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Moz’s 2014 Annual Report

Posted by SarahBird

Moz has a tradition of sharing its financials (check out 2012 and 2013 for funzies). It’s an important part of TAGFEE.

Why do we do it? Moz gets its strength from the community of marketers and entrepreneurs that support it. We celebrated 10 years of our community last October. In some ways, the purpose of this report is to give you an inside look into our company. It’s one of many lenses that tell the story of Moz.

Yep. I know. It’s April. I’m not proud. Better late than never, right?

I had a very long and extensive version of this post planned, something closer to last year’s extravaganza. I finally had to admit to myself that I was letting the perfect become the enemy of the good (or at least the done). There was no way I could capture an entire year’s worth of ups and downs—along with supporting data—in a single blog post.

Without further ado, here’s the meat-and-potatoes 2014 Year In Review (and here’s an infographic with more statistics for your viewing pleasure!):

Moz ended 2014 with $31.3 million in revenue. About $30 million was recurring revenue (mostly from subscriptions to Moz Pro and the API).

Here’s a breakdown of all our major revenue sources:

Compared to previous years, 2014 was a much slower growth year. We knew very early that it was going to be a tough year because we started Q1 with negative growth. We worked very hard and successfully shifted the momentum back to increasingly positive quarterly growth rates. I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished so far. We still have a long ways to go to meet our potential, but we’re on the path.

In subscription businesses, If you start the year with negative or even slow growth it is very hard to have meaningful annual growth. All things being equal, you’re better off having a bad quarter in Q4 than Q1. If you get a new customer in Q1, you usually earn revenue from that customer all year. If you get a new customer in Q4, it will barely make a dent in that year, although it should set you up nicely for the following year.

We exited 2014 on a good flight path, which bodes well for 2015. We slammed right into some nasty billing system challenges in Q1 2015, but still managed to grow revenue 6.5%. Mad props to the team for shifting momentum last year and for digging into the billing system challenges we’re experiencing now.

We were very successful in becoming more efficient and managing costs in 2014. Our Cost of Revenue (COR), the cost of producing what we sell, fell by 30% to $8.2 million. These savings drove our gross profit margin up from 63% in 2013 to 74%.

Our operating profit increased by 30%. Here’s a breakdown of our major expenses (both operating expenses and COR):

Total operating expenses (which don’t include COR) clocked in at about $29.9 million this year.

The efficiency gains positively impacted EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization) by pushing it up 50% year over year. In 2013, EBITDA was -$4.5 million. We improved it to -$2.1 million in 2014. We’re a VC-backed startup, so this was a planned loss.

One of the most dramatic indicators of our improved efficiency in 2014 is the substantial decline in our consumption of cash.

In 2014, we spent $1.5 million in cash. This was a planned burn, and is actually very impressive for a startup. In fact, we are intentionally increasing our burn, so we don’t expect EBITDA and cash burn to look as good in 2015! Hopefully, though, you will see that revenue growth rate increase.

Let’s check in on some other Moz KPIs:

At the end of 2014, we reported a little over 27,000 Pro users. When billing system issues hit in Q1 2015, we discovered some weird under- and over-reporting, so the number of subscribers was adjusted down by about ~450 after we scrubbed a bunch of inactive accounts out of the database. We expect accounts to stabilize and be more reliable now that we’ve fixed those issues.

We launched Moz Local about a year ago. I’m amazed and thrilled that we were able to end the year managing 27,000 locations for a range of customers. We just recently took our baby steps into the UK, and we’ve got a bunch of great additional features planned. What an incredible launch year!

We published over 300 posts combined on the Moz Blog and YouMoz. Nearly 20,000 people left comments. Well done, team!

Our content and social efforts are paying off with a 26% year-over-year increase in organic search traffic.

We continue to see good growth across many of our off-site communities, too:

The team grew to 149 people last year. We’re at ~37% women, which is nowhere near where I want it to be. We have a long way to go before the team reflects the diversity of the communities around us.

