Posted by ajfried

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

Since the beginning of SEO time, practitioners have been trying to crack the Google algorithm. Every once in a while, the industry gets a glimpse into how the search giant works and we have opportunity to deconstruct it. We don’t get many of these opportunities, but when we do—assuming we spot them in time—we try to take advantage of them so we can “fix the Internet.”

On Feb. 16, 2015, news started to circulate that NBC would start removing images and references of Brian Williams from its website.

This was it!

A golden opportunity.

This was our chance to learn more about the Knowledge Graph.

Expectation vs. reality

Often it’s difficult to predict what Google is truly going to do. We expect something to happen, but in reality it’s nothing like we imagined.

Expectation

What we expected to see was that Google would change the source of the image. Typically, if you hover over the image in the Knowledge Graph, it reveals the location of the image.

This would mean that if the image disappeared from its original source, then the image displayed in the Knowledge Graph would likely change or even disappear entirely.

Reality (February 2015)

The only problem was, there was no official source (this changed, as you will soon see) and identifying where the image was coming from proved extremely challenging. In fact, when you clicked on the image, it took you to an image search result that didn’t even include the image.

Could it be? Had Google started its own database of owned or licensed images and was giving it priority over any other sources?

In order to find the source, we tried taking the image from the Knowledge Graph and “search by image” in images.google.com to find others like it. For the NBC Nightly News image, Google failed to even locate a match to the image it was actually using anywhere on the Internet. For other television programs, it was successful. Here is an example of what happened for Morning Joe:

So we found the potential source. In fact, we found three potential sources. Seemed kind of strange, but this seemed to be the discovery we were looking for.

This looks like Google is using someone else’s content and not referencing it. These images have a source, but Google is choosing not to show it.

Then Google pulled the ol’ switcheroo.

New reality (March 2015)

Now things changed and Google decided to put a source to their images. Unfortunately, I mistakenly assumed that hovering over an image showed the same thing as the file path at the bottom, but I was wrong. The URL you see when you hover over an image in the Knowledge Graph is actually nothing more than the title. The source is different.

Luckily, I still had two screenshots I took when I first saw this saved on my desktop. Success. One screen capture was from NBC Nightly News, and the other from the news show Morning Joe (see above) showing that the source was changed.

(NBC Nightly News screenshot.)

The source is a Google-owned property: gstatic.com. You can clearly see the difference in the source change. What started as a hypothesis in now a fact. Google is certainly creating a database of images.

If this is the direction Google is moving, then it is creating all kinds of potential risks for brands and individuals. The implications are a loss of control for any brand that is looking to optimize its Knowledge Graph results. As well, it seems this poses a conflict of interest to Google, whose mission is to organize the world’s information, not license and prioritize it.

How do we think Google is supposed to work?

Google is an information-retrieval system tasked with sourcing information from across the web and supplying the most relevant results to users’ searches. In recent months, the search giant has taken a more direct approach by answering questions and assumed questions in the Answer Box, some of which come from un-credited sources. Google has clearly demonstrated that it is building a knowledge base of facts that it uses as the basis for its Answer Boxes. When it sources information from that knowledge base, it doesn’t necessarily reference or credit any source.

However, I would argue there is a difference between an un-credited Answer Box and an un-credited image. An un-credited Answer Box provides a fact that is indisputable, part of the public domain, unlikely to change (e.g., what year was Abraham Lincoln shot? How long is the George Washington Bridge?) Answer Boxes that offer more than just a basic fact (or an opinion, instructions, etc.) always credit their sources.

There are four possibilities when it comes to Google referencing content:

• Option 1: It credits the content because someone else owns the rights to it
• Option 2: It doesn’t credit the content because it’s part of the public domain, as seen in some Answer Box results
• Option 3: It doesn’t reference it because it owns or has licensed the content. If you search for “Chicken Pox” or other diseases, Google appears to be using images from licensed medical illustrators. The same goes for song lyrics, which Eric Enge discusses here: Google providing credit for content. This adds to the speculation that Google is giving preference to its own content by displaying it over everything else.
• Option 4: It doesn’t credit the content, but neither does it necessarily own the rights to the content. This is a very gray area, and is where Google seemed to be back in February. If this were the case, it would imply that Google is “stealing” content—which I find hard to believe, but felt was necessary to include in this post for the sake of completeness.

Is this an isolated incident?

At Five Blocks, whenever we see these anomalies in search results, we try to compare the term in question against others like it. This is a categorization concept we use to bucket individuals or companies into similar groups. When we do this, we uncover some incredible trends that help us determine what a search result “should” look like for a given group. For example, when looking at searches for a group of people or companies in an industry, this grouping gives us a sense of how much social media presence the group has on average or how much media coverage it typically gets.

