tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-46059397195492864272024-03-18T20:24:57.445-07:00SEO Consultants in Bangalore, Affordable SEO Services, Social Media MarketingSEO Service for Google 1st Page Ranking. One of the Best SEO Company in Bangalore India. Rank your website in 1st page of Google. Contact us for affordable SEO, Social Media Marketing, ORM(Online Reputation Management), SEO Consulting. Call @ 080 - 42111388 for SEO Consulting, Website Analysis. Get your website listed in 1st Page of Google for more leads, enquiry, sales, and buyer for your products/Service? Pay per month, Guaranteed SEO Ranking or Money Back.Inderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17791906594554515959noreply@blogger.comBlogger64125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4605939719549286427.post-80086798721294031092016-11-10T00:45:00.007-08:002016-11-10T00:45:52.498-08:005 Tips to Get Off the Content Marketing Struggle Bus & Create Content Your Audience Will Love<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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The young man at the back of the ballroom in the Santa Monica, Calif., Loews hotel has a question he's been burning to ask, having held it for more than an hour as I delivered a presentation on why content marketing is invaluable for search.</div>
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When the time comes for Q&A, he nearly leaps out of his chair before announcing that he's asking a question for pretty much the entire room.</div>
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"How do I know what content I should create?" he asks. "I work at a small company. We have a team of content people, but we're typically told what to write without having any idea if it's what people want to read from us."</div>
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When asked what the results of their two blog posts per week was, his answer told a tale I hear I often: "No one reads it. We don't know if that's because of the message or because [it's the] wrong audience for the content we're sharing."</div>
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In fishing and hunting circles, there's a saying that rings true today, tomorrow, and everyday: "If you want to land trophy animals, you have to hunt in places where trophy animals reside."</div>
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Content marketing is not much different.</div>
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If you want to ensure that the right audience consumes the content you design, create and share, you have to "hunt" where they are. But to do so successfully, you must first know what they desire in the way of bait (content).</blockquote>
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For those of us who've been involved in content marketing for a while now, this all sounds like fairly simplistic, 101-level stuff. But consider this: While we as marketers and technologists have access to sundry tools and platforms that help us discern all sorts of information, most small and mid-size business owners — and the folks who work at small and mid-size businesses — often lack the resources for most of the tools that could help flatten the learning curve for "What content should I create?"</div>
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If you spend any time fishing around online, you know very well that the problem isn't going away soon.</div>
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For small and mid-size business looking to tackle this challenge, I detail a few tips below that I frequently share during presentations and that seem to work well for clients and prospects alike.</div>
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#1—Find your audience</h2>
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First, let's get something straight: When it comes to creating content worth sharing and hopefully linking to, the goal is, now and forevermore, to deliver something the audience will love. Even if the topic is boring, your job is to deliver best-in-class content that's uniquely valuable.</div>
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Instead of guessing what content you should create for your audience (or would-be audience), take the time to find out where they hang out, both online and offline. Maybe it's Facebook groups, Twitter, forums, discussion groups, or Google Plus (Yes! Google Plus!).</div>
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Whether your brand provides HVAC services, computer repair, or custom email templates, there's a community of folks sharing information about it. And these folks, especially the ones in vibrant communities, can <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">help</em> you create amazing content.</div>
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As an example, the owner of a small automobile repair business might spend some time reading the most popular blogs in the category, while paying close attention to the information being shared, the top names sharing it, and common complaints, issues, or needs that commonly arise. The key here is to see who the major commenters, sharers, and influencers are, which can easily be gleaned after careful review of the blog comments over time.</div>
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From there, she could "follow" those influencers to popular forums and discussion boards, in addition to Facebook groups, Google Communities, and wherever else they congregate and converse.</div>
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The keys with regard to this audience research is to find out the following:</div>
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<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">Where</strong> <strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">they are</strong></li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">What</strong> <strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">they share</strong></li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">What unmet needs</strong><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;"> they might have</strong><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;"></strong></li>
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#2—Talk to them</h2>
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Once you know where and who they are, start interacting with your audience. Maybe it's simply sharing their content on social media while including their "@" alias or answering a question in a group or forum. But over time, they'll come to know and recognize you and are likely to return the favor.</div>
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A word of warning is in order: <strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">Take off your sales-y hat. </strong>This is the time for sincere interaction and engagement, not hawking your wares.</div>
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Once you have a rapport with some of the members and/or influencers, don't be shy about asking if you can email them a quick question or two. If they open that door, keep it open with a short, simple note.</div>
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<img src="https://d1avok0lzls2w.cloudfront.net/uploads/blog/581fc09a41e2e4.93460513.png" style="border: 1px solid rgb(219, 227, 227); box-sizing: border-box; display: block; margin: 20px auto; max-width: 80%; padding: 5px;" />With emails of this sort, keep three things in mind:</div>
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<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;">Be <strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">brief</strong></li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;">Be <strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">bold</strong></li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;">Be <strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">gone</strong></li>
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Respect their time — and the fact that you don't have enough currency for much of an ask — by keeping the message short and to the point, while leaving the door open to future communication.</div>
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#3—Discern the job to be done</h2>
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We've all heard the saying: "People don't know what they want until they've seen it."</div>
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Whether or not you like the bromide, it certainly rings true in the business world.</div>
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Too often a product or service that's supposedly the perfect remedy for some such ailment falls flat, even after focus groups, usability testing, surveys, and customer interviews.</div>
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The key is to focus less on what they say and more on what they're attempting to accomplish.</div>
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This is where the Jobs To Be Done theory comes in very handy.</div>
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Based primarily on the research of Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) is a framework for helping businesses view customers motivations. In a nutshell, it helps us understand what job (why) a customers hires (reads, buys, uses, etc.) our product or service.</div>
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Christensen writes...</div>
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"Customers rarely make buying decisions around what the 'average' customer in their category may do — but they often buy things because they find themselves with a problem they would like to solve. With an understanding of the 'job' for which customers find themselves 'hiring' a product or service, companies can more accurately develop and market products well-tailored to what customers are already trying to do."</blockquote>
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<em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Christensen's latest book provides a thorough picture of the "Jobs To Be Done" theory</em></div>
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<em style="box-sizing: border-box;"></em>One of the best illustrations of the JTBD theory at work is the old saw we hear often in marketing circles: <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Customers don't buy a quarter-inch drill bit; they buy a quarter-inch hole.</em></div>
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This is important because we must clearly understand what customers are hoping to accomplish before we create content.</div>
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For the auto repair company preparing to create a guide for an expensive repair, it would be helpful to learn what workarounds currently exist, who are the people experiencing the problem (i.e., DIYers, Average Joes, technicians, etc.), how much the repair typically costs, and, most important, what the fix allows them to do.</div>
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For example, by talking to some of the folks in discussion groups, the business owner might learn that the problem is most common for off-roaders who don't feel comfortable making the expensive repair themselves. Therefore, many of them simply curtail the frequent use of their vehicles off-road.</div>
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Armed with this information, she would see that the JTBD is not merely the repair itself, but the ability to get away from work and into the woods on the weekend with their vehicles.</div>
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An ideal piece of content would then include the following elements:</div>
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<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;">Prevention tips for averting the damage that would cause the repair</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;">A how-to video tutorial of the repair</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;">Locations specializing in the repair (hopefully her business is on the list with the most and best reviews)</li>
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A piece of content covering the elements above, that contains amazing graphics of folks kicking up dirt off-road with their vehicles, along with interviews of some of those folks as well, should be a winner.</div>
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#4—Promote, promote, promote</h2>
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Now that you've created a winning piece of content, it's time to reach back out the influencer(s) for their help in promoting the content.</div>
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First, though, ask if what you've created hits the threshold of incredibly useful and worth sharing. If you get a yes for both, you're in.</div>
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The next step is to find out who the additional influencers are who can help you promote and amplify the content.</div>
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One simple but effective way to accomplish this is to use BuzzSumo to discern prominent shares of your amplifiers' content. (You'll need to sign up for a free subscription, at least, but the tool is one of the best on the market.)</div>
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After you click "View Sharers," you'll be taken to a page that list the folks who've re-shared the amplifier's content. You're specifically looking for folks who've not only shared their content but who (a) commonly share similar content, (b) have a sizable audience that would likely be interested in your content, and (c) might be amenable to sharing your content.</div>
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As you continue to cast your net far and wide, a few things to consider includes:</div>
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<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">Don't abuse email.</strong> Maintain the relationships by offering to help them in return as/more often than you ask for help yourself.</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">Share content multiple times via social media.</strong> Change the title each time content is shared, and look to determine which platforms work best for a given message, content type, etc.</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">Use engagement, interaction, and relationship to inform you of future content pieces.</strong> Don't be afraid to ask, "What are some additional ideas you'd be excited to share and link to?"</li>
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#5—Review, revise, repeat</h2>
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The toughest part of content marketing is often understanding that neither success nor failure are final. Even the best content and content promotion efforts can be improved in some way.</div>
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What's more, even if your content enjoys otherworldly success, it says nothing about the success or failure of future efforts.</div>
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Before you make the commitment to create content, there are two very important elements to adhere to:</div>
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1.) Only create content that's in line with your brand's goals. There's lots of good ideas for creating solid content, but many of those ideas won't help your brand. Stick to creating content that in your brand's wheelhouse.</div>
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2.) This line of questioning should help you stay on track: <strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">"What content can I create that's (a) in line with my core business goals; (b) I'm uniquely qualified to offer; and (c) prospects and customers are hungry for?"</strong></div>
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My philosophy of the three Rs:</div>
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<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">Review: </strong>Answer the questions "What went right?", "What can we do better?", and "What did we miss that should be covered in the future?"</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">Revise: </strong>You'll need to determine the metrics that matter for your brand before creating content, but whatever they are ensure they're easy to track, attainable, and, most important of all, have real meaning and value.</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">Repeat: </strong>Successful content marketing efforts occur primarily through repetition. You do something once, learn from it, then improve with the next effort. Remember, the No. 1 reason we have less and less competition each year is many aren't willing to pay the price of doing the little things over and over.</li>
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This post is, by no means, an exhaustive plan of what it takes to create effortful content. However, for the vast majority of brands struggling with where to start, it's exactly what the doctor ordered.</div>
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Nancy Phttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11509695821749932674noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4605939719549286427.post-29498342031749145032016-10-24T06:52:00.000-07:002016-10-24T06:52:21.370-07:00A Guide on How to Use XPath and Text Analysis to Pitch Content<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">I<span style="background-color: white; color: #5d6769; font-family: Lato, "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;">n my day-to-day role at Builtvisible, I build tools to break down marketing challenges and simplify tasks. One of the things we as marketers often need to do is pitch content concepts to sites. To make this easier, you want to pitch something on-topic. To do that more effectively, I decided to spend some time creating a process to help in the ideation stage.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">In the spirit of sharing, I thought I'd show you how that process was created and share it with you all.</span></div>
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Tell me what you write</h2>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">The first challenge is making sure that your content will be on-topic. The starting point, therefore, needs to be creating a title that relates to the site's own recent content. Assuming the site has a blog or recent news area, you can use XPath to help with that.</span></div>
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<img height="219" src="https://d1avok0lzls2w.cloudfront.net/uploads/blog/580aa28169f934.66348628.jpg" width="400" /></div>
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Here we see the main Moz blog page. Lots of posts with titles. If we use Chrome and open up Web Inspector, we see the following:</div>
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<img src="https://d1avok0lzls2w.cloudfront.net/uploads/blog/580aa2acbf7e01.80062873.jpg" style="border: 1px solid rgb(219, 227, 227); box-sizing: border-box; display: block; margin: 20px auto; max-width: 80%; padding: 5px;" /></div>
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We can see here the element that corresponds to a single blog post title. Right click and hover over "Copy," and we can copy the XPath to it.</div>
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<img src="https://d1avok0lzls2w.cloudfront.net/uploads/blog/580aa2cba36dc7.29887351.png" style="border: 1px solid rgb(219, 227, 227); box-sizing: border-box; display: block; margin: 20px auto; max-width: 80%; padding: 5px;" /></div>
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Now we're going to need a handy little Chrome plugin called <a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/xpath-helper/hgimnogjllphhhkhlmebbmlgjoejdpjl?hl=en" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #3594ba; outline: none; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">XPath Helper</a>. Once installed, we can open it and paste our XPath into XPath Helper. That'll highlight the title we copied the path to. In this case, that XPath looks like this:</div>
