seo

Posted by jenstar

Webmasters were caught by surprise two weeks ago, when Google released many new statements about their Panda algorithm to The SEM Post. Traditionally, Google tends to be rather quiet about their search algorithms, but their new comments were a departure from this. Google was quite transparent and shared a lot of new Panda-related information that many SEOs weren’t aware of.

Here are what I consider to be the top new takeaways from Google about the Panda algorithm. These are all things that SEOs can put into action, either to create new, great-quality content or to increase the quality value of their current content.

First, the Panda algorithm is specifically about content. It’s not about links, it’s not about mobile-friendliness, it’s not about having an HTTPS site. Rather, the Panda algorithm rewards great-quality content by demoting content that’s either quite spammy in nature or that’s simply not very good.

Now, here are the most important things you should know about Panda, including some of the mistakes and misconceptions about the algorithm update that have confused even the expert SEOs.

Removing content Google considers good

One big issue is that many SEOs have been promoting the widespread removal of content from websites that were hit by Panda. In actuality, however, what many webmasters don’t realize is that they could be shooting themselves in the foot by doing this.

When performing content audits, many penalty experts will cut a wide swath through the site’s content and remove it. Whether claiming that X% of content needs to be removed to recover from Panda or that older, less fresh content needs to be removed, doing this without the proper research will cause rankings to decrease even further. It’s never a “surefire Panda recovery tactic,” despite what some might say.

Unfortunately for SEOs, there’s no magic formula to recover from Panda when it comes to the quantity, age, or length of the content on the site. Instead, you need to look at each page to determine its value. The last thing you want to do is remove pages that are actually helping.

Fortunately, we have the tools to be able to determine the “good versus bad” when it comes to figuring out what Google considers quality. And the answer is in both Google Analytics (or whatever your preferred site analytics program is) and in Google Search Console.

If Google is sending traffic to a page, then it considers it quality enough to rank. If you were going to remove one of these pages because it was written a few years ago or because it was below a magic word count threshold, you would lose all the future traffic Google would send to that page.

If you’re determined to remove content, at least verify that Google isn’t sending those pages traffic before you add to your Panda problems by losing more traffic.

Your content should match the search query

We all laugh when we look in our Google Search Console Search Analytics and see the funny keywords people search for. However, part of providing quality content is also delivering those content expectations. In other words, if a search is repeatedly bringing visitors to a specific page, you’ll want to make sure that page delivers the promised content.

From the Panda Algo Guide:

A Google spokesperson also took it a step further and suggested using it also to identify pages where the search query isn’t quite matching the delivered content. “If you believe your site is affected by the Panda algorithm, in Search Console’s Search Analytics feature you can identify the queries which lead to pages that provide overly vague information or don’t seem to satisfy the user need for a query.”

So if your site has been impacted by Panda — or you’re concerned it might be and want to be proactive — start matching up popular queries with their pages, making sure you’re fully delivering on those content query expectations. While this won’t be as big of a concern for sites not impacted by Panda, it’s something to keep in mind if you do notice those “odd” keywords popping up with frequency.

Ensuring your content matches the query is also one of the easiest Panda fixes you can do, although it might take some legwork to spot those queries that under-deliver. Often, it’s just a matter of slightly tweaking a paragraph or two, or adding an additional few paragraphs to change the content for those queries from “meh” to “awesome.” And if you deliver that content on the visitor’s landing page, it means they’re more likely to stick around, view more of your content, and share it with others — rather than hitting the back button to find a page that does answer their query.

Fixable? Or kill it with fire?

“Fixing” versus “removing” is another area where many experts disagree. Luckily, it’s been one of the areas that Google has been pretty vocal about if you know where to find those comments.

Google has been a longtime advocate of fixing poor quality content. Both Gary Illyes and John Mueller have repeatedly talked about improving the quality of content.

In a hangout, John Mueller said:

Overall, the quality of the site should be significantly improved so we can trust the content. Sometimes what we see with a site like that will have a lot of thin content, maybe there’s content you are aggregating from other sources, maybe there’s user-generated content where people are submitting articles that are kind of low quality, and those are all the things you might want to look at and say what can I do; on the one hand, hand if I want to keep these articles, maybe prevent these from appearing in search.

Now, there are always edge cases, and this is what many experts get hung up on. The important thing to remember is that Google’s not talking about those weird, random edge cases, but rather what applies to most websites. Is it forum spam for the latest and greatest Uggs seller? Of course, you’ll want to remove or noindex it. But if it’s the content you hired your next-door neighbor to write for you, or “original” content you bought off of Fiverr? Improve it instead.

If you do have thin content that you’ll want to upgrade in the future, you can always noindex it for now. If it’s not indexable by Google, it’s not going to hurt you, from a Panda perspective. However, it’s important to note that you still need to have enough quality content on your site, even if you’re noindexing or removing the bad stuff.

