Posted by SamuelScott

It’s October 26, 1985. The top song in the United States is Whitney Houston’s “Saving All My Love for You.” The top weekend movie at the US box office is “Jagged Edge,” starring Glenn Close and Jeff Bridges. And Marty McFly was about to travel back in time in “Back to the Future.”

(photo: Back to the Future Day)

Yes, for any Mozzers who do not know, Back to the Future Day—the exact date when Marty went to the future in the sequel to the original film—is today!

Also in the mid-1980s, the Internet was largely confined to the US military and large higher-education institutions. Most marketing at the time, of course, occurred via print, magazine, TV, and radio mediums and channels in what is now often called “outbound marketing.”

Why, then, is this relevant in 2015? One problem in digital marketing is that many digital marketers do not have much education or experience in traditional marketing and communications. If you mention the 4 Ps or ask about the promotion mix at most SEO conferences, you’ll probably receive blank stares in response.

It’s important to know what marketers did before the Internet because many of the strategies that had been developed and honed since the early twentieth century are still applicable today. So, to help the community, I wanted to give a high-level overview of traditional marketing and communications and then provide discussion topics for the comments below, as well as actionable tasks for readers to start integrating traditional marketing principles into their digital strategies.

By the end of this post, you’ll have a solid sense of the following:

• What is the difference between marketing and communications?
• What is the integrated discipline “marcom?”
• What are the 4 Ps?
• What parts comprise the promotion mix (within the 4 Ps)?
• When should I do outbound and inbound marketing?
• How do the Internet and digital marketing fit into all of this?
• What about SEO, social media marketing, content marketing, growth hacking, and linkbuilding?
• What actionable things can I do?
• Why did Marty McFly’s mom and dad not recognize him from the 1950s when he had grown into a teenager in the 1980s?

This post is related to an earlier Moz post of mine on the marketing department of the future—I will address the connection between the two essays below. I hope you’re excited! Where we’re going, we don’t need roads—just a little bit of time.

All “Back to the Future” photos are from the official site

The basic points to remember

Here are two of my favorite quotes in the sidebar of the blog of advertising industry veteran Bob Hoffman:

Marketing does not really change that much because people do not change—and anyone who says differently is selling something. Countless gurus, writers, and keynote speakers have proclaimed that “inbound marketing is the future,” “social media has changed everything (a parody of TED talks),” and “advertising is dead.”

But some examples from Hoffman prove otherwise: Traditional live TV viewing is not “dying” at all, and most people are not using DVRs to skip TV ads. Traditional “outbound” TV advertising is often still important enough that in one example, Pepsi lost a lost of money and dropped to third place in terms of market share when the company moved its entire ad spend from television ads to social media.

The point is that no marketing strategy or tactic is always best for every purpose, product, brand, or industry. Sometimes TV advertising should be a part of the promotion mix; sometimes not. Sometimes content marketing is the best way to go; sometimes not. Sometimes modern “inbound” methods deliver the greatest value; sometimes it’s traditional “outbound” ones. More on that below.

Here, I wanted to take us back—back to the past to show the future where we have been, why it matters, and how we should incorporate it into digital marketing.

A full list of resources is provided at the end for those who wish to learn more.

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The marcom workflow

This flowchart is a high-level overview of the step-by-step process that I will describe in detail below. For those who want a quick summary, here is the workflow that marcom executives typically use:

1. List all of the external audiences with whom your company communicates
2. Remember that current and potential customers are just one of your audiences
3. Determine the specific messages that you want to communicate to each “public” based on your audience research and buyer personas
   
   For customers:
4. Establish product-market fit
5. Decide on a pricing strategy
6. Choose how you will prioritize direct marketing, personal selling, advertising, sales promotion, and publicity in your promotion mix in general and then allocate your resources accordingly
7. Determine which online and offline communications channels you will prioritize within your promotion mix and then allocate your resources accordingly
8. Create the needed creatives, sales collateral, and marketing content
9. Transmit the marketing materials over your selected channels to your audience
10. Measure and audit the results
11. Return to steps 3–8 as necessary and adjust to attempt to maximize revenue, sales, ROI, or any other metric based on your business and marketing goals

Marketing vs. communications

Traditionally, marketing and communications had been entirely different functions that each had their own departments. Marketing focused on issues such as customers, sales, and brand awareness. Communications (often called public relations or external relations) dealt with everyone else in the outside world with whom the company interacted, such as the government, community, media, and financial analysts.

In other words, communications (another word for PR) as a whole is the act of communicating with any relevant external group of people. Obviously, companies would usually not want to say the exact same thing to customers, influencers, the media, the government, and the local community.

Today, however, more and more companies are combining Marketing and Communications under a single department (often called “marketing communications” or “marcom”) to become more efficient and ensure that all messages are consistent among all audiences and across all channels.

The key to understand: Publish and transmit unified, integrated messaging on and across all online and offline marcom channels including websites, social networks, advertising campaigns, online content, news releases, product brochures, and sales catalogues.

SEO pro tip: When relevant, include your desired keywords—using natural language rather than keyword stuffing, of course—in your messaging everywhere (for the co-occurrence benefits; websites seem to rank more highly for search terms when links to those sites appear on pages that also mention those terms!).

Remember:

Communication is one person speaking with another. Marketing is one type of communication.

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The 4 Ps in traditional marketing

In a unified marcom strategy, all of a company’s audiences need to be included strategically. However, because Moz’s readers focus mainly on marketing rather than PR, I will focus the rest of this essay on “customer relations” (or “marketing”) specifically.

After creating the overall marketing messages that a company will communicate to current and potential customers, the next step in traditional marketing theory is to focus on the 4 Ps: product, price, place, and promotion. (Note: This process is not set in stone. Sometimes the 4 Ps will be determined before the overall marketing messaging is decided.)

Product

Not a bad product!

Product strategy, according to Study.com, is essentially maximizing product-market fit—the degree to which a product or service satisfies the demand for it. In the modern, inbound world (and most specifically in terms of SaaS products), product strategy has been rebranded as “growth hacking.” For those who are interested, Ryan Holiday goes into more detail in “Growth Hacker Marketing.”

The process generally follows these steps:

1. Create a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), traditionally called a prototype.

2. Get a core set of early testers/users to establish product-market fit. Show them the MVP and quiz them on what they like, what they don’t like, what would be more useful, and what is not necessary. Revise the product and get more feedback, revise the product and get more feedback to have a product that is constantly improving.

3. Incorporate sharing and growth naturally in the product. Push new users to refer friends for a discount. Put social sharing buttons inside the user dashboard.

4. Experiment with the different ways to get “traction” to see what gets the most users quickly at the lowest cost. It could be advertising, organic traffic, media coverage, or any other potential marketing strategy.

