seo

Posted by ksaleh

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

[Estimated read time: 8 minutes]

Your website’s copy is far more important than you realize.

Besides design, copy forms the foundation of your brand. How you describe yourself and your products leaves a palpable impression on your customers. Whether customers think of your brand as bold, futuristic, quirky, or cute depends largely on your copy.

Web copy is also crucial for conveying product information. Your customers want to know how your product works and how it will change their lives.

Unfortunately, far too many e-commerce stores spend hours optimizing their website’s design and layout but completely skip over the copy.

The result? Poor conversion rates.

The relationship between copy and conversion rates

If you’re running an e-commerce store, a SaaS startup, or a marketing agency, the three of your biggest challenges are:

1. Informing visitors about the store’s products and their unique features and benefits
2. Evoking emotions that drive action and persuade the visitor
3. Fostering a long-lasting relationship by emphasizing the brand’s values (and how they align with their customers’ values)

You’ll realize that you can meet all of these challenges through smart copywriting. In fact, it isn’t unusual for improving a website’s copy to increase its conversion rates by 2x, 3x, or even 4x.

For example:

• FreckleTime increased the conversion rate for its homepage by 2.4x simply by changing its copy.
• Invesp increased conversion rates for BlogTalk Radio and Oreilly by over 90% by focusing on copy and value proposition in the copy throughout the site.
• Encyclopedia Britannica increased conversion rates by 103% by changing its sales page copy.

There is a distinct, direct relationship between copy and conversion rates. Better copy, whether it’s on landing pages or product descriptions, leads to better conversion rates.

The obvious question is: how can you improve your e-commerce copy?

Here are four actionable tactics you can use right away to get better conversions.

1. Write for your target personas

Sketching out a target customer profile based on your brand’s personas will help you craft laser-targeted, high-converting copy.

Nearly all your customers will belong to one or more of these four persona types:

• Logical persona: This persona type is logical, methodical, and detail-oriented. A customer with a logical persona will carefully scrutinize your offer before hitting the “Buy” button. He will also shop around for better deals. Roughly 40–45% of the audience falls into this category.
• Impulsive persona: An impulsive persona type is spontaneous, risk-oriented, and optimistic. This persona is more prone to making quick decisions and will focus on the benefits when buying. Roughly 30–35% of the audience would be characterized as an impulsive persona.
• Caring persona: A caring persona is concerned deeply about the well-being of others. This persona will consider your offer only when it helps others as well. Instead of looking at the product and its features, those having caring personas will also browse through your About Us page to see what kind of company you run. Roughly 15–20% of the population falls into this category.
• Aggressive persona: An aggressive persona is rational and focused on self-improvement. This persona holds herself to a high standard of integrity and will expect the same from you. Roughly 5–7% of the population has this persona.

How to write for each customer persona

What kind of copy you’ll use for each persona will depend largely on what category the persona falls into. A logical persona type will respond very differently to your copy than an impulsive persona type.

Try following some of these guidelines for your persona-types:

Logical persona

• Emphasize features
• Include extensive details, especially of the technology behind your products
• Avoid fluff and vague language

Example: Take a look at the product descriptions on Canada-Goose.com. This is a brand that sells expensive but high-quality outerwear for extreme cold weather conditions.

Canada Goose customers care about the quality and construction of the clothes. The copy reflects this, focusing on features and underlying technology.

Impulsive persona

• Focus on benefits
• Use rich imagery and power words
• Weave a story around your product

Example: Read the product descriptions on the J Peterman catalog. This brand sells the story behind each product.

The details are sparse and the copy uses rich imagery and metaphors to appeal to its target audience.

Caring persona

• Show how your products benefit others, both within product descriptions and on unique pages (About Us, mission statement, etc.).
• Emphasize the environmental or social benefits of your products.

Example: On Patagonia.com, each product page has a separate section detailing the product’s supply chain. This is in line with Patagonia’s mission statement that promotes sustainable living and environmentally-friendly policies.

Aggressive persona

• Focus on how the product will help the customer improve himself/herself
• Emphasize the underlying technology, especially how it relates to performance improvements
• Focus on your store or your brand’s heritage and history to establish credibility

Example: Most fitness brands fall under this category (see the copy for Keen, a brand of hiking footwear):

The copy lists out the technology used in the shoe and tells the reader how it improves performance.

Ideally, you want to use copy that targets all of these personas on every page. If that’s not possible, you should at least try to figure out the dominant customer persona for each product or category, and use the appropriate copy.

2. Use power words and action words

Staggering. Smashing. Stunning.

These are all examples of power words — words that evoke strong emotions in your readers.

