Tuesday, May 3, 2016
Sunday, October 11, 2015
Monday, September 28, 2015
Friday, September 4, 2015
Friday, March 27, 2015
What Does an SEO Do In Their Day-to-Day Work - Whiteboard Friday
Posted by randfish
There’s a common misconception that SEO is a “one and done” task — that you clean up and optimize a site, and once that’s done, you can focus your efforts elsewhere. There’s so much more to the day-to-day work of an SEO, though, and in today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand walks us through those ongoing parts of the job.
For reference, here’s a still of this week’s whiteboard!
Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I want to tackle a question I get sometimes about the day-to-day activities of an SEO and what should you do after you’ve completed that first site audit, sort of fixed the problems, what does the day-to-day work look like?
A lot of SEOs, especially those coming from consulting backgrounds or who’ve joined companies as in-house SEOs who’ve had kind of this big project based SEO work to do, find themselves struggling after that’s done. Typically, that process is pretty straightforward. You kind of do an audit. You look at all the things on the site. You figure out what’s wrong, what’s missing, where are opportunities that we could execute on. Maybe you do some competitive analysis, some market analysis. You identify those fixes. You work with teams to make those changes, validate the results have been completed, and then you’re sort of in this, “Well, do I go back and audit again and try to iterate and improve again?”
That doesn’t feel quite right, but it also doesn’t necessarily feel quite right to go to the very, very old-school SEO model of like, “All right, we’ve got these keywords we’re trying to rank for. Let’s optimize our content, get some links, check our rankings for them, and then try to rinse and repeat and keep improving.” This model’s pretty broken I’d say and just not reflective of the reality of opportunities that are in SEO or the reality of the tactics that work today.
So the way that I like to think about this is the SEO audit, an SEO focused audit — which is trying to say, “What traffic could we get? What’s missing? What’s broken and wrong?” — only works at the low level and the very tactical trenches of a marketing process or a business process. What you really need to do is you want to be more incrementally based, but you need to be informed by and you need to be evolving your tactics and your work based on what is the business need right now.
So this process is about saying, “What are the top level company and marketing goals overall? For everyone in the company, what are we trying to accomplish this year, this quarter, the next three year plan? What are we trying to achieve?” Then figure out areas where SEO can best contribute to that work, and then from there you’re creating tactical lists of projects that maybe you’re going to positively move the right needles, the ones that you’ve identified, and then you’re going to evaluate and prioritize which ones you want to implement first, second, and third in what order, and test implement those.
So, hey we’ve figured out that we think that a new blog section for this particular piece of content, or we think that getting some user generated content, building up some community around this section would be terrific, or we think outreach to these kinds of publications or building up our social stats in these worlds will expose us to the right people who can earn us the amplification we’ll need to rank better, etc., etc. Okay, this is a fine process, and you’re going to want to do this, I would say, at least annually and maybe even think about it quarterly.
All this work is essentially centered on a customer profile universe, a universe of people. I’ve got my person X, Y, and Z here, but your customer universe may involve many different personas. It may involve just one type of person you’re targeting that you’re always trying to reach over and over again, but it probably involves also the people who influence that direct subsection of your market.
From there, you can take the, “Hey, you know what, person Z is really interested in and consumes and searches for these types of content topics and these kinds of keywords, so we’re going to start by taking keyword set A or content set A and figure out our keyword list and our content list. We’re going to create, launch, and promote work that supports that.” It could be content pieces, could be video, could be some combination of those things in social media, all forms of content. It could be tools, whatever you want, an application.
We’re going to launch that, promote it, and then work on some amplification, and then we’re going to measure and learn, which is a critical part of that process. I want to not only see what are my results, but what can I learn from what we just did and hopefully I’ll get better and better at iterating on this process. This process will work iteratively, kind of similar to our broken process over here or to our site audit process there. It will work iteratively, and then every now and then you should pop back up and go, “Hey, you know what, I feel like we’ve exhausted the easiest 80% of value that we’re going to get from 20% of the work on keyword set A. Let’s move on and go visit keyword set B now, and then let’s go visit content set C.”
Occasionally, you’re even going to want to move one step up and say, “Hey, you know what, maybe our personas or our market is changing a little bit. We want to try targeting some new customers. We’re going to look at these folks over here or this guy over here and see if we can reach them and their influencers with new kinds of content and topics and keywords, and that sort of thing.”
If your site is rocking and rolling, if you’ve completed your audit, things are just smooth sailing, then this kind of a process is going to work much better, so long as it’s tied to real business objectives. Then when you achieve results here, you can point back to, “Hey, remember I told you these are the areas SEO can contribute to our overall goals, and now I can connect these up directly. The metrics that I get from all this SEO stuff can tie directly to those areas, can tie directly to the business goals.” Everyone from the CEO on down is going to love what you’re doing for the company.
All right everyone, I hope you’ll join me again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!
