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Someday You’ll Thank Me: An Essential Task List for Junior SEOs to Master

Let’s face it: SEO isn’t as black & white as most marketing channels. In my opinion, to become a true professional requires a broad skill set. It’s not that a professional SEO needs to know the answer for everything; rather, it’s more important to have the skills to be able to find the answer.

I’m really pleased with the results of various bits of training I’ve put together for successful juniors over the years, so I think it’s time to share.

This is a Junior SEO task list designed to help new starters in the field get the right skills by doing hands-on jobs, and possibly to help find a specialism in SEO or digital marketing.

How long should this take? Let’s ballpark at 60–90 days.

Before anything, here’s some prerequisite reading:

Project 1 – Technical Fundamentals:

Master the lingo and have a decent idea of how the Internet works before they start having conversations with developers or contributing online. Have the trainee answer the following questions. To demonstrate that they understand, have them answer the questions using analogies. Take inspiration from this post.

Must be able to answer the following in detail:

What is HTTP / HTTPS / HTTP2? Explain connections and how they flow.
Do root domains have trailing slashes?
What are the fundamental parts of a URL?
What is “www,” anyway?
What are generic ccTLDs?
Describe the transaction between client and server?
What do we mean when we say “client side” and “server side?”
Name 3 common servers. Explain each one.
How does DNS work?
What are ports?
How do I see/find my public IP address?
What is a proxy server?
What is a reverse proxy server?
How do CDNs work?
What is a VPN?
What are server response codes and how do they relate to SEO?
What is the difference between URL rewriting and redirecting?
What is MVC?
What is a development sprint / scrum?
Describe a development deployment workflow.
What are the core functions that power Google search?
What is PageRank?
What is toolbar PageRank?
What is the reasonable surfer model?
What is the random surfer model?
What is Mozrank, Domain Authority, and Page Authority — and how are they calculated?
Name 3 Google search parameters and explain what they do (hint: gl= country).
What advanced operator search query will return: all URLs with https, with “cat” in the title, not including www subdomains, and only PDFs?
Describe filtering in search results, and which parameter can be appended to the search URL to omit filtering.
How can I Google search by a specific date?
If we say something is “indexed,” what does that mean?
If we say something is “canonicalized,” what does that mean?
If we say something is “indexable,” what does that mean?
If we say something is “non indexable,” what does that mean?
If we say something is “crawlable,” what does that mean?
If we say something is “not crawlable,” what does that mean?
If we say something is “blocked,” what does that mean?
Give examples of “parameters” in the wild, and manipulate any parameter on any website to show different content.
How should you check rankings for a particular keyword in a particular country?
Where are some places online you can speak to Googlers for advice?
What are the following: rel canonical, noindex, nofollow, hreflang, mobile alternate?(Explain each directive and its behavior in detail and state any variations in implementation)

Explaining metrics from popular search tools

Explain SearchMetrics search visibility — how is this calculated? Why would you see declines in SM graphs but not in actual organic traffic?
Explain Google Trends Index — how is this calculated?
Explain Google Keyword Planner search volume estimates & competition metric — is search volume accurate? Is the competition metric useful for organic?
Explain SEMrush.com’s organic traffic graphs — Why might you see declines in SEMrush graphs, but not in actual organic traffic?

Link architecture

By hand, map out the world’s first website — http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html (we want to see the full link architecture here in a way that’s digestable)
Explain its efficiency from an SEO perspective — are this website’s pages linked efficiently? Why or why not?

Project 2 – Creating a (minimum) 10-page website

If the trainee doesn’t understand what something is, make sure that they try and figure it out themselves before coming for help. Building a website by hand is absolutely painful, and they might want to throw their computer out the window or just install Wordpress — no, no, no. There are so many things to learn by doing it the hard way, which is the only way.

Grab a domain name and go setup shared hosting. A LAMP stack with Cpanel and log file access (example: hostgator) is probably the easiest.
Set up Filezilla with your host’s FTP details
Set up a text editor (example: Notepad++, Sublime) and connect via FTP for quick deploy
Create a 10-page flat site (NO CMS. That means no Wordpress!)
- Within the site, it must contain at least one instance of each the following:
  - <div>,<table>,<a>,<strong>, <em>, <iframe>, <button>, <noscript>, <form>, <option>, <button>, <img>, <h1>, <h2>, <h3>, <p>, <span>
  - Inline CSS that shows/hides a div on hover
  - Unique titles, meta descriptions, and H1s on every page
  - Must contain at least 3 folders
  - Must have at least 5 pages that are targeted to a different country
  - Recreate the navigation menu from the bbc.co.uk homepage (or your choice) using an external CSS stylesheet
  - Do the exact same as the previous, but make the Javascript external, and the function must execute with a button click.
  - Must receive 1,000 organic sessions in one month
  - Must contain Google Analytics tracking, Google search console setup, Bing webmaster tools, and Yandex webmaster tools setup
  - Create a custom 404 page
  - Create a 301, 302, and 307 redirect
  - Create a canonical to an exact duplicate, and another to a unique page — watch behavior

The site must contain at least one instance of each of the following, and every page which contains a directive (accompanying pages affected by directives as well) must be tracked through a rank tracker:

Rel canonical
Noindex
Noindex, follow
Mobile alternate (one page must be mobile-friendly)
Noarchive
Noimageindex
Meta refresh

Set up rank tracking

The trainee can use whatever tracking tool they like; https://www.wincher.com/ is free for 100 keywords. The purpose of the rank tracking is to measure the effects of directives implemented, redirects, and general fluctuation.

Create the following XML sitemaps:

Write the following XML sitemaps by hand for at least 5 URLs: mobile, desktop, Android App, and create one desktop XML sitemap with hreflang annotations
Figure out how to ping Google & Bing with your sitemap URL

Writing robots.txt

Design a robots.txt that has specific blocking conditions for regular Googlebot, Bingbot, all user agents. They must be independent and not interfere with each other.
Write a rule that disallows everything, but allows at least 1 folder.
Test the robots.txt file through the Search Console robots.txt tester.

Crawl the site and fix errors (Use Screaming Frog)

Have the trainee read: https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/user-guide/
Ensure the trainee has a full, registered version of the software
Crawl the site and have them correct any errors on the site

Project 3 – PR, Sales, Promotion and Community Involvement

These tasks can be done on an independent website or directly for a client; it depends on your organizational requirements. This is the part of the training where the trainee learns how to negotiate, sell, listen, promote, and create exposure for themselves.

Sales & negotiation

Close one guest post deal (i.e. have your content placed on an external website). Bonus if this is done via a phone call.
Create & close one syndication deal (i.e. have your content placed and rel canonical’d back to your content). Bonus if this is done via a phone call.
Close one advertising deal (this could be as simple as negotiating a banner placement, and as hard as completely managing the development of the ad plus tracking)
Sit in on 5 sales calls (depending on your business, this may need to be adjusted — it could be customer service calls)
Sit in on 5 sales meetings (again, adjust this for your business)

PR

Create a story, write a press release, get the story covered by any publication (bonus if there’s a link back to your original release, or a rel canonical)
Use a PR wire to syndicate, or find your own syndication partner – this

Community involvement

Sign up for a Moz account and answer at least 15 questions in the forum
Sign up for a Quora account and answer at least 5 questions
Write 3 blog posts and get them featured on an industry website
Speak at an event, no matter how small; must be at least 10 minutes long

YouTube

Create a screencast tutorial, upload it to YouTube, get 1,000 views (they will also need to optimize description, tags, etc.)
Here’s an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXhmF9rjqP4 (that was my first try at this, years ago which you can use as inspiration)

Facebook & Twitter Paid Ads

On both networks, pay to get 100 visits from an ad. These campaigns must be tracked properly in an analytics platform, not only in FB and Twitter analytics!

Adwords

Create 1 campaign (custom ad) with the goal of finding real number of impressions versus estimated search volume from Keyword Planner.
Bonus: Drive 100 visits with an ad. Remember to keep the costs low — this is just training!

Project 4 – Data Manipulation & Analytics

Spreadsheets are to SEOs as fire trucks are to firefighters. Trainees need to be proficient in Excel or Google Docs right from the start. These tasks are useful for grasping data manipulation techniques in spreadsheets, Google Analytics, and some more advanced subjects, like scraping and machine learning classification.

