Posted by Jeremy_Gottlieb

Working in SEO, I always find myself poring over data and looking for ways to expedite the analysis process. Analyzing data can often be tedious, mind-numbing, and boring work, so anything that can be done to speed up finding that needle in the haystack is almost always a good idea. A few months ago, I began using a formula in Excel to categorize data and I’m constantly finding new ways to use it.

It took a little bit of time and practice to remember the formula, to understand how it works and how to troubleshoot it if it breaks, but the time and energy put into learning it have been dwarfed by the rewards I’ve seen from employing it successfully. If you take the time to learn this formula, I promise that it will be worth it — you’ll easily be able to cut down thousands (or more) of rows in Excel into bite-sized chunks for easy insight-pulling and data presentation.

Without further ado, I present to you:

=if(isnumber(search(“string 1”, [beginning cell])),”Category 1”, if(isnumber(search(“string 2”, [beginning cell])),”Category 2”, “Other”)

I apologize if I’ve confused you already. I’ll dive into the formula deeper, explaining its meaning and providing 3 different use cases for how it can help you speed up your work.

Use Case #1: Keyword research

When I’m doing keyword research for a client and I’m staring down a list (likely thousands of rows long) of potential keywords to analyze and their search volumes, I try to lump similar ones together to see patterns of similarity. At Distilled (we’re hiring, btw!), I might use a tool like Brightedge or SEMrush to see the queries a website has visibility for. Additionally, I could just put a topic into Google Keyword Planner and receive an output of similar terms per Google. Export your results in a CSV file and you’ll have your starting point for data analysis. You might even wonder how the formula I mentioned before could even be useful because Google Keyword Planner provides an “Ad Group” column, so one should easily be able to know how to divide up the provided keywords.

Problem is, the output is often divided up between “Seed Keywords” and “Keyword Ideas”, neither of which is helpful for segmenting keyword cohorts. The screenshot above captures the queries and search volumes around related terms for “workout supplements” (note the “Seed Keyword” in cell A2 compared to all others.)

But what if I want to break down this entire list (681 queries, obviously all not shown in the screenshot) to find out how many queries include the word “supplement?” Or perhaps I want to know how many contain “muscle”; I can do that too.

The first thing I’m going to do is remove column A (Ad group) because it’s completely useless. I’m then going to add a column to the right of our search volume column and label it “Category.” At this point we’ll come up with our initial ideas for categorization, so let’s go with “supplement” and “muscle.” In cell C2 we’ll type the formula:

=if(isnumber(search(“supplement”,A2)),”Supplement”, if(isnumber(search(“muscle”,A2)),”Muscle”,”Other”))

Translated, this formula says: Search cell A2 and if “supplement” is found, return the category “Supplement.” If “supplement” is not found, look for “muscle,” and if that is found, return “Muscle” as the category. If neither “supplement” nor “muscle” are found, return “Other” as the category.

I can continue to add specifications to the formula as I see fit; “other” would just keep getting pushed back as other strings get searched for. The screenshot below shows this formula in action:

The real power of this formula is that it can be used across the entire dataset, removing the need for someone to manually go through and categorize each keyword. Double-clicking on the bottom-right corner of cell C2 (where our sheet now says Supplement) will apply the formula to all cells in column C, as long as there’s a value next to it in column B (this is a rule of Excel, not the formula). The screenshot below shows the effects of applying the formula to all of the data. Notice how the formula has changed from analyzing cell A2 to cell A19 within cell C19, where the formula is being applied.

“Muscle” isn’t listed as a category in the screenshot, but it is listed as a category later in the dataset. I also need to point out a deficiency in the formula at this point. Where a particular query includes more than one of the strings we’re trying to categorize for, it will return a category for the first positive string match it finds. Row 29 is a good example of this. In this particular scenario, the query is “muscle supplements,” but because the formula looks for “supplement” before it looks for “muscle,” and it found a positive match in “supplement,” it categorizes the cell as “Supplement.”

In the cells where neither “supplement” nor “muscle” were found, it returns “other.” At this point, we add a filter to the data set and can filter out all “muscle” and “supplement” queries to reveal exactly what makes up “other.”

Looking at this list, queries containing “protein” seem to be a sizable percentage of the list, so we can add that as a category as well. From here we can add in a pivot table and sort by search volume and count of keywords. Click here to learn more about pivot tables.

From here we can gain a perspective of where we should be targeting our efforts and where we need to focus more. “Other,” at this point, is still too large a category, so I’d go in and refine it further to create more categories to find out how we can make this even more actionable.

Use Case #2: Disavow work

Google claims that a new Penguin update is “getting closer and closer,” but the actual release date is still unknown. What is known is that monitoring your backlink profile for spammy and manipulative links is a pretty smart idea. I recommend being proactive and analyzing opportunities to disavow certain links if you think they could be a potential liability. My colleague Sergey Stefoglo recently wrote a piece on how to do a backlink audit in 30 minutes, but if you plan on manually inspecting your referring domains (and you should), this categorization formula can help.

Depending on the size of your site, you could potentially be dealing with thousands or millions of linking root domains, so you’d need to start somewhere and cut your list down. One way is to sort the domains by some sort of metric (I often use trust flow from Majestic). I use the formula to look for common words that are associated with spammy domains like “submit,” “seo,” “directory,” “free,” “drugs,” and “articles,” though there are certainly many more (“.xyz” is another I’ve seen frequently). The formula finds any of the specified queries within your list of linking root domains, allowing you to quickly identify those as spam and add them to your disavow list. The screenshot below shows a sample site’s link profile sorted by “Spam,” using the filters above as criteria and then by ascending order of trust flow. The formula used in this case is slightly longer than our previous example, but follows the same pattern.

=IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH(“submit”,A2)),”Spam”,IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH(“seo”,A2)),”Spam”,
IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH(“directory”,A2)),”Spam”,IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH(“free”,A2)),”Spam”,
IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH(“drugs”,A2)),”Spam”,IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH(“articles”,A2)),”Spam”,
IF(ISNUMBER(SEARCH(“.xyz”,A2)),”Spam”,”Other”)))))))

In many cases, your link profile will have spammy links that come from legitimate-sounding domains. This formula won’t be able to filter out all of the spam, but it often helps remove at least some of the domains from your list. Also, it’s possible that some of the domains now flagged as spam by the formula may actually be legitimate websites. You should always analyze the output of this formula just to make sure it’s worked properly. Again, it serves as a starting point for your disavow work and can hopefully cut down on some of the domains, but it is by no means the only thing you should be looking at.

Use Case #3: Parsing Analytics

Another really cool use case for this categorization formula is data analysis from Google Analytics. For my clients, I’m often analyzing information about traffic to a client’s site from organic channels. I’ll change the displayed number of results from 10 to 2,500 and export the data. Once exported, I may want to know which types of pages tend to get the most traffic, convert at the highest rate, bring in the most money, or the opposite of all of these.

As each client’s site is different, you’d be looking for different things on each site. Ideally, the site will have an established subfolder structure like example.com/blog/article-1, example.com/supplements/product-1, or example.com/toys/gadget-1. With these common features in the URLs, you’d be able to label them whatever you’d like, perhaps “blog” or “supplements” or “toys,” and use this categorization to break down what types of pages work best and where can improvement be made.

For one client, I exported their data from Google Search Console and broke out their pages by “comparison,” “reviews,” “alternatives,” and “other.” From this, I was able to identify where we could possibly improve, establish what was working, and have more concrete data to show the client.

Conclusion

Categorization will not solve any SEO or digital marketing problems for you, but it can make data analysis much faster and visually compelling. The faster you can identify opportunities, the more time you’ll actually have for making recommendations and an impact for your business or client.

This formula is so versatile that it can be used for nearly anything. I hope that you find clever ways for it to make your data analysis easier and less tedious. As each site is different, it’s impossible to say exactly which strings you should be looking for in any given scenario, but if you can take away from this post an understanding of the power of this formula and how to re-create it, you’ll find quite quickly it can be used for more tasks than you can dream up. Please comment or share your ideas for how to use this formula in the comments section below or at my Twitter handle, @mr_jeremyg.

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Posted by randfish

We don’t live in a world where we have the luxury of thinking about just user experience or just SEO. The two share many of the same spaces online, working in tandem and sometimes even clashing. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand details the considerations and compromises that must be made for UX & SEO to coexist in harmony.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re chatting about managing tension between user experience and SEO. This is a topic we’ve touched on a little bit in the past, but we’ve seen it come up quite a bit as many more folks are thinking about user experience and working with user experience designers and product and project managers and SEO. They’re trying to reconcile some of these differences.

So it is the case that a lot of the things that positively impact user experience also positively impact SEO. In fact, we have a whole Whiteboard Friday about those kinds of things. But UX touches on lots of things that impact rankings in the search engines.

Affecting SEO with UX changes

Certainly spam, to a certain indirect degree, Google can be looking at pages and sites and may say, “This fits in our template of what spam looks like.”

It affects links, especially because user experience helps to predict whether someone might link to you. If you have 1,000 people coming to your site, by improving the user experience you may go from 1 link per 1,000 people coming to your site to 2 or 3, which could dramatically increase the links that come to you, affecting your search engine rankings.

Obviously, content is being impacted here. User experience affects how search engines judge content just as it affects how users judge that same content.

User and usage data. Naturally, of course, technical issues certainly in some respects, especially with things like page load speed, mobile friendliness, these are big UX elements that impact.

Probably less so with things like query interpretation and user context. Those are generally less impacted signals that search engines might use.

But regardless of this, nearly everything you do that’s on a site or a page that’s going to positively impact user experience or negatively impact user experience will have a corresponding impact on SEO, with a small handful of exceptions. The small handful of exceptions is where we see a lot of these tensions and challenges coming into play, and that’s what we’re going to discuss today, specifically four kinds of tension that can exist.

So what I’m going to do is ask you to imagine two worlds, one world in which there is no SEO. It’s before search engines. We’re just worried about the user experience. People only come to your site through the site itself, and they only navigate through the website. They don’t navigate from engines directly to your pages. They’re not performing searches. We’re UX-only world.

1. In UX-only world, one of the big exceptions here is page consolidation versus segmentation.

So page consolidation would be, I’m going to put a bunch of different user intents all together on a single page because we can serve users best from that single page, single experience. That is true in UX-only world.

But what has happened is that you’ve forgotten about UX+SEO world. I’ll give you an example here. Let’s say I’m trying to make a website all about transportation in the Seattle area. I want to provide people with how to get to and from places, and the best times to go, and are you thinking about traffic, and are you thinking about comparing public versus private transport options, and driving versus Lyft versus Uber versus renting a car, all these different kinds of things. I’m covering the whole world of Seattle transit.

So I have in my UX-only world a single experience that describes getting to and from any neighborhood or any particular location to any other one. That page is sort of a singular experience. It provides everything all those users might need.

