Posted by John-Henry

Digital marketing is a pretty introverted industry. This tends to make us a bit hesitant to embrace sales and outbound selling. There’s no beating around the bush: Sales can be difficult, scary, uncomfortable, and awkward — but if you want to grow your client base, it may require getting out of your comfort zone.

Image via Quinn Dombrowski

Sales has a bad rap, especially with digital marketers. Even Moz’s founder frequently expresses how much he dislikes outbound. Let’s make one thing clear first: There’s a difference between spamming a scraped email list with offers for digital marketing and strategically building a database of prospects to work over time. This post is all about the latter.

You may not know it, but your agency has been training quality sales development reps all this time — you’ve just been calling them link builders. At DocSend we have an SDR (Sales Development Representative) team whose day-to-day consists of locating contact information for decision makers, cold email pitching, polite and persistent follow up, and negotiation…. sound familiar? Outreach teams have a nearly identical skill set to SDRs.

Image via HaPe_Gera

If you take a link builder or promotions person on your team and set their sights on local business owners and marketers in your area, your team can build a database of potential leads for your agency that you can strategically contact, work, and close over time. Here’s a step-by-step guide to starting up an outbound sales process for your small-to-mid-sized agency using your link building team.

Table of contents

• Creating your ideal customer profile for your agency
• Generating prospect lists for your Local SEO agency
• Qualifying prospects for potential agency fit
• Finding business owner & decision maker contact information
• Procuring emails for sole proprietorships and small businesses
• Moving up market: Prospecting for medium-sized businesses
• What to do with all this contact info?

Creating your ideal customer profile for your agency

Image via Thomas Quine

It’s time to categorize every current and former client and determine what aspects of their business made them a fit (or not a fit) for your agency. Here’s a simple spreadsheet template that I like to use. The goal is to identify the commonalities and qualities of the customers that have been great for your business. I like to bucket my clients into three groups: good, fair, and bad. Here is some criteria I like to use when evaluating past and current clients:

Location: What’s the geographic location of client’s business?

• Where are your best client located? Does being close in proximity and being able to hold face-to-face meetings correlate with longer client retention for your agency? Do you have an established client base in a distant city where your agency is building up customers + trust that you should target?

Monetization: What’s the primary goal of the site?

• Lead gen, ecommerce, and advertising models require very different skill sets and domain expertise. Does your agency provide the best results for a specific type of business model that you can focus on and target?

B2B or B2C: What kind of customer does this business sell to, other businesses or consumers?

• B2B marketing and B2C marketing have some stark differences. Content consumption behaviors of the target demographic and the promotional strategies to get in front of those audiences are vastly different. Does your firm excel at connecting your customers with consumers, or is it stronger at generating interest from other businesses for your clients?

LTV of customer: How much is the ideal client worth to your business? HubSpot has a great guide on calculating LTV for agencies.

• Everyone dreams of big clients, but where does your business actually get tangible returns? It’s more important to be a profitable agency, rather than a high-revenue agency. Chances are your most profitable accounts aren’t your highest paying.

Services performed: What was in the SOW?

• Analyzing your clients based on the type of work performed will provide insights into what service provides the best client experience and provides the most value to your agency. Does your agency tend to get clients for local SEO and keep them by providing solid results while losing most of your paid social clients in under a year?

CMS/Technology stack: What kind of technology were they working with?

• Every agency has their wheelhouse. Once you’ve worked with a particular platform or CMS several times, you learn their quirks. What stacks can your AMs and analysts traverse confidently? Can your team handle an SEO project for a site on angular JS? Do you know how to deal with the parameters and faceted navigation that come with using ATG? Or are they more comfortable working with sites on WordPress, Shopify, or Django CMS, where they can recommend easy-to-install plugins?

Point of contact: Who was your point of contact?

• Does your team work better with founders/owners of earlier-stage companies, where employees all wear a lot of hats, or do they get better results and retain clients longer when there is a dedicated marketing lead to work with and help them drive client-side change?

After going through my historical freelance clients for good fits, here’s what my ideal client looks like:

What analyzing past clients taught me and why it’s valuable

After going through everyone I’ve worked with, I discovered a lot of interesting info:

• The clients I keep the longest are small businesses in Chicago and San Francisco that have less than ten employees and have a budget between $500 and $2,000 per month to spend on SEO.
• In the past I’ve worked with East Coast clients, but they don’t seem to be as good of a fit (possibly due to time zone differences).
• Businesses I work best with are typically consumer-facing and the sites have less than 100 URLs.
• The business that stay the longest typically need help with technical SEO, local SEO, and penalty recovery.
• Sadly, this process also helped me discover that clients that need consistent link building (even though it’s something I love doing) are not a good fit from a revenue/retention standpoint.

Although this wasn’t the most exciting way to spend a weekend, this process yielded a lot of valuable findings. I’m less likely to seriously pursue any business on the east coast. If anyone comes to me with a project for a massive site, I’m now quick to pass that lead on. I also no longer provide freelance link building, which is kind of a bummer. This has allowed me to focus on the type of customers that I provide the best results for and retain the longest, and avoid investing in leads that are likely to churn.

Picking target verticals for lead prospecting

Personally, I look for businesses that are sought after once a trigger event occurs for a consumer, i.e. “I need a lawyer because I’m getting divorced” or “I need a house because I’m having a child.” These businesses tend to be competitive in search and their owners are already familiar with SEO and SEM. Here’s some I like:

• Services:
  • Swimming pool construction
  • Basement waterproofing / seepage
  • Maids and housekeeping
  • Carpet cleaning
  • Tax prep
  • Photography
  • Computer repair
  • Compliance repair
  • Automotive repair
  • Debt consolidation
  • Financial advisor services
  • Accounting
  • Banking
  • Residential painting
• Real Estate:
  • Residential
  • Luxury
  • Rentals
• Law:
  • Mediation
  • Tax
  • Labor and employment
  • Immigration
  • Civil
  • Criminal law / DUI attorney
  • Divorce and family
  • Probate
  • Intellectual property
  • Document preparation
  • Real estate
  • Wills and estate planning
  • Disability
  • Bankruptcy
  • Contracts
  • Real estate
  • Personal injury

Don’t just prospect in these industries — this is what works for me, not necessarily for you. Even nuanced outbound cold email has admittedly low response rates, so you are going to need to harvest a lot of prospects to see ROI. The more you blow this list out, the more opportunities you have.

Generating prospect lists for your Local SEO agency

In order to generate a robust database of leads, I use SEMrush to generate keyword lists and Link Prospector to determine market share for a given industry’s keyword set. Here’s a step-by-step breakdown:

Step 1: Plug competitive head terms for the target service into SEMrush

For this example, we’ll use car window repair.