<pre style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #5d6769; font-family: monospace, monospace; font-size: 18px; overflow: auto;">//*[@id="wrap"]/main[1]/div[1]/article[1]/header/h2/a</pre>
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This only selects one title, though. Fortunately, we can modify this to pick up <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">all</em> the titles. That XPath looks like this:</div>
<pre style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #5d6769; font-family: monospace, monospace; font-size: 18px; overflow: auto;">//*[@id="wrap"]/main/div/article/header/h2/a</pre>
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By removing the nth selectors (where it says [1]), we can make it select all instances of links in h2 headings in headers in articles. This will create a list of all the titles we need in the results box of XPath helper. Doing that, I got the following...</div>
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Recent Moz post titles</h3>
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<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;">Digital Strategy Basics: The What, the Why, & the How</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;">Should My Landing Page Be SEO-Focused, Conversion-Focused, or Both? - Whiteboard Friday</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;">A Different Kind of SEO: 5 Big Challenges One Niche Faces in Google</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;">Google's Rolling Out AMP to the Main SERPs - Are You Prepared?</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;">Diagramming the Story of a 1-Star Review</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;">Moz Content Gets More Robust with the Addition of Topic Trends</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;">Wake Up, SEOs - the NEW New Google is Here</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;">301 Redirects Rules Change: What You Need to Know for SEO</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;">Should SEOs and Marketers Continue to Track and Report on Keyword Rankings? - Whiteboard Friday</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;">Case Study: How We Created Controversial Content That Earned Hundreds of Links</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;">Ranking #0: SEO for Answers</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;">The Future of e-Commerce: What if Users Could Skip Your Site?</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;">Does Voice Search and/or Conversational Search Change SEO Tactics or Strategy? - Whiteboard Friday</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;">Architecting a Unicorn: SEO & IA at Envato (A Podcast by True North)</li>
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Doing this for a few pages gave me a handy list of titles. This can then be plugged into a text analysis tool like <a href="http://www.online-utility.org/text/analyzer.jsp" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #3594ba; outline: none; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">this one</a>, which lets us see what the posts are about. This is especially useful when we may have lists of hundreds of titles.</div>
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Having done this, I got a table of phrases from which I could determine what Moz likes to feature. For example:</div>
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<tr style="box-sizing: border-box;"><th style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1em; padding: 20px 5px 20px 20px;">Top Two-Word Phrases</th><th style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1em; padding: 20px 5px 20px 20px;">Occurrences</th></tr>
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<tr style="border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(240, 247, 247); box-sizing: border-box;"><td style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1em; padding: 20px 5px 20px 20px;">how to</td><td style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1em; padding: 20px 5px 20px 20px;">13</td></tr>
<tr style="border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(240, 247, 247); box-sizing: border-box;"><td style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1em; padding: 20px 5px 20px 20px;">guide to</td><td style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1em; padding: 20px 5px 20px 20px;">6</td></tr>
<tr style="border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(240, 247, 247); box-sizing: border-box;"><td style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1em; padding: 20px 5px 20px 20px;">accessibility seo</td><td style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1em; padding: 20px 5px 20px 20px;">4</td></tr>
<tr style="border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(240, 247, 247); box-sizing: border-box;"><td style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1em; padding: 20px 5px 20px 20px;">local seo</td><td style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1em; padding: 20px 5px 20px 20px;">3</td></tr>
<tr style="border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(240, 247, 247); box-sizing: border-box;"><td style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1em; padding: 20px 5px 20px 20px;">for accessibility</td><td style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1em; padding: 20px 5px 20px 20px;">3</td></tr>
<tr style="border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(240, 247, 247); box-sizing: border-box;"><td style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1em; padding: 20px 5px 20px 20px;">in 2016</td><td style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1em; padding: 20px 5px 20px 20px;">2</td></tr>
<tr style="border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(240, 247, 247); box-sizing: border-box;"><td style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1em; padding: 20px 5px 20px 20px;">online marketing</td><td style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1em; padding: 20px 5px 20px 20px;">2</td></tr>
<tr style="border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(240, 247, 247); box-sizing: border-box;"><td style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1em; padding: 20px 5px 20px 20px;">how google</td><td style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1em; padding: 20px 5px 20px 20px;">2</td></tr>
<tr style="border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(240, 247, 247); box-sizing: border-box;"><td style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1em; padding: 20px 5px 20px 20px;">you need</td><td style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1em; padding: 20px 5px 20px 20px;">2</td></tr>
<tr style="border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(240, 247, 247); box-sizing: border-box;"><td style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1em; padding: 20px 5px 20px 20px;">future of</td><td style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1em; padding: 20px 5px 20px 20px;">2</td></tr>
<tr style="border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(240, 247, 247); box-sizing: border-box;"><td style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1em; padding: 20px 5px 20px 20px;">conversion rates</td><td style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1em; padding: 20px 5px 20px 20px;">2</td></tr>
<tr style="border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(240, 247, 247); box-sizing: border-box;"><td style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1em; padding: 20px 5px 20px 20px;">the future</td><td style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1em; padding: 20px 5px 20px 20px;">2</td></tr>
<tr style="border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(240, 247, 247); box-sizing: border-box;"><td style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1em; padding: 20px 5px 20px 20px;">seo for</td><td style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1em; padding: 20px 5px 20px 20px;">2</td></tr>
<tr style="border-bottom: 1px solid rgb(240, 247, 247); box-sizing: border-box;"><td style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1em; padding: 20px 5px 20px 20px;">long tail</td><td style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1em; padding: 20px 5px 20px 20px;">2</td></tr>
<tr style="border-bottom: 3px solid rgb(240, 247, 247); box-sizing: border-box;"><td style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1em; padding: 20px 5px 20px 20px;">301 redirects</td><td style="box-sizing: border-box; font-size: 14px; line-height: 1em; padding: 20px 5px 20px 20px;">2</td></tr>
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Assuming that Moz is writing about things people care about, we can look at this and make a few educated guesses. "How," "guide," and "you need" sound like phrases around educating how to do specific tasks. "Future of" and "the future" indicates people might be looking for ways to stay ahead of the curve. And, of course, "SEO" turns up with various modifiers. A blog post that might resonate with the Moz crowd, then, would be something focused on unpacking a tactic, focused on delivering results, that not many people are yet using.</div>
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Who's writing what?</h2>
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So we've decided we're going to write a guide about something to do with SEO, focused on enabling SEOs to better address a task. Where do we go from here?</div>
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In the course of creating ideas for what became this post (and a few other posts), I started to turn to other sites that I knew the community hung around on, and used the same trick with XPath and content analysis on those areas. (For the sake of completeness, I looked at <a href="https://inbound.org/" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #3594ba; outline: none; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Inbound</a>, <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #3594ba; outline: none; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">HackerNews</a>,<a href="https://lobste.rs/" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #3594ba; outline: none; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Lobsters</a>, and <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=content+marketing" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #3594ba; outline: none; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Twitter</a>.) Things that came up repeatedly included content marketing, {insert type here} content, and phrases around the idea of effective/creative/innovative methods to {insert thing here}.</div>
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With this in mind, I had a sit and a think about what I do when I want to pitch something, and how I've optimized that process over the years for speed and efficacy. It fit into the types of content Moz seems to like, and what the community at large is talking about at the moment, with a twist that is reasonably unique.</div>
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The same data gives a list of people who are interested in and writing about similar stories. This makes it easy to create a list of people to reach out to with regards to research, who you can get to contibute, and who'll be happy to promote it when it's live. Needless to say, in a world where content is anything but scarce, that network of people shouting about what you've created is going to help you get word out and make the community take more notice of it.</div>
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Taking this further</h2>
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For the moment, and because I'm a developer first, I don't have much problem with the slightly technical and convoluted nature of this. However, as SEOs, you might want to swap out some of the tools. You could, for example, use Screaming Frog to compile the titles, and people might want to use their own text analysis tools to break down phrases, remove stop words, and other useful things.</div>
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Nancy Phttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11509695821749932674noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4605939719549286427.post-3365682988282561122016-10-21T00:48:00.000-07:002016-10-21T00:48:03.659-07:00Content Gating: When, Whether, and How to Put Your Content Behind an Email/Form Capture <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #5d6769;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Have you ever considered gating your content to get leads? Whether you choose to have open-access content or gate it to gather information, there are benefits and drawbacks you should be aware of. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand weighs the pros and cons of each approach and shares some tips for improving your process, regardless of whichever route you go.</span></span><br />
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Video Transcription</h2>
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Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about content gating.</div>
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This is something that a lot of content marketers use, particularly those who are interested in generating leads, individuals that their salespeople or sales teams or outreach folks or business development folks can reach out to specifically to sell a product or start a conversation. Many content marketers and SEOs use this type of content as a lure to essentially attract someone, who then fills in form fields to give enough information so that the sales pipeline gets filled or the leads pipeline gets filled, and then the person gets the content.</div>
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As opposed to the classic model that we're used to in a more open content marketing and open SEO world of, "Let me give you something and then hopefully get something in return," it's, "You give me something and I will give you this thing in return." This is a very, very popular tactic. You might be familiar with Moz and know that my general bias and Moz's general bias is against content gating. We sort of have a philosophical bias against it, with the exception of, on the Moz Local side, some enterprise stuff, that that marketing team may be doing, may in the future include some gating. But generally, at Moz, we're sort of against it.</div>
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However, I don't want to be too biased. I recognize that it does have benefits, and I want to explain some of those benefits and drawbacks so that you can make your own choices of how to do it. Then we're going to rock through some recommendations, some tactical tips that I've got for you around how you can improve how you do it, no matter whether you are doing open content or full content gating.</div>
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Benefits of gating content</h2>
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<img rel="box-shadow: 0 0 10px 0 #999; border-radius: 20px;" src="https://d1avok0lzls2w.cloudfront.net/uploads/blog/58094f9c603111.47186344.jpg" style="border-radius: 20px; border: 1px solid rgb(219, 227, 227); box-shadow: rgb(153, 153, 153) 0px 0px 10px 0px; box-sizing: border-box; display: block; margin: 20px auto; max-width: 80%; padding: 5px;" /></div>
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The two. This is the <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">gated</em> idea. So you get this free report on the state of artificial intelligence in 2016. But first, before you get that report, you fill in all these fields: name, email, role, company website, Twitter, LinkedIn, what is your budget for AI in 2017 and you fill in a number. I'm not kidding here. Many of these reports require these and many other fields to be filled in. I have filled in personally several that are intense in order to get a report back. So it's even worked on me at times.</div>
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The opposite of that, of course, would be the report is completely available. You get to the webpage, and it's just here's the state of AI, the different sections, and you get your graphs and your charts, and all your data is right in there. Fantastic, completely free access. You've had to give nothing, just visit the website.</div>
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The benefits of gating are you actually get:</div>
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<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">More information about who specifically</strong><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;"> accessed the report</strong>. Granted, some of this information could be faked. There are people who work around that by verifying and validating at least the email address or those kinds of things.</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">Those who expend the energy to invest in the report may view the data or the report itself as more valuable, more useful, more trustworthy, to carry generally greater value</strong>. This is sort of an element of human psychology, where we value things that we've had to work harder to get.</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">Sales outreach to the folks who did access it may be much easier and much more effective</strong>because you obviously have a lot of information about those people, versus if you collected only an email or no information at all, in which case would be close to impossible.</li>
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Drawbacks of gating content</h2>
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Let's walk through the drawbacks of gating, some things that you can't do:</div>
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<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">Smaller audience potential</strong>. It is much harder to get this in front of tons of people. Maybe not this page specifically, but certainly it's hard to get amplification of this, and it's very hard to get an audience, get many, many people to fill out all those form fields.</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">Harder to earn links and amplification</strong>. People generally do not link to content like this. By the way, the people who do link to and socially amplify stuff like this usually do it with the actual file. So what they'll do is they'll look for State of AI 2016, filetype:pdf, site:yourdomain.com, and then they'll find the file behind whatever you've got. I know there are some ways to gate that even such that no one can access it, but it's a real pain.</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">It also is true that some folks this leaves a very bad taste in their mouth</strong>. They have a <strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">negative brand perception</strong> around it. Now negative brand perception could be around having to fill this out. It could be around whether the content was worth it after they filled this out. It could be about the outreach that happens to them after they filled this out and their interest in getting this data was not to start a sales conversation. You also <strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">lose a bunch of your SEO benefits</strong>, because you don't get the links, you don't get the engagement. If you do rank for this, it tends to be the case that your bounce rate is very high, much higher than other people who might rank for things like the state of AI 2016. So you just struggle.</li>
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Benefits of open access</h2>
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What are the benefits and drawbacks of open access? Well, benefits, pretty obvious:</div>
