seo

Posted by Everett

If there has been one “SEO tactic” that we’ve seen work consistently throughout 2015, it’s the idea of pruning underperforming content out of Google’s index.

Sometimes it is a result of outdated SEO tactics like article spinning, or technical issues such as indexable internal search results or endlessly crawlable faceted navigation. Other times there are thousands of products with little or no content, or manufacturer-supplied product descriptions. This is why it’s important to make distinctions between pruning off the site (i.e. removing) and pruning from Google’s index (e.g. a “Robots Noindex” meta tag).

In order to find these opportunities, it helps to first perform a Content Audit. This is not a how-to guide for doing content audits. For step-by-step instructions, refer to this tutorial here on Moz.

But there are some differences between auditing eCommerce content compared to other types of content, like blogs or resource sections. For example, when we use the phrase “eCommerce Content Audit,” we’re limiting the analysis to “catalog” content (i.e. Home, Categories, Products, and a few others). More content auditing tips specific to eCommerce websites can be found in the resources section at the end, and in this blog post.

Again, this isn’t a guide for doing content audits. Think of it more as a guide to pruning eCommerce catalog pages, which we find is the most important outcome of many such projects.

Why you should consider pruning your eCommerce site

There are two specific case studies below, which do a pretty good job of answering this question. But, if you don’t mind, allow me to draw a few parallels first.

Pruning is something that occurs naturally in a variety of ways, from dead limbs and autumn leaves to the development of our adolescent brains. Without pruning, systems tend to get bloated and dysfunctional. That’s why if you don’t take the time to maintain your indexable content inventory by pruning it, Google will do it for you — sometimes at a great cost to overall traffic and revenue for the entire site.

Synaptic pruning = (Use it or lose it)

Even the human brain prunes itself. This plasticity is one of the reasons we dominate the planet. We’re adaptable. We grow new connections when we need to, and prune the rest as time goes on. This is probably the biological origin of the phrase “Use it or lose it.”

At different times in our lives (6 months to 2 years old) we need to soak up as much information as we can. But most of the time we need to focus on what’s important to each of us and let certain things, like riding a skateboard and 80% of what we learned in high school, go by the wayside. You can’t keep scaling up forever. At some point, there needs to be a scaling down.

When it comes to nerve cells making and losing connections based on how often they are accessed, “Use it or lose it” describes the situation perfectly.

In terms of eCommerce content, “use it” applies to your visitors. If users are not visiting, linking, sharing, or buying that product, you might consider losing it.

Tree pruning = (Remove it to improve others)

Not unlike removing deadweight content from your site, pruning trees involves the careful selection of limbs to remove for the purpose of improving air circulation (crawling) and consolidating light and nutrients (page-level metrics) into the most important branches (pages).

For centuries, people have removed inward-facing, crossed, broken, sick, unwanted, etc. branches in order to improve the health of important trees — or at least limit their impact on tree health when harvesting firewood.

So, back to why we should prune our sites of unhealthy content…

Because our sites look like this:

Think of these broken and crossed limbs as the types of thin, duplicate, and low-quality content you’ll find on most enterprise eCommerce sites these days. Or any site, really.

Remember back when you could customize internal search result pages to make them look like landing pages (which you should do anyway) instead of boring search results? And then you could mine the internal search logs for keywords with more than one search to automatically “publish” them simply by giving Google a link (which you should definitely not do)? Or how about “article spinning,” remember that?

Then you probably remember this from around February 2011:

Even simple “white hat” tactics like writing halfway decent content for lots of keyword variations has started to become less effective, and potentially harmful. You don’t need separate pages on your site for “choosing a blue widget,” “how to choose a blue widget” and “choosing blue widgets,” and Google definitely doesn’t need them in their index.

URL pruning = (Improve it or remove it)

When it comes to low-quality content dragging down the rankings of your entire site, “Improve it or remove it” makes the most sense. Removing may involve deleting, redirecting, 404/410 codes, “Robots Noindex” meta tags and other options, depending on the situation. Some of this will be discussed later, but first…

The real reason you should prune your eCommerce site

Assuming you have A LOT more “catalog URLs” indexed than you have categories and SKUs (very common), pruning the site will most likely increase your revenue for a comparatively small investment.

What if I told you this might be the best SEO ROI most large sites could hope to get in 2016?

Case studies

The following two case studies involve real clients for whom Inflow has performed eCommerce Content Audits, including implementation support.

Auto Body Toolmart (Large-scale pruning with a hatchet)

The client, Auto Body Toolmart, had 17,057 pages indexed by Google, according to the Index Status report in Google Search Console. However, the Sitemaps report was showing that Google had only indexed 6,135 of the 25,000 URLs in the XML sitemap. What’s wrong with that picture?

Fewer than a quarter of the pages they wanted Google to know about were indexed. Most of the time this is an architecture issue, like using Javascript frameworks (e.g. angular.js, react.js) without providing a crawl-path to paginated pages. Or like inadvertently blocking directories in the robots.txt file that are important crawl paths, instead of with a <META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, FOLLOW”> meta tag.

And yet, nearly 11,000 URLs were indexed that probably shouldn’t have been.

Most of the time something like this comes down to a technical issue, like non-canonicalized sorting and filtering page URLs being indexed. Upon further inspection, we also correlated major traffic drops with early iterations of Google’s Panda and Penguin updates.