Upon further investigation of terms similar to NBC Nightly News (other news shows), we noticed the un-credited image scenario appeared to be a trend in February, but now all of the images are being hosted on gstatic.com. When we broadened the categories further to TV shows and movies, the trend persisted. Rather than show an image in the Knowledge Graph and from the actual source, Google tends to show an image and reference the source from Google’s own database of stored images.

And just to ensure this wasn’t a case of tunnel vision, we researched other categories, including sports teams, actors and video games, in addition to spot-checking other genres.

Unlike terms for specific TV shows and movies, terms in each of these other groups all link to the actual source in the Knowledge Graph.

Immediate implications

It’s easy to ignore this and say “Well, it’s Google. They are always doing something.” However, there are some serious implications to these actions:

1. The TV shows/movies aren’t receiving their due credit because, from within the Knowledge Graph, there is no actual reference to the show’s official site
2. The more Google moves toward licensing and then retrieving their own information, the more biased they become, preferring their own content over the equivalent—or possibly even superior—content from another source
3. If feels wrong and misleading to get a Google Image Search result rather than an actual site because:
   • The search doesn’t include the original image
   • Considering how poor Image Search results are normally, it feels like a poor experience
4. If Google is moving toward licensing as much content as possible, then it could make the Knowledge Graph infinitely more complicated when there is a “mistake” or something unflattering. How could one go about changing what Google shows about them?

Google is objectively becoming subjective

It is clear that Google is attempting to create databases of information, including lyrics stored in Google Play, photos, and, previously, facts in Freebase (which is now Wikidata and not owned by Google).

I am not normally one to point my finger and accuse Google of wrongdoing. But this really strikes me as an odd move, one bordering on a clear bias to direct users to stay within the search engine. The fact is, we trust Google with a heck of a lot of information with our searches. In return, I believe we should expect Google to return an array of relevant information for searchers to decide what they like best. The example cited above seems harmless, but what about determining which is the right religion? Or even who the prettiest girl in the world is?

Questions such as these, which Google is returning credited answers for, could return results that are perceived as facts.

Should we next expect Google to decide who is objectively the best service provider (e.g., pizza chain, painter, or accountant), then feature them in an un-credited answer box? The direction Google is moving right now, it feels like we should be calling into question their objectivity.

But that’s only my (subjective) opinion.

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Posted by Cyrus-ShepardToday we’re excited to make freely available the new Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet 3.0. Ever since the indelible Danny Dover created the original version in 2008, the SEO Cheat Sheet has been downloaded tens of thousands of tim… Continue reading →

Posted by mattgratt

User behavior and customer purchase journeys are more complex today than they’ve ever been before.

Modern consumers – especially those purchasing high-consideration or B2B products – look across a variety of media and conduct a lot of searches. Google reports that the average B2B researcher does 12 searches before they engage on a specific brand’s site. They are seeking reinforcement and comfort not just from the information about the product, but also from the opinions of other customers.

How SEOs and marketers approach keyword research has to evolve, along with this consumer behavior.

In many industries people simply search, click, and transact. In some verticals, though, user search patterns have grown more complex – they look for:

• Reviews
• Adjacent topics
• Comparisons
• And even after they’ve bought they look for ways to get the most out of their products

This is a model of SEO that is dramatically more complex than simply aiming to rank number one for a bunch of commercial keywords. It seeks to model a customer decision journey, optimize appropriately, give the right person the right message at the right time, and win the competitive battle before it even occurs.

This same model also allows for a modern search practitioner to create significantly more value for a client or organization. In place of simply “traffic plus conversion”, the value of search becomes “awareness + branding + list building + traffic + conversion + competitive wins + reducing support costs + upsell, cross-sell, and customer success,” justifying both more investment and a much larger organizational impact (and promotions or higher consulting fees for the practitioner).

In this post, we’ll look at a SaaS companies as examples, as SaaS and software comprise the majority of my experience, clients, and knowledge.

However, this framework can be applied to many industries and verticals. One good example: Everette Sizemore recently wrote a great Moz post about using lead-gen tactics in ecommerce.

The considered purchase search journey (also known as a funnel)

No Problem Awareness

This is the very beginning of the process, when the prospect is fully ‘at rest.’ They don’t know you, they don’t your product, and they don’t even know they have a problem.

So you might be wondering, can we even do SEO here?

I would say yes – in this case, the opportunity is audience development, and building an audience of people interested in your topic (that can subsequently convert after they’ve grown to know, like, and trust you).

When you think “audience development,” focus on trying to get the right people to come to your website. That means building that audience and affinity with a mix of content marketing and SEO before it starts.