This is also what Google recommended in the Panda Algo Guide:

A Google spokesperson also said this, when referring to lower quality pages. “Instead of deleting those pages, your goal should be to create pages that don’t fall in that category: pages that provide unique value for your users who would trust your site in the future when they see it in the results.”

Still determined to remove it after checking all the facts? Gary Illyes gave suggestions during his keynote at Pubcon last year on how to remove thin content properly.

Ranking with Panda

One of the most surprising revelations from Google is that sites can still rank while being affected by Panda. While there are certainly instances where Panda impacts an entire site, and this is probably true in the majority of cases, it is possible that only some pages are negatively impacted by Panda. This is yet another reason you want to be careful when removing pages.

From the Panda Algo Guide:

What most people are seeing are sites that have content that is overwhelmingly poor quality, so it can seem that an entire site is affected. But if a site does have quality content on a page, those pages can continue to rank.

A Google spokesperson confirmed this as well.

The Panda algorithm may continue to show such a site for more specific and highly-relevant queries, but its visibility will be reduced for queries where the site owner’s benefit is disproportionate to the user’s benefit.

This comment reinforces the idea from Google that a key part of Panda is where Google feels the site owner is getting the most benefit from a visitor to their site, rather than vice-versa.

Duplicate content

One of the first things that webmasters do when they get hit by Panda is freak out over duplicate content. And while managing your duplicate content is always a good idea from a technical standpoint, it doesn’t actually play any kind of a role in Panda, as confirmed by John Mueller late last year.

And even then, John Mueller described fixing duplicate content on a priority scale as “somewhere in the sidebar or even quite low on the list.” In other words, focus on what Panda is impacting first, then clean up the non-Panda related technical details at the end.

Bottom line: Duplicate content can certainly affect your SEO. But from a Panda perspective, if your main focus is on getting your site ranking well again in Google after a Panda hit, leave it until the end. Google is usually pretty good about sorting it out, and if not, it’s fixable with either some redirects or canonicals.

Word count

Many webmasters fixate on the idea that content has to be a certain number of words to be deemed “Panda-proof.” There are plenty of instances of thousand-word articles that are extremely poor quality, and other examples of content so great that even having only a hundred or so words will trigger a featured snippet… something Google tends to give only to higher-quality sites.

Now, if you’re writing content, there’s nothing wrong with trying to set up certain benchmarks for the number of words — especially if you have contributors or you’re hiring writers. There’s no issue with that. The issue is with falsely believing that word count is related to quality, both in Google’s eyes and from the Panda algo perspective.

It’s very dangerous to assume that because an article or post is under a specific word count that it needs to be removed or improved. Instead, as with the case of considering whether you should remove content, look to see whether Google is sending referrals to those pages. If they’re ranking and receiving traffic from Google, word count is not an issue.

Advertising & affiliate links

The role that both advertising and affiliate links play in Google Panda is an interesting one. This isn’t to say that all advertising is bad or all affiliate links are bad. It’s a topic that John Mueller from Google has brought up in his Google Hangouts, as well. The problem is the content surrounding it — how much there is and what it’s like.

Where there’s an impact is in the amount of advertising and affiliate links. Will Google consider a page that is essentially just affiliate links without any quality content as good? It’s not that Panda is specifically targeting ads or affiliate content. There are lots of awesome affiliate sites out there that rank really well and are not affected by Panda whatsoever.

The problem lies in the disconnect between the balance of useful content and monetization. At Pubcon, Gary Illyes said the value to the visitor should be higher than the value to the site owner. But as we see on many sites, that balance has tipped the other way, where the visitor is seen merely as a means of revenue, without concern about giving that visitor any value back.

You don’t need to hit your visitors over the head with a huge amount of advertising and affiliate links to make money. That visitor brings a lot of additional value to your site when they don’t feel your site is too ad heavy. From the Panda Algo Guide:

There are also benefits from traffic even if it doesn’t convert into a click on an affiliate link. Maybe they share it on social media, maybe they recommend it to someone, or they return at a later time, remembering the good user experience from the previous visit.

A Google spokesperson also said, “Users not only remember but also voluntarily spread the word about the quality of the site, because the content is produced with care, it’s original, and shows that the author is truly an expert in the topic of the site.” And this is where many affiliate sites run into problems.

There’s another thing that often happens when a website is hit by Panda: naturally, the revenue from the ads they do have on the site goes down. Unfortunately, often the response to this loss of revenue is to increase the number of ads or affiliate links to compensate. But this degrades the value of the content even further and, despite the knee-jerk reaction, is not the appropriate move in a Panda-busting plan.

Bottom line: There is absolutely nothing wrong with having advertising or affiliate links on a site. That alone won’t cause a Panda issue. What can cause a Panda issue, rather, is how and how much you present these things. Ads and affiliate links should support your content, not overwhelm it.

User-generated content

What about user-generated content? Sadly, it’s getting a pretty bad rap these days. But it’s getting this reputation for the crappy user-generated content out there, not for the high-quality user generated content you see on sites. Many so-called experts advise removing all user-generated content, when again that’s one of those moves that can negatively impact your site.

