Olde Tyme Whiteboard Friday

"Howdy SEOmoz fans, and welcome to this special edition of Old Tyme Whiteboard Friday. Now, this week on Whiteboard Friday I want to talk to you about the major search engines: Lycos, Northern Light, HotBot, AltaVista, Infoseek, Yahoo, Webcrawler, and Dogpile. Now these fine search engines are going to help your visitors get to your website. The website is a very important page. It's on something called the Internet. My understanding is there are tubes, system of tubes that connect so you can get to them, and the way to get to the top of these search engines, none other than, starting with keywords.

Keywords are the cat's pajamas. You must have keywords. You want to repeat them as often as you can, stuff them into your titles, put them in your meta keywords tags, your meta descriptions tags, all over the page if you can. If I could have a page that was just a big list of keywords, I would do it.

Next, doorway pages. These are magical. The doorway page is a great way to stuff keywords into a page and yet show that only to the search engines and not have to force it upon your users, because, as we all know, visiting a doorway page can get a little, you know, rough. So you want to gazoozle a bit and show the search engine your doorway page.

Next, submissions. Submissions are very critical if you want to earn a happy cabbage. Now, to do direct submissions, you need to find all the search engines that I've listed up here, plus many hundreds of others. Remember that many hundreds of secondary search engines power these major search engines. You want to get into those so you can get into these.

And last, but not least, directories. Directories are critically important. Submitting to the directories, getting included in the directories, you can't be fimble-fambling around here. You've got to do the hard work and get in the directories.

All right, everyone. In addition, to our Old Tyme Whiteboard Friday, we're going to do a little bit of serious Whiteboard Friday, but first a drink. It smells like heaven. Don't want to take too much at work here. There we go. Just take my handy . . . burns like heaven. I feel better already.

So old-tyme SEO had some weird things going on with it, but, in fact, there are some classics from the late '90s, from the early 2000's that still work today. We're going to help you with these.

First off, reciprocation. Actually, that feels ridiculous. Reciprocation, if you help other people out, they, in turn, will help you. I don't just mean this in terms of you link to someone else and they'll link to you, although that can be helpful. But what I mean is if you help someone out doing something, something on social media, something with their website, you can often get them to pay that back to you. I'll give you one of the best examples I've got.

We love to send tons and tons of traffic to other people's websites through the Moz Top Ten. When we do that, when we drive traffic from SEOmoz's email subscribers, about 250,000 people subscribe to the Moz Top Ten, that drives traffic to those sites, and then those sites all tell people, "Wow, I was in the Moz Top Ten. You should subscribe to it." Wonderful way to play reciprocation and to get something back for giving something out.

Being on the jiffy with your keyword research and targeting. So this is really interesting, because what I mean by on the jiffy is getting to a keyword before it makes its way into the common keyword research tools. This is mostly the AdWords search tool. Before Google has volume there, you can find phrases that have come out in news, new brand names and products, things that bloggers are talking about, things people are searching for and talking about on social media, trending items. Those things will have search volume next month, but they might not make their way into the keyword research tools for 30 or 60 days. That means you can jump the gun and be ahead of any of your competitors. Using search suggest for this is actually a really smart way to go too, because a lot of the times, those search suggest terms don't make their way into the AdWords keyword research tool.

Improving on the good works of others. I've been shocked to see, you know what, we have this inside our heads, as content producers, that we have to produce something very unique and different. But great artists steal, and it is just fine to take something else on the Web that's a good resource, that you think, "Man, that's solid but I could do it better," and do it better. We've had tons of success with this.

SEOmoz, when we first started out, I used to use Vaughns-1-pager around SEO ranking factors. Then I thought, "I wish there was a better one of that." We made our own ranking factors, and it worked out great. We got statistical data and the opinions of lots of SEOs and aggregated them, so it wasn't just me saying what I thought was important. That worked very, very well. It got us a ton of notoriety and citations and links.

Empathizing with the needs of your audience. This is one area where your distance from your customers hurts you. The further you are from your customers, the worse off you're going to be. But the closer you are, the better you can be. If you can spend time with your customers, talking to them, figuring out, "Hey, what do they need? What do they like? What are they missing? What do they not understand," not just about what you're doing, but about anything that's going on in your field, about any topic that a large percent of your customers are having, even if it doesn't really relate to what you sell or what you do, you can produce content and provide solutions, basic easy tools, a resource guide or a list. You can contract this out to somebody who might be an expert, to have them come in and produce the content for you, a video, a landing page that describes all these problems, a downloadable white paper, a research document. This kind of stuff works wonders in terms of not just getting engagement, but also targeting new keywords, reaching your audience, and making them delighted.

And finally, requesting action at the pinch of the game. So, a lot of the time we will do things that I think are a little bit foolish in the inbound marketing sphere. One of my favorite examples, worst examples too, is you get to a blog post and you look at the top and on the sidebar, and it's just filled with all these things asking you to share and subscribe and become my friend on Facebook. You kind of think to yourself, "I've never been here before. How do I know that I want to share this on LinkedIn, and pin it on Pinterest, and put it on Facebook?"

Ask in the pinch of the game. Once they've finished reading the article, then, at the bottom, right, that's the time to potentially ask. This happens all the time. For example, someone's just purchased something from you in an e-commerce store. One of my favorites was this store that I bought some supplies from, and they sent, in their email, in their thank you email and confirmation a, "If you had a great experience with our product, with our store, we'd love to get a link from you, and here's a little embed you can put on your site, saying that you're a customer." What a great time. Don't ask for it before you've done a good job for me. Ask for it after you've done a great job for me. That's the pinch of the game.

All right, everyone, I hope you've enjoyed Old Tyme Whiteboard Friday, and we will see you again next week for another edition, sans chopped mustache and ridiculous costume. Thanks everyone. Take care."

An Updated Guide to Google Webmaster Tools

With the recent Google Webmaster Tools security bug, I thought a deep dive into what GWT has to offer SEOs might be prudent since many SEOs may have logged in recently.

Google Webmaster Tools was once Google Webmaster Wasteland. But the past year has been a fruitful one as Webmaster Tools has rolled out improvements faster than Facebook does new privacy statements. Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) is now full of insightful data and metrics that you cannot get anywhere else. Some GWT data is useful, some is not. Let's dive in and take a look at each tool in GWT.

Guide to Google Webmaster Tools Index

Webmaster Tools Home

When you first login, you'll see a list of all websites in your Google Webmaster tools account as well as few links to view all messages from Google, 'Preferences', 'Author Stats' (Labs), and a few miscellaneous links under 'Other Resources'.

All Messages

Google used to rarely communicate with Webmasters through messages. This year some probably wish they communicated a little less with the amount of "love notes" many SEOs have received. You might see a message here if:

• Google thinks your site may have been hacked
• Google detected unnatural links pointing to your site
• Google thinks links pointing to your site are using techniques outside Google's Webmaster Guidelines

You can set the messages email threshold to: 'only important' or 'all messages' under the "Preferences" tab

See it: View All Your Messages

Labs - Author Stats

Since authorship isn't tied to a single domain, Google shows authorship stats for all sites you write for as well as individual stats. You'll need a valid author profile (go Google+!) to see stats here. The stats are interesting, and good for verifying which URLs are showing your ugly mug in the SERPs.

See it: View your Author Stats

Other Resources - Rich Snippets/Structured Data

If you've never used the rich snippets testing tool, now known as "structured data", bookmark it now. It's a one stop shop to test URLs to see if your author profile is linked correctly.

You can also use the tool to check if you've setup or verified your:

• Author Page
• Name
• Google+ Page as a Publisher
• Any structured data detected (reviews, products, song titles, etc) in the form of microdata, microformats, or RDFa

See it: Test Your URLs for Structured Data

Specific Site Dashboard in Google Webmaster Tools

Once you select a site after logging in, you see the real meat of the tool. The site specific dashboard has a nice overview showing:

• Crawl Errors
• URL Errors
• Site Errors
• Health status of DNS, Server Connectivity & Robots.txt
• Overview of # of Queries (plus clicks and impressions)
• Sitemaps (including submitted URLs and indexed URLs)

There are five major sections once you've selected a site: 'Configuration', 'Health', 'Traffic', 'Optimization', and 'Labs'. I find that the most insightful data is in the 'Heath' and 'Traffic' sections, and what you can get inside Google Analytics.