Our paid, paid vacation perk is very popular with Mozzers, and why wouldn’t it be? Everyone gets $3,000/year to use toward their vacations. In 2014, we spent over $420,000 to help our Mozzers take a break and get connected with matters most.

PPV.png

Also, we’re hiring! You’ll have my undying gratitude if you send me your best software engineers. Help us, help you. 😉

Last, but certainly not least, Mozzers continue to be generous (the ‘G’ in TAGFEE) and donate to the charities of their choice. In 2014, Mozzers donated $48k, and Moz added another $72k to increase the impact of their gifts. Combining those two figures, we donated $120k to causes our team members are passionate about. That’s an average of $805 per employee!

Mozzers are optimists with initiative. I think that’s why they are so generous with their time and money to folks in need. They believe the world can be a better place if we act to change it.

That’s a wrap on 2014! A year with many ups and downs. Fortunately, Mozzers don’t quit when things get hard. They embrace TAGFEE and lean into the challenge.

Revenue is growing again. We’re still operating very efficiently, and TAGFEE is strong. We’re heads-down executing on some big projects that customers have been clamoring for. Thank you for sticking with us, and for inspiring us to make marketing better every day.


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The Nifty Guide to Local Content Strategy and Marketing

Posted by NiftyMarketing

This is my Grandma.

Mike's grandma

She helped raised me and I love her dearly. That chunky baby with the Gerber cheeks is me. The scarlet letter “A” means nothing… I hope.

This is a rolled up newspaper. 

rolled up newspaper

When I was growing up, I was the king of mischief and had a hard time following parental guidelines. To ensure the lessons she wanted me to learn “sunk in” my grandma would give me a soft whack with a rolled up newspaper and would say,

“Mike, you like to learn the hard way.”

She was right. I have spent my life and career learning things the hard way.

Local content has been no different. I started out my career creating duplicate local doorway pages using “find and replace” with city names. After getting whacked by the figurative newspaper a few times, I decided there had to be a better way. To save others from the struggles I experienced, I hope that the hard lessons I have learned about local content strategy and marketing help to save you fearing a rolled newspaper the same way I do.

Lesson one: Local content doesn’t just mean the written word

local content ecosystem

Content is everything around you. It all tells a story. If you don’t have a plan for how that story is being told, then you might not like how it turns out. In the local world, even your brick and mortar building is a piece of content. It speaks about your brand, your values, your appreciation of customers and employees, and can be used to attract organic visitors if it is positioned well and provides a good user experience. If you just try to make the front of a building look good, but don’t back up the inside inch by inch with the same quality, people will literally say, “Hey man, this place sucks… let’s bounce.”

I had this experience proved to me recently while conducting an interview at Nifty for our law division. Our office is a beautifully designed brick, mustache, animal on the wall, leg lamp in the center of the room, piece of work you would expect for a creative company.

nifty offices idaho

Anywho, for our little town of Burley, Idaho it is a unique space, and helps to set apart our business in our community. But, the conference room has a fluorescent ballast light system that can buzz so loudly that you literally can’t carry on a proper conversation at times, and in the recent interviews I literally had to conduct them in the dark because it was so bad.

I’m cheap and slow to spend money, so I haven’t got it fixed yet. The problem is I have two more interviews this week and I am so embarrassed by the experience in that room, I am thinking of holding them offsite to ensure that we don’t product a bad content experience. What I need to do is just fix the light but I will end up spending weeks going back and forth with the landlord on whose responsibility it is.

Meanwhile, the content experience suffers. Like I said, I like to learn the hard way.

Start thinking about everything in the frame of content and you will find that you make better decisions and less costly mistakes.

Lesson two: Scalable does not mean fast and easy growth

In every sales conversation I have had about local content, the question of scalability comes up. Usually, people want two things:

  1. Extremely Fast Production 
  2. Extremely Low Cost

While these two things would be great for every project, I have come to find that there are rare cases where quality can be achieved if you are optimizing for fast production and low cost. A better way to look at scale is as follows:

The rate of growth in revenue/traffic is greater than the cost of continued content creation.