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<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">Greater ability to drive traffic from all channels</strong>, of course — social, search, word of mouth, email, whatever it is. You can drive a lot more people here.</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">There's a larger future audience for retargeting and remarketing</strong>. So the people who do reach the report itself in here, you certainly have an opportunity. You could retarget and remarket to them. You could also reach out to them directly. Maybe you could retarget and remarket to people who've reached this page but didn't fill in any information. But these folks here are a <strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">much greater audience potential for those retargeting and remarketing efforts</strong>. Larry Kim from WordStream has shown some awesome examples. Marty Weintraub from Aimclear also hasshown some awesome examples of how you can do that retargeting and remarketing to folks who've reached content.</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">SEO benefits via links that point to these pages, via engagement metrics, via their ranking ability</strong>, etc. etc. You're going to do much better with this. We do much better with the Beginner's Guide to SEO on Moz than we would if it were gated and you had to give us your information first, of course.</li>
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Overall, <strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">if what you are trying to achieve is, rather than leads, simply to get your message to the greatest number of people, this is a far, far better effort</strong>. This is likely to reach a much bigger audience, and that message will therefore reach that much larger audience.</div>
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Drawbacks of open access</h2>
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There are some drawbacks for this open access model. It's not without them.</div>
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<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;"></strong><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">It might be hard or even totally impossible to convert many or most of the visits that come to open access content into leads or potential leads</strong>. It's just the case that those people are going to consume that content, but they may never give you information that will allow you to follow up or reach out to them.</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">Information about the most valuable and important visitors</strong>, the ones who would have filled this thing out and would have been great leads <strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">is lost forever when you open up the content</strong>. You just can't capture those folks. You're not going to get their information.</li>
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So these two are what drive many folks up to this model and certainly the benefits of the gated content model as well.</div>
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Recommendations</h2>
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So, my recommendations. It's a fairly simple equation. I urge you to think about this equation from as broad a strategic perspective and then a tactical accomplishment perspective as you possibly can.</div>
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<strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">1. If audience size, reach, and future marketing benefits are greater than detailed leads</strong> as a metric or as a value, <strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">then you should go open access</strong>. If the reverse is true, <strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">if detailed leads are more valuable to you than the audience size</strong>, the potential reach, the amplification and link benefits, and all the future marketing benefits that come from those things, the ranking benefits and SEO benefits, if that's the case, <strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">then you should go with a gated model</strong>. You get lots of people at an open access model. You get one person, but you know all their information in a gated content model.</div>
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<strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">2. It is not the case that this has to be completely either/or.</strong> There are modified ways to do both of these tactics in combination and concert. In fact, that can be potentially quite advantageous.</div>
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So a <strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">semi-gated model</strong> is something we've seen a few content marketers and companies start to do, where they have a part of the report or some of the most interesting aspects of the report or several of the graphics or an embedded SlideShare or whatever it is, and then you can get more of the report by filling in more items. So they're sharing some stuff, which can potentially attract engagement and links and more amplification, and use in all sorts of places and press, and blog posts and all that kind of stuff. But then they also get the benefit of some people filling out whatever form information is critical in order to get more of that data if they're very interested. I like this tease model a lot. I think that can work really, really well, <strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">especially if you are giving enough to prove your value and worth</strong>, and to earn those engagement and links, <strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">before you ask for a lot more</strong>.</div>
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You can go the other way and go a <strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">completely open model but with add-ons</strong>. So, for example, in this, here's the full report on AI. If you would like more information, we conducted a survey with AI practitioners or companies utilizing AI. If you'd like the results of that survey, you can get that, and that's in the sidebar or as a little notification in the report, a call to action. So that's full report, but if you want this other thing that maybe is useful to some of the folks who best fit the interested in this data and also potentially interested in our product or service, or whatever we're trying to get leads for, then you can optionally put your information in.</div>
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I like both of these. They sort of straddle that line.</div>
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<strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">3. No matter which one or which modified version you do, you should try and optimize the outcomes. </strong>That means in an open content model:</div>
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<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">Don't ignore the fact that you can still do retargeting to all the people who visited this open content and get them back to your website</strong>, on to potentially a very relevant offer that has a high conversion rate and where you can do CRO testing and those kinds of things. That is completely reasonable and something that many, many folks do, Moz included. We do a lot of remarketing around the web.</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">You can drive low-cost, paid traffic to the content that gets the most shares in order to bump it up and earn more amplification</strong>, earn more traffic to it, which then gives you a broader audience to retarget to or a broader audience to put your CTA in front of.</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;">If you are going to go completely gated, <strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">a lot of these form fields, you can infer or use software to get and therefore get a higher conversion rate</strong>. So for example, I'm asking for name, email, role, company, website, Twitter, and LinkedIn. In fact, I could ask exclusively for LinkedIn and email and get every single one of those from just those two fields. I could even kill email and ask them to sign in with LinkedIn and then request the email permission after or as part of that request. So there are options here. You can also ask for name and email, and then use a software service like FullContact's API and get all of the data around the company, website, role and title, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc., etc. that are associated with that name or in that email address. So then you don't have to ask for so much information.</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">You can try putting your teaser content in multiple channels and platforms to maximize its exposure</strong> so that you drive more people to this get more. If you're worried that hey this teaser won't reach enough people to be able to get more of those folks here, you can amplify that through putting it on SlideShare or republishing on places like Medium or submitting the content in guest contributions to other websites in legit ways that have overlapped audiences and share your information that you know is going to resonate and will make them want more. Now you get more traffic back to these pages, and now I can convert more of those folks to the get more system.</li>
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So content gating, not the end of the world, not the worst thing in the world. I personally dislike a lot of things about it, but it does have its uses. I think if you're smart, if you play around with some of these tactical tips, you can get some great value from it.</div>
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Nancy Phttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11509695821749932674noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4605939719549286427.post-85078671156599062492016-10-19T23:54:00.000-07:002016-10-19T23:54:42.794-07:00All Content is Not Created Equal: Comparing Results Across 15 Verticals<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Are you holding your content marketing to unrealistic standards?</div>
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No matter how informative your infographic about tax law may be, it’s not going to attract the same amount of attention as a BuzzFeed Tasty video. You shouldn’t expect it to. In order to determine what successful content looks like for your brand, you first need to have realistic expectations for what content can achieve in your particular niche.</div>
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Our analysis of hundreds of Fractl content marketing campaigns looked at the factors which have worked for our content across all topics. Now we've dived a little deeper into this data to develop a better understanding of what to expect from content in different verticals.</div>
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What follows is based on data we've collected over the years while working with clients in these industries. Keep in mind these aren’t definitive industry benchmarks – your mileage may vary.</div>
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First, we categorized our sample of over 340 Fractl client campaigns into one of 15 different verticals:</div>
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<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;">Health and Fitness</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;">Travel</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;">Education</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;">Entertainment</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;">Drugs and Alcohol</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;">Politics, Safety, and Crime</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;">Sex and Relationships</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;">Business and Finance</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;">Science</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;">Technology</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;">Sports</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;">Automotive</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;">Home and Garden</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;">Pets</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;">Fashion</li>
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We then looked at placements and social media shares for each project. We also analyzed content characteristics like visual asset type and formatting. A “placement” refers to any time a publisher wrote about the campaign. Regarding links, a placement could mean a dofollow, cocitation, nofollow, or text attribution.</div>
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Across the entire sample, <strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">an average campaign received 90 placements and just over 11,800 social shares</strong>. As expected, the results deviated greatly from the average when we looked at the average number of placements and social shares per vertical.</div>
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Some verticals, such as Health and Fitness, outperformed the average benchmarks by more than double, with 195 average placements and roughly 62,600 social shares. Not surprisingly, verticals with more niche audiences had lower numbers. For example, Automotive campaigns earned an average of 43 placements and 1,650 social shares.</div>
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What were the top-performing topics?</h2>
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The average campaigns in Health and Fitness, Drugs and Alcohol, and Travel outperformed the average campaigns in other verticals. So what does it take to be successful in each of these three verticals?</div>
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Health and Fitness</h3>
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Our Health and Fitness campaigns were nearly nine times more likely to include side-by-side images than the average vertical.</div>
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Many of these side-by-side image campaigns were centered around body image issues. For instance, we Photoshopped women in video games to have body types closer to that of the average American woman. We also used this tactic to highlight male body image issues and differences in beauty standards around the world.</div>
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<strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">Takeaway:</strong> Contrasting images immediately pass along a wealth of information that can be difficult to capture as effectively with standard data visualizations like charts or graphs. Additionally, they carry emotional power.</div>
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For instance, we created a morphing GIF of Miss America from 1922 to 2015. The difference between Miss America in 1922 and Miss America in 2015 is stark, and the GIF makes a powerful statement. Readers and publishers were also able to access information about the images that wouldn’t have come across in figures alone (such as the change in clothing styles and the relative lack of diverse contestants).</div>
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As part of the project, we also charted the decline in BMI for pageant winners. Depending on the project and available information, it may be helpful to provide some quantitative data to support the narrative told through images.</div>
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Interestingly, although Health and Fitness campaigns were 36.4 percent more likely to use social media data than the average vertical, each of the social media campaigns were in the bottom 68 percent of all Health and Fitness campaigns by social shares.</div>
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Drugs and Alcohol</h3>
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Our Drugs and Alcohol campaigns were 2.2 times more likely to use curated data (65 percent versus 30 percent) and 1.4 times more likely to have interactive elements (26 percent versus 19 percent) than the average campaign.</div>
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<strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">Takeaway: </strong>When dealing with emotional and controversial topics like drugs and alcohol, you don’t necessarily need to collect new data to make an impact. Readers and publishers value visualizations that can help explain complex information in simple ways. An additional benefit: creating interactive experiences that allow your audience to explore data on their own and make their own conclusions.</div>
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One good example of these principles is our “Pathways to Addiction” campaign, in which we created interactive platforms for exploring data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, including information about the sequence in which people have tried different substances.</div>
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This format allowed readers to explore a controversial topic on their own and draw independent conclusions.</div>
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<strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">Pro Tip: </strong><em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Whether you choose to use curated data or collect your own data, it is imperative to be impartial in your presentation and open in your methodology when working on campaigns around sensitive or controversial topics. You don’t need to stay away from controversial topics, but you do need to take precautions for your agency and your client.</em></div>
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Travel</h3>
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Our Travel campaigns were 28.6 percent more likely to use social media data and 30.5 percent more likely to use rankings and comparisons than a campaign in the average vertical.</div>
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<strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">Takeaway:</strong> Travel is an inherently social behavior. For many people, travel isn’t complete until they’ve captured the perfect photo – or five. Travel content that acknowledges this social aspect can be really powerful. Rankings, which also feature heavily in travel content, are strong geographic egobait for readers and publishers and play up the social aspect of the Travel vertical.</div>
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Stratos Jet Charters’ Talking Tourists, which combined social media data with rankings, is a great example. For this campaign, we gathered over 37,000 tweets to determine which places were the most and least friendly to tourists.</div>
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Talking Tourists was successful (96 placements and over 56,000 social shares) because it used content types with proven success in the travel vertical (social media data, rankings, and maps) to explore a topic that isn’t often explored quantitatively.</div>
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How to achieve content marketing success in every vertical</h2>
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The three industries listed above are ripe for highly successful content, but does that mean less popular verticals should go in with low expectations?</div>
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Even with topics that are more difficult to attract the attention of readers and publishers, it is still possible for your content to perform well beyond other content in the vertical. This is particularly true when campaigns align with trending stories or tell a completely unique story.</div>
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However, not every piece of content can hit it out of the park. Rand estimates that it will take five to ten attempts to create a piece of successful content. Even then, the average high-performing Science content will not receive the same amount of attention as the average Health and Fitness content.</div>
