Posted by rMaynes1

In September 2014, Mediative released its latest eye-tracking research entitled “The Evolution of Google’s Search Engine Results Pages and Their Effects on User Behaviour“.

This large study had participants conduct various searches using Google on a desktop. For example, participants were asked “Imagine you’re moving from Toronto to Vancouver. Use Google to find a moving company in Toronto.” Participants were all presented with the same Google SERP, no matter the search query.

Mediative wanted to know where people look and click on the SERP the most, what role the location of the listing on the SERP plays in winning views and clicks, and how click activity on listings has changed with the introduction of Google features such as the carousel, the knowledge graph etc.

Mediative discovered that, just as Google’s SERP has evolved over the past decade, so too has the way in which search engine users scan the page before making a click.

Back in 2005 when a similar eye-tracking study was conducted for the first time by Mediative (formerly Enquiro), it was discovered that people searched in a distinctive “triangle” pattern, starting in the top left of the search results page where they expected the first organic listing to be located, and reading across horizontally before moving their eyes down to the second organic listing, and reading horizontally, but not quite as far. This area of concentrated gaze activity became known as Google’s “Golden Triangle”. The study concluded that if a business’s listing was not in the Golden Triangle, its odds of being seen by a searcher were dramatically reduced.

Heat map from 2005 showing the area known as Google’s “Golden Triangle”.

But now, in 2014, the top organic results are no longer always in the top-left corner where searchers expect them to be, so they scan other areas of the SERP, trying to seek out the top organic listing, but being distracted by other elements along the way. The #1 organic listing is shifting further down the page, and while this listing still captures the most click activity (32.8%) regardless of what new elements are presented, the shifting location has opened up the top of the page with more potential areas for businesses to achieve visibility.

Where scanning was once more horizontal, the adoption of mobile devices over the past 9 years has habitually conditioned searchers to now scan more vertically—they are looking for the fastest path to the desired content, and, compared to 9 years ago, they are viewing more search results listings during a single session and spending less time viewing each one.

Searchers on Google now scan far more vertically than several years ago.

One of the biggest changes from SERPS 9 years ago to today is that Google is now trying to keep people on the result page for as long as they can.

An example is in the case of the knowledge graph. In Mediative’s study. when searchers were looking for “weather in New Orleans”, the results page that was presented to them showed exactly what they needed to know. Participants were asked to click on the result that they felt best met their needs, even if, if reality, they wouldn’t have clicked through (in order to end that task). When a knowledge graph result exactly met the intent of the searcher, the study found 80% of people looked at that result, and 44% clicked on it. Google provided searchers with a relevant enough answer to keep them on the SERP. The top organic listing captured 36.5% of pages clicks—compared to 82% when the knowledge graph did not provide the searcher with the answer they were looking for.

It’s a similar case with the carousel results; when a searcher clicks on a listing, instead of going through to the listing’s website, another SERP is presented specifically about the business, as Google tries to increase paid ad impressions/clicks on the Google search results page.

How can businesses stay on top of these changes and ensure they still get listed?

There are four main things to keep in mind:

1. The basic fundamentals of SEO are as important as ever

Create unique, fresh content, which speaks to the needs of your customers as this will always trump chasing the algorithm. There are also on-page and off-page SEO tactics that you can employ that can increase your chances of being listed in areas of the SERP other than your website’s organic listing such as front-loading keywords in page titles and meta descriptions, getting listed on directories and ratings and reviews site, having social pages etc. It’s important to note that SEO strategy is no longer a one-size-fits-all approach.

2. Consider using schema mark-up wherever possible

In Mediative’s 2014 Google SERP research, it was discovered that blog posts that had been marked up using schema to show the picture and name of the author got a significant amount of engagement, even when quite far down the first page—these listings garnered an average of 15.5% of total page clicks.

Note: As of August 2014, Google removed authorship markup entirely. However, the results are still a good example of how schema mark-up can be used to make your business listing stand out more on the SERP, potentially capturing more view and clicks, and therefore more website traffic.

In the study, participants were asked to “Imagine that you’re starting a business and you need to find a company to host your website. Use Google to find information about website hosting companies”. The SERP presented is shown below:

Almost 45% of clicks went to 2 blog posts titled “Five Best Web Hosting Companies” and “10 Best Web Hosting Companies”.