Power words are rarely used in everyday speech (recall the last time you used “staggering” or “sensational” in a casual conversation). This makes them stand out all the more when used in e-commerce copy.

Using power words is the easiest way to elevate your copy beyond the ordinary. A sprinkle of these words can turn boring product descriptions into emotion-generating copy that turns browsers into customers, customers into fans.

See how Firebox uses power words in its product descriptions:

These simple words turn ordinary copy into something far more compelling.

So what are power words like?

Here’s a short list of power words that are particularly useful for e-commerce copywriting tasks.

Amazing	Audacious	Authentic	Backed	Best-Selling
Banned	Breathtaking	Crazy	Caution	Cheerful
Crush	Cheap	Certified	Censored	Controversial
Confession	Dumb	Defying	Delight	Dare
Discount	Exciting	Epic	Eye-opening	Explosive
Extra	Economical	Fortune	Free	Frenzy
Frugal	Forbidden	Faithful	Fearless	Flirt
Grateful	Greatest	Guaranteed	Hack	Happy
Hero	Hope	Hidden	Inexpensive	Incredible
Ironclad	Insider	Joy	Jaw-dropping	Jackpot
Jubilant	Looming	Legendary	Luxurious	Lifetime
Little-known	Magic	Mind-blowing	Miraculous	Massive
Marked-down	Money	Mystery	Naughty	No obligations
No questions asked	Official	Outlaw	Pluck	Provocative
Pummel	Passionate	Profit	Prize	Private
Proven	Protected	Priceless	Risk-free	Remarkable
Rich	Reduced	Researched	Refund	Reliable
Secret	Select	Secure	Savings	Skyrocket
Soaring	Surging	Smashing	Staggering	Stunning
Surprising	Tank	Targeted	Triumphant	Tantalizing
Thrilling	Tested	Unauthorized	Uplifting	Unconditional
Victory	Value	Verified	Whopping	Wonderful

Use action words

Power words evoke emotion, but they don’t drive readers to take action.

For that, you need to use action words in your copy.

These are simply words that describe an action: add, act, take, get, etc.

Let’s take another look at the Firebox product description page:

Action words make your copy sound more energetic and active. They also subtly tell the reader to take some action.

You don’t have to use them excessively. Just pepper them in whenever you want to hammer in a feature/benefit or get your readers to take some action.

Here’s a list of some action words you can use in many different types of copywriting tasks:

Add	Act	Buy	Break	Bite
Begin	Collect	Catch	Call	Create
Choose	Drink	Drive	Draw	Eat
Exude	Feel	Find	Fly	Grow
Go	Give	Guard	Hold	Hurry
Jump	Know	Kick	Love	Listen
Locate	Make	Measure	Multiply	Mix
Print	Prepare	Play	Pull	Push
Read	Run	Ride	Ring	Shout
Sell	Shake	Study	See	Speak
Say	Take	Think	Text	Try
Taste	Tell	Test	Understand

3. Use the right formatting

Your website visitors don’t read your pages.

They scan.

According to eye-tracking studies conducted by Nielsen, people scan e-commerce pages in an F-shaped pattern:

That is, they first look to the left column, then to the right, then drag their eyes down the page.

This means that users won’t read your copy — however remarkable it may be — unless it’s formatted correctly.

Follow these guidelines for improved e-commerce copy formatting:

• Follow an information hierarchy. The most important content should go in the first couple of paragraphs. Less important information should be further down the page.
  
  Take a look at this product page on NewEgg.com. It lists the most important things about the product, including availability, seller name and key features, at the top of the page:

• Follow a two-column layout, with the product image on the left and critical product details on the right. People are already used to this convention and will naturally look at the image on the left first, followed by the text on the right.
  
  Overstock.com uses this layout on its product pages:

• Use bullet points for the text to the right of the image (i.e., the most important content). You can use paragraphs for longer product descriptions.
  
  For example, Amazon mentions each product’s top features in the form of a bullet list at the top of the page:

• Use information-rich headers to organize the content (such as key features and sizing information). Users will scan these to find what they’re looking for as they scroll down the page.
  
  NewEgg organizes this information in separate tabs:

BestBuy’s product pages follow a similar structure, but with even better content organization:

• Use keywords in your copy. Users will quickly scan your copy to figure out details about your product. Adding keywords such as size and price will help them scan your page faster.
  
  Great examples of this can be found on Target’s product pages, including this one:

Keep these tips in mind when you write your copy. Otherwise, you just might end up creating impeccable content that no one reads.

4. Don’t forget unique pages

Your homepage, About Us page, mission statement, and the like comprise your site’s unique pages.

