seo

Posted by EricaMcGillivray

On November 20, 2015, Twitter took away share counts on their buttons and from their accessible free metrics. Site owners lost an easy signal of popularity of their posts. Those of us in the web metrics business scrambled to either remove, change, or find alternatives for the data to serve to our customers. And all those share count buttons, on sites across the Web, started looking a tad ugly:

Yep, this is a screenshot from our own site.

Why did Twitter take away this data?

When asked directly, Twitter’s statement about the removal of tweet counts has consistently been:

“The Tweet counts alone did not accurately reflect the impact on Twitter of conversation about the content. They are often more misleading to customers than helpful.”

On the whole, I agree with Twitter that tweet counts are not a holistic measurement of actual audience engagement. They aren’t the end-all-be-all to showing your brand’s success on the channel or for the content you’re promoting. Instead, they are part of the puzzle — a piece of engagement.

However, if Twitter were really concerned about false success reports, they would’ve long ago taken away follower counts, the ultimate social media vanity metric. Or taken strong measures to block automated accounts and follower buying. Not taking action against shallow metrics, while “protecting” users from share counts, makes their statement ring hollow.

OMG, did Twitter put out an alternative?

About a year ago, Twitter acquired Gnip, an enterprise metrics solution. Gnip mostly looks to combine social data and integrate it into a brand’s customer reputation management software, making for some pretty powerful intelligence about customers and community members. But since it’s focused on an enterprise audience, it’s priced out of the reach of most brands. Plus, the fact that it’s served via API means brands must have the knowledge and development skills/talent in order to really customize the data.

Since the share count shutdown, Gnip released a beta Engagement API and has promised an upcoming Audience API. This API seems to carry all the data you’d need to put those share counts back together. However, an important note:

“Currently only three metrics are available from the totals endpoint: Favorites, Replies, and Retweets. We are working to make Impressions and Engagements available.”

For those of you running to your favorite tools — Gnip’s TOS currently forbids the reselling of their data, making it essentially forbidden to integrate into tools, although some companies like Buzzsumo have paid and gotten permission to use the data in their software. The share count removal caused Apple to quietly kill Topsy.

Feel social media’s dark side, Twitter

Killing share counts hasn’t been without its damage to Twitter as a brand. In his post about brands who’s lost and won in Google search, Dr. Pete Meyers notes that Twitter dropped from #6 to #15. That has to hurt their traffic.

However, Twitter also made a deal with Google in order to show tweets directly in Google searches, which means Twitter’s brand may not be as damaged as it appears.

Perhaps the biggest ding to Twitter is in their actual activity and sharing articles on their platform. Shareaholic reports sharing on Twitter is down 11% since the change was implemented.

It’s hard to sell Twitter as a viable place to invest social media time, energy, and money when there’s no easy proof in the pudding. You might have to dig further into your strategy and activities for the answers.

Take back your Twitter metrics!

The bad news: Almost none of these metrics actually replicate or replace the share count metric. Most of them cover only what you tweet, and they don’t capture the other places your content’s getting shared.

The good news: Some of these are probably better metrics and better goals.

Traffic to your site

Traffic may be an oldie, but it’s a goodie. You should probably already be tracking this. And please don’t just use Google Analytics’ default settings, as they’re probably slightly inaccurate.

Some defaults for one of my blogs, since I’m lazy.

Instead, make sure you tag what you’re sharing on social media and you’ll be better able to attribute your hard, hard work to the proper channels. Then you can really figure out if Twitter is the channel for your brand’s content (or if you’re using it right).

Use shortening services and their counters

Alternatively, especially if you’re sharing content not on your own site, you can use share and click counting from various URL shortening services. But this will only count toward individual links you share.

Twitter’s own free analytics

No, you won’t find the share count here, either. Twitter’s backends are pretty limited to specific stats on individual tweets and some audience demographics. It can be especially challenging if you have multiple accounts and are working with a team. There is the ability to download reporting for further Excel wizardry.

Twitter’s engagement metric is “the number of engagements (clicks, retweets, replies, follows, and likes) divided by the total number of impressions.” While this calculation seems like a good idea, it’s not my favorite, given the specific calculation’s hard to scale as you grow your audience. You’re always going to have more lurkers instead of people engaging with your content, and it’s going to take a lot of massaging of metric reporting when you explain how you grew your audience and those numbers went down. Or how the company with 100 followers does way better on Twitter’s engagement metric.

TrueSocialMetric’s engagement numbers

Now these are engagement metrics that you can scale, grow, and compare. Instead of looking at impressions, TrueSocialMetrics gives conversation, amplification, and applause rates for your social networks. This digs into the type of engagement you’re having. For example, your conversation rate for Twitter is calculated by taking how many comments you got and dividing it by how many times you tweeted.

At Moz, we use a combination of TrueSocialMetrics and traffic to report on the success of our social media efforts to our executives. We may use other metrics internally for testing or for other needs, depending on that specific project.

Twitcount

Shortly after the removal of share counts was announced, Twitcount popped up. It works by installing their share counters on your site, where it then can surface historical totals. Twitcount’s numbers only start counting the day you install the code and the button to your site. There are limitations, since they use Twitter’s API, and these limitations may cause data inaccuracies. I haven’t used their solution, but if you have, let us know in the comments how it went!

Buffer’s reach and RT metrics

Again, this only counts for your individual tweet’s metrics, and Buffer only grabs metrics on tweets sent out via their platform. Buffer’s reach metric is similar to what many traditional advertisers and people in public relations are used to, and it is similar to Twitter’s general impressions metric. Reach looks at how far your tweet has possibly gone due to size of the retweeter’s audience.

Like most analytic tools, you can export the metrics and play with them in Excel. Or you can pay for Buffer’s business analytics, which runs between $50–$250/month.

Trending topics and hashtag reports

There are many tools out there where you can track specific trends and hashtags around your brand. At MozCon, we know people are tweeting using #MozCon. But not every brand has a special hashtag, or even knows the hot topics around their brand.

SproutSocial’s trends report is unique in that it pulls both the topics and hashtags most associated with your brand and the engagement around those.

Obviously, in last July, #MozCon is hot. But you can also see that we have positive community sentiment around our brand by what else is happening.