A good local content strategy at scale will create a model that looks like this:

scaling content graph

Lesson three: You need a continuous local content strategy

This is where the difference between local content marketing and content strategy kicks in. Creating a single piece of content that does well is fairly easy to achieve. Building a true scalable machine that continually puts out great local content and consistently tells your story is not. This is a graph I created outlining the process behind creating and maintaining a local content strategy:

local content strategy

This process is not a one-time thing. It is not a box to be checked off. It is a structure that should become the foundation of your marketing program and will need to be revisited, re-tweaked, and replicated over and over again.

1. Identify your local audience

Most of you reading this will already have a service or product and hopefully local customers. Do you have personas developed for attracting and retaining more of them? Here are some helpful tools available to give you an idea of how many people fit your personas in any given market.

Facebook Insights

Pretend for a minute that you live in the unique market of Utah and have a custom wedding dress line. You focus on selling modest wedding dresses. It is a definite niche product, but one that shows the idea of personas very well.

You have interviewed your customer base and found a few interests that your customer base share. Taking that information and putting it into Facebook insights will give you a plethora of data to help you build out your understanding of a local persona.

facebook insights data

We are able to see from the interests of our customers there are roughly 6k-7k current engaged woman in Utah who have similar interests to our customer base.

The location tab gives us a break down of the specific cities and, understandably, Salt Lake City has the highest percentage with Provo (home of BYU) in second place. You can also see pages this group would like, activity levels on Facebook, and household income with spending habits. If you wanted to find more potential locations for future growth you can open up the search to a region or country.

localized facebook insights data

From this data it’s apparent that Arizona would be a great expansion opportunity after Utah.

Neilson Prizm

Neilson offers a free and extremely useful tool for local persona research called Zip Code Lookup that allows you to identify pre-determined personas in a given market.

Here is a look at my hometown and the personas they have developed are dead on.

Neilson Prizm data

Each persona can be expanded to learn more about the traits, income level, and areas across the country with other high concentrations of the same persona group.

You can also use the segment explorer to get a better idea of pre-determined persona lists and can work backwards to determine the locations with the highest density of a given persona.

Google Keyword Planner Tool

The keyword tool is fantastic for local research. Using our same Facebook Insight data above we can match keyword search volume against the audience size to determine how active our persona is in product research and purchasing. In the case of engaged woman looking for dresses, it is a very active group with a potential of 20-30% actively searching online for a dress.

google keyword planner tool

2. Create goals and rules

I think the most important idea for creating the goals and rules around your local content is the following from the must read book Content Strategy for the Web.

You also need to ensure that everyone who will be working on things even remotely related to content has access to style and brand guides and, ultimately, understands the core purpose for what, why, and how everything is happening.

3. Audit and analyze your current local content

The point of this step is to determine how the current content you have stacks up against the goals and rules you established, and determine the value of current pages on your site. With tools like Siteliner (for finding duplicate content) and ScreamingFrog (identifying page titles, word count, error codes and many other things) you can grab a lot of information very fast. Beyond that, there are a few tools that deserve a more in-depth look.

BuzzSumo

With BuzzSumo you can see social data and incoming links behind important pages on your site. This can you a good idea which locations or areas are getting more promotion than others and identify what some of the causes could be.

Buzzsumo also can give you access to competitors’ information where you might find some new ideas. In the following example you can see that one of Airbnb.com’s most shared pages was a motiongraphic of its impact on Berlin.

Buzzsumo

urlProfiler

This is another great tool for scraping urls for large sites that can return about every type of measurement you could want. For sites with 1000s of pages, this tool could save hours of data gathering and can spit out a lovely formatted CSV document that will allow you to sort by things like word count, page authority, link numbers, social shares, or about anything else you could imagine.

url profiler

4. Develop local content marketing tactics

This is how most of you look when marketing tactics are brought up.

monkey

Let me remind you of something with a picture. 

rolled up newspaper

Do not start with tactics. Do the other things first. It will ensure your marketing tactics fall in line with a much bigger organizational movement and process. With the warning out of the way, here are a few tactics that could work for you.