According to our Content Audit Strategies Tool, Auto Body Toolmart falls squarely into the bottom-right corner (extra large site with an existing content penalty).

Clicking on “Focus: Content Audit with an eye to Prune” reveals a more detailed prescription:

“Often, we are unable to bring content quality up to par at this scale. Figuring out what can be improved and removing the rest is key. Get the amount of pages indexed down drastically to improve the ratio of good content pages to poor content pages without having to write thousands of pages of copy. Consider removing or noindexing entire sections of the site, or certain page-types, if they would be considered low-quality, thin, duplicate, overlapping, irrelevant…”

From this starting point, Dan Kern and Tim Hampton (Inflow strategists) were able to move forward in the right direction with what limited information they had, while collecting more information to customize the strategy for this particular client.

The gist of their strategy was this: Prune it down heavily, and build it back up as pages are improved (starting with a prioritized group of 1,300 products).

The store had about 20,000 SKUs. Most of them weren’t getting any traffic because they had thin (one or two short bullet points) or duplicate (manufacturer supplied) product copy.

Dan recommended a lot of <META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, FOLLOW”> meta tags on product pages — 11,000 of them, in fact.

Imagine being this client and taking our word that removing more than half of the site from search engine indexes is going to somehow increase revenue.

As you’ll see, they made the right decision.

A major copywriting project is underway in which we are working with the client to get the top 1,300 of those product pages rewritten — all prioritized and managed via their eCommerce content audit dashboard. This will fix duplicate, thin, and other low-quality content at the rate of about 100 product and/or category pages per month.

Post-pruning results

There was a 31% increase in organic traffic with a 28% increase in revenue (despite 11,000 fewer pages indexed) before one word of copy was improved. The only thing that had been implemented was pruning via <META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, FOLLOW”> and a small disavow file (annotated below).

Organic search before & after

About 11,000 total URLs were removed from the index, yet overall traffic began to increase.
Seasonality would not account for this lift, and YOY traffic was up almost 38%.

Revenue went up over 28% within the weeks following the massive pruning of underperforming product pages.

Sessions increased by about 31% during the same time period.

We kept all of these products in the catalog so as not to lose any selection from a user-experience perspective. Just because a product page doesn’t rank well, doesn’t have any referral or search traffic, and doesn’t have any links does not mean it won’t sell.

Our end goal is to improve the page and remove the “Robots Noindex” tag so it can eventually be found through organic search once it provides a better user experience.

Moving forward

We’re in the midst of the copywriting project at the moment, and expect fantastic results by rewriting about 100 pages per month (as per client’s budget). We’ll let you know what happens. The long term revenue increase from an efficient and affordable pruning of 11,000 products from search engine indexes will more than pay for the copywriting of the 1,300 products Dan marked as “Improve” in the content audit.

There are also nearly 700 category pages that have been marked as “Improve” because they were identified as needing better titles, descriptions, and on-page content. These pages have NOT been removed from the index, and we are working on them in weekly batches. One of the biggest things we will do for categories is to add unique content and optimize those that don’t have intro descriptions.

TL;DR – Auto Body Toolmart

By noindexing pages with practically zero organic search traffic to begin with, we effectively and efficiently (read: hatchet, not scalpel) pruned Google’s indexation of the site.

However, by keeping the pages on the website and findable via internal search and navigation, we preserved the user experience and direct/referral revenue. Allowing search engines to discover and “follow” the URL is also hugely important for crawlability of the entire site, and will ensure faster indexation/ranking of the page once the content has been improved and the page is released back into search engine indexes.

America’s Best House Plans (Content audit combined with link cleanup)

This eCommerce site sells ready-designed house plans direct to consumers. They came aboard after a sharp decline in revenue that was suspected to be linked to the Google Panda and Penguin Algorithm updates.

Tim Hampton started by performing a complete audit to uncover the roots of the problem, and found issues with detrimental backlinks and a high percentage of non-performing catalog pages.

Next, a content audit was performed, which resulted in pruning close to 80% of their catalog pages from search engine indexes.

Post-pruning results

After what seemed like a long wait for Google to release updates and reindex the site, a large upswing in traffic and revenue took place.

This resulted in a 434% increase in revenue from organic traffic YOY. Organic traffic improved 78.48% YOY as well.

The downtick at the end has to do with the selected dates. As you can see, both year-lines dip.

Organic search revenue

After a major jump in May and June, YOY organic search revenue settles back into the forecasted goal range for the month of July.

Notation icon indicates the pruning date.

TL;DR – America’s Best House Plans

By temporarily pruning out 80% of the catalog from search engine indexes and cleaning up their link profile, we saw an impressive multi-month lift in traffic and revenue from search followed by a course on-par with last year — despite having fewer indexed pages.

Moving forward

We will be improving product pages as quickly as possible and re-introducing them into the index in batches. We expect steady improvement over the coming months.

Scalpel work

The examples above deal mostly with large-scale content audits in which our “weapon of choice” is a hatchet. This tends to give the most noticeable results worthy of using in case studies.

Most of you probably already have scalpel examples of your own.

You have probably taken a small group of average and/or low-quality pages and consolidated them into one awesome page. Did you lose traffic because you had fewer pages indexed, or did traffic to the much better page outpace that total within the first couple of months? Please share your results in the comments below.

Now that we’ve made the case for pruning, let’s have a look at the different types of pruning options available to us.