Excel skills

Must be able to fill in required arguments for the following formulas in under 6 seconds:

Index + match
VLOOKUP (we should really be teaching people to index-match, because it’s more versatile and is quicker when dealing with larger datasets)
COUNTIF, COUNTIFS (2 conditions)
SUMIF, SUMIFS (2 conditions)
IF & AND statement in the same formula
Max, Min, Sum, Avg, Correl, Percentile, Len, Mid, Left, Right, Search, & Offset are also required formulas.

Also:

Conditional formatting based on a formula
Create a meaningful pivot table + chart
Record a macro that will actually be used
Ability to copy, paste, move, transpose, and copy an entire row and paste in new sheet — all while never touching the mouse.

Google Analytics

Install Google Analytics (Universal Analytics), and Google Tag Manager at least once — ensure that the bare minimum tracking works properly.
Pass the GAIQ Exam with at least 90%
Create a non-interaction event
Create a destination goal
Create a macro that finds a value in the DOM and only fires on a specific page
Create a custom segment, segmenting session by Google organic, mobile device only, Android operating system, US traffic only — then share the segment with another account.
Create an alert for increasing 404 page errors (comparison by day, threshold is 10% change)
Install the Google Tag Assistant for Chrome and learn to record and decipher requests for debugging
Use the Google Analytics Query explorer to pull from any profile — you must pull at least 3 metrics, 1 dimension, sort by 1 metric, and have 1 filter.
Create one Google Content Experiment — this involves creating two pages and A/B testing to find the winner. They’ll need to have some sort of call to action; it could be as simple as a form or a targeted click. Either way, traffic doesn’t determine the winner here; it’s conversion rate.

Google Search Console

Trainee must go through every report (I really mean every report), and double-check the accuracy of each using external SEO tools (except crawl activity reports). The point here is to find out why there are discrepancies between what SEO tools find and what Google Search Console reports.
Fetch and render 5 different pages from 5 domains, include at least 2 mobile pages
Fetch (only fetch) 3 more pages; 1 must be mobile
Submit an XML sitemap
Create https, http, www, and non-www versions of their site they built in the previous project and identify discrepancies.
Answer: Why don’t clicks from search analytics add up compared to Google Analytics?
Answer: How are impressions from search analytics measured?

Link auditing

Download link reports for 1 website. Use Google Search Console, Majestic, Ahrefs, and Moz, and combine them all in one Excel file (or Google Doc sheet). If the total number of rows between all 4 exports are over Excel’s limit, the trainee will need to figure out how to handle large files on their own (hint: SQL or other database).
Must combine all links, de-duplicate, have columns for all anchor texts, and check if links are still alive (hint: the trainee can use Screaming Frog to check live links, or URL Profiler)

Explore machine learning

Use Bigml.com and create a decision tree for classification. Try and predict something. Follow http://machinelearningmastery.com/bigml-tutorial-develop-your-first-decision-tree-and-make-predictions/.

Scrape something

Use at least 3 different methods to extract information from any webpage (hint: import.io, importxml)

Log file analysis

Let the trainee use whatever software they want to parse the log files; just remember to explain how different servers will have different fields.
Grab a copy of any web server access log files that contain at least the following fields: user-agent, timestamp, URI, IP, Method, Referrer (ensure that CDNs or other intermediary transactions are not rewriting the IP addresses).
Trainee must be able to do the following:
- Find Googlebot requests; double-check by reverse DNS that it’s actually Googlebot
- Find a 4xx error encountered by Googlebot, then find the referrer for that 4xx error by looking at other user agent requests to the same 4xx error
- Create a pivot table with all the URLs requested and the amount of times they were requested by Googlebot

Keyword Planner

The candidate must be able to do the following:

Find YoY search volume for any given term
Find keyword limits, both in the interface and by uploading a CSV
Find the mobile trends graph for a set of keywords
Use negative keywords
Find breakdown by device

Google Chrome Development tools

The candidate must be able to do the following:

Turn off Javascript
Manipulate elements of the page (As a fun exercise, get them to change a news article to a completely new story)
Find every request Chrome makes when visiting a webpage
Download the HAR file
Run a speed audit & security audit directly from the development tool interface
Change their user agent to Googlebot
Emulate an Apple iPhone 5
Add a CSS attribute (or change one)
Add a breakpoint
Use the shortcut key to bring up development tools

Project 5 – Miscellaneous / Fun Stuff

These projects are designed to broaden their skills, as well as as prepare the trainee for the future and introduce them to important concepts.

Use a proxy and a VPN

As long as they are able to connect to a proxy and a VPN in any application, this is fine — ensure that they understand how to verify their new IP.

Find a development team, and observe the development cycle

Have the trainees be present during a scrum/sprint kickoff, and a release.
Have the trainees help write development tickets and prioritize accordingly.

Have them spend a day helping other employees with different jobs

Have them spend a day with the PR, analytics folks, devs… everyone. The goal should be to understand what it’s like to live a day in their shoes, and assist them throughout the entire day.

Get a website THEY OWN penalized. Heck, make it two!

Now that the trainee has built a website by hand, feel free to get them to put up another couple of websites and get some traffic pouring in.
Then, start searching for nasty links and other deceptive SEO tactics that are against the Webmaster Guidelines and get that website penalized. Hint: Head to fiverr.com for some services.
Bonus: Try to get the penalty reversed. Heh, good luck 🙂

API skills

Request data from 2 different APIs using at least 2 different technologies (either a programming language or software — I would suggest the SEMrush APIand Alchemy Language API). Hints: They can use Postman, Google Docs, Excel, command line, or any programming language.
Google APIs are also fantastic, and there are lots of free services in the Google Cloud Console.

Learn concepts of programming

Write 2 functions in 2 different programming languages — these need to be functions that do something useful (i.e. “hello world” is not useful).

Ideas:

A Javascript bookmark that extracts link metrics from Majestic or Moz for the given page
A simple application that extracts title, H1, and all links from a given URL
A simple application that emails you if a change has been detected on a webpage
Pull word count from 100 pages in less than 10 seconds

If I were to pick which technology, it would be Javascript and Python. Javascript (Node, Express, React, Angular, Ember, etc.) because I believe things are moving this way, i.e. 1 language for both front and back end. Python because of its rich data science & machine learning libraries, which may become a core part of SEO tasks in the future.

Do an introductory course on computer science / build a search engine

I strongly recommend anyone in SEO to build their own search engine — and no, I’m not crazy, this isn’t crazy, it’s just hard. There are two ways to do this, but I’d recommend both.

Complete intro to Computer Science (you build a search engine in Python). This is a fantastic course; I strongly recommend it even if the junior already has a CS degree.
Sign up to https://opensolr.com/, crawl a small website, and build your own search engine. You’ll go through a lot of pain to configure what you want, but you’ll learn all about Apache Solr and how a popular search technology works.

Super Evil Genius Bonus Training

Get them to pass http://oap.ninja/, built by the infamous Dean Cruddace. Warning, this is evil — I’ve seen seasoned SEOs give up after just hours into it.

These days, SEO job requirements demand a lot from candidates.

Employers are asking for a wider array of skills that range from development to design as standard, not “preferred.”

Have a look around at current SEO job listings. You might be surprised just how much we’re expected to know these days:

Strong in Google Analytics/Omniture
Assist in the development of presentations to clients
Advanced proficiency with MS Excel, SQL
Advanced writing, grammar, spelling, editing, and English skills with a creative flair
Creating press releases and distribution
Proficiency in design software, Photoshop and Illustrator preferred
Develop and implement architectural, technical, and content recommendations
Conduct keyword research including industry trends and competitive analysis
Experience with WordPress and/or Magento (preferred)
Experience creating content for links and outreach
Experience in building up social media profiles and executing a social media strategy
Ability to program in HTML/CSS, VB/VBA, C++, PHP, and/or Python are a plus
A/B and Multivariate testing
Knowledge of project management software such as Basecamp, MS Project, Visio, Salesforce, etc
Basic knowledge of PHP, HTML, XML, CSS, JavaScript
Develop + analyze weekly and monthly reports across multiple clients

The list goes on and on, but you get the point. We’re expected to be developers, designers, PR specialists, salespeople, CRO, and social managers. This is why I believe we need to expose juniors to a wide set of tasks and help them develop a broad skill set.