In this case, you’ll want to target keywords that people would search for before or after they think about your product. This is one case where going for the high-volume, low-to-medium competition keywords with little purchase intent can be really helpful. (This is also the spot where that high-funnel, highly linkable content belongs.)

For example, for a website optimization software company, in this stage content might include interviews with web performance experts, general resource guides, and other content that, while it ranks for keywords with volume, doesn’t yet address a specific customer pain point.

You see companies like Marketo doing this, creating guides around topics other than marketing automation but that are top of mind for their consumers, like international expansion and event marketing. Even though Marketo has some features here, they know that people interested in these topics may someday become loyal Marketo customers.

You’ll want to get the right people to your site and then bring them into a permission marketing asset – be it an email list (the best), a social audience (good but less so), or a retargeting pool (generally the least preferred).

Vero is a company out in the market today that’s doing a great job using email marketing teardowns, getting people who are interested in email marketing into their purchasing funnel while also building awareness and educating potential customers.

Awareness of the problem

This is the next step on the buying path. Your prospect knows they have a problem and looks for information, but doesn’t really understand what you’re doing yet – or even what to do to solve their problem.

This is an often-ignored opportunity. You can get ahead of people by creating landing pages and content about their problems and pain points.

Action Item: Take your target audience’s pain points and try to turn them into keyword lists. What problems does your product solve? How might someone search for those?

Some of the best tools to do this are KeywordTool.io and Term Explorer, and I’ll detail the process below.

For example, if you consider the website speed optimization tool again, some of the things we’d look for are:

• “Slow website”
• “Diagnosing a slow website”
• “Why is my website slow?”
• “How to speed up a website?”
• “Increase website speed”
• “Make my website fast”

And other similar phrases.

How to do it

Start by brainstorming a list of problems your product addresses, and begin by putting these keywords into something like Google suggest (or a tool like UberSuggest or KeywordTool.io):

Then, I like to pick the best ones, and bring them into Term Explorer’s keyword discovery engine, for further expansion:

After that, I like to pick the ones I have a realistic chance of ranking for (based on SERP and PPC competition), and begin asking, “How can I address this question? What content – topics, ideas, and forms – will help this person, while potentially moving them a step down the funnel?”

Sometimes the answer is a landing page. Sometimes it’s something like a blog post or a free tool. All of these strategies should be judged against organizational resources, keyword competitiveness, and ultimately ROI.

Solution awareness

At this stage in the funnel, prospects know what they need. Coming back to our running example, they’re looking for a marketing automation solution, or a website optimization solution, or something else they can clearly define.

This is the land of the “3-letter acronyms,” where people know what they’re looking for and it’s up to you to provide it.

For the tools used here, I would take your conventional ‘category’ terms and put them into Keyword Tool and then Term Explorer to build out a larger collection of keywords, and then take a look at what has significant volume.

The other area you can work on here is “modifiers” – descriptive terms like “simple CRM system” or “secure web host.”

While you can look at your original positioning documents (sometimes this will be obvious), the other approach is to use your Net Promoter Score (NPS) feedback. NPS feedback is a wonderful source for the “voice-of-the-customer” that you can incorporate into your keyword research process.

What traits do the promoters (NPS 9-10) like about your service? Those are the best modifiers to go after.

Additionally, there’s another positioning exercise here in your NPS data. If you don’t have a clear idea of what exactly you should be optimizing for (there are, after all, some great products that don’t lend themselves to a simple description), consider asking your 9 and 10 NP scores:

“So, if a friend of yours at a conference said, ‘What’s (Brand Name),’ how would you describe it in a sentence or two?”

This can result in great customer language to use on landing pages and in A/B tests, as well as in keyword targeting.

If your product does a lot – if you have more of a “solution” than a “tool” or simply have lot of good use cases for your tool – consider optimizing for each of those and doing additional keyword research around it.

This is where prioritization is crucial. There will be some extremely competitive categorical keywords that will never provide much value and will take tons of time and money. Ideally you can go after keywords where you can rank in a reasonable amount of time and have enough volume to move the needle for your business.

Solution comparison

If you’re in an established market, you will have competition, be it direct or indirect. If you have no competition, that’s generally a bad sign, and is generally a segment where SEO is not going to be the best marketing channel. Remember, SEO is a tactic to harvest demand, not to create it from scratch.

This is a part of people’s search as well, and you can find these comparison terms and reach those people appropriately. These searches are often (for example) something like “marketo vs hubspot”.

You can find these by simply throwing [“Your Brand” vs] into a keyword tool. For example, for our friends here at Moz, it looks like this:

These terms are interesting ones to optimize for – it generally means someone is towards the bottom of their purchase path. (It’s also a great term set for affiliates to optimize for.)

Now that you understand the competitive set, how should you approach these?