Image via Twanda Baker

Step 2: Export SEMrush keyword data

I like to use either the phrase match list of keywords or the full related list of keywords.

Step 3: Clean your data

Remove all branded and geographic keywords from your data set.

Branded & geo terms will just muck up your data — they must be deleted! Here’s how to use filters to quickly clean your keyword list:

• Highlight all columns
• Hit the “Filter” button in the menu ribbon
• Hit the dropdown menu in the keyword column in cell A1
• Click “Clear all” from the dropdown filter menu
• Search for branded and geographic terms in the filter menu
• Delete all terms that are branded and geographic
• Click “Select all” and de-select “(Blanks)” and hit OK
• You should now be left with non-branded, non-localized keywords

Step 4: Localize your keyword set

Once you have a list of at least 50 commercially viable head terms, delete columns B–F in the Google Doc and add geographic keyword modifiers to each of the search terms to localize them to your agency’s preferred service area. For example, “car window repair” would become “car window repair chicago.” Here’s how I like to set it up in a Google Doc:

Step 5: Run your keywords through Link Prospector

Take your list of localized search terms for your target vertical and drop all of them into a custom report in Link Prospector:

After a few minutes, your report will finish and you will be left with a huge list of results.

Pay special attention to the LTS metric. According to Link Prospector’s creator, Garrett French, if a URL ranks in position 1 for a query, Link Prospector assigns the domain 100 LTS points. Each URL below the #1 position gets slightly less LTS points than the result above it in the SERP. This metric was originally intended to estimate SEO link value potential, but it is also a great proxy for market share if you are creating custom reports that solely consist of local keywords for a single industry.

Step 5: Categorize your Link Prospector results for potential leads

After looking at the Link Prospector export, there are a bunch of national sites and service aggregators that are competing for market share. These are likely to have corporate offices, gatekeepers, procurement teams — they are best to avoid. To identify and exclude enterprise sites, I use Domain Authority scores. Anything over a DA of 50 is unlikely to be local.

Here’s the beginning of my categorization for car window repair in Chicago:

You can find some great prospects with low DA and LTS, so go through the whole list.

Step 6: Add potential leads to your CRM

Add any site that’s a potential match to a spreadsheet for easy tracking, or to a CRM if you have one. HubSpot currently has a free CRM and if you already use BuzzStream, it can work pretty well to track potential leads. Here’s a simple spreadsheet that I like to use that you can copy.

Step 7: Manually evaluate the sites marked as “potential lead”

You need to determine if these leads are a fit for your business. These are sites that fit your ideal customer profile that have functional websites that your team can work with. I also like to run sites that seem like a solid fit through SEMrush to see if they’ve been hit by any penalties or filters like Panda or Penguin. I also utilize the Builtwith Chrome plugin for insights about their technology stack to get a feel for how sophisticated their marketing is.

Qualifying prospects for potential agency fit

After going through a chunk of the list for “Chicago window repair,” here are some of the potential leads identified for car window repair in Chicago. In your CRM, place a note next to each site that is manually evaluated by your team, along with the other metrics you decide to track and record. Here’s a sample of some of our notes:

1. franksautoglasschicago.com– Good-looking site that appears to have some marketing spend. Several analytics packages, Optimizely, Google remarketing, AdRoll, Facebook and Twitter, and several display network tags live on site. Site is on WordPress.
2. aaronglass.com – Decent-looking site; not as professional as competitor franksautoglasschicago.com. Site has Google Analytics deployed, but no ad tech.
3. chicagowindowrepair.com – Site is ranking well, but would need to invest in redesign before I could provide value.
4. chicagoautoglasspros.com – Site appears to be lead gen owned by franksautoglasschicago.com
5. chicagoautoglasscompany.com – Site appears to be lead gen owned by aaronglass.com
6. expressautoglass.com – A more basic website than the typical competition, but still worth approaching. Pitch may need to be framed around betting the market leaders.
7. grandautoglass.us – Rough UX and web design, not an ideal client — do not contact
8. chicagocarwindowrepair.com/ – Rough UX and web design, not an ideal client — do not contact

Finding business owner & decision maker emails

Image via Born1945

Your link builders have experience getting email addresses for bloggers, but getting emails for business owners and decision makers can be slightly different. You can rarely use WhoIs lookups, and tactics like exporting social media posts for contact info don’t tend to pan out. However, it’s easy enough to guess the proper email at a small business that has its own mail server set up.

There’s already been a ton of great posts written on email gathering or guessing. Whoever is doing the prospecting on your team might get some value out of this reading list as a refresher course:

• The Complete Guide To Finding Any Email Address: Tools, Tips, Tactics, And More – YesWare
• How to Find the Unfindable: 12 Ways to Find Anyone’s Personal Email Address – WordStream
• How to Find Someone’s Email Address – Siege Media
• Find (Almost) Anybody’s Email Address – Distilled
• Content Marketer’s Guide To Finding Anyone’s Email Address – ContentMarketer.io
• 3 Ways to Find Any Email Address – SideKick
• 8 Hacks to Find Anyone’s Email Address – Hubspot

And tools like FullContact’s gmail plugin and Rapportive are the DocSend sales teams’ guiding light when it comes to email address gathering.

Procuring emails for sole proprietorships and small businesses — Advanced tactics

Not all the tricks in the above guides are going to result in a verified email for a prospect. Some of these local businesses may be using Gmail (or even Hotmail or AOL!), so you may have to get crafty.

Hack 1: The BBB is a gold mine of business owner info

Local businesses are often registered with the BBB, and their detail pages sometimes display business owner contact information publicly.

Bonus — full name of business owner acquired:

Hack 2: Hunt for contact info in existing citations

Citations often have contact info; here’s one from Yahoo Maps.

1 down, 1 to go.

Hack 3: Look for responses to reviews online to get business owner/decision maker name and email.

Here’s someone in charge of protecting a network of doctors’ online reputation responding to a negative review; they’ve kindly left their full name and email.

Hack 4: Use reverse image search on social media avatars

Yelp is a battleground for local businesses trying to protect their reputation. To create an account, Yelp allows users to login via Oauth from other social media accounts. When an account on Yelp is created with data from another social media platform, the profile picture from the parent social media account is automatically imported into the Yelp account.

By doing a reverse image search (get the handy Chrome plugin here) on the business owner’s avatar that responds to customer complaints on a Yelp page, you can sometimes find their other social profiles and hopefully their full name — and then guess and verify their email.

After a little bit of sleuthing through image search results, we are able to find the business representative’s full name.

We have the decision maker’s name, and some additional prospecting found two general email addresses for this business. Although we don’t have a direct email for this prospect, we have both the business phone number and address. If need be, we can make contact over the phone or via direct mail.

