Posted by russvirante

Penalization has become a regular part of the search engine optimization experience. Hell, it has changed the entire business model of Virante to building tools and services around penalty recovery and not just optimization. While penalties used to be a crude badge of honor worn by those leaning towards the black-hat side of the SEO arts, it is now a regular occurrence that seems to impact those with the best intentions. At Virante, we have learned a lot about penalties over the last few years—discerning between manual and algorithmic, Panda and Penguin, recovery methodologies and risk mitigation—but not much study has been done on the general response of websites to penalizations. We have focused more on what webmasters ought to do without studying what webmasters actually do in response to various penalties.

How webmasters respond matters

As much as we often feel a communion among other SEOs in our resistance to Google, the reality is that we are engaged in a competitive industry where we fight for customers in a very direct manner. This duality of competition—with Google and with each other—plays out in a very unique way when Google penalizes a competitor. We learn a great deal in the following months about the competition, such as the sophistication of their team (how quickly they respond, how many links they remove, how quickly they recover), their financial strength (do they increase ad spend, how much and on what terms), and whether they eventually recover.

It is also important from a wider perspective of understanding Google’s justifications for particular types of penalties that seem sweeping and inconsistent. Conspiracy theories abound regarding Penguin updates; I can’t count how many times I have heard someone say that penalties are placed to encourage webmasters to switch to AdWords.

So, I decided to investigate the behavior of webmasters post-Penguin from a macro perspective to determine what kinds of responses we are likely to see, and perhaps even answer some questions about Google’s motivations in the process.

The methodology

1. Collect examples: I collected a list of 100 domains that were penalized by Penguin 2.0 last year and confirmed their penalization through SEMRush.
2. Establish controls: For each penalized site, I identified one website that ranked in the top 10 for their primary keyword that was not penalized.
3. Get rankings and AdWords data: For each site (both penalized and control), we grabbed their historical rankings and AdWords spend from SEMRush for the months leading up to and following Penguin 2.0
4. Get historical link data: For each site (both penalized and control), we grabbed their historical link data from Majsetic SEO for the months leading up to and following Penguin 2.0.
5. Analyze results: Using simple regression models, we identified patterns among penalized sites that differed significantly from the control sites.

Do webmasters remove bad links?

After a Penguin 2.0 update, it is imperative to identify and remove bad links or, at minimum, disavow them. While we can’t measure disavow data, we can measure link acquisition data quite easily. So, do webmasters in general follow the expectations of link removal following a penalty?

Aggressive link removal: It appears that aggressive link removal is a common response to Penguin, as expected. However, we have to be careful with the statistics to make sure we correctly examine the degree and frequency with which link removal is employed. The control group on average increased their root linking domains by 41 following Penguin 2.0, but that could best be explained by a few larger sites increasing their links. When looking at an average of link proportions, only about 22% of the control sites actually saw an increase in links in the three months post-Penguin. The sites that were penalized saw a drop of 578 root linking domains. However, once again, this statistic is impacted by the link graph size of the individual penalized sites. 15% of those penalized still saw an increase in links in the three months following Penguin.

So, approximately 22% of domains not impacted by Penguin 2.0 had more root linking domains three months after the penalty, while only 15% of those penalized had more root linking domains post-Penguin. Notice how small the discrepancy is here. Webmasters responded differently only by 7% depending on whether or not they were penalized. While certainly those penalized removed more links, the practice of link building in general was very similarly affected. In the three months following Penguin, 78% of the control websites either dropped links or at least stopped link building and lost them through attribution. This is remarkable. There appears to be a deadening effect related to Penguin that impacts all sites—not just those that are penalized. While many of us expected Penguin to have a profound impact on link growth as webmasters respond to fears of future penalties, it is still amazing to see it borne out in the numbers.

What I find more interesting is the variation in webmaster responses to Penguin 2.0. Some penalized webmasters actually doubled down on link building, likely attributing their rankings loss to having too few links, rather than being penalized. We can tease this type of behavior out of the numbers by looking at the variances in percentage link change over time.

The variance among link fluctuations for sites that were not penalized was .08, but the variance among sites that were penalized was .38. This means that the behavior of websites after being penalized was far more erratic than those that were not. Some penalized sites made the poor decisions to greatly increase their links, although more sites made the decision to greatly decrease their links. If all webmasters responded uniformly to penalties, one would not expect to see such an increase in variance.

As SEOs, we clearly have our work cut out for ourselves in teaching webmasters that the appropriate response to a penalty is very much NOT adding more and more links to your profile, because this behavior is actually more common than link removal post-penalty. It is worth pointing out that it is possible that the webmasters disavowed links rather than removing them. We do not have access to that data, so we cannot be certain regarding that procedure. It is possible that some webmasters chose to disavow while others removed, and that the net impact on link value was identical, thus making the variance calculation false.

Do webmasters increase their ad spend?

I’ll admit, I had my fingers crossed on this one. Honestly, who doesn’t want to show that Google is just penalizing webmasters because it helps their bottom line? Wouldn’t it be great to catch the search quality team not being honest with us about their fiduciary independence?

Well, unfortunately it just doesn’t bear out. The evidence is fairly clear that there is no reason to believe that webmasters increase ad-spend following a Penguin 2.0 penalty. Let’s look at the numbers.

First, across our data set, no one who was an advertiser prior to Penguin 2.0 stopped advertising in AdWords in the three months after. Of the sites that were not advertisers prior to Penguin 2.0, 10% of those not penalized ended up becoming advertisers in AdWords, while only 4% of those penalized became advertisers. Sites that weren’t penalized were far more likely to join the AdWords program than those that were.

