Posted by mattround

Before joining Distilled I worked for UsVsTh3m, an experimental Trinity Mirror project, where we created hundreds of games, quizzes and daft “toys.” We had unprecedented freedom to try out new interactive formats, learning a great deal about what works… and what doesn’t.

The key to success was “viral” traffic. You’ve probably heard the term bandied about in reference to something popular, and might even have rolled your eyes; it’s a much-abused buzzword.

The idea is that online word-of-mouth can drive exponential traffic growth and broad media coverage with little or no traditional promotional support, but achieving this requires a certain way of thinking. This article focuses on interactive content, but many of the same principles will apply to other formats.

The viral life cycle

It’s useful to aim for interactive content to be…

1. Clickable — When someone sees a link and description (on social media or a site), it seems compelling enough to take a look.
2. Playable — The visitor sticks with it and finds it enjoyable or interesting.
3. Shareable — There’s a strong urge to tell others, often involving the visitor sharing their individual result/score.

You usually need all three aspects to be strong to get a viral hit. It’s easy to focus on one, an experienced team can usually achieve two, but it’s difficult to consistently get the full set.

Crudely, you can think of it in terms of losing potential sharers, ultimately needing to end up with more than one to start the next cycle(s). This image explains it nicely:

Congratulations, it’s going viral! That’s a massive simplification, but a helpful one.

11 ways to make it shareable

1. Attributes

Develop a concept that ties in with the player’s personal attributes: age, location, abilities, personality, etc. For example, measuring reaction time in milliseconds is fine… but if you can correlate it with age, then you’ve immediately got something far more compelling.

2. Tribes

Reinforce a sense of belonging; tribes can be regional, generational, interest-based, political, etc. Perhaps play different tribes off against each other so that your interactive content can address niche groups while having broad appeal overall.

3. Insights

It tells you something about yourself or, more likely, confirms a flattering/intriguing attribute, leading into…

4. Humblebrags

Sharing to make yourself look good… but without it seeming too blatant.

5. “One more go…”

Ensure the player is hooked and will want others to share in that. Although bear in mind that the best games often aren’t the most viral — adding multiple levels and features to a game tends to put off non-gamers and can actually reduce sharing (enthusiasm has a chance to ebb away, and the game will tend to end on a low note when the player finally fails or quits).

6. Topical

People are impressed by fast-turnaround topical content, and sharing it can show you’re up-to-date (perhaps even the first in your social circle to discover something). We regularly developed and launched games in half a day at UsVsTh3m, and more than once within an hour. This obviously isn’t feasible for most commercial projects, but with more agile development and approval processes you can reduce lead times.

7. Delight

Overwhelm the senses: strong use of music, dance, animation, spectacular explosions, anything that’s a straightforward pleasure.

8. Competition

“Can you beat this score?”

9. Comparison

“I got this result, how about you?” This is much “softer” than direct competition and typically more welcoming for a broad audience.

10. Collaborating

Things like global counters, polls, or territorial maps can create the sense of playing your part in a bigger cause. Even just clicking something to increment a number can be made hard to resist with the right “cause.”

11. Quality

It’s still possible for something to succeed simply by being good, but in the absence of any other aspects it’d better be really good. Knock-your-socks-off good.

Of course, all of the above overlap and interrelate, and it’s by no means an exhaustive list.

Telling the world

Something that’s strongly viral can actually just be exposed to a few hundred people via Twitter or Facebook. It won’t need a big push; the viral mechanism will ensure it spreads and attracts media attention.

It’s often useful to accompany a launch with relevant press material, perhaps teasing out key angles or supplementary content/data to suit each type of media outlet. Don’t force a story if there isn’t one, though; you don’t want to jeopardize later coverage based around “this cool thing is going viral.”

If the stats are showing it’s strongly going viral (this should be obvious within minutes), you’re then in the fortunate position of planning for success. Keep an eye out for initial coverage that may benefit from additional material, and look to do a follow-up press campaign at a suitable milestone (e.g. at X million visitors, or when you have interesting data to share), broadening the coverage.

If it’s not going viral, stop and consider whether minor changes to wording might make it more clickable. Look at whether it needs to break into a niche audience or broaden its appeal, and retarget accordingly. Although Twitter drives far less traffic than Facebook, it offers more freedom to experiment, target influential individuals, and re-promote over time. If a topical angle may arise, perhaps wait and be ready to repackage and relaunch at a moment’s notice.

Case studies: Two simple games that went viral

The North-o-Meter

UsVsTh3m’s North-o-Meter (sadly, this is currently broken due to hosting issues) used multiple-choice questions to guesstimate how Northern/Southern you are. Despite being entirely UK-focused, within just 4 days of launch it had 3.6 million visitors, 1 million Likes, 1.1 million comments on Facebook, and 41,000 tweets. It went on to get millions more visits, virtually saturating the potential audience. Countless similar quizzes had used this topic before, so why did this one make such a big impact?