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So how can you maximize the chances for success? Here’s what we’ve observed about our top-performing campaigns in the following verticals:</div>
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<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">Automotive:</strong> If you want to create automotive content that appeals to a wider audience, consider using data from social media. Four of our top seven campaigns (by placements) in this vertical featured data from social networks.</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">Business and Finance:</strong> When it comes to money, people want to know how they stack up. Our top Business and Finance campaigns (by social shares) relied on comparisons or rankings. If you’re looking for social shares, this is the way to go.</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">Drugs and Alcohol:</strong> Finding interesting correlations or stories in existing datasets can prove popular in this vertical – the majority of top campaigns used curated data.</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">Education:</strong> Our top Education campaigns featured social media data and interactive features.</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">Entertainment: </strong>Timely content that connects with a passionate fan base is a recipe for success.</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">Fashion: </strong>Successful fashion campaigns focused on solving problems for the audience.</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">Health and Fitness:</strong> Side-by-side images that show a strong contrast perform extremely well in this vertical.</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">Home and Garden:</strong> To attract attention from readers and publishers in this niche, make your content timely or pop culture-related.</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">Pets: </strong>The highest-performing campaign in this vertical appealed to readers and publishers because it focused on the social aspects of pet ownership. We also included a geographic egobait component by highlighting distinct regional differences in popular dog breeds.</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">Politics, Safety, and Crime:</strong> Our top-performing campaign (by social shares) in Politics, Safety, and Crime used social media data to explore a trending topic.</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">Science:</strong> In this vertical, relating complex topics to pop culture figures, like superheroes, can boost your content’s social appeal. Creating interactive platforms to explore complicated data can also help your audience connect with your campaign.</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">Sex and Relationships: </strong>Talking about sex and relationships feels a little scandalous, which piques interest. Two of our top three campaigns in this vertical, both by placements and by social shares, used social media data to measure conversation around these topics.</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box; position: relative;"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">Sports: </strong>This vertical naturally lends itself well to regional egobait. Although only two of our Sports campaigns included maps, these were the most shared of all our sports campaigns.</li>
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Browse through the flipbook below to see examples of top-performing campaigns in each vertical.</div>
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Try a mixed-vertical strategy</h2>
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For many of our clients at Fractl, we create content both within and outside of the client’s vertical to maximize reach. Our work with Movoto, a real estate research site, illustrates how one company’s content marketing can span multiple verticals while still remaining highly relevant to the company’s core business.</div>
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When developing a content marketing strategy, it is helpful to look at the average placement and social share rate for various verticals. Let’s say a brand that sells decor for log cabins wants to focus 60 percent of its energy on creating highly targeted, niche-specific projects and 40 percent on content designed to raise general awareness about its brand.</div>
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Three out of every five campaigns produced for this client should be geared toward publishers who write about log cabins and readers who are on the verge of purchasing log cabin decor. This type of content might include targeted blog posts, industry-specific research, and product comparisons that would appeal to folks at the bottom of the sales funnel.</div>
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For the other two campaigns, it’s important to look at adjacent verticals before determining how to move forward. For this particular client, primarily creating Travel content (which yields high average social shares and placements) may be the best course of action.</div>
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In addition to the data I’ve shared here, I encourage you to analyze your own content performance data by vertical to set realistic expectations. Vertical-specific metrics can also help identify opportunities to create cross-vertical content for greater traction.</div>
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Nancy Phttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11509695821749932674noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4605939719549286427.post-64109544382209359942016-09-26T00:40:00.000-07:002016-10-19T23:47:28.730-07:00Penguin 4.0: Was It Worth the Wait?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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For almost two years (707 days, to be precise), one question has dominated the SEO conversation: “When will Google update Penguin?” Today, we finally have the answer. Google announced that a Penguin update is rolling out and that Penguin is now operating in real-time.</div>
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September has been a very volatile month for the SERPs (more on that later in the post), but here’s what we’re seeing in MozCast for the past two weeks, including last night:</div>
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In a normal month, a temperature of 82°F would be slightly interesting, but it's hardly what many people were expecting, and September 2016 has been anything but a normal month. It takes time to refresh the entire index, though, so it's likely Penguin volatility will continue for a few days. I'll update this graph over the next few days if anything more interesting happens.</div>
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What happened in September?</h2>
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September has been the most volatile month for SERPs since I started tracking temperatures in April of 2012 (just a couple of weeks before Penguin 1.0). To the best of my knowledge at this time, the volatility during the rest of September was not due to the Penguin 4.0 roll-out.</div>
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There are no official statements (currently) about other updates, but we’re aware of two things. First, many local SEOs saw major shifts around September 1st, when MozCast tracked a high of 108°F. This has been dubbed the <a href="http://searchengineland.com/everything-need-know-googles-possum-algorithm-update-258900" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #3594ba; outline: none; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Possum Update</a>, and reports are that local pack URLs also moved substantially (MozCast does not track this data). We did see an overall drop in local pack presence in our data set on that day (about 7.3% day-over-day).</div>
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Second, between September 13th and 14th there was a massive drop in SERPs with image (vertical) results on page 1 in our data set. This caused substantial volatility, as image results occupy an organic position and so those SERPs got an extra organic result on page 1. The temperature that day was 111°F. Here’s the two-week graph of SERPs with image results on page 1:</div>
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SERPs with images in our data set dropped 49% overnight and have not recovered. I've hand-checked dozens of these results and have verified the drop. In some cases, images moved to deeper pages. It's unclear if other vertical/universal results were affected.</div>
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Were you affected by Penguin 4.0?</h2>
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I've often said that measuring algorithm flux is like tracking the unemployment rate. It's interesting to the economy at large if the rate is 5% or 6%, but ultimately you either have a job or you don't. If you were hit by an algorithm update, it's little comfort that the MozCast temperature was low on that day.<br />
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Hopefully, if you were impacted by Penguin in the past and have made changes, those changes have been rewarded (or soon will be). The good news is that, now that Penguin is real-time, we shouldn't have to wait another two years for a major refresh.</div>
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Nancy Phttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11509695821749932674noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4605939719549286427.post-45078159597111637632016-09-23T02:04:00.001-07:002016-10-19T23:49:14.075-07:00How to Appear in Google's Answer Boxes - Whiteboard Friday<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #5d6769; font-size: 18px;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Featured snippets are the name of the rankings game. Often eclipsing organic results at the top of the SERPs, "ranking zero" or capturing an answer box in Google can mean increased clicks and traffic to your site. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains the three types of featured snippets and how you can best position yourself to grab those coveted spots in the SERPs.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Video Transcription<br />Paragraphs<br /><img src="https://d1avok0lzls2w.cloudfront.net/uploads/blog/57e43a17303591.04513876.jpg" /><br />Lists<br /><img src="https://d1avok0lzls2w.cloudfront.net/uploads/blog/57e43ac5423de3.17536434.jpg" /><br />Tables<br /><img src="https://d1avok0lzls2w.cloudfront.net/uploads/blog/57e43afa94dfa7.64484053.jpg" /><br />Best practices to appear in the answer box/featured snippet<br />1. Identify queries in KW research that, implicitly or explicitly, ask a question.<br />2. Seek out queries that already use the answer box. If the competition's doing a poor job, these are often easy to grab.<br />3. Ranking #1 can help, but isn't required! Google will pull from any first page result.<br />4. Format and language are essential! Match the paragraph, or table, and use the logical answer to the query terms in your title/caption/label/section header.<br />5. Be accurate. Google tend to favor stronger, more correct responses.<br />So for example, many folks point out, "What about in political spheres where there might be arguments about which one is correct?" Google will tend to prefer the more accurate one from a scientific consensus-type of basis or from trusted resources, like an NPR or a Wikipedia or a census.gov or those kinds of things. Not necessarily from those domains, but information that matches what is on those domains. If your census numbers don't match what's on the actual census.gov, Google might start to trust you a little less.<br />6. Entice the clicks by using Google's maximum snippet length to your advantage.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week, we're going to chat about answer boxes, those featured snippets that Google puts in ranking position zero, oftentimes above the rest of the organic results, usually below some of the top ads, and sometimes they can draw a ton of the clicks away from the rest of the 10 results that would normally appear in Google's organic ranking.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Now, thanks to our friends up at <a href="https://getstat.com/" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #3594ba; outline: none; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">STAT</a> in Vancouver — Rob Bucci specifically, who did <a href="https://seomoz.box.com/shared/static/sbzn8ajzp93mjjg94261xcd57dn9q5x3.pdf" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #3594ba; outline: none; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">a great presentation at MozCon</a>, he delivered some really interesting research — and so we know a little bit more about the world of featured snippets. Specifically, that there are three kinds of featured snippets or answer boxes, if you prefer, that appear in Google's results on both mobile and desktop. Now, Rob used desktop-based, but in my research I checked through all the examples that I could find, and the same featured snippets that we saw in desktop were replicated on mobile. So I think this is a pretty one-to-one ratio that's going on here.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The three were <strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">paragraphs, lists,</strong> and <strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">tables</strong>. I'll show you examples of all of those. But globally, we're talking about 15% of all queries in STAT's database that came up with one of these answer boxes.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">So I did a search here for "<a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=istanbul+history" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #3594ba; outline: none; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Istanbul history</a>." You can see that Wikipedia is not just ranking number one, they're also ranking number zero. So they have this nice featured snippet. It's got a photo or an image that'll appear on the right-hand side on desktop or on top of the text in mobile, and then the snippet, which essentially tries to give you a brief answer, a quick answer to the question. Now, of course, this query is pretty broad, I probably want to know a lot more about Istanbul's history than the fact that it was a human settlement for 3,000 years. But if you want just that quick answer, you can get those.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">There are paragraph answers for all sorts of things. These are about 63% of all the answer boxes are in paragraph format.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Lists look like this. So I search for "<a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=strengthen+lower+back" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #3594ba; outline: none; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">strengthen lower back</a>," I get, again, that image and then I get — this is from wikiHow, so quality, questionable — but back strengthening exercises. They say, number one, do pelvic tilting. Number two, do hip bridges. Number three, do floor swimming. Number four, do the bird dog exercise. That sounds exciting and painful. This is from an article called "How to Strengthen Lower Back," and it's on wikiHow's URL there. These lists, that are usually in numeric or they can be in bullet point format, so either one can appear, they're about 19% of answers.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">And then finally, we have ones like this. I searched for "<a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=wordpress+hosting+comparison" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #3594ba; outline: none; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">WordPress hosting comparison</a>." These tables show up in a lot of places where you see a comparison or a chart-type of view. In this case, there actually was a visual of an actual graph, and then performance of the best WordPress hosting companies, the name, the account type, the cost per month. This is from wpsitecare.com. Again, this was ranking, I believe, number two or number three and also ranking number zero. So this is sort of great. I can't remember who was ranking number one, but they're ranking ahead of the number one spot, as well, by being in this position zero.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">These are about 16% of answers, so really close on tables and lists. This is via STAT's featured snippet research, which I will link to. It's a great <a href="https://seomoz.box.com/shared/static/sbzn8ajzp93mjjg94261xcd57dn9q5x3.pdf" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #3594ba; outline: none; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">PDF document</a> that you can check out from Rob that I'll point to in the Whiteboard Friday.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">In addition to knowing this about featured snippets, that, hey, it's a fairly substantive quantity of things, it can also jump you above the rest of the results, and there are these three different formats, we had a bunch of questions and we keep getting them on, "How do I get in there?" I actually have some great answers for you. So not only has Rob and his team been doing some research, but we've done some research and some testing work here at Moz, and Dr. Pete has done a bunch. So I do have some suggestions, some recommendations for you if you're going to try and get into these featured snippets.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">You actually need to do your keyword research and <strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">identify those queries that implicitly or explicitly are asking a question</strong>. The question needs to be slightly broader than what Google can deliver directly out of Knowledge Graph.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">So for example, if you were to ask, "How old is Istanbul," they might say "3,000 years old." They might not even give any citation at all to Wikipedia or any other website. If I were to ask, "How old is Rand Fishkin," they might put in 37, and they might give absolutely no citation, no link at all, no credit to any page of mine on the web. Again, very frustrating.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;"></span>So these are essentially queries that we're looking for in our keyword research that are slightly broader than a single line or single piece of knowledge, but they do demand a question that it's being answered. You can find those in your keyword research pretty easily. If you go into <a href="https://moz.com/explorer" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #3594ba; outline: none; text-decoration: none;" target="_blank">Keyword Explorer</a>, for example, and you use the suggestions filter for our questions, virtually all of those are. But many things, like Istanbul history, it's an implicit question, not an explicit one. So you can get featured snippets for those as well.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;"></span>You want to <strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">seek out queries that already use the answer box</strong>. So again, if you're using a tool like Keyword Explorer or something — I believe STAT does this as well — where they will identify the types of results that are in the query. You're looking for these answer box- or featured snippets-types of results. If they are in there and someone else already owns it, that means you can usually leapfrog them by providing a better-formatted, more accurate, more complete, or higher-ranking answer.