Local landing page content

Our initial concept of local landing pages has stood the test of time. If you are scared to even think about local pages with the upcoming doorway page update then please read this analysis and don’t be too afraid. Here are local landing pages that are done right.

Marriott local content

Marriot’s Burley local page is great. They didn’t think about just ensuring they had 500 unique words. They have custom local imagery of the exterior/interior, detailed information about the area’s activities, and even their own review platform that showcases both positive and negative reviews with responses from local management.

If you can’t build your own platform handling reviews like that, might I recommend looking at Get Five Stars as a platform that could help you integrate reviews as part of your continuous content strategy.

Airbnb Neighborhood Guides

I not so secretly have a big crush on Airbnb’s approach to local. These neighborhood guides started it. They only have roughly 21 guides thus far and handle one at a time with Seoul being the most recent addition. The idea is simple, they looked at extremely hot markets for them and built out guides not just for the city, but down to a specific neighborhood.

air bnb neighborhood guides

Here is a look at Hell’s Kitchen in New York by imagery. They hire a local photographer to shoot the area, then they take some of their current popular listing data and reviews and integrate them into the page. This idea would have never flown if they only cared about creating content that could be fast and easy for every market they serve.

Reverse infographicing

Every decently sized city has had a plethora of infographics made about them. People spent the time curating information and coming up with the concept, but a majority just made the image and didn’t think about the crawlability or page title from an SEO standpoint.

Here is an example of an image search for Portland infographics.

image search results portland infographics

Take an infographic and repurpose it into crawlable content with a new twist or timely additions. Usually infographics share their data sources in the footer so you can easily find similar, new, or more information and create some seriously compelling data based content. You can even link to or share the infographic as part of it if you would like.

Become an Upworthy of local content

No one I know does this better than Movoto. Read the link for their own spin on how they did it and then look at these examples and share numbers from their local content.

60k shares in Boise by appealing to that hometown knowledge.

movoto boise content

65k shares in Salt Lake following the same formula.

movoto salt lake city content

It seems to work with video as well.

movoto video results

Think like a local directory

Directories understand where content should be housed. Not every local piece should be on the blog. Look at where Trip Advisor’s famous “Things to Do” page is listed. Right on the main city page.

trip advisor things to do in salt lake city

Or look at how many timely, fresh, quality pieces of content Yelp is showcasing from their main city page.

yelp main city page

The key point to understand is that local content isn’t just about being unique on a landing page. It is about BEING local and useful.

Ideas of things that are local:

  • Sports teams
  • Local celebrities or heroes 
  • Groups and events
  • Local pride points
  • Local pain points

Ideas of things that are useful:

  • Directions
  • Favorite local sports
  • Granular details only “locals” know

The other point to realize is that in looking at our definition of scale you don’t need to take shortcuts that un-localize the experience for users. Figure and test a location at a time until you have a winning formula and then move forward at a speed that ensures a quality local experience.

5. Create a content calendar

I am not going to get into telling you exactly how or what your content calendar needs to include. That will largely be based on the size and organization of your team and every situation might call for a unique approach. What I will do is explain how we do things at Nifty.

  1. We follow the steps above.
  2. We schedule the big projects and timelines first. These could be months out or weeks out. 
  3. We determine the weekly deliverables, checkpoints, and publish times.
  4. We put all of the information as tasks assigned to individuals or teams in Asana.

asana content calendar

The information then can be viewed by individual, team, groups of team, due dates, or any other way you would wish to sort. Repeatable tasks can be scheduled and we can run our entire operation visible to as many people as need access to the information through desktop or mobile devices. That is what works for us.

6. Launch and promote content

My personal favorite way to promote local content (other than the obvious ideas of sharing with your current followers or outreaching to local influencers) is to use Facebook ads to target the specific local personas you are trying to reach. Here is an example:

I just wrapped up playing Harold Hill in our communities production of The Music Man. When you live in a small town like Burley, Idaho you get the opportunity to play a lead role without having too much talent or a glee-based upbringing. You also get the opportunity to do all of the advertising, set design, and costuming yourself and sometime even get to pay for it.

