Posted by SimonPenson

Social search has long been heralded as the “next big thing.” The opportunity to create the search engine for people is too enticing; the prize being held above all others in the race to build the next Google.

Facebook is widely recognised as the only company other than the search giant itself capable of creating such a product, and it’s one of the key reasons behind its enormous  price-to-earnings ratio. Few are investing on the strength of the current format; instead they know that the data it has at its fingertips could be world-changing in terms of information retrieval and advertising.

And that project began in earnest, publicly at least, with the launch of Graph Search in 2013.

At the time the product lacked any significant features and after a short fanfare, marketers’ focus shifted elsewhere. The engineers, however, had very clear instructions to iterate, fast, and the results of that work are now starting to float to the surface.

---

What is graph search?

Graph Search is Facebook’s way of mapping all the data we give the platform together in a really useful way. It is by far the best example of “Social Search” – the premise of creating a search engine based not on websites but on entities – people, places and things.

The company has been quietly iterating it since last year. There’s still a long way to go but the foundations are already there for what promises to be the only true rival to Google in the world of information organization and retrieval and only days ago did they start testing new functionality that allows some users to search through content as well as people, interests and things.

---

Search operators

So what has changed that makes Facebook’s search engine worth talking about again for digital marketers?

The answer is the introduction of a large number of much more sophisticated search operators, or ways of searching, layered over the top of a greater connected data set.

To help understand what we mean, we have created this free  Facebook Graph Search Cheat Sheet, brimming with many of the useful connotations you may want to use to improve your understanding of your customers, or those of your competitors.

This post is about using it specifically to find, learn about, and work with influencers in your space and build out a much more detailed picture of your existing and prospective audiences.

Using Graph Search

Before you can even begin extracting useful information from the platform, however, you need to check to see if you have access to the full search facility. To do that there is a very simple little hack that involves changing your language settings.

Claiming Graph Search

If you are reading this from the US then chances are you will already have Graph Search by default. That is not the case for all. If you fall outside of this and still have the painfully poor old search box you must head into settings to change this.

To do it search for your settings in the top nav.

Next, go to the General account settings and change your language to English (US) and hey, presto: You should now have enabled Graph Search.

Marketing uses

There will undoubtedly be scores more ways for marketers to use Graph Search as the months roll on and functionality improves, but as we examine the options today we can divide them into five key areas:

1. Audience insight
2. Influencer discovery
3. Influencer research
4. GSO – Graph Search optimization
5. Advertising

1. Audience insight

Number one on the list has to be the ability it gives you to join the dots in your audience research work. The endless hours I and other marketers spent sitting behind one way screens as part of ethnography research group work in past decades made true insight very labour-intensive and expensive. It was also only partially effective, as by the time data from these methods was processed it was often weeks, or even months, old.

Not for one moment am I saying, however, that those methods have no value, as getting in front of your audience to see how they really use or interact with your product(s) can be extremely useful. But the data pot is small.

Where you can really start to trust your findings is when the data you are handling is “big,” aggregating the beliefs of tens of thousands of current or potential customers.

So, how does Graph Search help? Let’s look at that in a little more detail.

Initial research

We have already discussed how the functionality of Facebook’s search engine has come on in leaps and bounds and here we can start putting that to use.

We’ve created a free cheat sheet to help you navigate the scores of search operators ( download it here).

Let’s look at a couple of examples in real time now so you can see how it works.

For this run-through we’ve chosen a brand in the UK entertainment space, but we have kept the brand anonymous. The process of running through that data, however, should give you a very good understanding of how to work through this, step-by-step, for your own brand.

To begin with, we can start with something relatively simple: A look at other pages liked by those that like the brand. This helps create a better understanding of the other interests of the audience:

To achieve this, search for: “Pages liked by people who like INSERT BRAND”.

As yet, however, we are not getting into anything especially insightful. To really dive into the exciting data we must find a way of segmenting these random brand and page affinities with broader interest sets.

To do this we can again lean on Graph Search to provide us with that detail.

To achieve this search for: “favorite interests of people who like INSERT BRAND”.

As you can see, there are already some revealing interests coming to the fore, and we’ll look at those in greater detail a little later.

As with any research, however, results can be skewed by small data sets, and so to bulk out those numbers it is possible to combine your brand with others in the same space.

To achieve this search for: “favorite interests of people who like INSERT BRAND and INSERT COMPETITOR”.

Once you have a list of relevant and useful results, the options are almost endless, and it is at this point that you can decide to add extra depth to the areas that matter most.

For instance, for our example brand it is important to understand what drinks and food the audience likes, as they run a large number of “brick-and-mortar” outlets.

To achieve this search for: ‘favorite ‘DRINK/FOOD’ of people who like ‘INSERT BRAND’.

And given that discussions may be ongoing around brand ambassadors it may be useful to extract some information about favourite celebrities, musicians or entertainers.

