Posted by KelseyLibert

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.

This post was co-authored by Kristin Tynski, VP Creative at Frac.tl and Kelsey Libert, Director of Promotions.

The importance of the idea

When it comes to creating viral content, if you don’t have an exceptional idea, you are dead in the water. Even if you’re able to execute production at a very high level and promote your content with the best of them, if the idea doesn’t check all the boxes of viral content, you’re toast. So, given you understand what a viral idea might look like, how do you bridge the gap between theory and actually coming up with one of these truly viral ideas? What follows is the process we use here at Fractl to come up with ideas that we feel confident will find viral success.

Defining parameters

We approach our ideation task as we would a riddle. Think of it this way: You are given a set of known parameters, and you must find an answer that elegantly satisfies all of those parameters. The difference here is that there’s more than just one correct answer. In fact, there are usually many answers that’ll fit. So what are your primary defining parameters? In nearly all cases the primary parameters I follow include:

1. The idea must play well with the brand/product/service topic area. It must also fit the constraints of the client. Decide beforehand if your ideas can be broadly related to a niche or topic area, or if they must be more constrained.
2. The idea must contain an emotionally compelling hook as described in my last post. More specifically, it must evoke feelings of surprise and interest, which are generally essential to a successful viral idea.
3. The idea must contain something original or new, and it’s even better if it’s newsworthy. From a content promotion and syndication perspective, having an idea that presents new information will make it much more likely to be picked up by mainstream blogs and news sites.
4. The related concepts should have some proof of past viral engagement. Can you point to some other piece of content and use it as a basis for predicting the success of your own content?

Be sure to keep these questions in mind as you begin your brainstorming; you will use them to keep your ideation on track.

Step 1: The research dump

It just so happens I have some ideation to do for one of Fractl’s clients, Rehabs.com, so I’m going to use it as an example to bring you through my research techniques and ideation process. The vertical/topic area we’re going after this time is “eating disorders.” From talking with this client, I know they are willing to stretch the topic area to a certain extent, so my ideation will keep this in mind, and I might go a bit broader in terms of how closely the content I come up with relates exactly to eating disorders.

Generally, the best way to begin ideation for any viral content marketing project is to first spend the time to gather all you can about the topic area and collect what sorts of things are currently buzzworthy or have been in the past. Begin by understanding your topic area in a general way, and then use that topic area as a basis for your ideation. I usually make a list of possible ideas by finding as many popular news stories and blog posts around my general topic area as I can.

I copy down this research in the first tab of my ideation document.

I go to the places online that allow for both content curation and the ability to organize that content by what has already been popular. The places I usually use are as follows:

1. Reddit: Try doing a simple search for about 3 to 5 keywords related to your topical area. In this case I would try eating disorders, body image, bulimia, and anorexia. For each keyword, I would organize the Reddit results by “top” and set the date range to “all-time,” giving me a curated list of content that’s ranked from most engaging to least. I then look through each list and pull out the stories that seem like they might be at least marginally interesting. Additionally, when I do these searches, I take note of the subreddits that pop up, often you will find niche communities related to your topic, go to each of these subreddits, and organize by top-all-time, to find the stories that have been most popular within these sub-niches as well. For example, searching “body image” on reddit showed me a subreddit called r/bodyacceptance, which I never knew existed, but seems quite active. Many of their top stories are a great place to start for viral content ideas.
2. Google: Try searching for (Viral + Keyword) and look for other instances of viral campaigns that have been successful. Add as many of these as you can find to your list.
3. Trendhunter: Trendhunter does a good job of picking up on trending concepts and ideas that can be searched by keywords. Try searching for your keywords and then list the interesting URLs in your brainstorming dump list.
4. BuzzFeed: BuzzFeed does a good job with conceptualizing viral ideas. They also have an effective search tool to find these posts. Put these in your list, too.
5. Latest research: Try searching Google Scholar or Pubmed Search. You can segment your search by date, so try to use content from the past year for fresher stories.
6. Latest news: Google News, organized by date, can yield a good overview of what newspapers and online news sites are covering most around your topic area.
7. Datasets: Listing all possible datasets out there would take a long time, but I usually check out this Quora post to see if there is anything that jumps out to me as being applicable to the topic area I’m looking at. Also, https://explore.data.gov/ is a great place to do a few keyword searches to see if anything pops up as well. Reddit also has an active dataset subreddit that is worth looking at. You can also try a search at ZanRan.com, which can sometimes give some good results as well.

Still stuck?

Here are a few other places you can go if you are still having trouble filling out your research dump:

• http://www.portent.com/tools/title-maker/
• http://wikipedia.cognition.com
• http://www.instagrok.com
• Content Idea Generator V2 (Put your topic area in cell B3)
• Google Autocomplete
• Quora Web Search

Step 2: extracting themes

Once you have done a considerable amount of research and feel you’ve found the bulk of the most talked about stories related to your topic, you’re ready to begin an overview analysis of the specific common sub-topics that seem to have a unique potential for further investigation. Go through each of the examples you have listed in your research dump and try to boil them down and label them under general subtopics. You will likely start to see several subtopics that seem to be the most talked about. These should be the subtopics you ideate around. For our example with Rehabs.com, the common subtopics I found were:

• Men and eating disorders
• The role of mass media in body image
• The role of marketing and advertising in body image
• Eating disorders as represented in Internet culture
• Real life stories of the afflicted
• Body image and happiness
• Eating disorder and body image memes

Step 3: ideating laterally on extracted themes

Using the extracted themes, the next step is the actual ideation phase, where we look to explore the different content ideas that will fit within each of these subtopic areas that we have identified as buzzworthy candidates. While doing ideation, I pay particularly close attention to ideas that fit my predefined set of parameters that were clearly defined before starting the ideation process.