In general, the top clicked posts were those that had titles including phrases such as:

• “Best…”
• “Reviews of…”
• “Top 5…”
• “How-to…”

According to Google, “On-page markup helps search engines understand the information on webpages and provide richer results…Google doesn’t use markup for ranking purposes at this time-but rich snippets can make your web pages appear more prominently in search results, so you may see an increase in traffic.”

Schema markup is probably the most under-utilized tool for SEO, presenting a huge opportunity for companies that do utilize the Google approved tool. Searchmetrics reported that only 0.3% of websites use schema markup, yet over a third of Google’s results contain rich snippets (additional text, images and links below the individual search results). BruceClay.com reports rich snippets can increase CTRs of listings between 15-50% and that websites using schema markup tend to rank higher in search results.

Schema mark-up can be used to add star ratings, number of reviews, pricing (all shown in the listing below) and more to a search results page listing.

3. Know the intent of your users

Understanding what searchers are trying to discover when they conduct a search can help determine how much effort you should try and put into appearing in the number one organic listing, which can be an extremely difficult task without unlimited budget and resources—and, even if you do make it the number one organic listing, traffic is not guaranteed as discovered in this reaserch. If you’re competing with big name brands, or ratings and review sites, and THAT is what your customers want, they you are going to struggle to compete.

The importance of your business being the first listing vs. on the first page therefore, is highly dependent on the searcher’s intent, plus the strength of your brand. The key is to always keep user intent top-of-mind, and this can be established by talking to real people, rather than guessing. What are they looking for when they are searching for your site? Structure your content around what people really want and need, list your site on the directories that people actually visit or reference, create videos (if that’s what your audience wants)—know what your actual customers are looking for, and then provide it.

There are going to be situations when a business can’t get to number one on the organic listings. As previously mentioned, the study shows that this is still the key place to be, and the top organic listing captures more clicks that any other single listing. But if your chances of getting to that number one spot are slim, you need to focus on other areas of the SERP, such as positions #4 or higher, which will be easier to obtain ranking for—businesses that are positioned lower on the SERP (especially positions 2-4) see more click activity than they did several years ago, making this real estate much more valuable. As Gord Hotchkiss writes about, searchers tend to “chunk” information on the SERP and scan each chuck in the same way they used to search the entire SERP—in a triangle pattern. Getting listed at the top of a “chunk” can therefore be effective for many businesses. This idea of “chunking” and scanning can be seen in the heat map below.

To add to that, Mediative’s research showed that everything located above the top 4 organic listings (so, carousel results, knowledge graph, paid listings, local listings etc.) combined captured 84% of clicks. If you can’t get your business listing to #1, but can get listed somewhere higher than #4, you have a good chance of being seen, and clicked on by searchers. Ultimately, people expect Google to continue to do its job, and respond to search queries with the most relevant results at the top. The study points out that only 1% of participants were willing to click through to Page 2 to see more results. If you’re not listed on page 1 of Google for relevant searches, you may as well not exist online.

4. A combination of SEO and paid search can maximize your visibility in SERP areas that have the biggest impact on both branding and traffic

Even though organic listings are where many businesses are striving to be listed (and where the majority of clicks take place), it’s important not to forget about paid listings as a component of your digital strategy. Click-through rates for top sponsored listings (positions 1 and 2) have changed very little in the past decade. Where the huge change has taken place is in the ability of sponsored ads on the right rail to attract attention and clicks. Activity on this section of the page is almost non-existent. This can be put down to a couple of factors including searchers conditioned behaviour as mentioned before, to scan more vertically, thanks to our increased mobile usage, and the fact that over the years we have learned that those results may not typically be very relevant, or as good as the organic results, so we tend not to even take the time to view them.

Mediative’s research also found that there are branding effects of paid search, even if not directly driving traffic. We asked participants to “Imagine you are traveling to New Orleans and are looking for somewhere to meet a friend for dinner in the French Quarter area. Use Google to find a restaurant.” Participants were presented with a SERP showing 2 paid ads—the first was for opentable.com, and the second for the restaurant Remoulade, remoulade.com.