Once you have established product-market fit, how will you communicate the value that the product provides on all online and offline marcom channels, including websites, social outlets, advertising campaigns, online content, news releases, product brochures, and sales catalogues?

Price

Thankfully, this ended up not happening.

Pricing strategy is not only a purview of the finance department—it is also a part of marketing. If, for example, a company wants to earn $100 in revenue, it can sell one “widget” for $100 or 100 “widgets” for $1 each. Each tactic requires a different marketing strategy.

A high price communicates high value and rarity (think about the high prices of diamonds, which are essentially shiny, useless rocks marketed to rich people) while a low price shows affordability and availability (think about Walmart and its value-based marketing to the less-rich Everyman). In a marketing context, the pricing strategy will also need to take into account items such as the size of the market, the cost to produce the product or service, the level of competition, the economics of the target market, and whether the company wants to market itself based on quality or value (or perhaps both).

Once you have decided on your pricing strategy, how will you incorporate that element into online and offline channels, including websites, social outlets, advertising campaigns, online content, news releases, product brochures, and sales catalogues?

Place

Distribution (how Place is now known) is the decision on how to transmit a product to customers. It might be setting up a lemonade stand on the corner, using franchisees, or mass producing widgets and then selling them to intermediaries, who then resell them.

In the Internet Age, when products and services can distributed, purchased, and consumed or used almost immediately from anywhere, this traditional part of the 4 Ps is becoming less important.

Promotion

One way to promote yourself is to get in the mass media.

Promotion is “raising customer awareness of a product or brand, generating sales, and creating brand loyalty.”

Promotion is also the most complex part of the 4 Ps because of the decisions that marketers make when deciding which methods are the best ways to achieve those three goals. The promotion mix has always consisted of five elements: direct marketing, sales promotion, personal selling, advertising, and publicity. Based on the product, industry, goal, and target audience, each element is given a different weight and priority both online and offline.

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The promotion mix

For a second, forget about “SEO,” “content marketing,” “social media marketing,” and the other terms that are frequently used among digital marketers. Here are the five elements of the traditional promotion mix described in specific detail.

I will use specific definitions from my old MBA marketing textbook (“Principles of Marketing” by Philip T. Kotler and Gary Armstrong) because, as I will explain below, how we define our terms greatly affects our marketing success.

Direct marketing

Direct marketing is “direct connections with carefully targeted individual consumers to both obtain an immediate response and cultivate lasting customer relationships.” Direct marketing “includes catalogs, telephone marketing, kiosks, the Internet, mobile marketing, and more. ”

Advertising

Advertising is “any paid form of non-personal presentation and promotion of ideas, goods, or services by an identified sponsor.” Advertising “includes broadcast, print, Internet, outdoor, and other forms.”

Personal selling

Personal selling is “personal presentation by the firm’s salesforce for the purpose of making sales and building customer relationships.” Personal selling “includes sales presentations, trade shows, and incentive programs.”

Sales Promotion

Sales promotion is “short-term incentives to encourage the purchase or sale of a product or service.” Sales promotion “includes discounts, coupons, displays, and demonstrations.”

Publicity

Publicity is “gaining public visibility or awareness for a product, service, or your company via the media.”

To learn more about publicity, read “The Father of Spin,” a biography on the person who essentially invented the practice in the early-twentieth century. As described in Amazon’s description, he did “publicity campaigns for American Tobacco, Ivory Soap, United Fruit, book publishers, manufacturers of eggs and bacon, and the platforms of presidents from Coolidge to Eisenhower.” (Marketing can be done for good or evil ends—I will leave the choice up to the readers.)

For a modern example, see this Kickstarter campaign to build a miniature version of the hoverboard that was shown in “Back to the Future II”:

Perhaps inspired by the Kickstarter, Lexus is also releasing its own hoverboard and getting a lot of publicity as a result. How much brand awareness and how many links and social shares and followings do you think they have gained as by-products?

Creating the best promotion mix

The chart above presents an overview of the uses, benefits, and drawbacks of each element of the promotion mix. Answering some of the questions below can help to determine which of the following are relevant to one’s marketing goals and show companies to allocate resources to each element appropriately.

• I need to introduce a new product to a new market (advertising)
• I have a product that’s under attack by competitor’s products, and I need to retain my current customer base (sales promotion)
• I have a product that is highly specialized, technical, or expensive (personal selling)
• I need to correct false impressions or counter false claims made about my product (publicity)
• I need to create greater brand awareness of my product (advertising)
• I need to communicate new features to increase consumption by present customers (direct marketing)
• I have a product with a long sales cycle (personal selling)
• I need to generate more “buzz” or word-of-mouth business (sales promotion or publicity)
• I need to build a new image and reposition my product (advertising)

Companies will generally allocate different weights to each part of the promotion mix based on how they answer these types of questions. Here is an example from the Edward Lowe Foundation, a US non-profit organization that helps to encourage local entrepreneurship:

Whichever elements you choose, how will you incorporate them into your desired online and offline channels, including websites, social outlets, advertising campaigns, online content, news releases, product brochures, and sales catalogues?

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Don’t get distracted by buzzwords

Now, I have been discussing external communications, the 4 Ps, and the promotion mix—all of which have been used by traditional marketers since before the Internet had even existed. But why is this important to digital marketers today?

In my earlier Moz essay on the integration of PR and SEO (from when I was working for an agency), I explained the traditional communications process in this manner:

Here’s what I had written at that time:

A sender decides upon a message; the message is packaged into a piece of content; the content is transmitted via a desired channel; and the channel delivers the content to the receiver. Marketing is essentially sending a message that is packaged into a piece of content to a receiver via a channel. The rest is just details.

The Internet is just a new set of communications channels over which marketing promotional mixes are executed. As Kotler and Armstrong note in my old textbook (emphasis added):

As noted earlier, online marketing is the fastest-growing form of direct marketing. Widespread use of the Internet is having a dramatic impact on both buyers and the marketers who serve them. In this section, we examine how marketing strategy and practice are changing to take advantage of today’s Internet technologies.

“Digital marketing” is really just doing direct marketing, sales promotion, personal selling, advertising, or publicity via a specific collection of communications channels that we call the Internet.

The myth of “social media marketing”

I think I see Friendster and Orkut in there.

There is no such thing as “social media marketing” as a thing unto itself. (Please notice that I put that phrase as a whole in quotes.)

