If you compare the latest data from comScore Video Metrix with the data from a year ago, then you’ll see there’s been a colossal increase in video viewing at Yahoo sites. For marketers, this means you need to keep your eyes wide open. Read more »
How Google’s "Search Suggest" (Instant) Works – Whiteboard Friday
Posted by randfish Google's Search Suggest automatically recommends popular searches as you type your query into the search field. Let's examine how Google determines these results and what factors go into influencing them. In this week's Whiteboard Friday, Rand suggests how you can use these instant recommendations to leverage your brand, or business. Please leave you comments below with your own suggestions! As part of the test mentioned in the video, we'd love to have your help running the query " Does Anyone Watch Whiteboard Friday " We'll watch the results for search suggest/instant and see what happens. Here they are just prior to publication of the blog post: Video Transcription Howdy, SEOmoz fans! Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're talking about the very exciting topic of search suggest, also known as Google Instant or Google Suggest. Bing actually does this as well. So do search engines like DuckDuckGo. Even places like Quora and Wikipedia are starting to do this so that as you type a query, so I started typing "Does anyone . . . " and Google has suggested things to me that perhaps I might want to search for. Curious things like, "Does anyone still use MySpace?" Well, maybe I am interested in that. "Does anyone use MySpace anymore?" Well, thank you, Google, that's quite repetitive of you. "Does anyone live in Greenland?" Well, yes, there are at least a few people. "Does anyone use Google+?" Nope, nobody. I'm just kidding. Hopefully, at least all of you watching Whiteboard Friday are using Google+. These suggestions are interesting from two perspectives. Number one, they're interesting because sometimes negative things can show up in here as you start searching for a business name. Things like scam or fraud or, I don't know, illegal activity or criminal or something like that, bad stuff can come up. Occasionally, SEOs will receive calls from clients or potential clients seeking to have that altered. Or you might be trying to control the reputation for your own business or your own name, making sure that search suggest is controlled so that the queries that show up in here, the phrases that are suggested by Google, are good ones. The second thing, of course, that is really, really interesting is thinking about this from a branding perspective. So I'll give you an exciting example. For years and years, if you started a search, let's make our own little search box here, if I started a search for SEO, the first thing that would come up, at least in most of the United States, was Seoul. Seoul, Korea, which is the capital there and the most common flight destination. Now, that's interesting, but there were other things that would come up - SEO book, SEO guide. Then as SEOmoz started to become a brand, SEOmoz would become suggested in there, which we thought was tremendously exciting and we really liked that. Then, over time, that actually moved up, and today, at least in most of the United States, although interestingly enough not Seattle because we have a lot of Korean-Americans here in Seattle who fly back and forth to Seoul and I think we have a direct flight as well, so Seattle has a lot of searches for Seoul compared to most of the rest of the country. SEOmoz is now the number one suggested result under SEO, which resulted when that shift happened. You could actually see the search traffic, if this was the line in our analytics for how much traffic we were getting for our branded keyword, that actually shot up within a couple days of that becoming the number one term. It went from, if I remember correctly, this was about a year and a half, two years go, it went from number three to number one, which is super cool. Really, really interesting stuff. This search suggest is influenceable, and it is something that over time through branding you can change the words and phrases that show up here. Let's talk about the signals that Google is using inside of search suggest. So, first off, query volume. If lots and lots of people start searching for "Does anyone else watch Whiteboard Friday," how about we all search for that. Wouldn't that be cool? Should we do a test? Let's do a test! Oh, that's a great idea! All right. So try searching "Does anyone watch Whiteboard Friday?" I tell you what. I will Tweet some links and share some stuff on Google+, and we'll see if we can't get some people searching for this particular phrase and we'll track how many. I'll use a bitly link and share it. In fact, I'll put the bitly link in this Whiteboard Friday so that we can actually test this. What you'll see, what you'll probably see, is with a few hindered to a couple thousand searches from across the US, about 50% of SEOmoz's traffic is here inside the US, folks who watch Whiteboard Friday, and the other 50% is from other countries all around the world, which is awesome. What you'll see is that may start to show up inside of these results over time. Now this is happening because query volume is something that the engines look at and they see, hey, people are searching for this. Let's start to suggest it. Now, be very careful, because Google did, in fact, have even a particular relationship with Amazon's Mechanical Turk a few years ago. There was a representative at Mechanical Turk who was contacted by Google and Google said, basically, hey we want to know if anyone's asking for search suggest influencing, that kind of thing. Google has gotten a lot more sophisticated about this, so you can bet that today they're probably using things like unique verifiable accounts, independent users. You know, if I go and search from my computer 100 times, that's probably not going to make a big difference, but if 500 people all around the Seattle area all start searching, you can bet that "Does anyone watch Whiteboard Friday?" will probably show up pretty highly in these results at least in this geographic area. Which gets to the second point, the second input, and that is the geography of the searchers themselves. Now interestingly we actually ran a test here at SEOmoz a while back, where I had about 1000 people around the world search for a phrase, and that