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How to Approach Owned and Earned Media

Posted by SamuelScott

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.

content-collage.jpg

Image: Flickr user nickrate

We all know content is king, but if your content marketing plan consists of blindly publishing daily blog posts on your website or submitting countless bylined articles (i.e., guest posts) to random outlets, your king will turn into the court jester.

Marketing must have a sound strategy behind it to be successful. To help the Moz community maximize the return on investment of their content, I want to share a strategy I used in my prior position as a senior director at a global agency, and continue to use as a digital marketing and communications consultant.

What is content, exactly?

First, it is important to know that content is not simply something used to get links. As I explained in a Mozinar and a subsequent blog post on integrating digital marketing and public relations, content is essential to any business’s overall marketing and communications strategy. Its functions include: 

  • Goal Identification
  • Audience Research
  • Messaging and Positioning
  • Channel Research
  • Content Creation
  • Campaign Execution
  • Measuring Results

To use an example from the earlier post: 

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

Content is merely the vehicle that contains a desired marketing message that is then transmitted via a channel to an audience.

The big idea

In case you haven’t heard, the newest thing is for brands to become publishers that create content.

While I was visiting SMX West in 2014, I heard this wonderful talk from Brian Clark of Copyblogger (see the SlideShare here):

The core message: Brands that become online media companies will dominate the Internet Age. One of Clark’s examples: Netflix went from merely distributing content (in the form of TV shows and movies) to creating content.

The strategy makes sense because the more content brands produce, the more likely it is that their content will be shared on social media, the more brand awareness they will generate and the more chances there are for the content to garner links. In the end, the act of becoming a media company is a way to increase overall online engagement, which is an important ranking factor many SEOs are neglecting.

As more and more brands become publishers, marketers have more and more places to publish. However, we cannot effectively target all of these places, especially when our own websites need content.

The key is to develop a strategic approach to content marketing.

The different types of content

In general, there is owned media and earned media. (There is also paid media, but that mainly refers to paying to get earned content placement on a website.)

  • Owned media is content you publish on outlets you own (e.g., your website)
  • Earned media is content other outlets freely give you (e.g., bylined articles and news coverage)

Here is the central question I wish to address: When should you use owned versus earned media? In other words: Say you create a great piece of content. When should you publish it on your website and when should you publish it somewhere else? Owned and earned media have their benefits and drawbacks.

For an in-depth look on online branding and the different types of media, I invite you to read this detailed essay by Will Critchlow on Moz.

Why you should use owned media

  1. You will own the content forever. If you publish, say, a blog post on your company website, then you will own and have access to that document for as long as you own your website. However, you have no guarantee of how long your content will remain on another website.
  2. Your website can rank in the search engines. Why should another website receive the search benefits of your hard work? If I write an e-book that targets a keyword theme addressing informational queries, I want my website to rank for those search terms for the foreseeable future to generate top-of-the-funnel awareness.
  3. It enhances brand building. The more you pub­lish (and promote), the more your brand authority will grow over time as the content gets traf­fic, news coverage, men­tions, and ­links. 

Why you should use earned media

  1. You can use someone else’s audience. A bylined article or news coverage about you on a website or publication read by 100,000 people provides invaluable exposure.
  2. You can earn links. As Jen Lopez explained here, you should not be submitting countless, short guest posts to random websites to get links. A targeted post on a respected website can gain numerous links for your brand. 
  3. You can likely build brand awareness more quickly. Building a brand on your own can take a long time, especially if you are a new business or startup with few readers and social followers. At my prior agency, we got an unknown CEO interviewed or published in what the public relations industry refers to as “Tier 3 outlets.” Then, we took those interviews to “Tier 2 outlets” as proof that he was an influencer worthy to quote or be published in their outlets. From there we went to “Tier 1 outlets” for coverage. This had a tremendous positive impact for the business overall. 

How to decide?

content-marketing.jpg

Image: Flickr user ralphpaglia

Obviously, there are benefits to using both owned and earned media. But a lot of the time, a single piece of content can only be used in one or the other channel. (See the last part of this article for important exceptions!) 

Here is the rule I use for both clients and for myself:

Owned media is used for your long-term mar­ket­ing goals. Earned media is used for your short-term mar­ket­ing goals.