Buzzsumo

Our friends at Buzzsumo can be used as a Topsy topic replacement and share counter. They did a great write-up on how to use their tool for keyword research. They are providing share counts from Gnip’s data.

Though when I ran some queries on Moz’s blog posts, there seemed to be a big gap in their share counts. While we’d expect to see Moz’s counts down a bit on the weekends, there would be something there:

I’m unsure if this is Buzzsumo’s or Gnip’s data issue. It’s also possibly that there are limits on the data, especially since Moz has large numbers of followers and gets large amounts of shares on our posts.

Use Fresh Web Explorer’s Mention Authority instead

While Fresh Web Explorer‘s index only covers recent data — the tool’s main function being to find recent mentions of keywords around the web a la Google Alerts — it can be helpful if you’re running a campaign and relying on instant data no older than a month. Mention Authority does include social data. (Sorry, the full formula involved with creating the score is one of Moz’s few trade secrets.) What’s nice about this score is that it’s very analogous across different disciplines, especially publicity campaigns, and can serve as a holistic alternative.

Embedded tweets for social proof

Stealing this one from our friends at Buffer, but if you’re looking to get social proof back for people visiting your post, embedded tweets can work well. This allows others to see that your tweet about the post was successful, perhaps choosing to retweet and share with their audience.

Obviously, this won’t capture your goals to hand to a boss. But this will display some success and provide an easy share option for people to retweet your brand.

Predictions for the future of Twitter’s share count removal

Twitter will see this as a wash for engagement

With the inclusion of tweets directly in Google search results, it balances out the need for direct social proof. That said, with the recent timeline discussions and other changes, people are watching Twitter for any changes, with many predicting the death of Twitter. (Oh, the irony of trending hashtags when #RIPTwitter is popular.)

Twitter may not relent fully, but it may cheapen the product through Gnip. Alternatively, it may release some kind of “sample” share count metric instead. Serving up share count data on all links certainly costs a lot of money from a technical side. I’m sure this removal decision was reached with a “here’s how much money we’ll save” attached to it.

Questions about Twitter’s direction as a business

For a while, Twitter focused itself on being a breaking news business. At SMX East in 2013, Twitter’s Richard Alfonsi spoke about Twitter being in competition with media and journalism and being a second screen while consuming other media.

Lack of share counts, however, make it hard for companies to prove direct value. (Though I’m sure there are many advertisers wanting only lead generation and direct sales from the platform.) Small businesses, who can’t easily prove other value, aren’t going to see an easy investment in the platform.

Not to mention that issues around harassment have caused problems even celebrities with large followings like Sue Perkins (UK comedian), Joss Whedon (director and producer), Zelda Williams (daughter of Robin Williams), and Anne Wheaton (wife of Wil Wheaton). This garners extremely bad publicity for the company, especially when most were active users of Twitter.

No doubt Twitter shareholders are on edge when stock prices went down and the platform added a net of 0 new users in Q4 of 2015. Is the removal of share counts something in the long list of reasons why Twitter didn’t grow in Q4? Twitter has made some big revenue and shipping promises to shareholders in response.

Someone will build a tool to scrape Twitter and sell share counts.

When Google rolled out (not provided), every SEO software company clamored to make tools to get around it. Since Gnip data is so expensive, it’s pretty impractical for most companies. The only way to actually build this tool would be to scrape all of Twitter, which has many perils. Companies like Hootsuite, Buffer, and SproutSocial are the best set up to do it more easily, but they may not want to anger Twitter.

What are your predictions for Twitter’s future without share counts? Did you use the share counts for your brand, and how did you use them? What will you be using instead?

Header image by MKH Marketing.

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 →

Posted by jmodjeska

Today I’m proud to announce some new features in Moz Pro that help you get a lot more value out of your keyword rankings reports. You can now view your full rankings history for any campaign, select specific date ranges for your charts and tables, better segment your rankings data to get a clearer understanding of your performance and visibility, and effectively manage large campaigns with numerous keywords. Did I also mention it’s lightning-fast? To get started, visit the keyword rankings page in any of your campaigns or test drive Moz Analytics with a free trial today.

Want a quick recap? Tori goes over the highlights in this quick 1:22 minute video!

Historical rankings: getting from 12 to infinity

The major value of today’s release is that it enables customers to visualize their campaign’s entire rankings history. This is thanks to an ongoing effort to completely overhaul our data assembly architecture. I’m excited about today’s release because it lets loose the first phase of this overhaul initiative, and marks the end of the 12-cycle limitation in our rankings reports.

As of today, timeframe selection has no bounds. You can report on rankings data with start and end dates anywhere in the life of your campaign, up to and including the entire campaign’s history, even on campaigns with long histories and lots of keywords. Your full rankings histories have been liberated.

12 weeks of keyword rankings history in Moz Analytics — a limitation until today

Success! A campaign’s entire rankings history in Moz Analytics

And more new features

In addition to unlimited rankings history, we’re giving users the freedom to compare rankings, search visibility, engine performance, and competitive metrics within customizable timeframes. We want our users’ reporting needs to drive the application, and not vice-versa. Here are some other features available as of today:

• Customizable timeframe selection. In addition to weekly and monthly views, you can now select and display start and end dates, and export reports for specific timeframes. Rankings deltas (changes over time) are now calculated over the duration of the selected timeframe.

Calendar controls to select your data display range

Quick-select menu for common timeframes

• Flexible, universal filtering. Fast response times and full keyword history means no more limits on how you view and filter your data. Use the new universal filter to narrow displayed keywords by locality, labels, and keyword text.

• On-the-fly aggregate calculations. Rankings summaries, deltas, search visibility, and universal results all update on-demand whenever you select a new timeframe.

• Flexible, fast sorting. Data points — like difference between rankings by engine — that previously took so much overhead to calculate that they couldn’t be sorted in-place, are now easily sortable on-demand.