“I’m a Junior SEO and my boss is making me do this training now, I hate you Dave!”

You might hate me now, but when you’re making a lot more money you might change your mind (you might even want to cuddle).

Plus, I’m putting you through hell so that….

You don’t lose credibility in front of developers (hint: these are the people who will have to implement your consulting). By using the correct terminology, and by doing parts of the work, you’ll be able to empathize and give better advice.
You don’t limit yourself to specific projects/tasks because of lack of knowledge/experience in other specialisms within SEO.
You will become a well-rounded marketer, able to take on whatever Google’s Algorithm of Wonder throws at you or jump into other disciplines within digital marketing with a solid foundation.

Feel free to ping me on Twitter (@dsottimano) or you can catch me hanging out with the DMG crew.

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Giving Duplicate Listing Management the Upgrade it Deserves

Posted by George-Freitag

Duplicate listings have been a plague to local search marketers since local search was a thing. When Moz Local first introduced duplicate closure in the fall of 2014, the goal was to address the horribly time-consuming task of finding and closing all those duplicate listings causing problems in Google, Bing, and various mapping platforms. Though we’ve consistently been making improvements to the tool’s performance (we’ll get into this later), the dashboard itself has remained largely unchanged.

Not anymore. Today, we’re proud to announce our brand new duplicate management dashboard for Moz Local:

Here’s a rundown of the features you can look for in the Moz Local upgrade:

New Duplicates Dashboard providing full visibility and transparency of duplicate listings at each stage of the workflow — open, reviewed, and closed — for all of your listings or any subset
Enhanced duplicates workflow making detecting, reviewing, and closing duplicate listings in Moz Local even easier through advanced filters
Enhanced duplicate management for faster and more accurate duplicate listing detection, submission, and tracking across all of Moz Local’s partner networks

This duplicate management update represents a new standard in the industry and will help our users be more productive and efficient than ever.

A bit of context

Eliminating duplicates and near-duplicates on major data sources and directories has always been one of the most effective ways to increase your presence in the local pack. It’s a key part of citation consistency, which was rated as the second most important tactic for getting into local pack results according to the 2015 local ranking factors survey. On top of that, in last May’s Mozinar on local search, Andrew Shotland of Local SEO Guide mentioned that he saw a 23% increase in presence in the local pack just by addressing duplicates.

So we know that seeking and destroying duplicates works. The problem is that doing it manually just takes for-e-ver. Anyone who works in local search knows the pain and monotony of combing through Google for variations of a business, then spending more time finding the contact form needed to actually request a closure.

How duplicates cause problems for search engines

Our duplicate listing feature has always focused on easily identifying potential duplicates and presenting them to marketers in a way that allows them to quickly take action. In the case of the aggregators (like Infogroup and Localeze) and direct partner sites (like Foursquare and Insider Pages), this takes the form of single-click closure requests that are quickly reviewed and sent directly to the source.

For sites that aren’t part of our direct network or don’t accept closure requests from anyone, like Facebook, we still do our best to point our users in the right direction so they can close the listing manually. Originally, the dashboard took the form of a long list where marketers could scroll down and take action, as needed.

Though this worked great for many of our users, it quickly became problematic for large brands and agencies. Based on data collected from the thousands of brands and locations we track, we know that the average enterprise client can have around 3,500 duplicate listings and, in some cases, that number can be as high as 100,000 duplicates. Even though we estimate our tool can reduce the time spent managing duplicates by around 75%, when you have literally thousands of duplicates to parse through, a single to-do list quickly becomes impractical.

1. New dashboard for full transparency

The first opportunity we saw was to provide you with a bit more transparency into our closure process. Though we always provided some insight related to where we were in the closure process, there was no way to view this at an aggregated level and no way to see how many duplicates had been closed so you could track your progress.

So we fixed that.

Now all Moz Local customers can easily see how many duplicates are still marked as “open,” how many are being reviewed, and how many listings have been successfully closed. If you’re an agency or consultant, this can be especially useful to demonstrate progress made in identifying and closing duplicates for your clients. If you’re a brand, this can be a great way to build a business case for additional resources or show the value of your local strategy.

We also saw another opportunity to improve transparency by further breaking down the reporting by the type of data partner. Moz Local has always been very deliberate in surfacing the relationship we have with our partners. Because of this, we wanted to add another layer of insight based on the nature of the partnership.

Verification Partners include Google and Facebook, since they’re sources we use to verify our own data. Though we can’t close duplicates directly at this point, they’re so influential we felt it was imperative to include the ability to identify duplicates on these platforms and guide you as far as possible through the closure process.

Direct Partners are data sources that we have a direct relationship with and submit business listings instantly through our distribution service. For all major aggregators and most of our direct partner directories, you can use our single-click duplicate closure, meaning that all you have to is click “Close” and we’ll make sure it’s removed completely from their database, forever.

Lastly, we have our Indirect Partners. These are sources that receive all of our listing data via our direct partners, but we do not submit to directly. Though we can’t close listings on these sources automatically, we can still detect duplicates and send you directly to their closure form to help you request the closure.

2. Improve workflow through filters

The second opportunity was to address the long list-view that our users used to identify, evaluate, and take action related to duplicates we discovered. With so many of our clients having hundreds or thousands of listings to manage, it quickly became apparent that we needed some advanced sorting to help them out with their workflow.

So we added that, as well.

Now, if you only want to view the listings that need action, you can just click “Open,” then scroll down and choose to close or ignore any of duplicates in that view. If you then want to see how many duplicates have already been closed and removed from the data partner, you can just click that checkbox. If you want to only see the open duplicate listings for a certain partner, like Foursquare, that’s an option as well.

Further, just like everything else in the Moz Local dashboard and Search Insights, reporting strictly follows any filters and labels from the search bar. This can be especially useful if you’re an agency that wants to narrow your view to a specific client, or a brand that wants to only view reporting for a single marketing region.

For example, if you only want to see closed duplicates from Infogroup located in Texas that are part of the campaign “hanna-barbera” well, there you go.

All data in any filtered view is easily exportable via CSV so you can repurpose it for your own reporting or research.

Lastly, all of these reports are retroactive, meaning any duplicates you’ve requested closure or closed in the past will show up in the new duplicates dashboard and be available for advanced sorting and reporting.

3. Enhanced duplicate management

The new interface and reporting features aren’t the only things we’ve improved. Over the last year, our developers have been spending countless hours fine-tuning the duplicate closure process and improving relationships with our data partners.

Early on, the Moz Local team decided that the product should focus on the data sources that have the greatest impact for local businesses, regardless of their relationship with us, directly. As a result, we built the widest and most complex set of partnerships with aggregators, direct and indirect partners, and business directories in the industry. This update not only launches a new dashboard but also marks the kickoff for some huge improvements to our back-end.

Faster closure processing

The challenge that comes with working with a network as diverse as ours is that each of our partners handle duplicate listings in completely different ways. The Moz Local team has always had resources devoted specifically to work with our partners to improve our data submission and listing management processes. For duplicates, however, this meant we needed to help some of our partners enhance their own APIs to accept closure requests or, in some cases, create the API all together!

As part of this update, our development team has implemented new instrumentation and alerts to better identify submission errors sent to our partners, speed up the closure process, and quickly re-submit any closure requests that were not processed correctly.

Shorter review cycles

Additionally, we’ve shortened our internal review cycle for closure requests. In order ensure the quality of duplicate closures and to be sure our “alternates” feature isn’t being used maliciously, we manually review a percentage of closure requests. Through a variety of processes, we are now able to programmatically approve more closures, allowing for faster manual reviews of all other closure requests. As a result, we are now able to automatically approve around 44% of all closure requests instantly.

The future

The most exciting thing about this update is that it’s only the beginning. Over the next few months expect to see further integration with our data partners, discovery and progress notifications, increased closure efficiency, and more.

We hope you find our new duplicates dashboard useful and, most importantly, we hope it makes your lives a little bit easier.

Get Started with Moz Local!

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10 CRO Truth Bombs That Will Change the Way You Think

Posted by larry.kim

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) has been around since the beginning of the web. Historically, a lot of the time and attention has been spent on the on-page elements — headlines, copy, calls-to-action, forms, and design — to increase conversions.