• It was clickable because the wording of tweets and Facebook posts worked well, teasing the Northern/Southern cultural identity element in a way that seemed intriguing and non-threatening.
• It was playable thanks to working well on mobile (people were playing and comparing scores late into Friday nights down the pub), being easy to play and giving constant visual feedback, unlike many similar things that simply ape static magazine personality quizzes.
• It was shareable by tapping into attributes (location/origin), tribes (north vs. south), insights (using mundane questions to infer something greater), competition, comparison, and quality (the visual feedback and often surprisingly accurate conclusions).
• Northern/Southern cultural identity is immensely strong in the UK. It’s a key part of how many people define themselves.
• The whole quiz was grounded in honest personal experience. One of our young journalists had written about moving to London, and the way it resonated with people led us to think about how to apply that to an interactive format.
• Naming a specific place to go with the percentage meant it sometimes got the player’s location/origin spot-on, so they were then likely to share it in a very enthusiastic way.

How Old Are Your Reactions?

How Old Are Your Reactions?, produced by Distilled for JustPark, is a simple web game where you stop a car with a tap/click. Your reaction time is then used to look up the corresponding age for that score, based on a survey of 2,000 players.

Our thinking beforehand was that it would work well due to the following aspects:

• It would be clickable by setting an intriguing personal challenge.
• It would be playable thanks to clear, quick gameplay and good presentation, including full mobile compatibility.
• It would be shareable due to attributes (age and reactions), insights (inferring age from reactions), humblebrags (impressively young age result), “one more go…” (few will play it just once), competition, comparison, and quality.
• Age is a key personal attribute, and age estimation prompts a great deal of conversation and comparison, whether the result is accurate or lower/higher than the player’s actual age. Lively conversations on Facebook help ensure visibility.
• Driving is a relevant, relatable way to dress the game up, particularly for this brand. A straightforward, bare-bones reactions test would have been “colder” and less engaging.
• The combination of elements would allow for multiple storytelling angles in coverage, to do with good-natured rivalry between generations, road safety, etc.

This all seems to have been borne out by the stats since launch: Over 3 million unique page views, nearly 300,000 social shares, and links from over 400 domains.

In summary…

Always ask yourself:

• How can we make it clickable, playable, and shareable? Judge your ideas harshly — you need all three.
• Which sharing impulses can it tap into? It should be possible to readily pick out a few motivations, or refine the concept to strengthen this aspect.
• What will be the best way to capitalize on success? Be ready to build a story around it, using popularity as the foundation for broad and varied coverage.

The way people share and interact is constantly changing, and reaching large audiences is always challenging, but the approaches I’ve outlined can help you to devise interactive content that’ll have a great shot at going viral.

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Posted by randfish

SEO has much of its roots in the practice of targeted link building. And while it’s no longer the only core component involved, it’s still a hugely valuable factor when it comes to rank boosting. In this week’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand goes over why targeted link building is still relevant today and how to develop a process you can strategically follow to success.

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

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re going to chat about four questions that kind of all go together around targeted link building.

Targeted link building is the practice of reaching out and trying to individually bring links to specific URLs or specific domains — usually individual pages, though — and trying to use those links to boost the rankings of those pages in search engine results. And look, for a long time, this was the core of SEO. This was how SEO was done. It was almost the start and the end.

Obviously, a lot of other practices have come into play in the industry, and I think there’s even been some skepticism from folks about whether targeted link building is still a valid practice. I think we can start with that question and then get on to some of these others.

When does it make sense?

In my opinion, targeted link building does make sense when you fulfill certain conditions. We know from our experimentation, from correlation data, from Google’s own statements, from lots of industry data that links still move the needle when it comes to rankings. If you have a page that’s ranking number 4, you point a bunch of new links to it from important pages and sites around the web, particularly if they contain the anchor text that you’re trying to rank for, and you will move up in the rankings.

It makes sense to do this if your page is already ranking somewhere in the, say, top 10 to 20, maybe even 30 results and/or if the page has measurable high impact on business metrics. That could be sales. It could be leads. It could be conversions. Even if it’s indirect, if you can observe both those things happening, it’s probably worthwhile.

It’s also okay if you say, “Hey, we’re not yet ranking in the top 20, but our paid search page is ranking on page 1. We know that we have high conversions here. We want to move from page 3, page 4 up to page 1, and then hopefully up into the top two, top three results. Then it is worth this targeted link building effort, because when you build up that visibility, when you grow those rankings, you can be assured that you are going to gain more visits, more traffic that will convert and send you these key business metrics and push those things up. So I do think targeted link building still makes sense when those conditions are fulfilled.