Instead, look at the actual user-generated content you have your site and decide whether it’s quality or not. For example, YouMoz is considered to be fairly high-quality user generated content: all posts still have to be approved by editors, and only a small percent of submitted articles make it live on the site. Even then, their editors also work to improve and edit the pieces as necessary, ensuring that even though it is user-generated content, it’s still high quality.

But like any content on the web, user-generated or not, there are different levels of quality. If your user-generated content quality is very high, then you have nothing to worry about. You could have a different contributor for every single article if you wanted to. It has nothing to do with how you obtained the content for your site, but rather how high-quality and valuable that content is.

Likewise, with forums or community-driven sites where all the content is user-contributed, it’s about how quality that content is — not about who contributes it. Sites like Stackoverflow have hundreds of thousands of contributors, yet it’s considered very high-quality and it does extremely well in the Google search results.

If your user-generated content has both its high point and its low point regarding quality, there are a few things actions that Google recommends so that the lower-quality content doesn’t drag down the entire site. John Mueller said if you can recognize the types of lower-quality content on the forum or the patterns that tend to match it, then you can block it from being indexed by Google. This might mean noindexing your welcome forum where people are posting introductions about themselves, or blocking the chitchat forums while leaving the helpful Q&A as indexable.

And, of course, you need to deal with any spam in your user-generated content, whether it’s something like YouMoz or a forum for people who all love a specific hobby. Have good guidelines in place to prevent your active users from spamming or link-dropping. And use some of the many forum add-ons that identify and remove spam before Google can even see it.

Do not follow the advice of those who say all user-generated content is bad… it’s not. Just ensure that it’s high quality, and you won’t have a problem with Panda from the start.

Commenting

You may have noticed a trend lately: Many blogs and news sites are removing comments from their sites completely. When you do this, though, you’re removing a signal that Google can use that shows how well people are responding to your content. Like any content, comments aren’t all bad simply because they’re comments — their quality is the deciding factor, and this will vary.

And it’s not just the Google perspective that dictates why you should keep them. Having a comment section can keep visitors coming back to your site to check for new commentary, and it can often offer additional insights and viewpoints on the content. Communities can even form around comment sections. And, of course, it adds more content.

But, like user-generated content, you need to make sure you’re keeping it high quality. Have a good comments policy in place; if you’re in doubt, don’t approve the comment. Your goal is to keep those comments high-quality, and if there’s any suspicion (such as a username of “Buy Keyword Now,” or it’s nothing more than an “I agree” comment), just don’t allow it.

That said, allowing low-quality comments can affect the site, something John Mueller has confirmed. I wouldn’t panic over a handful of low-quality comments, but if the overall value of the comments is pretty low, you probably want to weed them out, keep the high-quality comments, and be a little bit more discriminating going forward.

Technical issues

No, technical issues do not cause Panda. However, it’s still a widespread belief that things like page speed, duplicate content, or even what TLD the site is on can have an impact on Panda. This is not accurate at all.

That said, these kinds of technical issues do have an impact on your overall rankings — just not for Panda reasons. So, it’s best practice to ensure your page speed is good, you’re not running long redirect chains, and your URL structure is good; all these things do affect your overall SEO with Google’s core algorithm. With regards to recovering from Panda, though, it doesn’t have an impact at all.

“Core” Algo

One of the surprises was the addition of the core algo comment, where Google revealed to The SEM Post that Panda was now part of the core algorithm. But what does this mean? Is it even important to the average SEO?

The answer is no. Previously, Panda was a filter added after the core search algo. Now, while it’s moved to become part of that core algo, Panda itself is essentially the same, and it still impacts websites the same way.

Google confirmed the same. Gary Illyes from Google commented on it being one of the worst takeaways from all the Panda news.

A2. I think this is the worst takeway of the past few days, but imagine an engine of a car. It used to be that there was no starter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starter_(engine)), the driver had to go in front of the car, and use some tool to start the engine. Today we have starters in any petrol engine, it’s integrated. It became more convenient, but essentially nothing changed.

For a user or even a webmaster it should not matter at all which components live where, it’s really irrelevant, and that’s why I think people should focus on these “interesting” things less.

It really doesn’t make a difference from an SEO’s perspective, despite the initial speculation it might have.

Overall

Google released a lot of great Panda information last week, and all of it contained advice that SEOs can put into action immediately — whether to ensure their site is Panda-proofed, or to fix a site that had been slapped by Panda previously.

The bottom line: Create high-level, quality content for your websites, and you won’t have to worry about Pandas.

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Posted by larry.kim

Wouldn’t it be so cool if you could drive engagement and qualified traffic to grow your business and brand from LinkedIn?

You can!

This article will show you how to get tons of likes on your LinkedIn updates and further grow your reach with LinkedIn Pulse.

Doing so requires one crucial thing. You must:

(Image source: me attempting to use Photoshop)

1. Build a large LinkedIn network

Smart marketers must build a large LinkedIn network.

