Posted by Alex Moss

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 SEOmoz, Inc.

In July 2012 I launched 3 Door Digital alongside my three co-founders. The launch was part of a merging process between two existing companies (Pleer, based in Manchester, UK and Matan Media based in Tel Aviv, Israel). Along with the merger came some potential operational hazards that we had to make sure we were on top of prior and post launch. Part of my responsibility was to find and apply the best project and time management process for our campaigns moving forward.

In the past few years I have used numerous task management tools and decided to put a few to the test to see which one would work for us. In the end we found that Google Docs was actually the best platform for us to use. This may seem like an uncommon choice but with the correct setup it has proved to be extremely successful.

I’m going to share how we manage to stay on top of over 30 client projects at any one time whilst making sure we don’t miss tasks or lose track of the hours we’ve spent.

Before covering all this, there was a second choice…

In the end we had a decision between two platforms – Basecamp and Google Drive (formerly Google Docs). Basecamp was great for us but there was something missing (which I’m sure will eventually be added at some point) – the ability to quickly browse tasks, task owners and time management all in one easy-to-read page. This is where Google Docs won. Don’t get me wrong – Basecamp is a fantastic choice for some companies – it just wasn’t the best solution for us.

So, there were a few reasons why we chose Google Docs and I’ll go through why, feature by feature. As well as this I’ll share a template document that you can copy as your own to tweak as you wish.

Google Docs Spreadsheets FTW

Before 3 Door Digital was born, I had two concurrent jobs: the Head of SEO at a search agency in Manchester and another running my own company with my wife and business partner. Because, at the time, there were only two of us it was quite easy to keep track of each other’s work using an Excel document within a Dropbox shared folder. Once 3 Door Digital started trading, it became obvious that this wasn’t going to be the best solution.

To start, I simply uploaded the spreadsheet template I’d been using for Pleer into Google Documents and added the additional clients from Matan Media into the new 3 Door Digital template. Simple!

“Simple” I thought – it wasn’t so simple. Although I was well aware that I was now planning out 20+ retainer clients, 10+ one-off clients as well as other internal tasks. It was time to roll out the “super template” that would make it easy to navigate these 30+ clients whilst being easy to read for all consultants, account managers and directors. Most of all, it had to be workable so that tasks were not missed out (the main personal downfall of mine for Basecamp’s GUI).

The Super Template

Marc and I took a day out to create this super template by discussing how both teams work between offices in two countries on various tasks. Each row would represent a different task, no matter how small. What we needed to do is select columns. For each task, we covered the following:

1. Client Name
2. Platform Name (because some clients have various sites and platforms, some of which may have different account managers)
3. Account Manager
4. Task Name
5. Owner (if not the account manager)
6. Deadline
7. Budgets
8. Actual Hours Undertaken
9. Completed (this uses a tick, exclamation point or cross – more on this later)
10. Notes

The “Summary Row”

Each client and platform is split by a few empty rows and a total time allowance is provided within a chosen “Summary” row. In this row we can use equations to calculate total hours spent on a platform and time left for the month. Scripts for time management are then applied in order to enable email notifications (covered later in this post).

Using other Tools to Compliment Google Docs

Even after all this, we were well aware that more information was needed dependent on the task. There is some information that you simply can’t illustrate well in a spreadsheet. Because more information is sometimes needed, or at least you need a separate area to work with for a specific task, we used other online collaborative tools and resources to help us with specific tasks – using the notes column as the point of reference.

Before Going Elsewhere, use the Comment function

This feature is easy to use. Right click a cell and you can add a comment. You can tag a user of the doc with the @ or + sign, and they will be notified by the email and directed straight to the comment itself. Once commented, a small orange label appears in the top right of the cell. Hovering over that cell shows the comments as a popup.

