Posted by Mackenzie Fogelson

If you own a business and are just getting started with social media, have a presence but not quite sure how to grow it, or are working on behalf of a client in this situation, you’re probably wondering how other businesses got here:

Or here:

From a starting point like this:

Or even this:

When you’re getting started with building a community around your business, you aren’t really starting from nothing. You can leverage the people, blogs, knowledge sources, and communities that already exist and that are relevant to your business and your industry.

Start with what’s already been built and go from there.

Once you’ve gone through this process, you’ll have a manageable list of quality knowledge sources (mainly blogs and people) that you will read, follow on social media, and engage with in order to actually build your community.

Before you begin your journey of identifying community, there’s a few things you might want to know:

1. If you’re looking to build a quality following, it does in fact take a lot of time and effort
2. It’s not all about the numbers
3. It’s an ongoing process (a more manual, human-type process)

So, where the heck do you start?

Who are you and what do you want to build?

Before you even get started doing the work to identify your online community, get very clear about why you’re even in business in the first place. Why do you matter? What are your values? What do you have to offer? How are you unique? Why should your customers care?

You’re going to build online community by being a great brand and providing something of value. But you’re also going to build community by identifying and attracting the right group of people.

Ask yourself what type of community you want to build. Who do you want in your audience?

Ideally, your community will be an audience of people who have chosen to be part of what you’re doing. Whether you’re acting as an individual or a brand, when you’re building followers, you’re building relationships. It’s not that every member of your community needs to engage or participate regularly (they won’t) but you want this group of people to care about what you do and what you stand for. You need to have some common ground.

In my experience, communities that thrive aren’t just in it for themselves. They don’t just self-promote and talk at their customers all day long. In real life, nobody wants to be around those people and that doesn’t change just because you’re hanging out online.

What kind of people do you want to be around in the real world? People who provide valuable and relevant information. People who welcome feedback (good and bad). People who listen. When you’re building a community (whether virtual or otherwise), you’re looking for live humans who, in some sense of the word, contribute to the conversation and the process. Thriving communities are full of people who want and who choose to be there. You can’t just gather a bunch of numbers to make up a ginormous group of followers and call it a community.

As in real life, you may not be able to hand-select every single person who belongs to your community. That said, you most certainly can be very clear about what you stand for so that your community is a match for your values. That way, as you build a community around your brand, it is a direct reflection of who you are and what you believe as a company.

Don’t just focus on the numbers

When identifying a community, it is important to focus on quality and not just quantity. Identifying a community is the start of building relationships with people who will support and help you grow your company. It starts with just a few key people and places (blogs and forums). If you’ve done your job to qualify these well, and do the hard work of generating and sharing value and being an authentic person (and company), then naturally, over time, your community (and your business) will grow.

This process I’m about to guide you through is not a circle-and-friend-and-follow-everyone-you-possibly-can-on-Google+-Facebook-and-Twitter-so-that-you’ll-have-a-humungo-community-kind of a thing. I’m advocating quality in quantity.

Your goal in identifying community is to come out of this with a list of people, companies, and knowledge sources that will serve as your roadmap for growing your online community. It’s a lot like outreach. Once you’ve identified your base, you will foster these relationships, build value in your business (i.e. meaningful content and resources that your customers need), and from there you will be led to additional people and places where you will discover even more pockets of opportunity.

Get clear on your business goals

Keep in mind that social media is a vehicle, not a strategy. Ideally, you want to determine exactly what it is you’re trying to accomplish in your business, and then you can figure out if it’s social media, SEO, content marketing, email marketing, PPC, or even a combination of a whole lot of other things that will actually get you there.

Are you working to increase brand awareness? Humanize your company? Help your support guys spend less time on the phone?

Whatever it is, if you’re clear on what it is you’re trying to accomplish for your company as a whole, it makes it a whole lot easier to identify and determine the online community you’d like to build. Over time, and as your community grows, you can evolve these objectives and really make it work for your business.

Once you have clarity on who you are as a company, what you have to offer, what you’d like to accomplish, and you’re ready to put in the work to grow your business online, start by identifying your community.

Start with some seeds

There are a few different ways to get your seeds in this process of identifying community. You can answer some simple questions, do some social media digging, sift through blogs, and also use search strings. Let’s start with the simple questions.

If you’re working on identifying community for your own company, then you will already have the answers to these questions. If you’re working on behalf of a client, put together a data collection document and ask them to answer the questions for you:

1. Who is your target demographic?
2. What specific industries do you cater to?
3. Who are your partners and colleagues?
4. Who are your competitors?
5. Who do you respect in the industry (people and companies)?
6. What organizations are you a part of?
7. What industry blogs do you currently read?
8. Who do you follow on social media (people, companies)?
9. What events do you attend?

Identify community with social media


You’ll want to determine where your target audience lives online so that you know exactly where to look your community. There are certainly any number of starting points for the hunt: Facebook, Google+, or any other social media outlet that’s appropriate for your customers. But just so that we have an example to work with, we’re going to use a company called Accent Branding Solutions (who is, of course, just getting started out building their online community), and we’re going to start with Twitter.

1. Go to Followerwonk 

   Visit https://followerwonk.com/ and click on Search Twitter Bios.
   
   
    
2. Enter in your search words
   
In the search field, enter the words that describe just one of your target audiences. For Accent, they’re targeting groups like the directors of marketing departments, admins of organizations or universities, associations, and marketing agencies. We’ll start with the group [marketing director] and, to narrow it down a bit, also specify their home town location of [Colorado].
   
   
3. Do some filtering

   You’re going to want to filter a bit initially as you go, and then once more when get down to your final picks of people who you think may be good to follow and cultivate as possible community members, influencers, or just great knowledge sources.


   
   
   
   You can see that I don’t have too many people to sift through since I limited my search location to Colorado. If I don’t get a ton of prospects, I may considering removing that qualifier (though these look pretty decent at first glance).
   
   

When filtering at a high level, I’d recommend looking at number of followers and number of tweets. Number of followers shows that they have some sort of a community built around themselves already and quantity of tweets shows their activity level.

 Once you’ve qualified at the high level and you want to start checking through individuals on the list, consider:

   1. Frequency and activity
      
What is the frequency of their posts? Are they on social media enough to even bother? Or do they post, like, every 6 months?

       
   2. Quality and relevance

      What kinds of stuff do they post about? Is it valuable? Relevant? Or do they just talk about themselves all day long? Are they sharing things that would be relevant for your customers (or your client’s customers)?

       
   3. Gut check
      
It all comes down to the human element. Is this person a fit for your company’s purpose, goals, and what you’re trying to accomplish with your community? You don’t have to be super picky, but don’t just put them on the follow list because you need warm bodies. This is definitely an ongoing process (you’re going to need to take these people for a test drive, evaluate, and then revise), but take the time for quality now. 

       
   4. Following and followers

      For the people who are looking like pretty good prospects, who are they following? Who’s on their list of followers? 

       
   5. A mix of the little and the big guys

      When it’s all said and done, you’re looking for a mix of people who are both obtainable (the little guys) and out of reach (the thought leaders). You want people who have a lot of followers and have some influence on them, but who would also notice when you share their content or interact with them (that’s the next step). 

If you look at the first page of Accent’s results on Followerwonk, you can see that even the top guy only has 1,700 followers.
      
      
      If I click through and check out his profile on Twitter I can see that he’s pretty active (averages a few tweets a day) and has some decent stuff to share. If I click through to his first post, he’s leading an active user group on LinkedIn so I can see that there may be a few easy ways to eventually make a connection with him.
      