Some companies are bold and make pages on their site for their comparison terms.

For example, HubSpot has a page about how they compare with Marketo:

If this isn’t something you’re comfortable with (many brands aren’t, and in some countries with different commercial laws such comparisons are illegal – definitely a good idea to consult with your legal counsel before embarking on a strategy like this), you can think about how to enlist your community to help people make the right choice when they search for these terms.

Some of the tools in your toolbox here are:

• Affiliates and friendly bloggers who write posts about tools
• Comparison sites like G2Crowd and TrustRadius
• Q&A sites like Quora which often rank for things

As the chart below shows, B2B buyers really want independent reviews – making heavy use of the independent sites makes sense here.

ProTip: If you have NPS data, consider asking your high-NPS customers to contribute to these sites about your product, so potential users can understand what your customers that really like your product think about it.

It’s also worth noting that you can step into competitor’s funnels here (if you’re comfortable with that.) “[brandname] alternative” is a structure that comes up in almost all SaaS searches – if you’re a small, scrappy startup, you may want to create pages about being an alternative to the big goliath competitor.

Buying

Similar to the previous stage, here people are at the very bottom of the funnel, and often want to figure out a few things before they start with your product.

This is a great opportunity to deliver a great, frictionless buying experience. For example, if you sell web hosting, people might want to know if you have cpanel or an alternative system – having a page on the site that addresses this can be really important.

You can:

• Look at your brand searches in UberSuggest – I know I keep coming back to this, but this is an amazing technique. For every popular query, do you have a page or a piece of content that addresses this?
• Live chat logs – Live chat is a wonderful source of online marketing insight. If you have chat logs from a support department or wherever else, start looking through them. If you see the same questions coming up over and over again, you definitely want to have content somewhere that addresses them – it means other people have the question and aren’t asking.
• Support requests and tickets – Similar to online chat logs, these support requests usually include specific language about what your customers are trying to accomplish and where they’re confused. This language should not only be used to improve the use and experience of your product, but also as a keyword map for solution-focused content.

Implementation, customer success, and upselling

Now that you’ve gotten the customer to become, well, at least a trial customer, go get something to drink – you’ve had your first small victory.

But if you’re in SaaS or another subscription business, it’s time for coffee, not champagne, because the hard work is still in front of you. You have to earn that monthly recurring revenue.

I would look at searches around your brand – can you help someone before they ever file a ticket? Are there common issues that you can proactively address?

For example, the popular heatmap tool Crazy Egg has a frequently searched term around “Crazy Egg Behind Login”. This means users are wondering if they can install Crazy Egg behind a log-in wall.

You can see that the team behind Crazy Egg have gone ahead and created a page optimized for this question – turning what would be a pre-sales question or frequent support ticket into something that can be handled effortlessly by their website.

And that’s the SaaS customer life cycle.

But before I leave you, one last thought…

Thinking beyond the landing page

As SEOs we often think about marketing to keywords in a somewhat simplistic way: If a given keyword exists, our page on our website must rank for it, or it’s like it never happened.

When we think that keyword searches represent one person on a mission to solve a problem and buy something – rather than “traffic” – we begin to see that strategy in a different light. And there are many terms that, frankly, we’re just never going to rank for.

But just because we may not be able to rank for a given term, doesn’t mean we can’t influence it. Rand Fishkin talks about “Barnacle SEO,” and I would suggest you take that mindset to other pages as well.

Can you:

• Make an affiliate partnership with the ranking site? This way you can still influence people, often on a pay-per-lead or acquisition basis, rather than investing in SEO. (Not the best choice, but still an arrow in your quiver.)
• Do PR and get on the site that way? This is a great way to quickly rank for things that you may never be able to rank for organically – especially if you’re new.
• Contribute bylined content (occasionally known as a guest post) to the site? Very similar to the above concept – but with a branding bonus as well.
• Buy an ad placement (through GDN, a service like BuySellAds, or directly) to get you placement on that site and page, and thus the search term?

You have many options to reach searchers – too often SEOs fail to think beyond SEO and market to people rather than keywords.

In closing

As customer journeys get more complicated, we can adjust and take advantage fo the full customer cycle, from unaware to aware to solution comparison and more. And if we’re creative, we can use these searche terms to not only deliver a great experience but to also capture customers early in the buying cycle, as well as lower support costs.

Good luck and good SEO’ing.

—

This post was co-authored by Matthew Gratt and Nick Eubanks.

Nick Eubanks manages digital strategy for W.L. Snook & Associates, Inc., a digital asset holding company with a focus on Ecommerce and Software. He is also a founding partner at I’m From The Future, and an active investor and advisor to online businesses including SchoolSupplies.com, YourListen, Sports Pick Predictions, and others.Nick is the owner of top-ranked SEO Blog, SEONick.net and the creator of Master Keyword Research in 7 Days.

