer is by explicitly laying out a policy against this behavior and how event organizers will respond to said bad behavior. Again, this should be solvable simply by saying "be TAGFEE"—or whatever other motto your brand chooses—but unfortunately, this is not the case.
Some of you have speculated about what happened to make the MozCon committee decide we needed a code of conduct. We created the code to be proactive.
This is just one more way to improve our conference and be welcoming to marketers of all stripes.

MozCon 2014 attendees having breakfast before the show.
Many people make employment choices, not to mention purchase decisions, based on "culture." Culture is a nebulous idea, and while it's formed by the combination of how people in your company act and brand perception, you can start out on the right foot. Culture's not a top-down dictate, but the signals come from both directions, and a strong brand voice and design guide can help company communication on what's implicitly acceptable and what's not.
Most of us work for brands that are gender-neutral. We don't cater to an exclusively female-identified or male-identified audience. However, we tend to adopt cultural tones that identify our band as a specific gender, and furthermore our industry as exclusive, instead of inclusive.
You're probably thinking about how Moz's own Roger Mozbot uses the male pronoun. While Roger's name and his use of the male pronoun will likely never change, those of us who work on Roger as a mascot strive to make him as gender neutral as possible. He doesn't use specific masculine language, and despite many requests from our community, he doesn't have a love interest. Roger's first love is SEO, after all. He's beloved by all our community members, not just the male-identified ones.
Not all companies think about these nuances. For example, why is banking portrayed as a masculine industry? Why does it need to support stereotypes that women are bad with money, math, and the financial market? Doesn't every adult need a bank account, retirement savings, and access to their money? Does the marketing-bias only reflect the hiring bias?

Who's getting interviewed here? Who looks most like a banker? Who should apply here?
Brands who do live in a sphere where they can say 80%+ of their audience comes from a particular gender should also pay attention. If none of your competitors are going after that other ~20% of audience share, you have a market opportunity. At the very least, small tweaks to your voice—like using that epicene "they"—or adding a pop color not commonly associated with your industry's dominant gender can make you the friendly, go-to brand for those who feel like outsiders in your niche.

ExOfficio shows actual customers fishing, not just models in the clothing.
Outdoor and travel clothing brand ExOfficio is known for their fishing clothing. Fishing is considered a male market, but they do a great job making the same fishing clothing for women too. Sure, they might add in different styling and colors and offer some variations geared toward women's fashion, but their imagery and their core offering of fishing clothing doesn't shout out that these are women fishing.
Let's also look at a cautionary tale of what can happen when brands try to be more inclusive toward women: the pinkification of the market.

While yes, this is marketed toward girls, not women, this fishing set nicely illustrates pinkification. Turning it pink and labeling it with Barbie somehow makes it "for girls." But what really makes me upset is the language. Behold the "Purse" of fishing, which contains the exact same actual equipment as the Spider-Man one marketed toward boys.
While this may seem a bit consumer-focused, the products you put out the world and the marketing behind them reflect directly if someone can see themselves working at your brand. When I first heard Apple announce the iPad, my gut reaction was to ask if there was a single woman working on the Apple marketing/product team. Because to me, this MAD TV sketch about the then-newly released iPad (possibly NSFW) said all the things I was thinking.
Conversely, if your employees know this matters, when something bothers them, they'll likely bring it up. Recently at Moz, our team worked hard on new customer personas. At the end of the day, four were chosen as Moz's current target market and the rest put on hold as future markets. While the personas were gender-balanced overall, it so happened that three of the four current customer personas were male. Because of Moz's culture, multiple people approached the persona team questioning this. The team then pivoted to change the names to be gender neutral selections and edit the accompanying art and descriptive text to reflect this.
While we're thinking about how your brand looks to potential employees, what images are out there of your company? Are they only men? Is there only one type of woman?

Unfortunately, this main image on our recruiting page presents Moz as looking for a certain type of employee: a young, fit, white professional, preferably with light-colored hair. This doesn't reflect the actual makeup of Moz, especially at 140+ people. But what if this was the only image? What would a potential employee or recruit who didn't fit that image think?
This can be particularly challenging for small businesses. You also don't want your employees to feel tokenized for their gender identity or minority status. Perhaps it's time to think more about what a photo means to applicants. BarkBox had 30 employees in early 2014, and here's their simple, yet more welcoming recruiting image:

It only takes a little extra effort to go a long way.
There's simply no excuse for an article or an event full of industry experts and to not have the final lineup include a single woman. While there's no "magical number" to achieve diversity, it's simply bad practice when a lineup features only men. If you seriously can't think of a single woman expert in your field, you're doing something wrong.
There's a strong correlation between seeing yourself demographically and dreaming that you could do that job too. We all need inspiration and heroes to look up to and aspire to be like. And great marketers, we come from all kinds of backgrounds and make this industry a better place because of that.
If you're a white man asked to speak as an industry expert, it's time to ask who else is being featured or speaking. Turn down engagements that only have male voices. Ask more of authors and conference runners. If you're the author or event curator, reach out to someone in the industry who's opinion you respect for ideas of experts you're not thinking of. I'll gladly send you my binders full of women marketing experts.