The 'Configuration' Section

Settings

Here you can target a specific country for your website, choose a preferred domain (www or non-www), and limit the crawl rate of Googlebot if you so choose.

Sitelinks

Google automatically choosing Sitelinks to display below your main URL on certain queries, usually brand related. If you have certain URLs you wouldn't want showing as Sitelinks you can "demote" them and Google won't show those demoted URLs.

URL Parameters

If you're having problems with duplicate content on your site because of variables/parameters in your URLs you can restrict Google from crawling them with this tool. Unless you're sure about what you're restricting, don't play with the settings here!

Change of Address

If you are switching your site to a whole new domain, do a 301 redirect, then make sure Google knows about it here.

Users

Ever taken like 20 minutes to add a new user to your Google Analytics account? No? OK, maybe that was just me. Luckily adding a user to GWT is much easier. There are two main user types: 'Full user' and 'Restricted User'. Restricted users are good for clients if you want to give them most view-only access, but little ability to change settings or submit things (you probably don't clients filing random reconsideration requests!).

Associates

This setting is a way for members of YouTube's Partner Program (probably not you) to link their YouTube Channel with Webmaster Tools. My guess is this section will get more settings in the future, but for now, it's very confusing. More details on the Google Webmaster Central blog here.

The 'Health' Section

Crawl Errors

Crawl errors shows you issues Googlebot had in crawling your site. This includes response codes (404s, 301s) as well as a graph of the errors over time. This is a fantastic resource for spotting broken links, as the URL shows up as a 404 error. You can see when Google first detected the error codes and download the table of errors into a spreadsheet.

Crawl Stats

Pages crawled per day is a good SEO metric to track over time. You can get some insight from the chart, but this is a metric to check in on and record every week. Ideally you want that number continuing to climb, especially if you are adding new content.

Blocked URLs Fetch as Googlebot & Submit To Index

Fetch as Googlebot will return exactly what Google's spider "sees" on the URL you submit. This is handy for spotting hacked sites as well as seeing your site the way Google does. It's a good place to start an SEO audit.

The really neat feature that's new this year is "Submit to Index". Ever made a title tag change and wished Google would update its index faster to get those changes live? 'Submit to Index' does just that. 50 times a month you can submit a page to update in near real-time in Google's index. Very handy for testing on-page changes.

Here's Matt Cutts on how to use the 'Submit to Index' tool:

Index Status

Make sure and hit the 'Advanced' button here so you can see all the interesting index stats Google shows about your site. Keep an eye on the 'Not Selected' number as that could indicate that Google is not viewing your content favorably or you have a duplicate content issue if that number is rising.

Malware

If Google has detected any malware on your site you will see more information here. Google often sends messages now if Malware is detected as well.

The 'Traffic' Section

Search Queries

These queries are when your site shows up in a search result, not just when someone clicks your site. So you may find some keyword opportunities where you are showing up but not getting clicks. I much prefer the interface in Google Analytics for this query data, and you may find a lot more queries showing up there then here.

Keep an eye on the CTR % for queries. If you have a known #1 ranking (your brand terms for example) for but an abnormally low position 1 CTR that's a sign that someone might be bidding on your brand terms (which may or may not be good). If you have a high position but low CTR it usually indicates that your meta descriptions and title tags may not be enticing enough. Can you add a verified author to the page? Or other structured data? That could help CTR rates.

Links To Your Site

This is my favorite addition to GWT this year. The link data here keeps getting updated faster and faster. When this was first launched earlier this year the delay on finding links was around three weeks. I've seen the delay down to as little as one week now.

There are two ways to download lists of links, but the "Download Latest Links" is the more useful of the two.

"Download More Sample Links" just gives a list of the same links as the latest links but in alphabetical order instead of most recent. The main report lists the domains linking to your site sorted by the number of links. Unfortunately drilling down into the domain level doesn't give really any useful insights other than the pages that are linked too (but you can't see where they are linked from on the domain). You'll find domains listed here but not in the "Latest Links" report. Bummer.

Internal Links

Pretty good report for diagnosing internal link issues. This tool is nothing fancy but URLs are sorted by most internal links. Use this to diagnose pages on your site that should be getting more internal link juice.

The 'Optimization' Section

Sitemaps

See a list of all the different types of sitemaps Google has found or that you have added and some stats about each one. You can also test a sitemap as well before submitting it and Google will scan to find any errors. Webmaster Tools shows stats here on Web sitemaps, as well as Video, News, and Image sitemaps as well

Remove URLs

You can submit URLs (only for sites you control of course) that you wish removed from Google. Make sure and follow the removal requirements process.

HTML Improvement

Think of this as a basic On-Page SEO audit tool. Google will show you lists of URLs on your site that don't have unique Title Tags, or are missing Meta Descriptions. This is a handy tool for quick On-Page SEO issues when you first take over a new website. Click on any of the issues found to return a list of the URLs that need improvement.

Content Keywords

See a list of single keywords, not key phrases, which Google thinks your site is about. As long as you don't see spam stuff here, you're good.

Structured Data

If you have some structured data on your site, such as a linked Google+ author or product review data, you can see stats about that data including the type of data found and the schema. This is useful to mass verify that all the pages you think are marked up correctly actually are.

The 'Labs' Section

Custom Search

Ever wanted to build your own search engine? You can with Google Custom Search. If you have a collection of sites that you're always searching through using Google, you might consider using Google Custom search to build your own Google that just returns results from those sites. You can see how the custom search engine would work on just your own site using the preview tool here in Webmaster Tools.

Instant Previews

Input any URL on your site (or just leave blank and click 'Compare' to see the homepage) to see what the preview of the site might look like in a Google desktop search results set, or on a mobile SERP.

Site Performance

This tool got dropped by Google's spring cleaning in April 2012. I like using webpagetest.org for testing site performance.

Webmaster Tools Data In Google Analytics

Connecting your Google Analytics account with your verified site profile in Google Webmaster tools brings some GWT data directly into your Google Analytics account. No need to login to two places.

To connect a verified GWT site to the correct analytics site, click the "manage site" dropdown:

Once connected, GWT data shows up in the Standard Reporting section of Google Analytics under "Traffic Sources" -> "Search Engine Optimization".

Not all GWT data is available in GA. You'll only get three data sets in Google Analytics:

• Queries
• Landing Pages
• Geographical Summary

Let's look at each of these and see what's worth looking at.

Queries

Queries are interesting because you can see some of the keywords that might be hidden under (not provided). This doesn't help with attribution of course, but at least we can still use that data for keyword research. Darn you (not provided).

What's really interesting is how many more queries show up in the query report in Google Analytics (that is supposed to be GWT data) than do when you directly get the query data in Google Webmaster Tools. For example, for the timeframe: Oct 28th-Nov 27th we had 317 queries report in Google Analytics:

but only 93 in the Google Webmaster Tools 'Top queries' report:

I'm not sure why such a big discrepancy between GWT queries and queries in Analytics from GWT. I definitely see more Google Images type queries in the GA report and less in the 'Top Queries' in GWT. Interesting discrepancy. Anyone else notice a big difference in query data?

Nonetheless the Query data can be interesting and it's nice to have right in GA. I hope that Google continues to provide more GWT data directly into Google Analytics like this.

Landing Pages

You're better off getting your actual top landing pages list from Analytics, but you can see what GWT sees as your tops pages sorted by Impressions. The interesting nugget of info here is the CTR. That's not data you see in analytics and could be insightful. I like comparing the CTR to the site average:

Geographical Summary

This section is again useful really for the CTR rate data. Looking at specific countries you can see where it might be worth running more Facebook ads or doing some international SEO work in.

What do you use Google Webmaster Tools For?

OK, I've ranted enough about what I like in GWT. What about you?

What data do you find useful in Google Webmaster tools?

Which Data Matters Most to Marketers? Take the Survey!

2012 was a year of triumphs and setbacks for marketers seeking the data to best accomplish their goals. Big improvements and additions in products like Google Analytics, GWMT, Bing Webmaster Tools, Mixpanel, KISSMetrics, Raven, and yes, SEOmoz PRO, too (along with dozens of others), helped many of us improve our reporting, auditing, and optimization efforts. But with the good came the bad, and setbacks like Google's expansion of keyword (not provided), the loss of referral data from iOS6, and kerfuffles over AdWords data appearing alongside rankings reared their heads, too.