Unlike product or category pages (which usually follow a template), each of these pages has distinct content, copy, and design.

Optimizing the copy on your unique pages can have a noticeable impact on conversion rates. For one, these pages help customers understand you and your brand. If you can describe your brand in a way that resonates with your target customers, you’ll be able to sell more products at better prices.

Tell a story through your unique pages

When writing copy for unique pages, the standard rules apply: Use power words and evocative imagery.

At the same time, you also want to make sure that your copy weaves a story about your brand.

ThinkGeek does the same by boldly stating its manifesto on its About page:

Emphasize your brand’s history and values

Another way to use copywriting to improve brand perception is to share your brand’s history and values on your unique pages.

For example, Patagonia.com has a separate page for its mission statement:

Tell your brand’s story

Your brand is more than just a collection of products. There are real people with real stories behind the business who come together to create all your amazing products.

Highlighting these on a separate “Our Story” page is a great idea.

For example, take a look at how Saddleback Leather does it:

Whatever tactic you use to emphasize your brand’s history and its values, the copy on these pages should reflect your brand.

Key takeaways

Copywriting and conversion rate are inherently related. Good web copy is closely correlated with good conversion rates. Using power words, appropriate formatting, and persona-targeted copywriting can help you drastically improve the copy of your e-commerce website and, by proxy, its conversion rates.

Has your brand made a commitment to enhancing conversion rates with effective copywriting?

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Posted by Dr-Pete

For the past couple of weeks, Google has been testing a major change to the width of the left-hand column, expanding containers from 512 pixels to 600 (a 17% increase). Along with this change, Google has increased the available length of result titles:

This naturally begs the question — how many characters can we fit into a display title now? When Google redesigned SERPs in 2014, I recommended a limit of 55 characters. Does a 17% bigger container mean we’ve got 9 more characters to work with?

Not so fast, my friend…

This is where things get messy. It’d be great if we could just count the characters and be done with it, but things are never quite that easy. We’ve got three complications to consider:

(1) Character widths vary

Google uses the Arial font for result titles, and Arial is proportional. In other words, different characters occupy different amounts of space. A lower- case ‘l’ is going to occupy much less space than an upper-case ‘W’. The total width is measured in pixels, not characters, and the maximum amount you can fit in that space depends on what you’re trying to say.

In our 10,000-keyword tracking set, the title below is the longest cut or uncut display title we measured, clocking in at 77 characters:

This title has 14 i’s and lowercase l’s, 10 lowercase t’s, and 3 narrow punctuation marks, creating a character count bonanza. To count this title and say that yours can be 77 characters would be dangerously misleading.

(2) Titles break at whole words

Prior to this change, Google was breaking words at whatever point the cut-off happened. Now, they seem to be breaking titles at whole words. If the cut happens in the middle of a long word, the remaining length might be considerably shorter. For example, here’s a word that’s just not going to fit into your display title twice, and so the cut comes well short of the full width:

(3) Google is appending brands

In some cases, Google is cutting off titles and then appending the brand to the end. Unfortunately, this auto-appended brand text still occupies space and counts against your total allowance. This was the shortest truncated display title in our data set, measuring only 34 words pre-cut:

The brand text “- The Homestead” was appended by Google and is not part of the sites <TITLE> tag. The next word in the title was “Accommodations”, so the combination of the brand add-on and long word made for a very truncated title.

Data from 10,000 searches

Examples can be misleading, so we wanted to take a deeper dive. We pulled all of the page-1 display titles from the 10,000-keyword MozCast tracking set, which ends up being just shy of 90,000 titles. Uncut titles don’t tell us much, since they can be very short in some cases. So, let’s focus on the titles that got cut. Here are the character lengths (not counting ” …”) of the cut titles:

We’ve got a fairly normal distribution (skewed a little to the right) with both a mean and median right around 63. So, is 63 our magic number? Not quite. Roughly half the cut titles in our data set had less than 63 characters, so that’s still a fairly risky length.

The trick is to pick a number where we feel fairly confident that the title won’t be cut off, on average (a guaranteed safe zone for all titles would be far too restrictive). Here are a few select percentages of truncated titles that were above a certain character length:

• 55% of cut titles >= 63 (+2) characters
• 91% of cut titles >= 57 (+2) characters
• 95% of cut titles >= 55 (+2) characters
• 99% of cut titles >= 48 (+2) characters

In research, we might stick to a 95% or 99% confidence level (note: this isn’t technically a confidence interval, but the rationale is similar), but I think 90% confidence is a decent practical level. If we factor in the ” …”, that gives us about +2 characters. So, my recommendation is to keep your titles under 60 characters (57+2 = 59).