The top sponsored listing, opentable.com, was viewed by 84% of participants, and captured 26% of clicks. The second listing, remoulade.com, only captured 2% of clicks but was looked at by 73% of participants. By being seen by almost 3/4 of participants, the paid listing can increase brand affinity, and therefore purchase (or choice) consideration in other areas! For example, if the searcher comes back and searches again another time, or clicks to opentable.com and then sees Remoulade listed, it may benefit from a higher brand affinity from having already been seen in the paid listings. Mediative conducted a Brand Lift study featuring Honda that found the more real estate that brands own on the SERP, the higher the CTR, and the higher the brand affinity, brand recognition, purchase consideration etc. Using paid search for more of a branding play is essentially free brand advertising—while you should be prepared to get the clicks and pay for them of course, it likely that your business listing will be seen by a large number of people without capturing the same number of clicks. Impression data can also be easily tracked with Google paid ads so you know exactly how many times your ad was shown, and can therefore estimate how many people actually looked at it from a branding point of view.

Rebecca Maynes is a Marketing Communications Strategist with Mediative, and was a major contributor on this study. The full study, including click-through rates for all areas of the SERP, can be downloaded at www.mediative.com/SERP.

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Posted by Cyrus-Shepard

“What is this page about?”

As marketers, helping search engines answer that basic question is one of our most important tasks. Search engines can’t read pages like humans can, so we incorporate structure and clues as to what our content means. This helps provide the relevance element of search engine optimization that matches queries to useful results.

Understanding the techniques used to capture this meaning helps to provide better signals as to what our content relates to, and ultimately helps it to rank higher in search results. This post explores a series of on-page techniques that not only build upon one another, but can be combined in sophisticated ways.

While Google doesn’t reveal the exact details of its algorithm, over the years we’ve collected evidence from interviews, research papers, US patent filings and observations from hundreds of search marketers to be able to explore these processes. Special thanks to Bill Slawski, whose posts on SEO By the Sea led to much of the research for this work.

As you read, keep in mind these are only some of the ways in which Google could determine on-page relevancy, and they aren’t absolute law! Experimenting on your own is always the best policy.

We’ll start with the simple, and move to the more advanced.

1. Keyword Usage

In the beginning, there were keywords. All over the page.

The concept was this: If your page focused on a certain topic, search engines would discover keywords in important areas. These locations included the title tag, headlines, alt attributes of images, and throughout in the text. SEOs helped their pages rank by placing keywords in these areas.

Even today, we start with keywords, and it remains the most basic form of on-page optimization.

Most on-page SEO tools still rely on keyword placement to grade pages, and while it remains a good place to start, research shows its influence has fallen. 

While it’s important to ensure your page at a bare minimum contains the keywords you want to rank for, it is unlikely that keyword placement by itself will have much of an influence on your page’s ranking potential.

2. TF-IDF

It’s not keyword density, it’s term frequency–inverse document frequency (TF-IDF). 

Google researchers recently described TF-IDF as “long used to index web pages” and variations of TF-IDF appear as a component in several well-known Google patents.

TF-IDF doesn’t measure how often a keyword appears, but offers a measurement of importance by comparing how often a keyword appears compared to expectations gathered from a larger set of documents.

If we compare the phrases “basket” to “basketball player” in Google’s Ngram viewer, we see that “basketball player” is a more rare, while “basket” is more common. Based on this frequency, we might conclude that “basketball player” is significant on a page that contains that term, while the threshold for “basket” remains much higher.

For SEO purposes, when we measure TF-IDF’s correlation with higher rankings, it performs only moderately better than individual keyword usage. In other words, generating a high TF-IDF score by itself generally isn’t enough to expect much of an SEO boost. Instead, we should think of TF-IDF as an important component of other more advanced on-page concepts. 

3. Synonyms and Close Variants

With over 6 billion searches per day, Google has a wealth of information to determine what searchers actually mean when typing queries into a search box. Google’s own research shows that synonyms actually play a role in up to 70% of searches.

To solve this problem, search engines possess vast corpuses of synonyms and close variants for billions of phrases, which allows them to match content to queries even when searchers use different words than your text. An example is the query dog pics, which can mean the same thing as:

• Dog Photos   • Pictures of Dogs   • Dog Pictures   • Canine Photos   • Dog Photographs

On the other hand, the query Dog Motion Picture means something else entirely, and it’s important for search engines to know the difference.