It wasn’t only true that those unaffected by Penguin 2.0 were more likely to sign up for AdWords; they increased their average Ad-spend, too. There was a 78% greater increase in ad-spend by those unaffected by Penguin 2.0 than those who were. Moreover, bidding shifts for those not impacted by Penguin remained similar in two month intervals across multiple randomly selected three-month differences, meaning that there appeared to be no related impact whatsoever.

We can safely conclude from this that there does not appear to be a direct, causal relationship between Penguin penalties and increased AdWords spending. Now, one could of course make the argument that better search results might increase ad revenue in the future as Google attracts more users to a better search engine, but accusations of a fiduciary motivation for releasing updates like Penguin 2.0 cannot be substantiated with this data.

Do they recover?

By the 5th month, approximately 24% of sites that were penalized were at or above their pre-Penguin 2.0 traffic. This is an exciting outcome because it does show recovery from Penguin is possible. Perhaps most important, sites that were penalized and removed links on average recovered 28% more traffic in the five months after Penguin than those that did not remove links. We have good evidence to suggest at least a correlation between post-penalty link removal and traffic recovery. Of course, we do have to take this with a grain of salt for a number of reasons:

• Sites that removed links may have been more likely to use the disavow tool as well.
• Sites that removed links may have been more SEO-savvy in general and fixed on-site issues.
• Sites that did not remove links may have had more intractable penalties, thus their lack of removal was a conscious decision related to the futility of a removal campaign.

These types of alternate explanations should always be entertained when using correlative statistics. What we do have good evidence of is that traffic recovery is possible for sites hit by Penguin, although it is by no means guaranteed or universal. Penguin 2.0 needn’t be a death sentence.

Takeaways

So, in a few weeks, we are likely to see another Penguin update, assuming Google follows its late-spring release date. When Penguin hits, be ready—even if you aren’t going to be penalized. Here are some things you should be doing…

1. Know your bad links already. There is no reason to wait to be prepared for removal or disavowal. While I personally think that preemptive disavowal is likely the best practice, there is no excuse to just wait.
2. Don’t worry about AdWords. There is no statistical evidence that your competition will surge post-Penguin in any meaningful fashion. The competitors who might come to depend move on AdWords also have less organic revenue to invest in the first place. At best, these even out.
3. Don’t double down. While we can’t be certain that link removal gets you out of penalties (it is merely correlated), we can be certain that even a correlation doesn’t exist for increasing links and earning recovery post-Penguin penalties.
4. Never assume. The behavior of your competitors and of Google itself is far more complex than off-the-cuff assumptions like “Google just penalizes sites to force people into AdWords” or that your business will know intuitively to remove or disavow links post-Penguin.

Hopefully, this time around we will all be more prepared for the appropriate response to Google’s next big update—whether we are hit or not.

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 Dr-Pete

This post is a part of the “Starting Over” series, the story of starting a blog (MinimalTalent.com) from scratch. See the end of the post for links to the rest of the series.

Launching a new site is exciting, and it should be, but we sometimes let excitement get the best of us. After months of building and planning, it’s understandable to want to finally pull the trigger, but launch is important and rushing it can delay real success. This is the story of how I got Minimal Talent off the ground.

Goods news and bad news

Online marketing has evolved a lot in the past decade, and changes to search and social have brought good news and bad news for webmasters. First, the good news – it’s relatively easy to get a new site indexed in 2014, and even ranking for long-tail terms. You don’t have to wait for Google to discover you or pay a search submission service (remember those?). Unfortunately, the bad news is that ranking on real, competitive terms has gotten harder, and it takes longer. Why am I telling you this up front? You need to have realistic expectations, or launch will be an unpleasant and ultimately unproductive experience.

Alerting the bots

You can’t win if you don’t play – if you want to eventually rank in search, you need to get indexed. In part 1, we set up Google Webmaster Tools and created an XML sitemap, which can be great for discovery. Next up is to submit your site.

Yes, submissions services may be [mostly] [hopefully] dead, but Google does allow direct submission of new pages. Go to Webmaster Tools, select the “Crawl” menu and click on “Fetch as Google” – you’ll see something like this:

To submit your home-page, just leave the field blank and click [FETCH]. Your URL should show up at the bottom, and your “Fetch Status” should soon return “Success”. Once it does, just click [Submit to index]. There is a limit to how many pages you can fetch, but typically I only use this to launch a site or refresh a page that is outdated or isn’t getting re-cached.

Within minutes, I was showing up for a “site:” search (site:minimaltalent.com), with seven pages indexed (which was about right):

I promised this series would be transparent, so I have to admit that I messed up a little here. Apparently, Google had managed to crawl the site prior to my official launch, and had actually cached it a few days earlier (checked with cache:minimaltalent.com).

For me, this was no big deal, but it bears warning that, if you don’t want your site to be out in the world prematurely, you may have to take steps to keep Google from crawling. Google has a way of finding new sites, which can be good and bad, depending on your plans.

Later on launch day, I was also ranking for my tagline (“Misadventures in Minimalism”), on page 1 in the #2 position:

I’d highly encourage you to track a few non-competitive, long-tail phrases (and, if you’re a Moz customer, set them up in Moz Analytics). They may not seem sexy, but you’ll see progress much sooner than with competitive phrases. It’s important to know that your site at least has the ability to rank, in order to detect any issues early.

Link chickens & Search eggs

Which came first, the link chicken or the search egg? Ok, let me try again. If you want to rank, you’re going to need links, but you can’t get natural links if no one can find you to begin with. This is the fundamental problem of modern search marketing.

Yes, you can manually build links (and there’s a place for that, done well and in moderation). Sometimes, though, we get so hung up on the mechanics of SEO that we forget that there are plenty of other channels to get the word out.

Alerting the humans

In other words, it’s time to tell people you launched. I’m not one to broadcast every post I write to my friends, family, and tax guy, but launch is different – if you’ve created something you’re excited about, then tell people. Who did I email?