A sample of the speakers at SMX East 2014
I saved this tip for last because it is one of the most powerful. Simply not keeping quiet and speaking up can change the world. We all have to work together.

“People will not listen unless you are an old, white man, so I’m an old white man, and I will use that to help people who need it.” — Sir Patrick Stewart

Unfortunately when women call people out on sexist behavior, it's not as powerful as men saying the same thing. Same goes for a black person calling a white person out on racist behavior, etc. And when a woman calls a man out, she's making a "political" statement and suffers real consequences in her life. Despite laws in many countries against these things, complaints of any kind can lead to economic consequences of losing jobs or clients and to safety concerns about harassment both online and offline.
A recent study actually showed that whistle-blowing or any kind of confrontation wasn't even necessary for economic consequences. Women and people of color who promoted other women and people of color and/or valued diversity in the workplace received lower performance reviews than white men who did the same.
Male-identified friends, if you see someone or a company doing these things, please help and speak up. Please stand up for those who are doing this hard work and please be aware of your own biases.
Basic resources:
White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack by Peggy McIntosh
The Male Privilege Checklist by Barry Deutsch
30+ Examples of Heterosexual Privilege in the US by Sam Killermann
Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is by John Scalzi
The Problem When Sexism Just Sounds So Darn Friendly… by Melanie Tannenbaum
Derailing For Dummies
Aamer Rahman from Fear of a Brown Planet
on "Reverse Racism"
8 Things White People Really Need to Understand About Race by James Utt
An open letter to privileged people who play devil’s advocate by Juliana Britto
Yes, All Men: Every Man Needs to Understand Internalized Misogyny and Male Violence by Tom Hawking
Roll up, roll up, to see a man talking about feminism. What could possibly go wrong? by Robert Webb
SEO, tech, and startup specific resources:
Not all men. Not all industries. But nearly always men in my industry by Martin Belam
Why Women Aren’t Welcome on the Internet by Amanda Hess
Women as Entertainment in the SEO Industry by Jane Copland
The Problem with ‘Brogrammers’: Why is Silicon Valley so stubbornly white and male? by Rebecca Burns
Meritocracy [in Tech] is Almost as Real as this Unicorn by Tara Hunt
Death by a thousand cuts: the reality of being a woman in tech by Meg Kierstead
In Tech Marketing Jobs, Women's Successes Are Rarely Recognized by Laura Sydell
Eve wasn't invited: Integrating women into the Apple community by Brianna Wu
Gender Bias in Online Marketing: Data Shows Women Are Undervalued by 21% by Larry Kim
Further resources:
On being an ally and being called out on your privilege by Andrew David Thaler
TEDxWomen Talk from Anita Sarkeesian about Online Harassment & Cyber Mobs
Dissent Unheard Of, real and economic impact of speaking out by Ashe Dryden
Dos and Don’ts To Combat Online Sexism by Leigh Alexander
In Which We Teach You How To Be A Woman In Any Boys' Club by Molly Lambert
The Confidence Gap by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman
"Raving Amazons": Antiblackness and Misogynoir in Social Media by I'Nasah Crockett
Visibility Conundrums of Being Queer by Erica McGillivray
About EricaMcGillivray — I'm Moz's Senior Community Manager! You may run into me doing my best Roger voice, working on MozCon, or reading your questions on Mozinars. I *heart* our community. In my spare time, I review a lot of comic books and tweet about geeky stuff.
View the original article here

Broken Link Building Bible: The New Testament

The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

View the original article here

Outdated SEO Concepts People Still Think are Reality

The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

It's on the internet, so it's true.

The bane of the existence of all search marketers is old or incorrect information given to clients at any point in time that they still hang on to. This post was inspired by an interaction with a client's co-workers, people that are not thinking about SEO on a regular basis. This is not to knock them, but to bring to the attention of everyone that there is a continual need for education. These concepts have a way of hanging around.

And this isn't about just clients either. This is about friends, parents, and partners. Does anyone else still get asked if they make pop-up ads when they try to explain what they do? (Just me? Crap.)

Doing research for this post, I noticed there are a ton of SEO misconceptions out there, and people are talking about them regularly, but many are related to content marketing or online marketing overall. I'm not covering all misconceptions, but those concepts that seem to be stuck to the idea of SEO and will not let go. Then I'll give you resources to help educate the people that believe these misconceptions and alternate solutions to give them.

The inspiration. The client is struggling with balancing revenue and content on the page. There is a large image on the page now and we suggested editing the page to add content about the product. The question was asked if we could just put the content behind the image and solve both problems.

My client stepped in and answered the question wonderfully, but it brought to mind how many times I've seen overstuffed alt text attributes and content in a noscript tag that doesn't match what's in the Flash.