Although optimizing on-page elements to maximize conversions still can and does have tremendous value, isn’t there a better way forward? Absolutely!

CRO Facts

There are several ways to increase your conversion rate by as much as 5x. But the smarter way to do it is by influencing the right people before they ever land on your site or persuading them to come back if they left your site before converting.

Here are 10 mind-blowing CRO truth bombs that will change the way you think about landing page optimization forever.

1. The classic A/B test is a fairy tale

Once upon a time, there lived a brilliant conversion rate expert who changed the [font type / line spacing / button color / image / something else] and magically increased conversions by 5 percent. And they all lived happily ever after. The end.

Except, the percentage increase you think you’ve achieved isn’t as real as it seems.

Oh no, it looks like someone has abducted our big CRO gains!

What really happens after a typical A/B test is that:

The early lead disappears.
Gains don’t persist over time.

When you get good results from A/B tests, it’s probably because your offer is new. Once that offer is no longer new, it loses its novelty.

You can’t keep selling last year’s offer forever. People want something new.

As is the case with ad fatigue, once you reach a certain point, your offer will bring diminishing returns. That’s why you can’t optimize your way to infinity.

Should you still do A/B testing? Yes! A/B testing is absolutely worth your time. You need to do it.

However, just realize that this isn’t a growth strategy — it’s table stakes. Improving something by 5 percent 10 times in a year doesn’t increase your conversion rate by 50 percent. The gains don’t persist.

Also, the more you optimize, the higher the risk of negative returns. If you start out with an offer that has a 0.5 percent conversion rate, there’s lots of upside. But once you’ve got a 6 percent conversion rate, there’s better than a 50/50 change your new offer will actually hurt sales.

2. CRO often increases quantity at the expense of quality

In ecommerce, a sale is a sale. But if you’re doing lead generation you have to be careful that you aren’t exchanging quantity for quality.

Quantity doesn’t always translate to quality. In fact, a higher conversion rate can actually ruin your percentage of marketing qualified leads. Here’s some data from one of our customers:

Beware of making superficial on-page changes that increase leads at the expense of quality, like promising free iPads or gift cards.

Remember, if you double your leads, you’re also doubling the time it takes for someone to follow-up on all those leads.

If you have too many leads, you run the risk of losing some gems in all that noise, and the longer it takes to get to someone, the lower the connect rates and conversion rates.

3. Average conversion rates haven’t changed much in years

The importance of CRO has certainly gained a lot attention in the past few years. No doubt you’ve recently seen some sort of case study where the author details how their company tripled their conversion rate.

If more people are doing CRO, then you’d think it would have a visible impact on outcomes industry-wide, right?

So why are conversion rates still pretty much the same as they were 15 years ago?

According to my WordStream data, the median search conversion rate is 2.35 percent, whereas the top 10 percent of sites — the unicorns — have conversion rates of 11.45 percent or higher:

We run these numbers periodically over the years but they never move. If more and more companies are adopting CRO, why aren’t industry average conversion rates moving up?

4. Raise your CTR to raise your conversion rates

Click-through rate (CTR) is the most important conversion metric. Why? Because the higher your click-through rate is, the higher your conversion rate will be.

Here’s an example of data from just one large client account. We see this in many accounts, but this is just one illustration. (The data gets murky when you combine accounts, since conversion rates depend on the industry and offer.)

If you can get people excited enough to click on your offer, then that excitement usually will turn into a conversion. So increasing your CTR by 2x will increase your conversion rate by 50%.

Now, it’s important to understand that I’m not advocating raising CTR by offering free kittens or other gimmicks. If you just add the word “Free” to your ad, the CTR will increase, but if your offer isn’t truly free, the conversion rate will drop.

Instead, I’m advocating finding truly innovative offers with massive differentiation and value that get your target market super excited about signing up for whatever you’re selling, right away!

From that perspective, your CTR is a great way to tell whether your offer sucks or if it is actually appealing to people who aren’t already biased toward you already (i.e., people who have visited your landing page in the past). Your market is much bigger than the people who are already in your funnel.

What is a good CTR? Check out these Google AdWords industry benchmarks:

Here are three ways you can raise CTR and create unicorn ads:

Focus on high commercial intent keywords.
Use ad customizers to create urgency and fear of missing out.
Use emotional triggers in your ad copy.

5. Brand familiarity is ridiculously important

One thing you can’t control with on-page CRO is brand awareness. People who are familiar with your brand are more likely to sign up or purchase your product or service.

At Wordstream, we looked at conversion rates, comparing those who were familiar with the company (repeat visitors) versus those who were not and found that repeat visitors were around 2–3x more likely to convert.

Granted, this isn’t a perfect measurement of who is familiar or not familiar with your brand. Someone who appears to be a new visitor might already have been exposed to that brand.

Regardless, brand affinity and recall clearly has a huge impact on CRO. This is where the highest leverage is.

6. Boost your conversions with remarketing

If greater brand exposure increases conversion rates, then how can you increase brand exposure? Go nuts with remarketing on the Google Display Network and Facebook.

We’ve seen it: conversion rates actually double the more times someone sees an ad in a remarketing campaign. Remarketing lets you turn one shot at converting a user into 100 or more possible shots.

With Facebook remarketing, you can target using the extremely valuable combination of behaviors, interests, and demographics to increase engagement and conversions by 3x for a third of the cost-per-click. This is where you want to push your hard offers, such as sign-ups, consultations, and downloads.

7. RLSA will save the day

We’ve found that RLSA (Remarketing Lists for Search Ads) campaigns are search ads that target people who search on your desired keywords AND have recently visited your website.

We’ve found that they typically have 2–5x better ROI than non-RLSA ads due to the fact that they are familiar with your brand. The problem is that RLSA, by definition, only targets people who have visited your site.

The solution: forget unbranded search ads and grow your cookie pools by using social media ads. If you can increase your audience sizes by 10x, you can capture 10x more conversions!

Note: This strategy applies only to certain verticals with very high CPCs where there’s a lot of competition and conversion rates are challenging. Get more details in my post, RLSA for Competitive Markets: A Ridiculously Awesome Way Forward in PPC.

8. Increase conversions for pennies with video ads

What’s the point of advertising? To bias people.

Video ads deliver on the two most important components of high conversion rates:

Strong brand recall (lots of ad impressions).
High CTR (high ad engagement).

Video ads on Facebook provide the highest value at the lowest cost. They are so cheap because they have the highest engagement rates.

People love visual content. Video is one of the best ways to bias people so they’ll choose you over some brand they’ve never heard of.

9. You need to change your offer in a BIG way

We’ve looked through billions of dollars of ad spend. It turns out that the highest converting offers have very little to do with conventional “CRO best practices.”

Here’s what actually matters: Your offer needs to be massively different and more valuable from what your competitors are offering.

It doesn’t matter how pretty your fonts and images are. Making small changes to your current bad offer won’t move the needle. It will just result in small changes to your conversion rate.

If you want to dramatically increase conversion rates, then you need a completely different and better offer.

Want to collect more emails? Rather than publishing yet another whitepaper, which has low differentiation, consider creating something people actually want, such as a calculator or tool, which we’ve seen have conversion rates as high as 50 percent.

For example, one way that WordStream offers substantially more value is by providing a keyword suggestion tool. People simply type in a keyword and we email them the full results for free in an Excel file. All they need to do is provide their email.

10. You can totally eliminate your landing pages

OK, here’s the problem. Only 2 percent of people are clicking on your ads, and only 2 percent of those people who reach your landing page are converting. That’s a HUGE dropoff.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could skip this landing page step and capture leads directly from ads? Well it is great, and you can do just that!

Thanks to new mobile technologies, like Facebook Lead Ads, you no longer have to send people to a landing page, which will continue to lose 97 percent of prospects. Only one field is needed — email. You can just eliminate that stage entirely from your funnel.

Summary: Unicorn CRO!