To achieve this search for: ‘favorite ‘DRINK/FOOD’ of people who like ‘INSERT BRAND’.

The results here can be truly eye opening – and there is still more you can dig into, which we’ll look at a little later.

Quantitative data

The challenge with the above is that while it can give you significant qualitative insight the problem is gauging just how much of your audience shares that same interest.

It’s all well and good creating content to suit individuals, but you may be wide of the mark if you don’t have a fuller view of shared interests.

Thankfully, however, there is a way to get just that.

I’ve written previously here about extracting social data for use in informing strategy and we can use that same principle here to add the richness we need to give us the confidence necessary to make real decisions.

The science bit

Grabbing that data is easier than you think and while it’s not perfect the result is worth the effort. Here’s how it works.

There are no fancy tools either I’m afraid, just a little bit of simple math, and to help make that process as hassle free as possible we’ve already built this simple calculator, which should make the process as pain-free as possible.

Step one

Start by jumping onto Facebook’s Ad Centre and click ‘create ad’. You’ll then be presented with this screen. Click on any of these, but we’ll use the Page Likes option here.

Once in the console scroll down until you get to the Audience section.

Start by selecting the geography you wish to look at. You can choose to focus on a global audience by default, but for this study we have chosen the UK. On the right hand side you’ll then be able to see how many people fit the selection. For instance, here we can see that there are 36,000,000 people in the UK on Facebook.

The next step is to add the audience interest. This can be anything from an interest to a brand, so let’s start with our example entertainment brand (BRAND A). The right-hand column now tells us that there are 96,000 people in the UK that ‘Like’ them.

The next step is to start to understand a little more about those interests we saw earlier using Graph Search.

Remember the pole dancing ‘interest’. Who couldn’t? The question is, just how many of those who already show an affinity with the brand ‘Like’ this alternative entertainment activity when compared to the average person?

Benchmarking

To do that we simply add pole dancing to our brand audience as you can see below and it gives us the combined audience of 126,000 people.

OK so far? Now comes the math part – and this is where the calculator can come in useful.

Below we can see the formula that sits behind the calculator and this will give us a better understanding of just how much our audience likes pole dancing.

Taking the numbers we have just talked through we can now create a sum that looks a little like this and it tells us that 6.25% of the brand’s audience likes pole dancing.

That feels like a high percentage but, feeling is not good enough. We need to know for certain and to truly understand what that means we need to look at the average person and then compare the two.

To do that we work through the same process by first getting the number for the UK Facebook audience and the pole dancing audience separately.

And we can then use this simple formula to work out what percentage of the average Facebook audience likes pole dancing.

The result here is that just 0.1% of the average audience likes this particular interest. The brand audience just got very interesting, as there is a huge over-indexing of this particular interest. We know, therefore, that content around this subject matter will resonate!

The idea from here is to then rinse and repeat this process for multiple interests so you can chart them against each other like this:

This is where we really start to understand our audience. The pink column represents the example brand’s audience and the blue the average Facebook audience. We can clearly see where the over indexing is.

Those are the interests you want to really concentrate on as part of your content plan, as you know there is a high propensity to engage.

Competition ideas

Graph Search can also be used to refine those content ideas. Let’s say, for instance, that you are running a competition to win restaurant vouchers. Rather than generically doing the same thing for everyone in the UK why not look to see if there is a North/South, or state divide?

Below we have used the same process as previously described but also looked at how location affects affinity with different restaurant brands.

The data above suggests there is a definite North/South divide and the marketer would be better offering McDonalds or Nandos vouchers to those in Manchester and Frankie and Benny chain coupons to those in London for better engagement.

2. Influencer discovery

Another area that Graph Search can really help marketers with is in finding key influencers and evangelists – both of which are critical to today’s marketing plans.

There are several ways you can do this.

To begin with let’s take a look at our example brand once more and start uncovering those people with the most potential reach. We are able to use a couple of more advanced Graph Search operators to see whose attention they may already have.

A great place to start is by looking at the blogosphere in a little more detail, and that starts with this search:

We can immediately see here that there are a number of people that run blogs and already like the brand; a brilliant conversation opener when you reach out to them.

And if you struggle to find bloggers who do follow the brand then why not utilize this search instead to see if they follow, or are friends with, people who work for the brand?

We can see here which other options are available to us in this section of Facebook’s data set if we want to refine our search. It doesn’t end here, either, as there are many more nuances available:

And if larger sites are your ultimate targets then a search for journalists is also possible, as below:

While you can also refine by location if your campaign needs to target a country, region or city:

Should you wish to refine that search further still you can target specific publications. Our search here for The Telegraph newspaper in the UK brings up more than 1,000 people, many of whom are key journalists:

And we can then use the internal search tool to refine further by job title:

By using it to find “writers,” it creates this search, and we have a list of 12 people to then connect with via LinkedIn or via a call to the newspaper’s news desk.