Sort by anything, anywhere

And performance improvements, too

These new features are built on an entirely new architecture. We’ve been running the new and old systems in full parallel mode for about two months now to ensure everything was ready to switch over. This has also given us the opportunity to measure some key performance improvements:

• 30X faster pipeline. Our data assembly and storage processes run up to 30X faster, eliminating delays between data collection and in-app availability. The low latency between data collection and availability is what facilitates the delivery of full campaign histories.
• 20X faster server response times. For most in-app requests, our response times are dramatically faster than the previous system. We’re seeing rankings datasets delivered in 50 ms for average-sized campaigns (compared to 800+ ms in the previous system). We’ve also moved many calculations into the browser, reducing network calls and wait times for filter and sort requests.

Why we did all of this

Rankings data is important to our customers

Keyword rankings data is a core component of the Moz Pro suite of tools. We gather localized and national data on millions of keywords each day across hundreds of search engine locales so that our customers can analyze their SEO keyword performance. Moz Analytics users spend the bulk of their time in the Rankings section, where we present metrics that include mobile and desktop keyword rankings, historical SERP analysis, local and national keywords, search visibility scores, and competitive metrics.

The data was already there

We store deep historical rankings data going back to the moment of a campaign’s creation. While this information has always been accessible via historical rankings CSV downloads, we’ve been aware for some time that this is frustrating and this data would be much more useful in the UI. What held us back was our architecture. If you’re interested in the technical challenges and how we overcame them to deliver these new features, I offer a detailed explanation on our Developer Blog, covering the project background and architecture that makes all of this possible.

Where we’ll go next

We plan to round out our rankings overhaul project with backend and UI updates to the Analyze a Keyword page. We’ll also speed up Page Optimization, at which point the entire corpus of ranking-related data will be on our new platform.

Ultimately, all of our numerous datasets, including crawl and links, will be assembled and stored on the new architecture, unlocking new features and delivering data faster as we go. We’ll continue to be agile and iterative, progressively releasing updates as soon as they’re ready.

So go check it out!

To experience the new features in the rankings section, visit your ranking report in any Moz Analytics campaign. If you’re not already a Moz Pro subscriber, why not take a free trial and see how our software can help you do better marketing? As always, we would love to hear your feedback below.

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 →

Posted by Suzzicks

Most people in the digital community have heard of Facebook’s 2G Tuesdays. They were established to remind users that much of the world still accesses the Internet on slow 2G connections, rather than 3G, 4G, LTE or WiFi.

For an online marketer in the developed world, it’s easy to forget about slow connections, but Facebook is particularly sensitive to them. A very high portion of their traffic is mobile, and a large portion of their audience uses their mobile device as their primary access to the Internet, rather than a desktop or laptop.

Facebook and Google agree on this topic. Most digital marketers know that Google cares about latency and page speed, but many don’t realize that Google also cares about connection speed.

Last year they began testing their revived mobile transcoding service, which they call Google Web Lite, to make websites faster in countries like India and Indonesia, where connection speed is a significant problem for a large portion of the population. They also recently added Data Saver Mode in Chrome, which has a similar impact on browsing.

AMP pages begin ranking in mobile results this month

This February, Google will begin ranking AMP pages in mobile search results. These will provide mobile users access to news articles that universally render in about one second. If you haven’t seen it yet, use this link on your phone to submit a news search, and see how fast AMP pages really are. The results are quite impressive.

In addition to making web pages faster, Google wants to make search results faster. They strive to provide results that send searchers to sites optimized for the device they’re searching from. They may alter mobile search results based on the connection speed of the searcher’s device.

To help speed up websites and search results as the same time, Google is also striving to make Chrome faster and lighter. They’re even trying to ensure that it doesn’t drain device batteries, which is something that Android users will especially appreciate! Updated versions of Chrome actually have a new compression method called Brötli, which promises to compress website files 26% more than previous versions of Chrome.

We’ll review the impact of Google’s tests on changing search results based on connection speed. We’ll outline how and why results from these tests could become more salient and impact search results at various different speeds. Finally, we’ll explain why Google has a strong incentive to push this type of initiative forward, and how it will impact tracking and attribution for digital marketers now and in the future.

The diagram below provides a sneak peak of the various connection speeds at which Google products are best accessed and how these relationships will likely impact cross-device search results in the future.

Connection Speed	Best for these Google Products	Impact on SERP
WiFi & Fiber	Fiber, ChromeCast, ChromeCast Music, Google Play, Google Music, Google TV, ChromeBooks, Nest, YouTube, YouTube Red	Streaming Apps, Deep Linked Media Content
3G, 4G, LTE	Android Phones, Android Wear, Android Auto, ChromeBooks, YouTube, YouTube Red	Standard Results, App Packs, Carousels, AMP Pages
2G & Edge	Android Phones, Android Auto	Basic Results, Google Web Lite, AMP Pages

Basic vs. standard mobile search results

The image below shows the same search on the same phone. The phone on the left is set to search on EDGE speeds, and the one on the right is set to 4G/LTE. Google calls the EDGE search results “Basic,” and the 4G/LTE results “Standard.” They even include a note at the bottom of the page explaining “You’re seeing a basic version of this page because your connection is slow” with an option to “switch to standard version.” In some iterations of the message, this sentence was also included: “Google optimized some pages to use 80% less data, and rest are marked slow to load.”

Notice that the EDGE connection has results that are significantly less styled and interactive than the 4G/LTE results.

Serving different results for slower connection speeds is something that Google has tested before, but it’s a concept that seems to have been mostly dormant until the middle of last year, when these Basic results started popping up. Google quietly announced it on Google+, rather than with a blog post. These results are not currently re-creatable (at least for me), but the concept and eventual implementation of this kind of variability could have a significant impact on the SEO world, further deprecating our ability to monitor keyword rankings effectively.

The presentation of the mobile search results isn’t all that’s. changing. The websites included and the order in which they’re ranked changes, as well. Google knows that searchers with slow connections will have a bad experience if they try to download apps, so App Packs are not included in any Basic search results. That means a website ranking in position #7 in Standard search results (after the six apps in the App Pack) can switch to ranking number one in a Basic search. That’s great news if you’re the top website being pushed down by the App Pack!

The full list of search results are included below – items that only appear in one result are bolded.