When it comes to marketing data, I really like the concept behind Google's own mission statement: organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Unfortunately, I think the search giant has been falling short on a lot of the aspects that relate to our world, and thus it's up to third parties to pick up the slack. Moz is obviously part of that group, and we have plenty of self-interest there, but many other companies (and often Google and Bing themselves) are stepping in to help.

To help better understand the information that matters most to professionals in our field, we want to run a short survey focused specifically on data sources:

TAKE THE SURVEY HERE

We hope that this takes less than two minutes to complete, and that by aggregating broad opinions on the importance of data sources, we can better illustrate what matters most to marketers. In the spirit of transparency, we plan to share the results here on the Moz blog (possibly in an update to this post) in the next week or two.

Please help us out by taking the survey and by sharing it with your fellow marketers (or any professional you know who relies on marketing data).

Thanks very much!

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*For those who have asked about SEOmoz's own plans regarding rankings vs. AdWords API data - we have removed AdWords search volume from our keyword difficulty tool (it was never part of the formula), and will be working on alternatives, possibly with the folks over at Bing. Like others in the field - Hubspot, Ginza, Conductor, Brightedge, Authority Labs, etc. - we plan to maintain rankings data in our software.

The Cassandra Memorandum: Google in 2013

Apollo fell in love with a priestess, and offered her the terrible gift of prophecy. She agreed to the gift, but when Apollo asked her to lie with him, the daughter of Priam refused. The God, angry, cursed her: the young priestess would have been a prophetess, but no one would believe her.

Her name was Cassandra.

Every day this month, I've seen Twitter posts with every kind of predictions about how web marketing disciplines will look in 2013.

I am not exempt from the desire to predict the future. The urge is something deeply human and, in an industry as uncertain as ours, sometimes it is a psychological necessity. However, some of those predictions are so improbable that this obscure prediction (written to be blatantly false by one of my Spanish friends) seems more plausible:

"Google launches Google Balrog. The name of this new Google algorithm is inspired by the name of the mythical creature imagined by Tolkien, because it will operate the same way.

It will be an algorithm that, wrapped in fire, will crawl the Web, penalizing and incinerating sites which do not include the anchor text "click here" at least seven times and not include a picture of a kitten asleep in a basket.

If your site will not meet these minimums, the Balrog will go after you." (The translation is mine from Ricardo`s original post in Spanish.)

Every speculation about how something may evolve in the future should be based on the knowledge of the past, and, in the case of Google, we should not make the mistake of excluding elements like its acquisitions and technological evolution when predicting its future.

For example, Panda should be seen as a needed action that Google took in order to solve a problem caused by the technological advancement of Caffeine. In fact, with Caffeine (June 2010), Google was able to find new pages (or new information about existing pages) and could add them straight to the index.

As a negative side effect, gazillions of poor-quality pages flooded the SERPs, objectively deteriorating them. I'm sure the Search Quality team was already working on finding a solution to the poor results in the SERPs, but this particular Caffeine side effect accelerated the creation of the Panda algorithm.

Opening the prophecies book of Cassandra

If you visit the About Us page of Google, you will read this: Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.

That is the why of Google, and three words matter the most:

1. Organize
2. Accessible
3. Useful

The how is represented by its algorithms; the what is composed by all the products Google has developed along the years (Search, Local, Mobile, Video, Voice, etc.).

 

Organized

For many years, I've considered Google as a cataloguer of objects, which offers information on a variety of topics:

• Written content
  • "Generic" content
  • Blog posts
  • News
  • Questions/Answers
  • Books
  • Patents
  • Academic articles
• Photos and images
• Videos
• Apps

You've probably noticed that these are the vertical searches Google offers and that compose the Universal Search right now (I excluded Products because they are a paid option, and I consider Google+ status as 'posts').

Almost all these 'objects' have their own algorithms which are frequently updated, similar to the YouTube, Google News, and Google Images algorithm updates. And all them have their flaws (for instance, the real value to be assigned to a link).

Until recent years, Universal Search seemed to be similar to a building constructed with Legos, but there were three important changes in 2011 that changed the landscape. These changed began developing in 2012 and ' possibly ' will be consolidated in 2013, which could really unify all the vertical searches. These three changes are:

1. Schema.org
2. Authorship
3. Google+

Schema.org

We know that Google is using semantic closeness in its categorization of crawled information, as we know how the concept of Entity is strongly related to semantic.

However, this aspect of the crawling function has assumed a larger relevance after the implementation of Schema.org. The general acceptance of HTML5 as the new standard (pushed by Google since its beginning) and tools like Open Graph has helped boost relevance, as well.

The fact that Google offers the opportunity to verify accuracy of rich snippets implementation (and is continuously updating the tool), changed its name to  the Structured Data testing tool, and recently offered the opportunity to highlight events structured data directly from Webmaster Tools makes me suspect that semantic is going to have even greater weight in how Google will organize the information it crawls.

The Knowledge Graph (and open data such as Freebase since Google's acquisition of Metaweb in 2010), which recently rolled out in many regional Googles, is based on the semantic web and is improving very quickly. My advice is to start thinking seriously about semantic as a channel for possible web marketing and SEO actions. 

Authorship

AuthorRank has been one of the hot topics of 2012. People smarter than me wrote about it, and even created a tool around it.

In my 2011 'Wake up SEOs, the New Google is here' post, I presented my hypothesis that AuthorRank would have become a part of a more complex set of graphs, whose purpose was to organize and present for real the best content in the SERPs. We have not yet seen that 'prophecy' become fact, but I am stubbornly convinced that this is the direction Google has taken. If not, why can we already use the relation 'author'/Google profile in posts, articles, videos, and books? In the future, I see AuthorRank becoming useful in other objects as well, such as photos, images, and audio.

Today, I want to focus on an aspect of AuthorRank which (incomprehensibly) does not receive much attention: the rel='publisher' mark up. It is rel='publisher' that connects a site (the publisher) with the authors. Even when those same authors abandon the publisher to start working with another site, their AuthorRank will continue to influence the 'PublisherRank,' which makes it even stronger.

Google+

During the last SMX Social Media Marketing Expo, Vic Gundotra told Danny Sullivan:

"I think people are just now starting to understand that Google+ is Google. At some point, we're gonna have a billion users. And eventually, you'll just say: 'Google has a billion users.''

I am not going to discuss the value of Google+ as a social media channel, but we must admit that it is the irresistible evolution of Google for a number of reasons:

• Social is the nature of a profiler tool.
• The fact that rel='author' and rel='publisher' are strictly related to Google profiles makes them part of the future of Google Search (and also Paid Search).
• It is the easiest way for Google to obtain real social signals, not just through how users act on Google+, but also through users connecting many other social accounts to the their G+ profile.

Accessible

"You don't need to be at your desk to need an answer."

You can find that phrase in the Ten Things We Know to Be True page of Google.com.

Google bought Android Inc. in 2005 and entered in the mobile phone industry in 2008. Why the sudden surge into mobile? Aside from Android being a gold mine, Google's goal is making information universally accessible. Because more and more people are using mobile for search (especially for local), it was imperative for Google to be a player in the space:

Search on mobile is almost synonymous with Local Search, which can also (partly) explain why Google Now has been developed, along with the peculiar design of the mobile version of Google Search.

Therefore, it's time to stop thinking of mobile as an option and realize it's a priority.

For that same reason (strongly connected to the concept of accessibility), Google started giving instructions and suggestions about how to build mobile-optimized sites, with special predilection for the responsive design technology.

Mobile accessibility means also Google Voice Search, and <irony> what a surprise </irony>, from Knowledge Graph, Schema, and Local Search.

In addition, we can't forget Project Glass. It is still a Google X project, but has been given to developers to start designing software/apps in preparation for its commercial release predicted for 2014.

Accessibility gives information to users quickly, which explains why site speed is so important to Google - so much that it released mod page speed this last October and updated it just few days ago.

Lastly, WPO (Web Performance Optimization) is not exactly an SEO activity, but it affects SEOs, so it must be considered one of the priority for 2013. The frequently troubled relation between SEOs and developers/web designers will forcedly find a solution in 2013. We will need to start being better communicators and reach them where they are.

Useful

At the end of November, Matt Cutts gave a definition of SEO as Search Experience Optimization in his Google Webmaster Help video series:

Nothing really new, but yet another confirmation that SEO should focus on providing users with useful information.

Panda, Penguin, EMD, Layout Update... all of these updates were aimed at prioritizing the most useful sites available, and punishing those that Google considered useless.

