seo

Posted by Everett

Quality and relevance are different things, yet we often discuss them as if they were the same. SEOs have been optimizing for relevance all this time, but are now being asked to optimize for quality. This post will discuss what that means and how to do it, with a focus on what I believe to be the single most effective and scaleable tactic for improving your site’s overall level of quality in most situations.

You need BOTH quality AND relevance to compete these days.

First, let’s establish what we’re talking about here, which is quality. You can have relevancy (the right topic and keywords) without quality, as shown here:

This MFA site is highly relevant for the phrase “Chairs for Baby.” But it also sucks.

“…babies are sensitive, delicate individuals who need cautious. So choosing a right Chairs For Baby is your gentle care.” WTF?

It doesn’t matter how relevant the page is. The only way to get that page to rank these days would be to buy a lot of links, but then you’re dealing with the added risk. After a certain point, it’s just EASIER to build a better site. Yes, Google has won that battle in all but the most hyper-competitive niches, where seasoned experts still find the reward:risk ratio in their favor.

OK, now that we’ve established that quality and relevance are different things, but that you need both to rank, how do you optimize for quality?

Quality Indicators	Tactics (How to Optimize for Quality)
Grammar, spelling, depth	Hire a copy editor. Learn to write better.
Expertise, Authority, Trust (EAT)	Make content deep and useful. Call out your awards, certifications, news coverage, and use trust symbols. Make it easy to contact you, and easy to find policies like terms of service, returns, and privacy.
PageRank (PR) from links	Build high-quality links. There are thousands of great articles out there about it.
Reviews	Ask your best clients/customers.
Short-clicks	Improve Out-of-Stock pages with in-stock alerts and related products. Be less aggressive with your pop-up strategy. Also see query refinements, pages per visit, and dwell time.
Query refinements	Only attract the “right” audience and deliver what you promised in the search results. Choose keywords by relevance, not just volume. Think about query intent.
Dwell time on site	Make your pages stickier by improving the overall design. Add images and video. Run GA reports on the stickiest traffic sources and develop a strategy to increase traffic from those sources.
Pages per visit	Improve internal linking, suggest related content, customize 404 pages. Split up long posts into a series.
Conversion rates	Do A/B testing, make your messaging very clear, follow CRO best practices.
Ad placements	No ads above the main content on the page and do not have an annoying amount of ad blocks or pop-ups.
CTR from SERPs	Craft better title tags, URLs, and descriptions. Grab attention. Gain trust. Make them want to click. Add schema markup when appropriate.
Page speed	Visit https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/.
Mobile experience	Responsive and/or adaptive design, less text, easy navigation, loads lighting fast, shorter forms.

There are many ways to improve the quality of your site. Some are obvious. Others are more abstract. All of these quality indicators together make up your site’s overall level of quality. For more, check out the keyword agnostic ranking factors and the engagement metrics from SimilarWeb areas in the Moz Search Engine Ranking Factors report.

We’ve already established that Google knows the relative quality of a page. Let’s assume — because it is very likely — that Google also knows the relative quality of your entire site. And let’s call that your sitewide QualityRank (QR) (h/t Ian Lurie, 2011).

What’s the most effective, scalable, proven tactic for improving a website’s QR?

In a word: Pruning.

Learn more about it here. Pruning requires doing a content audit first, which you can learn more about here. It’s nothing groundbreaking or new, but few clients come in the door that can’t substantially benefit from this process.

Sometimes pruning is as easy as applying a robots.txt noindex tag to all pages that have had zero organic search traffic over the course of a year. You may be surprised how many enterprise-level sites have huge chunks of the site that fit that criteria. Other times it requires more analysis and tougher decisions. It really all depends on the site.

So let’s look at some pruning case studies.

Three things to remember:

1. Significant portions of the sites were removed from Google’s index.

2. Pruning was not the only thing that was done. Rarely do these things happen in a vacuum, but evidence points to pruning as a major contributor to the growth examples you’re about to see.

3. You can read more about Inflow’s research in our case studies section.

1800doorbell had technical issues that made it possible to identify cruft and prune big chunks of the site quickly. This contributed to a 96% increase in revenue from organic search within six months.

The dip at the end has to do with how the timeline was generated in GA. Growth was sustained.

We’re not the only ones finding success with this. Go check out the Ahrefs case study for another example. Here’s a compelling image from their case study:

Ahrefs saw amazing results after performing a content audit and pruning their blog.

If you weren’t already convinced, I hope by now it’s clear that performing a content audit to determine which pages should be improved and which should be pruned from Google’s index is an effective and scalable SEO tactic. That being established, let’s talk about why this might be.

We don’t know exactly how Google’s ranking algorithms work. But it seems likely that there is a score for a site’s overall level of quality.

Does QualityRank actually exist as a calculation in Google’s organic algorithm? Probably not under that name and not in this simplistic form. But it DOES seem likely that something similar would exist, especially since it exists for PPC. The problem I have with the PPC equivalent is that it includes relevance factors like keyword use in their metric for “quality.”