Is this form of link building worthwhile?

Is this something that can actually do the job it’s supposed to do? And the answer, yeah. Look, if rank boosting is your goal, links are one of the ways where if you already have a page that’s performing well from a conversion standpoint — from a user experience standpoint, pages per visit, your browse rate, things like time onsite, if you’re not seeing high bounce rate, if you have got a page that’s clearly accessible and well targeted and well optimized on the page itself — then links are going to be the most powerful, if not one of the most powerful, elements to moving your rankings. But you’ve got to have a scalable, repeatable process to build links.

You need the same thing that we look for broadly in our marketing practices, which is that flywheel. Yes, it’s going to be hard to get things started. But once we do, we can find a process that works for us again and again. Each successive link that we get and each successive page whose rankings we’re trying to move gets easier and easier because we’ve been there before, we’ve done it, we know what works and what doesn’t work, and we know the ins and outs of the practice. That’s what we’re searching for.

When it comes to finding that flywheel, there are sort of tactics that fit into three categories that still do work. I’m not going to get into the individual specific tactics themselves, but they fall into these three buckets. What we’ve found is that for each individual niche, for each industry, for each different website and for each link builder, each SEO, each one of you out there, there’s a process or combination of processes that works best. So I’m going to dictate to you which tactics works best, but you’ll generally find them in these three buckets

Buckets:

One: one-to-one outreach. This is you going out and sending usually an e-mail, but it could be a DM or a tweet, an at reply tweet. It could be a phone call. It could be — I literally got one of these today — a letter in the mail addressed to me, hand-addressed to me from someone who’d created a piece of content and wanted to know if I would be willing to cover it. It wasn’t exactly up my alley, so I’m not going to. But I thought that was an interesting form of one-to-one outreach.

It could be broadcast. Broadcast is things like social sharing, where we’re broadcasting out a message like, “Hey, we’ve produced this. It’s finally live. We launched it. Come check it out.” That could go through bulk e-mail. It could go through an e-mail subscription. It could go through a newsletter. It could go through press. It could go through a blog.

Then there’s paid amplification. That’s things like social ads, native ads, retargeting, display, all of these different formats. Typically, what you’re going to find is that one-to-one outreach is most effective when you can build up those relationships and when you have something that is highly targeted at a single site, single individual, single brand, single person.

Broadcast works well if, in your niche, certain types of content or tools or data gets regular coverage and you already reach that audience through one of your broadcast mediums.

Paid amplification tends to work best when you have an audience that you know is likely to pick those things up and potentially link to them, but you don’t already reach them through organic channels, or you need another shot at reaching them from organic and paid, both.

Building a good process for link acquisition

Let’s end here with the process for link acquisition. I think this is kind of the most important element here because it helps us get to that flywheel. When I’ve seen successful link builders do their work, they almost all have a process that looks something like this. It doesn’t have to be exactly this, but it almost always falls into this format. There’s a good tool I can talk about for this too.

But the idea being the first step is opportunity discovery, where we figure out where the link opportunities that we have are. Step 2 is building an acquisition spreadsheet of some kind so that we can prioritize which links we’re going to chase after and what tactics we’re going to use. Step 3 is the execution, learn, and iterate process that we always find with any sort of flywheel or experimentation.

Step 1: Reach out to relevant communities

We might find that it turns out for the links that we’re trying to get relevant communities are a great way to acquire those links. We reach out via forums or Slack chat rooms, or it could be something like a private chat, or it could be IRC. It could be a whole bunch of different things. It could be blog comments.

Maybe we’ve found that competitive links are a good way for us to discover some opportunities. Certainly, for most everyone, competitive links should be on your radar, where you go and you look and you say, “Hey, who’s linking to my competition? Who’s linking to the other people who are ranking for this keyword and ranking for related keywords? How are they getting those links? Why are those people linking to them? Who’s linking to them? What are they saying about them? Where are they coming from?”

It could be press and publications. There are industry publications that cover certain types of data or launches or announcements or progress or what have you. Perhaps that’s an opportunity.

Resource lists and linkers. So there’s still a ton of places on the web where people link out to. Here’s a good set of resources around customer on-boarding for software as a service companies. Oh, you know what? We have a great post about that. I’m going to reach out to the person who runs this list of resources, and I’m going to see if maybe they’ll cover it. Or we put together a great meteorology map looking at the last 50 winters in the northeast of the United States and showing a visual graphic overlay of that charted against global warming trends, and maybe I should share that with the Royal Meteorological Society of England. I’m going to go pitch their person at whatever.ac.uk it is.