As I mentioned in my last post, strong emotional reactions of interest and surprise are absolutely essential in creating a viral effect. In order to activate these emotions, your goal should be to come up with an idea that presents something unexpected, counterintuitive, or completely novel.

Coming up with ideas of this sort requires what is known as “lateral thinking.” This type of creative thinking happens when we are able to connect seemingly disparate ideas in new ways. It also happens when we realize how innovations in one area could also be applied to another area. Fortunately, there are several ways to prime your brain to think in this sort of way. I’m going to switch gears and move on from the Rehabs.com example in order to illustrate these brainstorming methods. I’ve found it can be effective to “warm up” your brain by thinking creatively on other topics first, before moving on to your actual ideation task.

1. Connecting Random Ideas

You can begin your warmup with nearly any topic area. I prefer a seemingly mundane topic for warmup, so that when I switch back to my actual ideation task, it feels easier. So, lets start with something seemingly boring, how about lighting equipment. For this exercise in lateral thinking, we’ll select either three random objects around the room or three random words from a dictionary. For this example, let’s go with a soda bottle, which is currently sitting next to me on my desk. Our goal now is to try to come up with ideas that connect a soda bottle with our general topical area of lighting equipment in a way that makes sense and is unexpected, counterintuitive, or novel.

Let’s start with the soda bottle. How does it relate to lighting? At first you might not think it does, but keep thinking and start asking questions. Could a bottle be somehow used as a light? Hmm … the answer is yes! After a quick Google search, we find this gem. It turns out that water bottles are being used effectively in the third world as makeshift skylights, and it works incredibly well! Now we can extrapolate on this idea. Keep asking questions. What are the implications of this innovation? What does this mean for populations that prior to this innovation had no lighting? The article says it might actually save lives by reducing the fire risk associated with these populations being forced to use candles. Could we create a piece of content that attempts to quantify the benefits of this innovation in some way?

Keep going by taking another tack; ask more questions. For instance, are there other types of lighting implements that utilize trash like empty soda bottles? Let’s find out! Yep, there sure are. But this isn’t an original idea, so how can we make it original? Keep asking questions. How were these created? How could we add value here? What if we created content that showed how to do these types of projects yourself? Make sure to write down your ideas, but keep going until you have exhausted all the ideas associated with your original item (the water bottle).

The truth is that your mind is inherently extremely creative—all you need to do is give it the fuel, and it will begin working on its own. Give your brain two things to connect, and it will start figuring out how it might be done.

2. Provocation technique

This lateral thinking technique relies on opening your mind to new possibilities by abandoning your assumptions and asking, “What if?” Your goal here should be to think widely and in an exaggerated way that steps outside of what is logically possible. By doing this, you can create a bridge to unexpected connections and extremely innovative ideas. This can be done in 5 primary ways:

Escape: Negate what you have taken for granted about the topic.

Reversal: Reverse something you have taken for granted about the topic.

Exaggeration: Is there a numerical or quantitative element you can play with to arrive at new ideas?

Distortion: Try to distort one piece of something you take for granted about the topic.

Wishful thinking: Suggest a fantasy you know isn’t possible that relates to your topic.

As you go through these exercises, remember to keep asking yourself questions. You can use the following checklist as you go:

• What would the consequences be?

• What would the benefits be?

• What special circumstances would make it a sensible solution?

• What principles are needed to support it and make it work?

• How would it work moment-to-moment?

• What would happen if a sequence of events was changed?

Let’s try this technique with our example of lighting:

Escape: We take for granted the permanence of indoor lighting. What if it wasn’t permanent? What if the U.S. was subjected to the rolling blackouts seen in many developing countries? What would the impact be? Could we create a piece of content that would explore this scenario? Can we extrapolate on current research about the importance of consistent electricity to make it more accessible to audiences that expect it as a given? Asking questions from our checklist might send us down paths to even more new areas of possibility. For example, could we create a piece of content that looked at the implications of what would happen if all the lights suddenly went out? What would be the benefits of this happening? The consequences? If all the lights in the world went out simultaneously, what exactly would happen?

Reversal: Another assumption we take for granted about lighting is that for most of us, the cost of lighting is pretty static. Let’s try reversing that. What if it was free or what if it was 10 times as expensive? This would lead us to questions about how the cost of lighting effects our habits. Perhaps we could create an interesting piece of content that tried to answer these hypothetical questions.

Exaggeration: Is there a numerical value associated with the topic that you take for granted that could be adjusted up or down? For example, we take for granted the speed of light. What would happen if we changed this number? Alternatively, we take for granted the brightness of our sun, so what would happen if our sun suddenly got brighter or dimmer? What if the number associated with lighting elements themselves changed. For instance, what if light bulbs lasted forever? What if they only lasted a day? Then go back and ask yourself questions from the checklist again and see if anything compelling floats up.

Distortion: Let’s try to adjust something we take for granted about lighting. How about the idea that lighting is almost always in the form of lamps or ceiling lighting. What are some other ways we could light a room in an unexpected or innovative way. What if our lighting came in another form; what might that look like?

Wishful Thinking: Try to ask yourself questions like, “Wouldn’t it be nice/cool/interesting if…” and list as many of these statements as you can with regards to your topic area. For example, wouldn’t it be awesome if there were lights that did more than just light a room? What if lights could be projectors? What if they could display information around a room? What if they could be used as cameras? What if they could be used to improve our health or beam us knowledge? Don’t be afraid to be outlandish—it might lead to an amazing idea.

To be sure, these examples are just some of the many techniques that can be used to help you think laterally. I love beginning my ideation sessions by doing a few exercises like the ones I’ve mentioned above, even if it’s on a subject that’s different from the one I’ll be doing ideation for. It opens my mind and gets me thinking of the possibilities that might exist when I let go of my preconceptions. In my experience, this type of creative thinking is most conducive to coming up with potentially viral ideas. This is because these types of ideas aren’t generated in a typical, logical way but are instead created by using unexpected ways of thinking that deviate from the norm.

