Moving to a New Location? Don't Forget about Local Search

It's obviously not uncommon for small businesses to move -- fluctuating rents, growth, lifestyle concerns for the business owner or employees, and any number of factors make good reasons to move. However, few business owners understand the Local Search headaches they may be creating for themselves or their customers as a result of a move.

Celia Bell, Assistant Director of SCORE's Austin chapter, is currently experiencing some of those headaches and sent me an email last week to ask for my advice on how to alleviate them. Given her essential help with Local University Austin next week, it was the least I could do to respond. The problem Celia's having is so common, though, that I thought I'd just turn my advice into a blog post/case study.

The situation

SCORE is a nationwide volunteer-driven non-profit organization that mentors small business owners and prospective entrepreneurs in 340 markets across the country. Each of its chapters operates relatively independently from a physical location, with significant support from the parent organization -- not unlike a typical commercial franchise or chain-store model.

SCORE's Austin chapter recently moved to a location about eight miles northwest of its old local headquarters. Unfortunately, Google was displaying its former headquarters right on the main search result for 'SCORE Austin,' and SCORE clients were actually visiting the old address for meetings and workshops. (In fairness to Google, other search engines were confused as well, though not quite to the same extent.)

 

The goal of this exercise: Ensure all prominent web, mobile, and app search results display only the current, proper information for the SCORE chapter.

Getting started

SCORE's volunteer webmaster only increased her frustration level by attempting to edit the group's Google Plus Local page over and over again, with nothing to show for it. Sadly, I suspect many business owners (and marketing agencies) go through the same process, with equally unsatisfying results. I hope that this guide yields more success and helps explain why the process must be more comprehensive than just a quick edit at Google.

The reason that simply correcting misinformation about your business at Google does not solve the problem is that Google's Local index pulls in business data from a nearly-infinite number of sources across the web. Some of these are more authoritative than others (such as those provided by Localeze, Infogroup, and Acxiom--see below), but a business owner's verified listing is only one source of this data. If all you're doing is updating your Google+ Local Page, you're going to continue to see problems because "new" erroneous data will constantly feed into Google from all of its other sources.

Assessing the damage

One of the central tenets of local search engine optimization is to ensure that your business's Name, Address, and Phone number, NAP for short, is consistent everywhere it's mentioned around the web (and offline, too). Your NAP is basically your digital thumbprint -- Google's unique identifier for an individual business.

When you move locations, you create an inconsistency in the A of your NAP. Sadly, there's no '301 redirect' or 'forward location' command that you can give the local search engines, similar to what you can file with the U.S. Postal Service. Google, Bing, and others can't identify your new NAP as belonging to the same business. In the best case, inconsistencies lead to lower search engine rankings for keyword searches you want to rank for. But in the worst case (SCORE's), not even customers who are specifically looking for your business can find you! So, unfortunately, it's up to you to update this information yourself.

The first thing I did was to run an Accuracy Report on GetListed for both SCORE's old and new NAP information. I wanted to see which search engines had indexed which location(s), and in what manner.

Running this report provided three key insights:

1) SCORE's phone number did not change during the move.

2) Their business name is actually an acronym for 'Service Corps Of Retired Executives' -- which is how they're listed on four of the most prominent local search engines:

US Score-Services Corps of Retired (Google)
US SCORE-SVC CORPS OF RETIRED (Infogroup)
US Score-Svc Corps of Retired (YP.com)
Service Corps of RTRD Exctvs Assctn (Nokia)

3) SCORE recently implemented a nationwide effort to unify branding across all of its chapters--moving from an older strategy of each chapter operating its own unique website (scoreaustin.org, e.g.) to giving each chapter its own subdomain on the national website (austin.score.org).

Item #1 is a major advantage over many small businesses who move locations -- a constant phone number means that Google and other search engines should be able to verify changes much more quickly. Item #2 is a disadvantage, since neither the old NAP or new NAP is 100% clean. This will mean multiple rounds of clean up. Item #3 may be a disadvantage depending on the email address in which SCORE's Google Plus Local pages are claimed.

The cleanup process

After running your Accuracy Report, go back to Google and perform a search, where your query is any combination of incorrect/old NAP information. Make note of the webpages that Google returns near the top of its rankings, as Google is likely pulling data from most of these sites. I find it useful to keep track of this information on an Excel or Google Spreadsheet, from a task management standpoint.

You can also click through to any Plus Pages returned by these searches. If you're lucky, sometimes Google will even tell you a few of the sites they are pulling this information from towards the bottom of those pages. In SCORE's case, Citysearch was a very important site feeding Google bad information.

You should also search Google Maps for out-of-date information. Once you do, click the little triangular drop-down button and select "Report a problem" at the bottom of the list. On the report a problem screen, correct any misinformation and explain to Google why you are requesting the change (i.e. you've moved!).

Pay special attention to the bottom of the webpages where your information is incorrect. Many of these are local directory sites where you will be able to update the information yourself--but they, in turn, may be getting this misinformation from another source. Good examples of this in SCORE's case were sites like this one for the Honolulu Star-Advertiser -- a newspaper that was not even in SCORE's market -- which was supplied with data by both Local.com and Acxiom.

In addition to fixing your data on these local directories, you'll want to fix it on sites that supply them with this data. These sites are Acxiom, Infogroup (ExpressUpdateUSA) and Localeze. Together, these are the three most important business data providers to Google, and if you want to update your old information permanently, you'll need to update it at all three of these sites. These companies also feed most major mobile apps like Facebook Nearby, Foursquare, and Apple Maps.

After searching Google and Google Maps, reporting problems directly, and keeping note of all of their erroneous data sources, you'll want to check one more site that Google operates: Google MapMaker. Think of MapMaker as a Wikipedia for locations. Google users from all of the world can add, edit, delete, and consolidate business information using this tool. For the most part, each edit is reviewed by other Google users before it goes live to the public.  

Not many business owners (or even marketers, for that matter) know about MapMaker, but it seems to have become a very important element in Google's business data cluster over the last few years, and it can be very helpful in cleaning up out-of-date information. Remember the "Report a problem" step above? My understanding is that that process actually feeds into the MapMaker community, but I've found that edits requested directly in MapMaker sometimes get processed more quickly than "reported problems."

To request an edit, simply click the "Edit" link under any incorrect listing for your business on MapMaker, update your information, and tell the community why you are asking for a change (i.e. your business has moved!).

Whew! This all seems a little complicated. As I said above, though, keeping track of all of the sites where you're listed incorrectly via an Excel or Google Spreadsheet can make things a lot simpler.  

Most of these major data sources for Google allow you to update information on out-of-date listings by creating a free account. Note: it's important to UPDATE old, out-of-date listings rather than create new ones. Just creating new, correct ones won't make the old, incorrect ones go away. During the course of your research, you may also find some independently-operated sites (such as local libraries or chambers of commerce), where you'll just have to reach out via email or by placing a phone call.

In my spreadsheet, I typically enter the profile page along with username, email address, and password information for each major data source on its own line. I then make a note of the last time I "touched" each listing and any notes that will help me remember special treatment for each.  

It's a best practice to choose a generic email address for your business (something like frontdesk@mybusiness.com) rather than a personal one (doglover@yahoo.com), so that future employees or agencies will be able to log in and update your information without you giving away any personal details.

Frustratingly, even though this is 2013 and this is the INTERNET, it typically takes 2-3 months for all of these updates to flow through the Local Ecosystem. So you may continue to see incorrect information showing up at Google while it assimilates all of these changes. If you've followed the process above, however, you should see a permanent update of your information at Google and other major search engines and mobile apps.

N.B. #1 I realize this guide is U.S.-Centric, and here on the SEOmoz Blog we have many international users. Over the course of the Spring, I'll be releasing Local Search Ecosystems for a number of major search markets around the world, including the UK, Germany, France, Spain, and Brasil. I already released the Canadian Ecosystem last year.  Although the data aggregators that feed Google vary across the world, the same process can be followed in other countries.

N.B. #2 I realize the additional step of querying Google and Google Maps for out-of-date NAP information seems unnecessary and duplicative, given what GetListed.org is designed to do. We are currently working on surfacing this information much more efficiently within the next version of GetListed, so stay tuned!