A Comprehensive Guide to Hidden Text

In this instance, we recommended putting text below the fold for the users that wanted the information and keeping the current image for returning users. Balance that satisfies both user needs and the business goals.

This isn't as obvious as hiding text, but it's something that companies refuse to stop doing. It's the concept that if a competitor is doing something, it must be worth doing. This goes for competitors ranking above a business, but it also covers competitors that the business just dislikes. We all have those competitors we want to "beat" and sometimes that makes us do things that are not fully researched and planned.

Amazon.com is my biggest annoyance. I can't count how many times I've heard the reasoning "but Amazon does it" by major brands that other businesses look up to. Amazon, like most major companies, tests many things, and there is a different person behind each test. If you work for a large company, you understand what I mean.

Stop Copying Your Competitors, They Don't Know What They are Doing Either

Everyone is on the hunt for the best results and bringing in new customers, retaining current customers, and making other stakeholders happy. The way you beat competitors is to listen to your stakeholders (customers, clients, partners, employees, investors) and make decisions based on their feedback as well as what is going on in the market.

This has been debunked so many times it makes my head swim. That doesn't change how many people still think that the total number of links (as reported by a third party tool like Moz, Majestic, or AHREFs) is the sole factor in ranking. Want to do better in SERPs? Well, we need to hire someone to build us some links! I'm going to leave one screen shot here (Search: "insurance") and then we'll get into resources and solutions for when you have to face this.

Moz Search Ranking Factors

This is more of an "additional solution," as links and mentions are still very important, but as seen above, it's far from the only factor in ranking. It's best to explain the different ranking factors like content relevance to the query, some social data, query deserves freshness, local, news, personalization, and all of the other things that can impact ranking. Focus on a marketing strategy that will not only result in links, but also send new customers through those links and engage the customers into lifelong evangelists.

The next two are focused on the issue of penalties. So many people are afraid of being penalized. I think this goes back to the days of black marks in your school record. That or people are worried about losing revenue. Maybe that.

The media gets involved with SEO when there is a penalty and so that is what most people hear about. FTD and Overstock types of situations. Then disaster strikes and revenue falls unexpectedly. After some digging, they find that website traffic is down. This paired with emails business owners get at least once a quarter (in a good year) from fly by night SEO companies telling them they can help with SEO, promise the moon and warn of penalties.

The only logical conclusion is a penalty! We have all seen it and most reputable agencies pipelines are filled with leads from companies in this exact situation. The thing is that we never know if there is a penalty unless we dive into the situation, but I have seen times where there is no penalty.

Many things could have happened including:

A developer added a noindex tag to a section of the site when meaning to add it to one page or they disallowed that section.The site was redesigned with URL changes that can drop the traffic coming into many sites if not done correctly.PPC traffic stopped due to a corporate card expiring and not being updated.

Guide to Common SEO Penalties and How to Recover From Them

Rather than paying the first person that will call you back, first look into what part of the site lost traffic and where that traffic was coming from in the past few months. Did you lose traffic from organic search, paid search, referral traffic, or social media? Try to narrow down what happened and figure it out from there. If you're sure it was organic search, look into the date and ask your developers if anything changed about the site. If nothing did, check Google Webmaster Tools for any messages from Google about a penalty. If you're sure it's organic search and there are no messages, that's a good time to contact a reputable agency. 

I did a talk on this very topic a few years back at Pubcon. So many people don't take the time to understand what duplicate content is and how to fix it. More importantly, there is a misunderstanding that duplicate content can cause or is a penalty. 

Most clients assume that having duplicate content will incur the "search engine gods' " wrath, and that just isn't true (for the most part; I mean, if your whole site is a copy of someone else's site ...). Duplicate content is a hindrance to site performance most of the time, but most likely not the cause for a substantial drop in traffic and definitely not a penalty from the search engines. 

Google's Guidelines for Duplicate Content

Don't fret. Take the time to visit Webmaster Tools regularly and check out your duplicated title tags and meta descriptions for an easy look into what might be causing duplicate content or crawling issues on your site. Maintenance is the best medicine!

We sometimes live in a bubble where we think people know everything we do and take for granted information like everything above. If someone asked you how to create a P&L Statement, could you? Maybe, maybe not, but you get what I mean. Take the time to answer questions, whether from clients or colleagues if you are in-house. You would be amazed how much more YOU can learn from teaching others. 

So what are your horror stories? Let me know in the comments below!

Photo credits (all images are linked):

Internet Open by Blaise AlleyneHiding Cat by Aftab UzzamanPenalty by Daniele ZanniEducate by Sean MacEntee

View the original article here

How Some Companies Succeed at Converting Visitors yet Fail to Earn Great Customers - Whiteboard Friday

It's easy to think that conversion is the end goal for most marketing teams, but any business that relies on customer loyalty needs to take a it a step farther. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains a few of the reasons that people we thought were new customers often decide to leave.

