Posted by Trevor-Klein

Last month, 766 of our readers took a few minutes to tell us what they thought of the Moz Blog. We were absolutely blown away by the quality of the feedback we got, and we’re excited to share what we learned with all of you.

You told us you’re squeezed for time in a constantly changing “need-it-yesterday” world. You told us you’re sick of “ultimate guides,” and that you’re (for the most part) already well versed in the basics of SEO, and are craving more advanced tips, tricks, and tactics. You told us that content marketing and data analysis are two areas where you could use some help.

We hear you.

The rest of what you told us can be found below, and we’ll be incorporating these takeaways into our planning for the Moz Blog over the coming months. The entire set of results is available as a Google Spreadsheet—if you’re interested, please feel free to make a copy. If you learn anything beyond what we show here, please let us know!

Your job titles

One of the things we’ve wondered as we’ve made the transition from SEOmoz to Moz is whether our audience would begin to include a greater number of people from outside the world of SEO. As Rand explained so well, we can’t just be SEOs anymore. So, we did what anyone would do—we tossed all of your job titles into a word cloud.

Two things are immediately obvious:

• SEO is still a huge part of what you all do, as it’s the largest word in this cloud
• Given how large the word “marketing” is, there are also quite a few of you whose jobs likely include many other aspects, as well.

It’d be interesting to see how this cloud changed over time. Would those two words be similar in size six months from now? A year? Time will tell, but for now, our best course of action might be the T-shaped approach. Lots of advanced depth in SEO, combined with enough depth in other areas to make sure everyone’s up to speed with the changes in the industry.

---

Your experience

Along the same lines, as our audience continues to expand and the Beginner’s Guide to SEO continues to be our most successful piece of content, we wanted to know how experienced our readers were in their lines of work. As it turns out, we have a pretty good spread:

---

Your level of SEO expertise

It’s no secret that Moz’s background revolved around SEO, and so it comes as no surprise that most of our readers consider their SEO skills to be pretty advanced. On a scale of 1-5, 86% of respondents rated their SEO expertise a 3 or better, and 14% labeled themselves “industry experts.” Given people’s natural inclination to choose responses toward the middle of a scale like this (central tendency bias), we might even have more industry experts than these results show.

Still, there are a significant number of readers who are relatively new to SEO, so one of our challenges is to find the right line between basic and advanced SEO content.

One of the ideas we’re considering is implementing more of what I call “pre-read transparency,” making it easier to get a feel for what a post is about and whether it’s relevant for you before you even start reading it. If done well, this could save our readers valuable time and make it easier to find additional reading that’s relevant to your work. (If you’ve got ideas on ways to make that happen, we’d love to hear about them in the comments!)

---

How much SEO?

At the same time, 45% of respondents said they spend less than half of their time doing SEO work. More than 20% said they spend less than a fifth of their time on SEO. There are some blurry lines here, for sure (how much of your day-to-day would you need to spend on SEO before you considered yourself an expert?), but our read is that even the people who have the most expertise in SEO are finding themselves doing more and more work outside of that area.

---

Your greatest challenges

This was one of the more telling sets of responses we received. Our primary goal with the Moz Blog is to help you all become better marketers, and in order to do that, we need to know what you all need help with. This was a text-entry question; people could write as much or as little about their challenges as they pleased. We noted recurring issues in the responses, and tallied every distinct mention of each of those issues.

Some issues might seem like they overlap, but we think this paints a pretty clear picture of what our readers are struggling with in today’s world of marketing:

We all work in a rapidly changing industry, and even the experts are constantly having to learn new techniques. One of our primary jobs involves not only informing you of those changes, but also offering recommendations on how you might adapt your work. We’ll continue to seek out the best advice in that respect.

Content marketing is obviously an essential field for today’s marketers, and there are relatively few good resources for people looking to improve their own content skills. We hope to bring you more posts to fill that niche and help you level-up.

There were also quite a few responses having to do with workplace productivity: time management, effective communication, and finding ways to convey the value of our work to clients and customers. These are areas we haven’t covered much on the Moz Blog, but are vitally important for effective marketers. Look for more of these posts in the future.

Your reading style

What we were really trying to get at here was how long we felt comfortable making posts (we’ve had a few doozies in our time). Given that nearly two-thirds of our readers try to go for the entire post (and yet only have so much time on their hands), we’re likely to try and keep things compendious so we don’t scare folks away from even starting in.

This also suggests that we shouldn’t worry quite so much about the inverted pyramid, since people generally tend to keep reading anyway, though in our minds that doesn’t hold a candle to Strunk and White’s age-old advice to “omit needless words.” =)

---

The devices you prefer

This was a shocker for us. One of the items that has remained on our back burner for some time is creating a more mobile-friendly responsive site, especially for the blog, and we wanted to know how much of a priority it was for all of you. With mobile devices now accounting for 28% of all web traffic, we figured this was a high priority for our readership. Boy, were we wrong:

More than 92% of respondents listed “laptop/desktop” as at least one of their preferred devices; fewer than 8% left the “laptop/desktop” option unchecked.