From an SEO point of view, this means creating content using natural language and variations, instead of employing the same strict keywords over and over again.

Using variations of your main topics can also add deeper semantic meaning and help solve the problem of disambiguation, when the same keyword phrase can refer to more than one concept. Plant and factory together might refer to a manufacturing plant, whereas plant and shrub refer to vegetation.

Today, Google’s Hummingbird algorithm also uses co-occurrence to identify synonyms for query replacement.

4. Page Segmentation

Where you place your words on a page is often as important as the words themselves.

Each web page is made up of different parts—headers, footers, sidebars, and more. Search engines have long worked to determine the most important part of a given page. Both Microsoft and Google hold several patents suggesting content in the more relevant sections of HTML carry more weight.

Content located in the main body text likely holds more importance than text placed in sidebars or alternative positions. Repeating text placed in boilerplate locations, or chrome, runs the risk of being discounted even more.

Page segmentation becomes significantly more important as we move toward  mobile devices, which often hide portions of the page. Search engines want to serve users the portion of your pages that are visible and important, so text in these areas deserves the most focus.

To take it a step further, HTML5 offers addition semantic elements such as <article>, <aside>, and <nav>, which can clearly define sections of your webpage.

5. Semantic Distance and Term Relationships

When talking about on-page optimization, semantic distance refers to the relationships between different words and phrases in the text. This differs from the physical distance between phrases, and focuses on how terms connect within sentences, paragraphs, and other HTML elements.

How do search engines know that “Labrador” relates to “dog breeds” when the two phrases aren’t in the same sentence?

Search engines solve this problem by measuring the distance between different words and phrases within different HTML elements. The closer the concepts are semantically, the closer the concepts may be related. Phrases located in the same paragraph are closer semantically than phrases separated by several blocks of text.

Additionally, HTML elements may shorten the semantic distance between concepts, pulling them closer together. For example, list items can be considered equally distant to one another, and “the title of a document may be considered to be close to every other term in document“.

6. Co-occurrence and Phrase-Based Indexing

Up to this point, we’ve discussed individual keywords and relationships between them. Search engines also employ methods of indexing pages based on complete phrases, and also ranking pages on the relevance of those phrases.

We know this process as phrase-based indexing.

What’s most interesting about this process is not how Google determines the important phrases for a webpage, but how Google can use these phrases to rank a webpage based on how relevant they are.

Using the concept of co-occurrence, search engines know that certain phrases tend to predict other phrases. If your main topic targets “John Oliver,” this phrase often co-occurs with other phrases like “late night comedian,” “Daily Show,” and “HBO.” A page that contains these related terms is more likely to be about “John Oliver” than a page that doesn’t contain related terms.

Add to this incoming links from pages with related, co-occurring phrases and you’ve given your page powerful contextual signals.

7. Entity Salience

Looking to the future, search engines are exploring ways of using relationships between entities, not just keywords, to determine topical relevance.

One technique, published as a Google research paper, describes assigning relevance through entity salience.

Entity salience goes beyond traditional keyword techniques, like TF-IDF, for finding relevant terms in a document by leveraging known relationships between entities. An entity is anything in the document that is distinct and well defined.

The stronger an entity’s relationship to other entities on the page, the more significant that entity becomes.

In the diagram above, an article contains the topics Iron Man, Tony Stark, Pepper Potts and Science Fiction. The phrase “Marvel Comics” has a strong entity relationship to all these terms. Even it only appears once, it’s likely significant in the document. 

On the other hand, even though the phrase “Cinerama” appears multiple times (because the film showed there), this phrase has weaker entity relationships, and likely isn’t as significant.

Practical tips for better on-page optimization

As we transition from keyword placement to more advanced practices of topic targeting, it’s actually easy to incorporate these concepts into our content. While most of us don’t have the means available to calculate semantic relationships and entity occurrences, there are a number of simple steps we can take when crafting optimized content:

1. Keyword research forms your base. Even though individual keywords themselves are no longer enough to form the foundation of your content, everything begins with good keyword research. You want to know what terms you are targeting, the relative competition around those keywords, and the popularity of those terms. Ultimately, your goal is to connect your content with the very keywords people type and speak into the search box.
   