The LinkedIn news feed algorithm isn’t a black box. It’s more like an open box. It’s about as basic as boiling water.

Updates that you “like” will be shared with your LinkedIn network. If your connections “like” your status updates, their connections will see that update.

So if you have 20,000 connections on LinkedIn, then it’s so much more likely that (a) more of your connections will click “Like” on your updates and (b) that their connections will also click “like” on your updates.

LinkedIn’s algorithm is about as stupid-simple as it gets — it shows your updates to all of your connections.

There’s no way to search for updates on LinkedIn — not even with advanced search. Nobody will see your updates unless they are connected to you.

When more people see your updates, it increases the odds that more people will like that update.

More connections. More likes. Simple.

Add connections and the results will multiply over time. Quality connections are key here. Only connect with people you know and want to know — don’t just try to connect with random people, recruiters, or those really annoying sales spammers.

If you add 10x more connections, then you’re 10x more likely to get that engagement.

How do you expand your LinkedIn network? You can definitely help yourself by optimizing the heck out of your LinkedIn profile and writing irresistible LinkedIn connection requests.

But having tons of connections is only half the battle.

2. Post high-engagement updates to LinkedIn

The second half of the battle is posting interesting updates more often. And by often, I mean 1 to 3 times a day.

But our battle begins not on LinkedIn. It begins on Twitter.

Here’s how this pyramid scheme works. (Don’t worry, it’s totally legal!)

You can try out lots of different updates on Twitter. Let’s say you post 20 tweets a day.

Some of your tweets will get tons of engagement (clicks, replies, retweets, likes). Some will do moderately well. Others will die of loneliness (hopefully not too many!).

We want to focus on the winners.

Think of this as your personal “LinkedIn Update Hunger Games.”

You audition the different updates on Twitter. Each tweet is one of your “tributes.”

Your best stuff is transported from Twitter to LinkedIn. Only your “victors” get the heroes’ welcome at The Capitol.

Using Twitter analytics, you pick your victors — the top 5 or 10 percent top-performing Twitter updates. The tweets people liked, retweeted, or replied to.

Use your top stuff from Twitter as a guide for your LinkedIn updates. After all, it’s highly likely that the same content that did well on Twitter will also get lots of likes on LinkedIn.

3. Hacking LinkedIn Pulse

Now let’s turn our attention to Pulse, LinkedIn’s content app and news feed curation service.

You can blog on LinkedIn and easily get a few thousands views. According to LinkedIn’s latest available figures, more than a million people have published posts on LinkedIn’s platform; more than 130,000 posts are published every week; and the average post reaches LinkedIn members in 21 industries and nine countries.

Sometimes LinkedIn articles perform fantastically well, transforming from average to a unicorn. We’re talking 50,000, 100,000, or even millions of views.

Wish you could get that many views? You can!

How do you do it?

First, you must get your content featured on a Pulse channel. Pulse has several Channels (i.e., topics) that have millions of followers — some of the most popular include Leadership & Management, Big Ideas & Innovation, Technology, Entrepreneurship, and Marketing & Advertising.

If you only have 500 or 1,000 followers on LinkedIn, Pulse is the outlet that can expose you to a massive audience.

So how do you get your blog post featured on a Channel?

Algorithmically

You need to do old-school SEO on your post. LinkedIn Pulse categorizes your content based on an analysis of the text of your article. This is like SEO from 15 years ago, when all you had to do was put the keyword in the title and all throughout the article! Crazy simple.

Ask an editor to feature your story

You can tweet them @LinkedInPulse and ask them to feature your article in a specific channel.

Getting featured on a Channel is awesome. But it isn’t enough.

Hitting it big on LinkedIn Pulse is similar on Digg or Reddit. Just because you submit something doesn’t mean you’re automatically going to get tons of traffic. You need to be one of the top two or three featured stories to get the lion’s share.

The same is true on LinkedIn. You’ll experience the biggest wins after you get to the top of a Pulse Channel.

How do you get to the top? One tactic that can work brilliantly is using Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin promoted posts to quickly drive lots of traffic to your LinkedIn article.

One key factor of LinkedIn Pulse’s algorithm is the amount of traffic and engagement an article has seen in the last several minutes. You don’t have to drive traffic forever. You just need a catalyst — something that gives your article a little push to get it to the top.

Once your Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter ads help your article get to the top, it will be self-sustaining for a while as people go to the Channel and check out what’s trending – make sure it’s your post!

The winning LinkedIn formula

So, there you have it. The way to get tons of likes on LinkedIn is the combination of high engagement content plus lots of connections. Then, take it a step further by optimizing for LinkedIn Pulse to expose yourself an even larger audience.

A long time ago, I used to treat LinkedIn separately. But I’ve since grown and found several reasons to treat LinkedIn more like Twitter. Key among them: More people will engage with you, share your best content, and visit your website.