I would recommend the work of Edward de Bono if you are looking for more ways to improve your lateral thinking skills. Another great way to switch your brain into lateral thinking mode is to simply do some riddles. Try these before you begin your brainstorming session.

Step 4: vetting ideas against a rubric

I usually try to do 2 to 3 ideas for each subtopic/theme area before moving on to ideation vetting. When vetting, I typically like to get feedback from at least 4 people (other than myself) who are familiar with the client, who know the parameters the content needs to meet, and who have a good understanding of the contributing factors of viral content. I ask them to assign a score to each idea based on the following factors:

1. The idea’s adherence to set parameters
2. The idea’s originality
3. The idea’s newsworthiness
4. The idea’s emotional impact (more specifically, does it create surprise and interest)

Step 5: choosing the idea

This is the easiest part—simply take your culled list and let the client choose! If it’s left up to you, any of the top 2 to 3 ideas should be perfect candidates. Perhaps decide based on factors unrelated to its potential for success. Consider cost, timelines, ease of execution, and whether or not the content is evergreen.

Check out the second and third tabs of my Rehabs.com ideation to see this part in action.

Conclusions

Great viral content ideas come from a combination of creativity and hard work. By cultivating a mindset that lends itself toward the ability to think laterally, and by following a process of investigation, brainstorming, and careful vetting, you can greatly increase your chances of a viral hit.

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Posted by Jon-C

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.

Hi, I’m Jon from WoodworkersUK – as you’ll probably guess from the company name, I’m not an SEO by profession; a very small part of my job entails battling to keep the website in the SERPs! I’m actually a Joiner (Carpenter if you’re reading this is the US) working in a small family-run business in North Wales; there are only four of us (and a dog named Ted)! So you’re probably thinking, a Carpenter writing on YouMoz, WTF?!

The motley crew (the Westie is the brains of the operation)!

We’re a good looking bunch, are we not?! 🙂

Image credit : Wil Reynolds Mozcon 2013 Slideshare (Slide 154)

I tend to try and follow as many of the top SEO or marketing blogs and sites as possible to aid myself in keeping our website going and I put into practice anything that I can, with mixed results. I love doing website content but find that it doesn’t pick up a lot of links naturally (‘Build content and they will come?!’ Really Mr Cutts?!). Being small, we’ve a very tight, limited budget for things like this as well, so some of the things I read online are not realistic for us; everything we do is handmade rather than mass produced, so we’re not churning hundreds of items out a week, which in turn, does not give us £1000s to play with each week.

To cut to the chase, I stumbled across a Wil Reynolds Mozcon 2012 video on this very site, it was called Real Company Shit (you’ll have to scroll down a bit) and got me thinking a bit. In the video, Wil talks about getting construction links from Mommy bloggers and it was the particular bit about ‘inspiring the next generation of engineers’ (about 7 minutes 20 into the video) that got me thinking ‘What could I do that is ‘Real Company Shit’? Hmmmmm?’

Lightbulb moment!

Fast forward a couple of days and I’m clearing out our workshops; we tend to accrue a lot of offcuts and timber, which costs us money, so obviously, we don’t like to throw it away as we may be able to use it in the future. However, we can only store so much against the walls until the workshops become narrower and narrower…

Whilst sorting through the offcuts, I thought ‘Real Company Shit’! As soon as I got home that night, I wrote a blog post offering the timber for free to local schools for their woodworking departments and thought no more of it and clicked publish and shared on Social Media.

Let’s get the next generation of woodworkers into working with wood! Schools use timber and suffer from budget problems and the kids are the next generation of Carpenters/Joiners etc.

Now let me get this straight, I never did this with the idea of getting links etc, I honestly wasn’t sure what would happen; I wanted to get rid of some timber and help local schools out first and foremost. I thought that at best we’d probably get a few mentions and likes on Facebook and shares on Twitter, if anything else happened then it was a bonus. By the end of the following day, I had a quick check and we’d had about 30-odd likes on Facebook; I know I know this does not sound a great deal to you SEO types, but for us and our niche, I was quite surprised.

The following day I was fielding phone calls from a couple of schools and decided to follow the original blog post with a second, and yep you’ve guessed it, a load more Facebook likes again. It was at this stage that I decided to add a sign up page to our website for both schools looking for timber and woodworkers with timber to offer to sign up, this way I hoped to reduce the phone calls to us and give people something to link to.

Outreach

By this stage, we’d got a list of schools in five counties all looking for timber and there is no way we can hope to supply all the local schools that have been in touch with us in a short time frame. We decided to try a spot of outreach. We’ve got a sign up form for other woodworkers so maybe I can get a few mentions online from Trade associations and rather than send emails, we decided to phone people up as it’s more personal…

Everyone will be famous for 15 minutes

First off, we got in touch with ITV Wales News (a local TV station covering the whole of Wales). I thought that this would be a complete waste of time but after a quick phone call, they told us it was a lovely quirky story and they would be in touch (blimey!). Lo and behold, they came down within a fortnight to film in our workshops and in Denbigh High School, which was the first school we supplied with timber. You can see what ITV Wales did here. Despite our best attempts, they wouldn’t link to us on their website, but a spot of national coverage was amazing!

We also tried writing a few press releases for the local papers, but unfortunately, they were not interested (I shall return to these later)! Also on our radar, was the trade timber websites and magazines; The British Woodworking Federation (BWF) was an easy one to sort out as we are already members, so wanting to help us out, they wrote a news item appealing for others to get involved and they also gave us a mention in their Email newsletter. The BWF actually have a campaign running (entitled ‘I made that’) to encourage more people to take up Joinery/Woodworking apprenticeships. This helped me as I took up the angle with all the trade organisations that we need to be getting the kids interested in woodwork in school; this would then make them more likely to turn to woodwork later on, if only schools had a steady supply of timber!