• Friends (IRL)
• Industry peers
• Co-workers
• Private mailing lists

In most cases, the email was customized to the list and even the individual. These things are worth the effort. As a marketer, emailing my peers isn’t just about a few pageviews – it’s a way to seed social sharing and potentially even drive links.

The other way around the chicken-and-egg problem is taking full advantage of social. We tend to obsess about whether or not social signals (Tweets, Likes, +1s) have a direct impact on ranking, and when we do that we miss two important points. First, sharing equals visibility, regardless of what happens on Google. Second, sharing can drive links, and better yet, those links are editorial, or as we call them, “natural”.

I shared the initial site and blog post on my main Twitter, Google+, and Facebook accounts. Since this project naturally has a visual aspect (the parody logos), it was well suited to Google+ and Facebook sharing, which tend to benefit from strong visuals.

I’ve wanted to put some time into Pinterest, so I set up a new folder just for the blog in my existing account, re-organized that account a bit, and then pinned some of the logos from the first post. Again, this project is visual, so Pinterest was a good fit.

My social screw-up

Ironically, I did on Pinterest what I tell everyone not to do on social media. I went to an account I rarely use and just started posting my own content. Since I’m not active, and I’m not sharing anyone else’s content most days, guess what happened? That’s right – absolutely nothing. A social media account is not a dumping ground for your crap. I failed to participate, and it’s going to take time to make up that lost ground. Luckily, I’m more active on other networks, but give-and-take matters quite a bit.

You may be thinking that, because I have a strong existing network, success with a new project on social is guaranteed. I wish it were that easy. A year or so ago, I launched a personal project that soundly flopped. Part of that was in my execution and commitment, but part of it was that the topic was a bit far afield for my existing audience. One of my goals with Minimal Talent was to find a topic that could tie minimalist design into something my existing audience was already interested in – in this case, branding. Be aware how your audiences overlap (or don’t).

Monitoring results

It can be hard to wait for results to come in, and patience is not one of my virtues. Luckily, Google gave us real-time analytics. While watching your numbers in real-time is an exercise in vanity most days, it can be very useful on launch day and during other big events. Are your social shares resonating? Which networks (if you stagger them in time) were most effective? Is it worth re-sharing on any particular network? Your real-time numbers can help make these calls.

I’m happy to say that I could actually see the needle move on launch day:

Fourteen active visitors isn’t going to make me rich, but it was definitely a start. At least I could tell that my social shares were leading to actual visits.

As the days went by, traffic from my launch and first post showed a pretty normal pattern:

Opening day was solid, with 383 visits, there was a tiny bump a couple of days later, and then little or nothing (the bigger bump on the right is the second post and sharing). This is the reality of most launches – sustainable traffic comes later. For now, you’re fighting for traffic post by post. If you expect launch day to be a benchmark of your day-to-day activity, you’ll be in for a very rude awakening.

I especially liked Moz Analytics overview of my first week’s traffic:

That’s right: PLUS INFINITY AND BEYOND!

Finally, I set up Fresh Web Explorer (available to Moz Pro subscribers) – FWE lets you track fresh mentions of your site and keywords. Unfortunately, my brand “Minimal Talent” contains common words, and can trigger false alarms, but FWE also lets you track things like root domains. Here’s how I set that up:

You can use the “rd:” operator to find new links to a root domain. On the main FWE screen, just click “Show search operators” to see a full list of options.

It felt good to be finally off the ground, and now I had the tools to start measuring my progress. Next time – how I handled initial SEO problems I discovered and finally started ranking for more interesting terms.

Read the full series

Use the links below to explore the entire “Starting Over” series:

• Part 1 – Pre-launch
• Part 2 – Launch

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 willcritchlow

This post is based on a talk I gave at our SearchLove conference in Boston last week. It ties quite closely with the post my colleague Ron Garrett wrote last week: Search Marketers Need to Evolve. You can probably tell we’ve been doing a lot of thinking about this.

When I gave this talk at SearchLove, I hoped that it would put in context why we bring such a range of speakers and topics together at our conferences and to inspire the attendees to go back to their companies and make real changes. I hope this post will do the same for you.

Photo by Zwickerhill Photography

As digital marketers, our focus on analytics has served us well in driving direct, measurable sales. The dominant form of brand marketing, however, has remained offline with TV taking the lion’s share of the budget and attention. We believe that as TV faces disruptive technology and business models, digital marketers have an opportunity to grow their influence and impact. In total, this is an opportunity worth tens of billions of dollars a year.

I’d very much like for us—our industry—you and me—to be the ones who benefit.

Despite all the growth we have seen in digital marketing spend, I think that we are only just entering what I’m calling the golden age of digital.

Building brands online first

We’re entering the age when the biggest brands in the world will be built online first. I hope to convince you of two things: first, that this change is happening right now. And second, that we are the people to win in this world.

Starting at the beginning

There are some confident statements above, but the last few years have had their share of introspection and crises of confidence. We’ve put a lot of time and energy over the years into understanding the direction marketing is moving and capitalising on the shifts. Duncan and I originally started by thinking that networked computing was going to be a big deal and then started our company initially on the back of a simple CMS that we built to help small business owners take advantage of the self-publishing revolution.

Photo by Zwickerhill Photography

As we shifted gears to focus more on the dominance of the search channel, we started trying to understand where Google in particular might be taking things.

We’ve written plenty about that over the years, but we were talking about effects similar to Panda, Penguin, and Hummingbird years before they actually came to pass. Panda and Penguin started making our vision come true. We were more effective search marketers than we’d ever been because we’d largely bypassed building the infrastructure for search as it was and tried to build it for how search would be.

And yet something was wrong.