Blog and social influencers. These are folks who tend to run, obviously, popular blogs or popular social accounts on Twitter or on Facebook or on LinkedIn, or what have you, Pinterest. It could be Instagram. Potentially worth reaching out to those kinds of folks.

Feature, focus, or intersection sources. This one’s a little more complex and convoluted, but the idea is to find something where you have an intersection of some element that you’re providing through the content of your page that you seem to get a link from and there is intersection with things that other organizations or people have interest in.

So, for example, on my meteorology example, perhaps you might say, “Lots of universities that run meteorology courses would probably love an animation like this. Let me reach out to professors.” “Or you know what? I know there’s a data graphing startup that often features interesting data graphing stuff, and it turns out we used one of their frameworks. So let’s go reach out to that startup, and we’ll check out the GitHub project, see who the author is, ping that person and see if maybe they would want to cover it or link to it or share it on social.” All those kinds of things. You found the intersections of overlapping interest.

The last one, biz devs and partnerships. This is certainly not a comprehensive list. There could be tons of other potential opportunity to discover mechanisms. This covers a lot of them and a lot of the ones that tend to work for link builders. But you can and should think of many other ways that you could potentially find new opportunities for links.

Step 2: Build a link acquisition spreadsheet

Gotta build that link acquisition spreadsheet. The spreadsheet almost always looks something like this. It’s not that dissimilar to how we do keyword research, except we’re prioritizing things based on: How important is this and how much do I feel like I could get that link? Do I have a process for it? Do I have someone to reach out to?

So what you want is either the URL or the domain from which you’re trying to get the link. The opportunity type — maybe it’s a partnership or a resource list or press. The approach you’re going to take, the contact information that you’ve got. If you don’t have it yet, that’s probably the first thing on your list is to try and go get that. Then the link metrics around this.

There’s a good startup called BuzzStream that does sort of a system, a mechanism like this where you can build those targeted link outreach lists. It can certainly be helpful. I know a lot of folks like using things like Open Site Explorer and Followerwonk, Ahrefs, Majestic to try and find and fill in a bunch of these data points.

Step 3: Execute, learn, and iterate

Once we’ve got our list and we’re going through the process of actually using these approaches and these opportunity types and this contact information to reach out to people, get the links that we’re hoping to get, now we want to execute, learn, and iterate. So we’re going to do some forms of one-to-one outreach where we e-mail folks and we get nothing. It just doesn’t work at all. What we want to do is try and figure out: Why was that? Why didn’t that resonate with those folks?

We’ll do some paid amplification that just reaches tens of thousands of people, low cost per click, no links. Just nothing, we didn’t get anything. Okay, why didn’t we get a response? Why didn’t we get people clicking on that? Why did the people who clicked on it seem to ignore it entirely? Why did we get no amplification from that?

We can have those ideas and hypotheses and use that to improve our processes. We want to learn from our mistakes. But to do that, just like investments in content and investments in social and other types of investments in SEO, we’ve got to give ourselves time. We have to talk to our bosses, our managers, our teams, our clients and say, “Hey, gang, this is an iterative learning process. We’re going to figure out what forms of link building we’re good at, and then we’re going to be able to boost rankings once we do. But if we give up because we don’t give ourselves time to learn, we’re never going to get these results.”

All right, look forward to your thoughts on tactical link building and targeted link building. 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 Cyrus-Shepard

Howdy Moz Fans,

After more than 5 years — including an 18-month hiatus as a Moz associate — tomorrow marks my last day working as a Mozzer.

Make no mistake — I love this job, company, and community. Moz has taught me to be a better marketer. Both Rand Fishkin and Sarah Bird (and many others) have taught me more about emotional intelligence and how to treat others than I thought possible of myself. Moz has introduced me to amazing coworkers and industry folk around the world. I’m truly grateful for this experience.

Since my first YouMoz post was accepted for publication by Jen Lopez before I even worked here, I’ve done my best to share SEO tips and tactics to help people advance their marketing and improve online visibility. These posts are truly the thing I’m most proud of.

Time for one last SEO tip, so I hope it’s a good one…

SEO white lies

The beauty of SEO is that, instead of pushing a marketing message onto folks who don’t want to hear what you have to say, you can reverse-engineer the process to discover exactly what people are looking for, create the right content for it, and appear before them at exactly the moment they are looking for it. It’s pull vs. push.

Works like magic. Customers come to you.

Let’s begin this process by telling a lie.

“Content is king.”

Bull hockey. The king doesn’t rule jack squat. A truer statement is this: If content is king, then the user is queen, and she rules the universe. Let’s say that again, because this is important.

“The user is queen, and she rules the universe.”