Now, graphic design is not one of my strong points (I’m personally more of a writer), but I’ve created a simple guide to illustrate that rule:

answer-these-questions.jpg

Here are some specific examples I’ve seen and used:

Owned media

  • Is it an attempt to rank highly in search results for a certain keyword theme over time? An example would be an essay that addresses a pain point your target customers have, one they would attempt to address by searching Google. At my prior agency, I wrote a guide to international SEO a few years ago. Last I checked, the agency still ranked in the top four for searches relating to “international SEO strategy” because of that document.
  • Is it part of your sales funnel? Perhaps the sidebar of your website includes a call-to-action to download an e-book. Of course, people would have to provide an e-mail address, and the e-book could contain links to product pages and sales representatives.

Earned media

  • Is it meant to introduce and/or brand yourself to a targeted audience? A client at my prior agency was a mobile advertising network. We had gotten bylined opinion articles for the CEO on major websites that are all about mobile devices and Internet advertising. Over time, the CEO received more and more attention from larger and larger publications, which helped his personal brand and that of the company’s as well. (This is the real reason for so-called guest posting.)
  • Is it meant to generate more immediate sales and/or social media followers? If your company is in a B2B industry, for example, then LinkedIn is an obvious platform on which to publish. By posting on LinkedIn Pulse, you can get more followers of the author’s profile (see an important thought below on company versus individual branding) business connections, leads, and thought leadership.

Internal content strategy for companies

conversations-in-pr.jpg

Image: Flickr user fletcherprince

With LinkedIn, internal branding decisions need to be made because the platform allows only individuals to publish content. So, if your business has a great piece of content for a B2B audience for LinkedIn Pulse or another similar outlet, you must decide who publishes it.

Here’s a brief outline of the strategy I recommend:

  • Determine who can or should represent the company in some public capacity
  • Decide what specific area each person will focus on based on his or her interests and expertise
  • Determine who should produce the content

As a hypothetical example, imagine a startup has a mobile app that helps companies create and manage online communities. Here is how duties could be divided up: 

  • The CEO would discuss topics that relate to founding and running a high-tech startup
  • The vice president of products would focus on technology and cater his discussions to such matters
  • The vice president of marketing would write and speak about community management

It’s crucial that your business divides content and PR duties among the senior staff. Plus, if multiple people are representing the company, there’s greater potential for coverage and exposure.

How to combine owned and earned media

Of course, a lot of your content might not fit neatly into one of the two buckets above. You don’t always have to choose one or the other.

The important point to understand is every third-party publisher is different and has its own rules. It’s crucial to know them so that you do not violate their policies and thereby risk losing the resulting exposure.

When you cannot republish earned media

Moz has a rule that contributors cannot republish posts on their own websites. So, whenever I publish an article here, I do the following:

  • Publish a post on my blog with an excerpt (usually the first paragraph or two) with a call-to-action to visit  Moz for the full article
  • Set the post on my blog to no-index and the canonical URL to that of the Moz post
  • If someone clicks the Twitter share widget on the specific post on my website, the share dialogue uses the canonical URL (to Moz)

This way, we both benefit. Moz gets the due credit (from Google and more), and my blog’s subscribers see that I have published the article (on Moz). I would use this strategy when publishing content on third-party networks that do not allow republishing.

When you can republish earned media

LinkedIn Pulse, for example, allows anyone to publish a lengthy essay, and the website seems to use a combination of algorithms and human editors to decide which essays to promote on specific channels (such as Marketing Strategy or Social Media) and on the website’s homepage.

While LinkedIn does allow you to publish content that has already been published elsewhere, the brand tends to more actively promote original content.

Here’s what I do to maximize the benefits from LinkedIn Pulse:

  • I publish the content on my personal blog
  • Then I immediately post the content to Google+
  • Both of those actions “tell” Google that my website was the original publisher (see this post by Cyrus Shepard on how quickly Google indexes content that is posted to Google+)
  • After about 15 to 30 minutes, I post the content to LinkedIn Pulse
  • LinkedIn is more likely to promote the content then because it is not yet detectable in Google’s SERPs

Here is just one example of an essay I published on my website and on LinkedIn—my website gets the credit in Google search and Google News. LinkedIn also promoted the post to thousands of users:

google-news-post.png

linkedin-pulse-promotion.png

linkedin-post.png

Images: Personal screenshots

This strategy can be used to your advantage. If you publish content on a third-party website, you might be able to convince them to set a canonical tag to your original post on your website. 