Google needs a way to measure the overall quality level of each site in order to rank them properly. It’s just probably much more mathematically complicated than what we’re talking about here.

The point of discussing QualityRank as a framework for pruning is to help explain why pruning works. And to do that, we don’t need to understand the complex formulas behind Google’s ranking algorithms. I doubt half of the engineers there know what’s going on these days, anyway.

Let’s imagine a site divided into thirds, with each third being assigned a QualityRank (QR) score based on the average QR of the pages within that section.

The triangle below represents all indexable content on a domain with a QR of 30. That sitewide QR score of 30 comes from adding all three of these sections together and dividing by three. In the real world, this would not be so simple.

I hope the mathematicians out there will grant me some leeway for the sake of illustrating the concept.

This is the same site after removing the bottom 50 percent from the index:

Notice the instant lift from QR 30 to QR 40 just by removing all LOW QR pages. That is why I say pruning is the most effective way to raise your site’s overall quality level for better rankings, IF you have a lot of low-quality pages indexed, which most sites do.

Time to switch analogies

Pruning works because it frees up the rest of your content from being weighed down by the cruft.

“Cruft” includes everything from a 6-year-old blog post about the company holiday party to 20 different variants with their own landing pages for every product. It also includes pages that are inadvertently indexed for technical reasons, like faceted navigation URLs.

Remove the bottom half of this iceberg and the rest of it will “rise up,” making more of it visible above the surface (i.e. on the first 2–3 pages of Google).

The idea of one page being weighed down by another has been around at least since the first Panda release. I’m not writing about anything new here, as evidenced by the many resources below. But I’m constantly surprised by the amount of dead weight most websites continue to carry around, and hope that this post motivates folks to finally get rid of some of it. Your choices are many: 404, 301, rel =”canonical”, noindex, disallow… Some of the resources below will help you decide which solutions to use for your unique situation.

Pruning for SEO resources:

• How To Do a Content Audit
• Pruning eCommerce Sites
• What, Why, & How of Pruning for SEO Mozinar
• Long Click and the Quality of Search Success
• Dwell Time: The Most Important Metric You’re Not Measuring
• Site Quality: Google’s Major Ranking Signal Explained
• eCommerce Content Audit Toolkit
• Clean Your Site’s Cruft Before it Causes Ranking Problems Whiteboard Friday
• Google Search Quality Rater Guidelines PDF
• Cut the Cruft – My Presentation at MozTalk Denver, 2016

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Posted by larry.kim

One of the biggest areas of speculation, contention, and confusion within the SEO universe over the past six years or so has been whether (or how much) social media signals impact organic search rankings.

But even if Google isn’t directly using social share counts in their search algorithms, there ought to be some other explanation out there about why high share counts correlate with high organic search rankings.

Well, that is exactly what we’re going to research in this post.

Are social shares a ranking signal?

People have noticed the connection between social shares and ranking going back to 2010. But correlating rankings and social signals has been a bit of a cat-and-mouse game.

If you’ve done any SEO at all, you’ve probably noticed that the stories that rank well tend to have high social share counts.

These are your unicorns – the extremely popular magical pieces of content that drive a ridiculous amount of traffic to your site. These types of elite “unicorn” content drive 10-1000x better results than all your other content (the donkeys).

Why do top-performing posts often also have a high number of shares? What exactly is causing these observable correlations?

Some SEOs believed that Google was somehow factoring social share counts into the algorithm like links (though not with nearly the same amount of weight).

Social shares figured into Moz’s Search Engine Ranking Factors 2015, albeit as a low factor:

“Always controversial, the number of social shares a page accumulates tends to show a positive correlation with rankings. Although there is strong reason to believe Google doesn’t use social share counts directly in its algorithm, there are many secondary SEO benefits to be gained through successful social sharing.”

Indeed, there is a strong reason to believe Google doesn’t use share counts as a direct ranking factor. Google has said so.

Repeatedly and emphatically.

Google doesn’t use Facebook, Twitter, or any other social share counts as a direct ranking factor.

It’s not shares, it’s engagement

We need a new approach to answer these important questions. Maybe we’re looking at the wrong social metrics. Maybe we should be looking at social engagement rates rather than just the total number of social shares.

What percentage of total unique people who saw your update clicked on it and/or shared it?

Perhaps the relationship is that the social posts that get very high engagement rates (which leads to high numbers of shares) come from the same content that get above-average click-through rates in organic search results pages, which we know tends to result in better organic rankings.

But how can we test this theory?

A crazy new correlation study: Social engagement, organic search CTR, & rankings

So here’s my crazy idea: to compare social engagement rates with normalized organic click-through rates for 1,000 pages.

Previous studies have only looked at external-facing number of shares. But bots and other factors can easily taint share counts. Plus, studies have shown that many social media users share content without actually reading it.

How did I do this? I:

• Downloaded post engagement data from Facebook Insights (sharing and engagement data).
• Downloaded query data from Google Search Console (CTR and ranking data).
• Matched up the data. This was somewhat difficult because neither Facebook nor Google provided me with the destination URLs, so some custom programming was required.