LinkedIn is constantly evolving to serve its more than 400 million members. So evolve your LinkedIn marketing strategy accordingly in 2016. Start building more connections and raising your visibility!

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Posted by randfish

From search ads and SEO to display ads, content, and your social efforts, there’s a lot to consider when creating the correct marketing concoction. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand goes over advice on how and why you should be auditing your funnel to ensure you have a balanced, effective marketing mix.

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 how to balance your marketing mix. Specifically, I want to talk a little bit more about search ads and SEO versus kind of content and social, those traffic channels that you invest in, either paid or organic, that can drive traffic kind of more at the top of the funnel or more in the conversion process.

But this is actually a complex equation, and the marketing mix overall is something that a lot of folks struggle with and that I find a ton of misplaced energy and misplaced dollars happening. So the way to solve for this, in my opinion, is we can start with a pretty simple auditing process. We can ask ourselves kind of strategically, “Where are we facing funnel challenges?”

Determining where your funnel challenges are.

I see lots of businesses — from tiny, small startups and small businesses on the web to giant companies — having this issue where they say, “We have a problem with the consideration and comparison phase. We feel really good that people are aware of our brand, and they come for that first visit. They come back for the return visit. But then they get to the consideration phase and we feel like we’re losing out against our competitors right there before conversion happens.”

Well, guess what? If you’re spending all your marketing dollars on display or on offline forms of display marketing, which go to awareness, and very little in the consideration and comparison set, where things like search can be great, especially your brand versus competitors, or your competitor versus your own brand, or features, or what to buy, or recommendations, or reviews, all those kinds of things, ranking for that stuff, buying those key terms, having content that serves them and maybe doing some display advertising to people who’ve already been to your website through a retargeting that’s trying to convince them, well, all of those forms of marketing can reach that set. But the problem is you’re spending all your time and energy, and people, and dollars up in awareness.

I see this across the board. I’ve seen people spend a ton on first visit and return visit, and nothing on recidivism and retention. I’ve seen them spend a ton at the point of conversion, but nothing up here to drive awareness. So they have a great-looking funnel for a very small number of people.

If you know where you have this problem, if you can identify where your issues lie, then you can invest in the right channels. You can change up your marketing mix and your people, your time, and your dollars accordingly.

Also, don’t be too narrow. My view here is a little bit narrow. But you should consider whether channels like community building, email marketing, offline advertising, or in-product, in-app marketing can actually be part of this mix and how they should be part of this mix. I don’t want you to limit it just to search, social, content, display. There’s a lot of opportunity there.

Validate that your investments can actually move the needle.

You can invest a lot of time and energy, and dollars, and people into one of these channels to try and move the needle on something, and get what look like good results in the channel itself. Like, “Oh, search is driving lots of traffic.” Or, “We have high rankings.” Or, “We are spending a lot on this display channel, and we’re seeing lots of people visit.”

But then, when you actually dig in, you see that you’re not moving the needle on what you need to. You’re not improving the problem that you have in your funnel.

So you might ask: “I’ve got a retargeting ad or a whole set of retargeting ads. Are we effectively improving conversion rate, or are we just bringing people back to the site? Which was our goal? Were we doing retargeting to earn return visits? Or are we doing retargeting so that we can increase conversion or so we can improve consideration and comparison against the competition?”

“Is this piece of content, or our content strategy overall, or the tactic of producing a daily blog post or a monthly report, or a white paper every quarter, is that reaching a broad enough audience? Is it targeting enough of our visitors and their influencers? Is it driving return visits? Is it driving conversion? Is it getting us a lead that we can then follow up with? What’s happening there?”

You can ask that question in SEO and in PPC as well. Does ranking for this keyword bring in the right qualified potential traffic? Does it bring us enough?

Are we ranking for a keyword where, you know what, it sounds like a great keyword and it would convert great. But we’re not getting enough people because Google has a knowledge graph and an instant answer up top. So the keyword opportunity score is way down low in the toilet, and it’s just not going to drive any traffic. So maybe we need to expand that keyword set. Maybe we’re doing great with SEO, but we need to do more of it for different keywords.

If you are doing this auditing process and you identify whether the tactics are actually moving the needle in the places you think they are, you can now move on to, “We know our funnel problems, where they exist, where they don’t. We know which tactics work and don’t.”

Analyze your resource allocation to match against the problems and ROI.

Now we can say, “You know what? Let me look at my marketing mix.

Let me look at my resource allocation and say, ‘Oh, maybe I’m putting 20% of my budget to display and 18% to paid search. Maybe I’m putting 15% to offline, and I’m putting 12% to social and 8% to content.” Whatever the numbers may be, “Is that the right mix? Does that effectively sound like it’s doing the right things over here, or should I be changing this up?”

Should I say, “Huh. You know what? We saw that we have a bunch of opportunity in SEO, or we have a bunch of opportunity in content. We have a lot of time and energy and people being spent in display. Could we put that on autopilot for a little bit? Let our display run for a quarter. Maybe do a weekly or monthly check-in from one person. But ask those people to go concentrate on content, and then have our SEOs help them become sophisticated and savvy with how to promote that content.”