Moving up market: Prospecting for medium-sized businesses

Image via Sean McGrath

Finding contact info at slightly bigger and more organized businesses can actually be easier than finding the info for one-woman and one-man shops. When it comes to prospecting for decision makers in SMBs, LinkedIn will be your team’s BFF. If you have a lot of Linkedin contacts, give whoever is doing the qualifying on your team access to your LinkedIn profile to navigate corporate decision makers.

This time, let’s go after San Francisco real estate

Using SEMrush again, we are going to compile our keyword list. This time around, I took head terms Zillow.com is currently ranking for in organic search and removed all the branded, geo-targeted, and irrelevant queries. Once the list was cleaned up, we concatenated variations of geo terms for San Francisco. Here’s a link to the Google Doc where it’s all set up.

There were only a few head terms that I wanted to target. Instead of scraping the bucket for long tail keywords, i mixed up the position and formatting of the geo modifiers for each of the keywords to allow for more robust prospecting.

This is just a small sliver of the potential leads I found from the Link Prospector export.

Next, let’s look at a few hacks for getting emails for slightly bigger local businesses.

Hack 1: Prospect on LinkedIn for stakeholders and guess their email using mailtester.com

This email is easy enough to guess; it only took two tries:

Hack 2: Look for executive team and bio pages for contact and detailed lead info

Small businesses might not have an executive page, so make sure to check the “About us” page as well; you’d be surprised at what kind of contact info people publish online:

Sometimes you get lucky, and the prospect publishes a ton of personal data on their bio page that you can use to inform the initial cold intro process:

Compiling your local lead database

Now it’s time to repeat this process for every single vertical that you want to target. Considering outbound conversion rates for cold intros, I recommend getting at least 1,000 local businesses in your database. If you want to outsource the data collection, you can use a cheaper service like Odesk/UpWork. If you are outsourcing email collection, I recommend using a third-party validation service like BriteVerify so you don’t hurt your email deliverability or waste your time. If you are looking to outsource the whole process but with a layer of management and QA, I’ve seen companies get great results with services like LeadGenius.

Make no mistake about it, this is a lot of work, and the initial prospecting and keyword list building can be done with an outsourced service — but I highly recommend that either you as a business owner, or your savviest link builder manually evaluate the websites for potential agency/business fit.

What to do with all this contact info?

The goal here is not to start cold-calling these people and pitching them on your services. Without a trigger event (traffic loss from organic search, penalty, big jump in CPC or CAC) it’s my experience that business are unlikely to switch vendors after a cold pitch.

Here are a few ideas on what you can do with your contacts:

• Host a free event for local business owners to learn about digital marketing; I stole this one from Orbit Media Studios. They regularly host Wine Web nights at their office where people come to sip a few glasses of vino and discuss marketing trends.
• Upload their emails into retargeting lists.
• Run the sites through URL Profiler to further enrich your data with stats like email addresses, PageSpeed, readability, and content metrics, or scrape their phone numbers.
• Attend local networking events and work the room for people from these companies.
• Send an ebook filled with helpful and localized tips for small business owners in your area that positions you as a local thought leader.
• Whenever you need to use a new business or service, reference your list of prospects to see if any of them are a fit so you can get your foot in the door.
• Start a digital marketing newsletter for local business owners and email everyone on your list asking them to sign up.
• Analyze their paid search efforts for glaring errors and email them with actionable tips to improve their performance.
• Run their site through Screaming Frog and find any easy-to-fix technical SEO issues that you can write up and explain in a quick email.
• Send your rate card for one-off services and let them know you can help them on short notice if they are ever in a bind.
• Anything you think will build trust and get you in their consideration set for when they have a trigger event.

If you think you can hard-pitch these businesses, go for it, but it’s never worked for me. I focus all of my sales efforts on nurturing prospects and building up trust via helpful information and friendly correspondence. Good luck and happy closing!

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Posted by willcritchlow

At our recent SearchLove conferences, I’ve been talking about things we need to do differently as marketers amidst the big trends that are reshaping search. My colleague Tom Anthony, who heads up the R&D team at Distilled, spoke about 5 emerging trends:

1. Implicit signals
2. Compound queries
3. Keywords vs intents
4. Web search to data search
5. Personal assistants

All of these trends are powered by Google’s increasing reliance on machine learning and artificial intelligence, and mean that ranking factors are harder to understand, less predictable, and less uniform across keywords. It’s becoming such a complex system, we often can’t really know how a change will affect our own site until we roll it out. The lack of transparency and lack of confidence in results has two major impacts on marketers:

1. It damages our ability to make business cases to justify targeted projects or initiatives (or even just to influence the order in which a technical backlog is addressed)
2. It raises the ugly possibility of seemingly good ideas having unforeseen negative impacts

You might have seen the recent news about RankBrain, Google’s name for the application of some of this machine learning technology. Before that announcement, I presented this deck which highlighted four strategies designed to succeed in this fast-changing world:

1. Desktop is the poor relation to mobile
2. Understand app search
3. Optimize for what would happen if you ranked
4. Test to figure out what Google wants from your site

It’s this last point that I want to address in detail today — by looking at the benefits of testing, the structure of a test, and some of the methodology for assessing winning tests.

The benefits of A/B testing for SEO

Earlier in the year, the Pinterest engineering team wrote a fascinating article about their work with SEO experiments which was one of the first public discussions of this technique that has been in use on a number of large sites for some time now.

In it, they highlighted two key benefits:

1. Justifying further investment in promising areas

One of their experiments concerned the richness of content on a pin page:

For many Pins, we picked a better description from other Pins that contained the same image and showed it in addition to the existing description. The experiment results were much better than we expected … which motivated us to invest more in text descriptions using sophisticated technologies, such as visual analysis.

– Pinterest engineering blog

Other experiments failed to show a return, and so they were able to focus much more aggressively than they would otherwise have been able to. In the case of the focus on the description, this activity ultimately resulted in almost a 30% uplift to these pages.

2. Avoiding disastrous decisions

For non-SEO-related UX reasons, the Pinterest team really wanted to be able to render content client-side in JavaScript. Luckily, they didn’t blindly roll out a change and assume that their content would continue to be indexed just fine. Instead, they made the change only to a limited number of pages and tracked the effect. When they saw a significant and sustained drop, they turned off the experiment and cancelled plans to roll out such changes across the site.

In this case, although there was some ongoing damage done to the performance of the pages in the test group, it paled in comparison to the damage that would have been done had the change been rolled out to the whole site at once.

How does A/B testing for SEO work?

Unlike regular A/B testing that many of you will be familiar with from conversion rate optimization (CRO), we can’t create two versions of a page and separate visitors into two groups each receiving one version. There is only one googlebot, and it doesn’t like seeing near-duplicates (especially at scale). It’s a bad idea to create two versions of a page and simply see which one ranks better; even ignoring the problem of duplicate content, the test would be muddied by the age of the page, its current performance, and its appearance in internal linking structures.