Pruning options

Pruning isn’t necessarily synonymous with deleting. There are several different ways to prune an eCommerce website, depending on the specific situation.

Temporarily pruning from the index while leaving in the catalog

You can “temporarily” prune pages out of the index, while leaving them on the site, using the <META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, FOLLOW”> meta tag. This is a good solution for very large sites with a product page copywriting project that is going to take several months to complete.

Example: A product page with manufacturer-supplied content that needs to be rewritten.

Temporarily pruning from the index as well as the catalog

This would be the same implementation as above, while also removing the product from the site’s navigation and internal search results. This way, direct links will continue to lead to the page and Google will continue to crawl the URL (probably less frequently the longer it stays non-indexable), but user experience and SEO best practices are both maintained.

Example: A long-term out-of-stock product page that will return next season, or as soon as you replace that unreliable, expensive vendor who always screws up the drop-shipping.

Permanently pruning from the index while leaving in the catalog

This one could be implemented in different ways, depending on the situation. You don’t want these URLs indexed by Google, but you may or may not want them to get crawled and “followed.” These pages typically serve a purpose, and so user experience (i.e. conversion rate) would suffer if they were to be removed from the site completely.

Example 1: Deep-faceted navigation URLs with multiple parameters.

At a certain point, even “crawling” needs to be cut off (thus, rel=canonical doesn’t do the trick) or spiders could continue creating new URL strings for who knows how long. Apply a “Robots, Noindex” meta tag and wait for them to be recrawled. Once they’re no longer indexed, add a “Disallow:” statement to the Robots.txt file.

Example 2: See Example 1 under “Consolidating two or more pages” below.

Sometimes you need a Blue Widget product page and a Green Widget product page because that provides the highest conversion rate from category pages in which the visitor can see all color options at once. You can either rewrite the product copy to make each of them completely unique, or you can “Rel = Canonical” to one of the color options from all of the others. After a certain scale, the latter becomes the most likely option.

Permanently pruning from the index as well as the catalog

One solution if you don’t want URLs indexed or accessed by search engines or shoppers would be to simply delete them. We do a lot more of that with blog content than we do with catalog content, such as product and category pages.

Simply delete the page and allow it to 404 or 410 if you want the URL out of the index quickly and it doesn’t have any traffic, links, sales, or purpose.

Example 1: A discontinued product page URL with no external links.

Example 2: Deep category pages showing zero products (stub pages).

Another solution is to put them behind a password-protected wall. And a far less drastic, often more useful solution is to consolidate the pages.

Consolidating two or more pages

It could be as easy as deleting the file and redirecting it to another, which would permanently remove it from both the catalog and Google’s index while consolidating traffic and page authority into the other page.

Example 1: Any time you redirect one URL to another, you are consolidating pages.

Acme Widget 1.0 is a discontinued product. Its product page URL has several high-quality external links because it was the first of its kind. This URL gets redirected to the next generation of that product line, Acme Widget 2.0, with big “New and Improved” red lettering on the page.

Example 2: Any time you use a “rel=canonical” tag with a URL other than the one in the address bar when you visit the page, you are consolidating.

Using a “rel=canonical” tag to indicate that /Mens/Accessories/Ties/ and /Accessories/Mens/Ties/ are essentially the same page (in this case, leaving both in the catalog, though there are certainly other options).

Example 3: Product variants may or may not need their own landing page. It all depends on the situation.

Combining Big Shiny Blue Widget 2.0 and Big Shiny Red Widget 2.0 via product variant dropdowns in cases where “colors” are not commonly used in searches for that product. This may or may not include any redirects.

Example 4: Often it is best to combine the content in a useful, seamless way so several average pages become one strong page.

That SEO company you hired back in 2011 put up category-style landing pages (Curated collections? Buying guides?) for every conceivable long-tail variation of product-related keyword searches. They’re indexed and in the sitemap, but your visitors don’t have any real way of getting to them via the navigation (and that’s a good thing). Some of the content is worth saving, but you don’t need ten “category” pages about exhaust manifolds. A good solution would be to take stock of the different topics and group the pages that way. Then, choose the best-performing page from each topic set, and redirect all of the others to that one after scavenging any great content they might have had for the best-performing page.

What to prune in an eCommerce content audit

Once you have made a complete inventory of all indexable catalog URLs and have settled on a general strategy of pruning out a good chunk of the site from the search indexes (at least temporarily until pages can be improved), it’s time to make some important decisions. But first, here are some things to look out for:

Thin content

Thin content comes in many forms. Most of the time the page serves a purpose on the site, which means we can’t just delete it. However, most of the time it also doesn’t have any business in the search results until the page is improved.

Example 1: Product page on which “Made in the USA” is the only description

Prune via: <META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, FOLLOW”> meta tag until useful content has been added.

Some pages do serve a purpose in the search results, even if they have “thin” content.

Example 2: Top-level category page with no static content

Do NOT prune. Just improve as soon as possible with helpful content.

Duplicate content

This can exist on the same domain, or on other websites. It is a very common problem at very large scales with enterprise eCommerce websites. And if you’re dealing with big drop-shipping plays (auto parts, SWAG…) #fuggedaboutit.

Example 1: Product page with manufacturer copy duplicated on other websites
Prune via <META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, FOLLOW”> meta tag until useful, unique content has been rewritten.