Important note: You have to normalize your CTR for search based on position. Obviously higher average positions have higher CTRs than lower positions, so I’ve used my Donkey detection algorithm to compute the expected CTR by position to help determine whether the CTR is above or below expectations.

The results: Organic search CTR vs. Facebook post engagement

Here’s what I’d consider a pretty strong link between higher social post engagement and higher organic CTR (and vice-versa):

Here, a 100% Relative Search CTR corresponds to a keyword/page achieving the expected CTR for organic search for a given ranking; 200% percent is double the expected search CTR; 50% is half the expected CTR, and so on.

What I found was that Facebook posts with extraordinarily high engagement rates – anywhere from 6 to 13 percent – also tended to have above expected organic search CTR.

Why? My theory: The same emotions that make people share things also make people click on those things in the SERPs. This is particularly true for headlines with unusually high CTRs.

The correlations were much stronger with unicorn content. The R-squared values were well above 0.5 – the model is stronger the more of an outlier you’re pushing. Unicorns with high social engagement rates almost always had high organic CTR, and vice versa.

The correlations were substantially weaker with donkey content. The R-squared values were pretty noisy, around .1 to .4. Donkeys sometimes had high engagement rates, sometimes low engagement rates. The same was true with CTR, some high, some low.

So this research illustrates how high social engagement rates correlate with high CTR, and vice versa.

Really, the argument isn’t whether social sharing causes organic search rankings or organic rankings cause social sharing.

It’s about how engaging your content is.

Actual examples

Theory is great. But let’s see if the theory matches by looking at some top-performing content.

Here are just three examples of posts from my company that have top organic rankings on Google and above-expected organic CTR. What was the engagement rate on Facebook?

This post has brought in nearly 500,000 visits from organic search. It had a 7.4 engagement rate on Facebook.

OK. Once is just a fluke.

This post brought in more than 250,000 visits from organic search. It got an 8.5 engagement rate on Facebook.

Two times? Could just be a coincidence.

This piece brought in 100,000 organic visits. It had a 7.1 percent engagement rate when shared on Facebook.

Guys, now we have a trend! All of these posts that rank well had 3x or 4x higher engagement than my average Facebook post.

I could keep posting more examples like these, but it would be more of the same.

Correlation or causation?

What is causing the correlation? There is one thing that makes me certain that the relationship between social engagement and organic click through rates is a co-dependent, causal relationship.

Machine learning.

Machine learning systems actually reward high engagement with higher visibility.

Higher visibility means higher organic rankings and more social shares.

To determine success, an algorithm looks at whether users engaged. If more people engage, that’s a clear sign that their algorithm is showing this right content; if not, their systems will audition other content instead to find something that does generate that interest.

Here’s a greatly simplified look at the role machine learning systems play in the Facebook news feed and Google search results. Basically, it’s all about rewarding content that has above-expected engagement:

When a piece of content fails to beat the expected engagement, it won’t get that same visibility, whether it’s on Google, Facebook, or any other system that measures user engagement.

Whenever someone searches on Google for something, Google wants to return the best result. Out of all the potential results Google could show for any given query, Google must find what’s most useful and relevant.

One way Google checks itself is to look at organic click-through rate (but not the only way!). Did users click on the result in Position 1, or did more people click on the Position 2 or 3 result?

Even though all three of these pages may answer a user’s need, click-through rate is a huge clue about whether Google is providing the best answers in the right order for users.

Now let’s think about Facebook. Whenever a piece of content gets hot, it means lots of people are talking about it relative to the number of people who see it, in a short period of time. Are tons of people liking, commenting, and sharing a post?

When this happens, Facebook’s machine learning algorithm gives these posts or topics greater visibility. It becomes a virtuous cycle:

• Post gets lots of user engagement (shares, likes, comments).
• Facebook rewards the engagement by showing it to more users.
• Higher visibility results in the post getting lots more user engagement.
• Facebook rewards the engagement by showing it to more users.
• And so on, until the the social post is no longer new and engagement dwindles.

What to do?

Turn your best social stuff into organic content and vice-versa.

Since stuff that does well on organic social tends to also do great in paid social, it follows that your content that gets top organic rankings will make great content for paid and organic social.

Conversely, your content that gets tons of engagement on social media platforms (paid and organic) will likely rank highly organically for the topics that they cover.

These unicorns I’ve been obsessing about forever matter. Big time. Is your content a sparkly majestic unicorn or a boring old donkey?

At the heart of a unicorn is a truly remarkable, inspiring idea. Truly exciting ideas (not just ideas you think are awesome). Content with remarkably high engagement rates has high conversion rates and does incredibly well in paid and organic search and social media, because of machine learning systems that greatly reward remarkably high user engagement.

Conclusion

The old theory was that high social shares correlates with high organic rankings.

But really it’s not the number of shares that matters. It’s the engagement rate.