But in UX+SEO world, we have to remember that somewhere between a third and half, sometimes even more of our traffic is actually going to be searching on Google for what we provide. They’re not going to be going directly to our website and then experiencing the site only through that. They’re also going to be searching on Google, and that means they’re going to be searching with all different kinds of queries.

Those different kinds of queries have different intents behind them, and we need to serve those with separate pages, which is why page segmentation is so important. So I might have a general landing page in UX+SEO world. I might have an individual neighborhood landing page. I might have a location to location landing page.

If I’m only thinking about UX and not SEO, I am not serving these folks well. In fact, I’m hurting the user experience of anyone who searches for me or who might come to me through a search engine. Because landing on this page, if I’ve already expressed to Google that I’m looking to go from Ballard to the Space Needle and I want my options, that’s a lousy experience. I have to go enter that information again. I already told Google what I wanted. Your website should be delivering that.

So this is one of those areas where we have to make the sacrifice and live in UX+SEO world, recognize this exists, create landing pages that specifically serve the needs of searchers and provide that great experience for them. Those pages have to be linked to. They have to be indexable. They have to be keyword-targeted. They need the right kinds of content on them. It’s different than pure UX world.

2. Exception number two, this also happens in internal linking and site navigation.

So in UX-only world, I can have a much more limited set of onsite navigation because I don’t have to point to nearly as many pages and because, in general, I can rely on the intuition of my users to be able to figure out that oh, this particular page probably lives in this particular section. If I want to go from neighborhood to neighborhood, I can look at the neighborhoods landing area. Or if I’m particularly interested in comparing costs of different kinds of vehicle rentals versus getting around the city with Lyft and Uber versus that kind of thing, I can go to the transportation options section.

But in UX+SEO world, again because we have different types of landing pages, we generally speaking have to link to much more, and so that might mean instead of a single section we actually need drop-downs. We need to have more navigation. Maybe we need to even put in a footer or have some more sidebar navigation. We may need to make a little bit of a sacrifice for the purity of user experience for someone who’s not coming from search in order to link to more things and in order to provide better internal anchor text. These links are going to need good internal, descriptive anchor text.

That is not actually just helpful for search engines. This is actually quite helpful for folks who may not have the same intuition that you’re assuming many of your visitors might have and for folks who are looking to quickly navigate directly, potentially on a mobile device or on a screen reader for those folks who have more trouble with accessibility issues. This is positive from all those perspectives. That internal anchor text, as we’ve discussed previously on Whiteboard Friday, can have quite a positive impact on your search rankings.

3. Exception number three, keyword use on pages in titles and in anchor text

So in UX-only world, I might have a page that’s “Ballard to Space Needle.” Great, that’s all I need to say. But in UX+SEO world, I need to show the search engines and, indeed, the searchers themselves that I’m very relevant to their query, that I’m answering exactly what they are looking for before they get to this page, because, remember, all they’re going to see in the search results is just the title and the description maybe, whatever is in that little snippet. They’re not going to know, “Oh you know what, they probably provide a great experience, but it’s very visual and interactive and so I just can’t see it. I’ll click them anyway.” That is not how people search. They look at that snippet. They decide whether they’re going to click and engage.

So we need to present a better, more optimized version of the page for search engines specifically. In this case, what is also true is that there’s probably a bunch of words and phrases — what we’ve called here at Moz related topics — related keywords, related topics that I should have on this page.

If I’m talking about going from Ballard to the Space Needle, I probably want to include words like bus, streetcar, farmers market, the farmers market in Ballard, or Seattle Center (which is at the base of the Space Needle surrounding it), monorail, which there is a monorail. It won’t get you from Ballard, but it will get you from downtown to the Space Needle. Uber and Lyft. These are all words and phrases that Google would expect someone who’s interested in transportation between these neighborhoods to want to find on this page. Therefore, we need to do a good job of serving those searcher intents and those related topics that Google cares about.

4. Fourth and finally, we need crawler-readable text content on pages.

In UX-only world, that’s not always the case. In fact, if you think about UX-only world, an app might be the very best type of experience. That could be a web app, or it could be a mobile app, or interchangeably both. It could provide a great experience by letting me just click around the city and know where I’m going and select things from inside the app. The URL would actually never change.

But you know what? This sort of visual interactive experience is not going to work in UX+SEO world.

We need descriptive content. We need to be able to navigate between pages. We need separate URLs for each of these. Those URLs need to have good anchor text that’s pointing between them back and forth. We need to have keyword targeting in all of the facets of that navigation. We need to figure out what all those keyword targets are, which requires keyword research. So there are just a lot of different changes that need to happen.

My advice is this. If you’re an SEO and you’re working with user experience folks, please remind them that the user experience doesn’t just apply to the people who are already on the site or navigating internally in the site. Search engines send a huge amount of traffic, and we need to think about the user experience of coming from a search engine to the website. It’s not just about rankings and traffic. It’s about the user experience that those people have as well.

If you’re a user experience professional and you’re working with SEOs, with the exception of these few things, generally speaking everything that you do to improve user experience — the UI itself and the visuals, the design, the branding, the load speed, the efficiency that people get between pages on a site — all of those experiential elements also improve SEO. So as a user experience professional, your pitch to SEOs should be, generally speaking, very easy because you can help them rank better so long as you keep these things in mind.