was "travel blog" and then the word that my wife's blog actually "Everywhereist." I wanted to see if search suggest actually had an influence on ranking position. So, essentially, does putting the brand name here, will that bump up the rankings of a site? It did not appear to, at least in this example. But what it did do is show me that very quickly this would pop into search suggest, and it popped into geographic areas where I had lots of followers or friends who searched for that, which is really, really interesting. It suggests strongly that the geography is influential but that you don't necessarily need that many users searching for a particular phrase in order to get it included in here. Now, obviously, there is black and gray hat things you could do with this. Don't do that. Don't try it. You're going to get in trouble. Google obviously does some scrubbing of these results anyway, so it is going to get caught very quickly. But if you can naturally do it, through branding, through product naming, through social sharing, through content marketing, through all sorts of forms of inbound marketing, then this is something you can change. Finally, and interestingly, the keyword a phrase mentions, and what I mean by mentions is actually mentions on the Web. So particularly in news and fresh content seeing the word, right, seeing the word "travel blog Everywhereist" appear or seeing the word "Does anyone watch Whiteboard Friday?" appear, so this video for example, as this blog post goes out and the phrase "Does anyone watch Whiteboard Friday?" appear across the Web as RSS feeders pick it up and people start searching for it and all those kinds of things. That will influence the search suggest as well. I am betting that Google does something where they verify both geographically and through unique users, and they look for keyword phrases and mentions. So if something is being searched for, but no one is talking about it on the Web, that might be a little odd. But if something is in the news, especially in news headlines, and it's popular, it's in lots of sources, and it's getting search volume, then it's probably going to make its way into search suggest. Hopefully this Whiteboard Friday has helped you to understand how Google is doing this stuff, and I look forward to seeing you again next week. Take care. Video transcription by Speechpad.com 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! Read more »
Video about pagination with rel=“next” and rel=“prev”
Webmaster Level: Beginner to Intermediate If you’re curious about the rel=”next” and rel=prev” for paginated content announcement we made several months ago, we filmed a video covering more of the basics of pagination to help answer your questions. Paginated content includes things like an article that spans several URLs/pages, or an e-commerce product category that spans multiple pages. With rel=”next” and rel=”prev” markup, you can provide a strong hint to Google that you would like us to treat these pages as a logical sequence, thus consolidating their linking properties and usually sending searchers to the first page. Feel free to check out our presentation for more information: This video on pagination covers the basics of rel=”next” and rel=”prev” and how it could be useful for your site. Slides from the pagination video Additional resources about pagination include: Webmaster Central Blog post announcing support of rel=”next” and rel=”prev” Webmaster Help Center article with more implementations of rel=”next” and rel=”prev ” Webmaster Forum thread with our answers to the community’s in-depth questions, such as: Does rel=next/prev also work as a signal for only one page of the series (page 1 in most cases?) to be included in the search index? Or would noindex tags need to be present on page 2 and on? When you implement rel="next" and rel="prev" on component pages of a series, we'll then consolidate the indexing properties from the component pages and attempt to direct users to the most relevant page/URL. This is typically the first page. There's no need to mark page 2 to n of the series with noindex unless you're sure that you don't want those pages to appear in search results. Should I use the rel next/prev into [sic] the section of a blog even if the two contents are not strictly correlated (but they are just time-sequential)? In regard to using rel=”next” and rel=”prev” for entries in your blog that “are not strictly correlated (but they are just time-sequential),” pagination markup likely isn’t the best use of your time -- time-sequential pages aren’t nearly as helpful to our indexing process as semantically related content, such as pagination on component pages in an article or category. It’s fine if you include the markup on your time-sequential pages, but please note that it’s not the most helpful use case. We operate a real estate rental website. Our files display results based on numerous parameters that affect the order and the specific results that display. Examples of such parameters are “page number”, “records per page”, “sorting” and “area selection”... It sounds like your real estate rental site encounters many of the same issues that e-commerce sites face... Here are some ideas on your situation: 1. It’s great that you are using the Webmaster Tools URL parameters feature to more efficiently crawl your site. 2. It’s possible that your site can form a rel=”next” and rel=”prev” sequence with no parameters (or with default parameter values). It’s also possible to form parallel pagination sequences when users select certain parameters, such as a sequence of pages where there are 15 records and a separate sequence when a user selects 30 records. Paginating component pages, even with parameters, helps us more accurately index your content. 3. While it’s fine to set rel=”canonical” from a component URL to a single view-all page, setting the canonical to the first page of a parameter-less sequence is considered improper usage. We make no promises to honor this implementation of rel=”canonical.” Remember that if you have paginated content, it’s fine to leave it as-is and not add rel=”next” and rel=”prev” markup at all. But if you’re interested in pagination markup as a strong hint for us to better understand your site, we hope these resources help answer your questions! Written by Maile Ohye , Developer Programs Tech Lead Read more »
Google’s Search Quality Meeting Video: Where’s the Beef?
