Posted by larry.kim

[Estimated read time: 13 minutes]

Does organic click-through rate (CTR) data impact page rankings? This has been a huge topic of debate for years within the search industry.

Some people think the influence of CTR on rankings is nothing more than a persistent myth. Like the one where humans and dinosaurs lived together at the same time — you know, like in that reality series “The Flintstones”?

Some other people are convinced that Google must look at end user data. Because how in the world would Google know which pages to rank without it?

Google (OK, at least one Google engineer who spoke at SMX) seems to indicate the latter is indeed the case:

Next time I hear a Googler say “we don’t use query/click data in rankings,” I’m pointing to https://t.co/qETZpGEbm9 pic.twitter.com/m9DO3cBVXb

— Rand Fishkin (@randfish) March 17, 2016

I also highly encourage you to check out Rand Fishkin’s Whiteboard Friday discussing clicks and click-through rate. In short, the key point is this: If a page is ranking in position 3, but gets a higher than expected CTR, Google may decide to rank that page higher because tons of people are obviously interested in that result.

Seems kind of obvious, right?

And if true, we ought to be able to measure it! In this post, I’m going to try to show that RankBrain may just be the missing link between CTR and rankings.

Untangling meaning from Google RankBrain confusion

Let’s be honest: Suddenly, everyone is claiming to be a RankBrain expert. RankBrain-shaming is quickly becoming an industry epidemic.

Please ask yourself: Do most of these people — especially those who aren’t employed by Google, but even some of the most helpful and well-intentioned spokespeople who actually work for Google — thoroughly know what they’re talking about? I’ve seen a lot of confusing and conflicting statements floating around.

Here’s the wildest one. At SMX West, Google’s Paul Haahr said Google doesn’t really understand what RankBrain is doing.

If this really smart guy who works at Google doesn’t know what RankBrain does, how in the heck does some random self-proclaimed SEO guru definitively know all the secrets of RankBrain? They must be one of those SEOs who “knew” RankBrain was coming, even before Google announced it publicly on October 26, but just didn’t want to spoil the surprise.

Now let’s go to two of the most public Google figures: Gary Illyes and John Mueller.

Illyes seemed to shoot down the idea that RankBrain could become the most important ranking factor (something which I strongly believe is inevitable). Google’s Greg Corrado publicly stated that RankBrain is “the third-most important signal contributing to the result of a search query.”

Illyes also said on Twitter that: “Rankbrain lets us understand queries better. No affect on crawling nor indexing or replace anything in ranking.” But then later clarified: “…it does change ranking.”

I don’t disagree at all. It hasn’t. (Not yet, anyway.)

Links still matter. Content still matters. Hundreds of other signals still matter.

It’s just that RankBrain had to displace something as a ranking signal. Whatever used to be Google’s third most important signal is no longer the third most important signal. RankBrain couldn’t be the third most important signal before it existed!

Now let’s go to Mueller. He believes machine learning will gain more prominence in search results, noting Bing and Yandex do a lot of this already. He noted that machine learning needs to be tested over time, but there are a lot of interesting cases where Google’s algorithm needs a system to react to searches it hasn’t seen before.

Bottom line: RankBrain, like other new Google changes, is starting out as a relatively small part of the Google equation today. RankBrain won’t replace other signals any time soon (think of it simply like this: Google is adding a new ingredient to your favorite dish to make it even tastier). But if RankBrain delivers great metrics and keeps users happy, then surely it will be given more weight and expanded in the future.

RankBrain headaches

If you want to nerd out on RankBrain, neural networks, semantic theory, word vectors, and patents, then you should read:

• Getting Your Head Around Google’s RankBrain by David Harry
• RankBrain: What Do We Know About Google’s Machine-Learning System? by Virginia Nussey (concentrate on Marcus Tober’s SMX presentation recap in the section “Machine Learning Ranks Relevance”)
• How Google Works: A Google Ranking Engineer’s Story by Kristi Kellogg

To be clear: my goal with this post isn’t to discuss tweets from Googlers, patents, research, or speculative theories.

Rather, I’m just going to ignore EVERYBODY and look at actual click data.

Searching for Rankbrain

Rand conducted one of the most popular tests of the influence of CTR on Google’s search results. He asked people to do a specific search and click on the link to his blog (which was in 7th position). This impacted the rankings for a short period of time, moving the post up to 1st position.

But these are all transient changes. Changes don’t persist.

It’s like how you can’t increase your AdWords Quality Scores simply by clicking on your own ads a few times. This is the oldest trick in the book and it doesn’t work.

The results of another experiment appeared on Search Engine Land last August and concluded that CTR isn’t a ranking factor. But this test had a pretty significant flaw — it relied on bots artificially inflating CTRs and search volume (and this test was only for a single two-word keyword: “negative SEO”). So essentially, this test was the organic search equivalent of click fraud. Google AdWords has been fighting click fraud for 15 years and they can easily apply these learnings to organic search. What did I just say about old tricks?

Before we look at the data, a final “disclaimer.” I don’t know if what this data reveals is definitively RankBrain, or another CTR-based ranking signal that’s part of the core Google algorithm. Regardless, there’s something here — and I can most certainly say with confidence that CTR is impacting rank. For simplicity, I’ll be referring to this as Rankbrain.