Powerful content was becoming ever more effective. And yet the greatest examples of content that we were seeing at search conferences weren’t built by SEO agencies.

Brands were getting a bigger and bigger advantage in search. And yet the best brand builders weren’t SEO agencies.

For a long time, we’ve talked about how “SEO” isn’t a verb. You don’t “SEO a website.” Ranking well is an outcome, not an activity. It’s like fame. “Famous” isn’t a verb. You don’t “famous someone.” You get famous for doing other things (playing sport, performing music, appearing on TV). SEO is the same.

But what if we weren’t the right people to do those things for people? What if we weren’t the world’s best PR firm, branding agency, or creative producers?

Don’t worry. I got over my insecurity. I believe the capabilities that we have been building are going to grow in power and influence. Here’s how:

The Innovator’s Dilemma

It was Mark Suster who kick-started my confidence with his talk in San Diego [use this link and sign up for an account to get access to the video for free]. He’s an entrepreneur-turned-investor. He’s smart and opinionated.

He talked about maker studios at our conference. You might have heard a few weeks ago that Maker Studios sold to Disney for half a billion dollars.

Maker is a producer and distributor of online video. The turning point for me was in realising that the forces they were betting on were also rampaging towards our quirky, exciting, geeky little corner of the marketing world.

There’s a book called The Innovator’s Dilemma by a Harvard Business School professor named Clayton Christensen. It’s a little dry, but if you’re interested in business theory and technology, it’s an absolute no-brainer: You should read it.

It describes two kinds of innovations that hit established markets. So-called “sustaining innovations” make existing processes faster, cheaper, or better. They can be very dramatic, but Professor Christensen’s research shows that they almost always end up benefiting the incumbent players in the market.

In contrast to “sustaining innovations” stand “disruptive innovations,” which are those that attack problems an entirely different way. They typically don’t work as well as the existing solutions, perhaps solving only part of the problem, but have a structurally different cost. So they’re “cheaper but worse.”

Cheaper but worse

Doesn’t sound too compelling, does it?

That’s what the incumbents think. They may spot a potential opportunity, and may even pay lip service to the idea that they should be pursuing it, but ultimately, their economic incentives are skewed towards maintenance of the status quo.

Therein lies the dilemma.

There’s often a subset of the market, for whom the new service is “good enough.” It may not be gold-plated, but it solves their immediate needs and they can afford it. As they invest, it gets better and better, capturing more and more of the market opportunity until it’s meeting the core needs of even the top end of the market while still being structurally cheaper. Money cascades to the new entrant and leaves the incumbents high and dry.

Let’s go back to the “cheaper but worse” innovation for a second. To me, that sounds an awful lot like the idea of building a brand online. Let’s look at the details:

• The established way of building a brand for a generation has been via mass market TV advertising and other classic above-the-line spend. Spends of $100m+ are not uncommon.
• Building a brand online is cheaper, yes, but right now, not as effective.
• The incumbent brand-builders pay lip service to digital, but when you look at their corporate structure, their fee structures, and their economic incentives, and you realise that they’d far rather see TV get bigger than have to do all this messy web marketing.

So I think there is a disruption coming to brand marketing, and I don’t think it’s going to benefit the big guys.

Online first

I’m calling this whole phenomenon “online first”: the biggest brands of tomorrow will be built online. This will be partly because the tools we have available to build brands online are going to get better and better, and partly because money is going to flow to digital from TV. I recently wrote about this in more detail in our Future of TV report:

I am definitely not saying that TV itself is in trouble. We live in an amazing time for TV content. You just have to look at shows like Breaking Bad, Walking Dead, and True Detective to see that we have exceptional content and more ways of accessing that content than ever before—and that’s before we even get to Netflix and House of Cards. In part as a result of this resurgence, the total time spent watching video has increased every year recently.

Our devices are also getting better and better. The cost of big screens is coming down; we now have full HD on our mobile devices.

But the way we get our content is changing. 80% of US households have some form of internet-connected device paired with their TV according to gigaom research. Whether it’s an Apple TV, Roku, Xbox, Chromecast or something else, we can increasingly watch anything we like on the big screen. And conversely, we can watch more and more of our “classic TV” content on smartphones, tablets, laptops and any other screen we can lay our hands on.

This particular part of the trend has been analysed to death. I’m not interested in that for the purposes of this analysis. I’m interested in the fragmenting viewership: In general, we’re no longer all watching the same thing at the same time. That has profound impacts on the way TV advertising is bought and sold.

The innovator’s dilemma predicts that the cost per unit of the high end of the old market will continue to rise even as the bottom starts to fall away. It’s becoming ever more valuable to reach consumers on those rare occasions when we do all sit down at the same time to watch the same content.

The complexity of time-shifted internet-delivered content rapidly surpasses human optimisation ability. The upfront media market in which Oprah stands on stage and extols her show and the network and seeks tens or hundreds of millions of dollars of spend is a process which can’t survive the move to digital-scale complexity (if you’re interested in this, I wrote an introduction to TV advertising a few weeks ago).

Advertising against TV-like content will have to be bought more like AdWords. It has to become real-time (depending on who’s actually watching at a given moment), it’ll have to be market-priced in one form or another (because you can’t negotiate all these things individually on the fly).

I’m in danger of getting dragged into deep economic arguments, but the effect of all this disruption is going to be a whole load of unbundling and a reallocation of budgets.

Of course, in part, this will open up opportunities in video marketing—both in brand-funded TV-like content and in video advertising against internet-delivered video (check out the talk by  Chris from Wistia’s [PDF]). I don’t think it’s a given that the incumbent TV advertisers will dominate that space. It’s structurally pretty different. We are certainly betting in this area—between  Phil and Margarita, we’re already doing video strategy and execution for ourselves and our clients.

It’s not all about video, though.