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Posted by EricaMcGillivray

We’re super-thrilled to say that it’s finally here: the MozCon 2015 Agenda. MozCon is July 13-15 in Seattle. We have an outstanding lineup this year featuring topics ranging from technical SEO and email marketing to content strategy and digging into your creative side. All of our speakers are already gearing up to deliver top-notch and actionable tips. And if you still need your ticket:

Buy your ticket now!

If you have any questions about the schedule, we’d love to hear ’em. Feel free to ask in the comments.

MozCon 2015 Agenda

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Monday

8:00-9:00am
Breakfast

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9:00-9:20am
Welcome to MozCon 2015! with Rand Fishkin

MozCon 2015 is here. Rand brings in the fun, recaps where our industry’s been, and talks a bit about the future.

Husband of Geraldine. Founder of Moz. Presenter of Whiteboard Friday. Writer of blog posts. Sender of tweets.

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9:20-10:05am
How to Make Your Marketing Match Your Reality with Dana DiTomaso

Too often, the tone and promises of marketing don’t match those of the business itself. Dana will help you bring your brand identity together, both in-store and online, whether at a conference, on the radio, or in a meeting.

Dana DiTomaso likes to impart wisdom to help you turn a lot of marketing bullshit into real strategies to grow your business. After 10+ years, she’s (almost) seen it all. It’s true, Dana will meet with you and teach you the ways of the digital world, but she is also a fan of the random fact. Kick Point often celebrates “Watershed Wednesday” because of Dana’s diverse work and education background. In her spare time, Dana drinks tea and yells at the Hamilton Tiger-Cats.

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10:05-10:25am
AM Break

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10:25-11:25am
How To Do Content Strategy (Probably) with Kristina Halvorson

Put 10 people in a room and ask them to define “content strategy,” and you’ll likely get 10 different answers. Kristina will share her own tried-and-true approach!

Kristina Halvorson is widely recognized as one of the most important voices in content strategy. She is the founder of Brain Traffic, the coauthor of Content Strategy for the Web, and the founder of the Confab content strategy conferences.

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11:25-12:10pm
An SEO’s Guide to the Insane World of Content with Matthew Brown

Find yourself arguing whether or not SEO is just great content? Matthew will talk through a strategic and tactical journey of content strategy from an SEO’s viewpoint and leave you with new tools and tactics.

Matthew Brown is on the Product Strategy and Design team at Moz, where he spends equal time on new products and staying out of the way. He enjoys bourbon and working on his upcoming novel, “Fifty Shades of Ginger” (look for it in 2019). Follow him at @MatthewJBrown for his special brand of hot takes.

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12:10-1:40pm
Lunch

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1:40-2:00pm
Delightful Remarketing: How You Can Do It with Duane Brown

By focusing on the differences between remarketing and creating delightful remarketing, Duane will help you grow the revenue and profit for your brand.

Duane Brown is a digital marketer with 10 years’ experience having lived and worked in five cities across three continents. He’s currently at Unbounce. When not working, you can find Duane traveling to some far-flung location around the world to eat food and soak up the culture.

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2:00-2:20pm
The Perfect Pair: Using PPC Data to Influence SEO with Stephanie Wallace

PPC is an easy testing ground for your SEO. Stephanie will explain how to better integrate them and leverage campaign data to influence SEO strategies.

Stephanie Wallace is Director of SEO at Nebo, a digital agency in Atlanta. She helps clients navigate the ever-changing world of SEO by understanding their audience and creating a digital experience that both the user and Google can appreciate.

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2:20-2:40pm
Tracking Beyond the Pageview with Adrian Vender

Typical engagement analytics don’t tell the full story of how people interact with your website. Adrian will show you how to use Google Tag Manager to turbocharge your content tracking and custom reports.

Adrian Vender is the Director of Analytics at IMI and a general enthusiast of coding and digital marketing. He’s also a life-long drummer and lover of music.

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2:40-3:00pm
PM Break

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3:00-3:35pm
Too Busy to Do Good Work with Marta Turek

Don’t let your work suffer from being busy. Instead, let Marta show you the tactics to clean up your PPC processes to finally get more strategic.

Marta Turek holds seven years of experience in digital advertising, specializing in lead generation, and paid search marketing. Developing digital strategies and telling stories through data is what rocks her boat. She’s currently at ROI·DNA.

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3:35-4:10pm
Online Personalization that Actually Works with Cara Harshman

Personalizing your marketing may be a daunting idea right now, but after Cara breaks it down, you’ll realize why embracing it early will be transformative, highly lucrative, addicting, and not creepy.