A crazy new experiment

Google has said that RankBrain is being tested on long-tail terms, which makes sense. Google wants to start testing its machine-learning system with searches they have little to no data on — and 99.9 percent of pages have zero external links pointing to them.

So how is Google able to tell which pages should rank in these cases? By examining engagement and relevance. CTR is one of the best indicators of both.

Head terms, as far as we know, aren’t being exposed to RankBrain right now. So by observing the differences between the organic search CTRs of long-tail terms versus head terms, we should be able to spot the difference:

We used 1,000 keywords in the same keyword niche (to isolate external factors like Google shopping and other SERP features that can alter CTR characteristics). The keywords are all from my own website: Wordstream.com.

I compared CTR versus rank for 1–2 word search terms, and did the same thing for long-tail keywords (4–10 word search terms).

Notice how the long-tail terms get much higher average CTRs for a given position. For example, in this data set, the head term in position 1 got an average CTR of 17.5 percent, whereas the long-tail term in position 1 had a remarkably high CTR, at an average of 33 percent.

You’re probably thinking: “Well, that makes sense. You’d expect long-tail terms to have stronger query intent, thus higher CTRs.” That’s true, actually.

But why is that long-tail keyword terms with high CTRs are so much more likely to be in top positions versus bottom-of-page organic positions? That’s a little weird, right?

OK, let’s do an analysis of paid search queries in the same niche. I use organic search to come up with paid search keyword ideas and vice versa, so we’re looking at the same keywords in many cases.

Long-tail terms in this same vertical get higher CTRs than head terms. However, the difference between long-tail and head term CTR is very small in positions 1–2, and becomes huge as you go out to lower positions.

So in summary, something unusual is happening:

• In paid search, long-tail and head terms do roughly the same CTR in high ad spots (1–2) and see huge differences in CTR for lower spots (3–7).
• But in organic search, the long-tail and head terms in spots (1–2) have huge differences in CTR and very little difference as you go down the page.

Why are the same keywords behaving so differently in organic versus paid?

The difference (we think) is that RankBrain is boosting the search rankings of pages that have higher organic click-through rates.

Not convinced yet?

Which came first: the CTR or the ranking?

CTR and ranking are codependent variables. There’s obviously a relationship between the two, but which is causing what? In order to get to the bottom of this “chicken versus egg” situation, we’re going to have to do a bit more analysis.

The following graph takes the difference between an observed organic search CTR minus the expected CTR, to figure out if your page is beating — or being beaten by — the expected average CTR for a given organic position.

By only looking at the extent by which a keyword beats or is beaten by the predicted CTR, you are essentially isolating the natural relationship between CTR and ranking in order to get a better picture of what’s going on.

We found on average, that if you beat the expected CTR, then you’re far more likely to rank in more prominent positions. Failing to beat the expected CTR makes it more likely you’ll appear in positions 6–10.

So, based on our example of long-tail search terms for this niche, if a page:

• Beats the expected CTR for a given position by 20 percent, you’re likely to appear in position 1.
• Beats beat the expected CTR for a given position by 12 percent, then you’re likely to appear in position 2.
• Falls below the expected CTR for a given position by 6 percent, then you’re likely to appear in position 10.

And so on.

Here’s a greatly simplified rule of thumb:

The more your pages beat the expected organic CTR for a given position, the more likely you are to appear in prominent organic positions.

If your pages fall below the expected organic search CTR, then you’ll find your pages in lower organic positions on the SERP.

Want to move up by one position in Google’s rankings? Increase your CTR by 3 percent. Want to move up another spot? Increase your CTR by another 3 percent.

If you can’t beat the expected click-through rate for a given position, you’re unlikely to appear in positions 1–5.

Essentially, you can think of all of this as though Google is giving bonus points to pages that have high click-through rates. The fact that it looks punitive is just a natural side effect.

If Google gives “high CTR bonus points” to other websites, then your relative performance will decline. It’s not that you got penalized; it’s just you’re the only one who didn’t get the rewards.

A simple example: The Long-tail Query That Could

Here’s one quick example from our 1000-keyword data set. For the query: “email subjects that get opened,” this page has a ridiculously high organic CTR of 52.17%, which beats the expected CTR for the top spot in this vertical by over 60%. It also generates insanely great engagement rates, including a time on page of over 24 minutes.

We believe that these two strong engagement metrics send a clear signal to Google that the page matches the query’s intent, despite not having an exact keyword match in the content.

What does Google want?

A lot of factors go into ranking. We know links, content, and RankBrain are the top 3 search ranking factors in Google’s algorithm. But there are hundreds of additional signals Google looks at.

So let’s make this simple. Your website is a house.

This is a terrible website. It was built a long time ago and has received no SEO love in a long time (terrible structure, markup, navigation, content, etc). It ranks terribly. Nobody visits it. And those poor souls who do stumble across it wish they never had and quickly leave, wondering why it even exists.

This website is pretty good. It’s designed well. It’s obviously well-maintained. It addresses all the SEO essentials. Everything is optimized. It ranks reasonably well. A good amount of people visit and hang out a while since, hey, it has everything you’d expect in a website nowadays.

Now we get to the ultimate house. It has everything you could want in a website — beautifully designed, great content, and optimized in every way possible. It owns tons of prominent search positions and everyone goes here to visit (the parties are AMAZING) again and again because of the amazing experience — and they’re very likely to tell their friends about it after they leave.

People love this house. Google goes where the people are. So Google rewards it.