Remarkably high social engagement rates correlate strongly with high organic search CTR, which correlates with high rankings. Meaning, click-through rate matters a great deal. Think of it like an invisible hand that helps determine whether your content succeeds (thumbs up) or fails (thumbs down).

What’s happening here is that Facebook Ads, Facebook’s news feed algorithm, Google AdWords, and increasingly Google organic search are all systems governed by machine learning systems that reward remarkable engagement with greater visibility.

High engagement rates and machine learning systems are the common factor that explains the correlation between SEO and social metrics.

What do you think? Do your very best-performing pieces of content get tons of social shares, have a high social engagement rates, and drive a ton of traffic from organic search and convert well?

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Posted by bridget.randolph

Here at Distilled NY we’ve been running a hiring cycle, and it’s really brought front and center for me the key elements that make a digital marketing (and specifically SEO) candidate stand out from the crowd. So I wanted to share a few things I’ve learned in the process.

For the purpose of this post, I’m going to tackle this topic from two angles (with 5 points on each, in true “10 Things I’ve Learned…” style):

Part I: 5 attributes I now look for in any new analyst or consultant hire (and what you as an employer might want to think about before making someone an offer), and

Part II: 5 things to consider as a job seeker if you’re applying for a role at a company like Distilled.

I should also note that this post is based on my own personal approach and viewpoint, rather than representing any kind of official Distilled documentation.

What I look for in a new SEO hire

At Distilled, we hire for SEO consultants at two levels — analyst (entry-level) and consultant (3+ years experience). The core elements we look for are the same for each, but for consultants there’s obviously also an expected baseline of technical knowledge.

There are four key skillsets we look for when we evaluate a candidate throughout this process (based on our Distilled manifesto), in addition to their level of technical knowledge.

These are some questions that I’ve found useful to ask myself (not necessarily the candidate!) when identifying whether someone is a good fit in each of these areas. Note that no single one of these questions will necessarily make or break the outcome, but taken all together they can provide a relatively strong indicator of the level of the candidate in each area:

1. Communication skills

• How well do you express yourself?
• How professional do you seem (both on the phone and/or in person)?
• Are you engaging and enthusiastic?
• How clearly can you tell a story?
• How clearly can you explain a technical concept?
• How clearly can you explain a subject I don’t know anything about?
• Could I trust you to lead a client meeting with confidence? At the C-Suite level?

2. Getting things done

• Can you give me clear examples of being a self-motivated person?
• Do you have any side projects (I don’t really care what they are, but this indicates a self-motivated learner)?
• Can you give me examples of achieving goals or targets?
• Can you give me examples of when you took action that had an impact?

3. Raw smarts and curiosity

Note that what I call “smartness” is not necessarily academic achievement, book learning, etc.

• Teach me about a topic you geek out about. Why?
• Are you a curious person?
• Do you ask questions about ‘why’?
• Did you teach yourself at least part of your marketing skillset? (I have no issue with people learning marketing from a course or degree, but I want to know that you will keep teaching yourself new skills without a teacher grading you or giving you assignments. This question is really about assessing self-starter indicators).

For me, this “smartness” piece really comes down to the curiosity part. I want to work with people who are always asking why, and who get excited about discovering new ideas or learning new skills. These people make great consultants.

4. Culture fit

• Would I be excited to have this person on my team?
• For me, this usually means that they show enthusiasm for the topic of SEO/digital, and that they’re a self-motivated learner. Basically, I want to feel that this person is going to push me to up my game, push themselves to constantly get better, and in the process will bring the whole consulting team up with them.
• What sort of work environment are you looking for?
  • We have a relaxed environment at Distilled, but this only works because our employees are self-motivated. If you tell me you’re looking for a flexible work environment, I’ll want to understand why.
  • Is it because you know how you work best, and you want a job that supports your best work? Or is it because you’re lazy? Because I can tell the difference.

5. Technical knowledge

If you’re applying at the consultant level, I will also test your technical knowledge and experience.

Examples of the type of technical questions I’ll ask on the initial phone screen are:

• What’s the biggest site you’ve ever done a technical audit of, in terms of number of pages?
  • Many of our clients have sites with millions of pages, so I want to know that you can handle this scale.
  • If you haven’t worked with a site this size before, it’s not necessarily a dealbreaker, but in that case I want to see that you’re aware that you haven’t worked with a truly massive site, and get a sense that you’d at least have a thought on how to approach this type of site. I once had a candidate respond to this question with an answer along the lines of “Oh yes, I’ve worked with some really big sites, they had, like, thousands of pages.” That makes me think that you don’t truly understand the scale that some of our enterprise clients operate at.