Google has released an "uncut" 8-minute video of a search quality meeting to show the process of how Google improves its search engine. However, the video is hardly revealing – I wish they'd give us search marketers a little bit more meat. Read more »
The Brand of SEO and the Trend of Inbound Marketing
Posted by randfish The web marketing community, and specifically many folks in the search field have recently been engaging in lots of conversations about the industry's nomenclature . I think these discussions are excellent to have and I'm glad we're openly communicating with one another on the topic. If there's to be a shift or a progression in how online marketers focused on non-paid channels describe themselves and their work, I believe rigorous debate is a great starting point. And, as part of that belief, I want to share my views on the topic. Considering taking the leap and having my official title changed to Inbound vs. SEO — Justin Briggs (@justinrbriggs) February 23, 2012 I've been in SEO a long time; at the end of this year, it will have been a decade since I joined my first SEO forum and attempted to learn how to capture the magical, free trafic that engines like MSN, Yahoo! and the emerging Google could send. In 2005, after experiencing the remarkable, positive impact SEO could have, I went from a practitioner to an evangelist. I loved SEO and I still love it. I love the complexities of search technology, the overwhelmingly vast sea of technical tactics, the individual stories, the packed conference-hall bars, the dark stories of spam and the illuminating tales of white hat triumphs. But, most of all, I love the people. I have met most of my best friends, hundreds of people I wish I saw more of and literally thousands of awesome individuals all around the world thanks to this field. To say I'm a raving, fanatical, lunatic SEO evangelist is putting it mildly. But over the past 3 years, I've been gradually coming around to the viewpoint that in spite of my personal adoration for all things organic search, the outside world of marketing departments, startups, small-medium businesses and individual consumers doesn't see it that way. Last night, a startup friend of mine was over, reviewing a slide deck I'm building for another round of fundraising pain , when he received a spam email trying to buy some links on his site. "Ha. You SEO guys never quit do you?" Then today, in an interview with a candidate, I asked her about her background in SEO and she replied, "I told my husband about SEOmoz and he said 'SEO company? Watch out, those guys are spammy and untrustworthy." We talked through it, of course, but if you're in the field, you surely encounter this feedback daily, too. There's the problem. No matter how many cities I fly to, or times I evangelize the great things SEO can do, no matter how many blog posts or retweets or guest articles, it will always carry with it the taint of manipulation and inauthenticity. Even from those who know better . Even from those who've invested in SEO . And always, always from the mainstream and tech media . So what's to be done? Should we give up using the acronym? Perhaps shift to something like "get found online," "search engine visibility" or "content optimization?" In my opinion, those aren't real options. SEO is an established practice and it's an established, descriptive term. For millions of people around the world, it carries the accurate meaning - the practice of improving a brand's visibility in and traffic from search engines. That meaning may be negatively tarnished by frustrating and inaccurate brand sentiments, but even if we could shift to a new phrase, this new moniker would undoubtedly attract the same sorts of bad actors who cloud SEO's perception today. For better or worse, SEO is here to stay. But I'm not blind to the emerging reality: a shift in terminology is accompanying the growth in responsibilities of professional SEOs . I did some simplistic LinkedIn research recently that's illustrated below: That figure above shows overlap between these various fields and skillsets, and it's my opinion that we're going to see considerably more overlap between them in the years to come. To be an effective social media marketer, you must understand content, analytics and SEO. To be a great SEO, you need social media, content marketing, analytics and CRO skills. The "specialist/generalist marketers" - those who excel at a particular facet but have competence in all of them - are best poised to win in the upcoming decade of marketing. We need a way to describe this combination - it's simply too cumbersome and not descriptive enough to say one's job is: " Content creation, combined with investments in both the technical and outreach-based tactics in channels such as organic search, social networks, blogs and other websites, measured through analytics and tuned with conversion rate optimization. " That's a mouthful, but it's getting to be a more and more common mouthful, because this process needs to be explained! Some say "SEO" already encompasses these: @ randfish I still believe SEO encompasses all those things. If not, then Internet Marketing. Remember when that used to sound cutting edge? — AJ Kohn (@ajkohn) March 9, 2012 This is hard, because in many ways, I agree. If you're a modern SEO and you don't also embrace content creation, social media marketing, link outreach for brand and direct traffic value (beyond their algorithmic contributions), PR, CRO and analytics, you're probably not achieving all that you could by combining these practices (at least a little). And yet, there's no way to explain to the outside world (even those in web marketing but not directly tied to SEO) that "search engine optimization" also includes "social media" or "conversion rate optimization" or "public relations" or "content marketing." SEO necessarily equates to search engine-bsaed stuff. Social media and other practices may have direct and indirect positive influences, but to an outsider, SEO will never mean all of these things, and saying you do "SEO" will never carry the meaning of that bolded sentence above. Hence, we need a term/phrase that accurately describes this combination (but is not "Internet Marketing" since that phrase encompasses vastly more than what we're trying to get across, paid channels in particular). I've been a personal fan of the concept behind Inbound Marketing for a long time - that we should earn our