Maybe. Maybe you can. The questions I like to ask in the resource allocation phase are: Are any of these already purely on autopilot? Are they just sort of running and they haven’t been audited? Because that can speak to why the tactic isn’t working, or why it’s not targeting the right phase of the funnel.

How many people and hours, not just dollars are going to each? Because a lot of folks, when they look at their marketing budget from a CFO level or a chief marketing officer, they’ll look purely at the numbers, not at the people. That can be very dangerous too, because if you say, “Hey, we’ve got a bunch of our budget is allocated to display. We have almost no budget to allocate it to SEO. But that’s intentional because SEO is a free channel.” Ahh. Pull out your hair. That’s crazy.

Or the only dollars that we have assigned to it are our SEO consultants, rather than people and hours, and time, and energy, which is what you need to be successful with an inbound marketing flywheel, like the content, search, social, email, community system.

Are any of these maxing out? If you’re seeing that you’re putting more dollars, more time against them, but you’re getting lower and lower ROI over time, that could be a sign that you’re sort of maxed out in that channel, and you either need to get more creative on how you’re reaching more people, or you might think about switching some of that expenditure of time and people and dollars.

Then, finally, do any of these have tracking or data issues? I find that in a huge number of organizations the reason they’re not solving the funnel challenges that they want to, and pursuing poor tactics and not investing in channels like search and social and content, is because they have no good way to measure it. So the first step might be admitting, “You know what? We’re bad at measuring the ROI of content. So that’s the first thing we have to do.”

We have to be able to say, “Did someone come to visit us for the first time from a piece of content? What happened in the 90-day window, or 120-day window, whatever the cookie lasts, however long we can make the cookie last? Did we see that person come back again and go to consideration and comparison phase, or go to conversion, or become more of a recidivist for our products or a highly-retentive customer who’s subscribing to us?”

If the answer to those things is yes, then you know what? Data is the place to invest. When you do that, then you’re able to effectively allocate your marketing channels.

So hopefully, this will kick off an exercise in audit for many of you. I’d love to hear from you in the comments with your shares about places you have reallocated dollars, places you’ve seen present lots of opportunity or present poor opportunity. Then, I’d love to see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Posted by ajfried

Thinking in templates

We all judge people on first impressions. When we see someone for the first time, we’re quick to decide what type of person they are — based on the clothes they wear, how they style their hair, and anything else we notice that immediately puts them in a group.

It’s certainly not fair, but it’s human nature. And I’d like to keep my faith in humanity and argue that lots of us try NOT to prejudge others.

Google is judging you

Believe it or not, Google is the same. It judges, too. Some might disagree with this theory, but our internal research supports it, as you’ll see in the data below. Google pre-classifies every single search term into a group for later recall.

Is that fair?

Is Google fair about how it does this?

Imagine, for a moment, that you’re about to walk onto the stage of MozCon. You’ve spent months preparing and you have new and thought-provoking research to share. You are legend and you’re about to blow everyone’s mind. And as you make your way up… SPLAT! You fall right on your face. I mean, really wipe out.

You’ll probably recover, because you’re dynamic and you’ll still nail your presentation. However, you’ll also be forever stamped as the one that fell on your face during the conference.

Is it fair that people treat us this way? Or how about Google? Is it fair that Google judges us like this, that we’re classified into select groups, or that Google may show years-old negative content about us or our clients?

I think most people would agree: it’s not. Something that’s truly not relevant to an individual’s or brand’s storyline shouldn’t be appearing prominently in a query for their name. An event that’s nothing more than a blip on the radar shouldn’t become the most important thing you see about them.

Yet, often it is. More often than you think. Some of the biggest brands in the world are dealing with this problem — having unfavorable content appearing for their name — and desperately try to get rid of it.

How does Google feel about ranking content?

On Google’s About page, Larry Page describes a perfect search engine as something that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.”

As an example, it states: “This means making search smarter and faster, so it can understand that when you type in [jaguar] you’re looking for the car, not photos of the animal.”

Well, first of all, they might want to find a different example, because queries without context can’t hint at intent, as you’ll see below.

Intent is really difficult

It’s a basic issue of not knowing what the context is for the query. And, arguably, some of the most important searches don’t have context. A brand? An individual? There’s nothing necessarily unique about these searches to give them context. For example, if I search for “Applebee’s” from my phone, there’s context behind it. I’m on my phone, I’m in the vicinity of a restaurant, I’m probably hungry. But a query for, say, a gentleman named “James Young” is useless, as it gives Google no context or basis for figuring out which results might be most relevant. Do I want to know where he lives? When he was born? What kind of work he’s in?

Arguably, these queries without context are the most important queries, and they’re where audiences form opinions about brands.

So, is Google out to get you?

Sometimes, it can seem like it is when your search results don’t reflect who you are or the content you’re putting out into the world. Truth is, though, Google’s probably not out to get you — in reality, it’s an emotionless machine.