This is the website you need to look like to Google.

No fair, right? The big house gets all the advantages!

Wrong!

So now what the heck do I do?

A bunch of articles say that there’s absolutely nothing you can or should do to optimize your site for Rankbrain today, and for any future updates. I couldn’t disagree more.

If you want to rank better, you need to get more people to YOUR party. This is where CTR comes in.

It appears that Google RankBrain has been “inspired by” AdWords and many other technologies that look at user engagement signals to determine page quality and relevance. And RankBrain is learning how to assign ratings to pages that may have insufficient link or historical page data, but are relevant to a searcher’s query.

So how do you raise your CTRs? You should focus your efforts in four key areas:

1. Optimize pages with low “organic Quality Scores.” Download all of your query data from Google Search Console. Sort your data, figure out which of your pages have below average CTRs, and prioritize those — it’s far less risky to focus on fixing your losers because they have the most potential upside. None of these pages will get any love from RankBrain!
2. Combine your SEO keywords with emotional triggers to create irresistible headlines. Emotions like anger, disgust, affirmation, and fear are proven to increase click-through rates and conversion rates. If everyone who you want to beat already has crafted optimized title tags, then packing an emotional wallop will give you the edge you need and make your listing stand out.
3. Increase other user engagement rates. Like click-through rate, we believe you need to have higher-than-expected engagement metrics (e.g. time on site, bounce rate — more on this in a future article). This is a critical relevance signal! Google knows the expected conversion and engagement rates based on a variety of factors (e.g. industry, query, location, time of day, device type). So create 10X content!
4. Use social media ads and remarketing to increase search volume and CTR. Paid social ads and remarketing display ads can generate serious awareness and exposure for a reasonable cost (no more than $50 a day). If people aren’t familiar with your brand, bombard your target audience with Facebook and Twitter ads. People who are familiar with your brand are 2x more likely to click through and to convert.

Key summary

Whether or not RankBrain becomes the most important ranking signal (and I believe it will be someday), it’s smart to ensure your pages get as many organic search clicks as possible. It means more people are visiting your site and it sends important signals to Google that your page is relevant and awesome.

Our research also shows that achieving above-expected user engagement metrics result in better organic rankings, which results in even more clicks to your site.

Don’t settle for average CTRs. Be a unicorn among a sea of donkeys! Raise your organic CTRs and engagement rates! Get optimizing now!

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Posted by randfish

[Estimated read time: 9 minutes]

Navigating linking practices can be a treacherous process. Sometimes it feels like a penalty is lurking around every corner. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand talks about the ins and outs of linking internally and externally, identifying pitfalls and opportunities both.

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 linking externally and linking internally, and some of the risks and rewards that are involved.

So some of you probably have seen April 11th, Google made this big move. They sent out a bunch of penalties to, well, a noticeably large number of websites — it was covered on a bunch of the SEO forums and in the SEO news — basically saying, this is Google sending out these warnings saying, “You are linking to unnatural looking sites or in unnatural patterns, and we’ve noticed and we think that those links shouldn’t be there. We may be penalizing your site, or we may not be passing PageRank or other types of link mechanisms, link value through your website anymore.”

This isn’t the first time Google has done this. They’ve done it many, many times over the last 10, 15 years. We’ve seen plenty of this. This was just another explosion in that.

It is also the case that we’ve seen some other cool things on the other side of the aisle, which is Google rewarding internal links in a way we had not seen previously. In fact, some cool experiments were done recently — hopefully they’ll be made public soon, and then we can link over to them — around internal links and the power that internal links still have.

So we know that it still matters and it’s still important to consider who we link to and what we link to from our sites and pages. So I thought maybe we’d talk through a few of those scenarios.

1) When you’re linking to external sites and pages.

Let’s say I’ve got my mobile phones compared website here. It is actually a very positive thing to link out to places like the official website of maybe Samsung’s S7, or to link out to the Engadget review if I’m collecting a bunch of reviews and aggregating that data there to give the reference point. This is positive.

However, if I’m linking, let’s say I’m getting some affiliate value or someone’s paid me to link, or I’m linking to the site because it turns out that I own it or someone connected to me owns it and I’m getting some benefit from it, this “mobile info 4 UR life,” maybe that could be a little suspicious.

It is the case, it is true and we’ve seen plenty of evidence to support this. I think ever since Marshall Simmonds from Define came in here many years ago and did his Whiteboard Friday about how The New York Times saw so much benefit from linking out, lots of folks have been investigating that and seen that benefit repeated over and over. So good external pointing links can give a boost to your site’s relevance, to how search engines consider you, and even to your rankings. Linking out is a positive thing.

It’s also the case that sites and pages that link out tend to earn more links back in, which seems obvious. They’re more helpful and relevant to people, they can serve as better resources, and it’s also the case that often that’s a very direct correlation because linking out might drive traffic to other websites who then notice it and say, “Oh yeah, I’d like to check you out. I might link to you.”

Engadget might see my link and say, “Oh, you guys do a great job of that comparison stuff. Maybe we’ll link to one of those in a future blog post that we do.” Or Samsung might see our comparison and say, “Hey, that’s some pretty cool data you’ve got. Do you think we could partner with you on a future research project and maybe we’d link to you from that project?” Very cool things.