Content marketing (the discipline that helps create useful information) has become a big priority for SEOs. However, there are still so many in our industry who don't really understand what content marketing really means and how SEO can be implemented into a content strategy. This is not the best place to discuss this topic, but check out the deck below for further explanation.

How to Build SEO into Content Strategy by Jonathon Colman

2013 will see definitive adoption of content marketing into SEO, and those sites that do not integrage marketable content into their strategies will see themselves overtaken in the SERPs.

At the same time, we will also see an increase of content marketing spamming: guest posts as article marketing, infograph-spam, or simply not consistent content actions. Sadly, SEOs tend to screw up a lot of at-first-good-tactics just because of a short-sighted tactical vision we may have. It's possible that some of the Search Quality Team actions will be focused on those facets of spam, because they already have the tools for doing it.

Usefulness to Google does not just mean "content," hence filling every kind of site with zombie infographics just because "they are cool" is not the way to go. Usefulness is paired with personalization, as if Google was saying, "We will offer you the opportunity to find the information that is interesting to you based on your previous searches, your interests, the authority of the sources, and where you are."

For that reason, I consider the Venice update the most underestimated update of 2012. It completely changed the SERPs for almost every kind of query.

Moving forward, I recommend paying close attention to the Gmail Search Field experiment, or why Google is putting effort towards making International and Multilingual SEO easier. 

Cassandra's appendices: what updates might we see in 2013?

Between 2011 and 2012, we experienced three major updates: Panda, Penguin, and EMD.

The first update's goal was to clean the SERPs of useless content, defined as content that doesn't provide any real value to the users. The second aimed to clean the SERPs of content that ranked thanks to a "false popularity" obtained through low-quality link building actions, rather than ranking by value according to users. The third update's goal was to clean the SERPs of content that ranked solely because of an exaggerated boost obtained from its exact match domain. 

The Penguin and EMD updates were even more necessary after Panda as a logical consequence, if you really think about it. Panda resulted in a large amount of sites disappearing from the SERPs. Other sidtes that survived Panda's ranking factors still won in the SERPs, mostly due to an over-SEO'd link building strategy. After Penguin, we saw those sites replaced by the sites relying only on the strength of their domain names, leading to the EMD update roll out.

Are the SERPs perfect now? Not quite. Domain crowding (and its counter part, domain shrinking), which was minor issue since 2007 was somehow justified by the Brand Update, is becoming a problem, especially in countries where the EMD update is not yet rolled out. 

Conclusion 

We know how much can still be done through Rich Snippets spam, the gaming of Local Search, and guest posting and infographic directories spam. In 2013, we may see the effects of a massive collection of spam sites (although Google is working on it, thanks to the disavow tool); could this be the "linkapocalypse," or maybe even the real "Balrog" update? These are simply my assumptions, as every year when it comes to possible updates. What is sure is that we will see new releases of Panda and Penguin, and the extension of the EMD update in all regional Googles.

This is Google in 2013 for me and I am not a prophet, just someone who likes to look at the past while trying to interpret the future. I am right? Probably not.

But, just maybe, I am Cassandra.

December Mozscape Index is Live!

Happy Holidays!! The December Mozscape index is now live! The latest index has just been released and you will see fresh Mozscape data in Open Site Explorer, the Mozbar, PRO campaigns, and the Mozscape API.

The Big Data team was hoping to provide a special holiday treat launching two indices in one month again, but, unfortunately processing was bitten by a full machine failure. We've had really good luck running Mozscape processing on the larger, high compute AWS machines, but, sadly, just a few days before the index was complete, an entire computing machine failed which forced us to have to re-run a few steps. Even with the failure, the December index is a few days earlier than our scheduled release date on December 27th - a pre-holiday treat for everyone!

In even bigger Big Data news - our private cloud is fully up and running in Virginia and we are about 25% done with our first production ready index! If all goes well, we'll be releasing the first Mozscape index created in our own private cloud in mid-January. What a way to bring in the new year!

Here are the metrics for this latest index:

• 78,671,787,078 (78 billion) URLs
• 687,827,137 (687 million) Subdomains
• 136,539,340 (136 million) Root Domains
• 917,094,026,686 (917 billion) Links
• Followed vs. Nofollowed
  • 2.32% of all links found were nofollowed
  • 56.69% of nofollowed links are internal
  • 43.31% are external
• Rel Canonical - 14.07% of all pages now employ a rel=canonical tag
• The average page has 72 links on it
  •  61.38 internal links on average
  •  10.45 external links on average

And the following correlations with Google's US search results:

• Page Authority - 0.36
• Domain Authority - 0.19
• MozRank - 0.24
• Linking Root Domains - 0.30
• Total Links - 0.25
• External Links - 0.29

The histogram for the freshness of the index's crawl data shows a pretty high volume of fresh crawl data coming from middle of November. This index will have data ranging as old as the end of October, but a large volume of the data was crawled from the middle to end of November. 

We'll be keeping an eye on things over the holiday, so send us your feedback - we always love to hear your thoughts! And remember, if you're ever curious about when Mozscape is updating, you can check the calendar here. We also maintain a list of previous index updates with metrics here.

Introducing New Followerwonk Engagement Metrics for Twitter

At Followerwonk, we're all about helping our customers find, engage, and optimize their Twitter audience. We're relentlessly focused on letting you dig into your followers, do advanced searches to help plumb the depths of Twitter, track your social graph, and more.

8 Copy Editing Tricks to Make You Look Professional - Whiteboard Friday

"Howdy SEOmoz fans. It's Whiteboard Friday. I'm Erica, and I'm the Community Attachè here at SEOmoz. Today we're going to talk about copy editing and things you can do to make yourself look more professional.

I realize many of you, we started out as SEOs. A couple of years ago, in the industry, it was like keyword research. Where am I ranking? The most copy you ever wrote was like a meta description, maybe a product description.

But today, the world of SEO, as we know, is drastically changing. We're doing all sorts of copywriting these days. Content marketing is huge. You've got guest blogging. We're all over, and a lot of you are really frustrated because you're like, "Man, I wish my writing was better. I wish I had a writer on my staff to help me out." But sometimes you are that person who is doing a little bit of everything. I've totally been there.

So today we're just going to talk about how to make your copy editing magical and make you look a little more professional. People will be like, "Wow, I knew you were an amazing SEO. I didn't know what a great writer you were too."

So these are some little handy-dandy tricks I try to remember any time I am writing.

So the first thing you want to do is you want to identify your why. Why are you writing this piece? What are you trying to accomplish by going out there and talking about it? Like when I sat down to outline my Whiteboard Friday, I said, "I have this knowledge about copy editing. I want to share it with SEOmoz's audience because I know you'll find it valuable, especially if you're going to write a YouMoz or something.

So if you can focus really on your piece and figure out that why it is so important with you, that's really going to make sure that your piece, that your writing comes together. If you're writing about kittens or unicorns or if you're writing a serious piece about using Google Analytics, importing into Excel, and doing all the crazy, amazing SEO things I know all of you know how to do.

So the second thing that you want to focus on is finding your voice. Every writer writes a little bit differently, just as every person is a little different. As you continue to write and continue to practice, there will be certain words you use. There will be certain ways you phrase things that really identify who you are.

One of the funnest things I like to play with is using styles or voices from other people. So, for instance, I've totally written a blog post as Rand, and it was kind of funny. Can I sound like Rand? Where can I go? Or I used to - and now Ashley our content specialist has taken this over - write the SEOmoz newsletter. One time I wrote as Roger, but as Captain Kirk doing a little captain's log. So you can have a lot of fun with your voice and your style. Don't be afraid to be a little kooky. Give it a little personality. Show who you are. Show what you're interested in.

The third tip, which is going more, once you've written your piece, you're kind of pulling back into the finer editing stage. Read your work aloud. Just do it. Sit there and go slowly. If you have to print it out, do it old school, and just read every word you've written.

When I was a kid, I had this problem where I would always skip over the little words like the, a and. My teachers would just paper full of red. Like what happened? I finally broke that habit when I went to college, and I started printing out my essays and reading them slowly aloud. I'm sure my dorm mate was like super thrilled to hear my essays about ancient Celtic languages, for instance.

But it will so much improve your writing, because you'll notice things. You'll read it and you'll like, "Wow, this doesn't make any sense. What was I even thinking?"

It helps with some of those more embarrassing typos or confusion if your sentences are getting really long and complicated, especially as you're diving into more advanced topics.