What Does an SEO Do In Their Day-to-Day Work - Whiteboard Friday
Saturday, March 14, 2015
Are On-Topic Links Important? - Whiteboard Friday
Posted by randfish
How much does the context of a link really matter? In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand looks at on- and off-topic links to uncover what packs the greatest SEO punch and shares what you should be looking for when building a high-quality link.
For reference, here’s a still of this week’s whiteboard!
Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re going to chat a little bit about on-topic and off-topic links. One of the questions and one of the topics that you see discussed all the time in the SEO world is: Do on-topic links matter more than off-topic links? By on topic, people generally mean they come from sites and pages that are on the same or very similar subject matter to the site or page that I’m trying to get the link to.
It sort of makes intuitive sense to us that Google would care somewhat about this, that they would say, “Oh, well, here’s our friend over here,” we’ll call him Steve. No we’re going to call him Carl, because Carl is a great name.
Carl, of course, has CarlsCloset.net, CarlsCloset.net being a home organization site. Carl is going out, and he’s doing some link building, which he should, and so he’s got some link targets in mind. He looks at places like RealSimple.com, the magazine site, Sunset Magazine, UnderwaterHoagies.com, Carl being a great fan of all things underwater and sandwich related. So as he’s looking at these sites, he’s thinking to himself, well, from an SEO perspective, is it necessary the case that Real Simple, which has a lot of content on home organization and on cleaning up clutter and those kinds of things, is that going to help Carl’s Closet site rank better than, say, a link from UnderwaterHoagies.com?
The answer is a little tough here. It could be the case that UnderwaterHoagies.com has a feature article all about how submariners can keep their home in order, even as they brunch under the sea. But maybe the link from RealSimple.com is coming from a less on-topic article and page. So this starts to get really messy. Is it the site that matters, or is it the page that matters? Is it the context that matters? Is it the link itself and where that’s embedded in the site? What is the real understanding that Google has between relationships of on-topic and off-topic? That’s where you get a lot of convoluted information.
I have seen and we have probably all heard a ton of anecdotal evidence on both sides. There are SEOs who will argue passionately from their experience that what they’ve seen is that on-topic links are hugely more beneficial than off-topic ones. You’ll see the complete opposite from some other folks. In fact, most of my personal experiences, when I was doing more directed link building for clients way back in my SEO consulting days and even more recently as I’ve helped startups and advised folks, has been that off-topic links, UnderwaterHoagies.com linking to Carl’s Closet, that still seems to provide quite a bit of benefit, and it’s very had to gauge whether it’s as much, less than, more than any of these other ones. So I think, on the anecdotal side, we’re in a tough spot.
What we can say is that probably there’s some additional value from on-topic sites, on-topic pages, or on-topic link connections, that Google has some idea of context. We’ve seen them make huge strides with algorithms like Hummingbird, certainly with their keyword matching and topic modeling algorithms. It seems very unlikely that there would be nothing in Google’s algorithm that looks at the context or relationship of content between linking pages and linking websites.
However, in the real world, things are almost never equal. It’s not like they’re going to get exactly the same anchor text from the same importance of a page that has the same number of external links, that the content is exactly the same on all three of these websites pointing over to Carl’s Closet. In the real world, Carl is going to struggle much harder to get some of these links than others. So I think that the questions we need to ask ourselves, as folks who are doing directed marketing and trying to earn links, is: Will the link actually help people? Is that link going to be clicked?
If you’re on a page on Real Simple that you think very few people ever reach, you think very few people will ever click that link because it just doesn’t appear to provide much value, versus you’re in an article all about home organization on Underwater Hoagies, and it was featured on their home page, and you’re pretty sure that a lot of the submariners who are eating their subs under the sea are very interested in this topic and they’re going to click on that link, well you know what? That’s a link that helps people. That probably means search engines are going to treat it with some reverence as well.
Does the link make sense in context? This is a good one to ask yourself when you are doing any kind of link building that’s directed that could potentially be manipulative. If the link makes sense in context, it tends to be the case that it’s going to be more useful. So if Carl contributes the article to UnderwaterHoagies.com, and the link makes sense in context, and it will help people, I think it’s appropriate to put it there. If that’s not the case, it could look a little manipulative. It could certainly be perceived as self-serving.
Then, can you actually acquire the link? It’s wonderful when you go out and you make a list of, hey, here’s the most important and relevant sites in our sector and niche, and this is how we’re going to build topical authority. But if you can’t get those links, hey that’s tough potatoes, man. It’s no better than putting a list of links and just sorting them by, God knows, a horrible metric like PageRank or Alexa rank or something like that.
I would instead ask yourself if it’s realistic for you to be able to get those links and pursue those as well as pursuing or looking at the metrics, and the importance, and the topical relevance.