customers' attention rather than interrupting them by buying it. I gave a talk about inbound for startups last December in Silicon Valley: If you skip to 7:05 or so in the video, you can see the start of my talk, one of the better ones I've given in the past year. I recognize that not everyone in the marketing and search field feels as positive as I do toward the phrase "inbound marketing." But, I am seeing nearly everyone adopt the principles behind it, which include: Combining the practices of content creation and conversion optimization to earn visitors' trust and their business Jointly leveraging the channels of search, social, blogs, PR, referring links, email and word-of-mouth to promote this content Using sophisticated analytics practices like first-touch and multi-touch attribution to better understand the true value of your content and your visitor sources I asked on Twitter last week about alternatives to "inbound marketing" that still mean the same thing - narrow enough to exclusively focus on free channels of web-based customer acquisition (which terms like "Internet marketing" or "digital marketing" wouldn't), yet broad enough to include the items mentioned above. Two other suggestions seemed widely-adopted enough to consider: "earned media" and "organic marketing." I ran a comparison of these across several services: That chart above compares keyword searches on LinkedIn, SimplyHired, Google News, Google's AdWords Tool (for exact matches) and Topsy's Analytics. To be fair, all of these trail behind the individual tactics like "SEO," "social media," or "blogging," (as I noted above, they're not meant to replace those terms, but rather to explain the marketing practice that combines them). Inbound is clearly many steps ahead of the other two, though "earned media" has a lot of traction in the c-suites of large enterprises and publishers. Even if inbound marketing isn't the term that wins the lexicon battle, I believe the principles behind it are sound. They work. And they earn outsized returns to investments in most paid marketing channels or myopically singular investments on search, social or content alone. That's a message I've been working to refine and spread for some time now. Many of you reading this blog likely know that I started a personal project with my friend Dharmesh (from Onstartups & Hubspot ) called Inbound.org . It's a site that seeks to highlight some of the best content around the marketing world. Along with that, I'm putting more effort into broadening my expertise in fields like content marketing, social media, CRO and PR, and when I talk about it publicly, I call it inbound marketing. Many other organizations, from software firms like Wordstream and Optify Read more »
Visualizing the Marketing Funnel – Whiteboard Friday
Posted by randfish In this week's Whiteboard Friday, we will be talking about visualizing and measuring your marketing funnel. All too often basic web analytics can mislead marketers which can lead to investing in the wrong channels. Understanding what content drives people to your site and when will allow you to make much more informed decisions on where to invest your money. Thanks for joining us and don't forget to leave your comments below. Enjoy! The SEOmoz Inbound Marketing Funnel Video Transcription Howdy, SEOmoz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're talking about the inbound marketing funnel. Specifically, we're talking about why basic web analytics can often fail and mislead marketers in to investing in a lot of the wrong channels. What I have done today is try to illustrate that visually with this beautiful funnel. I know, I know, it looks a little complex. You're going to go, "Boy, that is really colorful and you must have taken a long time to draw those lines." I did. But think about things this way. Let's imagine the flow of visitors to your website. What happens is there are some visitors who are coming to you for the first time. Never seen your site before, you're sort of capturing them early in the stage. Maybe they know very little about you. Maybe they've heard something about you through word of mouth. Maybe they saw someone tweet a link. Maybe they found you through a search. Maybe they found you through just typing in your web address directly or through an email someone sent them. Whatever the case might be, you can track all of those. You know where they come from. I've simplified this. Obviously, there are more channels and you could break these up into direct, search, social, RSS, your blog, and referring links. Referring links from sort of the blogosphere, the news world, forums, links on other corporate sites, whatever it is. There could be advertising things in here too, but I am going to ignore paid for the moment. What's interesting is when you think about this, think about the people who come to you for the first time and how you capture them. Those channels might be entirely different from the people who way down here at the bottom of this funnel completed a transaction that was worth money. So these are people who made me directly dollars or Euros or whatever . . . Euros. Is that the Euros symbol? I don't know. Let's do the yen symbol. I know that one better. Made you cold hard cash. Excellent. Great. But what happens? Marketers almost always, and particularly the higher up you go in a marketing organization, they look at what sent traffic here and that's where they assign the budget. Right? Because they're tracking actions down here and they go, "Oh, well, fantastic. You know, these people down here, look at this. Social in green sent no completed transactions, screw social. Stop wasting your time on Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn and Google+. Those are a waste of time, because look, they didn't send us any transactions." Oh yeah? How did all these people know to subscribe to your RSS feed? How did they know to come from referring links? How did they know to type in your web address directly? How did they know to search for you? Particularly if this is branded and unbranded search, if I break that our right here, I bet this is going to be 90%+ branded search, meaning people who searched for your brand name or items related to your brand name, not unbranded terms that they've never heard of before and aren't familiar with. Because of this, you attribute revenue and people and time to places that they shouldn't go, and this is a very, very