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">So if you're ranking number three or number four and the number two or number one result is producing that answer box and you reformat your content (and I'll talk about how we can do that in a sec), you reformat your content to meet one of these items, the correct one, whichever one is being triggered, you can leapfrog them. You can take that position zero away from your competition and earn it for yourself. It's especially easy when they're doing a poor job. If they've got a weak result in there, and there are a lot of these that are very weak today, you can often take them away.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">Ranking number one is helpful,</strong><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;"> but it is not required</strong>.<strong style="box-sizing: border-box;"> Google will pull from any first-page result</strong>. In fact, you can test this for yourself. Very frequently, if you do a query that pulls up an answer box and then you take the query string and you add "&num=100", or you change your settings in Google Search such that Google shows 50 or 100 results, they are often going to pull from a lower-down result, sometimes in the bottom 30 or 40 results rather than the top 10. So Google is essentially triggering this answer result from anything that appears on page one of the query, which is awesome for all of us because it means that we could be ranking number 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and still get the answer box if we do other things correctly, like...</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">Format and language</strong>. <strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">These are essential</strong>. The language means the language used. We need to use the terms and phrases a little more literally than we would with a lot of other types of keyword targeting, because Google really, really seems to like, if I search for "strengthen lower back," they are showing me an article called "strengthen lower back," not "back strengthening for newbies" or that kind of thing. They are much more literal in most of these than we've seen them be, thanks to technologies like RankBrain and Hummingbird, with other kinds of queries.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">We also need to make sure that we're <strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">matching the paragraph, the list, or the table format and that we're using a logical answer to those query terms</strong>. That answer can be in the <strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">title of your web page</strong>, but it can also be in the <strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">caption of an image</strong>, the <strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">label</strong> of a section, or a <strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">section header</strong>. In this case, for example, part three of this article was back strengthening exercises. That's where they're pulling from. In this case, they have "City of Istanbul" and then they have history and that's the section. In this case, it's the performance chart that's shown right at the top of the web page. But they will pull from inside a document. So as long as you're structured in one section or in the document as a whole correctly, you can get in there.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">You want to<strong style="box-sizing: border-box;"> be</strong> <strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">accurate</strong>. <strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">Google actually does tend to favor more accurate results</strong>.I know you might say, "How do I know I'm being accurate? Some of this information is very subjective." It is true. Google tends to look at sources that they trust to look for words and phrases and structured information that matches up many, many times over across many trusted sites, and then they will show results that match what are in those trusted sites more often. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">This is less about how to rank there, but more about how to earn traffic from it. If you're ranking in position zero, you might be frustrated that Google is going to take those clicks away from you because the searcher is going to get the answer before they ever need to click on your site, thus you don't earn the traffic.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">We've seen this a little bit, but, in fact, most of the time when we rank number zero, we see that we get more traffic than just ranking number one by itself. You're essentially getting two, because you rank number zero plus whatever normal or organic position you're in. You can entice the click by using <strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">Google's maximum snippet length to your advantage</strong>. Meaning, they are not going to put all the different numbered answers in the lists here from wikiHow, they're only going to put the first four or five. Therefore, if you have a list that is six or seven or eight items long, someone has to click to see them all. Same thing with the paragraph. They're only going to use a certain number of characters, and so if you have a <strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">paragraph that leads into the next paragraph</strong> or that goes <strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">long with the character count</strong> or <strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">the word count</strong>, you can again draw that click rather than having Google take that traffic away.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">With this information at your disposal, you should be armed and ready to take over some of those result number zeros, get some answer boxes, some featured snippets on your side. I look forward to hearing your questions. I would love to hear if you've got some examples of featured snippets, where you're ranking, and we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.</span></div>
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Nancy Phttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11509695821749932674noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4605939719549286427.post-31147590096796590262014-06-18T22:55:00.002-07:002016-10-19T23:47:05.340-07:00Feeding the Hummingbird: Structured Markup Isn't the Only Way to Talk to Google<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #616161; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22px;">In a recent poll, Moz asked nearly </span><strong style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #616161; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22px;">300 marketers</strong><span style="background-color: white; color: #616161; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22px;"> which Google updated affected their traffic the most. Penguin and Panda were first and second, followed by Hummingbird in a distant third.</span><br />
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Unsurprising, because unlike Panda and Penguin, <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Hummingbird doesn't specifically combat webspam</em>. </div>
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Ever wonder why Google named certain algorithms after black and white animals (i.e. black hat vs. white hat?) Hummingbird is a broader algorithm altogether, and Hummingbirds can be any color of the rainbow.</div>
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One aspect of Hummingbird is about <strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">better understanding of your content</strong>, not just specific SEO tactics.</div>
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Hummingbird also represents an <strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">evolutionary step in entity-based search</strong> that Google has worked on for years, and it will continue to evolve. In a way, optimizing for entity search is <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">optimizing for search itself</em>.</div>
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Many SEOs limit their understanding of entity search to vague concepts of structured data, Schema.org, and Freebase. They fall into the trap of thinking that the only way to participate in the entity SEO revolution is to <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">mark up your HTML with complex schema.org microdata.</em></div>
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Not true.</div>
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Don't misunderstand; schema.org and structured data are awesome. If you can implement structured data on your website, you should. Structured data is precise, can lead to enhanced search snippets, and helps search engines to understand your content. But Schema.org and classic structured data vocabularies also have key shortcomings:</div>
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<li style="box-sizing: border-box;"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">Schema types are limited. </strong>Structured data is great for <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">people</em>, <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">products</em>, <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">places,</em> and <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">events</em>, but these cover only a fraction of the entire content of the web. Many of us markup our content using Article schema, but this falls well short of describing the <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">hundreds</em><em style="box-sizing: border-box;"> of possible entity associations</em> within the text itself. </li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box;"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">Markup is difficult. </strong>Realistically, in a world where it's sometimes difficult to get authors to write a title tag or get engineers to attach an alt attribute to an image, implementing proper structured data to source HTML can be a daunting task.</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box;"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">Adoption is low</strong>. A study last year of 2.4 billion web pages showed less than 25% contained structured data markup. A recent SearchMetrics study showed even less adoption, with only 0.3% of websites out of over 50 million domains using Schema.org.</li>
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This presents a challenge for search engines, which want to understand entity relationships across the <strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">entire web</strong> - not simply the parts we choose to mark up. </div>
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In reality, search engines have worked over 10 years - since the early days of Google - at extracting entities from our content <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">without</em> the use of complex markup.</div>
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<span style="color: #616161;"> </span><span style="color: blue;"> </span></div>
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Nancy Phttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11509695821749932674noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4605939719549286427.post-46707555302466478412014-05-31T01:26:00.001-07:002014-07-23T02:25:34.882-07:00Breaking the SEO Rules: When Not to Follow Best Practices - Whiteboard Friday<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #616161; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22px;">Best practices are set in place to guide us toward success in </span><em style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #616161; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22px;">most situations</em><span style="background-color: white; color: #616161; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22px;">. Not </span><em style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #616161; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22px;">all </em><span style="background-color: white; color: #616161; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22px;">situations. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Cyrus shows us several instances in which it's actually best to break the rules and throw those best practices out the window.</span><br />
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Howdy Moz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm Cyrus Shepard. Today we're going to be talking about one of my favorite subjects -- breaking the SEO rules, and when not to follow best practices.</div>
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Now, best practices are something we talk a lot about here at Moz, and people are very adamant about following them oftentimes. So before we get started, I want to talk about what exactly we mean when we say "best practices."</div>
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For example, a best practice would be that your meta description length is only so long, or that your title tag length is 512 pixels or something like that. So when we talk about best practices, we're talking about a set of rules that are consistently showing superior results. It doesn't mean they're the only way you can do things, but in general, over time, they deliver the best results over other techniques.</div>
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Best practices are also used as a benchmark so that when you compare two different techniques, such as title tag length is this long or title tag length is that long, one set of those results you can use as a benchmark to measure your results.</div>
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Finally, best practices are meant to evolve and improve. Best practices get better over time. If you're running a business or you're doing SEO, your best practices are going to change the better you get at what you're doing and the more you learn. This is one thing that people often forget -- that best practices do change.</div>
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But sometimes you want to ignore best practices, and that's what we want to talk about today. One of the first reasons that you sometimes want to forget about best practices is when you want to deliver the highest ROI for your activities. When you're working on a client's site, when you're doing in-house SEO, time and resources are limited. So you want to make sure that you're doing the activity that leads to the highest return on investment for what you're doing.</div>
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This is a really common example when people start. When they're new to SEO, they start on a campaign, and they start optimizing their on-page elements and crawlability and engine accessibility. At the beginning of your campaign, that's a really high-ROI activity.</div>
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<span style="color: #616161; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 22px;">http://moz.com/blog/breaking-the-seo-rules-when-not-to-follow-best-practices-whiteboard-friday</span></span></div>
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Nancy Phttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11509695821749932674noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4605939719549286427.post-84215296892989253802014-05-26T22:31:00.002-07:002014-07-23T02:25:48.453-07:00How to Be More Creative in Your Online Campaigns<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
The SEO landscape has changed so much in the last few years in the wake of the Penguin and Panda apocalypse that the discipline is now considered in the broader terms of online marketing or digital marketing. The one element that is common is the requirement for new skills such as PR, classic marketing and most importantly: creativity. Agencies and freelance individuals who can't adapt, evolve and embrace the new mode of thinking/operating are vulnerable with nowhere to hide behind mediocre work and outdated tactics.<br />
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Be more creative, is a phrase often used within business and marketing with little consideration given to its meaning. But, what does it mean to be creative?<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #616161; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22px;">There is much confusion about what creativity is and a general misconception of mistaking style for creativity. Most designers are </span><em style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #616161; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22px;">stylists</em><span style="background-color: white; color: #616161; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22px;">: they make things look good. Creativity is about </span><em style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #616161; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22px;">concepts, ideas</em><span style="background-color: white; color: #616161; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22px;"> and </span><em style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #616161; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22px;">innovation</em><span style="background-color: white; color: #616161; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22px;">. In art school, I was always taught that being able to justify the concept was the most important element of creativity. You had to argue your reason for why the design piece was a solution to the problem. I can still recall how nervous I used to get before a group critique session (the phrase </span><em style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #616161; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22px;">blood bath</em><span style="background-color: white; color: #616161; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22px;"> comes to mind) even though it was over 20 years ago. It's not about how good it looks - </span><strong style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #616161; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22px;">it's how well it answers the questions.</strong><br />
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<strong style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #616161; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22px;">Creativity is a skill we can all access.</strong><span style="background-color: white; color: #616161; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22px;"> Everyone has the capacity to generate ideas. Admittedly, some people are more inclined towards creative thinking, just as some are able to figure large maths calculations in their head or swim like Michael Phelps. But anyone can increase his or her level of creativity by learning the </span><em style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #616161; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22px;">skills</em><span style="background-color: white; color: #616161; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22px;"> of thinking and exercising their </span><em style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #616161; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22px;">idea muscle</em><span style="background-color: white; color: #616161; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22px;">.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #616161; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22px;">I recently published a free ebook called 'What is Creativity?' and the following are six ideas extracted and expanded from the book to increase your creative thinking and improve your online campaigns:</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22px;"><span style="color: #616161; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;">http://moz.com/blog/how-to-be-more-creative-in-your-online-campaigns</span></span></div>