      
      
      On the other hand, if I take the [Colorado] location qualifier off of my search in Followerwonk, I get a much larger set of results for [marketing director] who have a much larger following (which isn’t always a good thing; sometimes it’s just more).
      
      
      Certainly we would need to do a lot more qualifying for Accent on this group of results, but let’s say they wanted to target Lil B (assuming, as the first rapper ever to write and publish a book at 19, that he’s part of our target group). He has 622,220 followers. If Accent wanted to get in front of this guy, we’d have our work cut out for us. Not to say that Lil B doesn’t have value to offer and that Accent may want to follow him as a knowledge source, but the chances of attracting Lil B to their community may be a little bit far reaching at this stage in the game.


      
      Basically – and especially when you’re just starting to build your community – you want to look for a mix of both the little guys and the big guys. Focus on people who you could possibly talk to in person at trade shows, meetups, or at conferences. People who have the time to get to know you and would appreciate the value you’re going to share or the contributions that you’re making to the industry. Not to say that influencers and thought leaders don’t care about what you’re doing, it’s just that they have less time to take notice. So make sure you shoot for the big guys but that you also combine that with some peeps who have less on their plate.
       
   6. Organize

      Using what we call a Super Fancy Spreadsheet (where we track all the things), organize and keep track of all the good stuff you’re discovering. As you identify prospects that you think would be good to include in your community, enter their data. We like to track things like: name, type (person, company, affiliation, association, competitor), twitter handle, blog URL, website URL, domain authority, target audience, industry, level of activity, and notes. You can customize this for what you want to know as you’re identifying community.
      
      
       
   7. Set aside blogs

      As you’re prospecting in the social media realm, you’re going to find blogs that look decent and that may be a good fit. As you discover those, set them aside (maybe even pull it over into a new window and keep stacking them up there). We’ll get to those next.

Identify Community with Blogs


Once you’ve got a pretty good list of social media seeds going, move on to blogs. In general, you’re looking for blogs that can serve as knowledge sources, places to engage, or reveal possibilities of new people to connect with and possibly attract into your own community.

While you’re filtering blogs, you’ll probably also find more people you’re going to want to check out on social media. Go back and add them to your Super Fancy Spreadsheet as necessary.



Also, you can certainly filter the blogs you’re looking at at a high level (and at quick glance) by using domain authority (more on this below), but ideally you’ll want to hand check these suckers.

Again, using your Super Fancy Spreadsheet, you’re going to:

1. Set aside blogs discovered during the social media hunt
   Check and see if the people you’ve qualified so far on social media have blogs. If so, set them aside.

    
2. Check out other blogs

   Look back at the seed questions that you or your client have answered. Look up competitors, partners, distributors, associations, or anyone else in their industry who may have blogs. If you find some, set those aside.

    
3. Use search strings
   
A lot of times we feel like we’ve exhausted all of the above and still don’t have any solid blog recommendations to make. So we go to search strings like [service/product offering/or target audience intitle:blog] or [service/product offering/or target audience inurl:blog].
   
   

Hopefully by now you’ve got a list of a few blogs or so, go ahead and filter through them:

1. Domain authority

   Use the SEOmoz toolbar to get a quick look at DA. Keep in mind that there are some very good blogs out there that don’t yet have a strong DA but would be an ideal community fit. Always look for potential and quality in addition to authority.

 More often than not, if a blog has a low DA (say, less than 10), it’s probably not very active. However, there are some blogs that have great knowledge to share but don’t quite have the outreach thing down. Those are perfect opportunities for joining forces and figuring out how you can partner to bring awareness to the strong content and value they’re providing.

    
2. Quality and relevance

   Is the content worth reading? Would you share this stuff? Would your customers (or your client’s customers) want to read this? Would you want to engage on this blog? Does it spark your (or your client’s customers’) interest? 

    
3. Activity and engagement

   Are people sharing the posts on social media? Who is sharing these posts (those could be prospects as well) and how often? Are there any comments?
   
   

We’re kind of spoiled in that most of the blogs we’re used to in the marketing industry have strong DA, a ton of social activity, and lots of engagement. Most of the blogs in more detailed niches or specialty industries won’t have any engagement at all. If the blog you’re considering has solid content and posts new stuff fairly frequently, it has potential. Blogs like this are a great place to engage because they’re listening. They would probably be pretty excited to have someone to engage with. Once you start sharing their stuff and become an active member of their community, they’re going to take notice and probably join yours as well.

Now what? Surrendering to the process

Just like building community, identifying community never really ends. As you continue to grow, you will continue to identify people and places that you may want to be a part of, and vice-versa. This is a more manual process, but it’s one that we have found to deliver quality results.

After all of this, if you were fortunate enough to come up with a ton of great people and places to start, you’ll probably want to prioritize and just pick five or ten relevant blogs, and also a group of about 5-10 people that you’re eventually (in the next stage of building community) going to commit to following and engaging with. You’ll want to start slow. This is a lot of (consistent) effort and you don’t want to burn out too quickly.



Whether you’ve identified community for your business or you’re working with a client, make sure you understand that this initial qualified list is just a start. Keep in mind that some of these seeds are going to suck (even when you thought they were going to be a gold mine). Yet even the bad seed can lead you to new places, people, and niches that will help to expand the base of the community that you’re building.

Okay, one more thing. If you’re working with a client, once they start working with their list, encourage open communication about how it’s going. Make sure that you’re consistently touching base about whether what you’ve delivered is a fit for them. If they provide you negative feedback about a specific blog, ask them what they don’t like about it. What’s not a match? Maybe the contrast will help them to better identify what they are looking for and then you can help them find it.

A few (more) things to remember

As if this post isn’t long enough (have you met me?), there’s just a few more things for you to remember:

This is just the first step
Identifying community (i.e. prospective knowledge sources and people to follow) is just the first step in building an online community. To do this right, you’ll want to develop a strategy that will guide this and your other online marketing efforts.

This will (eventually) help your rankings
Building a community is a supplement to search. Remember that all of this building community stuff has to do with helping you bring more value to your customers and more visibility to your business. All of the efforts that you make when growing a community will not only build value in your business, it will help your rankings.

The benefit of going this route is that it’s sustainable. If you understand by now that it’s important that you’re not just chasing algorithms and want to invest in something that will weather the changes, this is probably a pretty good way to go.

I call BS on boring (or non-existing) niches

Communities don’t build themselves. Even the big brands had to start somewhere. But complaining about the fact that there is nothing there is just an excuse for not doing the work.

We work with all kinds of clients who start from scratch which means, when they begin, there is (wait for it) nothing. All that means is that you’ve got some hard work to do and one stellar opportunity in front of you. So hunker down and get to it.

Using this process of identifying community has helped our clients to get over their misconceptions about social media and discover niches and verticals that they didn’t realize existed to help them grow their business. The possibility is there, but you’ve got to do the work and quit making excuses.

Don’t give up
Like anything that’s worth having, the reward is worth the wait. There isn’t a magic pill. It just takes time and consistent effort. A lot of it. For a while you’re going to feel like, ‘what’s the point?’ But remember that this is just a stage.
 

After you’ve identified your community, you’re ready to start building it. The one thing that I want you to remember going forward is this: your purpose is providing value, not making it all about you. Be the kind of community member you’re looking for: generous, knowledgeable, and engaged. And, while your community should support and foster your business, it is primarily a means to provide better service, knowledge, and support to your customers.

As always, give it a shot, and let me know how it goes.

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Posted by willcritchlow

This is a post of two halves. The first half runs through my thoughts on what makes for good metrics, while the second half focuses on a specific process for building appropriate reporting metrics for your individual situation.