We also contacted both TRADA (Timber Research and Development Association) and TTJ (Timber Trades Journal), both thought it was great and both wrote news items for their websites!

All links have so far brought me a steady stream of visitors too.

Reclaim those brand mentions

As I say, the TTJ wrote a news article but unfortunately the article in question was subscriber only, which I thought defeated the point a bit – a quick phone call unlocked this article for all to see. Unfortunately when I did get to read the article they had mentioned the sign up page url but not as a link. Another quick phone call (they were probably getting sick of me by now!) and they made it into a link for us, job done!

Back to the local press

We had no joy with the local press; however, I was put in touch with a local university looking for timber for their art students. After a chat with the person responsible for PR, we were told he could get write an article on their website in the press section, which would then get sent to the local papers. Sure enough, he was as good as his word and not only did we get a mention (and link) from the University website, but we also got mentions in three local papers!

Local mentions

We’ve also managed to get a spot of publicity by working with Business to Communities, an organisation that encourages responsible business practice by helping out in the community; this can be donations of materials, time etc., anything that may make a difference. Denbigh High School (who featured in the ITV Wales video) also linked to us!

Social media

We’ve got one sign up page on our website devoted to this and in regards to shares etc, it is by far the most popular; at last count, it’s got 66 Facebook likes, 25 Tweets and 2 Google+ (on a side note, does anybody apart from Internet marketers use G+?!). In total, adding together the four posts on our blog as well, we’ve 268 shares across various networks, Facebook being by far the largest at 205 likes!

People seem to share the sign-up page more as this has the majority of social media action (66 likes on Facebook, 25 Tweets and 2 Google+).

For us this is going viral!

You can find out more on what people have been saying here.

We’ll put on the show ourselves

It hasn’t all been plain sailing, however. We have tried repeatedly to get the local authorities that are responsible for school budgets involved to lend a hand in publicising what we are trying to do, but we have been met with suspicion and a completely unhelpful attitude (Welsh Assembly Government/Denbighshire County Council/Flintshire County Council). We’ve a few more ideas of where we can go with this in the future, with a view to getting other woodworkers involved. Most notably, something we’re thinking of suggesting is working in partnership with Denbigh High School, as they have been a joy to supply and work with; they are definitely a school that we will continue to supply timber to come hell or high water.

Have you got the wood?

In the unlikely event of you reading this and you are a North Wales (or nearby) woodworker (or know of one who may be interested) with scrap timber to spare, then please get in touch as we’re still looking for others to get involved.

As I say, I’m no SEO/Internet Marketer and it was a bit daunting writing this! Thanks for reading and I hope you’ve enjoyed my YouMoz post!

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Posted by Ruth_Burr

Google’s recent announcement that it will be obfuscating all keyword referral data going forward has created yet another occasion for (and perhaps the first occasion that really deserves) that age-old cry, “is SEO dead?”

My response to the “is SEO dead” question is always the same: The Internet isn’t going away, and neither is selling stuff. It’s a pretty safe bet that online marketing is here to stay, and as long as search engines drive traffic to websites, marketers should be thinking about how to get the best audience and the most sales from that traffic. The optimal traffic from search engines, if you will.

Here at Moz, our organic traffic has already been at over 50% (not provided) for over a year, and our (not provided) numbers have been hovering around 80% for a while now, so I’ve had some time to mull this over: in a post-keyword world, what is SEO?

Moving away from keywords

One reason Google’s move toward (not provided) feels like such a blow is that for a long time, SEO was all about keywords. You’d start by brainstorming and researching keywords, and once you had your list you’d assign those keywords to pages and content pieces. Then, once you had each page nice and targeted around a keyword, you’d build some links, track traffic from those keywords to those pages, and adjust as needed. Done and done.

The thing is, even without the loss of Google’s referring keyword data, search engine traffic isn’t just about the keyword anymore. Thanks to the new search carousel, it’s possible for users to perform several searches and get to several different SERPs from just one query. Thanks to Google’s autocomplete feature, users are often using a suggested query rather than whatever their original keyword might be.

The real killer of the keyword-driven approach isn’t (not provided), though. It’s Google’s increasing devotion to semantic relationships between topics and entities on the web. Author Rank, personalization, and the Knowledge Graph have added new elements to consider: Now, in addition to what your content says and who links to it, Google also cares about who created it, what else they’ve done, and who’s shared it. Content from a trusted source can rank in personalized results for related keywords without specifically targeting them; Google’s gotten that good at figuring out topical relationships.

Pages and authority

What this means for SEO is that we need to shift our focus from getting traffic from keywords to getting traffic to pages. The recent hot trend in SEO around quality content is one aspect of that transition—it’s much easier to drive traffic to a great piece of content, regardless of how keyword-targeted it is. A more content-oriented mindset will also help us build topical authority, which is clearly something Google is interested in; they’ve spent a lot of time and a lot of money trying to figure out who knows the most about what, and authorship is just the latest development in that ongoing quest.

Building authority around a topic involves new, #RCS-oriented twists on classic SEO techniques:

• Brainstorm specific content pieces within your target topic, research to gauge potential audience interest, plan it out and create it (keyword research, anyone?).
• Promote your content to audiences you know have an interest in it (some people might call this social media).
• Build relationships with entities who already have established authority in your topic, especially those who are in your geographical area, and start brainstorming new content and sharing each other’s content (that’s link building but without all the horrible, tedious or shady stuff).

The great thing about focusing on building topical authority is that all of these tactics also drive traffic to pages. If your goal becomes “get a lot of awesome traffic to this awesome page” rather than “rank for this one keyword by any means possible” or “build x number of links per month” you can continue proving excellence in everything you do while doing better marketing.

In fact, shifting the focus from keywords to pages means that you can show the traffic that came from links you built—there’s no faster way to wean an exec off of the “x number of links per month” mentality than to show what a huge difference there is in different links’ potential to drive traffic.