Nancy Phttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11509695821749932674noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4605939719549286427.post-24001079318947228362014-05-24T02:59:00.001-07:002014-07-23T02:26:00.595-07:00Silly Marketer, Title Tags Are for Robots!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Like all good marketers, we think carefully about our title tags before publishing new content. Then we just take that carefully crafted title and plop it into the OG tags for social shares, right?<br />
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In today's Whiteboard Friday, Jen Lopez explains why we need to put in a little more effort than that.<br />
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Hey, Moz fans, welcome to yet another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm Jen Lopez, the Director of the Community here at Moz, and today I'm going to take you on a tale of two marketers.<br />
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We have the SEO, right? We focus on making sure that the robots and that the spiders are crawling through our sites and can get to them. Then when we want things to show up in the SERPs, we make sure that our title tags are keyword rich and our meta descriptions are super enticing, right? We make sure that when somebody clicks from the search engine results page, that they see exactly what we want them to see. And that's smart, right? Those keywords are actually a high ranking factor. All of these things that we focus on, we work very hard to make sure that our keywords are at the beginning of the title and that sort of thing.</div>
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But then we have the social media marketer. Yes, I drew that. I'm sorry, all social media marketers. I know you don't actually look at that. We think about the people, right? How are people going to look at it? How are people going to re-share this? And so as a social media marketer, we're thinking like, "How can we change the Open Graph tags so that people on Facebook and people on Google+ and people on LinkedIn are seeing these things exactly the way we want to see them?" We want to see big images. Who cares about keywords? That's what that SEO person does, right?</div>
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What about Twitter cards? You want to make sure that when you send something in a tweet or somebody tweets your blog post or your infographic, or whatever it may be, that it's coming across exactly the way you want to see it. You're thinking about rich pins, and you salivate when you're on Pinterest and you see a recipe and it actually shows all of the ingredients in the recipe. That might just be me, but in general that's often what we do.</div>
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What tends to happen is people are getting better about using the Open Graph tags and the Twitter cards and that sort of thing. But what we normally do is we take what we have, put in the title tags and meta description, and we make it the default so that it's really simple. So we're doing the basics. We're being lazy. That's exactly what we're doing.</div>
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<span style="color: #616161; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 22px;">http://moz.com/blog/silly-marketer-title-tags-are-for-robots</span></span></div>
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Nancy Phttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11509695821749932674noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4605939719549286427.post-89748459378990056252014-05-22T02:15:00.000-07:002014-07-23T02:29:35.192-07:00Is eBay A Big Loser In Google’s Panda 4.0 Update? — Winners & Losers Data<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Google began rolling out their Panda 4.0 update designed to punch low-quality content. That’s generated both “winners” who have moved up in rankings as “losers” have dropped down — and eBay might be one of the big losers.<br />
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Searchmetrics gave us their initial winners and loser charts, based on rankings they continually monitor. These show that one of the biggest losers was eBay. According to the data, eBay lost a tremendous amount of traffic from Google, much of it from the ebay.com/bhp/ area of its site.<br />
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<span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Another huge loser was Ask.com, yes, the search engine, that lost a tremendous amount of traffic in their Questions section at ask.com/question/.</span></div>
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The Losers: Ask.com, eBay, Biography.com & Google-Backed RetailMeNot</h2>
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Among the top losers include Ask.com, ebay.com, biography.com and retailmenot.com. I should note, retailmenot.com is venture backed by Google’s venture arm. Here is the top list of losers from the Searchmetrics initial analysis:</div>
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The Winners</h2>
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With all algorithm updates, there are also those who win and gain rankings. The big winners seem to be glassdoor.com, emedicinehealth.com, medterms.com, yourdictionary.com and shopstyle.com.</div>
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http://searchengineland.com/panda-4-0s-big-loser-ebay-winners-losers-chart-192123</div>
Nancy Phttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11509695821749932674noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4605939719549286427.post-37514623091524573762014-05-09T06:46:00.000-07:002014-07-23T02:29:50.092-07:0010 Tactics to Improve Blog Readership<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #616161; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22px;">If you're looking to increase traffic to your blog, there are many tactics that can significantly boost your progress. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand lays a roadmap for the journey, offering 10 of the best tactics for you to keep in mind along the way.</span><br />
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Howdy, Moz fans and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week, we're answering the question, "How can I improve the readership and reach, the interactions, sharing, and of course, the links which will all help me get rankings and traffic to my blog?" So a lot of people start investing in blogging, and I actually think a blog is a wonderful thing to invest in, assuming you meet the criteria for what you're trying to achieve with a blog as opposed to separate content sections. And that means having, you know, a person at least, and potentially, a team of two, three, four people who can contribute content on a regular basis and who have an affinity for and stylistic you know ability to contribute at a very high level because it is tough to blog.</div>
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So you know, a blog is essentially just content that is put out in a consistent fashion, in a timeline sort of view. Blogs are great because they can help you do things like earn traffic, and build your brand, attract links, and shares, and rankings, grow your addressable audience. And this can also... a blog can also help you create affinity with and a connection with your community, which means a blog can help you and has definitely helped me, and a lot of times, manufacture serendipity. Serendipitous things that wouldn't have otherwise come about; do come about because you have a blog, because you're creating content on a regular basis. And that's touching people who can potentially help you achieve what you're trying to achieve in business.</div>
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<span style="color: #616161; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 22px;">http://moz.com/blog/10-tactics-to-improve-blog-readership-whiteboard-friday</span></span></div>
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Nancy Phttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11509695821749932674noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4605939719549286427.post-48429867154886627632014-04-29T00:22:00.002-07:002014-04-29T00:22:50.273-07:00Google’s Matt Cutts: Why Google Will Ignore Your Page Title Tag & Write Its Own<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Google’s Matt Cutts posted a video answer on the question about why and when Google will ignore your title tag and use something else for the snippet title in the search results.</div>
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Matt explains in the video that Google really wants the title of the snippets to match on some level the query of the searcher. This logic often results in a higher click through rate on the URL and thus should be better for both the searcher and the web site owner.</div>
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The criteria Google uses when coming up with a new title tag are:</div>
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(1) Something that is “relatively” short</div>
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(2) Have a good description of the page and “ideally” the site that the page is on.</div>
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(3) And that it is relevant to the query.</div>
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If your existing title tag fits the criteria, then Google will most likely use your title tag. If not, then Google may use (1) content on your page, (2) anchor text links pointing to the page and/or (3) may also use the Open Directory Project.</div>
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Nancy Phttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11509695821749932674noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4605939719549286427.post-82457309439217621382014-04-25T07:32:00.004-07:002014-04-25T07:32:47.296-07:00The Greatest Misconception in Content Marketing<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #616161; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22px;">It's probably pretty clear to everyone that content marketing takes time, but there's a common misconception in just how much time. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand warns us of an overly optimistic mindset, and shows us how things really (usually) end up happening.</span><br />
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Howdy Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today we're going to talk a little bit about content marketing and specifically this giant myth, this misconception that exists in the content marketing field about how the practice really works.</div>
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This hurts a lot of people. This hurts people on the SEO side. It hurts people who do social media. It hurts people who invest in actually building the content, and it hurts teams and executives and people who plan and strategize around what content marketing can and can't achieve and how it should work.</div>
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You know, I really came to this because I think it's been something that's been bubbling up in the world of content and inbound marketing for a long time. But I was speaking to a number of startups yesterday afternoon here in Seattle. I was talking to them about how we at Moz produce blog posts, video content, like Whiteboard Friday, presentations, and webinars in all of these different mediums.</div>
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I got this question, like, "Okay, it must be the case . . . how do you put out a blog post, Rand, that once you launch it, once people read it, they're actually going to go and buy from you?"</div>
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I had this moment of, "Oh my God, this happens all the time." People think that the reason you're putting out content is so that someone will consume that content and be inspired from it to go and make a purchase.</div>
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This is how the myth works. Step one, oh yeah, you know, ta-dak I created this amazing piece of content. Look, it's got lovely parallax scrolling, and responsive design, and beautiful graphics, and a lovely layout. Fantastic content. Wow. All right. People are going to download that. They're going to share it. They're going to love it.</div>
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Step two, thankfully, people are thinking about this at least. All right, I'm going to go tweet and Facebook share and put it on Google+. I'm going to point a bunch of links to it. I'm going to put it on my LinkedIn account. I'll promote that content through all of these platforms.</div>
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Then, look at these hordes of people right there. Not the most attractive horde. A little gangly. But, wow, that's really good. We should sign up for whatever these people are selling. They must be amazing, right? The visitors who experience the content, and then some percent of them, like oh maybe 2% are going to go and convert.</div>
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This doesn't happen, does it? This is not actually how content marketing works. But it's how a lot of people invest in and think about content marketing. But it almost never happens. With a few rare exceptions, this is not how content marketing really works.</div>
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How it actually works is you repeat step one and two many, many times, again and again and again and again until you start to get good at the process, until you start finding the XYZ, the piece of amazing content that really is going to resonate with your audience. That takes a lot of trial and failure. It really does.</div>
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Step three is entirely a myth. It is almost never the case, practically never the case that someone goes, experiences a piece of content from a brand they don't know about or haven't heard of, or experiences that content for the first time and then immediately goes, "I wonder what they sell. I should buy whatever that is." Or even sees kind of a plug or a pseudo-plug for their product inside that content and goes, "Yes, you know what, I'm just going to buy that right now." That almost never happens.</div>
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What really does happen is that people come many, many times. They essentially grow this memory about your brand, about what you do, and they build up kind of what I'd call a positive bank account with you. But that bank account, there are not coins and money in there. There are experiences and touches with your brand. Those content touches, and those social media touches, and those touches that come through performing a search and seeing you listed there, those build up the capital in the account.</div>
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<span style="color: #616161; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 22px;">http://moz.com/blog/the-greatest-misconception-in-content-marketing-whiteboard-friday</span></span></div>
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Nancy Phttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11509695821749932674noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4605939719549286427.post-88983525014401995952014-04-22T07:47:00.001-07:002014-04-22T07:47:11.944-07:00Google Introduces Google Trends Email Alerts, Trending Topics and Hot Searches Delivered To Your Inbox<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Google announced today they will be rolling out the ability for users to have popular topics from Google Trends and Hot Searches delivered via email.<br />
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This new feature will work in a very similar way to how Google Alerts currently works. You will be able to subscribe to a particular topic and receive a notification if there is an increase in search volume around that topic.<br />
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Currently, Google allows you to subscribe to any search topic, Hot Searches for any country, or any U.S. monthly Top Chart.<br />
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You will also be able to subscribe to notifications about trending topics by location. For example, if you want to stay up to date about trends and popular searches in your local area, you can set up an email notification to tell you about the “hottest” Hot Searches in the location of your choice and get occasional emails about major local trends.<br />
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To set up an email subscription, simply visit the Subscriptions section within Google Trends and click on Add subscription.<br />
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<img alt="Screen Shot 2014 04 18 at 12.53.31 PM 380x119 Google Introduces Google Trends Email Alerts, Trending Topics and Hot Searches Delivered To Your Inbox" src="http://ho9od35yvs05ejqn.zippykid.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Screen-Shot-2014-04-18-at-12.53.31-PM-380x119.png" /><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #6f6f6f; font-family: museo-sans, sans-serif; font-size: 18px; letter-spacing: -0.18000000715255737px; line-height: 27px;">From there, select the topic and country of your choice and indicate how often you would like to receive notifications. Then click the Subscribe button.</span><br />
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<img alt="Screen Shot 2014 04 18 at 12.56.40 PM 380x190 Google Introduces Google Trends Email Alerts, Trending Topics and Hot Searches Delivered To Your Inbox" src="http://ho9od35yvs05ejqn.zippykid.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Screen-Shot-2014-04-18-at-12.56.40-PM-380x190.png" /><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #6f6f6f; font-family: museo-sans, sans-serif; font-size: 18px; letter-spacing: -0.18000000715255737px; line-height: 27px;">That’s all it takes to keep your finger on the pulse of trending topics and popular search terms. This is an incredibly useful feature for all the busy professionals out there who don’t have time to manually sift through blogs and websites every day to stay current. Now the information can be sent directly to you.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; letter-spacing: -0.18000000715255737px; line-height: 27px;"><span style="color: #6f6f6f; font-family: museo-sans, sans-serif; font-size: medium;">http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-introduces-google-trends-email-alerts-trending-topics-hot-searches-delivered-inbox/102207/</span></span><br />
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Nancy Phttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11509695821749932674noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4605939719549286427.post-84394905629437871672014-04-18T03:12:00.000-07:002014-04-18T03:12:52.193-07:006 Changes We Always Thought Google Would Make to SEO that They Haven't Yet<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #616161; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22px;">From Google's interpretation of rel="canonical" to the specificity of anchor text within a link, there are several areas where we thought Google would make a move and are still waiting for it to happen. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand details six of those areas. Let us know where you think things are going in the comments!</span><br />
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<strong style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span style="color: magenta;">Number one</span></strong><span style="color: #616161;">, a lot of people in the SEO field, and even outside the field, think that it must be the case that if links really matter for SEO, then on-topic links matter more than off-topic links. So, for example, if I'm linking to two websites here about gardening resources, A and B, both about gardening resources, and one of those comes from a botany site and the other one comes from a site about mobile gaming, well, all other things being true, it must be that the one about botany is going to provide a stronger link. That's just got to be the case.</span></div>