Standard Search Result “Superman Games”	Basic Search Result “Superman Games”
App – City Jump	Web – herogamesworld.com>superman-games
App – Man of Steel	Web – www.heroesarcade.com>play-free>sup…
App – Superman Homepage	Web – LEGO>dccomicssuperheroes>games
App – Superbman	Web – Wikipedia>wiki>List_of_Superman_vi…
App – Batman Arkham Origins	Web – www.kidsgamesheroes.com>tags>supe…
App – Subway Superman Run	Web – YouTube>watch (Superman vs Hulk – O Combate – YouTube)
Web – Herogamesworld.com>superman-games	Web – www.supermangames235.com
Web – Heroesarcade.com>play-free>sub…	Web – fanfreegames.com > superman-games
Web – Wikipedia>wiki>List_of_Superman_vi…	Web – moviepilot.com>posts > 2015/06/25
Web – LEGO>dccomicssuperheroes>games	Web – m.batmangamesonly.com > superman-ga…

You may have the urge to write this off, thinking all of your potential mobile customers have great phones and fast connections, but you’d be missing the bigger picture here.

First, slow connection speeds can happen to everyone: when they’re in elevators, basements, subways, buildings with thick walls, outside of city centers, or simply in places where the mobile connection is overloaded or bad. Regardless of where they are, users will still try to search, often ignorant of their connection speed.

Second, this testing probably indicates that connection speed is an entirely new variable which could even be described as a ranking factor.

Responsive design does not solve everything

Google’s desire to reach a growing number of devices might sound fantastic if you’re someone who’s recently updated a site to a responsive or adaptive design, but these new development techniques may have been a mixed blessing. Responsive design and adaptive design can be great, but they’re not a panacea, and have actually caused significant problems for Google’s larger goals.

Responsive sites face speed and development challenges.

Responsive design sites are generally slow, which means there is a strong chance that they won’t rank well in Basic search results. Responsive sites can be built to function much more quickly, but it can be an uphill battle for developers. They face an ever-growing set of expectations, frameworks are constantly changing, and they’re already struggling to cram extra functionality and design into clean, light, mobile-first designs.

They can have negative repercussions.

Despite Google’s insistence that responsive design is easier for them to crawl, many webmasters that transitioned saw losses in overall conversions and time-on-site. Their page speed and UX were both negatively impacted by the redesigns. Developers are again having to up their skills and focus on pre-loading, pre-rendering, and pre-fetching content in order to reduce latency — sometimes just to get it back to what it was before their sites went responsive. Others are now forced to create duplicate AMP pages, which only adds to the burden and frustration.

Wearables/interactive media pose new problems.

Beyond the UX and load time concerns, responsive design sites also don’t allow webmasters to effectively target these new growth channels that Google cares about — wearables and interactive media. Unfortunately, responsive design sites are nearly unusable on smartwatches, and probably always will be.

Similarly, Google is getting much more into media, linking search with large-screen TVs, but even when well-built, responsive design sites look wonky on popular wide-screen TVs. It seems that the development of mobile technology may have already out-paced Google’s recommended “ideal” solution.

Regardless, rankings on all of these new devices will likely be strongly influenced by the connection speed of the device.

Is AMP the future of mobile search for slow connections?

The good news is that AMP pages are great candidates for ranking in a Basic search result, because they work well over slow connections. They’ll also be useful on things like smart watches and TVs, as Google will be able to present the content in whichever format it deems appropriate for the device requesting it — thus allowing them to provide a good experience on a growing number of devices.

App streaming & connection speed

A couple months ago, Google announced the small group of apps in a beta test for App Streaming. In this test, apps are hosted and run from a virtual device in Google’s cloud. This allows users to access content in apps without having to download the app itself. Since the app is run in the cloud, over the web, it seems that this technology could eventually remove the OS barrier for apps — an Android app will be able to operate from the cloud on an iOS device, and an iOS app will be able to run on an Android device the same way. Great for both users and developers!

Since Google is quietly working on detecting and perfecting their connection-speed-based changes to the algorithm, it’s easy to see how this new ranking factor will be relied upon even more heavily when App Streaming becomes a reality. App Streaming will only work over WiFi, so Google will be able to leverage what it’s learned from Basic mobile results to provide yet another divergent set of results to devices that are on a WiFi connection.

The potential for App Streaming will make apps much more like websites, and deep links much more like…regular web links. In some ways, it may bring Google back to its “Happy Place,” where everything is device and OS-agnostic.

How do app plugins & deep links fit into the mix?

The App Streaming concept actually has a lot in common with the basic premise of the Chrome OS, which was native on ChromeBooks (but has now been unofficially retired and functionally replaced with the Android OS). The Chrome OS provided a simple software framework that relied heavily on the Chrome browser and cloud-based software and plugins. This allowed the device to leverage the software it already had, without adding significantly more to the local storage.

This echoes the plugin phenomenon that we’re seeing emerge in the mobile app world. Mobile operating systems and apps use deep links to other local apps plugins. Options like emoji keyboards and image aggregators like GIPHY can be downloaded and automatically pulled into to the Facebook Messenger app.

Deep-linked plugins will go a long way toward freeing storage space and improving UX on users’ phones. That’s great, but App Streaming is also resource-intensive. One of the main problems with the Chrome OS was that it relied so heavily on WiFi connectivity — that’s relevant here, too.

What does music & video casting have to do with search?

Most of the apps that people engage with on a regular basis, for hours at a time, are media apps used over WiFi. Google wants to be able to index and rank that content as deep links, so that it can open and run in the appropriate app or plugin.

In fact, the indexing of deep-linked media content has already begun. The ChromeCast app is using new OS crawler capabilities in the Android Marshmallow OS to scan a user’s device for deep-linked media. They then create a local cache of deep links to watched and un-watched media that a user might want to “cast” to another device, then organize it and make it searchable.

For instance, if you want to watch a documentary on dogs, you could search your Netflix and Hulu apps, then maybe Amazon Instant Video, and maybe even the NBC, TLC, BBC, or PBS apps for a documentary on dogs.

Or, you could just do one search in the ChromeCast app and find all the documentaries on dogs that you can access. Assuming the deep links on those apps are set up correctly, you will be able to compare the selection across all apps that you have, choose one, and cast it. Again, these type of results are less relevant if you are on a 2G or 3G connection and thus not able to cast the media over WiFi.