Example 2: Product variant pages (black, yellow, green, 6-pack, 12-pack…)

• Write unique content for each SKU on its own URL, or…
• Consolidate product variants onto one page with a drop-down selector, and then…
• Redirect or “rel=canonical” the rest to the new page

Example 3: Indexable category pagination URLs showing the same static content

• Only show the static content on the first page, and…
• Prune via <META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, FOLLOW”> meta tag to paginated URLs

Underperforming content

This could include a variety of situations. Generally speaking, we look at the following areas when making judgements about whether to improve and/or remove a page:

1. No links
2. No shares
3. No traffic
4. No sales

Discontinued and long-term out-of-stock products

If it has been discontinued, or is out of stock for months at a time, consider removing these pages from the index. While it is tempting to want to hold on to traffic going into discontinued products, a better user experience would be to redirect that URL to the next generation product (or the closest category page) so a better page will start to rank for better keywords instead of landing unsatisfied searchers on an out-of-stock product page. If the out-of-stock product page also lacks any links, direct or referral traffic, it may be more efficient to remove it completely and show a 404 or 410 status code.

Indexable search results

I recommend removing these from the index, and then blocking them in the robots.txt file, as recommended by Google here and here. However, we did have one client that was getting so much traffic to these results, it was difficult to make the case for pruning them on the spot. This is just another case of Google making liars of us.

Obviously, every situation is different and one-size-fits-all advice usually turns out to be too general for some. The above recommendations are provided as general examples only.

Packaged resources

We’ve put together a few resources that will help you break this project down into bite-sized chunks. They’re packaged into a single folder called the eCommerce Content Audit Toolkit. Here’s what it comes with:

Content audit template with automated strategies by URL
This Google Spreadsheet can be thought of as a content audit template with training wheels. Unlike the template I shared in the Content Audit Tutorial, which has 8 tabs and no strategy automation, the template above only has two tabs, one of which isn’t even actively used.

The idea is that you simply import the site crawl and URL metrics, and nearly everything else is done for you.

Experienced content auditing pros will probably want to use the original file, but feedback from other marketers indicated a need for a stripped-down version with strategy automation features. Hat tip to Alex Juel for doing a lot of the leg-work on this thing.

Content audit strategies for common scenarios
Like the automated strategy formulas for each URL in the spreadsheet above, this tool is meant to help those new to content audits when choosing an overall strategy for the project as a whole. Access it online any time at the link above. The “toolkit” includes a printable PDF version.

Example stakeholder reports
Audits mean nothing if they don’t result in actionable insights and, ultimately, implementation of your recommendations. One way to make your insights more actionable is to break them up by stakeholder. As an eCommerce SEO, you can provide added value to the rest of the company by producing reports for eCommerce directors, marketing executives, merchandisers, copywriters, developers, and more.

eCommerce content audit white paper
This is an overview of the concept with several more case studies. It would make a great introduction for marketing executives and others without a lot of technical SEO experience.

Instructions for making the most out of the toolkit
It’s no good to get a bunch of files if you don’t know what to do with them.

Other useful resources

• How to Do Content Audits (with a link to a step-by-step on Moz)
• Ian Lurie’s Guide to Creating Content Strategy in “Only” 652 Steps
• How to Conduct a Content Audit by Rebecca Lieb on Marketing Land
• Screaming Frog (crawler)
• Botify (crawl and analysis)
• Xenu (crawler)
• URL Profiler (crawler, API metrics compiler, awesome tool)
• More Things to Consider for eCommerce Catalog Content Audits

This post was too long; I didn’t read it (TL;DR)

The two most important takeaways are:

1. Don’t be afraid to make pruning choices when the metrics back up your strategy.

When you perform a content audit, it allows you to make recommendations based on real data that can easily be shared with decision makers. You can also use case studies and small-scale tests to bolster your case.

Don’t be afraid to take out a good portion of the site if the metrics tell the story of useless URL-bloat.

2. Pruning isn’t synonymous with deleting.

You can (temporarily) remove URLs from the index while managing the copywriting process, returning them to the index as they are brought up to standards.

That’s about all I have to say about pruning eCommerce sites at the moment. Have you done a content audit yet? How did it go? What were your sticking points? Any major successes or failures?

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 tallen1985

We know Facebook has a huge amount of data on people. For the last 18 months, they’ve been sharing more of this information than ever before through their platform, Audience Insights. As a result, we can begin to pull together audience personas for very little cost other than time, effort, and a Facebook account.

This post is going give a whirlwind tour of how we can begin to use Audience Insights to build personas for our business that will allow us to target content better and keep people in mind rather users & sessions.

What is a persona and why should we build them?

A persona is the summary of research or observations based on a key group of users who show similar behaviours and lifestyle choices.It allows us to collectively group users into buckets, rather than having to focus on thousands of individual needs and wants.

This is then distilled into a fictitious person that can be referenced to guide business decisions, whether they be the type of design we use, the content of our email marketing, the tone of voice we use for our brand, or even the types of products we may look to be selling.

We may end up generating multiple personas to connect to various users we are looking to share our brand with. This will help guide business decisions, rather than taking a one-size-fits-everyone approach.

Three things to be aware of

1. Facebook offers two audience options — “All of Facebook” or “People connected to your Page.” In the past, if we have paid for Facebook followers or used extremely broad advertising options, the “People connected to your Page” data could potentially be an inaccurate representation of our target audience.
2. If our audience segment is less than 1,000 people, Audience Insights won’t display any information.
3. If you select more than one option in the faceted navigation, this uses an “or” functionality. This can make data hard to dissect, particularly if you input multiple interests.