For my advertising responsibilities, I decided to write a few blog posts and drive traffic to them. As any good Harold Hill would do, I used fear tactics.

music man blog post

I then created Facebook ads that had the following stats: Costs of $.06 per click, 12.7% click through rate, and naturally organic sharing that led to thousands of visits in a small Idaho farming community where people still think a phone book is the only way to find local businesses.

facebook ads setup

Then we did it again.

There was a protestor in Burley for over a year that parked a red pickup with signs saying things like, “I wud not trust Da Mayor” or “Don’t Bank wid Zions”. Basically, you weren’t working hard enough if you name didn’t get on the truck during the year.

Everyone knew that ol’ red pickup as it was parked on the corner of Main and Overland, which is one of the few stoplights in town. Then one day it was gone. We came up with the idea to bring the red truck back, put signs on it that said, “I wud Not Trust Pool Tables” and “Resist Sins n’ Corruption” and other things that were part of The Music Man and wrote another blog complete with pictures.

facebook ads red truck

Then I created another Facebook Ad.

facebook ads set up

A little under $200 in ad spend resulted in thousands more visits to the site which promoted the play and sold tickets to a generation that might not have been very familiar with the show otherwise.

All of it was local targeting and there was no other way would could have driven that much traffic in a community like Burley without paying Facebook and trying to create click bait ads in hope the promotion led to an organic sharing.

7. Measure and report

This is another very personal step where everyone will have different needs. At Nifty we put together very custom weekly or monthly reports that cover all of the plan, execution, and relevant stats such as traffic to specific content or location, share data, revenue or lead data if available, analysis of what worked and what didn’t, and the plan for the following period.

There is no exact data that needs to be shared. Everyone will want something slightly different, which is why we moved away from automated reporting years ago (when we moved away from auto link building… hehe) and built our report around our clients even if it took added time.

I always said that the product of a SEO or content shop is the report. That is what people buy because it is likely that is all they will see or understand.

8. In conclusion, you must refine and repeat the process

local content strategy - refine and repeat

From my point of view, this is by far the most important step and sums everything up nicely. This process model isn’t perfect. There will be things that are missed, things that need tweaked, and ways that you will be able to improve on your local content strategy and marketing all the time. The idea of the cycle is that it is never done. It never sleeps. It never quits. It never surrenders. You just keep perfecting the process until you reach the point that few locally-focused companies ever achieve… where your local content reaches and grows your target audience every time you click the publish button.


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Using Term Frequency Analysis to Measure Your Content Quality

Posted by EricEnge

It’s time to look at your content differently—time to start understanding just how good it really is. I am not simply talking about titles, keyword usage, and meta descriptions. I am talking about the entire page experience. In today’s post, I am going to introduce the general concept of content quality analysis, why it should matter to you, and how to use term frequency (TF) analysis to gather ideas on how to improve your content.

TF analysis is usually combined with inverse document frequency analysis (collectively TF-IDF analysis). TF-IDF analysis has been a staple concept for information retrieval science for a long time. You can read more about TF-IDF and other search science concepts in Cyrus Shepard’s excellent article here.

For purposes of today’s post, I am going to show you how you can use TF analysis to get clues as to what Google is valuing in the content of sites that currently outrank you. But first, let’s get oriented.

Conceptualizing page quality

Start by asking yourself if your page provides a quality experience to people who visit it. For example, if a search engine sends 100 people to your page, how many of them will be happy? Seventy percent? Thirty percent? Less? What if your competitor’s page gets a higher percentage of happy users than yours does? Does that feel like an “uh-oh”?

Let’s think about this with a specific example in mind. What if you ran a golf club site, and 100 people come to your page after searching on a phrase like “golf clubs.” What are the kinds of things they may be looking for?