That said, manipulative linking is dangerous. This is sort of the inverse of what we classically think of as link penalties, where we’ve gotten links that have pushed us up in the rankings, and they are from bad places, linking out to bad places or to good places for bad reasons, bad reasons being manipulative reasons, someone’s paid you, you’re getting some benefit from it. Google recently, a few months ago, made this announcement around how if bloggers are receiving free items from companies, and then they’re linking back to those products, that could be penalized or could be perceived as violating FTC rules if there’s not an advertisement or advertorial sponsor message on there. So all kinds of things here.

2) Linking to internal pages or other sites you own or control.

All right. Let’s move over to internal links. On internal links, we’ve got a little bit of the same story but with some caveats. So again, my mobile phones compared page is here.

I could be linking off to my own review. I could be linking off to my video category, maybe if I’ve got a video at the bottom of this page. I’m providing navigation. I’m helping visitors go where they want to go. This is a very positive thing. It cannot only help to get those pages indexed and crawled, it may also help them rank higher with a few caveats. So the right internal links, good ones, can have a large positive impact across a big website.

Internal links that tend to perform the best, the ones that help the most tend to be the ones that drive real traffic, and they sort of continue a visitor’s journey. They help people find what they’re looking for, and it’s also the case that the ones that don’t drive traffic, that aren’t perceived as helpful seem to have less of an impact on the pages they link to.

Now, I will point this out. If you’re worried about like, “Oh, should I add one more link on here to another category page, or should I reference another page from here,” you generally don’t need to worry about that. As long as you think that some small portion, even a small portion of your audience would be potentially interested in that and it makes sense from a usability perspective, you should go ahead and add the link. I don’t tend to worry at all about like, “Well, the difference between 52 links on a page and 53 links is those 52 links will get a little bit less PageRank or a little bit less link energy, whatever it is, voting power than the 53rd link.” I would not sweat that at all. Those days are long since gone.

But it is true that internal links tend to have the largest impact on already authoritative sites. If you’ve already got a lot of authority on your site, you can help many of the pages deep in your site structure to get crawled and indexed and to rank better by linking to them. We’ve seen this pretty substantially with some very big websites lately where they’ve gone through these redesigns and had remarkable results.

That said, manipulative links, for example, let’s say I went through and I just wrote a little bot that crawled my entire website, found every instance of the word “LG,” the manufacturer, the phone manufacturer and linked to my LG page. It gets a little manipulative. There’s probably some places where it makes great sense, but every single time the word is mentioned — you’ve probably seen some websites like these, although fewer of them in the last three or four years than in the five years before that when this tactic was really prevalent and Google wasn’t penalizing for it.

We’ve actually seen examples where people removed that, and they made it much more subtle. They only did it on the first instance of the word on a page, and they only did it on category-level pages or blog-level pages, not deeply index pages or paginated versions of things, that kind of stuff. In fact, they saw their rankings rise. I love this. They saw their rankings rise like almost immediately. There was a really a cool example a few years back. I think I might have done a Whiteboard Friday about that (correction: I didn’t do a WB Friday on this topic after all – apologies!).

So with manipulative internal links, especially ones that are stuffed into footers or jammed into every word instance or those kinds of things, Google tends to perceive that as manipulative, which in fact it really is. You’re not doing that for visitor’s benefit. You’re hoping that it helps you with your rankings, and in fact it’s probably doing the opposite.

General rule of thumb: If you can’t find any way to justify how something that you’re doing for SEO also benefits a visitor, maybe you should reconsider it, with a few exceptions. XML sitemaps might be a reasonable one.

It’s the case that oftentimes the ones that are in footers or in structured template areas of a website that tend not to get clicked by people, sometimes a sidebar can do it, sometimes top nav can do it, sometimes even in-content stuff that’s wrapped around can do it, that tends to be the most dangerous places, but it’s not the only kind that gets penalized. In fact, it’s not even always bad.

We’ve seen instances again on very big websites where they’ve done very significant footers and linked off to all their properties that the site or the company owns and controls. We’ve seen it where they use it to get greater indexation, and in fact it’s positive because the footer is well done, because it tends to link to good places, because it’s clearly a high-quality one, and it’s not anchor text stuff. Anchor text is again a big risk here with internal linking.

So this is a very fine line, and it’s a fine meandering line. I can’t give you a clear-cut “never do this, always do this.” It’s a considered process. That’s true for internal linking, and it’s true, maybe a little less true for external linking.

If you’ve got great advice that you’d like to share, or some experiences, or you want us to take a look at some of your internal or external linking practices, feel free to leave a comment. We’ll check them out, and I’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 ronell-smith

[Estimated read time: 8 minutes]

One of my most memorable interactions in college took place in English 202, when my professor would have us come to the front of the class and share with him (while seated in a chair right beside his desk) what our thesis was for the assignment we’d be working on for the first half of the semester.

In nearly every case, my thesis was too long, something my professor had no truck with.

“Smith,” he’d say, “if you cannot explain it in a sentence, you don’t understand it clearly.”

I’d always walk away wondering how on Earth I was supposed to distill my idea into one sentence.

It would be years later, while studying physics, that I encountered a similar quote, often attributed to Albert Einstein [“Unless you can explain it simply, you do not understand it fully”], before I finally understood the message my professor was trying to get across: “The better you understand an idea, and can distill its essence internally, the easier it is for you to share the idea succinctly and clearly to the reader.”

We now live in a world overflowing with words, even as the time we have to read them gets shorter and shorter.