Keep in mind, of course, that cut-offs aren’t always bad. A well placed “…” might actually increase click-through rates on some titles. A fortuitous cut-off could create suspense, if you trust your fortunes to Google:

Now that titles are cut at whole words, we also don’t have to worry about text getting cut off at confusing or unfortunate spots. Take, for example, the dangerous predicament of The International Association of Assemblages of Assassin Assets:

Prior to the redesign, their titles were a minefield. Yes, that contributed nothing to this post, but once I had started down that road, it was already too late.

So, that’s it then, right?

Well, no. As Google evolves and adapts to a wider range of devices, we can expect them to continue to adjust and test display titles. In fact, they’re currently test a new, card-style format for desktop SERPs where each result is boxed and looks like this:

We’re not even entirely sure that the current change is permanent. The narrower format is still appearing for some people under some conditions. If this design sticks, then I’m comfortable saying that keeping your title length under 60 characters will prevent the majority of cut-offs.

Note: People have been asking when we’ll update our title tag tool. We’re waiting to make sure that this design change is permanent, but will try to provide an update ASAP. Updates and a link to that tool will appear in this post when we make a final decision.

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Posted by Tom-Anthony

[Estimated read time: 8 minutes]

Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPAs) are capable of radically disrupting the way we search for and consume information on the Internet. The convergence of several trends and technologies has resulted in a new interface through which people will be able to interact with your business. This will have a dramatic impact — if your long-term marketing/business plan doesn’t account for IPAs, you may be in the same boat as those people who said they didn’t need a website in the early 2000s.

Your website is an API to your business

If we look to pre/early Internet, then the primary interface to most businesses was the humble phone. Over the phone you could speak to a business and find out what they had in stock, when they’d be open, whether they had space for your reservation, etc., and then you could go on to order products, ask for directions, or place reservations. The phone was an interface to your business, and your phone line and receptionist were your “API” — the way people interacted with your business.

As the Internet matured and the web gained more traction, it increasingly became the case that your website empowered users to do lots of those same things that they previously did via the phone. They could get information and give you money, and your website became the new “API” for your business, allowing users to interact with it. Notice this didn’t necessitate the death of the phone, but lots of the requests that previously came via phone now came via the web, and there was also a reduction in friction for people wanting to interact with your business (they didn’t have to wait for the phone line to be free, or speak to an actual human!).

Since then, the web has improved as technologies and availability have improved, but fundamentally the concept has stayed the same. Until now.

The 5 tech giants have all built an intelligent personal assistant

Intelligent Personal Assistants apps such as Google Now, Siri, Cortana, and Facebook M — as well as the newer appliances such as Amazon Echo, the new Google Home, and the rumored Apple Siri hardware — are going to have a profound effect on the way people search, the types of search they do, and the way they consume and act upon the results of those searches.

New entries, such as Hound and Viv, show that intelligent personal assistants are growing beyond just something phone makers are adding as a feature, and are becoming a core focus.

In the last couple of years we’ve discussed a variety of new technologies and their impact on search; a number of these are all feeding into the rise of these personal assistants.

Trend 1: More complex searches

The days of searches just being a keyword are long since over. The great improvements of natural language processing, driven by improvements in machine learning, have meant that conversational search has become a thing and we have seen Hummingbird and RankBrain becoming building blocks of how Google understands and handles queries.

Furthermore, implicit signals have also seen the rise of anticipatory queries with Google Now leading the way in delivering you search results based off of your context without you needing to ask.

Contributing technologies & trends:

• Implicit Signals
• Natural Language
• Conversational Search
• Hummingbird & RankBrain

Watch this video of Will Critchlow speak about these trends to hear more.

Trend 2: More complex results

Search results have moved on from 10 blue links to include the Knowledge Graph, with entities and direct answers being a familiar part of any search result. This has also meant that, since the original Siri, we’ve seen a search interface that doesn’t even do a web search for many queries but instead gives data-driven answers right there in the app. The earliest examples were queries for things like weather, which would turn up a card right there in the app.

Finally, the rise of conversational search has made possible complex compound queries, where queries can be revised and extended to allow the sorting, filtering, and refining of searches in a back and forth fashion. This phase of searching used to be something you did by reviewing the search results manually and sifting through them, but now search engines understand (rather than just index) the content they discover and can do this step for you.

Contributing technologies & trends:

• Entities / Direct Answers
• Faceted search
• Data driven answers

You may like Distilled’s Searchscape which has information and videos on these various trends.