You will also notice a “Resolve” button at the top right of the popup. Clicking this, tags the comment thread as resolved, removes the orange marker, and hides the comments from the cell itself. If you want to access all comments within the document you can access them by clicking the Comments button at the top right of the screen (next to the Share button):

Use other Google Docs

Sometimes the commenting feature is never going to cover everything that needs to be covered. Some projects may need a separate document or spreadsheet or have more dialogue with more limited access. Let’s say for example that this whole task document is viewable to the whole company but one task only the Account Manager and one Director want to see details of this specific task. Here, we would create a new document and only give the Account Manager and Director access rights. In the task sheet you simply link to that separate document.

For Even Larger Tasks that Require a Folder Structure

Sometimes a task or project needs its own file and folder structure consisting of a lot of different types of files. Within the company we use Dropbox for collaborative filesharing. We used the share option within Dropbox to link to the specific folder or noted down the folder location for anyone to access. Here’s an example of where an image is entered within the notes column for other people to click and view:

Tasks that Require a More Visually friendly UI

One example of this could be a web build. We use Trello – a fantastic task management tool that I have been personally using for years and can’t recommend enough. I don’t want to talk about Trello in this post, however, sign up (it’s free), and get to know it well – and be comforted in the knowledge that they have an iPhone, Android and Windows 8 app and are currently developing their iPad app.

Paddy Moogan of Distilled wrote a great post about using Trello to Manage Projects for SEO – go and check it out.

Conditional Formatting FTW

I’ve never been at a level with spreadsheet production that I would call myself advanced, but when I learn something new in it I realise how versatile it is and how it can display information. One thing I’m a fan of is colour coding as I like to see the status of multiple tasks without always reading each row in any detail. To achieve this, I used conditional formatting in two columns:

Completed

For completed tasks I knew that there were only three options that we would need to choose:

1. Incomplete
2. Hurdle
3. Complete

The “Hurdle” option is when something outside our control is stopping us from completing the task. When this happens, we add notes into the notes column where we can make efforts to complete the task as soon as we can. Using conditional formatting I have made the three different statuses with three different backgrounds for us to easily identify. As well as this, we used the Data Validation option to ensure that only these three option can be selected by a dropdown. This is set by right clicking the column/cells and selecting Data Validation. We used the following configuration for status:

This then allowed us to select an option rather than type the words manually. This is done when you select the cell and you will notice a dropdown option that opens a popup for you to make the relevant selection:

Originally in Microsoft Excel, I used a different system whereby each task is set to 0 by default for incomplete, 1 for hurdle and 2 for completed. In Microsoft Excel (version 2010 or newer) you can use conditional formatting using the tick/exclamation/cross Icon Set, which is what I use when not using Google Docs (if you work for Google and you’re reading this please forward that as a feature request ). This is the specific conditional formatting we used for the Status Column:

Deadline

This column used more sophisticated conditional formatting. We wanted to have different colour coding dependent on how many weeks or days there were to the task’s deadline. These were as follows:

• If more than a week away, we’re good
• If within the next week, turn orange
• If within the next 2 days, turn red
• If in the next 24 hours, turn even deeper red
• If deadline has passed, turn black

This conditional formatting is somewhat limited in Google Docs when it comes to timescales (another feature request :P) so we used the conditions above, the setup of which looks like this:

Keeping the Document Tidy

After a while you may find that the document becomes crowded. To eliminate this, you could hide rows where the tasks are confirmed as completed. Hiding a row (different than deleting a row) means that all data is still stored for future reference; as well as it keeping other formula data such as time management.

We choose not to hide rows, as we personally like to see all tasks regardless of its completion. Instead, we split our tasks into worksheets separated by month. At the end of each month, we copy the existing month’s worksheet as a new worksheet and delete all completed rows. This then leaves us with only incomplete tasks, which are then added to as the month progresses. If we want to refer to a previous month, we simply refer to the relevant month’s worksheet. This way we can easily see every task over the course of the whole year.

Getting More Technical with Time Management Scripts

One thing I found that Basecamp lacked apart from its UI was the lack of time management connectivity. Relevant Managers want to be notified via email if a client is running out of management time for that month. Within the email we can include information from anywhere else in the spreadsheet. In our example, we have used the Client Name and the amount of hours left.

If this method isn’t your cup of tea, other online tools such as Toggl and Harvest will help you with time management.