All right, everyone, look forward to your comments, and we’ll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Posted by EricaMcGillivray

Last year, we hosted the first MozCon Ignite, and it was the blast. We had so much fun listening to 5 minute stories on everything from how to cook a hot dog to running a coffee charity from your kitchen that we’re bringing the event back for a second year. We can’t wait to hear your story. MozCon Ignite takes place Tuesday, September 13, during MozCon as one of our evening networking events. In order to attend, you gotta:

Buy your MozCon 2016 ticket!

Wait, what is an Ignite-style talk?

Ignite-style talks are five minutes in length with auto-advancing slides. They tell short stories to spark ideas and conversations. If you’re still scratching your head, check out Ignite Seattle’s Scott Berkun giving an Ignite-style talk explaining Ignite talks:

How does Ignite work at MozCon?

Each evening at MozCon, we provide fun, networking, and relaxing after a day of learning. MozCon Ignite specifically focuses on networking and kicking back to be entertained with stories from your fellow attendees.

We want you to share your stories, passions, and experiences. There are 16—yes, 16—speaking slots.

Our one topic rule: these stories is cannot be about online marketing or career advice. We’ve heard all about that during the day. To get your ideas flowing, these were the topics from last year:

• Regales of an Accidental Nightcrawler Stunt Double with Jay Neill
• Sled Dogs, Northern Lights, and Mushing Tails! with Anna Anderson
• Performing a Canine C-Section with Marie Haynes
• Bulltown Strutters: The Band That Married Its City with Mark Traphagen
• Okay, I Have a Confession: I Was Homeschooled with Garrett Mehrguth
• Conquering the 100 Best Books of All Time with Kristen Craft
• Tales of Coffee from a Kitchen Window with Scott Callender
• Go Frost Yourself: 7 Basic Frostings & Their Uses with Annette Promes
• A Creative Endeavor Inspires & Lengthens a Life with Ralph Legnini
• Finding and Embracing Healthy Eating Habits with Carrie Hill
• I Was Told There Would Be Hoverboards. with Dan Petrovic
• The Day I Disremembered with Chris Hanson
• What Did You Expect in an Opera, a Happy Ending? with Chrissi Reimer
• The Best Practices in Cooking Hot Dogs with Josh Couper
• Raising My Parents with Jen Lopez
• Stoned Nerd versus the Four-Legged Home Invaders with Ian Lurie

The ever fabulous Geraldine DeRuiter, aka the Everywhereist, will be back as emcee.

Annette talks about yummy ganaches at MozCon Ignite 2015.

The basic details to pitch

• To submit, just fill out the form below.
• Please only submit one talk! We want the one you’re most excited about.
• Talks cannot be about online marketing or career-focused.
• They are only 5 minutes in length, so plan accordingly.
• If you are already speaking on the MozCon stage, you cannot pitch for this event. You also cannot pitch if you spoke at MozCon Ignite previously.
• Submissions close on Thursday, July 21 at 5pm PDT.
• Selection decisions are final and will be made in late July / early August.
• All presentations must adhere to the MozCon Code of Conduct.
• You must attend MozCon, September 12-14, and the Tuesday night event in person, in Seattle.

If selected, you will get the following

• 5 minutes on the Tuesday night stage to share with our audience. The event lasts from 7-10pm and will be at McCaw Hall (where the Seattle Opera is).
• $300 off a regular priced ticket to MozCon. (If you already purchased yours, we’ll issue a $300 refund for regular priced ticket or $100 for an early bird ticket. Discount not available for super early bird special.)
• We will work with you to hone your talk!
• Stage tour of event space between 5-7pm Tuesday night so you can get familiar with the venue and being on stage before the crowd shows up.

Unfortunately, we cannot provide travel coverage for MozCon Ignite speaking slots.

Loading…

What makes a great pitch

• Focus on the five minute length.
• Be passionate about what you’re speaking about. Tell us what’s great about it.
• For extra credit, include links to videos of you doing public speaking.
• Follow the guidelines. Yes, the word counts are limited on purpose. Do not submit links to Google Docs, etc. for more information. Tricky and multiple submissions will be disqualified.

We cannot wait to see what you want to share with us! Like other MozCon speaker selections, we’ll have a small committee of Mozzers reviewing your pitches. If you’re interested to see more Ignite talks and get inspired, check out the videos from Ignite Seattle 30, which you may see yours truly in one of them.

As always, best of luck pitching! And we will let you know either way of our decision. May the odds ever be in your favor.

Buy your MozCon 2016 ticket and don’t miss MozCon Ignite!

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Posted by ronell-smith

Darren Shaw of Whitespark speaking at Mozcon Local

The gentleman sitting across the table from me at a crowded lunch spot has what he sees as a workable business idea for a local business, a sound plan to get it off the ground, enough funds to weather the ups and downs of the current business climate in his area, and the determination to stick around long enough to be successful.

However, what he doesn’t have are the answers to three questions pertaining to content marketing for his small business:

• “What should I write about?”
• “How do I [rank higher in local SERPs?]”
• “Do I need to use social media? Will it help my brand?”

My heart breaks a little as he looks down to pick at his salad. Not because I don’t like questions, or because the questions are difficult to answer. They aren’t.

In fact, the answer I gave comes from a slogan i learned of in college and have used repeatedly when attempting to get small brands to see the shortest path to success: “Think globally, act locally.”

The SERPs won’t save you

Every brand wants to be No. 1 in the SERPs, or so they think.

What they really want, however, is to be the No. 1 most-chosen brand.

What ultimately matters in the earliest stages of your relationship with prospects is that they see you in the SERPs, recognize your brand for its quality of service and/or excellent products(s), and reward you with a click.