Trend 3: Bots, conversational UI, and on-demand UIs

More recently, with the increased interest in bots (especially since Facebook’s F8 announcement), we can see a rise in the number of companies investing in various forms of conversational UI (see this article and this one).

Bots and conversational UI provide a new interface which lends itself to all of the benefits provided by natural language processing and ways of presenting data-driven answers.

Note that a conversational UI isn’t limited to purely a spoken or natural language interface, but can also provide an “on demand” UI for certain situations (see this example screenshot from Facebook, or the Siri/Fandango cinema ticket example below).

Contributing technologies & trends:

• Conversational UI
• Bots
• On-demand UIs within the IPA interface

Trend 4: 3rd-party integration

Going back to the first versions of Siri or Google Now, there were no options for 3rd-party developers to integrate. They could only do a limited set of actions based on what Apple or Google had explicitly programmed in.

However, over time, the platforms have opened up more and more, such that apps can now provide functionality within the intelligent personal assistant on the same app.

Google Now, Amazon Echo, Cortana, and Siri (not quite — but rumored to be coming in June) all provide SDKs (software development kits), allowing 3rd-party developers to integrate into these platforms.

This is an opportunity for all of us integrate directly into the next generation search interface.

What’s the impact of all this?

More searches as friction reduces

Google published an (under-reported) paper on some of the research and work that went into Google Now, which when combined with their daily information needs study indicates how hard they’re trying to encourage and enable users to do searches that previously have not been possible.

The ability of intelligent personal assistants to fulfil more complex search queries (and of “always listening” search appliances like Amazon Echo and Google Home) to remove the friction of doing searches that were previously “too much work” means we’ll see a rise in search queries that simply wouldn’t have happened previously. So rather than cannibalizing web-based searches that came before, a large segment of the queries to IPAs will be wholly new types of searches.

Web rankings get bypassed, go straight to the top

As more and more people search via personal assistants, and with personal assistants trying to deliver answers directly in their interface, we’ll see an increasing number of searches that completely bypass web search rankings. As 3rd-party integration becomes more widespread, there will be an increasing number of dynamic queries that personal assistants can handle directly (e.g. “where can I buy The Martian?,” “flights to Berlin,” or “order a pepperoni pizza”).

This is a massive opportunity — it does not matter how many links and how much great content your competitor has to help them in “classical SEO” if you’ve integrated straight into the search interface and no web search is ever shown to the user. You can be the only search result shown.

The classic funnel gets compressed; checking out via IPAs

This part is probably the most exciting, from my perspective, and I believe is the most important from the impact it’ll have on users and businesses. People have modeled “the funnel” in a variety of different ways over time, but one common way to look at it is:

The search is separate to the browsing/checkout process, and that checkout process happens via a website. Apps have had some impact on this classic picture, but so far it hasn’t been a big part.

However, conversational search/UI combined with the ability for developers to integrate directly into IPAs opens up a huge opportunity to merge the interfaces for the search step and the steps previously fulfilled by the website (browsing and checking out). There are already examples of the funnel being compressed:

In this example, using Siri, you can see I was able to search for movies playing nearby, pick a particular movie and cinema, then pick a particular showing and, finally, I can click to buy, which takes me to the Fandango app. I am most of the way through the checkout process before I leave the intelligent personal assistant app interface. How long until I can do that final step and actually check out inside the personal assistant?

Integrating with intelligent personal assistant apps currently normally happens via the app model (i.e. you build an app that provides some functionality to the assistant), but how long until we see the possibility to integrate without needing to build an app yourself — the intelligent personal assistant will provide the framework and primary interface.

Summary

Intelligent Personal Assistants bring together all the recent developments in search technology, and as integration options improve, we will see an increasing number of queries/transactions go end-to-end entirely inside the personal assistant itself.

People will conduct searches, review data, and make purchases entirely inside that one interface, completely bypassing web search (already happening) and even checking out inside the personal assistant (within the next 12 months) and thus bypassing websites.

IPAs represent an absolutely massive opportunity, and it would be easy to underestimate the impact they will have (in the same way many people underestimated mobile initially). If you’ve been on the fence about building an app, you should re-evaluate that decision, with a focus on apps being the way they can integrate into intelligent personal assistants.

What do you think? I’d love to have a discussion in the comments about how everyone thinks this will play out and how it might change the landscape of search.

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Posted by randfish

Moving your customers down the funnel from awareness to conversion can make for a winding and treacherous road. Until you fully research and understand the buying process inside and out, it’s far too easy to make a misstep. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand steps back to take a higher-level look at the path to customer purchase, recommending workflows and tools to help you forge your own way.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we’re going to chat about the path to customer purchase and how to research that path. The reason this is so critical is because we have to understand a few things like our content and conversion strategy around where do we need to be, what content we need to create, how to position ourselves, our product, our brand, and how to convert people. We can’t know this stuff until we truly understand the buying process.