So my fourth tip is put your writing aside. I'm sure many of you have suffered from writer's block or just frustrations when you get to the editing part. You just don't want to let it go. Writers often call this killing your babies, which is kind of vulgar maybe. But we get really attached to what we've written, and we can't always see how to edit it and how to bring it back in and really refine our piece.

Maybe you start a draft and you set it aside and maybe you come back to it tomorrow. Maybe you come back to it six months to a year from now. You never know when it's . . . if it's something you love and it's something you're passionate about, maybe you can't push it. But sometimes maybe it's just that 24 hours, because I realize a lot of you are also out there writing things that are super time sensitive that you have to get out right away, which brings me to the next point.

Ask a friend to edit. If you're doing something really time sensitive, this is extremely helpful. If your friend has any editing experience, it's even better. You never know what crazy typos you're going to send out into the world or what crazy communication flubs, or maybe your piece just needed like five paragraphs cut out of it. Having someone you trust and someone who you can respect their opinion goes even further.

You definitely don't want to do things like I've done where I was sending out an email about fly fishing clothing and in the subject line I put,
"Flying fishing clothing sale today" or something like that. It just really helps you from making that mistake and then going, "Oh, what did I do? Oh no."

Friends can also be great at telling you what's good about your writing and encouraging, bringing those themes out. I just wrote an essay about Dr. Who. My editor came back to me, and she was like, "You know, you've been doing too much recapping. Cut this, cut this, cut this." I was kind of sitting there like, oh my gosh, wilting flower. I don't want to kill my babies. But what my editor was great about was she said, "You know, I really love what you're doing here and here and here. Let's bring that out." So at the end of the day, I had to do a super bunch of editing, but it helped me to know what the best things were out of that piece too. So criticism is both a negative and a positive.

Getting a little more into the technical, a lot of you out there are like, "How can I be better with my grammar?" I get a lot of questions from people at SEOmoz about grammar things, like, "Should I put a comma here? What the hay. Where do I go? How can I improve my grammar stuff?"

The first thing, which I suggest, is looking at what's called active versus passive voice. Active means exactly what you all know the word means. Active means that you're out and about. Your language is springy versus passive it's just kind of in the corner. It's like the wallflower at the party. You don't really care.

So, for instance, if you had the sentence, "The dog was jumping on the bed." You're dog is bad. Your dog is jumping on your bed. But it's just kind of boring. If you're like, "The dog jumps on the bed," it's much more active. It tells you what the dog is doing. It brings that sentence to life. Often it's just a simple switch of moving what you're talking about at the end to the beginning.

You can look up more about active versus passive voice online. It's known to be verbs are passive.

The next thing you want to do is look at your sentence lengths. You want to vary them. A lot of people get really long winded when they're writing because they're trying to cram everything in. You get these super long sentences that are all the way to the ground. If you just step back and look and be like, "Oh, I can put periods here. I can shorten it." You can have a short sentence and a long sentence. It's a littlie advanced, but it will make your writing much more snappy and sound like people actually converse.

For those of you who are really, really advanced in your grammar, here's my last tip. Learn to diagram sentences. I'm sure my 7th and 8th grade English teachers are very happy that I'm recommending this to you. But if you really want to know grammar and if you really struggle with it, learn how to diagram sentences so you can identify the subject of your sentence, the verb of your sentence the object, and any sort of clauses or anything. Then you can figure out, if people come to you and say like, "You always have run-on sentences, you always have incomplete sentences," these are the type of things that if you can identify the parts of the sentence, you can say,
"Oh, I know exactly why this sentence isn't working. Or I know why it's not communicating clearly to my audience." But that's just your advanced homework.

So I hope that all of you will learn these magical tips and transform your writing. You can now go from just an ordinary SEO to something more magical."

Help Team University

Here at Moz, we live for happy customers. We want to give our customers the best experience possible when using our product, interacting with our community, and solving problems if they arise, and the way we wanted to get there was to give everyone in the company a chance to do customer support. To help us reach our goal, we developed Help Team University, a daylong crash course where everyone at the company does support for our customers. The concept may seem a little odd. How does training developers, HR, and even executives on the finer details of customer care actually help customers?

Think about it this way: put a Mozzer who directly influences features in our products on the phone with a customer who has been adversely affected by a bug and it will provide a completely new perspective. By establishing a new window into customer support, we hope to make our products better from the ground up. We hope that HTU is a small step in the direction of being the most customer-driven SAAS company in the world!

Why HTU?

I believe that every single person at Moz is in customer support. We create a product for people to use and love. Every piece of the Moz process, from the E-team to Operations, deeply affects customers. HTU reinforces this connection and keeps the customer fresh in Mozzers' minds. We like to think that the best customer support is a well-built product that is easy to use. Having the entire company interact with the people who use the product everyday will help us get there, because feedback is best coming directly from you, the customer.

Help Team University gives customers a tangible voice in shaping the entire company. For instance, one of our engineers had a conversation with a customer about a bug that had been persisting for a few weeks. The engineer then opened his laptop and started fixing the bug right then and there. In addition to providing on-the-spot fixes, HTU is also valuable in providing Mozzers insight into how customers actually use our product. Moz is rapidly growing and some of our newest additions may help develop our SEO crawler, but it's tough to know exactly what pieces customers use their crawl diagnostic reports without talking directly to users. HTU provides members from all teams the opportunity to learn how people use our tools, which aids the evolution of our analytics set to be more useful to you!

Another Level of TAGFEE

The most important thing Moz has to offer the world is TAGFEE. With HTU, we are teaching another level of TAGFEE to everyone at Moz, beyond how we express TAGFEE internally. The great thing about TAGFEE is that it looks different every time it's used, depending on the team or situation. People sitting down with us for HTU are getting a lesson in how to treat a customer with a deep level of empathy. Every conversation we have with a customer is framed with, 'Well, put yourself in their shoes.' Mozzers are consistently surprised by how empathetic and generous we are to customers experiencing bugs. This will hopefully translate to generosity and empathy deeply embedded in our product.

Showing Off

The Help Team loves showing off how we interact with customers (for example, we send out a weekly digest to the entire company that lets them know how happy our customers are and what bugs are weighing heavily on our community). HTU takes this a step further. We get to show the rest of the team the entire process of how we collect happiness metrics and bug reports. HTU gives the Help Team a chance to show the rest of the team how we keep thousands of customers happy with 5-6 people.

Rewards

The HTU process wouldn't exist if it wasn't rewarding. Everyone on the Help Team rewards students by teaching them with optimism and humor. We like to make everyone laugh and keep their up, even if there is a tool outage or another issue is prompting a lot of customers to reach out. We also like to keep the HTU students grounded by focusing their attention to how important PRO is to our customers. In my opinion, that intimate connection could be the most rewarding takeaway from Help Team University. I think this is the reason people ask to come back and do HTU again, and why engineering leads frequently stop in to ask about any issues we've noticed, or even to just chat about customers. To top it off, we add an awesome HTU achievement badge (designed by Abe Schmidt) to their Moz profile page.

I am extremely lucky and proud that HTU continues inspire Mozzers. The entire process has been enlightening for the Help Team and the rest of Moz.  I think any company with a customer care team would benefit from having all hands help support their community. If your company does something similar or has thought about ways to be radical advocates for your customers, please share in the comments! Also, if you have any great ideas we can implement, please let us know! Oh, and don't forget to thank everyone on our Help Team and Sarah Bird for giving HTU life.

"It was a really fun day, and I feel like it grounded me back in the help world, which I've always loved." - Rand

"I really liked HTU. Specifically, I liked getting a feel for what kinds of issues come up and what Help Team thinks about to maintain a quality experience for customers.  I also liked being able to tell people outside of SEOmoz about HTU. Friends were very impressed by a company that values their Help Team's job enough to allow engineers to get mentoring from the Help Team. " - Ethel

"It good." - Miranda

What Happened on December 13th?

On the morning of December 14th, MozCast registered the largest 24-hour Google ranking flux on record since we started tracking data in early April. The temperature for Thursday, December 13th was 102.2° F (for reference, the original Penguin update was 93.1°):

This was especially striking since I had just rolled out a small fix in our computations for a problem that was slightly overestimating temperatures on some days since the rollout of 7-result SERPs.  SERPmetrics confirmed substantial levels of 24-hour flux, and webmaster chatter suggested that people were seeing major ranking and organic traffic changes.