Let’s think about this from a broad perspective. Search engines are caring about what? They’re caring about matching the content relevance to the searcher’s query. They care about raw link popularity. That’s sort of like the old-school algorithms of PageRank and number of links and that kind of thing. They do care about topical authority and brand authority. We talked about on Whiteboard Friday previously around some topical authorities and how Google determines the authority and the subject matter of a site’s authority. They care about domain authority, the raw importance of a domain on the web, and they care about things like engagement, user and usage data, and given how much they can follow all of us around the web these days, they probably know pretty well whether people are clicking on these articles using these pages or not.
Then anchor text. Not every link that you might build or acquire or earn is going to provide all of these in one single package. Each of them are going to be contributing pieces of those puzzles. When it comes to the on-topic/off-topic link debate, I’m much more about caring about the answers to these kinds of questions — Can I acquire the link? Is it useful to people? Will they actually use it? Does the link make sense in context? — than I am about is it on-topic or off-topic? I’m not sure that I would ever urge you to prioritize based on that.
That said, I’m certainly looking forward to your feedback this week and hearing about your experiences with on-topic and off-topic links, and hopefully we’ll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!
Are On-Topic Links Important? - Whiteboard Friday
Friday, February 27, 2015
My Favorite 5 Analytics Dashboards - Whiteboard Friday
Posted by Sixthman
Finding effective ways of organizing your analytics dashboards is quite a bit easier if you can get a sense for what has worked for others. To that end, in today’s Whiteboard Friday the founder of Sixth Man Marketing, Ed Reese, shares his five favorite approaches.
UPDATE: At the request of several commenters, Ed has generously provided GA templates for these dashboards. Check out the links in his comment below!
For reference, here’s a still of this week’s whiteboard!
Video transcription
Hi, I’m Ed Reese with Sixth Man Marketing and Local U. Welcome to this edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today we’re going to talk about one of my favorite things in terms of Google Analytics — the dashboard.
So think of your dashboard like the dashboard on your car — what’s important to you and what’s important to your client. I have the new Tesla dashboard, you might recognize it. So, for my Tesla dashboard, I want navigation, tunes, calendar, everything and a bag of chips. You notice my hands are not on the wheel because it drives itself now. Awesome.
So, what’s important? I have the top five dashboards that I like to share with my clients and create for them. These are the executive dashboards — one for the CMO on the marketing side, new markets, content, and a tech check. You can actually create dashboards and make sure that everything is working.
These on the side are some of the few that I think people don’t take a look at as often. It’s my opinion that we have a lot of very generic dashboards, so I like to really dive in and see what we can learn so that your client can really start using them for their advantage.
#1 – Executives
Let’s start with the executive dashboard. There is a lot of debate on whether or not to go from left to right or right to left. So in terms of outcome, behavior, and acquisition, Google Analytics gives you those areas. They don’t mark them as these three categories, but I follow Avinash’s language and the language that GA uses.
When you’re talking to executives or CFOs, it’s my personal opinion that executives always want to see the money first. So focus on financials, conversion rates, number of sales, number of leads. They don’t want to go through the marketing first and then get to the numbers. Just give them what they want. On a dashboard, they’re seeing that first.
So let’s start with the result and then go back to behavior. Now, this is where a lot of people have very generic metrics — pages viewed, generic bounce rate, very broad metrics. To really dive in, I like focusing and using the filters to go to specific areas on the site. So if it’s a destination like a hotel, “Oh, are they viewing the pages that helped them get there? Are they looking at the directional information? Are they viewing discounts and sorts of packages?” Think of the behavior on those types of pages you want to measure, and then reverse engineer. That way you can tell they executive, “Hey, this hotel reservation viewed these packages, which came from these sources, campaigns, search, and social.” Remember, you’re building it so that they can view it for themselves and really take advantage and see, “Oh, that’s working, and this campaign from this source had these behaviors that generated a reservation,” in that example.
#2 – CMO
Now, let’s look at it from a marketing perspective. You want to help make them look awesome. So I like to reverse it and start with the marketing side in terms of acquisition, then go to behavior on the website, and then end up with the same financials — money, conversion rate percentages, number of leads, number of hotel rooms booked, etc. I like to get really, really focused.
So when you’re building a dashboard for a CMO or anyone on the marketing side, talk to them about what metrics matter. What do they really want to learn? A lot of times you need to know their exact territory and really fine tune it in to figure out exactly what they want to find out.
Again, I’m a huge fan of filters. What behavior matters? So for example, one of our clients is Beardbrand. They sell beard oil and they support the Urban Beardsman. We know that their main markets are New York, Texas, California, and the Pacific Northwest. So we could have a very broad regional focus for acquisition, but we don’t. We know where their audience lives, we know what type of behavior they like, and ultimately what type of behavior on the website influences purchases.
So really think from a marketing perspective, “How do we want to measure the acquisition to the behavior on the website and ultimately what does that create?”
These are pretty common, so I think most people are using a marketing and executive dashboard. Here are some that have really made a huge difference for clients of ours.