One of the most interesting comments on the survey’s blog post alluded to the idea that this could simply be a result of what people are used to, not what their preferences actually are, since many blogs (our own included) still lack responsive design. That’s something we’ll absolutely work on when we can, but at the same time, these numbers are so wildly skewed toward reading on computers that we feel pretty safe taking care of other priorities first.

Relevancy to your work

This might be more of a baseline to work from than a real metric of how we’re already doing, but we were certainly pleased to see this curve leaning to the right:

We’re planning on diving a little deeper into the data for this one, too. In a sense, the data behind this graph can provide us with a rudimentary content audit. We can look at the people who landed toward the top of this graph, and figure we’re providing plenty of content that’s relevant to their lines of work. We can also look at the people at the bottom of this graph and know we’re missing the mark for them.

As a whole, though, it’s certainly encouraging to see that most people find the majority of the posts on the Moz Blog to be pretty relevant. We’ll likely conduct another (perhaps shorter) survey in a year or so in order to measure progress against data like this.

---

Accessibility

One debate we have frequently in the Mozplex is whether our posts are appropriately accessible. In other words, are people bored because they’re not learning anything they don’t already know? Or, are they confused because our posts go right over their heads?

Our customer mentor, Matt Roney, has done some fantastic work with Moz Analytics subscribers, and has found out that many people seem to be confused by the complexity of web marketing, and thereby of our tools. That made us wonder if folks were generally confused by our posts, as well.

As it turns out, most of our audience finds the balance to be about right:

One interesting note is that there are significantly more people who think posts are too basic than folks who think they’re too advanced, confounding our expectation based on Matt’s interactions.

Also interesting is the degree to which people find posts too basic or advanced. We asked respondents who chose “too basic” to rate just how basic they were on a scale of 1-5, and asked a similar question for people who chose “too advanced.” The average score for people who thought it was too basic was 2.7—right at the middle of the scale—and the average score for people who thought it was too advanced was 3.6—much higher on the scale. This implies that our beginner-level readers are more lost than our advanced readers are bored.

There’s a great solution to this, which is to offer help to beginner-level readers on the more advanced posts. Perhaps this comes in the form of tool tips with explanations and definitions of more advanced concepts. Maybe it’s a couple of links in the sidebar that lead to relevant “background content,” such as a chapter in the Beginner’s Guide to SEO. Whatever the case, we’re likely to lean just a little in the advanced direction while also offering beginners a way to catch up quickly.

---

Room for improvement

We asked you all an open-ended question about what you’d like to see different about the Moz Blog. We coded and tallied mentions of each request, and we have to say we’re pretty happy with the #1 response:

There’s a lot of other great feedback in here, too, including a confirmation of your desire to see more tutorials, case studies, and action-oriented posts that keep you on top of your game. There was also an echo of the call for more advanced posts.

More than 30 people requested an increase in posts that include videos, with many of those expressing an appreciation for Whiteboard Friday. While we’re pretty happy with just one Whiteboard post each week, there’s something to be said for finding other ways to present video content, as there are a great many examples of successful educational videos. We’ve even begun offering our own educational videos to subscribers through Moz Academy. This is an area ripe for further exploration.

Oh, and for the 11 folks who asked for more from Rand, you may get your wish before long. =)

Topics

This was one of the most interesting sets of results for us. We asked about which topics you’d like to learn more about, hoping to gain some direct insight into the most valuable things we could post about on the blog. Respondents could select as many of these options as they liked. As you might guess, advanced SEO came out on top, with nearly 3/4 of responses selecting that option.

If we didn’t already have enough evidence that content marketing was at the forefront of people’s minds, this speaks for itself:

We were also interested to see how high data analysis ranked on this list, although with the volume of data we all deal with on a regular basis, there’s no real surprise. The ability to transform information into knowledge and knowledge into wisdom is vital for today’s marketers, and we’ll do everything we can to equip you all for the task.

We’ll use these responses (among other things) as a guide for the distribution of topics we post on the blog. It won’t be an exact science—you won’t see exactly 73 posts out of every 100 covering advanced SEO—but you can expect we’ll post more about advanced SEO than we do about paid search marketing or community management, and so forth.

We’ll also work hard to draw connections between these categories, realizing that it’s impossible to silo them all away from one another. Social media is heavily connected to branding, for example, and video marketing is simply a specific type of content marketing. We’ll use what we know about your day-to-day work as a foundation, and show you what you need to know about the other areas in this list.