Managing Account Hours

To begin, let’s use a sample client. This client has three platforms and has a number of tasks within each platform. Each platform therefore has its own set time allowance for the month. We now have the following time data:

• Total allowance for the month
• Total estimated time for each incomplete task (if you want to be that detailed)
• Actual Hours Undertaken

We use this data to perform the following equation to find how many hours left there are for a platform:

Time left=SUM(Allowance-(SUM of all actual hours undertaken))

Here’s one example:

Column I, the number of hours left, is updated as the document is edited and is the number we need in order to see how many hours are left for the month. What we needed was a way to be emailed once this approached a low number.

Creating Scripts

David Sottimano of Distilled shared a script with me that emailed a chosen recipient if the number of a specific cell reached a specific number. From here, I took that script and integrated it into our Task Document.

The script runs every time the document is edited (or opened, depending on how you configure it) and is triggered if the “Time Left” figure for the platform reaches 2 or less than 2 (i.e. 2 hours). Once triggered, the script collects the Platform name and emails the person responsible for receiving the alerts with an email that the platform has run out of account hours. To install the script you will need to configure

• The column that contains the Platform name
• The column that contains the “Time Left” formula
• An integer that triggers the alert (we chose 2)
• The email(s) to send the alert to
• The column to set the notification integer (otherwise you’ll get a LOT of emails :P)

To include the script, you can use the script manager tool and set the trigger in there:

And here is the script itself (highlighting the five variables you can configure above):

function notifyManagement() {
// Update & Edit values below ###############

var testing = false; // false = Live emails … true = Browser popup…

// The Column for the task name
var taskColumn = “B“;

// The Column for Time Remaining
var timeLeftColumn = “I“;

// Number of Hours (less than X) that you want to be notified
var HourTrigger = “3“;

// Column for notifications
var managementNotifiedColumn = “O“;

// Emails addresses in array format [”,”,”]
var managementEmails = [“joe@bloggs.com“,”someone@else.com“];

// Stop Editing values here ##################

var sheet = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSheet();
var lastRow = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSheet().getMaxRows();
var row = 0;

 // loop through the timeleft column
for(row=1; row < lastRow; row++){
   var cell = timeLeftColumn + row;
   var managementCell = managementNotifiedColumn + row;
   var taskCell = taskColumn + row;

   // let us get all the values ready for checking
   var timeLeft = sheet.getRange(cell).getValue();
   var notified = sheet.getRange(managementCell).getValue();
   var taskName = sheet.getRange(taskCell).getValue();

       //check to see if we should send an email
   if ((timeLeft < HourTrigger) && (!notified) && (isInt(timeLeft))) {  
     // Set the notified cell
     sheet.getRange(managementCell).setValue(“1”);
     // email management
     for (var i = 0; i < managementEmails.length; i++) {
       if (testing) { Browser.msgBox(“Email to ” + managementEmails[i] + “\n” + taskName + ” time managementccccss warning!”); }
       else {
          MailApp.sendEmail(managementEmails[i], taskName + ” time managementccccss warning!”, taskName + ” has ” + timeLeft + ” hours remaining”);
       } // end testing check
     } // end of send emails loop
   } // end of checking if we should notify
} // end of for loop of all rows
} // end of mailMe function

function isInt(n) {
  return typeof n === ‘number’ && n % 1 == 0;

}

Internally, we also created a similar function to email us when budgets were too low using the same template as above and changing the variables at the beginning to focus elsewhere in the document.

Triggering the Script

Once you’ve created your script you can set triggers for each one. To do this, select the “Current script’s triggers…” within the script editor:

Here, we have decided to trigger the scripts on edit so we have live notifications sent to us and not just when the next person opens the document:

Too Much for You? No Problem!

This post either may be too technical for you, or will take you too long to implement. That’s fine – I’m a nice guy. I’m a guy who’d be kind enough to share a canvas template for you with the script installed, conditional formatting set up, scripts running (with a fake email) and even included some sample data 🙂

Known Bugs

Sometimes we have found when adding rows or editing the doc with new information, some of the rows or columns begin to look messed up. A simple refresh of the document usually fixes this and your updates should be all good!