How our industry competes

There are three broad areas that we all need to get great at to take advantage of this opportunity. Video fits into the first of these, which is technical creativity—that place where technology and storytelling meet:

1. Technical creativity

I’ve been endlessly frustrated over the years by the creative storytellers who misunderstand (or don’t even care about) technology. The stupid apps that no one uses. The branded social networks that nobody joins. The above-the-line campaigns telling you to search for phrases they don’t rank for.

Old-school SEOs can spot crawl issues or indexing problems in their sleep. We’ve had to get good at things like analytics, UX, and conversion. Indeed, one of the most popular talks last week (and Slideshare of the day) was from  Aaron Weyenberg at TED, and was all about UX. The things that stood out to me the most were all about the different ways they listened to their audience and gathered feedback at different stages of the process. This incorporated everything from the standard hall-way tests through qualitative and quantitative surveying to a really nicely-executed beta. You can see the full deck here:

And we mustn’t lose sight of the value of that technical knowledge. Screw up a migration and you’re just as hosed as you’ve ever been.

For me personally, the creative is the more challenging part—but luckily it’s not all about me. We’ve been  investing in creative for a while, and I loved the presentation our head of creative, Mark Johnstone gave last week entitled how to produce better content ideas. It really clarified my thinking in a few areas—particularly about the effort and research that should go in early in the process in order to give the “lightbulb moment” a chance. By coupling that with examples of deconstructing other people’s creative (and showing us / giving us further reading on how to practice ourselves) he made a compelling argument that we can all do this so much better—and that not only designers can be “creative.” I’m also looking forward to trying out the immersion techniques he talks about for getting from unstructured to structured. You can check out the full deck here:

[If you’d like to see more of the decks from Boston, you can currently get them here and in the next few weeks the videos will be available within DistilledU]

2. Broad promotional ability

The second capability we need after technical creativity is a broad promotional ability. This is your classic owned, earned and paid media.

As search marketers, we’ve typically focused primarily on the earned side of this—via outreach and digital PR—and my colleague Rob Toledo gave a great presentation about some of the cleverer forms of earned media in his presentation The Hunter/Gatherer. He talked in detail about ways of reaching that tricky kind of influencer—the one who wants to discover their own interesting share-worthy material. It was a funny presentation that contained some exceptional tactics. You can see the full deck here:

I think paid media is going to have an ever-increasing part to play in online brand building though. Pay Per Click is typically measured on direct response metrics—sending traffic to landing pages and converting them—but social and video advertising is on the rise. We increasingly spend money on promoting content instead of promoting landing pages. I expect that trend to continue.

The eagle-eyed among you might have noticed that this isn’t inbound. I make no apology for that.

3. Influence and measurement throughout the Customer Lifecycle

Finally, alongside our technical creativity and promotional ability, we need to double down on our ability to influence and measure customer behaviour throughout the customer lifecycle.

We’ve all heard (or even been) the search experts who stand on stage and talk about the measurability of digital. Sometimes they go further and make off-hand comments about how you “can’t measure TV.”

Does anyone really believe that? Anyone think Proctor & Gamble or Unilever really waste half the money they spend?

One of the most mind-blowing talks I ever attended was at ad:tech a few years ago—it was a speaker from Ogilvy talking about the econometric models they use to measure their work for P&G. It was all about how they were tying together the influence of point-of-sale, coupon codes, TV, and other above-the-line advertising to understand what’s making them the money. They are good at it but it’s expensive. Our industry’s stuff is cheap in comparison. It’s not yet good enough but if we work hard and invest, it can be.

What I didn’t say

Remember: I didn’t say TV is dead. I didn’t say search is dead. I said that our crazy blend of technical creativity, promotional chops and measurement skills is going to be the skillset that builds tomorrow’s biggest brands. AND—crucially to the topic near and dear to much of the Moz audience’s hearts, it’s also going to be how you rank in Google.

Advertising is a half-trillion dollar a year industry struggling to understand its place in a digital world. I don’t want the same old guys to win on our turf. The internet is our domain. Let’s go get great at this.

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 randfishFrom Google’s interpretation of rel=”canonical” to the specificity of anchor text within a link, there are several areas where we thought Google would make a move and are still waiting for it to happen. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, R… Continue reading →

Posted by RichardMillington

None of the technology released in the past five years has made us better at building communities.

It’s made it easier to build communities, but it hasn’t made us better at building communities.

In fact, much of it has proved a costly distraction that has reduced the chances of us succeeding.

We say that with confidence. We’ve crunched, munched, and otherwise stared at numbers until our eyes bleed. Technology tweaks, barring a correction for an earlier mistake, rarely have a big long-term impact upon a community’s level of growth and activity.

We’ve had organizations invest millions (the record was $2.1m) on a new community platform to revive a fading community. That’s a lot of money to waste. That’s at the ‘ people getting fired’ level of money.

There is a far better approach to making our communities more successful. It doesn’t involve big technology overhauls or spammy marketing pushes.

It’s creating a sense of community.

In this post, I’m going to outline why the sense of community is the missing piece of the community puzzle, the power of a strong sense of community, and how we can use social science to guide us.

The closest thing we have to a silver bullet

Sense of community is the idea that community is experienced (or imagined).

The only people in a community are those that believe they are, not those that have completed a registration form  in 30 seconds.

When people are really members of a community, they feel a strong psychological connection to that group.  They sacrifice part of their own identity to accept, embrace, and then defend the group identity.

Sense of community has been shown to significantly  increase activity, increase customer loyalty and buying behaviour, higher levels of brand advocacy, increase knowledge exchange, and reduced tendency to engage in negative behaviors.

The research here is about as conclusive as the existence of gravity. This can lead to only one conclusion, that we absolutely must be developing a sense of community among our members.