• Take the Lexus Back to the Future hoverboard’s Facebook page. All of the posts that are gaining likes, comments, and shares are not examples of “social media marketing”; by definition, it is “publicity” (via an online channel) because it is “gaining public visibility or awareness for a product, service, or your company via the media.”
• If I export a list of people who mention “widgets” on Twitter and then tweet to each person to sell them widgets, that is not “social media marketing.” By definition, it is doing direct marketing (via an online channel) because I am establishing “direct connections with carefully-targeted individual consumers to both obtain an immediate response and cultivate lasting customer relationships.”
• If I respond to customers who are asking questions on Facebook or Twitter about how my company’s product works, then I am not doing “social media marketing.” Obviously, I’m doing customer support.

“Social media” is not a marketing strategy. Social media, just like the telephone, is a communications channel over which marketing, PR, customer support, and more can all be performed. After all, there’s no such thing as a “telephone strategy.”

Why words matter

As a former journalist, I take pride in being very precise with language because it is always important to communicate ideas 100% accurately, fairly, and objectively. Within the articles that I contribute to the digital marketing community (and sometimes in the comments on others), I often discuss the definitions of terms because being precise with our language is the best way to help all of us do our jobs better.

If you want to integrate traditional and digital marketing—or, to be more accurate, if you want to market over digital channels—here are some examples of what to do:

• Stop studying “social media marketing.” Start studying the best practices in “direct marketing,” “customer support,” or any other desired activity and then apply those ideas whenever you use social media channels. In the coming years, publicists, customer support representatives, and others will naturally incorporate social media into their existing functions. “Social media” is not going to be a job unto itself.
• Stop studying “linkbuilding” and “doing content marketing to earn links.” Start studying the best practices in “publicity” because 99% of natural, quality, and authoritative links come as natural by-products of getting the media, bloggers, and people in general to talk about you online. The same principles of publicity apply regardless of whether I am using the channel of the telephone, e-mail, or social media when communicating with the media.
• Start studying the best practices in personal selling and sales promotion, and apply those principles whenever you do personal selling or sales promotion over digital channels.

Selecting the channels for your promotion mix

What channels would the makers of “Back to the Future” use to market the film in 1985 compared to 2015?

After you have decided upon your communications messages, determined the 4 Ps, and selected your promotion mix, only then is it time to select your channels by answering these questions:

• Can our audience be best reached online or offline (or some degree of both)?
• Based on the answer to the first question, which channels within each category should we use? (For example, the offline channels of TV, radio, newspapers, or magazines, or the online channels of advertising networks, social media, or online communities?)

The rule of thumb is to “go where the target audience lies”—whether it’s online or offline or both—but it’s more complicated than that. Channels themselves have their positives and negatives. Here are some examples based on executing the promotion mix online or offline:

• Advertising: The results and ROI of traditional offline advertisements are difficult to track precisely, but people generally pay more attention to them. Online advertising is easier to track, but the industry is rife with alleged fraud (a Moz essay of mine), and more and more people are using ad blockers.
• Direct marketing: Is it best to grow an e-mail list, to run searches on Twitter to isolate groups of people who are interested in what you offer, or to send a sales catalogue and track who purchases products? The answer will be different for everyone based on the audience.
• Personal selling: If you’re selling, say, diamonds or expensive enterprise software, fewer people might buy following a Pinterest campaign compared to using the telephone or even meeting someone in person.
• Sales promotion: Offering quick discounts needs to convey a sense of urgency, so it’s important to use channels that will reach audiences immediately. Therefore, it makes more sense today to use mobile marketing over snail-mail, for example.
• Publicity: Traditional and digital PR are increasingly two separate entities. As I explained in a Moz post on PR 101 for digital marketers, publicity in the past has focused on writing pitches, creating media lists, and pitching reporters and bloggers on a story. However, gaining attention for a company today may require using Facebook, Twitter, and other social media networks to ensure mass exposure to a creative campaign.

Now, I understand that Moz’s audience is focused almost entirely on digital. But digital is not always the answer. Take this question from Hoffman, the retired ad agency CEO:

First, I want you to think about your refrigerator.

Think about all the stuff that’s in there: The cheese, the eggs, the juice, the jelly, the butter, the beer, the mayonnaise, the bacon, the mustard, the frozen chicken strips…

Now think about your pantry. The cereals, the beans, the napkins, the flour, the detergent, the sugar, the rice, the bleach…

Now answer these questions:

Do you “share branded content” about any of this stuff?
Do you feel “personally engaged” with these brands?
Do you “join conversations” online about this crap?
Do you ever “co-create” with any of these brands?
Do you feel like you are part of these brands’ “communities?”

Now answer me this: If you don’t, why in the f—— world do you believe anyone else does?

The specific product and industry is important to keep in mind while selecting channels. Big consumer brands usually benefit the most from traditional channels. After all, Pepsi lost a lot of money when it moved all its ad spend from TV to social media. SaaS products, in one example, might be completely different. Again, the key is to test to see what works.

The rest of the marketing process

The 4 Ps, promotion mix, buyer personas, and channel research are only the strategic first-half of the marketing process. As I explained in my earlier essay on the marketing department of the future, the rest of the process consists of creating online and offline marketing collateral and content, transmitting it to the audience, and then auditing the results.

Examples of creatives

• Direct marketing: producing sales collateral to give to prospects directly
• Advertising: creating online and offline ads
• Personal selling: designing presentations and webinars
• Sales promotion: creating coupons, landing pages, and more
• Publicity: writing online and offline by-lined articles or capturing a publicity stunt on video

Transmission & audit

The next step is to transmit the creatives to the audience over the selected online or offline channels.

Once a full marketing campaign has been executed, it’s time to audit the results. A company might find, for example, that a combination of offline advertising, online direct marketing, and a combination of online and offline publicity works the best. Or it could be something else entirely. The only way to know is to test.

A hypothetical example

Here are four examples—one hypothetical and three real ones—of the different ways that traditional and digital marketing strategies can be integrated.

One comment I left a few months ago on another Moz essay on creating demand for products was this:

Moz sells, in part, “SEO software.” Say SEOmoz (as it was called in the beginning) had been launched in 1995. There would be little keyword volume for “SEO software” for this reason: No one knows that “SEO” exists in the first place, so there would obviously be no demand for “SEO software” specifically. Moz would probably have had only one customer—Danny Sullivan. 🙂

So, in such a scenario, if I were to sell SEO software in 1995, I would first do a PR and advertising campaign to generate awareness of SEO in general and SEO software specifically. I’d bet that search volumes would increase in due time. Then, once people know that both things exist, then you can start to capture prospects and move them down the funnel via inbound marketing.

“Outbound marketing” and “inbound marketing” will always be needed because outbound marketing creates demand while inbound marketing fulfills demand. In my opinion, studies that purport to show that inbound marketing is always better than outbound marketing only tell part of the story. If traditional, offline advertising is so ineffective, they why do I still see thousands of ads everywhere I go every day?