Now, I’m a very numbers-driven person. I studied math(s) and once thought I was going to be an inventor until I realised that inventing = engineering, and I needed to be good at partial differential equations.

I find, however, that I’m often on the side of less measurement and quantitative decision-making. I like using editorial discretion in our conference programming and often “disagree” with the audience feedback(*). I like running split tests, but spend a lot of time aiming for the big wins (that are easy to spot with the most rudimentary measurement) over small percentage gains gleaned from detailed analysis.

(*) it’s interesting for me to think about what I mean by “disagreeing” with quantitative data from large groups of people. I think this may be called arrogance but at least I’m in good company.

My typical way of working is to spend a lot of energy thinking about hard problems – often in the abstract and often diving deep into whatever data I have to hand – before making the best decision I can in the messy real world. I am not as good as I should be at looping back around on my decisions afterwards and sense-checking them against the resulting outcomes.

I once asked a management consultant friend of mine if his company ever went back and checked their revenue/cost forecasts for companies that they did due diligence on. He looked at me as if I’d reordered his PowerPoint slides. When he got over the shock, he asked me what the point of that would be?

Taking that charitably, I think he was saying “the value is in the planning, not the plans.”

This all leads me into the first half of my post (note that, throughout, I’m going to use Distilled examples because I can be more transparent with our numbers than with those of any of our clients):

1. My views on good metrics

There is no one metric to rule them all

Of course, at a business level, cash rules everything. Run out of cash and you die. But as a marketer, you are so far removed from cash collection or burn rates (in most businesses) that this is not helpful.

Understanding the correct metric to use in any given situation is a large part of the skill of a consultant or marketer. I constantly find myself recommending different metrics in different situations.

The best metrics guide behaviour

People like investors and boards care about KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that demonstrate the health of a company at a glance. These high-level metrics are good for busy executives and remote investors because they guide behaviour for those people:

• A healthy KPI means “all is fine – go work on something else”
• A sickly KPI means “this is where your focus should be”

An example of a company-level KPI for a profitable, growing company like Distilled that doesn’t have a bankroll of investor cash is a (conservative) projection of minimum cash levels over the coming months. Growing a company is cash-intensive, and one of the trickiest parts is funding growth out of operational cashflow. As long as the cash situation looks good, management time should be spent growing the company, but if the cash situation were ever to be poor, there would be nothing more important than resolving that situation.

When we get down into individual marketing campaigns, however, the kind of KPIs beloved of executives become useless. While an executive will focus on whether total online revenue is on-budget (which feeds into the operating model and cashflow mentioned above), knowing that we are above or below budget doesn’t change the day-to-day activities carried out by the marketing team.

Two things go wrong in marketing projects:

• We don’t get as much done as we wanted to (blog posts shipped, contacts made, pages updated, development tickets completed).
• Our efforts are less effective than we predicted they would be (not enough people read our posts, too many people ignore our emails, updated pages don’t drive the traffic or conversions we hoped, bug fixes don’t move the needle like they should).

So, for ourselves, I always advocate measuring activity and outcomes. Add some KPIs into the mix to communicate effectively with the execs and you are well on your way to an effective reporting pack.

But, connect to the money

The reason these metrics guide behaviour is that they are ultimately connected to the company’s financial objectives. It’s important that you can see the path from your metrics to those company-wide goals even if there are a bunch of assumptions needed to get there.

At Distilled, we recently started working with an experienced finance guy – his last gig was CFO at a public company – and had a very interesting few days connecting together our various financial reporting. At the end of it, we had a model that connected top-line revenue and costs in the P&L through non-cash balance sheet movements to cashflow. Of course, it bakes in a variety of assumptions (some of which have a critical impact on the outcome – like debtor days).

Even taking into consideration the importance of those key assumptions, it has revolutionised our management accounting to be able to see our financial data all connected together. Of course, we can then both run scenarios on the key assumptions and calibrate them against the real world.

The equivalent assumptions in online marketing are things like conversion rate and churn rate. Of course, in some projects these aren’t assumptions but rather variables – if you are directly seeking to change user behaviour – I’ll talk about this in a little more detail below.

Measure something even when you can’t measure what you’d like to

As the usercycle guys put it, “what happens here?”:

The Lean Startup is a methodology designed (as the name implies) for startups, but there are a lot of analogies to marketing campaigns that rely on earned media. Typically, there is a long period of time during which a lot of action generates precious little in the way of end results before (hopefully) the curve starts trending upwards and ultimately (again, hopefully) surpasses any of the ways you could buy new customers.

Eric Ries talks about innovation accounting as a way of defining, measuring, and communicating progress during these long, lonely months. If you are going to succeed as an online marketer, you are going to have to master a similar set of skills.

Our goal during this phase is best described as “learning” – we want to find the things we should be doubling down on, the things to kill before they cost too much money and give ourselves enough evidence to quieten both our own inner demons and those hard-to-convince bosses and clients.

For startups, I’m a big fan of Dave McClure’s pirate metrics – so named after the acronym AARRR:

• Acquisition
• Activation
• Retention
• Referral
• Revenue

He argues that your metrics should carefully measure each of these stages in the lifecycle of a customer and, importantly, that you should track them over cohorts of users (we use two-week long cohorts for DistilledU).

During the phase where you only have leading indicators, you may get executive pressure to forecast numbers. My approach here is to plug them into some simple assumptions that are easy to highlight and understand as being currently guess-work (“if these pages accrue search traffic at 80% of the average of similar pages, we will grow traffic X% year on year&rdquo .

Only worry about costs when it matters

Cost per acquisition (CPA) is a critical metric for paid marketing channels where the costs scale linearly (or super-linearly) with conversions. In particular, it passes the “actionability” test I described above. If your CPA is too high you can reduce bids, increase conversion rates or increase customer spend.

When we are considering channels with non-linear relationships between cost and conversions, it’s not easy to work out actions from average CPAs. It could be that you need to do more of what you were doing to benefit from flywheels and economies of scale. It could be that you need to throw away the plan and do something different because there is fundamentally no path from here to a profitable campaign.

Much of the artistry present in search and other earned marketing channels comes from the difficulties of working with this uncertainty.

Some tips that I’ve found useful in practice:

Look at the biggest picture you can

Look at the biggest picture you can – earned channels perform best over longer horizons, when multi-touch conversion is considered and lifetime value is counted appropriately. I would far rather be working out whether a five or six figure spend brought a big enough total uplift than deciding if an individual blog post (or even bigger piece of creative) has earned its keep.

Make sure you are considering the profit margin of an incremental sale

It is tempting to think about the marginal profit of a single conversion as:

• Total profit (for this product) / number of sales

This is misleading any time you have fixed costs involved. Let’s take an extreme example from our business illustrate this:

• We can easily imagine a situation of a conference that just beat breaking even with (say) 110 paying delegates paying £500 per head and fixed costs of (say) £50,000.
• How much are another 10 delegates worth?
• If we have valued incremental delegates as average profit, we think each delegate is worth £45 [((110 * 500) – 50,000) / 110] and so 10 more are worth £450.
• In fact, in our example with only fixed costs, an extra 10 delegates would bring us additional profits of £5,000 – more than 10x more.

In our own business, I tell anyone working with marketing to consider our whole business as 100% gross margin:

• In DistilledU, there are (essentially) no variable costs and so 100% gross margin is actually reasonable
• In conferences, variable costs are dwarfed by the fixed costs and there is a hard-to-quantify benefit to having more people at a conference (in lifetime value, in network effects, in “noise” the conference makes on Twitter etc)
• The way our consulting works – based almost entirely on full time permanent staff (many of whom have grown up with our business) – we either have no capacity to take on new work (hence no conversions) or there is little marginal cost to doing so

In reality, what I’m doing here is conflating two hard-to-measure things – the marginal cost of an incremental sale and the lifetime value of a sale above and beyond the first transaction.