Cara Harshman tells stories at Optimizely. She was the second marketer to join and is now a Content Marketing Manager+Blog Editor. In 2012, she (openly) ghost-wrote A/B Testing the book, on behalf of the co-founders.

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4:10-4:55pm
Ultimate Search and Social Mashup: Expertly Curate Owned Audience Cookie Pools with Marty Weintraub

Stay relevant, marketers! Learn to mine merged search and social data to build audience-based cookie pools for performance marketers to exploit.

Marty is Founder of aimClear®. He was honored three years straight as a “Top 25 Most Influential PPC Expert”; was 2013 “US Search Personality of the Year”; is an acclaimed author; and fixture on the international digital marketing conference speaking circuit.

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7:00-10:00pm
Monday Night #MozCrawl

We’re having a pub crawl on Monday, official stops coming soon. You’ll be able to explore some of our favorite haunts and make some new friends. Go at your own pace, and visit the stops in any order. Spread across seven bars, each stop is sponsored by a trusted partner and one by us. You must bring your MozCon badge—for free drinks and light appetizers—and your US ID or passport. See you there!

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Tuesday

8:00-9:00am
Breakfast

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9:00-9:45am
Surviving Google: SEO in 2020 with Pete Meyers

Organic results are disappearing, replaced by Knowledge Graph, direct answers, new ad hybrids, and more. How can SEOs be ready for Google in five years?

Dr. Pete Meyers is Marketing Scientist for Moz, where he works on product research and data-driven content. He has spent the past three years building research tools to monitor Google, including the MozCast project, and he curates the Google Algorithm History.

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9:45-10:30am
Become a Mobile SEO Superhero with Cindy Krum

With Google’s algorithm mobile change, Cindy will walk you through the changes, what they mean for your site and its rankings, and what you should be focusing on going forward.

Cindy Krum is the CEO and Founder of MobileMoxie, LLC, and author of Mobile Marketing: Finding Your Customers No Matter Where They Are. She brings fresh and creative ideas to her clients, and regularly speaks at US and international digital marketing events.

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10:30-10:50am
AM Break

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10:50-11:25am
Digital Analytics: People, Process, Platform with Adam Singer

In a data-driven world, Adam will pull you back to think again about your analytics, best practices, and how you report.

Adam Singer is Analytics Advocate at Google, startup adviser, investor, and blogger. He previously was director for a global consulting team and has provided digital strategy for brands in a variety of industries including marketing, technology, healthcare, and more.

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11:25-12:00pm
How to Better Sell SEO to the C-Suite with Purna Virji

Whether you need more resources, trust, or buy-in, Purna will share practical tips for focusing on Profit & Loss and better communicating SEO planning, forecasting, and strategizing.

Purna Virji is the founder and CEO of Purview Marketing, a boutique consulting firm helping companies of all sizes grow via search and content marketing. Purna is an avid traveler and speaks six languages (and can swear in 17!).

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12:00-12:35pm
Drive More Conversions with Lifecycle Email Campaigns with Tamara Gielen

Triggered emails can be powerful marketing. Tamara will lead you through data-driven decision making to improve your campaigns and connect with customers.

Based near Brussels, Belgium, Tamara Gielen is one of the world’s leading experts in email marketing with over 14 years of experience managing email marketing programs for international corporations.

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12:35-2:05pm
Lunch

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2:05-2:40pm
Reaching Critical Mass: 150 Active Members with Rich Millington

Imagine you could create and rejuvenate a successful community whenever you like? Richard Millington will take you through a step by step action plan to reach critical mass.

Richard Millington is the Founder of FeverBee, a community consultancy, and the author of Buzzing Communities.

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2:40-3:25pm
Dark Search and Social—Run Rabbit Run! with Marshall Simmonds

With data from 112 publishers with 164+ billion page views, Marshall will dive into the challenges of tracking social and search campaigns. He’ll focus on history’s lessons and what’s happening with direct and mobile traffic in an app-heavy world.

Marshall Simmonds is the Founder of Define Media Group, the enterprise audience development company specializing in strategic search and social marketing. Define works with many of the most influential brands and networks in the world.

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3:25-3:45pm
PM Break

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3:45-4:20pm
Back to the Future with Local Search with Mary Bowling

Google’s model of our world now mirrors the physical world better than it ever has before. Learn how to meld the online and offline actions of your business for optimal Local Search success.

Mary Bowling’s been concentrating on helping businesses succeed with Local SEO since she got into this crazy biz in 2003. She’s a consultant at Optimized!, a partner at Ignitor Digital, a partner in LocalU, and a trainer and blogger for Search Engine News.