#3 – New markets
Love new market dashboards. Let’s say, for example, you’re a hotel chain and you normally have people visiting your site from Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana. Well, what happened in our case, we had that excluded, and we were looking at states broader — Hawaii, Alaska, Colorado, Texas. Not normally people who would come to this particular hotel.
Well, we discovered in the dashboard — and it was actually the client that discovered it — that we suddenly had a 6000% increase in Hawaii. They called me and said, “Are we marketing to Hawaii?” I said no. They said, “Well, according to the dashboard, we’ve had 193 room nights in the past 2 months.” Like, “Wow, 193 room nights from Hawaii, what happened?” So we started reverse engineering that, and we found out that Allegiant Airlines suddenly had a direct flight from Honolulu to Spokane, and the hotel in this case was two miles from the hotel. They could then do paid search campaigns in Hawaii. They can try to connect with Allegiant to co-op some advertising and some messaging. Boom. Would never have been discovered without that dashboard.
#4 – Top content
Another example, top content. Again, going back to Beardbrand, they have a site called the Urban Beardsman, and they publish a lot of content for help and videos and tutorials. To measure that content, it’s really important, because they’re putting a lot of work into educating their market and new people who are growing beards and using their product. They want to know, “Is it worth it?” They’re hiring photographers, they’re hiring writers, and we’re able to see if people are reading the content they’re providing, and then ultimately, we’re focusing much more on their content on the behavior side and then figuring out what that outcome is.
A lot of people have content or viewing of the blog as part of an overall dashboard, let’s say for your CMO. I’m a big fan of, in addition to having that ,also having a very specific content dashboard so you can see your top blogs. Whatever content you provide, I want you to always know what that’s driving on your website.
#5 – Tech check
One of the things that I’ve never heard anyone talk about before, that we use all the time, is a tech check. So we want to see a setup so we can view mobile, tablet, desktop, browsers. What are your gaps? Where is your site possibly not being used to its fullest potential? Are there any issues with shopping carts? Where do they fall off on your website? Set up any possible tech that you can track. I’m a big fan of looking both on the mobile, tablet, any type of desktop, browsers especially to see where they’re falling off. For a lot of our clients, we’ll have two, three, or four different tech dashboards. Get them to the technical person on the client side so they can immediately see if there’s an issue. If they’ve updated the website, but maybe they forgot to update a certain portion of it, they’ve got a technical issue, and the dashboard can help detect that.
So these are just a few. I’m a huge fan of dashboards. They’re very powerful. But the big key is to make sure that not only you, but your client understands how to use them, and they use them on a regular basis.
I hope that’s been very helpful. Again, I’m Ed Reese, and these are my top five dashboards. Thanks.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!
My Favorite 5 Analytics Dashboards - Whiteboard Friday
Friday, February 20, 2015
Driving Traffic from Facebook - Whiteboard Friday
Posted by randfish
Facebook sends a remarkable amount of traffic, but there’s a lot of confusion around both just how much and (perhaps more importantly for our work) how we can optimize our work to take advantage of it. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand clears up some of the statistical noise and offers 10 tips for optimizing your Facebook traffic.
For reference, here’s a still of this week’s whiteboard!
Video transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today we’re going to talk a little bit about Facebook. Facebook has been growing massively. It sends out a tremendous amount of traffic, and as a result, more and more of us in the field of web marketing as a whole, and because it’s so interesting as a correlated factor with things that tend to perform well in Google, are interested in the traffic that Facebook can drive and in potentially growing that.
So I’m going to start out with a few stats. I think it is actually very important that marketers like us understand how statistics work, especially as they’re represented. I hear from folks all the time like, “Oh, my boss emailed me the new Shareaholic report, and it says that 25% of all traffic comes from Facebook, and we only get 10% of our traffic from Facebook. So we must be doing Facebook badly.” That’s not actually the case.
Then I’m going to talk a little about some rough estimates, just for theoretical fun purposes, around traffic that Facebook might send versus Google, and then I actually have a bunch of tips for Facebook optimization. None of this is going to be dramatically brand new, but I’ve tried to distill down and aggregate some of the best ones, throw out some of the ones that no longer apply as Facebook has been maturing and getting more sophisticated and those kinds of things. All right, let’s start with these stats.
So let’s say your boss does send you this Shareaholic report, and Facebook sends 24% of all referral traffic. Wow. Shareaholic is on 300,000 websites. That’s a pretty big group. Like how can we ignore that data? It’s not that you should ignore it, but you should also be aware of why is Shareaholic installed and who uses it.
So these 300,000 sites are almost certainly massively over-representative across the several hundred million websites that exist on the Internet of those that receive and are optimizing for social media traffic. I think this is an excellent stat, and if you are a social media heavy site and you are getting less than say 20%, less than 15% of your traffic from social, well, you probably have some work to do there and some opportunity to gain there.