This trend should also (hopefully) eventually kill the idea that we will come in to an existing content site and “do SEO” to it (can I get an amen?)—instead, it’s more important than ever that SEO be considered throughout the process of building a site.

Brand power

One potential pitfall of targeting increased traffic, especially in the absence of specific keyword targeting, is that clients may claim that increased traffic comes from brand recognition, not from your SEO efforts. To which my rejoinder is: Who says brand building isn’t part of SEO?

Part of building topical authority is setting up your brand as the place to go for the best information on that topic. Bust up the notion that branded keyword traffic never comes from SEO! Use your link-building efforts, whether that’s PR, guest blogging or content sharing, to get your brand out there. You can track your progress in building your brand online by monitoring search volume for your branded terms in Google Trends. By increasing search volume for your branded terms, which you probably already rank for, you’re also—you guessed it—building traffic to pages! #Winning!

Win at fundamentals

If you’re really invested in showing Google that your site is an authority on a topic, you should also be showing Google that your site is a pleasant place to be—not a weird, difficult-to-parse heap of broken pages that takes forever to load. Do you see where I’m going with this?

If (like me) you work on a big site, or an old site, you know that when it comes to technical SEO there’s always more to do. That’s one part of SEO that hasn’t changed at all: Solid technical SEO can still take you very far. Make it easy for Google (and Bing, and, you know, people) to load your site, to navigate your site and to figure out what each page is about, and you will be rewarded with return visits. Semantic markup is the new hotness in technical SEO for a reason: It helps search engines easily figure out what you’re trying to do with your data.

The nice thing about technical SEO is that it doesn’t require people outside of your company (or your client’s company) to take action in order to succeed. You can have a running list of SEO improvements in your dev team’s queue, launching while you’re taking the time (and it does take time) to build relationships and create great content.

OK, but what about keywords?

Focusing on topical authority and building traffic to pages is great, but search engines are still search engines, and that means that queries—a.k.a. keywords—are still important. Rand had a great post recently about ways to back into keyword tracking—if you know you’re ranking for a popular keyword, and you know you’re getting search traffic to that page, it’s a fair bet that at least some of that traffic is being driven by that keyword.

This is the time, however, to be training our clients away from keywords. Keywords feel nice, and it’s great to Google yourself and have your site come up, but the more we can track our activities back to real traffic from real people (and real sales that result in real money!), the better and more interesting work we’ll be able to do.

To that end, we all need to be thinking beyond Google when we think about traffic sources. We need to be thinking about other search engines. We need to be thinking about traffic from social media, link building, and third-party content-sharing sites like Pinterest and SlideShare. Reducing our dependence on Google is the best way to “algorithm-proof” our sites and make sure we’re getting the best traffic and sales we can. So maybe next time there’s a big change like this, it won’t be quite so upsetting.

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Posted by bridget.randolph

Note: This post is based on a presentation I recently gave at BrightonSEO. In writing up the blog post, I’ve expanded on some of the points and included more statistics. If you’re interested in viewing the presentation slides, I’ve embedded the deck at the end of the post.

——-

Mobile is huge.

I don’t think any of us would dispute this, but in case you’re not convinced, here’s a fun fact:

In 2012, the global Internet usage from mobile devices was 12x the amount of data that was used for the entire internet in the year 2000.

A few more stats:

• 25% of UK consumers have made a purchase using their mobile device
• 69% of tablet owners make a purchase on their device every month
  
• 77% of smartphone users have researched a product or service on their phone, with about half then purchasing the item in-store
• and mobile accounts for 31% of site traffic on average in the UK

I think everyone can agree that businesses need to be mobile-friendly.

The problem

The problem is that people are doing it wrong. Even big brands are making very basic mistakes. For example:

Forbes inflicts an interstitial pop-up ad every time someone visits its site (although to be fair, they do this to desktop users as well, so they’re just doing it wrong all around).

The New York Times has a mobile site, but fails to automatically redirect its mobile visitors, forcing you to opt in:

Starbucks took the trouble to design a beautiful responsive website, with lovely big call-to-action buttons:

But when viewed on a smartphone, the CTA disappears below endless reviews (which on the desktop version are collapsed on load):

Worse still, some companies haven’t bothered to do anything. Including Apple.

In fact, only 70% of the top 20 UK retailers even have a mobile-friendly website. And when it seems that even the biggest brands are struggling, how can a small business compete?

Small businesses, unsurprisingly, are even less likely to have a mobile-friendly web presence.

Only 60% of small businesses even have a website, and of those that do, only half (so roughly 30% of all small businesses) are mobile-friendly.

Why so few?

Well, I believe there are two reasons:

1) They don’t see the value.

But it’s easy enough to show the value of mobile marketing and a mobile-friendly web presence. You only have to look at the stats I mentioned earlier, and many, many more which have similar messages. For instance, that 84% of small businesses saw an increase in new business due to mobile marketing efforts.

So the second reason seems more likely:

2) They do see the value, but they don’t know where to start.

That’s where I come in. In this post, I will cover the three main phases of getting started with mobile:

1. Creating a mobile-friendly website (or making your existing site mobile-friendly)
2. Search and discovery: making it easy for mobile users to find you
3. Reaching your customers where they are so they don’t even need to be actively looking

Let’s get started.

Phase 1: mobile-friendly website

Your website is the most basic element of your online presence. It’s where your customers primarily interact with you. And so it’s crucial to make it accessible to all your visitors, not just desktop users.

Quick Stat: 61% of mobile users who land on a non-mobile-friendly site will leave and go to a competitor’s site.

There are three main approaches you can take to creating a mobile-friendly website.