Google only cares about your content inasmuch as it answers the user’s search query. Search results are not a collection of “good” content; they are a ranked list of content that best satisfies what the user is looking for.

Here’s a typical process many SEOs use when building content:

1. Conduct keyword research to discover what people are searching for relative to your niche.
2. Pick a series of high-volume, low-competition phrases
3. Build content around these phrases and topics
4. Launch and market the page. Build some links.
5. Watch the traffic roll in. (Or not)
6. Move on to the next project.

The shortcoming of this approach is that 1–4 are often hit or miss. Google’s Keyword Planner, perhaps the best available keyword tool available, is famous for not surfacing most long-tail keywords. Additionally, creating the exact content and building the right links in order for Google to rank you for precise pages is challenging as well.

Unfortunately, this where most people stop.

My advice: Don’t stop there.

This whole process relies on traditional SEO signals to rank your content higher. Signals like keyword usage and PageRank (yes, it’s a real ranking factor). While these factors remain hugely important, they miss the point of where SEO has already moved.

In our latest Ranking Factors Expert Survey, we asked over 150 top search marketers to rate which factors they see gaining and losing significance in Google’s algorithm. The results showed that while most traditional SEO features were expected to either retain or decrease in influence, we found that user-based features were expected to increase.

In addition to signals like mobile-friendliness, site speed, overall UX, and perceived quality, the factors I want to focus on today include:

1. Page matches the searcher’s intent: In other words, the page has a high probability of being what the user is actually looking for.
2. Search engine results clickstream data: This may include measuring the search results that users actually click, as well as the pogo-sticking effect.
3. Task completion: The user is able to complete the task they set out to do. In other words, their questions have been completely answered.

What I am going to talk about is how to improve all three of these factors for underperforming pages at the same time, using a single technique.

Here’s the tip: Optimize for how users are actually using the page — as opposed to how you optimized the page ahead of time — and you’ll see significantly better traffic.

Once you begin receiving traffic from search engines, you have an incredible amount of data regarding real search visits. If your page receives any traffic at all, Google has already guessed what your content is about — right or wrong — and is sending some traffic to you. In all reality, there is a gap between the traffic you thought you were optimizing for when you created the page, and the traffic you are actually getting.

You want to close that gap. We’ll ask and answer these 3 questions:

1. Is my content matching the intent of the visitors I’m actually receiving?
2. Based on this intent, is my search snippet enticing users to click?
3. Does my page allow users to complete their task?

Here’s how we’re going to do it. I present your SEO homework.

1. Identify your low- to mid-performing pages

This process works best on pages with lower or disappointing traffic levels. The reason you want to stay away from your high-performing pages is the adage: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

That’s not to say that high-performing pages can’t be improved, but whenever you make changes to a page you risk ruining the things that work well, so for now we’re going to focus on our under-performers.

The simplest way is to use analytics to identify pages you believe are high quality — and target good keyword phrases — but receive less traffic than you’d expect based on site averages.

For this example I’ll use Google Search Console for my data, although you could use other platforms such as Bing Webmaster or even features found in Moz Pro.

Here’s a picture of our traffic and search queries for Followerwonk. While it’s a good amount of traffic, something looks off with the second URL: it receives 10x more impressions than any other URL, but only gets a 0.25% click-through rate. We’ll use this URL for our process.

2. Discover mismatches between user intent and content

Next, we want to discover the keyword phrases that surface our URL in search results. Here’s how you do it in Search Console.

After you complete #3 above by clicking on the URL you wish to analyze, you’ll find a page of data isolating that URL, but it will lack keywords. Now hit the “Queries” tab to filter keywords filtered for this specific URL.

For our Followerwonk URL, we discover an interesting result. The phrase “twitter search” generated a million search impressions, but only 724 clicks. Google believes we deserve to rank for this query, but obviously the page doesn’t offer what people are looking for

Or does it?

The Followerwonk Bio Search page offers advanced Twitter bio search, complete with lots of advanced options you can’t find on Twitter. It’s reasonable that tons of people searching for “twitter search” would find enormous value in this page. So why the disconnect?

A quick screenshot reveals the heart of the problem.

That’s it — the entire page. Very little explanatory text makes it difficult to quickly grasp what this page is about. While this is an awesome page, it fails in one key aspect for its highest volume search query.

The page fails to satisfy user intent. (At least in a quick, intuitive way.)

So how can we fix this? Let’s move on to the next steps.

3. Optimizing for user intent

Now that we understand how users are actually finding our page, we want to make it obvious that our page is exactly what they are looking for to solve their problem. There are 5 primary areas this can be accomplished.