How to build a persona using Facebook Audience Insights

Let’s assume here that we are building a persona using all of Facebook’s data, either because we are a new brand, doing some client research and we don’t have access to their Facebook account, or as mentioned earlier, our existing Facebook followers have been dirtied by either buying followers or previous advertising campaigns being too broad.

*If we decide to build personas based on existing Facebook followers, the process is extremely similar; however, if the number of followers is low, we may not be able to segment our audience interests as much as in the steps that follow.

1. First thing, head over to Facebook Audience Insights. You don’t need an advertising account — all you need is a Facebook profile.

2. Let’s assume we have a fictitious sports clothing brand who are trying to appeal more to runners. Enter an interest closely aligned to your brand or products; in this instance, it’s “running.”

3. The initial search gives us some pretty broad options that probably aren’t that useful. However, they do indicate that of those interested in running, 60% of them are women, so let’s narrow by gender for our first audience persona. Remember, we will end up creating multiple personas for our brand — this is just one demographic we are targeting.

4. The results show that a large portion of our audience sits between the ages of 18 and 44 — however, that is once again a quite broad segment of our audience. Let’s focus on where the bulk of the market appears to be by also filtering by age, 25–34.

5. From the Demographics screen we can start to dig into the type of people who might be interested in our product and start building their persona.

Audience Insights categorizes our audience into Lifestyle demographics and provides us with a brief description about the type of lifestyle they may lead from which we can extract relevant information to filter our audience further. The table below indicates those lifestyles that fit best with our running brand for the demographics defined so far.

6. From here we can build a better picture of the type of person that may be interested in our products. Using the above information, we now know the following information about one group of potential customers.

They are:

• Females aged between 25-34
• Mainly homeowners
• Both singles and couples
• Working
• Mixture of childless or young children families.

Adding all of this information as facets and we have cut our audience down to between 300k and 350k monthly active people.

7. From here, we can drill into each of the individual tabs to extract relevant information about our target persona, such as:

• Demographics: Age, gender, job title, relationship status, education level
• Interests: Categories and page likes
• Location: Where they live
• Activity: Frequency of online activity and device usage
• Household: Income, home ownership, home market value, spending methods
• Purchase Behavior: Likelihood of online purchases, purchase behavior

Example of a persona that can be built using Audience Insights

We now have a decent amount of information that we can pull together to start to build the profile of the type of person we want sell our products to. We can keep this person in mind when pulling together any content or carrying out any type of marketing activities.

Below is just one audience persona that we might look to target for our fictitious running brand.

So, that’s all we have to do?

We would need to rinse and repeat this process for different demographics that we believe may be interested in our brand. But yes, these are some initial steps we can take to building audience personas that we can target our products and brand towards.

However, I’m not saying that this is the only task we have to complete to build audience personas.

Yes, Facebook has a lot of data, but they’re still piecing together all the parts. In the same way we know we shouldn’t completely trust the numbers that Google Keyword Planner gives us, they just give us a ballpark to play in. As such, the data we are given by Audience Insights should be just one of multiple research methods we should be looking to use to build audience personas.

Big brands spend huge volumes of their budget trying to understand their customers. Many of us can’t compete on that level. We need to look to the tools and data we have available to us, and build the best personas we can for our budget.

Here are a handful of resources that can be used to help develop personas that won’t cost a lot, other than perhaps in time:

• Dig around Google (other search engines are available) for other surveys that have previously been carried out within your niche. Everett Sizemore discussed this in a post on inbound.org on how to carry out audience persona research on a budget.

• My colleague Craig Bradford took a look at how to use the the Alchemy API to build personas from users Twitter profiles
• Google Analytics has been giving us demographic data for a while now (if you’ve turned it on). A quick insight on how to do this can be found from Steven Sparber here.
• Actually speaking to people. Zachary Cohn has a great slide deck discussing 18 tips on running customer interviews.

What other processes do you use to help build audience personas? Have you used Audience Insights to build personas, and if so, do you have any further tips? Please share in the comments below or reach out to me on Twitter @the_timallen.

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 Dr-Pete

Earlier this year, Google rolled out the Related Questions feature (AKA “People Also Ask”). If you haven’t seen them yet, related questions appear in an expandable box, mixed in with organic results. Here’s an example from a search for “Samsung Galaxy S6”:

If you click on any question, it expands into something that looks like a Featured Snippet:

Currently, Related Questions can occur in packs of between 1–4 questions and answers. Here’s an example of a box with only one question, on a search for “lederhosen”:

Once expanded, a typical answer contains a machine-generated snippet, a link to the source website, and a link to the Google search for the question.

How common are related questions?

We started tracking Related Questions in late July on the MozCast 10K, where they originally appeared on roughly 1.3% of queries. Keep in mind that the MozCast set tends toward commercial queries, and the absolute percentage may not represent the entire web. What’s interesting, though, is what happened after that. Here’s a graph of Related Questions prevalence since the end of July:

You can clearly see two spikes in the graph — one measured on October 27th, and one on December 1st. As of this writing (December 10th), Related Questions appeared on about 8.1% of the queries we track. In less than 5 months, Related Questions have increased 501%. This is a much faster adoption rate than other Knowledge Graph features.

Where do the answers come from?