• Responsive design: keeps a single URL, and all the content/HTML, and simply uses different CSS to rearrange elements on a page to fit different screen sizes.
• Dynamic serving (also known asadaptive design or RESS): keeps a single URL, but serves different content (HTML) based on the visitor’s user agent.
• Separate mobile site (e.g.m.domain.comor www.domain.com/m): a completely separate site, with different URLs.

None of these approaches is always the best, and your decision should be based on three things: your goals, your technical capabilities, and your users’ needs.

If you want more guidance on how to choose an approach, you can use the flowchart I created with Kristina Kledzik for Distilled’s best practice guide Building Your Mobile-Friendly Website, or check out Aleyda Solis’s post on State of Search, and also her resources page.

Each business is different, and you need to carefully consider your options when making this decision.

However, for a small business with a small website (and a small budget), I’d usually recommend using a responsive template with a CMS like WordPress.

This doesn’t have to break the bank; you can get all of these themes for under $100:

• Designfolio (from PressCoders): free, or $79 with support licence
• Standard: $49 or $99 with support licence
• Responsive (from CyberChimps): free

For more options, check out these premium WordPress theme providers:

• Elegant Themes: ~$40/year with full support.
• WooThemes: free-$70.

And if you don’t want to use WordPress, check out:

• SquareSpace: from $8/month(for the most basic service).
• Wix: around $10/month.

If this still sounds too expensive, then start saving now; it is easily worth this cost. In the meantime, if you do nothing else, make sure you have a Facebook and Google+ page for your business, because they’re mobile-friendly already.

There’s one final point to remember:

A mobile-friendly website is NOT a strategy. It’s just a starting point. It means you’re ready for…

Phase 2: search and discovery

At this stage, you’ve got a mobile-friendly website, and you want to make sure that people find it. There are three areas/tactics to focus on for this phase:

• Mobile SEO
• Local search
• Social media

Mobile SEO

If you have a responsive design, mobile SEO is easy; you don’t have to do anything extra.

That’s because the HTML stays the same regardless of what type of device is used.

If you’re using dynamic serving, you don’t need to do too much; just make sure you’ve set a Vary HTTP – User Agent header. This will indicate to Google that you serve different content based on a visitor’s user agent.

If you have a separate mobile site with different URLs to your desktop site, it’s a bit more involved (you’re basically doing SEO for another site, as well as indicating to Google that it’sa mobile version and not just duplicate content). I wrote another post here on Moz all about how to optimize a separate mobile site.

Local search

Once you’ve optimized your mobile site, it’s time to think about other types of search results.

If your business has a physical location and/or a location-based service area (for example, a plumber who goes to customers’ houses would have a ‘service area’ which only covers a certain geographical radius), you should be thinking about local search.

Local search is valuable for desktop results, and even more important on a small mobile device because of the very limited screen real estate. You can see highlighted in this screenshot how far below the fold the first non-local result appears:

There are several factors for local search rankings, and I don’t have space to delve in too deeply here, but the rapid-fire overview is:

• On-page optimization for location (using location-based keywords in your on-page content)
• Local business directory listings: Google+ Local is the big one here, but there are several others, including Yahoo! Local, Bing Local, Yelp, Merchant Circle, Angie’s List, Judy’s Book, and Kudzu
  • Note: Google+ Local isn’t the same as Google+ (yet!): You should have a Google+ Local page and a Google+ profile page which you can then merge
• Local link-building: seeking links from local sites (e.g. local news sites, local government sites, local blogs, etc.)
• “NAP” citations: like links for local SEO. NAP simply refers to anywhere on the web where your business is mentioned with its Name, Address, and Phone Number. The key with these is consistency; this signals that they all refer to the same business.
  • Protip: use Whitespark’s Local Citation Finder tool (from $20/month)
• images: of your storefront/store interior and your products. By including these images in your Google+ Local profile, they can show up in the Google Maps search results.
• Structured data:
  • Schema.org: /Place and /LocalBusiness
  • hCard markup
  • KML file for GoogleMaps
• Social profiles:
  • Google+
  • Facebook
• Reviews and recommendations: the most important here are Yelp and Google+ Local. Others include TripAdvisor, Yahoo! Local, Foursquare, and Zagat for restaurants

For a great local SEO resource, check out David Mihm’s report on Local Search Ranking Factors 2013. He provides a lot more detail about the factors that go into local rankings. I also wrote a post over on the Distilled blog about optimizing for mobile-local search.

Does it work?

Case Study:

Coffee Corner, a coffee shop in Headcorn, UK, worked with agency Target Local to implement a responsive site and local search optimization. Gareth Brown, the agency’s founder, said,

We managed to get them to the top of page 1 within 6 weeks, which took their search traffic from 100 to just under 300 visitors per month. …They’re also seeing visitors coming from their Yelp profile.

Now, 300 visitors/month may not sound like a lot…but effectively, their monthly traffic tripled. That’s a pretty good result!

Social media

Now, I’ve mentioned social media already, as a temporary stopgap for a mobile website and as a factor for local search. But it’s also a marketing channel in its own right. And while it’s not an exclusively mobile platform, 80% of people who access Facebook daily do so on a mobile device. Twitter has a similar percentage of daily mobile users.

So social media is a great way for mobile users to find and interact with you, if you do it right.

First, remember: It’s about conversation, not broadcast. A small business doing this really well on Twitter is The Dolphin Pub.

Second, use the “dinner party test:” If you wouldn’t say it to someone you met at a dinner party, don’t say it on social media.

Finally, if you’re worried about not knowing what to say, you can make a content plan and an editorial calendar for your social accounts, just like you do for blogging (and you can promote your blog posts via social media!).

Now, all of those tips are just as useful for social media users on desktop as for those on mobile, so here’s a mobile-specific tip:

Make sure that the content you share via social media is mobile-friendly. If four out of five people access it on a mobile device and it doesn’t show up properly, or crashes their browser, they probably won’t share it. Make it look amazing for mobile visitors!