2. Putting it all into practice

Here’s a step-by-step process to follow:

Understand how the business makes money

In order of increasing complexity:

• Sells (near-)100% gross margin products online (including pageviews)
• Sells fixed margin products online
• Sells variable margin products online (this includes many subscription products where LTV depends directly on churn rate)
• Micro-converts website visitors onto an easily-valued asset (e.g. an email list that sells advertising)
• Generates leads online that are converted into sales offline
• Micro-converts website visitors onto a less-easily-valued asset (e.g. an email list designed to generate consulting leads)

My favourite approach here is to make some simplifying assumptions that we can return to later to sense-check. Let’s think about some assumptions we can make in the most complex situation of building an email list for a consulting business:

• Fixed micro-conversion rates over time (i.e. if I increase the number of visitors to a conversion page, sign-ups will go up in lockstep)
• List growth will continue to turn into leads at the same rate as the past
• The sales team will continue to close leads at the same rate and to the same size contracts as in the past

The goal of all of this work is to come up with KPIs at the micro-conversion level that correlate with the bigger-picture business goals. You need to trade off “small” (benefits = easier to influence, quicker to change, quicker to measure) against “close to the money” (benefits = speaking the language of management, real business benefits).

In the complex situations, I typically find that the sweet-spot is somewhere between visitor growth (to appropriate pages from a good channel) and micro-conversion growth (i.e. email list growth or contact form submissions).

In the simpler businesses, you can typically get closer to the real business metrics and simply work directly with revenue growth.

Build a simple model

This step is probably overkill in many client engagements but it’s important for in-house teams (and those in-house teams should be sharing their models with external teams in my opinion).

The output should be the simplest Excel model you can think of that captures the important business drivers. The important part here is really the planning process rather than the specific plans that come out of it.

Here’s the majority of the inputs I created when I was building the DistilledU business model before it had launched to the public (i.e. while it was still in private beta):

In our case, I pulled a bunch of numbers from Rand’s exceptionally transparent funding post and used them to benchmark against our visitor numbers and conversion rates.

The output was a single sheet Excel model that forecast revenue growth (most of which was to be driven by inbound means):

In truth, pretty much every single assumption in my model is wrong – many of them by quite some distance (including our ability to generate conversions from paid advertising which has been even worse than we forecast). But the planning process was the valuable part, and although the real world is never as neat and tidy, we have ended up not a million miles away:

And now we know where the levers are that we need to pull to get the business results we want (one of which is conversion rate – we’ve already had one successful A/B test that nearly doubled conversion rate thanks to Optimizely – my favourite testing platform – but that’s a story for another day).

Estimate LTV, model CPA

Any serious discussion of measurement in marketing needs to understand the lifetime value (LTV) of a conversion. As discussed above, it can be hard enough to work out the immediate value of a micro-conversion, never mind the lifetime value.

Here are some techniques I have used to get to workable LTV numbers:

Assume static churn rates

If you are working with a subscription business, you can estimate LTV as:

monthly average revenue per user (ARPU) / monthly churn

So if you make $35/month / user on average and have a churn rate of 9%/month you can estimate LTV as $389

Make the numbers work with first purchase only

If you have an efficient enough marketing engine, you may get to beyond break-even on average on first purchase. In this case, you can build a reporting pack based on first purchase (sometimes with some hard-to-estimate factors in the other direction such as the variable margins mentioned above) and include notes of additional uplift available from subsequent / repeat purchases. This is the approach I’ve taken with big ticket / b2b services with long lead and delivery times – even if there are repeat purchases, they come so far in the future that they are irrelevant on the short-term planning horizon.

Average everything together – assuming all users are similar

If you have access to the right data, you can bucket together large sets of users and their purchases over some large time horizon (12-24 months is sensible for many online businesses), discount appropriately and get to a very rough average LTV. This misses many subtleties and variation in underlying LTV. It’s probably most effective with small-to-mid-ticket basket sizes that aren’t skewed by large repeat purchases in the way that, say, consulting services would be.

I’ve even used this approach to bucket together the “LTV” of email subscribers – many of whom purchase nothing. Doing some back-of-the-envelope calculations led me to a rough value of $6 per email subscriber per year for Distilled, for example. If I were to rely on this for paid marketing, I would need to keep a very close eye on the trends in this value as I artificially added subscribers from a different channel mix than that which grew the list to its current size.

Build a simple model

For mid-ticket purchases where basket sizes (and repeat purchasing behaviour) can vary over a wide range, I’ve found it best to build an explicit model based on a simple “propensity to convert again” in each time period after initial purchase.

For those working through this at home, you end up modelling a simple Poisson Process but you can get 80+% of the way there with a simple “x% of prior customers buy again in the subsequent quarter and y% in the quarter after that”. I tend to move towards longer time-periods when modelling this kind of process as purchases that fall close together might as well be counted simply as a larger basket.

Measure a combination of KPIs and lean metrics

So you now have access to a bunch of (estimates / modelled versions of) metrics like LTV, churn rate, CPA and have picked AARRR metrics that correlate with future success. Finally (we’re nearly there, I promise) you need to put this together. I suggest that you think about building two different reporting packs:

• KPI pack with high level “total success” metrics that demonstrates the value of the work you are doing (this will need to contain leading indicators and extrapolations in the early days)
• Project steering pack with actionable metrics that helps you, your team and your immediate point of contact / boss build a more effective campaign

KPI pack – most likely updated and reviewed quarterly

Brings together big numbers over long time periods – for example, it might contain:

• Total LTV generated through your channels
  • % growth for new products
• YoY traffic and revenue growth
• 2+ year projections

You want to show graphs like this one (revenue from organic search to deep pages within DistilledU):

Project steering pack – most likely reviewed monthly

Based on time-boxed or cohort-based data, focusses on metrics that give you deep insight into what you need to change to do even better in each of the key activities you are undertaking. This is likely to be highly custom to your specific business and marketing campaigns but here are some examples from campaigns I’ve been involved with recently:

Conversion rate optimisation:

• Number of tests run
• Total traffic to each variation
• Conversions for each variation
• Number of successful tests run
• Total improvement in conversion rate

Outreach:

• Total new contacts made
• Responses (segmented by approach / type of contact)
• Successful outcomes

User satisfaction:

• % of new sign-ups who subsequently upgrade to paid
• % of new paying members who engage with the service
• churn rates

The table below shows (a section of) our cohort analysis for DistilledU and the bump in conversion rates to paying and engaging with the content when we announced that we were including all of our conference videos within DistilledU subscriptions:

This was a test – and initially one that we marketed only to our existing community. It wasn’t without its costs (we estimated that it would reduce video sales by $50-100k / year) but the success led to (a) keeping it in place and (b) a successful landing page A/B test that we’re going to write up on our own site soon.

I hope this meander through meaningful metrics has been useful to you. I’d love to hear your experiences in the comments and any thoughts you have on how I can improve any part of my approach.

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!

Posted by randfish

Finding a decent SEO is hard work, and the recommendations you get for selecting your perfect fit will vary as much as the people providing them.

Whether you’re looking for a consultant or an agency, you don’t need to feel alone in your search! In this week’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand walks you through his tips for finding an SEO that will be the cheese to your macaroni.

Do you have any other tips you’ve used to find an SEO that we haven’t covered? Leave them in the comments below!

Video Transcription

“Howdy SEOmoz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I wanted to actually take a question from one of our users in the community and that question was:  “How do I find a good SEO?” They were hoping I would do a Whiteboard Friday on it. So here it is.