I also like this one from Define Media Group. Define of course is a Marshall Simmonds’ company, and they measure across major publishers. So one of the things that you might hear is Buzzfeed, for example, last year put out their big article about how they get 70% plus of their traffic from social, and they don’t even care about search, and search is dead. No one does SEO anymore and blah, blah, blah. It turns out actually, I think Buzzfeed does a tremendous amount of caring about SEO despite what they say, but they don’t want to be perceived as doing that. Define said across all of their 87 major publishers — so these are big news sorts of publishers and entertainment content publishers and that kind of stuff — social sent about 16% of all traffic, search 41%, and direct 43%. That’s a very big difference from the social sharing site. So again, you’re seeing that granularity and disparity as we look across different segments of the web world.
Worldwide by the way, according to StatCounter, whose stats I like very much because they’re across such a wide range of distributed websites, many hundredths of thousands, I think even millions of websites in the U.S. and abroad, so that’s really nice and they share their global statistics at gs.statcounter.com, which is one of my favorite resources for this type of stuff. According to them, worldwide Facebook, in January of 2015, driving around 80% of all social referrals in the U.S. Interestingly enough, people like Pinterest and Twitter and LinkedIn and Google+ have more of a share than they do in the rest of the world, and so Facebook is responsible for only about 68% of all social referrals in the U.S. as a conglomerate.
It is the case for anyone measuring Facebook traffic, the average pages per visit tends to be around one. Now, you compare that to Google, where it’s around 2, 2.2, or 2.5, you compare that to Direct and Direct is usually closer to the 3, 4, or 5 visits per session. So Facebook’s traffic is kind of at the low end of the performance and engagement scale. It tends to be the case that when you’re in that Facebook feed, you’re just trying to consume content, and you might see something, but you’re unlikely to browse around the rest of the website from which it came, and that’s just fine. Although, interestingly enough, Facebook does perform better, slightly better than Twitter does by this metric. So Twitter’s traffic is even more ephemeral.
I tried to do some rough statistics and think about like, okay Rand, I really need a comparison between how much traffic does Google send and how much traffic does Facebook send. This is something that people ask about all the time. There are no terrific sources of data out there, so we sort of have to back into it. I think you can do that by saying, “Well, we know that Google’s getting around 6 billion searches a day currently, and we know that those send on average . . . well, we don’t know for sure. We know that years ago an average Google search resulted in 2.1 or 2.2 clicks.” I think that was 2009, so this was many years ago. So it could have gone down, or it could have gone up from there. I’m going to say between 1.5 and 3 visits on average, somewhere in there.
Facebook has 890 million daily active users, and we don’t know the statistics again perfectly there. But again, several years ago, I want to say maybe 4 years ago, 2011, they had a stat that around 2 external clicks per day per Facebook user. So let’s say it’s probably gone up maybe 2 to 4, somewhere between there. So given that, Google is in the 9 to 18 billion referrals per day stage and Facebook 1.8 to 3.6 billion.
So if you think Facebook has grown just absolutely huge, it could be as big as a third of the smallest growth maybe that Google has experienced in terms of referral traffic. I think that’s possible. I think the numbers are probably closer to the 9 and 3.6 than they are to the 18 and 1.8. That would be my guess. I think Facebook is somewhere between 15% and 30% of the traffic that Google’s driving. So pretty massive. Definitely bigger than any of the secondary search engines. Probably driving more traffic than YouTube, driving more traffic than Yahoo!, driving more traffic than Bing. Probably driving more traffic than all three of those combined even. That’s quite impressive, just not as impressive as the enormous amounts of traffic that Google does set.
Still, one of the reasons that we care about Facebook even if we don’t love the traffic that Facebook sends us because we don’t feel that it performs well, Facebook’s likes and shares are very indicative of the kinds of content that tend to perform well in search. So if we can nail that, if we understand what kind of content gets spread socially on the web and engages people on the social web, we tend to also perform well in the kind of content we create for search engines.
So some tips. First off, make sure that the Facebook audience and whoever your . . . well, that pen is going to work beautifully for someone never. Let’s see if I can make it from here. You guys can’t see this, but we’ll just pretend I make it. Oh yeah, nailed it. Oh, it almost went in. It like bounced off the shelf and then almost went in.
All right. First off, make sure that your Facebook audience usage matches your content goals and targets. If you’re saying, “Hey, we’re trying to convert people to a B2B software product in an industry that really targets technical folks on the engineering side,” Facebook might be really, really tough. If, on the other hand, you are selling posters of adorable cats and dogs, woo, that’s a Facebook audience right there. You should nail that. So I think you do have to have that concept. You can’t just disassociate those two. If you’re working for a patent attorney, trying to get likes and shares is going to be really hard for their content versus maybe trying to get some tweets or some shares on LinkedIn or those kinds of things.