An Added Note

This is an awesome document and works for us better than anything else we’ve used, but this may not be for you or your agency. We all have our own preferences, although I am pretty sure at some point we may need to invest in our custom management toolset.

This doc isn’t the only thing I use to manage my own time – I also have my own personal Trello board and can’t live without the traditional email inbox to keep me from going insane.

I’d love to know what other tools and resources you use for your own project management…

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Posted by bridget.randolph

Kristina Kledzik recently wrote a post here on the SEOmoz blog about responsive design and why it’s often the best option when creating a mobile-friendly online experience. She discussed its advantages in dealing with usability issues, duplicate content, mobile search rankings, and link building. Google recommends using a responsive website design where this makes sense from a user perspective, and Bing encourages a “one URL per content item” approach.

Kristina makes a compelling case for responsive design. However, responsive sites can be tricky to develop, especially if the original desktop version has lots of content and/or navigation options. If you have a business or a client whose site has hundreds of thousands, or even millions of pages, it may be difficult to redesign the entire site with a responsive design. A separate mobile site, however, can start with fewer pages, and you can add more as you have time. For some businesses, responsive design is simply not the best option because their mobile visitors’ needs are so different from desktop users, and thus require drastically different content. So we can’t always rely on the advice that responsive design is the preferred solution.

Aleyda Solis recently created this flowchart to illustrate the decision-making process for choosing a mobile-friendly option. Below, I’ve highlighted the “separate URL versions” option, which Aleyda recommends for when ‘you cannot implement’ a single URL/responsive design.

If your site (or your client’s) falls in this “separate URL versions” category, you’re in good company. Among the UK’s top 20 retailers, only 14 have mobile-friendly sites, and 13 of them have separate mobile sites. The pattern is similar in the US, with MongooseMetrics reporting that 73% of websites ranked in the Quantcast Top 100,000 sites used URL redirects to a mobile specific URL.

Here are a few examples of major retailers’ different approaches to mobile:

Apple doesn’t have any type of mobile site; Ebay uses a separate URL mobile site; Currys uses a responsive design.

The good news is that mobile sites, when done correctly, are certainly able to handle these same issues of usability, duplicate content, mobile search ranking, and link building.

So, how do you optimize a mobile site to work as well as implementing a responsive design? You must ask yourself a few questions before reaching your final goal.

Information Architecture

When you’re just starting out, the first thing you need to think about is information architecture. One benefit of a mobile site (over a purely responsive design) is that you can provide the user with a drastically different experience from the desktop version. First, you need to ask some questions:

1. Does your mobile site reflect mobile users’ intent?

When structuring a mobile site, one of the first things to ask is whether mobile visitors are interacting with your site differently than desktop users. If so, your mobile site design needs to reflect this.

If you’re not sure how your users are interacting with your site, have a look at your analytics and segment out the mobile traffic. Google Analytics already has “advanced segments” for mobile and tablet traffic. The mobile segment includes traffic from tablets, though, so you may need to create a custom segment in order to view only non-tablet mobile traffic.

This can be slightly tricky, as you’ll need to use a regular expression (‘RegEx&rsquo . The setup I’m using is:

• Name: ‘Mobile – no tablets
• Include: ‘Mobile (Including Tablet)’ containing ‘Yes’ AND
• Exclude: ‘Screen Resolution’ Matching RegExp (1\d|[7-9])\d\d+x.*

What this regular expression means is that this custom segment should include traffic from mobile devices but exclude traffic from devices with a screen resolution of 700+ by anything. You may decide to tweak the RegEx depending on how large (or small) a device you want to include. (Some of the larger smartphones also fall in this range, but then again, maybe these should be seeing the desktop version, as well.)

Once you have the data, focus on landing pages (are people entering your site in the right place?), conversion rate, and where people leave the conversion funnel (where are they getting stuck?); bounce rate (are people not finding what they’re looking for?); and, if possible, site search and organic search keywords (what are people looking for to begin with?). If you have analytics set up for your mobile site, you should use that data in order to see which mobile site pages are performing above or below average. For a detailed overview of what to look for, see Section 3.1: Your Mobile Users in this great article by Aleyda Solis.