So, now you’ve got a mobile-friendly website, and you’ve made it easy for mobile users to find you.

Now what?

Now the fun part.

Phase 3: reaching your customers where they are

In this phase, you can reach out to your customers where they are, instead of waiting for them to come to you.

I’m going to look now at a few ways you can bypass the search process altogether:

• Apps
• Exclusive mobile content
• Email marketing

Apps

Do you need an app? …probably not. But:

if your business model relies on frequent return visits, it may be worth investing in one. This is because an app sits on the home screen of a mobile device, and therefore enables the user to access it directly without using search engines or needing to type in a URL.

There are 2 types of app:

1. Native app (iOS, Android, etc)
2. Web app (HTML5 – effectively a website skinned to look like an app and be accessible from the home screen)

As you can see, there are pros and cons to each. Generally speaking, a native app provides a more tailored, faster experience but is more expensive both to develop and to maintain. A web app is cheaper and easier to maintain, but also less customized to the individual operating system and usually has little or no support available via app stores.

An app is not for everyone, and it’s also worth noting here that the Apple app store currently has around 775,000 apps listed. So even with app store support, it’s hard to get noticed unless it’s a really good product.

But if you think this is something that could work for your business model, here are some fairly inexpensive tools and services to help you build an app:

• Bizness Apps: from $59/month (native apps)
• ViziApps: starts from £29/month (web app) or £99/month for (native app)
• AppMakr: free native Android app (with ads), or for $9/month native iPhone and Android apps (no ads).
  
  • Premium option: $99 one-time fee for white-label version.
• RedFoundry: contact for a quote

Apps can also come in handy for producing content,

Exclusive mobile content

This one’s a bit tricky to describe, because really it could be anything. Be creative with it!

Let’s imagine a coffee shop that has a loyalty program with a stamp card: buy nine coffees, get the 10th free.

They could create a loyalty app, offering people virtual “stamps” on their mobiles, instead of needing to cart around a paper loyalty card. Then, when people with the loyalty app were nearby, the coffee shop could use geotargeting to send push notifications with a special offer: “We noticed you’re nearby! Come in for a coffee and get an extra stamp.”

They could also provide exclusive offers more generally to their mobile visitors; for example, “thanks for using our app! To say thank you, here’s a code for 20% off your next coffee.”

A great real-world example of good exclusive mobile content is Chase Bank, which allows mobile users to take a photo of a check with their smartphone and deposit it into their account electronically. What’s great about this example is that it uses mobile device-specific functionality—in this case, the camera on a smartphone.

If you’re not sure you need an app, there’s also an easy hack for providing exclusive content to mobile customers: Use check-in and coupon services like Foursquare, Facebook, and Groupon.

Using the example of our coffee shop again: If they wanted to go this route instead of creating an app, they could incentivize checking in with special discounts and offers. “Check in at our coffee shop on Foursquare, and next time we see you we’ll give you 10% off your order!”

The added benefit of this approach is that it gives your business online visibility and social proof, as opposed to an app, which is effectively a “walled garden.”

Bonus tip: This one’s not strictly “mobile-only,” but social media competitions are another great way to reach a mobile audience since (as we’ve seen) the majority of regular social network users access these networks via mobile devices.

Email marketing

This one’s pretty basic.

If you do email marketing, make sure you’re using mobile-friendly email templates.

79% of smartphone owners use their smartphone for reading email. This is a higher percentage than those who use their phone to make phone calls. Stop and think about that for a minute.

Your emails need to be mobile-friendly.

Here are a couple of fairly inexpensive email providers with mobile-friendly templates:

• MailChimp: from ~$10/month
• Campaign Monitor: from $10/month or $5/campaign

If you don’t want to use their full service, sign up anyway. You can use them to build your email and then export the HTML to your preferred provider (of course, if that provider already has mobile-friendly templates, so much the better!).

Finally, a bonus tip: provide in-store wifi and you can collect customer data such as email addresses, or (quick!) survey answers.

This isn’t as intimidating to set up as it sounds.

MyPlaceConnect in the UK (mostly) and LessNetworks in the US are two providers that I’ve come across who offer this service to small businesses.

Wrap up

Now, whether or not you decide to do ALL these things, there are a few important things to remember:

Mobile is HUGE, and you need a mobile strategy.

So start with a mobile-friendly website, and build up from there. It’s easier than you think!

Here’s the slide deck from the BrightonSEO presentation:

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Posted by randfish

In the last year or so, Google has increasingly displayed hyper-fresh content in SERPs, leading many marketers to think about how they can take advantage of that preference. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains a few ways to go about that without risking penalties.

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

Video Transcription

Howdy Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I want to talk a little bit about Google’s strange and overwhelming in some cases bias to fresh content. I want to give a shout out to Glen Allsopp who had talked about this a little bit and written some blog posts exposing some of Google’s priorities around freshness or what feel like priorities for them around freshness.

Google’s been biasing to fresh content, trying to show more and more fresh results, recently published results in their SERPs for several years now, but it’s gotten particularly strong in the last 12 months in certain sectors. I think Glen had noticed it very strongly in some of the sectors that he was watching for some of his clients. We have seen it in some places very heavily, in other places not as much. But you can definitely feel it.

There are places like Shakespeare plays. This is a search result that a few years ago, even 6 to 12 months ago probably you would not have seen much freshness, and now you’re starting to see more and more of these types of things, results that call out when they were published, a feeling that things that are published more recently, even if they don’t have as many links or as good of keyword targeting or as authoritative a website, those kinds of things are ranking a little bit higher. You’re seeing news results in there, which is a relatively new development, especially on a phrase like this which the intent one might interpret as “well, they’re probably looking for a list or maybe they’re looking for plays in their area.”