Unfortunately, Google was unable to confirm an algorithm update. So, where does that leave us? It turns out that it's not an easy question.

The Big Signals

A while back we launched a set of five top-view metrics to help provide an at-a-glance view of patterns across the entire set of rankings MozCast tracks.  Only one of those metrics moved noticeably between December 13th and 14th ' PMD Influence suffered a sizeable one-day drop. PMD Influence is the percentage of Top 10 results occupied my partial-match domains (PMDs). This includes hyphenated and non-hyphenated domains that contain the keyword phrase but are not an exact match. Here's the 30-day view:

PMD Influence dropped from 3.73% on 12/13 to 3.54% on 12/14 (about a 5.1% drop in 24 hours). While my gut says that drop wasn't the full picture, it's a good place to start. So, which sites lost out in this change?

Across the 1,000 SERPs tracked, this PMD drop represents a change of only 18 partial-match domains that fell out of the top ten. It's a bit more complicated than that, though. There were actually 36 PMDs that fell out of the top ten, and 18 new PMDs that entered the top ten, for a net difference of 18. Analyzing these domains one-by-one can turn into a wild goose chase pretty quickly, so let's look at a couple of situations where a keyword lost multiple PMDs.

One query that lost two PMDs was 'barbeque'. On 12/13 the following PMDs ranked in the top ten:

1. www.springcreekbarbeque.com
2. www.qbarbeque.com
3. www.barbequeman.com
4. scbarbeque.com
5. www.waltsbarbeque.com

The next day, domains (4) and (5) fell out of the top ten. Domain (5) had been floating near the #10 spot, so that may be a fluke. Interestingly, for just one day, Wikipedia's barbecue page fell completely out of the top ten, after ranking in the #1 position consistently. We'll explore that in the next section.

Here's another example with multiple PMD losses ' the keyword 'joannes" had three PMDs ranking on 12/13:

• www.joannesbedandback.com
• www.joannesbb.com
• www.joannesgourmetpizza.com

The next day, only (1) remained. Again, (2) and (3) were taking up the tail end of the top ten, and in this case were bumped out by Yelp and Urban Spoon, so this change may be smaller than it initially looks.

One PMD that lost ranking caught my eye ' a query for 'gmaps'. On 12/13, the domain [www.mgmaps.com] fell out of the top ten. This turns out to be a shift from a 10-result SERP to a 7-result SERP, and the PMD was sitting at #8 prior to the shift. Interestingly, though, Google Maps, which had been sitting at #2, took the #1 spot and got site-links and a 7-result SERP. We'll come back to this one.

Sorry - we're not exactly making the situation clearer, are we? I want to illustrate just how complex the situation really is. I've come to believe that not even Google fully understands the dynamic system they've created. Ultimately, there were no clear patterns across the PMD changes, so let's dive into a couple of specific situations.

A Wiki Situation

Wikipedia suffered a rare (albeit temporary) loss of their coveted #1 position for the query 'barbeque'. Since Wikipedia holds the largest share of top-ten real estate in our data set, a major change to the site (such as a technical problem that caused temporary de-indexation) could cause very large-scale flux in the rankings. Luckily, we can run these numbers.

On 12/13, Wikipedia had a 4.56% top-ten share in our data set, which dropped to 4.41%, for a net loss of 14 rankings. This may not sound like much, until you recall that that change is on par with the 18 ranking PMD shift (and Wikipedia is just one site). In some ways, this seems to be an anomaly of 12/13 more than 12/14, as Wikipedia held a 4.46% share on 12/12. Historically, the 12/14 numbers aren't unheard of ' Wikipedia had a 4.82% share back in June, for example.

I should also note that the Wikipedia page in question for the query 'barbeque' was actually the '/Barbecue' (alternate spelling) page. It's possible that a spell-check adjustment or other very minor code tweak could have had unexpected repercussions.

This does go to show, though, how a site as powerful as Wikipedia can definitely have an impact on the overall SERP landscape. Like the PMDs, I don't think it's the entire picture, but it is a piece of the puzzle.

The Curious Case

Let's go back to another oddity in the PMD analysis ' the query for 'gmaps'. On the morning of 12/14, the official Google Maps site not only jumped from #2 to #1, but it got site-links and a 7-result SERP, pushing out three domains. It's easy to jump to conclusions and assume Google is favoring their own products, except that two pieces of data make that unlikely here.

The first clue is that Google Maps returned to the #2 position on 12/15 (and a 10-result SERP). The second is that we know that something big happened on 12/13 ' Google Maps finally re-launched on Apple's iOS6. Here's a headline and time-stamp from Forbes:

Obviously, this story had a ripple effect across 12/13, and probably had a huge impact on metrics (CTR, dwell time, etc.) related to Google Maps and the official site. While this doesn't help our quest to find the source of the update, it is interesting to note that a major news item could not only change a ranking, but cause a 7/10 shift in results. My ongoing investigations indicate that 7-result SERPs are highly dynamic and automatically change based on factors that may include user metrics and QDF ('freshness').

The Big Movers

Everything to this point came out of just one data point ' the PMD shift. Let's go back to the beginning and ask the other obvious question ' which queries changed the most from 12/13 to 12/14? This turns out to be a tricky question, because some queries are just naturally higher-flux than others. Typically, I compare the 24-hour 'temperature' for any given query to the 7-day average for that query, to get a ratio. This helps indicate which queries are unusually high-flux. For 12/14, here are ten unusually high-flux queries (with temperatures):

1. 'knockout roses' (181°)
2. 'condo rentals' (168°)
3. 'rosatis pizza' (161°)
4. 'aerosoles store locator' (158°)
5. 'bj wholesale hours' (151°)
6. 'party stores' (143°)
7. 'kitchen sinks' (137°)
8. 'millionaire matchmaker' (125°)
9. 'celiac disease diet' (119°)
10. 'garnishment' (115°)

Any one query is an anecdote ' the web changes. What we're looking for in the data is a calling card of sorts ' a story that ties these queries together. Unfortunately, the patterns are all over the place. Our top mover (1) was just a case of an eHow page jumping up the rankings. Two of these queries (6 and 10) have no clear explanation other than multi-spot shifts. Query (8) seems to be a case of QDF and has high volatility outside of the 7-day window.

Four queries (2, 4, 5, and 9) showed shifts in domain diversity. For three of them, one domain went from a single spot in the top ten to multiple spots. For query (5), though, one domain lost spots (diversity increased). Our top-view metrics aren't showing any big overall shifts in domain diversity, but there are always winners and losers day-to-day.

Query (3) was another case where Wikipedia dropped out of the top ten, and (7) saw an Amazon product page fall from #1 to #10. In the case of (3), Yelp moved up and went from one ranking in the top ten to two. In both cases, the big sites regained their positions on 12/15, which is certainly interesting. If we look at the MozCast 'Big 10' data, though, Wikipedia was still #1 and Amazon #2 on 12/14, and the overall SERP share of the Big 10 didn't move much.

The Bigger Mystery

So, where does all of this leave us? A handful of people were kind enough to send me evidence of search traffic losses on 12/14, but it's very difficult to reconcile these specific cases against MozCast's sampling of top ten SERPs. I can't pinpoint any single factor here, but it seems clear that the amount of change was unusual, and it can't be simply explained by any single event (this data was all recorded prior to the tragic events in Connecticut, for example).

It's possible that Google made a small change ' so small that they didn't even consider it an 'update' ' that had unexpected repercussions. It's possible that something non-algorithmic but still under Google's control happened, such as processing a large chunk of disavow requests (we have no evidence of this ' just covering the bases). It could be that a small set of highly influential sites, like Wikipedia, made large-scale changes. Or it could just be a massive coincidence (although my gut still says no on this one).

I'd welcome further data and discussion. We're actively working to expand the MozCast data set, and the next version of it will include some enhancements, including a keyword set that's cleanly divided across some major categories/verticals. We'll also be working in the new year to automate some of the analysis tools, so that we can process large numbers of SERPs more quickly. We're learning as we go, and I hope the exploration is useful.

How Communication Resolves Internal Issues

After working at a handful of consulting agencies, as well as starting my own businesses, I have learned how to anticipate, spot, defuse, and resolve different levels of issues and interpersonal challenges in order to keep teams focused and on track. When the stakes are high and everybody on the team is dedicating themselves to the success of their clients, their company, their team, and their own personal development, it is critical that it's somebody's job to own conflict resolution within the organization - even if that person is you!