3. Influencer research

The value that Graph Search can bring to your marketing plan doesn’t end there either.

Using it to paint your audience understanding picture and discovering influencers in your network is obviously very powerful in itself but you can also use the platform to add further colour to your influencer pitches.

As journalists are pitched to every hour of the day, warming that conversation with some prior intelligence can make the difference between success and failure.

It’s possible to find out a lot about individuals with this same process and give you a much better understanding of the journalist you want to work with as a result.

Take this search for example. Let’s say we want to find out more about the Assistant Editor at The Telegraph magazine, discovered with this little search:

We can then use many of the searches previously mentioned to build a really good picture of his interests, and what makes him tick.

Knowing that he clearly supports Tottenham Hotspur and that he will be excited about the new Inbetweeners movie coming out gives you a brilliant “in” and conversation warmer.

And we can even see where he likes to spend time. Below you can see one of many searches that use Bing’s map functionality to bring extra location-based insight. It gives us the places the Assistant Editor has visited:

It’s this area of Graph Search that could offer the most promise in the long term, and I would be worried if I ran Tripadvisor or any other review-based site, on this evidence.

While review sites are generally based on the general public view Facebook is able to slice and dice to give you the views of anyone from your friends or family to those with similar interests or ages to you—trusted reviews from people you know and or respect.

4. GSO – Graph Search optimization

If Graph Search is going to become more useful then the likelihood is that people will start using it more and that means one thing; the birth of Graph Search optimization, or GSO.

Being at the top of those lists could drive significant traffic to brand pages and understanding how Facebook orders that will be key.

There is very little information on this area at present but logic suggests that the same signals used to order Facebook’s activity wall would apply to Graph Search.

This may mean that Likes and the new links with extra weight given to Likes from people and pages with the largest audiences. The more authoritative the person or brand behind the connection the greater the impact on Graph Search rankings.

If you then throw page actions into the mix, such as content likes, shares and comments as well as app usage and so on, you soon build up a clear picture of how GSO may work.

Could this mean that the digital PR of the future includes work to incentivize key influencers to Like Facebook Pages, or engage with key content? Only time will tell.

And given the fact that the Menlo Park company is already testing a search facility for content, this area will undoubtedly become more important still.

5. Advertising

The value of the insight also extends to social advertising. Given that CPCs are often higher in important commercial niches, it can really pay to understand where else your audience may be interacting.

If, for instance, those you want to target are also very likely to have an affinity with gardening, then creating ad groups to test your advertising in that niche can often result in a reduction in CPCs.

Not all interest sets will work here and in practice it is a good idea to create six or more campaigns targeting the top shared interests and then run them for a day or so to see how they perform.

Takeaways

Graph Search is here to stay and will increasingly become a major weapon in any marketers’ armory as we all look for ways of making our strategies and campaigns smarter and more effective.

The audience insight it gives and ability to drill down into the minutia is what those investing in Facebook see as its real value, and they’ve clearly only just started opening the treasure chest.

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

Continue reading →

Posted by Nick_Sayers

The onset of fall sharpens the air. Kids laboriously lug stacks of books and binders to class. Teachers puzzle over their lesson plans for the year. Lockers that were once empty now overflow with paper, and quiet hallways fill with the chatter of eager minds. School is finally back in session. In the spirit of fall and the start of school, we think it’s a perfect time to open up Moz Academy to our community!

If you’ve never heard of Moz Academy, let me give you an earful! At Moz, we really want people to be awesome marketers so they can use our products in fun ways and make the Internet way cooler, with less spam and garbage content. We’ve got a ton of terrific instructors at Moz, but Moz Academy has so much SEO knowledge that it’ll make teachers out of all of you!

Over the past year we’ve added more than 30 videos to Moz Academy. One of my favorite lesson plans shows off how you can use Moz Pro to help with your day-to-day marketing. We’re also proud to offer a comprehensive Local SEO section that we built with our good friends over at LocalU.

To give you a sense for what we’ve got, we wanted to show you some of our favorite Academy lectures!

---

First up: Listen to Steve Martin look-alike Cyrus Shepard tell you how to size up your competition in Moz Pro—like a pro.

---

Next, listen to the mustached master of SEO, Rand Fishkin, instruct us on how to correctly implement redirects.

---

If you’re into advanced filtering in Google Analytics, listen to Tim Resnik’s explanation of how to segment your search traffic into verticals by pulling a parameter from the URLs in the SERPS.

---

Our own Jen “Don’t call me J-LO” Lopez, gives us a crash course on measuring your social media efforts.

---

Finally, Mike Ramsey from Nifty Marketing can help you get a handle on creating local content.

---

Now that school is back in session we hope you’re excited to start learning again. Please enjoy Moz Academy and share the lessons with folks learning SEO or trying to get a nice refresh.

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

Continue reading →

Posted by neilpatel

I used to perform keyword research in the typical, perfunctory way—go to the Keyword Tool, type in some words, and punch out a list of terms.