Instead of creating groups of users, the kind of testing we are proposing here works by creating groups of pages. This is safe — because there is just one version of each page, and that version is shown to regular users and googlebot alike — and effective because it isolates the change being made.

In general, the process should look like:

• Identify the set of pages you want to improve
• Choose the test to run across those pages
• Randomly group the pages into the control and variant groups
• Measure the resulting changes and declare a test a success if the variant group outperforms its forecast while the control group does not

All A/B testing needs a certain amount of fancy statistics to understand whether the change has had an effect, and its likely magnitude. In the case of SEO A/B testing, there is an additional level of complexity from the fact that our two groups of pages are not even statistically identical. Rather than simply being able to compare the performance of the two buckets of pages directly, we instead need to forecast the performance of both sets, and determine that an experiment is a success when the control group matches its forecast, and the variant group beats its forecast by a statistically-significant amount.

Not only does this cope with the differences between the groups of pages, but it also protects against site-wide effects like:

• A Google algorithm update
• Seasonality or spikes
• Unrelated changes to the site

(Since none of these things would be expected to affect only the variant group).

The statistics and underlying mathematics behind all of this is quite hairy in places, but if you are interested in learning more, you can check out:

• The section of my SearchLove presentation that covered this briefly
• Predicting the present with Bayesian structural time series [PDF]
• Inferring causal impact using Bayesian structural time series [PDF]
• CausalImpact R package
• Finding the ROI of title tag changes
• My colleague Ben Estes has also written about R and analytics forecasting

Good metrics for measuring the success of tests

We generally advise that organic search traffic is the best success metric for these kinds of tests — often coupled with improvements in rankings, as these can sometimes be detected more quickly.

It is tempting to think that rankings alone would be the best metric of success for a test like this, since the whole point is in figuring out what Google prefers. At the very least, we believe these must be combined with traffic data because:

1. It’s hard to identify the long tail of keywords to track in a (not provided) world
2. Some changes could improve clickthrough rate without improving ranking position — and we certainly want to guard against the opposite

You could set up a test to measure the improvement in total conversions between the groups of pages, but this is likely to converge too slowly in practice on many sites. We generally take the pragmatic view that as long as the page remains focused on the same topic, then growing search traffic is a valid goal. In particular, it’s important to note that unlike a CRO test (where traffic is assumed to be unaffected by the test), conversion rate is a very bad metric for SEO tests, as it’s likely that the visitors you’re already getting are the most qualified ones, and doubling the traffic will increase (but not double) the total number of conversions (i.e. there will be a lower conversion rate even though it’s a sensible action).

How long should tests run for?

One advantage of SEO testing is that Google is both more “rational” and consistent than the collection of human visitors that decide the outcome of a CRO test. This means that (barring algorithm updates that happen to target the thing you are testing) you should quickly be able to ascertain whether anything dramatic is happening as a result of a test.

In deciding how long to run tests for, you first need to decide on an approach. If you simply want to verify that tests have a positive impact, then due to the rational and consistent nature of Google, you can take a fairly pragmatic approach to assessing whether there’s an uplift — by looking for any increase in rankings for the variant pages over the control group at any point after deployment — and roll that change out quickly.

If, however, you are more cautious or want to measure the scale of impact so you can prioritize future types of tests, then you need to worry more about statistical significance. How quickly you will see the effect of a change is a factor of the number of pages in the test, the amount of traffic to those pages, and the scale of impact of the change you have made. All tests are going to be different.

Small sites will find it difficult to get statistical significance for tests with smaller uplifts — but even there, uplifts of 5–10% (to that set of pages, remember) are likely to be detectable in a matter of weeks. For larger sites with more pages and more traffic, smaller uplifts should be detectable.

Is this a legitimate approach?

As I outlined above, the experimental setup is designed specifically to avoid any issues with cloaking, as every visitor to the site gets the exact same experience on every page — whether that page is part of the test group or not. This includes googlebot.

Since the intention is that improvements we discover via this testing form the basis for new and improved regular site pages, there is also no risk of creating doorway/gateway pages. These should be better versions of legitimate pages that already exist on your site.

It is obviously possible to design terrible experiments and do things like stuffing keywords into the variant pages or hiding content. This is as inadvisable for A/B tests as it is for your site in general. Don’t do it!

In general, though, whereas a few years ago I might have been worried that the winning tests would bias towards some form of manipulation, I think that’s less and less likely to be true (for context, see Wil Reynolds’ excellent post from early 2012 entitled how Google makes liars out of the good guys in SEO). In particular, I believe that sensibly-designed tests will now effectively use Google as an oracle to discover which variants of a page most closely match and satisfy user intent, and which pages signal that to new visitors most effectively. These are the pages that Google is seeking to rank, and whether we are pleasing algorithms designed to please people or pleasing people directly isn’t too important — we’ll converge on the right result.

What are the downsides?

So, this all sounds great. Why isn’t everyone doing it?

Well, the truth is that it’s quite hard. Not only do most content management systems (CMS) fail to offer the ability to make changes to arbitrary groups of pages, but it’s also hard to gather and analyze the data to come to the right conclusions. There are also theoretical limitations, even on big sites — particularly around understanding and analyzing the effects of changes like internal linking structure, which cascade through the site in unpredictable ways.

We do, however, know of a handful of large sites, with tons of traffic, and huge development resources who have gone down this path and are reaping substantial rewards from it.

Although there will always be sizes of website and levels of traffic below which its uneconomical or impractical to perform sensible tests, we want to make the ability to run these tests available to a much wider audience than it is currently. To achieve this, we’ve been working on our own platform designed both to make it easy to run tests, and also to gather and analyze the output (it also happens to make it easy to roll out quick changes that are hard to get bumped up your backlog, for whatever reason).

Distilled’s Optimization Delivery Network (ODN)

You can read more about the tool in my launch announcement over on the Distilled blog.

As I said over there:

We are calling this type of platform an Optimization Delivery Network or ODN. It works like this:

• It sits in your web stack like a Content Delivery Network (CDN) (or behind your CDN if you are using one).
• It allows you to make arbitrary changes to the HTML (and HTTP headers) of any page or group of pages on your website — operating a little like a CMS over the output of your CMS and avoiding the need for a lengthy wait for your development backlog.
• In addition, it makes it possible to make certain kinds of changes to subsets of pages in order to test to see what will work best.

If you’re interested in hearing more, seeing a demo, or even signing up to the beta, please go ahead and fill out our form.