In the end, there are three types of unicorn conversion rate activities that impact conversions:

On-page elements: This is historically where much of the focus goes — on “best practices” that are mostly about making changes to images, copy, fonts, user experience, psychology, etc.
Brand awareness: Even though this isn’t what most people would consider “CRO,” brand familiarity has a huge impact on your conversion rates. People are more likely to buy from brands they know and like.
“Growth hack”: The biggest reason for a low CTR is a boring offer. You need to hit users with the right offer at the right time. (Note: I’m not talking about adding the word “free” to your offer; this may raise your CTR but kill your conversion rate because you’ll have to sort though more unqualified leads. No, I’m talking about changing your offer in a powerful way to make your product more appealing to more people — such as how Dropbox offers you extra storage or Uber will give you a free ride or credits for bringing in new customers.)

There’s much more to CRO than moving around your on-page elements. Why increase your conversion rate by a measly 5 percent when you could increase it by 5x?

Focus on #1 is a minimum. Focus more on #2 and #3 for insanely great returns.

Start thinking more widely about the conversion lifecycle. Think about not just what’s on your landing page, but also what happens before and after they see it — or consider the possibility of eliminating that page altogether.

New technologies such as mobile, remarketing, and RLSA are the future of CRO. The real leverage is less about tweaking on-page elements and more about branding and growth hacking.

Continue reading →

The Finalized MozCon 2016 Agenda & Congratulations MozCon Ignite Speakers!

Posted by EricaMcGillivray

All the puzzle pieces have come together, and MozCon 2016 is ready to rock! Over the past week, I’ve had the pleasure of peeking at our speakers’ outlines, and I cannot wait. Whether you’re looking to for the latest SEO information, ready to tackle mobile’s biggest issues, wanting to push your content to 10x, or generally wanting to absorb everything online marketing, it’s going to be so good.

If you’re reading this post and remembering you haven’t bought your ticket yet, I’ll pause:

Buy your MozCon 2016 ticket!

Now let’s get to the good stuff:

The MozCon 2016 Agenda

Monday

08:00–09:00am
Breakfast

09:00–09:20am
Welcome to MozCon 2016! with Rand Fishkin

Wizard of Moz
@randfish

Rand Fishkin is the founder and former CEO of Moz, co-author of a pair of books on SEO, and co-founder of Inbound.org. Rand’s an un-save-able addict of all things content, search, and social on the web.

09:25–10:10am
Uplevel Your A/B Testing Skills with Cara Harshman

Content Marketer and Storyteller at caraharshman.me
@caraharshman

A/B testing is bread and butter for anyone who aspires to be a data-driven marketer. Cara will share stories about how testers, from one-person agencies to dedicated testing teams, are doing it, and how you can develop your own A/B testing expertise.

Cara Harshman just celebrated her four-year anniversary at Optimizely. Besides managing content strategy, customer case studies, and the blog, she has been known to spend a lot of time writing parody songs for company all-hands meetings.

10:10–10:40am
AM Break

10:45–11:15am
The Big One: Relaunching Your Website with Lauren Vaccarello

VP of Marketing at Box
@laurenv

Change makes us all nervous, and relaunching an entire site can be both thrilling and daunting. Lauren will walk you through how to do it right, from infrastructure and content to design, information architecture, and marketing automation, and share real life triumphs and cautionary tales.

Lauren Vaccarello is a best-selling author and currently runs corporate and field marketing at Box.

11:15–11:45am
The Hidden Talents of Email: Creating Customer-Centric Messages with Justine Jordan

VP Marketing at Litmus
@meladorri

Far from dead, email is a powerful workhorse that belongs in every marketer’s optimization toolkit. Justine will show you how to use email to deliver personal, 1-to-1, and contextually relevant messages that delight your subscribers and encourage engagement.

After mastering table-based layouts in college, Justine Jordan fell in love with the unruly art of email design back in 2007. Currently VP of Marketing at Litmus, Justine and her team are passionate about inspiring fellow marketers to create better email.

11:45am–12:15pm
How to Do Reputation Marketing with Rhea Drysdale

CEO at Outspoken Media
@rhea

Dig into the discipline of reputation marketing and strategy. Rhea will show you what the role of a reputation marketer looks like, what analytics to track, and why everyone should be investing in their organization’s reputation to diversify and reduce marketing spend and other high business costs.

Rhea Drysdale is the Co-Founder and CEO of Outspoken Media, a reputation marketing agency that offers custom solutions for difficult SEO, content, and reputation problems.

12:15–01:45pm
Lunch

01:50–02:20pm
Rethinking Information Architecture for SEO and Content Marketing with Joe Hall

SEO Consultant at Hall Analysis LLC
@joehall

Information Architecture (IA) shapes the way we organize data, think about complex ideas, and build web sites. Joe will provide a new approach to IA for SEO and Content Marketing, based on actionable insights, that SEOs can extract from their own data sets.

Joe Hall is an executive SEO consultant focused on analyzing and informing the digital marketing strategies of select clients through high-level data analysis and SEO audits.

02:20–02:50pm
Breaking Patterns: How to Rewrite the CRO Playbook with Mobile Optimization with Talia Wolf

CMO at Banana Splash
@Taliagw

Best practices lie. Talia shares how to build a mobile conversion optimization strategy and how to turn more mobile visitors into customers based on A/B testing their emotions, decision making process, and behavior.

As CMO at Banana-Splash and Founder of Conversioner, Talia Wolf helps businesses optimize their sites using emotional targeting, consumer psychology, and real-time data to generate more revenues, leads, and sales. Talia is a keynote speaker, author, and Harry Potter fan.

02:50–03:20pm
Taking the Top Spot: How to Earn More Featured Snippets with Rob Bucci

CEO at STAT Search Analytics
@STATrob

Featured snippets (also known as “answer boxes”) are steadily appearing in the first organic SERP spot, providing big opportunities for SEOs able to snag them. Armed with the latest data and analysis, Rob Bucci will take you on a deep dive into the constantly evolving featured snippet and show you how to earn more for your site.

Coming from Vancouver, Canada, Rob Bucci is the CEO of STAT Search Analytics. He especially loves tackling big data challenges in data mining and analysis. When he isn’t doing that, you can find him splashing in the ocean, or taking cookies out of the oven.

03:20–03:50pm
PM Break

Ross Simmonds

03:55–04:25pm
Content Chaos: Building Your Brand through Constant Experiments with Ross Simmonds

Co-Founder at Crate
@TheCoolestCool

A look at how taking risks on content and making investments can work out in a big way for brands and marketers. Whether it’s Reddit, Slideshare, Quora, or Instagram, Ross shares some of the lessons he’s learned from a variety of different content experiments.

Ross Simmonds is a digital marketing consultant and entrepreneur. He’s worked with both startups and Fortune 500 companies and is the co-founder of two startups: Crate and Hustle & Grind.

04:25–5:10pm
Social Media: People First, “Rules” Second with Dana DiTomaso

Partner at Kick Point
@danaditomaso

You can follow all the “rules” about perfect post length, perfect time to post, perfect image size, and everything else and still not see any financial impact from social media. Dana doesn’t think social media should always revolve around community building and group hugs. When you show the right people what they want to see, when they want to see it, you’ll start attributing revenue increases to social media efforts.

Dana DiTomaso is a partner at Kick Point, where she applies marketing into strategies to grow clients’ businesses, in particular to ensure that digital and traditional play well together — separating real solutions from wastes of time (and budget).

07:00–10:00pm
Monday Night #MozCrawl

Catch the pub crawl on Monday night, details coming soon! You’ll be able to explore some of our favorite haunts and make some new friends. Spread across multiple bars, go at your own pace and visit the stops in any order. Each stop is sponsored by a trusted partner and one by us. You must bring your MozCon badge — for free drinks and light appetizers — and your US ID or passport. See you there!

Official MozCrawl stops and partners coming soon.

Tuesday

08:00–09:00am
Breakfast

09:05–09:50am
You Can’t Type a Concept: Why Keywords Still Matter with Dr. Pete Meyers

Marketing Scientist at Moz
@dr_pete

Google is getting better every day at understanding intent and natural language, and the path between typing a search and getting a result is getting more winding. How often are queries interpreted, and how do we do keyword research for search engines that are beginning to understand concepts?

Dr. Pete Meyers is Marketing Scientist for Seattle-based Moz, where he works with marketing and data science on product research and data-driven content. He has spent the past four years building research tools to monitor Google, including the MozCast project.