2. Have you designed for the user?

Once you understand your users’ goals, you should design your site to reflect the most common reasons for visiting the site on a mobile device. An obvious example of this is using a mobile phone to find a store location near you. This feature might be less prominent on the desktop site, but for a mobile user, it should be very easy to find on the homepage.

You can also take advantage of mobile-specific features to improve the user experience. Using the same example, you could offer the option of store lookup by postcode, but also by geolocation (“use current location”). When the “nearest store” results come up, include a phone number that is click-to-call.

(Screenshots from m.primelocation.com)

3. What about tablet users?

The current recommendation from Google is to serve tablets the desktop site, rather than the mobile site. This is because user browsing patterns and screen size on a regular-sized tablet like the iPad more closely resemble desktop browsing than smartphone browsing. Also, a site that looks great on a small smartphone browser will appear too big and annoyingly grainy on the much larger tablet screen. Be sure to test the touch screen capabilities of your desktop site.

An exception to the current guideline would be if you want to provide a tablet-specific online experience, in which case you might decide to use a third subdomain (t.domain.com). As tablet sizes become more varied, this guidance may change.

Let’s check out some examples of tablet-specific domains:

Example one: Colbert Nation is the official site for Comedy Central show, The Colbert Report.

Example two: Mail Tribune is a news publisher.

It’s important to make sure your mobile visitors are being served the correct version of your website. My best advice is to use redirects based on user agent. If you’re not redirecting based on user agent, you should set up redirects based on user agent detection, so that when someone visits the desktop site on a mobile, they are redirected to the mobile version. If possible, use server-side redirects (301s or 302s) rather than Javascript redirects; JS causes a lag in the load time (because the page has to load and then parse the JS), and a page with a Javascript redirect is less likely to be cached. Also, make sure that if someone on a desktop PC clicks a mobile link, they will be redirected to the desktop version.

A few quick tips for handling redirects to mobile site:

• Google’s most recent guidance states that either a 301 or 302 may be used.
• When using user agent detection, be careful of cloaking.
• Don’t redirect all desktop pages to the mobile homepage; instead, use a mobile page which is relevant to the original. If you don’t have a relevant mobile page, consider creating a page which explains this and offers the option to view the desktop version of the desired page and/or alternate pages on the mobile site.
• Be sure to include a link to “view desktop version” on your mobile site (and vice versa). Use cookies to ensure that if a user clicks on this option the user agent detection will be overridden and they will not be redirected again (unless they choose to switch back via the “view mobile version” option).
• Try to use ‘mirrored’ URL structures (so that www.domain.com/hello redirects to m.domain.com/hello, not m.domain.com/xi3l3kxd. This may not be possible, however, if there’s not a one-to-one relationship between desktop and mobile pages.
• For more information on mobile site redirects, see Cindy Krum’s article on ‘generating mobile redirects properly.
• To avoid the appearance of duplicate content, you should use a special mobile rel=’canonical’ tag. This will be covered in more detail later.

Google Analytics

Once you’re happy with the structure of your site, you need to be able to track its usage. Jeff Tirey at Mongoose Metrics recently wrote about their fantastic study which found that on 37% of websites that are a) using Google Analytics, and b) also have separate mobile versions of their site, the mobile version is not being tracked! This is craziness. And it’s simple to fix.

1. Is your tracking code implemented properly?

If you simply haven’t added the tracking code to your mobile site, go do it now. If you aren’t sure whether to use the special non-Javascript version, keep in mind that you should be able to ignore the special “tracking a mobile site” option. Instead, you should use the same Javascript code that you use on your desktop site.

The (rare) exception to this would be if you have a disproportionately high amount of traffic from feature phone (non-smartphone) users that you need to track. Feature phones don’t support Javascript, so the normal tracking code can’t track these visits. However, this is an unlikely situation, as most websites don’t see much traffic from these types of phones. If you are worried about it, you can check the site’s server logs for visits from feature phone user agents.