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Posted by randfish

Mobile’s been a hot topic for a while now. We know it’s not something to be ignored, but when it comes to different mobile mediums, it can be tricky to determine where to focus your efforts. In this week’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand goes over the differences between marketing via mobile apps and mobile web, examines some criteria that can help guide your decision, and speculates about the future of the mobile world in general.

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 going to chat a little bit about the mobile world and specifically whether we should be investing our mobile marketing efforts into the mobile web — meaning a website that is responsive and adaptive or just specifically designed for mobile browsers — or whether we should be worried about building a mobile app to help draw in traffic and gain customers and users. I think these two worlds are actually quite different.

So I spent a bunch of time recently here internally at Moz going through a huge number of statistics, trying to gather as much data as I could to understand these two worlds, and I thought I’d share that with you. I’ll give a bunch of links in this presentation, probably a good dozen of them that I’ll make sure are in there.

Sources:

• Pew Internet: Smartphone Use in 2015
• Comscore & MarketingLand: Apps Eat Digital Media Time
• Morgan Stanley & MarketingLand: No, Apps Aren’t Winning, the Mobile Browser Is
• IAB Study & MarketingLand: Despite Time Spent, Mobile Web Just as Important as Apps
• Fred Wilson [AVC]: Mobile Web is Top of Funnel, Mobile Web is Bottom of Funnel
• MarketingLand: Search is Number One Content Discovery Tool for Mobile Users
• SimilarWeb & Clickz: Why Mobile Web Still Matters in 2015
• Andrew Chen: Mobile App Retention Rates
• Smart Insights: Mobile Marketing Statistics
• Think with Google: Mobile Path to Purchase
• Comscore: 2015 Mobile App Report
• Forrester: Mobile Users Spend 80% of Time in Just 5 Apps
• Nielsen: So Many Apps, So Much More Time for Entertainment
• TechCrunch & Nielsen: An Upper Limit for Apps
• TechCrunch & Forrester: Only 5 Apps See Heavy Use
• VentureBeat: Mobile Browser Traffic is 2X Bigger than App Traffic
• Quartz and Comscore: Most Smartphone Users Download 0 Apps per Month

Mobile web qualities

Just to give you a broad overview, basically the mobile web kind of looks like this.

There’s a lot less time spent in the mobile web, meaning on mobile websites on a mobile device, than there is in the world of apps — far, far less time spent. But weirdly, and this is very strange but confirmed by several different sources, there’s more traffic overall, meaning more unique people making more different visits, which makes a little bit of sense when you think about how those things are done. Remember that a visit to a web page is a much less intense activity than loading up a mobile app and then spending time in it. So sure that can make some sense.

It’s also growing faster. So the mobile web is about two times bigger in terms of raw traffic, and it is growing faster than the mobile app world, which will also make sense in a sec when we talk about apps.

This is Morgan Stanley data. I think they’re using comScore as one of their sources, and there’s another one that backs this up as well.

Mobile traffic is also highly distributed, and you can see that in everyone’s numbers, everyone from SimilarWeb to comScore to Nielsen. They’re all reporting this. It’s a lot like desktop, which again makes sense.

It’s not that we spend all our time on just a few websites. In fact, because so much of the time that we spend on the web in desktop is on Facebook’s website and on YouTube’s website, and that is mostly app traffic in the mobile web, the long tail looks really long when it comes to the mobile web. There’s essentially tons of people visiting tons and tons of different websites all across there, I think on average visiting a few hundred to a few thousand unique websites in a month across mobile browsing.

For the mobile web, search, social, and word of mouth or type in or bookmarking, those are the big sources of mobile referrals, which isn’t surprising. Those are pretty big on desktop as well.

So pretty distributed broad system here. A lot of similarities to the desktop web. We’re pretty familiar with this world.

Mobile app world

Mobile app world qualities, kind of different though. Apps dominate. I mean dominate like they crush the times that we spend on mobile devices. So you might have seen Mary Meeker’s State the Internet Report for this year showing that mobile traffic in 2014 eclipsed desktop traffic.

Desktop traffic is weird. It basically kept growing, growing, growing from 1990 to 2010, and then it’s basically today almost exactly where it is in 2010. Weirdly, I think a good trivia question would be, “Do people spend more or less time on desktops today than they did five years ago?” Of course, we would all say, “Well, they spend less.” But actually we spend a teensy, tinsy bit more than we did then.

It’s just that mobile has gone crazy. Mobile has eaten up all of the rest of the time in our lives. We don’t see our friends or family any more. We don’t eat meals. We just browse our mobile devices.

So mobile is about 85% to 90% depending on the source of time spent on mobile. It’s your YouTubes and your Facebooks and all those kinds of things.

It sends and receives far fewer referrals. So basically, most of the ways that people are getting to apps is not from another app or from a website. It’s directly from the launcher. They’re going to their home screen. They’re clicking on that app. That makes pretty good sense.

But they’re also not sending out as much traffic. So if you’re browsing Facebook on a mobile device, it seems like, on average, you’re less likely to click on to a mobile web link and then load up a web page versus maybe if you’re browsing Facebook on the desktop web, which also makes sense. You want to stay in the app that you’re in. Mobile speeds are slow or especially outside of countries where 4G and LTE are common.

The top 25 to 50 apps in mobile — and it depends on who you ask — some sources are showing that just the top 5 apps are responsible for 80% to 90% of all app usage. This is data from Forrester and data from comScore. Marketing Land did some work on this.

So what we’re essentially saying here is if you’re not in the top 25 to 50 apps on a platform, you’re probably getting very little mobile app activity, because it turns out that the long tail is nowhere near like it is on the mobile web. People don’t visit hundreds and thousands of apps. They visit just a few.

In fact, the average mobile owner uses about 24 apps per month, 24 unique apps per month and visits between 10 and 30 times as many unique websites in a given month.

Seven percent of heavy app users (so the people who download the most apps, who use the most apps), they’re responsible actually for 50%, a full half of all download activities.

So it’s sort of a small subset of app users who just go crazy. They download every app that they can. They treat apps like websites. They have this huge long tail. But for the 93% of the rest of us, a little bit different.

Most new discovery for mobile apps comes from three sources — mobile web, word of mouth, or app store top lists. That tends to be how we get to the app world.

So these two are very, very different. They’re different in usage. They’re different in how they operate. They’re different in how you would need to do marketing around them.

Things every business needs to optimize for mobile web

It’s my general opinion, based on what I’ve seen about the mobile web, that every business needs to optimize for the mobile web, and you have to optimize in a few ways. That means you must have responsive or adaptive design. It’s not just an option any more.

You’ve got to have a mobile search-friendly experience, so being able to get the mobile search-friendly tag, which means you can rank better.

But it also means that you’re delivering a better user experience from search because search is so big to the mobile web world.