---

Types of posts

Make no mistake, we will never title any blog post “The Ultimate Guide to ___” again. =)

This is no typo or data entry error—out of the 749 people who answered this question, not a single one indicated they wanted to see more “ultimate guides” on the blog.

We’ve talked about this quite a bit in the office, and our theory is that it is always a false promise. There’s no ultimate guide to anything (in any sense of the word). There are really good guides, and there are some that many people will consider the best available—but if someone else put in enough effort, they could certainly make a better guide.

One of the many (many) lessons I’ve learned from Cyrus Shepard is that headlines are a promise to the readers. If what’s behind the headline doesn’t live up to that promise, you’ve lied about what you have, and are breaking the hard-earned trust you’ve built with them over time.

We also think that while some “ultimate guides” are impressive (and are widely shared as a result), they’re usually far too long to actually read through right away. Given the well established lack of time that folks in our industry have, these posts often get pocketed indefinitely, undermining their true value.

That isn’t the only useful part of these responses, though—it’s quite clear that the most valuable posts we can give you all are those that contain truly actionable content. It isn’t about inspiration as much as it is about helping you stay ahead of industry changes, and showing you step-by-step how to be more effective and efficient with your work. You can expect to see more tutorials and case studies as time goes on.

Now we go to work. Thanks to all of you, we have a great sense for what kinds of content we should seek out in order to provide the most value for you.

Here’s a run-down of some of our biggest takeaways:

• While our readers are increasingly focusing on other areas of marketing, the foundation of their work still lies in SEO, and our content needs to reflect that specialization. We should think of our readers as “T-shaped,” focusing on advanced depth in SEO while drawing connections to areas like content, social, branding, and others.
• Our readers are challenged by a constantly changing industry in which they’re required to continually learn (and evangelize) new techniques to retain their expertise. They are frustrated by a lack of time and resources, difficulty in communicating and reporting their work to both colleagues and customers, and a need for up-to-date best practices in many areas—especially content marketing and link building.
• Our readers prefer to consume blog posts on desktops or laptops, and if they choose to read a post, most of them try to get all the way through it.
• Our readers generally have an advanced knowledge of SEO, but there are many who are relatively new to the field and feel lost when reading our more advanced posts.
• There is a great demand for action-oriented posts among our readers, including tutorials and case studies. This demand vastly overshadows the demand for more generalized overviews and higher-level strategies.

Given all of that, here are some things you might expect to see on the Moz Blog as we move forward:

1. More actionable posts, including tutorials and case studies
2. A tendency toward more advanced posts related to SEO, along with more basic posts that connect SEO to other areas of inbound
3. More help for beginners in getting the background necessary to understand the more advanced posts
4. High quality posts to fill the content marketing niche
5. More posts on data analysis, competitive research, social media, workplace productivity, and other topics toward the top of the list above
6. More “pre-read transparency,” offering details to help you determine a post’s relevancy to you before you click

Overall: Content that’s more relevant and valuable to you and your work. That’s our goal, and we want to keep hearing from you. Please feel free to send us your thoughts at any time (editor@moz.com), whether about something we posted, topic suggestions, or anything else related to the blog.

We’d also love to see your analysis of this data: Did we miss anything? Get something wrong? Let us know in the comments below.

Thanks to everyone who gave their time for this survey; it was immensely insightful for us Mozzers!

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 Jess_Champion

In a past life I worked exclusively in traditional print and broadcast PR, where digital coverage was viewed as a bonus. But since landing a job as a PR consultant at Distilled, all of that has changed. My goals have shifted.

Previously my goals were things like brand awareness and changing audience perceptions—and these were driven by press coverage.

But, while these goals still come in to play, I have a new goal too—to build links. And, as most of you know, link building is not easy.

So, eight months down the line, I feel it’s time to share what I’ve learned.

An eight-step plan

There are a few tried and tested methods for PR driven link-building, like guest posting and pitching for by-lined articles, but these can be slow-burning processes.

What I’m going to talk you through is a process which, if invested in and executed well, is much more likely to result in multiple links from high quality, authoritative news sites.

There’s no quick fix. Even before search was on my radar, I’d always believed in integrated communications. Link-building is just another component of what should be a multi-faceted approach, and as such, I believe that links are symptomatic of a well-executed PR campaign.

For any marketing campaign you should be looking to use multiple channels. However, the purpose of this post is to specifically explore ways of working with the media, and consequently how to build links on top-tier media sites.

Step one: Find the story

If you want to be in the media, you need to find a story. It’s as simple as that. No amount of spin is going to see your latest annual review on The New York Times‘ homepage.

In a recent Distilled blog post, I wrote about the eight criteria that make something newsworthy. In brief, these criteria are:

Image: @Distilled

Head over to that post if you’d like more details and examples of each one.

Sometimes you’ll have things going on that already fit the bill. Maybe you’re launching a new product in time for Christmas. Or perhaps you’ve got a great case study which will help you tell a human interest story.