Note: the rel=canonical tag is only a suggestion to Google. If another website publishes a post with a canonical tag to your website, the search engine may still choose to make that website the authoritative copy. I would also add a text link somewhere in the body of the post with wording such as “Originally published…”. Matt Cutts has also recommended that the tag be placed as close to the top of <head> section of code as possible.

But even in cases where the canonical tag is not an option, you can still publish the same content in multiple locations, provided one of several provisions is in place. 

The main takeaway

The content marketing strategy for your own website (owned media) should focus on organic search and your sales funnel. The content marketing strategy for publishing and getting coverage elsewhere (earned media) should focus on your public relations and publicity goals (see my Moz essay on the basic principles of PR).

Both inbound and outbound marketing are crucial in any overall marketing strategy. Strategic deployment is the key. 


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A Universal SEO Strategy Audit in 5 Steps – Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

When it comes to building an SEO strategy, many marketers (especially those who don’t spend a significant amount of time with SEO) start off by asking a few key questions. That’s a good start, but only if you’re asking the right questions. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand puts the usual suspects on the chopping block, showing us the five things we should really be looking into when formulating our SEO strategy.

For reference, here’s a still of this week’s whiteboard!

Universal SEO Strategy Audit Whiteboard

Video transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re chatting about building an SEO strategy and having a universal set of five questions that can get you there.

So number one: What keywords do you want to rank for?

Number two: How do we get links?

Number three: Site speed. Mobile? Doesn’t even seem like a question.

Number four: What about Penguin and Panda?

Number five: When do I get money?

This is bologna. That’s not a strategy. Some of those go to tactics you might invest in an SEO, but this is not an SEO strategy. Unfortunately, this is how a lot of conversations about SEO start at teams, with CMOs, with managers, with CEOs, with clients or potential clients, and it’s very frustrating because you can’t truly do a great job with SEO just in the tactical level. If you don’t start with a compelling strategy, doing all of these things is only going to produce a small amount of potential return compared to if you ask the right questions and you get your strategy set before you begin an SEO process and nailing your tactics.

So that’s what I want to go through. I spend a lot of time thinking through these things and analyzing a lot of posts that other people have put up and questions that folks have put in our Q&A system and others, on Quora and other places. I think actually every great SEO strategy that I have ever seen can be the distilled down to answers that come from these five questions.

So number one: What does our organization create that helps solve searchers’ questions or problems? That could be, “Or what will we create in the future?” It might be that you haven’t yet created the thing or things that’s going to help solve searchers’ questions or problems. But that thing that you make, that product or service or content that you are making, that expertise that you hold, something about your organization is creating value that if only searchers could access it, they would be immensely thankful.

It is possible, and I have seen plenty of examples of companies that are so new or so much on the cutting edge that they’re producing things that aren’t solving questions people are asking yet. The problem that you’re solving then is not a question. It’s not something that’s being searched for directly. It usually is very indirect. If you’re creating a machine that, let’s say, turns children’s laughter into energy, as they do in the film “Monsters, Inc.”, that is something very new. No one is searching for machine to turn kids laughing into energy. However, many people are searching for alternative energy. They’re searching for broader types of things and concepts. By the way, if you do invent that machine, I think you’ll probably nail a lot of that interest level stuff.

If you have a great answer to this, you can then move on to, “What is the unique value we provide that no one else does?” We talked about unique value previously on Whiteboard Friday. There’s a whole episode you can watch about that. Basically, if everyone else out there is producing X and X+1 and X+2, you’ve either got to be producing X times 10, or you’ve got to be producing Y, something that is highly unique or is unique because it is of such better quality, such greater quality. It does the job so much better than anything else out there. It’s not, “Hey, we’re better than the top ten search results.” It’s, “Why are you ten times better than anything on this list?”

The third question is, “Who’s going to help amplify our message, and why will they do it?” This is essential because SEO has turned from an exercise, where we essentially take content that already exists or create some content that will solve a searcher problem and then try and acquire links to it, or point links to it, or point ranking signals at it, and instead it’s ones where we have to go out and earn those ranking signals. Because we’ve shifted from link building or ranking signal building to ranking signal earning, we better have people who will help amplify our message, the content that we create, the value that we provide, the service or the product, the message about our brand.