You should be SEO-aware and optimize your site for search engines. That’s critical. If you’re watching Whiteboard Friday, you’re probably doing a fine job with that.

You need to load fast, even on slow connections.

I think one of the challenges is that a lot of us assume that everybody is on 4G or everybody is on LTE. That is not the case, especially in a lot of the developing world. But even in the United States and in Europe and in other countries like Japan, there are plenty of connection speeds that are slow or limited due to where people are, particularly when they travel or are inside buildings or are having connectivity issues. I’m sure you’ve all experienced that.

Finally, you’ve got to provide that great user experience and a great content experience that delivers answers quickly.

So I don’t mean just loads fast. I mean gives people the answers they’re looking for quickly, because as we know, Google is using click-through rate and pogo-sticking and all those kinds of things. If you have a bad experience where you’re not delivering, even if your page loads fast, you’re not delivering the answers someone was seeking when they performed a mobile search, they land on your mobile web page, they’re going to click the “Back” button and choose somebody else. They’re less likely to choose you in the future, and Google is less likely to rank you in the future. Very frustrating.

My take on mobile app development

But mobile app development — again, this is my opinion — I think that there are plenty of folks out there who have reasonable disagreements about the way that I think about this. But based on what I’ve seen, I would generally recommend that mobile app development is only right for your organization if you fit a few criteria.

(A) You need to have a great strategy around what your mobile app will do and that there need to be features and value that your app provides that you could not provide well or could not provide at all in a mobile web experience. Apps can do things like push notifications, even when the app is dormant. That’s very, very tough for a website to do, although Google has talked about potentially making that available in Chrome someday. So maybe.

Integration with contacts or integration with other apps. Integration with the phone features itself, the calling and the device system or the root functions of the phone. Those types of things, if you can provide value off of that that you could not do through a mobile website, okay.

By the way, the mobile web provides a lot more features and functionality than many folks often think it does. I’ll link you to another great piece (What the Web Can Do Today) that was on Hacker News the other day that has just a great chart of all the things that you might want to be able to do and whether they’re supported on mobile web or app or both.

(B) You’ve got to be able to convince not only yourself but convince your team, convince your audience that you can be among the top few — let’s say hundred — apps in the world, or you only need a small handful, maybe a few hundred to a few thousand people that install your app in order for it to be successful.

If you can’t make one of those claims — either we’re going to be one of the top few hundred apps in the world, or we only need a few hundred to a few thousand people on our app — well, the way apps work is the rich, the dominant apps get all the traffic, all the activity.

I think it can be very frustrating to say, “Hey, we’re going to build a great app that sits somewhere in the middle of the pack just like our website sits somewhere in the middle of the pack.” That’s not how it works. All the attention goes to the most popular apps.

(C) Your app can beat the retention curve odds.

So again, in my research what I found time and time again is that mobile app retention, it’s just awful, terrible. Basically, the overwhelming majority of apps, I think more than 9 out of 10 apps will never be opened again after 90 days. So you’ve got to find a way to make your app retain users and keep their interest, keep them coming back to you again and again, and that is no small feat.

(D) You’ve got an amazing team of app developers or an incredible one or two people who can do great app development and make a world-class product.

Because if you’re not going to be best in class, app world just doesn’t feel like it’s worth it.

This could all change if…

All right. Now let me add a quick caveat at the end of this. So what I want to say is that this world of apps versus mobile web could change.

In fact, I think there’s a lot of people in the SEO world who believe that it’s on the verge of changing because of what Google is doing with mobile app integration into mobile web search.

So if I do a search today for “best pasta Portland” on my mobile device, I am going to get pretty much exclusively mobile web content. That’s true until and unless I perform a search that really is very app-focused or app-centric. So if I were to perform a search like “find best local restaurants near me,” it might come up with Yelp or a travel destination app. Google will pull up in my results probably TripAdvisor and stuff like that. That is happening a little bit today, and we do see it. I think there’s folks who are going, “Hey, this is an opportunity.” It is an opportunity.

But Google has also made another change where they are now indexing content inside of apps, including in Facebook, which was a big announcement a few weeks ago, and potentially will be placing those inside of the mobile search results, potentially even if you don’t have that app installed. That’s the game changer. If it turns out that mobile search, which is now more than 50% of all search, becomes a place where Google does sort of what they did with Google+, remember where they were giving highly biased, preferential treatment to posts that had been Google Plussed, even from people who were barely in your network or connected to another person and they made Google+ like this center of the local ecosystem and all those kinds of things.

If they do the same thing in the app world and they give this biased, preferential treatment across the board to apps rather than to mobile web content, we could see this equation start to change. Then it might make sense to say, “Hey, even if I can’t attract and keep people and build the best app in the world, maybe I should build an app anyway just to be able to expose my content and get the benefit to Google.”

I think it would be a little bit of an odd move from Google, but it’s not impossible, and I think in 6 to 12 months we’re going to know a lot more. There’ll be plenty of studies and data about the clickstream patterns on mobile search and how often the results appear and how often they’re clicked and how often that leads to a mobile app download. All those kinds of metrics should be available in the next 6 to 12 months. Then we’ll be able to report back to you with a lot more about whether this equation has changed.

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

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Posted by EricEnge

The past 20 years have seen the fastest rate of change in human history. Breathtaking as that may have been, the reality is, that was just the beginning. In fact, the pace of change is going to continue to accelerate. Because of these changes, I see the need for brands to evolve into what I am calling a 10x brand.

This is an expansion of the concept of 10x Content that Rand Fishkin discussed in a recent Whiteboard Friday video. During this WBF, Rand showed why brands now need to produce content ten times better than anything else showing up in search. In this post, I’m proposing that not only do you need to have 10x content (as Rand called it), but you need to be a 10x brand. In other words, it’s becoming necessary that your brand must be ten times better known, ten times more trusted, ten times more referenced than any of your competitors’ brands.

Because of the three trends I’m about to share with you, just being “better” is no longer good enough. I’ll conclude the post with a set of actionable steps you can take that will help you become such a brand. So get ready, hold on tight, and prepare to enjoy the ride!

Change #1: The rise of the millennials

It’s Duane Forrester that deserves credit for forcing this change into my consciousness. The millennials are the first generation that has grown up in a world with this incredible pace of change:

Image Source: Bloomberg

Don’t skip past the significance of that. Change is the norm for this generation. If you are Gen X, or a baby boomer like me, there was some real stability in the world of tech. Things changed, but not every single year as seems to happen today.

According to the above-referenced Bloomberg article, the millennials in North America stand to inherit $30 trillion in wealth from the baby boomer generation. This will be the largest generational transfer of wealth in the history of mankind, and is in addition to their own earnings. This will give them unprecedented spending power. So yes, you should care about them.