Easy. Quick. Simple.

Today, things are different. The much-loved keyword tool has been replaced, long-tail keywords have the ascendancy, and it’s harder to figure out what users are actually searching for.

The rules have changed, and so have the ways of playing the game. I still use the Keyword Planner, but I’ve also discovered a medley of not-so-obvious ways to get keywords that improve my organic traffic.

1. Wikipedia

Do you think of Wikipedia as just a massive encyclopedia? Think again. I use Wikipedia for keyword research.

Image from Search Engine Journal.

My process is pretty simple.

Step 1: Google inurl:Wikipedia and my topic. Or just Google the topic or head term. Wikipedia is often the first organic result.

Step 2: Look at the SERP to identify the most relevant terms and possible keywords within a Wikipedia entry.

Step 3: Open the entry in Wikipedia and identify the most relevant terms from the first few paragraphs, morphing them into longail iterations.

Step 4: Identify other relevant terms from Wikipedia’s table of contents on the topic.

Step 5: Link to other associated Wikipedia to see related subjects, and identify even more keywords.

Wikipedia is the world’s sixth most popular website, and ranks it at number #4 on Google’s list. It boasts 310,000,000 unique visitors (20% of its traffic), and has 7,900,000,000 pageviews. All of this with absolutely no advertising.

In other words, Wikipedia has one of the best organic SEO strategies on the planet. Obviously, these are keywords that matter. Wikipedia’s popularity shows us that people want information. It’s like the greatest content marketing strategy ever, combining user-generated content with prolific publishing on a grand scale.

Do what Wikipedia does. Use the terms that people search for. You won’t outrank Wikipedia, but you will start to rank organically for the longtail varieties that you discern from Wikipedia.

2. Google autocomplete

When you type stuff into Google’s search bar, Google predicts your query and types it out for you. The feature has been around for a long time. The more time that goes by, the more intelligent the autocomplete algorithm becomes.

These autocomplete suggestions are all based on real user queries. They vary based on geographic location and language. However, in spite of the variation, autocomplete provides a fairly accurate representation of what people are looking for.

Here is why autocomplete is a killer source of keywords:

Step 1: It indicates some of the most popular keywords.

Step 2: It provides longtail suggestions.

Step 3: The keywords are ranked according to the “freshness layer” algorithm. That means that currently popular search terms will rank higher in the autocomplete list.

How do you use autocomplete for keyword research? Well, you can go about this the good old-fashioned spade and shovel way, like this:

Step 4: Open Google. To prevent Google from autocompleting previously-searched for terms, log out of Google or open an “incognito” window (Chrome: Shift + Cmnd + N).

Step 5: Type in your main keyword or longtail keyword E.g. “lawnmower.”

Step 6: Write down the suggestions that appear in autocomplete.

Step 7: After you type in your main keyword or head term, type in “A” and write down the autocomplete suggestions.

Step 8: Repeat Step 7 for rest of the alphabet.

Or, you can do it the easy way, with Übersuggest. It’s called”suggest on steroids.” It will do all the work for you. The only downside is that it doesn’t suggest keyword extensions based on search popularity.

If you can get past the eye-popping UI, Übersuggest is a pretty awesome tool.

Keep in mind that Google is not going to provide suggestions for everything. As quoted in Search Engine Land, here is what the algorithm will filter out:

• Hate- or violence-related suggestions
• Personally identifiable information in suggestions
• Porn & adult content-related suggestions
• Legally mandated removals
• Piracy-related suggestions

3. Google Related Searches

Since Google is the biggest search engine, we’ve got to take our cues from its mighty algorithm, imperfect and agonizing though it may be.

Google’s related searches is a really easy way to snag some instant keyword research.

Step 1: Search for your keyword in Google.

Step 2: Scroll to the bottom, and ignore everything in between.

There, at the bottom is a harvest of keywords, ripe for the selection:

The idea is similar to Google suggest. However, instead of providing autocomplete suggestions, Google takes the keyword and mixes it up with other words. These other words may be at the end, at the beginning, or sprinkled throughout. These related searches might not even include the actual keyword, but are simply connected in a tangential way.

Whatever the case, you will undoubtedly find some keyword ideas from this list.

4. MetaGlossary.com

Not a whole lot of people know about MetaGlossary.com. You won’t find a lot of information about the company itself, but you will find a ton of keyword ideas.

Here are the instructions. Not too hard.

The whole point of the glossary is to provide definitions. But along with the many definitions, you’ll get “related terms.” That’s what we’re looking for.

When I type in “Search Engine Optimization,” my head term, here’s what I get:

All of those are potential keywords.

I can take this a step further by looking through the definitions. These can provide even more keyword fodder:

For this particular term, I found 117 definitions. That’s enough to keep me busy for a while.

5. Competitor keywords

Another great way to get keyword ideas is to snag them from the competition.