All around we hear, see, and read where people don’t have time to write — yet when they do write, it’s more essay than note. All the while, the folks consuming our content are crying out, “Give me the damn info, already!”

Ann Wylie, one of the preeminent writing and communication coaches in the world, agrees, writing in a recent newsletter: “The longer your story, the less of it your readers will read — and the less likely they are to understand and act on it.”

In fact, she shares research conducted by Wilbur Schramm, who she calls the “father of communication studies,” highlighting the effect of story length on reading:

• A nine-paragraph-long story lost three out of 10 readers by the fifth paragraph.
• A shorter story lost only two.The short and the long of it: More people read further when the story is shorter rather than longer.

“That’s the 33% reading gap between a short piece and a longer one,” says Wylie. “Bottom line: The longer your piece, the less of it they’ll read.”

People read more of shorter content (Image source)

I think it’s time we all took a stand against word bloat, focusing our attention on writing shorter, punchier content.

If you’re in (and I hope you are), I’m going to share three simple tips for creating amazing short content, replete with real-life examples showcasing exactly what I’m talking about.

Where digital can take a cue from print

Before I dive into the tactics, I’d like to quash what I think might be three objections to writing shorter content:

• Brevity is tough.
• But some people enjoy reading longer content.
• What about those times when I need more words to make my point?

Let me take them in order:

• I cannot help you here. Life is tough; but the alternative is far worse. The same can be said for people not consuming your verbose content. It’s worth the effort to attempt to write shorter.
• Yes, and they’ll likely enjoy it even more if you cut needless information. Most importantly, imagine all of the OTHER people who’d consume, enjoy, and share your content if it didn’t take forever to read it.
• In almost every case, we could make our messages more effective if we actively looked for ways to write more succinctly.

“We take it as a given that the more information decision makers have, the better off they are,” wrote Malcolm Gladwell in Blink. However, “that extra information isn’t actually an advantage at all … In fact [it’s] more than useless. It’s harmful. It confuses the issues.”

In my opinion, the rise of blogs, where we’re all free to write as much as we like, has helped to ruin great writing. I wish we’d steal from print — where space is anything but free — the notion that each word needs to make a case for its own existence.

Why listen to me?

In some way, shape, or form, I’ve been an editor for more than half my life, going back to college when I was an Opinions Page editor. I’ve since held editing jobs for newsletters, magazines, and websites. I’ve also won numerous writing and editing awards, including from the Associated Press.

Maybe my most fun editing job is the one I have now as the head of YouMoz, Moz’s user-generated content website.

In this role I get to work with hundreds of writers, see thousands of posts, and have meaningful interactions that lead to authors becoming better at sharing ideas than they ever thought possible.

Also, given the high volume of posts we receive, I’ve developed a strong sense of what typically derails a piece. All things being equal, it’s length. In nearly every case — even for content that we eventually accept — posts come in far too long. Sadly, most authors refuse to cut pieces, even for the sake of clarity.

The authors who are up to the challenge typically follow one of three paths:

Tip #1: Show, don’t tell

Instead of using words to tell your story, use screen captures. How-to content is vital in the content marketing space. People want to know how to do what you’ve described. Why not show them?

This works very well for any step-by-step posts where readers would be better served seeing what they are to do.

A few great examples include:

• How to Find and Fix Structured Data Markup Errors via the Google Search Console, by Al Gomez
• The Brand Halo Effect: Does Brand Awareness Impact Organic Search Rankings?, by Tom Coad
• Here’s How to Automate Google Analytics Reporting with Google Sheets, by Gabriele Toninelli

Notice how, in each case, the authors use an economy of words but place a priority on screen captures.

Also, don’t be afraid to use a single image or a short video to capture and share your idea. Not all ideas need the added weight of text.

Tip #2: Make a statement

This was my go-to tactic when I first started blogging for my own site in 2010. I keep track of the information listed in the screen capture in a Gmail draft, but you can use Evernote or whatever note-capturing platform you prefer. (I sometimes capture the initial idea in a Moleskine pad, then transfer it to Gmail later. I like using Gmail because it’s easy to search for my idea when I’m ready to work on it.)

The key element with this approach is that it ensures I have a clear, strong point to make, then can back it up with supporting facts. The real genius of this approach is once I’ve covered my three points, I’m done.

The goal isn’t to write everything there is to write on a topic; the goal is to share sufficient information that leads to learning and/or opens the topic up for further discussion.

If you decide to use this approach/style of post, keep these numbers in mind:

• 100: Number of words to make your point in the initial paragraph
• 300: Total number of words for the three supporting points
• 50: Number of words in the closing paragraph, including the call to action

I’ve seen this approach work very effectively for SMBs and enterprise brands.

Tip #3: Write anecdotally

If you’re familiar with the Wall Street Journal, you’ve no doubt seen the treatment they give to the beginning of many of their stories. It’s called an “anecdotal lead,” where you use a real-life person/example to make the reader aware of what the story is about.

The goal is to make them so interested they cannot walk away, but not provide so much information that they don’t read the story.

And by using a real person to make the point, the stories are more interesting, more personal, more memorable, and more likely to be read.

Last year we rolled out a section on YouMoz called called “Here’s How,” where people share how they/their team/their brand did or does something using a story to provide step-by-step details to make the impact real to the audience.