Next, consider the impact of the changes that have already occurred. The two biggest ones of these are:

The practical impact of these two things are:

1. Nearly all the world’s information at your fingertips
2. Dozens or hundreds of options to consider in regards to any purchase or action you might want to make
3. Immediate connectivity with your friends and others for real-time feedback and information

These factors have all led to changes in consumer behavior — not just for millennials, but for any hyper-connected person. Here are some of the key characteristics of this modern consumer:

Demand for high quality

The demand for quality is higher than it has even been before, largely because accessing alternative choices is easier than it’s ever been before.

Engagement or entertainment

They want to be engaged or entertained by the companies they do business with. This expectation has arisen because there are so many progressive brands that are willing to do it, so those that don’t look stale in comparison.

Authenticity

All communications need to be authentic and backed by behavior, because there are so many ways that inauthentic behavior can get exposed.

Impatient

When they want something, be prepared to give it to them now. If you don’t, someone else will.

Short attention span

You will need to work very hard to keep their attention. There are just too many enticing options available to them.

The desire for these things is not new, but the instant availability of alternative options is what has changed. Any failure to deliver on your part, is immediately actionable by the consumer – they get what they want from someone else.

Change #2: The rise of new Internet-connected devices and voice-driven interactions

Forecasts for device sales over the next 5 years show a stunning rise in the sale of new types of Internet-connected devices: wearables, smart TVs, thermostats, refrigerators, and more. This environment has given raise to the phrase “The Internet of Things.”

If you look at the above chart closely, you will see that by 2020 the cumulative installed base of PCs, tablets, and smartphones (all the stuff we actively use today) will be less than 1/3 of the total Internet-enabled devices. The overwhelming majority of the new devices will have no keyboards, and they will instead rely on voice commands for interaction.

For years, people have argued that voice search will be limited because people won’t want to use it in public places, but that concern appears to be becoming less of an issue. A study comissioned by Google in 2014 showed that 55% of teens and 41% of adults use voice search at least once a day. It also appears that the times and places where people are willing to use voice search are increasing:

The Google study also shows interesting data on why people use voice search:

In case you think the Google study is biased, data supporting the rise of voice search is available from other sources, such as this one from Economictimes.indiatimes.com:

These two studies show increases in usage of voice search on a smartphone. The trend in this direction, in my opinion, will be rapidly accelerated by the new types of Internet-connected devices. Most of these devices will have no keyboard for input. For example, if you are wearing a smartwatch, or interacting with your refrigerator, voice-driven interaction will pretty much be your only option for most functions.

Change #3: Fundamental changes in advertising models

One of the biggest drivers of Google’s success on the World Wide Web has been their AdWords advertising system. It offered a brilliant model where advertisers paid on a per-click basis, and provided a massive source of revenue to the company. For the most part, this relies on people clicking on an AdWords ad in the search results, or an AdSense ad on third-party websites.

Even with the advent of the smartphone, the screen real estate needed for much of this advertising model has shrunk dramatically. In wearable devices and embedded devices, that screen real estate is gone.

It’s not 100% clear how the new economic models will work in this new world. In a smartphone environment, where we still have some screen real estate, the number of ads that can be shown are greatly reduced. There are many that believe that success in this environment will depend on personalization. For this reason, major advantages come to those who have people actively using apps (where those people stay logged in by default), as they can continuously collect information about you. For reference, here are the most popular apps in 2015 accoring to comScore:

It also matters what types of information those apps are able to collect along the way. Because they know so much about you, Facebook has an extremely strong position in this new world, and Google is arguably playing catch-up. This entire story becomes even more complicated when you get to the world of wearables and embedded devices. For some of these, there may be zero real estate available for ads. This will further complicate the world of monetization, and it may all morph into affiliate models.

How will all this end up? I honestly don’t know, but fundamental change is a given.

(Thanks are due to Mike Grehan for stimulating some of my thinking in this area at Pubcon.)

Why should I become a 10x brand?

The world that Google currently dominates is the World Wide Web, a world which is navigated by the browser. That world is not going to disappear, but its share of people’s attention will diminish over time. Google may still be a huge player in this new world, but they will have significant competition. And, even if Google is the leading player in it, the shape of how digital marketing is done will be substantially different.

In short, the tactics that work for promoting your business in a web-driven world won’t apply. You will need to view this new environment as a massively connected ecosystem. Any, and all, of your imperfections are likely to be found out and exposed. From a content marketing perspective, the landscape will look something like this:

At each corner of the Internet you touch, you have to view what you are doing as visible in every other corner. Your messaging needs to focus on building relationships across the spectrum of all that you do. For that reason, find ways to add value and help others, find ways to engage and interact, and find ways to entertain.

Why do I think this is the case? In a shifting landscape, your best defense (and your best offense) is a passionate audience. People who believe in what you do. People who believe in who you are. And, in a world where personalization is a huge factor in how information is delivered, having that audience that wants to remain connected with you is huge. In short, if a service provider does not make your products and or services available to people who want them, then those people may become dissatisfied with that service provider. What will those people do then? They might switch to another service provider.

The competition between Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and others for the future is ON. They all see it coming, and how this will shake out is not at all certain. This means competing for audiences and securing their own market share. Building your own passionate, connected audience is your clear path for surviving and prospering.

Your goal needs to be becoming a 10x brand. You need to go above and beyond what others do. You don’t want to simply be good; you need to be outstanding.

What does it take to be a 10x brand?

1.) View every touchpoint as an opportunity to build or enhance relationships.

By everywhere, I mean everywhere. That includes offline. Have stores? Then interactions within those stores are an opportunity. Have a customer service function? Use it to build trust and perceived value. And, of course, anything you do in social media, on your site, or through content marketing, as well.

Two brands that do this really well are Whole Foods and Marathon Petroleum. You can read more about how they engage with people both online and offline below:

• Interview with Whole Foods’ Natanya Anderson
• Interview with Marathon Petroleum’s Brandon Daniels

2.) Solve problems for others via content and interaction.

Do this everywhere you are present online.

Create 10x content that helps users on a regular basis (at least once per month). As mentioned earlier in this article, Rand made a great argument for why 10x content is a requirement.

Publishing great content is an awesome way to add value to the overall market ecosystem in which you live.

10x content is a baseline requirement for a 10x brand.

3.) Stop producing any sub 1x content whatsoever.

Quality is far more important than quantity. In your content marketing efforts, stop creating OK content, or 1x content — it’s a waste of your time. It will not help you grow. Note: what you put on product pages will probably be more focused on driving conversion, and is likely to be more basic; the focus here is on what you do in content marketing.

4.) Freely share the best content covering your market, including that created by others.