dangerous thing. So let's walk through the funnel. I think that everyone who has Google Analytics or something more advanced installed can build this out. In fact, I built this for SEOmoz's own website recently. I'll give Kenny a screenshot to put in the Whiteboard Friday of that specific image that I built. It's not very advanced, but it can give you a sense of what ours sort of looks like. So, you can take a count of the first-time visitors. So, it's like, oh, I've got a million first time visitors in the last 60 days, and maybe I have 750,000 returning visitors in the last 60 days. How many people made 4+ visits in the last 60 days? Well, that's interesting. You can segment. You can create a segment that's says, "Hey, only show me people who have visited 4 or more times in the last 60 days, and now show me the channels that they came through. Show me the referring sources of those individuals." Wow. Now I can start to see a pattern emerging. I can see, oh look at this. This was actually true for SEOmoz. RSS very little at first time, bigger at referring, and then a nice segment, a really nice segment, right down to completed transaction where people don't really come through RSS very much when they complete a transaction. You can do this. Let's say there's 300,000 who came in the last 60 days 4 or more times, and maybe there's 100,000 who came 10+ times. Wow. These people are really interesting. Particularly these people are really interesting because they must really like what you have. They must like your content or your blog or something that you do on your site, some sort of tool, some sort of function that you provide to them. Yet, there's going to be a very different look at who sent these visitors, right, which of these sources sent these visitors versus which sent the people who made a conversion action, something like signed up for an email account, or signed up with their email address, or subscribed to your newsletter, or filled out a survey, or filled out a request for a white paper that gave you a lead versus actually completed a transaction, like went back to the site and signed up for the paid service or bought the product, or did whatever it is that makes you money. Knowing these source differences and building out this funnel, visualizing this funnel and being able to see these means that you will be able to do a bunch of things right. So, I have some action items that I want you to take away from this inbound marketing funnel visualization. Number one, please, if you can do nothing else, at least set up first touch attribution. So you may not be able to get the concrete segment that has made at least one visit from this source before converting somewhere in their funnel, because a lot of those people who convert down here are going to be in the 10+ or 4+ visit segment, and they're going to have come to you multiple times, and usually you're only doing last touch attribution, meaning you only see the source that sent them the last time. There are some more advanced analytics like Mixpanel or KISSmetrics that can help you see deeper into that multitouch funnel, but at least you can set up first touch attribution tracking in Google Analytics. There is a good blog post on how to do that Will Critchlow from Distilled wrote. We'll link you over to that. Second step, segment the content that is driving people, so not just the visit sources, but the content that's driving people early on in your funnel and later in your funnel. Understanding that dichotomy will give you a sense of, hey, we can't just give up on the content that's bringing people in here or the content that's bringing people in the 4+, 10+, made a converting action. We need to focus on both of those, and here's how we should be distributing our time. Let's not spend, you know, be careful not to over assign value with resources of any kind, with dollars, with people, with time, to channels that are just getting you into the bottom of the funnel. It's really, really dangerous. It can mean that what happens over time is you increase conversion rate here, yeah, and things are going well, but as this dries up, your competitors are taking this traffic. They are getting it one way or another. Or you're not executing on it, which means no one is happy and finding what they need on the Web from you or whatever it is that you provide. Finally, the other thing is track those actions that are likely to lead to transactions. So, if you know that a high percentage of people in a certain bucket, in a number of visits bucket, in a number of visits to specific content bucket, in a conversion-like action, say they did this thing like sign up for an email newsletter, track the percent and the number that are flowing down to actual dollar value transactions. If you do that, you'll have a great sense of where you can invest sort of in the middle of the funnel that will help to drive that action further down. This is a complex fascinating process, and I know it's not easy to implement. But for those of you who do, the returns can be phenomenal. Thanks very much, and I hope I'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care. 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! Read more »
How to Leverage Content Communities to Expand Your Brand Reach
Posted by Julianne Staino “Content is King!” Ah, the wonderfully overused statement that makes me want to throw my monitor at the wall and then hang my head in shame because it’s actually true. I feel like I can safely assume that we can all agree on the increasing importance of awesome content. Recently, it seems like everyone is championing for companies to evolve the way in which they approach creating content. (Ie. Coca-Cola’s 2020 content strategy . If you haven’t watched these videos, I’d highly recommend investing 20 minutes in order to see how big brands are changing the way they think about a cohesive marketing strategy) Here in the Distilled NYC office, I’m surrounded by Tom Critchlow and John Doherty who are single handedly pushing companies to have inspired content and changing marketers mindsets . This is great and all, and ‘imma let you boys finish, but shifting a companies’ mindset and creating inspiring pieces is tough! Note: I am in no way suggesting we don’t strive to achieve this, we should always try to effect change and produce content that strikes a nerve within. I’m just pointing out the obvious fact that these content strategies