Not only are you going to identify some great keywords, but you’ll be able to gain these keywords ideas from the top-ranking organic sites in the SERPs.

Here’s how to do it.

Step 1: Google your top keyword.

Step 2: Click the first organic result.

Step 3: View the page source (Chrome: Cmnd + Alt + u)

Step 4: Search for “<Title>”. Identify any non-branded terms as possible keywords.

Step 5: Search for “<h1>”. Identify any potential keywords in the H1 text.

Step 6: Search for “<keywords>”. Identify any potential keywords that they have identified as such. Some websites have this, such as specific Wordpress themed sites, or WP sites using an SEO plugin. Most websites don’t.

Step 7: Look at all the content and locate any additional longtail keywords or keyword variations.

The competitors that are first in the SERP for a given head term or longtail query are ranking high for a variety of reasons. One of those reasons is their keyword selection. Sure, they may have good link profiles, but you can’t rank for a keyword unless you actually have that keyword (or some variation thereof) on your page.

6. Amazon.com

Amazon.com is king of the ecommerce jungle, no questions asked.

Part of their power is that they have total domination of the organic search results for just about any purchase-related keyword. When your audience circles closer to a transactional search query, Amazon is ranking somewhere.

Why? They’ve got keywords—lots of them. And they have reviews—lots of them. This means one thing for you: Lots of keywords ideas.

Let me make a quick clarification. Not everyone is going to find keyword ideas on Amazon. This works best if you have a physical products, and obviously only if Amazon sells it.

Here’s how to skim the cream off of Amazon’s great keywords.

Step 1: Google your keyword.

Step 2: Locate the Amazon entry in the SERP.

Step 3: Click on the result to see the product/landing page on Google.

Step 4: Locate keywords in the following places.

-“Show results for” menu

-Main header

-Text underneath main header

-“## Results for” text.

-Breadcrumb

-Items listed

Here’s a quick survey of where you can find these keywords. Notice the highlighted text.

You’ll find even more keywords once you dive into individual products.

Pay special attention to these areas on product pages:

-“Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought”

-“Product Description”

-“Product Ads from External Websites”

-“Customer Questions & Answers.” You’ll find some nice query-like longtail keywords here.

-“Customer Reviews.” Again, this is a great source of longtails.

Let Amazon be your guide. They’re the biggest e-retailer around, and they have some great keyword clout going for them.

Conclusion

Keyword research is a basic skill for any SEO. The actual process of finding those keywords, however, does not require expensive tools, formula-driven methods, or an extremely limited pool of options.

I’ve used each of these methods for myself and my clients with incredible success.

What is your favorite source for finding great keywords? 

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

Continue reading →

Posted by Cyrus-Shepard

It’s rare that Google reveals any of its actual ranking factors, so it came as a big surprise when representatives announced they would reward sites using HTTPS encryption with a boost in search results.

HTTPS isn’t like other ranking factors. Implementing it requires complexity, risks, and costs. Webmasters balance this out with benefits that include increased security, better referral data, and a possible boost in rankings.

Google’s push for HTTPS adoption appears to be working. A recent Moz Poll found 24% of webmasters planning to make the switch.

SEO advantages of switching to HTTPS

In addition to the security offered by HTTPS (which we’ll discuss below) there are additional SEO benefits for marketers to take advantage of.

1. More referrer data

Whenever traffic passes from a secure HTTPS site to a non-secure HTTP site, the referral data gets stripped away. This traffic shows up in your analytics report as ‘Direct.’ This is a problem because you don’t know where the traffic actually comes from.

If you use HTTP, traffic from sites like Hacker News shows up as ‘direct’, because Hacker News uses HTTPS.

Fortunately, there’s a simple solution: when traffic passes to an HTTPS site, the secure referral information is preserved. This holds true whether the original site uses HTTP or HTTPS.

As more and more sites make the switch, this becomes increasingly important.

2. HTTPS as a rankings boost

On one hand, Google has confirmed the ranking boost of HTTPS. On the other hand, with over 200 ranking, it’s likely you’ll find the effect of any ranking influence to remain quiet small.

In fact, a recent study by Search Metrics showed no detectable advantage to sites using HTTPS.

Like most ranking signals, it is very hard to isolate on its own.

In fact, don’t expect HTTPS to act as a silver bullet. If rankings are your only concern, there are likely dozens of things you can do that will have a bigger impact. Here are several:

3. Security and privacy

Many people argue that HTTPS only provides an advantage if your site uses sensitive passwords. That’s not exactly true. Even regular boring content websites can benefit from HTTPS / SSL encryption.

HTTPS adds security in several ways:

• HTTPS verifies that the website is the one the server it is supposed to be talking to,
• Because HTTPS prevents tampering by 3rd parties, it stops Man-in-the-middle attacks, making your site more secure for visitors.
• HTTPS encrypts all communication, including URLs, which protects things like browsing history and credit card numbers.