Here are some things they might want:

  1. A way to buy golf clubs on your site (you would need to see a shopping cart of some sort).
  2. The ability to select specific brands, perhaps by links to other pages about those brands of golf clubs.
  3. Information on how to pick the club that is best for them.
  4. The ability to select specific types of clubs (drivers, putters, irons, etc.). Again, this may be via links to other pages.
  5. A site search box.
  6. Pricing info.
  7. Info on shipping costs.
  8. Expert analysis comparing different golf club brands.
  9. End user reviews of your company so they can determine if they want to do business with you.
  10. How your return policy works.
  11. How they can file a complaint.
  12. Information about your company. Perhaps an “about us” page.
  13. A link to a privacy policy page.
  14. Whether or not you have been “in the news” recently.
  15. Trust symbols that show that you are a reputable organization.
  16. A way to access pages to buy different products, such as golf balls or tees.
  17. Information about specific golf courses.
  18. Tips on how to improve their golf game.

This is really only a partial list, and the specifics of your site can certainly vary for any number of reasons from what I laid out above. So how do you figure out what it is that people really want? You could pull in data from a number of sources. For example, using data from your site search box can be invaluable. You can do user testing on your site. You can conduct surveys. These are all good sources of data.

You can also look at your analytics data to see what pages get visited the most. Just be careful how you use that data. For example, if most of your traffic is from search, this data will be biased by incoming search traffic, and hence what Google chooses to rank. In addition, you may only have a small percentage of the visitors to your site going to your privacy policy, but chances are good that there are significantly more users than that who notice whether or not you have a privacy policy. Many of these will be satisfied just to see that you have one and won’t actually go check it out.

Whatever you do, it’s worth using many of these methods to determine what users want from the pages of your site and then using the resulting information to improve your overall site experience.

Is Google using this type of info as a ranking factor?

At some level, they clearly are. Clearly Google and Bing have evolved far beyond the initial TF-IDF concepts, but we can still use them to better understand our own content.

The first major indication we had that Google was performing content quality analysis was with the release of the Panda algorithm in February of 2011. More recently, we know that on April 21 Google will release an algorithm that makes the mobile friendliness of a web site a ranking factor. Pure and simple, this algo is about the user experience with a page.

Exactly how Google is performing these measurements is not known, but what we do know is their intent. They want to make their search engine look good, largely because it helps them make more money. Sending users to pages that make them happy will do that. Google has every incentive to improve the quality of their search results in as many ways as they can.

Ultimately, we don’t actually know what Google is measuring and using. It may be that the only SEO impact of providing pages that satisfy a very high percentage of users is an indirect one. I.e., so many people like your site that it gets written about more, linked to more, has tons of social shares, gets great engagement, that Google sees other signals that it uses as ranking factors, and this is why your rankings improve.

But, do I care if the impact is a direct one or an indirect one? Well, NO.

Using TF analysis to evaluate your page

TF-IDF analysis is more about relevance than content quality, but we can still use various precepts from it to help us understand our own content quality. One way to do this is to compare the results of a TF analysis of all the keywords on your page with those pages that currently outrank you in the search results. In this section, I am going to outline the basic concepts for how you can do this. In the next section I will show you a process that you can use with publicly available tools and a spreadsheet.

The simplest form of TF analysis is to count the number of uses of each keyword on a page. However, the problem with that is that a page using a keyword 10 times will be seen as 10 times more valuable than a page that uses a keyword only once. For that reason, we dampen the calculations. I have seen two methods for doing this, as follows:

term frequency calculation

The first method relies on dividing the number of repetitions of a keyword by the count for the most popular word on the entire page. Basically, what this does is eliminate the inherent advantage that longer documents might otherwise have over shorter ones. The second method dampens the total impact in a different way, by taking the log base 10 for the actual keyword count. Both of these achieve the effect of still valuing incremental uses of a keyword, but dampening it substantially. I prefer to use method 1, but you can use either method for our purposes here.