Fixing bad data across the Local Search ecosystem: The Cliffs Notes Version

1) Search Google.com and Maps.Google.com for your business name and city.
1a) In this era of increasing mobile engagement, you may also want to check Apple Maps or other primary mobile applications.

2) Run an Accuracy Report on GetListed.org for both correct and incorrect information returned by Google.

3) Search Google.com for your incorrect NAP. 

4) From your Google.com searches and GetListed.org Accuracy Report, keep track of major data sources that list your information incorrectly in an Excel or Google Spreadsheet.

5) Search Google Maps for your incorrect NAP and "Report a problem" for any listing that is incorrect. 

6) Visit Infogroup, Localeze, and Acxiom to check for out-of-date information.

7) Create accounts on major search engines and update incorrect listings.

8) Search Google MapMaker for your incorrect NAP.  Make edits as needed for any listing that is incorrect. 

9) Keep track of your accounts and your progress in an Excel or Google Spreadsheet.

Other great resources for helping you move locations digitally

• Marking Your Place as Closed or Moved from the Google Places for Business Help Section
• Google Support Guru Joel Headley on the best way to move your business
• Moving? No Need for Your Local Search Ranking to Suffer (VIUS)
• 31 Places to Change Your Business Address (Outspoken Media)
• Closing an Old Google Local Listing vs Editing It (NGS Marketing)
• How to Remove Duplicate Listings from Different Business Directories (NGS Marketing)
• Improved Messaging for Moved Businesses (Mike Blumenthal)

Top Three Inbound Marketing Strategies for Mobile Apps

Disclaimer: This post is an extension of the recent Mozinar "Standing Out in the Sea Of Apps: Building an Audience of Fans for Your Mobile App's Success" and covers questions from audience Q&A. You can watch the recorded Mozinar here!

Mobile. The very word makes some of us cringe these days. Everywhere you look in the marketing world, you see signs of it ' mobile this, mobile that' Is it just me, or is it a bit overkill?

Sometimes, I feel like we're pushing the idea of mobile to the limit. But then I look at the numbers:

• There are currently 750,000 apps in the App Store alone.
• These apps have over 40 billion downloads.
• There are one billion smartphones existing in the world, and that number is growing.

Whoa.

There are over one billion consumers looking for information on their mobile devices, and you know what works when consumers are looking for information? Inbound marketing. 

In this post, I share the top three most effective inbound marketing tips app marketers can use to begin making waves in the world of mobile. 

Inbound marketing wins in mobile

The opportunity to connect deeply with consumers through inbound marketing has never been larger than it is today, and mobile is fueling a huge amount of the growth. When it comes to apps, all you need to know is this: apps have already surpassed the web when it comes to consumer time-spent, and are second only to time spent watching television.

The secret is this: very few companies are taking advantage of this space. It's 2013, but in the world of mobile apps, it's like it's 2001 all over again.

App developers and their audiences need help acquiring customers profitably and not focusing simply on vanity metrics, such as number of downloads. That's where inbound marketing comes in.

Inbound marketing on the web has matured and grown a lot over the past several years. We can learn a lot from our past and apply it to our future (i.e. we can take what we know and apply it to mobile marketing). Below are three simple inbound marketing strategies for mobile apps that are delivering absolutely incredible results.

1. Be social

By this point, we should all understand how important social is to any good marketing strategy. However, when it comes to mobile, social is just what we do as humans. We text and email like crazy. We ride the bus and check Facebook. We Instagram our lunches and Tweet our random observations while standing in line at Starbucks.

These days, to be mobile is to be social. This means that social is a perfect venue for conversations about your mobile app's offerings. Let's take a look at two of social's leaders and how they can be used for mobile purposes.

Twitter

A while back, Nike ran a Twitter-focused experiment to introduce a new mobile app they'd created. They proactively shared their content and the app with likely consumers who were sharing their athletic activities on Twitter. The results astounded them. Their two week experiment yielded:

• Over three clicks per outbound Tweet
• A doubling of the positive ratings and reviews in the app store for their app
• As many downloads from the Twitter campaign as their largest paid channel

Although Nike is a large company, the results of their campaign fascinating at any level. The last part is the most interesting: they received as many downloads from their social 'experiment' as they did through their largest paid channel. The ROI was extraordinary.

Facebook

It's impossible to talk about the social landscape without bringing up Facebook. For mobile, Facebook can be incredibly important. For certain categories of apps (movies, tv, games, news, and others), connecting with Facebook drives a massive increase in revenue and engagement from users. Take a look at the data from some of the most popular apps who have integrated a Facebook login.

Facebook isn't necessarily the best option for every app developer, but when it's done well, it's clear that integrating Facebook into your app can really improve your results.

2. Tell your own story

Consumers generally surf and search for apps from within the app store. As such, making sure that you've optimized your app store presence is absolutely crucial.  Getting discovered by a large audience of interested customers can be as simple as:

• Selecting the right name
• Investing in a compelling and memorable icon
• Experimenting with categories and keywords, and
• Testing and optimizing your app's description (social proof in the description itself works wonders ' take a look at the description that document signing app SignNow has crafted)

You must own your presence in the app store and also make it another channel for telling your app's story. Most app developers gloss over many of the important details that can affect downloads for an app. It's important to not let the app store tell your app's story for you. If you do, you'll be missing out on a large marketing opportunity.

The app store is only one place to tell your story. Using your website and other channels to share why people use your app and what problems you're solving is an increasingly powerful method of enabling app discovery, and it also makes your app seem more "human."

Because apps are so exceptional at providing task-oriented solutions in small consumable packages, journalists and bloggers are actively searching for apps they can share with their audiences. The largest tech blogs and app review sites routinely drive as many installations as a feature in the app store. Take the time to produce content and information that will appeal to journalists and share your story in enough detail that they'll discover your app and want to learn more. For a great example, take a look at how the small team behind Chewsy has shared their unique take on restaurant and dish reviews with publications like Forbes. By sharing your story with these outlets, it's likely that your downloads will increase. 

3. Court your audience of fans from day one

It should be clear that you want to own your story and tell it in the app store and elsewhere. However, there is another, more powerful route - having your customers tell great stories about you. Not only is this personally gratifying (nothing's better than hearing from a customer that you've developed something that delights them), but word of mouth is incredibly effective. Consumer studies continue to show that recommendations from the people we know are trusted the most for the average consumer.

Now, how do you get your fans to go tell their friends and say good things in public?

For many web businesses, this is an incredible challenge because there's no centralized source for customers to share their thoughts. For mobile apps, that's not the case - the app stores give you a great venue for this in the form of the ratings and reviews sections.

But how do consumers get to the app store to review your app? Despite the existence of easy opinion-sharing venues most customers don't speak up. In fact, it appears that less than 0.1% of downloads result in a rating or review in the app store. Most consumers need a nudge ' a reminder that they can share their thoughts and opinions.

This is why you should be proactively connecting with your customers from day one. If your app has a returning audience it means that there are people who are a fan of what you've built. Those customers are highly likely to share their fandom with the world, if you make it easy for them to do so.

The wonderful thing about developing apps is that you can use them as a direct channel to talk with your customers. Reaching out to your biggest fans inside your app, and connecting more deeply with them is a powerful strategy for increasing customer loyalty and motivating a group of evangelists.

Connecting with your audience of fans certainly increases the number of customers leaving great reviews for your apps, but it's about more than just reviews. It's about the recognition that we walk around with our smartphones all day long.

When we take a look at our phone in a meeting or open it at dinner, we're around others, introducing them to apps we love. By communicating closely with your customer base, you can massively change your awareness and download trajectory. We've talked with a number of developers who can map their adoption geographically. Word of mouth, in the real world, is a major inbound channel for mobile which every app developer can influence in a meaningful way.

As this Microsoft ad from a few years ago uncomfortably reminded us ' we're addicted to our phones.

So, mobile

'is a term we're all going to be hearing a LOT over the next several years. As big and as fast as this opportunity is growing, the mobile apps industry is in its infancy and could benefit from the expertise that any great inbound marketer can bring to the table.