Authors have readily cottoned to the idea of sharing content in this form, in large part because they’re living through the experience, so sharing it with rich detail is easy. They simply share a little of the who and the what, then go straight to the how. In fact, the goal with regard to Here’s How is for 90% of each post to be how-to information.

Here are a few examples:

• Here’s How to Turn First-Time Customers into Loyal Fans with Context-Rich Content, by Rocio del Moral
• Here’s How a Brand New Website Built an Email List of More than 1,300 Contacts in Three Days, by Sam Anthony
• Here’s How to Break down Reporting Options in Mobile Analytics, by Ran Avrahamy

Don’t be afraid to steal this approach. It works. But remember, don’t over-tell the story.

Leave them yearning

Speaking of over-telling, I’ve gone on far longer than I’d hoped to with this post. But there’s one final point I’d like to leave you with.

Take advantage of the comments sections on blogs. Instead of trying to cover everything under the sun, use the comments to share additional elements that didn’t have to go in the story itself, but would provide great insight for those who’ve read your content.

By taking this approach, you can leave a little to the imagination in the post, then reward readers for sticking around.

What are your thoughts on the three ideas shared above?

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Posted by adamf

[Estimated read time: 6 minutes]

Just a few months back I wrote a blog post reviewing Moz Pro in 2015 and shared some of our lofty goals for 2016. Now that we’re a quarter of the way through the year, I wanted to share some of the progress we’ve made and offer a glimpse into other great SEO features we’ll be working on over the next three months.

Want to learn more about Moz Pro?

Campaign rankings leveled up

We overhauled Moz Pro’s rankings architecture, dramatically improving response times and unlocking all kinds of new features. For the full scoop on the core release, check out Jeremy’s excellent post. Below are some improvements included in the bigger release, as well as some additions we made after the fact.

#1: See your rankings data over any timeframe

For years we collected your rankings data over time, but, confoundingly, we were never able to make that data fully accessible in the product. We’re pleased as punch that this is now supported on top of our more stable and flexible architecture. This is great for those looking for deeper comparisons, analyses, and reporting.

#2: Advanced sorting and filtering

Those same architectural limitations made it slow and laborious for us to build in new filters and sorting. You can now filter to your heart’s content by location, label, and text string. For example, you might quickly create a filter to show only your branded keywords, with a location of Seattle, and that include the word “coffee.” This is especially powerful when you have a long list of keywords, where sorting and filtering was once slow and unmanageable. Oh, and you can sort your keywords alphabetically now too. Thanks for your patience!

#3: Google algorithm overlays on your graphs

Dr. Pete has done some amazing work in tracking Google algorithm updates with Mozcast. You can now leverage that data to get more value out of your rankings reports. If you go to one of your campaigns and look at your last year or two of rankings data, you’ll see vertical lines on the graph corresponding to major algo updates. Hover over the little icon at the bottom to learn more about what happened. If you’ve seen your organic search traffic suddenly increase or decrease, this is another great diagnostic in your toolkit.

#4: Improved performance and UX

Our new, better-organized, cleaner interface makes it easier to read and customize your reports. Faster pages are pretty nice, too.

#5: New weekly email updates

This is another improvement that I’m pretty psyched about. Our new emails are cleaner and more informative, and now include both ranking updates and important insights that we discover for you each week. We plan to add more timely information to these as we continue to improve our datasets and refine the logic behind Insights.

On-page analysis is much better with Related Topics

In March we launched a new feature that can help you make sense of how search engines understand topics and phrases. You can use this data to build deeper content, improve your topical authority, find keyword ideas, and generally better understand the SERP. It uses machine learning and topic modeling to mine related topics from the SERPs.

#6: Topical analysis report

See the topics that your SERP competition is writing about. This can help you understand what kinds of keywords signal topical relevance and provide good ideas for how you can make your content more robust and relevant to searchers. I’m not going to go too deep here, but check out Jon White’s fantastic post for some great tips and examples to get the most from this feature.

#7: Quick access to on-page and topical analyses from Rankings

Page Optimization scores are now included in your rankings views, so you can see which landing pages have potential for optimization and jump directly to the report for keyword targeting suggestions and topical analysis.

We’ve made Insights better

A long while back, we dabbled with a new section in campaigns called Insights. This mini-dashboard is tasked with surfacing interesting problems, statuses, and insights from across all sections within a campaign. This section is still a work in progress, but we made some nice additions in the last couple of months.

#8: “To do” and “done”

We heard feedback that many of you are using the Insights as to-do list items. Now you can check them off your list once you’ve read them, or when they’re complete. A new workflow improvement allows you to dismiss an insight you’re done with. This allows for better tracking of work progress.

#9: Add to Trello

If you need a more robust workflow, we’ve added a way to quickly add insight tiles to Trello. Trello is a power task management solution, which also happens to be free. I’ve used it quite a bit myself, and happily recommend it.

#10: Rankings Summary tile

A new tile providing a quick look at your latest rankings, including your most significant improvements and declines.

Reporting got some needed attention

Outside of the more obvious features I’ve shared, we’ve also been working quietly behind the scenes to make our reporting and exports better.

#11: Customizable CSV exports for rankings

When we launched the ability to select custom timeframes in rankings, one feature that lagged was the ability to export data specific to that timeframe. We recently launched updated CSVs in that section that will respect filters as well as time frames.