My advice is this: Make the switch to HTTPS if doing so is reasonable for your business. Security and trust add to the small ranking gains, making it worth the effort if you can.

Challenges to overcome with HTTPS

1. Mistakes happen

Moving your entire site to HTTPS requires many moving parts. It’s easy to overlook important details.

• Did you block important URLs in robots.txt?
• Did you point your canonical tags at the wrong (HTTP) URL?
• Is your website causing browser bars to display warnings that frighten people away from your site? (Side note: That’s the very first article I wrote for SEOmoz!)

While rare, these problems do happen. Moz has spoken privately with webmasters who have seen both rankings and conversions plummet after implementing HTTPS.

In most cases it’s a simple fix, but beware the risk.

2. Speed issues

Because HTTPS requires extra communication “handshakes” between servers, it has the potential to slow down your website – especially on slower sites.

Add to this the fact that speed is itself a ranking factor, especially on mobile.

The good news is, if you follow best practices your site should be more than fast enough to handle HTTPS. New HTTPS friendly technologies like SPDY offer you the opportunity to speed up your website more than ever before.

3. Costs

Many webmasters pay between $100-200 a year for SSL certificates. That’s a significant amount for small websites. It’s also a barrier that most spammers won’t bother with.

On the other hand, it’s completely possible to switch to HTTPS for free.

4. Not everything is ready for HTTPS

Sometimes, things don’t play well with HTTPS. Older web applications can have trouble with HTTPS URLs. (Fortunately, Moz updated Open Site Explorer just this year.)

If you run AdSense, you may see your earnings fall significantly, as Google will restrict your ads to those that are SSL-compliant.

Even Google’s own Webmaster Tools doesn’t yet support HTTPS migration. The world may be moving toward 100% SSL encryption, but in the meantime be prepared for growing pains.

Growing number of sites using HTTPS

Lots and lots of sites use HTTPS today, but most restrict usage to checkout and registration pages.

Very, very few sites use HTTPS sitewide.

According to the latest statistics from BuiltWith, only 4.2% of the top 10,000 websites redirect users to SSL/HTTPS by default. While that number appears small, the percentage drops to 1.9% for the top million sites.

This number is likely to increase in the very near future as more websites pursue adoption.

SEO and HTTPS best practices

This post talks about the SEO implications of switching to HTTPS. If you are looking for a technical guide, there are several we’d recommend:

• Moving Your Website to HTTPS / SSL
• Switch to HTTPS Now, For Free
• HTTPS for WordPress
• How to Deploy HTTPS Correctly

What type of SSL certificate works best?

Companies offer a myriad and confusing array of SSL certificates. The two primary ones to pay attention to are:

1. Standard Validation SSL – Standard level of validation. Typically cost between $0-$100.
2. Extended Validation SSL – Offers the highest level of validation and often costs between $100-500.

From a rankings point of view, it makes absolutely no difference what type of certificate you use. For now.

John Mueller of Google has stated that Google doesn’t care what kind of SSL certificate your website uses, but that may change in the future.

From both a security and user experience point of view, the type of certificate you choose can have an impact. Consider how different certificates alter how your website appears in the web browser address bar.

The green bar associated with extended certificates communicates trust, while the warning symbols associated with errors can cause worry with visitors.

Tips for FeedBurner and RSS

Many sites still use FeedBurner for RSS feeds. Unfortunately, Google stopped supporting it long ago and FeedBurner isn’t compatible with HTTPS.

If you use FeedBurner, you’ll need to migrate your RSS to an HTTPS-compatible service. If you’re technically competent you can do this yourself, or FeedPress has a very inexpensive RSS migration solution.

Migrating social share counts

When migrating to HTTPS, you often want to preserve you social share counts. These are the numbers that display in social share buttons.

These counts don’t impact your rankings (as far as we know) but they act as strong social proof, and it’s frustrating to migrate a page with thousands of tweets and likes only to see them reset to zeros.

In fact, some social networks will transfer the social counts through their APIs, but it may take weeks or months for them to show up correctly. Here’s a list of what does and doesn’t eventually transfer over:

• Facebook: Yes
• Twitter: No
• Google +1s: Yes
• Google shares: No
• LinkedIn: Yes
• Pinterest: No

If you want instant karma, Mike King wrote an excellent tutorial on how to preserve your social share counts by altering the code of your social buttons. We used this method on Moz when we migrated from SEOmoz in order to preserve the counts on our content. 

Example button codes to preserve social shares (edit for your site):

<div class="fb-like" data-href="http://moz.com/blog/10-tools-for-creating-infographics-visualizations" data-send="false" data-layout="box_count" </div>

<a href="https://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-counturl="http://moz.com/blog/10-tools-for-creating-infographics-visualizations" data-url="https://moz.com/blog/10-tools-for-creating-infographics-visualizations" data-count="vertical" data-via="moz">Tweet</a>

<div class="g-plusone" data-size="tall" data-href="http://moz.com/blog/10-tools-for-creating-infographics-visualizations"></div>

Keep in mind: This only displays social shares from the URL you dictate. Because of this, it doesn’t update your counts with any new social shares. This works best with content like older blog posts that are likely not to get many new shares. 