We’ve done a lot of Whiteboard Fridays that involve very, very tactically specific items in one of the steps in these, like: how to understand the awareness funnel and how to build your social media audience; or how to get into the consideration process and understand how you compare against your competition; or how to convert people at the very end of the buying cycle on a landing page.

But I want to take a step back because, as I’ve talked to a lot of you out there and heard comments from you, I think that this bigger picture of, “How do I understand this research process,” is something we need to address.

Buyers: Who are they?

So let’s start with: How do we understand who our buyers actually are, and what’s the research process we can use for that? My general sense is that we need to start with interviews with a few people, with salespeople if you’re working with a team that has sales, with customer service, especially if you’re working with a team that has customer service folks who talk to lots of their audience, and potentially with your target demographic and psychographic audience. Demographic audience would be like: Where are they, what gender are they, and what age group are they? Psychographics would be things around their interest levels in certain things and what they consume and how they behave, all of that type of stuff.

For example, let’s say we’re going to go target Scotch whisky drinkers. Now, I am personally among that set of Scotch whisky drinkers. I’m big fan of a number of scotches, as are many Mozzers. In fact, I have a bottle of Ardbeg — I think it’s the Uigeadail — in my office here at Moz.

So I might go, “Well, let’s see. Let’s talk to the people who sell whisky at stores. Let’s talk to the people who sell it online. Let’s talk to the customer service folks. Let’s do interviews with people who are likely Scotch buyers, which are both male and female, perhaps slightly more demographically skewed male, tend to be in a slightly wealthier, maybe middle income and up income bracket, tend to be people who live in cities more than people who live in urban and rural areas, tend to also have interests around things like fashion and maybe automobiles and maybe beer and other forms of alcohol.” So we can figure out all that stuff and then we can do those interviews.

What we’re trying to get to is a customer profile or several customer profiles.

A lot of folks call this a “customer persona,” and they’ll name the persona. I think that’s a fine approach, but you can have a more abstract customer profile as well.

Then once you have that, you can use a tool like Facebook, through their advertising audience system, to research the quantity of people who have the particular attributes or affiliations that you’re seeking out. From there, you can expand again by using Facebook and Twitter. You could use Followerwonk, for example in Twitter specifically, to figure out: What are these people following? Who are their influencers? What are the brands they pay attention to? What are the media outlets? What are the individuals? What are the blogs or content creators that they follow?

You can also do this with a few other tools. For example, if you’re searching out just content in general, you might use Google Search. You could do this on Instagram or Pinterest or LinkedIn for additional networks.

There’s a very cool tool called FullContact, which has an API that essentially let’s you plug in let’s say you have a set of email addresses from your interview process. You can plug that into FullContact and you can see the profiles that all of those email addresses have across all these social networks.

Now I can start to do this type of work, and I can go plug things into Followerwonk. I can go plug them into Facebook, and I can actually see specifically who those groups follow. Now I can start to build a true idea of who these people are and who they follow.

What needs do they have?

Now that I’ve researched that, I need to know what needs those folks actually have. I understand my audience at least a little bit, but now I need to understand what they want. Again, I go back to that interview process. It’s very, very powerful. It is time-intensive. It will not be a time-saving activity. Interviews take a long time and a lot of effort and require a tremendous amount of resources, but you also get deep, deep empathy and understanding from an interview process.

Surveys are another good way to go, but you get much less deep information from them. You can however get good broad information, and I’ve really enjoyed those. If you don’t already have an audience, you can start with something like SurveyMonkey Audience or Google Surveys, which let you target a broad group, and both of those are reasonable if you’re targeting the right sorts of broad enough demographics or psychographics.

The other thing I want to do here is some awareness stage keyword research. I want to understand that this awareness phase. As people are just understanding they have a problem, what do they search for? Keyword research on this can start from the highest level.

So if I’m targeting Scotch, I might search for just Scotch by itself. If I plug that into a tool like Keyword Explorer or Keyword Planner or KeywordTool.io, I can see suggestions like, “What’s the best Scotch under $50?” When I see that, I start to gain an understanding of, “Oh, wait a minute. People are looking for quality. They also care about price.” Then I might see other things like, “Gosh, a lot of people search for ‘Islay versus Speyside.’ Oh, that’s interesting. They want to know which regions are different.” Or they search for “Japanese whisky versus Scotch whisky.” Aha, another interesting point at the awareness stage.