Howdy Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I'm talking about some conversion rate optimization mistakes that we've made. They're pernicious and challenging to understand, because we've succeeded in one big important aspect of CRO, which is converting visitors into customers. That might sound like a great thing, but in fact sometimes being great at that can be a terrible thing. I'll talk about exactly why and how.

I've seen this at Moz. We've had a little bit of a problem with it. I've seen this at many, many other companies. I want to try and use Moz as an empathetic example to everyone out there of how these problems happen.

Succeeding at converting visitors into customers is not the end goal for the vast, vast majority of companies, unless you have a product that you know you're only ever going to sell once, and that will be the only brand interaction that you hope to have with that human being ever or that organization ever in your lives. Well, usually that's not the case.

Usually, most companies have a relationship that they want to have with their customers. They're trying to earn that customer's brand loyalty, and they're trying to earn future sales from that person. That means building a longer term relationship, which is how CRO can occasionally go very, very wrong.

I've got the three primary examples. These are the three types of things that I've seen happen in company after company. It's not just true in software, but software makes a particularly good example of it because we have a retention type model. It's not just about converting someone, but it's also about keeping them part of your service and making your product consistently useful to them, etc.

Here's our friendly Joe Searcher. Joe goes ahead and searches for SEO tools. Then, Joe gets to the free trial of Moz Pro, which you could conceivably get to if you search in Google for that. We often have AdWords ads running for things like that and maybe we rank too.

Then, Joe goes, "All right. Yeah, maybe I'll give this a spin. It's a 30 day free trial." He sees all the stuff in there. He's like, "All right. There's the Moz Bar. Maybe I'll try that, and I'll set up my Moz Analytics campaign. I see I'm getting some crawl errors and keyword scores."

Then, Joe is like, "Man, I don't know. I don't really feel totally invested in this tool. I'm not sure why I should trust the results. Maybe I don't know quite enough about SEO to validate this. Or I know enough about SEO to know that there are some little things here and there that are wrong. Maybe they told me to do some keyword stuff that I don't feel totally comfortable with. I don't trust these guys. I'm out of here. I'm going to quit."

Well, that kind of sucked, right? Joe had a bad experience with Moz. He probably won't come back. He probably won't recommend us to his friends.

Unfortunately, we also provided a customer with access to our stuff, ran a credit card, and accumulated some charges and some expenses in his first month of use, and lost him as a customer. So it's a lose-lose. We were successful at converting, but it ended up being bad for both Joe and for Moz.

The problem is really here. Something fascinating that you may not know about Moz is that, on average, before someone takes a free trial of our software, they visit our website eight times before they take a free trial. Many, many visits are often correlated with high purchase prices.

But for a free trial, there are actually a lot of software companies who convert right on the first or the second visit. I think that might be a mistake. What we've observed in our data and one of the reasons that we've biased not to do this, to try and actually avoid converting someone on the first or second visit, is because Moz customers that convert on the first, or second, or third visit to our website tend to leave early and often. They tend to be not longstanding, loyal customers who have low churn rates and those kinds of things. They tend to have a very high churn and low retention.

Those who visit Moz ten times or more before converting turn out to be much more loyal. In fact, it keeps going. If they visit 14 times or more or 20 times or more, that loyalty keeps increasing. It's very fascinating and strongly suggests that before you convert someone you actually want to have a brand relationship.

Joe needs to know that Moz is going to be helpful, that he can trust it, that he's got the education and the knowledge and the information, and he's interacted with community, and he's consumed content. He's been like, "Okay, I get what's going on. When I see that F Keyword Score, I know that like, oh, right, there's some stemming here. It might not be catching all the interpretations of this keyword that I've got in there. So I give Moz a little leeway in there because this other stuff works well for me, as opposed to quitting at the first sign of trouble."

This happens in so, so many companies. If you're not careful about it, it can happen to you too.

Another good example here is, let's say, Mary. Mary is a heavy Twitter user. She has great social following and wants to do some analysis of her Twitter account, some competitive Twitter accounts. So she finds Followerwonk, which is great. It's a wonderful tool for this.

She says, "Okay, I want to get access to some of the advanced reports. I need to become a Moz Pro member to do that. What does Moz have to do with Followerwonk? Okay, I get it. Moz owns Followerwonk, so I'm getting to the free trial page for Moz Pro. Weirdly, this trial page doesn't even talk about Followerwonk in here. There's one mention in the Research Tools section. That's kind of confusing. Then, I'm going to get into the product. Now you're trying to have me set up a Moz Analytics account. I don't even own and control a website or do SEO. I'm trying to use Followerwonk. Why am I paying $99 a month if my free trial extends? Why would I do that to get all this other stuff if I just want Wonk? That doesn't make any sense, so I'm out of here. I'm going to quit."