1. Title tag
2. Meta description
3. Page title and headers
4. Body text
5. Call to action

Rewriting the title tags and descriptions of underperforming pages to include the keyword queries users perform to find your URL can lead to a quick increase in clicks and visits.

Additionally, after you get these clicks, there’s a growing body of inconclusive evidence that higher click-through rates may lead to higher rankings. In the end, it really doesn’t matter. The whole point is that you get more traffic, one way or another.

The key is to take this data to optimize your search snippet in a way that entices more and better traffic.

Earning the click is only half the battle. After we get the visitor on our site, now we have to convince them (almost immediately) that we can actually solve the problem they came here to find. Which leads to…

4. Improving task completion

Consider this: A user searches for “best restaurants in Seattle.” You want your pizza parlor to rank #1 for this query, but will this satisfy the user?

Likely not, as the user is probably looking for a list of top restaurants, complete with reviews, hours, maps, and menus. If you can offer all — like TripAdvisor, Opentable, and Yelp — then you’ve helped the user complete their task.

The key to task completion is to make solving the user’s problem both clear and immediate. On our Followerwonk page, this could be accomplished by making it immediately clear that they could perform an advanced Twitter search, for free, along with an expectation of what the results would look like.

A standard for task completion can be found by answering the following question: After the user visits this page, will they have completely found what they are looking for, or will they need to return to Google for help?

When the query is satisfied by your website, then you’ve achieved task completion, and likely deserve to rank very highly for the targeted search query.

5. Submit for reindexing

The beauty of this process is that you can see results very quickly. The easiest thing to do is to submit the page for reindexing in Google, which can help your changes appear in search results much faster.

You may see changes submitted this way reflected in search results within minutes or hours. Usually it’s not more than a day or two.

6–7. Measure results, tweak, and repeat

Now that your results are live, you want to measure present performance against past. After a few days or weeks (whenever you have enough data to make statistically significant decisions) you want to specifically look at:

• Rankings, or overall impressions
• Clicks and click-through rate
• Engagement metrics, including bounce rate, time on site, and conversions

Warning: You may not get it right the first time. That’s okay. It’s fine to iterate and improve (as long as you don’t destroy your page in the process). In fact, that’s the whole point!

If you follow this process, you may see not only increases in traffic, but improved traffic coming to your site that better aligns what you offer with what the visitor is searching for.

The best content that aligns with user intent is what search engines want to deliver to its users. This is what you want to broadcast to search engines. The results can be rewarding.

Transitions

What’s next for me? In the near term, I’m starting a boutique online publishing/media company, tentatively named Fazillion. (Our aim is to produce content with heart, as we ourselves are inspired by sites like Mr. Money Mustache, Wait but Why, and Data is Beautiful.)

I can’t express enough how much this company and this community means to me. Moving on to the next adventure is the right thing to do at this time, but it makes me sad nonetheless.

Say what you want, SEO is a wonderful industry of awesome human beings.
— Cyrus Shepard (@CyrusShepard) January 21, 2016

Coincidentally, my departure from Moz creates a unique job opening for a talented SEO and Content Architect. It should make a wonderful opportunity for the right person. If you’re interested in applying, you can check it out here: SEO Content Marketer at Moz

Happy SEO, everybody! If you see me walking down the street, be sure to say hi.

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Posted by Isla_McKetta

Fifteen minutes into my first ever flight with my newborn son — a flight that had been delayed for an hour and a half, during which we’d held off feeding him so he could eat on the way up to make sure his little ears wouldn’t pop from the pressure and he wouldn’t start the flight screeching — fifteen minutes in, we were still ascending and even with his little head concealed beneath a nursing scarf, I could tell he was starting to get full.

I was terrified.

If he started screaming I had no idea how we would survive the four hours left in the flight. My husband and I were not the cool couple who had brought earplugs and coffee cards for all the passengers around us. I was certain everyone would hate us and, even worse, we’d never, ever fly again. I was the worst mother in the history of mothers.

As I was readjusting my son and trying to keep him calm, I noticed this phrase on the back of the nursing scarf’s label:

“You’re doing a great job!” Were there any words I needed more to hear in that moment? Would anything less perfect have incited me to expose this very personal, vulnerable moment to the vast readership of the Moz Blog? If the makers of the Itzy Ritzy nursing scarf hadn’t reached deep into my soul and sent me a message across the universe, would you have ever heard of their product?

You, too, can grab your audience by the heartstrings and build a lasting connection that gets them to come back to you time and again while also evangelizing your business to all their friends. Because while the designers of the Itzy Ritzy nursing scarf did not know specifically when or how this new mom was going to need encouragement and, yes, the kindness of strangers, it was an easy guess to say that every one of their customers would at some point. And with a cheap, but creative, insertion of content on the back side of their label, they won my heart and loyalty.