Far too often, however, local brands think too broadly (often as a result of poor keyword selection) and attempt to rank for terms and/or categories they’ll never be able to consistently rank for. All the while, they ignore low-hanging fruit, such as ensuring their Google My Places is up-to-date, their citations are accurate, and prioritizing reviews on third-party sites.

Worse still, even brands that do commit to these efforts too often ignore creating local-specific pages, which can be a tremendous asset for capturing traffic, leads, and driving conversions for local brands.

Individually, not capitalizing on these areas is bad for brand health; collectively, they amount to leaving the door open to the competition.

Image source

And if you’re a small or midsize business (SMB) owner, your focus must be on closing doors to the competition. To do that you’ll need to use your size and the knowledge of your local service area to your advantage.

As I’m wont to say, it’s simple, but it won’t be easy.

Local SEO to the rescue

A few months, I had the distinct pleasure of getting to work with Local SEO expert Mary Bowling as she prepared for Mozcon Local. During a phone conversation, I shared with her my frustration at seeing local brands get pwned by big brands, in large part because the former has all but given up on the quest to be competitive, even when they have wood to throw on the fire.

She agreed that there some holes SMBs are refusing to expose.

“Big brands do have the resources to dominate in local search, but to a large degree they often won’t spent the money needed to be successful, specifically as it regards local-specific content,” says Bowling, owner of Ignitor Digital, which provides online marketing and Local Search marketing solutions to SMBs. “Often small brands don’t create good content because they don’t think they have the time. But it’s not as complicated as they believe. Also, being that they are the local experts, local-specific content is easier to create than they think and can provide the [perfect vehicle to ward off bigger brands].”

That conversation was the wellspring for discussions I’d later have at Mozcon Local with speakers Mike Ramsey of Nifty Marketing and Darren Shaw of Whitespark. I also had the privilege of interviewing each of them, in addition to Local SEO whiz Phil Rozek of Local Visibility Systems, after the event.

What follows is a post based on the entirety of those conversations, with the goal of answering one question: How can local SMBs better compete with big brands in their respective areas?

Local content is David’s slingshot to Goliath’s plate of armor

One of the toughest parts of working with SMB owners is getting them to realize the vast world around them is actually much smaller than they assume, in at least two key ways:

• Big brands with local or regional offices/locations are always a threat for stealing local customers.
• Their reach is as limited as their resources, in that while their service area is small, so too is their ability to rank in the SERPs.

That is, unless SMBs use the biggest and best weapon available to them: Local-focused content that makes a priority of using people, personalization and events to help them stave off the typically much stronger competition.

Full disclosure: Nothing related to business pisses me off more than seeing big brands dominate local search queries, when I know smaller brands that provide better service are all around.

Equally frustrating is seeing these small brands try to compete outside their league by relying too heavily on paid search and ignore how effective content marketing can be for their business’s long-term success.

If this sounds like your brand, I implore you to own your local turf by following the three steps outlined below.

#1 — Think quality > quantity

As a business strategist, two questions comes up over and over from SMB owners:

1. “What should I write about?”
2. “How often should I post blogs?”

A better question is, “What topics are my prospects most interested in, and how can I write about those topics with the quality necessary to gain and retain their attention?”

The process begins with you thinking less about how often you write and more about how well you write on the topics your prospects and customers care most about.

“If you want to get local content, and get ranking but also customers, think quality over quantity,” says Phil Rozek. “Get your sea legs. Can you create a page that gets rankings but also customers?”

The last point, which I discussed extensively with Rozek via phone, is a very important one.

The key to success for any brand’s content goes well beyond the SERPs, and that applies doubly so for local SMBs, where butts in the door or phone calls are the lifeblood of the business.

The focus, he says, must be on producing content of sufficient quality and relevancy to move the needle, not simply attain eyeballs.

“The goal is to get the phone to ring,” adds Rozek. “You want it to rank and continue to get the phone to ring. But you also want it to be good enough that you get customers who become brand advocates. If you can’t do that, you need to go back to the drawing board.”

Ramsey says well-performing local content should hit at least one of the following points perfectly:

• “It’s unifying. Think of sporting events — it’s one thing in a local place that brings everyone together across different walks of life and puts everyone on the same page. Good local content that gets shared and loved does the same.”
• “It’s educational. Local is confusing. Whether explaining history, directions, or tips, people crave good information about places.”
• “It’s insider. There is nothing worse than someone talking about a place that they don’t understand. It’s why content ‘only’ locals perform so well.”

As an example, Ramsey uses Movoto, a service provides tools and information for the real estate, as a great example. You can see from the example below that localized pages they create go way beyond what we typically see for city-specific pages, as the content is compelling visually and topically, creating a rich experience visitors are likely to read, share, and link to.

Adds Ramsey, “SMBs should ask every customer where they spend their time online. When they know that, they can start to create content that will appeal to them. The problem that most SMBs have is they get ‘sold’ on products that will update feeds with garbage or create content that doesn’t really relate to their audience.

“Then they give up. I think they have to step back and realize that you can’t outsource strategy. They need to be a part of it. They know their customer and need to be involved in determining how best to reach them.”

• What this tells us: Content quality goes beyond good grammar and solid images. Creating a content experience is the optimal goal.
• How to make it for your brand: Focus on creating content that is uniquely better than anything you’ve seen or that could be easily created by the competition, no matter how large. Think of the elements that make your area unique and interesting, then work to create content that provides a sensory experience worthy of being talked about and shared.
• Recommended reading/viewing: How to Create 10x Content – Whiteboard Friday

#2 — Relish the role of local expert

Mary Bowling speaking at Mozcon Local

Each time I do a search for a local service provider and see a large national or regional brand show up, a little of the strategist in me dies insides. Yes, I get that larger brands have the deep pockets to spend on Google Adwords and the domain authority to wreak havoc in the organic search. But come on… A lot of small brands aren’t even trying to compete, and that’s a shame.