2. Is your mobile site data being tracked through your primary domain?

You should track your mobile site on the same web property (i.e., using the same UA-XXXXX-Y account number) as your desktop site. This requires a simple tweak in the code on both versions in order to indicate to GA that your m.domain.com site is a subdomain of your main site. You should also set up a special profile exclusively for traffic to m.domain.com. To learn more, check out these tips from Google:

• How to set up crossdomain tracking
• How to set up a new profile

Technical SEO

1. Do you have a mobile XML sitemap?

Even if you have a mobile HTML sitemap, it is best practice to create an XML sitemap for your mobile site, and submit it to Google and Bing. To learn more about how to create a mobile sitemap, check out this these instructions from the Google Webmaster Tools blog.

2. How will Google know it’s a mobile site and not duplicate content?

To make sure Google know’s your mobile site is a separate entity from your main site, it’s best to implement the special mobile rel=canonical tag. In order to indicate to Google that your mobile site isn’t just duplicate content, you can use a special version of the rel=canonical tag. On the desktop page, add the rel=alternate tag:

< <link rel=”alternate” media=”only screen and (max-width: 640px)” href=”http://m.example.com/page-1″ >

This tag will point to the mobile version.

On the mobile page, add the rel=canonical tag:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/page-1″ >

This tag will point to the desktop version. Simple as that!

3. Make sure you’re not blocking the ‘Smartphone-Googlebot’ from your desktop version in robots.txt, and don’t block regular Googlebot from the mobile version.

Bing is a bit more ambiguous in their advice (from March 2012):

“Occasionally, it may make sense to keep some URLs targeted at specific clients (e.g. mobile devices), which you can opt to block from us via the usual methods (robots.txt, webmaster tools) or not.” (The emphasis is mine.)

Since the guidance is unclear, I would recommend the less drastic approach. My advice is to allow Bing to crawl your mobile and desktop sites. You can opt to follow my recommendation…or not.

On-page Optimization

1. Are your meta tags mobile-friendly?

Since mobile screens are smaller, there are fewer characters displayed in the SERPs. To adapt to the smaller screen size, it’s important that your meta tags be formatted in a mobile-friendly style.  

For the best results, your title tags should be kept within 40-60 characters. Similarly, meta descriptions should be kept within 90 characters.

2. Are you targeting mobile-friendly keywords?

It’s becoming increasingly important to do your keyword research specifically for mobile traffic. Mobile visitors will likely be looking for different results than desktop visitors, so you must lay the groundwork properly.

Optimizing the content on your mobile site for mobile keywords is also a great way to rank highly in the mobile SERPs (this may or may not be necessary, depending on whether they’re different from your desktop site).

3. Is your site load time too slow?

The goal for your site load time should be around 2-3 seconds. After waiting five seconds for a page to load, 74% of mobile users bounce.

You can check your page load time in Google Analytics. Use your mobile site profile (often the desktop load time is vastly different, which will mess up the averages). If you don’t yet have the data in a separate mobile site profile, you can also check this using your custom segment for non-tablet mobile devices.

Another way to increase you site load speed is to compress large images. Be sure to check other on-page elements, such as Javascript and videos, with a mobile emulator like Google’s Gomometer. Remember that certain formats, such as Flash, aren’t displayed on most mobile phones, so be conginzant of what works and what doesnt.  Also, remember to be careful with Javascript  in order to use the correct approach for your design.

Extras 

I’ve thrown in a few extra pieces of advice for those of you who made it this far. Keep on reading!

1. Are you missing out on easy eCommerce wins (if applicable)?

To keep your conversion rate optimization on track, here are a few points to consider:

• Ensure the checkout/shopping baskets on your site sync across all platforms.
• Implement larger on-site buttons so that visitors don’t have trouble clicking the correct one on their device.
• Feature a “find-a-store” option.
• Use click-to-call for any phone numbers listed on your site.
• Ensure an easy, ideally 1-click checkout for customers to complete their orders.

2. Where appropriate, are you using structured data markup?

Where it makes sense, use appropriate markup on your desktop and mobile sites. This should allow rich snippets to appear in mobile SERPs.