Essentially, we created a path where Mary can't get what she actually wants and where she's forced to use things that she might not necessarily want. Maybe she doesn't want them at all. Maybe she has no idea what they do. Maybe she has no time to investigate whether they're helpful to her or not.

We're essentially devaluing our own work and products by bundling them all together and forcing Mary, who just wants Followerwonk, to have to get a Moz subscription. That kind of sucks too.

By the way, we validated this with data. On average, visitors who come through Followerwonk and sign up for a free trial perform terribly. They have very, very low stickiness until and unless they actually make it back to the Followerwonk tool immediately and start using that and use that exclusively. If they get wrapped up inside the Pro subscription and all the other tools, Open Site Explorer, Moz Analytics and Moz Bar, Keyword Difficulty, and Fresh Web Explorer, blah, they're overwhelmed. They're out of here. They didn't get what they want.

The other thing that really sucks is we've seen a bunch of research. There's been psychological research done that basically suggests that when you do this, when you bundle a whole bunch of things together, they are inherently cheapened and believe the value to be less, and they feel themselves cheated. If you buy all of this stuff and you only wanted Followerwonk, you feel like well, Followerwonk must only be worth like $20 a month.

That's not actually the case. Inside the business we can see, oh, there are all these different cost structures associated with different products, and some people who are heavy users of this and not heavy users of that make up for it. Okay, but your customers don't have that type of insight, so they're not seeing it. Again, quick conversion has failed to create real value.

Number three, what is SEO? We're going to have Fred here. Fred's going to do a search for "what is SEO." He's going to get to the free trial of Moz Pro maybe because we were running an advertisement or that kind of thing. Then, Fred's going to go, "All right. Yeah, that sounds good. I want to do SEO on my website. I know that's important. Search traffic is important."

Then, he starts getting into the product and goes through the experience. He has to enter his keywords, and he's like, "Man, I don't know what keywords they mean. What do they mean by keywords? I need to learn more about SEO. I'm out of here. I'm quitting this product. It doesn't make sense to me."

The problem here is an education gap. Essentially, before Fred is able to effectively use and understand the product, he needs education, and unfortunately what we've done is end around and put the conversion message ahead of the education process and thus cost Fred. This, again, happens all the time. Companies do this.

There are ways to solve these. There are three things you can do that will really solve these conversion issues. First, measure your customer journey, not just your conversion path. So many folks look at paths to conversion. You have your reports set up in Google Analytics, and you look at assisted conversions and path to conversions, but you don't look at customer journey, which is what do people do after they convert.

If you're an e-commerce or a retail store, you care about this too, even though it seems like a one-time purchase. Do they come back? Do they buy more stuff from you? Are they amplifying? Are they sharing the product? Do you have a good score with them when you ask people on Net Promoter Score like, "Hey, would you suggest or recommend using this service, using our ecommerce shop? Did you have a good experience?"

If you're seeing low scores there, low return visits, low engagement with the product that you're offering, chances are good that you're doing something like this. You're converting someone too early.

Second, you don't want to cheapen, mislead, or bundle products without evidence that people will actually enjoy them, appreciate them, and that it matches your customer need, as we've done here by bundling all of these things with Followerwonk. It may be the case that this can go one way and not the other.

You might say, as we did, I was like, "Oh, I'm in SEO and I love Followerwonk. It's so useful for all this stuff. But I wasn't thinking about the 600 people a day who go into Followerwonk just for Twitter analytics and don't really have a whole lot of need around other SEO tools."

So optimizing the bundle one way and not the other was probably a mistake. I think it's a mistake that Peter Bray and the team are working on fixing now, my mistake that they're now working on fixing. I apologize for that.

This bundling can also be very misleading. You need to be careful in validating that customers actually want two products, two services, two goods together.

Finally, this is a huge part of how content marketing works. You want to educate before you convert. Educate before you convert and find ways to filter for not right customers.

Imagine if in Fred's process here, he'd searched for "what is SEO," and he got to the Beginner's Guide. Then, he got to the free trial page, and we had identified, "Hey, Fred's never been here before. He just got done with the Beginner's Guide when he got to the keyword page here."

We can nudge him maybe with some proactive suggestions here. But if he goes through and starts entering keywords and he can't figure it out, maybe we need someone from our Customer Success Team to actually email him and say, "Hey, Fred, is there something I can help you with? Can we set up this process for you? Do you want to have a phone call," these kinds of things. We need to provide some assistance.

Likely you're doing one of these things as well. When you get aggressive about converting customers fast and early, yes, you can really juice your revenue. You can turn a low conversion rate into a high one. But you can also in the long run cost your company if you aren't measuring and thinking about the right things.

Hopefully, you'll do that and have a great customer journey experience throughout your conversion process. We will see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

View the original article here

A Content Strategy Template You Can Build On

Picture it. A room full of executives from a company you never thought you could land as a client. They're so engaged in what they are saying that they're leaning forward in their chairs. The CEO looks poised to ask a question but you can tell she doesn't want to interrupt your flow.