   
2. Research around topics and themes. Resist researching single keywords, and instead move towards exploring your keyword themes. Examine the secondary keywords related to each keyword. When people talk about your topic, what words do they use to describe it? What are the properties of your subject? Use these supporting keyword phrases as cast members to build content around your central theme.
   
   
3. When crafting your content, answer as many questions as you can. Good content answers questions, and semantically relevant content reflects this. A top ranking for any search query means the search engine believes your content answers the question best. As you structure your content around topics and themes, make sure you deserve the top ranking by answering the questions and offering a user experience better than the competition.
   
   
4. Use natural language and variations. During your keyword research process, it’s helpful to identify other common ways searchers refer to your topic, and include these in your content when appropriate. Semantic keyword research is often invaluable to this process.
   
   
5. Place your important content in the most important sections. Avoid footers and sidebars for important content. Don’t try to fool search engines with fancy CSS or JavaScript tricks. Your most important content should go in the places where it is most visible and accessible to readers.
   
   
6. Structure your content appropriately. Headers, paragraphs, lists, and tables all provide structure to content so that search engines understand your topic targeting. A clear webpage contains structure similar to a good university paper. Employ proper introductions, conclusions, topics organized into paragraphs, spelling and grammar, and cite your sources properly.

At the end of the day, we don’t need a super computer to make our content better, or easier to understand. If we write like humans for humans, our content goes a long way in becoming optimized for search engines. What are your best tips for on-page SEO and topic targeting?

Special thanks to Dawn Shepard, who provided the images for this post.

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Posted by Kristina Kledzik

There’s a reason we use the terms  “white hat” and “black hat” for SEO: it used to be the Wild West. Black hat tactics were so effective, they were almost necessary to market online. Paying a few thousand dollars to an SEO could get you to rank #1 for almost any term (before you let them go and your competitor paid them the same to outrank you). You only got a few thousand dollars in return for that ranking, though, since there weren’t many people shopping online yet.

Fast forward to today: Ranking well on Google is insanely profitable—much more so than it ever was in the early days—and Google’s algorithm has advanced dramatically. But former SEOs and people outside our industry still hold on to that idea that a few thousand dollars of “technical SEO” can make them magically rank #1. 

So, how do you convince your old school clients things have changed?

The immediate answer

When this comes up in conversation, I have a few trump phrases that usually bring clients around:

• “Yeah, that used to be a great tactic, but now it puts you at risk for getting a penalty.” (Really, any response that includes the word “penalty” stops clients in their tracks.)
• “That makes sense, but Matt Cutts said…” / “Good point, but Google’s official blog recommends…”
• “I / another coworker / another client / a Mozzer has tried that, and it had disastrous results…”

Basically, acknowledge their idea as valid so you don’t insult them, then explain why it won’t work in a way that scares the shit out of them by mentioning real repercussions. Or, you know, just persuade them gently with logic.

If you can’t persuade/scare the shit out of them, tell them you’ll do some research and get back to them. Then do it.

If that doesn’t work…

Okay, so you have answers for on-the-spot questions now. They will work anywhere from moderately well to amazingly well, depending on your delivery and the respect you’ve gained from your client. But the client may ask for more research, or be skeptical of your answer. To be really effective, the right answer has to be coupled with a lot of respect and a logical, well-delivered explanation. 

Many of you are probably thinking, “I establish respect by being right / talking professionally / offering a lot of case studies during the sales process.” That’s the sort of thinking that doesn’t earn respect. You gain respect by consistently being:

1. Respectful, even if your clients are wrong

It’s embarrassing to be wrong. When your client says, “What meta keywords should we put on this page?” and you chuckle and say, “Gosh, meta keywords haven’t been used in so long—I don’t even think Google ever used them,” your client is going to fight you on it, not because they’re particularly invested in the idea of using meta keywords, but because you’ve made them feel wrong.

So when your client is wrong, start by validating their idea. Then, explain the right solution, not necessarily digging into why their solution is wrong:

Client: What meta keywords should we put on this page?

2. Honest

You’re probably smart enough not to make up client anecdotes or lie about what Matt Cutts has said. Where I usually see dishonesty in consulting is when consultants screw up and their clients call them on it. 

It looks bad to be wrong, especially when someone is paying you to be right. It’s even worse to be caught in a lie or look dishonest. Here’s my mantra: It’s not wrong to make an honest mistake. When clients tell you you’ve done something wrong, consider it a misunderstanding. Explain where you were coming from and why you did what you did briefly, then fix it.