I recommend a lot of things when people ask me for SEO assistance, consultants, agencies, that kind of thing, and I do it all the time. But I have a benefit of being in the industry for a long time and knowing a lot of people and usually knowing pretty well the people that I’m talking to or asking them a few questions to get those probing, in-depth answers that can let me know who I should recommend them to. This process is not particularly scalable, and certainly I can’t have everyone just emailing me and ask. So please everyone who needs an SEO, don’t email and ask me.

But if you’re looking for somebody, I would recommend a process similar to this. I would start with your network, meaning check out LinkedIn, check out people that you might know on Twitter and Facebook who have SEO or have SEO experience in their profile. You could even post something on these sites saying, “Hey, does anyone have someone that they’d strongly recommend?” I’m not saying that you go directly from this process to hiring someone, just that you can start with it, any of the web communities where you participate, your friends and family, business colleagues.

Even local meet-ups, if you see that there is an SEO meet-up in your area, that might not be a terrible idea to actually go, meet some people, get friendly, especially if you find some folks in that community who don’t necessarily offer SEO services – maybe they are in-house SEOs, they work for software companies, those kinds of things – but they will often have very good recommendations about who’d they suggest that you use. That’s a great process, find sort of a neutral third party whose only interest is in helping you, but who knows the field well. That’s what I’d be looking for here, more so than a direct consultant right away.

Second thing, check out SEOs on the major marketing communities. If you don’t have anyone in your network, you might try going to places like SEO blogs. I think SEO.alltop.com actually has a very good list of sort of all the popular and major sites in SEO, blogs in SEO. The SEOmoz Q&A certainly is a great place. This is actually one of my favorite features of Q&A now. There have been lots of people who have found their consultants and lots of consultants who have gotten work through Q&A. So I love that.

Quora is actually a good place to participate. You can see lots of people both asking and answering SEO questions there. I think the people who tend to give really good answers on Quora also tend to be pretty darn good folks. I see Ian Lurie, for example, from Portent Interactive, which is a great company here in Seattle, giving a lot of good answers there.

Some of those SEO forums, as well, if you see someone who not only the content of their answers, but the style of those answers. They are not reflexive or offensive. They don’t get into arguments all the time. They’re very open. They’re empathetic. That’s great. When you find people in these types of communities, that can be a good resource. Again, don’t just think to yourself, “Oh, well they don’t do consulting, or they’re out of my price range.” That can be a good thing. You can reach out to them and get a recommendation. These are the kind of people you want to find to get that recommendation.

Next, I want you to build a smart consideration set of the traits that matter to you, and this is certainly not exhaustive, these six, but these are traits that a lot of people have. So that could be I want someone who is very experienced, or I want someone who is relatively early in their career. I want someone whose background is they’ve been to college before, they’ve worked for several agencies, or I’m looking for an agency that has the background of having worked with several people in my field, or the opposite. A lot of times when they’re seeking SEO consultants, they want someone who has no conflicting clients who are also in that field so that the links they build, the content they build, that work will all be for them exclusively and it won’t be partnered out to several different folks.

Geography and location can matter a lot. I would be cautious about thinking about this one. Just because someone is not in your geography doesn’t mean that you necessarily can’t get together with them in person. If they’re willing to fly out to your location or those kinds of things, I would still put them in your consideration set. I think that at least one or two meetings in person is a great thing if you can accomplish it. But geography tends not to be super important for doing SEO kinds of work, other than being able to connect up in person and sort of shake each other’s hand and that sort of thing.

The agency consultancy size. Maybe you’re looking for a one man operation or one woman operation. Maybe you’re looking for a large agency that’s inside a broader ad firm so they can serve lots of needs, that kind of thing.

Price, obviously, is a consideration for a lot of people. And timing and availability. Can they start their work right now? How many people do they have available? All those kinds of things.

You should add other things in this consideration set that matter to you. So, for example, values of the person might be really important. It might be very important to you that the person fits some particular criteria around what they’ve accomplished in the past or that they’re very focused, they have a lot of skills on the content side as opposed to the linking side, or on the technical SEO side and the HTML and development side versus social media side. Whatever it is that matters to you, make sure to put that in your consideration set and consider people equally as you look through there.

Then I’d go and I’d create a short list of SEOs from the recommendations that you got. I would also do it, even if you’re sure, absolutely 100% sure. You’re like “You know what? This is the person for me. I just know that they’re going to be the right one.” At least talk to a couple of others. The perspectives that you’ll get and the process of that interview is going to be very, very useful for you going forward and judging the work. You could find maybe you had your heart set on this person, but they turned out not to be right, and there was some reason. Just go through this process of at least vetting a couple of vendors.

So I would ask them some things like some project specific questions, related to specifically what we’re trying to accomplish here at our company and the rankings we’re trying to achieve, the visibility we’re trying to get, the people we’re trying to draw in, the intent of the marketing that we’re doing. Great, ask them project specific questions, but also ask them generic SEO knowledge questions. There is actually a great resource that Joel linked to in the blog post of sort of a ten question litmus test that I wrote for professional SEOs a couple years ago now, but I think can still be quite valuable.

Get a reference or three, but be very careful in the references that you get. This is my experience, time and again, when reference checking vendors. You ask for a reference upfront, and you get people who they know will give a good reference. So really all you’re saying is, “Do you have two or three people who will always say nice things about you?” That’s not really a great reference check.

This is what I would do. When you start talking to them, don’t ask for references. Ask, “What companies have you worked with? Who have been some of your clients over time?” Make sure to write down that list, and you can prompt them. If they give you a couple, you can say, “Oh, are there any others? Did you work with anyone in travel, anyone with a big site?” Whatever the criteria you have. Then write those all down and go back to LinkedIn or your personal network, see if you know people at those companies. Reach out to them independent of getting the reference and ask, “Hey, did you work with so and so? Were you happy with that experience?” Going that direct route is much better.

Then, I’ll add this important caveat, very important caveat, which it’s okay to get a couple of references that are not great. It really is. If you get one good reference from them and one of the people that you go back through your network says really good things about them, and you like them, and one other person that you’ve gone through your network says, “Ah, we were not happy,” that’s okay. It’s okay to have a couple of people. There is no way that you’re going to do SEO consulting or agency work, any kind of consulting or agency work or services work and not have a few unhappy people in the past. I think that 100% happiness ratio is extremely rare, and even if they were happy at the time, oftentimes people become dissatisfied over time with things, and that could be not the agency’s fault, the consultant’s fault. So I wouldn’t dismiss these, but I would consider them very carefully, balance them on the whole, and make sure that you know all the things that are going on. Oftentimes, in any type of a services organization, it’s not one person’s fault or always the agency or the service provider’s fault. Oftentimes, fault lies somewhere in between the company and the agency.

Then I would check out some online contributions too, places where they’ve contributed – blogs, social media, comments, those types of things. It tends to be the case that if you have people from the consultancy or the agency who’ve done stuff on the web that you can observe, you’re seeing them in a little bit more of their natural setting, and you can see what I would call kind of behind the curtain of the polish that they present to you directly. That can be extremely valuable. So I love looking at sort of oh, I met someone at a conference and I thought they did a good job speaking, let go me check out some of their other presentations. Then I’ll check out some of the stuff that they’ve done online. Boy, I get the sense that this person is kind of mean and rude on the Internet. I’m not sure that they’re actually a match. That kind of information can be really interesting and really useful to you.