From there, I can determine the search terms that are getting used at awareness stage. I can go to consideration. I can go to comparison. I can go to conversion points. That really helps me understand the journey that searchers are taking down this path.

It’s not just search, though. Any time I have a search term or phase, I want to go plug that into places like Facebook. I want to plug it into something like Twitter search. I want to understand the influencers on the networks that I know my audience is in. That could be Instagram. It could be Pinterest. It could be LinkedIn. It could be any variety of networks. It could be Google News, maybe, if I’m seeing that they pay attention to a lot of media.

Then once I have these search terms and awareness through the funnel, now I’ve got to understand: How do they get to that conversation point?

Once I get there, what I’m really seeking out is: What are the reasons people bought? What are the things they considered? What are the objections that kept some of them from buying?

Creating a content & conversion strategy.

If I have this, what I essentially have now is the who and the what they’re seeking out at each phase of this journey. That’s an incredibly powerful thing that I can then go apply to…

Where do I need to be?

“Where do I need to be” means things like: What keywords do I need to target? What social platforms do I need to be on? Where do I need to be in media? Who do I need to influence who’s influencing my audience?

It tells me what content I need to create.

I know what articles or videos or visuals or podcasts or data my audience is interested in and what helps compel them further and further down that funnel.

It tells me a little bit about how to position myself in terms of things like style and UI/UX.

It also tells me about benefits versus features and some of the prototypical users. Who are the prototypical users? Who should I showcase? What kinds of testimonials are going to be valuable because people say, “Ah, this person, who is like me, liked this product and uses it. Therefore it must be a good product for me.”

Lastly, it tells me about how we can convert our target audience.

Then it also tells us lastly, finally, through those objections and the reasons people bought, the landing page content, the testimonials to feature and what should be in those. It tells me about the conversion path and how I should expect people to flow through that: whether they have to come back many times or they make the purchase right away. Who they’re going to compare me against in terms of competitors. And finally the purchase dynamics: How do I want to sell? Do I need a refund policy? Do I need to have things like free shipping? Should this be on a subscription basis? Should I have a high upfront payment or a low upfront payment with ballooning costs over time, and all that type of stuff?

This research process is not super simple. I certainly haven’t dived deep on every one of these aspects. But you can use this as a fundamental architecture to shape how you answer these questions in all of the web marketing channels you might pursue. Before you go pursue any one given channel, you might want to try and identify some of the holes you have in this.

If you have questions about how to do this, go through and do this research first. You’ll have far better results at the end.

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

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Posted by EricaMcGillivray

Like the talking mice to Cinderella, we’re already working hard on MozCon and crafting Roger one heck of a ball gown. (And letting our metaphors get out of control in the meantime.) Which means I’m here to share with all of you the current MozCon 2016 Agenda and a ton of other preview goodies.

If you’re suddenly like “Oh snap, I haven’t bought my ticket(s)!”, I’ll pause while you:

Buy your MozCon 2016 ticket!

New emcees: we’re mixing it up!

As some of you know, Cyrus won’t be emceeing MozCon this year. (We still adore him, and I’m sure his face will make it into a few slide decks.) So we decided to take this opportunity to shake it up.

Emceeing MozCon is a hard job. We want each and every speaker to feel supported by our stage and have the emcee warm up the audience for their talk. Instead of having one emcee for three days, we’re having three different emcees, one each day.

Please congratulate them!

Jen Sable Lopez

Sr. Director of Community and Audience Development at Moz
@jennita

Leading our community and audience development efforts here at Moz, Jen Sable Lopez’s the biggest fan of you: our community. She’s deeply invested in being TAGFEE and bringing educational content and community love to you. Jen also does a great Grumpy Cat impression, serves as Moz gif maker, and loves traveling and her family.

Ronell Smith

Strategist at RS Consulting
@ronellsmith

Ronell Smith is a business strategist with a passion for helping brands create a user experience their customers will recognize, appreciate, and reward them for with their business.

Zeph Snapp

CEO at Altura Interactive
@zephsnapp

A bilingual, bicultural marketer, Zeph Snapp helps international companies reach Spanish speakers in the US and Latin America. If you want him to go on a rant, ask him about machine learning as it relates to translation and content.

The sneak peek MozCon 2016 Agenda

Because we’re releasing this earlier than ever, there’s still a few TBD spots and topics. I can’t thank our speakers enough for being so gracious and super hard-working to settle on their topics.

You’ll also notice that community speakers are still forthcoming. That’s right — they’re coming soon (keep an eye out for the submission post!), and we wanted to give you a head start to noodle on your potential topic.