When you expand a question, the answer looks a lot like another recent Knowledge Graph addition — Featured Snippets. Digging deeper, though, it appears that the connection is indirect at best. For example, here’s an expanded question on a search for “monopoly”:

If you click on that search, though, you get a SERP with the following Featured Snippet:

It’s interesting to note that both answers come from Investopedia, but Google is taking completely different text from two different URLs on the same site. With Featured Snippets, we know that the answer currently has to come from a site already ranking on page one, but with Related Questions, there’s no clear connection to organic results. These answers don’t seem tied to their respective SERPs.

Where do the questions come from?

It’s clear that both the answers in Related Questions and the snippets in Featured Snippets are machine-generated. Google is expanding the capabilities of the Knowledge Graph by extracting answers directly from the index. What may not be as clear, at first glance, is that machines are also generating the questions themselves. Look at the following example, from a search for “grammar check”:

Out of context, the question doesn’t even make sense. Expanded, you can see that it relates to a very specific grammar question posted on Quora. While the topic is relevant, no human would attach this question, as worded, to this search. Consider another example, for “cover letter examples”:

The first and last question are obviously, to a human, redundant. To a machine, though, they would look unique. To be fair, Google has come a long way in a short time — even a couple of months ago, some of these questions were riddled with grammar and spelling errors. As of this writing, I can’t find a single example of either.

Finally, there are the questions that no human would ever ask:

No rational human would ever want to know what kind of meat is in a gyro. It’s better that way.

What’s coming next?

It’s clear that Google is rapidly expanding their capability to generate questions and answers from the index. Both Featured Snippets and Related Questions have evolved considerably since their respective launches, and Google’s ability to understand natural language queries and semantic data is growing daily. It may be months before we fully understand if and how these results cannibalize organic clicks, but it seems very clear that Google no longer considers these features to be experimental and will be aggressively pushing forward question-and-answer style SERPs in the near future.

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 Dr-Pete

Earlier this year, Google rolled out the Related Questions feature (AKA “People Also Ask”). If you haven’t seen them yet, related questions appear in an expandable box, mixed in with organic results. Here’s an example from a search for “Samsung Galaxy S6”:

If you click on any question, it expands into something that looks like a Featured Snippet:

Currently, Related Questions can occur in packs of between 1–4 questions and answers. Here’s an example of a box with only one question, on a search for “lederhosen”:

Once expanded, a typical answer contains a machine-generated snippet, a link to the source website, and a link to the Google search for the question.

How common are related questions?

We started tracking Related Questions in late July on the MozCast 10K, where they originally appeared on roughly 1.3% of queries. Keep in mind that the MozCast set tends toward commercial queries, and the absolute percentage may not represent the entire web. What’s interesting, though, is what happened after that. Here’s a graph of Related Questions prevalence since the end of July:

You can clearly see two spikes in the graph — one measured on October 27th, and one on December 1st. As of this writing (December 10th), Related Questions appeared on about 8.1% of the queries we track. In less than 5 months, Related Questions have increased 501%. This is a much faster adoption rate than other Knowledge Graph features.

Where do the answers come from?

When you expand a question, the answer looks a lot like another recent Knowledge Graph addition — Featured Snippets. Digging deeper, though, it appears that the connection is indirect at best. For example, here’s an expanded question on a search for “monopoly”:

If you click on that search, though, you get a SERP with the following Featured Snippet:

It’s interesting to note that both answers come from Investopedia, but Google is taking completely different text from two different URLs on the same site. With Featured Snippets, we know that the answer currently has to come from a site already ranking on page one, but with Related Questions, there’s no clear connection to organic results. These answers don’t seem tied to their respective SERPs.

Where do the questions come from?

It’s clear that both the answers in Related Questions and the snippets in Featured Snippets are machine-generated. Google is expanding the capabilities of the Knowledge Graph by extracting answers directly from the index. What may not be as clear, at first glance, is that machines are also generating the questions themselves. Look at the following example, from a search for “grammar check”:

Out of context, the question doesn’t even make sense. Expanded, you can see that it relates to a very specific grammar question posted on Quora. While the topic is relevant, no human would attach this question, as worded, to this search. Consider another example, for “cover letter examples”:

The first and last question are obviously, to a human, redundant. To a machine, though, they would look unique. To be fair, Google has come a long way in a short time — even a couple of months ago, some of these questions were riddled with grammar and spelling errors. As of this writing, I can’t find a single example of either.

Finally, there are the questions that no human would ever ask:

No rational human would ever want to know what kind of meat is in a gyro. It’s better that way.

What’s coming next?

It’s clear that Google is rapidly expanding their capability to generate questions and answers from the index. Both Featured Snippets and Related Questions have evolved considerably since their respective launches, and Google’s ability to understand natural language queries and semantic data is growing daily. It may be months before we fully understand if and how these results cannibalize organic clicks, but it seems very clear that Google no longer considers these features to be experimental and will be aggressively pushing forward question-and-answer style SERPs in the near future.

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 ryanwashere

Over the last 2 months, I’ve driven well over 6,000 organic Facebook visits to my site.

It’s not coming from a Facebook Page; it’s coming from a Facebook Group.

Several months ago I started my own Group, Digital Marketing Questions — this week we hit 3,000 active, engaged, spam-free members.

In this post, I’m going to retrace my steps and tell you exactly how to build your own Facebook Group.

What are the benefits of building a Facebook Group?