You’ll also get a sense for how knowledgeable they are. They can seem very knowledgeable in person, and then you go on the web and you sort of get this sense of, oh, actually this person seems to be giving bad advice or asking questions that don’t seem like they know what they’re doing. Unfortunately, because the SEO field is so easy to enter, you do have a lot of folks who just got started in the industry, maybe are looking for their first clients still, or folks who have been operating who may not necessarily be SEO experts, maybe they’re great at other parts of web agency work but not SEO.

Finally, my last piece of advice on this process, be very careful about choosing exclusively on price or experience. Now, price is an obvious one. You sort of go, “Yeah. I’ll get what I pay for and choosing the lowest price vendor might not be a great idea,” and those kind of things. That’s true. But experience is a dangerous one also. I see a lot of folks saying, “Ah, you worked with our big competitor,” or “You worked with someone else in the field that we respect and admire, therefore, we’re picking you.” We lose track of all the other important traits and criteria. Just be cautious about that. I think that there is something to, whether you’re hiring someone onto your team, we do a lot of hiring here, and one of the things that I see is relevant experience does not always trump sort of that excited newcomer. As long as they have the chops to do the work, sometimes that passion and that lack of experience can actually open up a lot of opportunity for you. So be careful about choosing on those alone, and hopefully this process will work for you.

I would love if you’re an agency or a consultant or someone who has found SEOs in the past and you have additional things that you’d like to add to a process like this, please include them in the comments below. I would love to see those.

All right. Thanks everyone. Take care. We’ll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.”

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!

Posted by randfish

Finding a decent SEO is hard work, and the recommendations you get for selecting your perfect fit will vary as much as the people providing them.

Whether you’re looking for a consultant or an agency, you don’t need to feel alone in your search! In this week’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand walks you through his tips for finding an SEO that will be the cheese to your macaroni.

Do you have any other tips you’ve used to find an SEO that we haven’t covered? Leave them in the comments below!

Video Transcription

“Howdy SEOmoz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I wanted to actually take a question from one of our users in the community and that question was:  “How do I find a good SEO?” They were hoping I would do a Whiteboard Friday on it. So here it is.

I recommend a lot of things when people ask me for SEO assistance, consultants, agencies, that kind of thing, and I do it all the time. But I have a benefit of being in the industry for a long time and knowing a lot of people and usually knowing pretty well the people that I’m talking to or asking them a few questions to get those probing, in-depth answers that can let me know who I should recommend them to. This process is not particularly scalable, and certainly I can’t have everyone just emailing me and ask. So please everyone who needs an SEO, don’t email and ask me.

But if you’re looking for somebody, I would recommend a process similar to this. I would start with your network, meaning check out LinkedIn, check out people that you might know on Twitter and Facebook who have SEO or have SEO experience in their profile. You could even post something on these sites saying, “Hey, does anyone have someone that they’d strongly recommend?” I’m not saying that you go directly from this process to hiring someone, just that you can start with it, any of the web communities where you participate, your friends and family, business colleagues.

Even local meet-ups, if you see that there is an SEO meet-up in your area, that might not be a terrible idea to actually go, meet some people, get friendly, especially if you find some folks in that community who don’t necessarily offer SEO services – maybe they are in-house SEOs, they work for software companies, those kinds of things – but they will often have very good recommendations about who’d they suggest that you use. That’s a great process, find sort of a neutral third party whose only interest is in helping you, but who knows the field well. That’s what I’d be looking for here, more so than a direct consultant right away.

Second thing, check out SEOs on the major marketing communities. If you don’t have anyone in your network, you might try going to places like SEO blogs. I think SEO.alltop.com actually has a very good list of sort of all the popular and major sites in SEO, blogs in SEO. The SEOmoz Q&A certainly is a great place. This is actually one of my favorite features of Q&A now. There have been lots of people who have found their consultants and lots of consultants who have gotten work through Q&A. So I love that.

Quora is actually a good place to participate. You can see lots of people both asking and answering SEO questions there. I think the people who tend to give really good answers on Quora also tend to be pretty darn good folks. I see Ian Lurie, for example, from Portent Interactive, which is a great company here in Seattle, giving a lot of good answers there.

Some of those SEO forums, as well, if you see someone who not only the content of their answers, but the style of those answers. They are not reflexive or offensive. They don’t get into arguments all the time. They’re very open. They’re empathetic. That’s great. When you find people in these types of communities, that can be a good resource. Again, don’t just think to yourself, “Oh, well they don’t do consulting, or they’re out of my price range.” That can be a good thing. You can reach out to them and get a recommendation. These are the kind of people you want to find to get that recommendation.

Next, I want you to build a smart consideration set of the traits that matter to you, and this is certainly not exhaustive, these six, but these are traits that a lot of people have. So that could be I want someone who is very experienced, or I want someone who is relatively early in their career. I want someone whose background is they’ve been to college before, they’ve worked for several agencies, or I’m looking for an agency that has the background of having worked with several people in my field, or the opposite. A lot of times when they’re seeking SEO consultants, they want someone who has no conflicting clients who are also in that field so that the links they build, the content they build, that work will all be for them exclusively and it won’t be partnered out to several different folks.

Geography and location can matter a lot. I would be cautious about thinking about this one. Just because someone is not in your geography doesn’t mean that you necessarily can’t get together with them in person. If they’re willing to fly out to your location or those kinds of things, I would still put them in your consideration set. I think that at least one or two meetings in person is a great thing if you can accomplish it. But geography tends not to be super important for doing SEO kinds of work, other than being able to connect up in person and sort of shake each other’s hand and that sort of thing.

The agency consultancy size. Maybe you’re looking for a one man operation or one woman operation. Maybe you’re looking for a large agency that’s inside a broader ad firm so they can serve lots of needs, that kind of thing.

Price, obviously, is a consideration for a lot of people. And timing and availability. Can they start their work right now? How many people do they have available? All those kinds of things.

You should add other things in this consideration set that matter to you. So, for example, values of the person might be really important. It might be very important to you that the person fits some particular criteria around what they’ve accomplished in the past or that they’re very focused, they have a lot of skills on the content side as opposed to the linking side, or on the technical SEO side and the HTML and development side versus social media side. Whatever it is that matters to you, make sure to put that in your consideration set and consider people equally as you look through there.

Then I’d go and I’d create a short list of SEOs from the recommendations that you got. I would also do it, even if you’re sure, absolutely 100% sure. You’re like “You know what? This is the person for me. I just know that they’re going to be the right one.” At least talk to a couple of others. The perspectives that you’ll get and the process of that interview is going to be very, very useful for you going forward and judging the work. You could find maybe you had your heart set on this person, but they turned out not to be right, and there was some reason. Just go through this process of at least vetting a couple of vendors.

So I would ask them some things like some project specific questions, related to specifically what we’re trying to accomplish here at our company and the rankings we’re trying to achieve, the visibility we’re trying to get, the people we’re trying to draw in, the intent of the marketing that we’re doing. Great, ask them project specific questions, but also ask them generic SEO knowledge questions. There is actually a great resource that Joel linked to in the blog post of sort of a ten question litmus test that I wrote for professional SEOs a couple years ago now, but I think can still be quite valuable.

Get a reference or three, but be very careful in the references that you get. This is my experience, time and again, when reference checking vendors. You ask for a reference upfront, and you get people who they know will give a good reference. So really all you’re saying is, “Do you have two or three people who will always say nice things about you?” That’s not really a great reference check.

This is what I would do. When you start talking to them, don’t ask for references. Ask, “What companies have you worked with? Who have been some of your clients over time?” Make sure to write down that list, and you can prompt them. If they give you a couple, you can say, “Oh, are there any others? Did you work with anyone in travel, anyone with a big site?” Whatever the criteria you have. Then write those all down and go back to LinkedIn or your personal network, see if you know people at those companies. Reach out to them independent of getting the reference and ask, “Hey, did you work with so and so? Were you happy with that experience?” Going that direct route is much better.