A simple and consistent focus on:

• Being social
• Telling your story effectively, and
• Empowering your customers to share their stories about you

...will be certain to pay off in the long run.

When it comes to mobile apps, inbound marketing looks a lot like the industry we've all grown to love. Provide a tremendous amount of value for your target customers and reap the rewards of building customer acquisition channels that increase in efficiency over time. 

Thanks so much for taking the time to read my thoughts on the emerging mobile app opportunity. Now, I'd love to hear from you. Have you been utilizing your inbound marketing prowess for mobile apps? Which strategies are working for you? Did I miss any strategies which are incredibly effective? Leave your thoughts in the comments below, or find the entire Apptentive team on Twitter!

The SEO of Responsive Web Design

Will Critchlow announced back in November that Distilled's blog was updated with a new responsive design, but it occurred to me recently that we never went into the specifics of why responsive web design is so great. Responsive design has been a hot topic in online marketing for the past few months, but is it really going to become an industry standard?

Short answer: yep.

Responsive web design means that you don't have separate mobile, tablet, and PC versions of your site: the site adapts to whatever size screen it's being displayed on. Regardless of what device a visitor is using to access your site, they'll see all of the content you have to offer (no more partial-content mobile versions of sites) and they'll see it in readable way.

With a 55% increase in smartphone subscriptions in 2012 alone, responsive web design is the future of online marketing.

How does it work?

Sounds too good to be true, doesn't it? It all started with a fairly simple theory from Ethan Marcotte in a 2010 article titled "Responsive Web Design." Rather than creating a single webpage that is 800px across and centers itself on the screen, responsive webpages are composed of elements that size, shape, and place themselves based on the width of the browser screen. Elements determine the screen size using CSS media queries.

Let's start with a simple example on a grid, using 9 rectangular elements labeled A'I. On a small screen, like a tablet or an older computer with fewer pixels, the elements would display themselves in a 3 x 3 grid:

When the screen is wider, those elements can spread out:

When it's narrower, they can stack:

Now, here's a real life, complex, and, might I say, ingenious example. Microsoft's website uses these sections:

When the screen gets smaller, elements stack differently:

For a more interactive example, go to www.microsoft.com and have some fun changing the browser screen.

In their design, Microsoft keeps all of the elements from the desktop version of the page to view on other devices. But one of the biggest differences between desktop sites and mobile sites is that mobile sites just don't have room or the browser memory to have so much content on one page. For example, Smashing magazine gets rid of the extra stuff as your screen size gets smaller:

Here is their desktop view:

The full-sized page has two levels of navigation on the left, the main content in the middle, and search and ads on the right. It centers the main content in the middle, where you'll be looking, but makes use of the ample width of the desktop screen.

Moving on to the iPad-sized tablet view:

When the screen doesn't have as much room on either side, Smashing Magazine keeps the ads and search on the right, but it moves the navigation to the top in a clever way that is noticeable, but doesn't take up too much space.

Here's their Kindle Fire-sized tablet view:

The ads were sacrificed as screen space became too valuable. Search was moved to the top, so that second tier of navigation was moved to the side to make sure the main content didn't start too low on the page.

And now, onto mobile:

On the mobile view, the ads are still gone, along with the share buttons. The navigation has changed from a constant element on the page to a small drop down at the top. The search bar was put in the space available once the top navigation was gone.

As you can see, responsive web design gives you an amazing amount of control. With some creativity, a responsive web design can convert almost anything from PC-optimized to mobile-optimized, to anything in between.

Why responsive design is good for SEO

So now you know that responsive design is a clever idea that, with the right set up, will cut down on web maintenance and content creation. But how does that help SEO?

Usability

Google wants to send visitors to the sites that they want to see. When searchers navigate to your site and immediately return to search engine results pages, Google makes a note that your site might not be the best choice for that search term.

If you have a mobile site that has less content or looks significantly different than your regular site, you'll frustrate return visitors who are looking for something they found on the desktop version. If you don't have a mobile site at all, 61% of visitors will return to Google to find a site that is easily readable. Either way, your bounce rate will rise and your rankings will drop. With a responsive web design, visitors will get all the content they want, in a format they can read.

Duplicate content

Don't worry, a mobile site with the same content as the main site won't be hit by Panda. But you'll still have the same content on two places on the web, which is bothersome for you and could bring visitors to the wrong version of your site. A responsively-designed website means that content is only in one place on the Internet.

Ranking for mobile searches

Google has said that it ranks sites optimized for mobile higher in mobile searches. Google recommends responsive web design, meaning your responsive designed site will rank as well on mobile search as a site designed specifically for mobile. That's especially useful for...

Link building

With a responsive web design, a link to your main site is a link to your mobile site as well. Mobile sites are still new, so your competition in mobile search is going to have significantly fewer backlinks. A responsively-designed website will have the backlinks of your original site, even while competing for mobile visitors. It'll give you an instant edge over there. And, as mobile usage rises and webmasters start linking to mobile sites, your backlinks from both mobile and desktop sites will combine for a stronger backlink profile.

Early adopter recognition

Making your site responsive now, when the topic is hot but largely unused, will get you noticed. Here are a few great examples:

• http://blogs.adobe.com/digitalmarketing/digital-marketing/mobile/responsive-web-design-and-web-analytics/
• http://inspirationfeed.com/inspiration/websites-inspiration/60-examples-of-responsive-website-design/
• http://www.clicknewz.com/5984/benefits-of-responsive-web-design-examples/
• And, of course, Microsoft and Smashing Magazine from this post.

As you can probably guess, if your site was previously unoptimized for tablet and/or mobile, you'll see a decreased bounce rate from those devices. We've seen the positive effects spread into the main site as well. On a fellow Distiller's site, implementing responsive web design increased visits by over 400% in a month:

That's an extreme example; the switch to responsive web design on Distilled's blog didn't have the same effect. However, results like this show that, in the right situation, responsive web design could bring amazing results.

The cons

Responsive web design isn't the Holy Grail of online marketing, though; there are some disadvantages you'll want to mull over before you decide to take the plunge.

Set up time

Moving to a responsive web design will take a significant amount of time from both your design team and your development team. It'll probably take longer than most redesigns you've been through since both teams will have to learn a completely new concept before they can implement it. On the plus side, when other sites start upgrading to responsive web design, you'll be ahead of the curve.

Large pages

If you have a lot of content on your desktop pages, responsive design means that all of that content has to be loaded on mobile pages. Can you imagine a poor phone trying to load all of this?

That's why sites like NYTimes.com and CNN.com have separate mobile versions that only display a small portion of all the articles and links they have on their desktop versions. If you have a site that's huge like that ' and is meant to be huge like that ' stick with separate mobile and desktop versions.

Mobile user experience

Since responsive web design confines you to the same pages and content on the mobile and desktop versions, it could limit your options for enhancing user experience. While I pointed out earlier that mobile users want the same content as desktop users, they're searching on a tiny screen with their fingers rather than a large screen with a mouse and keyboard, so their journey to that same content will feel completely different. If you have a really interactive or complicated site that needs to have different pathways to content, like Facebook, you might want to keep that mobile version of your site so you can have that control.

So, is responsive web design right for your site?

If your site is too large or too complicated and needs a mobile site, you're probably aware of it (and probably already have an amazing mobile site that shouldn't be messed with). But, what if you don't have a mobile site, or have a simple one and don't know if the switch to a responsive web design is worth it? You're going to do a little Google Analytics research:

Do I even need a mobile site?

Start by going to the Mobile Overview report, which is a Standard Report in the Audience section under the Mobile drop down. If the number of mobile and tablet visits is under 5% of your total traffic, you probably don't need to worry about creating a mobile-specific site (yet: this number is only going to grow).

If it's more than that, click on the Goal Set or Ecommerce metrics set ' whichever you use to track conversions ' at the top of the page, under the Explorer tab:

Are your desktop visits converting significantly more than mobile visits? If mobile conversion rate is less than half of desktop conversion rate, your site is performing below industry standard, and you need to optimize for mobile visitors.