If we don’t have those people who, for some reason, care enough about what we’re doing to help share it with others, we’re going to be shouting into a void. We’re going to get no return on the investment of broadcasting our message or reaching out one to one, or sharing on social media, or distributing. It’s not going to work. We need that amplification. There must be some of it, and because we need amplification in order to earn these ranking signals, we need an answer to who.

That who is going to depend highly on your target audience, your target customers, and who influences your target customers, which may be a very different group than other customers just like them. There are plenty of businesses in industries where your customers will be your worst amplifiers because they love you and they don’t want to share you with anyone else. They love whatever product or service you’re providing, and they want to keep you all to themselves. By the way, they’re not on social media, and they don’t do sharing. So you need another level above them. You need press or bloggers or social media sharers, somebody who influences your target audience.

Number four: What is our process for turning visitors from search into customers? If you have no answer to this, you can’t expect to earn search visits and have a positive return on your investment. You’ve got to be building out that funnel that says, “Aha, people have come to us through channel X, search, social media, e-mail, directly visited, referred from some other website, through business development, through conference or trade show, whatever it is. Then they come back to our website. Then they sign up for an e-mail. Then they make a conversion. How does that work? What does our web-marketing funnel look like? How do we take people that visited our site for the first time from search, from a problem or a question that they had that we answered, and now how do they become a customer?” If you don’t have that process yet, you must build it. That’s part of a great SEO strategy. Then optimization of this is often called conversion rate optimization.

The last question, number five: How do we expose what we do that provides value here in a way that engines can easily crawl, index, understand, and show off? This is getting to much more classic SEO stuff. For many companies they have something wonderful that they’ve built, but it’s just a mobile app or a web app that has no physical URL structure that anyone can crawl and be exposed to, or it’s a service based business.

Let’s say it’s legal services firm. How are we going to turn the expertise of our legal team into something that engines can perceive? Maybe we have the answers to these questions, but we need to find some way to show it off, and that’s where content creation comes into play. So we don’t just need content that is good quality content that can be crawled and indexed. It also must be understood, and this ties a little bit to things we’ve talked about in the past around Hummingbird, where it’s clear that the content is on the topic and that it really answers the searchers’ underlying question, not just uses the keywords the searcher is using. Although, using the keywords is still important from a classic SEO perspective.

Then show off that content is, “How do we do a great job of applying rich snippets, of applying schema, of having a very compelling title and description and URL, of getting that ranked highly, of learning what our competitors are doing that we can uniquely differentiate from them in the search results themselves so that we can improve our click-through rates,” all of those kinds of things.

If you answer these five questions, or if your customer, your client, your team, your boss already has great answers to these five questions, then you can start getting pretty tactical and be very successful. If you don’t have answers to these yet, go get them. Make them explicit, not just implicit. Don’t just assume you know what they are. Have them list them. Make sure everyone on the team, everyone in the SEO process has bought into, “Yes, these are the answers to those five questions that we have. Now, let’s go do our tactics.” I think you’ll find you’re far more successful with any type of SEO project or investment.

All right gang, thanks so much for joining us on Whiteboard Friday, and we’ll see you again next week. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com


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Leveraging Panda to Get Out of Product Feed Jail

Posted by MichaelC

This is a story about Panda, customer service, and differentiating your store from others selling the same products.

Many e-commerce websites get the descriptions, specifications, and imagery for products they sell from feeds or databases provided by the manufacturers. The manufacturers might like this, as they control how their product is described and shown. However, it does their retailers no good when they are trying to rank for searches for those products and they’ve got the exact same content as every other retailer. If the content in the feed is thin, then you’ll have pages with…well….thin content. And if there’s a lot of content for the products, then you’ll have giant blocks of content that Panda might spot as being the same as they’ve seen on many other sites. To throw salt on the wound, if the content is really crappy, badly written, or downright wrong, then the retailers’ sites will look low-quality to Panda and users as well.

Many webmasters see Panda as a type of Google penalty—but it’s not, really. Panda is a collection of measurements Google is taking of your web pages to try and give your pages a rating on how happy users are likely to be with those pages. It’s not perfect, but then again—neither is your website.