Relating to real people, like Batkid, will help you tell your story

(Picture: Bhautik Joshi/Flickr)

Oftentimes, though, our clients just haven’t got anything newsworthy going on. And this is when you need to create your own story.

Step two: Create a story

There are a few different ways you can create a story, the most obvious being PR stunts. But these often mean spending big bucks. A cheaper way to create a credible news story is to conduct a survey.

For example, I recently ran a survey for our client Worldpay Zinc. We only launched it two weeks ago, but here are some of the results so far:

• An article on the website of one of the UK’s national newspapers, The Telegraph, incorporating two links
• A write-up on The Guardian, which also included two links
• Daily Mail coverage
• 3 pieces of national print coverage
• 30+ pieces of online regional coverage
• A BBC Radio 2 appearance
• A mention on national TV

You’ll notice that I’ve included results that don’t include links, but that’s to reiterate a point that I often make at Distilled: Links are symptomatic of great PR.

That’s not to say there aren’t ways and means to increase your chances of getting links, though, and we’ll explore these in the steps below.

Step three: Conduct a survey

Once you’ve decided on a survey topic and incorporated as many of the newsworthy criteria as you can, you’ll need to devise the questions. Here are some general rules for conducting robust PR surveys:

1. Start with the story and work backwards

It makes a good deal of sense to have an idea of your angle before you start, so always think about the story you’d like to tell. Each question should directly relate to this story, regardless of whether you get the results you expect or not. The aim here is not to manipulate, but to make sure the answers translate into interesting data points.

2. Choose a reputable market research agency

Journalists are much more likely to cover surveys if they come from a trustworthy company. The agency will also help you fine-tune your questions and make sure you’re not being unintentionally leading.

3. Think about your demographic

Surveying the general public is fine but sometimes looking at a specific niche will strengthen your story. If your client is a parenting website, why not run a survey of parents? As an aside, if you poll the general public then you’ll need to survey at least 2,000 people. 1,000 is generally fine for smaller niches.

4. Split your demographic

A great way of drilling down into a story is by splitting your demographic into subcategories. Most polling companies will do this by age, gender, and region as standard but, often at additional cost, it’s possible to dig even deeper. A strong leading stat with lots of subsequent data points will help you create a much more robust story.

5. Ask as many questions as you can

As a rule, you should ask at least 10 questions. Along with the demographic splits, this should give you enough data to write a compelling news story with lots of interesting points. The more details you can add to a story, the more news copy you’ll generate.

6. Use lists

Where you can, compile lists. Journalists love a good “Top 10 list.” In fact, the WPZ survey I mentioned earlier has two articles on the Telegraph site. The second was titled “The 10 jobs men don’t trust women (or men) to do.”

Step four: Make your story link-worthy

Once you’ve analysed your data and come up with a strong story, you then have to find a way to generate links. Increasingly, newspapers are reluctant to link out, and in my experience, the only way to get a decent link on a high-tier site is to create something of value to both the journalist and their readers. Digital journalists are crying out for great visuals and digital content; if you can create something that genuinely adds value to the story (and makes the journalist look good in front of their editor), then you’re onto a winner.

For the WPZ story we created a report and an infographic, both of which garnered links.

Click image to open(via WorldPayZinc).

Step five: Present the story

The press release is something that is hotly debated in the PR industry, with arguments both for and against.

However, as David Hamilton says in the article linked to above, while the context may have changed, the need for press releases has not: “The key is to make sure that they are part of a proper strategy and are a supplement to, not a substitute for, proper relationships with journalists.”

I use press releases to get my ducks in a line, to get to the crux of a story and to help me establish my key messages. I don’t publish them on newswires. For me, the press release comes at the end of a conversation with a journalist. For the most part, it’s a tidy way of sending them everything they need, after they’ve already expressed interest in a story. It’s worth noting that I do still get asked for press releases. When written well, with your target publication in mind, they can really help out a busy journalist. You should also publish your press releases on your website, so journalists can find them online if they need to.

Step six: Writing the press release

Rather than trying to big-up your client with hyperbolic language that will surely piss off journalists, spend your energy trying to think like a reporter and find the most interesting elements of your story. You can do this by thinking about the “w’s:”

Who? Who’s involved in the story? Who cares?

What? What’s the story? What’s new?

Where? Where is the story taking place? Is there a local angle and/or local publications you can target?

When? Is the story relevant now? Can you tie it in with a current or forthcoming event or “hot topic?”

Why? Why should people care? Why are you telling this story? Why is it relevant to the media you’re targeting?

Structuring your release

Think of a press release as an inverted pyramid—get as many of the w’s as possible in the first paragraph. While doing this, get straight to the point and keep it simple. Remember to avoid jargon and hyperbole.