Push yourself and your teammates to communicate early and often, even when the individual doesn't think the problem is easily solvable. From my experience, most issues arise from a lack of communication or a misunderstanding. Internal conflict and issues can lead to unhappy clients, unhappy employees, and unproductive teams.

Over the years, I have learned that keeping people happy, focused, and efficient at their job while still making sure they have the ability to be creative, be heard, and express their passion/ability in a meaningful way is an art form, and today I will share some of the specifics around how I have managed this process successfully to date.

This post was written for:

• Individuals that manage their own team or company
• Individuals whose job requires them to effectively interact with multiple teams/departments
• Individuals that manage client relationships
• Individuals who one day aspire to be managers themselves and want to set themselves up for success when they finally take that opportunity

Clearly communicate the company's mission, vision, and culture (values)

It's extremely important for a company to have a clearly defined mission, vision, and sense of culture (values). Equally crucial is to communicate these things on a somewhat consistent basis to the members of your team and to periodically review them to make sure that they are growing and evolving as your business grows. Regardless of whether you are a big fortune 500 company or a small three person team, it will serve you, your partners, and your employees well to have a sense of purpose, direction, and a core set of values from which to make decisions and keep everyone focused.

Here are times and places within the organization you should look to communicate this information:

• During interviews, which can ensure that you are hiring individuals who are the right fit for your company
• On-boarding processes for new hires
• Company-wide meetings
• Team meetings
• Regular employee reviews (semi-annual, annual, etc..)
• Posting it visibly inside the office (by the entrance, in lunch areas, etc...)

Grovo is a company doing a tremendous job at communicating their core values

Company Values Board at the Entrance of Grovo

For smaller businesses or managers of a  team, it can be daunting to create a mission, vision, and culture. If this is not something your company has defined, you can start by making sure that whenever a new individual joins your team, someone is responsible for making sure that the employee has a clear understanding of why they were brought into the company.

An example of a clear "why" for a SEO company could be:

"We hired you as an SEO consultant to handle anywhere between 3-5 clients of your own, deliver value for your clients, and retain and grow the relationship over time."

Another example for an executive role could be:

"We hired you to research, build, and innovate upon a new marketing channel for our company. The goal for your role is to have this channel up and running within six months and expand into the European Market within 12-18 months."

This immediately establishes a clear definition and direction for that individual, as well as begins to paint a picture of how their role fits in within the rest of the team. By clearly defining and communication the "why" to that individual, you avoid potential confusion and frustration by this team member down the road.

Another added benefit of making sure every person on the team is clear in their role and what the company/team manager expects of them, is they will have a clear framework for making better decisions. They will know how to treat/work with their co-workers, have the ability to self reflect and up with solutions on their own, and encouraging others to live up to their full potential. This empowers people to solve their own issues by asking themselves 'What would my company expect of me in this situation?'

Effective communication creates problem solvers, NOT problem creators

I often espouse to my colleagues that 'just because we all speak English doesn't mean we speak the same language.' I believe that taking into account the audience/person you are speaking to, as well as considering their specific listening, learning, and comprehension types is extremely vital in being an effective communicator. It is not enough just to talk AT someone. When you want a person or group of people to truly listen, process, and interpret what you are saying, you have to think about things from their perspective and demonstrate you've put thought into their considerations, not just what you plan to communicate.

Below is a list of questions I ask myself before I attempt to communicate with another individual.

• What is this person's or group's communication type? (brief/succinct/to the point OR detail-oriented/needs lots of examples/very thorough)

• How much does this person or group value me as a person?

• How much do I think this person or group will value the things I say?

• Have I earned this person's or group's trust and respect?

• Is what I'm about to communicate applicable to this person or group?

• Have I spent time listening to them when they have communicated to me in a way they deemed meaningful?

• What mood is this person or group in?

• If I plan to communicate something at this time, will this person or group be focused on what I'm communicating?

• Do I want this person or group to find what I'm communicating to be memorable?

• If I want this person or group to take action off the back of what I'm communicating, how actionable am I making it?

Building a successful framework for creating, setting, and reviewing expectations

Every company should build a framework for creating, setting, and reviewing expectations. This ensures that as people and teams grow, become more efficient/effective, and blow past existing targets, company expectations are growing alongside it in an organic way.  This is also a great way to encourage personal development and growth. 

Creating expectations (goals)

When creating expectations (goals) for those within your organization, it's important to map out what is required from the position, from the individual/team, and from the business. This will help define what success looks like. When defining expectations, it's always important to leave an area of flexibility so that the person can help define expectations that match also match their passion/goals/strengths. Don't just look to meet your needs, but create a win-win situation for the individual as well.

Setting expectations for everyone at the company

In both the world of consulting and working in-house, there is nothing more important than setting expectations (with the exception being delivering on your primary job competency). This applies to setting a client's expectations, setting your boss's expectations, and even setting up your own expectations. It's important to make sure all expectations are clear, consistent, and that you regularly revisit them to make sure they haven't shifted over time, otherwise before you know it, this could be you (see below). Painful right?

Image Courtesy of Savage Chickens

Below is a list of the items I find helpful when setting someone's expectations:

• Make sure you set aside dedicated time in your schedule for this task

• Pick an environment that allows for few or no distractions

• Make sure everyone who needs to be involved is a part of the process

• Be sure to preface the conversation by telling the individual the purpose of this conversation, why it's important, who it's important to, and how important it is

• Be explicit/extremely clear

• Make sure you are pacing yourself when you communicate expectations and aren't speaking too quickly
   
• Find appropriate places to pause and ask the person or group, 'Does all of what I'm communicating make sense?'

• Encourage and allow the person or group to ask questions should something not make sense (even if that means pausing the conversation momentarily)

Once you have communicated all of this information to the person/group, take some extra time to have them communicate the information back to you. This is a great way to make sure they were listening and also keeps them engaged, especially when stakes are high (such as when deadlines have to be met, when reputation is on the line, or any type of sensitive situation is taking place). Below is an example of something I would say:

'I appreciate your time this afternoon. Now that we've gone through expectations together, I wanted to make sure I was clear and we are all on the same page. Would you mind communicating back to me the expectations that I have laid out to the best of your ability?'

Once you feel the person/group has taken in all of the information you have provided them and processed it, be sure to ask if they feel comfortable/confident living up to or exceeding those expectations. For example, I would say:

"That is exactly what I had in mind. Thank you for communicating that back to me. Based on what I have communicated today, do you feel like these are expectations you feel comfortable meeting or exceeding?"

Once you have a sense of whether or not the person/group feels confident they can meet or exceed expectations, don't hesitate to get a commitment from them. Getting a commitment makes it real for most people. Once it becomes real, the person feels both a moral and professional obligation to live up to those expectations. I would conclude by saying:

'That's great to hear! We are proud to have you on our team. Can I get a commitment that you will work towards meeting or exceeding these expectations over the coming 60-90 days?'

It is VERY, VERY IMPORTANT that with any verbal/written agreement between people, you must also leave room for flexibility. Any time you are too rigid, it puts people off or makes them feel like they can't bring challenges, mistakes, or missed targets up to you in instances when they can't meet expectations. That damages the communication and relationship between individuals/groups of people. 

'I want to be very clear that although these are the expectations we have for you right now, I also expect things to change because I know that nobody is perfect. What is more valuable to me than meeting expectations is ensuring that we maintain an open line of communication, so that in instances when expectations change or you're struggling to meet expectations, we can openly discuss it together and figure out a way to ensure your success here. How does that sound?'

At the end of every such conversation, I want to ensure the person/group feels good about the meeting we had and feels like they have clarity, direction, and an open channel of communication to feedback on how they are doing moving forward. I will then find a way to talk about something a bit more light-hearted and loosen up the tone of the conversation. A great way to do this is to tell them something personal about yourself and then ask them something personal about themselves.

"Really appreciate you making time to have this discussion with me. Do you have any fun plans for this weekend? <PAUSE AND LISTEN.> Oh that sounds like fun. My wife and I are planning a trip to the mountains later this month to go fishing and get some fresh air. I can't wait!'

Reviewing expectations (goals)

A great way to review expectations with people at your organization is to set-up a line manager meeting with them. This is an opportunity for each individual within the company to sit down in a one-on-one environment to discuss performance, personal goals, as well as struggles at work. Also set-up quarterly reviews to make sure that each individual is on track for meeting or exceeding agreed upon expectations (goals). Both types of reviews provide multiple touch points throughout the year to ensure things are on track and in areas where something is lacking, defining solutions to get back on track or reset expectations.