Second, learn what does work in your topics in Facebook. There’s a great tool for this. It’s called BuzzSumo. You can plug in keywords and see the pieces of content that over the past six months or a year have performed the best across social networks, and you can actually filter directly by Facebook to see what’s done best on Facebook in my niche, with my topics, around my subjects. That’s a great way to get at what might work in the future, what doesn’t work, what will resonate, and what won’t.
Number 3, you should set up your analytics to be able to track future visits from an initial social referral. There’s a great blog post from Chris Mikulin. Chris basically shows us how in Google Analytics you can set up a custom system to track referrals that come from social and then what that traffic does after it’s come to you from social and left, oftentimes coming back through search, very, very common.
Number 4, headlines often matter more than content in earning that first initial click. I’m not going to say they matter more than content overall, but headlines are huge on Facebook right now, and that’s why you see things like the listicles and click bait all of those types of problems and issues. Facebook says they’re working to update that. But for right now there’s a ton of sharing going on that’s merely around the text of that 5 to 15 word headline, and those tend to be extremely important in determining virality and ability to make their way across Facebook.
Number 5, it is still the case — this has been true for many years now across all the social media platforms — that visuals tend to outperform non-visual content. When you have great visuals, the spread and share of those tends to be greater.
Number 6, timing still matters a little bit, but actually, interestingly not as much as it used to. I think a lot of folks in the social media sphere have been looking at this and saying, “Gosh, you know what? We’re running the correlations and we’re trying these experiments, and what we’re seeing actually is that it seems like Facebook has gotten much smarter about timing.” So they’re not saying, “Oh, you posted in the middle of the night and you didn’t get very many likes, so we’re not going to show your post to as many people.” They’re now saying, “Well, as a percentage of the engagement on average that’s received by this group in these geographies, in these time zones, at these particular times, how did you do?” I think that relativism has made their algorithm much more intelligent, and as a result we’re seeing that posting at a certain time of the day, when more people are on Facebook or less are, isn’t quite as powerful as it used to be. That said, if you want to try some timing experiments, watch your Facebook Insights page, and figure those things out. There’s still some optimization opportunity to be gleaned there.
Number 7, the really big driver of Facebook spread and of the ability to be seen by more and more people, have a post seen by more and more people on Facebook, appears to be — at least from all the social media experts, and I would validate this myself from my experiences there — the percentage of the audience that’s seeing the post, interacting with that post — and by interacting I mean they like, they comment, they share, they click on the link, or even, I’m fairly certain that Facebook is also using a dwell time metric, meaning that if they’re looking at that post for a considerable amount of time, even if they’re not clicking Like or Share or Comment or clicking, if they’re observing it, if that’s staying active on their Facebook feed in the visual portion of the panel, that seems to be a metric that Facebook is also using. I would be fairly sure it is. I think they’re pretty smart about that kind of stuff. Because this is a big driver, what you’re trying to do is grow engagement. You want more people to interact more heavily with your content. I think that’s one of the reasons that unfortunately things like click bait work so well and great headlines do too.
Number 8, brand page reach is limited. We know this. There have been many sort of Facebook algorithmic updates that talk about what’s the organic reach if you post, but you don’t pay at all, those kinds of things. However, the flip side of this is that in order for Facebook to not be overwhelmed by content, because the amount of content that’s posted there is simply enormous, they’ve reduced some of those things. But that means a little bit more room for individual people. So individual accounts, like your Facebook account, my Facebook account, not my public page, but my personal Facebook account, your personal Facebook account, those have a little bit more opportunity to get reach versus brands, which for a while were more dominating than they are. Now it’s pretty small.
Number 9, if your traffic from Facebook has good ROI — and this is one of those big reasons why you need to be measuring the second order effects and when that traffic comes back and those kinds of things — go ahead and pay to amplify. This is just like Google. If you see that a key word is performing well and you can turn on AdWords and you can get more of those visitors and they’re going to convert, hey, the same thing is true on Facebook, and Facebook’s traffic, generally speaking, is much cheaper on a per-click basis than Google’s is. It’s also much less targeted. It tends not to perform as well, but much less expensive. So I would urge you to pay to amplify. When you see sites that are performing gangbusters — Buzzfeed being a very fair example of that — they’re paying a lot of money to drive all that traffic to their site and to amplify their organic reach. They’re getting organic and paid reach.
And the last one, number 10, Facebook is really hard to game anymore – it didn’t used to be this case — with direct signals. It used to be the case that if you posted something on Facebook, you could have a bunch of your friends like, “Hey, everyone go check their Facebook feed now. Make sure you’re subscribed to me. If you don’t see it in your feed, go over to my specific feed, click it, Like it, Share it, comment it.” Then we can sort of amplify its organic reach, because Facebook cares a ton about those first 5 or 10 minutes and what the engagement is like there. That doesn’t work very well anymore. Facebook is very, very careful, I think, nowadays to look at: Who did we organically show this to in the news feed? How many of them interacted and engaged with it? What’s their history of interacting and engaging with stuff on this particular site? Are they somehow connected? Is there gaming going on here? Have they consistently liked everything that’s come from this site in the first five minutes of it being published? All those kinds of things that you would expect them to eventually get to, they’ve really gotten to, and so gaming it is much more hard.