The reason for visualising an inverted pyramid is that, historically, editors would slash a press release from the bottom up if they didn’t have space for the whole thing. So get crucial elements of your story in early. Your following paragraphs should flesh out the story and give more detail.

(Image: Wikipedia)

Be human: Quotes that’ll get you quoted

The majority of the release should be factual and straight to the point. There is, however, room for some colour in the form of a quote or two. Quotes are where a little hyperbole is permitted. For survey stories, quotes should be used to say how you feel about the results. Are you shocked? Saddened? Thrilled? For further credibility you could also include a quote from an expert, or from a case study.

You should always include quotes in a press release but never quote someone who won’t be available for interview. This is a guaranteed way to irritate a journalist calling for a follow-up with your spokesperson.

Most importantly, make sure your quote sounds like a real person. This is the ideal opportunity to get your passion for the story across. Don’t spew mission statements or company visions, and don’t sound like a robot—or worse still, an advert. Read it out loud, does it sound like something someone would actually say?

As an aside, if you can, try to ensure that your spokesperson has a profile page on their website. Journalists will occasionally link to this profile page if they feel the homepage is too commercial. Similarly, another trick that has worked for me in the past is to include the website’s URL in a spokesperson’s job title.

Freddie Starr Ate my Hamster: getting your headline right

Keep your headline as short and interesting as possible, but don’t try too hard. Occasionally there’s scope for a great pun or witticism, but if not, don’t sweat it. It’s more important that it actually makes sense and piques interest in the reader.

Try to keep your headline on one line, and if possible, short enough to be tweeted with a link. And, tempting as it is, avoid putting the company name in the headline. Remember, you’re offering the journalist an interesting story, not an advert.

And you’re off!

By now you should have a good idea of what makes a decent press release but here are a few extra pointers to help you on your way:

• Make sure you include your contact information (including a phone number), and make sure you’re actually available to respond swiftly to any resulting enquiries.
• Double space your release so it’s easy to read.
  
• Try to keep the main body of the release on one side of A4 (roughly 8.5×11″). If you must write more, make sure you don’t go over two pages.
  
• Copy the press release into the main body of an email—never include attachments.
  
• Similarly, if you have accompanying images, just let the journalist know rather than clogging up their inbox—they’ll tell you if they want to see them.
• If you’d like to see an example, the Worldpay Zinc press release can be read here.

Step seven: Find journalists

The most important aspect of pitching a story is making sure you find the right journalist. And this is nothing that a good old-fashioned Google search can’t help you with. Look at stories on similar subjects, or those written for similar audiences—and don’t undervalue smaller niche sites.

Once you’ve found the journalists you want to target, finding their contact details needn’t be too difficult. I’m fortunate in that I have the luxury of a subscription to a media database. If you can’t afford this luxury, here are a few tips that could help:

• Take a look at this post from our COO Rob Ousbey—it contains tonnes of great tricks for finding email addresses.
• Call the switchboard of the organisation you’re targeting. It’s fine to call and either say, “I have a story on X and would like to know who best to pitch it to,” or to simply ask for an email address.
• For UK-based journalists, take a look at journalisted.com
• For US-based journalists, take a look at helpareporter.com
• Contact journalists on Twitter. I’ve had success just by saying, “I have something I’d like to pitch to you, mind if I send an email?” Usually they’ll reply with their email address, or at least tell you where to find it.

Step eight: Pitch to journalists

Now that you’ve got the best possible story and have created valuable, link-worthy assets, it’s time to pitch. Pitching is something that I get asked lots of questions about and I’ve met many people that seem terrified of pitching to top-tier journalists. But let me tell you a couple of secrets:

Secret #1: Journalists are human too

Secret #2: If you’ve got a great story lined up, pitching isn’t hard.

Here are my top pitching dos:

• Craft your subject line well. Don’t waste space telling journalists who your client is, tell them about the genuinely newsworthy story you’ve so lovingly crafted.
• Be human and personable.
  
• Get their name right. You’d be surprised how many times I’ve heard a journalist moan about being wrongly addressed.
• Reference their work. Tell the journalist about an article you particularly enjoyed. But use flattery sparingly—be genuine.
• Build a relationship first. Journalists are more likely to read your emails if they recognise your name. Twitter’s perfect for this.
• Leave a reason to follow up. “Just checking” emails don’t go down well. Ask them if you can help with any more information or an embed code, for example.
• Pre-pitch. If you have a genuine news story, then you’ll need to do all your pitches in one go. (Use Boomerang to schedule emails.) A tactic I’ve had a lot of success with is to pitch the story ahead of the release. Give the journalist enough information to pique their interest. Use an embargo if you need to. (But use sparingly and only for genuine news stories.)
• Keep it short and simple (KISS). Journalists don’t have time to read long, rambling emails.