Before I tell you how to build one, I quickly need to talk about why you should build one.

Facebook might not be “cool,” but it’s crazy effective

All the kids left Facebook years ago for Instagram (now Snapchat) and a number of businesses gave up on Facebook marketing efforts when “organic reach” plummeted.

Despite this, there are still hundreds of millions of users still on Facebook.

In fact, Mark Zuckerberg posted a status a couple of months ago stating that for the first time in the network’s history, Facebook had over 1 billion active users in a single day.

Let that marinate for a second.

Facebook is a powerhouse that isn’t going anywhere anytime soon — it’s time to re-invest back into the network.

Group updates send notifications to members

Facebook pages and personal posts rely completely on the Newsfeed algorithm for organic exposure. Facebook Groups send users a notification whenever someone posts to the Group, thus driving traffic to each post.

On mobile as well:

Facebook gives users the option to silence these notifications. However, if your Group consistently adds value, they won’t.

Groups have more organic “reach” than Pages

A while back I ran a test:

• My page had 660 likes; My Group had 660 members
• I took a link from my blog and tagged it with 2 different CIDs in the URL Builder
• I called tagged the first URL as “Group Test” and the second as “Page Test”
• I took both appended URLs and posted “Group Test” to my Group and “Page Test” to my Page at the exact same time
• Results: Group = 122 visits, Page = 8 visits
• That’s over 15 times the traffic!

Owning a quality Group is a bargaining chip

Let’s piggyback off the previous point for a second.

• When the Group had 660 members, we were driving 122 visits per post = 18% visit rate (CTR)
• A recent post when the Group had 2,700 members drove 600 visits = 22% visit rate (CTR)

With the ability to drive quality traffic with a single post, you’ve got a powerful value proposition. I do a ton of link outreach for clients — including the Group in my pitch has skyrocketed success rate.

I mean, which outreach email would you respond to?

Outreach email 1:

Hey [Editor’s name],

I came across your post [insert URL] and really enjoyed it. I noticed you’re linking out to some posts about [insert topic] and wanted to pitch you on my latest guide that fits in perfectly.

If interested, let me know and I can send you the URL to check out for yourself.

Outreach email 2:

Hey [Editor’s name],

I came across your post [insert URL] and really enjoyed it. I noticed you’re linking out to some posts about [insert topic] and wanted to pitch you on my latest guide that fits in perfectly.

If included, I’d be happy to share it with my active Facebook Group [insert link] that regularly drives over 600 visits every time I post.

Link building (and marketing, really) is about the exchange of value. When you’ve got a solid value proposition in exchange for the link, your acceptance rate goes through the roof.

Can you say… free content?!

Despite the lack of organic reach, Facebook Pages are still a tremendous marketing resource. However, you need invest time into creating content to be successful. This is a full-time job in itself which requires you (or someone else) to spend time managing it.

When properly managed, Facebook Groups run themselves because the content is crowd sourced from members.

All you need to do is stay active on threads and make sure you’re keeping a close eye on spam.

How to build your own active Facebook Group

Hopefully I’ve convinced you about the benefits of building a quality Group. Now, let’s talk about the how…

Step 1 – Create a Group

I’m not going to go into detail on how to create your Group because it’s easier than setting up a Facebook Page.

I do want to talk about creating the context of your Group. In other words, what should your Group be about?

Unless you’re a brand, don’t make it about you.

Shopify has a number of helpful Groups geared towards customer support, marketing, general tips, etc. They’re able to build communities based on their brand.

For those of us who aren’t brands, we don’t have that luxury.

In the grand scheme of things, I’m a nobody. If I would’ve made my Group “Ryan Stewart’s Digital Mastermind”, I wouldn’t be writing this article right now because nobody would’ve joined.

Focus the context of your Group on the value it provides to members. I like to approach it like I would content strategy:

• If you own a coupon website, create a Group focused on exchanging couponing tips
• If you own a local bakery, create a Group about recipes, holiday treats, etc.
• If you own an oil-changing business, create a Group for motorheads

Facebook Groups shouldn’t be approached with a conversion or direct marketing mindset. They work best when approached as a branding tool.

If you can create a valuable resource, your brand will grow with the Group by association.

Step 2 – Keep your Group active

Remember, Groups are communities—they need to be focused on what engages members. That means hold off on promoting yourself, your business, and links until you’ve earned the Group’s trust.

How do you build trust? By delivering value.

Create native content for the Group

Some Facebook groups are just a feed of links to the admin’s blog articles.

Don’t do that.

Instead, create native content specifically for the group. Keep ALL the content and engagement within the Group, instead of trying to drive them to your latest post.

In fact, I went a full month without posting a link directly to my site.

Things to try:

• Polls
• Images
• Native video uploads

Make it obvious you’re there to help them.

Do this well and when you do post a link to blog/promotion, people will trust you enough to click it.

Step 3 – Promote your Group

A Facebook Group can grow much faster than a Facebook Page (my Group grows 20x times faster than my Page). However, they don’t grow on autopilot. They need a significant investment of time, energy, and resources to drive members.

The key to growing a Group (or anything, really) is making it a priority. If you foresee value in owning a Group, take it seriously by investing the necessary resources into growth.

Get influential people to join

First, let me say this…

DO NOT add people to the Group without their permission.

2 reasons:

1. It’s annoying.
2. Facebook’s algorithm is heavily based on engagement. If you add people who don’t want to be there, they won’t participate. If they don’t participate, your Group’s content will get poor engagement, i.e. poor visibility.