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4:20-5:05pm
The Time to Do the Web Right Is Incredibly Short with Wil Reynolds

In “web time,” competitive advantage can be lost in an instant, speed matters. Wil shares how keep on the pulse of competitor agility and how to get things done to stay ahead of them.

Wil Reynolds – Director of Strategy, Seer Interactive – founded Seer with a focus on doing great things for its clients, team, and the community. His passion for driving and analyzing the impact that a site’s traffic has on the company’s bottom line has shaped SEO and digital marketing industries. Wil also actively supports the Covenant House.

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7:00pm-10:00pm
MozCon Ignite at Benaroya Hall

We’re thrilled to announce the addition of a networking and Ignite-style event for attendees on Tuesday night. Join us to meet—and—greet your fellow community members and hear them talk about their passion projects. Leave that notebook in your hotel and settle into some fun. Enjoy light appetizers and a couple of drinks on us.

Want to speak at (or just learn more about) this event? We are accepting pitches through Sunday, May 17, at 5pm PST!

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Wednesday

8:30-9:30am
Breakfast

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9:30-10:15am
Marketing Innovations: Creative PR, Content, and SEO Strategies with Lexi Mills

Lexi shows you how to apply strategies used in emerging markets to grow the success of your PR, SEO, and content work from bathrooms to rock bands.

Lexi Mills is a PR SEO specialist, with over eight years experience working with both small firms and big brands. She has designed and implemented integrated PR, SEO, content, and social campaigns in the UK, Europe, and USA for B2B and B2C clients. She’s currently at DynamoPR.

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10:15-10:50am
Upside Down and Inside Out with Mig Reyes

Mig shares how to shake up your marketing projects by looking at your work through a lens of experiments and creativity.

Mig Reyes is a traditionally trained graphic designer who escaped advertising agency life, cut his teeth at the T-shirt powerhouse known as Threadless, and now helps lead branding, marketing and even a bit of product work at Basecamp.

10:50-11:10am
AM Break

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11:10-11:30am
Get Hired to Do SEO with Ruth Burr Reedy

You dream in SEO—but all the SEO job descriptions require something you don’t have! Ruth Burr Reedy will teach you how to show employers you know your stuff, by building your personal brand with real-life examples of your SEO prowess.

Ruth Burr Reedy is the head of on-site SEO for BigWing Interactive, a full-service digital marketing agency in Oklahoma City, OK. At BigWing she manages a team doing on-site, technical and local SEO. Ruth has been working in SEO since 2006.

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11:30-11:50am
Rocking Your CRO Efforts with Radical Redesigns with Chris Dayley

Too often we have design blinders on when running A/B tests, focusing only on things like button text. Chris will help you break through to find dramatic gains in your CRO efforts.

Chris Dayley is a digital marketing expert and owner of Dayley Conversion. His company provides full-service A/B testing for businesses, including design, development, and test execution.

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11:50-12:10pm
Parole, Parole, Parole: Practical, Modern Keyword and Topical Research with Gianluca Fiorelli

Just using Keyword Planner and Google Suggest is a waste time. Gianluca will show you how keyword and topical research is more about culture, not guessing, and explore unusual sources and seldom used tool features to make your research more effective.

Moz Associate, official blogger for Stateofdigital.com and well-known International SEO and Inbound Strategist, Gianluca Fiorelli works in the Digital Marketing industry, but he still believes that he that he knows nothing.

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12:10-1:40pm
Lunch

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1:40-2:15pm
The Psychology of Social Media with Courtney Seiter

Courtney dives into the science of why people post, share, and build relationships on social media and how to create an even more irresistible social media experience for your audience.

Courtney Seiter examines social media and workplace culture at Buffer, and her writing has been published at TIME, Fast Company, Lifehacker, Inc., and more. She lives in Nashville, where she is a founder of Girls to the Moon, a leadership camp for girls.

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2:15-2:50pm
Astoundingly Useful Applications of Facebook Search for Marketers with David Mihm

Facebook has long neglected its potential as a local search giant, and as a result, its Graph Search product is an afterthought for too many marketers. David showcases Graph-powered insights for small-business marketers—with utility well beyond Facebook.

David Mihm has created and promoted search-friendly websites for clients of all sizes since the early 2000’s. David co-founded GetListed.org, which he sold to Moz in November 2012. He now serves as Moz’s Director of Local Search Strategy.

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2:50-3:10pm
PM Break

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3:10-3:45pm
(Check back soon; we’re still finalizing the details of this session!)

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3:45-4:30pm
Onsite SEO in 2015: An Elegant Weapon for a More Civilized Marketer with Rand Fishkin

SEO has come full circle as on-page SEO has returned to the forefront. Rand will share how and why on-site SEO is so important and show off uncommon tactics with powerful potential.