And don’ts:

• Take advantage. If you have success once, don’t be tempted to go back to the journalist unless you’re certain your story will interest them.
• Blanket bomb journalists with a press release. Press releases are still useful (and journalists still ask me for them) but they should come at the end of a conversation. It is ok to just send releases to general news@ addresses, but don’t expect these emails to be fruitful.
• Call to follow up. Many a PR has been known to call a journalist to say, “Did you receive my press release?” Don’t do it—it will only piss them off! Call ahead if you like, but never after.
• Use hyperbole or buzzwords. It’s just plain annoying.
• Ramble. If you call them, don’t launch into a pitch and ramble on. Ask if they have a moment to spare first.

A quick recap: remember

• The most successful digital PR campaigns incorporate a newsworthy element.
• However, they must contain complementary digital assets in order to get links.
  
• Surveys are a great way of creating stories, but be sure to use a credible research company.
• The press release isn’t dead. But we’ll kill it if we abuse it.
• Pitching isn’t that hard—as long as you are pitching something worthy.
• Links are symptomatic of good PR.

I’m hoping that by now you’ll have a better idea of the process of creating a story and selling it in to the digital press. Just remember that PR isn’t an exact science and there are never any guarantees. When it does pay off, though, the results really do speak for themselves.

Success for Worldpay Zinc: Coverage (and 2 links) on the Telegraph

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 adamsinger

Releasing a mobile app to the public is certainly an accomplishment, but launch day is nowhere near the end of the process. It’s just as vital to measure people’s interaction with your apps as it is to measure their interaction with your web properties.

In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Adam Singer—Google’s analytics advocate—walks us through some of the most important metrics to watch to make sure your app is as successful as possible.

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

Video Transcription

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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

In late 2012 and early 2013, companies were allowed, for the first time, to apply for new TLDs (Top-Level Domains). There was a lot of press about big companies buying swaths of TLDs – for example, Google bought .google, .docs, .youtube, and many more. The rest of us heard the price tag – a cool $185,000 – and simply wrote this off as an interesting anecdote. What you may not realize is that there’s a phase two, and it’s relevant to everyone who owns a website (below: 544 new TLDs – cloud created with Tagxedo).

Phase 2: TLDs go live

You may have assumed that these TLDs would simply be bought up and tucked away for private use by mega-corporations, Saudi Princes, and Justin Bieber. The reality is that many of these TLDs are going to go live soon, and domains within them are going to be sold to the public, just like traditional TLDs (.com, .net, etc.). I talked to Steve Banfield, SVP Registrar Services at Demand Media (which owns eNom and Name.com), to get the scoop on what this process will mean for site owners.

Gold rush 2014

ICANN had more than 1,900 applications for TLDs, and of those Name.com currently lists 544 that will be available for sale in the near future. These domains cover a wide range of topics – here are just a few, to give you a flavor of what’s up for grabs:

• .app
• .attorney
• .blog
• .boston
• .flowers
• .marketing
• .porn
• .realtor
• .store
• .web
• .wedding
• .wtf

This is an unprecedented explosion in available domain names, and you can expect a gold rush mentality as companies scoop up domains to protect trademarks and chase new opportunities and as individuals register a wide variety of vanity domains. So, when do these domains go on sale, and how much will they cost? As Steve explained to me, this gets a bit tricky…

“Sunrise” & Pre-registration

Understandably, ICANN is reluctant to simply release hundreds of TLDs into the wild all at once and upset the ecosystem. As the TLDs have been granted, they’ve been gradually delegated to the global DNS and are coming online in batches. As each TLD becomes available, it has to undergo a 60-day “sunrise” period. This period allows trademark holder to register claims and potentially lock down protected words. For example, Dell may want to lock down dell.computer or Amazon.com may grab amazon.book. These domains must still be registered (and paid for), but trademark holders get first dibs across any new TLD. Trademark disputes are a separate, legal issue (and beyond the scope of this post).

Some registrars will allow pre-registration during or immediately following the sunrise period. While you can’t technically register a domain without a trademark claim during the 60 day sunrise, they’ll essentially add you to a waiting list. This gets complicated, as multiple registrars could all have people on their waiting list for the same domain, so there are no guarantees. Some registrars are also charging premium prices for pre-registration, and those premiums could carry into your renewals, so read the fine print carefully.

Facts and figures

Once sunrise and pre-registration end, general availability begins. You may be wondering – when is that, exactly? The short answer is: it’s complicated. I’ll attempt to answer the big questions, with Steve’s help:

When do the new domains go on sale?

The first group of domains began their sunrise period on November 26, 2013, and it ends on January 24, 2014. After that, additional domains will come into play in small groups, throughout the year. To find out about any particular domain/TLD, your best bet is to use a service like Name.com’s TLD watch-list, which sends status notifications about specific domains you’re interested in. Your own registrar of choice may have a similar service. The specifics of any given TLD will vary.