Then, I’ll add this important caveat, very important caveat, which it’s okay to get a couple of references that are not great. It really is. If you get one good reference from them and one of the people that you go back through your network says really good things about them, and you like them, and one other person that you’ve gone through your network says, “Ah, we were not happy,” that’s okay. It’s okay to have a couple of people. There is no way that you’re going to do SEO consulting or agency work, any kind of consulting or agency work or services work and not have a few unhappy people in the past. I think that 100% happiness ratio is extremely rare, and even if they were happy at the time, oftentimes people become dissatisfied over time with things, and that could be not the agency’s fault, the consultant’s fault. So I wouldn’t dismiss these, but I would consider them very carefully, balance them on the whole, and make sure that you know all the things that are going on. Oftentimes, in any type of a services organization, it’s not one person’s fault or always the agency or the service provider’s fault. Oftentimes, fault lies somewhere in between the company and the agency.

Then I would check out some online contributions too, places where they’ve contributed – blogs, social media, comments, those types of things. It tends to be the case that if you have people from the consultancy or the agency who’ve done stuff on the web that you can observe, you’re seeing them in a little bit more of their natural setting, and you can see what I would call kind of behind the curtain of the polish that they present to you directly. That can be extremely valuable. So I love looking at sort of oh, I met someone at a conference and I thought they did a good job speaking, let go me check out some of their other presentations. Then I’ll check out some of the stuff that they’ve done online. Boy, I get the sense that this person is kind of mean and rude on the Internet. I’m not sure that they’re actually a match. That kind of information can be really interesting and really useful to you.

You’ll also get a sense for how knowledgeable they are. They can seem very knowledgeable in person, and then you go on the web and you sort of get this sense of, oh, actually this person seems to be giving bad advice or asking questions that don’t seem like they know what they’re doing. Unfortunately, because the SEO field is so easy to enter, you do have a lot of folks who just got started in the industry, maybe are looking for their first clients still, or folks who have been operating who may not necessarily be SEO experts, maybe they’re great at other parts of web agency work but not SEO.

Finally, my last piece of advice on this process, be very careful about choosing exclusively on price or experience. Now, price is an obvious one. You sort of go, “Yeah. I’ll get what I pay for and choosing the lowest price vendor might not be a great idea,” and those kind of things. That’s true. But experience is a dangerous one also. I see a lot of folks saying, “Ah, you worked with our big competitor,” or “You worked with someone else in the field that we respect and admire, therefore, we’re picking you.” We lose track of all the other important traits and criteria. Just be cautious about that. I think that there is something to, whether you’re hiring someone onto your team, we do a lot of hiring here, and one of the things that I see is relevant experience does not always trump sort of that excited newcomer. As long as they have the chops to do the work, sometimes that passion and that lack of experience can actually open up a lot of opportunity for you. So be careful about choosing on those alone, and hopefully this process will work for you.

I would love if you’re an agency or a consultant or someone who has found SEOs in the past and you have additional things that you’d like to add to a process like this, please include them in the comments below. I would love to see those.

All right. Thanks everyone. Take care. We’ll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday.”

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!

Posted by Dr. Pete

In August of 2012, Google launched 7-result SERPs, transforming page-one results. MozCast data initially showed that as many as 18% of the queries we tracked were affected. We’ve been collecting data on the phenomenon ever since, and putting some of the most common theories to the test. This is the story of the 7-result SERP as we understand it today (image created with PULP-O-MIZER).

I. 7-Result SERPs in The Wild

By now, you’ve probably seen a few 7-result SERPs in the “wild”, but I think it’s still useful to start at the beginning. Here are a few examples (with screenshots) of the various forms the 7-result SERP takes these days. I apologize in advance for the large images, but I think it’s sometimes important to see the full-length SERP.

(1) The “Classic” 7-Result SERP

The classic 7-result SERP usually appears as a #1 listing with expanded site-links (more on that later), plus six more organic listings. Here’s a screenshot from a search for “some ecards”, a navigational query:

(2) The 7 + 7 with Local Results

It’s also possible to see 7-result SERPs blended with other types of results, including local “pack” results. Here’s the result of a search with local intent – “williamsburg prime outlets”:

(3) The 6 + Image Mega-Pack

It’s not just organic results that can appear in the #1 spot of a 7-result SERP, though. There’s a rare exception when a “mega-pack” of images appears at the top of a SERP. Here’s a “7-result” SERP with one image pack and six organic listings – the search is “pictures of cats”:

II. Some 7-Result SERP Stats

Our original data set showed 7-result page-one SERPs across about 18% of the queries we tracked. That number has varied over time, dropping as low as 13%. Recently, we’ve been experimenting with a larger data set (10,000 keywords). Over the 10 days from 1/13-1/22 (the data for this post was collected around 1/23), that data set tracked 7-result SERPs in the range of 18.1% – 18.5%. While this isn’t necessarily representative of the entire internet, it does show that 7-result SERPs continue to be a significant presence on Google.

These percentages are calculated by unique queries. We can also looking at query volume. Using Google’s “global” volume (exact-match), the percentage of queries by volume with 7-result SERPs for 1/22 was 19.5%. This compares to 18.5% by unique queries. Factoring in volume, that’s almost a fifth of all queries we track.

Here are the 7-result SERP percentages across 20 industry categories (500 queries per category) for 1/22:

These categories were all borrowed from the Google AdWords keyword research tool. The most impacted vertical is “Travel & Tourism”, at 36.2%, with “Health” being the least impacted.  At only 500 queries/category, it’s easy to over-interpret this data, but I think it’s interesting to see how much the impact varies.

III. The Site-Link Connection

Many people have hypothesized a link between expanded site-links and 7-result SERPs. We’ve seen a lot of anecdotal evidence, but I thought I’d put it to the test on a large scale, so we collected site-link data (presence and count) for the 10,000 keywords in this study.

Of the 1,846 queries (18.5%) in our data set that had 7-result SERPs on the morning of 1/22, 100% of them had expanded site-links for the #1 position. There were 45 queries that had expanded site-links, but did not show a 7-result count, but those were all anomalies based on how we count local results (we include blended local and packs in the MozCast count, whereas Google may not). There is nearly a perfect, positive correlation between 7-result SERPs and expanded site-links. Whatever engine is driving one also very likely drives the other.

The only minor exception is the image blocks mentioned above. In those cases, the image “mega-pack” seems to be the equivalent of expanded site-links. Internally, we count those as 6-result SERPs, but I believe Google sees them as a 7-result variant.

While most (roughly 80%) of 7-result SERPs have six expanded site-links, there doesn’t seem to be any rule about that. We’re tracking 7-result SERPs with anywhere from one to six expanded site-links. It doesn’t take a full set of site-links to trigger a 7-result SERP. In some cases, it seems to just be the case that the domain only has a limited number of query-relevant pages.

IV. 7-Result Query Stability

Originally, I assumed that once a query was deemed “worthy” of site-links and a 7-result SERP, that query would continue to have 7 results until Google made a major change to the algorithm. The data suggests that this is far from true – many queries have flipped back and forth from 7 to 10 and vise-versa since the 7-result SERP roll-out.

While our MozCast Top-View Metrics track major changes to the average result count, the real story is a bit more complicated. On any given day, a fairly large number of keywords flip from 7s to 10s and 10s to 7s. From 1/21 to 1/22, for example, 61 (0.61%) went from 10 to 7 results and 56 (0.56%) went from 7 to 10 results. A total of 117 “flips” happened in a 24-hour period – that’s just over 1% of queries, and that seems to be typical.