But gaming people is not much harder, because unfortunately our software has not been considerably upgraded in the last few hundred years of evolution. So as a result, gaming human psychology is really how to, I don’t want to say manipulate, but certainly to get much more reach on Facebook. If you can find the angles that people care about, that they’re vocal about, that they get engaged, excited, angry, passionate, of any emotional variety about those things, that’s how you tend to trigger a lot of activity on Facebook. This is a little different than how it works on other social networks, certainly LinkedIn, parts of Twitter, Instagram different. Facebook very much this kind of controversy, passion, excitement, tribalism tends to rule the day on this platform. I think that’s part of why you see some of these click bait and headline heavy sites performing so well. But if you want to find ways to make Facebook work for you, you might want to marry the things that are on brand, on topic, helpful to you, actually will earn you good visits, but do take into account some of that human psychology that exists on Facebook.
All right everyone, what I would love, and I don’t always ask for this, but I would love if you have great tips or things that you’ve seen work really well on Facebook, please share them in the comments below. I would love to read through them. I’m guessing there are some folks in the Moz community who have extensive, wonderful experience here. We’d love to hear from you.
All right everyone, take care. We’ll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!
Driving Traffic from Facebook - Whiteboard Friday
Saturday, February 14, 2015
Wait, Paid Media Investments Can Yield SEO Value?! - Whiteboard Friday
Posted by randfish
Investing in advertising might feel like we’re simply buying people’s time and attention, but there’s far more to it than that. Done right, advertising can show returns in many organic channels, including SEO. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand shows us how.
For reference, here’s a still of this week’s whiteboard!
Video transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re going to chat about advertising investments and how paying for advertising can actually yield positive results for SEO, for links, for social shares, for content investments, for email marketing, for all of these organic channels.
I know this seems weird, but it actually can work. Google has some guidelines around this. They say, “Look, if you’re over here and you’re saying like, “Hey, man, I’ll give you 500 bucks for a link on your site, a live, followed back link directly,’ that is not okay.” Even if the person on the other side says, “Sure, I’ll take your 500 bucks and add that link.”
Google doesn’t want to count those links. They treat those as web spam. They’re going to find ways to avoid that type of manipulation. They can, in fact, penalize you for it, and lots of times they do.
However, Google is totally fine with and they even support, endorse, and run systems, a whole advertising network around this to say, “Hey, I’d love to buy some ad spots from this website.” Sure. My sidebar ads are no followed, and they cost $ 150 a month. This is totally 100% okay by Google.
In fact, this is okay by any form of things. So social networks are fine with this. Email things are fine with this. The FCC, the Federal Communications folks here in the U.S. are totally fine with this. The EU is fine with this. It’s totally okay. As long as it’s disclosed that this is an advertising relationship on the website, you’re in the clear. In fact, very often it’s the case that there’s a correlation, a strong correlation between advertising and organic types of relationships and returns.
Tactics that are worth trying (depending on your business goals)
Blogs, forums, niche websites, or news/media sites
So a lot of times you’ll see an ad buy is the first step to a deeper relationship between a website or a blogger or a media source and an advertiser, and that will lead to some forms of content sharing. Maybe some of the content will be promoted on the advertiser’s site or the other way around. That might lead to some business development of some kind. That could lead to guest contributions of content or guest posting of some kind. It can lead to social sharing where the advertiser shares something that they’ve sponsored on the media sites or the other way around. It can lead to email inclusions and email sponsorships.
It can even lead directly to links and brand mentions. People will say, “Hey, I want to thank my advertiser,” or “Hey, one of my advertisers came out with this cool product that, in fact, they didn’t pay me to endorse, but I am organically endorsing it because I really like it. By the way, they happen to be top of mind for me because they’re an advertiser.” Sometimes you don’t even realize those relationships are happening, but they do.
This is why often there is a very strong connection between advertising dollars and those kinds of more organic forms of relationships. While Google certainly is smart enough to realize that those relationships exist, they don’t say, “No, it’s not okay that you bought an advertising format from this person, and that eventually led to a more organic kind of relationship and now they’re endorsing you without a followed link, without payment in an editorial kind of way.” That’s actually totally fine.
This is why advertising can be so powerful, not just for search and for links, although that’s certainly a big one. So I’ve actually got a few suggestions, some places where we’ve seen over the course of time, and I’ve seen certainly in some of the companies that I occasionally help out informally, where they’ve benefited from these types of things. On the other side, I’ve seen from bloggers, journalists, and media sites and niche websites and forums, how they have also benefited from these forms of advertising.