“Too often, with small brands, they think they’ll have to hire someone else to create it,” says Bowling. “They don’t realize they are the local authorities, and simply writing what they know can go a long way. Most sales are taken at the location level, but small brands often don’t do enough location-specific content to help their business. Often, with a simple phone call and a fifteen minute interview, we can create a post that’s able to move the needle for their brand.”

Bowling further added: “The goal for the content these small brands create is localized excellence.”

Rob Robillard, aka A Concord Carpenter, provides an excellent example of how local brands can use the expert mantle to own their space. A general contractor, carpenter, and woodworker, Robillard has parlayed his expert and local knowledge into a correspondence gig for the Boston Globe.

Image courtesy of A Concord Carpenter

Says Rozek, “Robillard doesn’t write ‘local’ content as much as he’s a local business owner whose business has benefitted from his having become a noted local authority. Not only does he write for the Boston Globe, he also has a cable show” and a popular video series.

Also, stresses Rozek, different types of businesses will have different goals for their content.

A plumber, for example, is likely less concerned with having a piece of content that draws and engagement and get links; she needs the phone to ring. So having strong city-specific pages that have the ability to rank and get the phone to ring would likely be a more desirable option.

However, if a small brand can do both, they’re better positioned to enjoy success.

“If you have a small site that has good authority and some good links, they’re in the bully pulpit because any page they create is a little more likely to rank,” says Rozek. “The name of the game, then, is to use the other pages of the site to help the city pages rank, since even if they are done well doesn’t guarantee that they rank by themselves. But if you build links to other related pages on the site, those city pages are [likely to see a lift as well in organic reach], which is significant for building authority and engagement, even if the pages the links are pointing to don’t get the phone to ring.”

What this tells us: Don’t focus solely on creating content that gets the phone to ring. Devote some resources to attaining links on other parts of the site.

How to make it for your brand: Spend time building your reputation as an expert of note in your area, then create and share content on your site and other sites you’re able to partner with. Also, while city pages get people in the door, effective outreach can help you build links to other parts of the site that, in turn, provide a boost to the other pages on the site, including the city-specific pages.

Recommended reading: Top-3 Local SEO “Content” Wins for People Who Hate to Write

#3 — Get personal

One of the toughest sells to SMBs is getting them to see the value of making the content they share personal in nature. Makes zero sense when you consider that unique-to-only-you content is the one thing the competition cannot effectively copy.

“Small companies can create more unifying, educational, and insider content, but to do so they have to find the time and money to do it,” says Ramsey, adding, if they do, “Small businesses can blow away competition.”

Mike Ramsey speaking at Mozcon Local

An impressive example of a small brand outpacing all comers is Danburry Barbershop in Provo, Utah. The site has a welcoming, old-school feel and contains images of customers before, during, and after they receive service.

Danburry is getting right to the heart of personalized content by making local folks celebrities of sorts for, well, simply sitting in a chair and getting a trim or a wash. Let’s be honest: Who doesn’t want to show off their new ‘do? You know the customers are sharing the experience with friends and family members while providing the barber shop with ready-made personalized content.

Also, the brand posts images to social media, including Facebook and Twitter, creating a web of personalized content even large brands must envy.

“The Danburry Barbershop is killing it with a subdomain on a .blogspot site simply because he uses his site to showcase his customers,” says Ramsey. “His Facebook feed is also filled with his customer stories and what they do. He is creating a loyal community of unified, educated, and insider Provo people.”

My question to small business owners is, “What’s stopping you from doing the same?” And for those who work with SMBs, either as strategists, SEOs, or content people, we mustn’t shy away from making recommendations of this sort, especially when a brand has the bandwidth and the clientele to make it work.

What this tells us: Look for ways to get personal with your clientele, particularly as it regards the sharing of information involving them.

How to make it for your brand: Think of the people who’ve talked or written about how much they enjoy your product or service. Why not reach out to them for a quick interview, which could take the form of a short video that could posted to Instagram or YouTube or hosted directly on your site?

All you’d need is a few questions to ask them — don’t make it about your brand. Make it about the audience: getting to know them, who they are, etc.

Recommended reading: The Power of the Personal: Personal Brands for Company Brands

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Posted by brianspatterson

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.

It was my first day at my new gig as a federal government IT consultant in Washington, D.C. I was slogging through the typical onboarding paperwork when a senior partner dropped by, introduced himself, and handed me a paperback book.

“Read and implement this,” he said. The cover read The Trusted Advisor by David H. Maister, a book with a sole focus on “the ability to earn the trust and confidence of clients.”

“Client management must be important,” I thought.

This encounter occurred more than 10 years ago, in my previous profession. Before doing search marketing or SEO, I was a government IT consultant. I navigated bloated systems and untangled red tape. In the time I spent consulting at the FBI, ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement), and the CBP (U.S. Customs and Border Protection), I learned quite a few lessons that apply directly to the SEO industry.

The most important lessons I learned, perhaps, were about the art and science of effective client management. Many of those lessons learned have become standard operating procedure at Go Fish Digital. What follows is the codification of our client management approach. It isn’t a sexy new link building strategy or a mind-blowing algorithm update, but it’s just as critical to the success of a project.