How much will the new domains cost?

Unfortunately, it depends. Each TLD can be priced differently, and even within a TLD, some domains may go for a premium rate. A few TLDs will probably be auction-based and not fixed-price. Use a watch-list tool or investigate your domains of choice individually.

What kind of a land grab can we expect?

With over 500 TLDs in play over the course of months, it’s nearly impossible to say. Some domains, like .attorney, will clearly be competitive in local markets, and you can expect a gold rush mentality. Other domains, like .guru may be popular for vanity URLs. Regional and niche domains, like .okinawa or .rodeo are going to have a smaller audience. Then there are wildcards, like .ninja, that are really anyone’s guess.

SEO implications

Naturally, as a Moz reader, you may be wondering what weight the new TLDs will have with search engines. Will a domain like seattle.attorney have the same ranking benefit as a more traditional domain like seattleattorney.com? Google’s Matt Cutts has stated that the new TLDs won’t have an advantage over existing domains, but was unclear on whether keywords in the new domain extensions will act as a ranking signal. I strongly suspect they will play this by ear, until they know how each of the new TLDs is being used. In my opinion, exact-match domains are no longer as powerful without other signals to back them up, and it’s likely Google may lower the volume on some of the new TLDs or treat them more like sub-domains in terms of ranking power. In other words, they’ll probably have some value, but don’t expect miracles.

There may be indirect SEO benefits. For example, if you own seattle.attorney, it’s more likely people will link to you with the phrase “Seattle attorney”, and since that’s now your brand/domain, it’s more likely to look natural (because it’s more likely to be natural). A well-matched name may also be more memorable, in some cases, although it may take people some time to get used to the new TLDs. To quote Steve directly:

What will matter is the memory of the end user and branding. Which is better: hilton.com or hilton.hotel, chevrolet.com or chevrolet.cars, coors.com or coors.beer? Today, it’s easy to say the .com is “better” for brand recall, but over time we’ll have to see which works better for brand marketing.

My conservative opinion is this – don’t scoop up dozens of domains just in the hopes of magically ranking. Register domains that match your business objectives or that you want to protect – either because of your own trademarks or for future use. If you hit the domain game late and have a .com that you hate (this-is-all-they-had-left.com), it might be a good time to consider your options for something more memorable.

Todd Malicoat wrote an excellent post last year on choosing an exact-match domain, and I think many of his tips are relevant to the new TLDs and any domain purchase. Ultimately, some people will use the new TLDs creatively and powerfully, and others will use them poorly. There’s opportunity here, but it’s going to take planning, brand awareness, and ultimately, smart marketing.

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 kaiserthesage

Content ties everything in the digital marketing realm together—that’s why it is king.

Content creation has been the core part of my blog/business’ inbound marketing strategy this year, which was around 70% of my entire marketing effort. The other 30% was allocated to content promotion/distribution, relationship building, site optimization, and analytics.

So this post is basically a case study of how I simplified a very complex process by only focusing on one integral part of inbound marketing (content), and how that led to hundreds of service leads for our company this year.

On content strategy

Content assets help brands communicate their messages to their target audiences. These may come in the form of visual guides, web-based tools, extensive resources and many more (as also listed by Cyrus Shepard on his recent Moz post).

In my case, I aim for every blog post I publish to be an asset that I can continuously optimize and improve.

So in order for my overall campaign to be really scalable (and for me to be able to easily integrate other inbound marketing practices), I based my content development efforts on these core principles:

• Create content that contains ideas/information that isn’t found anywhere else.
• Make the content very comprehensive and evergreen if possible.

And as for the content formats, I mostly focused on creating:

• Case studies
• Extensive and evergreen blog posts (how-to’s)
• Reusable content (newsletters, slide presentations, PDFs, etc.)

If in case you’re wondering about the content assets I’ve repurposed, here are few samples:

2 months ago, I released a 4 part newsletter series that talks about 12 different scalable link building tactics.

After a couple of weeks, I decided to publish the entire series as a long-form blog post here on Moz.

Another sample is with one of my most popular guides this year (that was also featured on Moz’s top-10 monthly newsletter) entitled 22 link building tips from @xightph, which I just recently turned into a SlideShare presentation:

Perhaps this approach of allocating the majority of my efforts into content development is easier for me to accomplish because I established my blog’s readership 2 years before I tried it, and also given that I’ve already built relationships with other online marketers who habitually share my new blog posts.

I still believe that this exact process is replicable for those who haven’t yet established themselves. Since it always comes down to what you can provide to your industry and finding ways to let others know you have it.

Content = links

Content assets are able to attract and build links over time, knowing that it is in the nature of content to be genuinely linkable.

Link building becomes automatic when you focus on creating useful and actionable content on a regular basis (and, of course, letting other people who’re interested in your content’s topic know that your content exists).