This is an important move for Google. Recently, they’ve been putting a lot of time and energy into their media offerings. They successfully launched ChromeCast2 and ChromeCastMusic at about the same time as they dramatically improved their GoogleMusic subscription service (a competitor to Spotify and Pandora) and launched YouTubeRed (their rival for Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon Prime Video). They may eventually even begin to include the “cast” logo directly in SERPS, as they have in the default interface of Google+ and YouTube.

Google’s financial interest in adapting results by connectivity

Google’s interest in varying search results by connection speed is critical to their larger goals. A large portion of mobile searches are for entertainment, and the need for entertainment is unending and easy to monetize. Subscription models provide long-term stable revenue with minimal upkeep or effort from Google.

Additionally, the more time searchers spend consuming media, either by surfacing it in Google or the ChromeCast app, or through Now on Tap, the more Google can tailor its marketing messages to them.

Finally, the passive collection and aggregation of people’s consumption data also allows Google to quickly and easily evaluate which media is popular or growing in popularity, so they can tailor Google Play’s licensing strategy to meet users’ demands, improving the long-term value to their subscribers.

As another line of business, Google also offers ChromeCast Music and Google Music, which are subscription services designed to compete with Amazon Music and iTunes. You might think that all this streaming — streaming apps, streaming music, streaming video and casting it from one device to another — would slow down your home or office connection speed as a whole, and you would be right. However, Google has a long-term solution for that too: Google Fiber. The more reliant people become on streaming content from the cloud, the more important it will be for them to get on Google’s super-fast Internet grid. Then you can stream all you want, and Google can collect even more data and monetize as they see fit.

Image credit: The NextWeb

What’s the impact of connection variability in SERPS on SEO strategy & reporting?

So what might this mean for your mobile SEO strategy? Variability by connection speed will make mobile keyword rank reporting and attribution nearly impossible. Currently, most keyword reporting tools either work by aggregating ranking results that are reported from ISPs, or by submitting test queries and aggregating the results.

Unfortunately, while that’s usually sufficient for desktop reporting (though still error-prone and very difficult for highly local searches), it’s nearly impossible for mobile. All of the SEO keyword reporting tools out there are struggling to report on mobile search results, and none take connection speed into account. Most don’t even take OS into account, either, so App Packs and the website rankings around them are not accurately reported.

Similarly, most tools are not able to report on anything about deep links, so it’s hard to know if click-through traffic is even getting to the website, or if it might be getting to a deep screen in an app instead. In short, ranking tools have a long way to go before they will be accurate in mobile, and this additional factor makes the reporting even harder.

In mobile, there are additional factors that can change the mobile rankings and click-through rates dramatically:

• Localization
• Featured Rich Snippets (Answer Boxes)
• Results that are interactive directly in the SERP (playable YouTube videos, news, Twitter and image carousels)
• AJAX expansion opportunities

All of these things are nightmares for the developers who write ranking software that scrapes search results. Even worse, Google is constantly testing new presentation schemes, so even if the tools could briefly get it right, they risk a constant game of catch-up.

One of the reasons Google is constantly testing new presentation schemes? They’re trying to make their search results work on an ever-growing list of new devices while minimizing the need for additional page loads or clicks. This is what drives all the testing.

If you think about a traditional set of search results, they’re an ordered list that goes from top to bottom. Google has gotten so fast that the ten-link restriction actually hurts the user experience when the mobile connection is good.

In response, Google has started to include carousels that scroll left to right. Only one or two search results can show on a smart watch at one time, so this feature allows searchers to delve deeper into a specific type of result without the additional click or page load.

However, carousels don’t appear in Basic search results. Also, the carousels only count as one result in the vertical list, but can add as many as 5 or 10 results to the page. Again, SEO’s and SEO software really haven’t settled on a way to represent this effectively in their tracking, and little has been reported about the impact on CTR for either the items in the carousel or the items below it.

Conclusion

Speed matters.

Not just latency and page speed, but also connection speed. While we can’t directly impact the connection speed of our mobile users, we should at least anticipate that search results might vary based on the use-case of their search and strategize accordingly.

In the meantime, SEOs and digital marketers should be wary of tools that report mobile keyword rankings without specifying things like OS, app pack rankings, location and, eventually, connection speed.

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 →

Posted by bridget.randolph

Everyone has an opinion about Tinder. Whether you’re happily single, actively seeking a partner, or in a committed relationship, something about the concept of “swiping” yes or no on strangers’ pictures seems to guarantee strong opinions. There are endless articles about what Tinder (and similar apps) say aboutmodern dating, love in the 21st century, and, more broadly, millennial shallowness. And, as someone who can’t resist twisting a good dinner party topic into a marketing blog post, I started thinking about how what we know about Tinder and the way people use it can give us insight into how people shop. After all, some of my friends refer to Tinder usage as “shopping for boys.”

[image credit: http://www.techinsider.io/married-after-meeting-on-tinder-2015-8]

So what does the modern singleton’s approach to online dating tell us about their shopping behavior? And what should we be doing about it? The answer can be found in a look at social and technological history and the concept of an individual with a sense of personal identity.

As a marketer attempting to connect with the “Tinder Generation,” your goal is to tap into your customers’ values at a very personal level, connect with them through their personal network or “tribe,” and help them to avoid choice paralysis while nonetheless providing them with a sense of having plenty of personalized options.

The rise of the individual and the concept of personal identity

Historically, in Western society, the family could be considered the basic unit of society. Marriage as a concept was heavily tied to economic factors, along with a diplomatic aspect at the higher levels of social status, and proximity at the lower end of that scale. The local community was a fairly static unit, with individuals being born, marrying, raising a family, and being buried all in the same village. Marrying for love is an age-old theme found in literature, but is not the typical experience for the majority of people until the 20th century.

In the wake of the Industrial Revolution, there was mass migration to cities. Over time, as cities were increasingly unable to accommodate all their residents, the concept of “living in the suburbs” became more common, but still as a family unit. There’s a strong sense of the gendered roles of men and women in this period, who together make up a family unit (particularly with the birth of children).