Overarching client management principles

To start, the following overarching principles help set team expectations. The three core areas that guide our client engagements are:

1. Transparency: The majority of our tasks and communication take place in a project management tool (Basecamp) that the client has access to. We want them to see and participate in our discussions, questions, and decisions. By not having this process behind closed doors, we can always go back to when and why a decision was made within Basecamp.
2. Continuous communication: We communicate at the pace the client prefers, but we err toward over-communicating. To a client, radio silence means no work is being done, even if that isn’t truly the case.
3. Alignment: What are your client’s key performance indicators (KPIs)? What problems keep them up at night? We make sure to align our work and reporting with what is important to the client, rather than only pushing what we think is most important.

The following nine principles are built out of these three core areas, highlighting how you put these principles to work in day-to-day interactions with clients.

It should be noted that these aren’t hard and fast rules, but rather a philosophy to guide our team (and hopefully other agencies) on how to become trusted partners with your clients. It is hard to be perfect all the time (I sure as hell am not), but the more often these nine items are standard operating procedure, the better. So let’s dive in, Star Wars-style.

1. Take the time to learn the industry

I got the call from a team member to let me know a new referral had come our way. He was excited because it was a strong referral and very likely to become a client soon. I asked him about the project and what industry they were in. “Plastics machine manufacturing” was his response. Interesting… I knew next to nothing about that industry. Yet, we were very likely to have them as a client to help them market their products online. The first thing we needed to do was understand the industry, and we did this by diving in head first to learn everything we could about the plastics manufacturing lifecycle.

To make sure we have a solid foundation for a client’s niche, the team conducts a lot of discovery in the first month, such as:

1. Reviewing the client’s website
2. Identifying industry publications and blogs and reading them consistently
3. Scheduling an in-person visit (if possible) to see how they work and meet the team
4. Requesting any documentation they have about their products or services
5. Watching online videos highlighting the industry, their products, and their team
6. Building a lexicon document that includes jargon and definitions of words commonly used in their industry
7. Purchasing and using the product or service ourselves (if reasonable and feasible)

As an SEO and marketing consultant, you will not be an expert in every client’s industry. But, it is important that you learn their space. This builds their confidence in you, helps you learn their language, and establishes trust.

2. Crush it on the kickoff call

We were kicking off an online reputation management (ORM) project with a celebrity’s publicist and assistant. Prior to the call, we gathered everyone in the company that was a fan of this celeb and did a quick research session so we were all up to speed with his movies, causes, friends, and issues. For the kick-off call, we built a detailed agenda which contained specific topics and questions. The call left the client team feeling at ease that we understood the issue and how to fix it. As a team, we were pleased that all of our early legwork (and TMZ watching) paid off.

After the sales process, the project gets handed over to a client manager like myself. The first thing I do is get a kick-off call scheduled quickly with the client and anyone from their side who will be on the project. Since this is one of your earliest communications with the client, it sets the tone for the entire engagement, so you want to be organized and responsive in getting this meeting set up.

We include on the call anyone from our team who might touch the project. This way, they hear everything from the client at the start, and the client feels good because so many people are working hard on their project.

We always build an agenda for the kick-off call, and I make sure that there is at least one item that each person on our team can speak to. This allows each employee to demonstrate their expertise in the beginning and build a relationship with the client. If it’s a phone call, the client may forget just how many people we have working on the account if only one or two people speak during the meeting.

3. Have open, visible tasks and team discussions

We’ve been working with Amy for several years now, and she continually expresses her gratefulness for our transparency. Amy is a senior employee at a data security firm and is often traveling and working on other projects. By keeping track of every task on Basecamp and looping her into our work, she is able to quickly skim through completed tasks and see exactly where we stand on every project. She sees not only what we’ve accomplished in her absence, but also what’s on the horizon. Additionally, she can be directly emailed with any pertinent messages and chime in with a response to keep everything moving forward.

The goal here is to show everything except how the sausage is made. Why would you want to hide all of the time-consuming, difficult, and sometimes menial tasks you’re doing? Showing the client everything we are doing for them helps drive home the value of our service and keeps them from getting antsy about the occasional slow result.

The only place where we hold back a little is on drafts of deliverable reports. We keep those in our team Dropbox and simply reference the folder path when discussing them on Basecamp. We’ve found it keeps clients from getting hung up on things that we haven’t quite finished.

4. Respond within 24 hours

I was just breaking into online marketing when I heard something on the radio that caught my attention. My favorite show, The Sports Junkies in Washington, D.C., were looking to build a website for a new venture. They talked about how annoying it was to work with web designers because things always get difficult. In a moment of inspiration, I sent them a short pitch email that ended with, “Messages don’t sit around in my inbox. I respond immediately.” The next morning, someone from the show emailed me back, saying “I’m not sure why exactly, but I think I can work with you.” I’ve worked closely with them ever since, and that relationship has helped springboard the Go Fish Digital brand in D.C.

From that original encounter on, I’ve always placed a high value on responsiveness. You know that person in your life who feels like you’re late if you’re on time? That’s how we are with this 24-hour response time rule. If you truly take 24 hours to acknowledge a client’s request, it may be within the time frame, but it isn’t honoring the spirit of the rule itself (37 pieces of flair, anyone?). It doesn’t take much to send a note saying, “We are on it”.

This is another area in which we err on the side of overdoing things. Even if the client sends an email that might not normally warrant a response, we still ping them back to let them know it was received.

One of the chief complaints about service-based companies is a lack of responsiveness. Counteract that by being committed to quick responses.