Three real-world examples

An American pizza restaurant

As I once explained in a BrightonSEO talk (see a summary with slides on my website), a small pizza parlor in Philadelphia got the best results—a lot of brand awareness, hundreds of high-quality links, and thousands of Facebook “likes”—by thinking not about “SEO” or “social media marketing” or “content marketing,” but rather good, old-fashioned “publicity” within the promotion mix.

The local business—whether intentionally or not—got a lot of local news coverage by allowing people to “pay it forward” by purchasing slices to give to people in need. The news coverage snowballed into national coverage in the United States and the business owner appearing on the talk show “Ellen.”

The pizzeria did not produce one piece of “content,” or even have a blog at all. For most small, local businesses (especially restaurants), I’d invest in a good, creative publicist over “content marketing” any day. Still, it’s crucial that one’s marketing toolkit contain every potential strategy and tactic because different promotion mixes work best for different companies and industries.

Pizza Hut Israel

Yes, I’ve got a soft spot for pizza.

While I was writing this post here in Tel Aviv, I received this e-mail and saw this Facebook post:

(That’s Pizza Hut Israel selling a pizza with a crust made of bite-sized pieces filled with cream cheese.)

Now, what is this? It’s not “e-mail marketing” or “social media marketing.” Pizza Hut here had decided to do a sales promotion via the channels of e-mail and Facebook. It was the company deciding upon a certain promotion mix (likely for the reasons described above) and then choosing to execute that promotion over the channels of e-mail and social media.

Logz.io

Logz.io cofounders CEO Tomer Levy (left) and VP Product Asaf Yigal (right) at AWS re:Invent 2015

In another example, we at Logz.io offer predictive error detection in our ELK-as-a-service cloud platform for DevOps engineers, and we have found that the best results for us come from a combination of personal selling and publicity.

The personal selling is when we sponsor and speak at conferences for DevOps engineers and system administrators; the publicity is when we publish and then publicize informational articles and guides in major publications and on our website. (For example, our CEO, Tomer Levy, wrote about different open-source DevOps tools on DevOps.com, we’ve published a guide on how to deploy the ELK Stack, and I discussed how to use server log analysis for technical SEO here on Moz.)

Again, every company and industry is different. It’s important to test every possible promotion mix to see what delivers the greatest ROI for you. Within the marketing industry, there are many self-interested parties that advise one promotion mix or another. The best thing to do is to test everything and see for yourself. I hope these three examples will help to get you thinking.

Now, where’s SEO?

I’ve discussed my opinions at length in the other essays of mine to which I’ve linked here, so I will just summarize here so I will not always repeat myself: “SEO” is now technical and on-page optimization. The more that one understands traditional marketing, the more that one sees that (good) “off-page SEO” tactics are really just doing good traditional marketing. Almost any “off-page SEO” tactic that anyone can name is simply direct marketing, sales promotion, personal selling, advertising, or publicity by another name.

The reason it is important to understand this concept is that, as Google’s algorithm becomes smarter and thinks more and more like a human being, it’s becoming imperative to think more and more about building a brand among people over the long term rather than chasing an algorithm and directly trying to get high rankings in the short term. To help the community, my goal here is for SEOs to stop thinking so much about SEO specifically and to think more about marketing. After doing all of the needed technical and on-page SEO, the best results—higher rankings, greater backlinks, and more engagement—will come simply as by-products of building real brands that have a lot of authority and engagement.

Today, this is what will happen if you try to manipulate, outsmart, or otherwise chase Google’s algorithm:

Summary

If you’ve read this far, I’m glad that you found my thoughts to be interesting! I’ll leave you with this final idea:

How would you market yourself if the Internet didn’t exist? Answer that, and it’ll help your online marketing too.
— Samuel Scott (@samueljscott) August 25, 2015

Complete List of Resources:

• Principles of Marketing by Philip T. Kotler and Gary Armstrong (textbook) (pro tip: buy a prior edition for a lot cheaper than the new edition)
• Public Relations: Strategies and Tactics by Dennis L. Wilcox and Glen T. Cameron (textbook) (ditto)
• The 4 Ps of the marketing mix—Product, Price, Place (now called Distribution), and Promotion
• “Growth Hacker Marketing” (the integration of product and marketing) by Ryan Holiday
• The promotion mix—advertising, personal selling, sales promotion, publicity, and direct marketing
• Creating a promotion mix: The Edward Lowe Foundation and the Chartered Institute of Marketing of the U.K. (PDF file)
• Publicity: See my prior Moz essays on An Introduction to PR and The Coming Integration of PR & SEO as well as my Mozinar on the latter topic. In addition, read “The Father of Spin“
• The Marketing Department of the Future (another Moz essay of mine)

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Posted by EricaMcGillivray

I love working with all kinds of speakers at Moz, whether for big shows like MozCon or our biweekly webinars, Mozinars. I also get out there and speak myself. Many people ask me how to become a speaker in our industry or if they can speak at one of Moz’s events. The truth is, speaking is hard. And putting yourself out there is awesome.

So, you’re ready to take a step toward being onstage. What should you be doing?

Have a speaking goal

A speaking goal will keep you focused on what you want to get out of speaking. Goals may vary event to event, or encompass both short-term and long-term dreams. And yes, they may change over time.

Here are some goals either I or speakers I’ve worked with have had:

• Conquer my fear of public speaking.
• Share my incredible new idea with a crowd of like-minded people.
• Share my field with an adjacent audience.
• Show my expertise in a field.
• Get new clients or a new job.
• Get other speaking gigs based on how well I do.
• Speak on the MozCon stage.
• Learn how to deliver a dynamic presentation the way speakers like Rand Fishkin and Wil Reynolds do.
• Speak in front of a crowd of more than 1,000 people.

What’s your goal?

Come up with pitches!

Keep a document of ideas that you’d like to speak (or write) about. Don’t wait until you see the announcement that a conference is now accepting pitches or until you receive outreach about speaking, as you’ll probably suffer from idea block.

Research the conference you want to speak at. Figure out who its audience is. Look at past topics. If possible, attend the conference before you toss your hat in to fully understand what it’s like. Make sure you’re the right speaker. Some conferences have requirements, such as being a sponsor, having a certain title (VP, Director, CEO), making sure speakers fit a code of conduct, preferring actionable talks to inspirational ones, etc.

Great pitches clearly communicate your topic to the people throwing the conference. Sadly, many pitches come in as a teaser written for an audience to get them to attend your session. A conference runner and selection committee need to know the actual meat of your presentation. They want to make sure the topic’s details are ethical, match their audience needs, meet knowledge level requirements, and more. Think of how different a link building session at Blackhat World would be compared to SMX.