Many SEO folks (including me) tend to focus on the kinds of tactical and structural things you can do to make Panda see your web pages as higher quality: things like adding big, original images, interactive content like videos and maps, and lots and lots and lots and lots of text. These are all good tactics, but let’s step back a bit and look at a specific example to see WHY Panda was built to do this, and from that, what we can do as retailers to enrich the content we have for e-commerce products where our hands are a bit tied—we’re getting a feed of product info from the manufacturers, the same as every other retailer of those products.

I’m going to use a real-live example that I suffered through about a month ago. I was looking for a replacement sink stopper for a bathroom sink. I knew the brand, but there wasn’t a part number on the part I needed to replace. After a few Google searches, I think I’ve found it on Amazon:

Kohler store, sink stopper, on Amazon.com

Don’t you wish online shopping was always this exciting?

What content actually teaches the customer

All righty… my research has shown me that there are standard sizes for plug stoppers. In fact, I initially ordered a “universal fit sink stopper.” Which didn’t fit. Then I found 3 standard diameters, and 5 or 6 standard lengths. No problem…I possess that marvel of modern tool chests, a tape measure…so I measure the part I have that I need to replace. I get about 1.5″ x 5″. So let’s scroll down to the product details to see if it’s a match:

Kohler sink stopper product info from hell

Whoa. 1.2 POUNDS? This sink stopper must be made of Ununoctium. The one in my hand weighs about an ounce. But the dimensions are way off as well: a 2″ diameter stopper isn’t going to fit, and mine needs to be at least an inch longer.

I scroll down to the product description…maybe there’s more detail there, maybe the 2″ x 2″ is the box or something.

I've always wanted a sink stopper designed for long long

Well, that’s less than helpful, with a stupid typo AND incorrect capitalization AND a missing period at the end. Doesn’t build confidence in the company’s quality control.

Looking at the additional info section, maybe this IS the right part…the weight quoted in there is about right:

Maybe this is my part after all

Where else customers look for answers

Next I looked at the questions and answers bit, which convinced me that it PROBABLY was the right part:

Customers will answer the question if the retailer won't...sometimes.

If I was smart, I would have covered my bets by doing what a bunch of other customers also did: buy a bunch of different parts, and surely one of them will fit. Could there possibly was a clearer signal that the product info was lacking than this?

If you can't tell which one to buy, buy them all!

In this case, that was probably smarter than spending another 1/2 hour of my time snooping around online. But in general, people aren’t going to be willing to buy THREE of something just to make sure they get the right one. This cheap part was an exception.

So, surely SOMEONE out there has the correct dimensions of this part on their site—so I searched for the part number I saw on the Amazon listing. But as it turned out, that crappy description and wrong weight and dimensions were on every site I found…because they came from the manufacturer.

Better Homes and Gardens...but not better description.

A few of the sites had edited out the “designed for long long” bit, but apart from that, they were all the same.

What sucks for the customer is an opportunity for you

Many, many retailers are in this same boat—they get their product info from the manufacturer, and if the data sucks in their feed, it’ll suck on their site. Your page looks weak to both users and to Panda, and it looks the same as everybody else’s page for that product…to both users and to Panda. So (a) you won’t rank very well, and (b) if you DO manage to get a customer to that page, it’s not as likely to convert to a sale.

What can you do to improve on this? Here’s a few tactics to consider.

1. Offer your own additional description and comments

Add a new field to your CMS for your own write-ups on products, and when you discover issues like the above, you can add your own information—and make it VERY clear what’s the manufacturer’s stock info and what you’ve added (that’s VALUE-ADDED) as well. My client Sports Car Market magazine does this with their collector car auction reports in their printed magazine: they list the auction company’s description of the car, then their reporter’s assessment of the car. This is why I buy the magazine and not the auction catalog.

2. Solicit questions

Be sure you solicit questions on every product page—your customers will tell you what’s wrong or what important information is missing. Sure, you’ve got millions of products to deal with, but what the customers are asking about (and your sales volume of course) will help you prioritize as well as find the problems opportunities.

Amazon does a great job of enabling this, but in this case, I used the Feedback option to update the product info, and got back a total bull-twaddle email from the seller about how the dimensions are in the product description thank you for shopping with us, bye-bye. I tried to help them, for free, and they shat on me.