(Note: this obviously doesn’t work if you made a stupid mistake. If you made a stupid mistake, apologize and offer to fix it, free of charge. It’ll lose you some money up front, but it’ll be worth it in the long run.)

It’s called the  Benjamin Franklin Effect: “He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself have obliged.” (Props to Rob Ousbey for telling me about this.)

When your client has done something right, compliment them on how they’ve made your job easier since you don’t have to fix their mistakes. When your client has done something wrong, let them know what they should do to fix it, but help them share in the work to make the change. It’ll make the client feel valued and it’ll take a big part of the workload off of you.

5. Proactive

Good project management is the key to effective consulting. When clients don’t know what you’re working on, they get worried that you’re wasting their money. Make sure that you consistently:

• Meet; I like to have scheduled meetings once a week
• Share a 3-6 month project plan, with dates and deliverables outlined
• Ship those deliverables on time
• Respond to emails within a day or two, even if the answer is “Great question! I’m prioritizing [other project for the same client right now], can I get back to you in a week or so?”
• Follow up with open questions; if a client asks you a question in a meeting you don’t know, admit you don’t know, say you’ll get back to them after you research it, then actually do that

I think that project management is often dropped because it seems so easy that it’s de-prioritized. Don’t believe that: this may be the most important of the five traits I’ve listed.

To sum it up: be honest, selfless, and proactive, and your clients are going to love you.

Even if you’re a terrible SEO (though try your best to be a good one), clients are going to respect consultants who put their clients’ business first, are open and honest about what they’re doing and thinking, and get their work done without being micromanaged.

Now that you’ve earned your client’s respect, they will be open to you changing their mind. You just have to give them a reason to.

Nail it with a great argument

When a client says, “Can we rank for ‘trucks’ by putting the word ‘truck’ as the alt text to each image on this page?” our mind immediately says, “No, why would you think that?” That’s not going to win the argument for you.

The reason we SEOs say “why would you think that?” is because we know the answer. So, teach your client. Start by validating their idea (what did we just learn about clients being wrong?), then explain the right answer, then explain why their answer won’t work:

Client: Can we rank for “trucks” by putting the word “truck” as the alt text to each image on this page?

You: Well, that would certainly get “trucks” on the page more often! To really optimize the page for “trucks,” though, we’ll need to put it in the page title, and a few times in the body of the page. SEO is all about competition, and our competition is doing that. We have to at least match them. Once the page is optimized for “trucks,” though, we’ll still have to work to get more backlinks and mentions around the web to compete with Wikipedia, which ranks #1 right now for “trucks.”

Don’t focus too much on their mistake.The more time you spend on the disagreement, the more frustrated your client will get; the more time you spend on your solution, the more impressed they’ll be with you.

If that doesn’t work, do the research to tell an even better story:

• Give examples from other clients. Don’t give away too many names, of course, but knowing that you’ve solved this problem or a problem like it in the past makes clients feel much more confident in you.
• If you’ve never seen this problem before, reach out to your SEO community. One of the best parts of working at Distilled is that when a client off-handedly emails me a question, I can email all Distilled consultants and usually get an answer (or at least an educated guess) within an hour or so. If you work on your own, build a community online, through Moz or another online portal, and ask them.
• Forecast the effects of your solution. I’ll be the first to admit, I’m not good at this because it can take a long time. But if your client is resistant, it’s definitely worth the trouble. Take clients through how you worked out the forecasting so they can see how much they’ll gain by working with you.

Once you’ve got proof behind your argument, restate your position, add your new arguments, and then follow up with your position and what you recommend your client does now. Make sure that you end in an action so there’s something concrete for them to focus on. 

Practice, practice, practice delivery

You can have the perfect explanation and a great relationship with your client, but if you trip over your own words or confuse your client, you won’t be convincing.

Written reports

Edit the paper multiple times. Only include the information that directly leads to an action item, don’t include all of the information that they already know, or that just shows you did your homework. That stuff is boring, and will encourage your client to skim, which will often lead to misinterpretations. Next, have a friend who’s been in SEO for awhile and knows about this old school stuff edit it. It’s hard to know where your descriptions might break down without someone else’s perspective.