Stay informed on when pitches go live for the conference. This means you can be prepared to submit your idea immediately—not worrying about the deadline—and will ensure you don’t miss it. For example, the pitches for MozCon community speakers always go live three months prior to the conference date. For the upcoming MozCon in 2016, they’ll be on our blog in June.

Build your speaking portfolio

I can’t stress the importance of having a speaking portfolio enough, especially if you’re interested in talking at conferences with closed selection committees, such as MozCon. Speaking portfolios show off your hard work and put actual, concrete examples in the hands of event organizers. It will also set you apart from others.

A search for “marketing speaker” on LinkedIn gives 43,000 results:

For “SEO speaker” on Google, 8.9 million results are returned, and Scott Wilson dominates the knowledge box:

What should you put into your portfolio?

1. A decent, professional headshot

For any conference you’re speaking at, you’ll need to send in a headshot. You’ll want to make sure yours looks good both on your portfolio and in comparison to your fellow speakers. Be prepared when you’re selected as a speaker. Don’t be the one who sends in a headshot taken at a party with someone else obviously cut out of it or from when you last renewed your passport.

There are plenty of professional photographers who will take headshots for you. Make sure you get both the rights to use them and the high-resolution version. If you can’t afford one, check out Kick Point’s guide to taking a professional headshot with your phone. While you want to present your best face, make sure the photos actually look like you. It’s okay to photoshop a pimple, but own and love your wrinkles, big ears, or whatever else you’re worried about.

Some speakers also might add a memorable touch to their photos, which they then bring to the stage. For instance, Ruth Burr Reedy’s headshot features a green blazer that she often wears onstage when speaking.

You will probably want to get a new headshot at least every other year. The reality is that we age, changing both our personal styles and our looks. The worst comment I’ve ever received was someone asking me the age of my headshot because I “looked so much younger” in it. It was only two years old, but I’d changed my hairstyle, which made me look older. (Also, when remarking on someone’s headshot, don’t make sexist comments like these.)

2. Have a speaking bio ready

Another general request from conferences will be to send in a bio about yourself. You want to keep it short and relevant for the audience you’re speaking in front of. No one wants to read a bio that’s longer than your topic pitch.

Here are some examples of my own bios:

Longer with a broader audience: Erica McGillivray is a die-hard geek who spends a ridiculous amount of time being nerdy, both professionally and personally. At Moz, she’s the senior community manager and wrangles a community of over 500,000 members, co-runs the annual MozCon, and works on whatever else is thrown her way. She’s also a founder of GeekGirlCon, a nonprofit run by volunteers that celebrates and supports geeky women with events and conventions. In her spare time, Erica’s a published author and has a comic book collection that’s an earthquake hazard.

Shorter with marketing-focus—Erica McGillivray spends a ridiculous amount of time being geeky, both professionally and personally. At Moz, she’s the senior community manager, wrangling 500,000+ people and co-running their annual conference MozCon. Erica also is a founder of GeekGirlCon, is a published author, and has a comic book collection that’s an earthquake hazard. Follow her at @emcgillivray.

Shorter with pop culture-focus—Erica McGillivray spends a ridiculous amount of time being nerdy, both professionally and personally. She’s a senior community manager and wrangles over 500,000 community members for a local startup. Erica’s also a founder of GeekGirlCon, a published author, and has a comic book collection that’s an earthquake hazard.

3. Share your slide decks

SlideShare makes sharing your decks 100% super easy. While some conferences will share your decks, you don’t want to make your decks hard to track down. You want results like Rand’s when your name is Googled with the words “slide deck”:

If you don’t want to use SlideShare, there are other services out there. Or you can just upload it to your own site. Make sure you use a PDF version of your slide deck for the upload on whatever service you use; otherwise, your typography will look terrible on other people’s computers who don’t have those fonts installed.

Example slide decks show off how well you can build knowledge into a deck. It shows your style, and it can also show how you’ve grown as a speaker. You can say that you always present “actionable tips,” but a deck speaks to what you really do.

What if all your decks are proprietary or unshareable to the public? It’s time for you to create a deck for your portfolio. Maybe later you’ll present it at a conference. Or maybe it’s just a piece telling the world that you can indeed create a great deck.

What if all your decks are more interesting when presented? I definitely subscribe to having less words on the screen, which can mean that presentations become almost meaningless without the audio.

Ian Lurie does a great job at adding text—in an obvious way—to slides that make no sense without his voice:

This is extra work, but can really boost you as an expert. Not to mention that your audience will love you for giving them access to your deck later.

4. Get a recording of you presenting

Nothing says more about your qualification as a speaker than a recording of you presenting. It shows off your style, your confidence, and your radness. However, there can be lots of challenges around getting a recording. Many conferences in our space which have great speakers, like Pubcon, SMX, and State of Search, don’t record sessions or most sessions. And other conferences, like MozCon and SearchLove, do record conferences, but sell the videos so they’re private.

How do you get a recording?

A. Do it yourself. Record one of the presentations you’ve already planned on giving (or maybe that sample slide deck you built). Even if it’s just you and the camera, it’s better than nothing. One of my own speaking recordings is me practicing a talk in front of a handful of coworkers.

B. Ask if your recording can be shared privately. In the case of MozCon, speakers have asked and then used their videos to privately show conference runners their work. This is a great option when you’re pitching, but isn’t ideal when you’re setting up a page to show off your good work.

5. Put it all together on a webpage

Since most of us haven’t done so much speaking that we’re easily Googled to find decks and videos, like Rand Fishkin, putting all your information on one page is paramount. Plus, it makes all your assets easy to link.

Chris Brogan uses his LinkedIn page (plus how to contact him):

Erika Napoletano‘s site makes it easy for you to understand her style and requirements for a speaking gig:

Kerry Bodine‘s site displays her videos and tells you which events she’s spoken at and will speak at:

Ask the conference organizer questions

Once you’re in, you want to be prepared for show day. Unfortunately, a lot of conferences don’t give you all the information. Here are five standard questions I ask conference runners when I’m speaking in order to be fully prepared, although you may have other needs:

1. What are the show’s hours? What time is my speaking slot? Are there any special events for speakers to attend (parties/networking, speaker-only gatherings, etc)?

You’ll want to know this information as you book your travel. You’ll want to make sure you’re on time for your talk, not completely jetlagged (if crossing time zones), and build in opportunities to meet your speaking goals.

2. How many people are attending this conference? Can you share some demographics about who your audience is?

You want to be prepared for both the audience size and their specialty. If you’re in front of a group of 20, you can easily do interactive elements in a way you cannot in a room of 1,000+ people. Likewise, you want to tailor your talk to the audience with examples and knowledge levels that they’ll relate to.