• Talk me through your process for a technical SEO audit.
  • What tools do you use?
  • What questions will you ask?
  • What are the issues that you would prioritize?
  • I don’t necessarily expect you to answer the way I would, but I want to see that you understand basic technical SEO principles and that you have a process that is logical and thorough.
• What was your biggest technical win for a client?
  • This gives me insight into how you think about technical priorities and value.
• What is the most common problem that you come across with client websites?
  • This gives me a sense of the kind of experience that you have.
• What do you think the biggest difference will be in SEO in five years’ time?
  • The main things I look for with this question are whether you…
    • Get excited at the opportunity to talk about the future of search
    • Have thoughts on this topic already because you think about/talk about this stuff for fun (curiosity and self-learning, remember?!)
• Rapid-fire round:
  • I say a task, you tell me your preferred tool:
    • Information architecture audit?
    • Keyword research?
    • Site crawl?
    • Content gap analysis?
    • Backlink audit?

There aren’t necessarily any right answers for most of these tasks, but if you don’t mention any of the common tools that we use frequently in the SEO space, even just to tell me why they’re not your tool of choice, that’s a red flag for me that you’re not particularly experienced. Bonus points if you can also tell me why you do or don’t use certain tools.

If a candidate moves forward to an in-person interview, we’ll dig a little deeper on technical expertise. As part of this, we will provide some common client-based scenarios and ask for your process for how you might approach the scenario. There is usually no one right answer, but if it’s a diagnostic problem, there are certain steps or sense-checks I would expect every competent SEO consultant to take before making a recommendation.

For instance, if I give you a scenario around how to handle duplicate content from faceted navigation, where the client has asked for separate pages for 10 color variants of the product across thousands of products, I would expect you to at least mention the following:

• Keyword research
• Handling parameters and crawl budget
• Ideas for how to differentiate identical product description content
• And also being willing and able to challenge, or at least sense-check, client assumptions about what the correct approach might be! In this scenario, for instance, maybe they don’t actually need to have every color variant of the product indexed if the search volume isn’t there.

We will also ask technical questions which do have clear right and wrong answers, to ensure that you have the baseline of knowledge that we would expect an analyst to achieve before we would be able to promote him or her to consultant. These are not always particularly challenging questions, but surprisingly, a lot of candidates get them wrong. An example of this type of question would be something like “Can you explain how Google search works to someone with limited technical knowledge?,” “Can you draw an example of a SERP layout on the whiteboard?,” or “How would you set up a robots.txt file to block these pages and folders?”

How to be a great SEO candidate (agency-specific)

Of course, all of the above applies equally as an applicant in terms of things to think about in preparation for an SEO interview. In fact, if you’re preparing for an interview like this, you may want to think about how you would respond to each of the questions I’ve outlined above, and how you could tell stories that would demonstrate these 5 key attributes that we’re looking for. The four main criteria are pretty universally valuable attributes in any workplace — and they’re also key indicators in my experience of whether a candidate will succeed in this specific type of role, and especially in an agency environment.

But! I promised you 10 things in the title of this post, so here are 5 applicant-specific things I’ve learned recently from seeing the process from the other side:

1. Don’t bullshit.

Be honest if you don’t know something. Especially at the analyst level, we’re looking for people we can train, and honesty about where you’re at is essential to that process.

2. Stay on point.

I need to see that you can communicate clearly with a client and outline the 5 Ws of a recommendation or strategy, without getting lost in unnecessary detail or losing your train of thought.

3. Don’t try to guess what answer I’m looking for.

I want to understand your thought process. It’s obvious when you’re just trying to tell me what I want to hear — because you’re not speaking with authenticity or conviction.

This one ties into the first two, because when you try to guess what I’m looking for, it also makes it harder to stay on point. You end up waffling and um-ing and ah-ing because you’re trying to feel your way to my point of view instead of presenting your own opinion. It’s an easy mistake to make when you get nervous, so a tip for dealing with the nerves is to just take a quick second to breathe before you answer, and check in with yourself about how you really feel about the topic. And if the answer is “I don’t know the answer” — that’s ok. Feel free in that case to talk about how you might approach figuring out the answer, though — if we’re going to be working together I want to know that you’ll be proactive enough to find out the answer, or at least have an idea of where to start when you get stuck!

4. Don’t try to “win” the interview.

Don’t go in with the end game of getting the offer. Go in with a sense of what you’re looking for in your next position and approach this time we’re spending together as an opportunity for us to explore together whether the role and the company is a good fit for you. I’ve made this mistake in both directions, as an interviewee prior to my current role and more recently sometimes as an interviewer (because I want you to like me, too!).

Remember: I really want you to be the perfect fit for what I need! So I’m not out to trip you up — in fact, if I can help you perform well, I will. For instance, if you don’t quite seem to understand the question, or if I don’t quite hear what I was hoping for, I’ll rephrase the question differently to help you see what I’m getting at and see if we can get there together. If you still don’t manage to get there when we give you that support, though, at that point it’s pretty clear that we aren’t a good fit.

5. Do the research.

We once interviewed someone for a sales role, and we asked them if they knew what services Distilled offered. She clearly didn’t know but tried to answer anyway, and went on to guess a couple correctly but then threw in a third service which is not a specialty of ours and is not advertised publicly as a service we provide. To me this showed a basic lack of preparation which I would view as necessary in any sort of consulting or sales-based role, and it was one of the reasons I didn’t recommend moving her forward in the process (although not the only reason).