Verbal presentations 

Practice your presentation ahead of time: talk through your recommendations to a friend or coworker. Have them interrupt you, because you will definitely be interrupted when you’re talking to your client. Make sure that you’re okay with that, that you can have a separate conversation, then jump back in to the report.

For presentations that are brief and over the phone, make sure that you’ve already sent your client something written. If it’s a report, make it clear and to the point (as described above), if it’s not, outline the action items in an email or a spreadsheet, so your client has something concrete to look at as you discuss. I’ve also found clients are able to digest information much better when they’ve already read it.

For big presentations – the ones that need an accompanying PowerPoint, follow the same advice as I gave in the written report section: Edit to be succinct, and get feedback.

This is pretty much a post on good consulting

I’ve consulted clients on technical SEO, promotions / outreach, creative, and content strategy-based projects, and I’ve found that the key to being effective in every one is a) coming up with a good answer, and b) everything discussed in this post. Building respect and communicating effectively is the foundation that supports your answers in almost every relationship, consulting, in house, or even personal. The key to convincing your clients that their black hat, overly white hat, or completely UX-based solutions are wrong is all sort of the same.

So what do you think? What resistance have you come up against in your consulting projects? Share in the comments below!

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Posted by randfish

Why hello there! You’re looking marvelous today, you really are. And, in other good news, Open Site Explorer has a bit of a new look—and an entirely new section called “Link Opportunities” to help make some link prospecting tasks easier and more automated. Come with me and I’ll show you; it’ll be fun 🙂

The new look

We know a lot of folks liked the old tab structure but we ran out of space. With this redesign we now have the flexibility to add new features and functionality simply by popping in new sections on the left sidebar menu. It’s a little bit more like Moz Analytics, too, and we figure some cohesion between our products is probably wise.

• New side navigation with plenty of room to grow and add new features (spam scoring and analysis, for example, will be coming in Q4—but shhh… I didn’t actually ask for permission to talk about that yet. I figure begging forgiveness will work.)
• Improved filtering that lets you slice and dice your link data more easily.
• Notice How Fast the New OSE Is? Oh yeah, that’s the stuff 🙂

You can still access the old Open Site Explorer’s design for a few more weeks, but the new features will exist only in the new version.

Introducing the new link opportunities section

Need help finding outreach targets for your link building campaign? We’re introducing three new reports that will help you build a curated list of potential targets. The new reports are available to all Moz Pro subscribers. If you’re a community member, sign up for a Moz Pro Free Trial and you, too, can kick it with the new functionality.

Reclaim links

A filtered view of Top Pages that lets you easily export a ranked list of URLs to fix.

Unlinked mentions

Powered by FreshScape, you can use Fresh Web Explorer queries to find mentions of a brand or site without links. Ping sources that may have talked about your brand, website, people, or products without giving you a link and you can often encourage/nudge that link into existence (along with the great SEO benefits they bring)

Link intersect

Find pages that are linking to your competitors but not you. By entering two competitive domains (they don’t have to be directly competitive; anyone you think you should be on lists with, or mentioned by the press alongside, is a good candidate), you can see pages that link to those sites but not yours. Getting creative with your targets here can reveal loads of awesome link opportunities.

This, however, is just the beginning. Be on the lookout for additional insights and opportunities as we improve our link index—we’ve just recently grown the size of Freshscape, which powers Fresh Web Explorer and two of the sections in link opportunities, so you should find lots of good stuff in there, but it can be a challenge. If you’re struggling with query formatting or getting creative around potential opportunities, let us know (in the comments or via Q&A) and we can give you some pointers or maybe find some searches that do the trick.

What about the old OSE?

We changed the workflow a bit and want to make sure you’ve got time to adjust. If you’re cranking through monthly reports or audits and want a more familiar OSE experience, you can switch to OSE Classic for a limited time. Just click on the “View in OSE Classic” link in the top right, and we’ll default to the old version.

But keep in mind new features and enhancements, like improved performance and Link Opportunities, will only be available in the new release. We’ll keep OSE Classic active until December 3rd in case you’re feeling nostalgic.

We’d love your feedback

If you’re using the new OSE and find problems, wish we’d change something, or have a particularly awesome experience, we’d love to hear from you in the comments below, in Q&A, or (especially if your issue is urgent/something broken) via our help team.

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