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And yet, we cannot seem to prove this. There doesn't seem to be data behind it or to support it. Anyone who's analyzed this problem in-depth, which a number of SEOs have over the years -- a lot of people, who are very advanced, have gone through the process of classifying links and all this kind of stuff -- seem to come to the same conclusion, which is Google seems to really think about links in a more subject/context agnostic perspective.</div>
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<strong style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span style="color: magenta;">Number two</span></strong><span style="color: #616161;">, I'm actually in this camp. I still think that someday it's coming, that anchor text influence will eventually decline. Yet it seems to be that, yes, while other signals have certainly risen in importance, and there have been lots of other things, it seems that anchor text inside a link is still far more important and better than generic anchor text.</span></div>
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Getting specific, targeting something like "gardening supplies" when I link to A, as opposed to on the same page saying something like, "Oh, this is also a good resource for gardening supplies," but all I linked with was the text "a good resource" over to B, that A is going to get a lot more ranking power. Again, all other things being equal, A will rank much higher than B, because this anchor text is still pretty influential. It has a fairly substantive effect.</div>
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I think this is one of those cases where a lot of SEOs said, "Hey, anchor text is where a lot of manipulation and abuse is happening. It's where a lot of Web spam happens. Clearly Google's going to take some action against this."</div>
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<strong style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span style="color: magenta;">Number three</span></strong><span style="color: #616161;">, 302s. So 302s have been one of these sort of long-standing kind of messes of the Web, where a 302 was originally intended as a temporary redirect, but many, many websites and types of servers default to 302s for all kinds of pages that are moving.</span></div>
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So A301 redirects to B, versus C302 redirecting to D. Is it really the case that the people who run C plan to change where the redirect points in the future, and is it really the case that they do so more than A does with B?</div>
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Well, a lot of the time, probably not. But it still is the case, and you can see plenty of examples of this happening out in the search results and out on the Web, that Google interprets this 301 as being a permanent redirect. All the link juice from A is going to pass right over to B.</div>
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With C and D, it appears, with big brands, when the redirect's been in place for a long time and they have some trust in it, maybe they see some other signals, some other links pointing over here, that yes, some of this does pass over, but it is not nearly what's happening with a 301. This is like a directive, and this is sort of a nudge or a hint. It just seems to be important to still get those 301s, those right kinds of redirects right.</div>
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<strong style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span style="color: magenta;">Number four</span><span style="color: #616161;"> </span></strong><span style="color: #616161;">Speaking of nudges and hints versus directives, rel="canonical" has been an interesting one. So when rel="canonical" first launched, what Google said about rel="canonical" is rel="canonical" is a hint to us, but we won't necessarily take it as gospel.</span></div>
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Yet, every test we saw, even from those early launch days, was, man, they are taking it as gospel. You throw a rel="canonical" on a trusted site accidentally on every page and point it back to the homepage, Google suddenly doesn't index anything but the homepage. It's crazy.</div>
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<strong style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span style="color: magenta;">Number five</span></strong><span style="color: #616161;">, I think, for a long time, a lot of us have thought, hey, the social web is rising. Social is where a lot of the great content is being shared, a lot of where people are pointing to important things, and where endorsements are happening, more so, potentially, than the link graph. It's sort of the common man's link graph has become the social web and the social graph.</span></div>
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And yet, with the exception of the two years where Google had a very direct partnership with Twitter and those tweets and indexation, all that kind of stuff was heavily influential for Google search results, since that partnership broke up, we haven't seen that again from Google. They've actually sort of backtracked on social, and they've kind of said, "Hey, you know, tweets, Facebook shares, likes, that kind of stuff, it doesn't directly impact rankings for everyone."</div>
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<strong style="box-sizing: border-box;"><span style="color: magenta;">Number six</span></strong><span style="color: #616161;">, last one. I think a lot of us felt like, as Google was cleaning up web spam, for a long time they talked about cleaning up web spam, from '06, '07 to about 2011, 2012, it was pretty sketchy. It was tough.</span></div>
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When they did start cleaning up web spam, I think a lot of us thought, "Well, eventually they're going to get to PPC too." I don't mean pay-per-click. I mean porn, pills, and casino.</div>
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But it turns out, as Matt Brown, from Moz, wisely and recently pointed out in his Search Love presentation in Boston, that, yes, if you look at the search results around these categories, whatever it is -- Buy Cialis online, Texas hold-'em no limit poker, removed for content, because Whiteboard Friday is family-friendly, folks -- whatever the search is that you're performing in these spheres, this is actually kind of the early warning SERPS of the SEO world. </div>
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<span style="color: #616161; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 22px;">http://moz.com/blog/6-changes-google-hasnt-made-to-seo-whiteboard-friday</span></span></div>
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Nancy Phttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11509695821749932674noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4605939719549286427.post-67879718861283756952014-04-16T01:56:00.000-07:002014-04-16T01:56:11.795-07:00Google is Rewarding Marketing Strategists<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #616161; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22px;">For many years now, search marketing has been a wide open market, with more business to go around than we have known what to do with. Brand after brand has recognized their need for help with search visibility, but they have not necessarily been clear on what that would entail. This led to the gold rush of search.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #616161; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22px;">While many larger agencies were focused on media buying, creative, and television campaigns, the digital landscape was taking form with SEO, PPC, social, display, conversion rate optimization, email marketing, outreach (PR for the web), and much more. We as search marketers know there is a massive opportunity to be had as the digital landscape continues to mature, but whether it is ours for the taking remains to be seen. </span><strong style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #616161; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22px;">In order for us to survive, search marketers need to become more well-versed into all digital marketing channels and gain a concrete understanding of when it is appropriate to invest into some of them.</strong><br />
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The combination of secure search (not provided), Google's continual innovation upon their ability to crawl and understand both the web and search behavior (with Hummingbird being the most recent example), their successful moves against scalable link building tactics (Penguin and manual penalties), and an overall increase in competition will push search marketers down either of these two paths:</div>
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<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">Become less and less white-hat over time, constantly looking for ways to justify the means for scalable tactics</li>
<li style="box-sizing: border-box;">Jump ship to broader digital marketing roles and bury the SEO hats (example: Director of Marketing, Marketing Strategists, Brand Strategist, Content Strategist, Product Manager etc.) to grow revenue/traffic over time on different marketing channels.</li>
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Given the picture I have described above, I want to provide you with a framework with supporting examples for how you, the search marketer, can better get more of the resources you will need in order to pursue path 2.</div>
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<img height="190" src="http://d2v4zi8pl64nxt.cloudfront.net/google-is-now-rewarding-broader-marketing-how-search-marketers-need-to-evolve-and-become-marketing-strategists/534dd60bafd388.73859195.png" width="400" /></div>
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<strong style="box-sizing: border-box; letter-spacing: 1px;">Google is a business</strong></h3>
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<strong style="box-sizing: border-box;"></strong>SEOs are dependent on a third-party platform that provides them with no proprietary information and gives them no advantage. The reality is that as Google's ranking algorithm becomes increasingly complex, what exactly the right recommendation is for any given site becomes more ambiguous. <strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">Google simply isn't in the business to support SEOs; they're in the business to build the best technology in the world, so that they continue to attract the greatest number of users and generate the greatest amount of revenue</strong>. If SEOs continue to chase the algorithm, they'll simply continue down a rabbit hole of becoming dependent on short-term tactics that at best, have no longevity, and at worst, damage the core of a business.</div>
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<img height="290" src="http://d2v4zi8pl64nxt.cloudfront.net/google-is-now-rewarding-broader-marketing-how-search-marketers-need-to-evolve-and-become-marketing-strategists/534dd60cd0e5a8.62266262.png" width="400" /></div>
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<strong style="box-sizing: border-box; letter-spacing: 1px;">Not provided</strong></h3>
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<strong style="box-sizing: border-box;"></strong>Not provided impacted how SEOs were able to directly attribute their work to organic growth. It has brought challenges not only to reporting, but also to how the previous work SEOs did was valued within an organization. With the advent of not provided, different marketing departments within an organization such as content, SEO, PR, and creatives can all justify that their work is what led to organic traffic growth. This makes it difficult for any organization to invest significant budget into SEO.</div>
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<strong style="box-sizing: border-box;"></strong>Penguin sent a very clear signal to SEOs that many of the link building tactics they were reliant on in the past were not only no longer effective but could even provide long-term damage to the bottom line of a business. Recovering from Penguin and any algorithmic update is uncertain, difficult, and extremely expensive. It also forced SEOs to step back and assess whether a tactic that might work today may also be detrimental to the site in the future.</div>
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<strong style="box-sizing: border-box; letter-spacing: 1px;">Hummingbird</strong></h3>
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<strong style="box-sizing: border-box;"></strong>Although Hummingbird may not appear to have significantly impacted search results at an initial glance, the reality is that the underlying algorithm has changed to become much more adept at understanding semantics. Hummingbird, in combination with not provided, indicates that a continued emphasis on keyword-focused strings is not sustainable. Future SEO initiatives cannot be siloed into keyword research, keyword-focused landing pages, and building links to those keyword-focused pages; <strong style="box-sizing: border-box;">wider context-based approaches are required</strong>.</div>
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http://moz.com/blog/search-marketers-need-to-evolve</div>
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Nancy Phttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11509695821749932674noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4605939719549286427.post-47264687094457948552014-04-12T02:34:00.004-07:002014-04-12T03:31:32.814-07:004 Reasons Why Social Network Marketing is a Bad Content Strategy<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<strong style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #2d2d2d; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Social network marketing</strong> is a poor strategy if your aim is new business, solid leads, and good traffic that converts.<span style="letter-spacing: -0.01em;">Playing around in the social networks *might* be good for branding, interacting with current and potential customers, but even that is questionable.</span></div>
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<b style="background-color: white; color: #2d2d2d; font-family: museo-sans, sans-serif; font-size: x-large; letter-spacing: -0.800000011920929px; line-height: 27.42840003967285px; text-align: left;">What is Social Network Marketing?</b></div>
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Social network marketing is diving (creating content that benefits your reader and you) into your social networks – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+ with the sole aim of generating leads that convert into real business. Social network marketing is generally what people are thinking/hoping for when they ask me, “Bill, can you help<strong style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #2d2d2d; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"> drive people</strong> to my web site?” Most social network marketing is all about getting people to click-through to another site/landing page where they can ‘convert’.<span style="letter-spacing: -0.01em;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Social network marketing doesn’t work for several reasons</span></h3>
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1. <strong style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #2d2d2d; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Driving is a poor, make that a lousy, strategy.</strong> Pushing people to go places they weren’t planning to go online, or in the real world for that matter, just doesn’t work. The ROI on time invested is terrible. Pulling people is the best strategy. This means that giving people something worth finding is at the heart of a solid <strong style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #2d2d2d; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">content marketing strategy</strong>. I demonstrated how a very aggressive social network marketing strategy can indeed increase traffic to your home site, but the cost in time with return on money made isn’t worth it.</div>
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2. <strong style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #2d2d2d; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Your social networks will tire of you and your marketing.</strong> Even you really think you are doing a favor to your 1000s of, ahem, ‘intimate’ friends and 10s of thousands of deeply loyal followers, and 100s of people in your circles and the circles you are in, plus your 100s of business connections, truth is, they are not in your social network so you can ‘do them a favor’. If it smells like marketing, they know it’s a duck. You can see in the graph below how one of my students got her friends and family to come to her site by marketing to her Facebook network. Notice how the numbers dropped off by the week until she finally gave up and let organic growth do it’s thing.</div>
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3. <strong style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #2d2d2d; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Referrals from social networks aren’t good shoppers</strong>. Historically, visitors that come to my website from a social network referral perform very poorly. That is they don’t turn pages. They don’t look at ads. They don’t buy. More often than not they will look at whatever they were sent to see, then smile, laugh or swear, then back out = bounce. And we know that a bounce is the worst thing that can happen to your site. Search engines understand that a bounce = the visitor came but didn’t like what they saw and left = poor quality that results in a worse ranking going forward.</div>
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4. <strong style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #2d2d2d; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The numbers don’t add up</strong>. Best estimates are that it costs $1 – 1.50 to acquire a Facebook fan. And it costs more to keep the fan. Harley Davidson and Victoria Secret estimate that about <strong style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #2d2d2d; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">half of one percent of anything posted on Facebook is only seen by the person who put it there</strong>. What that means is that I, or somebody I pay, must update my Facebook page 200 times before somebody MIGHT see what I did. I need 100 ‘people saw this’ to maybe get one click-through to a site where I want them to take action. And I need 100 click thrus to get a 1% action rate. That’s 200 updates times 100 times 100. I either need to be a mad dog on my Facebook or have a lot more friends. But remember, friends cost money. Visit any of the Facebook pages of your favorite star, company, hero. Find out how many fans they have. Look at how often they update. Check the number of comments and divide by the number of commenters/likes by the total of number fans. What’s the percentage?</div>
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Nancy Phttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11509695821749932674noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4605939719549286427.post-38611745320777007262014-04-07T00:51:00.001-07:002014-04-07T00:51:41.456-07:00Use Paid Promotion to Refine Your SEO and Make Your Visitors More Valuable<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
I recently found myself trying to give a client a rough estimate of the value organic traffic brought them. In the process of doing so, I stumbled upon the world of paid promotion. Considering Rand's Whiteboard Friday about surviving the SEO slog, paid promotion is important to tactics that we know do provide immediate tangible value, and I wondered if there was potential for it to be a part of a wider online marketing strategy that could also enhance the work of SEO. I want to open up that world a bit and discuss what I discovered: how paid promotion can complement organic search.<br />