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So there you have it — 10 things I’ve learned recently about hiring and applying for SEO jobs!

I hope that you’ve found this post helpful, regardless of which side of the table you’re currently finding yourself on. I’d love to hear your best tips and worst experiences in the comments 😉 and if you’re looking for a new opportunity, and this process sounds like something you’d like to explore further, check out our Jobs page for current openings!

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Posted by randfishKnowing what content to create is one of a marketer’s most difficult jobs. It’s all too easy to imagine your target audience and what they already appreciate, then create more of that. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand discusses why … Continue reading →

Posted by MiriamEllis

‘Barnacle SEO’ was a term first popularized by Will Scott in 2011 to describe the process of attaching your business to existing high-ranking entities (like major directories) and then promoting them as a means of dominating search engine results for desired terms.

Today, we’re going to take that novel concept in a different direction, with the goal of increasing brand awareness for single, multi-location, and enterprise local businesses by latching onto existing influences in any given community. Up ahead: simple tips for interpreting your city, a downloadable community awareness spreadsheet, and real-world examples for your inspiration!

Before we dive in, take a look at these two eye-opening statistics:

“73% of people care about the company, not just the product, when they’re making purchasing decisions.”
– BBMG

“63% of global consumers would buy from a company they consider to be authentic, over and above competitors.”
– Cohn & Wolfe

The Cohn & Wolfe survey of 12,000 participants included these definitions of authenticity consumers care about: the business stands for more than just making money (74%), has a relevant and engaging story (43%), and is well-known in its region or field (63%). The combination of these three statistics should ring bells with any local search marketing expert or department.

Today is the last day you’ll ever worry over what to write about

Independently owned businesses hit roadblocks when they fear they have nothing real to say. Multi-location businesses fret over meaningful differentiation of one location from another. Large enterprises struggle with fostering local authenticity because the distance between the CEO and the clerk behind the checkout counter is sometimes too great, and brand-wide initiatives may result in generic, rather than truly local, messaging.

How to overcome these challenges? The solution lies in realizing that almost any given community is already writing your local story; you just have to discover how to latch onto it.

A significant portion of your blog posts, social outreach, and even paid advertising can be based on the fact that there are local, national, and global influences already firmly established in the minds of your consumers, almost every day of the year. Whether it’s the small-town 4th of July BBQ or the big-city Earth Day celebration, there are events, holidays, weather patterns, long-standing customs, and emerging news items of which your customers are already aware. Your barnacle local awareness marketing simply involves tying your business into pre-existing conditions, proving that you, too, are aware.

Barnacle example #1

To put it another way, you don’t have to tell a customer that summer has arrived. He already sees the sunshine and feels the heat. But if one of the branches of your home improvement franchise is located in a steaming hot, asphalt-topped shopping center, you can:

• Set up a big, friendly, self-serve cooler of iced tea and invite customers to pop in for a free drink.
• Erect a doggy drinking station under a shady overhang and let customers know they can stop by anytime.
• Set up a few quality lawn chairs next to your big display of high-powered fans and invite customers to take a seat and enjoy the breeze.
• Blog, tweet, post, hang up signage, and otherwise share your call for neighbors to come cool off while they’re making their usual shopping rounds.
• Hold a summer contest with a prize of vouchers for the local swim center or other refreshing retreat.
• Sponsor the swim center and earn a sponsorship listing on their website

All of this says you’ve noticed it’s summer, too, that your customers are perspiring, and that you’d like to help. Your outreach establishes your goodwill and an extra reason to visit your business.

Barnacle example #2

Or maybe yours is a large natural foods store enterprise, and you’ve got a location in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Every October, the city hosts the famed week-long Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta. Your customers are already aware of this event, already talking about it, and making plans surrounding it. Your proofs of local awareness could include:

• Sponsorships
• Donations of money or supplies
• A food booth at the event
• An event photo contest with a nice prize
• In-store specials on picnic items to take to the event
• Fun tips for planning a great picnic meal
• ‘Secret’ insider info on great parking spots near the event grounds
• Staff photos of the fiesta
• Sharing all of the above on your website and social profiles

Your outreach will put this branch of your enterprise right in the middle of a major community happening, establishing your local awareness.

With even a modest application of research and brainstorming, chances are, your community is literally overflowing with inspiration for barnacle local marketing opportunities. For efficiency’s sake, organization will play a key role in planning your schedule of timely outreach. Read on!

4 simple steps to becoming a seaworthy Barnacle Marketer

1. Start with a spreadsheet

There’s nothing quite so organized as a good old spreadsheet, and to save you trouble, we’ve created this one for you, pre-filled in with major holidays and a few influences and fields we think will help you get started. Some holidays are on fixed dates, of course, but you’ll want to edit the dates of others each year.

Here’s an example of what a completed spreadsheet might look like for the month of September for a hypothetical major medical center in the city of Boise, Idaho:

Access your complimentary spreadsheet here.

To make a copy for your own use, simply select “File” from the main menu, then “Make a copy.” You can then add in your own events, change up the formatting, translate it to Swahili, whatever you’d like.