How does my mobile site look on their screens?

Go to the Standard Reports > Audience > Mobile > Devices and change the primary dimension to 'Screen Resolution.' You can change that right above the table, by clicking the Other drop down to the right of the line of other primary dimensions you could use. Try out the 10 most common screen resolutions that are used by your visitors. How does your mobile site look on them? Use Screenfly to see your site on different devices. You might be surprised by how many tablets or large phones are seeing an overly simplified site that isn't very compelling. Even if you have a mobile site that looks great on 50% of mobile visits, if it looks bad on the other 50%, you should consider responsive web design.

Does my mobile site give visitors what they want?

Look at the mobile bounce rate under Standard Reports > Mobile > Overview. When visitors land on your mobile site, is something making them leave more quickly than on a desktop? Mobile visitors should have roughly the same bounce rate as desktop visitors.

If you have the time, do a full mobile SEO audit to really identify what the mobile version of your site needs to look like. Aleyda Solis wrote up a great mobile audit guide on State of Search.

Your best option: move towards responsive web design slowly

If you'd like to move towards responsive web design slowly or already have a pretty good mobile site out there, consider making your site responsive so that it's optimized for desktop and tablet, but not mobile just yet. The design will be easier, but you'll get a first taste of the technical side, and you'll get better conversions for tablet users (which you probably haven't optimized for yet).

Ethan Marcotte explains how the coding works in his original article and developers have been creating themes for popular CMSs (for WordPress, for Drupal, and for Joomla).

Be aware that the technical implementation is fairly advanced, and there are a number of small mistakes you should watch out to avoid:

1. Use compressed images

You might have some gorgeous photos that load fine on the desktop version of your site, but those are going to have to be loaded on mobile versions as well. 74% of mobile users will leave after 5 seconds waiting for a page to load, so make sure that you compress your images as much as possible, and use them somewhat sparingly. Smush.it is a great tool for compressing images.

2. Design for all screen sizes

A lot of designers will want to design for one mobile size, one tablet size, and one desktop size, and just make a 'responsive' design that snaps the site into a different layout for those standard sizes. But we have large and small cell phones, tablets the size of Kindle Fires to 10' Samsung Galaxy Tabs, and desktop monitors as big as 30'. A responsive design is more about resizing the elements on a page as you have more pixels than it is about snapping one design into another. As designer Stephen Hay says, 'Start with the screen small first, then expand until it looks like sh*t. Time to insert a breakpoint!'

3. Always show all content

It might feel overwhelming to find a way to fit all of the content from the desktop version of a page onto a mobile version of a page, but that's the point of responsive web designs. In the examples described above, the only content that goes away is ads (which users probably didn't want in the first place) and some navigation (which is replaced by a simpler version of navigation). No actual content is hidden. Mobile visitors want just as much information and just as many options as desktop users do, so don't deprive them.

4.  Optimize for touch

You probably won't accidentally include an onmouseover JavaScript event on the mobile size of your site, but be aware that tablets can't hover with their mouse either, and someone on a desktop might be using Windows 8 and want to use touch. Best practice is to make your site completely accessible with touch-only, regardless of the screen size.

5.  Test on all browsers

Remember the good old days, when you complained about having to test your website on IE and Firefox? Now you've got:

Desktop:

• IE9 for Windows 7
• IE10 for Windows 8 (which doesn't run Flash)
• Firefox
• Chrome
• Safari

Tablet/Mobile

• Safari
• Default Android browser
• Chrome beta
• Dolphin
• Opera
• Firefox

And those are only the most popular ones. You'll have to test on all of those, at different screen resolutions, too.

But it's worth it

Switching over to a responsive web design will be a big challenge, but with the way the industry is moving, it'll prepare you for the future, and put you a step ahead of your competitors.

Have any of you made the switch? Any advice for those who haven't?

Another January Mozscape Index Has Been Released!

Just 13 days ago on January 11th, we released the first Mozscape index for 2013. And today, we're launching the latest January Mozscape index - another two indexes in one month! Mozscape data has been refreshed across all our applications so you can see the latest data in Open Site Explorer, the Mozbar, PRO campaigns, and the Mozscape API.

• 70,278,347,012 (70 billion) URLs
• 1,516,212,211 (1.5 billion) Subdomains
• 145,518,352 (145 million) Root Domains
•  783,206,227,396 (783 billion) Links
• Followed vs. Nofollowed
• • 2.24% of all links found were nofollowed
  • 56.43% of nofollowed links are internal
  • 43.57% are external
• Rel Canonical - 15.11% of all pages now employ a rel=canonical tag
• The average page has 78 links on it
• •  66.68 internal links on average
  •  11.07 external links on average

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

How Unique Does Content Need to Be to Perform Well in Search Engines? - Whiteboard Friday

We all know that content needs to be unique to rank highly in the SERPs, but how "unique" are we talking? From a content creation perspective, it's imperative to know what duplicate content really means and to understand the implications it can have on SEO.

In this week's Whiteboard Friday, Rand discusses what makes content unique in the eyes of the crawlers, and the bane of duplicate content.

Video Transcription

"Howdy SEOmoz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I want to take some time to talk about content duplication and content uniqueness, which is very important from an SEO perspective. It can also be important from a content marketing perspective.

For SEO purposes, search engines like to filter out what they view as duplicative content, things that are exactly the same. They never want to show you a set of results where result two, three, four, and five are all exactly the same article or are essentially the same three paragraphs repeated with the same photos embedded in them. It could be that content gets licensed among different parties. News vendors do this a lot. It could be that someone has done some plagiarism and actually stolen a piece. It could just be that someone is posting the same article in several different places on the web that accept content submissions. In any case, the engines are trying to filter this type of behavior out. They don't want to see that content because they know users are made happy by, "If I didn't like this result on this website, chances are I'm not going to like it on result number three on the different website." So they try and filter this stuff out.

From an SEO perspective and for content creators, it's therefore very important to understand, "What does that really mean? What is meant by duplicate content, and how unique do I really need to be?"

The first thing that I always like to talk about when we get into a discussion of content uniqueness is that content, when we talk about the content that the engines are considering for this, we're referring only to the unique material on a page. That excludes navigation, ads, footers, sidebars, etc.

I've got a page mockup over here, and you would exclude all this stuff - the logo, the navigation, the sidebars. Maybe this person is running some ads in the sidebar. Maybe they've got a little piece about themselves, and they've got a bunch of text down the right-hand side. Then they think, "Boy, I only have a couple of lines of text on this page and a photo and maybe a couple of bullet points. Is this unique from these other pages that look exactly the same except they have some different content in the content section?" This is the content. If you're worried that, "Oh no, I think that my pages might be kind of heavy and my content is kind of light," I wouldn't worry too much about that so long as you're doing everything else right. We'll talk about some of those. Number two, uniqueness applies to both internal and external sources. Copying either one can be trouble. It could be that these are other pages on your site and these are other pages somewhere else on the web where this content exists, and you're taking from those and putting those pieces on your site. That can be a problem in either of those cases. Internal duplication, usually engines will try and ignore it if it's small and subtle, just happens here and there. It's like, "Oh, there are four different versions of this page because they've got a print version, a mobile version. Okay. We'll try and canonicalize and figure that out."

You would be wise in these situations to use something like a rel=canonical. Or if you're consolidating pages after a big site move or a re-architecturing, something like that, a 301 is proper. But you should also be aware that this can happen from external stuff.

However, when I say that, what I don't mean to say and what I know a lot of people get confused about in the SEO world is this doesn't mean that you can't take a paragraph from Wikipedia and put it in a bigger article that you're writing, or cite a blogger and include a couple of phrases that they say, or take a piece from New York Magazine or from the Wall Street Journal, from Wired, or wherever you want and take, "Oh hey, I'm going to caption this, and I'm going to have a little clip of it. I'm going to put a video that exists on YouTube already." That's not duplicative so long as you are adding unique value.