#12: Revamped interface for custom reports

Adding and managing custom reports is easier to use and easier on the eyes.

A glimpse into the future

We have a few other tricks up our collective sleeves.

Keyword Explorer!

Yup, this long-anticipated keyword research tool is literally just around the corner. Be wary.

Keyword analysis page revamp

When you click on a keyword from a campaign, you will very soon be presented with a much cleaner and more informative analysis to help you understand your history with that keyword and its SEO potential.

Keyword volume in campaigns

We’ve been working on a more accurate keyword volume metric that offers a volume range built on multiple data sources, instead of a very precise but often incorrect number. You’ll find this soon on the keyword analysis page, and a bit later along with your keywords rankings, so you can better gauge the value of the keywords you track and the rankings you earn.

SERP features

A high organic ranking is excellent, it’s true. However, with an increasing number of ads, packs, and answers on many SERPs, your visibility might still be low. We plan to include the top SERP features that SEOs can act on along with your rankings. This can help you better understand visibility and inform strategic choices.

On-page reports from the Mozbar

Kick off a page analysis report directly from the MozBar as you review the page on your site.

“Real” PDF exports

Our current PDF export solution is functional, but pretty rough. It converts page modules into images and then encapsulated them in a PDF. Yeah… not so great. We’ll soon launch an updated method for creating PDFs so that they include text as text and images as images, offering better editing, copying, and image quality.

New & improved site crawl

Expect big improvements to the interface and the data surfaced. On top of that, this update includes a rewrite of the crawler itself, allowing for faster and more reliable crawling. We are targeting a beta in Q2 and a full launch in Q3.

In conclusion…

We’re keeping busy and trying to bring more value to our products. If you aren’t a customer and want to check things out, go ahead and give Moz Pro a spin with a 30-day free trial.

As always, please share your thoughts. We count on your candid feedback to help us guide our priorities build better products.

Before I go:

I want to give a shout out to our sisters and brothers at Moz that are working tirelessly on focused offerings for content marketing, influencer marketing, local search, and API data access. If you find yourself in need for such tools, check them out!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Posted by Kenia

[Estimated read time: 9 minutes]

The rise and rise of online video content over recent years is showing no signs of slowing. According to Cisco Forecast, video will represent 69% of all consumer-based Internet traffic by 2017; this is expected to rise to 80% by 2019.

Meanwhile, another study from Business Insider estimates that video advertising will account for 41% of total desktop display-related spending in 2020 in the US.

Looking at these stats, it’s clear that video will continue to be a critical element of successful digital marketing strategies for the foreseeable future. As YouTube and Facebook jostle to be top dog in online video, our team of digital marketing scientists at Wolfgang Digital naturally wanted to run an experiment to determine which platform delivers the best value when promoting video content and, importantly, how much quality watched time you get for your investment on each advertising platform.

Let’s analyze the numbers and try to settle the “Facebook vs YouTube” video battle once and for all!

Setting the scene: Facebook versus YouTube

Here’s how the battle for video has been shaping up over recent years.

• New online video platforms such as Vine, Instagram, and Snapchat have emerged in the last two years.
• Meanwhile, others — like Facebook Video — have grown considerably.
• In April 2015, Facebook got 4 billion daily views. In the space of just 6 months this figure doubled, reaching 8 billion daily views.
• Critics pointed out that the arbitrary metric of “a view” didn’t really mean much, since YouTube counts a view after 30 seconds and Facebook counts a view after only 3 seconds.
• In January 2016, Facebook announced that people watch around 100 million hours of video a day.
• In February 2016, Google CEO, Sundar Pichai, reminded investors that YouTube’s audience watches hundreds of millions of hours of video every day.
• Since 2012, YouTube has measured its performance in terms of “hours watched,” not video views.
• As of 2016, Facebook now also refers to the “hours watched” metric.

So, where can you get the best value for your video advertising budget?

Our experiment ran the numbers — including impressions, overall time watched, and quality time watched — to find out.

Wolfgang’s video experiment

For this experiment, we advertised the same 20-second-long video over the same period of time and with identical budgets via YouTube ads and Facebook Video ads. We also targeted the same type of individuals using demographics and interest-based targeting.

The first hurdle to overcome was that each platform has different methods for counting views and charging for advertising.

How YouTube and Facebook charge for video ads

In YouTube advertising, you’re charged per view. A YouTube “view” is counted after 30 seconds (or the full duration of the video, if it’s shorter than 30 seconds) or when a user engages with your video.

Facebook, on the other hand, charges by cost per 1,000 impressions (CPM) and a “view” is counted after just 3 seconds. Facebook also displays the Cost Per View by dividing the total spend of the campaign by the views.

Taking this information into account for our experiment, a YouTube video view will be counted when it reaches the full duration of our video (20 seconds) and a Facebook view will be counted after 3 seconds.

How to calculate overall watched time

Despite the fact that both YouTube and Facebook have begun referring to “hours watched” as a statement of their performance, this metric is not easily accessible to advertisers. At the time of posting, neither the AdWords nor the Facebook interface give you a number for the exact amount of time watched.

In the AdWords interface, you can find the “quartile report,” which shows you the percentage of your audience that viewed certain percentage runtimes of your video (25%, 50%, 75%, and 100%). For instance, in the table below, 91% of total viewers watched up to 25% of the video. In Facebook, you can find a similar report, but instead of showing you percentages it shows you the number of views per percentile. So according to the table below, there were 2,240 views of up to 25% of the video.