Some of these tactics may be worth trying. It’s really going to depend on your business goals and who your audience is. But the first and most obvious one is really what’s reflected over here, and that is reaching out to these bloggers, forums, niche websites, news and media sites. They often offer direct forms of sponsorship or display or text ads on their site. They are going to be no followed, or they’re going to use some sort of JavaScript redirect.
What you want to do, though, is you want to go direct. So I want to buy from NicheBloggerABC.com, not from Google Ads or Federated Media, which happens to power advertising on their site. So you want those direct advertising inquiries, where you have the relationship personally, and that’s what you’re building. Don’t use that generic ad provider.
By the way, if you’re going direct, make sure those links are no followed. You don’t want to buy followed links, or you’ll get into the problem that we had over here. You’re trying to build a relationship, not a followed link. Hopefully, all those other positive organic things, those will come later if you buy these no followed links, if you start that relationship with advertising.
Conference and event sponsorships
Especially, in particular, more creative and more audience relevant forms of advertising can create much greater engagement. So if you buy a booth at a conference, well that can help. Maybe you’ve got a trade show booth and people come by and that kind of thing, and that does work for some folks, especially if they’re looking for leads.
We’ve done a few things with conference and events, even here at Moz, where we’ve done forms of sponsorship that are more creative. We give out swag. We share some content. We do something that’s very special for the audience, that happens to be relevant to their interests, usually along the lines of SEO stuff. That works much better. That often will get pickup and coverage by press and media, by bloggers who attend events, by people on social media who go to these events.
Weirdly, almost ironically, the less promotional you are in your advertising, which seems counterintuitive, the better this works for all of the organic kinds of things you’re seeking. It might not work quite as well for that direct lead capture or sales capture. But by saying, “Hey, we’re going to provide free Wi-Fi to the entire conference, and all you have to do is enter a repetition of our brand name three times as the password.” Well, guess what? That builds a lot of brand equity, and it is much more appreciated than, “Hey, we’re going to need you to take this free demo” or “You need to give us your email address and be promoted to,” and these kinds of things. That less promotional can often have greater returns.
Outdoor/TV/radio/print advertising
Then the last one I’ll mention here, even though this list could go on and on and you can use your imagination, is outdoor TV, radio, print, those old school forms of advertising. I think one of the most interesting studies I saw was a couple of years ago showing the correlation between these forms of advertising and search volume. The team from SEER Interactive put up a case study about some outdoor advertising.
Now, it could have been SEER. It might have been Distilled. I’m going to make sure, and I’m going to put it in the blog post itself. I’ll link over to that study for you guys, showing that when one of their clients had invested in these forms of advertising, they saw a direct bump in search traffic.
Editor’s note: Rand offered up a couple of other relevant links for more information about the relationship between offline ads and search traffic:
Mercedes-Benz: Quantifying how online and offline marketing work together to drive sales volume
Can TV Advertising Really Impact Search Performance?
Essentially more people were searching for their brand name, for their products, and those people went to their website. Now that’s a beautiful thing, especially if you are trying to increase search demand and search click-through rate.
So if you perceive that you have a weakness in terms of, “Hey, we’re just not getting as much branded search. We’re not getting as high a click-through rate. Our brand recognition is low. That’s hurting us in search results. People are getting better engagement than us, and as a result they are getting higher rankings and better links and all this other kind of stuff.” This is a great way to potentially combat this.
With any form of tactic that you’re trying like this, you’re going to want to think really carefully about audience makeup. So many of the times when you’re doing more traditional kinds of advertising, what you’re seeking is an audience that’s made up of people who are going to buy your product, people who have a high potential to be a customer.
That’s actually not necessarily what you’re seeking when you do these forms of advertising. You are really seeking, yes, people who might become customers, but also people who might influence customers. Customer influencers is often a very different group than direct customers themselves. It might be that you’re reaching a much smaller audience, but it is more targeted to that flow.
For conferences and events, you really want those press and media types of people. For these blog, forums, and niche websites, you might be targeting influencers and journalists and other bloggers and social media mavens and that kind of stuff, who consume this type of content online far more than your regular customers do.
So you want to be careful about that when you’re choosing advertising that is supposed to be helping you with organic channels. This is a really interesting topic. It’s one of the newer kinds of forms and ways that people are leveraging paid advertising. It can run the risk, if you get too aggressive with it, that you actually step on some of these FCC guidelines or Google’s guidelines. So you’ve got to be very careful. But if you walk this line well, you can experience great benefit to your SEO, your social, your content, your email, your brand by paying for it and getting those indirect benefits as a second order effect.
All right, everyone. Hope you’ve enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday. I look forward to some great comments. Hopefully, you all have some stories to share about this, and we’ll see you again next week. Take care.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!
Wait, Paid Media Investments Can Yield SEO Value?! - Whiteboard Friday