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First, let me define what I mean by "paid promotion." This might include typical paid search, but also display ads, remarketing, and paid ads on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Paid promotion comes in many forms, including sponsored images, sponsored stories, and everything else in the following image .<br />
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Recently, there's been lots of discussion of the decreasing organic reach on Facebook. It seems that there's been a shift in the Facebook algorithm—certain posts have seen a decrease, others an increase in organic reach. Pages with over 500,000 likes are seeing a particularly massive decrease in organic reach, perhaps in an effort to encourage them to pay for ads. Additionally, MarketingLand recently reported that Pinterest will be adding promoted pins.<br />
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The reality is, paid promotion has a lot to offer online marketing, and can really complement some of what you might be doing with search marketing and optimization. Paid promotion offers a way to test things out to make sure they're worth putting the effort and resources into, as well as add more punch to the impact that search is already making for a site. Paid promotion offers quick results you can control, making it a great complement to your overall marketing strategy.<br />
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http://moz.com/blog/using-paid-promotion-to-enhance-seo</div>
Nancy Phttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11509695821749932674noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4605939719549286427.post-22872560425579881812014-04-04T00:46:00.006-07:002014-04-04T00:46:57.280-07:00The Rules of Link Building - Whiteboard Friday<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Much of marketing, especially SEO, has shifted from a game with very few rules to a game that Google is fairly strictly refereeing. With their old tactics eliciting penalties, many marketers are simply throwing in the towel.</div>
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In today's Whiteboard Friday, Cyrus Shepard calls a time-out and shows us the new strategy we need to come out on top.</div>
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Video transcription</h2>
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Howdy, Moz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Cyrus. Today we're going to be talking about the rules of link building. Now this is really important because we see a lot of people out there in the marketing world getting scared of link building, past actions coming back to haunt them, people saying that link building is dead, links losing value in Google's algorithm. Rand did a great Whiteboard Friday a few weeks ago about that.</div>
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Beware links you control</h3>
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First of all, I want to start off with some things that we want to avoid when link building. If we look at what Google has been targeting, there are usually two common factors in links that they target. They are, first of all, links that you control. When we see Google crack down on guest blogging networks, on widget links, signature profile links, they all have that one element in common: that you control the anchor text. That's exactly what Google is looking for. I predict any new link penalties that happen in the future will also follow this pattern. It will be links where you control the anchor text.</div>
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Be cautious with links that scale</h3>
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The same thing goes for links that scale. Again, we're talking about widget links, author bio boxes. When you combine these two together, those are exactly the kind of links that you need to be extra special careful with and not scale, not do too much anchor text manipulation because they will always be subject to those penalties.</div>
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Don't ask for anchor text</h3>
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One rule that I've been following for years, I got this from Eric Ward, the very famous link builder: Never ask for anchor text. When you're doing outreach, when you're talking to other people, when you're guest posting, asking for the anchor text is going to raise a lot of red flags. That's what kills it for you, because when you start asking for anchor text, your brain starts working. You think, "Well, I need this keyword. I need this keyword." You create patterns. You create over-optimization. No matter what the temptation is, if you don't ask for anchor text, you're going to get a much more natural link profile.</div>
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Don't link externally in the footer</h3>
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A couple of other rules that I see people violate all the time that Google has made painfully clear in the past few months: Don't link externally in the footer. Just don't. I'm not going to go into the reasons. Just don't do that.</div>
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Avoid site-wide links</h3>
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By the same token, except for navigation, avoid site-wide links. This is something that we've known for years. If someone links to you externally, site-wide, in the side bar, that's ripe for Penguin-style links.</div>
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Again, these are best practices. There are always exceptions to the rules. But, generally, following these rules is going to help you out even if you have to break them sometimes.</div>
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Keep doing link building!</h3>
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On the "do" side of things, one thing that I want to emphasize is do link building. Don't give up just because Google is imposing these rules and penalizing people. We still need the people who are actively out there building links. They still have a huge opportunity to win. So don't give up on this as a part of your practice. </div>
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<span style="color: #616161; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 22px;">http://moz.com/blog/the-rules-of-link-building-whiteboard-friday</span></span></div>
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Nancy Phttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11509695821749932674noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4605939719549286427.post-21339705767923565542014-04-01T00:31:00.002-07:002014-04-01T00:31:32.887-07:00Google’s Matt Cutts On How They Evaluate New Search Algorithms<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Google Head of Search Spam Matt Cutts posted <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muZuX9OaMLo" style="color: #555555;">a video</a>today answering how Google goes about evaluating which new search algorithms they use and which they throw away or adapt.</div>
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The question was posed by James Foster of Sydney, Australia who asked:</div>
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What are some of the metrics that Google uses to evaluate whether one iteration of the ranking algorithm is delivering better quality results to users than another?</blockquote>
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Matt Cutts breaks it down to about three steps of the evaluation process:</div>
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(1) They test the algorithm offline, benchmarking how the results rank with the new algorithms and if the URLs are higher quality than the previous algorithms in place. The quality is based on how the search quality raters rate the URLs in previous cases. If the URLs were unrated, Google can request these raters to rate the new URLs or compare the old search results to this new test set. Then based on those metrics, Google may decide to move the test to the next phase.</div>
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(2) Live tests, where Google will sample a subset of real live searchers and give them the new results with the new set of test algorithms. If Google sees a higher click rate on the new search results, it may imply that the new results are better than the older ones. This is not always the case, specifically with webspam, Cutts said. But in general, the more clicks on a specific search result page, the better quality the results.</div>
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(3) Then the Google Search Quality Launch Committee has the ultimate say on if the algorithm goes live to the public or not.</div>
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Matt said Google has this down to a “pretty good system” but every now and then they need to refine some of the processes within this workflow.</div>
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<span style="color: #444444; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 20px;">http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-evaluate-new-search-algorithms-188044</span></span></div>
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Nancy Phttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11509695821749932674noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4605939719549286427.post-48230765797846358402014-03-26T04:15:00.004-07:002014-03-26T04:15:48.534-07:004 Digital Marketing Strategies: An Airbnb Case Study<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 22.5px;"> If you are searching for a place to stay in Google, you will likely come across Airbnb. This is the story of a fresh, new peer-to-peer vacation rental website that spread their marketplace service throughout the world via creativity. They had a digital marketing strategy to match their mission leading to international waters and, with a little struggle, came out on top. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: Lato, sans-serif;"><b>Visibility Drivers of Vacation Rentals in Germany:</b></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 22.5px;">Airbnb.de’s visibility when it comes to generic keywords in Germany is the result of AdWords. They show the most paid visibility in the German Vacation Rentals category, but very little organic visibility at the moment. If you take a look at the graphs below, you can see what drives the visibility of the domains in Germany and what content type provides the most visibility in the category.</span><br />
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<img alt="InsideIndustry DE Vacation Rentals Visibility Drivers 4 Digital Marketing Strategies: An Airbnb Case Study" height="225" src="http://ho9od35yvs05ejqn.zippykid.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/InsideIndustry-DE-Vacation-Rentals-Visibility-Drivers.png" width="400" /><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Creative Digital Marketing Strategies</span></h2>
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<span style="font-size: small;">1. Digital Marketing via Google Ratings</span></h3>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 22.5px;">I did a little digging and found that this “Other” visibility for Vacation Rentals in Germany is mostly due to ratings, which makes sense, since ratings are a big part of the online vacation rentals business plan, especially in a peer-to-peer marketplace. Of course Airbnb uses the ratings system for their rental listings just like the others, but they also make sure that the ratings from Trustpilot.com show up in their AdWords listings. When I looked at the other top 5 domains in the category, this did not seem to be a part of their digital marketing strategy.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">2. Content Strategy Matters :</span></h3>
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In an article published by TechCrunch, Anand Iyer talks about Airbnb’s management of listings as a form of carefully curated content. The most appealing spaces on Airbnb’s website are ranked higher in the website’s search results, while listings with lower ratings or lower quality content, in general, are harder to find due to a good algorithm and employees who curate and feature the best content.</div>
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In addition, returning to the idea of visual stimulation, Iyer mentions how Airbnb offered the mutually beneficial service of professional photos of the spaces listed on the site and guidelines for user-generated images. This way, the visuals provide better content and the spaces become more attractive to users searching for a place to stay.</div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">3. Google Display Advertising for Expansion :</span></h3>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 22.5px;">Sometimes we forget that aside from high positioning in Google SERPs, people also need to be visually stimulated for a good click-through rate. Airbnb chose to invest in Google display advertising with banner ad campaigns including images from actual housing being offered on their site. This allowed Airbnb to attract international traffic and increase their listings dramatically.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">4. Google and CraigsList for Digital Marketing :</span></h3>
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I left my favorite digital marketing strategy that Airbnb used for last. When they started out, Airbnb was quite resourceful. In the beginning, Airbnb realized they needed to integrate with two digital marketing giants to get enough customers. Obviously Google is the place to be for any e-commerce website, but Craig’s List can be useful for vacation rentals, especially for a peer-to-peer business. This noteworthy move allowed Airbnb to get the hosts and clients necessary to give them a good head start in their market. How did they integrated with these giants?</div>
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Since people were already using Craig’s List to post ads for short-term housing, Airbnb decided to let people have the opportunity to share their Airbnb posts on Craig’s List as well, driving more traffic to both the user’s listing and the Airbnb website. Clever!</div>
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<span style="color: #444444; font-family: Lato, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px; line-height: 22.5px;">http://www.searchenginejournal.com/4-digital-marketing-strategies-airbnb-case-study/95007/</span></span></div>
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Nancy Phttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11509695821749932674noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4605939719549286427.post-13266098179121063912014-03-23T23:19:00.001-07:002014-03-23T23:19:20.209-07:00How to Get More Twitter Followers for Your Brand with Content Marketing<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 22.5px;">Content marketing and social media are integral to any successful blogger or publisher’s revenue-generating strategies. But how can you be sure that you are taking the right steps to build your fan base while also trying to monetize? This is a task that many online publishers struggle with. However, Mayhem Studios’ Calvin Lee pointed out that building your following is as simple as creating valuable content and positively interacting with your social media followers.</span><br />
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<img alt="Calvin Lee How to Get More Twitter Followers for Your Brand with Content Marketing" height="225" src="http://ho9od35yvs05ejqn.zippykid.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Calvin-Lee.png" width="400" /><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: Lato, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 22.5px;">In a recent interview from South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, Calvin chats with Murray Newlands about how to generate more Twitter followers for your brand via content marketing and offers up his own personal tips for growing your Twitter following with great content.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-size: 15px; line-height: 22.5px;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: Lato, sans-serif;">http://www.searchenginejournal.com/get-twitter-followers-brand-content-marketing/94463/</span></span></div>
Nancy Phttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11509695821749932674noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4605939719549286427.post-72938773836331841952014-03-21T23:28:00.000-07:002014-03-26T04:18:30.399-07:00How Can Mobile SEO Help my Non-Mobile or Local Business?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #616161; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22px;">Google recently said that mobile search volume </span><em style="background-color: white; box-sizing: border-box; color: #616161; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22px;">could exceed</em><span style="background-color: white; color: #616161; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22px;"> desktop search volume by the end of 2014. Don't panic, though; there's quite a bit more nuance to the trend than most people realize.</span><br />
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In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand helps us understand that nuance, and talks about how we can level-up our mobile game in ways that will benefit our businesses <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">regardless</em> of whether and when Google's forecast comes true.<br />
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http://moz.com/blog/how-can-mobile-seo-help-my-nonmobile-or-local-business<br />
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Nancy Phttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11509695821749932674noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4605939719549286427.post-40300459614628155152014-03-19T01:57:00.001-07:002014-03-19T01:57:44.188-07:00When Building Communities Isn't the Best Way to Build Links<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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I entered SEO as a link builder. In 2010, my job was easy and my toolset mainly consisted of article marketing software, directory submissions, comment posting and link networks. Fast forward four years >> I now solely create visually engaging content in an effort to scale link building. I didn't make this career shift because "link building is no longer effective;" quite the opposite: I changed focus from manual to scalable link building because I now work in more competitive industries and my clients generally need 100+ links per asset to move the needle—content helps me meet that demand to acquire large amounts of new linking root domains at once.</div>
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Over the past two years I've become obsessed with content (and Reddit, unfortunately). I've started to keep the companies that are producing the best and most successful digital content on my radar. Two companies that have recently started to stick out are <span style="color: #2ca6d6;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">Movoto</span></span> and <span style="color: #2ca6d6;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box;">Airbnb</span></span>. Both are scaling link acquisition via content, but they are going about it in entirely different ways. Airbnb is growing its own grassroots community, while Movoto is actively targeting existing and passionate online communities with its content marketing.</div>
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<span style="color: #616161; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 22px;">http://moz.com/blog/when-building-communities-isnt-the-best-way-to-build-links</span></span></div>
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Nancy Phttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11509695821749932674noreply@blogger.com0