3. But I don’t get enough traffic to get the questions

Don’t have enough site volume to get many customer requests? No problem, the information is out there for you on Amazon :-). Take your most important products, and look them up on Amazon, and see what questions are being asked—then answer those ONLY on your own site.

4. What fits with what?

Create fitment/cross-reference charts for products. You probably have in-house knowledge of what products fit/are compatible with what other products. Just because YOU know a certain accessory fits all makes and models, because it’s some industry-standard size, doesn’t mean that the customer knows this.

If there’s a particular way to measure a product so you get the correct size, explain that (with photos of what you’re measuring, if it seems at all complicated). I’m getting a new front door for my house. 

  • How big is the door I need? 
  • Do I measure the width of the door itself, or the width of the opening (probably 1/8″ wider)? 
  • Or if it’s pre-hung, do I measure the frame too? Is it inswing or outswing?
  • Right or left hinged…am I supposed to look at the door from inside the house or outside to figure this out? 

If you’re a door seller, this is all obvious stuff, but it wasn’t obvious to me, and NOT having the info on a website means (a) I feel stupid, and (b) I’m going to look at your competitors’ sites to see if they will explain it…and maybe I’ll find a door on THEIR site I like better anyway.

Again, prioritize based on customer requests.

5. Provide your own photos and measurements

If examples of the physical products are available to you, take your own photos, and take your own measurements.

In fact, take your OWN photo of YOURSELF taking the measurement—so the user can see exactly what part of the product you’re measuring. In the photo below, you can see that I’m measuring the diameter of the stopper, NOT the hole in the sink, NOT the stopper plus the rubber gasket. And no, Kohler, it’s NOT 2″ in diameter…by a long shot.

Don't just give the measurements, SHOW the measurements

Keep in mind, you shouldn’t have to tear apart your CMS to do any of this. You can put your additions in a new database table, just tied to the core product content by SKU. In the page template code for the product page, you can check your database to see if you have any of your “extra bits” to display alongside the feed content, and this way keep it separate from the core product catalog code. This will make updates to the CMS/product catalog less painful as well.

Fixing your content doesn’t have to be all that difficult, nor expensive

At this point, you’re probably thinking “hey, but I’ve got 1.2 million SKUs, and if I were to do this, it’d take me 20 years to update all of them.” FINE. Don’t update all of them. Prioritize, based on factors like what you sell the most of, what you make the best margin on, what customers ask questions about the most, etc. Maybe concentrate on your top 5% in terms of sales, and do those first. Take all that money you used to spend buying spammy links every month, and spend it instead on junior employees or interns doing the product measurements, extra photos, etc.

And don’t be afraid to spend a little effort on a low value product, if it’s one that frequently gets questions from customers. Simple things can make a life-long fan of the customer. I once needed to replace a dishwasher door seal, and didn’t know if I needed special glue, special tools, how to cut it to fit with or without overlap, etc. I found a video on how to do the replacement on RepairClinic.com. So easy! They got my business for the $10 seal, of course…but now I order my $50 fridge water filter from them every six months as well.

Benefits to your conversion rate

Certainly the tactics we’ve talked about will improve your conversion rate from visitors to purchasers. If JUST ONE of those sites I looked at for that damn sink stopper had the right measurement (and maybe some statement about how the manufacturer’s specs above are actually incorrect, we measured, etc.), I’d have stopped right there and bought from that site.

What does this have to do with Panda?

But, there’s a Panda benefit here too. You’ve just added a bunch of additional, unique text to your site…and maybe a few new unique photos as well. Not only are you going to convert better, but you’ll probably rank better too.

If you’re NOT Amazon, or eBay, or Home Depot, etc., then Panda is your secret weapon to help you rank against those other sites whose backlink profiles are stronger than carbon fibre (that’s a really cool video, by the way). If you saw my Whiteboard Friday on Panda optimization, you’ll know that Panda tuning can overcome incredible backlink profile deficits.

It’s go time

We’re talking about tactics that are time-consuming, yes—but relatively easy to implement, using relatively inexpensive staff (and in some cases, your customers are doing some of the work for you). And it’s something you can roll out a product at a time. You’ll be doing things that really DO make your site a better experience for the user…we’re not just trying to trick Panda’s measurements.