This is the moment content strategists dream of.

But if you're like me, it's easy to get caught up in how new the field is and wonder, "Am I even doing this right?" There are lots of posts to help you, such as  How to Build a Content Marketing Strategy and Content Strategy: You're Doing it Wrong. There are also comprehensive guides to creating content strategies. There's even an epic list of content strategy resources. And there are books (my favorite is Kristina Halvorson and Melissa Rach's Content Strategy for the Web).

Still, sometimes you just want to peek over someone else's shoulder at a concrete example to see if there's anything you can learn. This can be especially true if you're working in-house and don't have anyone to bounce ideas off of.

So, I built a template:

Download the content strategy template

Content strategies take many forms, from a 50-page word document to an hour-long PowerPoint presentation. That means this template is not meant to be gospel. Instead, it introduces you to the many moving parts that make up a content strategy and gives you an example of how I, based on the years I spent consulting on content strategies for everything from stock photography to software as a service, would write it up.

Peek over my shoulder to get your next strategy started, or just to get a glimpse of how someone else approaches a strategy. Build on this template and make it your own. You'll find that the template is written from an agency perspective (with lots of references to "the client") but it works equally well if you are in-house and are writing for that one, all-important client—your boss.

The content strategy template walks you through researching and writing up the three key elements of a content strategy: what content looks like now, what it should look like, and the ecosystem in which content is created.

A strategy should provide an assessment of the client's current content, as well as insight into their competitors' content. That assessment may include any or all of the following:

Personas Stakeholder interviews Content inventory Content audit Gap analysis Competitive analysis

Then you want to show your client where the content should take them and how they can use various channels to get there. Some of many places content resides are:

Onsite content 

HomepageLanding pages Category pages Product descriptions Blog Error pages Etc.

Offsite content 

Emails Social media Brochures Packaging Invoices Voicemail messages Etc.

Finally, you want to think about the environment in which the content gets created—the governance of content. This includes:

Brand, voice, and style guidelines Workflow analysis Best practices for writing on the web SEO tips Editorial calendar

See the template for more in-depth descriptions of all of these elements as well as some of my favorite tools to get them done.

Again, take these pieces and use them to create your own template. Each strategy you do will require its own tweaks, but this will give you the leg up to put your own stamp on this emerging field.

My brand of content strategy, and you'll see this reflected a little in the template, is that a content strategy is a story. For a deeper understanding of this, check out the Mozinar I gave a few weeks ago, The Storytelling of Content Strategy.

Basically, I advocate for taking the elements of fiction and using them to get a fresh perspective on a brand's journey toward a goal.

Here's how the five elements of a story are also the basis of a content strategy:

A content strategy can either be about a brand's journey to land a customer (useful when a brand is new or has lost its way), or a content strategy can be about a customer's journey and how the brand can help. See the webinar for an example of each.

You can't start a strategy until you know where your hero is coming from. Most of the initial research you do—from stakeholder interviews to content inventories and audits—is to understand the starting point of your strategy. This is where the journey begins. You will be measuring all future success against the understanding you build of this landscape.

You can't plot a strategy if you don't know what direction the brand wants to grow. Goals should come from the brand itself, but you might find that the brand needs a little coaching. It's helpful if you distinguish overall business goals from content goals. They are related, but there are some goals (e.g. reducing employee turnover) that content plays a much smaller role in achieving. Setting specific goals for your content strategy also lets you get more granular about some goals in which content is the star player (e.g. increasing email open rate).

Even if you're going to write the most TAGFEE content strategy ever, you still need to figure out where your competitors are and how you can learn from their example. And it's important to remember that because of the way search engines work, your business competitors might be different than your SERP competitors. Ideally a content strategy will address both.

At this point in the story, you know who the players are, what's working and what's not, and have some ideas about how to move forward to achieve those goals.

When I write up a strategy, I think about them as though I were plotting a novel. Each tactic or channel is a way to move the brand closer to those goals. What obstacles might they encounter? Who are they competing with in the space? How can they master this tactic or channel? And how can content help them achieve their goals and ride happily off into the sunset?

Now it's time to download that template and see what story your content strategy is trying to tell. Once you're confident in the strategy you're presenting, you'll have the complete attention of every executive in that conference room. And, with any luck, they'll refer you to their friends. 

Download the template

I want to learn from you, too. Is there anything you'd include in the template that I haven't covered? Do you have any strategies for success in presenting content strategies or any lessons learned? Please share your ideas and stories in the comments.

VisitsPageviewsAvg. Time on PageDirect TrafficSearch TrafficReferral TrafficYikes, looks like something went wrong. Please try again later.

View the original article here

Searchmetrics Ranking Factors 2014: Why Quality Content Focuses on Topics, not Keywords

The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

Searchmetrics recently launched their yearly Ranking Factors Study that bases numbers on rank correlation and averages of top 10 SEO rankings, and this year's analysis shows that content on top-performing sites is much more holistic and less keyword-focused.