2. Do local, national, and global research

Almost every local Chamber of Commerce website has an events calendar which will detail most significant community happenings. You can also use sites like Eventbrite for further inspiration. And, indeed, there are paid opportunity-finding services like ZipSprout that can do the work for you and hook you up with with relevant sponsorship matches. Remember, you’re looking for well-known happenings that are already part of your customers’ consciousness — events that they are seeing advertised around town, promoted on the web, local TV, and radio.

On the national/global side, major news sites will be your best bet. Some events (like international summits or sports championships) are publicized well in advance. Others will require-up-to the minute awareness of items in the ‘15 minutes news cycle’ that could impact your customers in some relevant way.

Gather links as you do your research and enter them in the spreadsheet.

3. Identify opportunities for participation & promotion

In our hypothetical example, the medical center has identified 2 holidays, 1 national/global influence and 3 local events in September. Their participation in these 6 existing circumstances might be broken down like this:

Image via Pixabay

Labor Day (9/5)

Given that this national holiday honors workers, the medical center has an opportunity for outreach about preventing common work-related injuries like carpal tunnel syndrome, eye strain from computer use, or back problems caused by heavy lifting or improper footwear.

Promotional Opportunities: The doctors could hold a free work-safety seminar for local start-up owners and blog about it. They could also post simple preventative health tips for workers on Facebook and Twitter. They could run an Instagram campaign with photos of optimal vs. risky postures for sitting, standing, and lifting at work, engaging the audience to check whether they are practicing good habits.

Image via Jeremy Noble

Local Labor Day Picnic (9/5)

Local traditions like this are a natural opportunity for sponsorships. New to sponsorships for local businesses? This excellent guide will give you a crash course. The medical center could simply help provide funds for the seating, food, and entertainment in exchange for being listed as a sponsor on promotional materials, or they could take a more active role. They could set up a booth at the picnic, offering refreshments high in electrolytes to rehydrate picnic-goers, or maybe free 5-minute therapeutic foot massages, or UV-protective sunscreen.

Promotional Opportunities: To truly ‘barnacle’ onto this event, the medical center should promote both it and their participation in it on their website and social profiles. Posts, tweets, and images to the tune of “Treat tired feet to a free massage by a licensed practitioner at the Labor Day Picnic, courtesy Green of Tree Medical Center,” with links to the event website would all be good. Promote the event, promote yourself.

Image via Clemens v. Vogelsang

Art in the Park (9/9–9/11)

Billed as one of the premiere art events in the Northwest, this annual Boise exhibit is another sponsorship no-brainer. These days, most event committees clearly post calls for sponsorship on their websites, and the really savvy ones detail exactly what sponsors can expect in return in terms of brand promotion including signage, blog posts, and social mentions. So, that’s one option. Another is to barnacle onto the idea that art serves many purposes in the human community and is, in fact, used as a form of therapy. If the medical center is full-service, there’s a clear opportunity to connect health and art.

Promotional Opportunities: If the medical center is an event sponsor, they could promote the event on the clinic’s website, and tie the theme into the practice of art therapy. This would be an excellent month to raise awareness of the center’s group art therapy sessions, or to offer a series of social media tips about the ways in which many art forms are believed to have a positive impact on everything from depression to stroke recovery. Or, perhaps some of the doctors’ or patients’ artwork will be featured in the event. What a great chance for some Pinterest marketing and an invitation to come see more of this work hanging in the medical center’s reception area!

Image via bark

First Day of Fall (9/22)

At first glance, many businesses may struggle to see how they can tie in with community awareness of leaves changing color or pumpkins ripening, but it just takes a little ideation. The medical center might launch a Healthier Boise campaign, with free flu shots, reminders to get asthma inhaler prescriptions refilled against the coming onslaught of woodstove smoke, and healthy recipes for using all those butternut squashes and greens in the market for optimum vitamin intake.

Promotional Opportunities: The campaign can be promoted on all of the medical center’s social profiles, as well as on the homepage of the company website, supported by additional pages or posts of useful content. This would be a smart time to interview some of the clinic’s doctors on general preventative medicine tips to strengthen the community for the coming cold season.

Image via Susumu Komatsu

Walk to End Alzheimer’s (9/17)

A renowned event like this offers remarkable, diverse opportunities for advocacy, sponsorships, and donations. Doubtless, numerous staff members will be participating in the walk and the medical center can tell the story of this while also tying this into ongoing research and services relating to Alzheimer’s at their facility.

Promotional Opportunities: Event booths, individual sponsorships, staff photos, patient photos, fundraising goals, and education can all be socially promoted. Participation in a large event like this deserves top billing on the website homepage, too, backed up with blog posts.

Image via Pixabay

Global Obesity Summit Los Angeles (9/26 – 9/28)

Most industries have summits, conferences, and events that will be attended by staff members and, often, consumers as well. Given how often America’s obesity epidemic is mentioned in mainstream media, the medical center can see in this important global event an opportunity for education and outreach on a very current topic. Sponsorship opportunities are easily apparent. Or, if one or more of the doctors will present at the summit or even just attend, their research and discoveries can then be shared with the city of Boise.