When Dr. Pete Meyers spoke at SMX Sydney, he Australiafied his slide deck:

3. Do you use fullscreen 4:3 format or widescreen 16:9 for presentations?

No one wants to create an entire slide deck and then find out it’s in the other format. Let me tell you from experience, changing the formatting in PowerPoint or Google Docs stretches or squashes your images in horrifying ways. Also, as a speaker, you should know what the differences between these formats are and how to properly set up your slide deck software for each format.

4. What sort of setup is the stage? Podium or no podium? Wireless mic with a battery pack, handheld wireless mic, or wired standing mic? Will the projection happen from my own computer or your A/V system?

All these questions ensure that you’re prepared with the right equipment and that you dress appropriately. You don’t want to run to the Apple Store at the last second when there are no proper cables for your Mac laptop. And if you’re wearing a wireless microphone, you want to make sure there’s a place to put the powerpack—like a pocket or belt—which, if you’re wearing a dress, may not be part of your outfit.

5. Is there a due date for slide decks?

Getting your deck and anything else you’ve agreed to provide a conference with on time is paramount for your own time management and making the conference runners happy. Conference organizers prefer smooth working processes, as there’s already enough that can go wrong with live events. The last conference I spoke at, the deck was due during my summer vacation. I made sure my deck was done ahead of my time off because I didn’t want to spend my holiday creating it.

Practice, practice, practice

Nothing makes your presentation better than practicing the talk. Try to practice in front of people so you know if your jokes land or when you need to pause to resonate points. (My cat never laughs at my jokes!)

By the time you’ve gone through your talk five to ten times, you’ll have it down much better. It will be more natural, hopefully without the stumbles and other pitfalls that occur with not having your points down. We all have parts we’re great at and others we’re not. That’s okay, but let’s work on them.

Have fun!

Never forget to have fun when you’re preparing to speak. Whether you’re deciding to pitch your first event or you’re a seasoned speaker, you can rock it!

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Posted by EricEngeWhen you first start in content marketing, you usually have little to no audience of your own for your content. If you’re a major brand, you may be able to develop this quickly, but it’s still extremely helpful to get visibility on th… Continue reading →

Posted by randfish

It’s a fact of life: we get better at what we do with time. Do you use that to your advantage when it comes to your site’s content? Whether you’re riding the wave of a successful post or improving what you’ve done before, republishing is something that should be on your mind and your to-do list. And what’s more, Google will actually reward you for doing it!

In this Whiteboard Friday, Rand explores the how and why of republishing, helping you set goals for yourself and your content.

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

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re chatting about republishing and why Google rewards republishing so much. I think this is actually an underutilized tactic in SEO and in content creation. We have this idea that we make our content checklist, and we say, “All right, these are the topics I need to cover. These are the keywords I’m targeting, and this is the audience I’m trying to reach.”

Then once you create that piece of content, you kind of go, “All right, let’s see how it does.” Then, however it does, you kind of go, “Okay, let’s try and make the next piece better. We already took our shot at that piece of content.”

But that does not have to be how it is. Google actually rewards republishing. So do, by the way, audiences. If a piece of content is a hit or if you’re sure that a piece of content could be a hit, or that an audience would appreciate and enjoy it, I guarantee they’re going to appreciate and enjoy it if you update that piece of content or produce something better on that topic.

Same thing is true of social media. You can see a lot of the big content sites, particularly those that are very, very successful these days, your BuzzFeeds and that kind of thing, doing pieces of content over and over and over again. Basically, finding a formula, hitting it, and updating that content once they do it.

So, let me talk about why this happens. I’m using the example of guinea pig food, as opposed to guinea pigs for food. You could do either way.

Here I’ve registered the domain name — I haven’t actually — RandsFurryFriends.com. I’ve got my guinea pig food content that I put in my guinea pig section on their diet. That was produced in 2010. But five years later, I’m going, “Man, that content is getting old. It’s not performing the way I want it to.

I’m going to publish a new piece of content targeting those same keywords, on the blog this time of RandsFurryFriends.com, and that’s going to get October 15th or whenever that’s coming out.” This works really well because Google does a few things here.

Why It Works

1. First off, they’re often testing. They’re verifying: When a piece of content comes out, did it do well? Google might place that piece of content on the first page of the results and then see how it performs with a small subset of searchers. That could be personalized, or that subset could be determined a bunch of different ways. But if it performs well, if it’s the case that we really liked how engagement looked on this SERP, a lot of people were clicking on that link, they weren’t clicking the Back button, they seemed to be happy with the results, then Google’s going to say, “Hey, maybe that page deserves to stay here long-term.” If you never republish, you don’t know whether the problem was that you didn’t earn the engagement and the user happiness and searcher happiness that Google needed in order to keep you on that front page. Maybe you had all the other ranking signals you would have needed, but you just didn’t get there with searcher engagement.
2. Fresh publishing often provides its own rankings boost. You can see this generally speaking. So Russ Jones from Moz has done an analysis of SERPscape and seen that in queries where Google is showing dates on multiple results in the SERPs, there tends to be a high correlation with positive rankings performance and showing a recent date. So we know that Google really likes fresh content for certain kinds of search queries, and it’s almost certainly the case that even for those where it’s not providing a massive boost, it’s providing some value. Being the most recent on a topic is probably going to give you some value and benefit. So that’s another one that helps us here.
3. When you publish multiple times, you’re building up that topical authority, that topical association that Google has with your site. So they might say, “Huh, Rand’s Furry Friends offers a lot of content, but he publishes quite often and quite in-depth about guinea pigs in particular, and so maybe we should start associating Rand’s Furry Friends with guinea pigs and show him for more and more guinea pig-types of search queries.” That can broaden the reach of any given particular piece of content to the keyword universe that you can potentially rank for, which again, awesome. Really nice to have that.
4. Multiple pieces of content tend to yield multiple opportunities to earn links, earn amplification, earn those social shares, earn engagement, and earn ranking signals of all kinds. So when I produce this, I’ve got another shot at reaching my audience and getting all the signals, all the links, and all the stuff that I need to rank well if I didn’t do it the first time. Or I can do it additionally.
5. Over time, you or your content team, you’re going to get better at this. Five years ago, I guarantee, the content that I created for Whiteboard Friday, which you’re watching right now, for our blog, it was not nearly as polished, as high quality as what you’re getting to experience today on the Moz blog. We’ve gotten better at this stuff.

Even our hits from 2010 are not as good as some of our good content in 2015 or 2014, because we’re improving. This is going to be true for you as well.

Potential Processes

There are three different ways, potential processes that you can go about when you’re doing the republishing thing. These shouldn’t all be done together. You should choose the one that makes the most sense for you and your situation.