Monday

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08:00–09:00am
Breakfast

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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 unsaveable addict of all things content, search, and social on the web.

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

Content Marketing Manager at Optimizely
@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.

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10:10–10:30am
AM Break

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10:35–11:05am
TBD with Lauren Vaccarello

VP of Marketing at Box
@laurenv

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

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11:05–11:35am
TBD

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11:35am–12:05pm
TBD

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12:05–01:35pm
Lunch

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01:40–02:10pm
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.

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02:10–02:40pm
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.

---

02:40–03:10pm
TBD

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03:10–03:30pm
PM Break

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03:35–04:05pm
TBD with Ross Simmonds

Founder at Foundation Marketing
@TheCoolestCool

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04:05–4:50pm
TBD with Dana DiTomaso

Partner at Kick Point
@danaditomaso

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).

---

Tuesday

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08:00–09:00am
Breakfast

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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 Wiebe Marketing Ltd
@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.

---

10:20–10:40am
AM Break

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10:45am–12:05pm
Community Speakers

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12:05–01:35pm
Lunch

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01:40–02:25pm
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.

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02:25–02:55pm
Reimagining Customer Retention and Evangelism with Kristen Craft

Director of Business Development at Wistia
@thecrafty

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.

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02:55–03:15pm
PM Break

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03:25–03:55pm
TBD with Rebekah Cancino

Co-Founder and Content Strategy Consultant at Onward
@rebekahcancino

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.

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03:55–04:40pm
TBD with Wil Reynolds

CEO/Founder at Seer Interactive
@wilreynolds

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.

---

Wednesday

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09:00–10:00am
Breakfast

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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.

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11:20–11:40am
AM Break

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11:45am–12:15pm
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.

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12:15–12:45pm
TBD

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12:45–02:15pm
Lunch

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02:20–03:05pm
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.

---

03:05–03:35pm
Mind Games: Craft Killer Experiences with 7 Lessons from Cognitive Psychology with Sarah Weise

UX Director at Booz Allen Digital Interactive
@weisesarah

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.

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03:35–03:55pm
PM Break

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04:00–04:45pm
Earning, Nudging, and (Indirectly) Buying the Links You Still Need to Rank 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.

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.

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Buy your MozCon 2016 ticket!

Don’t worry, we’ve got your MozCon evenings covered!

After a day of learning and possibly discovering a brand-new city, I know I sometimes struggle with what to do after the conference closes for the day. At MozCon, we work to bring you three evening events where you can chill, network, make new friends, and grab some food and drinks. (We will also have a post in late August or early September with a ton of great recommendations for things to do and food to eat in Seattle!)

Monday’s MozCrawl from 7–10pm

The best part of our MozCrawl is being able to explore a neighborhood in Seattle. Bring your walking shoes (or load your favorite rideshare app), and get to know a little about the flavor of Seattle. While the locations are still TBD, Moz and our MozCon partners will each host a bar with light appetizers and drinks.

To ensure you see as much of Seattle as possible, each bar will have a scavenger hunt element. Our sweet, bar-hosting partners:

• Buffer
• BuzzStream
• SimilarWeb
• Unbounce
• Whitespark
• Wordstream

(We also have two other partners, STAT and Wistia, who will be keeping a low profile that night.)

Tuesday’s MozCon Ignite from 7–10pm

In my completely biased opinion, this is my favorite MozCon evening event. For those who’ve never been to an Ignite-style talk, they are 5 minute talks with auto-advancing slides. Because we’re learning all day at MozCon about online marketing, our Ignite talks are 100% not about marketing or business. They are passion projects, hobbies, and interests.

Last year, our 16 talks ranged from a touching tale about helping a terminally ill child musician record an album, to how to love opera, to how to make frosting. You can sit back, relax, laugh, and cry. Plus, beforehand, there are networking opportunities to chat with your fellow attendees.

If this sounds like something you’d want to speak at, we’ll be opening up pitches in early July. Our venue is currently TBD.

Wednesday’s MozCon Bash at the Garage from 7pm–12am

Make sure to book your flight home the day after MozCon so you can join us at our annual MozCon Bash to celebrate another great year of learning. Put on your bowling shoes and see if you can out-turkey your new friends! Or play a round of pool, or sing your heart out with some karaoke. Food and drinks, both alcoholic and non-alcoholic, are on us. You’ll take home even more memories and some photobooth mementos to look back on.

Grab your ticket today — we’ve sold out for the last 5 years.

Buy your MozCon 2016 ticket!

If you have any questions about MozCon programming, please don’t hesitate to ask in the comments.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Continue reading →