are a longer-term play. Besides the obvious SEO benefits to having unique content, engaging materials also help your customers remember your brand. So by having things people find interesting on your site, the more likely it is for them to come back. However, what if you’re not Coke and don’t have a huge fan/customer base to rely on along with a marketing budget that has a lot of zeros? All this amazing content you’re producing is falling on deaf ears. Of course you’ll most likely push the content through all the various social channels to hopefully gain some traction, but again this will mainly reach people that already know about your brand. So how do you create excellent pieces of content that attracts a new audience and spreads your brand reach? Well, if you are a company that doesn’t have time or resources to invest heavily into outreach you can create content for specific content niche communities. Typically, before I begin working on a creative piece or kick-off linkbuilding or produce any form of content for a client, I think: “Who would want to read/watch/listen to this?” and “What 5 sites would link to this?” By doing this, I’m ensuring that I have a clear understanding of why I’m producing this content. Read more »
How to Leverage Content Communities to Expand Your Brand Reach
Posted by Julianne Staino “Content is King!” Ah, the wonderfully overused statement that makes me want to throw my monitor at the wall and then hang my head in shame because it’s actually true. I feel like I can safely assume that we can all agree on the increasing importance of awesome content. Recently, it seems like everyone is championing for companies to evolve the way in which they approach creating content. (Ie. Coca-Cola’s 2020 content strategy . If you haven’t watched these videos, I’d highly recommend investing 20 minutes in order to see how big brands are changing the way they think about a cohesive marketing strategy) Here in the Distilled NYC office, I’m surrounded by Tom Critchlow and John Doherty who are single handedly pushing companies to have inspired content and changing marketers mindsets . This is great and all, and ‘imma let you boys finish, but shifting a companies’ mindset and creating inspiring pieces is tough! Note: I am in no way suggesting we don’t strive to achieve this, we should always try to effect change and produce content that strikes a nerve within. I’m just pointing out the obvious fact that these content strategies are a longer-term play. Besides the obvious SEO benefits to having unique content, engaging materials also help your customers remember your brand. So by having things people find interesting on your site, the more likely it is for them to come back. However, what if you’re not Coke and don’t have a huge fan/customer base to rely on along with a marketing budget that has a lot of zeros? All this amazing content you’re producing is falling on deaf ears. Of course you’ll most likely push the content through all the various social channels to hopefully gain some traction, but again this will mainly reach people that already know about your brand. So how do you create excellent pieces of content that attracts a new audience and spreads your brand reach? Well, if you are a company that doesn’t have time or resources to invest heavily into outreach you can create content for specific content niche communities. Typically, before I begin working on a creative piece or kick-off linkbuilding or produce any form of content for a client, I think: “Who would want to read/watch/listen to this?” and “What 5 sites would link to this?” By doing this, I’m ensuring that I have a clear understanding of why I’m producing this content. Read more »
11 Google Analytics Tricks to Use for Your Website
Posted by Eugen Oprea This post was originally in YouMoz , and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author's views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc. Do you know what is the most common question that I get every day on social media, forums or email? "How to get insights about my Google Analytics data?" People approach me saying that they have a Google Analytics account for years, but they look only at page views or the number of visitors they get. And this is wrong, this is so wrong when they have powerful free Web Analytics tools that they can leverage to learn more about their visitors and use those insights to better serve their visitors. That is why in this article I am going to tell you some Google Analytics tricks that you should use for your website. You can get the basics from my Google Analytics course , but right now I am going to take this one step further to help you get even more insights from Google Analytics. Now, if you don't use the latest version of Google Analytics, login into your account and click the [New Version] link from the top right corner of your screen before we get started. This way I can be sure that you use the latest Google Analytics interface and you can follow this article along. 1. Setup Goals Something that it's quite a straight forward process, it's actually neglected by the majority of people and this is the fact that after you install the tracking code on your website you need to setup goals. The goals you setup for your website are the foundation of your website analysis because everything gravitates around your goals and conversion rates, the goals that are ultimately your business goals. If you are wondering what goals you need to setup, start by asking yourself what is the purpose of your website. Is it an eCommerce site and you want to sells tangible goods, is it a blog where you want to make revenue from ads, do you sell eBooks or services? What is the main purpose of your site? Then, once you figure this out you can go and start setting up goals base on your business objectives. If this is still unclear for you, here are some examples that will give you traction: eCommerce site - enable eCommerce tracking and start checking the conversion rates for your products Engaged Visitors - people who spend more than one minute on your site Readers - people who visit at least two pages on your site Calls to action - use event tracking (see below in the article) to measure calls to action Best performing ads - again, use event tracking to measure your best performing ads Subscriptions - check how the visitors who subscribe to your list behave Purchases - if you sell eBooks or courses you can get insights about your buyers Later, these goals will help you track conversion rates and get insights about what are the main traffic sources that send you visitors which convert, what are the keywords who send you customers, which page your visitor use most to signup for your newsletter, where are your customers from and examples can continue. Use these examples to get started, but please note that every website is unique and it will have unique goals. 