Promotional Opportunities: Staff participants can be interviewed for the blog, offering new suggestions for maintaining a healthy weight based on summit presentations. If the medical center offers exercise classes or dietary counseling, here’s a perfect opportunity to reach out socially with a free first session offer to the community. Could be a fun time to experiment with Snapchat. Be as generous as possible in sharing tips that could improve patients’ lives.

Even at a glance, it’s easy to see that a local business can quickly fill every calendar month of the year with community outreach and promotion of the company’s involvement. Don’t forget that to be a good barnacle, you’ve got to promote awareness of community happenings as well as promoting your own participation in them. Put up in-store flyers and posters, tweet, share, and chat!

I’d further recommend tracking the outcomes of each campaign so that you learn, over the course of the next couple of years, which events and which forms of participation resonate most with a given community and result in the greatest ROI for the business.

My question for our readers: Which forms of tracking do you use to measure success from these types of activities? Please, share your expertise to benefit the community!

4. Designate a Local Expert at each business location

Hopefully the above three steps will already have the wheels turning about how your brand can discover and participate in the influences your potential consumers are already aware of, but doubtless, this questions arises:

“Who’s going to do all of this work?”

The answer is, you’re going to need to give an existing employee or a new hire the nifty title of ‘Local Expert.’ If you’re the owner and your business is very small, the Local Expert may have to be you until you grow the company a bit more, but for most small-to-large local businesses, local marketing is vital enough to be a genuine job.

Multi-location companies and large enterprises should expect to appoint a Local Expert for each branch, or at least for each city in which the business operates. In the interview process, here are 5 things you want to look for in an existing or new staff member that should spell success:

1. Has lived in the target city for some years. A born-and-bred local would be my ideal, because she may be aware of cherished history and customs beyond the ken of newcomers, but let’s stipulate that the Local Expert has lived in the region for at least a couple of years.
2. Has above-average communication skills, both in person and on the web. Your expert will not only be socially promoting your company’s participation in events (necessitating interaction with the community), they will also likely be on the phone with event holders and attending some events in person. Be sure you feel confident about this person representing your business and that they have the real-world social skills necessary to foster excellent interactions.
3. They must know or be willing to learn the basics of Local SEO. Even if this staff member has nothing to do with optimizing your website or managing your citations, they must understand that the core goal of all of their work will be increasing the local visibility of your brand. They need to understand how local search works to comprehend why this is such a big deal.
4. They must know or be willing to learn local/social media marketing. If the candidate for the job can reel off the things they’re already doing on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Periscope, smartphone apps, and their personal blog, you’ve got a winner on your hands. Better still if they tend to be ahead of the social technology curve and are able to identify trends in the popularity of various platforms that could spell out innovative opportunities for your local marketing.
5. They should bring a sense of excitement and fun to the work. Based on the barnacle principle, your Local Expert should be energized by the task of promoting both his city and his workplace, enriching the community with useful information. This is one job in which enthusiasm will really shine through in the final product.

Would some real-world inspiration really get you going?

I always find it easier to conceptualize tasks when I take a look at what others have done. If that goes for you, too, here are some real-world examples of local awareness proofs.

1. Here’s an inspiring story about a NYC-based organization called New Women New Yorkers which helps immigrant women gain access to resources that will make their lives safer, more profitable, and more interesting in their new country. A local Lebanese restaurant called Manousheh answered the organization’s call for sponsorships and donations for an event, and was thanked on an events page and mentioned on events sites like this one. To close the barnacle loop, all the restaurant needs to do is start a page on their own site mentioning that they support this organization and that they participated in an event. It would be nice, too, if the organization would make sponsor logos link to their websites. Everybody is off to a good start here and just needs to go one step further.
2. 2016 marked the 41st anniversary of a Santa Fe event called Pancakes on The Plaza. Local bank First National of Santa Fe comes out as a winner with a featured logo on this sponsors page and with a barnacle shout out on their own website, promoting both their participation and the event, plus proud mentions on their Facebook page. The deal is further sweetened by blog mentions like this one, this one, this one… and the list goes on!
3. And here’s a delightful example of just how grateful a really motivated business can be to its sponsors. In this case, the Prince Edward Island Potato Board is getting all kinds of Twitter love from a local restaurant and live theater venue:

And PEI Potato barnacles on like pros, holding a contest for tickets to a summer musical performance at the sponsored theater:

If restaurants, banks, & potato growers can do it, so can you!

Your community is already alive to the influences surrounding it: businesses, events, organizations, seasonal traditions, and relevant news. You don’t have to write a new story from scratch; you just need to discover where you fit into the existing storyline. Generosity, creativity, and a genuine desire to contribute to community well-being are what it takes to become a visible player in local life.

Has your business been using the barnacle method all along to prove local awareness? Our Moz community would benefit from your inspirational stories. Please share them in the comments!

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