Everybody talks about how "content is king." People are advised to "create quality content for users," and not ever since keyword (not provided), some have said "the keyword is dead." Though these phrases may convey somehow understandable approaches, they are often nothing more than empty clichés leaving webmasters alone with without any further information.

Making relevant content measurable

What is quality content? How can I create relevant content for my users? Should I still place the keyword in the title or use it seven times in the content?

To understand how search engines develop over time and what kind of features increase or decrease in prevalence and importance, we analyze the top 30 ranking sites for over 10,000 keywords (approximately 300,000 URLs) each year. The full study with all 100 pages of details is  downloadable here.

In a nutshell: To what extent have Panda, Penguin, and not least Hummingbird influenced the algorithm and therefore the search results?

Before we get into detail, let me—as a matter of course—point out the fact that correlation does not imply causation. You can find some more comprehensive information, as well as an introduction and explanation of what a correlation is, here. That is why we took two approaches:

Correlation of Top 30 = Differences between URLs within SERP 1 to 3 Averages = Appearance and/or extent of certain factors per position

Most keyword factors are declining. This is one of the major findings of our studies over the years. Let me give you an example:

The decrease of the features "Keyword in URL" and "Keyword in Domain" is one of the more obvious findings of our analyses. You can clearly see the declining correlation from 2012 to 2014. Let's have a look at some more on-page keyword factors:

What you see here as well are very low correlations. In other words: With regard to these features, there are no huge differences between URLs ranking on positions from one to thirty. But there is more than that. It is also important to have a look at the averages here:

Explanation: X-Axis: Google Position from one to 30 / Y-Axis: Average share of URLs having keyword in description/title (0.10 = 10%). Please note that we have modified the crawling of these features. It is more exact now. This is why last year's values are likely to be actually even a bit higher than given here. However, you can see that relatively few sites actually have the keywords in their headings. In fact, only about 10% of the URLs in positions 1-30 have the keyword in h2s; 15% have them in h1s. And the trend also is negative.

By the way: What you see in positions 1-2 is what we call the "Brand Factor." It is often a big brand ranking on these positions, and most of them differ from the rest of the SERPs when it comes to classic SEO measures.

Actually, taking only correlation into consideration can sometimes lead to a false conclusion. Let me show you what I mean with the following example: 

The correlation for the feature "% Backlinks with Keyword" has considerably increased from 2013 to 2014. But the conclusion: "Hey cool, I will immediately do link building and tell the people to put the keyword I want to rank for in the anchor text!" would be a shot in the dark. A glance at the averages tells you why:

In fact, the average share of links featuring the keyword in the anchor text has declined from 2013 to 2014 (from ~40% to ~27). But what you see is a falling graph in 2014 which is why the correlation is more positive with regard to better rankings. That means: the better the position of a URL is, the higher the share of backlinks that contain the keyword (on average). On average, this share continuously decreases with each position. In contrast to last year's curve, this results in the calculation of a high(er) positive correlation.

Conclusion: The keyword as such seems to continue losing influence over time as Google becomes better and better at evaluating other factors. But what kind of factors are these?

Co-occurrence evaluations of keywords and relevant terms is something we've been focusing on this past year, as we've seen high shifts in rankings based on these. I won't go into much detail here, as this would go beyond the scope of this blog post, but what we can say is that after conducting word co-occurrence analyses, we found that Proof and Relevant keywords played a major role in the quality and content of rankings. Proof Terms are words that are strongly related to the primary keyword and highly likely to appear at the same time. Relevant Terms are not as closely related to the main keyword, yet are still likely to appear in the same context (or as a part of a subtopic). These kinds of approaches are based on semantics and context. For example, it is very likely that the word "car" is relevant in a text in which the word "bumper" occurs, while the same is not true for the term "refrigerator."

Let's have a look at an example analysis for Proof and Relevant Terms regarding the keyword "apple watch," done with the Content Optimization section of the Searchmetrics Suite:

The number behind the bar describes the average appearance of the word in a text dealing with the topic, the bar length mirrors the respective weighting (x-axis, bottom) and is calculated based on the term's semantic closeness to the main keyword. Terms marked with green hooked bubbles are the 10 most important words, based on a mixed calculation of appearance and semantic weighting (and some further parameters).

As you can see, the terms "iphone" and "time" are marked as highly important Proof Terms, and "iwatch" is very likely to appear in the context of the main keyword "apple phone" as well. Note that simply reading the list without knowing the main keyword gives you an idea of the text's main topic.

The above chart shows an excerpt from the list of Relevant Terms. Note that both the semantic weighting and the appearance of these terms is somewhat lower than in the previous chart. In contrast to the Proof Terms list, you won't know the exact focus of the text just looking at these Relevant Terms, but you might probably get an idea of what its rough topic might be.