5. Be organized

The director of marketing at a large financial organization likes to meet with our team weekly. We review the previous week’s progress and talk through our tasks for the next few days. This client is especially chatty, so without a formal agenda in place, there was the potential for the calls to devolve into a free-for-all, which would be inefficient for everyone. Because of situations like this, we always send a formal agenda ahead of time, which keeps us all on track and demonstrates to the client that we understand their goals and respect their time. Of course, we always allow our clients to ask questions or bring new things up. For the most part, though, we try to stick to the agenda.

Disorganization is frustrating. Sometimes you just have to deal with it. A spouse or child who misplaces everything, a friend who can’t remember an appointment, or a co-worker that never replies to important emails. While in these instances there is nothing you can do, a client who’s fed up with her vendor’s disorganization can simply get a new vendor. So we stress the importance of being ultra-organized on the project.

Have well thought-out agendas. Follow those up with meeting notes and action items if appropriate. Keep Basecamp organized with to-dos and messages. Communicate clearly. Always use calendar appointments. It’s the little things that show you are professional.

6. Be flexible and adaptable

We work with a large car sales website that aggregates all car listings from across the web. When you’re dealing with a site that has over 3 million pages, it’s important to focus on optimization opportunities that scale. We identified site speed as one of these optimization opportunities. The site had been particularly laggy, and I was doing my best to get to the bottom of the issues with their CDN. Alas, I was stuck.

Fortunately, one of our other team members is Akamai certified and has configured CDNs for multiple large government websites. I looped him in; he started throwing around big words like “nodes” and “end points.” Some magic happened, I assume, and everything was fixed. The site was now blazing-fast and the client happy that his SEO team resolved an issue he didn’t even know they could help with.

No project is ever the same, which is great. How boring would it be if you applied the exact same strategy and principles to different projects, over and over?

We’re always looking for ways to show additional value to the client. Whether it’s by helping them with something out-of-scope or helping with deliverables that they have to pass on to senior management, there are always ways for us to contribute value. Although there’s nothing wrong with up-selling, we don’t often like to say “that is out of scope” for a task that wouldn’t take us too long or be too difficult.

Additionally, we’re very flexible in terms of how we work with a client. Is the client a phone person or email person? Are they hands-off, or intimately involved in the details? We try to get a good feel for this, and then adjust how we work with them based on their preferences.

7. Be in front of the technological curve, not behind it

Our new yacht charter client had just finished their first month with us and we were reviewing everything that had been done thus far. It was all very positive, and during the call, the CEO casually said, “I love the internal communication tool (Slack) so much that I’ve started using it at my other company.” Clients want to feel like you are doing things efficiently, effectively, and with the latest technology.

In our field, change is the norm. Every time Google launches an algorithm update, it can mean that a tactic that’s worked for us for months or even years is suddenly obsolete. We’ve found that one of the best ways to avoid any surprises here is to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to strategies and tools.

I’ve mentioned our project management tool, Basecamp, a few times now. It may not have all the bells and whistles of others, but it’s dead simple to learn and our clients pick it up without any help from us.

We also use Slack both internally and with clients for brainstorming sessions. Slack provides quick access to the entire team, which is helpful for most of our day-to-day communication.

In addition to tools, we’ve found that everyone on the team needs to be comfortable with a core set of tech-savvy tasks:

1. Reviewing and editing HTML and CSS
2. Testing, installing, and configuring WordPress plugins
3. Editing a WordPress theme
4. Running ScreamingFrog against a site and reviewing the results
5. Performing more advanced Excel functions like vLookups and pivot tables
6. Examining a website’s DNS and understanding each element

Being tech-savvy in all areas of our business reinforces their trust that they are with the best team. Clients expect us to be tech-savvy, so we don’t want to let them down by looking like noobs.

8. Have an escalation path to turn to

While project work was underway for one of our financial sector clients, a reputation crisis popped up that went beyond our defined scope of work. We had worked with Google in the past to get certain defamatory web pages removed, but this particular case required some legal expertise. Luckily, we had a highly specialized ORM attorney in our network who was equipped to handle situations exactly like this. The client was grateful that we had a trusted expert on call and felt like their issue was being handled by an elite team that could deftly handle any issue that arose.

If things aren’t working, clients like when you have options to turn to. Bring in an expert from your team or even an outside consultant, but be sure to sell it as a unique offering or connection that you have. Being able to escalate situations to special people and processes when the initial solution doesn’t work keeps the project moving forward and prevents clients from seeking solutions from other agencies.

9. Show you care on a personal level

Our client was having his first child, a baby girl. That is certainly a time to celebrate, so we made a nice card and sent it to his family along with an edible arrangement when his bundle of joy arrived. It went over great, both with the client and his wife.

I hesitate to call this a tactic, since caring should never be manipulative. Let’s just call this a reminder to care. Small talk at the top of calls, for example, can go a long way in establishing a more personal connection than the robotic client/agency relationship. It’s hard for introverts like me, but I force myself to do it because it gives the relationship more depth and meaning. At the end of the day, your reputation as a person is more important than building brands or making money.

Final thoughts

We do our best to instill these values in our organization and make it clear up front what our expectations are of every employee. Over time, these nine principles have evolved and will continue to do so as we work to continue building a good agency with a strong reputation.

Maintaining a positive relationship with the client is everything. Delivering on the results you sell and adhering to these nine principles will help both you and your client achieve success.

Do you disagree with any of these principles? Or are there others that are important to you, either as a provider or as a client? Let us know in the comments!

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