Once you have the TF calculated for every different keyword found on your page, you can then start to do the same analysis for pages that outrank you for a given search term. If you were to do this for five competing pages, the result might look something like this:

term frequency spreadsheet

I will show you how to set up the spreadsheet later, but for now, let’s do the fun part, which is to figure out how to analyze the results. Here are some of the things to look for:

  1. Are there any highly related words that all or most of your competitors are using that you don’t use at all?
  2. Are there any such words that you use significantly less, on average, than your competitors?
  3. Also look for words that you use significantly more than competitors.

You can then tag these words for further analysis. Once you are done, your spreadsheet may now look like this:

second stage term frequency analysis spreadsheet

In order to make this fit into this screen shot above and keep it legibly, I eliminated some columns you saw in my first spreadsheet. However, I did a sample analysis for the movie “Woman in Gold”. You can see the full spreadsheet of calculations here. Note that we used an automated approach to marking some items at “Low Ratio,” “High Ratio,” or “All Competitors Have, Client Does Not.”

None of these flags by themselves have meaning, so you now need to put all of this into context. In our example, the following words probably have no significance at all: “get”, “you”, “top”, “see”, “we”, “all”, “but”, and other words of this type. These are just very basic English language words.

But, we can see other things of note relating to the target page (a.k.a. the client page):

  1. It’s missing any mention of actor ryan reynolds
  2. It’s missing any mention of actor helen mirren
  3. The page has no reviews
  4. Words like “family” and “story” are not mentioned
  5. “Austrian” and “maria altmann” are not used at all
  6. The phrase “woman in gold” and words “billing” and “info” are used proportionally more than they are with the other pages

Note that the last item is only visible if you open the spreadsheet. The issues above could well be significant, as the lead actors, reviews, and other indications that the page has in-depth content. We see that competing pages that rank have details of the story, so that’s an indication that this is what Google (and users) are looking for. The fact that the main key phrase, and the word “billing”, are used to a proportionally high degree also makes it seem a bit spammy.

In fact, if you look at the information closely, you can see that the target page is quite thin in overall content. So much so, that it almost looks like a doorway page. In fact, it looks like it was put together by the movie studio itself, just not very well, as it presents little in the way of a home page experience that would cause it to rank for the name of the movie!

In the many different times I have done an analysis using these methods, I’ve been able to make many different types of observations about pages. A few of the more interesting ones include:

  1. A page that had no privacy policy, yet was taking personally identifiable info from users.
  2. A major lack of important synonyms that would indicate a real depth of available content.
  3. Comparatively low Domain Authority competitors ranking with in-depth content.

These types of observations are interesting and valuable, but it’s important to stress that you shouldn’t be overly mechanical about this. The value in this type of analysis is that it gives you a technical way to compare the content on your page with that of your competitors. This type of analysis should be used in combination with other methods that you use for evaluating that same page. I’ll address this some more in the summary section of this below.

How do you execute this for yourself?

The full spreadsheet contains all the formulas so all you need to do is link in the keyword count data. I have tried this with two different keyword density tools, the one from Searchmetrics, and this one from motoricerca.info.

I am not endorsing these tools, and I have no financial interest in either one—they just seemed to work fairly well for the process I outlined above. To provide the data in the right format, please do the following:

  1. Run all the URLs you are testing through the keyword density tool.
  2. Copy and paste all the one word, two word, and three word results into a tab on the spreadsheet.
  3. Sort them all so you get total word counts aligned by position as I have shown in the linked spreadsheet.
  4. Set up the formulas as I did in the demo spreadsheet (you can just use the demo spreadsheet).
  5. Then do your analysis!

This may sound a bit tedious (and it is), but it has worked very well for us at STC.

Summary

You can also use usability groups and a number of other methods to figure out what users are really looking for on your site. However, what this does is give us a look at what Google has chosen to rank the highest in its search results. Don’t treat this as some sort of magic formula where you mechanically tweak the content to get better metrics in this analysis.

Instead, use this as a method for slicing into your content to better see it the way a machine might see it. It can yield some surprising (and wonderful) insights!


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