By the way, the length of content also continues to increase. Furthermore, high-ranking content is written in a way that is easier for the average person to read, and is often enriched by other media, such as images or video. This is shown in the following charts:

Shown here is the average text length in characters per position, in both 2014 and 2013. You can see that content is much longer on each and every position among the top 30 (on average) in 2014. (Note the "Brand Factor" at the first position(s) again.)

And here is the average readability of texts per position based on the Flesch score ranging from 0 (very difficult) to 100 (very easy):

The Flesch score is given on the y-axis. You can see that there is a rather positive correlation with URLs on higher positions featuring, on average, easier-to-read texts.

But just creating more (or easier) content does not positively influence rankings. It's about developing relevant and comprehensive content for users dealing with more than just one aspect of a certain topic. The findings support the idea that search engines are moving away from focusing on single keywords to analyzing so-called "content clusters" – individual subjects or topic areas that are based around keywords and a variety of related terms.

So, please stop these outdated "Checklist-SEO" practices which are still overused in the market from my perspective. It's not about optimizing keywords for search engines. It's about optimizing the search experience for the user. Let me show you this with another graphic:

On the left, we have the "old SEO paradigm: 1 Keyword (maybe some keyword variations. we all know the " An SEO walks into a bar joke") = 1 Landing Page – Checklist SEO. That's why, in the past, many websites had single landing pages for each specific keyword (and those pages were very likely to bear near-duplicate content). Imagine a website dealing with a specific car having single landing pages for each and every single car part: "x motor," "x seats," "x front shield," "x head lamps," etc. This does not make sense in most cases. But this is how SEO used to be (and I must admit: the pages ranked!).

But, to have success in the long term, it's the content (or better, the topic) that matters, not the single keyword. That is why landing pages should be focused on comprehensive topics: 1 Landing Page = 1 Topic. To stick with the example: Put the descriptions of all the car parts on one page.

How these developments actually influences the SERPs can be seen in the impact of Google's Hummingbird. The algorithm refactoring means the search engine now has a better understanding of the intent and meaning of searches which improves its ability to deliver relevant content in search results. This means search engine optimization is increasingly a holistic discipline. It's not enough to optimize and rank for one relevant keyword – content must now be relevant to the topic and include several related terms. This helps a page to rank for several terms and creates an improved user experience at the same time.

In a recent analysis on Hummingbird, we found that the diversity in search results is actually decreasing. This means, fewer URLs rank for semantically similar ("near-identic") yet different keywords. Most of you know that not long ago there were often completely different search results for keyword pairs like "bang haircuts" and "hairstyles with bangs" which have quite a bit of overlap in meaning. Now, as it turns out, SERPs for these kinds of keywords are getting more and more identic. Here are two SERPs, one for the query "rice dish," and one for the query "rice recipe," shown both before and after Hummingbird, as examples:

SERPs pre-Hummingbird

SERPs post-Hummingbird

To get an insight of what some of the more important ranking factors are, we have developed an infographic adding evaluations (based on averages and interpretations) in bubble form to the well-known correlation bar chart. Again, you see the prominence of content factors (given in blue). (Click/tap for a full-size image.)

The more important factors are given on the left side. Arrows (both on the bubbles and the bars) show the trend in comparison to last year's analysis. On the left side also, the size of the bubbles represents a graphic element based on the interpretation of how important the respective factor might probably be. Please note that the averages given in this chart are based on the top 10 only. We condensed the pool of URLs to SERP 1 to investigate their secrets of ranking on page 1, without having this data influenced by the URLs ranking from 11 to 30.

Good content generates better user signals

What you also notice is the prominent appearance of the factors given in purple. This year we have included user features such as bounce rate (on a keyword level), as well as correlating user signals with rankings. We were able to analyze thousands of GWT accounts in order to avoid a skewed version of the data. Having access to large data sets has also allowed us to see when major shifts occur.

You'll notice that click through rate is one of the biggest factors that we've noticed in this year's study, coming in at .67%. Average time on site within the top 10 is 101 seconds, while bounce rate is only 37%.

Brands are maturing in their approach to SEO. However, the number one factor is still relevant page content. This is the same for big brands and small businesses alike. Make sure that the content is designed for the user and relevant in your appropriate niche.

If you're interested in learning how SEO developed and how to stay ahead of your competition, just download the study here. Within the study you'll find many more aspects of potential ranking factors that are covered in this article.

Get the Full Study

So, don't build landing pages for single keywords. And don't build landing pages for search engines, either. Focus on topics related to your website/content/niche/product and try to write the best content for these topics and subtopics. Create landing pages dealing with several, interdependent aspects of main topics and write comprehensive texts using semantically closely related terms. This is how you can optimize the user experience as well as your rankings – for more than even the focus keyword – at the same time!

What do you think of this data? Have you seen similar types of results with the companies that you work with? Let us know your feedback in the comments below.

View the original article here