Some keywords have flipped many times – for example, the query “pga national” has flipped from 7-to-10 and back 27 times (measured once/day) since the original roll-out of 7-result SERPs. This appears to be entirely algorithmic – some threshold (whether it’s authority, relevance, brand signals, etc.) determines if a #1 result deserves site-links, probably in real-time, and when that switch flips, you get a 7-result SERP.

V. The Diversity Connection

I also originally assumed that a 7-result SERP was just a 10-result SERP with site-links added and results #8-#10 removed. Over time, I developed a strong suspicion this was not the case, but tracking down solid evidence has been tricky. The simple problem is that, once we track a 7-result SERP, we can’t see what the SERP would’ve looked like with 10 results.

This is where query stability comes in – while it’s not a perfect solution (results naturally change over time), we can look at queries that flip and see how the 7-result SERP on one day compares to the 10-result SERP on the next. Let’s look at our flipper example, “pga national” – here are the sub-domains for a 7-result SERP recorded on 1/19:

1. www.pgaresort.com
2. www.pganational.com
3. en.wikipedia.org
4. www.jeffrealty.com
5. www.tripadvisor.com
6. www.pga.com
7. www.pgamembersclub.com

The previous day (1/18), that same query recorded a 10-result SERP. Here are the sub-domains for those 10 results:

1. www.pgaresort.com
2. www.pgaresort.com
3. www.pgaresort.com
4. www.pgaresort.com
5. www.pganational.com
6. en.wikipedia.org
7. www.tripadvisor.com
8. www.pga.com
9. www.jeffrealty.com
10. www.bocaexecutiverealty.com

The 10-result SERP allows multiple listings for the top domain, whereas the 7-result SERP collapses the top domain to one listing plus expanded site-links. There is a relationship between listings #2-#4 in the 10-result SERP and the expanded site-links in the 7-result SERP, but it’s not one-to-one.

Recently, I happened across another way to compare. Google partners with other search engines to provide data, and one partner with fairly similar results is EarthLink. What’s interesting is that Google partners don’t show expanded site-links or 7-result SERPs – at least not in any case I’ve found (if you know an exception, please let me know). Here’s a search for “pga national” on EarthLink on 1/25:

1. www.pgaresort.com
2. www.pgaresort.com
3. www.pgaresort.com
4. www.pganational.com
5. en.wikipedia.org
6. www.tripadvisor.com
7. www.jeffrealty.com
8. www.pga.com
9. www.bocaexecutiverealty.com
10. www.devonshirepga.com

Again, the #1 domain is repeated. Looking across multiple SERPs, the pattern varies a bit, and it’s tough to pin it down to just one rule for moving from 7 results to 10 results. In general, though, the diversity pattern holds. When a query shifts from a 10-result SERP to a 7-result SERP, the domain in the #1 spot gets site-links but can’t occupy spots #2-#7.

Unfortunately, the domain diversity pattern has been hard to detect at large-scale.  We track domain diversity (percentage of unique sub-domains across the Top 10) in MozCast, but over the 2-3 days that 7-results SERPs rolled out, overall diversity only increased from 55.1% to 55.8%.

Part of the problem is that our broad view of diversity groups all sub-domains, meaning that the lack of diversity in the 10-result SERPs could overpower the 7-result SERPs. So, what if we separate them? Across the core MozCast data (1K queries), domain diversity on 1/22 was 53.4%. Looking at just 7-result SERPs, though, domain diversity was 62.2% (vs. 54.2% for 10-result SERPs). That’s not a massive difference, but it’s certainly evidence to support the diversity connection.

Of course, causality is tough to piece together. Just because 7-result SERPs are more diverse, that doesn’t mean that Google is using domain crowding as a signal to generate expanded site-links. It could simply mean that the same signals that cause a result to get expanded site-links also cause it to get multiple spots in a 10-result SERP.

VI. The Big Brand Connection

So, what drives 7-result SERPs? Many people have speculated that it’s a brand signal – at a glance, there are many branded (or at least navigational) queries in the mix. Many of these are relatively small brands, though, so it’s not a classic picture of big-brand dominance. There are also some 7-result queries that don’t seem branded at all, such as:

1. “tracking santa”
2. “cool math games for kids”
3. “unemployment claim weeks”
4. “cell signaling”
5. “irs transcript”

Granted, these are exceptions to the rule, and some of these are brand-like, for lack of a better phrase. The query “irs transcript” does pull up the IRS website in the top spot – the full phrase may not signal a brand, but there’s a clear dominant match for the search. Likewise, “tracking santa” is clearly NORAD’s domain, even if they don’t have a domain or brand called “tracking santa”, and even if they’re actually matching on “tracks santa”.

In some cases, there does seem to be a brand (or entity) bias. Take a search for “reef”, which pulls up Reef.com in the #1 spot with four site-links:

Not to pick on Reef.com, but I don’t think of them as a household name. Are they a more relevant match to “reef” than any particular reef (like the Great Barrier Reef) or the concept of a reef in general? It could be a question of authority (DA = 66) or of the Exact-Match Domain in play – unfortunately, we throw around the term “brand” a lot, but we don’t often dig into how that translates into practical ranking signals.

I pulled authority metrics (DA and PA) for a subset of these queries, and there seems to be virtually no correlation between authority (as we measure it) and the presence of site-links. An interesting example is Wikipedia. It occupies over 11% of the #1 results (yeah, it’s not your imagination), but only seven of those 1,119 queries have 7-result SERPs. This is a site with a Domain Authority of 100 (out of 100).

VII. The “Entity” Connection

One emerging school of thought is that named entities are getting more ranking power these days. A named entity doesn’t have to be a big brand, just a clear match to a user’s intent. For example, if I searched for “sam’s barber shop”, SamsBarberShop.com would much more likely match my intent than results for barbers who happened to be named Sam. Sam’s Barber Shop is an entity, regardless of its Domain Authority or other ranking signals. This goes beyond just an exact-match domain (EMD) connection, too.

I think that 7-result SERPs and other updates like Knowledge Graph do signal a push toward classifying entities and generally making search reflect the real world. It’s not going to be enough in five years simply to use keywords well in your content or inbound anchor links. Google is going to want to want to return rich objects that represent “real-world” concepts that people understand, even if those concepts exist primarily online. This fits well into the idea of the dominant interpretation, too (as outlined in Google’s rater guidelines and other documents). Whether I search for “Microsoft” or “Sam’s Barber Shop”, the dominant interpretation model suggests that the entity’s website is the best match, regardless of other ranking factors or the strength of their SEO.

There’s only one problem with the entity explanation. Generally speaking, I’d expect an entity to be stable – once a query was classified as an entity and acquired expanded sitelinks, I’d expect it to stay that way. As mentioned, though, the data is fairly unstable. This could indicate that entity detection is dynamic – based on some combination of on-page/link/social/user signals.

VIII. The Secret Sauce is Ketchup

Ok, maybe “secrets” was a bit of an exaggeration. The question of what actually triggers a 7-result SERP is definitely complicated, especially as Google expands into Knowledge Graph and advanced forms of entity association. I’m sure the broader question on everyone’s mind is “How do I get (or stop getting) a 7-result SERP?” I’m not sure there’s any simple answer, and there’s definitely no simple on-page SEO trick. The data suggests that even a strong link profile (i.e. authority) may not be enough. Ultimately, query intent and complex associations are going to start to matter more, and your money keywords will be the ones where you can provide a strong match to intent. Pay attention not only to the 7-result SERPs in your own keyword mix, but to queries that trigger Knowledge Graph and other rich data – I expect many more changes in the coming year.

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