Number three, uniqueness alone, some people get lost in the minutiae of the rules around SEO, the rules around search engines and they think, "Well, this content exists nowhere else on the web. So I just took someone else's and I changed all the words." You have technically provided unique content, but you have not provided unique value. Unique value is a very different thing. What I mean when I say "unique value" and what the search engines would like you to do and are building algorithms around is providing value that no other sources, no other sites on the web are specifically providing. That could mean that you take a look at the visitor's intent, the searcher's intent or your customer's intent and you say, "Hey, I'm going to answer each of these things that this person is trying to achieve."

If somebody searches for hotels in Cape Town, South Africa, well they're probably looking for a listing of hotels, but they probably have other intents as well. They might be interested in other stuff related to traveling there. They could be wanting to know things about weather. They could be wanting to know things about neighborhoods where these hotels are located. So providing unique value as opposed to just, "Hey, I'm going to take the content from Expedia's website and then I'm also just going to rewrite the paragraph about the hotels specifically," that's not going to help you. But if you were to do something like what Oyster Hotels does, where they actually send a reporter with a camera, a journalist essentially, to the location, they take tons of their own unique photos, and they write about the weather and the neighborhood and the hotel cleanliness and investigate all these sorts of things and provide true, unique value as well as unique content, now you're hitting on what you need to achieve the uniqueness that search engines are talking about when they talk about unique versus duplicate.

Four, there's this imagination that exists in the minds of folks in the SEO field, and has for a long time, that there must be some mythical percentage. If over here, "Oh, this is 100% duplicate and this is 0% duplicate, 100% unique and this is the 50/50 mark, there must be some imaginary, magical, if I just get to like right here at 41%, that's the number. Therefore I'm going to create a huge website and all my pages just have to hit that 47% mark." That is dead wrong. Just totally wrong. There's nothing like this.

The algorithms that you might imagine are so much more sophisticated than an exact percentile of what is and isn't duplicate, even when it comes to just studying the content in here. That specific percentage doesn't exist. They use such a vast array of inputs. I'll give you some examples.

You can see, for example, that an article that might be published on many different news sites, after it moves out of Google news and into the Google main index, sometimes duplicates will appear, and oftentimes those duplicates are the ones that are the most linked to, the ones that have lots of comments on them, the ones that have been socially shared quite a bit, or where Google has seen user usage data behaviors or previous behaviors on those sites that suggests that each site provides some sort of unique value, even if the content is exactly the same.

Like Bloomberg and Business Week are constantly producing the same articles. Business Insider will produce articles from all over the place. Huffington Post will take articles from places that writers submit, and it'll be published in different places. People will publish on one site, and then they'll publish privately on their own blog. Sometimes Google will list both, sometimes they won't. It's not about a percentage. It's about the unique value that's provided, and it's about a very sophisticated algorithm that considers lots of other features.

If you are in a space where you're competing with other people who are posting the same content, think about unique value and think about getting the user usage data, the branding, the social shares, the links, all of those things will be taken into consideration when it comes to, "Are we going to rank your site or this other site that's licensing your content or from whom you are licensing content?" Domain authority can play a big role in there.

The last thing I want to mention is that duplicate and low value content, because of Google's Panda update from 2011, Panda means that low quality content, duplicative content that exists on one part of your site can actually harm your overall site. I'd be very cautious if you're thinking, "Hey, let's produce an article section on our site that's just these 5,000 articles that we licensed from this other place or that we're copying from someone's blog. We might not get much SEO value from it, but we will get a little bit of extra search engine traffic." In fact, that can hurt you because as the Panda algorithm runs its course and sees, "Boy, this site looks like it copied some stuff," they might hurt your rankings in other places.

Google's been very specific about this, that duplicate, low quality content in one area can harm you across your entire site. Be mindful of that. If you're nervous about it, you can robot.txt that stuff out so engines don't crawl it. You can rel=canonical it back up to a category page. You could even not include that in search engines. Use the disallow meta noindex, or you could do it inside your Google Webmaster Tools, disallow crawling of those pages. These are all options for that kind of stuff.

All right everyone. Hope you've enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday and you'll go out there and create some unique and uniquely valuable content, and we'll see you again next week. Take care."

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Answer Customer Needs by Building a Customer Advisory Board

We sure do love feedback at Moz. One of our biggest contributors to feedback is our Customer Advisory Board (which we lovingly call CAB). Who doesn't love sharing the work they do with a group of awesome people, hearing their insights, and learning how to provide the most value to users based on their feedback?

Dana Lookadoo sporting her Customer Advisory Board shirt at MozCon.

A few weeks ago, our VP of Growth Marketing, Joanna Lord, did a Whiteboard Friday about 10 Ways to Get Feedback. I'd love to expand on this topic and share how we developed our CAB, what's worked well, and how we've improved.

Framing the CAB

We started the process of creating our Board over a year ago. Fortunately, our Director of Product, Samantha Britney, already had a fabulous framework formulated for us (how's that for alliteration). It was important for us to flesh out and gather ideas in a document so we could define the purpose of the CAB, understand what it would take to be successful, and mitigate any risks that might occur.

First, we defined the purpose. Our Board members would weigh-in and validate product decisions, and they would provide feedback during early stages of product planning and design. The feedback gathered from the Board would need to be strategic and tactical, and would be used to help unveil any issues that may arise and expand on ideas we might not have thought about yet. We also wanted to develop relationships with folks in the industry in order to better understand our customers' needs. Finally, if CAB members love the work that we do, they may, over time, turn into our biggest evangelists.

Once our goals were set, it was time to move on to the "what ifs" of implementing this new program. There were a few risks we acknowledged before creating the Customer Advisory Board, which allowed us to think critically about the feedback we would received. For example, many of our contacts are relatively close to our company, brand, and/or product. This is awesome! However, their feedback might be swayed by their preconceptions about us and potentially lead to 'group think.' We took steps to move away from these notions and help keep our CAB members neutral.

It was also important to set goals to ensure that our CAB was functioning like we intended it to. We defined indicators to use as benchmarks, such as participation of the CAB, quality of the feedback loops, and amount of CAB member's time we use (that last one was important, because we didn't want to violate any promises we made to those helping us). This allowed us to gauge our success and to determine when it was time to revise our original framework.

Selecting the team

The final piece of our framework was to list the type of candidate we want to engage with. We used written "personas" to group potential candidates into more manageable sectors during our selection process. We originally called for 20-25 people (although the number has currently been upped to 35). These CAB members are open and honest with us, even if they provide negative feedback. They represent a diverse segment of our users and work in small to large companies, from in-house SEO's to independent consultants.

To make the selection process as neutral as possible, we compiled of a list of candidates from internal recommendations, active community members, and folks who gave feedback to our Product Team in the past to make our final selections. With our final group, we were sure that we would not only hear praise, but would be provided with a significant amount of "tough love" that was needed to make the CAB project a success.

CAB members challenge us, allowing us to make better products. 

Getting to know our CAB

Now that you know the driving factors behind our process, it's time to learn a little bit more about who makes up our Customer Advisory Board.

The folks on our Board have very different backgrounds, areas of expertise, and passions, which means their feedback can be quite diverse. When a CAB member first joins, we ask them to fill out a little 'getting to know you' survey. The goal is to understand that no two people are going to want the same thing, and it helps set context around the feedback that we receive.

We have 35 CAB members from seven different countries, including the U.S., Portugal, Spain, England, Austria, Australia, Brazil, and Canada. They've been customers of SEOmoz's anywhere from 1 to 6 years, and some have more experience with our brand and product than others. They work in different a variety of  different environments so we can field customer needs from all sides of the inbound marketing process.

Every CAB member has different expectations at work.

So, have we been successful?

Success? I think YES! We've had several formal feedback loops (11 and counting), and many more informal conversations with our Customer Advisory Board members. From these meetings, we've been able to collect the following data:

• Of the original 15 members that joined, all 15 are still active members.
• We have an average of 9 out of 10 Customer Advisory Board members giving feedback when asked (although we're getting closer to 9.5 out of 10!).
• Every member that opts-in to a feedback loop (whether the loop is a survey, email, or in-person interview) has finished the feedback loop.
• We've found the feedback is so useful that we went a step further and created a Local Customer Advisory Board for GetListed last month.