2. Connect your Google Webmaster Tools account Google Webmaster Tools is another free product from Google which helps you see data about your website such as the number of impressions for your search queries and their position in Google, the number of links to your site or diagnosis information reported by Google after crawling your website. Additionally, you can check +1 metrics, your site performance or submit a sitemap for Google to index. But what the really interesting thing is the fact that you can connect your Google Webmaster Tools account with your Google Analytics account and get access to the new Search Engine Optimization reports. Once you do that, you will be able to see three new reports in your Google Analytics account: Queries, Landing Pages and Geographical Summary. They will help you learn more about your top performing search queries (keywords) and landing pages. Then, you can use that data to identify: Keywords with a low click through rate, but a good average position. Once you know them, you can change the meta title and description of your page to improve their click through rate. Landing pages with a good click through rate, but a low average position. These pages can be easily run through an on-page optimization process that will improve their rankings. What are the countries of your organic visitors and who your target market is. To connect your site from Google Webmaster Tools in Google Analytics, go to the [Traffic Sources] section, select [Search Engine Optimization] and then one of the three reports. At this stage you will see a page with the benefits of linking your accounts and a button where it says [Set up Webmaster Tools data sharing]. Click that button and then click [Edit] from the [Webmaster Tools Settings]. Then, you will be redirected to your Google Webmaster Tools where you can connect it with Google Analytics. 3. Enable Site Speed Site speed is also a neat feature of Google Analytics that lets you see the load time of your pages. This will help you check what pages need your attention and determine you to look for ways of speeding up the load time of your pages. If you wonder why this is important, I can tell you that the load speed of your pages can significantly improve your visitors experience on your site and it's also a ranking factor in Google . So a good load speed can make your visitors happy and can also increase your rankings. Along with the number of Page Views and Bounce Rate, you can see the Average Page Load Time (in seconds) and the number of visits that have been used as a sample for every page on your website. Additionally, if you click on the [Performance] tab, you can check different buckets of your page load time and see what is the average load speed of your pages. The [Map Overlay] will show you what is the load speed for different countries or territories. If before you needed to add an additional code to your Google Analytics tracking, now that is no longer required and Google Analytics will automatically add data to your reports. 4. Enable Site Search It's a fact that visitors who use the search box on your site are more likely to convert than the ones who don't. The reason why this happens is because they are more engaged with your website, with your content or your products and services. The beautiful thing about site search is that it lets you discover the exact keywords that people use to search for your products, so you can take this a step further and use them in your search engine optimization campaigns. You can actually use the most important keywords that people use to search on your site to optimize your pages and drive more targeted traffic to your website. Additionally, they might look for products or services that you do not have on your offer, but you can add them with little effort and increase your sales. Or if you have a blog, site search is a great way to see what your readers are looking for and get a ton of article ideas out of them. If you would like to enable site search on your website, first make sure that you have a search form on your site and then enable Site Search in Google Analytics. 5. Track Events Event tracking is a powerful feature in Google Analytics that can help you track among others: How many people download your eBook What ads are performing better and who clicks on your ads Which signup form converts better (sidebar, below the post, about page) Who pauses, fast forward or stops a video What errors a visitor encounters during the checkout But that is not all. Using the latest version of Google Analytics, you are also able to set these events as goals which can help you see the performance of your events based on different metrics. Enabling event tracking it's not a hard process. All you have to do is just add the code below next to your URL, before you replace the default values. onclick="_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'category', 'action', 'opt_label', 'opt_value']);" These default values will help you identify your events and here's what they represent: Category – You can use this element to identify what you want to track: eBook, video, signup form, ads. Action – This element can be used to define the interaction of your visitor and can be: click, button, play, stop. Personally, I use it to specify the place of my button/signup form/ad. Label – Use this to identify the type of event that is tracked. Value – This element helps you specify a value for you event that can be used when you setup a goal for your event. If you would like to see a working example, here's what I used to track a link to my new product, where "Ads" is the category of my link, "Sidebar" the place where I added the link and "WAB" the label. Then once you setup your links, all you have to do is just setup that event as a goal, using the Category, Action, Label, and Value conditions you have setup for your event. 