If you expect your content to continue to earn social activity, you may simply want to let the numbers update naturally over time.

Making the leap

Much of the web is now moving towards SSL encryption, and within a few years it may even become the default. SEOs, consultants and agencies that become experts know may be rewarded as the popularity of the protocol grows.

Will you make the switch to HTTPS?

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

Continue reading →

Posted by tallen1985

Diving into Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) for the first time can be a challenge. You are faced with a whole armoury of new tools, each containing a huge variety of features. Optimizely is one of those tools you will quickly encounter and through this post I’m going to cover 6 features I wish I had known from day one that have helped improve test performance/debugging and the ability to track results accurately.

1. You don’t have to use the editor

The editor within Optimizely is a useful tool if you don’t have much experience working with code. The editor should be used for making simple visual changes, such as changing an image, adjusting copy or making minor layout changes.

If you are looking to make changes that change the behaviour of the page rather than just straightforward visual changes, then the editor can become troublesome. In this case you should use the “Edit Code” feature at the foot of the editor.

For any large-scale changes to the site, such as completely redesigning the page, Optimizely should be used for traffic allocation and not editing pages. To do this:

1. Build a new version of the page outside of Optimizely

2. Upload the variation page to your site. Important: Ensure that the variation page is noindexed.

We now have two variations of our page:

www.myhomepage.com & www.myhomepage.com/variation1

3. Select the variation drop down menu and click Redirect to a new page

4. Enter the variation URL, apply the settings and save the experiment. You can now use Optimizely as an A/B test management tool to allocate traffic, exclude traffic/device types, and gather further test data.

If you do use the editor be aware of excess code

One problem to be aware of here is that each time you move or change an element Optimizely adds a new line of code. The variation code below actually repositions the h2 title four times.

Instead when using the editor we should make sure that we strip out any excess code. If you move and save a page element multiple times, open the <edit code> tab at the foot of the page and delete any excess code. For example, the following positions my h2 title in exactly the same position as before with three fewer lines of code. Over the course of multiple changes, this excess code can result in an increase of load time for Optimizely.

---

2. Enabling analytics tracking

Turning on analytics tracking seems obvious, right? In fact, why would we even need to turn it on in the first place, surely it would be defaulted to on?

Optimizely currently sets analytics tracking to the default option of off. As a result if you don’t manually change the setting nothing will be getting reporting into your analytics platform of choice.

To turn on analytics tracking, simply open the settings in the top right corner from within the editor mode and select Analytics Integration.

Turn on the relevant analytics tracking. If you are using Google Analytics, then at this point you should assign a vacant custom variable slot (for Classic Analytics) or a vacant custom dimension (Universal Analytics) to the experiment.

Once the test is live, wait for a while (up to 24 hours), then check to be sure the data is reporting correctly within the custom segments.

---

3. Test your variations in a live environment

Before you set your test live, it’s important that you test the new variation to ensure everything works as expected. To do this we need to see the test in a live environment while ensuring no customers see the test versions yet. I’ve suggested a couple of ways to do this below:

Query parameter targeting

Query parameter tracking is available on all accounts and is our preferred method for sharing live versions with clients, mainly because once set up, it is as simple as sharing a URL.

1. Click the audiences icon at the top of the page 

2. Select create a new audience

3. Drag Query Parameters from the possible conditions and enter parameters of your choice.

4. Click Apply and save the experiment.

5. To view the experiment visit the test URL with query parameters added. In the above example the URL would be: http://www.distilled.net?test=variation

Cookie targeting

1. Open the browser and create a bookmark on any page

2. Edit the bookmark and change both properties to:

a) Name: Set A Test Cookie

b)URL: The following Javascript code:

<em>javascript:(function(){ var hostname = window.location.hostname; var parts = hostname.split("."); var publicSuffix = hostname; var last = parts[parts.length - 1]; var expireDate = new Date(); expireDate.setDate(expireDate.getDate() + 7); var TOP_LEVEL_DOMAINS = ["com", "local", "net", "org", "xxx", "edu", "es", "gov", "biz", "info", "fr", "gr", "nl", "ca", "de", "kr", "it", "me", "ly", "tv", "mx", "cn", "jp", "il", "in", "iq"]; var SPECIAL_DOMAINS = ["jp", "uk", "au"]; if(parts.length > 2 && SPECIAL_DOMAINS.indexOf(last) != -1){ publicSuffix = parts[parts.length - 3] + "."+ parts[parts.length - 2] + "."+ last} else if(parts.length > 1 && TOP_LEVEL_DOMAINS.indexOf(last) != -1) {publicSuffix = parts[parts.length - 2] + "."+ last} document.cookie = "optly_"+publicSuffix.split(".")[0]+"_test=true; domain=."+publicSuffix+"; path=/; expires="+expireDate.toGMTString()+";"; })();</em>

You should end up with the following:

3. Open the page where you want to place the cookie and click the bookmark

4. The cookie will now be set on the domain you are browsing and will looking something like: ‘optly_YOURDOMAINNAME_test=true’

Next we need to target our experiment to only allow visitors who have the cookie set to see test variations.