So first off, (A) multiple pieces that are published one after another—that time frame could be anything between them—targeting slight keyword variations and slight content variations. So right here I’ve got the 10 foods your guinea pig will love and guinea pig food, just the broad article. I might actually link to each of these between the two of them. This one, it’s a little more listicle-kind of format. This one’s a little more informational, knowledge-based.

The idea, hopefully, what I really want to do is get one of these ranking in the top two or three results. Then once I produce the other one, if it ranks on page one, we know how Google treats that. They’ll put it directly below. So they won’t have you rank number two and you rank number eight. No, you’ll rank number two, and if you rank number eight, boom, they’ll bump you up to rank number three.

So now I dominate two and three in the top three results. That’s going to boost my click-through rate. That’s going to give me a ton of opportunity to earn those searchers. Just awesome. That’s the dominate search results approach.

(B) is replacing old content with new. So essentially, I’ve produced XA, and I’m going to replace it with XB. So I might say, “This page, I’m putting this content on there. The URL is going to stay the same.” The idea being I’m updating and improving that content. I have a second chance at earning links, earning amplification signals, and hopefully getting better engagement. Maybe if I’m already ranking well, I can improve that.

I do this a lot with Moz blog posts. If I get an email from someone and I’m referencing an old post, and I notice that old post is just a little messy or not exactly what I’d offer today, I’ll go in and update it. Sometimes that only takes me 10 or 15 minutes. Sometimes it takes me an hour or two. But then I can broadcast it again. I can tweet it. I can put in on LinkedIn. I put it on Google+. I put it on Facebook. I share it around. That broadcast activity often earns lots of new links pointing to it, and I see that pretty consistently, at least with my audience.

(C) I can redirect old content to new. So potentially I can say, “Hey, you know what? I’m producing this new piece on 10 neat foods your guinea pig will love. This old article I just don’t love anymore, but I want to get the rankings benefit and all the signals to this new page that this old one has.” So all these links and wonderful things that were coming in here, I want to redirect them, and so I’m going to use a 301 to point A over to B.

This has worked for us many, many times with big content pieces that we’ve produced here at Moz, everything from the Ranking Factors to our industry survey to lots and lots of other things. We’ll even do this when we produce a new blog post that is really replacing an old one. We’ll go ahead and 301 redirect, or potentially rel=canonical that old one, so make sure that old one is still accessible for someone if they want to see the historical version, but send all the ranking signals, all the links, and all the traffic to the new one.

Like I said, these three, you should choose which goal you’re trying to solve and then pick the republishing process that works best for you.

All right everyone. Look forward to seeing you in the comments and to seeing you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Posted by MarieHaynes

Thin content! Duplicate content! Everyone knows that these are huge Panda factors. But are they really? In this article, I will explore the possibility that Panda is about so much more than thin and duplicate content. I don’t have a list of ten steps to follow to cure your Panda problems. But, I do hope that this article provokes some good discussion on how to improve our websites in the eyes of Google’s Panda algorithm.

The duplicate content monster

Recently, Google employee John Mueller ran a webmaster help hangout that focused on duplicate content issues. It was one of the best hangouts I have seen in a while—full of excellent information. John commented that almost every website has some sort of duplicate content. Some duplicate content could be there because of a CMS that sets up multiple tag pages. Another example would be an eCommerce store that carries several sizes of a product and has a unique URL for each size.

He also said that when Google detects duplicate content, it generally does not do much harm, but rather, Google determines which page they think is the best and they display that page.

But wait! Isn’t duplicate content a Panda issue? This is well believed in the SEO world. In fact, the Moz Q&A has almost 1800 pages indexed that ask about duplicate content and Panda!

I asked John Mueller whether duplicate content issues could be Panda issues. I wondered if perhaps duplicate content reduced crawl efficiency and this, in turn, would be a signal of low quality in the eyes of the Panda algorithm. He responded saying that these were not related, but were in fact two separate issues:

The purpose of this post is not to instruct you on how to deal with duplicate content. Google has some good guidelines here. Cleaning up your duplicate content can, in many cases, improve your crawl efficiency—which in some cases can result in an improvement in rankings. But I think that, contrary to what many of us have believed, duplicate content is NOT a huge component to the Panda algorithm.

Where duplicate content can get you in trouble is if you are purposely duplicating content in a spammy way in order to manipulate Google. For example, if a huge portion of your site consisted of articles duplicated from other sources, or if you are purposely trying to duplicate content with the intent of manipulating Google, then this can get you a manual penalty and can cause your site to be removed from the Google index:

These cases are not common, though. Google isn’t talking about penalizing sites that have duplicate product pages or a boatload of Wordpress tag pages. While it’s always good to have as clean a site as possible, I’m going to make a bold statement here and say that this type of issue likely is not important when it comes to Panda.

What about thin content?

This is where things can get a little bit tricky. Recently, Google employee Gary Illyes caused a stir when he stated that Google doesn’t recommend removing thin content but rather, beefing up your site to make it “thick” and full of value.

Jen Slegg from The SEM Post had a great writeup covering this discussion; if you’re interested in reading more, I wrote a long post discussing why I believe that we should indeed remove thin content when trying to recover from a Panda hit, along with a case study showing a site that made a nice Panda recovery after removing thin content.

The current general consensus amongst SEOs who work with Panda-hit sites is that thin content should be improved upon wherever possible. But, if a site has a good deal of thin, unhelpful pages, it does make sense to remove those pages from Google’s index.

The reason for this is that Panda is all about quality. In the example which I wrote about where a site recovered from Panda after removing thin content, the site had hosted thousands of forum posts that contained unanswered questions. A user landing on one of these questions would not have found the page helpful and would likely have found another site to read in order to answer their query.

I believe that thin content can indeed be a Panda factor if that content consistently disappoints searchers who land on that page. If you have enough pages like this on your site, then yes, by all means, clean it up.

Panda is about so much MORE than duplicate and thin content

While some sites can recover from Panda after clearing out pages and pages of thin content, for most Panda-hit sites, the issues are much deeper and more complex. If you have a mediocre site that contains thousands of thin pages, removing those thin pages will not make the site excellent.

I believe Panda is entirely about excellence.

At Pubcon in Vegas, Rand Fishkin gave an excellent keynote speech in which he talked about living in a two-algo world. Rand spoke about the “regular algorithm,” which, in years past, we’ve worked hard to figure out and conquer by optimizing our title tags, improving our page speed, and gaining good links. But then he also spoke of a machine learning algorithm.