The gendered division of labor is reflected in the dating behavior from this period. The stereotype of “boy meets girl, boy buys girl a milkshake, boy marries girl” is a product of this emphasis on the family as the basic unit, where the man is the provider and the woman is the homemaker. This is a society in which a man asks a girl’s father for her hand in marriage, and typically you marry the boy or girl “next door” (a callback to the traditional economic and proximity factors).

From a marketing perspective, this is the society which produced those charmingly disturbing retro ads like this one:

[image credit: http://all-that-is-interesting.com/20-bizarre-vintage-ads]

Following the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s, and the zeitgeist which produced feminist works like Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, this focus on gendered division of labor, and viewing of the individual only as he or she contributes to the family unit, began to shift. The individual becomes the basic social unit rather than the family. There is also far less emphasis on marriage and starting a family as the primary markers of having attained adulthood and respectability.

This leads to a much greater emphasis within modern society on personal identity and authenticity (“be true to who you are”).

Within this model, the approach to dating is about “me”: my personal identity, what my choice of partner says about me, and what I want from a relationship at this point in time. There are more options than ever, and we want to be seen as unique and autonomous beings.

Despite this, humans are social creatures. We like to connect. We like to share an identity with a group, to feel like part of a tribe. This is why we borrow aspects of different social groups to explain that unique personal identity.

This also explains why, as people become more detached from their original location- and family-based communities, they nevertheless find (and create) new tribes and communities which are not based on traditional structures. What used to be a relationship based on kinship by birth is now based instead on personal choice and finding other people “like us” in terms of identity rather than genetics. For instance, the concept of an “urban family”, or the close-knit ties represented in popular tv shows like Friends and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

[image credit: http://img2.tvtome.com/i/u/28c79aac89f44f2dcf865ab8c03a4201.png]

And this is why marketers have consistently seen the power of social proof — which is all about reinforcing that tribal identity (“1000 other people like you have bought this product!”).

Technological innovations and the rise of personalization

In the meantime, technology has been developing (in parallel to these societal shifts) which supports individual freedom and endless choices. We’ve moved from the more family- and community-oriented devices of the past (radio, tv, even household PCs) to individual devices (smartphones, tablets, smartwatches) which contain all aspects of our lives and our individual identities.

The popularity of these hyper-personal devices, combined with the power of the Internet to connect people globally, has enabled big data collection and analysis. This in turn leads to granular personalization and machine learning on a mindblowingly large scale. And this explosion of personalized, high-speed technology has contributed to the expectations that we as consumers have from businesses and their products or services:

• We expect lots of options that “work for me”
• We expect convenience and ease of use
• We expect to have everything in one place
• We expect instant gratification and will do almost anything to avoid boredom
• We expect to stay connected to other people digitally

When we combine all of this with the social phenomenon of the individual’s personal identity being the most important thing, we get the rise of the blogger, the Youtube celebrity, the Twitter activist – all of these people who want to express their own unique voice and share it with the world. And for the rest of us, we get social media in general, which is all about presenting a particular, curated identity and staying connected to family, friends, and fans digitally and in real-time.

The rise of social media leads to the concept of “viral” content, which is a piece of content which a lot of people share, often because of what it allows them to say about themselves. Buzzfeed are the masters of creating this type of content, becausethey understand the value of tapping into those personal loyalties and other elements which go into creating a sense of one’s own identity while remaining connected to others.

[image credit: http://www.slate.com/features/2014/01/buzz_quiz/htdocs/graphics/130127_buzzfeedQuiz.jpg]

But what does this have to do with Tinder? Or marketing?

This is where Tinder comes in. Tinder represents the intersection of these two historical trends: the sociological and technological. Modern dating, and particularly online dating, has always been about curating an “authentic” but attractive version of one’s identity and selling that identity to one’s target audience, namely a prospective partner. Tinder takes these elements, combines them with the desire for choices, convenience, and the rise of the smartphone, and turns it all into a fun game to play when you’re bored. And it provides all of these benefits in one simple action: the swipe.

[image credit: http://blog.gotinder.com/post/115903239496/introducing-moments]

Tinder users are often accused of being shallow and judging people based solely on externals. But in reality, Tinder is the perfect example of this phenomenon of tapping into social cues and semiotics in order to tell a story about the person whose profile you are looking at. It’s a classic example of a phenomenon written about in books such as Blink, Thinking Fast and Slow, and Predictably Irrational. For a more in-depth explanation of this as it applies to Tinder, check out this Buzzfeed article (meta, no?).

In essence, Tinder reflects the “acquisition behavior” of a generation who have grown up in the age of the Internet, social media, and the rise of the smartphone. Tinder allows users to curate and announce a personal identity as well as reflect tribal affinities (I’m a traveller, I’m a hipster, I’m a frat boy, I’m an artist … or, I’m some combination of all of these). It then allows these users to browse through countless “match” options who reflect these same affinities and values to a greater or lesser degree, and provides the illusion of infinite choice. And it alleviates boredom by providing an entertainment option for when you’re stuck in line at the store or bored on your commute. The interface deliberately plays into this ?gamification” by rewarding you with an “It’s A Match” screen with two options: “Send a Message,” or, significantly, “Keep Playing.”

[image credit: http://blog.gotinder.com/post/123460733076/introducing-verified-profiles]

If you want someone to “convert” from your profile to a real world date, you face a similar challenge as that which the majority of brands are facing: the paradox of choice. With so many potentially better options available, how do you create a profile which will not only earn you a swipe right but also continue to engage your target customer throughout the user journey from match screen to conversation to first in-person date?

The principles remain the same as those of any good marketing strategy in today’s world:

• Reflect your target audience’s values (for example, if you want to meet someone who values intelligence and education, you might use a university photo as one of your pictures);
• Connect with them on the basis of shared friends or interests (this is the social proof aspect of Tinder’s interface); and
• Personalize the experience in order to guide them to the conversion point (for instance, don’t start a conversation with “heyyy” or “what’s up” unless you want to be ignored).

So how do marketers reach the Tinder Generation?