5. Click the audiences icon at the top of the page

6. Select create a new audience

7. Drag Cookie into the Conditions and change the name to optly_YOURDOMAINNAME_test=true

8. Click Apply and save the experiment.

Source: https://help.optimizely.com/hc/en-us/articles/200293784-Setting-a-test-cookie-for-your-site

IP address targeting (only available on Enterprise accounts)

Using IP address targeting is useful when you are looking to test variations in house and on a variety of different devices and browsers.

1. Click the audiences icon at the top of the page

2. Select create a new audience

3. Drag IP Address from the possible conditions and enter the IP address being used. (Not sure of your IP address then head to http://whatismyipaddress.com/)

4. Click Apply and Save the experiment.

---

4. Force variations using parameters when debugging pages

There will be times, particular when testing new variations, that there will be the need to view a specific variation. Obviously this can be an issue if your browser has already been bucketed into an alternative variation. Optimizely overcomes this by allowing you to force the variation you wish to view, simply using query parameters.

The query parameter is structured in the following way: optimizely_x EXPRIMENTID=VARIATIONINDEX

1. The EXPERIMENTID can be found in the browser URL

2. VARIATIONINDEX is the variation you want to run, 0 is for the original, 1 is variation #1, 2 is variation #2 etc.

3. Using the above example to force a variation, we would use the following URLstructure to display variation 1 of our experiment: http://www.yourwebsite.com/?optimizely_x1845540742=1

Source: https://help.optimizely.com/hc/en-us/articles/200107480-Forcing-a-specific-variation-to-run-and-other-advanced-URL-parameters

---

5. Don’t change the traffic allocation sliders

Once a test is live it is important not change the amount of traffic allocated to each variation. Doing so can massively affect test results, as one version would potentially begin to receive more return visitors who in turn have a much higher chance of converting.

My colleague Tom Capper discussed further the do’s and don’ts of statistical significance earlier this year where he explained,

“At the start of your test, you decide to play it safe and set your traffic allocation to 90/10. After a time, it seems the variation is non-disastrous, and you decide to move the slider to 50/50. But return visitors are still always assigned their original group, so now you have a situation where the original version has a larger proportion of return visitors, who are far more likely to convert.”

To summarize, if you do need to adjust the amount of traffic allocated to each test variation, you should look to restart the test to have complete confidence that the data you receive is accurate.

---

6. Use segmentation to generate better analysis

Okay I understand this one isn’t strictly about Optimizely, but it is certainly worth keeping in mind, particularly earlier on in the CRO process when producing hypothesis around device type.

Conversion rates can vary greatly, particularly when we start segmenting data by locations, browsers, medium, return visits vs new visits, just to name a few. However, by using segmentation we can unearth opportunities that we may have previously overlooked, allowing us to generate new hypotheses for future experiments.

Example

You have been running a test for a month and unfortunately the results are inconclusive. The test version of the page didn’t perform any better or worse than the original. Overall the test results look like the following:

In this case the test variation overall has only performed 1% better than the original with a significance of 60%. With these results this test variation certainly wouldn’t be getting rolled out any time soon.

However when these results are segmented by device they tell a very different story:

Drilling into the desktop results we actually find that the test variation saw a 10% increase in conversions over the original with 97% significance. Yet those using a tablet were converting way below the original, thus driving down the overall conversion rates we were seeing in the first table.

Ultimately with this data we would be able to generate a new hypothesis of “we believe the variation will increase conversion rate for users on a desktop”. We would then re-run the test to desktop only users to verify the previous data and the new hypothesis.

Using segmented data here could also potentially help the experiment reach significance at a much faster rate as explained in this video from Opticon 2014.

Should the new test be successful and achieve significance we would serve users on the desktops the new variation, whilst those on mobile and tablets continue to be displayed the original site.

Key takeaways

• Always turn on Google Analytics tracking (and then double check it is turned on).
• If you plan to make behavioural changes to a page use the Javascript editor rather than the drag and drop feature
• Use IP address targeting for device testing and query parameters to share a live test with clients.
• If you need to change the traffic allocation to test variations you should restart the test.
• Be aware that test performance can vary greatly based on device.

What problems and solutions have you come across when creating CRO experiments with Optimizely? What pieces of information do you wish you had known 6 months ago?

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

Continue reading →