When Rand said “We’re talking about algorithms that build algorithms,” something clicked in my head and I realized that this very well could be what’s happening with Panda. Google has consistently said that Panda is about showing users the highest-quality sites. Rand suggested that machine learning algos may classify a site as a high quality one if they’re able to do some of the following things:

• Consistently garner a higher click-through rate than their competitors.
• Get users to engage more with your site than others in your space.
• Answer more questions than other sites.
• Earn more shares and clicks that result in loyal users.
• Be the site that ultimately fulfills the searcher’s task.

There are no quick ways to fulfill these criteria. Your site ultimately has to be the best in order for Google to consider it the best.

I believe that Google is getting better and better at determining which sites are the most helpful ones to show users. If your site has been negatively affected by Panda, it may not be because you have technical on-site issues, but because your competitors’ sites are of higher overall quality than yours.

Is this why we’re not seeing many Panda recoveries?

In mid- to late 2014, Google was still refreshing Panda monthly. Then, after October of 2014, we had nine months of Panda silence. We all rejoiced when we heard that Google was refreshing Panda again in July of 2015. Google told us it would take a while for this algo to roll out. At the time of writing this, Panda has been supposedly rolling out for three months. I’ve seen some sporadic reports of mild recoveries, but I would say that probably 98% of the sites that have made on-site quality changes in hopes of a Panda recovery have seen no movement at all.

While it’s possible that the slow rollout still hasn’t affected the majority of sites, I think that there’s another frightening possibility.

It’s possible that sites that saw a Panda-related ranking demotion will only be able to recover if they can drastically improve the site to the point where users GREATLY prefer this site over their competitors’ sites.

It is always good to do an on-site quality audit. I still recommend a thorough site audit for any website that has suffered a loss in traffic that coincides with a Panda rerun date. In many cases, fixing quality issues—such as page speed problems, canonical issues, and confusing URL structures—can result in ranking improvement. But I think that we also need to put a HUGE emphasis on making your site the best of its kind.

And that’s not easy.

I’ve reviewed a lot of eCommerce sites that have been hit by Panda over the years. I have seen few of these recover. Many of them have had site audits done by several of the industry’s recognized experts. In some cases, the sites haven’t recovered because they have not implemented the recommended changes. However, there are quite a few sites that have made significant changes, yet still seem to be stuck under some type of ranking demotion.

In many cases like this, I’ve spent some time reviewing competitors’ sites that are currently ranking well. What I’ll do is try to complete a task, such as searching for and reaching the point of purchase on a particular product on the Panda hit-site, as well as the competitors’ sites. In most cases, I’ll find that the competitors offer a vastly better search experience. They may have a number of things that the Panda-hit site doesn’t, such as the following:

• A better search interface.
• Better browsing options (i.e. search by color, size, etc.)
• Pictures that are much better and more descriptive than the standard stock product photos.
• Great, helpful reviews.
• Buying guides that help the searcher determine which product is best to buy.
• Video tutorials on using their products.
• More competitive pricing.
• A shopping cart that’s easier to use.

The question that I ask myself is, “If I were buying this product, would I want to search for it and buy it on my clients’ site, or on one of these competitors’ sites?” The answer is almost always the latter.

And this is why Panda recovery is difficult. It’s not easy for a site to simply improve their search interface, add legitimate reviews that are not just scraped from another source, or create guides and video tutorials for many of their products. Even if the site did add these features, this is only going to bring them to the level where they are perhaps just as good as their competitors. I believe that in order to recover from Panda, you need to show Google that by far, users prefer your website over any other one.

This doesn’t just apply to eCommerce sites. I have reviewed a number of informational sites that have been hit by Panda. In some cases, clearing up thin content can result in Panda recoveries. But often, when an informational site is hit by Panda, it’s because the overall quality of the content is sub-par.

If you run a news site and you’re pushing out fifty stories a day that contain the same information as everyone else in your space, it’s going to be hard to convince Google’s algorithms that they should be showing your site’s pages first. You’ve got to find a way to make your site the one that everyone wants to visit. You want to be the site that when people see you in the SERPS, even if you’re not sitting at position #1, they say, “Oh…I want to get my news from THAT site…I know them and I trust them…and they always provide good information.”

In the past, a mediocre site could be propelled to the top of the SERPS by tweaking things like keywords in title tags, improving internal linking, and building some links. But, as Google’s algorithms get better and better at determining quality, the only sites that are going to rank well are the ones that are really good at providing value. Sure, they’re not quite there yet, but they keep improving.

So should I just give up?

No! I still believe that Panda recovery is possible. In fact, I would say that we’re in an age of the Internet where we have much potential for improvement. If you’ve been hit by Panda, then this is your opportunity to dig in deep, work hard, and make your site an incredible site that Google would be proud to recommend.

The following posts are good ones to read for people who are trying to improve their sites in the eyes of Panda:

How the Panda Algorithm Might Evaluate Your Site – A thorough post by Michael Martinez that looks at each of Amit Singhal’s 23 Questions for Panda-hit sites in great detail.

Leveraging Panda To Get Out Of Product Feed Jail – An excellent post on the Moz blog in which Michael Cottam gives some tips to help make your product pages stand out and be much more valuable than your competitors’ pages.

Google’s Advice on Making a High-Quality Site – This is short, but contains many nuggets.

Case Study – One Site’s Recovery from an Ugly SEO Mess – Alan Bleiweiss gives thorough detail on how implementing advice from a strong technical audit resulted in a huge Panda recovery.

Glenn Gabe’s Panda 4.0 Analysis – This post contains a fantastic list of things to clean up and improve upon for Panda-hit sites.

If you have been hit by Panda, you absolutely must do the following:

• Start with a thorough on-site quality audit.
• Find and remove any large chunks of thin content.
• Deal with anything that annoys users, such as huge popups or navigation that doesn’t work.

But then we have to do more. In the first few years of Panda’s existence, making significant changes in on-site quality could result in beautiful Panda recoveries. I am speculating though that now, as Google gets better at determining which sites provide the most value, this may not be enough for many sites.

If you have been hit by Panda, it is unlikely that there is a quick fix. It is unlikely that you can tweak a few things or remove a chunk of content and see a dramatic recovery. Most likely, you will need to DRAMATICALLY improve the overall usefulness of the site to the point where it’s obvious to everyone that your pages are the best choices for Google to present to searchers.

What do you think?

I am seriously hoping that I’m wrong in predicting that the only sites we’ll see make significant Panda recoveries are ones that have dramatically overhauled all of their content. Who knows…perhaps one day soon we’ll start seeing awesome recoveries as this agonizingly slow iteration of Panda rolls out. But if we don’t, then we all need to get working on making our sites far better than anyone else’s site!

Do you think that technical changes alone can result in Panda recoveries? Or is vastly improving upon all of your content necessary as well?

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