Instead, target influencers in their space and share their content.

Tag them in the post so they know you shared it.

They’ll most likely join the Group on their own. This is a huge bonus for Group members and incentive for more to join.

Promote the Group on your site

You’ve got your Facebook Page on your website, right? Why not add (or replace) this with a link to your Facebook Group?

If your website does significant traffic, this is a great way to grow your Group.

Data shows the standard logos in the header attract little to no attention. Instead, I added a link to my Group in the bottom right-hand corner of my footer and tagged the link with a tracking CID.

Over 3 months, it drove 346 clicks. Not a massive amount, but every little bit helps.

Create “gated content” to entice people to join

It’s not uncommon to create a great piece of content to entice email opt ins (aka “gated content”). Instead of asking for emails, you can drive people to your Facebook group.

For example, I wrote a post about how to create an SEO proposal. I also took the time to create a free proposal template for visitors to download for their own use.

I hosted the proposal template within the “Files” section of the Group.

To download it, they had to join the Group. Of course, just creating content isn’t enough, we’ve got to promote it as well.

I chose to use organic channels like Inbound.org, GrowthHackers, Warrior Forum, and a few others.

This was by far the most effective method I used, not only to gain members, but quality ones as well. Try and focus your promotion efforts in places where your target users are spending their time.

We want to focus more on building a quality, engaged member base as opposed to a massive, inactive one.

Facebook Ads are extremely effective

It took me some tinkering to figure out how to promote the Group with Facebook Ads.

You can’t promote a Facebook Group the way you can with a Page.

Here’s how to get around it:

1. Write a post on your Facebook Page and drop a link to the Group
2. Create a new Ad, select “Boost your posts”
3. Select the post with a link to your Facebook Group

I started by targeting by remarketing list and then expanding to lookalike audiences after that was exhausted.

In honor of full transparency, exact results from the ads are difficult to track.

“Results” are calculated by post engagements, i.e. Page likes, comments, shares, etc. Not included in “results” are people who clicked through and joined the Group.

From my own calculations, the Group grew 300 members during the 1 week we were boosting the post — that’s three times the organic growth rate.

Even though you can’t directly track new members with analytics, Facebook ads are no doubt a valuable promotion tool.

Drive [indirect] traffic to it

I write a lot of guest posts. Within my posts I often link to my personal website.

That site has a big ol’ call to action to join the Facebook Group:

This helps to strategically reach new audiences without directly promoting the group within the post.

You can also use guest posts to drive traffic to your post with “gated” content. Both tactics work well, but this one is slightly more direct.

Cross-promote with other Groups

If you’re consistently adding new members, you can pitch other Group admins to exchange cross promotion posts. I’ve had good success using Facebook’s internal search to find similar groups.

It takes a while to find spam-free Groups, but once you do it’s just a matter of tracking down admins, adding them as friends, and sending them a quick pitch.

If you’ve got a different audience base, you can add tremendous value to each other by exposing your Groups to new audiences.

Step 4 – Keep your Group spam-free

The biggest knock against Facebook Groups is spam. A Group can turn into a discount Ray Ban marketplace overnight if not carefully watched by the admins.

It’s your job to set and enforce the rules.

It starts with a strong Group description

Leave no room for guessing. If someone joins the Group and immediately promotes a link, they’re banned, no questions asked. It’s entirely too much work to give individual warnings to people.

Encourage Group members to flag spam if they see it — stand firm on your no spam rule.

Remind members of the rules from time to time

Some people are in a lot of Facebook groups. They don’t always remember what they can or can’t do in each group.

If you get an uptick in spam in your group, post a reminder about the rules. This has the added benefit of pulling the group together, since the members genuinely want a spam-free place for questions and discussion.

I got tired of repeatedly posted warnings so I created a video and pinned it to the top of the Group. Since doing that, we’ve seen a significant drop in spam posts.

Handle rules infractions via PM

Even established members of the group will occasionally break the rules. Usually it’s because they forgot or weren’t sure if something was okay to promote.

In those cases, delete the post, but also PM the offending member and let them know what happened.

Often the person will apologize and that’s all you’ll need to do. If they argue with you, just remember it’s your group, not theirs. You get to decide who stays and who goes.

Occasionally let people know when you ban someone

When you ban someone from the Group, it’s an opportunity to reinforce the pride people feel at being part of the “inner circle.”

They get to stay, because they followed the rules. The other people broke the rules, so they got banned.

This also reminds people to report spam or rules infractions when they see them.

Moderate disputes by PM

Sometimes a passionate discussion devolves into an ugly argument. When that happens, PM to the parties involved and let them know it’s not okay to have a big public fight in the Group.

Usually that will calm things down. If things got really nasty, you also have the option to just delete the entire thread.

Consider getting a full-time moderator

Finally, when your group gets big and active, you might not have time to properly moderate it.

That’s the time to hire a moderator. Often you can find someone who’s already active in the group, knows the rules and is willing to do it for free.

Bottom line — a Facebook Group can turn to spam quickly. Make sure you’re prepared to invest some resources to make sure it stays clean over time.

Conclusion

The numbers don’t lie — my Facebook Group is the strongest brand asset I have.

If you’re looking to build an active, engaged community around the problems your business solves, I strongly suggest you look into creating one of your own.

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 →