In terms of applying these insights to our marketing strategies, we can break them down into three key areas:

• Personal values
• Tribal affinities
• Personalization

For each of these areas, there are tactics which can allow you to tap into these sociological and psychological factors and optimize for your target audience. I’ve included some examples below, but this is by no means an exhaustive list.

Personal values

• Find a way in which your product or service enables the customer to “say something about myself” by using it. A great example of this is luxury brands like Gucci, whose customers literally self-identify by wearing clothing and other objects with the logo of the brand visible.

• Recognize that the top of the funnel is becoming smaller as people self-qualify themselves in or out of the funnel before they even enter the customer journey. This is particularly true with the changes to search engine algorithms and interfaces, which allow the search engine to do the lead qualification on your behalf. A great tip for this is to think in terms of what “actions” the user can take on your landing pages, and optimize for the action you want them to take. Craig Bradford and I have talked about this over here as part of the Distilled Searchscape project.

• Entertain your customers and provide distraction when they’re bored. This won’t work for every brand, but a great example of a product brand successfully doing this is Red Bull’s content branch. But even if you can’t build out an entire publication arm of your business, this might be a good way to approach your social media strategy. How much does your social media presence encourage users to visit your page specifically? Sephora’s Pinterest strategy does just that.

Tribal affinities

• Understand your audience as a social group: who influences them? What do they value as a group? Can you tap into this in your content? Your social strategy? Through an influencer outreach campaign? Remember that it’s not always the influencer with the most followers who is the most influential in terms of a particular segment of their audience.

• Make use of social signals (language, references, influencers) to indicate your affinity with your target audience, and social proof related to the specific tribe/community which your target audience is a part of (“8 out of 10 moms say…”).

• Segment your audience and target your campaigns at the most specific level possible.

Personalization

• Personalize the user experience to the individual’s needs. Be as granular as possible. Qubit have some great case studies of companies doing this well.

• Provide the illusion of choice while making it easy to choose the “best” option (choice architecture). This may involve a UX or CRO audit. For more on this topic, read Predictably Irrational and The Paradox of Choice.

These are just a few of the ways in which marketers can adopt some of the same strategies that work in the dating world and apply them to business. But even if the specific tactics mentioned here don’t directly apply to your business, you can’t go wrong by paying attention to your audience and their behavior. Consider what they do when they’re in a non-buying context, and see if you can interact with them on that level (if not in that context!). And with a bit of practice, and some well-targeted campaigns, your customers should discover that you’re a match made in heaven!

---

Now it’s your turn! Are there any tactics you’ve noticed in these areas which have worked particularly well for you and your target customers? Do you agree with my theories about dating? Let me know your thoughts 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 →

Posted by randfish

It’s probably crossed your mind before. Should you optimize for your competitors’ branded keywords? How would you even go about it effectively? Well, in today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains some carefully strategic and smart ways to optimize for the keywords of a competitor — from determining their worthiness, to properly targeting your funnel, to using third-party hosted content for maximum amplification.

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 optimizing for your competitors’ branded terms and phrases, the keywords that are your competitors’ product names or service names. This gets into a little bit of a dicey area. I think it’s challenging for a lot of SEO folks to do this and do it well, and so I’m going to take you through an approach that I’ve seen a lot of folks use with some success.

A strategic approach

So to start off with, let’s go to the strategy level. Is it actually the case — and sometimes it’s not, sometimes it is not the case — that branded keywords are driving high enough volume to actually be worth targeting? This is tough and frustrating, but basically one of the best thing that I can recommend in this case is to say, “Hey, if we are…”

I’m going to pretend for the purposes of this Whiteboard Friday that we’re all working together on the SEO campaigns for Wunderlist, which is a to-do app in the Google Play and iPhone app stores, bought by Microsoft I think a little while ago. Beautiful app, it looks really nice. One of their big competitors obviously is Evernote, certainly an indirect competitor but still.

Are branded keywords driving high enough volumes to be worthwhile?

Essentially what you might want to do here is actually go ahead and use AdWords to bid on some of these keywords and get a sense for how much traffic is really being driven. Can you draw any of that traffic away? Are people willing to consider alternatives? If there’s almost no willingness to consider alternatives — you can’t draw clicks here, you’re not getting any conversions, and it is the case that the volume is relatively low, not a lot of people are actually searching for Evernote, which is not the case, there are tons of people searching for Evernote and I’d probably tell Wunderlist they should go ahead. Evernote is actually bidding on Wunderlist’s terms, so turnabout is fair play. Bidding on AdWords can answer both of these questions. That can help them get us to:

What do you need to solve?

All right, now what is it that we need to solve? What are potential customers doing to compare our products or our services against these folks, and what are they interested in when they’re searching for these branded names? What makes them choose one versus another product?

Related searches can help us here, so too can normal forms of keyword research. So related searches is one form, but certainly I’d urge you to use search suggest, I’d urge you to check out Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool, if you like keywordtool.io or if you like Huballin or whatever it is that you think is a great keyword tool, check those out, go through those sources for your competitor’s keywords, see what’s coming up there, see what actually has some real volume. Obviously, your AdWords campaign where you bid on their branded terms can help tell you that too.

Then from there I’d go through the search results, and I’d see: What are people saying? What are the editorial reviews? For example, CNET did this Wunderlist review. What does their breakdown look like? What are people saying in forums? What are they saying on social media? What are they saying when they talk about this?

Ask the same questions of your competition

So if I’m seeing here’s what Wunderlist versus Evernote looks like, great. Now let me plug in Evernote and see what everyone’s saying about them. By the way, you don’t just have to use online research. You can go primary source on this stuff, too. Ask your customers or your audience directly through surveys. We’ve used here at Moz Google Custom Audience Surveys, and we’ve used SurveyMonkey Audience’s product. We like both of those.

Once you’ve got this down and you say, “Hey, you know what? We’ve got a strategic approach. We know what we need to talk about in terms of content. We know the keywords we’re targeting.” Great. Now you get to choose between two big options here — self-hosting some content that’s targeting these terms, or using third-party hosting.

Self-hosted content

With self-hosted content we’re going to try and go after those right terms and phrases. This is where I’ve seen some people get lost. They essentially go too high or too low in the funnel, not targeting that sweet spot right in the middle.