It’s not a silver bullet for community professionals, but it’s the closest thing we will ever get to a silver bullet.

The problem at the moment is most community professionals completely ignore this. They don’t try to create a strong sense of community among their members. Those that do don’t understand the principles of doing so. They hop from one idea to the next hoping each new idea will give them the sense of community explosion they crave.

Let’s change this. If we want to immediately be much better at building communities, let’s master the core principles of fostering a sense of community.

The four foundations for sense of community were highlighted in a landmark article published David McMillan and David Chavis in 1986. These are:

1) Membership

2) Influence

3) Integration and fulfilment of needs

4) Shared emotional connections

Membership is the feeling that an individual has a right to belong in the community and can identify other members who also have the right to belong in a community. It comprises four attributes:

1) Boundaries

2) Emotional safety

3) Personal investment

4) A common symbol system.

You can intentionally add (or manipulate) each attribute to your community.

1) Boundaries

Boundaries separate insiders from outsiders. Boundaries are what separate your community from mainstream society. They allow members to be themselves and emotionally open to the group.

Boundaries can be real (think gated communities) or imagined (common experience). They can include rituals and traditions. The higher the boundary, the stronger the sense of community.

The easiest way to increase the sense of community is to raise the boundary to being an accepted member of the community. This usually means developing a more narrow focus for the community. We can use Ramit Sethi’s two-qualifier method here.

The best communities are those for {x} who do {y}. Where {x} and {y} are demographic, habits, or psychographic variables (who we are, what we do/have done/can do, and what we think/feel). See the table below:

You need to pick at least two. 

If you have an existing community and want a stronger community, simply add another boundary to the focus of the community.

This is why smaller communities typically have a stronger community (and more active membership) than the larger behemoths. If we look at the different types of community, we see a LARGE number of communities with multiple qualifiers.

The RockAndRoll tribe is a community for middle-aged (demographics) people who love rock and roll (psychographics). Not for those that love rock and roll, not for those middle-aged, but a very specific group that feel a strong sense of community with one another.

Below,  BackPacking Light is for travellers (habits) who want to have the lightest possible backpacks (psychographics). This crowd completely geek out on shaving a few grams off their backpacks.

If you have an existing community, it’s quite easy to increase the sense of community by adding a common shared goal to the group and making this goal explicit.

Most communities, especially those created by organizations, are aimless. Ask 10 members what they want to achieve in the future or what they fear and add that as a boundary. E.g. ” This is a community for HR professionals who want to embrace collaborative learning. “

If that’s not possible, look at age, location, or experience factors. If say only people with five years’ experience in the field can join, everyone with 5+ years of experience will want to join. That’s powerful.

The community for StudentDoctors, for example, might not look like much – but it hosts almost 15m posts from 419,224 members. That makes it more popular than almost any community for doctors. This group has common goals, experiences, and shared connections with one another.

Our own community, CommunityGeek, only accepts community professionals with a strong track record in the social sciences. It’s the two qualifiers that ensure we feel a strong connection to one another.

We can also embrace a process known as boundary maintenance in communities. This is a process by which boundaries are made more visible and reinforced by references to it and, most importantly, rituals and traditions.

In college groups, this used to be the reason behind hazing. Sadly, this isn’t something we can do in our communities. However, we have a ritual we make new members go through. We usually ask them to share their biggest mistakes.

This is a powerful discussion for three reasons. It’s usually funny and interesting to new members, most people can identify with the mistakes, and it makes people emotionally open to the group.

It’s also a discussion that almost anyone can participate in. Guide people towards these discussions as opposed to the generic and tedious introduce yourself discussion. Make the introduction process fun and part of a ritual your community uses.

Alternatively, use an experience-based discussion. For example, BaristaExchange, below, asks members to share how they learned to roast. You can adapt this to any community you’re working on:

How/where did you learn to {x}?

When did you become interested in {y}?

2) Emotional safety

Communities should be a place where we can talk about things that we can’t talk about anywhere else. Sometimes that is a ferocious 40,000 word debate about whether to capitalize the I in Star Trek: iInto Darkness. Usually it’s about discussing the geekiest or more hardcore topics.

There aren’t many places you can discuss current detection an a Allegro ACS756 on an ATmega328. Luckily, the terrific Element14 community (by Premier Farnell) is one of them.

You should push your community to discussing the things they can’t discuss anywhere else. It might be being frustrated at how difficult it is to lose weight with diabetes.

Communities should be a place where feel comfortable discussing the most difficult, geekiest, or most hardcore topics in our space. Very often, this means you need to initiate exactly these sorts of discussions.

Some communities, like GAIA Online really want to discuss who would win in a fight between Kirk and Spock. This gives them a feeling of emotional safety within the group. It leads to strange sounding posts like these:

Make sure your community is the place to discuss the geekiest and most emotive topics in your sector.

3) Personal investment

Members want to work to feel they have earned their place in the group. The more they have invested their time, resources, energy, emotions into the community they more they will continue to participate to avoid cognitive dissonance.

The more we have invested into the success of the community, the more we feel a connection to that group. The challenge is provide people easy, but meaningful, methods of investing in the group at the beginning. We want to work to fit in and be accepted.

There are a few simple tactics you can apply here. One is to turn your community’s registration form into an application form. This is a nifty act of psychological ju-jitsu. The community becomes a place that you can join to a place that you might be able to join if you’re good enough. People that apply are far more likely to participate. We use this in CommunityGeek.

Another simple tactic shown above is priming members to be in the participation mindset when they join.

We ask new members what they can offer the community when they join the group. This forces them to think what skills and experiences they have and how they could contribute them. Once they are approved (if they are accepted), they know what they can do. They know what investments they can make in the community. They also feel they have earned their place in the community, as per above.