09:50–10:20am
How to Be Specific: From-The-Trenches Lessons in High-Converting Copy with Joanna Wiebe

Creator and Copywriter at Copy Hackers
@copyhackers

Abstracted benefits, summarized value, and promise-free landing pages keep marketers safe — and conversion rates low. Joanna shares how and why your copy needs to get specific to move people to act.

The original conversion copywriter, Joanna Wiebe is the founder of Copy Hackers and Airstory. She’s optimized copy for Wistia, Buffer, Crazy Egg, Bounce Exchange, and Rainmaker, among others, and spoken at CTA Conf, Business of Software… and now MozCon.

10:20–10:50am
AM Break

10:55–11:15am
Server Log Files & Technical SEO Audits: What You Need to Know with Samuel Scott

Director of Marketing and Communications at Logz.io
@samueljscott

Server log files contain the only data that is 100% accurate in terms of how Google and other search engines crawl your website. Sam will show you what and where to check and what problems you may to need to fix to maximize your rankings and organic traffic.

Samuel Scott is a global marketing speaker and Director of Marketing and Communications for log analysis platform Logz.io, as well as a contributor to TechCrunch and Moz.

11:15–11:35am
Digital Marketing Skill Pivot: Recruiting New Talent with Emma Still

Marketing Lead at Seer Interactive
@mmstll

Torn between your marketing work and hiring? Emma shares how to take the skills you already have, flip them on their head, and find people to hire on your growing marketing teams. Spoiler: they’ve been under your nose the whole time.

Emma Still leads all Marketing efforts for Seer Interactive. Prior to that, she led a team of SEO professionals at Seer, where she leveraged her digital marketing skills to recruit team members to build stronger, more successful digital teams.

11:35–11:55am
Boost SEO Rankings by Removing Internal Links with Alex Stein

SEO Manager at Wayfair
@sonofadiplomat

Learn how to optimize internal link structure for an easy and surprisingly large SEO ranking wins. Alex will cover the math behind how authority flows through your site, how to evaluate links in your global navigation, common mistakes on CMSs, and other tactics to improve your site’s most important pages.

Alex Stein is currently SEO Manager at Wayfair.com, an online home goods store. Follow him on Twitter @sonofadiplomat for all things SEO, and he is, in fact, the son of a diplomat.

11:55am–12:15pm
Improve Your UX & SEO through Navigation Optimization with Robyn Winner

SEO Manager at Hornblower Cruises and Events
@robyn_winner

Learn the tactics for creating a navigation that increases your organic visibility, streamlines user experience, and boosts conversion rates as Robyn walks you through the most important steps to getting your navigation in order.

Robyn Winner is a passionate SEOer with a deep love for data analytics, user experience optimization, content strategy development, and her two adorable cats who fill her life with joy and fur… on everything.

12:15–01:45pm
Lunch

01:50–02:35pm
Local Projects to Boost Your Company and Career with Mike Ramsey

President at Nifty Marketing
@mikeramsey

Mike will walk through the projects that his individual team members took on to improve how they handled local links, reviews, reports, and lots of areas in between.

Mike Ramsey is the President of Nifty Marketing, which works with big brands and small businesses on digital marketing. He talks about running agencies, local search, and Idaho a lot.

02:35–03:05pm
Reimagining Customer Retention and Evangelism with Kristen Craft

Director of Business Development at Wistia
@thecrafty

True customer loyalty and retention lies in the experience people have with your brand. Kristen will show you how to leverage video to optimize for experience, foster loyalty, lower churn, and create evangelists.

As Director of Business Development at Wistia, Kristen Craft loves working with Wistia’s partner community, building connections with other companies that care about video marketing. Kristen holds degrees in business and education from MIT and Harvard.

03:05–03:35pm
PM Break

03:45–04:15pm
Optimizing the Journey to Deliver Radically Relevant Experiences with Rebekah Cancino

Co-Founder and Content Strategy Consultant at Onward
@rebekahcancino

How do you connect your search rankings to your long-term conversion rates? Customer journey mapping. Rebekah will show you how to bridge the gap between SEO, content, design, and UX with an effective framework your team can use to deliver radically relevant digital experiences when and where it matters most.

Rebekah Cancino spent the last decade helping clients, like Aetna and United Way, overcome some of their toughest content problems. Her consultancy offers workshops and training for in-house teams that bridge the gap between content, design, and technical SEO.

04:15–05:00pm
Putting Trust into Domain Authority with Wil Reynolds

CEO/Founder at Seer Interactive
@wilreynolds

Domain Authority is a trust sentiment, not a pure numeric value. Wil will show real examples of sites that build authority and trust by understanding and then solving users’ problems. He’ll also give you practical ways to use Google SERPS to uncover the many ways to best solve these problem.

Wil Reynolds — Director of Strategy, Seer Interactive — founded Seer with a focus on doing great things for its clients, team, and the community. His passion for driving and analyzing the impact that a site’s traffic has on the company’s bottom line has shaped the SEO and digital marketing industries. Wil also actively supports the Covenant House.

07:00–10:00pm
Tuesday Night Networking: MozCon Ignite!

We’re thrilled to bring back MozCon Ignite: A networking and passion-talks event for attendees on Tuesday night from 7–10 pm at Marion Oliver McCaw Hall at Seattle Center. Here you’ll meet-and-greet your fellow Community members and hear them give five-minute talks about their hobbies and passion projects. Last year, we heard about everything from how to cook the perfect hot dog to what it’s like to lose your short-term memory. Leave that notebook in your hotel and settle in for some fun. Enjoy light appetizers, non-alcoholic drinks, and two alcoholic drink tickets on us. It’s going to be a blast! Speakers announced here.

Wednesday

09:00–10:00am
Breakfast

10:05–10:35am
The Irresistible Power of Strategic Storytelling with Kindra Hall

Strategic Storytelling Advisor at Kindra Hall
@kindramhall

Whoever tells the best story wins. In marketing, in business, in life. Going beyond buzzwords, Kindra will reveal specific storytelling strategies to create great content and win customers without a fight.

Kindra Hall is a speaker, author, and storytelling advisor. She works with individuals and brands to help them capture attention by telling better stories.

10:35–11:20am
29 Advanced Google Tag Manager Tips Every Marketer Should Know with Mike Arnesen

Founder and CEO at UpBuild
@mike_arnesen

Google Tag Manager is an incredibly powerful tool and one you’re likely not using to its full potential. Mike will deliver 29 rapid-fire tips that’ll empower you to overcome the tracking challenges of dynamic web apps, build user segments based on website interactions, scale the implementation of structured data, analyze the consumption of rich media, and much more.

Mike Arnesen has been driven by his passion for technical SEO, semantic search, website optimization, and company culture for over a decade. He is the Founder and CEO of UpBuild, a technical marketing agency focusing on SEO, analytics, and CRO.

11:20–11:50am
AM Break

11:55am–12:25pm
Engineering-As-Marketing for Non-Engineers with Tara Reed

CEO at AppsWithoutCode.com
@TaraReed_

Tara shares how to build useful tools like calculators, widgets, and micro-apps to acquire millions of new users, without writing a single line of code.

Tara Reed is a Detroit-based entrepreneur and founder of AppsWithoutCode.com. As a non-technical founder, she builds her own apps, widgets, and algorithms without writing a single line of code.

12:25–12:55pm
Persuasion, Data, & Collaboration: Building Links in 2016 with Kirsty Hulse

Managing Director at Manyminds
@kirsty_hulse

Securing links can be tough, and it’s not about how creative or productive or smart we are, but how persuasive we are. Kirsty will walk you through how to get clients and managers to say yes to your best ideas, how to get interesting, affordable data, how to get experts to collaborate with you, and how to create outreach emails that compel people to cover your campaign.

Kirsty Hulse is the founder of Manyminds Digital, a digital marketing agency made entirely of expert, independent resource. With a decade’s experience, she has defined search strategies for some of the world’s leading brands.

12:55–02:25pm
Lunch

02:30–03:15pm
Indexing on Fire: Google Firebase Native and Web App Indexing with Cindy Krum

CEO and Founder at MobileMoxie, LLC
@suzzicks

In the future, app and web content will be indistinguishable, and Google’s new Firebase platform allows developers to use the same resources to build, market, and maintain apps on all devices, in one place. Cindy will outline how digital marketers can use Firebase to help drive indexing of native and web app content, including Deep Links, Dynamic Links, and Angular JS web apps.