1. Target the right terms & phrases

So essentially, if someone’s searching for “Evernote review,” the intent there is that they’re trying to evaluate whether Evernote is good. Yeah, you know what? That’s right in the middle. That’s right in the sweet spot, I would say that is a good choice for you targeting your competitors’ keywords, anything around reviews.

“Evernote download,” however, that’s really at the bottom of the funnel. They’re trying to install at that point. I don’t think I’d tell you to go after those keywords. I don’t think I’d bid on them, and I don’t think I’d create content based on that. An Evernote download, that’s a very transactional, direct kind of search. I’d cross that one off my list. “How to use Evernote,” well, okay that’s post-installation probably, or maybe it’s pre-installation. But it’s really about learning. It’s about retaining and keeping people. I’d probably put that in the no bucket as well most of the time. “Evernote alternative,” obviously I’m targeting “Evernote alternative.” That is a great search phrase. That’s essentially asking me for my product. “What is Evernote,” well okay, that’s very top-of-funnel. Maybe I’d think about targeting some content like, “What do apps like Evernote, Todoist and Wunderlist do?” Okay. Yeah, maybe I’m capturing all three of those in there. So I’d put this as a maybe. Maybe I’d go after that.

Just be careful because if you go after the wrong keywords here, a lot of your efforts can fail just because you’re doing poor keyword targeting.

2. Craft content that delivers a superior user experience

Second is you need to craft that content that’s going to deliver a superior user experience. You’re essentially trying to pull someone away from the other search results and say, “Yeah, it was worth it to scroll down.

It was worth it to click and to do the research and to check out the review or check out the alternative.” Therefore, you need something that has a lot of editorial integrity. You need that editorial integrity. You can’t just be a, “Everything about them is bad. Everything about us is great. Check out why we kick their butt six ways from Sunday.” It’s just not going to be well-perceived.

You need to be credible to that audience. To do that, I think what’s smart is to make your approach the way you would approach it as if you were a third-party reviewer. In fact, it can even pay in some cases to get an external party to do the comparison review and write the content for you. Then you’re just doing the formatting. That way it becomes very fair. Like, “Hey, we at Wunderlist thought our product compared very well to Evernote’s. So we hired an outside expert in this space, who’s worked with a bunch of these programs, to review it and here’s his review. Here are his thoughts on the subject.”

Awesome. Now you’ve created some additional credibility in there. You’re hosting it on your site. It’s clearly promoting you, but it has some of that integrity.

I would do things like I’d think about key differentiators. I’d think about user and editorial review comparisons. So if you can go to the app stores and then collect all the user reviews or collect a bunch of user reviews and synchronize those for folks to compare, check out the editorial reviews — CNET has reviewed both of these. The Verge has reviewed both of these. A bunch of other sites have reviewed both of them. Awesome. Let’s do a comparison of the editorial reviews and the ratings that these products got.

“Choose X if you need…” This is where you essentially say, “If you’re doing this, well guess what? We don’t do it very well. We’d suggest you use Evernote instead. But if you’re doing this, you know what? Wunderlist is generally perceived to be better and here’s why.” That’s a great way to do it. Then you might want to have that full-feature comparison breakdown. Remember that with Google’s keyword targeting and with their algorithms today they’re looking for a lot of that deep content, and you can often rank better if you include a lot more of those terms and phrases about what’s inside the products.

3. Choose a hosted location that doesn’t compromise your existing funnel

This is rarely done, but sometimes folks will put it on their main homepage of their website or in their navigation. That’s probably not ideal. You probably want to keep it one step away from the primary navigation flow around your site.

You could conceivably host it in your blog. You could make it something where you say, “Hey, do you want to see comparisons? Or do you want to see product reviews?” Then we’re going to link to it from that page. But I wouldn’t put it in the primary funnel.

3rd-party hosted content

Third-party hosted content is another option, and I’ve seen some folks do this particularly well recently. Guest content is one way to do that. You could do that. You could pay someone else, that professional reviewer and say, “Hey, we want to pitch this professional reviewer comparing our product against someone else’s to these other outlets.”

Sometimes there are external reviewers who if you just ask them, if you just say, “Hey we have a new product or we have a competing product. We think it compares favorably. Would you do a review?” A lot of the time if you’re in the right kind of space, people will just say, “Yeah, you know what? I’ll put that on my schedule because I think that can send me some good traffic, and then we’ll let you know.” You kind of knock on wood and hope you get a favorable review there. You could contribute it to a discussion forum. Just be open and honest and transparent about who you are and what you’re doing there.

Native ads

Today you can do sponsored content or what’s called native ad content, where essentially you’re paying another site to host it. Usually, there’s a bunch of disclosure requirements around that, but it can work and sometimes that content can even rank well and earn links and all that kind of stuff.

Promotion & amplification

For promotion and amplification of this content, it’s a little trickier than it is with your average content because it’s so adversarial in nature. The first people I would always talk to are your rabid loyal fans. So if you know you’ve got a community of people who are absolutely super-passionate about this, you can say, “Hey, guess what? We released our comparison, or we released this extra review comparison of our product versus our competitor’s today. You can check it out here.”

You can pitch that to influencers and pundits in your space, definitely letting them know, “Hey, here’s this comparison. Tell us if you think we were honest. Tell us if you think this is accurate. Tell us if this reflects your experience.” Do the same thing with industry press. Your social audiences are certainly folks that you could talk to.

Give them a reason to come back

One of the key ones that I think gets too often ignored is if you have users who you know have gone through your signup flow or have used your product but then left, this is a great chance to try and earn their business back, to say, “Hey, we know that in the past you gave Wunderlist a try. You left for one reason or another. We want you to see how favorably we compare to our next biggest competitor in the space.” That can be a great way to bring those people back to the site.

Consult your legal team

Last thing, very important. Make sure, when you’re creating this type of content, that you talk to your legal professional. It is the case that sometimes using terms and phrases, trademarked words, branded words, has some legal implications. I am not a legal professional. You can’t ask me that question, but you can definitely ask your lawyer or your legal team, and they can advise you what you can and cannot do.

All right, everyone. Hope you’ve enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday, and we will see you again next week. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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

Continue reading →