Don’t send your newcomers aimlessly into the group. Guide them towards positive actions they will convert them into regular members. Josh Elman’s talk at the HabitSummit is worth watching here (skip to 20 minutes in).

The most highly converting action we know of are self-disclosure discussions. These are bonding-orientated self-discussions where we reveal information about our experiences, our thoughts/opinions on different topics, or information about who we are.

These discussions make people feel  a stronger sense of connection to the group, especially a virtual group.

The BaristaExchange example above is a good idea here. Some types of discussions tend to work in all sectors. For example:

• How did you first become interested in {topic}?
• What was your biggest success in {topic}?
• What was your worst mistake in {topic}?
• Who do you most admire in {topic}?
• Show off your best {topic-related thing}

Feel free to use your own. The goal is to guide a member to participate in this discussion within the first few minutes of registering for the community.

You need to indoctrinate them into the social aspect of the community. Guide members to participate in exactly these sorts of discussions via your post-registration page, confirmation/welcome e-mail, autoresponders, and in any personal messages to newcomers.

Update and rotate the discussion on a regular basis to keep it fresh.

Once someone participates they’re more likely to visit again to see the response to their contribution. They get caught up in the notification cycle of visiting, contributing, being notified of a response, and visiting again.

Via this process they also become socialized into the community. They get to know the other members.

The community membership lifecycle is fickle; you need to offer members the opportunity to make the right investments at the right time. These investments gradually build up until a member becomes a regular participant in your community and feels a strong sense of connection to the group.

4) Common symbol system

A big problem facing branded communities is the community feels like an inauthentic marketing attempt to peddle whatever the organization is selling this month.

You get companies initiating conversations like this:

I don’t know “MB_Melissa”.

She might genuinely be looking forward to hearing what you think.

She might be on the edge of her seat, refreshing the page constantly in anticipation of the impending eruption of responses. But I doubt it.

I’ve never seen a member initiate a discussion using the phrase “Product Discussion“. Those very words conjure negative connotations. The body of the content will make members cringe. The half-hearted and unnatural segue into a discussion feels repulsive.

Inauthentic symbols undermine any possible sense of community. The only way to overcome this is by bringing common symbol systems into the community.

You need to identify the words, images, ideas, and signs that have a unique meaning to community members and spread them liberally throughout your community.

This means mentioning them in content, naming the community after them (e.g. Element14 is quite literally a symbol here), and naming parts of the community after them. I don’t know much about the  Coconut Monkeyhead Fun Club, but it’s very popular in Carnival’s terrific community.

Talk to members of the target audience and pay special attention to the expressions they use which have a unique meaning to them but not to outsiders. Then use these symbols throughout the community.

This also means replicating their tone of voice and language style. That can be difficult for many organizations to accept. This is why communities initiated by amateurs are far more successful than those initiated by people paid to develop them on behalf of organizations.

Action points:

• Raise the boundary to being an accepted member of the community.

• Encourage more personal investments of time, energy, emotions, and resources.

• Introduce a ritual to the newcomer process.

• Introduce shared symbols to the community content (and name)

People only participate in a community if they feel they can influence the community. Notice the word feel in that sentence. Not everyone will be able to influence the community, but everyone needs to feel they could influence the community.

A big mistake of branded communities is they don’t offer members enough influence. We have efficacy needs to satisfy. To create this feeling we need to do two things.

First, we need to create plenty of opportunities for members to have influence.

Second, we need to amplify the influence that members do have.

Creating opportunities for influence

Communities should provide members keen to be more involved with a simple process of becoming more involved. If members want to write a regular column, help run areas of the site, interview experts, organize events, approve and welcome new members or lend their expertise, the community should have a place where they can do that.

You can also interview the key members in the community that aren’t putting themselves forward but would benefit from the influence they then receive.

Feature contributions. Prominently feature the contributions of members on the community platform. If a member makes a great contribution, mention it in a news article and encourage the member to write a column based upon the topic.

Write about your members. Use your content to write what members are doing. Talk about their milestones. It might be a work achievement, a topic-related success or even a lifestyle success. If a member is getting married or has a child, is climbing a mountain congratulate them. Profile members that are doing interesting things.

Promote existing expertise. Find members who are already experts in a niche topic within your field and invite them to have their own Ask Me areas in the community.

This both encourages the existing members to participate more, shows other members that they too could have their own ask me area, and gives other members a reliable source of expertise on a particular topic.

Or, if you have high-profile people in your sector, Reddit’s AMA (ask me anything) is an alternative approach that is usually entertaining and helps bond the community into a group.

Just be careful that the interviewee fully understands the concept.

Once people have had an influence, amplify and showcase the influence to the rest of the community. Write case studies, add it to your community’s epic community history, and mention it in your news posts and your newsletters. Shine as big a spotlight on the influence members have had as possible.

The needs of the community and the individual need to align in a manner that’s beneficial to both. Too many communities focus on pumping out endless content. This attracts a lot of people to read, but not to participate.

This doesn’t satisfy our needs to be a part of a group with a strong identity.

We want to join groups that make us better than we are today. We want to associate with the best, brightest, smartest, or otherwise most valued people in our sector. We want to feel they have the same-shared values as we do.

Status of being a member

Being an accepted member should be a status symbol that members can embrace. You need to raise the profile of the community outside of the platform. Make sure it gets featured in relevant media. Set goals for the community to achieve, and achieve them. The more you raise the profile of your community, the more members want to join.

People do not join communities they don’t feel will succeed. If your community looks quiet/empty, you need to remove the dead areas of the site set small milestones the community can achieve early on. Concentrate activity in as small an area as possible so the community feels active.

In CommunityGeek, we have no forum categories at all. All the activity takes place on the landing page of the community. This makes the community feel very active very early on.