3. Is your mobile site optimised for local search?

Approximately 40% of mobile search is local. There are two big ways to take advantage of this fact:

• Make use of geo-positioning features, such as the HTML5 Geolocation API.
• Optimize your mobile strategy for Local Search. This also ties in with using structured data (as above).

4. Is your video content optimised for mobile viewing?

Video is one of the most common things people do on their mobile devices. To make the process as easy as possible, consider the following:

• Don’t use Flash for embedded video content; use HTML5.
• Check out these tips on optimizing video for mobile.

Well there you have it, folks! Hopefully this list will come in handy for those who want to optimize a mobile site.

Did you find this information helpful? What kinds of experiences have you had in this area? What other tips and tools would you add to this list? Leave your thoughts in the comments below!

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Posted by matt @ highonseo

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 SEOmoz, Inc.

(This post is aimed at business owners and new Moz users studying search engine optimization, not full-time, experienced SEOs. This is an in-depth answer to a frequently asked question in the Q&A forums. If you are a full-time SEO, this is one post you can easily skip.)

Regular readers of the SEOMoz Q&A forum will likely notice that the “general” SEO questions come up again and again as new users struggle with the same questions we have all asked at some point.

• “What am I doing wrong on this page?”
• “How can I improve my SEO?”
• “What/where can I do link building?”
• “Subdomains or Subfolders?”

And the one we will address here:

“Why is example.com outranking me for X and Y keyword, even though…?”

This question has been posted in various forms many times in various forms lately on Q&A. Here are a few:

• http://www.seomoz.org/q/competitor-out-ranks-my-site
• http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-does-this-site-rank-higher-than-a-seemingly-better-one
• http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-can-this-website-be-ranking-so-well
• http://www.seomoz.org/q/why-would-a-site-with-virtually-no-external-links-and-low-authority-rank-very-high
• http://www.seomoz.org/q/why-is-this-site-ranking-better-than-me

Non-SEOs, mostly small business owners, come to SEOMoz to learn a bit about SEO and hopefully improve their site. You learn about Domain Authority and Page Authority and work hard to improve your MozTrust and MozRank. Those metrics are readily apparent and easy to track with the SEOMoz trial.

So you sign up for the trial, run your brand new SERP overlay tool and see this:

The Keyword Difficulty score for “credit card debt” here in Australia is 53, which is rated “highly competitive.” Is debtrescue’s very high ranking an aberration? Maybe this keyword is an anomaly and other sites do not “make sense” based on metrics, either. But that is not the case. In fact, this ranking (debtrescue is 2^nd on my search, 4^th by the Keyword Tool’s search) has the lowest Domain Authority by over 15 points and the 2^nd lowest Page Authority by 22 points.

This is not really close – by the stats, debtrescue.com.au has no business ranking on page 1. Just for information, the 9^th site (95 DA, 1 PA) is a .gov site so we know why this particular “PA 1” ranks this well.

So you own a business and you are new to SEO. You have looked at the SERP overlay and it makes no sense. You look at the DA/PA chart on keyword difficulty and it is fairly clear that this site does not rank based on metrics. Let’s pull just one more set of data to make the point.

Our target site has nearly the lowest mozrank, by far the fewest links of the non-.govs, the lowest subdomain mozrank by a lot, the lowest Page authority by a wide margin and the lowest domain authority by a mile. The page 2 results for the same search shows a trusted bank site – NAB.com.au – they have a DA of 82, PA of 44. They have 300,000 links.

So our question is clear now – how can a site like debtrescue outrank anything else on page one or NAB on page 2? The metrics all say these other sites should be winning handily.

So what is the magic answer?

That elusive magic answer …

I could give you twenty, maybe fifty possible answers. Unfortunately, I could give you twenty and the right one for your situation may be #21. So let’s ask the question again and then reword it so you can see the problem clearly.

“Why is example.com outranking me for X and Y keyword even though _________?”

The real question is this:

“Aren’t these Moz metrics what count?”