6. Real-Time Reporting Google has taken analytics one step further recently and introduced Real-Time Reporting, which displays information about visitors that are on your website in a specific moment. Your are able to see how many visitors are on your website in that moment, where they are on your website, from where they come (keywords and referrals) and where they live. Additionally, you have access to another 3 reports with more insights about their location, how they arrived on your website and what pages they visit. To access the real-time reports you need to go to the [Home] menu > [REAL-TIME (BETA)]. The [Locations] report will provide you information about the number of your visitors and the countries where they are located. You can also check their location on a map. [Traffic Sources] will display information about where they come from. You will see the medium and source along with the total number of your visitors. The [Content] report will show you what are the active pages that your visitors read and how many active visitors are on each of the pages displayed on your report. 7. Multi-Channel Funnels With Multi-Channel Funnels Google Analytics provides even more value for users who are passionate about conversion rates. If before you were able to track the last source that the visitor used to convert, with Multi-Channel Funnels you are able to also track other sources (ads, referrals, social media, organic) that the visitor used to reach your website from. Let's say for example that your visitor (Cindy) landed for the first time on your website from Twitter and subscribed to your RSS feed. Next time, Cindy used the feed reader to come and read your new articles. Ultimately she was looking for advice on blogging and found your eBook using a search engine. Now, because she knows your site already, she will buy it and become a customer. Using this example, in the old version of Google Analytics the search engine was used to be credited for the conversion, but now, with Multi-Channel Funnels you can see the whole path that Cindy took to convert: Social Network > Referral > Search engine. To check the Multi-Channel Funnels reports, go to the [Conversions] section. Watch this video to learn more about Multi-Channel Funnels: 8. Use Campaign Tracking Tracking online marketing campaigns will help you get past that large number of direct visits that come from URL shorteners like bit.ly or clients like tweetdeck. Additionally, it will help you track more accurately links from other websites and links that you use to promote your content or campaigns. In order to use Campaign tracking in Google Analytics, you need to tag your URLs with special parameters. Those parameters can be added to your links using the URL Builder tool from Google. Once you tag your URLs with the mandatory parameters, use them as they are or use an URL shortener when sharing them. Then, check the [Campaigns] report, under [Traffic Sources] > [Sources] to get insights about your online marketing campaigns. To see step by step instructions and how to check Google Analytics Campaign Tracking reports, read more in this article. 9. Plot Rows Plot Rows allows you to create instant segments of your data in tabular reports. If you usually look at standard reports, you can use Plot Rows to get more insights from your metrics. To use this feature, you need to select two rows from any tabular report and then click the [Plot Rows] button from the bottom of the table. Once you do that, you will see that the chart has changed and you are able to see additional information there about the items that you have selected. In other words it instantly creates a segment with two of your items compared with the total metrics. Use this feature to check how your main keywords, referrals or pages compare with each other and with the overall metrics of the site. But make sure that you select items that do not have a big difference between their metrics (i.e. compare a keyword with 2340 visits with one that has 154). 10. Custom Dashboards In the old version of Google Analytics you used to have available only one dashboard. However, right now you can create up to 20 dashboards customized to your needs. To create a custom dashboard, go to the [Home] menu > [Dashboards] and select [+New Dashboard]. Once you do that, you will need to choose whether you will want to start from scratch with a blank canvas or get some pointers with the [Starter Dashboard]. Then you can use slick widgets to create custom metrics, pie charts, timelines or tables. To get started with custom dashboards, have a look at my screenshot above and try to duplicate it or check out 5 Insightful Google Analytics Dashboards . Then, you will be able to customize it and add the metrics that are relevant to your business. 11. Flow Visualization Flow Visualization definitely deserves a separate article to present it, but in the meantime I will outline it's benefits. Google Analytics rolled out two reports, [Visitors Flow], under the Audience section and [Goal Flow], under the Conversion section. Visitors Flow The Visitors Flow will display the path that your visitors have taken to navigate through your website. You will be able to see, based on a selected dimension, such as country source or keyword, the exact path of your visitors and where they stopped to read your content. On hover, the report displays for each page additional details, like the total number of visits, how many visitors moved to a different page and how many of them dropped the funnel and left. If you click on a page, you will be able to highlight the traffic that went through that page, explore traffic through that page or display in a popup even more details. Goal Flow The Goal Flow report is essentially a better representation of the Funnel Visualization report and contains the same dimensions as the Visitors Flow report. But the main difference between this and the Visitors Flow is the fact that the Goal Flow report doesn't uses all pages, but the steps you configured in the conversion funnel. Additionally, you can also use advanced segments to filter your data and get additional insights from the Visitors Flow and Goal Flow reports. Your turn In this article I presented 11 tips that you should use for your website and ultimately some of my favorite features in Google Analytics, but now it's your turn to do the same. What do you like most in Google Analytics and what features/tricks you think that everyone should know about? 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