If your community is highly active, then show off this high level of activity. Highlight the quantity and quality of comments in the community. Make people they are participating in something they has momentum and is successful.

The frontpage of FetLife, a community for people with alternative sexual lifestyles (NSFW), posts the numbers to all members on the landing page of community along with testimonials about the site.

Competence

You need to attract and retain talented and knowledgeable members.

People want to be in a community with the best and brightest. You need to attract them (appeal to their ego – weekly columns, interviews etc…) and keep them engaged in the community. You need to ensure your community is the best fountain of knowledge for your topic in your industry.

The best method of attracting key figures is to appeal to their ego. Interview them, write about them in news posts, feature their work, create community awards you can give them, or rank.

Alternatively, make the community exclusive and only for the best people in the topic. All the best people in the topic will want to join (but pretend they don’t care about it).

Shared values

Members have to feel that fellow members share the same values. One method of doing that is creating a constitution or purpose statement for the community (mission statement has negative connotations). This outlines why the community exists, what the community believes in, and what the community intends to achieve.

You can send this out to all new members when they join the community to begin indoctrinating them into the culture of the community.

Overcoming Bias, for example, posts the following statement:

This highlights to newcomers why this site exists and the purpose it serves its members. Your community should do the same. It’s usually best to base the community around one of BJ Fogg’s motivations[xlv]. It should be based around pleasure, reducing pain, hope for a change in the world, reducing fear of something bad happening, social inclusion, or avoiding social exclusion.

The communities with the strongest sense of community oscillate at the same emotional frequency. They are happy, sad, and angry at the same things at the same time. Developing this shared emotional connection is difficult.

A shared emotional connection comprises of several elements. These include regular contact, good quality of interactions, shared experiences, shared history, and emotional openness.

Ensure regular contact

The more people interact, the more likely they will like each other. This is based upon the  mere exposure effect. The more we are exposed to something, the more we like it. In the contact hypothesis, the more frequently we come into contact with other people, the more likely we are to like them.

Your members need to regularly interact with each other. Don’t wait for these interactions to happen, proactively do things that drive these interactions.

Initiate regular weekly online discussions. Have live discussion topics around different issues, interview VIPs in your sector live, organize online and offline challenges or quizzes. Make sure your members are interacting with each other as frequently as possible.

Make the interactions meaningful

The interactions have to be meaningful. Exchanging information is fine, but limited. Introducing and highlighting (via sticky threads etc…) bonding-related or status-jockeying discussions will improve the quality to discussions.

Don’t try to overly control what members want to talk about or force members to talk about the topics you want to see more of. Let members lead the discussion and see where it goes. At the British Medical Journal’s Doc2Doc community, we found most doctors didn’t want to spend their spare time sharing medical advice. In fact, they want to debate ethical dilemmas.

The most popular ever discussion was this one below; was it wrong to use medical care to track down Osama Bin Laden?

This means you need to allow off-topic discussions. If members can only ever talk about the topic, they will never get to know each other personally. If they can’t personally get to know more about each other (or even remember previous contributions of members), they’ll never feel a strong sense of community with that group.

This is why it’s common for the off-topic discussions to be the most popular discussions in the majority of communities. People want to connect and get to know more about each other. Don’t shut these down.

Shared history

Ensure your community has an epic and explicit history. Write it down. Talk about the major events and activities that have taken place within the community. Make sure all newcomers understand the narrative of the community their joining and their place within it.

Nostalgia is good here too. Subtle reminders to positive events which have taken place in the past reinforce the community identity.

Provoke emotional discussions

A final tactic is to introduce more emotionally provocative discussions. Members are likely to feel the same way about the same things at the same time.

If you can provoke those discussions, members are likely to share their feelings with one another about the topic.

If you begin introducing the above elements into your community, you should begin to notice members feeling more familiar, the tone and the language chances, and the overall sense of community begin to develop.

Measuring the sense of community

Measuring something as intangible as the sense of community is difficult. It doesn’t show up in Google Analytics. You have to survey a sample of members using the sense of community index (SCI-2) developed by David Chavis at CommunityScience.com.

Don’t invite all members to compete the survey. This will lead to a non-response bias. Those most likely to feel a strong sense of community are also those most likely to complete the survey. You need to segment your community in four groups and obtain a sample from each group which broadly represents the community.

We do this every quarter with some of our client communities. Here is an example:

This is an example of an average sense of community result for a former client.

However this only paints a broad picture of what happened in the community. The index allows us to identify which aspects of the sense of community are present and which need further development.

Here you see that the sense of community was initially low within this client’s community. We decided to tackle one aspect at a time and improve that. In this case, we chose influence. We decided to give members as many opportunities to feel influential within the group.

This means we sub-divided the community into smaller groups, we increased the number of interviews, we created opportunities for members to interview one another, and we began mentioning the names of members in every single news post we published in the community.

The level of influence rose immediately. Next we would tackle the shared emotional connection with positive (although not quite as impressive) effects. The power of this index is in identifying specifically what you can improve and then using the tactics above to improve it.

Do you want a community that lasts for 30 years?

Last year, I had the opportunity to meet John Coates. Most people haven’t heard of John; he’s the world’s first ever online community manager. He was the community manager of The WELL – the first online community. The WELL was founded in 1985.

When you listen to John speak, you realize that throughout the entire history of the community they have always had an incredibly strong sense of community among the group.

Developing a powerful sense of community is the most effective thing anyone managing a community can do to increase the level of growth, activity, and value over the community over the long-term.

Developing a sense of community will give you a community that lasts for years, maybe decades, instead of month.

Developing a sense of community is something each one of us is able to do among any group of people. Once you know and understand the elements above, it’s easy to use them to build any number of successful communities.

Good luck!

You can download half of my book,  Buzzing Communities, for free here: http://course.feverbee.com/learn-more

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 →