Cindy Krum is the CEO and founder of MobileMoxie, LLC, and author of Mobile Marketing: Finding Your Customers No Matter Where They Are. She brings fresh and creative ideas to her clients, and regularly speaks at US and international digital marketing events.

03:15–03:45pm
Mind Games: Craft Killer Experiences with 7 Lessons from Cognitive Psychology with Sarah Weise

UX Director at Booz Allen Digital Interactive
@weisesarah

How often are you asked to influence people to click a button? Buy a product? Stay on a page? We like to think of ourselves as logical, yet 95% of our decisions are unconscious. Sarah shares how to weave cognitive psychology concepts into your digital experiences. Steal these persuasive triggers to boost engagement, conversions, leads, and even delight.

Sarah Weise is UX Director at Booz Allen Digital Interactive. She has crafted experiences for hundreds of websites, apps, and products. Over the past decade, she has specialized in creative, lean ways to connect with customers and build experiences that matter.

03:45–04:15pm
PM Break

04:20–05:05pm
Link Building’s Tipping Point with Rand Fishkin

Wizard of Moz
@randfish

Links still move the needle — on rankings, traffic, reputation, and referrals. Yet, some SEOs have come to believe that if we “create great content,” links will just appear (and rankings will follow). Rand will dispel this myth and focus on how to build the architecture for a link strategy, alongside some hot new tools and tactics for link acquisition in 2016.

07:00pm–12:00am
Wednesday Night Bash

There ain’t no party like a Moz party! It’s true. We invite all MozCon attendees to join us on Wednesday night until midnight at the Garage for pool, photos, bowling, karaoke, and more. Let’s relax and celebrate with all the new friends we’ve made.

Buy your MozCon 2016 ticket!

Congratulations to our MozCon Ignite speakers!

MozCon Ignite is quickly becoming one of our favorite evening events. Trust me, you don’t want to miss this Tuesday night MozCon event where our community comes together to share ideas, heartwarming tales, hilarious fun, and more about their lives outside of business and marketing. All in 5-minute stories. If you don’t know what Ignite is, check out this 5-minute Ignite talk about what Ignite presentations are. This year, MozCon Ignite will be at McCaw Hall, home of the Seattle opera.

Our lineup (in alphanumerical order):

Help! I Can’t Stop Sweating – Hyperhidrosis with Adam Melson

Seer Interactive
@adammelson

With a love for all things digital, Adam Melson works for Seer Interactive as a team lead and has been there for over eight years. Outside of work, Adam loves running, hanging around his wife and baby, and sweats. A lot. Many people have a sweating problem. He’ll go into that problem and solutions for it.

Life Lessons Learned as a Special Needs Parent with Adrian Vender

Internet Marketing Inc
@adrianvender

Adrian Vender is a seasoned digital marketing and analytics consultant, currently acting as the Director of Analytics at IMI. Adrian has a passion for integrating technical solutions to marketing strategies to provide the best opportunity for campaign optimization. When Adrian decides to give up on working for the day, he can get lost in the world of Reddit or in quality family time.

How Pieces of Paper Can Change Lives with Anneke Kurt Godlewski

Charles E. Boyk Law Offices, LLC
@amkurt

After traveling and studying abroad in the Netherlands, Anneke Kurt Godlewski settled in Toledo not only to be close to family, but also because northwest Ohio has the most interesting and compassionate people, which has helped her career in community-based marketing and PR.

Anneke has been called an excellent cook (she’s just a great recipe-reader!), and she loves to take photographs, read, write, and give. She’s also a freelance writer and currently working on a memoir called The Curvy Catholic, which chronicles keeping faith after bad dates, self-acceptance issues, and crazy motherhood.

Prison and a Girl that Loves Puppies with Caitlin Boroden

DragonSearch
@caitlinboroden

Caitlin Boroden is a Senior Digital Marketing Strategist at DragonSearch in the beautiful Hudson Valley, NY. She is fascinated by SEO, photography, puppies, and has a slight addiction to Reddit.

My Year of Fuck It! with Daisy Quaker

AMSOIL INC.
@daisyquaker

Daisy Quaker is an Online Marketing Manager at AMSOIL INC. She leads in-house SEO, online advertising, marketing automation, and lead nurturing efforts. She moonlights as co-founder at NezLab. NezLab specializes in Online Advertising (AdWords) audits that help clients maximize the return on their online ad campaigns. She also makes a mean curry and tries to get seven hours of sleep every night.

A Plane Hacker’s Guide to Cheap *Luxury* Travel with Ed Fry

Hull.io
@edfryed

Ed Fry is a London-based marketer, employee #1 at inbound.org, and has just joined Hull.io as their first marketer. Outside of marketing, one of his favorite past times involves indulging in tea and scones at 35,000 feet.

Embracing Awkward: The Tale of a 5′ 10″ 6th Grader with Hannah Cooley

Seer Interactive
@hccooley

Hannah Cooley is an SEO manager at Seer Interactive in San Diego. (Yes, she knows Wil Reynolds. No, she doesn’t have his personal phone number.) She may have been the most awkward 6th grader on earth, a phase that never quite went away.

Hornets, Soba, & Friends: A Race in Japan with Kevin Smythe

Moz
@KevSmythe

Kevin Smythe is a trail runner based in Seattle. When not running in the mountains, he’s the controller at Moz, crunching numbers to provide balance to his life.

Wooly Bits: Exploring the Binary of Yarn with Lindsay Dayton LaShell

Diamond + Branch Marketing Group
@lindsaydayton

Lindsay Dayton LaShell is an experienced digital marketer, content strategist, and the founder of Diamond + Branch Marketing Group. She wishes she had six arms so that she could drink beer, scritch her dog, answer email, and knit a sock at the same time.

Finding Myself in Fiction: LGBTQUIA Stories with Lisa Hunt

Moz
@gentlethorns

Lisa Hunt is a Moz Helpster: the first to be hired outside of the U.S. and part of our small UK team. Before moving into support, she worked in retail as the manager of a bookshop. She was very disappointed to learn that they don’t teach you to read in your first year at primary school and insisted that her mum teach her instead.

Is Your Family Time for Sale? with Michael Cottam

Visual Itineraries
@Michael512

Michael Cottam is an independent SEO consultant from Bend, Oregon. Michael’s a full-time single dad of 9-year old Benjamin, and when not saving clients from the wrath and whim of Google, he takes Ben traveling around the world and exploring the great outdoors.

How to Start an Underground Restaurant in Your Home with Nadya Khoja

Venngage Inc.
@nadyakhoja

Nadya Khoja is the Director of Marketing for Venngage and online infographic maker. When she is not working on promoting the tool, she hosts trade-based dinner parties in her apartment in Toronto.

Flood Survival: Lessons from the Streets of ATL with Sarah Lively

Nebo Agency
@sarahinatlanta

Sarah Lively is a Senior SEO Specialist at Nebo Agency where she specializes in building online reputations and helping clients perfect their digital strategies. She is also considered to be an amateur meteorologist and spends most of her spare time studying rain patterns and hiding from storms.

How a Cartoon Saved My Life with Steve Hammer

RankHammer
@Armondhammer

Steve Hammer is the co-founder and president of RankHammer, the 2015 US Search Awards small agency of the year. He’s best known for his love of Adwords scripts and eating better than most anyone in Internet marketing.

It’s going to be a blast! Thank you to everyone who tossed their hats in the ring. Seriously, it takes courage to try.

Hope to see you all at MozCon! Make sure to buy your ticket, as we sell out in advance every year.

Buy your MozCon 2016 ticket!

Continue reading →

Digital Strategy Basics: The What, the Why, & the How

Posted by CraigBradford

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Strategy is hard enough if you understand it. It’s even harder if you don’t.

If you understand it, you realize it’s made up of many moving parts. If you don’t, the best you’ll come up with is some version of operational efficiency: building more links, writing more blog posts, making more video. Those activities aren’t strategies — and if you fail to differentiate your plan, you’ll find yourself forever chasing those who started before you, or falling behind better-funded competitors.

I enjoy strategy, both on the academic and theoretical side of things and in more practical opportunities helping our clients at Distilled. Below are some of the things I’ve learned along the way that you might find useful, especially if you’re a business owner, setting up marketing strategies, or a consultant. If you’re in more of an individual contributor role, you’ll receive the background and basis you need to understand how it all fits together and create a personal development plan towards building strategy.