Husband of Geraldine. Founder of Moz. Presenter of Whiteboard Friday. Writer of blog posts. Sender of tweets.

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7:00pm-12:00am Wednesday Night Bash at the Garage

Do you love singing “I Love Rock n’ Roll”? How about bowling in some fancy shoes? Or are you a pool shark? Our after-party has a little something for everyone.

Chill with the new friends you’ve made, catch up with your old friends, and get to know the people you’ve only ever met online. We’ll provide heavy appetizers and plenty of beverages. This year’s assortment includes the MozCow Mule Mocktail, as well as well liquor, beer, house wine, soft drinks, and of course, plenty of our friend H2O.

Make sure to bring your MozCon badge and an ID (driver’s license or non-US passport). See you there!

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Posted by EricEnge

In my last column, I wrote about how to use term frequency analysis in evaluating your content vs. the competition’s. Term frequency (TF) is only one part of the TF-IDF approach to information retrieval. The other part is inverse document frequency (IDF), which is what I plan to discuss today.

Today’s post will use an explanation of how IDF works to show you the importance of creating content that has true uniqueness. There are reputation and visibility reasons for doing this, and it’s great for users, but there are also SEO benefits.

If you wonder why I am focusing on TF-IDF, consider these words from a Google article from August 2014: “This is the idea of the famous TF-IDF, long used to index web pages.” While the way that Google may apply these concepts is far more than the simple TF-IDF models I am discussing, we can still learn a lot from understanding the basics of how they work.

What is inverse document frequency?

In simple terms, it’s a measure of the rareness of a term. Conceptually, we start by measuring document frequency. It’s easiest to illustrate with an example, as follows:

In this example, we see that the word “a” appears in every document in the document set. What this tells us is that it provides no value in telling the documents apart. It’s in everything.

Now look at the word “mobilegeddon.” It appears in 1,000 of the documents, or one thousandth of one percent of them. Clearly, this phrase provides a great deal more differentiation for the documents that contain them.

Document frequency measures commonness, and we prefer to measure rareness. The classic way that this is done is with a formula that looks like this:

For each term we are looking at, we take the total number of documents in the document set and divide it by the number of documents containing our term. This gives us more of a measure of rareness. However, we don’t want the resulting calculation to say that the word “mobilegeddon” is 1,000 times more important in distinguishing a document than the word “boat,” as that is too big of a scaling factor.

This is the reason we take the Log Base 10 of the result, to dampen that calculation. For those of you who are not mathematicians, you can loosely think of the Log Base 10 of a number as being a count of the number of zeros – i.e., the Log Base 10 of 1,000,000 is 6, and the log base 10 of 1,000 is 3. So instead of saying that the word “mobilegeddon” is 1,000 times more important, this type of calculation suggests it’s three times more important, which is more in line with what makes sense from a search engine perspective.

With this in mind, here are the IDF values for the terms we looked at before:

Now you can see that we are providing the highest score to the term that is the rarest.

What does the concept of IDF teach us?

Think about IDF as a measure of uniqueness. It helps search engines identify what it is that makes a given document special. This needs to be much more sophisticated than how often you use a given search term (e.g. keyword density).

Think of it this way: If you are one of 6.78 million web sites that comes up for the search query “super bowl 2015,” you are dealing with a crowded playing field. Your chances of ranking for this term based on the quality of your content are pretty much zero.

Overall link authority and other signals will be the only way you can rank for a term that competitive. If you are a new site on the landscape, well, perhaps you should chase something else.

That leaves us with the question of what you should target. How about something unique? Even the addition of a simple word like “predictions”—changing our phrase to “super bowl 2015 predictions”—reduces this playing field to 17,800 results.

Clearly, this is dramatically less competitive already. Slicing into this further, the phrase “super bowl 2015 predictions and odds” returns only 26 pages in Google. See where this is going?

What IDF teaches us is the importance of uniqueness in the content we create. Yes, it will not pay nearly as much money to you as it would if you rank for the big head term, but if your business is a new entrant into a very crowded space, you are not going to rank for the big head term anyway

If you can pick out a smaller number of terms with much less competition and create content around those needs, you can start to rank for these terms and get money flowing into your business. This is because you are making your content more unique by using rarer combinations of terms (leveraging what IDF teaches us).

Summary

People who do keyword analysis are often wired to pursue the major head terms directly, simply based on the available keyword search volume. The result from this approach can, in fact, be pretty dismal.

Understanding how inverse document frequency works helps us understand the importance of standing out. Creating content that brings unique angles to the table is often a very potent way to get your SEO strategy kick-started.

Of course, the reasons for creating content that is highly differentiated and unique go far beyond SEO. This is good for your users, and it’s good for your reputation, visibility, AND also your SEO.

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

Continue reading →