What this meant for our experiment was that in order to estimate the overall watched time on each channel, we had to use different techniques based on this table and utilize YouTube Analytics.

It’s difficult to estimate total time watched using the AdWords interface, but we’ve discovered a 5-minute method that doesn’t require any complex math work. See the steps outlined below.

Calculating overall watched time: YouTube

1. First of all, forget about the AdWords interface and go to YouTube Analytics.

2. Click “Traffic sources,” then select the video you want to measure, the timeline you used when you promoted it, and finally, filter your data by traffic source by selecting “YouTube Advertising.”

3. Once you have done that — voilà! You now have overall watched time without having to break out the calculator.

*Please bear in mind that there can be a slight variation between the data in YouTube Analytics and the data in the AdWords interface.

Calculating overall watched time: Facebook

It’s a little bit trickier to measure overall watched time on Facebook, as there’s no advanced measurement system in place like in YouTube Analytics.

Facebook displays video views per percentage of the video watched. In order to estimate the overall watched time, you need to:

1. Get the difference between the views in each percentile (to avoid double-counting). A viewer that has watched 100% of the video has watched 75%, as well.

2. Multiply that difference in views by the watched time in that percentile.

3. Also, don’t forget to count the views (more than 3 seconds) that haven’t reached the 25% mark of the video.

The problem with this technique is that you could over- or under-count the time watched, since each percentile varies by almost 5 seconds. For this reason, we are taking the midpoint of each percentile to estimate the overall watched time.

The findings

As we previously mentioned, we compared the results between both channels by focusing on the following metrics: impressions, overall watched time, and quality time watched.

Impressions

When we compared the same promoted video on both platforms, we noticed that the number of impressions on Facebook was 334% higher than on YouTube. This is because the cost per 1,000 impressions (CPM) is considerably cheaper on Facebook. YouTube CPM stands at €4.31 whereas Facebook CPM is €0.98.

When promoting a video on Facebook, you could get 3 times more impressions for your budget. However, since autoplay could be activated on users’ devices, every impression could potentially count as at least 1 or 2 seconds for Facebook’s overall watched time count.

If Facebook counts those autoplay seconds from the impression as a part of their overall watched time, then that could explain why Facebook Video is growing so quickly. By charging a more competitive CPM, Facebook is maximizing its overall reach. As a result, the watched time increases, too.

Overall watched time

So, how did the two platforms fare in terms of overall watched time?

Since neither the Facebook nor the AdWords interface displays an exact time metric, we’ve taken the midpoint of each percentile to estimate the overall watched time.

For example, for our 20-second video, a view in the 25% percentile could include anywhere between the range of 5 to 9.9 seconds. Since there’s no way to determine the exact time, the midpoint in this percentile would be 7.45 seconds. We have also taken autoplay into account for both channels.

Our results showed that overall watched time was higher on Facebook (19.9 hours, including autoplay time) than on YouTube (17.7 hours).

We know that YouTube Analytics only shows the watched time from the number of legitimate views for your videos (more than 30 seconds or the full completion of your video if it’s shorter than 30 seconds). In this case, legitimate views would represent around 7 watched hours from the total 17.7 hours.

Does the overall watched time affect the cost? No. In fact, this metric gives you visibility on all the additional watched time you are getting for “free.” Since we’re only paying for full views on YouTube (7hrs), we could see that there were about 10 hours of watched video coming from non-complete views that we didn’t have to pay for.

The big question is: How is Facebook counting the overall watched time? If it’s considering more than “views” in its calculation, that could represent almost 20 hours of watched time. On the other hand, if it’s taking only views (more than 3 seconds) into account, that could cut the watched time in half to 9.6 hours!

So for Facebook, if you’re reporting on cost per view, any time watched below 3 seconds is essentially free of charge.

Quality watched time

Watched time could be a really impressive metric for these video giants and their epic battle, but digital advertisers and their clients should be more concerned about “quality watched time.”

Quality watched time is a relative metric and can vary from video to video. It’s up to you to determine what should be considered quality watched time for your video. A useful way to do this would be to count quality watched time as the point in your video where you’ve delivered your message and call-to-action (CTA). If your video is really short, maybe you’d only count complete views as quality watched time.

Since our video is only 20 seconds long and the CTA is at the end of the video, we considered a complete view as quality watched time.

In our experiment, Facebook video advertising delivered approximately 4.6 hours of quality watched time, at a cost of €5.47 per hour. YouTube delivered approximately 7.3 hours of quality watched time at a cost of €3.44 per hour.

In other words, a full watched minute on Facebook cost €0.09, whereas on YouTube it cost €0.06.

*Please bear in mind that these are time approximations, since YouTube also counts a view if the user is engaged (e.g. if the user clicks on the video). Moreover, a full view in Facebook is counted not only when your video is viewed to 100% of its length, but also if the user skips to this point.

Facebook vs YouTube: Who’s the winner?

Well, that depends on your KPIs. If you want to put your video in front of as many people as possible, you may opt for using Facebook, whereas if you want to pay for quality watched time, YouTube may be a better option. We highly recommend using both channels in order to expand your reach.

*Overall time watched is an approximation. Since there isn’t an exact way to measure watched time. The results may vary depending of the quality of your video, length and target audience.

Do you use both channels? How do you measure video success?

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