We've been thrilled with the success of our CAB so far. Though it took some time to get this process in place, our gains from answering to and gaining feedback from our CAB have far outweighed the time and effort it took to get it up and running. 

A quick thanks

Our Customer Advisory Board is doing us a huge favor by putting in time and energy towards keeping us awesome. We constantly bounce ideas off of them, show them product plans, introduce crazy new content and designs, and the list goes on and on. We are benefiting from their help in a million ways. CAB members help drive us to success (pun intended). To all our CAB members, THANK YOU!

Does your team have a Customer Advisory Board? What are the results you've seen? Please leave your tips and thoughts in the comments below!

25 Killer Combos for Google's Site: Operator

There's an app for everything ' the problem is that we're so busy chasing the newest shiny toy that we rarely stop to learn to use simple tools well. As a technical SEO, one of the tools I seem to never stop finding new uses for is the site: operator. I recently devoted a few slides to it in my BlueGlassX presentation, but I realized that those 5 minutes were just a tiny slice of all of the uses I've found over the years.

People often complain that site:, by itself, is inaccurate (I'll talk about that more at the end of the post), but the magic is in the combination of site: with other query operators. So, I've come up with two dozen killer combos that can help you dive deep into any site.

1. site:example.com

Ok, this one's not really a combination, but let's start with the basics. Paired with a root domain or sub-domain, the [site:] operator returns an estimated count of the number of indexed pages for that domain. The 'estimated' part is important, but we'll get to that later. For a big picture, I generally stick to the root domain (leave out the 'www', etc.).

Each combo in this post will have a clickable example (see below). I'm picking on Amazon.com in my examples, because they're big enough for all of these combos to come into play:

You'll end up with two bits of information: (1) the actual list of pages in the index, and (2) the count of those pages (circled in purple below):

I think we can all agree that 273,000,000 results is a whole lot more than most of us would want to sort through. Even if we wanted to do that much clicking, Google would stop us after 100 pages. So, how can we get more sophisticated and drill down into the Google index?

2. site:example.com/folder

The simplest way to dive deeper into this mess is to provide a sub-folder (like '/blog') ' just append it to the end of the root domain. Don't let the simplicity of this combo fool you ' if you know a site's basic architecture, you can use it to drill down into the index quickly and spot crawl problems.

3. site:sub.example.com

You can also drill down into specific sub-domains. Just use the full sub-domain in the query. I generally start with #1 to sweep up all sub-domains, but #3 can be very useful for situations like tracking down a development or staging sub-domain that may have been accidentally crawled.

4. site:example.com inurl:www

The "inurl:" operator searches for specific text in the indexed URLs. You can pair 'site:' with 'inurl:' to find the sub-domain in the full URL. Why would you use this instead of #3? On the one hand, "inurl:" will look for the text anywhere in the URL, including the folder and page/file names. For tracking sub-domains this may not be desirable. However, "inurl:" is much more flexible than putting the sub-domain directly into the main query. You'll see why in examples #5 and #6.

5. site:example.com -inurl:www

Adding [-] to most operators tells Google to search for anything but that particular text. In this case, by separating out "inurl:www", you can change it to "-inurl:www" and find any indexed URLs that are not on the "www" sub-domain. If "www" is your canonical sub-domain, this can be very useful for finding non-canonical URLs that Google may have crawled.

6. site:example.com -inurl:www -inurl:dev -inurl:shop

I'm not going to list every possible combination of Google operators, but keep in mind that you can chain most operators. Let's say you suspect there are some stray sub-domains, but you aren't sure what they are. You are, however, aware of "www.", "dev." and "shop.". You can chain multiple "-inurl:" operators to remove all of these known sub-domains from the query, leaving you with a list of any stragglers.

7. site:example.com inurl:https

You can't put a protocol directly into "site:" (e.g. "https:", "ftp:", etc.). Fortunately, you can put "https" into an "inurl:" operator, allowing you to see any secure pages that Google has indexed. As with all "inurl:" queries, this will find "https" anywhere in the URL, but it's relatively rare to see it somewhere other than the protocol.

8. site:example.com inurl:param

URL parameters can be a Panda's dream. If you're worried about something like search sorts, filters, or pagination, and your site uses URL parameters to create those pages, then you can use "inurl:" plus the parameter name to track them down. Again, keep in mind that Google will look for that name anywhere in the URL, which can occasionally cause headaches.

Pro Tip: Try out the example above, and you'll notice that "inurl:ref" returns any URL with "ref" in it, not just traditional URL parameters. Be careful when searching for a parameter that is also a common word.

Maybe you want to know how many search pages are being indexed without sorts or how many product pages Google is tracking with no size or color selection ' just add [-] to your "inurl:" statement to exclude that parameter. Keep in mind that you can combine "inurl:" with "-inurl:", specifically including some parameters and excluding others. For complex, e-commerce sites, these two combos alone can have dozens of uses.

10. site:example.com text goes here

Of course, you can alway combine the "site:" operator with a plain-old, text query. This will search the contents of the entire page within the given site. Like standard queries, this is essentially a logical [AND], but it's a bit of a loose [AND] ' Google will try to match all terms, but those terms may be separated on the page or you may get back results that only include some of the terms. You'll see that the example below matches the phrase "free Kindle books" but also phrases like "free books on Kindle".

11. site:example.com 'text goes here'

If you want to search for an exact-match phrase, put it in quotes. This simple combination can be extremely useful for tracking down duplicate and near-duplicate copy on your site. If you're worried about one of your product descriptions being repeated across dozens of pages, for example, pull out a few unique terms and put them in quotes.

12. site:example.com/folder 'text goes here'

This is just a reminder that you can combine text (with or without quotes) with almost any of the combinations previously discussed. Narrow your query to just your blog or your store pages, for example, to really target your search for duplicates.

13. site:example.com this OR that

If you specifically want a logical [OR], Google does support use of "or" in queries. In this case, you'd get back any pages indexed on the domain that contained either "this" or "that" (or both, as with any logical [OR]). This can be very useful if you've forgotten exactly which term you used or are searching for a family of keywords.

14. site:example.com 'top * ways'

The asterisk [*] can be used as a wildcard in Google queries to replace unknown text. Let's say you want to find all of the "Top X" posts on your blog. You could use "site:" to target your blog folder and then "Top *" to query only those posts.

Pro Tip: The wild'card [*] operator will match one or multiple words. So, "top * questions" can match "Top 40 Books" or "Top Career Management Books". Try the sample query above for more examples.

15. site:example.com 'top 7..10 ways'

If you have a specific range of numbers in mind, you can use "X..Y" to return anything in the range from X to Y. While the example above is probably a bit silly, you can use ranges across any kind of on-page data, from product IDs to prices.

16. site:example.com ~word

The tilde [~] operator tells Google to find words related to the word in question. Let's say you wanted to find all of the posts on your blog related to the concept of consulting ' just add "~consulting" to the query, and you'll get the wider set of terms that Google thinks are relevant.

17. site:example.com ~word -word

By using [-] to exclude the specific word, you can tell Google to find any pages related to the concept that don't specifically target that term. This can be useful when you're trying to assess your keyword targeting or create new content based on keyword research.

18. site:example.com intitle:'text goes here'

The "intitle:" operator only matches text that appears in the <TITLE></TITLE> tag. One of the first spot-checks I do on any technical SEO audit is to use this tactic with the home-page title (or a unique phrase from it). It can be incredibly useful for quickly finding major duplicate content problems.

19. site:example.com intitle:'text * here'

You can use almost any of the variations mentioned in (12)-(17) with "intitle:" ' I won't list them all, but don't be afraid to get creative. Here's an example that uses the wildcard search in #14, but targets it specifically to page titles.

Pro Tip: Remember to use quotes around the phrase after "intitle:", or Google will view the query as a one-word title search plus straight text. For example, "intitle:text goes here" will look for "text" in the title plus "goes" and "here" anywhere on the page.

20. intitle:'text goes here'

This one's not really a "site:" combo, but it's so useful that I had to include it. Are you suspicious that other sites may be copying your content? Just put any unique phrase in quotes after "intitle:" and you can find copies across the entire web. This is the fastest and cheapest way I've found to find people who have stolen your content. It's also a good way to make sure your article titles are unique.