As I’ve mentioned previously, I don’t believe it’s evil. I think it’s a machine controlled by an algorithm, with imperfections and flaws. Choices must be made based on the information available. Sometimes there isn’t enough to work with, or the right information that it’d like to show is missing, so it makes the wrong choices.

So… How do we change what Google wants to show?

Learning from Google’s templates

Google’s job is to show you what you’re looking for. This can only be done by finding patterns and trends. Behind all the search results are templates that every query needs to fit in to.

When you perform a search in Google, you’re effectively seeing whatever information it wants to show you on that day. It’s a ton of information — but it’s not data. If you’re able to collect all that information and trend it, an unbelievable amount can be learned.

For example, among the top 100 hedge funds:

• 74% have their homepage at position 1
• 72% have a knowledge graph
• 38% have Wikipedia at average position 4.41
• 74% have LinkedIn on page 1

Having this data, you start to uncover a deeper meaning behind the search results. You expose the template Google has created for this “type” of query. It should come as no surprise that these templates will change from industry to industry.

Understanding search result templates and trends by industry

The graph below gives a breakdown of what shows up in search results for these industries. (Note: the percentages are the percentage of Google page 1 results.)

Some notable observations:

• Telecommunications companies have more results that are corporate on page 1 of Google than pharmaceutical companies do.
• Pharmaceutical companies will have significantly more media content appearing in their search results than an engineering/construction company.
• Food/drug stores don’t usually get stock quotes appearing in their results.

Using data to create the content Google wants to show

Armed with this information, you can now identify what kind of content Google wants to show for you or your brand.

While we’ve all heard a million times that “content is king” and we should create more content, the reality is that only the RIGHT content is what’s going to make the difference. Content is not churning out post after post after post of products and other junk. Rather, content is about creating an impression that enhances the brand in the viewer’s mind.

Practically, this idea of templates becomes extremely important in planning the right content for your brand. If you can use these templates to identify certain trends appearing for brands similar to your own, you can create the content Google wants to show.

Case studies and analysis

To help articulate this point, I want to share a few case studies.

Case study #1: The not-for-profit president that seems unfavorable

Take, for example, a client we had in the not-for-profit industry. He was the president of an organization and notable enough to have a Wikipedia profile, as did all of his competitors. His corporate site and social profiles were ranking relatively consistently with everyone else, and he authored content regularly. However, he had a disproportionate amount of media coverage about him compared to his competitors, causing negative content to rank prominently.

What became clear was that all the authored content was on his corporate sites, as opposed to a leading industry publication. Content creation was happening, but it was being put in the wrong place. According to the data, someone like this individual should be generating content on reputable industry publications.

Result: We worked to migrate some of his content to relevant publications. With a few relevant links, it began ranking within a few weeks.

Case study #2: The CEO gets all the news!

Another example was the CEO of an asset management company who had a disproportionate amount of news content appearing about them, some of which was negative. This caused frequent changes to the search results for the individual’s name and a lack of branding around their name.

When you examine the results closer, you notice that on average, the CEO of a company like this would have two non-owned, executive-style profiles on sites like Forbes, Bloomberg, or Fortune.

Result: This individual was missing from notable lists, specifically the Forbes billionaire list. Working with the communications team, he was included in the list, displacing some of the negative content.

Case study #3: The need for more ownership

The final example I’ll offer was of a client who had been trying to brand themselves through the use of content, blogging, press releases, and other similar information.

The biggest problem they had? They already had a nice amount of “ownership” within their search results. That means they had full and total control over half of the results appearing. Based on the peer analysis, it was going to be highly unlikely that they’d get more than that.

However, when we ran a frequency analysis, we noticed that every single one of their competitors has a GuideStar profile appearing.

The only differentiator between our client and their competitors was the level of their profile, which is earned by completing it. They were at silver, while everyone else had gold status (Note: there’s some speculation about the level of status).

Once we helped them build up their profile to gold, we added a few easily-attainable and relevant links pointing to the profile. Easy ones, like from their corporate website. It doesn’t get more legit than that.

Result: Within a matter of weeks, we saw the profile ranking at the bottom of page 1, displacing negative content about the brand.

Practically using this information

At the end of the day, Google is nothing more than an organized system. We sometimes give it too much credit because it happens to be REALLY good at understanding what we want and mean. But this is based on an organized understanding of how we (all humans that use Google) use the search engine.

Not all content can rank for all types of queries. Just because a certain result appears for one query doesn’t mean that another will; randomly creating a bunch of profiles is not going the solution. For example, if you happen to be one of the 200 richest Americans in the world, Pinterest is not likely to rank for you. (It appears for 3 of them on page 2: Randa Williams, Milane Frantz, and H. Ross Perot Sr).

Using historical and competitor analysis, understanding what type of content is frequently appearing will give you tremendous insight into the kind of content you should be building to fit into the template Google has built for your brand.