That leads us much closer to the answer: these metrics count, but they don’t come close to telling the whole story.

According to the 2011 Search Engine Ranking Factors on SEOMoz, many SEOs think Page Level and Domain Level Link Metrics account for roughly 43% of the algorithm. Over half of your total ranking is determined by factors other than Page and Domain link metrics.

Are you starting to see the bigger picture? How sites rank on Google depends on many factors other than the few you are introduced to when you start learning about SEO. Pagerank, number of inbound links, and the main Moz stats tell a story about your site. Unfortunately, it is like a two-part season finale of your favorite show. You didn’t know there was another part next week and now this?

So what is the rest of the story? What else matters?

If you ask 100 SEOs for the top 50 ranking factors, you will get back 100 completely unique lists. The fact is, we don’t know the whole story. Google can’t come out and tell us the whole algorithm because people would take advantage of that information to rank poor quality sites simply by manipulating the ranking factors and focusing on nothing else.

Here is what we know: Google tracks certain data. You should believe that Google tracks data it finds relevant and reliable. So what can you find in Analytics and with a bit of testing?

Visit duration matters. This metric tells Google that someone found your page and enjoyed it enough to stay on site longer than when they went to your competitor’s site. Duration is a sign of the page’s overall quality and usefulness.

Pages per visit matter. If a user searches for “credit card debt” and visits just one page on the #1 site then seconds later bounces back and goes to #2 where they spend 15 minutes and visit 3 pages, any guess which site Google thinks matters more to that search query?

On page factors matter. The days of putting your keyword keyword keyword on the page three keyword times are keyword thankfully over. This will rarely help you and can actually penalize your site. However, having accurate and descriptive titles that match the content of the page and the user intent of a search? That does matter!

Algorithmic and manual penalties matter. If you put that keyword fifty times on your page, as we discussed above, you will run into an algorithmic penalty. This means Google knows you have “stuffed” the page and will take a bit off your ranking. Do it repeatedly and you’ll get a much larger penalty. If a Google manual reviewer catches you doing this, or a competitor reports you for it, you may get a manual penalty. You will get a notification in your Webmasters Tools about this one and you do need to fix it or suffer a harsh penalty.

Social Share Metrics Matter. Some SEOs believe social metrics matter very little. We have tested these ourselves and found that social metrics matter “some.” If you get three retweets on your link, no, it won’t help you very much. You won’t notice a bump. Get 200 retweets on that same link, have it shared 50 times on Facebook and now it is pinned 8 times? Yes, that will affect your ranking.

Anchor text matters. Don’t misunderstand what I am saying here. Anchor text can be positive *and* negative. If you over-optimize a handful of keywords, it will be a negative effect. If you balance these, include branded anchor text across a variety of link types, it will have a positive effect.

301 redirects matter. Your competitor with the poor metrics may actually have fantastic metrics – on another site. They may have changed domains and redirected all that great SEO juice over to the new site, which looks like it has no value but is absorbing a lot of the value from the previous domain.

We could keep playing this game for a while but we won’t. You should understand that the metrics you start with are a small part (less than half) of the overall picture. We also know of certain “exceptions” to all these rules, such as the ranking bonus new sites get when they first appear on the SERPs. You can’t control how Google sees other people’s sites so try to stay focused on what you control.

For even more information, be sure you go back to Eppie Vojt’s phenomenal “How Garbage Ranks in the SERPs: A Case Study”

Eppie posited that manual penalties may occur because “Google just can’t allow low quality sites to outrank billion dollar brands for high visibility terms” and I tend to agree with him. Sites that do not “deserve” their ranking often fall off quickly or get manual penalties. Ask yourself if this site was there a month ago – and then check whether it still ranks in another month.

When you are done with Eppie’s excellent article and you want to learn even more about how truly bad sites rank, continue your education with Wil Reynolds’ “How Google Makes Liars Out of the Good Guys in SEO”

I hope this explanation helps some of you who are just learning and starting your SEO journey. I also hope the more experienced SEOs jump in and give a few of their ideas on ranking factors, why some sites rank well despite their average or even poor Moz metrics.

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