21. 'text goes here' -site:example.com

If you want to get a bit more sophisticated, you can use "-site:" and exclude mentions of copy on any domain (including your own). This can be used with straight text or with "intitle:" (like in #20). Including your own site can be useful, just to get a sense of where your ranking ability stacks up, but subtracting out your site allows you to see only the copies.

22. site:example.com intext:'text goes here'

The "intext:" operator looks for keywords in the body of the document, but doesn't search the <TITLE> tag. The text could appear in the title, but Google won't look for it there. Oddly, "intext:" will match keywords in the URL (seems like a glitch to me, but I don't make the rules).

23. site:example.com 'text goes here' -intitle:"text goes here"

You might think that #22 and #23 are the same, but there's a subtle difference. If you use "intext:", Google will ignore the <TITLE> tag, but it won't specifically remove anything with "text goes here" in the title. If you specfically want to remove any title mentions in your results, then use "-intitle:".

24. site:example.com filetype:pdf

One of the drawbacks of "inurl:" is that it will match any string in the URL. So, for example, searching on "inurl:pdf", could return a page called "/guide-to-creating-a-great-pdf". By using "filetype:", you can specify that Google only search on the file extension. Google can detect some filetypes (like PDFs) even without a ".pdf" extension, but others (like "html") seem to require a file extension in the indexed document.

25. site:.edu 'text goes here'

Finally, you can target just the Top-Level Domain (TLD), by leaving out the root domain. This is more useful for link-building and competitive research than on-page SEO, but it's definitely worth mentioning. One of our community members, Himanshu, has an excellent post on his own blog about using advanced query operators for link-building.

Why No Allintitle: & Allinurl:?

Experienced SEOs may be wondering why I left out the operators "allintitle:" and "allinurl:" ' the short answer is that I've found them increasingly unreliable over the past couple of years. Using "intitle:" or "inurl:" with your keywords in quotes is generally more predictable and just as effective, in my opinion.

---

Putting It All to Work

I want to give you a quick case study to show that these combos aren't just parlor tricks. I once worked with a fairly large site that we thought was hit by Panda. It was an e-commerce site that allowed members to spin off their own stores (think Etsy, but in a much different industry). I discovered something very interesting just by using "site:" combos (all URLs are fictional, to protect the client):

(1) site:example.com = 11M

First, I found that the site had a very large number (11 million) of indexed pages, especially relative to its overall authority. So, I quickly looked at the site architecture and found a number of sub-folders. One of them was the "/stores" sub-folder, which contained all of the member-created stores:

(2) site:example.com/stores = 8.4M

Over 8 million pages in Google's index were coming just from those customer stores, many of which were empty. I was clearly on the right track. Finally, simply by browsing a few of those stores, I noticed that every member-created store had its own internal search filters, all of which used the "?filter" parameter in the URL. So, I narrowed it down a bit more:

(3) site:example.com/stores inurl:filter = 6.7M

Over 60% of the indexed pages for this site were coming from search filters on user-generated content. Obviously, this was just the beginning of my work, but I found a critical issue on a very large site in less than 30 minutes, just by using a few simple query operator combos. It didn't take an 8-hour desktop crawl or millions of rows of Excel data ' I just had to use some logic and ask the right questions.

---

How Accurate Is Site:?

Historically, some SEOs have complained that the numbers you get from "site:" can vary wildly across time and data centers. Let's cut to the chase: they're absolutely right. You shouldn't take any single number you get back as absolute truth. I ran an experiment recently to put this to the test. Every 10 minutes for 24 hours, I automatically queried the following:

1. site:seomoz.org
2. site:seomoz.org/blog
3. site:seomoz.org/blog intitle:spam

Even using a fixed IP address (single data center, presumably), the results varied quite a bit, especially for the broad queries. The range for each of the "site:" combos across 24 hours (144 measurements) was as follows:

1. 67,700 ' 114,000
2. 8,590 ' 8620
3. 40 ' 40

Across two sets of IPs (unique C-blocks), the range was even larger (see the "/blog" data):

1. 67,700 ' 114,000
2. 4,580 ' 8620
3. 40 ' 40

Does that mean that "site:" is useless? No, not at all. You just have to be careful. Sometimes, you don't even need the exact count ' you're just interested in finding examples of URLs that match the pattern in question. Even if you need a count, the key is to drill down. The narrowest range in the experiment was completely consistent across 24 hours and both data centers. The more you drill down, the better off you are.

You can also use relative numbers. In my example above, it didn't really matter if the 11M total indexed page count was accurate. What mattered was that I was able to isolate a large section of the index based on one common piece of site architecture. Assumedly, the margin of error for each of those measurements was similar ' I was only interested in the relative percentages at each step. When in doubt, take more than one measurement.

Keep in mind that this problem isn't unique to the "site:" operator ' all search result counts on Google are estimates, especially the larger numbers. Matt Cutts discussed this in a recent video, along with how you can use the page 2 count to sometimes reduce the margin of error:

---

The True Test of An SEO

If you run enough "site:" combos often enough, even by hand, you may eventually be greeted with this:

If you managed to trigger a CAPTCHA without using automation, then congratulations, my friend! You're a real SEO now. Enjoy your new tools, and try not to hurt anyone.

Announcing Moz's 2012 Metrics, Acquisition of AudienceWise, & Opening of Our Portland Office

2012 was an amazing year at SEOmoz. We grew tremendously in members, revenue, and employees; finally raised a second round of funding; added some cool features to PRO; and acquired three companies (though, until today, we've only publicly talked about two of those). In this blog post, I'm going to cover our 2012 numbers in some detail and tell you about our very exciting, final acquisition of the year, AudienceWise.

The blog post is broken into several sections for those who'd like to jump around:

• Moz's Acquisition of AudienceWise
• The Opening of Our Portland Office
• 2012 Moz Financials
• 2012 Employee & Customer Growth Data

Moz's Acquisition of AudienceWise

I first met Matthew Brown along with his partner-in-crime at Define, Marshall Simmonds, in Xiamen, China. I was with my grandfather, Si, speaking at SES Xiamen, and the NYTimes' SEO team was hosting us for dinner. I still remember my Grandfather commenting that he'd been a subscriber to the Times for 50 years, and it was about time they took him out to dinner :-)

Since then, Matthew's gone on to start his own consultancy, AudienceWise, with Tim Resnik, former CEO of a gaming startup and a tremendously accomplished marketer & data junkie. Both have been frequently involved in the Moz community - Matt spoke at Mozcon two years ago and will again. Tim and he are both quiet lurkers on the blog, but with this transaction, I expect that to change a bit. Over the past couple years, we've talked extensively about recruiting them to the SEOmoz team. They were on our list of potential acquisitions for our failed funding round in summer 2011, and part of the "use of funds" we spoke about with Brad Feld in our April 2012 round.

Matt and Tim are really here at Moz to help us scale our in-house marketing and product expertise. Both have built software products in the past (Matt worked with Marshall on SearchCLU, Tim on an online poker subscription service) and have tremendous depth-of-knowledge in the fields of both inbound and paid marketing. We have a lot of phenomenal talent at SEOmoz, but only a few of us are deep into the fields of SEO, social media, content marketing, email, CRO, etc. Matt and Tim are here to help serve as mentors and as internal-consultant experts to our entire team, a role that I've been far too busy to fill effectively the last 18 months.

The AudienceWisers have been by the Mozplex several times, but in their first official visit as employees, they impressed a lot of folks on our team and have already jumped into a ton of projects. For example, Tim is working on visiting our rankings data & how we'll build reports for rankings going forward, and reviewing a big secret project that I'm not allowed to talk about on the blog. Meanwhile, Matt's working with Erica to head up our search for great Mozcon speakers, co-piloting the 2013 ranking factors work with Dr. Matt Peters (as an aside, doesn't Matt & Dr. Matt sound like a good sitcom title?), helping with the new version of the Mozbar, working with the product and engineering teams on the web classification system, and much more. 