This is called manufacturing serendipity and here’s how you do it.

Understand your audience’s needs

We talk a lot about empathy at Moz, and that’s because the value of empathy cannot be overstated — in marketing or in life. Empathy is a super power. Dr. Brené Brown describes that super power as “feeling with people,” and it creates a spark of connection for the person being empathized with. That spark can be fanned into the burning passion of a long-lasting relationship — in business and in life.

To understand how to empathize with your customer, first create personas. Find out where your audience is emotionally. Figure out what they’re insecure about, what scares them, what they most need in the moment that they’re visiting your site. It’s not rocket science to understand that a new mom might be feeling insecure about nursing her child in public, and if that’s what your product is designed to help her with… go that extra mile to connect.

Ways to reach into your customer’s soul and speak to their needs include:

• A car insurance company that caters to the accident prone starting their rate page with copy that assures the customer the company will be there no matter what happens.
• Creating an ROI calculator after uncovering that your customer needs your software to generate client reports, sure, but she also needs to be able to show her boss the value she’s adding to the company with her daily work.
• Understanding that everyone’s time is limited, ask the most essential survey question first and then give your customer the chance to expound if he wants to. Like Sears does at the bottom of their two-question satisfaction survey:

Put content in the right places

Are you using all the content opportunities available to you? Reeling from the sniffles, fussiness, and, yes, boogies, that came with my son’s first cold, I opened up the lid on a package of Boogie Wipes to find this:

The wise marketers at Boogie Wipes know that many parents will buy almost anything to make their child feel better. So they seized the opportunity to let me know that they have even more products to help me. Serendipity? It sure felt like it. And you can bet someone (not it!) dashed off to the drug store to buy some saline spray.

You don’t have to turn your site into the Times Square of the Internet to put content in the right places. Instead:

• Include a call to action at the end of product-related blog posts for a free trial or other promo.
• Send a reminder email to a customer who’s filled their cart and then left your site. Bonus points if you can pinpoint and speak to why they might not have finished the transaction. Comparison shopping? Offer a discount. Too busy to finish? Suggest a recurring delivery option.
• Use the mobile version of your site or app to direct customers to your nearest storefront.
• Make sure the link to your next webinar or event is on your homepage so no one has to dig for it.
• Or, like clothing retailer Boden, put an order widget at the bottom of all those reviews so it’s super easy to order the item after doing your due diligence:

It doesn’t always take a large change to connect your customer with the content they need.

Surprise, delight, inform

Serendipity is the feeling of happy coincidence. If your content sparks surprise, incites delight, and manages to inform along the way, you’re more likely to get the response you’re looking for from a potential customer. According to Dr. Read Montague, a neuroscientist at Baylor, surprise lights up the brain’s reward pathways. And, unfortunately, delight in marketing is still surprising to most people, so by delighting your customer, you’re creating a positive association with your brand in two ways.

Some favorite examples of content that’s surprised, delighted, and informed me are:

• The way The Land of Nod positions a website error is both amusing and perfectly tailored to their audience:
• A “Moments” announcement email from Twitter. Instead of telling me about their new feature, they clued into what I use this account for (live-tweeting The Bachelor) and surfaced content that’s specific to my interests:
• The image on AirBNB’s 503 error page captures that feeling we have when something gets between us and that sweet treat (or vacation reservation) we’ve been dreaming about:
• And, finally, because not all content is online, I love the way yogurt maker Brown Cow uses the lids of their yogurt to playfully highlight the many ways a customer could eat the yogurt’s cream top. This both signals to me that the yogurt has a cream top (not everyone’s favorite) and shows me new ways to experience it:

Serendipity isn’t new. Rand’s been talking about it for a long time. But it’s important to remember that serendipity sometimes needs a little help

Now that you understand your customer’s needs, are looking at creative content placement, and understand how important it is to surprise, delight, and inform your audience, you have the tools you need to help serendipity along.

So if you’re ready to build a lasting connection with your customers, go manufacture some serendipity already. You might just soothe the nerves of a new mom so well that she’ll start evangelizing your products the minute she safely steps off the plane with her calm, jet-setting son.

The title for this post may have subconsciously been inspired by an earlier (but much different) post by Rand. Serendipity? You decide.

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Posted by SarahBird

Greetings, Moz Community!

We’ve been very busy at Moz. In keeping with my tradition, I’ll tell you what we’ve been up to in excruciating detail in my upcoming 2015 Year in Review post (next week).

But first, some big news! Moz closed a $10 million Series C round of financing yesterday. We’ve got great VC partners in Foundry Group and they are ponying up the entire round.

Unlike Jack Donaghy, my leadership mentor, I’m buzzing with excitement. I have ambitious goals for Moz and it feels fantastic to get more support on our journey.