  1. Your pages will rank better, and bring more traffic.
  2. Your pages will convert better, because users won’t leave your site, looking elsewhere for answers to their questions.
  3. Your customers will be more loyal, because you were able to help them when nobody else bothered.

Don’t be held hostage by other peoples’ crappy product feeds. Enhance your product information with your own info and imagery. Like good link-building and outreach, it takes time and effort, but both Panda and your site visitors will reward you for it.


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Learn From Dana Lookadoo, Support Her Medical Fund

Posted by jennita

One aspect of the Moz Community that doesn’t get mentioned enough is the individual community members who were here in the early days of SEOmoz. The folks who stuck around when our tools were brand new, when Rand was “just another SEO guy,” and when our community was really just a bunch of folks talking about SEO.

One of those early members was Dana Lookadoo. She joined Moz in April 2007, and has been a supporter, trainer, and mentor to many others ever since. Whether it’s the blog posts she’s written, the thoughtful comments she’s left, or the presentations she’s given at MozCon and in webinars, she’s provided for this community like few others have.

Last year, Dana took a horrible fall when she was on a bike ride (she’s an avid cyclist), and broke her neck and back. She’s had many ups and downs since the accident, and hasn’t been able to work full-time. Dana now suffers intense burning from neuropathy and muscle spacicity that has spread from head to toe, and she has burning and spasms covering approximately 75% of her body. Her mobility and function is greatly limited and she suffers a lot of pain each day.

She splits her time between the wheelchair, the bed, and some in the walker. Unfortunately, over the last few days she’s had so much pain and spasms that she isn’t walking as much. It is also quite difficult for Dana to deal with bright lights, and she can’t spend much time on her phone or computer.

Dana has given so much to the Moz community, and to our industry as a whole. Her knowledge and generosity has helped marketers for many years, and now it’s our turn to return the favor. She’s in need of part-time caregivers, which cost $4,125 per month. That’s almost $50k for a year (…and that’s only part-time!). This doesn’t include paying for the multiple hospital stays, visits to the ER, physical therapy, occupational therapy, neuropathy treatment, and so on.

I’m asking you to help one of our amazing community members by donating to her medical fund. Every little bit helps, and you can even set up a monthly payment (I’m doing $25 per month). If you don’t have the means, please help us spread the word. It’s our turn to give back to Dana.

I wanted to take this opportunity to highlight some of Dana’s amazing work she’s done for the Moz Community, as so much of it remains great advice to marketers.

Stress-free Website Redesign for Search and Social

Download a PDF of the presentation

In September 2013, just two months before her accident, Dana presented an excellent webinar with us about how to make sure your search and social efforts don’t go to waste when you redesign a website. The full webinar is a little over an hour, but believe me, it’s worth the watch.

Rock Your SEO with Structured Social Sharing

At MozCon 2012, Dana was one of our very first Community Speakers to rock the stage. After seeing how well these presentations were received, we decided to continue the program each year. We’ve always been grateful to Dana for helping to make this so successful. In her presentation she discusses how to make your SEO even better by ensuring your social sharing is set up correctly. Give it a watch!

And if you’d like to just check out the slide deck, you can view that below:

I could honestly go on and on, as she’s been such an integral piece of the greater online marketing community. 

Donations needed

Please take a few moments and donate what you can. Every little bit helps! If you don’t have the means, we understand that as well, and hope you’ll share the post and fund using the methods below.

Please help share

Let’s get the word out! Here are some easy ways to help make a difference for Dana:

Lazy RT: https://twitter.com/Moz/status/560516906675736578

Embed a widget on your site:

<object classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" width="258" height="338" title="Click Here to donate!" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"><param name="movie" value="http://funds.gofundme.com/Widgetflex.swf" /><param name="quality" value="high" /><param name="flashvars" value="page=danalookadoo&template=11" /><param name="wmode" value="transparent" /><embed allowScriptAccess="always" src="http://funds.gofundme.com/Widgetflex.swf" quality="high" flashVars="page=danalookadoo&template=11" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="258" height="338"></embed></object>

Share this image on Twitter: 

If you have other ideas on how to get the word out and help our fellow community member, let’s hear it. Thank you all for your support and assistance.


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