I particularly loved the email Matt sent on the allstaff thread welcoming him and Tim:

Some notes on the acquisition:

• The total acquisition price (including salary, stock, and deferred payments) is in the low seven figures.
• SEOmoz is acquiring AudienceWise's process & products (including some research work and software Matt & Tim have built), the team itself, but NOT the consulting business. Matt & Tim will continue to do a small amount of consulting outside of SEOmoz, and our business will continue to remain free from services revenue.
• The AudienceWise Portland offices only hold three people, so we're getting some new space (more on that below).
• Technically, the deal closed in mid-December, but we wanted to wait to announce until Matt & Tim had wrapped up their other obligations and started at Moz full time (which happened last Monday, Jan. 14).
• Matt will be reporting to me with the title "Head of Special Projects," while Tim will be on Adam Feldstein's product team as "Principal Product Strategist." We're doing more with titles in the next couple months at Moz, so these may change. Neither will have any direct reports, but both will be contributing as consultants/advisors/project leads on a number of teams.

I'm sure that Matt & Tim would love to hear from you and are happy to take questions in the comments of this post, so feel free to leave them, and please join me in welcoming them to the Moz team!

The Opening of Our Portland Office (aka Mozlandia)

We Mozzers have long loved Portland from our perch in the Emerald city. We visit on weekends to sample their insanely weird and tasty food carts and restaurants. We stay extra nights after conferences to tour their far-too-cool-for-Seattle clothing stores. We rant jealously about their much lower cost-of-living and their lack of a state sales tax (which adds to the retail goodness). And, of course, we poke fun at their hipsterdom.

In fact, after watching three seasons of Portlandia, and experiencing the magic that city has to offer, we could no longer resist its pull. Starting in April of this year (probably, maybe May or June depending on lease details), SEOmoz will be opening only its second office ever in Portland, Oregon, nicknamed "Mozlandia."

We've already created a poster of our own:

Pictured from left to right: Peter Bray (FollowerWonk), Matthew Brown and Tim Resnik (AudienceWise), Galen Huntington (FollowerWonk), and David Mihm (GetListed).

I'm pretty sure this picture alone means our Portland office is going to be an amazing place to work (honestly, Galen looks WAY more "Portland" than his counterpart in the IFC photo). We'll start recruiting more formally soon, but in the meantime, feel free to check out any of the open positions at Moz, many of which teams may be open to staffing in Portland. We will continue to offer our $12,000 referral and signing bonus for software engineering positions in both cities.

2012 Moz Financials

It was a good year for the company financially, despite our focus being on a lot of other issues. We ended the year at $21.9mm in revenue - nearly doubling from 2011's $11.4mm.

I think 2012 and 2013 are going to go down in our history as "investments in the foundation" years. After our funding round closed in April, we spent the vast majority of the year building products that have yet to launch (stay tuned), building up recruiting and onboarding processes, bolstering our product and team with acquisitions, experimenting with how to handle a much larger big data product (Mozscape - sadly most of our efforts to dramatically grow size & increase freshness in 2012 failed, but we believe we now know enough to have success in 2013), and managing culture at a mid-size company (which went pretty well and led to some nice kudos like Seattle's Best Place to Work).

Below is a look at overall product revenue growth from 2007-2012:

More than 90% of total revenue comes from SEOmoz PRO subscriptions, with additional contributions from the SEOmoz API (these are combined in the "product revenue" chart above). Mozcon tickets sales and DVD sales are not included in this graph, nor is consulting revenue, which ended in 2009.

I did, however, want to show our expenses for 2012, compare them to 2011, and break them down by category so you can get a better sense of what's in our costs (and see how we're spending that fancy VC money!). I didn't have a great way to show this as a visual graph (pie charts over time are funky - I guess I could have done the stacked graph, but they're also funky), yet the chart conveys the data pretty well:

There are a few interesting takeaways from the above:

• Personnel as a percentage remains the same, and I'd guess it will go up a small amount in 2013.
• Hosting is where most of our COGS (Cost of Goods Sold) and pain comes from. It should be going down as we reach larger scales, but in 2012, we chose to invest in building faster rather than going slow and finding solutions to our declining margins. That will change in 2013, and while this year as a whole will probably still be high, we're predicting that our total hosting costs will be ~50% of what they are today (~650K/month) by Q4.
• Contractors are a resource we've leaned on heavily in the past, particularly on the development front. That number will probably remain similar in 2013, though eventually we plan to bring the vast majority of production in-house, and rely on contractors only for specialized needs.
• Facilities is one that will, hopefully, take a huge leap up in 2013. We need a new office here in Seattle, and while we've been a bit stymied on our first six months exploring spaces (we've had two offices we wanted fall through on us), we want to be moving to a much larger headquarters as soon as possible. In the meantime, Mozlandia will help us grow a bit in Portland.
• Not a believer in inbound marketing? If this data doesn't convince you, nothing will. The incredibly low percent of costs that go to attracting traffic and acquiring customers (on the "marketing" line - remember that SEOmoz has no sales team or costs) are a testament to SEOmoz drinking our own Kool-Aid, and investing in sources like content, organic search, social media, email, CRO, and word-of-mouth to spread our brand. It means we can invest much more in research, product, and data. Check out traffic from the last 6 quarters:

Some spikiness from viral content skews the trendline a bit, but in general, we're seeing healthy growth from every channel.

If you have questions about this stuff, feel free to ask in the comments and myself or Sarah Bird (our COO) can answer.

2012 Employee & Customer Growth Data

The financials tell part of the story, but a few other data points felt interesting to me and may be to you as well. First up is our growth in employee count from our first year as a software company to today:

The chart shows headcount of full time employees at the end of each year. We've obviously had a ton of growth here in 2012, and we're budgeting to add another 66 team members in 2013 (though a lack of new office space may slow that down). What amazes me the most is how well our culture has managed to handle this growth. I feel better about the persistence of TAGFEE and the other cultural aspects at SEOmoz today than I did when we were at 50 people, 25, or 5. To be honest, that's not what I expected. I thought things would get invariably harder and worse at this scale, but given the trend, I'm incredibly optimistic about 150, 250, even 500! Though, I know all of those will take incredible effort to succeed.

Next is our customer growth:

18,731 was the final count of paid PRO subscribers on Jan. 1st, 2013 (our historical numbers for prior years were less precise, hence the rounding).

It's pretty remarkable and truly humbling to have nearly 20,000 paid customers using our product. But we know that we've got a long way to go. In 2012, we had four pretty severe incidents and several smaller ones where critical customer data like rankings, crawl info, or Mozscape index updates were missing or late. We launched a few cool features at the end of 2011 and very beginning of 2012 (social analytics, historical link analysis, universal SERPs tracking, and custom reports) but with the exception of Followerwonk (which is a huge addition to PRO, and continues to develop new features itself), it was a very quiet year for features.

2013 is going to be very different. Our first major launch since Wonk is only a few weeks away, and spring should see the start of many more. We also have an entire team of five engineers, under the leadership of Shawn Edwards, focused on uptime and reliability. The levels of unreliability we've had in the past are unacceptable, and the speed of product improvement is, too. In our reviews for each other this month, Sarah and I were chatting about a large release we've been working on since late 2011, and Sarah told me, "If we haven't launched by June, we should both fire each other." I couldn't put it better myself. This year, we need to kick ass for our customers and be more deserving of the incredible support and growth you've enabled for our team.

---

January 2013 marks my 11th anniversary working in this job (prior to 2004, I worked with my Mom, Gillian, at the web design/marketing company that would become SEOmoz). I've never been more amazed by what the company's accomplished than I am today, but I know every day from now forward presents the challenge to all of us at Moz - to prove we're worthy of the fantastic things we have (customers, revenue, investors, supporters) and to not be trapped by the mistakes of the past, nor fall prey to the pitfalls of the future.

Matt & Tim will be a huge help, as the teams from FollowerWonk and Getlisted have been already. Mozlandia is going to be an exciting new experiment for us. And 2012 was a great year, but honestly, I can't wait for 2013 to get going, and for us Mozzers to be able to show all of you what the remarkable team we've built can do.