[The Aspiration]

The fundamental relationship between organizations and their current and potential customers is changing. New marketing disciplines are emerging to take advantage of exciting changes in how we learn, communicate, make friends, and conduct business. Moz was founded to help marketers capitalize on these shifts.

We are helping people understand and grow their digital influence, and using ours to spread TAGFEE. We’re helping organizations transform how they market to be more Transparent, Authentic, Generous, Fun, Empathetic, and Exceptional. People have higher expectations about how businesses will interact with them, and less patience for dated and inauthentic approaches.

My dream is that Moz will be a force for good in marketing and in our communities. I’m passionate not just about what we do, but about how we do it. And I’ve got great investors, like Foundry, who feel the same.

We want to build beautiful software that customers love and that consistently delivers value. We want to be an inclusive place that helps you learn and build something greater than you can build alone. We also want to share what we have with the communities around us. After all, we’re all in this together, one way or another.

[The Struggle]

We’ve soared and stumbled along the way. Sometimes within the same day. It’s exhausting and exhilarating simultaneously. Entrepreneurship is not for the faint of heart.

Late 2013 and early 2014, in particular, tested our mettle. We struggled through a brutal product launch and a bunch of scaling challenges. We made mistakes large and small, a few of which we’re still working to resolve.

In the immortal words of Jack Donaghy, management legend, “Business doesn’t get me down; Business gets me off.” We tortured ourselves for lessons, questioned and gave up old dogmas, and began transforming ourselves into an even greater company.

[The Transformation]

At the time of our Series B, we had a single SAAS product and an API. We ended 2015 with a portfolio of FIVE products and another big project on the way. In 2015, we invested in building new products, new engineering platforms, and retiring tech debt. We’re not slowing down in 2016. We’re building on our momentum.

Moz Local growth is burning up!

Moz Local makes it fun and painless for brick-and-mortar businesses in the US and UK to grow their digital influence. After a mere 21 months, Moz Local has already generated an impressive $5.7 million USD in its lifetime (cash, not revenue). Moz Local revenue grew over 400% last year alone! We’re currently helping over 60,000 business locations manage their information across the web.

In November 2015, we released a major update to Moz Local that shows how a business location is performing over time and compared to its competitors. We’re also making it easier for businesses to manage their Google My Business profiles. The new features are in beta now and will be available for purchase in February.

If you haven’t played with Moz Local yet, start by checking to see if your business’s information is accurate.

Introducing our newest addition: Moz Content

We’re hoping to replicate Moz Local’s success by launching more standalone tools.

For example, our recently launched Moz Content helps marketers understand and improve their content marketing efforts. This product is powered by a proprietary Moz API to identify keywords and topics interesting to their audience. We’re still very early in this newborn product lifecycle and we’re shipping updates regularly. Since December, over 28,500 marketers have performed ~22,000 content audits and 44,000+ content searches. Usage continues to climb as we add features and polish to our brand-new product.

If you haven’t yet, give Moz Content a whirl.

[The Money]

This round of financing allows us to build on the momentum we’ve started by growing our new product lines, and kicking Moz Pro and Moz Local up a notch.

In the year ahead, we’ll use the money for growth initiatives, like marketing, experimenting our way to product/market fit, and adding sales and account management folks.

If you’re really into the funding details…

Our pre-money valuation was $120 million. We did about $38 million in revenue for 2015. For reference, our 2012 Series B pre-money was $75 million. We’ve carried forward the same basic terms from the last round (1x liquidation and non-participating preferred). Foundry is contributing the entire $10 million. (Thanks, Foundry!)

Brad Feld, whom we love, is stepping off of the board, and Seth Levine (also from Foundry) is stepping on. I’m getting to know Seth and I’ve enjoyed all my interactions with him. He’s TAGFEE, deeply experienced, and passionate about Moz. He’ll be a great addition to the board. I like to think of this as gaining Seth, rather than losing Brad; they are both still on Team Moz.

Thanks for your support!

I want Moz to be a company that customers and employees love. I want to create something lasting and meaningful.

We have an ambitious mission. We help organizations transform the way they market to match how people want to engage, learn, and shop. Although I’ve been working on it since 2007, we’ve still got a long way to go, because the target is always moving. Happily, we’re invigorated by big challenges.

We’ve got strong momentum heading into 2016, and I appreciate Foundry’s continued support. Moz is an exceptional company, and we plan on keeping it that way.

I’m also grateful for this TAGFEE team. Mozzers are optimistic, courageous, creative, and committed. We’ve been accused of being cult-like, and I’m proud of that. And thank you to everyone in the Moz community for cheering us on. We endeavor to serve you.

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