One final note

The only loose end in this process is the thought that you’re now “stuck” in a template. Once Google perceives you a certain way, is that it? Are you stuck? Can the CEO who loves arts and crafts convince Google that Pinterest should rank prominently for queries with their name?

There is some subjectivity to this, to be sure, but the entire process above is by far the path of least resistance. This is the content Google wants to show for queries about you or your brand, based on trends of others in your industry.

If you create an experience on that network that’s highly popular, engaging, and something in which you invest a lot of time and effort, I think it’s fair to say that it could change how search engines classify you. But convincing someone to blog or use social media when it’s not something they’ll do aggressively or passionately usually doesn’t end well. Most people have these profiles, but that doesn’t mean they actively use them.

These templates exist because of the type of information that typically shows for these queries. It’s low-hanging fruit. If you have info that doesn’t make sense for who you are, it likely won’t appear right away without really hard work.

Work with the algorithm and make sense of which content it’s clear that the search engine wants to show. If you create that content, it will rank.

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Posted by Wayfair

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.

At Wayfair.com, we conduct a lot of SEO tests. We’re constantly measuring and evaluating our strategies, some of which were shared in our last post for YouMoz, Accidental SEO Tests: When On-Page Optimization Ceases to Matter. Sometimes, however, we stumble across what we call “accidental SEO tests.” This typically happens when a bad code deploy unintentionally hurts our SEO, and we end up learning something useful from our mistake.

Tens of thousands of 301 redirects

One of our accidental tests involved regularly 301-redirecting large batches (i.e., tens of thousands) of product pages. On average, we found a consistent (and essentially permanent) traffic loss of about 15% for 301-redirected URLs.

In the past, Google has said a small amount of PageRank is lost through a 301 redirect, which is the same as through a link. Now, for the first time, we can put a hard number to how much that loss is.

Structure of an accidental SEO test

Like any good SEO team, our product pages were set to use the name of the product in the URL. Furthermore, if for any reason a product URL was changed, the old URL was set to automatically redirect to the new one.

What we didn’t realize, though, is that our merchandising teams were also busy being good at their jobs, part of which involved changing the naming standards of products on a regular basis. Every change they made was good for the customer. But when the the naming standards changed, it caused thousands of products to change names. This, in turn, updated the URLs of those product pages, triggering a 301 redirect on every page.

For example, when updating for the purpose of having a consistent style, the merchandising team changed “barstools” to the more accurate two-word version of the product name, “bar stools.” Wayfair had over 8,000 bar stools, all of which 301-redirected to a new URL following the name change. Then, a couple of months later, the merchandising team found that they were getting better results by including the height of the bar stool in the product name, so they updated the product names again, which resulted in the product pages 301-updating once more to a brand new set of URLs.

This process of updating product names was being implemented across dozens of different product classes, with multiple updates per month. It quickly added up to a lot of 301 redirects.

Measuring the impact

After reshaping our URL logic to prevent the constant redirects, we realized that we had a great opportunity to find out exactly how 301 redirects affect organic traffic. Nailing down data was easy. We had the exact dates of the changes; groups of thousands to tens of thousands of pages, with tens of thousands of organic visits; and could compare those classes against others that we knew didn’t change to exclude the impact of Wayfair’s overall increase in organic traffic.

We found with surprising consistency that we had a drop very close to 15% of organic traffic for any product class that changed URLs. In our bar stools example, we lost just under 15% of organic traffic at the first change. When the URL changed again over a month later, we lost another 15%.

Every product class we looked at showed the same drop within one to two weeks of the change. Sometimes the drop was almost immediate (like with bar stools); other times, however, it was spread out over a couple weeks (e.g., area rugs, with over 30,000 products).

We did not see any evidence of recovery from the impact of the 301 redirects, even after many months. There was the appearance of recovery — class traffic levels eventually returned to where they started — but that was because our overall organic traffic was increasing across the entire site. We were still 15% below where we would have been without the redirects.

What’s particularly fascinating about this number, 15%, is that it is exactly the amount of PageRank loss Google described in the original PageRank paper. So our measured results matched theory with surprising precision. Perhaps the broader authority signals Google now measures follow the same logic for flowing through pages as they did in 1998? Or perhaps it’s just a happy coincidence.

What it means

We’ve always known there was a “small” cost to implementing a 301 redirect, but our accidental SEO test showed us that the cost is quite significant, and it becomes much greater with every hop in a redirect chain.

It’s worth stressing, however, that we are not saying that 301-redirecting any particular page is going to cost you 15% of your organic traffic. If you rank in position #1 for competitive terms, a redirect could drop you to position #2 or #4. That would cost you far more than 15% of your organic traffic. On the other hand, your page could be so strong that you may not not see any loss in rankings after redirecting it.

What our data suggests is that, on average, there’s a 15% traffic loss following a 301 redirect; but any individual redirect could be much better, or much worse.

While 301-redirecting a dead or changed page to the new location is still good practice, the best practice of all is not to change your URL in the first place.

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