Read on and you’ll have a better understanding of what strategy means, what type of strategy you need and how to make good decisions. For each section, I’ve included a reading list too.

What is strategy?

Good strategies are compounds, not elements.

Start here:

A good starting point for understanding strategy is an infamous article by Michael E. Porter – “What is Strategy?” It’s quite academic, but covers a lot of the key points. I recommend reading it a few times; it’s worth it.

To understand what strategy is, I like to use a chemical analogy of elements and compounds. A compound is a combination of two or more elements. In the case of a strategy, the activities would be the elements and the strategy would be the compound. I like this analogy for a few reasons:

Reverse-engineering a compound can be challenging

Many people fall into the trap of trying to copy a competitor’s strategy. This is bad for a number of reasons, but one in particular that I’d like to highlight: even if you think you know what a competitor’s strategy is from the outside, it can be very hard to copy successfully unless you know all of the individual details.

Much like a chemical reaction, different quantities of the same elements combined in different ways can produce very different results. Often, when people try to copy a strategy, they’re really just copying an element or activity.

Compounds are only as strong as their weakest link

Different strategies take different levels of energy to crack. In What is Strategy?, this idea is referred to as “activity systems” and “fit.” The example used is Southwest Airlines. Some people would try and describe a strategy as a slogan: “Southwest Airlines services price- and convenience-sensitive customers.” That might be true, but there’s not anything particularly advantageous about that idea. The competitive advantage comes from how they integrate:

“Through fast turnarounds at the gate of only 15 minutes, Southwest is able to keep planes flying longer hours than rivals and provide frequent departures with fewer aircraft. Southwest does not offer meals, assigned seats, interline baggage checking, or premium classes of service. Automated ticketing at the gate encourages customers to bypass travel agents, allowing Southwest to avoid their commissions. A standardized fleet of 737 aircraft boosts the efficiency of maintenance.”

This is what those individual pieces look like as part of a system:

Click to open a larger version in a new tab

The more stable the compound, the slower it reacts

A stable compound with lots of bonds, while strong and hard to copy, is slow to adapt if the market changes unexpectedly. Change forces managers to dismantle their existing resource systems and reassemble them in new strategic positions.

“For example, Liz Claiborne, an apparel company, relied on a positioning strategy in which production, distribution, marketing, design, presentation and sales resources were all tightly linked. But when the industry changed, the company’s relationships with department stores were disrupted. In an effort to adapt, Claiborne executives changed resources such as their “no reordering” process that had antagonized department stores. But since this process was synergistically entwined with other resources like overseas logistics and distant manufacturing locations, the “no reordering” process could not be undone without damaging system coherence. Financial performance sank precipitously. Only after Claiborne executives dismantled their existing resources and started reconnecting new ones did positive performance begin to return.”
– Source

All of the above is to say that the key to an effective and sustainable strategy is to focus on the integration of activities. Operational efficiency alone isn’t a strategy. A good way to sanity-check this is by asking why you’re doing an activity.

I like this slide from fellow Distiller Rob Ousbey, which puts some of theory into context in marketing strategy:

Making marketing strategy easier

What type of strategy do you need?

Start here:

Which Strategy When?

The type of marketing strategy you use can (and should) change as the business requirements change. Two questions that are a good place to start:

How predictable is your market?
How malleable is the market (can you influence demand, needs, etc.)?

Based on your answers to those questions, there are choices. I like the wording from “Which Strategy When?”:

Position (fortress) – Positional-based strategies are best when you’re trying to defend a long-term position in the market. Strategies in this space involve deepening the activities and resources that you have within a particular area. This is best in markets where there isn’t a lot of change.
Leveraging strategy – Leveraging strategies are useful in markets where you have some influence on how the market moves and there’s less predictability. A chess analogy is a good one, since it’s not just about having the right pieces; it also requires making smart moves. A recent example that I love is the example of Google using Deepmind AI to reduce data center costs by 15%. That’s a pretty big deal.
Opportunity (surfing) – Opportunity strategies can be compared to surfing and waves; it’s hard to predict when they’ll come or how long they’ll last. Timing is important, and occasionally you get a good one. Being set up in a way that allows you to capitalize on opportunities as they arise is crucial.

It’s possible, probably recommended, to have some mix of all three. I like the graph that our R&D team use to explain this, shown below. The idea is that there are always trade-offs between the chance of success and reward.

Click to open a bigger version in a new tab

Picking a strategy and making decisions

Start here:

Closely related to the difficulty of strategy is the necessity to make choices. Strategy forces you to make decisions and explicitly cut off options. This can be difficult for a number of reasons. I talked about this in depth in my SearchLove Boston presentation, Creating a Digital Strategy:

Final - Craig Bradford - Searchlove Boston - Creating Digital Strategy copy (Craig’s MacBook Pro's conflicted copy 2015-04-30).001.jpeg

One of the hardest things about strategy? Resisting the urge to do it all. The most obvious way this happens is by getting distracted by competitors. In the book The Secrets of Consulting, the first chapter introduces the idea of the law of strawberry jam: “the wider you spread it, the thinner it gets,” which is a nice way of saying that you can’t do it all. Every service or feature you add to your business has a cost of some kind. Trade-offs are a critical part of making sure your strategy is sustainable, because they protect from competitors trying to straddle multiple markets.

To go back to the previous example of Southwest Airlines, someone that tried to spread it far and thick was Continental Lite. By trying to copy Southwest and offer a low-cost airline solution while still trying to compete as a full-service airline:

“The airline dubbed the new service Continental Lite. It eliminated meals and first-class service, increased departure frequency, lowered fares, and shortened turnaround time at the gate. Because Continental remained a full-service airline on other routes, it continued to use travel agents and its mixed fleet of planes and to provide baggage checking and seat assignments.”
Source: What is Strategy?

If you haven’t made some trade-offs, your position probably isn’t sustainable and is open to imitation.

“Trade-offs ultimately grounded Continental Lite. The airline lost hundreds of millions of dollars, and the CEO lost his job. Its planes were delayed leaving congested hub cities or slowed at the gate by baggage transfers. Late flights and cancellations generated a thousand complaints a day. Continental Lite could not afford to compete on price and still pay standard travel-agent commissions, but neither could it do without agents for its full-service business. The airline compromised by cutting commissions for all Continental flights across the board. Similarly, it could not afford to offer the same frequent-flier benefits to travelers paying the much lower ticket prices for Lite service. It compromised again by lowering the rewards of Continental’s entire frequent-flier program. The results: angry travel agents and full-service customers.”
Source: What is Strategy?

Other academic theories as to why copying competitors is a bad idea are covered in the Innovator’s Dilemma, which I also recommend reading.

The short version is that when competitors copy each other, the only person that wins is the customer. Over the long term, the more competitors converge, the more they look like each other and customers default to price to help choose between options. This drives prices down and squeezes margins.

To draw comparisons to the search space, I see this taking place in processes like keyword research. So many companies make a big list of keywords, then churn out average content that looks the same as every other article online about that topic. Don’t waste your time.

Advice for choosing a digital marketing strategy

Start here:

Don’t turn it into an optimization problem. There’s more than one right answer in the majority of cases. I like the advice Scott McNealy gives (he was a co-founder of Sun Microsystems and its CEO for 22 years). When asked how he makes decisions, he said:

“It’s important to make good decisions. But I spend much less time and energy worrying about ‘making the right decision’ and much more time and energy ensuring that any decision I make turns out right.”
Source

What an amazing attitude! You can see how this applies at the later stage in strategy. Once you’ve gone through all of the possible scenarios, validated the ideas, and narrowed it down to the last couple, this is the stage where analysis paralysis takes effect and people naturally want to turn strategy into planning. Just pick one and focus on making sure it turns out a success. Another way to think about this: strategy is about placing bets and shortening odds of success. Remember that you can course-correct; strategy isn’t sniping. You can take more than one shot and iterate, so don’t be afraid to change.

With that in mind, I’ll wrap it up. Hopefully this was useful to some people. For a deeper dive into this, take a look at my SearchLove presentation, Creating Your Digital Strategy , which covers all of the above and in a more practical, process-driven way.

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