Your content won’t stand on its own and be linkable by itself, so it’s also important to make an effort for it to be more visible to your target audience. Here are a few things you can do to ensure it’ll get to your audience:

• Outreach: Connect with other content publishers, industry influencers, and enthusiasts, and see if they’re interested in checking out your content.
• Social ads: Use content placement services from Facebook or StumbleUpon to get more eyeballs to your content.
• Conversations: Participate and share your content on relevant discussions from online communities in your space (forums, groups, blogs, Q&A sites, etc.).
• Distribution: Promote your content assets through other content distribution channels such as guest blogging, regular columns, newsletters, slide presentations, videos, or podcasts.

Further reading:

• How to promote and build links to your great content
• 32 experts share their best content promotion tips

Content = relationships

Providing high-value content assets on a regular basis will also help you easily connect and engage other content publishers in your industry.

This can somehow impact how other people perceive your brand as a publisher, especially when other thought leaders are sharing your content, interacting with your brand, and inviting you to contribute to their websites (which is quite similar to what Moz has done in past years).

Relationships, partnerships, and alliances are vital in this age of marketing, as they can help increase your readership and follower base, and can particularly help improve the shareability of your site’s content.

Here are a few pointers on how to engage and build relationships with industry influencers:

• Mention or use their works as a reference for your content. You can also ask them to review and validate the information within your content to build a rapport (which is also a great way to get them to see the quality of your work).
• Make sure that your content appeals to their audience/followers; this increases the likelihood of getting your content shared.
• Don’t worry. You don’t have any reason to be afraid to reach out to influencers when you’re really confident with the caliber of your content.

Content = social activity

With the right push, a well-thought-out piece of content will almost always do well in terms of social sharing. Most content assets are designed to be share-worthy, and the common factors that make most content assets shareable are:

• Their design and if they’re visually appealing.
• If they’ve been shared by popular/influential entities in their industries.
• If the content is emotionally compelling, educational, useful, and/or just simply adds unique value to the industry.

Making your linkable assets timeless or evergreen can also amplify its social activity, given that every time it gets a new visitor the content remains relevant, which can continuously increase the amount of social shares it is getting.

And the more you create content assets on your website, the more you can grow your following base and network. Which is why content plays a big role in social media – because it’s what people are sharing.

For more actionable tips on increasing your content assets’ social activity, you might want to also check the post I wrote a few weeks ago at Hit Reach on how to get more social shares for your site.

Content = search rankings

The ways in which search engines determine web pages’ importance (and whether they really deserve to be prominently visible in search results) have evolved over the years.

Major factors such as relevance (which can be measured through usage/page activity) and authority (measured through social, links, domain authority, brand signals, etc.), though, still play a huge role in terms of search rankings. These metrics are also elements that most successful content assets embody.

Great content generates rankings.

A couple of pointers on making the most out of your site’s content pool to boost your SEO:

• Turn the pages on your website that target key industry terms into evergreen content assets.
• Optimize your important pages/content assets for interaction, conversions, and user-experience. For example, test your pages’ CTAs, encourag people to share the content, etc. These are the key areas that will make your pages rank better in search results.

Further reading:

• How to optimize content for search

Content = email subscribers

Email marketing is an essential part of inbound marketing, because it’s a marketing platform that many businesses have full control of (owned media).

Growing your email list is a whole lot easier when you’re consistently putting new content up on your site (and especially when you consider every piece of content you launch as an asset).

The more content you publish, the more people get to discover your brand, which can ultimately increase your chances of getting them to subscribe or sign up for your email newsletter.

Tips on how to increase email sign-ups:

• Make your opt-in form(s) very visible on the site’s key landing pages.
• Incentivize sign-ups by offering free content such as ebooks, whitepapers, newsletter series, and/or access to free web-based tools.

Content = conversions

Content assets can definitely lift conversions, mainly because they can strongly demonstrate the brand’s domain expertise and authority.

If you’ve planted a lot of useful and actionable content on your site, then these things are influencing your site’s ability to convert visitors.

More on improving your content assets’ conversions:

• Identify which landing pages/assets are constantly driving sales/new customers/service inquiries to your business. Make them more visible by building more internal/incoming links to them, improving or updating the content itself to earn better search rankings, sharing them on social networks, or basically anything that can improve their traffic.
• Continually test and improve the content’s calls to action.

Becoming a better inbound marketer

Before I became an SEO in 2010, I was a freelance writer. It never occurred to me that I’d be doing both in the future—and actually more.

But I guess knowing how to get the right traffic and having a better grasp of the kinds of content that my audience needs and wants to read made me a better inbound marketer.

I would love to hear your ideas about this approach to inbound marketing, or if you have questions, I’d also love to see them in the comments section. You can also follow me on Twitter @jasonacidre.

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 →