Scaling communication: what happens as offices get bigger and/or open up in multiple locations?

As companies grow and expand into new territories, communication, knowledge sharing, and time for one-on-one chats become more challenging to execute effectively.

Image Courtesy of SpaceToday

Bob,

Keeping a pulse on your organization

As organizations grow, mature, and age, it's important to keep a hand on the pulse of your company and its ever changing needs. Find ways to figure out what your organization needs in order to be successful and invest in infrastructure. So many organizations depend on people in order to solve problems and as a result, it's crucial to find solutions that connect people, create engagement amongst teams, and facilitate learning.

Clearing Up Digital Marketing Confusion Among SMBs

Following up on last week's post inspired by ILM West, one of the most striking statistics presented by BIA Kelsey's analysts in L.A. a couple weeks ago was this one: 42% of small business owners said their top priority for using Facebook was customer acquisition. In the audience that day, I allowed myself a discreet LOL and shook my head.  

Seriously?

I can't remember ever purchasing anything on Facebook after reading a comment in my news feed from my friends or even directly from businesses that I've liked. As a digital marketer, I'm usually a bit of an outlier when it comes to consumer behavior, but according to a Reuters/Ipsos survey earlier this year, that behavior puts me in an overwhelming majority of Facebook users. Even taking ads into account, only 20% of the population has ever bought anything as a result of seeing it on Facebook.  

The ever-voluble-and-astute Mike Blumenthal beat me to the punch somewhat with his column highlighting this disconnect between business owners and consumers. Citing a client-commissioned study of consumer behavior in searching for a lawyer, forget 20% -- only 2% think of any social network when they're looking to hire an attorney. Let alone the singular network of Facebook.

While Facebook has recently started to offer an extremely efficient two-step ad product to help business owners get more Likes, and future products related to Nearby might be extremely compelling for SMB's, it's hard to conceptualize Facebook in its current iteration as a primarily transactional platform.

It struck me that business owners might have a similarly large misconception when it comes to their expectations of loads of other digital marketing options. For instance, although most business owners who run daily deals expect a fire hose of new customers, one frequently-cited study from Rice and Cornell Universities finds that 78% of daily deal purchasers were already customers of the business from which they purchased the deal. And while mobile apps are all the rage right now, few business owners realize that just having an app doesn't mean it will automatically pop up on Apple or Android's recommended list to be seen by oodles of new prospects.

The linked graphic in the paragraph above attempts to help business owners prioritize the marketing strategies they choose based largely on the time-vs.-money spectrum. If you work with small businesses, though, perhaps it would be helpful to take one step back and first ask them about their primary goals for their digital marketing campaigns, whether or not you offer the services to meet those goals.

My hope is that this follow-up graphic (below) makes that discussion a whole lot easier for you as a marketer. And if you're a small business owner trying to figure this stuff out for yourself, I hope it helps you prioritize your marketing efforts based on your higher-level business goals.

What do you guys think? Are you more or less confused about digital marketing than you were before? Do you have any suggestions for how to improve the graphic (besides fixing the title so it doesn't end with a preposition)?

Marketing Analytics and the Problem of Attribution Modeling

Guys, we need to talk about attribution modeling. It's a hot issue in our industry and most of us (SEOmoz included) aren't doing it as well as we want to be. It's tough stuff. Mike P from Distilled gave a great MozCon presentation on the topic, but most of us aren't anywhere close to that sophisticated - and even his model is impacted by Google Analytics' limitations.

It's been covered in far more detail elsewhere, but in a nutshell: attribution modeling attempts to solve the problem of which channel gets credit when a user touches multiple channels prior to converting. Many marketers simply throw up their hands and say the last touch gets all the credit ' but then we have to live with the knowledge that some of our efforts are far more effective than we give them credit for.

Not-so-super modeling

Supermodel by Soggydan on Flickr

Unfortunately, attribution modeling is very hard to do well for a lot of reasons: 

• Any site to which users return daily (like, for example, SEOmoz.org) quickly fills up with touches that may or may not be related to conversions.
• Channels like social media and community building are often a first touch but rarely the only touch before conversion, meaning they tend to get less credit than they deserve.
• Attributing offline sales to online efforts can be very painful, not to mention tracking one user's conversion path as she uses multiple devices during her buying decision.
• In our post-Panda world, we're spending a ton of time and effort on content that may end up on third party sites, opening us up to the near-impossible task of tracking view-through conversions.

In my opinion, however, the biggest problem with the attribution models available to us today is that their roots lie in web analytics tools like Google Analytics. This means that attribution models tend to be biased toward on-site efforts. The bulk of our marketing efforts doesn't happen on-site, so why should our measurement? Our competitors certainly aren't doing things on our site, so why should we content ourselves with on-site data?

Web-analytics-based attribution models also tend to break up sources at the channel level: organic search, social media, direct traffic, etc. Anyone who's worked for months on driving traffic from Twitter and then had one tweet from Rand break their site can tell you not all social media touches are created equal, so why lump them all into Social Media?

Finally, attribution models are incredibly difficult to implement for success metrics beyond conversion (more on that later).

Marketing analytics is about campaigns, not channels

Here at the MozPlex, we've been talking a lot about marketing analytics: the way we measure and optimize our marketing activities. I think Joanna put it best in her post: 'Marketing analytics is the act of looking past mere website results, and asking yourself, 'How did that marketing campaign really go?''

Marketing analytics means going beyond the data we can get from our web analytics tool so you can measure off-site and even offline activities. Capturing that additional data about how your off-site and on-site marketing activities are performing allows you to test with greater confidence, and as marketers, we should always be testing. It's probably not as simple as 'social media doesn't drive as many conversions as organic search.' Instead, we can test how to spend our time and money - which levers to pull at which time and in which way - to attract, keep, and delight our customers. At the same time, we can take a cross-channel, holistic view of our efforts to see what messages are resonating best.

All conversions aren't created equal

Of course, one thing we want to do with our marketing efforts is make more money. ROI-driven modeling is always going to be part of what we're measuring. However, modern marketers are driving for more than just the lead or the sale or the free trial. We're looking at micro-conversions like newsletter signups. We're watching and participating in conversations about our brand. We're investing in customer happiness. We're tracking shares, tweets, mentions, and views ' and we're keeping an eye on how are competitors are doing, too.

In addition to major conversions, marketing analytics is about tracking customer loyalty.

Forever Friends by dprotz, on Flickr

We can often gain as much revenue from keeping our existing customers happy as from getting new ones. What happens after the conversion?

Marketing analytics is also about tracking brand identity. This is becoming more and more important as the major search engines focus more and more on brand strength as a quality indicator. This is another area where typical attribution models just don't go far enough. Brand-centric campaigns are as much about generating conversation and positive feelings as they are about directly causing more conversions ' this makes it harder to prove value if conversions are your only KPI. Branding has an influence on direct traffic, but it also has a big influence on organic search traffic from branded keywords.

So, should that traffic still count as organic search, if branding efforts are what inspired the search in the first place? This is another area where a more campaign-centric view can provide more insight than simply attributing conversions to channels.

Getting closer to marketing analytics

We're still in the early days of true marketing analytics, which means we're still mashing up data from a bunch of different tools and struggling to find the right ways to track campaigns. In the meantime, we can start hacking our web analytics' attribution monitoring tools to go beyond simple channel attributions:

Advanced metrics for attribution modeling

• Top referrers (separated out from the rest of referral traffic)
• Top keywords (separated out from the rest of the keywords)
• Long-tail keywords (same deal)
• Top partners and/or affiliates
• (not provided) search traffic
• Branded and non-branded search traffic
• Individual social networks (A friend and a follower may not be the same!)
• Individual feeds
• Individual paid advertising sources

We can also start thinking of (and tracking) our data with a marketing analytics mindset:

Advanced metrics for marketing analytics

• Messages
• Type of touch (Branding? Promotion? Retention? Happiness?)
• Type of product
• Audience
• Time of day
• Conversations

In the end, marketing analytics is more useful than straight-up attribution modeling, because it allows you to view your marketing efforts holistically. When you view individual customer touches as part of a larger whole instead of siloed by medium, you can take a longer and more customer-driven view of your marketing efforts.