So more and more of these cases Google is biasing to show recently published results, and, because of that, there are some opportunities for folks in the SEO field. If you’re seeing this kind of thing in the results that you’re looking at, seeing a lot of dates, especially a lot of recent dates, in particular recent dates on published content that seems to not have the ranking ability that you would expect of the rest of the pages, you could use something like the keyword difficulty SERPs analysis tool from Moz to kind of try and figure that out. This may be a real opportunity for you, and there are a few ways that you can take advantage.

Number one, I suggest these kind of anyway. This isn’t a, “Oh, I want to exploit something in Google’s algorithm where they’re weak, and I’m black hat, gray hat, and I’m trying to exploit it.” This is actually Google saying, “Hey, we think users want fresh content, and so publishers please produce it because we’re willing to put it in front of our audience.” I think that’s just fine. It could be that Google’s a little over the line right now. Maybe they’ll swing that pendulum back over time.

But number one, find keywords and terms and phrases with fresh results, like we talked about here, and then target them with some new content. Give this a try. Essentially, if you’re looking out and you’re saying, “Gosh, this is a hyper-competitive keyword. I’m not sure that I can normally rank here. Let me see if I can get there for a day or a couple of days. Do I have the ability to start ranking on fresh stuff?” If you can’t hit the front page, the first page of results with that particular phrase, try a little bit longer tail keyword term.

Number two. If you have some old content, I think this is something that many of us experience. We have older content that’s targeting valuable keywords, important keywords that are critical to our brand to attracting the visitors that we want, and those have fallen down in the rankings. It may be that you used to be in the top three or four, and now you’re in the bottom half of the top ten results or on page two or three. Consider an update. I’ve done this several times and had a lot of success with it. Just updating an old blog post or an old resource, making it fresh again, adding new things, things that have emerged or come to light over the past few months or few years.

Then a republication or promotion. The critical thing here is to think about: Do you want to produce that at the same URL, or do you want to do a redirect? This is a little bit tough because, generally speaking, what I like to do is keep these at the same URL if they are outside of an RSS feed. So, essentially, not a blog post or not a news item or those kinds of things. I like to do the redirection when it’s, “Hey, I’m rewriting this old blog post. I’ve got a new version of it. You know what? I’m going to 301 redirect that old version to the new version.” Or if I really want to keep it available at the old URL, I’ll use rel=canonical to say, “Hey, this is the more updated version. This is essentially a duplicate, just a more recent duplicate, and here’s the old one if you want to see that.”

Number three. If there are some hyper-valuable keywords that are consistently showing fresh results, you’re just seeing this over and over and over again, well, maybe it’s time for a regularly updated series. Think about columnists who do syndication, or they write a weekly column on a particular topic or around a specific subject or they do something once a month. This might be a big opportunity for you to say, “Hey, you know what?
What’s a piece of content that we could refresh every month, that would be on this topic, and we could consistently be in those fresh results and we could always be delivering the most recent, most valuable stuff?”

Good example is in the sports world. The sports world changes so fast. There are different scores, different teams, rankings, standings. An old page is nearly useless. Unless you’re updating that page every time there’s new information, it’s not that valuable. So I think those are exactly the kinds of places where you might consider some form of regularly updated either series, new posts, new publications, or a single page that you’re regularly updating.

Then number four, in terms of doing some research to try and find these types of phrases, obviously you can check out the SERPs if you’re tracking in Moz Analytics and you’re looking at your search results. You sort of can see those listed in there. But you might also use, to find some new phrases, things like Google Trends, Ubersuggest, which scrapes Google’s suggest results. News sites, a lot of times when things are published that are news oriented, people will be doing searches around them. You can look at aggregators like Reddit or Alltop, social sites, obviously Twitter and Facebook, and these types of things to keep an eye on that.

Double Click Ad Planner, which sort of has similar data too, but seems to be slightly different than Google Trends, and sometimes you can see some more stuff there, and Fresh Web Explorer, which of course is part of the Moz Analytics research tools package to find those trends.

Last thing I’m going to say on this. There are a few rules that I have for fresh content. First off, fresh content doesn’t just mean recycling and republishing. I realize that, because of this bias, sometimes, and Glen pointed this out in some of his posts, that you can take advantage of this simply by republishing similar content again and again. I would highly recommend against doing that. I think you’re putting yourself at risk for things like Panda if you do it at a large scale or for manual penalties or for having low click-through, low engagement, high pogo sticking back to the search results. That kind of stuff is dangerous.

Make sure you’re serving the visitor’s intent. Remember that with fresh content there’s probably a recency intent on top of whatever other layers. So, if I’m publishing something about Shakespeare’s plays, I don’t just want to list, “Well, here are all the plays, and they were all written in the 17th century or 16th century, and so they haven’t changed. He’s not writing any new ones. Yes, but new things are constantly coming out. The news results show different types of stuff. The quotes are showing which ones are popular. There’s a movies page that’s showing which Shakespearean plays are being made into movies or which new spin offs are being done with Shakespearean concepts in them. So I do recommend that.

I also suggest, if you can, get your site, get your feed included in Google news, and if that’s not a possibility, at least have an RSS feed and be doing social shares on top of the content that you’re publishing.

Then last, but not least, be cautious about abusing dates. I realize that there’s a few folks in the gray hat, black hat world who have been doing this and been having a little bit of success with it on and off, which is just sort of modify the dates on the page of publication to fool Google. I don’t know why it seems to work sometimes. Or fooling them by adding new comments, which is sort of weird. We’ve seen this a few times with Moz blog posts, where an old blog post gets a comment. That comment has the date of the comment’s publication, and that actually will make the results show up with that newer, fresher date, which is a little bit awkward and odd. I don’t think that’s a bad thing if it’s just happening naturally and Google happens to be messing up, but if you’re specifically abusing it, I think you could get into trouble.

So I look forward to reading some great comments about what you’re seeing in fresh results, how you’re taking advantage of them. I’m sure you have some great suggestions for our readers as well. Take care. We’ll see you again for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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