So many brands are not willing to share great content published by others, but if it’s valuable to your audience, it will help enhance your relationship with that audience. In addition, it will help grow you grow your social media audience.

5.) Build genuine relationships with other progressive industry thought leaders (influencers).

There are so many reasons to do this:

• Close cooperation with other well-known experts is awesome for your own reputation and visibility
• It opens doors to a wide range of joint promotional opportunities
• It can lead to their sharing your content through your social channels
• Ultimately, these factors all play into improved SEO

6.) Proactively engage with others on social media, including customers and prospects.

It’s great to interact with influencers, but you can’t make it only about them. As noted above, every interaction is a chance to build a relationship. In addition, every interaction in most places online, such as social media, takes place on a public stage.

How you treat others is public information in these environments. Take advantage of the opportunity that represents.

7.) Develop key employees into public faces for your company (what Mark Traphagen calls a PBR, or “personal brand rep”).

Every company has limited funds. Enabling your employee base to participate in building your brand can dramatically increase the effectiveness of your efforts.

This should extend beyond social media and into your offline activities, as well.

8.) Stop any edgy business (including SEO) practices you have been using.

The downside risk of public exposure is way too high:

Questionable business practices designed to get you an unfair edge just aren’t worth it. Just ask Volkswagen about the downside of skirting the rules.

Summary

You may want to argue with me about being a 10x brand, asking why being a 2x brand isn’t enough. There’s merit to the argument, but the challenge for you is that the basic channels for information discovery are shifting underneath our collective feet.

If you are seeing success in today’s channels, this is a threat to you. If you don’t have passionate loyal fans, those new channels have no real need to make information about you available. People won’t miss you if you’re not there.

That’s the key. You need to be in-demand. If some channel does not make it easy to find you, you need people to miss you. That’s why you must behave like an authentic, engaged member of the overall community. Having a great product or service will be a requirement, but that’s just table stakes — you need to be a 10x brand. If you can create this position for yourself, you win.

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Posted by IanWatson

Some say the only constant thing in this world is change — and that seems to go double for the online marketing and SEO industry. At times this can seem daunting and sometimes insurmountable, but some have found ways to embrace the ambiguity and even thrive on it. Their paths and techniques may all differ slightly, but a commonality exists among them.

That commonality is the utilization of data, mainly via API-driven custom tools and dashboards. APIs like Salesforce’s Chatter, Facebook’s Graph, and our very own Mozscape all allow for massive amounts of useful data to be integrated into your systems.

So, what do you do with all that data?

The use cases are limitless and really depend on your goals, business model, and available resources. Many in our industry, including myself, still rely heavily upon spreadsheets to manage large data sets.

However, the amount of native data and data within reach has grown drastically, and can quickly become unwieldy.

An example of a live reporting dashboard from Klipfolio.

Technology to the rescue!

Business intelligence (BI) is a necessary cog in the machine when it comes to running a successful business. The first step to incorporating BI into your business strategy is to adopt real-time reporting. Much like using Google Maps (yet another API!) on your phone to find your way to a new destination, data visualization companies like Klipfolio, Domo, and Tableau have built live reporting dashboards to help you navigate the wild world of online marketing. These interactive dashboards allow you in integrate data from several sources to better assist you in making real-time decisions.

A basic advertising dashboard.

For example, you could bring your ad campaign, social, and web analytics data into one place and track key metrics and overall performance in real-time. This would allow you to delegate extra resources towards what’s performing best, pulling resources from lagging activities in the funnel as they are occurring. Or perhaps you want to be ahead of the curve and integrate some deep learning into your analysis? Bringing in an API like Alchemy or a custom set-up from Algorithmia could help determine what the next trends are before they even happen. This is where the business world is heading; you don’t want to fall behind.

Resistance is futile.

The possibilities of real-time data analysis are numerous, and the first step towards embracing this new-age necessity is to get your first, simple dashboard set up. We’re here to help. In fact, our friends at Klipfolio were nice enough to give us step-by-step instructions on integrating our Mozscape data, Hubspot data, and social media metrics into their live reporting dashboard — even providing a live demo reporting dashboard. This type of dash allows you to easily create reports, visualize changes in your metrics, and make educated decisions based on hard data.

Create a live reporting dashboard featuring Moz, Hubspot and social data

1. First, you’ll need to create your Mozscape API key. You’ll need to be logged into your existing Moz account, or create a free community or pro Moz account. Once you’re logged in and on the API key page, press “Generate Key.”

2. This is the key you’ll use to access the API and is essentially your password. This is also the key you’ll use for step 6, when you’re integrating this data into Klipfolio.

3. Create a free 14-day Klipfolio trial. Then select “Add a Klip.”

4. The Klip Gallery contains pre-built widgets for your whatever your favorite services might be. You can find Klips for Facebook, Instagram, Alexa, Adobe, Google Adwords and Analytics, and a bunch of other useful integrations. They’re constantly adding more. Plus, in Klipfolio, you can build your own widgets from scratch.

For now, let’s keep it simple. Select “Moz” in the Klip Gallery.

5. Pick the Klip you’d like to add first, then click “Add to Dashboard.”

6. Enter your API key and secret key. If you don’t have one already, you can get your API key and secret ID here.

7. Enter your company URL, followed by your competitors’ URLs.

8. Voilà — it’s that easy! Just like that, you have a live look at backlinks on your own dash.

9. From here, you can add any other Moz widgets you want by repeating steps 5–8. I chose to add in MozRank and Domain Authority Klips.

10. Now let’s add some social data streams onto our dash. I’m going to use Facebook and Twitter, but each of the main social media sites have similar setup processes.

11. Adding in other data sources like Hubspot, Searchmetrics, or Google Analytics simply requires you to bet set up with those parties and to allow Klipfolio access.

12. Now that we have our Klips set up, the only thing left to do is arrange the layout to your liking.

After you have your preferred layout, you’re all set! You’ve now entered the world of business intelligence with your first real-time reporting dashboard. After the free Klipfolio trial is complete, it’s only $20/month to continue reporting like the pros. I haven’t found many free tools in this arena, but this plan is about as close as you’ll come.

Take a look at a live demo reporting dash, featuring all of the sources we just went over:

Click to see a larger version.

Conclusion

Just like that, you’ve joined the ranks of Big SEO, reporting like the big industry players. In future posts we’ll bring you more tutorials on building simple tools, utilizing data, and mashing it up with outside sources to better help you navigate the ever-changing world of online business. There’s no denying that, as SEO and marketing professionals, you’re always looking for that next great innovation to give you and your customers a competitive advantage.

From Netflix transitioning into an API-centric business to Amazon diving into the API management industry, the largest and most influential companies out there realize that utilizing large data sets via APIs is the future. Follow suit: Let big data and business intelligence be your guiding light!

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